luciaphile

I've always been annoyed at people who pretend that traffic signals don't apply to them - as if they were special or something....its like the guy who runs the shoulder in a merge to get further ahead....him thinking he is special just causes more traffic for everyone else.

Recently, nearby, a cyclist was killed by someone doing something similar, getting to the right onto the shoulder and passing everyone to get to the light and turn. It likely seemed to the elderly driver, if he had any thoughts at all, that he was doing something harmless.

The other day near home, in the car, I came up suddenly behind a grade-schooler on a skateboard, in the middle of the single lane. They like to fly down the hill - they don't have to push for a quarter of a mile. He turned around and calmly held up one imperious finger to say "Wait a second, lady."

I wasn't the least bit upset. On the contrary, I thought, "Little urchin, you are awesome. I salute you."

No, he wore no helmet. Yes, I realize he could have been killed, helmet or no. Yes, if I had been the one to hurt him, I would be devastated, probably permanently unhinged.

I don't seem to be able to regard things in such stringent, consistent terms as the people on my favorite thread on my favorite obscure internet forum.

The cyclists have legs like pistons (it's not terrible, living on the bike route) so I don't think they're girlie men.

To come to a full stop on a bicycle would in nine out of ten situations be stupid, though consistent with statute; for drivers, it should be habitual, but I've noticed guys find it unnatural. You all must be model citizens.

I don't believe the tree of liberty is really nourished by the occasional mild insubordination of safely and deliberately violating some minor traffic law, but it's preferable to that blood of tyrants business.

No doubt the best way forward for any individual is to throw off the past and cast off the narrowness of his particular cohort. And we're all about the individuals, aren't we?

I don't pretend that it's been an easy progression of increasing civil liberties, much less a steady one. Reversals of fortune have been too common.

I made no reference to the history of civil liberties, interesting and important as it is. Per you:

And a curious thing about happiness; although government is capable of imposing despair, it is utterly incapable of imposing happiness.

But I yield on the supposed ameliorative power of hateful words -- I acknowledge that I am the unreconstructed one. Ready for my reprogramming!

Or are we less concerned with individual than with mass well-being:

... we're so divisive, polarized, segregated, de-massified, we've lost comprehension of the scale of our own problems and have no mechanism to communicate them across partisan lines.

I confess I don't follow politics very closely and so don't know what political solutions you might be in search of. The only thing that has a really populist ring is the occasional, mainly symbolic call for protectionism, which I know can't be what you suggest.

Anyway, when people start talking about effecting political change on behalf of the masses, someone like me should probably run for the dacha. Only, if it's going to happen, I hope it will happen soon, while I'm still relatively young like Lara. I think the Revolution May Actually Be Televised this time, and I want to look pretty on camera, fleeing. That's how I've pictured it.

So you've got me curious. I've been thinking about taking the Amtrak Sunset Limited out to Alpine and renting a car from there. I'd probably go sometime in early November. Would love to know your secrets.

The Niche, I have sent you a PM.

As I washed up on the rocks, shipwrecked, blind, calling out for help, being refused it--not simply ignored, but expressly refused--it is a pattern of behavior that demands a summary description, an idea contained by a word. The word fit, more than a senseless epithet.

I am starting to wish I could teleport to that beach and haul you up! I don't pretend to understand that behavior. I've never seen anything like that. I am truly sorry that happened to you.

As long as you got to the big speech, that's what mattered most.

Some words communicate ideas that are uncomfortable. All the more reason to ponder them, to use them with deliberate infrequency so that the meaning is not lost or despoiled. They should command attention and scrutiny. Their use should be cause to reflect upon oneself, to examine our character, that we might express them with hesitance but without guilt.

"Whatever, Punk Ass White Boy."

{So disappointed. Since I'm out of my depth where vulgarity is concerned I just googled "absolute worst thing to call white boy urban dictionary." I was hoping for something so shocking, maybe with a hint of sexual cruelty, that you'd be like "OMG luciaphile" and I'd be like "What? - I didn't know" and then I'd get thrown off the forum. That's it, Google? That's all ya got ? Not your finest effort. I've heard that on network television!}

{Houston mother, now as obsessed with Words With Friends as she is with bridge, hands me her phone so I can figure out her next play--

Me: "Mother, what on earth is ---------?"

