Letters are posted as we receive them during the week, and before they are printed in the paper, so check back frequently to see new letters. If you'd like to send a letter to the editor, use this postmarks submission form, or email your letter directly to mail@austinchronicle.com. Thanks for your patience.

Dear Editor,
    Re: “Against Eastside Disc Golf Course” [“Postmarks,” Jan. 7]: Anita Quintanilla, I think you are misinformed as to the impact of disc golf courses. To claim that a proposed disc golf course in your community will be disturbing birds, damaging trees/plants, and an eyesore is most definitely “petty” (as you hinted it may be) and unvalidated. I won't even touch her claim of representing all Eastsiders on the issue, but I do live on the Eastside and could not disagree with her more. The matter of principle she claims to stand on does not hold up on an environmental basis or a community development one. Contrary to recent hot-air remarks, disc golf courses do not cause an adverse impact to the environment nor do they represent an activity that would be a negative aspect of a community. Anita, recognize you are complaining about a park being put in because you claim it will not save the land for future generations. Would you rather it be developed as is, which is zoned for commercial development?
    Added nugget: A number of disc golf courses already exist in East Austin; birds, trees, plants, and Anita withstanding.

Dear Editor,
    When my brother and I grew up in the '50s during the drought, one of the things that our teachers tried to impress on us in school was that Austin sits on the edge of desert, and sometimes it gets dry. At that time Austin was not even one-tenth the size it is today and the Lower Colorado River Authority had no real water demands to meet other than that of a few small towns along the banks of the Colorado River and of some downstream rice farmers.
    I have addressed one question to the City Council and city planning department. With the size of the city today and its growth policy to attract added business to the city, can the city today withstand a multiyear drought that compares to that of the drought of the 1950s?
    You may recall that in 2009 the Highlands Lakes was drawn down to the 40% level and that the only water program that the city seems to have is that of water restrictions. Every time I put the above question to the city, they pretended I never asked the question. A thinking person should realize that a water plan of restrictions will not add a drop to the water supply. I think that unless there is some plan to obtain additional water, it strikes me as insane to encourage added growth to the city and Highland Lakes dependent area if the area cannot meet high population water demands under extreme conditions that had visited us in the past.
    In that I assume that The Austin Chronicle is up to date on such issues, can you tell me if the city is able survive a protracted 1950s multiyear drought today without becoming a ghost town? When the Texas Water Development Board or the LCRA tells us that they have enough water to meet our demands for 100 or 60 years with restrictions, do they give us these projections from a hoped-for average yearly rainfall?

   [News Editor Michael King responds: Alas, the Chronicle has no specialized knowledge nor predictive powers concerning long-term drought conditions.]

Dear Editor
    The present Republican posturing has enormous implications in opportunity costs (a posturing that uses precious legislative time and energy in declaring Barack Obama's health care legislation unconstitutional and undoing the enormous work for health care coverage of Americans) and has profound import. The health care legislation has been estimated to cut the federal deficit by $1.3 trillion over the next 20 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and will cover 95% of all Americans. Secondly, health insurance companies collaborated on this legislation, and thus the public option was deleted; this should be reconsidered if the Republicans wish to create a constructive mandate that is cost-saving and responds to the crisis in health care coverage. Now John Boehner needs to show his worth if the symbol of the Republican Party survives into perpetuity or whether the voting public decides that the Hydralike head of the party (whether tea party, Libertarian, or Republican mainstream) needs to be replaced by a functional political entity that is in touch with reality.

Dear Editor,
    About four years ago, I started noticing white “lines” in the sky, the kind you usually see behind airplanes, but I was perplexed at how long they lingered in the air when there were no airplanes in sight. I mentioned it to a few people, but no one else I had talked to seemed to notice or care until one day a friend asked me if I had noticed the “chem” trails in the sky. He lent me a movie called What in the World Are They Spraying? which answers the question of what they are spraying, which is aluminum and barium. The theories on why range from slowing down global warming (which doesn’t make sense to add more pollution to the sky from airplanes), to the idea that Monsanto – the biggest agri-business in the world, which has developed a seed resistant to aluminum and barium – is sterilizing all seeds so that there will no longer be organic options for people to grow their own food.
    Today while walking in the park, I noticed the sky was crisscrossed with these white lines like a grid and there were two planes still at it. My questions are: Why is this being done? Who is doing this? How is it affecting our health? And does anybody care?

