Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Lessons from a Dallas Deck Park

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Quality urban renewal takes a lot of commitment from multiple people and organizations. It cannot be all governmental, or it will fail to live up to potential due to suffocation in layers of red tape. You know the drill: shortfall-budgeted, bureaucratized, top-down, one-size-fits-all, rules-driven rigidity, unimaginative design, CYA decision making, and poor-quality, lowest-bidder contract work. That’s a recipe for disuse, decay and crime. Yet it can’t be all private, or it will lack transparency, public accountability and maybe even public access.

Dallas offers a success story most would have deemed highly unlikely beforehand: an urban park built over a freeway, doubted by many in city government itself, opposed by the adjoining major art museum that’s now awash in revenue from it, named after a living child. The park was conceived by highly regarded architects, urban planners, engineers and designers mainly hired through a nonprofit foundation, and molded conceptually by visits to renowned spaces in several other cities.

It was and is funded by a wide mix of wealthy private donors, venture capital, big-corporate gifts, city, state, and federal sources, all shrewdly solicited by talented business people and dealmakers devoted to applying those skills to civic service. All of the above had to set their egos aside and make compromises, which ain’t easy when great gobs of money are at stake. It sounds complicated, daring, and risky to pull off, absolutely needing bold visionaries with dogged determination to make it happen. It was all of those things — and that’s what it takes.

I’ve been to Klyde Warren Park several times now, and it’s both a relaxing and exciting hangout: a large, surprisingly roomy and open deck park bridging Uptown and Downtown in ways even the “pie in the sky” dreamers and early promoters didn’t imagine. One sees restaurants with open-air seating, street-food trucks, pavilions, trees, gardens, sunny and shaded areas, executives in Armani suits, moms strolling babies, children at play, teen lovers, yuppie residents of all the new condos nearby, buskers, tour buses, film crews, blue-collar workers from nearby taking breaks, the occasional celebrity sighting, some event or another (concerts, weddings, festivals, small fairs) almost daily, a lot of people without feeling crowded, unrestricted access from either side, and enough police presence to notice and keep it fairly safe, without being obtrusive.

That combination is not common in this country. It also hosted a huge total-eclipse party in April 2024; a lot of the awestruck, cheerful roar I heard through the urban canyons emanated from that direction within seconds after the moon blackened the sun’s space in the sky.

Massive residential, office and arts developments have sprouted around the park to the tune of over $1 billion in value, with cranes rising continually in the line of sight, and the surrounding tax base growing. Several cities look to it for inspiration for their own forthcoming projects. Best of all, access is free to the public, with a million visitors a year.

For all the problems Dallas has had the last 20 years or so on several other civic fronts, bogged down in red tape, interdepartmental and governance disputes, study after study sans tangible action, that deck park is a spectacular success. The city has just opened another over I-35E in Oak Cliff, near the zoo, with more on the way. Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster won a 2026 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for his outstanding story on how it all came about.

Excerpt:
“That philosophy of programmatic excess defines the park and makes it, aesthetically, something of an upended toy box, with its diverse goodies strewn about. There is little relationship, for example, between the park’s allée of mini-arches with Japanese-style lanterns and the cool minimalism of Phifer’s performance and restaurant pavilions. The park surely subscribes to the mantra of architect Morris Lapidus, champion of Miami Beach modernism: ‘Too much is never enough.'”

Norman “Stormwater” Utility: An Unpublished Letter

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BACKGROUND

A Norman Transcript article appeared early this summer, ostensibly as news, but in reality thinly disguised advocacy for a utility for “stormwater” (should be two words: storm water, hyphenated when used as a modifier). This came on the heels of two wise and proper election defeats of the idea in the past decade, as I wrote a letter to the editor.

My letter qualified for publication on every stated check box. It was cleanly and creatively composed, free of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and usage errors, contained no personal attacks, and tallied a volume well under the word-count limit. Despite that, the editor of the Transcript ignored the letter, yet published several others favoring water-rate increases of other types not directly tied to storm water.

Clearly my offering struck a nerve. Choosing not to publish well-written dissent places the paper in firm editorial-control grip of those who favor more bureaucracy, higher taxes, and anti-rural agendas.