Her: "It was in the Urban Dictionary. Don't look it up."}

Okay, I think I understand what you mean, and I'll have one last try at conveying what I mean.

That speech is good. I'm not surprised it made waves. But self-scrutiny is one thing. Kicking somebody when they're down is another. I think we can agree that by most objective measures, the black underclass is suffering. But where you, The Niche, evidently see only self-inflicted wounds (yes, I acknowledge them), and a failure to mimic white ambition (which failure increasingly seems a white phenomenon as well, so don't get too comfortable, PAWB!) -- I see social shifts set in motion not by blacks but by what we once described as the "elite." Upper-middle-class whites may have weathered those changes -- the sidelining of mainstream religion, destruction of marriage, casual attitude toward drug use, etc. -- well enough but their effects compound the farther down the socioeconomic ladder one goes. The politicization of Everything hasn't helped, either. These things will never be unmade, but they are also "cause to reflect."

Finally, the N-word has a political dimension to it, has ever since the Civil War, that is -- I can't underscore this enough -- bound up more with bitterness and class resentment than with what is commonly thought of as racism. (This is something that I think people from the North will never understand, nor the people in the cottage industry that surrounds race, the people who would have to re-invent it if the idea of race ever really died out). The word is by no means a simple signifier in my view - perhaps it would be more acceptable if it were. Do you feel the same concern to trot out the word "Polack" so that we will preserve how we once thought Poles were dumb or uncouth? In case we need that label sometime?

The craziest thing I've ever done alone is taken a sit-inside kayak out onto the Gulf of Mexico on a day with nine-foot swells (trough-to-crest) and whitecaps. Three or four miles into it, I found myself upside down under water, the paddle ripped from my arms, my glasses ripped from my head. After a frantic ejection and right-siding, I found myself sitting in a craft that was held buoyant only by air trapped in the fore and aft compartments. The waterline was above my belly-button. I was straddling a kayak-turned-submarine, legally blind, with a high center of gravity. One wave after another would topple me back over. I eventually washed up on Galveston's seawall.

I met a guy who, when he left the Marines, decided to walk cross-country. He walked from Southern California to Maine. (He cached water in the desert, but - anyway, details are not important.) A stray dog joined him early on. In Maine he fell in with a kayak-builder and decided to make the return journey to Texas via water. (I'd have to look at a map to remember how that was done.) The Mississippi spat him out and he was on the last leg, ocean kayaking along the Gulf. He still had the dog. Why wouldn't he have kayaked in the Intracoastal canal? I've forgotten. One evening he had an experience like the one you've described. He said it was the worst night of his trip, which had had some low moments since he really hadn't sufficient funds for the journey. He lost the dog.

But - happy ending - a few hours later, the dog paddled back to him! He was never so elated in his life.

I recommend kayaking in a tranquil bay. But I don't get bored easily.

The semi-submersible ocean kayaking while blind story was only the scariest. I was more scared during all of that than I was when I camped on a mountaintop in west Texas on an evening that spawned a lightning storm and during which a mountain lion investigated the campsite. I had packed a gun, although it was highly illegal to have it or to use it in that location; it was also illegal to camp on that mountaintop. That's the only time that I'd ever bothered to unpack a firearm or to load it with the intent to use it. Naively, I wasn't that scared. Of course, I also wasn't alone on that occasion and so my odds of being mauled were cut in half; but my date (things weren't as hopeless during college) was put thoroughly out of the mood. That was unfortunate.

Where were you? Do tell. You weren't camping on the seasonally-deserted Scout Ranch in the Davis, were you? We stayed there once. Either there was no gate or it wasn't locked. Lovely creek.

Perhaps your date reacted badly to your calculating of the odds.

