You do realize that the pasture analogy was used because that was the original analogy used by Grant Hardin in his Science article The Tragedy of the Commons which is where the term and concept originated, right?

Ownership of less bounded resources (open access resources) is trickier but at some level ownership of all resources within a polity are granted by the state. With all but the most hardcore minarchists or anarcho-capitalists, there is an assumption that one of the roles of the state is enforcement of contract, one of which is ownership of resources. Ownership without rule-of-law is somewhat meaningless - anyone more aggressive than the current owner will simply take what s/he wants. (Anarcho-capitalists would outsource enforcement of contract to non-governmental entities but it seems to me that would quickly devolve into something akin to government anyway.)

Most libertarians would look for a set of laws that put the minimal possible burden and maximal possible rights on ownership - not no burdens and infinite rights. Ironically, the objection you raise (airwaves) has moved strongly in a libertarian direction - frequency auctions with ownership rights. (Some more minarchist libertarians would argue that in a perfect world the original airwave frequency space would have been "homesteaded" by private individuals and then been subjected to property protections, but that ship sailed a long time ago.) The FCC has not been abolished but its scope has been trimmed. Some frequencies are owned by an industry (say WiFi) rather than by individual corporations but the concept is similar (the ownership of WiFi frequency is largely governed by physical location - my neighbor can't impinge on my use of those frequencies on my property by using a transmitter strong enough to overwhelm my router).

No, libertarians argue that the problem is conceptually hard not that it doesn't exist. Liberals generally feel the problem is fairly easy conceptually (just regulate it) but hard politically.

The problem is that there is no one simple answer (as the linked video acknowledges - straight from the mouth of libertarians). Some commons problems are amenable to privatization schemes (land and fisheries ownership - Ronald Coase did a lot of work on this idea) while others work more smoothly based on cooperative communities (Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for her work on this tactic). Both of these tactics are well respected in libertarian circles because they use locality to solve the knowledge problem.

Where it gets truly complicated is in open-access resources that don't lend themselves to either method (air and water being two common examples). In this area, there may be areas where regulation is necessary but it should try to be as locally and market focused as possible. Which is why libertarians have put a lot of thought behind ways to get pricing into those types of markets. Libertarians like Jonathan Adler have been advocating carbon taxes for years and the entire Summer 2013 issue of Cato's Regulations magazine features deeply researched and well argued cases for implementing carbon taxes and how best to price them for maximum gain at reasonable cost.

I think you are arguing against straw man libertarians rather than real ones.

Yup - libertarians don't think about this problem at all. Oh wait...

Uruguay and Argentina are "whiter" the the USA, while Costa Rica, Cuba and Chile are majority Caucasian descent. Brazil is just under 50% and Columbia and Venezuela have large Caucasian populations. Most of Latin America is still ruled by Spanish descendants and once you move into Mestizo (mixed Caucasian/native) you're talking about the vast majority of the population having "recent" Caucasian ancestry.

Libertarians (and libertarian Republicans) couldn't give a damn about English First or English Only. Look at the sponsors of H.R. 997 (English Language Unity Act) - Steve King, Louis Gohmert, Michelle Bachmann - the part of the party so looney they manage to embarrass other Republicans enough to be denounced by them fairly regularly.

In contrast, the National Vice Chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus, Eduardo Jesus Lopez-Reyes, is Spanish speaking, Puerto Rican born and of Guatemalan descent. (He's also a Mormon who lives in New Hampshire - the Venn intersection he's in is pretty damn small...).

Of course, we may get to test this theory if Puerto Rico ever becomes the 51st State. More likely than not, it would keep Spanish as the primary "state" language - and you'd probably get some movement at the federal level to make Spanish even more of an official auxiliary language.

Technically, a libertarian think tank.

Yeah, myOpenID is just an implementation of OpenID. That it was sort-of the first and most open version is the ironic bit - GNU MediaGoblin is mostly going to have to rely on closed implementations (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc.) of the standard to do the actual authenticating.

Ironically OpenID support is announced the same day that myOpenID announces it's shutting down.

(Yeah, I know, OpenID is all over these days, but it's still funny/sad.)

Hey, Blagojevich managed to kill at least one person - his aide, Chris Kelly.

And the list of Illinois Gubernatorial felons is deeper than two - Otto Kerner and Dan Walker went to the big house too. Big Jim Thompson was too smart to get caught and Jim Edgar was too nerdy. The joke around these parts is if you manage to avoid be sent to jail as Governor, they'll name a big building after you (Thompson Center, Ogilvie Center, Stratton Building). Heck, Stevenson had a highway and pretty much every third school in the state named after him... (of course, you have to go way back to the 50s to find someone that clean in Illinois politics)

The market hasn't failed - clean energy just isn't cheap enough yet. Economies don't switch energy sources to more expensive sources unless the government steps in. Petroleum finally took over from whale oil when it got cheaper/whale oil got more expensive - before that, who wanted to use dirty old petroleum that had to be expensively processed before becoming useful when you get just harpoon a whale and melt down its fat for immediately usable energy.

Natural gas is still projected to be less than half the cost of the most cost-effective solar plants in 2018. Even if you add the costs of a carbon capture system, the most cost effective solar is estimated to be 55% more expensive - five years from now.

Come now - it's far easier to run on water than walk on water. Heck, the basilisk can run on water. Jesus not only walked on water, but he just stood there too and helped pull another guy (Peter) out of the water when he started to sink. Granted, Peter did manage to walk on the water for a little while, so it's not just a Jesus thing...

How is that any different from the 11 US Senators (9 Democrats, 1 Independent Democrat and 1 Republican) who signed an anti-GMO salmon letter even though there is a wide scientific consensus built over 15 years that they are perfectly safe?

Politicians have all sorts of wacky ideas (or claim to have them due to having a wacky constituency, or because it actually helps them for an entirely different reason). I'm 100% sure that a number of the signatories of the anti-GMO salmon letter have no idea whether it's bad or not but don't want competition to their salmon fisheries so they use a convenient stick.

There's no such thing as a politician who is going to agree with you on everything. This kind of purity test is silly.

Please - they were just called Blue Dog Democrats. The Blue Dogs went from being a substantial part of the Democratic Party (54 members in 2009) to non-existent (14 members in 2012) in just the last few years. Anyone who actually follows American politics knows this. Hell, Bill Clinton was a New Democrat - another DINO group. The Democratic Leadership Council was yet another DINO group - the list of chairs of that organization reads like a Who's Who of formerly prominent Democrats who couldn't buy a leadership position in today's party (Joe Lieberman, anyone?).

If you don't belive me, look up Democrat in Name Only on Wikipedia, where all of those organizations are listed, directly or indirectly.

The Democrats have been about as effective purging their ranks of the center-right as the Republicans have.

SyFy has a Childhood's End series in development.

The question is, will it be BSG quality or Riverworld quality?