letters
TO THE EDITOR
COAL TRAIN FREE
Thanks for your cover story (1/19) on
the coal trains coming soon to dozens of
Northwest communities. I wanted to alert you
that there’s more that residents can do than
to merely plead with their local politicians
to pass nonbinding resolutions. They can
instead follow the lead of the group Coal-
Free-Bellingham.org, which just launched a
local ballot initiative campaign.
Bellingham, Wash., is the newest
addition to the more than 150 mostly East
Coast communities that are learning how
to exercise their inherent right of local self-
governance by passing community rights-
based legally binding ordinances. These
communities in six states have banned
corporate fracking, corporate agriculture,
corporate mining, corporate water extraction
for bottling and corporate sewage sludge
dumping on farmlands. You can review the
actual ordinances at celdf.org
I work full-time on building this
community rights movement across
Oregon and would love to return to Eugene
soon to help your community to jump on
board this new-paradigm campaign.
Imagine if we could pass this same
ordinance in towns along each of the rail
lines the coal corporations plan to use!
Wouldn’t that be exciting?
It’s time we the people stopped
pleading with our politicians and started
exercising our right to govern ourselves. We
live in a corporate state. Let’s acknowledge
this fact and start acting accordingly.
I urge EW to write a follow-up story
on Bellingham’s legally groundbreaking
efforts, so that all local residents here
can learn more about this extraordinary
new rights-based movement. More info at
PaulCienfuegos.com
Paul Cienfuegos
Portland
IMPROPER POLICE
OK, so a federal judge and jury says
offi cer Bill Solesbee violated the rights
of and used excessive force upon Josh
Schlossberg. But Chief Pete Kerns and
his internal investigation ruled Solesbee
acted properly! Who can we believe? Not
Kerns, the former supervisor of rapist
Roger Magana. Not Solesbee, notorious for
instigating the Ian Van Ornum incident. Not
his Taser-happy sidekick Judd Warden, or
our town’s own renegade duo, federal agent
Rob Hart and offi cer Jim McBride. This
untrustworthy police department repeatedly
makes Eugene liable for its illegal actions
and ought to be disbanded and investigated.
We have the constitutional right and moral
obligation to instead form a community
militia to competently defend Eugene
COAL VS. PASSENGERS
Will the coal trains be sharing the
tracks with Amtrak thereby reducing
Amtrak service quality and encouraging
riders to go to their cars?
Glenn Heiserman
Eugene
NUDE YOGA: A HISTORY
ourselves and throw these cynic brutes off
the public payroll.
Michael McFadden
Eugene
ALTERNATE FILM REVIEWS
Ideally, moviegoers would make
choices about what movies to see based
upon the opinions of more than one person,
but given busy lives sometimes a glance at
how many stars a movie receives in the EW
is the deciding factor. While critics should
certainly give their honest opinions about
the movies they review, I’d like to suggest
that alongside its “stars,” the EW publish
the average ratings of other critics and
viewers, especially in instances in which
the EW reviewer’s rating is very much at
odds with these averages.
Rick Levin’s one-star review (1/19) of
Shame contrasted sharply with an average
critic rating of 7.4 out 10 (based on 159
reviews) and an average audience rating of
3.9 out of 5 (based on over 10,000 viewer
ratings, see rottentomatoes.com). The EW
wields signifi cant power over the health of
Eugene’s beloved Bijou and should wield
this power more responsibly. Oh, and Sissy
was played by Carey Mulligan, not Carey
Sullivan (as erroneously stated in Levin’s
review).
Also, in response to nurse Brandy
Gordon’s letter (1/19) regarding OMSI’s
Body Worlds exhibit, she “went there
to learn about anatomy,” but objected to
“nipples, penises, and vulvas left intact.”
Who are her patients, the Muppets?
Doug & Robin Quirke
Eugene
SORENSON SUPPORT
I’m not a Lane County resident any
longer, but I lived in Pleasant Hill in Lane
County between 1989 and 2003. I’m
writing to point something out about the
work of Commissioner Pete Sorenson.
He played a signifi cant national
role in the effort to “decouple” federal
forest payment dollars from logging on
National Forests and forest lands managed
by the BLM. He testifi ed before the U.S.
House Subcommittee on Forests and
Public Lands, pointing out that county
government cannot tax the federal lands
and that payments to counties, in lieu of
their taxing the federal lands, should be
made not on the basis of logging those
lands but from other sources.
This effort, called decoupling, is a
national conservation effort. Not only
did Sorenson testify at the congressional
hearings on this, but that legislation was
signed into law by President Clinton in
October 2000. For his work in support
of this legislation, he was invited and did
witness the president signing the law in
the Oval Offi ce. He was the only county
commissioner in the nation who both
testifi ed on the legislation and followed it
through to signing.
I now live in southwest Oregon,
where the process of decoupling has been
especially helpful in turning down the heat
in the “timber wars.” As a consequence
I am reminded that Lane County has a
national leader in Sorenson. I’m glad he’s
there and he has my support.
Rich Fairbanks
Jacksonville
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4
FEBRUARY 2, 2012
EUGENE WEEKLY
EW’s Jan. 9 Slant column said that
“fl exible minds want to know” how nude
yoga is one of the rating criteria for Eugene
being the 22nd gayest city in America
according to a Jan. 9 The Advocate
magazine article.
Perhaps it comes from The Advocate’s
four-decade-long archives. In the 1970s,
nude yoga became common in gay
hippie communities from Eugene to San
Francisco. Nude yoga was practiced by
the famous UO journalism graduate Randy
Shilts, whose fi rst job was at The Advocate,
which at the time was a national biweekly
gay newspaper. In 1982, Shilts moved
on to The San Francisco Chronicle — he
became a famous reporter and author of
several books that were made into major
motion pictures before he died of AIDS.
The poet Allen Ginsberg and other
authors of the book Queer Dharma mixed
nude yoga with Buddhism. Photos of men
in nude yoga spiritual positions appear
on the cover of this book, edited by
Winston Leyland and published by his Gay
Sunshine Press of San Francisco in 1988.
I doubt The Advocate has the
resources to fact check it because they are
struggling fi nancially, similar to most other
print magazines.
Thomas Kraemer
Corvallis
MISSING THE POINT
In response to Rob Spooner’s “Absurd
Numbers” letter (1/19) I have to reply that
generalizing numbers can prove virtually
any point you wish to make, for the right
or the left. When you generalize as you do
in your letter, it only proves that you are
trying to spin a message to your side of the
debate.
You completely missed the point of
Bob Cassady’s original letter (12/22). Sure,
Johnston may have been exaggerating the
numbers, but that’s what happens when
one generalizes. So let’s get specifi c.
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