I've only ever awakened, when sleeping out in the open in Guadalupe Mtns.NP, to find a skunk on the edge of my sleeping bag, so I am very thrilled by the mountain lion story. That is a rare occurrence. Mountain lions choose whether to be seen. Did you actually see it? I've heard people who've lived in West Texas twenty years say they've seen a lion once, or never. And if you didn't open the tent how did you know it was a lion and not a bobcat? Did you hear it scream, and did it in fact sound like a woman? The last time we were in Big Bend they mentioned that only a few days previously a child had been attacked by a lion in the parking lot behind the motel dining room in the Basin! His parents beat it off, but he was injured. Please give more details, and in return I will tell you my top West Texas travel secret, make that two secrets. You may already know them, but you might not; and it's a long way to drive and miss anything.

The word is ...is only a symbol.

Not only do I thoroughly reject the idea that words are only symbols, I believe that words partly bring the world into being; or short of that, that they alone or foremost lend meaning to experience: whether it's the Queen's English or ... the "birdsong" language of the Pirahã that actually seems to constrain their cognition to a strangely unwavering present moment.* Language doesn't express thought, it is thought.

And for some few people, math, not words, suffices. I know Einstein demurred, but I trust such people that math doesn't correspond with reality, but that it is reality, a deeper level that will, depressingly, always be hidden from me; all I can see is the overlay since I am not capable of higher-order thinking.

I'm guessing we may have to amicably differ on this.

* "He walked out of now" instead of "he walked out of the village" is an example I read. I admit this is controversial, though. I think only one person, a missionary who dropped his mission and became a linguist, has really studied them. They are spectacularly well-adapted to their environment, and they don't need us to Raise Their Standard of Living, The Niche, because they would not then be who they are. They're not even in my National Geographics.

First, I was intimidated by the length of the video - I have an MTV-generation attention span - but I did watch it, most of it - not quite finished - and found it very on point. Thanks for finding it.

You can traffic in stereotypes all you want; that does nothing to increase incivility in the world. I believe that epithets do. That young black comics have embraced the "N-word," or tried to defang it, has no application to the rest of us.

And since no one can fail to notice your glee in provoking people and exposing their hypocrisy in some fashion (though I don't find these reactions as endlessly diverting as you do, I usually prefer inanity over snark, and I find you more entertaining when you are just thinking out loud, not trying to catch people out) -- I will give you what you want. One of my objections to the word you so casually drop, beyond simple distaste, is that I associate it with a white socioeconomic class from which I will always, always want to distance myself.

Overall, The Niche, I think you will find that I am not a very satisfying target for these brinksmanship games. Now, I know it is probably hard to keep different posters straight, but try to remember this about me: I am often a reactionary, though I'm not fond of that word - the "R-word" - given its origins, but I will never be guilty of faux outrage.

Next I'll try to wade into that Wittgensteinian stuff, if I'm not too sleepy.

The Niche, we now have three distinct strands going, it seems to me. I'll have to revisit your posts, since it was late for me and I think you may have been a little drunk -- at any rate your spelling had begun to deteriorate. (The eminent forum maverick's demise was imminent. As his life flashed before him, he reflected a final time on the immanence of the divine in the mundane surroundings he had once taken for granted.) I do wish to pursue those strands -- I enjoy walking in and out of strangers' minds -- it helps make up for the fact that the meat of my friends' conversation, much as I love them, is: health, kids, Mad Men, aging parents; and a fair amount of spirituality that I can't share. So, as you've put it, "Notice has been delivered." I'll get back to you in "Anything You Want."

Just not now, 'cuz I'm at work.

Please, out of nothing more than consideration for me, make this the last day you use that word, or allude to it. Your use of it strongly suggests that you didn't grow up with black people, and I don't say that it suggests anything more; but for those of us who did, it is hard to hear. It contributes nothing, and heaven knows it was an emblem of the sort of "groupthink" you despise.

I am glad the Gulf didn't swallow you.

Okay, time now to finish my post. Will do so in "Anything Goes."

Well, The Niche, you tried:

"Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea. "

And:

"They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;

These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep."

Moving water is absolutely overpowering. Once took child, about four, to New Braunfels, stopping on the way at Academy to buy him a little life vest; we went in the Comal and then, with him in my arms, through the tube chute through which the whole of the river is funneled. Predictably, we lost our tube. I managed to hold tight to him, but we were both carried along underwater for about 500 feet. The current then spread out and a lifeguard fished us out.

