Letters to the Editor

In Wednesday’s Letters to the Editor, two letters were inadvertently combined. Our apologies to both writers. Here they are in their correct form.

Pot hole-filled street needs to be fixed by owner

My wife and I have lived in Pahrump for almost 23 years. We get our mail at the post office. For 23 years, we have driven across the pot hole-filled road caused by the water running onto Postal Road from the RV park.

Apparently, no one in the county, township, or state has the guts to tell the owner to fix it or face fines like every other citizen of Pahrump would be told. What’s the problem? Gutless.

Brian Phillips

Homeless project meeting was display of bureaucracy

We attended the meeting concerning the housing and nutrition project recently. It was a typical bureaucratic display of charts, graphs and untruths.

I thought the meeting was held in order to determine if the locals were in favor of the project or not. This was not the case, Kathie McKenna made it clear she would do whatever she wanted regardless of what the people wanted. She is a Biden/Harris supporter and the “our way or no way” was clearly on display.

Bill Mooney

Has military ‘overhaul’ been taking place for years?

In a recent letter to the PVT, there was opposition to Trump’s choice of the next secretary of defense, due to “plans to overhaul America’s military”. Maybe there has been an “overhaul” taking place for many years already, just without much fanfare or public knowledge that may not be very conducive to what I remember being told many years ago was the top “mission” of the U.S. military.

Most of us have at least heard of Dwight Eisenhower’s warning of the “Military Industrial Complex”, that led to the U.S. military paying $200 for standard ball peen hammers, $500 for standard toilet seats, and etc.

That later created a revolving door for connected government people that approved such things, to later get things like well-paid board positions on the corporations that profited handsomely by those contracts. And maybe it’s grown worse by pressures from various groups turning the U.S. military into “social experiments”, that have done things like lessen various standards, which in turn has made recruiting of really qualified people much more difficult.

Lack of “diplomacy” was used to question Mr. Hegseth’s qualifications, which is or should be the Department of State’s top mission, not the U.S. military’s. When you start easing or blurring of primary missions of different agencies of a country that has the longest lasting constitution in world history, changes should be very open, thoughtful, and publicly debated rather than being done by the actions of small influential groups for whatever reason.

David Jaronik

Reader says Trump just made presidential error

A recent article in Vox summarized U.S. public health data on the spectacular annual decline of serious and often-fatal diseases after the introduction of vaccines in the early- to mid-1900s. (“The stunning success of vaccines in America, in one chart,” Vox, 11-19-24)

Annual measles cases pre-vaccine: 530,000; annual measles cases post-vaccine: 13.

Annual diphtheria cases pre-vaccine: 200,000; annual diphtheria cases post-vaccine: 0.

Annual rubella cases pre-vaccine: 48,000; annual rubella cases post-vaccine: 6.

Annual smallpox cases pre-vaccine: 29,000; annual smallpox cases post-vaccine: 0.

Annual polio cases pre-vaccine: 16,000; annual polio cases post-vaccine: 0.

Smallpox has a 30% fatality rate. Thousands died of measles every year. Diphtheria killed 1,800 people annually.

During the past many decades vaccines have been required in schools, and that is why the diseases have disappeared.

President-elect Trump has said he will end federal funding of schools that make vaccines mandatory. Big mistake Mr. President-Elect.

Kimball Shinkoskey