Category Archives: Transhuman News

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul announced Thursday hes backing Republican Don Huffines in his campaign to unseat Gov. Greg Abbott in a GOP primary next spring.

The Kentucky Senator, who grew up in Lake Jackson and attended Baylor University, said hes known Huffines, a Dallas developer, for more than 20 years.

He is a loyal, steadfast fighter for limited, constitutional government, Paul said. He has been in the thick of every conservative fight since I have known him. He is unafraid to stand up to the establishment. He is someone who will defend our freedoms.

The endorsement gives Huffines, a former state senator, backing from a leader in libertarian-conservative circles, and it aligns him with one of the most vocal critics of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the nations handling of COVID-19. Huffines has built a key part of his campaign around being critical of Abbotts mask mandate last summer and other executive orders he released during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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When Abbott had the chance to protect the freedoms of all Texans, he instead sided with power-hungry, pro-lockdown politicians in Washington, Huffines said. Abbotts lockdowns killed more than 3 million Texas jobs in one week.

Huffines is one of two high profile Republicans who have announced they are challenging Abbott in a primary next year when Abbott will be seeking a third four-year term as governor. Earlier this month, former Florida Congressman Allen West announced he too is running for the Republican nomination for governor.

Abbott has never faced a major primary challenger in his previous two campaigns for governor. Campaign finance reports show Abbott has more than $55 million ready for the 2022 election cycle.

Paul is the son of former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, who became a leader in the Tea Party movement and has run for president both with the Libertarian Party and the Republican Party.

jeremy.wallace@chron.com

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Sen. Rand Paul wades into Texas governor's race against Gov. Abbott - Houston Chronicle

Parents across the country are fighting to stop government schools from indoctrinating their children with Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory is a form of Marxism that focuses on the oppression of racial minorities. Central to Critical Race Theory is the belief that free markets are a tool of racial oppression that must be abolished and replaced with socialism.

This is dangerous nonsense. History shows that governments, not free markets, are and always have been the instruments of racial oppression. For example, legislators passed Jim Crow laws because private businesses refused to voluntarily segregate their customers.

Numerous scholars have documented how the welfare state and the war on drugs, as well as minimum wage laws, occupational licensing laws, and other anti-liberty laws, disproportionately harm minorities. Some of these laws were passed with the explicit goal of protecting white workers from competition with minorities.

Public outrage over teaching children that the only way to overcome racism is to sacrifice liberty helped build efforts to pass laws banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory. Some of these efforts are accompanied by advancing mandates that schools promote a positive or patriotic view of America. This can replace one form of indoctrination with another.

A patriotic curriculum could teach children that the change from a constitutional republic to a welfare-warfare state was a victory for liberty. It could also teach that the American government is morally justified in, and capable of, managing the economy at home and spreading democracy abroad. It could teach children lies like capitalism caused the Great Depression.

Instead of arguing over what form of statism government schools should indoctrinate children in, liberty activists should work to replace government control of education with parental control.

The key to this is to restore parental control of education dollars though education tax credits and tax-free education savings accounts. This can enable parents to afford to ed-exit from government schools by sending their children to private schools. It can also help parents afford the costs associated with homeschooling. Increased charitable deductions can help fund private education for low-income families. Tax credits can be implementing without increasing the deficit by tying them to legislation closing the Department of Education.

Homeschooling is an increasingly attractive option for many parents. Parents interested in providing their children with a quality education should consider my homeschooling curriculum. The Ron Paul Curriculum provides students with a well-rounded education that includes rigorous programs in history, mathematics, and the physical and natural sciences. The curriculum also provides instruction in personal finance. Students can develop superior communication skills via intensive writing and public speaking courses. Another feature of my curriculum is that it provides students the opportunity to create and run their own businesses.

The government and history sections of the curriculum emphasize Austrian economics, libertarian political theory, and the history of liberty. However, unlike government schools, my curriculum never puts ideological indoctrination ahead of education.

Interactive forums ensure students are engaged in their education and that they have the opportunity to interact with their peers outside of a formal setting.

I encourage all parents looking at alternatives to government schools alternatives that provide children with a well-rounded education that introduces them to the history and ideas of liberty without sacrificing education for indoctrination to go to RonPaulCurriculum.com for more information about my homeschooling program.