They blow a horn whenever they see anyone struggling, then one of the lifeguards jumps in. I asked the child's father, "Did they blow the horn for us?"

Him: "They blew the horn before you even entered the chute. They saw your ridiculous hat."

Child did not seem unduly stressed, but when we got back to our picnic spot, he said to me, "Thank you for buying me that life vest," which caused me to then burst into tears.

Maybe the men who didn't help you when you were in peril were not themselves able to swim. Remember, we've learned recently that Galveston has never had a public swimming pool in which people might learn.

Here is the article about stop signs -- I find things so easily ever since I outsourced (or do I mean offshored, hmm?) my brain to Google. You'll like it. Very Malcolm Gladwell-ish. An economist looks at traffic, comes to some unconventional conclusions, and is ignored.

http://www.theatlant...s-daisy/306873/

Although I'm unsure how well a four-way yield plays out, it does sound like a reasonable enough public policy.

It sounds like infinite regress to me. But I think it works in England, where they've elected to remove a lot of signage and give common sense free rein.

It takes focus, attentiveness, and physical exertion to play nice when you're on a bike. Humans don't like doing these things. We're lazy.

You need also to be able to sustain conversation the entire time you are riding, which I find amazing. I live on a bike route in Baja Westlake, where it's quite exerting to ride; about 100 people cycle past every day, many more on weekends. Because of the Doppler effect, I guess, I can hear with crystalline clarity their effortlessly carried-on conversations through the window about 15-20 seconds before they pass. Popular topics include: bike route lore, UT men's basketball, recent vacation destinations, and how much they're "pulling down." The men never talk about women. The women are sometimes talking about men. As for the stop sign up the way, it would be ridiculous for them to come to a halt just before climbing the huge hill ahead, and no one expects them to. Not that it would be hard for them -- they're incredibly fit, they all look just like Lance Armstrong to me with those machined calves.

So sweet that you took in a bike that no one else could see the good in, a bike that's been mistreated, unspeakable things done to it; and you put yourself out there and took a chance. Not to overstep, though, but I have a hunch, with your stated preference for gritty realism, The Niche, that you might possibly have more the soul of a mountain biker. It's Houston -- that's problematic, but there are probably some mountain bike trails somewhere about.

When I was little, I use to love to stretch out across the whole back seat and sleep. Guess it's a good thing there was never a panic stop needed back then.

No, you're misremembering. There were sudden stops. You would have rolled into the floorboard. I was already there so there was really nowhere for me to go. In the front seat, yes, we occasionally hit our heads on the glove box, but that was why my mother always flung her arm out when she hit the brake, to prevent that.

It's not just the required seat belts that are the big users of space. Its the child seats. That's where the real arms race in size is. They are friggin huge. I'll be glad when the last two little ones get tall and heavy enough to be only in belts. It will be much more room and comfort for everyone else in the vehicle. I admit - they probably are safer for the little ones (although with it seems like just about every single brand eventually being recalled - who knows) but man to they take up space.

The hospital wouldn't let me leave with my newborn until I showed them I had a car seat (they were on to me). I was pleased to show them that I did have one. I didn't understand that it was meant to lay flat and backwards for infants, though. I just propped him upright, a baby less than twenty-four hours old, in the car seat as if he were a toddler. He slumped a bit, to be candid. I recall on the way home having the feeling, as so often, "This seems not quite right."

But when he was strapped in, he was really secure! I can't remember why, but people often had difficulty figuring out how to release him. Once he went off with my friend and her children and when I arrived to pick him up more than an hour later he was sitting in their living room in his car seat, with his little friends playing around him, like a deposed king. She wanted to cut the straps but was afraid it would be hard for me to afford another car seat.

I am glad kids are safer in cars, though it seems odd they're in booster seats until nearly kindergarten. When I was little my favorite place was lying in the floorboard, my head inches from the ground.

