Children today are barraged with messages about going green, about sustainability, about saving the environment. But if you are a parent, you still probably spend a lot of time walking around the house switching off lights.

Because if your kids are like my kids, there are certain lights they never turn off. Ever. And that’s just a dim glimpse into what goes on in their minds. Despite the little coloring exercises they get at school, the guilt-inducing slogans, the catchy TV ads, they are children, and they still don’t think much about it all when the (environmentally unsustainable) rubber hits the road.

But that doesn’t mean my wife and I would give up, no matter how calloused my light switch-flipping finger is. So we try to teach them. Forget those lights that we fight about nearly every day (I have mentioned they don’t turn off the lights, yes?). We try to be role models of sustainability, despite the uphill, and thus energy wasting, nature of this battle.

“We recycle paper!” I have trumpeted. You know those little tabs of paper you rip off a check that comes in the mail? I even put them in the paper recycling bin. Yet my kids draw something that may be a hobbit or a machine gun or a zebra on only one side of a piece of paper, then they chuck it in the trash can.

To the annoyance of our garbage collectors, I have often placed shards of plastic in the yellow glass and plastic bin, following the same dedication as my treatment of the tabs of check paper. I try to show the kids that every little bit counts. But they’ll suck down a Gatorade and toss it in the trash.

I’m just getting started.

We trek outside in the cold to put a peanut shell in the compost pile. But the kids will throw a whole watermelon rind in the trash can, you guessed it, next to the Gatorade bottles and one-side-only pictures of hobbit-gun-zebras.

We walk the kids to school. Rain or shine. Snow or hurricane. After all, it’s only two blocks. But is their character hardened, forged? No. Anytime they can, they all pile into a neighbor’s car to make that two-block ride. In air conditioning. Then they whine about walking to school for weeks.

Speaking of air conditioning, we almost never run the air in the summer, no matter how hot it is. In the winter, the thermostat hovers at 60 at night, and sometimes I sneak in an extra degree, dropping it to 59. They complain it’s too hot, it’s too cold, but do they burst forth from the house on a snowy day and leave the door open? They do.

They’ll eat half a taco and wander away, leaving the other half, ignorant of our pleas that they consider the kids who were happy to have a quarter of a taco for dinner. “But they probably don’t have cheese on theirs,” is the response.

I even tell them how by staying relaxed and calm you can sometimes sneak in two wears of your work shirts between washings. But my daughter I believe once had on and then hampered, a new definition I just created, 11 outfits. Before noon.

In the face of our failed role modelship, we thought all was lost.

But then we stumbled upon their sustainability niche. We mentioned to them how much water they could save by not running the faucet while brushing their teeth and taking shorter showers. Blankness. But then I mentioned the magic word: toilet.

I said if I use the bathroom and then one of them uses the bathroom and then we flush, we could save water. We pointed out that they could do even better by having one flush in the morning when the three of them make a similarly goal-based quick bathroom journey. We used precise measurements, in both standard and metric volumes.

This resonated with them, especially for our boys. Non-flushing became their immediate contribution to sustainability. Indeed, they have saved thousands of gallons of water. Maybe millions.

Because let me tell you, they do not flush.

I’m proud, although there is a cost associated with this green living. But does it matter that when you walk by one of our smartly appointed bathrooms you are brought to your knees by a nostril-curdling stench more powerful than the kiddie shoe bin in a fast food restaurant play area? Does it matter that when you enter that bathroom, the olfactory assault is reminiscent of an old Vet Stadium bathroom in the fourth quarter of an Eagles game? Does it matter that should you battle through the effluvium that you, in horror, see a film of what can only be a form of advanced, perhaps malevolently intelligent, algae?

Even my pride has its limits, so I’ve ask them, gagging, choking, why they don’t flush? “We don’t want to waste water,” they say, providing statistics, using my data against me. They recite the mellow-yellow-brown-down toilet etiquette mnemonic device (which, I might add, is not always followed). They are downright angelic in their intentions.

So, there it is. This is their environmentalism. Ah, it brings a tear to my eye. But whether it’s the tear of genuine emotion or one induced by a miasma of vaporized ketones and ammonia — my god, especially after asparagus night — you, reader, will have to be the judge.

Thank you, Mr President. You put the case fairly and well although if you really want to impress you might find an audience a bit more seasoned and a bit less willing to roll over and have their tummies rubbed. You have split your hand and doubled down on Green Alternative Energy so you must be holding at least twenty. Now it’s time to turn all the cards. I hope the White House searchbots have been comprehensive and found the odd moments when I Hoped to Believe in the Change you have promised but on the big question of how we power our modern world, yes, I have been a detractor. Your well documented expertise in engineering and physics should have given me caution but let my indictment show that I have also been fair, once in a while. Once in a very great while.

