Debunking de beach debate

I wish I could.  Debunk it, that is.  But the fact is, I have no real "feel" for the bottom line on the beach debate.  And the longer I ponder it, the more my head hurts. 

Let me re-cap briefly my unsophisticated understanding and analysis, and then proceed with the mental fruits of the walk I took yesterday evening.

Back in July 2011, I published a post called "West end wackiness" which crudely summarizes the state of the mess surrounding the challenges to the Texas Open Beaches Act. 

Things apparently haven't gotten much clearer in the intervening period of time.  There was a subsequent judgment in March of 2012 affirming that the "beach" had indeed become private property (if I'm understanding it correctly), but I'm not entirely sure that anyone really understands what that means on a practical level at this point.  The mainstream news media hasn't been all that helpful because they've tended to view the issue through the lens of whether or not "the public" is allowed onto "the beach".  But apparently it's not that simple. 

Pic from that original July 2011 blog post.  The whole thing started because of legal debate over the line of natural vegetation and what happens following abnormally-intense erosive events, such as hurricanes.  Like Ike, for instance.   

Here's a similar view taken yesterday - a bit farther up the coast but you can still see the same water tower as a point of reference.  The amount of vegetation gained during this intervening period of time is impressive, at least to my un-trained eye.  But what exactly does this mean for private property claims?  I'm not sure. 

I'm still perplexed as to why this beach is allowed to be treated as a right-of-way.  There's so much vehicle traffic that they've basically carved a superhighway through the vegetation that reportedly means everything in the eyes of the law. 

And yet signs like this are present, apparently of a post-Ike vintage (judging from their shiny and new appearance).  But of course, if that property being torn up by vehicles is actually private property, I'm betting that there would be little grounds for enforcement.  Not from a municipal authority, at least. 

But if it's private property, one would think that it has a very high monetary value, because it's beach frontage.  So you'd think that the private property owners would be motivated to preserve that value.  So why do they collectively appear to be allowing people to drive vehicles all over it and tear it up??

In sooth, I got the feeling yesterday that I really was in a type of existential Twilight Zone.  I can't fathom any of these things.  Like, what is it?  Whose is it?  What rules apply?  Yesterday, it felt like I was in No-Man's Land. 

As I was trolling for the latest updates on this issue, I found this FAQ produced by the Texas General Land Office.  According to that source, the "wet beach" (the portion below the high tide line) can still be lawfully accessed by the public, regardless of any recent legal judgments. 

That being the case, at least we've preserved the rights of future generations of Texas children to be able to collect shells...

...and see all the fascinating evidence of life in the littoral zone, even if they have to wait until low tide to do it. 

But if we extrapolate that thought, that statement regarding dry-beach access restrictions, out to its full extent, the picture it paints is very bizarre.   What would families do if we were all held to this wet-beach-only access restriction?  Would people line their cars up on FM 3005 and sit patiently waiting for the tide to recede before they could get out and legally trek to a narrow ribbon of damp sand?  It would be the beach-analog of being relegated to the steerage section of the Titanic, a scenario that strikes me as a particularly ugly form of classism. 

And if I'm understanding things correctly, the thought experiment gets even weirder from that point.   Because, wouldn't private property owners themselves be held to exactly the same restriction?  Sure - the microscopic subset of beachfront owners would be able to claim exclusive rights to their own fifty-foot chunk of dry beach - but apparently by this new set of rules, they would not be allowed to walk on anybody else's fifty-foot chunk of dry beach because, after all, it's private property. 

So if they themselves wanted to take a proverbial walk on the beach, technically, wouldn't they have to exit their beach-front houses, trek across their own miniscule section of dry beach, and enter the wet beach with all the rest of the steerage class people? 

But realistically, would they even be able to do that much?  Because if a bunch of steerage-class Texans saw a property owner emerging to walk on that very same paltry strip of wet sand to which they themselves had been relegated, I'm guessing that the resulting social situation would not be very comfortable for the beachfront owner.  The word "lynching" comes to mind. 