I felt like hopping on my three-speed and weaving, helmetless, into this thread:

I figured Marksmu would have a truck full of "serious cargo," because he sounds so very mechanically inclined -- like he would have been a useful person to know when we needed to disable the check engine light on an ancient Honda long enough for it to pass inspection.

But perhaps even he might acknowledge that the average pickup has an umbrella in the gun rack and a bag of cat food in its very pristine bed, and its driver no especially industrious purpose.

I think people who approach driving with a lot of anger are a hazard, and the Venn diagram of those folks and consumers with a Live and Let Die attitude and preference for heavy vehicles would show quite a bit of overlap.

And I know I will be pilloried for this, but when people suggest they need a heavy SUV because they care about their family too much to get anything less, it irks me. Until gas got so high it resembled an arms buildup or something. Their "precious cargo" is safe (so they think) and they don't care about collateral damage. I know it's not their fault the seat belt law mandates big cars for families. The oft-quoted figure is that seat belts are thought to have saved some 250,000 lives since 1975. But of the million and a half automobile deaths since then, or disabling accidents, I wonder how many would have been averted if moms and dads didn't need to have seating for eight or nine in their respective cars.

I am thinking of five cousins and Mother crammed into the splendidly non-practical-as-a-family-car late-sixties Jaguar E Type whose "back seat" seemed to be meant for a suitcase. I was very little and it was dark and we had stalled -- what a surprise! -- in the rain on Westheimer.

I think people are on board with seat belts. Maybe the law could be repealed and people could be allowed to stuff themselves into smaller, lighter cars like they used to; as long as overall they continued to wear seat belts, perhaps getting heavier cars off the road would offset the change, safety-wise.

I have a weird feeling this may be crazy talk, though. My filter may be broken.

Rainey Street is near where sad Waller Creek empties into Town Lake. Ideas for the way the creek might look after a tunnel to divert floodwater is built were presented last weekend:

http://wallercreek.org/finalfour/

And there were sundogs in Austin today.

Maybe 100 years from now someone will figure out how to get food from a particular rock that only exists in those plots of land; who knows? Institutions can think in those terms.

Thank you for that insightful comment, editor. Maybe we should begin irrigating the desert with Gatorade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy) to coax forth this non-carbon-based bounty.

I think Horizon City is a real place. I think I may have noticed it because I was permitted to drive for an hour last time we left El Paso. The area referenced was maybe in the vicinity of Hueco Tanks SHP.

I realize academic endowments like to invest in land -- I think when the paper companies pulled out of East Texas, Harvard became a huge landowner, or timber-rights owner, there for awhile -- but these lots in the desert were just on the order of five to twenty-acre parcels maybe.

El Paso: I'm not that familiar with it, but I like it -- the downtown seems very appealingly-scaled (HAiF-ers wouldn't like, I suppose) and I love that the architect of UTEP looked to the "land of the thunder dragon" for inspiration. It's too bad the Franklin Mountains aren't a little higher so that they could act as cloud-catchers (or cloud-creators, I don't know which, my ignorance is pleasingly total, though I find that doesn't prevent me from talking like a weatherman, "afternoon heating may spark a thunderstorm or two," or, "if only this high pressure would move off," etc.). It was an effect I saw that same day with every succeeding mountain range in AZ, each having its own dark blue weather system above, very dramatic. Curious cases of ownership compel me to mention AZ's Mt.Graham in the Coronado NF, which has a fairly vertigo-inducing guardrail-free drive to the top (HAIF-ers would like, I suppose) -- that seemed a bit harrowing in the rain. It is home to a federally-listed endangered species which is easy to catch sight of, because it's a squirrel. At the top are some big telescopes, jointly owned, if memory is correct, by the University of Arizona and .. the Vatican! I figure they are either looking for God or trying to make up for what they did to Galileo.

However, Realtors (note the capitalized 'R' because the word is trademarked and copyrighted) are a class of malcontented lobbyists that impose a cartel upon the public and a system of agency whereby expectations are low and information is tightly-held.