One incident that may not be captured since my support came only in a few comments here and there, is on this question of algae. Oh, that Newt had a field day with that one, didn’t he? And I was saddened to see those ignorant, giggling attacks take their toll. You seem to have given up on pond slime and the slime-based community but you did so too quickly, sir. Whatever big-headed adviser slipped that note into your palm with the one scribbled word…. ALGAE! was not a traitor, imbecile or Koch-brother and should be released from confinement immediately. Algae, or aqua-cultured bio-diesel may turn out to be a joke but it has not yet. It at least has the possibility of freeing us from ethanol which burns our food (or the food of Mexicans) to no good effect; is scalable and has the advantages of liquid handling over dry. Gingrich shows an almost Alinskyite joy in his opportunistic mockery but perhaps he is still feeling the sting from when you rubbished his own far-looking but far from absurd proposal for lunar mining and power. Hopefully that bit of blowback and mutual bruising will encourage a more frank discussion on these matters, something, as you say, we need most desperately.

As a pre-teen subscriber to Popular Science and a youthful library lay-about I have been following these developments for many years. When you were in your fine, Hawaiian prep school I languished in the public system but even there we knew the promise of Alternative Power. Solar and wind and a few also-rans would let us thumb our noses at those Ayatollahs good and proper! But forty years of cover stories and massive subsidies have produced barely a trickle of energy that could get one to school (although I walked) or heat my sister’s curling iron. Certainly you have noticed this. Yes, a spike in those subsidies…. a Green Power Surge was a plausible path when you entered office but no one now disputes that those funds and the billions preceding them have produced some impressive growth in the massage industry and top shelf liquor sales but NO conspicuous breakthroughs however generous the terms or promising the technology. And it is the same in the Green paradise of Europe as it is here in the bleak fields of Troglodytic America. The long range forecast has been accurate; no sun, no wind.

But you strike a chord, sir. No, I would not want to go down in history as the man who kept Columbus on the dock, although I find this respect and admiration for Columbus’ accomplishments an odd phenomenon in your constituents. They are generally down on The Admiral, but we are casting away our old prejudices. If a gym full of Occupiers can cheer the discovery of America, what can be called impossible? What follows is no new information or thoughts and the prescriptions are not even mine though I will put them forward without meticulous checking since your declamations on President Hayes show that you did likewise. Let the chips fall where they will and if Secretary Chu is hiring, I am available.

From my cave on the flattened earth I denounced solar given it’s triple vulnerability to weather, dust accumulations and that daily bugbear of man, the sun’s rise from its birth as a flaming chariot in the east and its sizzling death in the extinguishing seas of the west. But I did not look far. Is it really, automatically beyond the strength of man to halt the sun at high noon? We should not laugh at that, as you say. The issue may be less the technology of halting Ra at his peak but more a political one as some parts of earth will have full daylight, some will be trapped eternally at four in the afternoon and some unlucky buggers will be cast into eternal night. As the most powerful nation on earth I think it is plain we will settle the sun in the Central Time Zone putting the Maritime Provinces in a jolly, permanent two pm, California at ten and Alaska will thaw in a 24 hour waking time. Surely these adjustments will be tricky but worth it to rid ourselves once and for all of our addiction to foreign fossil fuels. And Russia will just have to throw on a sweater.

Still we deal with weather and dust. Dust is a great problem where solar seems most promising; in deserts where abrasive sand may be driven at high speeds for long periods not just blotting the sun but wrecking these contraptions that are largely glass. We could put solar panels above the dust on mountain tops but the punishing winds will destroy them. If only there were a site beyond dust and weather where there already IS an eternal noon. I recall something in the few books at my young disposal called “orbit“, a concept I never could quite get my head around. It makes no sense unless the earth is a sphere or at least a cube which is balderdash. How could it just hang in the ether? In any case, if there WERE this fantasyland where there is no weight and no storm we can not access it as the President, most wisely, has cancelled the expensive hoax known as the Space Shuttle.

Instead let us harness those buffeting winds. It wouldn’t be the first time. Wind, after Fire, may be our most developed technology. In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, it was not with a trireme galley of slave rowers. No, it was not a quadrarime or septarime though these were the mightiest ships of antiquity. His fleet was wind powered. Its only carbon emissions came from the lungs of its skillful sailors and they would have been breathing on shore anyhow so the net is ZERO! our collective goal. But as I mentioned, wind has issues that turned me like a groundhog who has seen his terrible shadow. There is the titanic expense of erecting these pinwheels with fancy dynamos as their axles. There is the problem that the most reliable winds are far from power consumers and not all that reliable, as it turns out. We return to that near-hero of the Republic, T. Boone Pickens who had a plan to save the nation the way Warren Buffett has saved industry; by dominating a fixed market. Did Pickens claim to bridle the wild winds? Nope, rather he cornered the more tractable natural gas market. The problems of rectifying the power coming from hundreds of finicky turbines and delivering it, on demand, to thousands of capricious homes were to be spackled over with gas driven turbines mated to wind driven generators vastly increasing the price (and market value) of both. Genius indeed. But T. Boone reckoned without the unexpected. He got frakked good and hard, that new technology making his long position on natural gas futures an asset bomb. He lost his shirt, though I think he has another, as gas prices have collapsed throwing a broomstick into the turbine business that cannot be shrugged off like an errant condor. Pickens cancelled his giant order with China for giant rotor blades and even those thousands delivered sit, unprotected, in Texas fields, awaiting someone with a dollar and a fleet of oversized diesel powered haulers to take them to some useful purpose.

