This is Volume III in the continuing saga of How My GF Convinced Me to Read the Outlander Series without Trying Very Hard. The first two volumes are here and here.

I will freely admit that the video adaptation on Starz played a big part in getting me to dive into the books three whole years after Kayleen first raved about them to me.

For the record, Voyager, the third novel in Diana Gabaldon's series, was first published in 1994, a little before the Star Trek franchise spawned its series that was also entitled Voyager. In the year following its publication, the book won an honor from Entertainment Weekly for Best Opening Line in a novel. Even if the opening doesn't make you chuckle, know that there are chuckles aplenty, and even a few LOLs, in this sweeping tale.

Maybe you want to watch this 40-minute Facebook Live video from Dr. Margaret Flowers, last year's Green Senatorial candidate from Maryland. Maybe you don't, and that's OK.

Maybe you truly believe that Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders's introduction of the new Medicare for All Act is perfectly timed and will generate the popular groundswell necessary to get it passed over the objection of Big Med and Big Pharma. Maybe you also believe that it will become the single "litmus-test" issue for candidates in 2018, especially in Democratic primaries. Maybe you believe neither of those, and that's OK too.

For me, as long as I've been paying attention to the issues, health care reform has taken a reluctant back seat to (1) anti-war/pro-peace, and (2) environmental matters such as climate change. Both (1) and (2) not only deal with the survival of life and civilization on this planet, but are also absurdly multi-faceted and loaded with ramifications. But I have been a proponent of a national single-payer health care system since high school, when the nationwide debate topic of comprehensive medical care.

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BIG UPDATE: Within minutes of my publishing this post, the Scott McLarty sent out this GPUS press release on the topic. So as a party, we're officially excited by this development.
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Today is the 16th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and we solemnly pause and remember the lives of the victims lost on that day sixteen years ago. I firmly believe that it takes nothing away from those victims and their families to remember the unquantifiable death and suffering that followed in the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Let us also not forget that today is the 44th anniversary of the US-backed coup that brought Augusto Pinochet and his cronies to power in Chile, the 35th anniversary of the Israeli massacres of refugees at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon.

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SocraticGadfly offers up a trio of Harvey-related thoughts related to possible future "big ones." Would an Ike Dike be a massive military-industrial complex boondoggle? Can Houston and Harris County do anything different on evacuation ideas? And does greater Houston, like some other disaster-prone areas, simply have too many people living there?

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme is angry with the previous head of Houston flood control and the current pollution helpers.

Dos Centavos wants us to think about undocumented immigrants as something other than cheap labor for rebuilding after disasters.

jobsanger profiles the four Texas Republican Congressmen who voted against federal assistance for Harvey victims.

Texas Vox, the blog for Public Citizen, kicked off its Texas Climate Change Tour in Austin.

Family feuds are the most fun to watch, especially when you're not in the family, laughed PDiddie at Brains and Eggs as he popped more corn.

Neil at All People Have Value said Democrats really need to move on from the Sanders/Clinton primary fight. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

The Lewisville Texan Journal reports that the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission is suing Denton County over allegation of gender pay discrimination. 

Off the Kuff looked at the hopefully temporary reinstatement of the voter ID law as it goes through the appeals process. 

And Nick Anderson, previously the Houston Chronicle political artist and now drawing for Texas Monthly, sums up what merits a special session for Greg Abbott and what does not.

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In other disaster-related news, Houston Matters reports that aftershocks from the 8.1 magnitude earthquake that leveled the Mexican city of Juchitan continue to hamper relief efforts there.

An Associated Press account reveals that more than two dozen storage tanks holding crude oil, gasoline and other contaminants ruptured or otherwise failed when Harvey slammed into the Texas coast, spilling at least 145,000 gallons of fuel and spewing toxic pollutants into the air. The environmental calamity left behind by Harvey will be the most difficult cleanup of all (where it manages to occur, that is). 

Texas Standard asks: will those displaced by Hurricane Harvey return to the Texas Gulf Coast?

Better Texas Blog talks fighting hunger after Harvey.

The Texas Living Waters Project will work to find innovative flooding solutions for the next hurricane.

The TSTA Blog cheers the selection of John Sharp as statewide rebuilding (post-Harvey) czar.

Offcite curates a few hurricane think pieces, including a NYT op-ed which uses a phrase familiar to Jill Stein supporters as the premise for rebuilding the nation's coastal regions. An excerpt:

Space City Weather points out that Houston is already pretty dried out, and going to get drier. 

Michael Li shows the proposed remedial Congressional maps.

Grits for Breakfast sees a rare moment for bail reform.

Michael Barajas at the Texas Observer took note of Trump’s nomination of two lawyers, Jeff Mateer and Matthew Kacsmaryk, from the First Liberty Institute—a far right Christian advocacy organization—to vacant federal judge seats in Texas. The reaction from LGBTQ groups and civil rights activists was swift.

