Train

Train

In reference to “Degrees of Education” [Letters, July 28–Aug. 3]: The late English motoring writer L.J.K. Setright, a man of erudition both wide and deep, once observed that “the God Mammon prefers his acolytes to be trained, rather than educated.” The masters of business want well-trained, docile workers, people who will do their jobs well without questioning the usefulness or significance of those jobs, or whether they ought to be doing something else. They need not be happy, or even content; if their skills are limited to their training, then they will continue plugging away as their only alternative to unemployment, a situation that entirely too many people consider to be normal.

Against this, I would argue that while a properly trained person will do that particular job competently and well, a properly educated one knows how to learn to do almost any job he cares to do, and to think of ways to do it better. If my prospective boss has a problem with that, I’d prefer to keep looking.

Will Owen

Pasadena

Third World

Regarding “They Wanted All Blacks Out” [July 28–Aug. 3]: I’m Hispanic, I came to the U.S. as a legal immigrant, and I am a naturalized U.S. citizen. I left behind a Third World country, and I find myself living in one now.

It’s common knowledge that over 50 percent of Latino gang members are illegal aliens and thus deportable.

Los Angeles Special Order 40 protects these criminals. Once and for all, I want law-enforcement authorities to get it through their heads that illegal aliens don’t testify against gang members because they fear deportation but because they fear retaliation! I’m in the U.S. legally, and I would not testify against gang members, because I know the police are incapable of protecting me!

According to a 2004 report from the Center for Immigration Studies, Washington, D.C.: “In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.” Demographics professor William Frey, from the University of Michigan, did a study of California and found 150,000 middle-class European-Americans and African-Americans are leaving California each year. Illegal immigration has destroyed California’s economy ($38 billion debt), educational system and health system, and has brought crime to the highest level in our country. We have a bunch of socialists running this state who are killing the goose that lays the golden egg. My children are white-collar workers who can no longer afford to live in this state. My husband and I will go where our children go.

Haydee Pavia

Laguna Woods

Competition

As a Chinese immigrant who used to prepare amnesty and other immigration applications, I hope that your article [“They Wanted All Blacks Out” July 28–Aug. 3] will make the NAACP and other black leaders who promote amnesty and mass immigration realize that their position on immigration will heighten tensions between blacks and Latinos.

In his 1992 article titled “Blacks vs. Brown,” then–L.A. Times editorial writer Jack Miles warned that the Rodney King riots’ underlying cause was due to poor blacks who felt out-competed economically by Asian and Hispanic immigrants. Another amnesty or continued massive immigration is another and much bigger time bomb and needs to be stopped for the sake of all Americans and existing legal immigrants.

Yeh Ling-Ling

Oakland

Digital Projection

Wait a minute, let me get this straight: The movie version of Miami Vice is shot in high-def video, edited in “his expansive Santa Monica offices” with the aid of a screening room “powered by a 2K digital projector” [“A Mann’s Man’s World,” July 28–Aug. 3], and there’s no theater in the L.A. vicinity, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation (an “industry town”!), where the public can see this digitally projected? A quick check at www.dlp.com shows that digital projection of this movie is commercially available, just not anywhere near here.

What’s going on here? I’d been looking forward to a digital presentation of this in a theater for months; now I’m resigned to waiting for the DVD instead.

Bob Casner

Venice

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