I have neither the carriage nor the dollar but I do have a way to make wind power, if not commercially viable, at least able to deliver a bit of  electricity ON DEMAND, which is the only way it is helpful. The hurdles are manifold but largely owing to the peculiarities of the phantom we call electricity. I hear the objections… what the hell do YOU know about it, English-Lit boy? And it is a good question but since the President also lacks a degreed foundation in science I will take my right to speak in ignorance as much as he. The spinning bird-beaters are an impressive sight, those blades being ninety feet or more but the true marvel lies within. It is the hub that is the nub. Each turbine has its own generator at the top of its stalk and this is a high-tech gadget because it must be relatively light to be hoisted up, up, up twenty stories or more, and this in remote and undeveloped regions. To achieve that goal the wind engineers must employ elements that are rare on our flat earth; rare flat-earth elements they call them and they come principally from our frenemy, China. But even with all this high-expense high technology we have a problem. The winds, no less than the sun (for now) are not at our command. We need a medium of storage. The Chevy Volt was considered an answer to that, feeding on current opportunistically that was not being used, buffering the calamitous spikes and troughs from intermittent power; managing the erratic flow into a gentle stream and then carting the family breadwinner to the cabbage fields. That hasn’t worked out and our ancient servant/master, Fire, has in part been the culprit. So here is the solution though it will turn wind on its head.

The high deserts and savanna are NOT well suited to wind power not least because they lack human customers. Rather let us go back to the languishing rustbelt, not because Pennsylvanian ingenuity will develop practical power storage and rectification but because it already has. We pick up the scraps of Pickens’ dream for a song and hike with them off to locales where towns draped in coal tailings and malaise sit comatose. Erect those erections in the vales and on the mountains where below are miles upon miles of abandoned mines. Instead of a weighty, expensive, fragile generator with a brief service life, instead in the hub of every turbine is a simple, single-valve pump attached to the whirling dervish. And what does it pump? Air. Yes, garden variety air will be driven down the pressurized stem of the windmill with the lazy flump of an elephant’s ear; down, down into the ground where the massive useless volumes of obsolete mines will serve as gigantic reservoirs of power; essentially turning the variable winds into a single powerful stream, switched on and off with a tap as power must be. The pressures must be kept low which is why the reservoirs must be gigantic, but these, unlike the technology for wind-farm rectification, already exist. Likewise the customers for that power already exist in place. Leakage? Again that is why it is a low-pressure system but yes there will be unseen leaks in the ancient mining tunnels so part of the installation and maintenance requires injections of radioactive gas of one sort or another, much like isotopes used in radiological medicine. This will expose those troublesome cracks which will be plugged with high pressure injections of very wet concrete until the gieger counter stops ticking. The power will be drawn off by a turbine or several, fed with the flow of stored atmosphere without heat waste. A similar concept can be used with off-shore implacements (if their subsonic noise pollution didn’t harrass the whales, not that I care) where sea water will be pumped into improvised reservoirs in tidal basins and released for hydro-style generation; these necessarily massive constructions will also serve as sea walls, improving ports or even creating new ones. Does that sound grandiose? Well, Mr President, I thought we were admonished to Think Big.

The fringe benefits of the air-reserve system are also intriguing. There could be pressure taps anywhere along the line. You might have your own generator producing power to your own specifications. Would you like to abandon Tesla’s alternating current and go to Edison’s direct current running your laptop off of a plug in the wall? You could well do so. Electric cars, by the way, also charge from DC. Power losses to transmission will be vastly curtailed and they are enormous. In Scranton industrial equipment could be run WITHOUT electricity, drawing rotational power straight from the pneumatic well. Householders could have a direct feed of pneumatic power, silent and unending. Metering? Not a problem. A simple flow meter which, again, is a well-tried technology, does the trick.

I’m sure your experts, Mr President, can tell you if there is worth or not in these projects. I defer to the greater wisdom of your crowd as opposed to mine but please keep in mind, whatever the value or lack is contained in my vapid daydreams, here on the flat earth we also occasionally gaze at the stars inquisitively, and long to see the scaffolding on which they are hung.