So OK - perhaps in light of that little existential hurdle, perhaps all the beachfront owners could band together and mutually agree that they could reciprocally walk on each others' dry-beach private property.  Even if we set the resulting insurance ramifications aside for the sake of argument (but it's debatable as to whether those issues could ever be discharged), how would the rightful beach-walkers be able to distinguish each other from steerage trespassers?  The average west-ender might be familiar with a few of their neighbors, but most of these west-end houses are only occupied part of the time.  Furthermore, they tend to be occupied by extended families, friends of those families, and/or weekend renters, so we're talking about an impossibly-large pool of people to potentially identify.  They'd have to wear wrist bands or forehead tattoos or something, wouldn't they?  Which would also be problematic, because that would further heighten the ability of the steerage beach-goers to visually identify them as potential targets of wrath. 

And even with all that, who would enforce the segregation?  Certainly not the taxpayers.  So theoretically, would the dry beach property owners perhaps have to band together to hire private security or something, to enforce private propery access? 

But even if they did that, what if an owner or an entitled visitor forgot to get his forehead tattooed on the way to Galveston?  What if the tattoo machine was temporarily broken?  Or what if a dry-beach owner had their wrist band accidentally torn off as they were frolicking in the surf?    What then?  Would they even manage to make it back to their own beach-front houses?  Or would they be apprehended by their own security team?  Would difficulties such as this maybe prompt them to start microchipping themselves instead, like dogs?  Because microchips can't wash off in the surf. 

But then they'd have to pay for microchip readers to be installed at the high tide line.  Microchip readers that the steerage class beach-goers would then be inclined to vandalize. 

And on, and on...

Am I missing something here?  Has anybody really thought this whole wet/dry scenario through to its logical end-points??  That's the question that was foremost in my mind yesterday, as my beloved dog and I walked for over an hour on a deserted narrow soggy strip of Every-Man's Land, the strip that exists at the bleeding edge of No-Man's Land. 

We don't yet have transparency on the bottom lines. For the time being, we'll have to settle for transparency in this delicate feather.  

Walnut woes and identity thefts

OK, this is getting downright surreal. 

Gonzalez had a short piece (paywalled) today describing a 2011-ish study done by this organization, in which League City was ranked as the "68th safest" city among 430 cities of population exceeding 75,000 that were assessed. 

That may not sound very impressive, but it puts us in approximately the top 16% of American cities in the size range assessed.  I'll take it. 

It looks like a lot of crime, but it's not when compared to the rest of our society.

RecordsPedia indicated that they'd prefer this content to be embedded as a frame, but I can't seem to adjust their HTML sequence to display properly in Blogger's layout, so here is a low-res screengrab. 

And in fact, very little crime tends to occur here in Centerpointe.  I've noted this previously when I've done routine crime summaries. 

But here's the thing: Of the crime that does occur in Centerpointe, a disproportionate share of it seems to occur on just one street:  Walnut Pointe.

This phenomenon has fascinated the hell out of me on more than one previous occasion.

Screengrab from this November 29, 2012 post which, in turn, referenced this June 19, 2012 post.  All of this related back to my original March 30, 2011 post on broken windows theory and the fact that parking cars on sidewalks is illegal, not to mention ignorant, inconsiderate, and un-neighborly. 

According to broken windows theory, one illegal activity sets the stage for additional illegal activities to follow.  Consistency does not equal proof, and there's a bit of chicken-and-egg effect tied up in all of this, but I find it to be a worthy theory - one that has some compelling real-world evidence of its efficacy. 

I usually retrieve most of our reported crime statistics from a website called Crime Reports.  They've changed their format recently such that only 30 days of data can be displayed at one time, rather than a full six months, which was a very efficient way of displaying data.  But going back to late August 2012, which is apparently when I did my last look-see, here's what got reported to that source:

Something heretofore unreported in the mix:  Identity theft, with these three reported incidents on Walnut Pointe.
Screengrab courtesy of Crime Reports.  See next image for corresponding details. 

