Laws Cause Police Killings

Leftists pretend to be concerned about the aggressive actions of police officers, which leads to outcomes like we saw recently in Minnesota and Colorado. Just this week, Paige Pierce Schmidt was shot and killed by police in Delta CO, as was Duante Wright in Brooklyn Center MN.

Police kill roughly 1,400 Americans every year, or 26 per week on average.

A disproportionate number -- about a third -- are black; the rest are mostly white.

At core, it is the plethora of useless and countless laws, like the prohibitions on drugs, prostitution, gambling, and, increasingly, guns -- laws that were either written or are supported by the left within the past century -- that led to Wright's and Schmidt's tragic and unnecessary deaths.

It is understood that Leftists wish to promote systemic problems that they can later riot over. It's called "job security" for progs.

"Good laws" and bad laws, both, are GOING to be enforced with force, no matter what you demand. At some level, everyone is aware of that. Anywhere you have an intersection between two positions you favor, when those positions are at odds, you have the potential -- and in fact, the high probability -- of those laws being upheld through the use of force. Up to, and including, death.

Mr. Wright, for example -- was in violation of gun control laws -- which almost all Leftists profess to favor (I say "profess" because the Left has never been shy about arming other Leftists and shooting the opposition -- as has been happening in Venezuela for the past decade). The traffic stop of Wright also was made under some dubious pretexts; and then the escalation of force was initiated because of a warrant relating to said gun laws.

Wright was within his Constitutionally-guaranteed right to carry a firearm.

You can't have the gun control you love, without the deadly force by police that you don't love.

Only Libertarians have a consistent position: We are opposed to police violence that was brought to bear against Mr. Wright -- but we are also absolutely opposed to the gun laws that were being enforced against him in the first place.

You simply cannot demand that the police treat black people with dignity and respect or hell, but then also support right-violating laws that we then expect the police to enforce. It simply won't work the way you think it will.

Libertarians acknowledge there will be some level of laws for the foreseeable future -- at least until a lot more people choose to reject the initiation of force and become Libertarians. But in the meantime, we demand that laws be kept to a minimum and that they will be enforced only when there is an actual human victim. These two steps would go far towards a rational, more peaceful approach to reducing harm caused by police.

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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, April 2021.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Montoni For Mesa County - Survey Answers for CRV

Colorado Candidates: I don't know how many of you are answering candidate questionnaires from groups that typically oppose Libertarian or non-government solutions, but I answered the rather long survey from Colorado Rural Voters.

My answers were rather long, too --there wasn't a text limit in the entry boxes, and I saw no notice that they preferred <100 words until I got to the confirmation screen.

Oh, well.

In any case, Colorado Rural Voters would be better named "Colorado Gimme Your Money and Rights Voters" -- look at their wish list on their main page.

Some of those wishes might sound good upon first blush to Libertarians.  But the tyrannical reality is how they want to implement them.

Anyway, most of my answers on their survey questions were copypasta from things I'd written earlier (in one case I copied something I wrote in 1999).  While some would quip that only proves I'm a closed-minded jerk, what I believe it means is that the takers are making the same arguments and coveting the same rights and property in 2020 as they were in 1999.

And in 1899.

Here is the actual survey.

Jeriel Clark is the contact person for this thing.  I have not looked into who funds this "nonpartisan" group (nonpartisan my ass).   If I remember correctly, before this she was a paid staffer for another group that was trying to saddle up the taxpayers of Grand Junction and every other municipality in Mesa (including the county itself) and take them for a sweaty ride on a massive debt load for a city-owned gym/fitness/pool/recreation center.   It is my fading memory that she was the person who came before the Mesa Libertarians and did a presentation for the gym.

I'm in the wrong business.  It apparently pays to be a leftist activist.

But getting on with the story, here is how I answered their survey:

Are Content Providers Free to DePlatform?

In the last few years, we have heard many stories of alternative viewpoints -- including Libertarian ones -- being "deplatformed" and "unpublished".

Some Libertarians are excusing this behavior by claiming those content providers are private property, and they can decide for themselves what they provide a platform for.

I fully understand the argument.  However...

That position is, at best, naive, and at worst, willfully ignorant.

It has become abundantly clear: Content providers are not really private companies any longer.

1) They get a huge government subsidy in the form of "artificial personhood".

2) All of the major platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are subscribers to the "services" of a spook-run "non-government organization" called the "Atlantic Council". 

3) Most of the spooks "advising" the oligarchs as to who to deplatform and what to censor are Obama-era players.

4) Dragging Zuck before congress wasn't meant to elicit information. It was a horse's head in the beds of the content oligarchs.

5) All of the content providers claim to be platforms and thus not liable for their content -- in public. However, in court, they claim the opposite.  Content carriers need to decide if they are publishers or platforms, and duck the hell out of gaming the system.


