A favorite weekly activity of mine has become watching the Tuesday afternoon Houston city council meetings. There are no votes in these meetings. The mayor doesn’t try to bully the female council members in these meetings, and there are no arguments with the City Controller. That all happens on the Wednesday morning meetings.

Tuesday afternoons are something entirely different. Tuesday afternoons are when the citizens of Houston get to address the mayor and the members of city council. The speakers get one to three minutes to tell their stories or ask their questions. Some get extended amounts of time. Some answer questions put to them by council. The mayor condescends to liberal speakers and women who don’t agree with him and the mayor generally refuses to answer questions put to him by the public.

Many of the speakers are there for legitimate reasons. They speak in favor of the bike lanes that the mayor is intent on destroying. They speak of neighborhoods being destroyed by road work. They request assistance from public works or details problems with the police department. The mayor and council members move in and out of the meeting while often referring speakers to staffers or thanking the speakers for all of the work they have put into various issues. This tends to get pretty boring, especially when a group of people show up to speak on the same issue.

But on occasion the strange and crazy people appear, like last year around the time of the presidential election when speakers would appear demanding that the mayor and council vote for Donald Trump because the communists had to be defeated, then there’s this lady in the Heights who likes to show up every couple of meetings whining about how bike lanes in the Heights have made turning left difficult and are harming this doughnut shop and as she ends she gets angry at her council woman who is a vocal bike lane supporter.

And there was a stretch around this same type when this guy would show up and speak of the need to stop putting fluoride in the water. He would always refer to this one court ruling which found fluoride to be dangerous, but he’d never actually give any details about the court ruling thus making it hard to find if anyone wanted to research the findings. He would also go off on things about destroying the purity of the water and causing cancer and things like that.

It was as if he was channeling Air Force General Jack D. Ripper, only he didn’t have the ability to send B-52s bombers to nuke Russia.

This is was all funny, of course, and I very much looked forward to his appearances to see what kind of insanity he would add to his weekly stump speech. He’s not been around lately though, so the meetings have lacked some of the fun and excitement.

But there’s a bigger problem I play. Insane people like this guy are now running the federal government. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for instance, has a documented brain worm eating up his gray matter, and has bragged about eating road kill. He believes vaccines cause autism and has discouraged people from getting the measles vaccine because of this while declaring that the ongoing measles outbreak is no big deal and that people really not need worry. He’s also made some changes that threaten to prevent new flu and covid vaccines this fall.

Then there’s this from last month:

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday said he plans to tell the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop recommending fluoridation in communities nationwide. Kennedy said he’s assembling a task force of health experts to study the issue and make new recommendations.

Further:

Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, has called fluoride a “dangerous neurotoxin” and said it has been associated with arthritis, bone breaks and thyroid disease. Some studies have suggested such links might exist, usually at higher-than-recommended fluoride levels, though some reviewers have questioned the quality of available evidence and said no definitive conclusions can be drawn.

Let’s check back in with General Ripper, shall we:

Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is one of the all-time great movies. It’s a dark comedy about the end of the world. It studies the obsession that some had with the atomic bomb and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. This was a doctrine adopted by the smart military and political types of the Western democracies and the Soviet and their satellites.

Mutually Assured Destruction was simply this: nuclear weapons were so destructive that neither side would use them, because using them would guarantee that both sides would be totally destroyed should either side decide to employ them in a conflict. Thus, you were mad, or insane, to use them.

But Dr. Strangelove posited this: what if an insane person slipped through the cracks and got possession of the weapons? In this case, that insane person being Air Force General Jack D. Ripper, a man who blamed his sexual impotence on fluoride in the drinking water. Director and writer Stanley Kubrick chose the issue of fluoride to demonstrate this man’s insanity, but now the insane are taking over.

The mayor of Houston has yet to take any action on fluoride — he’s too busy with his crusade to rid Houston of bike lanes and walkable neighborhoods to handle fluoride. But that doesn’t mean the state of Texas isn’t taking action because the state of Texas is run by insane morons like General Ripper.

For instance, I give you the attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton:

Attorney General Ken Paxton has sent Civil Investigative Demands (“CIDs”) to Colgate-Palmolive Company (“Colgate”) and Proctor & Gamble Manufacturing Co. (“Proctor & Gamble”)—which advertises and sells “Crest” branded fluoride toothpaste—for marketing toothpaste products to parents and children in ways that are misleading, deceptive, and dangerous.

SNIP

“I will use every tool available to protect our kids from dangerous levels of fluoride exposure and deceptive advertising,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Toothpaste manufacturers must follow state law to ensure that they aren’t putting Texas families in peril through their false, misleading, and deceptive marketing, and these CIDs will help my office discover any potential wrongdoing. As this investigation continues, I will take aggressive action against any corporation that puts our children’s health at risk.”

Here’s the thing: I don’t think Ken Paxton believes any of this crap. Paxton’s corrupt, but he’s not an idiot. But the people who vote for Paxton are idiots, and for some reason they believe this crap about fluoride, and they’ve set their minds to putting into power people who either believe this crap or don’t who don’t care if it’s true or not, they just want to wreak havoc and make money. It doesn’t matter if people get sick or die — they don’t even care if people get sick or die. All that matters is they get the power, and the way to get power is to get the idiots to support you.

There are a couple of MAGA-types on the Houston city council, and the mayor is that type of corrupt bully who knows his power comes from those MAGA-types. The fluoride guy hasn’t been appeared at any council meetings this year. But that doesn’t mean he and his minions aren’t around, and that doesn’t mean dentists in the Houston area won’t soon be getting very rich because fluoride has been outlawed thanks to morons, the insane, and the corrupt.