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

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Ron Paul: 'Ed-Exit' To Protect Your Kids From Critical Race Theory OpEd - Eurasia Review

Director Richard Linklater kicked off the thirtieth-anniversary screening of his debut, Slacker, by welcoming members of the films cast and crew to join him on the Paramount Theatre stage on July 13. There were a lot of them37 in all, taking turns recounting how theyd become part of Austin and indie film history, way back in the summer of 1989, when production began. But their circle extended into the sold-out crowd, too. It encompassed the many friends there who hadnt actually made it into Slacker, but had lived the lifestyle that the film nowpreserves as a kind of historical curio. And in many ways, that group included everyone else who moved to the city in the films wake, drawn by its dream of gloriously squandered youth.

Just as he did at Slackers tenth anniversary in 2001, Linklater likened the occasion to a high school reunion where you actually want to see everybody. (The recycled line still got a laugh.) And as with any reunion, nostalgia soon mingled with talk of the dead. Not just among the cast, although a post-film In Memoriam confirmed several more had passed since even the last anniversary. As is so often the case, celebrating Slacker also offered the occasion to mourn Austin itself. You make a film, it exists, and youve gotta deal with it the rest of your life, as Linklater told the Paramount audience. Thats true of Austin, too. Austin made Slacker, and its had to cope with it ever sincewatching as the zeitgeist swell it created overtook the city, then spending three decades grieving what was lost, forever looking back.

Most of the casts stories revolved around long-gone institutionsprimarily the coffee shops Les Amis and Captain Quackenbushs Intergalactic Dessert Company and Espresso Caf on the Drag, where Slackers overeducated, underemployed characters hold forth on Dostoyevsky and the subtext of Scooby-Doo over endless coffee and cigarettes. Theyre also where Linklater and his filmmaking partner Lee Daniel found much of the films on-screen talent, drawn from the actual baristas and waitstaff. The Paramount crowd gave mournful awwws at these stories, as it did whenever one of these landmarks appeared onscreen. We grieved loudly for things we didnt even realize we missed until we saw them againlike the original, ugly facade of the Castilian dorm, or the old blue faithful that was Roys Taxi. If youve lived in Austin for more than a decade or so, youve become conditioned to this wistful feeling, forever playing the game of that used to be... on newly disorienting streets.

Of course, even more than cheap rents or greasy diners, people just miss being young. Slackers cast captured an entire generation of Austin scenesters in their prime, when they had all the time in the world to waste on being happy. One by one, the cast talked about finding their kindred spirits Xeroxing show flyers at Kinkos, or bonding over late-night breakfasts at Magnolia Cafe, or attending marathon Andrei Tarkovsky retrospectives. These are the kinds of things that only happen in your twenties, when you have no real reason to get up early, and you can stay up talking about books and movies and music forever. Its only natural to get a little melancholy about that.

But theres a more philosophical bent to this lamenting, tooone that has to do with Austins lost spirit, or soul. Its something Austin has been doing since before Slacker was even born. Austinites carry a default attitude of You just missed itas in, all the really cool stuff already happened. As Linklater pointed out in his post-show Q&A, thats something he and his friends heard back in the eighties from all the hippie cowboys whod seen the citys true heyday in the sixties and seventies. Linklater pointed to the Slacker scene where local noise rockers Ed Hall played their song Sedrick to a near-empty Continental Club. Its lyrics, Linklater said, perfectly sum up the Austin point of view: Things were so much better before you were here /...So much better in the past / I had myself a real gas.

Slacker comments wryly on this sentiment, revealing it as myopic and defeatist. But almost immediately after its release, the film became an emblem of it, too. To many, Slacker captures a time and place when Austin really was betteror, at least, way less of a hassle. The films very existence provides evidence of the kind of looser, freer city Austin used to be, when Linklater and his crew could just take over the streets and sidewalks of West Campus, sans permits, without worry of being bothered. The only location fee theyd ever paid, Linklater said, was the twenty bucks he grudgingly offered to a guy whose property abutted the spot where theyd hurled a typewriter off the East MLK bridge. The police got involved exactly once, pulling over a car fitted with loudspeakers seen near Slackers endthe one driven by a guy ranting about bloody carnage through quiet residential streets. The crew told the cops they were making a movie, Linklater said, and they just let them go.

