Letters to the editor for Thursday, April 16, 2015

Tsarnaev should die for Boston Marathon bombing

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother didn’t care about killing people at the Boston Marathon, so why should federal courts show him any compassion and spare his life?

His defense attorneys are saying he was just a kid or teenager at the time, like he shouldn’t be held accountable for his actions when the bombing occurred. But I say if he, at 19, was brave enough to plant a bomb, then at 21 years old, he’s man enough and should die for taking part in it. I know that’s not a very nice thing to say, but it wasn’t a very nice thing what he and his brother did, either.

It’s a shame when you can’t go to something as innocent as the Boston Marathon to have a good time without a couple of crazed maniacs ruining things for everyone — the victims never did anything to them. I remember watching on television, surveillance footage of the pair before and after they planted their bombs, especially that of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It didn’t look like he was under some evil influence by his brother. He knew what he was supposed to do and his age had nothing to do with it; the only influence he was under was his own.

Federal courts found him guilty for the deaths of those people in Boston, so he should die for it. I feel sorry, not just for the victims, but also the family of the two brothers. Look at the shame they brought to their family’s name.

Donald Paetz

Carson City

Accepted age of universe has changed

In response to Larry Taylor’s comment on continental drift over hundreds of millions of years in the Friday, April 10 Appeal, I went to school in the 60s. At that time, the official age of the universe was 24 billion years. Today, that official/scientifically accepted age is 4 billion years. Now, either I am more than 24 billion years old, or science has made another blunder.

There is no successful method to date the age of the universe. There are seven methods of carbon dating. If you take a rock and submit it to all seven methods, you will get answers with variations of six and seven figures in length. Yes, this has been done.

When examining a theory, it is best to return to the author of said theory. Darwin stated in his book “Origin of the Species” that if his theory was correct, we would soon find “thousands of transitional fossils.” Well, that was in 1859. We haven’t found one transitional fossil yet.

From the other side of the argument — the sun shrinks at a rate of 0.1 percent every hundred years (5 feet per hour). With those calculations, 20 million years ago the sun would be touching the surface of the earth. However, if you are a creationist, the extrapolation as to the size of the sun 6,000 years ago isn’t a problem. The evidence for creationism is extensive, but not popular. People have to make a choice to discard the evidence in favor of evolution.

Bill Fullilove

Carson City