Table of contents for October 2017 in The Texas Observer

The Water Rises Melissa del Bosque’s interview with Todd Miller (“The Rising Storm,” August issue) did important work shedding light on the humanitarian, immigration and national security implications of climate change. The article also made clear the critical importance of citizen engagement on this topic to “change the narrative.” However, the interview provided no concrete suggestions. ¶ I invite concerned readers to be like me and join Citizens’ Climate Lobby. CCL has hundreds of chapters in the United States building political will for a livable world by lobbying for a carbon fee and dividend. Lowest income people in Texas and abroad will suffer most from climate change, so they have the most to gain from this transformative carbon pricing model. Ben Boral AUSTIN Don’t Forget Dems I WANTED TO TAKE…

ROBERT BEVERLY TITLE/ORGANIZATION President, This Is Texas Freedom Force THE CAUSE Preserving “Texas history,” often Confederate monuments NOTABLE ACCOMPLISHMENT Mobilizing 1,000 people, many armed with rifles, to defend a statue of Sam Houston from a nonexistent threat ALLIES •Militias •Neo-Confederate groups •The “Proud Boys” MONEY QUOTE “I’m not on some mission to destroy the world. I just want to hang on to what I have.” WAXAHACHIE NATIVE Robert Beverly, 57, is a jack of many trades. He’s an artist, an Air Force veteran and president of the brevity-challenged outfit This Is Texas Freedom Force, a group that made waves this summer defending Confederate monuments from protesters in major Texas cities. This Is Texas Freedom Force is a ragtag coalition of rifle-toting ex-military sorts and other mostly white Texans who favor…

SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE IS WITHIN our reach — if we want it. The Republicans’ inability to pass an alternative to Obamacare, much less articulate a moral case for shredding the health care of millions of Americans, is a watershed moment. In a sense, it means the debate is all but over: Conservatives have proven they don’t have a serious plan to address the inefficiency and cruelty of this nation’s byzantine system of provisioning health care. During this summer’s brinkmanship over “repeal and replace,” GOP leaders in Congress said they faced a choice between repealing Obamacare or working with Democrats to fix the law’s problems. Democrats now face a choice of their own: Obamacare or universal single-payer. At a more fundamental level, political leaders need to decide whether they believe health…

WHEN JENNIFER COOPER LOOKED DOWN at her phone at 2 a.m., she was surprised to see she had missed texts and calls from two of her sons. The phone had been on silent mode while Jennifer and her husband, Noble, finished up a church retreat in the East Texas woods, a four-hour drive from their home in northeast San Antonio. Why would the boys call so late? ¶ Jennifer didn’t really understand the first message, from her middle son, Norman. Before his parents left town that week, Norman, 33, had argued with his wife, Carly — he came home too late one night, they fought, and he agreed to stay somewhere else for a couple of days to let things cool off, according to family. Now Norman was upset, texting…

“So much of the Rio Grande Valley’s wilderness has been lost. If we lose these last little fragments like Santa Ana, that’s it. It’s gone.” THE SANTA ANA NATIONAL WILDLIFE refuge is a 3.3-square-mile tract of protected forest, wedged between the winding Rio Grande and the booming development of Alamo and McAllen. It’s a wild place at the intersection of desert, floodplain, scrub forest and jungle, where alluvial clay settles into sandy soils and where species at the edge of their ranges come together. Ninety-five percent of the region’s habitat is gone; Santa Ana remains. At least 400 species of birds have been sighted inside, and 450 kinds of plants grow here, pollinated by half of North America’s butterfly species. Charismatic rarities like ocelots, jaguarundi and indigo snakes move through…

