Joel Kotkin, an urbanologist based in California, recently compiled a list for Forbes magazine of the best cities for job creation over the past decade. Among those with more than 450,000 jobs, the top five spots went to the five main Texaplex cities—and the winner of the small-cities category was Odessa, Texas. A study by the Brookings Institution in June came up with very similar results. Mr Kotkin particularly admires Houston, which he calls a perfect example of an “opportunity city”—a place with lots of jobs, lots of cheap housing and a welcoming attitude to newcomers.

He is certainly right about the last point: not too many other cities could have absorbed 100,000 refugees, bigheartedly and fairly painlessly, as Houston did after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. With vibrant Asian communities alongside its balanced Hispanic, white and black mix, with no discernible racial tensions, and with more foreign consulates than any American city except New York and Los Angeles, Houston is arguably America’s most enthusiastically cosmopolitan city, a place where the future has already arrived.

And maybe the less so sunny….

Texas has the highest proportion of people lacking health insurance of all 50 states; the third-highest poverty rate; the second-highest imprisonment rate; the highest teenage-birth rate; the lowest voter turnout; and the lowest proportion of high-school graduates. Mr Shapleigh is not surprised that these figures are so terrible: Texas spends less on each of its citizens than does any other state. Being a low-tax, low-spend state has not made Texans rich, though they are not dirt-poor either; their median income ranks 37th among the 50 states.

The question is where will we land: An Alabaman nightmare of no-education, and the bottom of every national metric, or Californian distopia of overbuilt social programs that break the state’s financial back. More from The Economist.

“I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor — not a commentator or analyst,” he said in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor in 1973. “I feel no compulsion to be a pundit.”

Would that we still had some of that in our broadcast news. Sad day.

Stay well little fella.

Joe Cisneros is the kind of guy they should make movies about, and actually they already have. The patron saint of Questa, New Mexico, he fought the mining companies that polluted the drinking water and took a bullet in his arm, among other abuses, for his trouble. Among his most recent efforts for his home town was his procurement of a grant to buy hyper-efficient wood burning stoves for the less than wealthy in his village, to fight off the New Mexico winter. In addition to being on the local school board he also has the distinction of being head contractor on every construction job at our cabin, with the few exceptions being, in his words, “fucking nightmares, man.” He’s about two feet shorter than me, and can curse at me fluently in a couple different languages (especially when i do something dumb like leave the 4-wheeler on all night).

Joe works a small crew, I think so he can have an equal opportunity to boss everyone around. It’s interesting to watch my Dad, whose spent the last six month meticulously hand-drawing plans for the current renovation explain a part of the project to Joe – he stands there for a moment, ponders the particulars, and says “Ok, Steve, here’s what we’re going to do…” and proceeds to embark on some wild-arsed solution that nominally involves yanking a tree out of the forest and milling it into some incredibly beautiful beam, an act I’m pretty sure violates more than few local and state ordinances, and stretches some provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago to the point where we should now technically be at war with Mexico. He bounces back and forth between Spanish and English, but thankfully since most of his Spanish is cursing, I can catch the drift of what he’s saying pretty easily. With sentiments like “What the hell are you doing standing there with your arms crossed? I will sew those goddamn hands to your armpits if you don’t get over here,” or “What the goddamn hell do you think this is a vacation? Get you asses up here and clean this shit up,” it’s hard to miss the meaning, and yet somehow it’s all good natured.

Joe rounds out his crew with, Ivan, the classic New Mexican Chicano, Larry the classic New Mexican Gringo gone native (he has three white buffalo in his back yard, and a gray pony tail), and for this week at least, myself, my dad, my cousin Hiram and four of his buddies from school. We’ve spent the last few days demoing walls, building walls, tearing out wiring , installing new wiring and most of all, sorting scrap wood (a byproduct of the 40-year construction project that this place has been – you you really have a metric crap-ton of wood. There are 2×4’s here that saw Kennedy in office.

Today, Joe made chicharrones for the crew and the attending family, which seems to be more about the process than the end result. Here’s the method as far as i can tell – use 4′ cast-iron wok with legs. Build a fire under said wok using leftover 2×4’s and ample amounts of gasoline. After it’s appropriately heated, dump about two cups of lard on the hot surface and about two pounds of raw pork fat. Stir with a giant paddle until appropriately blackened. In a a sort of drive-by maneuver, pour coca-cola onto said mixture, hopefully without getting third degree bunrs as the whole concoction over flows. Then careful extinguish the ensuing grease fire. Serve with tortillas, green chillies and ample intestinal fortitude.

I haven’t thought about work in quite a few days, but I will say that, this is the kind of thing I work for – to be able to come up here and do a good days work, and sleep in a beautiful place. It’s a bit odd that I have to sit in front of computer for 40 hours a week to be able to come up here and preform the manual labor that I really enjoy, but I guess that’s the fucked up way of the world, and the strange tuning of my character that makes me enjoy things like drilling holes in studs, and destroying sheetrock.

