All the important conversations at the Liberty Forum happen outside Fiesta's Restaurant on smoking breaks. I don't smoke, but if I stand upwind, I can still participate without getting a nicotine buzz.
Last Thursday, as we were standing on the sidewalk, I was asking questions about our possible candidate for the 3rd Congressional District and the 1st. I made the offhand comment that I had once thought about running for office, and next thing I knew we were talking about my exploratory committee for a run for the New Mexico State House, District 22.
At the Albuquerque Tea Party on July 4th, I talked to some people about their issues and concerns as I passed out Libertarian literature (my favorite: the fake 1 million dollar bill with the legend, "this is what your government is spending every 5 seconds") and I got favorable comments. On Wednesday night at our New Mexicans for Liberty 9-12er group meeting, I floated the idea and got a positively enthusiastic response. One of the movers and shakers of that group quickly contacted the libertarian owner of one of our AM radio stations, who said that he'd be happy to teach me how to get free media coverage.
The "I might run" has transmuted into the "I am forming an exploratory committee" blindingly fast. And that is probably necessary, because, if I am going to run, I have to get signatures on petitions by next January in order to get on the ballot. And the NM Libertarian Party chair says I need to be making public appearances by August.
Next step: conferences with the state LP chair and the Bernalillo County Chair on strategy and issues. I want to run as a Libertarian in order to give the party more visibility in New Mexico, and help us win back our minor party status in the state. This means that I need to frame the issues based on local concerns and libertarian ideas. I have to think about fundraising.
As a Libertarian, I have been told, one ought to do what one does for fun and/or profit.
Being third party (and honest) running for office cannot be done for profit. So I'll be doing for fun.
The thought that came to me as the NMFL people were starting to think about how to support me was this: What if I win?
Friday, July 10, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Skate Boarding!
NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY
The Boychick entertained his cousin, D., here at Ragamuffin house for two weeks.
We picked D. up at the airport on Father's Day, and I took him back to the airport Monday morning for a flight back to St. Louis, where he would be picked up by his mother and taken home to Bloomington, IL.
Aside from one trip to the VLA, and a day at the Tea Party, the guys spent most of their days, and some evenings, trying out the skateboard parks of Central New Mexico.
D. demonstrates his skill on the back patio.
The Boychick, in very good form,
on the back patio.
The Boychick coming down the steep form.
That's a pretty steep angle to the unitiated.
Like Me!
A good time was had by both boys. They didn't have a lot of desires.
They just wanted to hang out with each other.
And go "boarding."
Next year, we'll do it again!
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
The Narrowing of Normal
"No one believes anymore that scientists are
trained in science classses or politicians in
civics classes or poets in English classes.
The truth is that schools really don't teach
anything except how to obey orders."
--John Taylor Gatto, "The Curriculum
of the Family" in A Different
Kind of
Kind of
Teacher, 2001.
A few weeks ago I read about a mother who had her son arrested for smoking pot. I first saw the story via a homeschooling blog, though I don't remember where. (Update: It is at The Thinking Mother here). The blogger seemed troubled by the story, although she could not put her finger on why. My visceral response vis-a-vis my kids and legal athority is to keep the two as far apart as possible. There is ample evidence that the systems euphemistically designed to "help" children in various ways also function to introduce a good deal of conformity among them. And those who refuse to conform are criminalized.
But the story got me thinking again about what I call the "narrowing of normal". It is a pervasive mind-set in our current culture; a mind-set that limits what is considered normal to a very narrow set of behaviors and choices, and criminalizes and/or makes diseases of any behavior outside those rapidly narrowing bounds.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, there were odd people in my world. Most of them could be characterized as "mostly harmless", like the earth itself according to The Hitcher's Guide to the Galaxy. We had words for them, words like 'eccentric" and "strange." Now we have other words for them, words that come from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In the past, people who just wanted to be left alone were called hermits, but now they are thought to have a disease, one that could be "a danger to society" and must be "treated" for the good of society, and, of course, "for their own good". In the 1950's, unconformity was socially nudged, but now it is legally punished in a variety of ways.