6) There have been multiple instances of spookish government bureaucrats visiting the C suites of all of the tech titans. Of course the records of what these spooks say to the execs is not made public, but here's a guess: "My, Mr Chairman, that's a beautiful twelve year old daughter you have there. It would be a shame if someone from our office visited her tonight."

7) The takedown of Backpage.com and the bankrupting of its principals in order to prevent them from hiring sufficient legal counsel was another horse's head.

No. The oligarchic providers have been captured by Leviathan. They are now functioning as management arms of the police state.  Almost all of the internet content providers are now deeply compromised.No corporation should be regulating political speech; and certainly no corporation -- which gets the government subsidy of artificial personhood -- should attempt to meddle in American elections in this manner.

It isn't the Russians who are interfering in our elections.

It's tech oligarchs, the mainstream media, and the military-industrial-spook complex.

The fix for this is to reduce government employment at all levels by 99% across-the-board, and shut down government agencies -- including the national-security-spy-state complex.

Hopefully the few thousand remaining government bureaucrats will be able to concentrate on activities that actually protect the individual rights of Americans. rather than violating them.

The elimination of corporate personhood and requiring businesses to bear the full cost and responsibility for their own actions that violate individual rights is also required.

Vote Libertarian.

Additional reading:

1.  Your taxpayer dollars are funding the Atlantic Council -- the organization "advising" Facebook on which viewpoints to censor.

2.  Facebook submits various content to an Atlantic Council lab that "detects" unacceptable opinions.





3.  More to come!

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Vote Libertarian * 800-ELECT-US * http://www.LP.org
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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, November, 2019.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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The Two-Minutes Hate on Vaping

In the news this past few weeks has been a good example of a manufactured "crisis".

Media outlets have breathlessly fixated on the "dangers" of vaping (aka "e-cigarettes").  I guess this is the assigned Two-Minute Hate for the last half of September.

But let's go over a few actual facts that don't fit well into the mainstream crisis narrative.

First: Tobacco is a legal plant that many individuals want to enjoy.  If it is prohibited, then we will simply have yet another war on a plant that will be as effective as the war on poppies, marijuana, coca, khat, and many others.

Standard, over-the-counter nicotine "vape juice" carries basically the same risk of long-term health effects as cigarettes.

Keep in mind that e-cigarettes, like cigarettes, is simply a "delivery device".  When different kinds of "delivery devices" are developed, different people are going to try them, and use them, if they wish to.  There are already cigarettes, cigars, little cigars, cigarillos, dissolvables (such as lozenges, strips, or sticks), smokeless (chewing tobacco and moist snuff), waterpipes ("Hookah"), and now e-cigarettes.


There are already millions of vapers.The mainstream media has generally (with a few notable exceptions) failed to make clear that the current "crisis" among vapers is not caused by vape juice, but rather, by a subset of vapers who are putting THC oils (and vitamin E oil, and other crap) in their e-cigarettes.  And probably a lot of other substances, according to investigative articles in the Washington Post and Wisconsin State Journal.


One of the more interesting aspects of vaping is the possibility that vape juice can be rather easily tailored, and there is already some evidence that the trend among longer-term users of e-cigarettes is to choose smaller nicotine content juice cartridges over time.

If the vaping market were left alone, there is reason to believe that trend (of lower nicotine content vape choices) would continue and/or accelerate: One thing that a free market always does is it tends to mitigate negatives and accentuate positives.

The black market (Prohibition) means adulterated drugs, which means death for more than a few users (especially youthful, inexperienced ones who don't know what to look for).  Which is what we are right now seeing with the current "Vaping Crisis".

Then consider what the free market has delivered in comparison to Prohibition: We now have light beer and non-alcoholic beer, whereas under Alcohol Prohibition the trend was toward harder and harder, more potent varieties of hooch.

In a legal market, and with steady Education and Persuasion campaigns, kids trying drugs will find pure (and ever-safer) prepackaged versions of them at Rite Aid and Wal-Mart, with instructions on safe use.

They won't get that from the local gang-banger who is filling vape cartridges with THC oil.

Over time, then, it stands to reason that it would be better for there to be a less-harmful alternative to cigarettes to be encouraged and available so people who have to put something in their mouths will be able to choose something less harmful rather than more harmful.

If vaping is made illegal, it will simply go underground.  The technology for vape pens is widely known and easy to replicate, and prohibiting it will simply open up a new market for organized criminals to supply.

As an interesting side note, Colorado is not having anywhere near the problem with this that other states are -- because marijuana is legal, and people therefore tend to use traditional marijuana delivery methods.

The THC oil vaping problem would likely resolve itself in a legal market.  If CVS and Walgreens were selling vape juice with THC in it, they would have to find ways to make it as safe as possible, or they would find themselves with a lot of liability claims.  Drug traffickers who are illegally filling vape cartridges have neither the will nor the ability to figure out how to do that -- they're just supplying a product that people want, and they aren't going to be hauled into court if their product hurts someone.