10. It’s so cold, you have trouble jump-starting your penguin

9. It’s so cold, you’re shivering like Rick Santorum at a Gay Pride parade

8. It’s so cold, when Wall Street investors jumping off buildings hit the sidewalk, they shatter into a million tiny pieces

7. It’s so cold, Osama bin Laden actually saw a snowball where he is

6. It’s so cold, Michele Bachmann’s husband is staying in the closet – for the coats

5. It’s so cold, nobody’s calling the fire department when their house catches on fire

4. It’s so cold, when police tell a robber to freeze, it’s redundant

3. It’s so cold, five rednecks have frozen off their truck nuts

2. It’s so cold, Anthony Weiner is Tweeting pictures of his mukluks

1. It’s so cold, you’re teeth won’t stop chattering – and they’re still in the glass

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Here, in Texas, we have an annual influx of ‘snowbirds’ … large masses of gente norteña fleeing the winter weather ‘up north’ to enjoy a season of clear skies and milder temperatures ‘down south.’ It’s a long and time-honored tradition … for many years, my great-grand-aunt and uncle made their own annual migration from Leisuretown, New Jersey down to the sun and surf of Florida. And it’s also a tremendous economic boon to parts of Texas that enjoy an annual influx of cash in return for all things leisure – goods, services, opportunities, you name it.

Not all snowbirds travel to Texas by R.V. … and it is THEY who provide US an opportunity, a chance to observe something not-often-seen in these parts of the U.S. Here’s a shot I took of two extraordinary snowbirds in Llano County, Texas, this past week. Regular visitors in the process of raising a brood of future snowbirds.

There is a nasty little radio spot airing nationally. It promotes “green” appliances and goods generally; swirly bulbs, “efficient” washers… that sort of thing although the specifics are tactically muddied. The ad pitches to a curiously young demographic. We’ve all met “Timmy”. Like Dickens’ Tiny Tim, Timmy is infectiously cute and contrived to pull at your major arteries. Timmy wants to go to the State Fair! Well, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t know there was such a thing as a State Fair but the announcer, whose relation to Timmy is unexplored, asks him breathlessly, “Do you want to go to the State Fair?” Of course he does! Sorry, you can’t. You see, Timmy, your parents are NOT using green, energy efficient doo-dads but the old busted bulbs and machinery, causing them to spend more on utilities and draining their pockets of the gas and ticket money necessary. If only your folks had bought the new, government approved and promoted doohickeys they would have been able to take you there for candy floss and teacup rides, whatever those are. If they get on board today then you can go to next year’s fair. “But I want to go NOW!” Radio Timmy coaches Timmies across the land in whinery to cajole mums and pops into replacing their eight-for-a-dollar earth-warming heat globes with pigtail bulbs at $8 dollars or more a pop. Needless to say, this public service message was paid for by Your Federal Family which draws its budget from you.

The stated aim is to increase the energy efficiency of our homes and NO ONE is against efficiency, are they? Even if you are only concerned with your own bottom line, and the ad equates the health of your bottom line with the state of tranquility at your table, green is the way to go, right? That is what the ad does not imply but declares emphatically; dragooning your children into their chorus with promises of dunking booths and funnel cakes. Only the assertion is false. Check into the performance and price of the competing items and you find that even the manufacturers only claim that their products will pay for their price differentials over time. How much time is variable but lengthy; for the bulbs it is a few years of heavy use. For the appliances it is even more, often the “savings” are not even promised to materialize until the very end of the machine’s service life while their performance is consistently poor. So on its own terms this little bit of green frummery is not only a fraud but is one that will do the exact OPPOSITE of what is promised. If Little Timmy’s parents don’t have the wherewithal to take him to this year’s State Fair they will be in desperate straits indeed spending a thousand dollars on a washer/dryer and hoping for a savings of $200 over a decade. If Timmy is successful in mau-mauing these purchases not only will he miss the State Fair he may have to make his shoes last another season or have his peanut butter switched to generic. And the only way serious “savings” will materialize is if power, gas and water itself radically increase in cost which is unlikely to increase the family entertainment budget. Other than scads of money, what could induce a person, or in this case a public institution, to disseminate such a vicious and transparent lie aimed at children across the public airwaves at public expense? It is possible only because, presumptively, these ads run in the service of Smart.

What is Smart. Hey, what isn’t? There is smartwater, there are smart Cars which are available with smartshift transmissions. Inconistent capitalization is also smart, apparently. On that one, I Agree. But for the most part the assignment of Smart is a simple declaration that is unchallenged. Smartphones are clearly smarter than dumb phones but are the precepts that underly these “green” initiatives and programs as obvioiusly and demonstrably synonymous with Smart? Timmy may feel quite smart, smashing his parents secret hoard of incandescent bulbs; saving money and the polar bears simultaneously but he won’t be going to any State Fairs unless it is in search of work. And when he goes, his clothes will be poorly laundered.