If you live in Austin, its impossible to hear those stories and not mourn the city a little. Maybe you even feel a little culpable for your own hand in ruining it. Speaking personally, Ive felt low-grade guilty about it since I arrived here in 1997. I was another Gen-X clich who contributed to the citys transformation into a frayed nerve center for everyone with vague ambitions toward making artor at least, not doing any real work. Id encountered Slacker during my first year of college, a time I spent slouching around my local coffee shop in Arlington before briefly bouncing up to Boston. The film offered a vision of that intellectual bohemian lifestyle Id been dimly pursuing: I also wanted to be in a band, or make movies, or maybe join some kind of anarchist art collective. Mostly, I wanted to sit around with my friends, smoking and overthinking eighties cartoons and peeling the labels off of Budweisers while we waited for something to happen. I could do all that in Austin, without paying big-city rent and never living more than a three-hour slink back to my hometown? It was a revelation.

The thing you choose not to do fractions off and becomes its own reality, you know, and just goes on forever, Linklater himself says in Slackers opening scene. His character (credited only as Should Have Stayed at Bus Station) is monologuing to a taxi driver about an imaginary book hes just read inside a particularly vivid dream. But really, hes talking about Austin. Slacker presents the city as a universe willed into existence by those who chose not to do anything. Its a liminal way station floating between the places where youre supposed to be, which means you can just do whatever you want. Throughout the film, characters express an overarching philosophy of refusal, valorizing idleness as the only truly noble way of life. Whos ever written the great work about the immense effort required not to create? asks one of its many coffee-shop sages, a line that lampshades the entire movie. In this passivity, I shall find freedom.

This inertia is sometimes framed as a political rebellion. Photos of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels peer over characters shoulders as they waste perfectly good afternoons asleep on the couch. In one of the films most memorable scenes, the late Waxahachie-born actor Charles Gunning plays an irascible hitchhiker who rages against the capitalist machine to a student documentary crew. I may live badly, but at least I dont have to work to do it! Gunning sneers, jabbing a finger into the camera thats aimed at every employee in the world: Every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death!

Later, Denise Montgomery plays a gregarious woman who offers passersby oblique strategies cards, one of which reads, Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy. This is reinforced during the swirling Super 8 montage that closes Slacker, when the camera pauses fleetingly on what may be the films Rosetta stone: a copy of Paul Goodmans subversive 1960 classic Growing Up Absurd. In it, Goodman argues that young Americans are increasingly disaffected and delinquent because society offers them nothing but meaningless, soul-draining jobs. The only way to be liberated from this cycle of exploitation and abuse, Slacker argues, is to simply opt out.

Theres a more cynical, fatalistic aspect to Slacker, too, one underscored by the films preoccupation with death and violence. Linklaters character steps out of his cab and immediately encounters an old woman (played by local punk rocker Jean Caffeine) lying in the street, having just been run over by a car. He and the other witnesses who approach her seem absurdly unconcerned. One guy starts flirting with a jogger over her body; another walks off with the groceries shes dropped. Throughout the film, death is reduced to an abstract or an entertaining anecdotea mass shooter on the freeway, a fatal stabbing inside a bar. These stories are met with silent nods of acceptance, or nothing at all. Slackers characters live in a world they know to be chaotic and cruel, where they could die at any moment. This risk is everywhere, so none of it feels particularly real or urgent. The persistent threat of mortality only deepens the characters resolve to ignore it.

Thirty years later, all those dark themes seemed to hit differently for those at the Paramount screeningeven the director. During the Q&A, Linklater explained that hed been ruminating at the time on the idea of secondary sources, on how everything we know or experience is always filtered through someone elses perception. Linklater also acknowledged the natural tendency to romanticize the extremes of violence and morbidity in your youth, when nothing much else is happening. I wouldnt have made it that way if I were a dad who cared about the future, he said.

In particular, Linklater added that he might not have kept one of the films most controversy-baiting moments, where the Old Anarchist, played by University of Texas philosophy professor Louis Mackey, fantasizes about pulling a Guy Fawkes at the Texas Capitol, then turns around and praises mass shooter Charles Whitman, of all people. Gazing toward the UT Tower where Whitman killed fourteen people and wounded dozens of others, Mackey proclaims the massacre as this towns finest houra line that provoked shocked laughter from the Paramount audience, commingled with groans. Mackeys bit about blowing up the Texas Legislature, meanwhile, garnered whoops and cheers. Both of these moments embody the kind of punkish, scorched-earth anger that most people tend to grow out ofas Linklater clearly didbut that still hangs around the margins of Slacker.