IN SEPTEMBER, A COUPLE OF CLINTON CAMPAIGN VETS LAUNCHED A NEW media venture, Verrit, which bills itself as “media for the 65.8 million,” the number of Clinton voters last year. Verrit produces Verrits, little picture memes with a statistic or quote on them, tailored to help liberals win arguments on social media. Each Verrit carries a seven-digit code that users can key into the Verrit search engine to authenticate that the Verrit is real and fact-checked. If the code doesn’t produce a result on the website, well, you’ve got yourself a fraudulent Verrit. The goal is to pump the internet full of “verified” memes, to combat the flood of “fake news.” VERRIT IS THE MOST SUBLIMELY USELESS WEBSITE IN the history of the internet, in large part because of the…

1832 DELIRIOUS MANIA Psychiatrists in Europe describe a rare but life-threatening psychosis marked by fear and “hyperactivity.” 1849 BELL’S MANIA Luther Bell writes of delusional, hallucinating patients at his Massachusetts insane asylum dying from “exhaustive mania” when staff restrain them. He gives the condition a 75 percent mortality rate. 1867 ACUTE MANIACAL DELIRIUM Writing in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Henry Maudsley describes crazed and violent patients who died after struggling with hospital attendants. He tells hospitals to seclude such patients and avoid confrontations with them, writing, “The prognosis is never very favorable in acute delirium.” 1934 LETHAL CATATONIA German psychiatrist K.H. Stauder publishes a study on more than two dozen patients who died suddenly but whose autopsies failed to reveal a cause of death. He writes that people stricken…

A tight, dense narrative, American Wolf races along like a predator on the hunt. SINCE EUROPEANS FIRST VENTURED ACROSS THE AMERICAN West — equipped with firearms and a sense of godly duty to transform what they perceived as a savage wilderness — the region has been divided by tensions between conservation and development. From the near extinction of the American bison in the late 1800s to the Sagebrush Rebellion over land management in the 1970s and ’80s, the West has always been a place where people and nature come into conflict. Most recently, this was personified in Cliven Bundy, whose two-decade-long miniature rebellion against paying grazing fees on public lands captured headlines when it grew into an armed standoff in 2014. Few of these fights have been as long-running or…

AFTER THE STORM “As tough as this was, it’s been a wonderful thing. I think even for the country to watch and for the world to watch. It’s been beautiful. Have a good time everybody, I’m going to be doing a little help over here.” — President Donald Trump in a Houston shelter for Hurricane Harvey evacuees on September 2. “Let’s not compare it to Sandy, let’s compare it to Katrina. … When you look at the number of homes that have been mowed down and destroyed and damaged, this is going to be a huge catastrophe that people need to come to grips with. It’s going to take years for us to be able to overcome this challenge.” — Governor Greg Abbott in a CNN interview on September 3.…

ODESSA // A former Girl Scout troop leader made off with a large quantity of cookies. KTXS reports that Heather Haskins, 23, evaded police for two days after stealing $25,210 in cookies from Girl Scouts of the Desert Southwest. “Haskins could possibly be selling Girl Scout cookies in Abilene,” Odessa police said in a statement, before they caught up with Haskins and charged her with theft. FORT WORTH // When he caught a thief in his walk-in freezer, a restaurant owner slammed the door and locked him in while waiting for cops to arrive. Francisco Islas, owner of Paco’s Mexican Cuisine, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the bandit was attempting to make off with a large bag of popsicles and meat. “He had a ribeye, some quail, a bunch…

BETO O’ROURKE IS SITTING IN A VINYL BOOTH in an overlit lobby bar at a Courtyard Marriott in Lubbock, and he’s holding forth about authenticity. “I think everybody’s bullshit detector is as sensitive as it has ever been,” he says, “and I’m really mindful of that. I really don’t want to come in with something you’ve seen or heard before.” Earlier this year, when he was starting to plan his bid for the Senate seat held by Ted Cruz, O’Rourke’s friends arranged meetings with a number of consultants and strategists. These were the people, his friends told him, who knew how to run a statewide campaign in one of the most complicated political battlegrounds in the country. The meetings didn’t go very well. “They show you all these ads,” O’Rourke…