Photo by shannonpatrick17

If you're the leader of a sovereign nation meeting with another sovereign nation to discuss a pipeline that will tote thick, sticky tar sands oil through your land if the project is approved, you might be just a little put out when the head of the other nation doesn't make time to sit down and talk this whole thing out. You might even walk out of the meeting.

Historically the Native Americans have never fared too well when they go up against the United States. Mainly because they get horrible new-to-them diseases like smallpox, fight and die, fight and are forcibly "relocated", or simply assimilated into the culture. It's a painful history of broken promises, slaughter and the steady ebbing of an entire culture.

But, the thing is, the ones who were relocated to South Dakota and other areas now find themselves in an interesting position - namely, their land is where a company, TransCanada, needs to go through putting in and expanding pipe to make the Keystone XL Pipeline. The project has been an issue of contention with landowners and environmentalists concerned about the impact that a pipeline transporting viscous bitumen, a thick heavy type of crude oil, more than 1,700 miles from the Alberta Tar Sands to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast.

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Going into the 83rd state legislative session, it seemed as if the state water plan would swim on through the legislative plumbing faster than Nemo went down that sink drain and onward to freedom and hanging out with some tubular sea turtles in Finding Nemo.

Well, that's just not how things went down. The water bill itself got passed, but the bill that would provide the funding for it faltered in the state House as Tea Party Republicans -- who never want to pull anything from the Rainy Day Fund -- and the Democrats -- who would only pull from the fund for water if the fund was also drawn on to restore education budget cuts made in the last session -- got together against the bill and managed to kill it on a technicality.

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It is completely official. The Centers for Disease Control announced this week that 2012 was a terrible year for West Nile Virus -- actually the worst ever -- and warns that it may happen again.

Clearly Houston is a prime stomping ground for the disease. We have swampland, mosquitoes and livestock (where mosquitoes like to hang around.) It's not enough that we have to be worried about tropical storms becoming hurricanes. The tiny annoying stealth bombers can also tear up our lives.

So how can we defend ourselves -- and let us say at this juncture that West Nile is no laughing matter. A serious case can result in death and even ones that don't kill can knock people out of school or work for weeks and months on end. Your body feels like you have the worst case of the flu ever and victims often have difficulty walking. And don't get us started on the headaches that are part of the package.

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Contributed by Diane Wilson

Diane Wilson, longtime Texas activist, chats with officers about the chain around her neck and the White House fence.

If you've never heard of Diane Wilson, you've probably heard about the environmentalist who poured Karo syrup on herself on the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., to protest the BP oil spill. (That was Wilson.)

Or about the one who chained herself to the Dow Chemical tower in 2002, serving four months in jail for trespassing. (Also Wilson.)

Or maybe you've heard the latest one, about the woman who went on a hunger strike and chained herself to the gates of the White House to try and shut down Guantanamo Bay prison. (You guessed it -- Wilson again.)

Wilson started a hunger strike on May 1, only accepting water and a pinch of salt and potassium to keep her body going. "I wasn't taking potassium during one fast, and my potassium levels dropped out from under me and I just felt awful, so I always take it now," she said.

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From the U.S. Drought Monitor

Last week, pretty much everybody and his grandmother thought the state water plan was deader than an Elvis Presley-era jumpsuit.

Hopes were high when the 83rd legislative session opened in January. Many people who pay attention to this stuff (i.e., people like us who think water rights are interesting, and the farmers, ranchers and local government officials who have all been feeling the pinch of water being harder to get) thought the lawmakers who'd arrived in Austin planning to fund an overhaul of the state water infrastructure would get it done in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

House Bill 4 proposed setting up a 50-year water plan and creating a kind of bank that would lend money at very low interest rates to local governments to let them build water projects to improve their water supplies. The water plan would pull $2 billion from the Rainy Day Fund -- a fund made up of oil and gas severance tax -- to provide the money for water projects to update the state's water infrastructure so that next time there's a drought, maybe towns like Spicewood won't run out of water.

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Texas law has always been a little loose -- and yes, in this phraseology "loose" is code for kind of slutty -- about environmental regulation, but now the state legislature has a few bills bouncing around during the 83^rd legislative session that may make it looser than Lindsey Lohan after some booze and a Xanax.

StateImpact Texas reported that these bills are part of a move toward making Texas more business friendly -- the assumption being that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the misnamed Railroad Commission (they're over oil and gas, not railroads), and legislators in general aren't besties with business yet. (None of the bills' sponsors would talk to us, by the way.)

If that's the case, then Gov. Rick Perry needs to rethink his whole advertising thing. He's been hitting up the people of Illinois and California in recent weeks, encouraging them to head to Texas, according to Time.

Right now, if, say a company wants to mine uranium from the water or put in an injection well, they have to go through a permitting process with the TCEQ, the state regulatory agency for all things environmental.

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More scenes like this, as seen in 2011 in a former branch of Lake Travis, could be coming to Houston.

The rain came last week. Finally. It came in droves, surging over the curbs, washing away the oil and grime and refuse into a filthy chemical blend. It came for hours. It was needed, in a state suffering a drought that has covered nearly every city and town and farm Texas knows.

And then it let up, and we dried off, and we were thankful that a state as desiccated as ours was finally receiving the storm it needed. But it wasn't nearly enough.

"After all of that rain, we learned that only 80 percent of the state is now in a drought," Talya Tavor, a field organizer with Environment Texas, told Hair Balls. "But that's still 80 percent. Even though we're down from where we were, that's still a huge amount of the state not getting the water it needs."

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If only UTMB had The Andromeda Strain's space-age equipment.

The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston is proud to be the home of many highly infectious, very deadly viruses and other potential weapons of biological mass destruction.

And that's just in the break-room fridge!!! (Ha! Kidding.)

Part of the job of keeping such things around the premises, of course, is you're expected to make sure such things do, indeed, keep around the premises.

We've all seen movies where hazmat-suited stars go through an endless series of security measures to get to one of these rare and dangerous vials.

On the other hand, maybe the folks at UTMB haven't seen those movies, because, it seems, they've lost one of those dangerous little vials.

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Congressman Steve Stockman has been a crackpot for so long it's sometimes easy to forget his nuttiness.

Luckily, every so often he tries to out-nutjob Louie Gohmert, and we remember once again why he's such a horrifying enjoyable freak show.

Like the tweet above, from what is labeled his "Official Congressional Twitter Feed."

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Photo by: Vanessa Piña

Since the summer of 2011, Texas has been faced with a drought that not only harmed wildlife but reduced our recreational opportunities and damaged our water supplies. By 2012 the drought conditions marginally improved, but the state's population continues to grow, causing the demand for water to increase daily.

At a press conference held Tuesday, experts said a judge ruled the state of Texas had violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to provide for sufficient flows of water in the Guadalupe River.

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