Still, that’s Smart. Green is Smart and the peddlers of Green am Smart. Al Gore is numero one in this department. Long before he was ever saving us dummies from a scorched earth he was saving us from a watery grave. The “high-efficiency” toilet was really the first Smart Product. The great triumph? To lower the average toilet flush from 2.2 gallons to 1.8. This, they certainly do and the Gorelet, as they are now known, has destroyed all its voracious 2.2 gallon competitors. Although it did this through no sort of competition unless it was in the lobbies of Congress and over collusive chats among manufacturers, municipalities and regulators both government and private. So not only MAY you Flush Smarter, you MUST! 2.2 gallon toilets can neither be manufactured or imported. Nor can they legally be installed in new construction. At least we are more efficiently and yet more Smartly moving our bowel contents off to their final reward, yes? No. While the flushes consume less water it takes MORE flushes to do the job as anyone who has lived between the two eras remembers quite well. The ancient, primitve crappers hardly ever needed a re-flushing absent a visit from a freakishly gigantic neighbor while the Gorelet must be played like a billiard table trick shot to get the job done with one handling of the handle. Even if you are some mad, throwback savage you don’t want to waste any precious water, do you? Of course not, so we do not just double flush as a matter of course which would raise our per movement consumption to 3.6. Instead we do nature’s business, loose the flood which sounds like a Dixie cup emptied into a coffee can and closely inspect the process while listening to the tank fill. Why? So we may time the second flush expertly enough to avoid a third spending our not-so-precious time and attention at least once daily. This, friends, is Smart.

But the Smart just keeps on coming! Sweeping California and other Smart locales is the smartgrid. Central to the smartgrid is the Smart Meter; a computer basically with a powerful digital transmitter. And what does it transmit? Your power consumption down to the smallest erg. And to whom is this information transmitted? Why, to the utility so they may charge you MORE for peak consumption and less off-peak as big industrial users are treated. But Average Joes have found in California that somehow the peak charges accumulate as the off-peak discounts evaporate. This while the download from the lurking meter is detailed enough to tell whomever what appliances you are running, what lights you have on, what rooms you are inhabiting and to what temperature you are heating or cooling them. This is all to your benefit, of course, as the utilities and their quasi-governmental golfing buddies cater their communications with you according to this data sheet, helpfully explaining how you may want to do your laundry at three in the morning or think about a sweater or how lingering in an open refrigerator is uncouth. Imagine how Smart you could become especially as the Smart Meters themselves expose you to radio waves of a frequency and strength similar to residing in a tree house built at the top of a cell phone tower. This is an experiment in Smart, one of many, many more.

An even greater blessing than the Smart Gadgets is the endless rain of Smart Guys (and Gals, of course). One who has shined brightly these last few weeks is a fellow named Jon Corzine. Once Governor of New Jersey and before that a Senator, Corzine is the epitome of Smart. The Governorship came to him strictly on his merits as the only Democrat less provably corrupt than the abysmal Bob Torricelli. This was some Smart Planning. But out of public office Corzine has been just as Smart, guiding MF Financials to outrageous gains! Of course he also led them to outrageous losses, including the dissappearance of some $600 million in quarantined funds belonging to investors. Quarantined from what, you might ask? Among other communicable ailments, these funds were to be quarantined from losses MF might incurr from Greek bond defaults. Now, I know what you are thinking: if Corzine bought Greek debt, how smart could he be? But he did no such thing. Only a fool would! Instead the genius play was for MF to sell insurance AGAINST Greek losses to those dummies who DID buy the bonds! So really Governor Corzine (if we may use his highest title) already separated the precious client funds from the raucous and hazardous dealmaking he had to engage in to turn a dollar, even before they were legally “sequestered”. That neither of these practices has kept the loot from walking out the door cannot fairly be laid at this gentleman’s door. After all, he is smart as a whip. Everyone knows.