I distilled those three incidents down to this list.  Two of the addresses are the same, but the thefts took place on different days, so there may have been more than one perpetrator. 

Assault on Walnut Pointe.
Screengrab courtesy of Crime Reports. 

A theft on Walnut Pointe.
Screengrab courtesy of Crime Reports. 

During approximately this same five-month timeframe, what else reportedly happened in Centerpointe?


Someone reportedly busted into a car on Almond Pointe.
Screengrab courtesy of Crime Reports.

Someone reportedly snatched from an unlocked vehicle on Willow Pointe.
Screengrab courtesy of Crime Reports.

And someone reportedly lifted an identity on Harvard Pointe, which is one of the only crimes reported here in Section 9 during our three-year existence.
Screengrab courtesy of Crime Reports.

So in this approximately five-month period of time, Centerpointe had one criminal incident reported on Harvard Pointe, one on Willow Pointe, one on Almond Pointe... and five on Walnut Pointe. 

But here is where I will veer away from a Walnut Pointe focus because these identity theft reports are very concerning. 

I don't yet have any details as to how they might have happened, but here's what concerns me: 

Back in late November and again in December, I talked about serious problems my family was having with the League City Post Office.  Our mail went missing and then mysteriously re-appeared from within the Post Office itself only after we filed a formal theft report with USPS. 

At the time, I speculated that we might have gotten caught up in the perfect identity theft set-up.  I had no proof that any actual wrongdoing was intended or had taken place, but I noted the air-tight possibilities for someone to exploit such a situation for those purposes.

And now today I see four reported incidents of identity theft in Centerpointe within the past few months, overlapping with our own mail troubles. 

Is all this a coincidence, or does the plot thicken?  As time allows, I will endeavor to find out. 

Warranty woes

We are now in the month of February, which means that Centerpointe Section 9's first houses are turning three years old. 

Over the last 3 years, I've had a lot of residents ask me, "Um, what the heck is 'Section 9'?"  It's the "new" tract of houses southeast of Centerpointe and the Boxelder Pointe utility easement.  All 75 houses in this section have either a Harvard Pointe or an Arlington Pointe address. 

The Googlemaps aerial (screengrab above) still shows us as being only half done, but we've been totally built-out for more than a year now. 

With age comes decrepitude - some of it premature.  This past weekend, it was difficult to miss all the construction noise on the northeast side of Section 9.  That racket was reportedly occurring because one of our builders was fulfilling a warranty claim on a resident's 3-year-old house, which appears to have significant structural defects.  I'm saying "appears" because the resident reported this to me but I myself have not set eyes on any proof, although I did witness a contractor tearing apart a portion of the exterior structure and replacing it with new materials.  It was a whole heck of a lot of work that occurred over the past few weeks, culminating in this weekend's effort.   

Residential construction in Texas is generally covered by a 10-year warranty for structural issues.  But here's the thing: if there does prove to be a problem with your house, it's only going to get worse with time and, depending on the nature of the issue, it could spin off ancillary problems which might be challenging to deal with in and of themselves as separate repairs.  These residents described above were smart to jump on their issues quickly, while their home is still in its toddlerhood, and get their warranty claim fulfilled now.  (There is a warranty site for our builder Meritage, and I can't seem to find an analogous page for our other builder Brighton, but here is a list of phone numbers for its parent company).

That resident's structural situation is not the only warranty claim I've been told about thus far in Section 9.  Furthermore, I've also heard multiple stories about "quirks" arising, issues with houses that may or may not eventually prove to be defects per se, but which are aggravations for homeowners.  Some of the houses are demonstrating remarkably consistent quirks from one house to the next, which is not unexpected, given that there were a limited number of trades teams swarming the section during construction.