Fortunately, we live in an age when we need not depend on mass media to get word out, and anyone can publish online as he or she sees fit, with equal access worldwide as a corporate newspaper gets. In that spirit, here was the verbatim text of my letter to the editor:

———————–
LETTER to the EDITOR

Regardless of any oversimplified portrayals one hears, the storm-water utility’s electoral failures here largely have revolved around two issues:

1. Inequity and misleading nature of the tax proposed to finance it. It’s called a “fee” for the sake of utility bills, but that’s playing a semantics game that voters here see right through. It is a de facto tax. Residents of rural wards comprised a major part of rejection in these votes. This is because the proposed tax was applied identically to rural as well as urban parts of Norman, even though storm-water hydrology in each is far from identical. The tax was thoughtlessly based on the absolute amount (rather than percentage) of impermeable cover on a lot. Hence the rural inequity: adjacent acreage and uncovered land are much larger for the same raw amount of rural impermeable cover, and rural houses and driveways will drain into dirt or ponds more than will urban apartments, businesses and houses.

2. Making it a separate utility (bureaucracy) from the water department. Although it’s “done elsewhere,” that’s a follow-the-lemmings rationale, not a reasoned one. It makes no sense because this is a water problem. Keep it in a slightly expanded yet streamlined water department with one set of overlords and staff instead of two, one computer system instead of two, one itemized bill, etc., not a separate utility, and it would stand a better chance of being approved.

Normanites mostly aren’t opposed to storm-water remediation. Want a path to passing? It needs to be done in a manner consistent with urban/rural equitability (most of Norman’s drained land area is rural!) and streamlined, efficient governance.

A Bucket of Hot Diarrhea and the Downfall of American Supremacy

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Earlier this month, just one in a roaring wave of mostly unpublicized urban crimes occurred in Los Angeles: a homeless man flung a bucketful of hot diarrhea on an innocent woman near the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Why was he free to do so? Why isn’t someone that deranged either in jail, or in a straitjacket in a rubber room, instead of out on the streets menacing and harming innocents?

Perhaps the better question is, why didn’t this, nor a resurgence of sanitation-related diseases like typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis, happen in Cody, WY, McPherson, KS, Huntsville, AL, Kearney, NE, Lewiston, MT, Kanab, UT, Twin Falls, ID, Tyler, TX, or Clarinda, IA? Why a California big city?

Why were and are housing costs (and therefore homelessness populations) overwhelmingly highest in Democrat-dominant cities? A low-housing-cost lefty city (Detroit) is that way after having been socioeconomically blasted back into a dystopian Stone Age state by decades of corrupt Democrat rule, and still hosts high poverty and high crime, regardless.

Why are six of the seven most unaffordable home-ownership cities located in California? Why are homeless populations skyrocketing in Democrat-controlled San Francisco, nearby Oakland, and not-nearby Los Angeles County?

According to Investopedia, the top ten costliest cities in the U.S. overall are: 

1. New York City, New York
2. San Francisco, California
3. Honolulu, Hawaii
4. Boston, Massachusetts
5. Washington, D.C.
6. Oakland, California
7. San Jose, California
8. San Diego, California
9. Los Angeles, California
10. Miami, Florida

Eight of the ten are under Democrat “leadership” (looking up registered party affiliations of mayor and city-council majority). Coincidence? Even more than the presence of cities, their density is a critical correlation to voting patterns: the densest cities vote the bluest, regardless of what state they’re in. Naturally they have the highest housing and other costs.

I have lots more bookmarks and could put up a thousand more hyperlinks to support my statements, but time is short this morning. Instead, research for yourself the socioeconomic policies put in effect over the past couple decades in California in particular, including those related to leniency on crime and illegal immigration, as well as problems with jobs, housing, and (lack of) child-friendly social values, then continue reading.

Thanks to a combination of cultural Marxism and Utopian social policies, supported by the very same “tolerant” rich leftists who have driven housing prices through the roof. They hypocritically demand that taxpayers solve homelessness by sacrificing more of their paychecks, while failing to take tangible personal steps themselves, such as paying directly for homeless housing, or most directly, hosting homeless people in their own residences. Hollywood in particular is the worst at this, with their giant mansions, gated communities, security systems, and other mini “Trump walls” to keep out the undesirables, (and here’s the key!) while demanding others pay for solving poverty and homelessness.

