(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 included 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, and the broader influence of Texas beyond its borders.
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).
“Doesn’t Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?”
– Martin Amis, “The Palace at the End”
There has to be something psychologically damaged in the governor of Texas. Any analysis of Greg Abbott ends up sounding like a political screed, even if all the writer does is list the governor’s executive decisions. Cumulatively, they are difficult to comprehend as the product of a rational mind. A psychiatrist might easily make a case that Abbott needs professional help simply based upon the anger issues that consistently manifest in his politics.
What the hell is wrong with Gregg Abbott?
His latest proclamation is his most venal and authoritarian. Because Democrats broke quorum and refused to allow passage of the most restrictive voting laws since blacks and women were kept from the polls, Abbott has issued a threat that he will de-fund a separate and equal branch of the government. The Texas governor said he plans to use the line-item veto to eliminate salaries and budgets of state legislators because they did not do his bidding by sending the ominous Senate Bill 7 to his desk for signature.
The governor, as he often is, seems oblivious to the constitutional questions that arise when he vetoes Article 10 of the Texas budget, which funds the legislature. As alarmist as it might sound, he is taking the first step down a path that follows a long parade of dictators who eliminated any institution of political opposition that prevented the implementation of their visions. The GOP bill constraining voters in Texas would likely have gone nowhere had Chief Justice John Roberts not ruled in in 2013 that it was not necessary for historically discriminatory districts to get a federal pre-clearance before changing voting rules. Consequently, Abbott will bring SB7 up in a special session of the legislature and expects lawmakers to end drive through voting, ballot drop boxes, extended voting days and hours, restrict mail-in ballots, and make it difficult to help get your neighbors to the polls.
What, precisely, happens to the constitutionally protected balance of powers if angry Abbott takes away the paltry $600 a month salaries of office holders, and also stops pay for the staffers that actually make government functional? Do the Texas House and Senate have any value as independent bodies and thinkers and legislators if they get shut down every time in the future that they refuse to goose-step when the governor issues edicts? Does a state or federal constitution ever function any more as an organizing principle for American society?
The only characteristic of Greg Abbott that outpaces his political distemper is his hypocrisy. Earlier this week, he ordered the state to rescind the licenses of 52 locations for the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in Texas, which are operated by the federal government. The forced closure of ORR facilities will require about 4000 minor immigrant children back into emergency shelters. In April, the governor’s scowling visage hovered outside one of those emergency operations and said it was a “health and safety nightmare,” and children needed to be moved into federal custody for their protection.
Instead of letting the federal government use professional caseworkers help the children in the ORR centers, Abbott is now demanding they be returned to the overcrowded and underfunded emergency shelters that he had recently denounced. Of course, when things were being well-managed under the auspices of the federal government, it was difficult for Abbott to attack the Biden administration for an alleged failure to deal with the immigration situation. This ass-Abbott approach uses minor children as political foils for a little man whose conscience also suffers from a separate handicap of missing humanity.
When he isn’t busy with ordering state troopers to kick homeless people out of their tents, Greg Abbott also enjoys ending unemployment insurance that isn’t even paid for by the state. The pandemic funds have provided for people who lost their jobs because of the virus are suddenly being eliminated, regardless of the fact congress has funded them until the end of September. The governor has told Washington that Texas will no longer accept the money after June 26, which means an estimated 344,000 people will receive $1200 less per month.
The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance money provided an extra $300 a week to workers who were already getting state UE assistance, and it offered payments to self-employed and gig workers. While some people will still be eligible for state unemployment, they will lose the $300 extra from the feds, and the self-employed and gig workers will have no further source of revenue, and many are likely to have not had time to rebuild their businesses.
Abbott’s announcement gave those relying on the assistance about a month to apply for and land a job, which is a challenge in the best of times. The Texas Workforce Commission claims there are as many open jobs as there are people looking for work, which led to the decision to not take further pandemic unemployment assistance. Another misleading argument for not taking money to help people in his state was that Abbott claimed 18 percent of all unemployment claims were fraudulent. That sounds like an awful lot of people are trying to game the system, but that’s not the case.
Eighteen percent of the money was probably paid out to people who weren’t unemployed, but these weren’t lazy fraudsters trying to live on the government dole. The thefts were carried out by online scammers who stole digital IDs, probably even from the Texas Workforce website, and used that data to file fake claims. Texas has paid out $577 million for unemployment assistance to more than 350,000 filers who had not asked for the assistance. What that means is not that there are that many individuals cheating but that the TWC and the state have lousy data protection systems and cyber thieves can make easy money with phony filings. Also, Greg Abbott can make it sound like there are hundreds of thousands of lazy Texans gaming the unemployment system and he wants their asses back at work, by god.
I have spent no small amount of time wondering what has made Greg Abbott such a hateful person. It is probably too simplistic to suggest he is exacting revenge on the world for the horrible tragedy that caused him to be paralyzed. By many accounts of his colleagues in Houston, before that tree limb fell onto Abbott while jogging, he was a liberal legal thinker who saw the importance of a government that facilitated better lives and didn’t constrict freedoms.
