culture war

Floods, fires, melting ice, heat waves and rainstorms are all touted in one article as proof of runaway global warming rather than eons-old common occurrences.

Another story tells us how British Columbia adopted California's "landmark greenhouse gas reduction law" and created "more than 20,000 new [taxpayer-funded, bureaucrat-run, politically-connected] clean-tech jobs."

And two others mentioned how the Senate scrapped a bill to curb carbon emissions "responsible for global warming" because of "opposition from Republicans and coal-state Democrats," proving that global warming is all about politics, not science.

Libertarian activism doesn't have to be over the top. You don't have to run for president, harangue a crowd, or splatter the internet with an endless stream of blogs and tweets and Facebook messages.

Libertarian activism can be simple and local and still effectively make its point.

That point is, and should always be, that people working together voluntarily will always outperform the coercion of governments.

When somebody else's Accordion Festival gets $25,000 in federal stimulus funds it's called a wasteful pork barrel boondoggle, but when it's $454,200 worth of government gravy for new lighting for a softball field in your own backyard that's entirely legitimate "need."

Some North Texans were upset when a John McCain/Tom Coburn report called it "wasting taxpayer dollars" to spend that kind of money to install new lights at Softball World, "The Crown Jewel of Adult Softball," in a city park in Euless.

(Editorial aside: isn't it a redundancy to say "corrupt government?")

The letters stand for "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch," meaning that, contrary to government-run collectivist socialist welfarist philosophy, neither people nor societies can get "something for nothing."

But if you can find a Panera nonprofit restaurant in your area you can eat for free, or for as much money as your conscience dictates.

A Dallas Morning News article was all agog about a USA Today article all agog about the city of Dallas building a deck over Woodall Rodgers freeway and turning it into a five-acre park.

So how did all this become a done deal (the park opens in 2012)? Follow the green: the money kind and the environmental kind.

First think of every politically correct sustainable environmental urbanism cliché you can and you have one answer.

Now think of every "public-private partnership" boondoggle you've ever heard of. This one gets $20 million from state and federal taxpayers and $16.7 million in Obama "stimulus" taxbucks.

Christopher Bridges, better known as rapper Ludacris, came to Dallas as part of a tax-funded $300 million "Luda on the Block Tour" to "change the perception of African Americans" about the 2010 Census.

Dallas/Ft. Worth's CBS TV Channel 11 announced  that Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) is facing a budget crisis, which means that future projects "could be pushed back."

Ironically, on the same day, March 24, 2010, the libertarian Cato Institute, told them why this is happening.

DART, which operates bus and rail service, claims they know why. A bad economy equals fewer jobs equals curtailed spending equals lower revenue from sales taxes.

Seems that over 75% of DART's income comes in from sales taxes collected from member cities, and "Sales tax revenue is millions of dollars less than expected."

"Census Bureau director kicks off national count" – Dallas Morning News, Monday, March 15, 2010

Got the official 2010 Census form in the mail today, right?

So grab a beer and let's get started.

Here are the basic rules.

If you're an Anarco-Capitalist Libertarian, toss it.

If you're a Conservative-Constitutionalist Libertarian, answer only question 1.

If you're none of the above, you have your work cut out for you.

The great Texas book battle is over for now.

The point of the battle, a periodic Texas Board of Education brawl fought along political lines, is to make Texas textbooks less liberally biased by making them more conservatively biased.

Libertarians will agree with some changes (Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek were added as champions of free-market economic theory) and reject some ("Other changes seem aimed at tamping down criticism of the right.")

(All quotes are from the New York Times article, Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change.)

On Sunday an off-duty sheriff's deputy shot and killed a man who burst into a Walmart during a gunfight with police in Commerce, Texas (60 miles northeast of Dallas).

What could be better for rabid gun-hating lefties than a shooting anywhere?

This is a Public Service Announcement.

A PSA, according to Wikipedia, is "an advertisement broadcast on radio or television for the public interest."

The "public interest" is whatever the government says it is.

This particular PSA is embedded in an article on a webpage for your personal interest.

Your "personal interest" is whatever you say it is.

The type of PSA we're most familiar with is typically created by incestuous public/private bedfellows consisting of a private ad agency that produces the ad pro bono (a Latin phrase that means, in this case, "in exchange for political favors") and is funded by a public government agency using tax dollars taken from citizens under threat of fine or imprisonment.

Ballot Proposition #4: Public Acknowledgement of God - The use of the word "God", prayers, and the Ten Commandments should be allowed at public gatherings and public educational institutions, as well as be permitted on government buildings and property. YES OR NO – Texas Legislative Update

Even though it only appears on the Texas Republican Party Primary ballot, non-binding Prop 4 is causing a stir all across the state, including the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.

Emails zapping back and forth through the webways amongst Libertarian and Libertarianish Meetup members in the Metroplex have been outdoing each other in pummeling Glenn Beck for dismissing Debra Median, the Ron Paulian Libertarian-tilting Republican candidate for Texas Governor, as a "911 Truther."

Medina appeared on Beck's radio show via local Dallas outlet 570 KLIF Talk Radio. When Beck asked her about the 911 Truth movement Medina replied that she wasn't taking a position on it, to which Beck responded through his chuckles, "People in America might think that might be a Yes."

Through poetic usage, a whited sepulchre is any person with similar duplicitous morals. In libertarian usage it refers to government.

Allen Patterson, a 48-year-old Ft. Worth resident who works as a shipping manager for a local manufacturing company, is a metaphorical tomb raider, breaking through the pretty exteriors of whited sepulchres to expose the rot within.