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Dawn DeCwikiel-Kane’s retirement from the News & Record is a greater blow than the sudden disappearance of “Judge Parker” and “Beetle Bailey” from the comics page.

I am grateful for the many years of Dawn’s informative and unbiased reporting on local performing and visual arts events and the artists who make them. I do think of Dawn as irreplaceable, but I fear you will not now assign a successor to cover the arts.

It must take several reporters’ salaries to make a paycheck for the various executive editors, editors in chief, publishers, etc., who have circulated onto and off the masthead in recent years. It looks as if the bigwigs who run the paper are conducting an experiment to find out how long they can keep a daily city-county-regional newspaper going without salaried reporters and still get readers to pay for it.

Not ready for prime time: the Biden-Granholm-Buttigieg folly of renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs).

Fossil fuels are money in the bank (America possesses centuries worth) and renewables for now are a gamble (we hope they may work sometime in the future).

Here are some of the major problems: Millions of everyday products are made with fossil fuels and their byproducts. Renewables/EVs require mining rare-earth minerals. There are battery disposal issues, few charging stations, no standards for charging connections/ports/stations. Charging power is generated 88% by fossil fuels. EVs are very expensive. All manufacturing facilities today depend on power generated by fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are modular and require no central grid. Electric power depends on power lines; broken lines equal no power. Natural disasters cannot be repaired with EVs (see Florida). What happens when the wind doesn’t blow or the skies go dark?

What about military rockets, ships, planes and vehicles?

This forced folly is like eliminating oil and gas lamps immediately when the light bulb was invented or euthanizing all beasts of burden when the internal combustion engine was invented. America should return to energy independence, supply/save the entire Western world with energy and diminish our enemies.

Fifty-six years ago, in 1966, I became alarmed at what appeared to be Lyndon Johnson’s determination to start a war in Vietnam. Since I lived in Massachusetts then, I wrote to Ted Kennedy, then a freshman senator. But since I had grown up in Tennessee, and admired Albert Gore Sr., I wrote to him also. The reply from Kennedy was clearly a boiler-plate affair and quite thoughtless. What Gore had to say was much more thoughtful and sympathetic, making clear that he opposed fighting any such war, calling it a civil war.

After the war got started, my cousin Ephraim Kirby-Smith was assigned to Vietnam. Eph had fought in World War II and also Korea, where he commanded the first-ever Marine helicopter assault. Some years later he directed the Marine survival school at Parris Island. Not long after arriving in Vietnam he retired and resigned his commission. I never asked him about this, but I think he was disgusted at how things were being run in Vietnam. Many other things deserve our attention now, for example, assault rifles with up to a hundred rounds of flesh-shredding bullets in magazines.

Foolish people defend the right of anyone to own these.

The main question my wife and I have is: Who decided to decimate the comics and puzzle section? Was this some individual who had no knowledge of the subscribers — or if they did, just didn’t care?

There was obviously no regard for your readers, especially those who literally loved the two crosswords, Boggle and Jumble. What we get now is the L.A. Times Crossword, which is way too difficult for the average reader, a Jumble which is way too easy, no Boggle, no second puzzle.

It seems obvious that you don’t really care about what your readers want. This is emphasized by the spreading of the comics. There was a time when, if you wanted to change one or two of the comics, you took a poll — got our opinion. Now it’s a dictatorship.

I see that many subscribers are going to cancel their subscriptions — many after 40–50 years. Not only is this sad, it just doesn’t make sense. Why don’t you take the time to explain to us why you did what you did and why you won’t go back to what we had?

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