Lawyers by contrast are a poorly organized sort. They can't even organize as a profession to effectively limit the number of new lawyers...the way that accountants and architects and Realtors have. Their profession is indeed miserable, but that is the nature of the law. It doesn't reflect on them. If they're good at what they do, then they keep you from doing things that you have no comprehension of as being stupid, but that are. And you feel resentful that they know that it's stupid, keep you from doing it, and perhaps cannot explain why it should be stupid. I've come to really appreciate lawyers. When you get caught being stupid, with your pants around your ankles, and they get you out of the mess, they are redeemed for being asinine...with money. And that's okay.

Probably having in-house lawyers is sometimes helpful to him, but I never hear about that. (It's a wife's part to listen uncritically to her husband's frustrations, not play devil's advocate; though you should not expect her to understand this for at least the first ten years of marriage, unless she is some kind of Wife Savant.) I think his objection is mainly that, being very detached from whatever he's trying to do, they have no strong desire to move things forward instead of derail them, and he feels they have a tendency to be overzealous, as a means of justifying themselves. But he is friendly with all.

Lawyers in-house and out do occasionally vex him (recently he watched incredulous as a very old good-old-boy lawyer earned his pay by convincing his client/buddy not to accept -- I guess I mustn't be too specific, just insert "colossal sum of money for doing nothing"). But a tiny, inconsequential, but representative thing, a diktat from above: after meeting with people, walking around with them and listening to them talk and being unfailingly polite -- whether or not these people are wanting something from him, or the reverse, he plays the supplicant in these interactions -- and then negotiating with them over a period of months: at some point in this mostly cordial process, he has to give this person who's likely a 6th-generation Texan a piece of paper and say, "I need you to sign this, it's just -- I need you to affirm that you are not a terrorist." The absurdity and embarrassment of this -- well, it gives him one more thing to blame on lawyers.

A solid Realtor® is not going to be concerned about someone's terrorist affiliations.

Mr.luciaphile was compiling a GIS data set of publicly-owned land in Texas that is not conservation land for his own nefarious purposes when he came across some failed -- nonexistent -- development in the desert an hour or so from El Paso. Lots held by a number of academic institutions:

Oglethorpe University

Wittenberg Univ.

Seattle Univ.

Lubbock Christian

Oklahoma Baptist

UT

Univ. of Oregon

Concordia Univ.

Univ. of Shalom

Johnson Bible College

Strake Jesuit

Boise Bible College

Goshen College

Southwestern Adventist College

Vassar!

Me: "Why?"

Him: "Oh, probably donated by people to their alma maters when they figured out they'd been had, to institutions that have no filter for judging gifts of land."

But all those Bible schools -- surely the speculator must have targeted them. It's not like they were going to drive out there, I guess. UT might have known better.

This is not merely an argument for economic growth, but for the betterment of mankind, for happiness...

I read further - a little further - into that Economist thing. Even though economics is not in his line, and he wasn't really paying attention to me, 'cuz he was looking at some odd GIS data of an area about an hour away from El Paso*, I gave my husband a ten-second summation of the Pro position on new "well-being" indicators, which predictably didn't interest him. I didn't mention the part about "failure to measure noneconomic activity," but he seized on that anyway. He instinctively feels that while the tools and indicators of economics are perfectly valid, we have so upended the role of the family -- for instance -- that the data of the past is unreliable, not readily comparable to the present and future. (Paraphrasing.) His example: A woman makes her child a sandwich. This is not counted as economic activity. Then the government usurps that role:

http://www.statesman...er-2392869.html

(It was the grotesque neologism "feeding sites" that caused me to recall reading that, my memory being mainly verbal.) Another woman is now paid to make that child a sandwich, and this is now counted as economic activity. At a stroke, the government has "increased" productivity.

End of him, beginning of me: And that is seen to correlate with "betterment."

*I'll find an El Paso thread for that, it's kind of fun.

The reality is that our collective inefficiency and waste, once captured and saved for another purpose, is not wholly expended on another inefficient or wasteful activity. (I would opt to travel to obscure international destinations, however the additional wealth might just as likely be captured for some kind of government-sponsored educational policy.) This is not merely an argument for economic growth, but for the betterment of mankind, for happiness. I'll argue against Halloween or Christmas just the same, and deservedly so, but at least holiday expenditures are undertaken without any appreciable public policy incentives.

