A Rocket Measuring Contest

(This newsletter is the rebirth of a project I started in 2017. I was sending out dispatches from my website of the same name and getting good uptake. Feedback was terrific and several hundred subscribers signed up for the weekly report, and thousands were reading. But the standard required to make a small amount of revenue to cover time and expenses was daunting. And I was otherwise engaged with endeavors consuming an increasing amount of my time. I surrendered.

But along came Substack, which appears to be designed for what I was trying to achieve with my writing. My goal here is to offer information, insight, and maybe even entertainment. There will be personal experience in here since I provide a point of view. But my focus is on this confounding state, its myths and realities. I will write about travel, literature, history, movies, politics, and just life its ownself under the Lone Star.

It’s free to anyone who wants it, but those modest paid subscriptions, if you are inclined, can help fire the engines. Go ahead and be inclined. I’ll publish at least once a week, depending on interest, yours and mine. I will also post randomly with stories worth sharing and that are not part of the weekly newsletter).

“I felt a little guilty about jangling the poor bugger’s brains with that evil fantasy. But what the hell? Anybody who wanders around the world saying, ‘Hell yes, I’m from Texas,’ deserves whatever happens to him.” 

― Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time

Rocket Measuring Contests

Two of the world’s richest men are crossing swords on Texas soil.

Their operations are almost as far apart as they can possibly be, geographically, and remain within the borders of a single state. But there is a payload of ego and ambition to fill the space between Van Horn in far West Texas and Boca Chica Beach at the Gulf of Mexico. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are engaged in a technology race for space that might define an epoch in this state that should be much grander than what happened during the brief window of time when the post-Civil War cattle drives flourished.

Maybe the astronaut can replace the cowboy as the state’s historic icon.

Bezos has put his Blue Origin rocket launch pad in a remote location West of the Delaware ranges near the old Figure Two Ranch north of Van Horn. If you had the inclination and chose the right day, you could hike up the front of the Sierra Diablo across the Texas Mountain Trail just to the west and look eastward and watch the fire power light up a New Shepherd booster as it begins a climb to just over 60 miles of altitude to the Karman Line, marking the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and space..

Although the launch dates are generally closely held, there can’t be much to see without binoculars. Bezos has set his launch facility in a low spot more than a few miles from the road between Van Horn and Guadalupe Mountains National Park. They have all, however, been successful launches. The booster has returned to earth and landed perfectly from the precise location where it lifted off and the passenger capsule softly parachutes back into the high desert and touches down with no more than a puff of dust.

But it’s fair to ask, as folks in Van Horn have since they first heard the news about their new neighbor, what, exactly, is the goal of the Amazon capitalist king? All of his rockets’ flights are sub-orbital and there are no announced plans to send passengers or payloads into low-earth orbit. The only recent declaration from Blue Origin was that it intended to soon reveal ticket prices for paying passengers. Each flight will soon carry four people to the edge of space to see the curvature of the planet and get a few minutes of weightlessness, gaze out oversized portholes, and float back to reality.

The ten-minute rocket ride on New Shepherd is expected to cost between $200-$300,000 dollars, or thirty large per minute, if the latter dollar amount is correct. If there are no orbital plans, and payloads are limited by human cargo weight, what Bezos has built is the ultimate Disney ride for the uber rich. Because he is generally developing the business with his own capital, there has been little written or talked about the moral question regarding space that came up as NASA was first reaching for the moon.

Why spend so much money on such an adventure when it could be used to feed the starving and house the poor and improve life on our little blue planet?

Bezos isn’t completely relying on his own considerable checkbook, either. He wants money for government space projects. The commercialization of space in recent years has NASA looking to private contractors rather than building its own systems like Saturn rockets and Apollo technologies that led us to the moon. Even for the richest men on the planet, space exploration is cost prohibitive as a capital investment. The real customer isn’t the rocket-riding tourist, but the government and corporations wanting to turn the heavens into a profit center.

(Will Amazon have one-day delivery to the Sea of Tranquility?)

The competition for big government contracts has put into graphic relief the conflict between the two space companies operating In Texas. They may sound like railroad tycoons from the country’s founding, men like Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, who espoused the glories of capitalism, but Bezos and Musk are as interested in government largesse as were the empire builders of the Gilded Age.