Libertarian Party articles about vaping bans:

https://www.lp.org/libertarians-vaping-industry-condemn-trump-vaping-ban/

1.  What do Libertarians think of Trump’s vaping regulation?


2.  Libertarians, vaping industry condemn Trump vaping ban

3.  I Vape I Vote Membership Promotion


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Vote Libertarian * 800-ELECT-US * http://www.LP.org
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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, May, 2019.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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Allegedly Gouging

Price Gouging: It may not fare well in the court of public opinion, but increased prices in the face of high demand and low supply is the market's way of conserving a resource.

If a hurricane blows through and I'm the first one to the store, I'm going to buy a dozen cases at $3 each and there will be none left for you.

If the price goes up to $25 a case, I'm going to buy 2 and the will be some available to you when you get there, albeit at a higher price point.

Here's a story about a guy named Chris. Just a regular working guy. He doesn't worry about stocking up on bottled water. Because Chris is smart. Before the hurricane blows through, he fills up containers from his tap water. And he also fills his bath tub full of water. It's not rocket science.

The fact that people are hysterical and idiotic should cost them money.

Every business owner is "price gouging" at all times. That is, they are all charging the highest price they can currently get for their product. All that changes in this scenario is the price that people are willing to pay. You aren't going to buy anything today that hasn't been prices at the highest price the provider thinks they can get the largest amount of people to pay.

Eliminating price gouging means fewer and fewer stores will bother sending employees to make emergency supply runs to stores further away from endangered areas so they can have product to sell.

So more "out of stock" signs.

That must be a good thing.

Right.

Libertarians aren't here to placate the ignorant voter.

We're here to speak to the exceptional voters who know the bullshit ignorant voters vote for is... bullshit.

Stop trying to kowtow to children, economic illiterates, moral relativists, and thieves -- all of whom were vaccinated to be that way by 12 years of government's coercion-funded forced- indoctrination penal colonies.

New College Major: "Useless Studies"

You know what those "_________ Studies" college major courses are?

They don't exist because they impart any useful skills for the demands of life after graduation.  Unless of course you can figure out a way to make ginned-up outrage into a paying occupation.

They exist for two reasons:

1) To enable the institution to meet hiring and student quotas. They serve perfectly to meet the ever-multiplying affirmative action laws and regulations (both in the faculty and student populations).

and,

2) To revenue farm, because universities are among the largest of our society's welfare queens (roughly a $100 billion cash sink at the federal level, a similar amount comes from states and localities). Think about it: Weak faculty members, and weak students, were once a market universities were neither interested in nor were they a market the university was able to tap.

Enter federal and state welfare (as well as donors who wanted to do a bit of cash virtue signaling). Now that the tap was turned on, administrators have become dependent upon the growth lathered on by debt-addled students who could never get into a rigorous program, hence never get into university.

And now we're going to "free" college for everyone.

Keep it up, y'all. Break that bank.

The sooner the country goes bankrupt, the sooner you'll crash the entire scam.

Blue Wave?

What "Blue wave"?

I am no Trumpkin, but the Left needs to up its game.

Obama lost SIXTY-THREE House seats and SIX Senate seats in his first midterms in 2010.

Clinton lost FIFTY-FOUR House seats and NINE Senate seats in his first midterm in 1994.

And THEY had an adoring press.

[Bush actually bucked the long trend and gained 2 Senate seats and 8 House seats in 2002.]

Trump has been under unrelenting, vicious attacks by most of the press, yet he is going to GAIN at least 2 seats in the Senate and will lose only between thirty and forty seats in the House.

Y'all are in trouble. Because the 2020 elections just started today, and what you thought was going to be a rout, really wasn't.

In addition, you squandered your opportunity to work with Republicans to get a more balanced Supreme Court by your underhanded treatment of the Kavanaugh nomination.  Your handling of that nomination assured that you will be run over if there are any more vacancies -- two more may well be in the cards within the next year.

Playing the "If you aren't a leftist, you're a creepy racist woman-hating redneck ignorant nazi gun nut homophobic bigot" card is probably too yesterday to work anymore.

What might work better for the left is working on actually solving problems.

Like, repealing the Prohibitions on drugs, gambling, and prostitution that drag the poor and minorities into the justice system disproportionately, ending all the wars, and working towards accountability and transparency for government workers -- including the police, who inflict such a horrendous toll on minorities through policing for profit and revenue farming in general.

And fixing those absolutely corrupt, murderous, bankrupt, and broken Left-led major cities all over the United States.

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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, October, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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Bootlickers Want YOU Out of Your Car

Eric Peters, a car enthusiast in Virginia, wrote on Sept 7, 2018, about something that's been gnawing at me too:

The average cost for insurance for a new teen driver is now north of $250 per month.