So wasteful spending is eventually recaptured for something productive. And Less will never be More, at least until the asteroid or the Keynesian endpoint, whichever comes first.

I think that's your drift, but your example kinda flummoxed me. (And what kind of monster doesn't like Halloween?!) I find it hard to view education spending as redeeming waste, would much rather you had said "national defense" -- wouldn't it be great if the military didn't have to beg for money, and schools had to hold a bake sale to keep the lights on? Although rooted in the Bad Seed that I was, this resentment of public school is by now one of my more well-developed convictions.

Or, alternatively, I'd be perfectly happy for the recaptured $$ to be used for travel expenses to any remote destination you like. How about Tristan de Cunha?

I've already been there. {National Geographic Jan.1964}

Wikipedia, on the island's school: "The current facility, which opened in 1975, has five classrooms, a kitchen, a stage, a computer room, and a craft and science room." More than adequate!

I am not suggesting that it should, merely that it should not actively undertake a mission to distort markets and suppress economic growth for the benefit of a special interest Realtor-class.

You do dislike realtors. Mr.luciaphile is that way about lawyers. Even the ones who are his colleagues, nominally engaged in the same work (but nearly always, he feels, working against him!). My well-concealed dislike is reserved for - yes - the education establishment, especially platinum-blond administrators; and careerist women in positions of authority generally (an ancient enmity); and members of the state legislature; and chiropractors, accupuncturists, brain-balancers, and infant massage therapists (okay, that's new - just saw their shingle yesterday) and all other quacks; and people who idle their trucks, buses,and SUVs for a long time; and Paul Krugman; and dog-obsessed people, or people who care about domestic animals but not wild animals; and people who love technology but mistrust science; and anyone who has a degree in Leadership. No offense meant, or not much.

A brother of mine works for a commercial real estate firm there in Houston. He really has to hustle -- I don't want him to have to forever. It has not been a great few years for him. Things to which I'm indifferent, I do want for him; so I suppose, in that one sense, I am rooting for the continued metastasis of Houston. But not this side of Waller County, please.

Forms of wasteful spending that people opt into can only be combated with education and countercultural influences.

The culture moved in the direction of the counterculture, co-opting only the worst aspects of it, until they became one, to the detriment of both; there is thus no "counter" current that I am aware of -- maybe you know of such. I have encountered some young, non-judgmental, home-schooling, early-church-emulating evangelicals, but they may be a local phenomenon, or a "lifestyle." They are having multiple babies, though, I've noticed -- that's a significant shift. They carry them in slings and give them names that sound sort of like a Biblical/ StarTrek-villain hybrid. Certainly the true conservationists, at least in Texas -- but I suspect this is true everywhere -- mostly have gray heads now, and many of them made the mistake of not having children. (Though absolutely right to be alarmed, they drew the wrong lessons from the Population Bomb.) Once more numerous, they were never very many, from boyhood mr.luciaphile easily being acquainted with all of them.

So "education" better reward your very striking faith in it. Perhaps it does so already -- you're not the malcontent -- people who are concerned about the environment do not use the term "environmental justice." My preoccupations are not yours, nor do I expect them to be, but thanks for replying.

Halloween was a poor example. Everyone loves it; it's easily worth six or seven billion dollars. Christmas then: people will buy much much more than they need would be inclined to rent, were people in the habit of renting consumer goods. Do you begrudge them all that useless spending and debt-going-into? Or is it only from the real estate sector that waste or inefficiencies ripple through the economy? The expense of Christmas will not match "enjoyment" except with the under-ten set; everyone else feels some combination of resentment, exhaustion, loneliness, angst, disappointment, seasonal affective disorder and ennui at the end of it. But if Christmas failed to come some year (12/11?) the retail establishment would apparently collapse. Eat Pray Shop -- it's your civic duty. Is there nothing precarious about an economy so dependent on excess consumption?

I just realized the words "excess consumption" can probably have no meaning in a value-neutral place like modern economic thought. I would express it some other way if I could.