Joe, Larry and Ivan – watching them work together is better than TV really. The pasta-bowl inspired wiring of the house has continued to pose problem fo us moving forward, leading to a general consensus to scrap most of it, pull what we can and get on with the thing. Running new mains without trashing any more sheetrock led to a delicate operation of inserting section of pipe into holes through the wall leading to plethora of inappropriate jokes between Larry and Joe, with Ivan just standing in the background laughing. Ivan’s a funny dude – the quietest of the bunch, normally from Albuquerque he’s working with Joe while up here taking care of his mother who’s been ill. As the day was finishing up we were talking about my normal existence and his kids who live in Austin. “Oh man,”he said ” my boys are great kids, they tried to get me to move down to Texas, even tried to buy me a house down there in Austin. You aint getting me out of here. New Mexico’s a poor damn state, but look at all this we have – you ain’t getting me out of these mountains.”

more pictures | view the latest on the cabin renovation

To borrow a turn-of-phrase from Badowski, you have to to wake up and make a commitment to excellence to get out of Texas under 10 hours. Maintaing  an average trip speed of 65 mph requires dedication, a strong bladder, an extremely long playlist, and the willingness to risk renal failure from the mix of coffee and Redbull. If I could find a way to refuel the wagon with out stopping in craphole towns like Vega, i would in fact pay double for my gas for some kind of mid-flight refueling solution.

All told, my  drive out to Red River is about twelve and a half hours, with very little interstate. Back roads mostly – two-lane state highways, some (especially in New Mexico) with only one lane-width of actual pavement (interesting at 80mph), and not a soul in sight to the horizon. Giant thunderheads spit out squall lines onto the hot plains kicking up true toad stranglers in the eastern New Mexico, with triple rainbows in my rearview mirror as they pass.

You also get the welcome and physiologically confusing experience of having the temperature drop 60 degrees from 104 in Austin to 45 at the top of the pass coming into Red River. And finally, sunset over the mountains, with the sky lit up like the fourth of july.

I’m a firm believer that everything should have general operating parameters. Don’t not use this toaster in the bathtub. This tuna best eaten before 2062. This bike is best ridden in non-fatal temperatures.

On that last one, I think perhaps we maybe exceeded our advisable temperatures range today. In hindsight the bike probably was fine, (the tires were not), but the rider (me) was functioning a little below optimal efficiency. Now I’m a big believer in getting out when it’s hot, and I’ll take this any day over the nefarious winter version of this extreme. If you can ride your bike in Texas in the summertime, you can ride pretty much anywhere. But at 5:30 we were pushing 104 with a Heat index of 107, so things were going from epic to stupid pretty fast.

The idea was, lets put down some miles on the road getting out to the trail, do a figure-eight loop with a few gut-buster climbs, roll back in to downtown the road, drink a beer at Royal Blue. It was solid, it was great, it was fucking retarded. The problem comes from me being cheap. Sometimes this works in my favor, sometimes it ends in me shotgguning lonestar’s at Rudy’s. Six months ago, I bought some very lightweight tires to race on and liked them so much, I’ve kept them into the summer (since my racing season was one race), and well past the useable life of the side-walls. Whether it was the heat, my ever-exapnding girth, or just my Karma coming back to bite me for being a cheapskate, At mile 3 everything started going wrong.

Keep in mind, I’m an Eagles Scout so I leave the house on a bike ride pretty well prepared. There’s redundancies in place to keep things from going to hell. Well, first the sidewall split and the sealant, which had pretty much cooked off in the heat, didn’t really cut the mustard. Then the tube i had was a narrower diameter than recommended for the tire. Then the whole thing exploding a second time, just as we finished our second descent to the creek bottom. So, at this point, as the british would say, we are good and fucked.

I guess we could look at the positives of this experience. I didn’t throw my bike into the woods like I tempted too (I did throw a few rocks). The bums that populate that area of the Greenbelt learned some new choice, f-bomb-laced phrases. Germ got to run an evac to get the car at time trail-speeds and find a new exit out tho the road that, in his words, smelled like death and dead things. And Rob and I got a scenic walk back through the gated community next to the bum camp (from which we almost did not escape), down 360 which was pleasantly radiating the days heat back into space and our faces, while Semi’s barreled past at mach5.

Not a good day, but we leaned some things – like don’t be cheap when it comes to something like a tire. Many public thanks to Germ and Rob for tolerating the chaos that I caused, and the facilitating the evac. New, thick bastard tire with a gallon of sealant, is going on today.

Figuring out which faltering states to help depends in large part on what they need. After all, as Tolstoy might have put it, every failing state is failing in its own way. Georgia, for example, jumped 23 places in this year’s index due to a substantial spike in that elusive indicator, “Invaded by Russia.” Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are failing because their governments are chronically weak to nonexistent; Zimbabwe and Burma are failing because their governments are strong enough to choke the life out of their societies. Iraq is failing, but its trajectory may be toward greater success, while Haiti is failing as well, and it is hard to imagine success around the corner.

View the bleakness.

“We support compassion for the even the smallest animals,” says Bruce Friedrich, VP for Policy at PETA. “We support giving insects the benefit of the doubt.”

Friedrich says PETA supports “brushing flies away rather than killing them” and was disappointed that the President had gone ahead and squashed the pesky fly.

This afternoon PETA sent a Katcha Bug, a device which traps bugs and allows their safe release back into nature to the White House.

Will someone please explain to me how I should go about giving an insect, that’s larval stage feeds off rotting flesh, the benefit of the doubt? If anything the precision strike on said insect only proves my theory that President Obama is a member of secret ninja society and has already killed Bin Laden with his bare hands.