No rational reason to refuse vaccine
Some people rationalize not getting vaccinated by saying they are putting their fate in the hands of God. If they, unfortunately, get sick with COVID-19, are they going to go to their church and put their medical fate in the hands of their pastor? Probably not. They will go to a hospital and put their fate in the hands of the medical community, which they did not trust in the beginning. Why trust them now? Facing serious illness or death changes one’s perspective. Why does it have to come to that?
KEN CHRISTY, WOODSTOCK
We will all pay for Biden’s blunders in Afghanistan
Embarrassing and stupid: two words that come to mind most readily when I think about what we see in Afghanistan. The word weak also comes to mind. People work full-time in the Biden administration to get things like an exit from Afghanistan right. They completely blew it. We will all pay in the future. While Biden rightly noted the buck stopped with him, his putting some of the blame on Trump (whose policies and decisions he has regularly rejected and overturned) is pathetic. We had not experienced a combat casualty in Afghanistan in over a year. A well-thought-through exit over a year or two — that protected the Afghans who helped us — would have been prudent. Instead, we got a foolish set of blunders. Biden had better get all his semi-socialist (i.e., you get free stuff no matter what) agenda before January 2023 because he just shot his party for the 2022 elections.
ALLEN BUCKLEY, SMYRNA
Columnist wrong in pointing blame for Afghanistan calamity
Wow, it didn’t take long for Patricia Murphy to board the Trump train, based on her AJC Aug. 18 column. She says the cause of the calamity in Afghanistan is because senators aren’t doing “what they are supposed to do.” Over the past 20 years, 12 have been under Republican control. During the eight years under a Democratic president, they complained about the lack of bipartisanship, followed by efforts to foil programs proposed by Democrats -- deja vu in 2020. Now, everything is the Democrats’ fault. Like most Americans, we are sad that the Taliban has taken over the country in record time. That said, if Trump had pulled our troops, they would be singing his praises while blaming Democrats for allegedly trying to block that withdrawal. The way I see it, U.S. authoritarian dictatorship is alive and well, and democracy is suffering a slow death only because the GOP is hell-bent on destroying our country as well.
SUSAN MATEJA, DECATUR
Plant Vogtle’s construction problems hurt taxpayers
Recent news of Plant Vogtle is about more delay, more cost overruns. Now, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission finds more construction faults, with overruns in construction dates and budget numbers. Every critic of this troubled, many-do-overs nuclear construction quagmire is correct. Every power company claim and promise has been broken.
The cascading costs will be dumped onto Georgians by our company-captive Georgia Public Service Commission. Unknown millions have already been taken from Georgia’s elderly, school taxes, and others and used in the shell game financing, all based on the now-obvious false claim of “lower-cost electricity” in the future. It’s a dinosaur-scale mess that needs more investigation and lots of sunlight on it.
ROBERT SEARFOSS, ATLANTA
Climate modeling and weather forecasting not the same
Re: the letter “Real threats to U.S. are government control, debt”, (Readers Write, Aug. 19), we must periodically reiterate the same points in order to combat misinformation and misconceptions.
The writer states “many people are understandably skeptical about 50- or 100-year climate predictions when we can’t forecast tomorrow’s weather”. We must repeat the point that weather forecasting and climate modeling are very different, and climate modeling certainly can be done with a much higher degree of confidence than a weather forecast.
Maybe you can’t predict exactly where in the river a molecule of water will be in the next minute or two, but you do know with confidence where the river goes.
CHRIS JONES, CONYERS