Here's what I suggest: if anything appears quirky in your house, communicate it to me and/or to our POA.  Knowledge is power, there's strength in numbers, and insert additional cliche's here.  Some of us are having to solve these types of problems and if you are also facing the same problem, we could potentially help you to avoid re-inventing part of the warranty wheel if we were to pool our information and experiences. 

Happy Birthday, Section 9.

Nothing but wood and wide open spaces:  Section 9 a bit more than three years ago. 

Sight-seeing while fright-seeing

I had a ridiculously large number of local business meetings last week, and not everything I saw fell into the fright-seeing category, so I thought I'd share a bit of that for the sake of amusement and reflection.

The taggers have been hard at work lately, but some slogans are more palatable than others.  This anonymous creation apparently raises the ire of few, because internet reports suggest that it has remained unremediated for at least six months. 

View from the other direction.  Ah, the boundless optimism of youth...

Now this is an iconic traffic photo if I've ever taken one. At first I was a bit perplexed at that officer in front of me, who cruised straight through the intersection without paying the dangler any heed. But then he turned around, probably to deal with it.

 

Almost 20 years ago, a 911 operator ripped me a new one for reporting this kind of thing. It was on a very windy day and the dangling traffic light was whipping around at the end of its electrical cord. Afraid it would smash down at any moment and crush to death a driver or a child in a passenger seat, I dialed 911. The operator chastised me, claiming that this was not a 911-worthy event. We argued the point and exchanged some expletives between the two of us, and then I hung up. With that memory in mind and given that HPD was already in front of me, I didn't report this one the other day.

 

I mean, think about it. Look at the size of that light fixture relative to this police car in front of me. Do the whole force = mass times acceleration (f=ma) thing in your head. Acceleration due to gravity over approximately fifteen feet of free-fall. Mass of several hundred pounds. Windshield or rear window of car providing no protection to humans. Basically, if a thing like this falls and strikes a car in the wrong place, we've got dead people on our hands.  Do we have to wait for serious injury or death to actually occur before we call 911, or can we anticipate a substantial risk and act accordingly?  Apparently that's a matter of interpretation. 

Along the same theme, I also dialed 911 once because a fence had broken and an entire herd of panicked cattle was running loose on FM 2351.  Cars were flying in every direction trying to avoid them.  The 911 operator was summarily unimpressed by my sense of urgency.  I said, "There are multiple eight-hundred-pound projectiles hurtling down a 50 mph roadway full of traffic, and you don't think this situation demands immediate attention?!"  

Blogger is apparently failing to preserve font sizes again...

Along the same lines:  Should we call 911 for an incipient situation like this, or wait until the resulting "sinkhole" grew large enough to actually swallow a car and then dial 911?

Do you see the water bubbling up through the seam in the concrete?  This most likely indicates that a pressure main has ruptured at depth.  As the water shoots out of that broken pipe, it erodes and liquefies the soil surrounding it.  Eventually, the overlying strata and road will collapse into the resulting hole, which Houstonians tend to refer to somewhat euphemistically as a sinkhole. 

In this case last week, I didn't have to debate whether I should alert authorities.  Under the IH-610 bridge, you can already see that an HFD truck has arrived on scene.

And yes, I know that we have non-emergency contact numbers available to us. Have you ever tried to dial one? You get into the queue with all the other non-emergency people who are calling in to complain because the sidewalk is cracked in front of their house. Good luck with that avenue of inquiry. 

From hemorrhaging water to hemorrhaging money:  why exactly are we, the taxpayers facing insurmountable debt, spending about a gazillion dollars ($86 million, to be more precise) on "beautification" of the Mickey Leland building?  Is all this necessary?  KTRK asked the same question not long ago.  This HAIF thread talks about some possible bona fide structural problems.  This doc suggests its being done via stimulus spending.  But no comprehensive cost justification jumped out at me from the quick internet search that I did. 

Not everything I encountered on the road last week was a disaster waiting to happen or an annoying affront.  Some of it was amusing and/or just plain cool. 

