Answering the News

Austin American Statesman Article: Giant Houses in Small Neighborhoods Giant houses in little neighborhoods is almost as bad as giant houses in giant neighborhoods.  And to successfully rationalize this trend as creating value to match what was paid for the lot the house sits on, takes ignoring a lot of realities. Forgetting the moral arguments where one compares house size to castle size, and how the average size new home talked about in the article is roughly five times the size of the average house in American in 1959.   Or how the waste of building materials to create something multiple times the size any family needs, and then the cost of heating and cooling something many times the size a family needs; or the confusion so many Americans have of the difference between ‘want’ and ‘need’; there is the simple equation that an expensive lot with a new house comparable to a neighborhood size standard will still be worth more than the investment.  Often, qui...

How Dirty Does It Have to Get Before You Realize You’re Partly to Blame It makes one wonder: all the people over the past fifty years, pointing to how dirty politics had become; have they any sense of awareness that the pure filth brought about by the political extremists today—most from the religious right, but many on the left, too—is a direct result of their failure to vote?  The feckless rancidity of Ted Cruz, the bellicose stupidities of Donald Trump, the seemingly benign hostilities of a Greg Abbott; can those who sit out democracy, opting with open arms instead for it’s mindless little brother, capitalism, still be unaware that the tarnishing of politics is greatly furthered each time they don’t vote, when they don’t demand better people running for office? This rolling Constitutional crisis is caused by the Silent Majority letting the Vocal Minority not just drive the dialogue, but elect our representatives.  Civility is not dead, it just went to the mall...