



I had been a New York Times subscriber for years and a Sunday New York Times reader for decades. However, a couple of months ago I let my subscription run out because I couldn’t justify the expense. My plan was to get one of the introductory offers before the election and have The New York Times for the final months of the presidential race at a much more affordable rate.

But now I’ve decided that even at 75 percent off The New York Times is not worth it because The Times has admitted that it is no longer making an attempt to produce objective journalism. The editors believe that it is too important to elect Hillary Clinton to let little things like facts get in the way of the story they want to tell.

If The Times isn’t even going to try, why bother? I get email updates from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Why do I need to read the same thing under The New York Times banner?

It’s sad to see one of the truly great newspapers in the world decide to throw in the towel to get someone of the caliber of Hillary Clinton elected president. I hope thousands more will dump The New York Times until it feels the pain, not that all newspapers aren’t feeling the pain these days.


Why is it you can surf all day on the internet with no problems, but when you really need it, suddenly you step back in time to dial-up speeds. Not that I would ever spend the day aimlessly surfing the net, but on Monday, the night of the great debate, I was all set up in my office to watch the debate on my monitor and take notes on my laptop when, an hour before the debate was supposed to start, I couldn’t even get a photo of a cute puppy and kitten to load.

The good news is that I had time to run home, and the only downside was I had to take notes the old-fashioned way – with a pen and paper. It did take until Wednesday to figure out why the internet was no longer my friend when everyone else in the office was getting along fine, but by then I had lost my cute puppy and kitten video and those are so hard to find on the internet. Who knows when I’ll find another.


There is a lot in the news these days about police body-worn camera videos and I’ve heard several people comment that the camera doesn’t lie. If that were true then Hollywood wouldn’t exist. The point of a movie is to convince you that something that doesn’t exist does, whether it is a Western town, which consists of a bunch of facades, or a war scene where the same set is shot from different angles to make it look like different places.

But even when people aren’t trying, cameras may not lie, but they don’t tell the whole story. You can’t see what is right outside the frame no matter how hard you try. A video is one view from one angle; you don’t know what happened right before the camera was turned to the scene and you don’t know what’s happening right outside the camera shot.

Videos can be a great asset, but sometimes you need to know the rest of the story.


I watched a television show the other night where a US senator was the villain. This senator it seems had nearly total control of the US intelligence operation and control over some units of the military. I’ve seen other movies and television shows where a senator with nearly unlimited power was the villain and wonder if there was any evidence that this has ever happened in real life.

I couldn’t in modern times find a single senator who had founded a criminal empire based on his complete power over departments of the federal government. This is not to say that we don’t have senators who think they are gods, because it appears we do. But it’s interesting that Hollywood considers it reasonable and acceptable to make a sitting US senator the head of a crime syndicate. I suppose it indicates Americans’ low opinion of elected officials, but it does seem to be quite a stretch. How many US senators are smart enough to run an international crime syndicate and keep their day job?


Friday we are supposed to have a “black moon.” This happens when you have two new moons in a calendar month. A new moon is when the moon has turned its back on the earth and the bright side is facing the sun, so it’s there but it’s hard to see.