Although adults can get away with being non-conformist to a limited degree, heaven help the child who does not conform to the increasingly narrow norm. I was talking to a former social worker over last winter's holiday, and she was explaining to me why she left the field. She told of terrible stories in which children were made responsible for family dysfunction, labeled and removed from their homes. Often those children ended up with a psychiatric diagnosis and were forced into treatment. Most of the time, this friend explained, they also ended up with legal record as well. A record that, like the one the young man whose mother reported him to the police for smoking pot will have, will bind that child for life, taking certain adult choices out of their reach. Choices like college or a career in politics or medicine.
I have seen the same in schools. Children who respond in any way except passive docility to the officious busy-body interference of school personnel are quickly labeled as oppositional, as defiant, as unable to learn. Screening instruments that cast a wide net of disorder around normally foolish and childlike behaviors are used to label children "in need of assistance" or "at-risk for school failure." A child who retains pride in her not-PC ethnicity, or who defends himself against a bully who comes from the protected ethnic group is likely to be labeled and made the problem.
Temple Grandin calls these potentially labeled behaviors as ones that break the "stupid neurotypical rules." But in the same breath, she warns parents and teachers that it must be impressed upon the child that not conforming with certain such rules could limit their options severely in the future, and even cost them them their freedom from officialdom in the near and far-off future.
Did I say that adults can be less conforming? Lately, at least in Albuquerque, this is only true if they stay away from the police. An elderly couple were arrested and roughed up last summer because they did not response docilely to a complaint that they had left a dog in the car. (It turns out the man had gone to get them all some water). The 90 year old husband ended up in cardiac care and the 87 year old wife was pushed around because she was supposedly trying to escape, even though, with a prosthetic leg and a walker, she wasn't likely to run anywhere faster than the cop. Recently, a young adult with a learning disability spent time in jail for DWI because his speech was slurred, even though his blood alcohol content was 0.00% (that's zero, precise to the hundreth of a percent). His crime? A speech impediment.
And don't get me started on "the war on drugs." Suffice it to say that to put young users caught with a small amount of pot in jail with hardened criminals is not terribly productive. And it is less so, if that person becomes a non-person in society, unable to go to college or work in certain fields, merely for having been arrested for such a "crime."
And then there is the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. The committee making it up is considering diagnoses that would make excess internet use (what is excess?), political apathy (sounds Soviet, nu?), and "parental alienation*" into psychiatric diseases. Being overweight is also being considered as some kind of mental disorder, as well as a socially stigmatized difference.
*I don't know if the parents are alienated or if the children are.
The formerly broad category of "normal", which was once so wide that one could argue about what it really meant, is being narrowed to a frightening degree. And those found outside the bounds are likely to become the targets of special government programs aimed at getting them to conform. Because to those who what's best for us, being different just has to be an impediment to happiness.
I believe this progressive narrowing of normal has two purposes and neither of them are good. The first is to impose fairness upon an unfair world by those who mistake equality for equity. Among such people, individual differences are an affront to their Vision of the Annointed. In the perfect collectivized world, everyone must be made equal. (For a great dystopian short story about this, see Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. A trailer for the movie 2081, based on this story can be seen here).
The other is about control. People who deviate from a very narrow norm can be used to illustrate the consequences of dissent and difference quite effectively, whether those consequences are labled as a mental illness to be medicated or as a crime to be punished. Thus a whole society can be enslaved to an unlivable moral code, their liberty taken from them by masters who have something to gain.
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? . . . We want them broken. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law abiding citizens? . . . But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted--and you create a nation of law-breakers--and then you cash in on guilt." (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Centennial Edition, p. 436, emphasis in the original).
The narrowing of normal, whether conscious or not, is a way to limit the freedom of others to be who they are. It destroys their liberty and their ability to freely pursue their own happiness, and often, too often, it destroys lives.
Monday, July 6, 2009
From Every Mountainside . . .
We are still recovering from our Independence Day celebration. In the morning we made signs. In the afternoon, we went to the Albuquerque Tea Party. In the evening, the Engineering Geek and I drove up to a Santa Fe R3volution Celebration and Concert to listen to Adam Kokesh formally announce his candidacy for Congress, 3rd District, New Mexico. We arrive back home at 2:45 AM, pretty late (or early?) for old curmudgeons like us.
From every mountainside . . .actually, mountain top. . . let Freedom ring!
