Letters to the editor March 23

Cartoonist gets it wrong

I take issue with the editorial cartoon on the March 14 opinion page. The cartoon stated “May 2018: Trump removes bank regulations that would have prevented Silicon Valley Bank Crash.”

This is false. First of all Trump cannot remove regulations, only Congress can do that. Which is what they did in a bipartisan act to remove regulations that were impeding competition in the banking industry.

Do an internet search for “Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform and consumer protection act.” Large banks are still required to comply with the Dodd-Frank rules. SVB may be one of those large banks that still has to comply with Dodd-Frank, I don’t know. Maybe someone in the Daily Inter Lake can find out if SVB was required to comply with Dodd-Frank. If they were then the rules were still in place and have not changed for this bank.

And secondly, the change in regulations had nothing to do with the SVB failure. The SVB failure was due to poor money management decisions that were compounded by high inflation and rising interest rates. If we did not have high inflation and rising interest rates SVB would still be solvent.

So in actuality, Joe Biden’s spending policies and resulting high inflation is what caused the failure of SVB. Larry Kudlow has a good evaluation of this on YouTube. I would listen to people who know what they are talking about and not a cartoonist.

— William Fry, Kalispell

Biology lesson

Anatomy and physiology for all. In my opinion, that should be required reading for all legislators as they attempt to regulate our lives.

Whether you believe in the “Big Bang” or the creation on the sixth day, anatomy deals with the structures within the body, and physiology studies the functions.

The eight characteristios of biological life include cellular organization, reproduction, metabolism, homeostasis, heredity, response to stimuli, growth and development and adaptation through evolution. Individual cells (and we each have 37.2 trillion of them) reproduce as well as zygotes, insulin is a hormone as well as estradiol, an organism uses chemical reactions to continue functioning, maintain temperature control, blood pressure and water balance.

All organisms develop over time to become more physically and mentally mature. On average, puberty begins between 8 and 13 in females and 9 and 14 in males. Puberty onset is marked by an increase in adrenal hormones.

For some individuals, chromosomal abnormalities, ie. Turner Syndrome and Klinefelter Syndrome which are the result of random genetic errors produce individuals that do not fit the definitions that this legislature assigns to the sexes. We, as humans have offspring that inherit genetic material through sexual reproduction. the offspring of asexual reproduction inherit genetic material from only one parent.

The litany of bills this session reminds me of a poem by Bliss Carman (1861-1929), called “Hem and Haw.”

— Norma Linsky, Kalispell