Dear Editor,
    In regards to the horrible tragedy in Arizona, and subsequent calls from pundits and politicians for Congress to expedite "inciting violence" legislation: time to step back here and perhaps revisit the sedition acts passed during World War I. A very slippery slope, indeed, to react to murder or terrorism by passing hasty laws limiting speech. The deranged kid possessed literature all over the extreme political map. We may never know who was doing the inciting, but here's a scenario: Say an administration, current or future, has gone ahead with military action in Iran, and peace activists are arrested on the Texas Capitol grounds because, under a new law, they are "inciting violence against government officials" by carrying signs crossing out the face of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose congressional subcommittee is leading the charge for Predator drones over Tehran, Iran. Hypothetically far-fetched? Maybe, but let's think this one over.

Dear Editor,
    I recently bought a huge yellow bottle of Bayer low-dose aspirin. The bottle contained 300, yet could have easily contained 3,000 of these tiny tablets. Why would a multimillion-dollar environmentally responsible pharmaceutical company spend 10 times more on plastic, molding processes, and shipping than is required to safely deliver the product to the customer? Why would they create 10 times more demand for offshore petrochemicals and 10 times more load on landfills than would be rationally required?
    Answer: Marketing is not rational. More shelf presence means more sales. Big is good. “I got a really big bottle of aspirin”; never mind that it was 90% air. Now multiply this little example to include everything we buy, and you get high levels of petroleum-based materials, gasoline for transportation, and landfill demand. These are levels of waste that would even embarrass our government.
    Suggestion: Given our government seems to want to stick its nose into everything these days, I recommend a government requirement for all packaged products to carry an easily readable “Percent Air” disclosure. High is bad, low is good. The public could compare products with some weighing on environmental impact and responsibility.
    These companies spend millions on their images. They call it “good will” and it is right in their budgets. I say force them to advertise the facts and trim back a bit on the marketing bullshit.

Dear Editor,
    I appreciate Belinda Acosta's informative “TV Eye” columns on the ups and downs of TV programming. I trust Ms. Acosta's insight to allow me to cut through the bullshit and monotony of much of what TV has to offer in favor of the more compelling shows. I also applaud Ms. Acosta's wish for the new year in “TV Eye” on December 31, 2010, in which she calls cable television subscriptions out for being overpriced, outdated, and saturated with annoyingly terrible commercials. On the point of being overpriced, it's one thing to have to pay 50, 60, or 70 dollars for a service with few or no commercials, but to pay the same amount for a service that spends 20 minutes of every hour trying to sell you stuff that you don't want or need is a sham and an outrage. Either make cable cheap ($10 a month) or make it expensive (like it already is) and cut out 80% of the commercials. I encourage and support the movement to cancel cable service in favor of getting other services with few or no commercials like Netflix and/or just a plain old Internet connection. It's time to break the corporate cable stranglehold on TV programming. Thanks for taking the lead on this in such a public way.

Dear Editor,
    Re: “The [basic] unit of civilization is not the individual but the family, so the equalization of men and women is changing civilization at its [very] root.” From “Letters at 3am” [Dec. 31, 2010].
    For that to be true, all actions in a civilization would be modeled as the interactions of families and groups of families. I can’t tell you how many ways that is problematic and just not the case.
    The mindset that seems to have inspired the article bugs me. I think it is a function of how history is taught these days: If you accept that our culture and political system are a function of impersonal forces, not the machinations of individuals and groups of individuals for specific ends, you have accepted your impotence as a citizen. You will be free to sway with the winds of fashion, not grounded in reality and principle. As such, your effectiveness in participating in the public sphere is severely limited.
    If however you see past events in terms of the actions of individuals and groups of the same, you are armed to apprehend real causes and generate opposition to those causes with which you do not agree. Without that concreteness, your actions are unfocused and ineffective. It is the difference between the effect of a spectator and that of a participant. The spectator state for the general public is desirable for those who wish to retain the status quo, and therefore is what is promoted in public and other state-accredited schools.
    World consolidation of cultures or governments is not inevitable or even desirable. Ultimately the world is a function of individuals and their voluntary interactions. I think it is selling one’s self short to characterize it in imprecise collectivist terms. If you think in those terms, you have volunteered away your freedom.
    Power to the individual.