4.22.2020

Random Wednesday Morning Thoughts



  • The Board:
    Total cases: 818,744

    Total deaths: 45,318
  • Texas:
  • Tarrant (the roller coaster continues):
  • Wise County: We've got another new one bringing us to 13. (And check out this page dedicated to Wise County.)
  • "You get a car! And you get a car!" 
  • "Everyone gets a car!"
  • Now this is what I expected with my Rural Uprising™ prediction. This is from a bar in the Stockyards.  Prediction: TABC will be there like the Sturmabteilung.
  • Other than the fact he's going to kill us all one way or another, how do you "shoot down" a boat? (To show you how his mind works, before he tweeted that this morning Fox and Friends had a segment on Iranian boats harassing U.S. ships.)
    Who gets to define "harass"?
  • I'm so glad that I'm much closer to retirement than I am fresh out of college. The future doesn't look particularly bright for all of us. 
  • I wonder if the Senior Class of 2020 will always get a little bit of special treatment for the rest of their lives. I mean, ten years from now if they dropped a line of, "You know, I graduated in 2020 and I never got to [insert event you were deprived of]", it ought to get you at least something in any give-and-take situation. 
  • Dan Patrick is in the news again. He qualified this by saying:  "[E]very life is valuable but 500 people [have died so far] out of 29 million and we're locked down and we're crushing the average worker, we're crushing small business, we're crushing the markets, we're crushing this country."  I've struggled with the concept from the get-go, but whenever you insert "but" after "every life is precious", things get a little tricky. 
  • Ticket fans: Julie Dobbs was furloughed. And it sounds like it is going to be a long one.
  • The Jacksboro Herald-Gazette has the story on the hunting accident that occurred last week. 
  • This West Texas school bragged on social media yesterday about having its new track installed. Look closely: That's a six man field. I was not familiar with Hermleigh ISD (which is southeast of Snyder.)
  • The crazy prices for May futures oil prices are now over with. We've now moved on to normalcy since the pricing is now for June contracts. This morning, the new normal for a barrel of oil is $13.57 a barrel.  That won't cut it. 
  • Messenger: Above the Fold


at 8:33 AM

4.21.2020

Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts



  • The Board:

  • Tarrant County (that's the lowest Monday number in quite some time.):
  • Wise County: 12 cases. We had an increase of 33% yesterday! (That's three more cases to you non-math majors out there.) 
  • I won't begin to tell you I understand how the price can go to -$35 for a barrel of oil, but I did have someone tell me yesterday it was all because "May [futures] contracts [are] expiring tomorrow", and Trump said at his press conference that "a lot of people got squeezed."  I think it was the equivalent of a bunch of traders having previously agreed to buy oil at $x a barrel on a certain date and yesterday it all became real. Either actually buy the oil at that previously agreed upon price or sell your contract. For those people who had no place to actually store the oil, they were willing to pay people to take it off their hands. It still makes no sense to me. The June futures contract are up next. They fell from $20 a barrel to $16 a barrel this morning. None of this is good news. 
  • The Art of the Oil Deal from nine days ago:
  • It would be a good gig to be a photographer at one of these protests.
    Note the mask.
    Spellcheck malfunction
    Some hard selling of Jesus thrown in there.
  • The governor of Maryland throwing shade. 
  • Of course he did. But who exactly wants to come here with unemployment moving to 30%? (I'm not sure that  "Invisible Enemy" label is as catchy as he thinks it is.)
  • Having to wear masks in our now open Texas state parks makes absolutely no sense. 
  • Of all states "opening up", it looks like Georgia will be the most ambitious with restaurants opening up on Monday. Then again, it was just a couple of weeks ago that its governor stated he had "just learned" that the coronavirus could be transmitted with people with no symptoms. That state deserves to be the guinea pig. (Cue John Mayer's "Why Georgia".)
  • Despite Trump being obsessed with his "great ratings" for his daily coronavirus updates (he tweeted about it again this morning), few people are watching. But I want you to. It is Bizarro World every day. 
  • Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for a state to allow a person to be convicted of a crime by a non-unanimous jury verdict. Seems like a pretty simple proposition, but those boys have to make everything complicated: 
  • Tom Lester, Ed Eb of Green Acres fame, has died. I saw that he was also a Baptist minister and made the circuit for most of his life. I'll have to confirm it, but I have a very vague memory of him speaking at the First Baptist of Bridgeport when I was a boy. (Side note: There's nothing wrong with Green Acres. Mrs. LL and I actually got sucked into it a couple of years back.)
  • Legal nerd stuff: Speaking of Georgia, a jury sent a note to a judge saying one juror had decided to vote not guilty because he didn't believe any of the State's witnesses so they wanted to know if that constituted a hung jury. Instead of saying "yep, it sure does", the judge removed that juror from the jury and the remainder of them convicted the defendant. It was reversed yesterday. (That link has the opinion and even video of the poor assistant DA trying to argue on appeal everything was kosher.) 
  • I always monitor the list of criminal cases (from Class C to Felonies) filed in Wise County every day. The list is normally thirty or more cases which are dominated, of course, with traffic tickets. Until now. Nothing is being filed including traffic tickets. These are strange days.

