18 Comment

• SBV June 30, 2015 at 10:03 am

  sinkhole is 20 ft by 30 ft, not 300 ft!
• monstermash June 30, 2015 at 10:12 am

  Thank goodness the media is pushing this anti-symbolism movement, or who else would? We need something to take our mind off campaign finance reform, taxes, healthcare, veterans, borders, pretty much anything else….
• Swamplot June 30, 2015 at 10:13 am

  @SBV: Yikes! Thanks for catching that. It’s fixed now.
• Dana-X June 30, 2015 at 10:46 am

  Nice to hear of the apartment complex being built on Wayside across from Gus Wortham. It’s not gonna be high-end apparently but it will be taking a step up from what’s over there now and is a harbinger of things to come.
• Mr.Clean19 June 30, 2015 at 12:03 pm

  TOP is a bunch of idiots. If they want to battle economic segregation so bad, why are they fighting market rate homes in the 5th ward? “We want affordable homes next to expensive ones but we don’t want expensive homes next to affordable ones.”
• BiasedMuch? June 30, 2015 at 12:04 pm

  Pic of pro-gay gathering with no accompanying story. A link to a silly fearmongering editorial claiming the World will end in 2040 due to global warming. Hmmmmm
• Rex June 30, 2015 at 12:44 pm

  Symbols are just objects until we give them power. Best way to give a negative object power? Repeatedly talk about how bad it is.
• MarkH June 30, 2015 at 2:03 pm

  BHP employees react to Post Oak bus lanes – 43.7% said they would ride the bus…..thats 52 people out of 119 that responded….BHP has 3000 people… evidently the other 2,881 people did not think enough of the bus lane to even respond! Typical Metro study….
• MrEction June 30, 2015 at 2:23 pm

  Wow, really neat to hear about the new apartment complex over there. Those apartment complexes by the Fiesta have been fairly blighted for a while. Nice to see someone doing some rebuilding!
• Memebag June 30, 2015 at 3:00 pm

  Re “anti-symbolism movement”: I don’t think any of this is motivated by people objecting to symbolism itself. I’m pretty sure people are objecting to the celebration of racists and racism, and the symbols are seen to be part of that.
  .
  Anyone here every visit the Fort Bend County Museum? Apparently slavery wasn’t so bad, and white people did a pretty darn good job of running the county once they got rid of the scalawags and carpet-baggers.
• MrEction June 30, 2015 at 4:27 pm

  Also for the confederate stuff, I think its seriously worth remembering that Sam Houston, the man our city was named after, thought the Confederacy was treasonous and basically ended his political career when we joined.
• Cody June 30, 2015 at 4:43 pm

  All those things you are concerned about are code words for someone that wants income inequality and hates brown people.
  .
  Why are you such a racist?
• Txcon July 1, 2015 at 12:07 am

  Environmentalists have told us that by the year 2000 everyone outside of North America and Australia would be starving. Now one of our greatest problems is obesity, not malnourishment. An article in Time Magazine in 1975 warned of an impending Ice Age, caused by man and that by 1985 air pollution would reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth by half. We know what happened there. Sen Gaylord Nelson in sponsoring the first Earth Day said that by 1995 80% of animal species on earth would be extinct. Those “mass extinctions” refer to remote islands, where 90% of extinctions have taken place. Nobel laureate Al Gore predicted the Arctic would no longer have sea ice by 2013. In 2013, Arctic sea ice covered 50% more surface area than in 2012. Now it’s food riots in 2040?

  Can anyone think of a time when one of these environmental alarmist predictions were right?
• bemocked July 1, 2015 at 7:32 am

  …as a BHP employee at the Post Oak office, all I can say is, “umm….what survey?”? Asked several co-workers, and no one else here was aware of an survey on their commute? I wonder how big the sample size was, or how they selected who to survey.

  If I had known about the survey I would have been the 53rd “yes”
• luciaphile July 1, 2015 at 9:39 am

  Txcon, that summer sea ice data, I do not think it means what you think it means:

  http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/4098/20130921/arctic-sea-ice-extent-doubles-last-year-still-6th-lowest.htm

  http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/09/more-ice-than-last-year-is-still-bad-news-for-the-arctic/

  Less less, is not more.
• BiasedMuch? July 1, 2015 at 12:12 pm

  Propagandists will spread propaganda…
• Txcon July 1, 2015 at 5:53 pm

  @Luciaphile

  Thanks for the link, but even 50% more area covered by thinner and slushy ice is not “no ice in five years.” Which was the claim. Again, I am requesting an example of an alarmist prediction that proved true.
• luciaphile July 2, 2015 at 10:23 am

  Txcon, I’m not the one to point you to that because I don’t believe in soothsayers, the reading of entrails, etc. I don’t believe it’s possible to predict the future (outside of sophisticated statistical prediction of something unimportant like a presidential contest, say).
  The enthusiasm leading up to Earth Day directly led to so much excellent work cleaning up our air and water during the Nixon administration that Gaylord Nelson’s overreach seems a matter of pretty total indifference. Maybe he wanted every day to be Earth Day.
  Prognosticating was really fashionable in the late 20th century, kicked off by the Ehrlich-Simon bet, I guess. It should never have carried so much weight. Five metals, ten years, Simon wins handily. Five metals, twenty years, Ehrlich wins, but it’s no more meaningful. I actually don’t understand what either of them thought their positions in the bet signified.
  However, anti-alarmists have had a go at prediction quite as often as alarmists. Some people might say their assertions are no less wild, and constructed to be untestable:
  Simon: “We now have in our hands – in our libraries really – the technology to feed, clothe and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years.”
  Up or down – for audacity, that kind of blows Al Gore’s miss on the summer sea-ice out of the water, especially when you consider that climate scientists do expect summer sea-ice to disappear this century … with the most hopeful scenario dependent on a policy course advocated by – that’s right, the alarmists. “Hoping to be proved wrong” by influencing events is not really a bad thing.
  Simon contended that resources were infinite, as they came “from our minds”. I wish my mind would feed me a grilled cheese sandwich once in awhile, or put some Eagle Ford shale in my backyard.
  The anti-alarmists were the crowd that predicted nuclear power would make electricity “too cheap to meter.” That hadn’t happened last time I checked my energy bill, despite my municipal utility’s having bet significantly on nukes at one time.
  I think the difference between alarmists and anti-alarmists is huge, but in one sense, they are only worried about different things.
  The alarmists worry about such things as the Sixth Extinction that we are said to be undergoing now. (We’re fortunate in that we’ll never know how it turns out: a predicted 20-50% species loss by century’s end.) I think, without meaning to be snide, simply from what I’ve read, that it’s safe to say the anti-alarmists do not care if this is true or even half-right. To them there is an utter equivalence between a vast variety of bird species, and a billion pigeons: so extinctions don’t matter. I leave it to you to judge how scientific that sort of talk is.
  I would have said that the anti-alarmists’ worries were a reaction, once, to big government, state coercion perhaps. Can’t say I blame them. (Though I can’t, just can’t, ignore the irony that private enterprise wouldn’t touch nuclear power without the unique blanket protections provided by a very big government, and didn’t exactly jump on it even then.) But the argument over the size and role of government is completely moot now, and we all know how it turned out; we are a thoroughly subject, compliant people. And environmentalists, not being populists, were decidedly not among the winners.