Have you seen these guys on FM 518 just east of IH-45?  What we can't figure out for the life of us is why there always seems to be a costumed guy plus some other guy standing back in the shadows.  Is this other guy just paying a social call, or is he somehow an active part of the overall advertising package?  Because you'd think that holding a banner while dressed as Liberty would really be a one-person job. 

Closer to home, our Centerpointe stormwater ponds resident hawk seems to be doing very well.  Here he is sitting on the "For Sale" sign for that tract on the east side of West Walker, during a stunning sunrise. 

I've been watching that "For Sale" tract like a hawk - get it??  And I got a bit excited last week when I saw two guys with a Mule out there, one of them wearing a cowboy hat, which often signifies "developer".  It wasn't until I got back to my office and looked at my hastily-taken pics that I noticed what appears to be a model airplane beside them. 

Oh well.  I will keep watching like a hawk.  As will the hawk. 

Happy Monday - which, by the way, is one of the new trash days for many of us, as wasteful (pun intended) as they are. 

Erroneous agetribution

The quote-of-the-day in this morning's NYT reads as follows, doing an acute disservice to greater Houston in the process (Willis, TX being just north of Conroe):

"When you're older, they just see gray hair and they write you off."

This is attributed as follows:  ARYNITA ARMSTRONG, a 60-year-old in Willis, Tex., who has been looking for work for five years since losing her job at a mortgage company.

Say it ain't so: condolences to the old fart, who appears fit and healthy but is summarily damned by his balding gray head??
Microsoft clip-art.

Every time I see something like Ms. Armstrong's quote, I cringe.  I cringe because most of the people who make those kinds of statements are in such acute denial.  They have absolutely no grasp of how the real world works or why it works as it does.  I cringe when I think of all the senior citizen petroleum industry veterans who have been begged and pleaded back out of their happy retirements because there aren't enough workers available to manage all the new operations that have developed because of the current oil boom. 

I was on the phone with one of my professional cohorts late Friday as he was driving in the Karnes City area, and he said, "There are so many flares here now... the sky is so bright that you don't even need to turn your car headlights on at night. I'm not kidding."

I can spot Willis, Texas on this photo as well - can you?  Hint:  it's relatively close to the employment action.

Screengrab from this Scientific American blogsite. 

The industry veterans who re-emerge from retirement don't need the money - they are already financially set for the rest of their lives.  They return to the oil field often forfeiting their Social Security benefits in the process, return purely out of a sense of allegiance to their cohorts and their companies, because this thing called an oil boom would be utterly unable to function without their participation, the shortage of skilled workers is so great. 

In my work, I routinely encounter the un-retired who are not sixty but are rather seventy to eighty years old!!  Their hair is not gray - it has long since turned white.  And they are working at six-figure salaries for only one reason: because they feel responsible in the old-school way which is increasingly rare these days.

And in stark contrast to those veterans are the people who whine their erroneous attributions such as age-related discrimination.  Those are often the people who, even in their advanced ages, are unwilling to accept the very same reality that we've been trying so passionately to teach our teenager:  that you must see the world the way it is - NOT the way you personally would prefer it to be.  And if you don't identify an in-demand job description that is palatable to you and that you can successfully gain skills for (even though it might not be your favorite choice), you will spend the rest of your life mired in a state of emotional uncertainty, financial insecurity, periodic if not chronic unemployment, and fear. 

It's just that simple, and yet so many people are unable to accept it.   You can't sit there and indulge in a pity party because nobody wants to hire you to do a job that society doesn't need done.  You have to go where the jobs are. 

You commercial investigative journalists who stumble across this blog rant... you may wish to develop a feature that documents the Texas Un-Retired, because theirs is an utterly fascinating human interest story.  Such a feature would make a satisfying counterweight to some of the warped perspective emphasized by the NYT.  It's the kind of true story that so many of the young and the old desperately need to read. 

Ten for seven and one for seventeen

It's hard to believe that it's now a decade. 

An excerpt from the card my daughter drew and left at the makeshift memorial in front of JSC: sad faces holding hands.  I kept a scan so she could remember that day when she was grown. 

