Skip to main content

RANDOM THOUGHTS #3 - TEXAS/SENATORS/CLIMATE CHANGE/TINFOIL

TEXAS/TINFOIL
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is reported to have ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor training exercises being conducted by Navy Seals and Green Berets in Texas as well as in other states. There are reasons that he's doing so, I suppose. There are also reasons that people wear tinfoil hats.

SENATORS/TINFOIL
Several Senators (some who are running for President, by the way) say that they are looking into the possibility that the United States is preparing to invade Texas. There are reasons that they're doing so, I suppose. There are also reasons that people wear tinfoil hats.

CLIMATE CHANGE/TINFOIL
I secretly admire the Forbes family. Papa Malcolm Forbes was a motorcycle aficionado, to be forgiven for his taste for Harleys. I knew some of his riding buddies. Good guys. Son Steve is kind of a nerd, though, to the Right of me politically, but I admire him for championing a flat tax. It's the way to go. (Here's my take on a flat tax.) And Forbes as a magazine is not as doctrinaire as some, although it's clearly the product of and beholden to the monied class.

Recently, an opinion piece in Forbes by Robert Bradley was featured on Yahoo's home page. Bradley is the founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research and was cited as such. But a modicum of digging uncovers that Bradley trained strictly as an economist and worked for sixteen years at Enron, ending his tenure as Director for Public Policy Analysis. And, of course, he's a climate change denier. How could he be anything else?

I get that some folks are tired of hearing that 97% of climate scientists agree. I get that some folks are adamant that climate change is a vast hoax. But these are the same folks who are perfectly willing to entertain the notion that Earth is 6,000 years old or that early humans rode dinosaurs like mechanical bulls. Or they are the politicians that pander to the holders of such notions. I cannot believe that our politicians are actually that stupid. I refuse to believe it. They've simply been bought in the same way that one buys a Gucci handbag. They're just a touch more expensive than Gucci.

It's time to insist that our leaders be made of sterner, less pliable, more intellectually honest stuff.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

RESTAURANT TEN, UZES: RESTAURANT REVIEW

Ten sits just off the market square in Uzes, one of the prettiest villages in southern France. The newly renovated space is airy and comfortable with tables of sufficient size and sufficiently spaced to provide for a pleasant dining experience. Service was cheerful, fully bilingual, and attentive without being overbearing. The food presented well to both eye and tongue. And the rate of approximately 30 € per person for a party of five included starters, mains, a dessert or two, two bottles of local wine, and coffees at the finish. Reasonable if not cheap eats.  So why am I hesitant to give an unqualified thumbs up?  It took me a while to figure it out. Uzes is a quintessentially French village in a quintessentially French region of southern France. There are those who will say that the Languedoc is just as beautiful but less crowded and less expensive than its eastern neighbors. I know. I'm one of those people. But the fact remains that for many people, villages like Uzes are t

Kreuz Market vs. Smitty’s Market: Texas Barbecue in Lockhart

I was born and raised in New Jersey. I didn’t taste Texas barbecue until I was twenty-two years old. What the hell do I know about barbecue? And what could I add to the millions of words that have been written on the subject? Well, I know a bit about food. I’ve managed to check out a few of the finer joints in Texas – Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse in Dallas, Joe Cotton’s in Robstown before the fire, the dear departed Williams Smokehouse in Houston, and the incomparable New Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Huntsville . So I can speak from a reasonably wide experience. This will not be a comprehensive discussion of the relative merits of Texas barbecue as opposed to the fare available in places like Memphis or the Carolinas. It’s simply a take on our recent visits to Lockhart and the relative merits of Smitty’s versus Kreuz from our point of view. I’ll get all over academic in a later post. On our way out to the ranch in Crystal City, we stopped at Smitty’s. You have to look

CHÉ OLIVE / LE ZINC, CREISSAN: RESTAURANT REVIEW

No, it's not Chez Olive. It is indeed Ché complete with red star and black beret. I have no idea why and I wasn't about to ask. The French are the French and not to be analyzed too closely when it comes to politics, especially these days. Creissan is the next town over from our village of Quarante. We pass through it often and Ché Olive is right there on the main road at the entrance to town. (One of the signs still says Le Zinc. Olive says he prefers Ché Olive though.) Olive opened it a couple of years ago after leaving the Bar 40, Quarante's basic local watering hole that's undergone a bit of a renaissance lately. We hadn't heard much about Ché Olive from our usual sources for dining recommendations. So we just kept passing by. For reasons not central to this review, we decided to stop in for lunch on a mid-week in late December. The bar is cozy, the restaurant open and bright and modern. Newly renovated and perhaps a bit sterile. We were the f