Musk’s SpaceX was recently awarded a $2.9 billion dollar contract from NASA to build a Human Landing System for the surface of the moon. A few days after becoming an even bigger socialist relying on government, Musk gloated on social media that Bezos, “Can’t get it up, (into orbit).” Karma came quickly calling, though, when Bezos and Blue Origin, along with third bidder Dynetics, protested the award to the Government Accounting Office (GAO), claiming the space agency “moved the goalposts at the last minute” to prejudice a decision in favor of Musk. The GAO ordered the suspension of all SpaceX work on the moon lander until it had adjudicated the claims made in the litigation.

Musk might be well-advised to slow things down in Texas, anyway. His heavy lifter rocket, the Starship, which he says is destined to take humans to Mars, seems to be having trouble not exploding. After each failure, he talks about the valuable data that was acquired to use for prevention, and it is surely “valuable,” at least in an economic sense, if it takes blowing up a rocket that cost untold millions to build just to acquire information.

As good as he is at getting astronauts and satellites into earth orbit, Musk might be better at the government grift, and doing whatever in the hell he pleases. He sent one rocket up without a license from the FAA, the first time that has happened in US history. The entrepreneur sounded as if he thought the regulations did not apply to his company.

“Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.”

Maybe humanity’s not in a hurry, bruh. We’ll go as soon as you figure out how to “fold space” and then grow trees on the red planet. Also, a place that makes good breakfast tacos will be a Mars essential.

Exhibiting almost a complete lack of self-awareness, Musk later tweeted about individuals receiving too much government help during the pandemic even as his companies were getting billions in tax breaks from Texas and Washington lawmakers. Between Travis County and the Del Valle Independent School District, Musk has agreed to $60 million in tax abatements, a shortfall that will be picked up by homeowners elsewhere in the state paying their taxes into the school finance system. Further, the land where his giga-factory is under construction will never be taxed at a valuation of more than $80 million dollars, by agreement, which means his tax bill will be about $4.6 million less annually than the apparent value of his facility.

Down at the tip of Texas, Musk is also doing quite well on tax kickbacks at the Boca Chica “star base” where he launches and blows up rockets. Cameron County commissioners gave him a ten-year abatement on property taxes, and his rocket launch and production facility has been provided with more than $13 million by the state’s Space Port Development Corporation. Musk and Bezos are both believed to also be taking advantage of Trump’s Opportunity Zone tax breaks, which are supposed to assist underdeveloped areas like Brownsville and Van Horn. Unfortunately, the feds require almost no reporting so taxpayers have no real understanding of what is happening in the OZ’s, other than they appear to getting leveraged for big dollars by corporations like SpaceX.

Musk is also trying to turn Brownsville and Boca Chica into a new kind of company town. He announced a plan to donate millions to area schools and the downtown revitalization efforts of Brownsville, historically one of the nation’s lowest income communities. In Boca Chica, which is home to a few dozen families, he is trying to encourage property owners to sell to SpaceX. Several have sold because Musk has said he wants to turn the little beach community into a new town he will call Starbase. The people who found the once-remote spot next to the Gulf of Mexico are being overwhelmed with traffic and construction noise and in the days before launches are given notices advising it would be safest if they vacated until the rocket was back on the pad. Must make backyard barbecues more exciting in a little cluster of homes that used to give off the vibe of a lost fish camp down at the bottom of America.

Meanwhile, on the 60th anniversary of Alan Shepherd becoming the first American into space, Bezos announced he was auctioning off the seat for the first Blue Origin passenger, and will give the money to charity. The flight is tentatively scheduled for July 20th, and chances are I will be sitting on my old motorcycle by the side of Highway 54, watching.

And wondering if it’s about anything more than money.

A Lone Star in Retrograde

The insanity, as it often does, began in East Texas, which tends to have politics that make it feel like the location is better described as West Mississippi. The weirdness arose just 20 miles west of Shreveport, and Congressman Louie Gohmert didn’t even have anything to do with it. The protagonist carried a teddy bear, close by his face, kind of snuggly, and it had a recording inside that made a sound like a heartbeat. On social media, Mark Lee Dickson, is photographed with his baseball hat backwards, slinging selfies, and proselytizing about the evils of abortion while billing himself as the “lead pastor” of the Baptist Sovereign Love Church in nearby Longview, and who also proudly declares himself a “35-year-old virgin.”

Which apparently makes him an expert on sex and reproductive matters for women?