We arrived at the JSC memorial to place this card, a white woman clutching a brown toddler, the quintessential family faces of multi-cultural Houston, and we were unexpectedly swarmed by major news organizations.  Out of respect, we answered their questions, but then I left the TV turned off when we got back home.  This plan of mine to preserve for my daughter the solemnity of the event backfired when she arrived at her day care the following Monday morning only to be told that everyone had seen her on TV.  But neither of us have ever seen any footage. 

The approximately one-mile stretch of NASA Road 1 (or NASA Parkway, if you're a name-convert, which we are not) adjacent to Johnson Space Center on its due south side has an unusual characteristic:  the scoring of the concrete for traction and drainage purposes resulted in particularly pronounced vibrational tones (am I using the correct terms?). 

Basically, the pavement "sings" as you drive over it, alternating rhythmically between two different but surprisingly-coordinated harmonic frequencies, with the actual pair of relative notes produced depending on the absolute speed of your vehicle.  It's not uncommon for Houston's concrete roadways to produce a tire-singing effect like this, but this particular stretch is unique with respect to both the amplitude and the musical quality of the complementary frequencies that are generated. 

As my daughter was growing up, I would frequently tell her that the unusually clear singing sounds we hear in that location are the angel voices of the seventeen astronauts who were tragically killed during the Apollo and Shuttle missions (although depending on how the count is made, the program-wide totals are actually higher). 

I have always wondered whether this pavement effect was intentional or not, because it's so distinctive.  Or maybe if not intentional, was there a subconscious mind-state that prompted the paving contractors to form it that way without even being consciously aware of what they were doing?

"That high road will be paved, in part, in blood and tears" is a quote attributed to Houston space writer Mark Whittington. 

Blood, tears, and an unexpected chorus of harmonies. 

...of Earth to touch the face of God. 
And they sang their praises accordingly. 

Whittington also made reference to Rudyard Kipling's "The Song of the Dead".

Local fright-seeing

My job has taken me all over Houston these past couple of days, and I thought I'd take you on a little fright-seeing, I mean sight-seeing, tour of some of the stuff I have encountered.

Sometimes I use a dash cam to record what I see as I'm traveling around, and I've made a number of historical posts based on that very revealing little tool.  But a dash cam is characterized by a very inconvenient limitation: the technology at my price point is still very crude.  The resolution is not sufficient for capturing vital details. 

And sometimes I need absolute proof of details, such as license plate numbers.  I used to also keep a pad of paper and pencil on the center console of my vehicle.  When I would see something really atrocious, I would grope for the pencil and scribble down the license plate number without taking my eyes off the road, and also any other details such as name of the company if the roadway incident involved a commercial vehicle. 

But even this additional measure hasn't proven to be sufficient for my purposes.  Case in point.  One day a few years ago, I saw a big rig driving very dangerously in Pasadena - so dangerously that it blew my mind.  I wrote down as many details as I could, and then I pulled into a parking lot and called the company whose name was painted on the truck cab.  As I was describing what I had witnessed, the company representative on the phone became increasingly frightened.  I finished my story by saying, "I'm just relating these things to you so that you can discipline your driver."  The panicked person at the other end then replied, "But you don't understand:  we don't have any assets anywhere in the state of Texas.  What you saw was someone who had counterfeited a truck to make it look like one of ours, and God only knows what illegal cargo they hauled through Pasadena today."

There's some merit to all that rhetoric that comes out of Homeland Security, eh? (See also local resources here).  Ordinary citizens really are in the best position to spot what's wrong out there in our daily world.  I'm not talking about paranoia - I'm talking about being in a situation where you know there's something wrong, such as the incident described above. 

