There was a bit of flag waving in Houston this week. I much preferred this reporter’s patriotic, respectful rescue (and correct folding) to Trump’s gratuitous waving of the Texas flag. If Trump wants cheering crowds and a pep rally, he best go elsewhere. The folks in Houston are a bit busy right now.
Agreed. Houston is not coming back, though, I fear, no matter what flags fly over it. It’s a total mess.
It will come back, in one form or another, just as New Orleans did. But it certainly won’t be the same and it’s going to take a long time.
That avatar! Yikes! Oh well…
It is pretty bad, isn’t it? Sorry about that. It’s computer-generated since you don’t have one of your own. You can set one up at https://en.gravatar.com/site/signup using any picture you like.
There, that’s better. I changed to a different set of avatars.
Like most economically thriving large metropolitan Texas cities, Houston has benefited/suffered from too much concentrated construction of structures that prevent the natural absorption of rain water. Maybe this event will expose the folly of believing that retention ponds have any value beyond mitigating the damage caused by the immediate drainage of non-absorbing land during minor rains. The whole of Southeast Texas is one giant retention pond.
I live on several acres that are essentially pastures that absorb rain water. The rural unimproved property appraisals around here increase almost geometrically and I am convinced that the reason is to drive us out so that more taxes can be realized by subdividing and building suburban neighborhoods. In my opinion, government greed is ignorantly it’s own worst enemy.
Great to hear from you again. I was worried.
Yes, the developers want to buy up and build on everything they can get hold of, and areawide drainage be damned. They do it here too, developing and paving over land as fast as they can. When I bought this house, I was only about a mile from open country. Now it’s more like three or four miles.There are retention ponds everywhere, but heavy rains can fill them, the creeks, and low areas pretty fast. That said, overall our topography still favors drainage a lot more than yours does. We are, after all, a mile above sea level.
Sure, government is partly to blame with zoning laws and regulations (or lack thereof), but at the heart of it all is the profit motive. Anything to make a buck. Right now the concern here is homes being built near or over abandoned gas lines and wells. Nobody’s worrying about drainage when homes are blowing up.
In my view, government is entirely to blame unless you want to blame society for subordinating many of it’s custodial rights and responsibilities to the government.
Right now contractors are held blameless if they build structures that conform to government regulations. This is in spite of the fact that an ordinarily intelligent person can research data that conflicts with the logic behind those regulations. Then to compound the irresponsibility of building those approved structures, the same government rewards those irresponsible builders with funds to repeat the exact same mistake.
Government greed is akin to stock market greed… whatever brings short term profit is justified.
Imagine a Python crawling through a picket fence surrounding a pig pen. It then swallows a pig that is too large to pass through the pickets. Until the pig is completely digested, the snake is trapped. If there is a flood or fire or whatever, it’s doomed to suffer the consequences.
The kind of life cycle profit decisions that need to be made are the kind that real stake-holding custodians make. Nobody owns “Public” property and nobody has the ability to protect or preserve it. Just my view.
True, the short term profit motive seems to be what drives most industries. Otherwise, if they were willing to take the long view, we might have started doing something about global warming, renewable energy, health care, etc., a long time ago. Everybody want to “get theirs” as fast as possible and as much as possible.
Not so sure about “government greed” and how that works, since the government is (some of) us, more or less. Increasingly it’s an oligarchy, working primarily to further benefit big wealthy industries. So I don’t know if I’d call that government greed or just another arm of corporate greed.
Government could protect “public” property if it wanted to, but the current issue about reducing the size of some national monuments shows that government protection is only good until some industry decides it wants to exploit the land the land in question.
I dunno. I may be talking oranges while you were talking apples.
Interesting example of the construction thing in Denver recently. The city lowered its standards for condo/apartment construction so the builders would be less subject to lawsuits for shoddy construction and therefore would build more apts and condos, which are badly needed in this market. Prices/rents have gotten so high in Denver that people are literally ending up on the streets, but encouraging the construction of even shoddier buildings seems bass ackwards to me.
Old Glory is certainly treated with reverence; it’s almost as if it was a living being!
This is what we are taught at an early age. It’s a shame so many people disregard it.
Is that really so? The impression given to the world is that it is adored by every American living or dead.
I know that during times of unrest there are some that do burn the flag, but I’ve always thought that they were burning it not out of hatred for it but because they were protesting that the government was actually destroying all that it stood for,
Sad to say, it’s not that uncommon for it to be burned, stomped on, or flown upside down by demonstrators. Either from hate or disrespect, or both. Or sometimes, maybe, just to anger counterdemonstrators or onlookers.
Most people locally have a Texas flag waving outside.
Want to know what was nice? Not having political BS on TV blaring. What was not nice was the national anchors/media arriving and immediately start up with stupid comments like “how long will the good will and spirit of cooperating together even though there are great economic/racial differences and divides…” and more like that than you can imagine. Trying to stir up trouble so they can get a story. Not really interested in people’s misfortune or helping at all.
Want to thanks all the out of state police, firemen, first responders who have been down to help. And the crew from Wisconsin from JJ Watt’s home town who arrive and pitched in.
Sorry we’re busy down here. And Houston/Galveston areas are open for business. It’s a mess and there’s still water around, but we’ve reinvented the city before. (Rockport, Beaumont, and many small rural communities are getting little attention yet are in very bad shape)
Amazing how fast the media forgot Texas when Irma popped up. But like you, I don’t miss the political garbage at all. Of course, it would be nice to hear a little bit about the horrible earthquake in Mexico, or what’s happening in the Middle East, or if North Korea has shot at us yet. But that’s cable news these days. Not all news all the time but one story all the time.
Your last sentence should be tattooed on every cable news anchor’s head.
I doubt it would help. Money is the name of the game, and it’s a lot cheaper to cover one story than to spread your resources trying to cover twenty. That’s just my guess, of course.