The Senior Center already nice enough

Corvallis voters should visit the existing Senior Center at Chintimini Park. It is a marvelous facility. It has a huge meeting room, a professional size kitchen, and lots of offices, conference and meeting rooms. It even has a computer lab.

When you visit, also look at the current monthly calendar for the Center. It sponsors a wide variety of interesting activities. Nobody could possibly keep up with all of the activities available. And yet, for many hours of the day, much of the facility is not even used.

If you spend $10 million on the Senior Center, of course you can argue that then the Center can provide "more" activities. But why not spend another $20 million instead? Then you could provide "even more" activities. Both of these arguments ignore an important concept: "enough, already!"

Corvallis does not need to spend $10 million, or so, to upgrade its Senior Center. The existing center is quite fantastic as it is.

A small portion of the proposed bond will go towards upgrading parks, mostly by adding lights. How did Corvallis survive before without these lights? Lights are unnecessary. In the long summer days, the sun provides the light. In the cold and rainy other seasons, the fields are often unusable so lights would be useless. Local neighbors will hate the lights. Other park improvements in this bond proposal can be phased in and financed out of ordinary city operating expenses. This $12 million bond is not necessary.

David Grappo, Corvallis

Other animals also suffered at the fair

I agree 100 percent with Kathleen Dodge's letter in the Aug. 5 edition, regarding the welfare of the "wild" animals on the fair. The same can be said for the domesticated animals on exhibit as well. Some examples:

• At the small animal exhibit, three "market" chickens were shown, a breed of chicken, raised as fryers, that grows to market weight in about 8 weeks and, when kept alive longer, will suffer from heart and respiration illness due to the excessive weight. One was gasping for air and lay face-down in its own waste.

• The extreme motor bike show resulted in panicking horses that were, of all places, penned next to the motor biking arena. Every time a bike came by, the horses tried to flee but could go nowhere.

• The goats that were shown across the same arena also were restless due to the noise of this event.

• There was a dying chick in the horse arena, and no warming light available for the newborn chicks to keep themselves warm.

• Guinea pigs were kept in cages so small, they could hardly turn around.

I left with a troubled feeling, and I am not sure if I will return next year.

For next year, I hope the fair organizers will use more common sense to make sure the welfare of all the animals - "wild" and domestic - will be honored.

Irma Kapsenberg, Corvallis

All is not well with our global climate

Jonathan Hayes' letter of Aug. 4, "Polar bears in trouble, and other global warming lies," was full of lies.

"Antarctic ice cap destruction," from Wikipedia: The Ellesmere ice shelf reduced by 90 percent in the 20th century. A 1986 survey of Canadian ice shelves found that 48 km". (3.3 cubic kilometers) of ice calved from the Milne and Ayles ice shelves between 1959 and 1974. The Ayles Ice Shelf calved entirely on Aug. 13, 2005. The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf lost 600 square km of ice in a massive calving in 1961-1962. It further decreased by 27 percent in thickness (13 m) between 1967 and 1999. In summer 2002, the Ward Ice Shelf experienced another major breakup. Two sections of Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf broke apart into hundreds of unusually small fragments (100's of meters wide or less) in 1995 and 2002.

Polar bears, from Wikipedia: Of the 19 recognized polar bear subpopulations, five are declining, five are stable, two are increasing, and seven have insufficient data.

Kilimanjaro, from Wikipedia: A study by Philip Mote of the University of Washington in the United States and Georg Kaser of the University of Innsbruck in Austria concludes that the shrinking of Kilimanjaro's ice cap is not directly due to rising temperature but rather to decreased precipitation.

Jonathan doesn't mention the disappearing Arctic ice cap, which has shrunk 44 percent (National Geographic) since 1979, opening the Northwest passage, which hasn't been clear of ice since mankind has been looking for it

Jeffrey McGonagill, Corvallis

Global warming just a scam on taxpayers

John Borowski's July 30 letter saying that the debate is over about global warming and that it's real is laughable. Thirty years ago, Newsweek has charts and graphs telling us that global cooling is real. The debate is over.

Let me get this straight: We have gone from severe global cooling in 30 years to now global warming. These lunatics even wanted to tow an iceberg down here because we would be out of fresh water.

Well, we don't have manmade global cooling any more than we have manmade global warming. There is a natural cycle that sometimes cools and sometimes warms the Earth.

The left-wingers have figured out a way to turn these natural cycles into a new way to tax us, and unless we wise up to this, the nation will undergo the largest frauds in history perpetuated on the American people. That's why Al Gore will not debate the issue. He would lose every time.

Pat Burrell, Alsea