We are concerned here, though, with Dickson dicking around with constitutional rights as though he were empowered by an angry god. Down the highway, just a short drive from his church, the community of Waskom, a town of less than 2000 souls, voted to outlaw abortion almost exactly two years ago. Dickson, who also runs Right to Life of East Texas, convinced five white males of Waskom’s city council to make their little exit off the Interstate lead to the first town in America that had become a “sanctuary city for the unborn.”

The cynical appropriation of language from the sanctuary city movement for immigrants poorly masks the fact that the local measure criminalizes doctors and organizations and anyone who assists a woman with an abortion. The city council graciously agreed to exceptions for rape and incest and acknowledged that their regulation contravenes an endless list of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, which means, they expect to get sued, and they can’t really enforce their supercilious edicts. Paying lawyers to make a losing political point seems like such a fine way to expend tax dollars in town without many resources.

But idiocy is afoot in the land.

About two dozen Texas cities have listened to Dickson make his errant pleadings and thought they made sense. Lubbock became the most recent and largest incorporated community to pass the onerous language outlawing a health care service the country’s highest court has almost always ruled is legal. Their city council up in the South Plains refused to approve the idea less than six months ago with a 7-0 vote but Dickson and proponents got the measure onto a local ballot, which passed by an almost 2-1 margin. Abortion at all stages of pregnancy in Lubbock is now considered “an act of murder.”

Lubbock is also the only town that has an abortion clinic and has succumbed to Dickson’s ignorance of law and lack of understanding of rights to privacy. No one can presently, under this country’s constitution, even by vote, make it illegal to provide an abortion or assist someone in getting to a women’s health services clinic, which is what Lubbock has tried to accomplish. In fact, driving a woman to a clinic or giving her money to pay for the procedure is considered a criminal act under the Lubbock statute, and there are no exceptions for rape or incest. The next nearest facility with applicable women’s health services is more than 300 miles distant.

Dickson continues to wander the state as an unconstitutional kind of Johnny Appleseed (here, look it up, kids) of anti-abortion regulations. His endeavors are being supplemented, too, by the Texas legislature, which is part of the conservative states’ tyranny to create laws designed to test Roe v. Wade at the U.S. Supreme Court. Texas lawmakers are sending to the governor an anti-abortion, anti-choice, anti-woman, anti-human law that makes it illegal to end a pregnancy when a heartbeat can be detected, which, physicians say can be as early as six weeks.

The linguistics of this particular fecal-adorned mandate are very dark, and driven, overwhelmingly, by white men. They open up legal claims against anyone assisting a pregnant woman with facilitating an abortion. Doctors, nurses, clinicians, even someone raising funds to help with abortions, can be sued by any interested party. Litigants are not required to have any type of personal, professional, or fiduciary relationship with the woman seeking the abortion; they need only to be outraged by her act. Given the fact that there were more than 56,000 women in Texas who ended problem pregnancies in 2019 and did so under the rights they were given under the U.S. Constitution, we ought to be prepared for a sea of frivolous lawsuits. Because there is no shortage of anti-choice maniacs with lawyers.

The state’s current governor has indicated he is eager for the bill to hit his desk so he can sign it. The rest of us are anxious for some kind of sanity to return to the legislative process in this state. We continue to lead the way in keeping alive fetal tissue and treating it as a human being but when that child finally issues into the world, Texas just doesn’t have time or resources to do much for it. A federal judge, for example, has had to intervene with an order for oversight of 78 foster care facilities that are leaving children sleeping in state CPS offices and placing them in what the court describes as “Dickensian conditions.” According to state records, at least 23 children have died in Texas foster care since last summer.  

That fits the definition of a crime, ending a problem pregnancy does not.

CueCat and Mouse

American stupidity may be more virulent than ingenuity. You don’t need to squint to see dumbass running like a river through business and politics. But that doesn’t make it any less shocking. I was reminded of that this week by an old article on Georgia’s presidential election recount back in December. A major Texas corporation, one of my former employers, helped to facilitate the launch and failure of one of the silliest pieces of technology ever devised.

The :CueCat (the branding had a colon in front of the name, seriously?) was kind of a computer mouse that was designed to look like a cat and ended up with a profile more like a rat with a goiter problem. The device was nothing more than a barcode scanner that was supposed to connect the printed page with the Internet. An advertiser, for instance, could put their barcode on a glossy ad, the CueCat could come along and scan the image, and automatically connect your computer to the advertiser’s website. No more typing in URLs was the great advantage. Did they not have bookmarking technology when this thing launched in 2000?

