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Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005 | 9:56 a.m.

Bus shelters don't adequately protect people

I hear that new bus-stop shelters may soon be built. That is good news, but there is a problem with many existing shelters: they're not.

What is it that people waiting at bus stops are supposedly being sheltered from? Inclement sun, rain and wind. A superficial look might suggest that such sheltering is being provided. But anyone who closely examines, and certainly everyone who uses, these so-called shelters soon will find serious design flaws that defeat their purported purpose. Some of them have translucent tops so that the noon-time sun is not blocked. These should be replaced with opaque tops.

The backing of many of the stop shelters is as full of holes as Swiss cheese. During our very hot summers, sunlight with its intense heat shoots through those holes like death rays from hell. That is why you may often see people at the stops standing up close to the solid and opaque advertising bill, unable to enjoy the comfort of sitting on the bench where they would be not sheltered from the sun, but bathed in its blaze.

When rain comes in at a slant and hits the backing, it splashes straight through onto the bodies and belongings of the supposedly sheltered people. Also, since bus shelters often have sprinklers right behind them, even on rainless days the unsuspecting bench sitters may be surprised by a drenching. Of course, the wind whistles right through these ridiculous holes.

There should be real shelters, not structures falsely labeled as shelters. People who have to wait for buses would greatly appreciate it.

MICHAEL PRESCOTT

Response was too little, too late

The ineptness of the Bush administration will now be chronicled in monumental historic terms. A war, halfway around the world, that was based on fabricated information and sold at the United Nations as a threat to world security. An unimaginable rise in the national debt and a growing deficit in the nation's balance of trade. Only to be followed by the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina.

In the current crisis, the ineptness of this administration began with the appointment of a political crony to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

It took the administration and the president days to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster.

"This is not the time for the blame game," Bush said while attacking the local government officials for their responses. He could not comprehend that the primary response to a multistate disaster of this magnitude is the responsibility of FEMA.

In its continuing effort to salvage some good will out of the situation, the Bush administration sent Vice President Dick Cheney to assess the damage. Far too little, far too late. In any other form of government, an election would be called for and the populace would throw Bush and his top staff members out of office.

RAY HARBERT

Steep increase in troops per gallon

George Bush made history recently when he almost told the truth about why we are in Iraq. It's to "protect" the oil fields from the terrorists. That is very nearly what the British Empire said when it first took over the region and formed the state of Iraq. Empires are always "protecting" valuable stuff from bad guys.

It's about the oil, stupid! Had Bush told the truth in the beginning, many Americans would have gone along with the war without all the stuff about WMD and terrorists. We get so upset when our gas prices go up. The demand was going up and Iraq had oil. Saddam was of no use to us anymore, so we had to take him out to get the supply. American companies would privatize Iraq's treasures, of course, but that's only right because we'd be giving them democracy.

The problem with the cheap gas is that there are hidden costs, such as the large tax burden imposed by waging a war and conducting an occupation. That must be added into the cost per gallon. Then there is the cost in human life. Instead of miles per gallon we might be talking in terms of troops per gallon. We could talk in terms of Iraqis per gallon, I suppose, but we do not count them.

JERRY BITTS

Era of gasoline guzzling is over

Somehow, someway, the American people must face the reality that the day of unlimited, cheap consumption of a finite energy source is over. This realization, if it ever comes, will mean the demise of all passenger vehicles with more than four cylinders. This does not mean the end of SUVs and other gas guzzlers -- it just means they will have to be built with no more than four cylinders.

It will also mean the re-emergence of public transportation as a primary means of travel for most people as reserves of fossil fuels continue to dwindle in spite of conservation and attempts at providing alternative sources in sufficient volume.

If mass transportation is not made a priority, it will also mean, eventually, that price controls and rationing (if my four-cylinder proposal is not adopted, and, really, I don't have much faith that it will be) will have to be imposed or the economy will be seriously damaged. In other words, life as we've come to know it cannot and will not go on much longer.

If the country had listened to President Jimmy Carter in 1979 maybe it could have been delayed for awhile longer, but nobody listened.

DANIEL OLIVIER Bullhead City, Ariz.

Facts support evolution of man

I was happy to see Ken Lucas' most recent letter. He has been an ardent opponent of the scientific fact of evolution, but seems now to have come out of the closet as an evolutionist. He admits that micro- evolution is an undisputed fact, but macroevolution and microevolution are exactly the same process, the only difference being the time scale involved.

In his tired arguments against evolution he again cites the fossil record by stating that there are only about 5,000 protohuman fossils. I find that number remarkable since fossilization is a rare event in nature, especially in the warm moist parts of the world in which human evolution occurred. I have the greatest admiration for the paleontologists and biologists who were able to uncover so many. On the other hand, if humans had arisen by some sort of divine creation, the number of protohuman fossils would be exactly zero.

In another effort to impugn the fossil record, he lists six fossils as being fraudulent or disputed. Four of the six are, in fact, undisputed and valuable parts of the fossil record, while the other two include a mistake and a fraud that were uncovered by, guess who: scientists.

Finally, he insults scientific evolutionists by saying that they believe that they are apes. Anyone with even a basic knowledge of evolution can only find that laughable. We are not apes; we are, however, closely related to apes as evidenced by the fact that more than 96 percent of our DNA is identical to that of chimpanzees.

WALLACE

J. H

ENKELMAN

Creationism is symbolic story

As a Catholic, I am surprised by the resurgence of controversy about evolution. I honestly thought this argument had been settled. So now, the Republican so-called "religious" right gets to dictate what is taught in public schools, even though they have not done enough research to understand scientific theory.

The word theory does not mean that evolution is just a guess. In science, it means a set of ideas based on observations about nature that explains many facts. It does not mean we believe we are apes, as one letter writer suggested.

Evolution explains a branching process that took millions of years, and one process of evolution is called speciation. An easier way to explain this is to say that 4 to 10 million years ago we had a common ancestor, or progenitor.

And to this religious Catholic, I believe the "story" of creation is symbolic, not literal. If it were not a story to explain where we came from, there would be a shrine over the graves of Adam and Eve.

PATRICIA KEASLING

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