I asked Google just now -- "is growth necessary?" It yielded this:

http://www.economist...e/days/view/698

I didn't read more than the precis -- one fellow seems to be for happiness indices of some sort, which government would use to make corrections in the economy, or give people the right things, I guess; the other disputing that government belongs in the happiness-granting business (though not, I'm sure, disputing one iota of Keynesian economics) -- but is there no third interpretation? If traditional economic indicators are untethered to quality of life (as they are unmoored from environmental considerations) -- why should the government pay any attention to them at all? Why should economic growth be the proper object of government? Only out of fear for its own stability? Who is working for whom then?

I'm all peevish now, so I'm going to curl up and read his old "First Things" magazines.

Well isn't that a fancy thing, that one government entity can wish another government entity's capital expansion plans into existence ...

A far less trivial example than Houston's internecine battle over transit and its funding is that Region C (Dallas area) has in its water plan a 72,000-acre reservoir on the Sulphur River in Region D (far northeast counties of Texas). Needless to say Region D does not have this reservoir in its plan, and has lived with the threat of it for thirty years. I was thinking of this because the smaller Lake Ralph Hall is also coming to the Sulphur basin, and it was a good day to be Ralph Hall recently with his successful passage of the North Texas Zebra Mussel Barrier Act of 2012. I think he even used it as an occasion to wax about how some causes are so grand and so urgent that they transcend bipartisan rancor.

And now, The Niche and mfastx, I have made it plain that my sympathies lie with rural interests; you may set aside your quarrel a moment and join together in peaceful shared derision/incomprehension. Happy to oblige in the name of amity.

This sentiment may not be popular in particular quarters but...since Google and Wikipedia have made K-12 librarians' jobs obsolete, perhaps the best use of school libraries (to the extent that they aren't filled with computer workstations) is as a display space for cultural artifacts and relics, which might be defined as anything that loses relevance when converted to a digital media. These displays could be put together and moved around between libraries by anthropology students, since their time is apparently worthless.

Oh, you are naive, The Niche. It would never occur to any current school official that children might want to look at real artifacts. That would suggest a landscape of childhood and a respect for the breadth of a child's mind that are vanished.

If you proposed now something as static-seeming as a mini-museum of archeological finds, the final result would look like this: a sand pit with digging implements for children to dig up fake artifacts (plastic dinosaurs probably - archeology? paleontology? the distinction would be lost on school personnel weaned on the Flintstones) so they can experience being an archeologist "Hands-On!," because current education theory seems bent on the idea that children want to mimic adult pastimes and vocations, and crucially so that a girl or child of color will know that s(he) too can be an archeologist, nothing's stopping them! -- never mind that no child has ever had a moment's worry on this score.

During the first grade an Eyptologist visited my Baptist primary school and lectured to all in the sanctuary. (It's possible they were trying to inculcate some negative propaganda related to pagan cultures that fixate on death. Whatever!) That was the best day! And no tedious talk of "how you too can be an Egyptologist" -- we were expected, quite rightly, to be interested in the subject at hand.

For many years there was in the library of the kid's school a big (100-gallon?) aquarium, which the children loved. The Booster Club paid for a service to maintain it, and the Tank Guy kindly kept it stocked. All the librarian had to do was feed the fish. Particularly popular was an eel on permanent loan. You can imagine the excitement this generated, waiting for that eel to pop out from his rock. Was this educational? .. oh yawn, I guess not.

At some point the Booster Club ladies decided the fee for the aquarium service might be better spent on cd-roms for the computer lab. At the meeting I made an ineffectual defense of the value of the aquarium ("Uh, I think it's really cool...") and they looked at me like I was a Creature from the Tank. The tank itself was sold to my next-door neighbor. I was around to see that the cd-roms' shelf life was no more than a year. Mostly the children practiced making power-points during their computer lesson.

About that time I inherited the school's collection of National Geographic magazines (all the way back to 1943!), since they got that on cd-rom too. Mr.luciaphile was probably not thrilled that I paid someone to build bookshelves for my free National Geographics. I'll bet those cd-roms are still in their cases.

If they should make a traveling mini-museum, I know someone who has a collection of coprolite to donate. Tell me the children won't love that!