Applauding the risk-takers

The release of documents by WikiLeaks shows that the United States continues to engage in covert and criminal activities. We seem to have learned nothing from past or current debacles, like an alcoholic spinning yet more tangled lies to avoid hitting bottom. We have invaded countries under false pretexts, overthrown democratically elected leaders, supported dictators, tortured prisoners and justified it, assassinated and kidnapped people, and so on. Yet we're the good guys! I wonder who the bad guys are and what they could possibly be doing. Our government has no credibility or integrity, and the world can see it in those documents.

Whistleblowers like Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks staff are protected by law. (The pursuit of Assange on rape charges sounds like a frame-up to take him out and discredit him at the same time.) I applaud what they've done and appreciate the risks they've taken. We need them desperately because so many others are willing to participate in the craziness and keep secrets.

Moss Henry

Santa Rosa

Hooray for Farms

Thanks to Art Kusnetz for his wonderful article ("Fearless Food," Dec 8). He unfortunately left out Lunita Farm in Kenwood, a superb and generous CSA for Sonoma Valley started by Austin Blair and Rachel Kohn Obut, young farmers who know what they are doing and how. Their produce is beyond words, and their CSA delivery is the most generous I've ever seen.

Sheila Reilly

Glen Ellen

Thanks, Sheila. There's a slew of worthy CSAs in the North Bay, and Art's focus was solely on those in Petaluma.

Are You in Denial?

I'm curious about the "conspiracy theory aversion" attitude implied by your publishing a pair of "crazy letters" along with a call for more palatable expression—oddly juxtaposed adjacent to Tom Tomorrow's weekly feature that regularly satirizes the plutocracy that is 21st-century U.S.A. Will he still be syndicated should America truly evolve into the police state that recent developments imply?

Are you in denial about what is happening before our eyes, or simply exhausted by the weight of it? Have you become but a few more specimens of the successfully socially engineered people that our populace continues to become?

I agree that these two letters were maybe a bit over the top, but not entirely unfounded. Sure, let's hear the lighter side, too—but what is the point if it is only to keep our heads firmly in the sand? Let's keep track of what's really happening, too, OK, "journalists"?

Brer Hawk

Occidental

Thanks, Brer. This might be a good time to remind readers that the original letter declared the new airport scanners to be Nazi gas ovens utilized by the government to irradiate its citizens with cancer in order to kill them all and systematically reduce the population of the world by 5 billion. Happy holidays y'all!

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