The Boychick (Dont Tread On Me) and his cousin D. (Old Glory) drove to the top of the ridge, flags out the window, waving wildly all the way.
Here they stand, signalling their patriotism to friends down toward Juan Tomas.
At the Tea Party, there were a least 7000 of us in the streets--at last accurately reported in the Albuquerque Journal--and a small flag for each person who registered to be "with us in spirit."
The count was made by giving out "dots" for each person in the cars, which parked in a huge lot across Alameda Blvd. from the site. Since we cannot guarantee we got ever biker and walker, as well as those who parked elsewhere, we at least know the minimum count.
The Engineering Geek, center, Navy Jack in one hand, and a homemade sign in the other. It says:
We the People are the true patriots and leaders for Liberty and Justice!
He was set up in the median, and I snapped the picture from across the street, where I had gone to pick up some more Libertarian Party literature to pass out.
We passed out 300 flyers for the Continental Congress 2009 for November, as well as the Libertarian stuff. The most popular handout was an enlarged 1 million dollar bill that said on the back, "Your Congress Spends This Much Every 5 Seconds." The "fine print" was the website and street address of the Libertarian Party. Another popular handout was the World's Shortest Political Quiz.
Across the street, a flag signals a nation in distress. Given the way our government ignores the Constitution and us (Non-representative Heinrich received messages 20:1 opposed to Cap-and-Tax, but voted the party line) we are now in distress. We are in terminal debt.
The Boychick was interviewed briefly and spoke into the camera with conviction about Cap-and-Tax, though he was not sure about healthcare. Pretty good for an 'Aspie' caught by surprise.
I have no pictures of the ride up to Santa Fe, as that took place at sunset for a 10 PM Rally at Greer Garson theater. I had a great time talking to some Libertarians from Arizona and California, over to help Adam get his campaign going. The rally was a combination of speeches by members of Campaign for Liberty, some other groups, and great music. Because of the encore calls for Jordan Page, who is one heck of a guitarist, we did not get out of there until 1:30! That's way past my bedtime.
It was a Glorious (and long!) Fourth!
Saturday, July 4, 2009
R3volution: Independence Day
Independence Day!
Living Historian Patriot poses before Faneuil Hall, Boston.
The statue is Samuel Adams,
Patriot, Son of Liberty and
signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Today we celebrate that great moment at which the Continental Congress declared that the 13 colonies "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states", thus creating the United States of America. They voted for "Independency" on July 2, 1776, but adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Different founders traveled to Philedelphia over the course of that long, hot summer to add their signatures to that sublime document, bringing the total who pledged their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor" to 56.
John Adams, who was probably the most influential of those who pushed for independence, wrote to his wife Abigail on July 3, 1776:
"Yesterday the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater perhaps never was, nor will be, decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.
"I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will triumph in that Days Transaction, even although We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not." --3 July 1776, Letter of John Adams to Abigail Adams. The Adams Papers (2007), M.A. Horner, Ed.
Adams wrote that it was Posterity that would gain from this decision, even though the founders might well "rue it" because, by signing the Declaration, the Founders were committing treason against King George III, and if things should go badly, they would be hanged for it.
The price of Liberty is always dear, and the Founders knew it. Thus, they understood the seriousness nature of the pledge they made to each other, and to Posterity, when they said:
"And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."
Today, many of us, John Adam's posterity, are watching in dismay as the Liberty that our Founders put their lives on the line to preserve is being dismantled. We are now on the express train to tyranny , shedding the precepts of Liberty that we inherited from the Founders. Thus, and most cogent, is this quote that appeared at the end of the HBO miniseries, John Adams:
"Well, posterity, you will never know what it cost us to preserve your freedom. I only hope that you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it." --John Adams
We are that posterity, and it is our duty to protect and defend the freedom that our Founders paid such a dear price to obtain for us. This charge is laid upon us in the Declaration of Independence itself:
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."
We have been drifting into tyranny, and the abuses and usurpations of our Constitution by our own government have been thus far sufferable, but soon--how soon we do not know--the petty power of our nonrepresenting representatives will have indelibly altered our Republic, and the abuses and usupations will become the absolute despotism that the Founders warned us about. Now is the time for the peaceful R3volution of the word and the pen and the vote. We must do it now, or our children will find themselves contemplating another kind of Revolution entirely.
