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I watch the nightly television news primarily for entertainment. Since the entertainment on television these days is bad and Hollywood's offerings are worse, television news is probably the best entertainment available. The trouble is that in watching it I fear I might start to uncosciously believe the fiction, much like some viewers in the late 1990s believed that the X-Files was a news show.

This afternoon, as I was pumping gas at the Sunoco station on NY Route 28 in Boiceville, NY, I conversed with a gentleman from New Jersey on a Memorial Weekend trip. As we were pumping gas, I commented on the high prices (nearing $5 per gallon for super). He said to me that he doesn't believe the claim that oil and food prices are high because of "traders" or speculators. I gave him an earful about the Fed and inflation. But as I thought about it, I realized that this guy, probably above average in some ways but very much a guy you might meet in a gas station, had heard some media lies and rejected them. Instead, I gave him the news. He will have done better by thinking about what I told him in this chance meeting in the Boiceville gas station than the propaganda on conventional news shows.