For a few weeks I’ve been relaxing in the Caribbean. While here I also decided to take a vacation from that online circus known as Facebook. It has been a liberating experience so far and has led me to consider getting off of the platform altogether or much more often at least. Here are a few insights into why I finally became fed up with Facebook:

What does humankind’s response to climate change and a hole in the middle of a street intersection have to do with each other? A lot apparently.

On June 12, 1944, a skinny 24-year-old sergeant named Walter Brotman drove a limousine off an amphibious landing craft onto Omaha Beach in Normandy, France. The scene he came upon shocked him. Six days earlier, on what became known as D-Day, the first assault waves of the Allied forces had landed at Omaha and were met with a wall of bullets, mortars, and artillery fire from defending German infantry. The beach was still strewn with burned-out tanks, jeeps, landing crafts, and other paraphernalia of war. The dead were stacked like cordwood in long rows on the sand, each corpse in a body bag or sometimes even hastily covered by a green Army-issued poncho. This is how Sergeant Brotman returned to Europe.

Earlier today I saw an article featured prominently on the New York Times website called "Who Won the Debate? Hillary Clinton Is Given the Edge." The Times is of course referring to the debate that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had in Flint, Michigan last night. I would have to say that this article is a prime example of what is sometimes called the "manufacturing of consent" by the American media.

In 2011 I interviewed a Lieutenant-Colonel in American Military Intelligence. What he told me confirmed what my research had already uncovered: that American intelligence knew a great deal more about Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, before November 22, 1963, than they have ever publicly admited. This is the story of how lost opportunities, and a massive intelligence failure, resulted in one of the greatest tragedies in American history--the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

It's the end of an era. After more than 10 years of landlord harassment to try and evict my roommate and I from our rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side, using every legal trick and lie you can think of, the scumbags have succeeded. We have till Dec 14th to move out. 

Ray was not only a great writer; he was a great man with the greatest of hearts--and I want the world, and posterity, to know what he did for me.