Meanwhile, California’s bigger cities are devolving precipitously into third-world cesspools of rancid physical, mental and moral filth. Churches are trying to help; however, not enough (nor wealthy enough) church membership exists in such increasingly secular, God-denying locales, to cover it all at more than fingers-in-leaky-dam levels.

So the solutions advocated by the political majority invariably involve forcing others (always others, isn’t it?) to pay more and more taxes, to rob money from the people through governmental coercion, then watch much of it disappear into the dank catacombs of administrative bureaucracy, and a fraction go back to the streets, where direct charity could have helped far more efficiently and focally. Of course, irrefutable arithmetic holds that every dollar lost to taxes is a dollar less that can be donated to charity and church. [Perhaps that’s by design.]

All the while homelessness and poverty and decrepitude keep growing alongside taxes. That’s nuts.

Such overt rot, in times of national economic prosperity (with the Dow and S&P-500 at or near all-time highs), is unprecedented in American history (as opposed to, say, truly awful economies like the Great Depression, or Civil War and the pre-Reconstruction South). Diseases previously thought eradicated have reappeared. Hygiene, sanitation and filth along many L.A., Oakland and S.F. streets is worse than the most turbid dregs of unkempt, big-city bus-station restrooms in decades of yore.

These policies appear misguided, unhinged, deranged, delusional and/or anarchic to most rational, traditional folk of sturdy, Middle American sensibility. Yet, don’t think for a second they aren’t by design. While still often unspoken by its purveyors, the pathological agenda behind this phenomenon is purposeful and straightforward: dependency on the state. That’s it. Make people wards of the state (the poorer and more dependent, the better), and pack them closer together, and you have them under tighter control. “Government will rescue you!”

Meanwhile, the Alinsky-ite lemmings (many of whom are too young to realize that’s exactly what they are, others old enough but not sufficiently well-read) blame it on “income inequality”. This is to justify policies leading to governmental confiscation of wealth and weapons, and erosion of other Constitutional freedoms from those not directly impacted, all under the diabolical guise of false “compassion” or weaponized “empathy”. [Even the sacrilegious ignoramuses known as “Christian left” are guilty and complicit…after all, show me where Jesus commanded us to “love” thy neighbor by means of governmental gunpoint.] Ultimately, through gun confiscation and economic coercion, all other citizens are rendered wards of the state as well.

Leftism tells a great lie: “We want to end poverty”. No, it’s precisely the opposite! The left’s mostly unstated yet obvious goal here is not to eliminate poverty and desperation for solutions to these woes, but to grow them, while crowding people into denser cities. Yes, the left’s objectives are to magnify social disorder and decay, to scales useful and necessary, in order to justify their means to an end. This includes the indoctrination of children into the ideology through collectivism-friendly school curricula—in our case gradual, due to the nation’s sheer size, cultural inertia, and the extreme difficulty of physical revolution, but in other nations’ cases instantaneously, in years and decades following either “democratic” election of collectivist despots (e.g., Venezuela), or overt regime overthrow (e.g., USSR).

Bollocks, you say? Study history. Fundamentally, this is nothing new. Every totalitarian regime of the past 100 years—no exception—became that way by leveraging the very same concepts, adapted mass-manipulatively to the national culture and social apparatuses of the time, ultimately undermining the antecedent governmental structure and imposing tyranny for “the greater good”. Some took decades, others just a few years, depending. That’s how they succeeded in destroying nations.

Are we on that path, as it so strongly appears? Is this undermining of American cultural, military and ideological supremacy, and (if successful) inevitable erosion of our world leadership to a feeble nub at best, the reason nothing quite resembling the U.S. is found readily in the prophecies of Revelation?  Could it be that America as a nation, and force for positive world influence, will have been spayed and neutered from within by that time, perhaps even absorbed into a larger, more hideous entity?  I recently told someone, “I’m starting to wonder”, but that’s literally not true. I’ve been wondering this since my early twenties, and my conversion back out of Godless and leftist thought. I would be so happy to be proved wrong; instead, the evidence is mounting, all around.

What you are seeing merely are baby steps in the larger process, with some of the objectives already becoming crossed off the neo-Marxist checklist to achieve the ultimate goal: total state control of the populace, and the eradication of individual liberty.

It’s really that simple…and that transparent. Yet it is the “woke” who are most deeply comatose to this reality, outside the subset who damn well know what they’re doing, and why.