Free State Observer

This morning, I worked from home in southern New Hampshire. Tomorrow, I’ll be working in Ann Arbor, MI. The day after that, I’ll be working in the San Francisco Bay Area. And last week I could have worked in Dublin, Ireland if I thought I could pull it off without my brain exploding. I’ve travelled for business before, but if I recall correctly, this is the first time I’ve ever done it solo. I keep sniggering to myself about this whole high-powered globe-trotting software consultant schtick; is anyone really buying this? I mean, this morning I was sitting in my underwear dipping Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies in coffee for an ever-so-nutritious power breakfast in front of the computer, and tomorrow I’ll be feeling silly wearing a suit while providing training to 66 people who, hopefully, don’t have a clue that I’ve never done this before. And the day after that, my employer will be spending a not insignificant amount of money training me in a new module of the software we configure and support. They do this because I am a “resource”. That is the actual word used. I’m like timber, or petroleum. God I love capitalism.

My trip has been relatively smooth so far, except for the moment of panic when I was next in line to go through the ever-so-pleasant airport security and suddenly remembered I had failed to remove my Swiss Army knife from my bike messenger bag. It’s a very nice, sapphire knife with lots of cool attachments and a ridiculously sappy inscription from a former love and I *really* didn’t want to gift it to the annoying security man who had remarked that I looked much happier in my driver’s license picture (why do men think it’s acceptable to tell complete strangers to smile? I hate that.) and later yelled at me for putting my laptop backpack on top of the laptop in the dishwashing bin thingie that goes through the scanner dohickey to keep the “homeland” safe. At least he didn’t comment on the fact that my big toe was sticking out of a large hole in my right sock. Fortunately, because New Hampshire is (at least for now) a lightly populated state where airport employees are actually fairly mellow and good-humored, I was able to retrieve my suitcase which had already been checked and disappeared through the mysterious flap through which all checked luggage goes and put my knife in it. If I’d been flying out of Boston instead of Manchester, I seriously doubt this would have happened (and some federal employee would be fondling my lovely knife that says [censored pet name] loves [censored pet name] right now).

I tried to get some dinner in the hotel restaurant, but it’s closed on account of Easter. So I walked across the street to Wendy’s… and it was closed too. Fearing a repeat of my historic first meal in New Hampshire, I ran across another street to a Korean/Japanese restaurant with a promising neon “Open” sign in the window. It was called “Seoul Garden”. I wonder if they even meant that as a joke. (You know.. .Michigan? Motown? “Seoul” Garden? OK, *I* thought it was funny.) It was definitely open, and full of real Asian people speaking an Asian language! Toto, we’re definitely not in New Hampshire anymore.

I like Koreans; they’re my kind of people. They don’t close their businesses in honor of Dead Jesus Day, they put cheese whiz on their salad (ok, not really, but it looks exactly like cheese whiz) and they will take absolutely any animal part, roast it, slather it in BBQ sauce, and call it a meal. A quick glance at the menu revealed tongue, tripe, heart, and ankle(?!). I even saw the word “dog” on there, although it did have the word “hot” before it so I’m hoping the place wasn’t *that* authentic. I had a delightful belly-expanding feast of cheese whiz salad, miso soup, seaweed salad and Unagi Ka______ (don’t speak Korean, forgot the word) aka BBQ’ed eel. Just like Mom used to make… not.

Here is some potentially helpful information reprinted verbatim from the wrapper of my chopsticks:
1. Tuck under thumb and hold firmly.
2. Add second chopstick and hold it as you would a pencil.
3. Hold first chopstick in original position move the second one up and down. Now you can pick up anything.

How come when I try this, I resemble Beatrix Kiddo after a day with Pai Mei? God I love forks.

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You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. — Morpheus in “The Matrix”

As I mentioned in my recent blog entry deep thoughts, I have been slowly and painfully transitioning from little- and big-l libertarian to full-blown anarchocapitalist. No one is more surprised by this turn of events than me.

I was first turned on to libertarianism by reading “Atlas Shrugged” in my mid-twenties. By odd coincidence, at the same time I was reading it, I moved into an apartment that was a mere 100 yards from a very busy train track used by both an Amtrak station directly across the street, and the Port of Oakland half a mile away. Trains went rumbling by 24 hours a day, and would blast their horns as a warning when approaching my driveway. Somehow, the noise never bothered me; I guess it became romanticized in my mind thanks to the synchronous misadventures of Miss Dagny Taggart.

I can remember quite clearly attending a local Free State Project meetup in northern California a mere… 4 years ago?… and being shocked and mildly disgusted to discover that one of the people in attendance was an anarchist. I not only didn’t believe that anarchy was feasible, it somehow repelled me.

Fast forward a couple of years: I had moved to New Hampshire, or the Free State as a few hundred of us hopefully/desperately/idiotically (depending on your perspective) refer to it. I was carpooling to the wedding of a fellow Free Stater, and recall being outraged when the guy whom I was giving a ride mentioned that he doesn’t vote, for philosophical reasons. Considering that I had just moved across the country in order to “work within the political system to minimize the size and scope of government”, I took it as some sort of personal affront. (Oh, the universe revolves around me, in case you didn’t get the memo.) I am now *most* of the way to understanding his perspective.