How is he supposed to get a car – or afford gas – when he is obliged to pony up $250 each month to the insurance mafia? ... How is a teenage kid working a minimum wage/part-time gig supposed to deal with it?

Faced with this extortion – and that’s exactly the right word; there’s no choice about paying the $250 per month, if the kid wants to drive legally – many simply opt out. A record-high percentage of 16-25-year-olds haven’t even got a driver’s license and forget the car. They stay home instead, game and text. When they need to get somewhere, they ride share or Uber or something that doesn’t require them to spend a minimum of 20-25 hours working at minimum wage (currently $10.50 er hour) gig hauling pizzas or some such just to tithe the mafia.... More and more of them just don’t care about cars – or driving.

Mission accomplished.

One way to get people out of cars – an agenda that has existed since at least the early ’70s in furtive “urban planning” circles but which has become aggressively obvious in recent years – is to make sure they never get into them. And the easiest way to do that is to make driving prohibitively and unavoidably expensive for new drivers especially. If they never learn to drive, they’ll never miss not driving.

I agree with Eric Peters that the dramatic increases in the cost of insuring new drivers is INTENTIONAL on the part of bureaucrats. It is government policy that allows insurance companies to do this. Just one of those policies is mandatory insurance -- which is nothing more than a massive subsidy to rent-seeking insurance companies.

It's many times more expensive to repair accident-damaged cars now than it was at the peak of Car Culture USA. That is again a direct result of federal policy: Cars must be built to federal standards, rather than customer standards. So what might have been a fender, hood, and grille replacement in 1968, now requires dozens of large and small parts, each one engineered to comply with federal crash standards, air bag systems (required by the feds), and crumple-zone standards -- and each one predictably pricey as a result.

Not long ago, there was an article in a car magazine where a GM engineer was reviewing past GM greats -- like the 1966 Chevrolet Malibu.  He said his department had actually studied the idea: that with the identical manufacturing, engineering, and features as one had in 1966, the same identical car would cost a buyer around $15,000 in today's dollars.

He also said that with modern regulation, all of the changes to every part of the car to comply with current regulations, you'd end up with a car that was almost unrecognizable, twice the weight, about the same power, and roughly three times the cost -- and either impossible to repair or horrendously expensive to repair.

The Murderous Left wants people out of cars. The single greatest liberator of all time -- the personal automobile -- is anathema to bootlickers who want to know who you are, where you are, what you're doing, who you're with, and what you have in your possession. AT ALL TIMES.

Bootlickers are control freaks who want the unwashed masses shuttled around in cattle cars that they can centrally shut down for whatever reason, and grab who or whatever they want.

They don't give a rat's ass about the environment, or deaths and injuries from accidents. All they are really after is CONTROL. And one way to get there is to make mobility-at-will all but impossible.

The Libertarian answer is to:

1) Abolish mandatory insurance requirements, like all other regulations

2) Abolish all government-issued identification regimes.

3) Eliminate all government-owned or operated transportation systems, and allow private ownership to mitigate the harm done by poor drivers.

4) Abolish government-operated police, and allow road owners to provide the kind of traffic control that suits them and their paying customers.

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Vote Libertarian * 800-ELECT-US * http://www.LP.org
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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, September, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Pole-Shifting and Shifty Alarmists

Earth's magnetic poles are never stable; they move constantly -- and sometimes they flip altogether.  Which is understandable, because the earth's core is actually a giant spinning magnet.

Some scientists who study the earth's internal magnet have noticed that the magnetic poles have moved a lot over the last few years.  There is some speculation that the increased speed of their wandering means they are about to flip.

Check out this article about emerging science on pole shifts.  It's fascinating stuff.

A complete flip from N to S is actually about 500,000 years overdue.

Shifting magnetic poles can change the climate immensely -- particularly, the amount of cloud cover (water vapor).  After the sun, more or less water vapor is the main determinant of temperature.

Which brings us to the politicization of the pole movement by the alarmist environmentalist left.

One would think that the climate models -- the ones the alarmist Left uses to blather up panic about the climate (and the taxpayer grants and book deals for their adherents) -- would have in included adjusting those models for the effect of magnetic pole shift .

So have they?  Have alarmists added the effect of moving magnetic poles into their models?

Not exactly.

They did the reverse: Now that acceleration of magnetic pole movement has become a topic of discussion, alarmist scientists have latched on and are suddenly claiming that melting glaciers and warmer temperatures on the surface are the drivers of the pole movement activity.

So someone else brings it up, whereupon it is adopted to mangle cause-and-effect into further support for their alarmist model -- even though there has been no connection yet proven.

Climate scientists -- at least the mainstream alarmist ones -- are inexcusably sloppy about their work.