This is what I did between calls at the Blackboard help desk this afternoon. It has been quite some time since I last posted a blog entry on hcgp.org, and I took too long getting around to putting up something Harvey-related. But then, so has the rest of the party.

Everybody and his proverbial dog has posted something about our recent unwelcome parade-pisser-onner Harvey, on magnillions of websites and social media pages. The Harris County Green Party's Steering Committee hasn't even posted an Ooh, Look! Climate Change in Action! piece. Some of them have been rather busy dealing with the after-effects of two feet of standing water in their living rooms.

As HCGP has no designated blogmeister, I took on the task and presumed to speak for the party organization. Having known these folks for 17 years or more, I feel comfortable in presuming, even though I no longer attend regular meetings.

​I hope you enjoy it and are sufficiently inspired to click some of the many links in it.

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UPDATE: As sustainability wonk Jay Crossley so eloquently put it on Facebook, Wow. Just wow. (From the Dallas Morning News, so you may run into a paywall.)

Harvey has drifted off to the northeast, still moving slowly, dumping a zillion gallons per hour on the Piney Woods of Texas and Louisiana. We have clear to partly cloudy conditions here in South-Central Houston today; yesterday, in light to moderate rainfall, I was helping a friend and his family move lots of stuff out of their flood-damaged home and surveying where Brays Bayou had lapped over some of its bridges inside Loop 610.

The university where I work remains closed, with classes canceled, but I will likely make a trip into the office to take care of some overdue business. Before that, however, I wanted to post this as an add-on to Monday's entry.

There has certainly been no shortage of articles, from various web publications, about the exact topic of Monday's entry. I wanted to link to just a few of those here.

Here's a pretty good piece from Ana Campoy and David Yanofsky on Quartz.

Naturally, Dahr Jamail weighs in on the climate angle, his specialty, for Truthout.

And at least one contributor thought it appropriate to mention the twin scourges of climate disruption and suburban development in the Wikipedia entry for Hurricane Harvey.

All for now.

Friday night, as Hurricane Harvey was pulling ashore near Matagorda Bay, we got a little rain here in Greater H-Town. It wasn't enough to scare my visiting brother into packing up his three sons and his new ladyfriend and all their stuff to leave town ahead of their scheduled Saturday morning departure. The Friday night meet & greet proceeded as planned; they rolled out of our sister's driveway early Saturday and arrived safely in Pennsylvania last night. The boys presumably made it to the first day of school this morning.

Meanwhile, here in Southeast Texas, we are not having school this week. Thanks to Tropical Marathon Summer Shower Harvey, in many places, the water is too high even for a school bus to get safely through. Area districts will resume (or in some cases start classes) the Tuesday after Labor Day. My own employer, a small private university, just now announced that it is closed for the entire week. (My director just texted to say that we'd soon have more news on extended closure soon.)

Most businesses are closed; social media outlets are useful for informing us which are actually open. Metro service is suspended, although yesterday I saw an Out of Service bus on Scott Street, presumably taking people to a storm shelter. Some surrounding communities are under mandatory evacuation. There are far fewer cars and trucks on our streets than usual, but yesterday on a reconnaissance walk I witnessed people parking their vehicles on Scott where it crosses Brays Bayou, getting out, and taking video of the high and rushing water.

Stormy Thoughts and Tweets

Hey Lee & Jill, I love you guys, but it's not certain whether we can pin the blame for Harvey on Anthropogenic Climate Disruption. While my neighbors and I endure this unprecedented amount of moisture, I have been careful not to kvetch on my social networks about climate change and those who enable it.

Presumably, according to the scientific consensus, ACD is to blame for our planet having more frequent, more intense, and wetter tropical cyclones. The amount of precipitation from Harvey breaks all records locally, but a lot of folks around Alvin still talk about 1979, Victoria about 1998, even if they don't remember that storms by name (Claudette and—well, Victoria's storm didn't even have a name).

​However, just as Katrina was a man-made disaster in 2005, I see Harvey as a continuation of a man-made disaster that has spanned multiple years. With Katrina, the lack of evacuation infrastructure and the inadequate structural integrity of the levees killed more people and caused more misery in Greater New Orleans than the storm itself. You could also throw in the loss of wetlands and mangrove patches in coastal Louisiana and Mississippi, wetlands that would have absorbed a lot of the rain.

In the ever-expanding Houston metropolitan area, we've lost some wetlands too. More importantly, we've been losing prairies. To the northwest, west, southwest, and south of the city, developers have been turning those prairies (as well as the old rice farms) into subdivisions. There is far less permeable ground in the watersheds of the bayous that flow from those prairies. The subdivisions discharge their treated sewage back into the bayous. Downstream, older neighborhoods that formerly flooded never or very seldom have had devastating floods four times in the last three years.

