Donation rolls in to food bank

Penticton Salvation Army community services manager John Rankin accepts a $5,000 donation from Kal Tire Penticton store manager Kurt Allatt. Kal Tire customers and employees, during the Get $50 Give $50 initiative last fall, donated a total of $110,000 to help food banks across B.C. Mahatma Gandhi and Bertrand Russell. None of them could accept it.

We know that countries with no death penalty generally have low murder rates, and those with it mostly have higher ones, but as Piet Hein wrote, “There was an old lady who lived in a shoe, who had so many children she didn’t know what to do, but which was the cause and which the effect, try as she would she could never detect.”

We also know that there are quite frequent false convictions, and that’s really hard to get around. I also try to follow the example of Jesus. He did not express an opinion on the subject that I know of, but he did hint pretty frequently that his belief in human justice was not absolute.

I do admit that I see no obvious social advantage to the continuing existence of persons such as Paul Bernardo, but I would not be willing to kill them myself, so I feel it would be a cop-out to hire someone else to.

Despite my strong personal opinion, I would not want to make this decision for everyone.

Neither do I want any other John, Jane, Jill or Joe to decide it. I think our elected representatives, backed by our Supreme Court, have to decide this, based on serious study, deliberation and experience, and I don’t envy them the job.

The wisdom of crowds is great for deciding questions like the use of Skaha Lake Park, or whether we want a performing arts centre, or more transit, or to raise money for individuals in trouble or musicians.

It is not the way to decide who lives and who dies. John Greene Penticton

It is very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished evaporated while suffering the inconvenience and expense of driving Hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your SUV and speedboat, nearly getting hit every day on your bicycle and replacing all of your 90-cent light bulbs with $9 light bulbs.

The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere in just four days by that volcano in Iceland has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast, carbon. And there are around 200 active volcanoes on the planet spewing out this crude at any one time every day.

I don’t want to pee on your parade too much, but I should mention that when the volcano Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the human race had emitted in all its years on earth.

Of course, I shouldn’t spoil this touchyfeely tree-hugging moment and mention the effect of solar and cosmic activity and the well-recognized 800-year global heating and cooling cycle, which keeps on happening despite our completely insignificant efforts to affect climate change.

Just remember that your government has imposed a whopping carbon tax on you, on the basis of the bogus “human-caused” climate-change scenario.

In conclusion, it is very interesting how they don’t mention “global warming” anymore, now it’s “climate change.” You know why? It’s because the planet has cooled by 0.7 degrees in the past few years. Carl Peterson Oliver