He sued the homeowner and their tree service company for his injury, and ended up with permanent health care, and about $10 million from an annuity. His last payment will be in 2022, a little over $740,000, on the date of his 65th birthday. When he became attorney general, Abbott then set about the business of making it hard for the average person to get their liability cases to the courthouse door, and even if they won, settlements were limited with guidelines that meant no one was likely to ever have an Abbott-sized judgment.
The Texas governor seems unable to understand the harm he is causing others with his policies, or he simply doesn’t care. A victim of an accident similar to his in 2021 would have a hell of a time even getting a trial lawyer to take their case because Abbott and Karl Rove managed to push tort reform through the state’s legislature, and unless damages and loss can be proven, most awards are limited to $250,000, which is about the cost of getting a case ready for trial.
Abbott also can’t see his personal hypocrisy or even contemplate the lives he is about to ruin with his anti-abortion “Heartbeat” bill, the permit-less carry gun law, and his undying refusal to accept more than $20 billion in Medicaid funding to deliver health care to the five million Texans, including one million children, who are uncovered. The man leads like he is still trying to purge his anger.
And his friends ought to intervene and get him some psychological help.
Borderlord
There is a stretch of Highway 385 that runs 58 miles from Fort Stockton, south to Marathon. The chip sealed caliche roadbed unfurls through a beauty way that increases in glory with each southbound mile. Though I have ridden a motorcycle or driven a four-wheeled vehicle down that road uncountable times in more than four decades, I am always enchanted by passing through the Sierra Madera Astrobleme, a crater caused by a meteorite colliding with our little planet.
An “astrobleme” is a compound word from Greek that means, literally, a “star wound.” Geologists from the University of Texas at the Permian Basin have studied the crater extensively and estimate the impact of the foreign object was about 100 million years in the past, which places it 34 million years prior to the Chicxulub impactor, which geological studies indicate was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Our Texas impact crater, located entirely within the private confines of the grand La Escalera Ranch, is less than ten miles across, and shows a spoiler pile of mountains that are about 800 feet above the desert floor. What we don’t know is the effect it had on all creatures, great and small, that were then walking in the world.
I was out that way again this week on the old motorbike, riding with a buddy, and luxuriating in my consistent good fortune that there was not a car to be seen in the rear view or across the long mountainous horizon I was running toward. Unfortunately, the serenity was temporary because I passed two black and white DPS troopers set up in speed trap formation and separated by only a few miles to maintain radio contact. Two more black and whites passed us as they headed northbound, and on the return trip a few days later, we witnessed three other DPS vehicles racing southward.
I mention this because, in all my years of rolling down that road, I have never seen a law enforcement vehicle. People in a hurry to reach the national park, or racing for a cocktail at the Gage Hotel, and who don’t care about a silly ol’ astrobleme, never seem to worry about speeding. There has been no apparent need. There have also rarely been cops, and in my case, none.
Guess what’s different?
Hate to bring him up again, but it’s Greg Abbott. The governor seems to be running a kind of borderland cop cartel. Whenever he wants to play tough guy or trigger the FOX “bimbobs” to call him up for an interview, Abbott flexes on border security. A surge of immigrants during the Trump administration didn’t bother the Texas governor enough for him to offer criticism of kids in cages and billions that were to be wasted on a useless wall. Biden’s election, however, prompted the governor to announce he was beefing up Operation Lone Star, a coordinated effort between the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard to protect the border.
If you happen to drive Highway 83 between Laredo and McAllen, you can see the manifest results of this increased law enforcement: There is a DPS vehicle parked on the road every four or five miles, and there are more as you approach towns. An officer always seems to be eating at every restaurant along the route, too. But are they actually needed? They certainly seem to have reduced speeding on that border road.
Protecting the border is the job of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (USCBP), not the Texas DPS or its chapter of the National Guard. If a crime is committed on Texas soil, the state’s law officers can arrest a perpetrator. What is less clear is their authority to detain border crossers. They use the benign term “referral” to describe what they are doing when getting illegal trespassers into the custody of USCBP. Abbott has increased numbers of these Texas civil servants to the border several times and has pissed away billions in taxpayer money to nab small time drug runners and mothers and children seeking asylum.
Each iteration of Operation Lone Star includes a news conference with the governor, always attired in khaki, surrounded by serious looking law officers, which is nothing more than a staged campaign event for him to talk about the alleged failure of the Biden administration. Taxpayers are funding his theatrics and Abbott and his enablers are already envisioning the TV ads that will come out of these histrionics and him playing America’s sheriff.
He’s already running for president.
UFOS and What Uncle Sam Knows
In advance of an official report to be released on UFOs later in June, the Pentagon has issued an early statement acknowledging Washington cannot explain hundreds of sightings of what it calls, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs. This is a carefully parsed version of the truth. Government officials and the Department of Defense admit they simply cannot explain what military pilots are seeing on an almost daily basis and that the technology is not part of a secret Pentagon program to develop weapons with a black budget.
