China’s virus duck
I see the United Sates will donate another 500 million COVID-19 vaccines around the world, bringing our total to over 1 billion (“US to share 500M jabs,” Sept. 22).
Our country continues to pay for China’s mistake. China has destroyed economies around the world, resulting in canceled weddings, birthdays, graduations and other celebrations. And let’s not forget it is responsible for over 4 million deaths worldwide.
What has China done to rectify the situation? Nothing. China gets away with murder (literally) and the US taxpayer gets the bill.
Tom Vespo
Bethpage
Free speech lost
Although I was heartened to read Teresa Manning’s excellent article on the Campus Free Speech Restoration Act, I think she missed the underlying point of the necessity of the legislation: the demonization of conservative thinking across academic America, fostered by the leftist faculties and lapped up by the young-adult students (“Saving Campus Speech,” PostOpinion, Sept. 23).
But it bears noting that this has not always been the case. When I attended Boston University almost 40 years ago, I would engage in hours of lively and delightful debate with my liberal friends, who referred to me with affection and respect as: “An oxymoron — an intelligent conservative.” Today, if I espoused the same ideas I’d be labeled simply as an “evil conservative.”
About 10 years ago, Rutgers University was forced to rescind an invitation for Condoleezza Rice to deliver the commencement address, because of faculty opposition to her place in the Bush White House.
The academic left has demonstrated that if it cannot stop conservative speech through intimidation (i.e., political correctness) it shall do so by force. John Stuart Mill’s “Marketplace of Ideas” is dead. And universities helped kill it.
Warren Nitti
Edgewater, NJ
MTA incompetence
The details described in “MTA’s $1.5M ‘pump fake’ ” (Sept. 20) sound like a textbook case of dysfunctional government.
MTA officials used $1.5 million in federal grant money to buy pump trucks to be used at bus depots in the event of extreme storm conditions.
According to the MTA Inspector General’s report, the trucks were delivered in 2018, but sat idle during the Aug. 31 flash flooding because depot personnel had not been trained to use the equipment. As a result, at least $8 million worth of damage occurred to buses in two depots.
All indications are that the execution of a comprehensive and integrated plan for using and maintaining the newly bought equipment as well as proper personnel training to execute the plan and stewardship of the project is probably a foreign concept to the MTA. As a result of this mismanagement, the taxpayer will pick up the tab. Not once, but twice.
Saul Ash
Massapequa
Rikers mayhem
I’m a firm believer that if you commit a crime, you deserve punishment, but not what is going on in Rikers Island at this time (“12th inmate this year dies in Dept. of Correx custody,” Sept. 23).
After all, these are not robots. They are flesh and blood. You can find a way to punish without resorting to circumstances where inmates are dying, sometimes by their own hand.
Who is responsible? Isn’t there one politician who is in a position to make the situation livable? Inmates needn’t be coddled, but what is going on in Rikers is pure madness and, amazingly, no one seems to care. How did we ever get to this point? Shameful.
Bunny Abraham
Manhattan
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