Of course, the real idea was to gather data from users’ machines and accumulate that for marketing purposes. But the kitty didn’t purr unless it was connected directly to your computer via hardwire. Who sits at their computer with stacks of magazines and newspapers at the ready? Isn’t getting rid of such publications a part of the point of digital technology?

The A.H. Belo Corporation, which owned the Dallas Morning News and a chain of TV stations, had executives who believed in the cat and invested $37.5 million dollars. A building full of great journalists cannot stop a host of dumb executives from jeopardizing all their hard work with bad leadership. Newspaper publishers wasted uncountable fortunes trying to figure out the Internet, but they shared their foolishness with other industries that could not see beyond next week. Before the CueCat got run to the ground by digital dogs, though, various investors had wasted $185 million dollars.

But the inventor is still around, and he is bravely trying to save our democracy with his latest techno-turd. Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, whose real name is apparently cooler, Jeffry Jovan Philya, deployed his latest scanning technology in Georgia’s presidential election ballot recount. He claimed that his tech could determine if ballots were fake, had been machine marked instead of with a pencil or ink, and even if their paper came from Russia!! But the “fraudit” was the real fraud.

Pulitzer was breathlessly introduced to Georgia Republicans almost as the man who could save the Trump presidency with his new cool cat technology. But he didn’t. The ballots there were hand counted, and a guy name Biden still won. Prior to finding easy marks in politics for his technology, Pulitzer was a failed treasure hunter, (ain’t we all?), but he seems to have the best prospects for finding treasure among denialist Republicans. Arizona has invited him to come help with its train wreck GOP audit of Biden’s victory.

Why not? The CueCat’s only used up one of its nine lives.  

Mississippi Yearning

The people who make the laws in Texas must be mad that a few other southern states are more backwards than us. Code going onto the books, for example, will make it more difficult to vote but considerably easier to carry a gun. The branding loonies of the Texas conservative movement call a new voter suppression bill a “voter integrity law,” which means there is more integrity when there are fewer people of color and marginalized communities of citizens showing up at the polls.

There is, of course, no election fraud problem in Texas, or in any other state in this fragile union of ours. In fact, 2020’s presidential election was, from the rocky coast of Maine to the sunny shores of California, probably the most secure in our history. While the Texas governor whines about making sure the right people get to vote and that their ballots count, his attorney general prosecuted only 55 cases of election fraud between 2015 and 2020. The crimes were all small beer, too, and are the only examples available after tens of millions of ballots were cast. Not a single case of voter fraud was reported in Texas last November, either.

But voter fraud!!!!

The new “integrity” measure heading toward a salivating governor will outlaw county election officials sending mail-in ballot request forms to all registered voters, which is what Harris County did to reduce the risk of people catching Covid on Election Day. But Harris County and Houston tend toward the strongly Democratic so we can’t have it being easy for their voters to be involved in the election.

The final form of the law is still taking shape but restrictions that have been under consideration include penalties for election workers who screw up, even if accidentally, protections for partisan poll watches, (you know the guys in camo who show up with guns trying really hard to make certain everything is going the right way?); they will be harder to remove even if they are disrupting the process by intimidating voters or impeding the election. There are also new rules requiring people to prove why they need assistance with voting and providing criminal sanctions for election workers who might scare those gun-toting, partisan poll watchers and treat them improperly. Constraints are also expected to be added on drive-through voting and extension of hours at polling places.

This is nothing more than a venal and blatant attempt to make sure 2020 doesn’t happen to America again. Even though Trump handily won Texas, Biden’s national victory has prompted GOP led states to push through regulations for voting that will have a disproportionate impact on people of color and low-income citizens wanting to exercise their franchise. These changes could all be challenged in court and there are almost certain to be requests for the Department of Justice to investigate potential discrimination as the intent and likely outcomes.

There will also be other consequences. The economy of the state could take a punch in the nose. Economist Ray Perryman’s analysis indicates Texas will lose about $31 billion through 2025 and that tourism will drop off along with major events scheduled for the state. Houston and Dallas have both bid on the World Cup for soccer in 2026 and Neolithic voting restrictions would harm those applications, which are predicted to generate around $4 billion for the state.