at 8:33 AM

4.20.2020

Random Monday Morning Thoughts


  • The Board. It's trending down but not as quickly as it rose. And additional testing might turn it into more of a plateau than a peak. Or maybe not.
  • Deaths. 
  • Texas:

  • Tarrant County (Where the persons in charge of reporting numbers must take the day off on Sunday. There's definitely a pattern. ): 
  • Wise County: 9 cases. 2 deaths. 
  • It's been 40 days since the night of Tom Hanks announcement, the NBA shut down, and Trump held his oval office press address.
  • I didn't know that Trump would take my Rural Uprising™ theory and make it a call for civil war and law breaking. This is shockingly reckless. 
  • Especially in light of the protesters looking very responsible.



  • Wow: This morning oil dropped below $12 a barrel. I've said it before: If there were no pandemic and the collapse of the oil field were the only story, Texas would still be in dire straits right now.
  • Gov. Abbott thought his task force on reopening Texas would instill confidence if he named it "Strike Force." It doesn't.
  • For the legal community, it doesn't look like anything will be happening at the courthouses at least until June per new state guidelines. "In-person proceedings of any size should be delayed until at least June 1." Courthouses may be the very last to open. It's one thing for people to make their own decisions as to when and where they will congregate, but forced co-mingling by the government in tight quarters is a totally different matter. 
  • This was left on a business owner's door in Denton. He put the orange "no" mark on it before posting it online. 
  • Speaking of Denton, the city government is considering layoffs. The loss of sales tax revenue for the cities and state will be a massive story in the upcoming months. 
  • Rep. Phil King on the Rural Uprising™. He's for it. 
  • We finally found something Senator John Cornyn cares about: A high end store that caters to to the rich. 
  • There aren't many details but a man was shot and killed during a turkey hunting accident in Young County.  A group of three men, all in their twenties, were from Jack County. Edit: The victim might have been from Bridgeport and worked in Decatur.
  • I watched some of the Global Citizen concert on the TV box on Saturday night and, even though I'm a music idiot, I stopped down for Eddie Vedder playing an organ, the Killers, and Billie Joe of Green Day.  All of those performances stripped down to simplicity make them arguably better than the original.  (Quick loading videos in the links). But most people were fascinated with the concept of Elton John shooting hoops in his spare time. 
  • If you want to educate yourself on our criminal justice system, Netflix is killing it right now. Its newly released The Innocence Files and How To Fix a Drug Scandal will make you question, as you always should, what prosecutors and their "experts" feed you. 

  • Bud Kennedy has a column on metroplex local officials supporting "Q." The post below is from the mayor pro-tem of Colleyville who was part of a wild lawsuit a year or so ago (which I still think is ongoing.)
  • Messenger: Above the Fold

at 8:29 AM

4.17.2020

It's Friday -- Let's Get Out Of Here







at 2:30 PM
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