Many of the earliest of the alarmists' models relied on data supplied by poorly-maintained weather stations, or stations where development, addition of a large parking lot, etc would rather obviously have had a significant effect on what data was recorded (see http://www.SurfaceStations.org/ ).  For years, the alarmist industry flat-out denied that those surface station assumptions needed to be tested or that the data they were supplying was unreliable.

It took a skeptic to start an audit movement.  Volunteers did all of the auditing because the multi-billion dollar alarmist-industrial complex couldn't be bothered to fund such an audit itself. 

Even gas stations have to get their measuring systems assessed and certified every few months -- but an alarmist industry that depends on the measuring instruments doesn't?

Come on.

Alarmist pseudoscience really got rolling in the late eighties and early nineties. Scientists looked at their data tables and saw that temperatures appeared to be climbing, and then they published, and started the cycle of alarm.

They forgot something major, however: The disappearance from the dataset of stations in more remote regions of Russia / USSR as the state collapsed and stopped maintaining, operating, and checking them, was not in any way accounted for.  Many of the abandoned stations were in Siberia.

If you have 1,000 stations all over the planet and 50 stations in some of the bitterest-cold areas on earth steadily drop out of the calculation, 5th grade math says the temperature average of the remaining stations will go up.

But alarmists glossed over it.

Alarmist scientists have also directly diddled with directly changing data tables they use in their models without either explaining the reasons for doing so or adjusting the assumptions the model builds on that data as a result -- and they pass off their diddled data and the conclusions they derive from it as "science" and claim anyone questioning it is just an apish knuckle-dragging throwback who has no place to talk.  Fudging data is in itself an academic and scientific crime for which none have been called to account.

But the real problem with alarmism is that the alarmist-industrial complex (a multi-billion dollar, taxpayer-funded white elephant), is that everything it "produces" is designed to affect government policy.

If you convince vote-happy politicians that the sky is falling, your budget for the following year will get a lot more lard slathered on it.  "Green" corporations and compliant scientists and other hangers-on get huge new government contracts and grants, while more efficient corporations using traditional energy sources or methods in their production, and skeptical scientists, are ignored.

I'm as concerned about the environment as anyone.  The biggest skeptic thinker I know is completely off-grid, uses solar for all of his home and business energy needs, and otherwise is completely self-sufficient.  Even his personal transportation is the ultimate in re-use: He buys ancient 50 mpg Geo Metros and fixes them up.  Compare the resources that went into his 1990 Metro to the local watermelon's brand-new 2018 Prius. The Prius can't quite beat the Metro on MPG, and its curb weight is roughly twice that of the Metro (twice the curb weight means at minimum twice the resources went into it).

I don't know a single watermelon writer or thinker who has as small a footprint.  I'm sure they exist.  But the mainstream watermelon is usually just the latest snob who moved into the local neighborhood of McMansions and wants to slam the door against anyone trying to follow him into that shiny new neighborhood -- as if taking a few plastic bottles to the curb once every two weeks makes up for the McMansion and the Prius.

All governments should abandon all funding of science and limit their activities to their legitimate role of protecting individual rights (and with them, property rights).

Libertarians suggest that only freedom and a lack of government meddling will bring about the lasting change in individual behavior that is necessary to protect our environment.  Private individuals should be left free to engage in education and persuasion activities for better, more efficient practices.

Using the sledgehammer of government policy to get the compliance you want only breeds waste -- and, eventually, backlash.  Abolition of government spending, including that which goes towards so-called 'science', would actually do much to improve environmental health.

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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, August, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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The Left's National Forest Reichstag Fires

Regarding the big wildfires in the American West this year:

A number of them are attributed to "pyroterrorism".  It's actually a real thing: USFS and other federal agencies have been holding training sessions and meetings about pyroterrorism at a more & more feverish pace the past few years...

Why?

Because jihadi groups have discovered that American forests have become supremely vulnerable -- and as a consequence, they can cost the US lives and billions -- for the price of a cellphone, a few ounces of gasoline, and a few matches.
 
The idea is not new: Hamas has been torching Israeli farm fields and nature reserves for many years in similar ways; and there is mounting evidence that the disastrous fires in Greece this year were largely a result of Turk and Muslim pyroterrorists who snuck into Greece alongside refugees & immigrants.

What's new, though, is that these extremists in America have begun training in remote-activated incendiary devices designed to ignite fires in fire-prone areas (think IED's for Smokey Bear).

Plus, stupid people are always around.

So why are American forest and grasslands are increasingly vulnerable?

One reason is that federal land policy has gotten trapped by lawsuits (many of which are funded by the forced "investment" by American taxpayers via the EAJA -- in other words a wholesale wealth transfer from taxpayers to the lawyer-industrial complex) which have done much to shut down logging on forests “managed” by the federal government, together with environmental activist political pressure to stop forest "management".   Land managers are increasingly restricted from setting up prescribed / controlled burns to eliminate fuel.  Nor can they contract out to resource (eg logging) companies to clear overgrown areas.