We are, as Edward Cline so eloquently reminded us last week, The New Sons of Liberty, should we choose to rationally confront the Crisis that is upon us.
Long may Lady Liberty live and endure!
Friday, July 3, 2009
R3volution: Taxation, Property Rights, and Tea Parties
". . . we cannot be happy without being Free, that we
cannot be Free without being secure in our Property,
that we cannot be secure in our Property if without
our consent others may as if by right take it away."
--Abigail Adams, 1774
There are those whom I have heard disparage the American Revolution as being solely about "taxation and money" rather than about "freedom." When I hear this, I always want to ask such people what their definition of freedom is, though I don't always have the opportunity.
I suspect that such a person would answer that freedom is the ability to act without compulsion, to choose one's behavior. Indeed, freedom is the ability to speak, to write, to act without fear of interference from authority or government. If this is the case, then taxation--the act of taking a citizen's property by force in the name of some collective good--is at the heart of the argument for liberty, as Abigail Adams understood when she undertook to write to the English historian Catherine Macauley in 1774 about the just cause of Liberty for America, saying:
". . . Suffice it to say that we are invaded with fleets and Armies, our commerce not only obstructed, but totally ruined, the courts of Justice shut, many driven out from the Metropolis (Boston. EHL), . . . all the Horrours of a civil war threatening us on the one hand, and the chains of Slavery ready forged for us on the other."
Abigail Adams profoundly states the relationship between liberty and property in the opening quote above, from a letter she wrote to the American scholar Mercy Otis Warren in the same year.
There are also those who disparage the modern revolutionary Tea Party movement, saying that it is "only about taxation" or more frequently of late, stating that the 4th of July Tea Parties are "not about taxation", but that they are "about liberty." To them I would answer, as I did last night at the Bernalillo Libertarian Caucus, that the Tea Parties are about unjust and confiscatory taxation, which makes them profoundly "about liberty." A person who can make no choices about the disposition of his property, and who is forced to work to support a government for nigh unto half a year under threat of prison, has no liberty to lose. Further, if a government official wishes to "spread the wealth around" as Obama said, taking by force wealth from individuals who created it in order to "redistribute" it to those whom he deems more deserving of it, then he is enslaving some individuals to those "more deserving" others. As Lord Acton put it: "A people averse to the institution of private property is without the first element of freedom." (Quoted without full citation in The Freeman online).
There are also those who say that the original Boston Tea Party was well and good, because it was taxation without representation that the Sons of Liberty objected to, whereas the taxation that the present Tea Parties object to is taxation imposed by the consent of the governed. However, I do not believe that citizens are being represented by our nonrepresenting representatives. Mine, at least, (and I suspect that the lot of them) are in hock to their parties, their party national platforms, and the special interests that finance their extremely extravagant elections.
We the People get barely a second thought, except at so-called "townhall meetings" like the one that Senator Udall (D, NM) held at Albuquerque the other day, at which any questions and comments in opposition to the Dems national platform were immediately shut down. The Engineering Geek attended and called it 'Udall's Town-joke'. This was in the same vein as with President Obama's elaborately staged and scripted Town Hall meeting on the "credit card crisis" at Rio Rancho High School in May. The nonrepresenting "representatives" must be putting on a show for each other at these staged events, because they certainly did not fool many of the people there.
Thus I was gratified to open the Albuquerque Journal today and read what Christopher E. Spade of Cuba, NM wrote in a Letter to the Editor entitled Tea Parties Renew Our Fight for Independence:
" . . . We are again being taxed without representation.
"When members of Congress vote for legislation without first reading that legislation . . . we are not represented.
"When members of Congress move to stifle exploration and development of domestic energy sources . . . in spite of the fact that a majority of Americans favor domestic energy development, we are not represented!
"When members of Congress vote for bailouts for failed, badly run companies . . .and thus put the taxpayers at risk, we are not represented!
"When members of Congress consider new regulatory power over what may be broadcast over open radio stations . . . in clear violation of free speech guarantees . . . we are not represented!
". . . When members of Congress vote for confiscatory tax rates on the entrepeneurs who create the jobs and wealth of this country . . . we are not represented!
"There is another revolution on the horizon. Only this time, it will be at the ballot box."