This is partly what made Slacker such a touchstone for Generation X. Id argue also that its why Slacker feels so distinctly Texan. There is a tendency to exclude Slacker from the canon of Texas films, likely because it feels so specific to Austin, a city often marginalized from Real Texas. But Slacker is part of a Texas cinematic lineageone that includes other uniquely Texas stories like The Last Picture Show and the movies of Eagle Pennellabout the restless people who mark time and make do here. Slacker draws on Texass turbulent history (it even pauses for a lengthy monologue from a JFK assassination buff) to underscore just how volatile and thin the veneer of civilization can seem down here. It prods at our innate suspicion of outsiders and authority, as captured in its characters paranoid rants about NASA plotting its globalist machinations just up the road in Houston. (Theres even a laugh-provoking cameo from a Ron Paul for President billboard.) Texans, perhaps more than anything else, are united by their dislike of others telling them what to do. And Id posit that youll find no Texas film that better expresses our mistrust of, and general apathy toward, the rest of the world.

This Texanness wasnt always so apparent to me as a kid, when I couldnt wait to escape to some artsy enclave on one of those pre-approved coastal cities. But seeing Slacker forever changed my perspective on my home state. There are plenty of restless dreamers and fringe thinkers here, all driven by the kind of optimism and stubbornness only Texas can produce. In his introduction to Linklaters Slacker companion book, author James L. Haley points out that Texas itself was settled by those who might be called slackers. The discontented, the rebellious, the in trouble, and the troubled came to Texas, Haley writes, and everyone from poets to politicians gravitated to Austin as a mecca for minding your own business. Or as Mackey puts it in the film, This town has always had its fair share of crazies. I wouldnt want to live anywhere else.

By the time I arrived in 97, the Austin of Slacker was rapidly fading, felled by an influx of the very hipsters it had inspired. I got here just in time to see Les Amis turned into a Starbucks and the general milieu of Slacker turned into a sitcom by MTVs Austin Stories. Over the years Ive watched that already-diminished Austin become increasingly paved over. The days of noble unemployment are long gone. The threat of violence that the film once toyed with as secondary, some exciting diversion in a vacuum, now seems far more real. And the philosophy of refusal and carefree rambling that Slacker propagated now seems so alien to a city that manages to turn everything into work. The slacker has been replaced by the hustler. Nobody here can afford to withdraw in disgust, unless youre ready to move out to Manor.

On a more optimistic note, however, that indolent creative class Slacker celebrates didnt have nearly as many avenues for finding personally meaningful work. Slackers characters might have railed against capitalism in theory, but a lot of them were still out to earn a buck. Maybe today, instead of hawking Madonnas pap smears, theyre doing graphic design for some boutique marketing agency, or trying to monetize their TikToks. Granted, they arent spending all day in a coffee shop, unless its hunched over a MacBook. Its doubtful theyre subsisting on beans and rice, unless its some $14 version with duck fat.

But beneath these bourgeois trappings, there is some tiny ember of the stubborn individualism thats always defined the city (and our state) burning within those who find themselves drawn here. Before the screening, the Austin Film Societys Holly Herrick read aloud an email from Louis Black, cofounder of the Austin Chronicle and South by Southwest (and Slackers Paranoid Paper Reader). Slacker, Black argued, is not some frozen time capsule. Its a blueprint for the future, showing us the timeless possibility of people who dedicate themselves to art and the pursuit of happiness above all else. We clapped, believingdefiantly, optimistically, without any real reason tothat this had to be true. Austin, like Texas, is a state of mind, one were perpetually chasing. We just missed it. But well keep trying.

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Thirty Years After Slacker, the Film Is an Austin Time CapsuleAnd a Hopeful Tribute to Its Spirit - Texas Monthly

WASHINGTON Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) joined Senate Republicans in a letter to President Biden urging him to abandon his effort to impose a capital gains tax increase on family-owned businesses, farms, and ranches. The proposal to repeal this section of the tax code could lead to job losses, liquidation or outright closure of multigenerational operations which support Americas robust agriculture industry.