Besides the external pressure towards ignoring management, there is internal inertia trending in the same direction: older forest managers who understood that American forests and open land were supposed to be for a balance of uses, including recreation, wild areas, logging, mining, and drilling, and so on, are gradually being replaced by a newer generation of land managers who are increasingly opposed to any uses other than recreation -- or, better yet: human-prohibited wild space.

So a perfect storm is building bigger and bigger every year -- with increasingly devastating wildland fires as the predictable result.

Common sense says global warming isn't global if it's local.  However, environmentalists and their leftist brethren are now peddling the idea that global warming can occur in one small region, which is absurd.  Nevertheless it is the "logic" behind claims that local heat records are evidence of global warming.  This is how environmentalists play their game.

Suppose those of us who are not alarmists do the same?  Let's try it:

"Arsonist forest fires are definitely a sign that Man’s activities has increased local temperatures – as much as 800-1000 degrees C. If environmentalists' opposition to sensible forest management contributes to this 800 degree rise in the local temperature, they should pay for the damages they've caused."

That’s the way, right?

If, by your actions, you create conditions that result in the destruction of property, which includes causing "local" ... er... "global" warming by 800 degrees, then you can expect to bear the consequences in law and liberty:

Pay up, y'all.

But the real solution is to get politics out of the environment (and insurance), and thenceforth to protect property rights.

The fed should sell off the millions of acres it owns to the highest bidder, and from that point on, allow property owners to provide for the protection and management of their property.  How they do so will be managed by their insurers.  Such a regime will encourage proper management of forest resources and the mitigation of harmful practices.

Libertarians have called for the abolition of the BLM, USFS, NPS, and other alphabet-soup bureaucracies, and the wholesale privatization of government property.  We also call for the abolition of welfare for lawyers and political activists who profit endlessly by suing government.  If governments didn't own property, taxpayers wouldn't be left holding the bag on both sides of every argument over the environment.

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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, August, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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Short Answers to the “Can You Win” Question

By Marc Montoni

Most of the many thousands of Libertarians who have run for office since 1972 (estimated to be in excess of 25,000) have faced the inevitable question from reporters (and voters as well, but especially reporters), “do you think you can win?”

The question itself reveals the intellectually lazy view of politics as a horse race.  There's no room in that religion for ideology, belief, passion, or anything else of any substance.  There's nothing in a horse race that really means anything.  Well, except winning.

Essentially, reporters asking it have reduced politics to a simple race of nothing vs. nothing.

How to get around it?

How do you lead someone with such a short attention span back to real issues?

Libertarians have come up with many ways to steer the reporter back to their reason for running.  We share them with you below so you will have them ready in your verbal arsenal.

Here is how a candidate who was professionally coached answered the question: Ed Clark, when asked if he would win, and how many votes he would get, had probably the best answer I've heard:

"I'm trying as hard as I can to win.  We have a serious message, we
want to address serious problems..."

Clark's answer avoided both self-marginalization on the one hand, and overblown expectations that any moron, much less a reporter, could see right through on the other.

The essay I quote below appeared on "libernet" in the early nineties, but I did not record who wrote it:

In 1982, Ed Clark put together an audio tape of fifty ques-tions and answers, and on this particular matter, the conversation went like this:

Question: Do you really expect to win?"

Answer: "I'm trying just as hard as I can to win.  Libertarians have the right solutions for today's problems, they have the ethics of individual liberty--the only correct ethics for politics--and we have been gaining strength and we are going to get a lot of votes this time".

Question: "How many votes are you going to get?"

Answer: "We are going to get a lot of votes in 1982.  More than we have had before and enough to show the public that Libertarians are a very strong alternative in American politics".

Mr. Clark then went on to say:

"If you note the way I have answered the last two questions, these are perhaps the only two in the whole set of questions where you do not give a direct answer, because if you ever answer a question "Do you really expect to win" with a "yes", in many cases people will discard you as somebody who is obviously not realistic in your answer.  If you answer that question with a "no" you eliminate one of the principal reasons that people are going to follow your candidacy and there is the possibility that you might win.  So these questions call for strong affirmative answers, but not to answer the question precisely".
   
You are, of course, never under any obligation to give a direct answer to any question, and indeed few politicians do, often preferring to give an answer that they think will put them in the best possible light, whether it relates to the subject at hand or not.

There are sound reasons for reconsidering your answers.  You do not know for sure that you are not going to win, even if you think you might not.

Let me take a little more of your time by relating an event which occurred here in British Columbia within the last three months.  The term of our governing Social Credit (conservative) Party was drawing to a close following a five year term which had been plagued by scandal and corruption, including the resignation of the Premier under allegations of conflict of interest.