But there is one Smart Guy who outsmarts them all, just ask him. That fellow is former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, elevated whenever he is spoken of as “the smartest guy in the room” with the implication being that the room is also not so dumb. Is he smarter than Joe Biden? Many claim this is so though they have not directly contested. Like Corzine, Newt is a Renaissance Man. Not merely a public servant he is also a professor of history and he professes with every breath. He is a top-selling author, consultant, public speaker and inspiration to a hungry world. Hungry, that is, for Ideas. Newt is the quintisential Idea Man. Even his political opponents, the devious and hellish Democrats agree that Newt is just full of Ideas and is in any case, Smart. What is meant by Smart is again, a fealty to the sort of smartness above. Newt was against Global Warming back when it was Global Warming, which is not long after it was Global Cooling (and now changed to Change). The carbon exchange which would tax emissions of carbon dioxide, yes, your exhalations, was championed if not contrived by old Newt. Likewise the most abrasive elements of Obamacare, which are identical to those in Romneycare, were just fine and dandy to Newt a half-hour ago. He was a supporter of the loosening of lending restrictions and government under-writing of the risks epitomized by the Community Reinvestment Act that has done so much to bid up the prices of our homes and seen their values cruelly dashed. There is scarcely an issue you could name (excepting abortion) that Newt has not been on both sides of and it is on this that the claims of his smarts are largely based. Even when supposedly acting as a rigid ideologue, close observers find this is only a pose. With Newt, there is always a back door with a coin-box. Coin box? ATM slot. No musty old ‘principle’ or claim to ethics would ever keep him from a dollar or a moment of adulation. This is what makes him the presumptive Smartest Guy in the Room while his true intellect would restrict that claim to his visits to the outhouse, if it is a one-holer. No, the Ideas Man is the empty sack he resembles. The very phrase smacks of Prof Harold Hill, as if we treasure ideas by the bushel or books by the pound. When questions of consistency and principle come up, as when he loudly jumped on this or that bipartisan bandwagon that now offends Republican primary voters, the Smart Guy shows the common touch, explaining how it was “the dumbest thing I ever did!” Or at least was caught at. We have three such superlatives to date, how can each be the dumbest? Well, Newt’s a Smart Guy. I’m sure he knows what he is talking about. And three is nothing anyhow. If he does get the nomination, a prospect all Americans should dread, you can be sure he will accumulate many, many more dumber things; most of which will have been those things he is saying and doing now to nail the Primary that will prove awkward in the general. Now THAT is Smart.

I just finished reading High Desert Barbecue, a novel by When Falls the Coliseum‘s own J.D. Tuccille. It’s a fun and very fast read (many of his chapters are only a couple of pages long). In the novel, wildly and humorously incompetent radical eco-terrorists face off against Rollo, a mountain man; Scott, a business writer with an anarchist attitude and a way with guns; and Scott’s  girlfriend Lani, a schoolteacher who’s no pushover. The trio, along with Scott’s heroic dog, Champ, has stumbled on the ludicrous efforts of the eco-terrorists, who, in cahoots with local authorities, argue among themselves in absurdly rendered dialogue as they try to burn down the forest in order to drive the people away and let nature reign. A violent showdown in the canyon ensues.

The nature, hiking, and firearms scenes are authentically described, full of rich details that bring the setting and story to life. It’s a yarn, for sure — the plot escalates and there’s a good bit of silliness and quite a few funny lines of dialogue and description. Given the political extremes the characters represent, there are, as might be expected, moments of political commentary and conversation from a generally libertarian viewpoint, some blatant, but Tuccille does not preach and doesn’t let politics interfere with the advancing action. His breezy tone and brisk pacing carry the reader along a novel that combines action and satire the whole way through.

Via Jackie Baisa comes something fantastic:

A murmuration of starlings.

I will refresh your memory of this crappy movie without refreshing my own. The Julia Roberts character is a young law clerk who has stumbled on a terrible secret while fulfilling an academic exercise. A Supreme Court Justice has been assassinated. Why? America can only theorize as this fictional jurist was a solid conservative on a panel pretty evenly split and certain to be quickly replaced with another. Now, if he were the swing vote, everyone could understand why he was offed. Whatever the next case coming up, the culprit is whichever party stands to gain from this unexcused absence. QED. How the setting for these events, ostensibly America in the 90s, became a place where political murder was as routine as in Rome, or even on Romulus, we are not informed.  But the baddies are off after a galloping Julia who has discovered that corporate Black Hats were about to do something mean, like drill a nasty hole into the ground and release the black goo within upon the surface world. And the only thing that could stop them, in court anyhow, was the status of a certain indigenous pelican as an endangered species. The late judge, certified Rightwing wanker though he was, apparently had a soft spot for sea-birds or birds altogether. He threatened an upset decision favoring the pelican so he had to die, naturally. Never asked is whether the claims of the pelican to nest and feed undisturbed were clearly superior to our claim to the oil beneath? Also never considered is whether it was quite clear that the oil drilling would be a serious, or indeed even a NOTICEABLE encumbrance to the joyous, omnivorous life of the pelican?

Recently returned from a fact-finding excursion to the Gulf beaches last year soiled by a deep drilling platform spill, I might have some insights. First, although the Deep Horizon leak was in some measures the worst domestic oil spill in history I can attest that the pelican race is not extinct. The object of the brief was a particular breed of pelican. I cannot as yet identify one species from the next too readily but if the pelicans at large were feeling the strain of that oily eruption into their habitat, it sure didn’t show. They were doing what pelicans do; a lot of rather smug gliding punctuated by sudden graceless collapse into the sea and then a gargle, spit and repeat. The pelican is an especially media-friendly “victim” of oil spills. Ungainly at their best, once doused in oil they appear and are helplessly fragile and probably doomed since their usual method of cleaning themselves is to eat whatever is soiling them. They are large, slow to flee humans and have appeared in cartoon shows since the earliest days. If penguins or seals or polar bears are not available the pelican will do well enough. The truly menaced manatee suffers from aesthetics even a personal trainer could not cure so the pelican speaks for nature in the Gulf.