But they start to lose credibility when the report suggests it is possible China or Russia may have developed hypersonic weaponry that is flying U.S. skies and coastal regions. Such a conclusion ought to have been ruled out, immediately, just by looking at the public videos. No human aircraft can accelerate from zero to gone in a second or two or make right and left, 90-degree turns while traveling at thousands of miles an hour. There is also evidence of these apparent aircraft coming down from great heights and going underwater without slowing their speeds and moving equally fast while submerged.
To imply that Russia or China has developed such engineering is patently absurd. Such an assertion means those countries are probably thousands of years ahead of American ingenuity, or that they have reverse engineered crashed craft from alien worlds and have turned recovered technology into practical military applications, which is probably more likely than the craft being the product of human intelligence. While that latter statement may sound like a nice sci-fi movie plot, it is considerably more believable than the notion the Chinese and Russian scientific communities have outstripped the billions the U.S. spends annually on defense and space research.
My guess is that if our enemies were armed with the type of technology being witnessed by military and civilian pilots on an almost hourly basis, they would not be playing tag with our planes. I think it is probable they would simply taunt our defenses by hovering over American air space and challenge us to try to use our capabilities to stop their incursions. We clearly would not be able to prevent such an aggravation.
I recently wrote a detailed examination of the UFO phenomenon and potential alien intelligences and the status of private and public investigations. We do not have incontrovertible evidence yet that the craft are from off planet and are intelligently controlled. The current best forensic evidence comes from those military tapes, however, unless the government is hiding artifacts from crashes or there truly are recovered craft being flown at Area 51 and stored at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Uncle Sam isn’t saying. But we ought to admit that what we are seeing is not made or flown by humans.
Until we do that, we cannot begin the real research of identification, and, who knows, maybe even communication.
Tales of the West
I would have like to have had a chat with Gilberto Luna, maybe sipping a bit of mezcal and getting him to tell a few tales of his life on the edge of America in the days before electricity and running water. Gilberto crossed the Rio Grande a bit before 1900 and just before turning 60 years of age. He had already lived a rather full life in Mexico and is said to have raised 58 children and stepchildren with as many as 13 wives. Maybe he was tired and decided to try some place new? Many of those children may have grown up with their father after he had taken them with him to the states.
Gilberto did not venture far from the big river. He found a flat spot not far from Alamo Creek and began to build a jacal in which to live. The low structure was made of limestone and sandstone blocks that were daubed together with mud. Gilberto’s roof was constructed with ocotillo branches, brush, earth, and stone, which were propped up on the inside by larger poles supporting center beams. A large, flat boulder sits at the back of his house. The jacal was three feet thick at the bottom and only two feet wide at the top of its walls, and they varied from three to four feet high.
The National Register of Historic Places has Mr. Luna’s story this way:
"Gilberto Luna was a pioneer Mexican farmer in the Big Bend country who settled in the Alamo Creek drainage, living there all his long life and raising a very large family. He died in 1947 at the age of 109. In the early years, Alamo Wash was on the Comanche War Trail through the Park, and Luna somehow established peaceful relations with these savage warriors and also with the Apaches resident in the vicinity. That he survived the incursions of these raiding Indians is a tribute to his diplomacy. That he succeeded for nearly a century in farming the dry Alamo Creek drainage using the technique of flood-plain farming is only slightly less amazing.
"The Luna Residence is significant as the prime example within the Park of the primitive Mexican house-shelter typical of earliest pioneer settlement."1 It is also considered to be a prime example of man's adaptation to the environment in the Big Bend National Park. Additionally, Luna was a widely known personage in the area, ‘a legend in his own time.’”
The National Park Service tells visitors that Gilberto lived along Alamo Creek when it was central to the old Comanche War Trail and that he had made peace with the tribal warriors constantly passing his homestead. Mr. Luna’s grandson said that was probably not accurate because he didn’t think his grandfather had settled in what is now Big Bend National Park until maybe fifteen years after the last band of Comanches had been moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which was 1874 to 1875.
How he survived, and even made a living, even without being threatened by indigenous peoples, seems almost miraculous to a 2021 visitor. He reportedly used a mule-drawn wagon to haul water up from the creek in an old oil drum and then hand-watered his crops individually with a gourd dipper. Whatever he did, it worked. Mr. Luna lived to be 108 or 109 years of age and died in 1947.
If you wish to be astounded by his resilience, and have a vehicle suited for travel on a dirt road, enter the national park from the West and turn onto the old Maverick Road and drive south toward the river. Luna’s jacal will appear on your left about six miles from the junction at the base of Pena Mountain. Walking through the jacal is a wondrous experience, and you will leave as baffled as you are amazed.
If one thinks Abbott as governor is bad enough, think about Abbott as president. The horror! the horror!