I've been reading Roots while I've been waiting for this stomach thing to pass. Maybe not the best choice for reading material when you're feeling sick, but it's a gripping story, very well told. It's long. And the slaves the stories are about didn't have the luxury of switching to a different entertainment medium. Now I find as I poke around on the net and read what people say about prejudice and racism, I think no -- that's doesn't begin to cover it. I read that 46% of Republicans polled feel the verdict in the Chauvin trial was wrong. The only universe that it was the wrong verdict was when black people, like George Floyd were slaves, and the only crime Chauvin would be guilty of was destroying another person's property. I wrote in a tweet: "We were taught in school that slavery was over in the US but for millions of Americans it wasn’t and isn’t." So far no one has objected to that interpretation. #

I did take a break from Roots to watch the Knicks win their 9th in a row. I love this team so much. Then I watched a couple of recommended movies on Netflix, High Flying Bird and Okja.#

This is what happens when a crazy minority takes control of the court. They want to make it legal to carry an unlicensed gun anywhere in the US, including urban states. This will get a lot of Americans hurt and killed. We have a huge gun problem in this country. It's like they're throwing around a nuke, we're hoping it won't go off. They're daring the Democrats to stop them. #

BTW, as you may know I also have a linkblog. I usually look for a link to a story on two sites: CNN and Axios. Neither site is overly cluttered with nonsense, and neither has a paywall. You can find out what the story is a few seconds and not use up any of your free allocation on other sites that do a good job but have paywalls. Thought I should get an endorsement in for this practice. They coud become the most-linked-to news sites. #

I'm having a lot of trouble understanding who the NY Times is, where they're coming from, and how I'm meant to understand what they're saying. Pretty sure they'd say, don't worry about these things, the Times just prints the truth, the whole truth, all sides well-represented. I don't think so. When I was a kid I believed that, I still knew they could make mistakes, but I thought they tried to get the actual story, that they weren't manipulating readers to believe things they wanted them to believe. The firing of Donald McNeil was a big deal for me. They never adequately explained why he couldn't continue as a senior reporter covering the story he had prepared for for decades. I don't believe the facts they presented. They were not adequate grounds for firing. Had something similar happened to a reporter of a different gender, race or age, nothing like that would have happened. Having exposed themselves so thoroughly, they have opened up a huge integrity issue. Remember integrity is the difference between what you are and what you appear to be. There's a deeper story there, and they've buried it. #

Another subject the NYT has no credibility on is Facebook. These days I don't even bother reading their coverage. Often the facts behind their criticism could be interpreted in Facebook's favor, but the Times never does that. They criticize Facebook for making a bad choice where all there are are bad choices. Could their own work stand up to that kind of scrutiny? I'd love to see them take a chance, but they don't. For every article that talks about all the terrible things that happen on Facebook, they have never, that I have seen, reported on how Facebook is useful, even indispensible. I assume this is because this idea is abhorrent to them. If they acknowledge that people, on their own, can provide service to each other, with no salaried reporter acting as a go-between, what does this say about their future? Well, a real news organization would put that aside, and go where the story is. A news organization that has more of a sense of service than the supposedly great NY Times. #