 House #1
A 20 room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house, all heated by gas.
In one month this residence consumes more energy than the average American household does in a year.
The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2400.
In natural gas alone, this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home.
This house is not situated in a Northern or Midwestern "snow belt" area. It's in the South.
House #2
Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university.
This house incorporates every "green" feature current home construction can provide.
The house is 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on an arid, high prairie in the American southwest.
A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat-pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer.
The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas and it consumes one-quarter electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system.
Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern.
Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house.
Surrounding flowers and shrubs native to the area enable the property to blend into the surrounding rural landscape.
HOUSE #1 is outside of Nashville, Tennessee; it is the abode of the "environmentalist" Al Gore. See:
http://www.tennesseepolicy.org/main/article.php?article_id=367
HOUSE #2 is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas; it is the residence the of the President of the United States, George W. Bush. See:
http://www.cowboysindians.com/articles/archives/1202/bush.html |
Hi Mike-o!
Long time. Good to hear from you. I lost touch with a lot of you guys when I lost my links and favorites (new computer). Glad you popped back in, though!
You bring up a good point--Gore does have a few mass genocides to his credit as Vice President of the United States under the Clinton Administration.
Alexander Tytler is credited with saying:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.
Truth to tell, it is we, the people who are to blame. We have voted the basest of society to rule over us, so what do we expect?
There are no reluctant leaders left, Mike-o, only opportunistic power-mongers.
Good to hear from you!
-Jack