The Senators wrote, Under current law, passing down a family business to the next generation does not impose a capital gains tax burden on the business or its new owners. Rather, the decedents tax basis in the business is stepped-up to fair market value, preventing a large capital gains tax bill on the growth in the businesss value.

These changes are a significant tax increase that would hit family-owned businesses, farms, and ranches hard, particularly in rural communities. These businesses consist largely of illiquid assets that will in many cases need to be sold or leveraged in order to pay the new tax burden. Making these changes could force business operators to sell property, lay off employees, or close their doors just to cover these new tax obligations. The complexity and administrative difficulty of tracking basis over multiple generations and of valuing assets that are not up for sale will lead to colossal implementation problems and could also lead to huge tax bills that do not accurately reflect any gains that might have accumulated over time.

As you will recall, a proposal to reach a similar outcome by requiring an heir to carry-over the decedents tax basis was tried before in 1976and failed so spectacularly it never came into effect. It was postponed in 1978 and repealed in 1980.

Sen. Cornyn signed the letter with U.S. Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Mitch McConnell (R-Ry.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), John Boozman (R-Ark), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio.), Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), Todd Young (R-Ind.), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), John Hoeven (R-N.D.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), John Kennedy (R-La.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), James Risch (R-Idaho), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).

Full text of the letter is here and below.

July 21, 2021

The Honorable Joseph BidenPresident of the United States1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NWWashington, D.C. 20510

Dear President Biden,

We appreciate your efforts to address Americas infrastructure challenges, but the cost of these investments should not be borne by family-owned businesses, farms, and ranches across the country. We are concerned that your American Families Plan proposes to make drastic changes to the taxation of capital income, including a longstanding tax provision that prevents family-owned businesses, farms, and ranches from being hit with a crippling tax bill when a family member passes away.

Under current law, passing down a family business to the next generation does not impose a capital gains tax burden on the business or its new owners. Rather, the decedents tax basis in the business is stepped-up to fair market value, preventing a large capital gains tax bill on the growth in the businesss value. If the functional benefit of the step-up in basis were eliminated and transfers subject to the estate tax also become subject to income tax, as you have proposed, many businesses would be forced to pay tax on appreciated gains, including simple inflation, from prior generations of family ownersdespite not receiving a penny of actual gain. These taxes would be added to any existing estate tax liability, creating a new backdoor death tax on Americans.

These changes are a significant tax increase that would hit family-owned businesses, farms, and ranches hard, particularly in rural communities. These businesses consist largely of illiquid assets that will in many cases need to be sold or leveraged in order to pay the new tax burden. Making these changes could force business operators to sell property, lay off employees, or close their doors just to cover these new tax obligations. The complexity and administrative difficulty of tracking basis over multiple generations and of valuing assets that are not up for sale will lead to colossal implementation problems and could also lead to huge tax bills that do not accurately reflect any gains that might have accumulated over time. As you will recall, a proposal to reach a similar outcome by requiring an heir to carry-over the decedents tax basis was tried before in 1976and failed so spectacularly it never came into effect. It was postponed in 1978 and repealed in 1980.

Further, the proposed protections simply delay the tax liabilityrather than provide any real tax relieffor those continuing to operate the business, farm, or ranch. In fact, these protections create new lock-in effects that could make any eventual changeover in operation or transfer of the business financially untenable. Imposing a tax increase on hardworking Americans would harm the economic recovery from COVID-19 and endanger American jobs. A recent study by E&Y found that eliminating the benefit of a step-up in basis would cost the U.S. economy 80,000 jobs each year over the next decadeand an additional 100,000 jobs per year in the long run. Additionally, for every $100 in revenue raised by this tax increase, $32 would come directly from the pockets of American workers. A study by the Texas A&M Agricultural and Food Policy Center reached equally unsettling conclusions, determining that 98 percent of the representative farms in its 30-state database would be impacted by a proposal to eliminate the benefit of the step-up in basis, with average additional tax liabilities totaling $726,104 per farm.

We respectfully urge you to reconsider your proposal to repeal this important part of the tax code. Preserving step-up in basis would save American jobs and ensure that small businesses, farms, and ranches across the country can stay in their families for generations to come.

Sincerely,

/s/

Originally posted here:
Cornyn Joins Letter Urging Biden Administration to Abandon the Tax-Hike Proposal on Farmers and Ranchers - Senator John Cornyn