Given that it was their corporate identity that was infringed upon, I left that company to pursue this truck-spoofing issue with the authorities, but at that point I resolved to do a better job of capturing the details of what I see as I'm out there on the road.  Much of the time, I now travel with my DSLR right in my lap.   I can't take my eyes off the road, but I can raise the camera up much the same as I would lift up a can of soda, and I can just start taking pictures blindly when I see something interesting or dangerous.  If I simply take many, many pictures, one or two are bound to come out clearly. 

So let's focus on a phenomenon that I encountered yesterday afternoon.  This next series of photos shows one example of a disturbing trend I've noticed lately on the freeways: Truck drivers intentionally frightening motorists for sport. 

The usual disclaimers apply:  As with everything else I write on this blog, what I'm presenting here are my opinions as to what transpired in this event.  I saw things happening that involved me, and I interpreted those events within the context that made maximum sense to me.  I intentionally took pictures to document what I observed, but I'm not a police officer and no crime has been proven to have been committed here.  Other people might look at these same events and photos and reach different conclusions. 

The driver of this truck drew the focus of my attention because he literally and intentionally forced me out of my lane with his hyper-aggressive driving (in my opinion).  This is not the first time I have seen this occur.  What they do is "gun" their engines and run up behind you as if they were going to ram you.  At the last second, they slam on their brakes to avoid a collision, but even then, they often tailgate at absurdly close range. 

This is what I observed this trucker initially doing to me (I could not take pics of that part because he was behind me).  He forced me to take evasive action.  But after I had vacated this lane, I followed him, because I knew without question that he would proceed to inflict the same dangerous game upon another chosen motorist.

IH-45 SB inside Houston's Loop 610, 20130130 2:30 PM.

Where he had a bit of straightaway at his disposal, he was driving like a bat out of hell, so there was some lag time for me to catch up with him and his next chosen victim. 

Sure enough, he got onto the back of yet another unsuspecting target, in this case, a little passenger vehicle painted bright colors to represent a commercial company.  Do you see how severely he is tailgating that vehicle right in front of him?  In some moments, I saw that there was barely a car length between them, with both traveling at 65 mph.

IH-45 SB near the Wayside exit, obviously.

Here's another shot as we were approaching the South Loop.  Now you can get a clearer peek at the car in front of him that he had targeted (in my opinion).  Do you see how his brake lights are illuminated here?  That's because he was in the process of feigning the ramming of that little commercial vehicle (in my opinion).

Close-up screengrab from the photo above.  Don't simply accept my opinion.  See the lack of separation between these two vehicles.  See these other vehicles in the same field of view with appropriate high-speed separation among them.  See the brake lights illuminated on the truck.  Draw your own conclusions about what was going on here. 

Finally the little commercial vehicle in front of him had had enough, and he gunned his own engine to put space between the two of them, jumping into my lane to evade this trucker, the very same evasive manoeuvre that I myself had been forced to take only minutes before. 

Minutes before I fell back to his flank and took this photo series, that is.  This is just so incredibly wrong.  We should not be forced to take flee like this for no reason other than we just happen to have been a random sport target for some sonofabitch trucker (as I interpret it).   

As I was watching this whole spectacle unfold, I wondered what in the hell could motivate any trucker to risk his life, risk other innocent drivers' lives, and risk his own livelihood for the sake of this dangerous entertainment (as I personally interpret it). 

It wasn't until I got home and examined these photos blindly taken that I began to formulate a theory.  This guy is from Laredo (a fact I did not realize at the time because I was watching the road, not my camera).  Even if someone were to report his dangerous driving to the authorities, by the time word gets out, he's probably long gone from our freeways.  I'm wondering if he's thinking he's simply unaccountable, above the law, when he's having fun at our collective expense way up here in good ol' Houston, Texas. 

But guess what, Jorge?  You, too, live in the Information Age.  The good people of this world may not be able to pin any specific incident such as this on you, but sooner or later, you will get your just deserts. 

And now I will do what I have done at previous times:  I will take this material and forward it to the law enforcement agencies that might have an interest in it.  Occasionally in the past, very interesting developments have occurred after I have done that kind of thing. But I won't go into those details here.