Dear President Obama:
Little did your school boy chums in Hawaii, watching you race up and down the basketball court, know how prescient they were when they nicknamed you “Barry O’Bomber”.
Little did your fellow Harvard Law Review editors, who elected you to lead that venerable journal, ever imagine that you could be a president who chronically violates the Constitution, federal statutes, international treaties and the separation of power at depths equal to or beyond the George W. Bush regime.
Nor would many of the voters who elected you in 2008 have conceived that your foreign policy would rely so much on brute military force at the expense of systemically waging peace. Certainly, voters who knew your background as a child of third world countries, a community organizer, a...
Lifestyle
Dear Random Redneck,
I know that you are extremely excited about your upcoming trip to the capitol city and War Memorial Stadium. As I am originally from South Arkansas myself, I remember with fondness the trips to Little Rock to watch the Razorbacks that shaped my identity as a Hog fan. Tailgating on the golf course and attending a game at War Memorial is a great experience, but it is one that is becoming defiled. Its reputation is going down the tubes. A legacy not of maniacally passionate fans overtaking the corner of Fair Park and Markham in a sea of cardinal, but one defined instead by its worst actors. The gaggle of drunken, sloppy, oblivious oafs. Sadly, this, more often than not, means you.
I want to change that. Because I like you. In most any other setting, you are...
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Dear Neil (if I may)-
When I was a kid, I had a coloring book with pictures of the possible jobs I could have when I grew up – fireman, cook, doctor and so forth. One page had a picture of scientist. I can still see it – classic and stereotypical image of a guy in a lab coat holding a beaker. Anyway – I liked that one picture so much, I refused to color on it. I was only about 8 but I already wanted to be a scientist.1
So, like you, I love science.
I grew up during the last decades of the Cold War. I still remember the fear and anxiety I felt when I watched The Day After in 1983. I also still remember the televised town hall meeting that ABC broadcast after the show ended. Among all the voices I heard that night, the one I trusted most was Carl Sagan.
As a teen, Carl Sagan was...
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Dear Ambassador,
We are writing to urge the UN Security Council to impose an arms embargo on both parties to the conflict in South Sudan, and to set up a panel of experts to monitor and report on the implementation of the embargo. The UN Security Council should also impose a travel ban and asset freeze against individuals credibly implicated in serious human rights violations or violations of the arms embargo.
The period between mid-December 2013 and mid-April 2014 was arguably the most abusive in a long history of conflict in Upper Nile, Jonglei and Unity states, with gruesome attacks on civilians and massive destruction and pillage of civilian property that amount to war crimes and potential crimes against humanity. Abuses by government and opposition forces as well as other armed...
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Dear Friends,
This is probably one of the most difficult periods in my political life as a Jew living in the state of Israel. The events of the war in Gaza hit hard at the foundations of my hope that a peaceful resolution of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians can be achieved in the near future. The feeling of despair is reinforced by the results of the recent elections, in which the majority within Israeli Jewish society voted for the right-wing parties that object to the idea of dividing the land between the two nations.
Moreover, my trust in humanity has been weakened, seeing the ease with which human beings rally for a war, exercise blind patriotism, express desire for vengeance, delegitimize the opponent, and develop an insensitivity to human life, denial of...
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Dear Prime Minister:
Many Americans love Canada and the specific benefits that have come to our country from our northern neighbor’s many achievements (see Canada Firsts by Nader, Conacher and Milleron). Unfortunately, your latest proposed legislation—the new anti-terrorism act—is being described by leading Canadian civil liberties scholars as hazardous to Canadian democracy.
A central criticism was ably summarized in a February 2015 Globe and Mail editorial titled “Parliament Must Reject Harper’s Secret Policeman Bill,” to wit:
“Prime Minister Stephen Harper never tires of telling Canadians that we are at war with the Islamic State. Under the cloud of fear produced by his repeated hyperbole about the scope and nature of the threat, he now wants to turn our domestic spy agency...
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Dear Mr. Netanyahu,
Yesterday you declared that the Belgian Supreme court made “a scandalous decision, which legitimizes terror and harms those who fight it. This turns the tables — when those who fight terror turn into the accused and the terrorists are victorious.”
As counsels of the plaintiffs, 28 Palestinian and Lebanese survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, we cannot accept your language, tone, or characterization of yesterday’s landmark ruling.
Our clients are not “terrorists,” but ordinary people who were raped, tortured, and wounded; who were forced to witness — and relive everyday since — the slaughter of their children, parents, husbands and wives, or who had their close relatives “disappeared.” By calling these victimized survivors “terrorists,” after all that...
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Dear Mr Brand,
The International Network of People who Use Drugs (INPUD) is a global peer-based organisation that seeks to promote the health and defend the human rights of people who use drugs. We, the INPUD Secretariat, feel compelled to respond to substantial parts of your recent documentary, entitled End the War on Drugs1. Our friends at Students for Sensible Drug Policy UK (SSDP) have already written to you2 regarding this programme, and we can only echo and add to their concern that “your personal views may have already caused great damage, given your public status and following”.
Though the programme made some helpful points with which we (and many public figures other than yourself) would agree, namely in highlighting some of the failures and harms of the so-called war on...
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Dear Mr [Plod],
It is my understanding that you are the correct officer to contact regarding the stealing of the “All Bleeping Bleepers” banner used by Class War . This was taken by coppers unknown during the protest last Thursday evening apparently on the grounds that it may cause offence.
I agree the photographs of Cameron, Miliband, Clegg and Farage are indeed offensive but that’s why Class War has chosen to call them “All Bleeping Bleepers” so as to neutralise the effects of seeing their ugly mugshots.
I hope you will see fit to now provide the banner back to its rightful owners. It is not for you or anyone else to curtail freedom of speech and freedom of assembly in this manner. We are currently in an election campaign and as a Class War candidate I reserve the right to...
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Dear Dave Mustaine,
It is impossible for me to express how much you can go get fucked by a bear in a hole somewhere. Truly you are the skin tag of the world, hanging on to the scene many feel you helped create by the filament-thin thread of a few semi-decent songs. You are dog shit after a light rain.
However, these statements are simple knee-jerk opinion, and do not accurately explain why I have come to hold you in such low regard. So allow me to pontificate on your rankness by taking your recent public comments, one after another, and dissecting them, so as to illustrate what a pathetic dickrag you are.
Let’s begin with your support of Republican politician and right-wing Christian Rick Santorum. Your political support alone is not something I can find fault in—people have...
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