Fast forward to a year ago, when a fellow Libertarian loaned me a copy of Murray Rothbard’s “For a New Liberty”. I read it, and agreed with the vast majority of it. Afterwards, I was left with a strange feeling of unease. Didn’t the philosophy described in the book indicate that what we, as big L Libertarians, were doing was wrong? If slavery is wrong, you don’t campaign for better working conditions for the slaves; you campaign for ABOLITION. Something was off.

I recall 14 months ago, when Ron Paul announced the launch of his exploratory committee regarding a run for President, as a Republican… and almost everyone I know appeared to go stark, raving mad. All Free Stater activity became Ron Paul-focused. The FSP broke its long-standing policy of not associating itself with any political party or candidate and repeatedly placed Ron Paul (not an FSP participant, or a resident of New Hampshire, or a candidate for any office in New Hampshire) on its home page. I felt oddly detached from this whole phenomenon. Aside from what seemed to me to be the glaringly obvious fact that Ron Paul was never going to be POTUS, it seemed equally obvious that, even if by some miracle he were elected… so what? He is one man. He can’t change the direction of this country. He can’t control the legislature. He can’t undo decades of brainwashing of the masses via public schools and television [comical aside: earlier today I read an email from my Congressman happily letting me know that our government is subsidizing citizen's purchases of digital televisions in preparation for the coming broadcast format change]. If his campaign proved anything, it proved that things are much, much worse than we thought. He went on national television and told people he would abolish the income tax, and they DIDN’T CARE!?! Kill me now.

Fast forward to 4 months ago, when the owners of NHFree, an online discussion forum very popular amongst the Free Stater community, politely but firmly announced that they no longer wanted their forum used for the discussion and planning of political activity and to kindly take it elsewhere. Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth, from myself and dozens of others! It seemed so insulting. Just because they’re anarchists who don’t believe in the political system, why were they banishing the discussions of those of us who chose to work within it? Weren’t we all working towards the same goal? Weren’t we all on the same side? My answers to these questions now aren’t the same as they were then.

Fast forward to a mere 3 weeks ago, when I started listening to podcasts on FreeDomainRadio. This was a first for me; I have never liked talk radio, and had never listened to a podcast, IIRC. I own an iPod but literally had never removed it from the box it came in. I found myself agreeing with the large majority of what Stefan Molyneux was saying. And what he was saying, in his rather humorous and wacky but inexorably logical way, was that everything I thought I knew was wrong.

At the moment I’m feeling a bit like Cypher in the Matrix, whinily wishing I had taken the blue pill and could continue to enjoy my blissful ignorance. But this will pass. I took a great deal of emotional and spiritual comfort throughout my childhood in religious beliefs that I rejected in my late teens, and although I’ve had some good times and met a lot of great people via political activism over the past several years, I can’t reinsert myself into the matrix of within-the-system political activism now that the scales have fallen from my eyes (or the tubes have been unscrewed from my skull sockets, to keep the Matrix analogy going). When I read the various email lists to which I’ve been subscribing for the past few years, that used to inspire me to action through hope or anger, now I just see the unfiltered code.

SO… now that I’ve just alienated the vast majority of my legions of readers , where do I, and this blog, go from here? Fuck if I know. Not quite sure how I’m going to spend my free time now; granted, Molyneux’s verbosity is staggering and I could conceivably spend every night and weekend for the next two years sitting in this chair listening to podcasts. But somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen. I could go live in a shack in the woods and commune with nature; but then the Starbucks drive-through would be too far away! I hold no pretensions of being Neo or Morpheus or John Galt or any other legendary leader of the anarchists. But maybe, like Frodo the hobbit, I can find just a few stout-hearted comrades and together, we can find a way to destroy the Ring of Power… or at least muck up Dagny’s railroad tracks a bit.

‘I will take the Ring’, he said, ‘though I do not know the way’. — J.R.R. Tolkien

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According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.S. Federal Government’s terrorist watch list is now approaching a million “winners”. The ACLU has a clever graphic demonstrating the rate at which this list is growing: you can watch the number grow in real-time: http://www.aclu.org/privacy/spying/watchlistcounter.html

Assuming that only adults are on this list (a very big assumption when dealing with the Feds, admittedly), and adding this figure to those in my last post, and assuming I still remember how to do algebraic equations (a very big assumption when dealing with my sodden brain, admittedly) this works out to 1 in 71.4 American adults who are either locked up or being watched.

Sing with me now: I’m proud to be an Amuricaaaaaaaan…

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According to a recent New York Times article, 1 in 100 U.S. adults are now behind bars:http://tinyurl.com/2oxar8

I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around these statistics. Seriously.

• 1 in every 99.1 adults in the U.S. is currently behind bars
• 1 in 36 Hispanic adults
• 1 in 15 black adults
• 1 in 9 black men between the ages of 20 and 34

I’ve been meaning to reread “1984″; it’s been many years. But IIRC, it seems like the current reality of the U.S. may actually be worse than Orwell envisioned. This is actually worse than all sorts of sci fi dystopian books/movies I’ve read/seen over the years.

1 in 100?

I’m currently re-reading Atlas Shrugged, and these statistics just bring into sharper focus the fact that an ever-shrinking number of us (including myself in this “us”) are supporting a shocking chunk of the rest of the population. We really are carrying the world on our backs.

But for how long?

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