They and the New Democratic (socialist) Party both ran a full slate of candidates.  The provincial Liberal (wishy-washy) Party had been pretty well defunct for the last twenty years until recent times when a very energetic fellow started making really strenuous efforts to revive it ready for this last election.  The net result of his efforts was that he persuaded enough people to run as candidates so as to give them a full slate.  This then gave him sufficient leverage to persuade the powers that be to include him in a Party Leader's debate on local television.  This proved to be the turning point from which they never looked back.

The final result was New Democrats 51 seats, Liberals 17 seats, and the once ruling Social Credit 6 seats.

Knowledgeable commentators forecast that at best the Liberals might take a handful of seats.  Instead, they are now the official opposition.

Here are some additional sound bite-ish answers:

"If I wanted chaos, I could sit on my couch and vote for Democrats and Republicans."

"I want liberty.  I want freedom.  I can't get either of those things voting for Democrats or Republicans.

"I want government to protect my rights, and get out of my wallet and my bedroom.  The other guys will give me the opposite."
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"I am running because I want liberty.  Voting for Democrats and Republicans is a lost cause; because both of them work to expand government and restrict liberty."

"Doing the same thing over and over - in this case, voting for Democrats and Republicans - and each time, expecting the results to be different, is insanity.  These guys refuse to protect individual rights, they are taxing the middle class into bankruptcy; they've saddled us with hundreds of thousands of laws no single person can be expected to know; they take our homes and give them over to developers; they've lied us into '100 years of war', and have made our money just about worthless.  Why give them a pat on the back and return them to office yet again?  I'm running because I refuse to give them that pat on the back."

For Libertarians in my homes state of Virginia, you can also make it a point to say that you're also running because Virginia doesn't have registration by party, and this is the only way we have to discover new Libertarians so we have a larger support base for the next election.  Along these lines, you might say:

"I'll count my race as a 'win' if I can find new libertarians and get them ready to support our candidates next year.  We Libertarians believe we're in a marathon, not a one-year sprint."

It is important for every Libertarian to remember the following:  You’re not going to get fiscal conservatives to vote for you; at least not en masse.

You're not going to get a mass number of liberals, either.

For that matter, winning is out of the question without a campaign war chest equal to the sum of both of your opponents.  Your campaign should pursue the swing voters who aren't married to either camp; and it should specifically target those who are already libertarian.

Below I provide you with several more brief articles on how to address “The Question”.  Enjoy!  And above all, good luck and have fun with your race!

Donny Ferguson says:

I would respond with:

1) There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of elected Libertarian officials.

2) There have always been independent and third party members of Congress, and they all beat Republicans and Democrats to get there.  Right now we have two independ-ent U.S. Senators.

3) Any candidate can win as long as you vote for him.

James R. Stevenson says:

Start off by saying that right now you have a 33% chance of winning.  If you can get your message out and people realize they are in agreement, then you can certainly win.

I would avoid using the word 'conservative' in any incarnation.  Say you are trying to appeal to those people who believe in personal liberty and fiscal responsibility.  This way you can appeal to any disaffected constituent, Democrat, Republican, or independent.  If you use the word 'conservative' you automatically lose all Democratic tribalists.  Similarly, if you use the word 'liberal', you automatically lose the Republican tribalists.

It is unfortunate that Bob Barr is already campaigning as a 'true conservative'.  He has already marginalized his campaign, just as Ron Paul did. Quite stoopid if not downright idiotic.

Probably the most important thing you can say is "If the media responsibly reports on your positions, then you have a great chance to win. If the media censors your candidacy, you will have little chance of winning".

Steve Damerell says:

One of the best answers is to say "I'm running to win, be-cause people don't run in elections to lose."  Then immediately delve into WHY you're running.

That lead-in sentence is neither defeatist nor delusional, and from there, you can bring the question back around to the issues, your strong point.

Rick Sincere says:

The classic response in this genre was, of course, William F. Buckley, Jr.,  running as a Conservative Party candidate for Mayor of New York in 1965.   Asked, "what's the first thing you'll do if you're elected?," Buckley  replied:  "Demand a recount."
 
I'm not saying you should copy Buckley, but you should be prepared with  something similarly pithy and funny -- something quotable that will get you noticed.

-------------

Marc Montoni serves as the President of the Libertarian Practical Politics Association as well as the Chief of the Annoyance Caucus of the Libertarian Party.  A long-time resident of Virginia, primariy Richmond and Harrisonburg, Montoni has served as the Membership Chairman for the Libertarian Party of Virginia as well as many other posts over four decades of service.  He now resides in Colorado with his family.

See his blog at:

http://FreeVirginia.blogspot.com

The Bamiyan Moment for America's Bigoted Social Justice Warriors

This is the Bamiyan Moment of America's intolerant social justice warriors and the perpetually offended: Vandalizing monuments.

OK.

Let's destroy them all. Every monument, any flag. We should even turn all the museums with any of that offensive garbage into rubble. Erase everything.

