RANDOM THOUGHTS #5 - IRELAND/GAY MARRIAGE, TEXAS/OKLAHOMA/FRACKING & JEB BUSH/ARROGANCE

IRELAND/GAY MARRIAGE
Now that I live in Europe, my sources of news and information have changed drastically. No more television or radio news. PBS, FOX, and NPR were my mainstays. We only subscribed to the weekend editions of our local newspaper, a rag on the way down. Daily, we subscribed to the The Wall Street Journal. As a result, our primary news sources were easily identifiable as being left or right of the political center. It's different now. I'm not always certain of the point of view of a particular source. Take, for instance, the Irish referendum on gay marriage.

I use an app called Flipboard as one of my information sources these days. Flipboard's news board aggregates articles from a wide variety of sources - from FOX to Huffington Post, from the The New York Times to the The Wall Street Journal and more from the States. And from abroad, Al Jazeera, Reuters, BBC and The Guardian all contribute. And I've just finished The Guardian's early analysis of the results of the Irish referendum on gay marriage. And I thought at first that The Guardian must be right of center.And then I read that it's considered left of center. And now I'm confused.

I'm confused because The Guardian emphasized anti-Catholicism due to the abuse scandals, foreign money, and pandering politicians as reasons for the landslide victory of the Yes vote. In fairness, they also pointed out that young, first-time voters played a huge hand. Here's hoping that young voters around the world will continue to express their more hopeful, empathetic nature at the ballot box even when high-profile issues are not at stake. We need their youthful optimism during school board elections just as much as we need them for referendums such as this one.

TEXAS/OKLAHOMA/FRACKING

Texas has thought seriously about secession. Can Oklahoma be far behind? The problem? States Rights. Federal overreach. The Feds just don't understand the importance of local control.

Yet both states' governments have decided that local municipalities don't have the right to ban fracking within their borders. Seismic shifts? Contaminated drinking water? Suck it up. What Big Oil wants, Big Oil gets. That's Texas...and Oklahoma...and...

JEB BUSH/ARROGANCE
"For the people to say the science is decided on this is really arrogant, to be honest with you." Jeb goes on to say, according to CNN, "It's this intellectual arrogance that now you can't have a conversation about it, even. The climate is changing. We need to adapt to that reality."

If that were true, if we could not have a conversation about climate change because of the closed minds of the scientists and the proponents of the scientific consensus, I might agree with Jeb. The problem isn't with the scientists, though. The problem is with the politicians who not only refuse to accept that consensus but who pass laws promoting ignorance on the subject. NASA, the military, the environmental agencies in several states, all under attack for trying to understand the scope of climate change and deal with the effects.

It's as if, during the debate about the safety of cigarettes, Congress had cut funding for NIH lung cancer research. It's bought and paid for, intentional ignorance that's the problem, not arrogance.

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

LE CHAT QUI PECHE (THE CAT THAT FISHES), ARGELIERS: RESTAURANT REVIEW

You would think that after over five years of searching for restaurants serving good food at reasonable prices, I would have made my way to Le Chat Qui Peche before now. After all, it's only about ten minutes from our house, in a beautiful spot along the Canal du Midi. But it took a friend to suggest that we would like the place. So we went. And we did. Port-Argeliers isn't much a port, just a spot along the Canal du Midi that boats use as a stopping place. Like a town that might be described as just a wide spot in the road, there hardly seems to be a reason for it to exist other than the fact that it does. So Le Chat Qui Peche, at the foot of a narrow but driveable bridge over the canal, commands a view of the canal that can't reasonably be described as bustling and scenery that might best be described as bucolic. We were among the first to arrive on a lazy summer day, breezy so we chose an outdoor table with less of a view but sheltered. Our server practiced his

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