Meanwhile, inside the Loop and just beyond it, older single-family homes and duplexes with yards (aka, affordable housing) have been razed and replaced with omnipresent, butt-ugly, multi-story townhomes on big concrete slabs with token vegetation deployed here and there (aka, profitable housing).

Bigger, Faster, Stupider
The connection between development (which is not exactly new) and the recent flooding is officially controversial, as this article notes. Even stupid development is not new: Just ask the folks who bought in Cy-Fair–area subdivisions like Norchester and Ravensway, both situated right along Cypress Creek.

But there are reasons, other than the Attwater's Prairie Chicken, for concerned citizens having fought against development of the Katy Prairie and the construction of the Grand Parkway for so many years. Even Republican candidates for elective office havepublicly and vociferously opposed the Grand Parkway, which has kicked the sprawl machine into top gear. Just as the oil & gas companies are now resorting to high-risk strategies like tar sands, deepwater drilling, and hydrofracking, the housing mafia has begun gobbling up the most vulnerable lands that might protect the area from Harvey-esque catastrophic flooding.

The painful part for me is that I have friends who live and work in that sprawl—e.g., teaching the children of the Sprawlites. One of them posted photos yesterday of Seven Lakes High School, which over the weekend has turned into One Lake.

Inside the city, the builders may be building for density, but they're doing it stupidly and maliciously. Townhomes and luxury mid-rises are pushing out students, working folk, and families who have lived in their neighborhoods for generations but can no longer afford the property taxes on their over-valued bungalows. The ultimate insult is the new Grey House and River Oaks District, which I've blogged about previously: a new-urbanism-style luxury apartment village with luxury boutiques on the ground floor, where rents start at if-you-have-to-ask-you-can't-afford-it. (OK, it's actually about $1,700 for a 1-1.)

Rather than continue wallowing here, I may have some real wallowing to do today. I'll post a follow-up tomorrow or the next day.

I'll be representing the Harris County Green Party at a League of Women Voters forum this Saturday, but that's the extent of my recent GP activity. Next Monday, I will report on what I say, and what the reps from the other three invited parties say. Perhaps thereafter I'll become more inclined to blog more regularly.

OOPS! UPDATE! The looming Tropical Storm Harvey, bringing possibly very heavy rains this weekend, has postponed the LWV Rising Stars forum. It will take place on 23 September.

Between now and then, I plan to post something lengthy about Naomi Klein's concise yet thorough No Is Not Enough.

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Here's the blog post and news roundup from last week.

Off the Kuff notes a new lawsuit filed to protect spousal benefits for Houston city employees against an assault by anti-LGBT zealots.

SocraticGadfly writes about another personal experience with age discrimination.

Texas (aka Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton) are going to take their chances with a new, conservative Supreme Court rather than have the Lege redraw Congressional and statehouse maps ruled unconstitutional for the umpteenth time, reports PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

A Texas Republican legislator thinks running over protestors should be encouraged. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme thinks he and his party are deplorable.

Texas Vox celebrates the end of the special session.

Texas Leftist reminds us that Trump also tossed out his infrastructure advisory council last week.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston remembers a time when "not all Republicans were racist."

The Lewisville Texan Journal shares the announcement that longtime Democratic activist Amy Manuel will run for Denton County Clerk in 2018. 

As always, Neil at All People Have Value took part in the weekly protest outside the Houston office of wicked-doing Senator John Cornyn. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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Confederate monuments came down on the campus of the University of Texas overnight.  Large rallies supporting their removal in Houston and Dallas were held over the weekend.  Six Flags Over Texas bowed to public pressure and announced that only the United States flag would fly at its front gate (but the flags of Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and the Confederate States of America would continue to fly—and be sold as novelty items at gift shops—elsewhere in the park).

Meanwhile Houston's mayor, Sylvester Turner, has called for a study to help him decide whether or not the statues should be taken away in the Space City.

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More news and blog posts from across the Lone Star State follow!

The CPPP Blog reflects on the special session, which sine died a day early last week.

Michael Li breaks down the redistricting ruling.

RG Ratcliffe wonders if the Republicans are going to start running the Lege like they do Congress.

Pete Von Der Haar rounds up ten movie scenes in which white supremacists get their butts handed to them.

Better Texas Blog calls the Senate-modified version of HB21 a step in the wrong direction that pits education against health care.

The Texas Living Waters Project calls for proactive drought response plans.

Somervell County Salon suggests Trump's various golf clubs and resorts as a great place to relocate the Confederate statues being removed in various cities across the country. 

And Pages of Victory posts the letter from Rosanne Cash that reminds white supremacists NOT to associate their philosophy with the long legacy of social justice her father lived.