I’m Not The Only One

One of the reasons I quit journalism after seven years in the business was because I got tired of defending journalism and the biased, unethical things that reporters and editors would do on an almost daily basis.  Sure, some offenses are more defensible than others, but they still contradict what journalists say they actually do.

One of my biggest pet peeves is, during election time, when newspapers publish a list of which candidates they endorse in the upcoming race.   Often this is a list of political candidates who have purchased the most advertising space from a particular newspaper.  In some cases, an editorial would run explaining why the newspaper had endorsed the candidate.

At the Queens Courier, the first newspaper at which I worked, candidates were able to bribe the publisher to publish an article smearing their opponents with less than flattering information that was ancient history and had no relevance whatsoever aside from the fact that a candidate had paid for said article to be published.

How can the editorial board of any newspaper say with a straight face that they are unbiased when they clearly make no effort to hide their bias and publish a list of the candidates they support?  How many people actually go out and vote for a candidate simply because their newspaper endorses them?  Is it any surprise that journalism has lost most if not all of the credibility this profession once had? Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t had the time to blog much since I have been somewhat active in the Ron Paul presidential campaign and have been juggling that activity with the regular routines in my daily life.  With the New Hampshire primary already having passed two days ago, I can return to INTOO.I was able to raise $55 (55%) of my goal which to help pay for one year of server space for this blog.  Much thanks to Terrence Rickaby of London and Art Haines of Maine for their contributions.  I will be starting a new ChipIn soon to raise money for server space for 2013, provided the Mayans are incorrect.   And yes, a new post is coming soon.  I’ve had a few ideas in my head for the last week or so but simply have not made the time to sit down and write them here.Hope 2012 will be better for you than 2011 was.

Ten years from now, when people look back on 2011, if they remember little else, it will most certainly be all the protesting that went on this year.  Perhaps inspired by ongoing Tea Party protests which began in 2009 and continued into the next year, Occupy Wall Street has inspired copycat protests in cities and states around the world.

Some college students, inspired by the larger Occupy Movement inspired by OWS as well as in a show of solidarity with OWS, have occupied public spaces on their universities’ campuses, protesting such issues as tuition hikes and demanding increased scholarship funds for low-income students.  The most famous of these campus occupations have been the one at University of California Davis during which campus police doused the protestors with large amounts of pepper spray.

The spraying of the occupiers quickly became infamous, spurring national debate about police abuse.  The image and video footage of the incident has since gone viral and has even evolved into an Internet meme called Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, a new post is on its way but…

I’ve been mulling over which multimedia format to use to amplify my blog (videoblogging, podcasting, etc.) and I’ve decided to go with libertarian-themed Internet memes.  I created one this morning and would love to share with you.  Enjoy!

The subject of Florida came up in a recent conversation, during which I complained that Florida requires recipients of food stamp benefits to take a drug test.  The woman with whom I was eating lunch said, “Good, they should do that here {in New Hampshire).  My tax dollars shouldn’t have to pay for someone’s drug habit.”

I couldn’t roll my eyes fast or hard enough at this ridiculous remark.

I replied, “Why should they test me for drug in order to get welfare benefits?  Nobody drug tested me when the state was stealing the money from my paycheck.”  Of course, you don’t have to be employed own property to pay local, state or federal taxes, as I’ve explained in a previous post.  But when most people think of taxpayers, they only include property owners and the employed within that definition.  But the system is set up so that everyone, including the unemployed, people on welfare, those whose incomes are from criminal activity and even illegal aliens are still paying taxes when they pay a bill or buy something. Read the rest of this entry »

Yeah, I know I should’ve pounded this one out sooner, and I didn’t take this long to publish this entry because the questions were hard, because they weren’t.  The following are questions asked of Judge Andrew Napolitano by moderate comedian/fake news anchor Jon Stewart when the former appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  Other libertarian sites and bloggers have attempted to answer these questions in their own way, and I thought it would be entertaining for me and informative for the reader if I attempted to answers these questions before peeking at the answers of others and actually watching the Daily Show episode.  Here goes.

1.  Is government the antithesis of liberty?

Yes and no.  Government by itself is not the antithesis of liberty.  It is the initiation of force and the implied threat of such initiation of force that is a threat of liberty.  The use of force and the implied threat of force, both lethal and non-lethal, is the only real power government has and is the sole purpose for its existence. Read the rest of this entry »

Like Occupy Wall Street, many of the participants in the worldwide Occupy protests have been painted as being overwhelmingly leftist with big government advocates demanding the government fix the problems it has created.

