A Question for “The Blob”

Re Amanda Sperber’s “Terror Out of the Blue” [Feb. 25/March 4]: Lots of interesting facts and statistics on Somalia. Some answers to a few questions. Except one: What is the United States doing there in the first place? I wonder what Matt Duss, whom you profiled in a recent issue [“Who Is Matt Duss and Can He Take On ‘The Blob’?,” by David Klion, Feb. 25/March 4], would say. Frank L. Friedman delanco, n.j.

Generation Climate Strike

Re Mark Hertsgaard’s “The Climate Kids Are Coming” [March 25]: Thank you for this article. I am 73 years old, and that young lady Greta Thunberg and those standing up with her are heroes. Shame on us for not stepping up to the plate with them.

Theodore Roosevelt once said, “To waste, to destroy, our natural resources…will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right hand down to them amplified.” We are infected with a deadly, communicable disease, which is called greed and the lust for power. Until we find a cure for it, nothing will change; it will always be “business as usual.” Until the last gallon of oil, the last ounce of gold, the last fish in the ocean, and the last dollar in a poor person’s pocket are gone, the rich will be focused on only one thing: having it all. Perhaps if those children’s wallets were filled with gold, they might then get some attention.George Trudeau

These kids are wonderful, but Frederick Douglass’s famous statement “Power concedes nothing without a demand” should probably be updated to something along the lines of “Power concedes nothing without resistance disrupting that power.” There are demands that power can and does ignore. But when that power is disrupted, then it pays attention.

Steve Muratore

I take exception to your description of Greta Thunberg: “her round, serious face and light-brown hair braided into pigtails.” I feel that it belittles her and misses what a tremendous inspirational leader she is. Andrea Dowling hunter river, canada

Endgame

Re Tim Shorrock’s article “Hamstrung in Hanoi” [March 25]: This fits in with my (perhaps) paranoid theory that the endgame of the bipartisan establishment is the destruction of the world. Look at the resistance to a nuclear deal with North Korea. (You can acknowledge the horrendous nature of the Kim regime and still be in favor of a deal.) Look at the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when President Kennedy averted nuclear war only by defying his own advisers—and probably paid for it with his life. Look at the reversals of the Reagan-Gorbachev arms reductions and the US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Look at the obliviousness of politicians from both parties to the shocking fact that the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now at two minutes to midnight. Look at the foolhardy US-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, which could have led to war with Russia because of the threat to its main fleet at Sevastopol. Look at the failure to do anything significant against global warming.

I am, of course, only scratching the surface here.

Caleb Melamed