ON THE CHIN

Hey Brian, Here’s to guest columnist John Doe. [“YES! Weekly discriminates against ‘Triad Today’”; Feb. 22, 2012] I’m glad he turned his penetrating insight away from the club ads and toward the rest of YES! Weekly. I would like to shake his hand. (After he has washed it, of course.) If John Doe is not Jim Longworth, give him a job. If he is Jim Longworth, give him a raise in salary — up to, say, two sandwiches a day. He writes pretty good, and he’s a TV guy! Bill Bloxham, Winston-Salem

THE POLICE STATE

I am the police state, hear me whimper. I decry the abuse of my inalienable rights by my government, but turn a blind eye when this same government abuses the God-given rights of those abroad. I fi nd outrage in the groping of the elderly at checkpoints, drones over our cities and invasive surveillance on our streets, but I happily cheer when this is done in other places with funny names like “Kandahar” and “Baghdad.” I insist on the need for foreign aid to our allies giving little concern to the fact that portions of it are required to be spent on American-made weapons that will be turned on foreign populations by their own governments once their economies are sacked to make debt payments inviting anti-American insurgencies to take root. I will call you “unpatriotic” if you don’t support overthrowing potential threats 10,000 miles away, but will praise you as a “free-market advocate” for supporting the true threat to our security which is the debt-based monetary system just blocks from my home. Despite these contradictions, I am still most hospitable and would gladly give you a place to stay. Unfortunately, I can no longer provide shelter for I am now homeless on the continent my forefathers conquered. Michael Norbury. Greensboro

NOT GETTING IT

I was horrified and extremely disappointed to see the caption under the picture from the article with the New Edition concert [“Cooling it, now”; Feb. 22, 2012; by Ryan Snyder]. Not only were the names wrong, they were NOWHERE near close. The group members’ names were correct in the article, but way off base in the caption. Al B. Sure, Guy, Father MC, Kadeem Hardison, Tevin Campbell and Ginuwine are NOT NOW, nor have they ever been, part of New Edition. I don’t know if it was a joke that made its way into the paper by accident, or what.... But I was very disappointed in the caption. Cami Marshall, Greensboro Editor replies: Yeah, that was a joke.