I cannot be the only citizen who is fed up with the excuses. Bentonville lost almost $1 million in tax revenue and all the man responsible for this department can say is it's a combination of mistakes and software. Ridiculous. If any one of us "lost" a million dollars of the government's money we would be fired, publicly ridiculed and sent to prison. I cannot believe he believes providing additional training is an appropriate punishment.
All parties involved starting at the top with him and each employee who was partly responsible needs to be fired immediately. "Oops, lost a million" is not acceptable. "We'll get it better next time." NO WAY.
One million dollars could have built 10-15 Habitat For Humanity Homes for 10-15 local homeless families. We could have built seven homes outright and just given them away to neighbors in need. How many starving people would that money have fed? And how can we make it back? We cannot. The only moral option is to resign immediately, everyone involved, or they should be fired with no severance, to say the least.
Would any company in the world not fire an employee immediately for such a blunder? In a heartbeat.
Joshua Blau
CENTERTON
Perspective piece failed
to deliver on satire
I was surprised the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published Roger Kimball's article ("America: Four possible futures") on the Perspective page of the Aug. 20 paper. The article would have fit better on the page next to "Otus the Head Cat." It was not an opinion piece or an informational piece. It was pure satire and propaganda.
Now, I appreciate good satire when it is funny and making fun of some obvious injustice. The problem with Kimball's article was it made up scenarios and claimed they belonged to Akira Kurosawa. The first set was four scenarios predicting the outcome of the 2016 election and the second set was predicting the future of the American republic. Of course, this was all made up by Kimball because Kurosawa died in 1998 and could not have predicted any of the so-called "scenarios." So, the whole premise was false.
The thing that bother me the most was that Kimball's article was more propaganda than satire. He used almost all the seven main types of propaganda in his article, such as:
Name-calling -- This was mostly directed at Hillary Clinton.
Logical Fallacies -- Robert Mueller was connected to Clinton and Obama as he gathered up his "posse."
Over-simplification-- The whole article reeked of ideas that were simply thrown out with no reason except to discredit any sort of reasonable political discourse.
The anarchy suggested was largely brought on by the Democrats while the Republicans tried their best to maintain order. So, the article was biased throughout.
Another type of propaganda used throughout the article was unwarranted extrapolation -- making huge predictions about the future on the basis of a few small facts.
Now we could just laugh off Kimball's article as him having a little fun, however, with the state of the union as it stands today and taking in the consideration that Kimball is editor and publisher of a very conservative magazine, that would be a dangerous thing to do.
At a time when fake news is a real problem and the news media and honest journalism are under attack, I believe Kimball's article was an insult to the long tradition of solid journalism on the Perspective page. I said at the beginning that I thought his article belonged on the page with "Otus the Head Cat." After reconsidering that statement, I would like to apologize to Otus.
Steven Trulock
Fayetteville
Commentary on 09/01/2017