The media further solidifies this image of the Occupy demonstrations as being a socialist movement by flooding newspaper, television and Internet with oodles of images of protestors wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, holding up images of Karl Marx and waving the anarcho-socialist flag.  But this isn’t Manhattan; labor unions and other big-government cheerleaders might be less likely to join an Occupy protest in libertarian-leaning New Hampshire.  In fact, the local limited government crowd might produce enough numbers to counter the progressive feel of other Occupy demonstrations elsewhere in the country. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who has their finger on the pulse of viral videos has most likely seen by now the YouTube video of a Manchester, New Hampshire high school student being manhandled by a police officer in the school cafeteria.  The video was quickly picked up by Cop Block, an organization dedicated to increasing police accountability and educating people on their civil rights.  Cop Block interviewed Frank Harrington, the 17-year old who was slammed into a cafeteria table by Manchester PD Officer Darren Murphy.  Cop Block also interviewed Harrington’s friend who video recorded the incident and in another video attempted to interview Officer Murphy.

Why was Harrington handled so roughly by this officer assigned to West Manchester High?  This kid isn’t exactly a model student.  At 17, he’s still taking sophomore classes, and doesn’t spend to much time worrying about classwork, or homework for that matter.  He stole his sister’s purse (also a student in the high school) with the intention of returning the purse to her after lunch period. His teachers and principal asked him for the purse, and he refused.  Apparently since the school officials felt they didn’t have the right to use physical force on Harrington to retrieve his sister’s purse without any legal repercussions, they sent in someone who they believed did. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reading articles all year long about individual states forming local alternatives to the Federal Reserve Note (FRN), a.k.a. the US dollar, as a way of stabilizing local economies and protecting the them from the ever-increasing inflation of federal currency or worse, if the Federal Reserve collapses completely and hurls the US dollar into hyperinflation.  Read the rest of this entry »

For those who have been paying attention, many disillusioned people have banded together in a demonstration called Occupy Wall Street.  The goal of this supposedly leaderless organization is to have 20,000 protestors flood the streets of lower Manhattan and occupy it for several months.  The goal is to restore democracy in America by mimicking the successes protestors made in Spain, Egypt, Greece and Iceland which Occupy Wall Street supporter claim was achieved by mass occupation of financial centers of those protestor respective countries.

So far the protest has received some media attention, with the mainstream media initially refusing to cover the protests but eventually have had to as independent media outlets and mountains of video footage of the event emerged on YouTube.  The first MSM outlet I’ve seen cover the OWS (other than a somewhat biased New York Times article) was a surprising editorial by MSNBC.  From the looks of these videos, it appears that almost every participant is equipped with some sort of video recording device.  The paramilitary organization known as the New York City Police Department has reacted to the protest with mass arrests, barricading protestors, assaulting them and dousing their eyes with pepper spray. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently met a New Hampshire native who was fairly familiar with the Free State Project and was also fairly critical of how successful it could be.  He was doubtful that people from other states would be successful in limiting the government in New Hampshire if they weren’t willing to do the same thing in their home states.

On the surface, this question has some merit, but when you dig deeper, the question sounds absolutely ridiculous.   The Free State Project was launched to attract liberty-minded people to come to a state where they had a far better chance of limiting government than wherever they came from.  The majority of people who emigrate to New Hampshire as part of the FSP come from states whose governments were far more intrusive, expansive and expensive than in New Hampshire.

Most NH natives have no real concept of what an extreme oppressive government is like, the phenomenon of being controlled by the state in many ways and paying extra taxes for the assumed privilege of being bullied around by said governments, so I can understand the ignorance from which this question comes.  Not to say that people from New Hampshire are ignorant; they are in fact some of the most fiscally and politically savvy people I’ve ever met. That said, their frame of reference of what role their local government plays in their lives is very, very different than what Americans from say, Los Angeles, New York City, New Jersey, North Carolina, Michigan and other parts of the country know.   Read the rest of this entry »

In the last week I’ve seen many people with the following status on their Facebook page.