The pelicans abide. Surely that is after their numbers were decimated by the oil spill though, right? As far as the internets can reveal, the total for all identified oiled sea-birds (some rescued and released, most not) is in the few dozens which is less than die from aviation. I know that doesn’t seem possible but if you look at news footage of the day of all the pelicans or gulls video could capture you will see that it is the same sad sack repeated endlessly. His majestic sheening head and his futilely flapping wings are a pathetic sight to behold but as far as the race of pelicans is concerned this is a case of extreme bad luck or extremely poor diving. Most pelicans were able to resist the urge to dive into a stinking oil plume which, in any case, was not hospitable to fish.

The pelicans muddled through alright but they are not the whole story. The news has grown weary of the spill, and that long ago, but you do hear occasional estimates of “damages” in the legal sense. Fishermen have been sorely treated. Huge tracts of the Gulf were made off-limits to fishing during the spill and long after it was plugged. State and federal officials made these calls and they seem to have been powerfully biased in the direction of what they would call “caution”, that is to close fisheries. Aren’t there pretty accurate tests that can be run to detect petroleum or its related toxins in water and in fish? Yes, there certainly are but the officials justify their existence and expense accounts not from serving oysters on the half shell or hauling grouper from sea to plate. Their posts are PR above all. Even if they are sticklers for science-backed policies, and they are not, they still must contend with the fact that someone somewhere is going to get sick from eating the fish if the fish is on the market. Families with lawyers will be quick, and probably successful, in casting the blame and the precious liability onto the nearest deep pocket. This might be the government or, more likely it would mean BP but that entity, like its Green Power cousin, is so intertwined with the Obama Administration that it is fiscally a government department. So the fisheries close for political and legal, not toxicological reasons. Still they are closed. The couchbound fishermen are enticed back onto the water to do, what? Few can say but it is all part of the cleanup so it must be good. They are promised rich compensation for their labors, lost earnings and the hire of their boats. Yet today, you will not find an unconnected individual who took advantage of these offers and was paid per the agreement. No, you will not find him. But you will find estimates of “damages” that reach the stratosphere where spilled oil was never encountered; largely owing to lost catches and depressed markets. Once it was the poor man who ate fish because he could go out and catch it himself. Now that America has forgot how to fish and cultivates a sportsman’s catch-and-release culture for the few anglers that remain, fish has become an exotic entree commanding high margins. But, with all the closures and everything, people are hesitant to maybe eat some oil with their bluefin. That apprehension lingers exacerbating the demand dip from the national economy even now that fishing has resumed. Large measures of the “damages” realized here did not come from oil in the water at all but from a ham-handed over-reaction to the news event by Team Obama who wisely feared the media appearance of an oily pelican.

BP (Barack Petroleum) is still present and active in the Gulf. They have plumped the local economy with massive media buys that solicit damaged parties to submit claims as the number of claims is key to their own claim of having discharged their responsibilities. And they do hire the local fellows for important work. You may recall the scourge of the tarballs. These beasties were found as far away as the OPPOSITE coast of Florida! Certainly this is the mark of migrating oil that is traveling faster than a cruiseliner! As an old sea dog myself, I can tell you that tarballs like this are a permanent fact of shore life. We used to have fights with them; like snowball fights. And they are not so dreadful. The newsies zoom in on a couple of them making you think they are as large as club chairs but they are not. There is a permanent and natural seepage of oil off most coasts including California, the Atlantic and the Gulf. These natural secretions have been producing tarballs the size of eggs and accumulating in dozens, at most, since before man crawled. But policing these little beauties in a media-friendly fashion is much of what the BP billions in “remediation” are going to. When you have your toes in the sand and a drink in your hand and see a couple fellows in long pants, sleeves and with masks and gloves scooping a cup of sand here and there into a hazmat sack, this is what they are doing for about $9 an hour. While children frolic with their castle molds grown men use long-handled snow shovels to plunk a tablespoon of solidified motor oil into their hoard. The absurdity is further revealed when their supervisor in BP polo shirt detects another tarball or three and directs their attentions where a teenage couple lounges in near nudity, apparently unpoisoned.

