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GELFAND’S WORLD - Everyone understands this implicitly, but even the pop news media are now saying it out loud. I refer to that bastion of journalistic fast-food, Yahoo. Here is a piece on how once low priced sit-down restaurants have been jacking up their prices. The authors single out the Olive Garden, the Cheesecake Factory, Panda Express, Chilis, Red Lobster, and Buffalo Wild Wings. The discerning reader will understand that if all of these restaurants are up-pricing, then it’s actually a general trend going through the whole economy and it’s called inflation.
The above may not be the hottest news for the consumer, but linked to this trend – a corollary – is the fact that some of the most popular restaurant chains are in real financial trouble. After all, for many people, rising prices do not correspond to rising personal salaries. You can read about a few of these restaurants here. Who is on the Yahoo link? There are a bunch that maybe you’ve never heard of, but the list does include Pizza Hut and – get this – Hooters.
A political signal that we should take seriously
Trump, through his opposition to Republicans who do not do his bidding, knocked out 5 Indiana Republican legislators who did not vote for midterm redistricting and defeated Louisiana’s incumbent GOP senator. This shows Trump’s extreme power in red states. How non-aligned and centrist voters ought to react to Trump’s clear and obvious political influence is a different question. If nothing else there ought to be an arguing point: that the rest of us should oppose this dangerously cult-like approach to governing. Centrist voters should be cautioned that any remaining Republicans are either dyed in the wool Trumpists or are the kind of politician who will side with Trump out of political fear.
This includes their unquestioning support for whatever goes down in the Iran conflict and, in a really ugly way, looking the other way from Trump’s clear and unalloyed corruption. How will they react, for example, at the idea that Trump’s multi-billion dollar lawsuit against his own government (specifically the IRS) is now in the settlement stage because the Department of Justice does Trump’s bidding. The DOJ is making itself part of the corruption by creating a slush fund to do things like paying off the January 6, 2021 Capitol rioters. To borrow that old line, “Have you no sense of shame?”
One or two additional comments on the governor race
First, on Bianco and climate change:
Here is a guy who stands on the debate stage and, each time, makes it his central campaign point that everyone else on stage and all the moderators are lying about everything. This always seemed to be a strange assertion – how can every other person involved in these debates be wrong about EVERYTHING? The logic didn’t make a lot of sense until we finally got a question on climate in the most recent debate.
Bianco’s answer was – with a little bit of paraphrasing here – that temperatures have been going up, but he isn’t so naive as to believe that this is caused by human action. So there it is: complete global warming denialism, since global warming is caused by increasing levels of carbon dioxide (along with some methane) in the atmosphere, and they get there through human action. At this point, you have to have a special kind of ignorance if you refuse to accept that people are causing global warming. I mean, even I have done measurements using an infrared spectrometer, and the growth of atmospheric CO2 has been carefully measured for something like 75 years at this point.
So we understand what Bianco means by “lying” – it is merely the statement of any fact made by any other person that is contrary to whatever it is that the MAGA Republicans want to believe at that particular time. We should be careful about accepting this level of thought in the governor’s office. To borrow a phrase developed by an old friend of mine, Bianco is weak in his reality testing. Being scientifically illiterate may not make much difference in performing as a sheriff, but it has a lot to do with the future of California.
One comment about the Democrats running for governor, and then back to one final remark about the Republicans.
We are at the point where the mail-in ballots have been delivered to voters and the election day deadline is June 2. That’s not much time, but it is the moment for Democrats and independents to coalesce around one candidate or, if absolutely necessary, two.
My first thought is necessarily incomplete due to the lack of immediate polling data, but what we have suggests that non-Republicans go with Becerra. He was leading as of the last debate. The complicating factor is that the opposition have been funding lots of opposition ads on television. Is Becerra really beholden to the oil companies? Probably not, but that seems to be the worst that Steyer and company can dig up on him – that he got a donation from Chevron. Meanwhile, there is still the likelihood that Republican Steve Hilton will make the runoff, so the other side has to put up someone. If nothing else, Becerra will be a competent governor who will have some say with the legislature. The alternative is for Democrats to take a chance and split their votes among Steyer and Becerra in order to achieve an all-Democratic final. It would be the reverse of what fearful pundits have been worrying about, which would be an all-Republican final.
A curious misstep
One curious misstep made by both Bianco and fellow republican candidate Steve Hilton: They both referred to the huge fires of the past few years, and managed to point out that the fires had put more CO2 into the atmosphere than the amount we have saved through conservation efforts. This is, first of all, an admission that carbon dioxide is indeed the greenhouse gas that causes global warming. It is a very short step to take this argument one microscopic step forward and point out that rising CO2 in the atmosphere is quantifiably due to humans burning stuff in cars and factories and electric power plants. What’s worse is that by relating CO2 released into the atmosphere by brush fires, the Republicans are precisely reversing (and misstating) cause vs effect. It is global warming induced Santa Ana winds that fed the Palisades fire, which in turn released CO2. In the real world of science, we view this as a vicious spiral (sometimes called a vicious circle) in which global warming, by stimulating brush fires and by melting the frozen tundra of the north (releasing methane) causes global warming to feed on itself. Bianco is obviously unable to follow this logic and make the obvious connection. And coming full circle, we can recognize that when Bianco accuses everyone else of telling lies, he just means that a lie is anything that contradicts his own collection of political biases. Since he believes that global warming is benign and we aren’t causing it, he concludes that what is happening isn’t all that bad and that it can be fixed through approaches like “forest management.” Hmmm – didn’t we hear that same nonsense coming out of Trump’s mouth when he visited the fire scene a few months ago?
Viewing things like a horse race
OK, so this is supposed to be a pun, in that I’m not talking about political polling. I’m talking about a real horse race, in this case the Preakness.
The Preakness had a certain unique charm to it that we don’t always see. It had a great set of names among the 14 entries. The winner was Napoleon Solo, which people of a certain age will remember as the Man from Uncle. Perhaps there will be a horse named Illya Kuryakan (Solo’s fellow spy) in some future race. My favorite, and the favorite of several pre-race commentators was The Hell We Did. There seems to be a modern day tendency for multi-word names, as the Preakness entries showed.
This contrasts with at least some of the most famous horses of yesteryear such as Swaps, Secretariat, and Seabiscuit.
Here are the Multi-word horse names in the 2026 Preakness, 9 horses out of 14:
Taj Mahal
Chip Honcho
The Hell We Did
Bull by the Horns
Iron Honor
Napoleon Solo
Corona de Oro
Great White
Pretty Boy Miah
It’s been a busy week, so a word about the presidential trip to China and the continuing war with Iran
The comments are full of remarks that Trump went to China without much of a plan, did his usual approach – which is just winging it – and probably lost out in consequence. The contrast is the historical “Nixon in China” trip which is in the history books and even inspired a modern opera. We should remember that Henry Kissinger pointed out that such things don’t just happen by jumping on an airplane and flying around (the pundits called it “shuttle diplomacy”). No. It requires the existence of objective facts that could lead to practical diplomacy, and then a lot of hard work.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
