MAILBAG:

Measure B is bad because it denies the public meaningful participation in selecting the final city hall site.

There are many candidate sites, and there are reasonable ways to conduct an election among many candidates. The traditional way uses a primary and a runoff. Better ways are the “Instant transferable vote,” used by San Francisco, and “Acceptance voting” used by some scientific societies.

It would have been quite appropriate for the people to approve an ordinance by initiative that specifies which of these methods should be used. That would be a useful legislative act, suitable for an initiative.

Instead, Measure B asks us to vote Yes or No on one arbitrarily selected candidate. That is like asking us to vote Yes or No on Cruz Bustamante before we know if Gray Davis is recalled.

Measure B is also bad because it clutters up the charter with detail. The charter is our Constitution — it deals with important matters, like the kind of government we will have.

A proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution to move the Capitol Building would be laughed at as a bad joke. Bill Ficker has a good sense of humor, but he has made a bad joke. We laugh only because someone was willing to put up more than $150,000 to get it on the ballot. That is not much of an argument for it, but in the world of politics, money is the strongest argument.

ALLAN BEEK

Newport Beach

English system still superior to metric

Thousands of people, including terrorists, streaming across our borders with impunity is a terrible threat to our country. This breach in security must be stopped, or we will reap the whirlwind of terrorist attacks in our country in the near future.

Leaving our borders unsecured as they are now amounts to national suicide, and it must be stopped. Also, converting to the metric system (“Times a-changin’, let’s go metric!”, Nov. 25) is a sinister plot as it weakens our country by increasing the cost of production. It has also caused untold mishaps such as the Mars lander space probe that reportedly crashed into Mars because the altimeter system was calibrated inaccurately when scientists integrated metric into the English system and the retro-rocket engines shut off too soon.

Also, a jumbo jet ran out of fuel over Canada because the fuel gages were calibrated in metric, which confused the ground crew who loaded the fuel incorrectly and forced the pilot to do a brilliant dead-stick emergency landing on a short remote landing strip. Everything barely came out OK, but we don’t need this kind of trouble just because some goofy subversive eggheads in our society want to convert to metric for no good reason.

The English system is superior to metric because it is based on natural measurements, instead of metric theoretical ridged mathematical quantities unrelated to pragmatic reality, and we should keep it.

ED NEMECHEK

Landers

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