 “NYPD FDNY AND EMS OFFICERS WERE NOT INVITED TO THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY CEREMONY OF 9/11… MAYOR BLOOMBERG CLAIMS THERE IS NO ROOM FOR THEM… 10 YEARS AGO, THEY WEREN’T INVITED BUT THEY SHOWED UP!!! REPOST IF YOU AGREE THEY SHOULD BE THERE….”

Technically I am re-posting this, but not on Facebook, which was the intenti0n of this post, so I definitely don’t agree with it.

In fact, I don’t think any employee or representative from any government agency should attend the 9/11 memorial ceremony at Ground Zero.  Those within the e 9/11 Truth Movement suggest that the federal government either knew about the attacks in advance and deliberately did nothing or orchestrated the attacks to trick Americans into supporting the Patriot Act and the invasion and conquest of Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya.

This is not unlike the conspiracy theory in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt allegedly ignored intelligence reports suggesting the Japanese were planning to attack Pearl Harbor, and that the Roosevelt administration deliberately failed to prevent the attack in order to convince Americans to abandon their isolationist sentiments, support the declaration of war on the Axis powers and bring the United States into World War II. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had a few people ask me why police oppression/brutality is so high in New Hampshire.  The Free State Project has the goal of getting 20,000 liberty-minded people to move to New Hampshire, but some of the content posted by Free Stater-owned media outlets like the Ridley Report, Free Keene, Talley.TV and Free Talk Live have made some people hesitant about moving to NH.  One click on any of the above websites and it is not hard to find some coverage about NH judges, state and local police abusing their authority.

One such incident occurred in June when some Free Staters decided to hold a protest outside the Manchester PD headquarters.  Some protestors scribbled slogans on the police station with chalk such as “Badges Don’t Grant Extra Rights” and many held video cameras and cameraphones to document how the police would react.  Eight people were arrested and charged with misconduct and criminal mischief for committing such crimes as chalking on the sidewalk and walls of the station, not dispersing when told to do so, refusing to present state ID and “collecting evidence” with their electronic devices.  Some had their devices confiscated (stolen) from police officers and were arrested when they attempted to retrieve their possessions later.

I don’t know about New Hampshire being the freest, but it is freer than a lot of other places in the country. In my hometown of NYC, the protestors would’ve been arrested just for assembling in public without a permit. Forget no ID or chalking.  And in New York, a lot of those protestors would’ve needed medical attention, as the cops there are lot more hostile and brutal than in NH, even to those who don’t resist arrest. Read the rest of this entry »

The following piece has been revised due to a factual error.  My apologies.

I’ve known about the following for a while, and was hesitant to discuss it because some of the people involved in this effort are Free Staters.  But, what the hell.

This weekend marked the grand opening of Manchester’s first dog park.  Dog owners in Manchester have been wanting one of their own, pointing out that other areas of New Hampshire, namely Hookset, Concord and Derry have had their own dog parks for years.  Some dog lovers banded together to form the Manchester Dog Park Association, a nonprofit with the mission of creating spaces for dogs to run around off-leash and play and build social skills.  The group got the permits, raised the funds through private donations The Association keeps repeating how the construction and upkeep is financed by member donations, and not by tax dollars.  I’m all for dogs being able to run around and play.  The only problem is that the land on which the dog park sits is owned by the city of Manchester. Read the rest of this entry »

One thing I kept hearing back when I was working in New York for Democrats on their election campaigns was, “No, no, no.  That’s just a political promise,” followed by a chuckle.  The issue at hand was residential zoning.  Homeowners who had been in the community for three or four decades wanted things just the way it had always been for them, and wanted the New York City Council to reform the zoning codes to restrict the development of multiple-household dwellings to be built in the neighborhood or for large homes to be subdivided into three or four apartments.

Newcomers to the neighborhood, especially recent immigrants wanted the zoning codes to remain as they were, allowing developers and property owners to continue to build multiple dwellings and subdivide existing structures to accommodate the ever-increasing demand for housing in New York City.  Dividing existing structures also made the individual apartments within the structure more affordable for people who otherwise could not have afforded to buy an entire home.  Of course, my candidate, who was the puppet of a very influential and well-connected politician, promised to fight for both affordable housing and neighborhood preservation, while in reality having no intention to assist either side.  Two political promises had been made. Read the rest of this entry »