This is tied with the Crimson Birdcage for the best cocktails I’ve ever had, or at least ever made…

2 ounces mezcal (not rotgut but needn’t be super high-end sippin’ whiskey–maybe $30-35 a bottle?)
1 ounce honey syrup (add one part hot water to three parts honey, stir until dissolved, chill)
1 part fresh lime juice

Shake over ice, strain into coupé, dust with: 1 part finely ground sea salt plus 1 part ground cayenne

Charlotte Iserbyte wrote The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America and John Taylor Gatto wrote Dumbing Us Down–both excellent books addressing the purposeful program of excising the ability to recognize manipulation or to find fallacies in arguments. Since John Dewey replaced classical education with modern education (a process succinctly described in the Dewey chapter of this excellent book: Makers of the Modern Mind, by Thomas P. Neill), the ability of the American public to recognize being manipulated through mass media, education and political lies has plummeted, as has their ability to lead and influence as citizens in the civic arena. This process has been going on in earnest for a hundred years, but I noticed in February 2016–earlier if you start with the speech the launched Trump’s campaign–a new process underway through which we are being what I’m calling “animalized” or “decivilized.”

Trump’s coarse language and tactless approach…

In June 2015 a very suspicious prison break with an implausibly lengthy manhunt was reported out of New York State. The story line held that a prison worker who met one of the prisoners while in the prison hospital developed a romantic interest in him and helped him and his buddy escape. This happened to be a similar story line to one from a show I had been watching at the time called Prison Break. I found this fishy and wondered if it foreshadowed an infusion of federal cash into the prison-industrial complex. Perhaps prisons would be allowed to deteriorate or escapes would be allowed or even orchestrated to justify spending money on that system.

I observed when I lived in Dallas that Cowboys Stadium fell into disrepair just as Jerry Jones was lobbying for taxpayer subsidies to build a money-printing colossus. The fan-base taxpayer-base support surged as the…