(The Albuquerque Journal, Friday, July 3, 2009, Section A, p.11).
Thank you, Mr. Spade for saying it far more eloquently than I could!
We are not being represented.
Go to your local July 4th Tea Party tomorrow.
The Albuquerque Tea Party will hold an Independence Day rally on July 4, 2009 from 4-6 PM on Alameda St NE, right near the Balloon Fiesta park.
ABQ Tea Party RallyJuly 4, 2009 4-6 PM, 4509 Alameda NEAlbuquerque, NM
Come as you are - patriotic!
ABQ Tea Party RallyJuly 4, 2009 4-6 PM, 4509 Alameda NEAlbuquerque, NM
Come as you are - patriotic!
The theme for this Indepedence Day Rally is "The Spirit of '76!"
It is time for us to take to the streets and let our nonrepresenting representatives know that we see through their sham democracy.
We want the Republic back, and the political power to rest where it rightly belongs, within each of us, at liberty to live our lives without interference from the government.
For if we do not, then soon we will be in the same straits as the people of Boston, circa 1774, with "our commerce obstructed" and the people "reduced to want" and "made dependent", as Abigail Adams observed in her letter to Lady Macauley.
We begin the R3volution in our streets this July 4th, and continue it at the ballot box come November 2010.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
The Very Large Array
NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY
The Boychick is hosting his cousin D., in from Illinois for a two-week visit.
The first week was a tour of the skate parks of the Greater Albuquerque area, but at the beginning of the second week the Engineering Geek and I decided that, not to be outdone by Camp Aunt Madge, we needed to take at least one educational field trip somewhere else in New Mexico.
The guys said a decided "No" to Fanta Se and the museums, Old Town, or the Salinas National Monument. But they said "Okay" to the Very Large Array, which is officially part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Featured in many films, it was the setting for much of the action in the movie based on Carl Sagan's novel, Contact. I don't know if it was the big machines or the movie that hooked them, but off we went on a jaunt to to the Plains of San Augustin, where the radio telescopes are.
I insisted that we take the back roads, South NM 14 to Mountain Air, and then U.S. 60 to Bernardo and Socorro, Magdalena and the VLA. Here is a view looking south to Chupadera Mesa from Torreon, NM. Chupadera blocked any outlet of Glacial Lake Estancia into the ancenstral Rio Grande, creating salt flats as blow-out dunes. But we were headed for the other big, ancient lake bed in West-Central New Mexico.
A view of the two arms of the VLA from the photo stop on US 60. What is amazing is that each of the dishes is the diameter of a major league baseball diamond, but here they are, almost lost in the immensity of the Plains of San Augustin, an old glacial lake-bed.
Three radio recievers pointing to the eastern sky. The foreground shows a blow-out dune of lake sand and silt, deposited here more than 10,000 years ago, during the Pluvial (wet, lake) period of the Wisconsin glaciation.
And the politicians think they discovered global climate change?
This summer, the receivers are in the "C" position, the axis of the Y formation being pretty short. This gives them more resolution for detail, but a narrower "view" of the part of the sky they are "looking" at. Here one receiver is "looking" at a different point than the other two.
The radio signals are a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we are accustomed to "listening" to, but computers make images of the radio sources, using color to show doppler shifts created by movement.
Each receiver has four orienting/tracking motors, and its own air-conditioning unit to keep the temperature low, which filters out earth-based "noise" in order to better received the faint radio signals from space. Standing under them, one can the faint hum of the tracking motors that keep the receiver oriented to a fixed point in the sky as the earth turns them toward the west.
They are huge, and yet gracefully beautiful in proportion to the vastness of the Plains of San Augustin.
The axes of the Y configuration in the the most outstreached "A" form, would cross the whole Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, stretching in Virginia, Mayland and Pennsylvania. But that is not the logest axis. The VLA is part of a continent wide Very Long Baseline Array, 3,000 miles long. You can "see" detail from very far away with the VLBA.
And of course, the farther out you look, the further back in time you see. One image captured at the VLA showed Quasars 10 billion light years away. The light left them 10 billion years ago. Before the sun was born, and the earth was formed. Space-time is inconceivably immense. And growing bigger every second . . .
What great vision our technology gives us . . .
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