One would think the market value of good news would be increasing, given its scarcity. That horrible disaster down south? In practical terms, it never happened. Or the electoral gunslingers might advise the President to declare victory and come home from the Gulf. BP has been publicly chastened. Maybe we could just stay clear of them for a couple years? But no, no and no again. The “clean-up” in the Gulf continues and it rages most earnestly where nothing was ever dirtied but where tourists and locals gather. The chief victim of the Deep Horizon blow out (other than those dozens killed in the explosion) was the Obama Administration and its squeaky-clean Green image. This one actually CAN be blamed on Bush, not Bush the man but Bush the media player. Barack’s handlers were not going to let THEIR guy be Katrinaed and they know quite well how it is done. No accusation of “inaction” will adhere to President Obama; you have my word on it, boss! So instead we have a never-ending pantomime like the boy in the bathroom who merely pretends to wash his hands. Whenever a pelican dives there is a collective gasp, fearing he might come up oozing and polluted, winking his sad eye…. S-O-S, S-O-S and harm himself as he struggles against those scrubbing him with Dawn liquid. We can’t have that. Good thing we DON’T have that but it is not good enough. We must continue raking the beaches like giant sandtraps. We must continue the moratorium on any further drilling. We must continue the support to the unoiled locals and continue the policies that harm their trade at a point where the total release from the oil spill is about the same as natural seepage over that time. It is all for the pelicans, you see.

Oh, and the dolphins. They’re cute, too.

Last week, my friend Sandy sent me an email:

“Dan, do you want to come with me to Bastrop? I’m going to shoot some pictures of the ruins.”

Sandy is a photographer who documents disasters, and since Bastrop just suffered the most destructive wildfire in Texas history- a raging inferno laid waste to 1,600 houses and 34,000 acres of land – he was keen to record the aftermath for posterity. As for me, I had never witnessed the effects of Biblical hellfire before, so I was curious. I agreed to go.

Bastrop is a heavily wooded area, but as we approached the town the green trees turned to tall, dead pillars of carbon stuck in the scorched soil. Turning down a road, we found ourselves in a mostly destroyed housing development located inside the ravaged forest.

It was a strange, surreal environment. Outdoor swimming pools and kid’s playgrounds had survived even as the homes they were attached to were reduced to mounds of abused metal, broken brick and ash. The flames had randomly skipped certain homes, while destroying others. Fireplaces and washing machines rose from the ashes, seemingly indestructible. There were few birds, and no woodland creatures. The deer and rabbits and armadillos had all been massacred by Mother Nature.

We stopped the car to walk around a weird complex of ruined outbuildings, ideal for storing car parts and/or sex slaves. The owner had left out cat food in the hope that his pet would return. I found it across the street, jammed in a pipe, surrounded by a halo of flies. It had died trying to escape the fire, which had not even singed its fur.

A young woman came out to talk to us. The flames had passed over her attractive two-storey house, only to destroy the home of the newly wed couple next door. They had lost everything, including priceless family heirlooms. ‘Do you feel guilty that your house survived?’ I asked. ‘Very,’ she replied, and two minutes later showed me a picture on her iPhone of a melted lamp-post two miles down the road. ‘Pretty cool, huh? I mean, it’s sad too, but…‘

Next we stumbled upon a man retrieving the copper from the rubble of his home before thieves sold it to buy meth. A burly Texas Viking, he had already hung up bird feeders as a sign that he was back. He had stayed until the flames were roaring down the street towards him, and was annoyed that the insurance agency hadn’t given him his money yet: ‘I can’t believe we’re not already rebuilding.’ He pointed at the green shoots rising from the black earth. ‘See? The forest is already coming back. I’m not going anywhere, nobody is. Everybody in this neighborhood will rebuild their homes.’

And so we continued, roaming through a landscape of wreckage at once immense and overwhelming. Everywhere, life was resuming – construction teams zipped past, helicopters buzzed overhead, and all manner of builders and constructors had put up signs advertising their services. Some houses still had evacuation notices stuck to their mail boxes; at others there were hand-written messages nailed to the trees warning trespassers that they would be shot. Then, in a poorer neighborhood I stumbled upon a house where somebody had covered what little wall that remained with the spray-painted message:

HOW GREAT IS OUR GOD- WE ALL WON!

Ironic? I wondered. Nah… this is Texas. And just as I was taking a picture, a woman holding a portable oxygen tank rushed towards me. Her name was Cindy Cruz, and this was her house.  ‘I tagged it,’ she said with a smile. She had written other messages, spitting defiance at Satan, but those parts of the house had since collapsed. She too had been present when the fires came rushing down the street, and had only had time to grab her laptop, a few knick-knacks and her pet Chihuahua, Dillinger.

‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘Only two people died- that’s why I wrote “How great is our God!” because it could have been so much worse.’ She had turned down an emergency trailer from the federal government- like many Texans she doesn’t want a handout, only to get on with the rebuilding.

I asked if anything had survived the fire. ‘Not much,’ she said, her lips slowly forming a smile. ‘Only… when my husband came back the first time, he found the urn containing the ashes of our first Chihuahua- Duke. It was cracked, but the ashes were still in there, they hadn’t spilled out. So he poured Duke into a plastic bag and drove away. Later I brought the bag to the funeral home. They remembered me, and gave me a new urn for free. So in spite of the fire I still have two of my beloved Chihuahuas! See? We won!’

We got in the car, and drove on.

To see images from the fire’s aftermath, click here.

Originally published at RIA Novosti, the home of awesomeness.