There will, however, be an increase in the number of people like Crystal Mason. The 46-year-old mom, helped by a poll worker, cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 election in Tarrant County. She was, however, on probation for a felony conviction of tax fraud, which made her ineligible to vote. Mason said she didn’t know she could not vote and assumed everything was being properly handled with the provisional ballot. (Hey, maybe the poll worker could be charged, too, under the next “integrity” laws).

Her probation came up in the research. But the Tarrant County District Attorney decided to prosecute her for voter fraud. She was convicted and faces five years in prison, if the review of her case before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denies her claims of innocence. Since her vote was not tallied, the prosecution’s claims of fraud seem a bit specious to me. The whole concept of a provisional ballot worked as designed in Mason’s case. But we need examples of VOTER FRAUD!!! to keep our governor and his political party happy. The entire point of the Crystal Mason prosecution is nothing more than intimidation of other voters, especially non-whites.

Here’s another case. But not in Texas. A Pennsylvania man, hoping to help re-elect Trump, was convicted of voter fraud for using his deceased mother’s name on a ballot. His was a willful, conscious act to deceive. He got five years’ probation. What’s the difference between Bruce Bartman’s punishment and Crystal Mason’s?

 Oh, well, she’s black. He’s white.

Come Some Sweet, Bluebonnet Spring

While the Indian paintbrush and bluebonnets still color the banks of the Colorado, follow old Webberville Road east of Austin out where the river makes a few horseshoe twists coming down from the Hill Country and marking its water course through the black land prairie out toward the Coastal Bend. Look for a sign indicating the Hornsby Cemetery, or stop and ask directions. Spring is the optimal time to visit the grave of one of the greatest baseball players to ever put on a Major League uniform. 

Rogers Hornsby, who still retains the highest batting average ever recorded in the big leagues, is buried in a modest cemetery not far from a bend in the Colorado named after his family. Often, an admirer will have left a perfectly useful baseball glove atop Hornsby’s grave, and his headstone will be easy to spot.

He rests not far from Reuben Hornsby, family patriarch, who was among the first Texas Rangers, and who had been given a grant of land in Texas by Stephen F. Austin. Reuben was a surveyor and with his wife Sarah settled the first community in what later became Travis County. Hornsby, who, eventually, helped to survey Austin for the capital of the Texas Republic in 1839, also was father to the first Anglo child in the county, sat on the initial jury in Travis County, and even grew the first corn. Twelve members of Hornsby’s family became Texas Rangers and are also buried in the cemetery. And one of Reuben Hornsby’s descendants became a player many baseball experts argue is among the greatest in the history of the game.

Rogers Hornsby (whose first name came from his mother’s family) was born in Winters, Texas. After his father’s death when Rogers was just two years old in 1898, his mother moved the family to the Austin area, which was just a few miles up the Colorado from where his grandfather had settled Hornsby’s Bend. The family returned to Fort Worth for work but by the time he was fifteen, Rogers was playing semi-pro, and he entered major league baseball still in his teens, eventually helping to launch the managerial career of Branch Rickey, the man who later made Jackie Robinson the first African American in pro baseball. 

Hornsby, who said he could remember nothing about his life before he held a baseball in his hand, played in the “dead” and the beginning of the “live ball” eras. But he hit most everything, regardless of its resilience against wood. Only Ty Cobb has a higher career batting average of .367. Hornsby batted .358 over his career of 23 seasons and earned two Triple Crowns, batted .400 or better three times, and in 1924 hit a .424 average, which remains the highest B.A. in MLB history. He is also the only player to hit .400 and get 40 home runs in a single season. 

But he was not a pleasant fellow. Teammates didn’t care for Hornsby, who never drank, smoke, or went to the movies. (Said the movies might damage his eyesight). He gambled on horses a bit, and was married three times, but lived for baseball. 

There are ball diamonds along Webberville Road today and there are boys and men still playing the game on them that Hornsby loved. My men’s team, a few years back, took our spring training on a nice private field only a few miles from where the great second baseman is buried. I was always hopeful, as baseball will make a man, of a good season, warm weather, and a happy life every spring as I drove through Hornsby’s Bend on my way to practice. And I frequently thought of what Rogers told a sportswriter that kept pestering him about who he was and what he did to occupy his time when he wasn’t playing the game. 

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”