And let's slaughter those who still "cling to their flags and guns".

Screencap of a CNN video of Afghan Taliban doing to
the Buddhas at Bamiyan what the American Taliban
want to do to statues and monuments in America

After all, we have to model our cultural cleansing after what the Taliban did to all of those offensive statues of Buddha at Bamiyan and elsewhere.

But let's not stop there.

George Washington was a slave holder. So was Jefferson. Let's shove their monuments into the Potomac.

Maybe the William Ellisson historical marker in Sumter SC should be taken down, also?

We could spend years figuring out how to get our society completely rid of all symbols that offend someone.

In fact, we could make a "War on Offensiveness", that will last us for generations, like the War on Poverty or the War on Drugs.

Or -- as a much quicker alternative -- we could take all the American Taliban Social Justice Warriors and dump them over Niagra Falls.

Those willfully and stupidly ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. And the worst thing is everyone else pays for their folly. The way Obama and the rest of the idiocracy is poking at Russia and China, one day it will be the USA that will be overrun, demonized and erased from history.

But I guess that will be just fine with the American Taliban leftist swills who will be sucking at the breast of the state in that era.

Taxpayer-Funded Lobbying Organization Loses One!

I was floored to read of the first crack in the stranglehold the Virginia Association of Counties (VACO) has on county-state politics.  Kudos to Goochland County.  I don't know how the Board of Supervisors came to the conclusion they did, but it is a pleasing development.

For a long time, I wondered how public debate always seemed to be so well-funded in favor of fatter government and getting more financial lard slathered all over its teeming bureaucrats.  Then I served a term on the Lord Fairfax Soil and Water District, and discovered that a good portion of the money we were given to fund operations was given to an organization called the Virginia Association of Soil & Water Conservation Districts (VASWCD).  Looking into it further, I discovered that VASWCD was essentially a "Taxpayer-Funded Lobbying Organization", or a "TFLO".  A large portion of the annual dues the Lord Fairfax district sent to them were used to fund lobbying efforts at the local, state, and even federal level.  I also learned that even the small bureaucracy that was the Lord Fairfax SWCD wasn't just funding VASWCD, but was also funneling cash to additional TFLO-type groups such as the Shenandoah Resource Conservation & Development (RC&D) Council.

Being a Libertarian, I objected to the District's membership in these organizations every year, because I think it is absolutely wrong for government to lobby government.  Legislators should adjust policy according to the wishes of the citizens, rather than doing so at the behest of highly-paid lobbyists who represent the 1% elite bureaucrats and politicians who presume to know what's best for the rest of us!

Unfortunately, I was the minority on the Board, and as a result the District continues to throw cash at lobbying front groups.

What VASWCD was to the Soil & Water District, the VACO is to county governments.  There are many other similar NGO's for every type of government under the sun.  The Virginia Municipal League, the Virginia Court Clerks Association, etc all have some lobbying component, and all of them are one way or another funded by taxpayers.

So VACO is the definition of a Taxpayer-Funded Lobbying Organization.  The reason that it and similar organizations should be of serious concern to every taxpayer is this:  the things they lobby for are almost always beneficial to governments and bureaucrats, and almost always detrimental to taxpayers.

County bureaucrats cannot lobby the government while on taxpayer time.  But they can do the same thing by setting up a front organization, call it an NGO, throw some taxpayer cash at it, and perform an ethical skirt-and-dodge.

Political hacks and bureaucrats should not be allowed to grab cash from the government trough, and shovel it at "non-government organizations" ("NGO's") so the NGO can then hire legions of paid lobbyists to work against the wishes of the taxpayer; government should never be given any opportunity to influence itself!

There are literally thousands of NGO's similar to VACO in the United States, and they all exist for one purpose: to get more taxpayer loot (or power) shoveled into their gaping maw.

The legislature should eliminate the ability of local and state bureaucrats or government bodies to lobby any other government body.  Membership in any NGO that lobbies (directly or indirectly) for anything that would favor the individual or originating government should be absolutely forbidden.

EnviroLibertarian

In the lamestream media today was a lapdog-type article about an alleged "former skeptic" named Richard Muller.

This seems to be another in a long line of breathless media front-page hyping of the warmist agenda; especially as the articles printed in most outlets didn't report on any contrarian views.

By the way, Muller is not a 'skeptic'. Having a couple of questions about the 'facts' his fellow alarmists have put forth does not make an alarmist a skeptic. He has been an alarmist for a long time, and in fact has received a not insubstantial amount lot of money from the government and alarmist NGO's.

I think the science is wholly unsettled and it will have to be studied for a long time at length with real science and accurate data, rather than politicized claims based on corrupted data with less-than-reliable measurements and falsified reporting. Climate will probably need to be studied for a good century or two -- before humans will have acquired sufficient data to be able to accurately predict climate changes due to anthro activity.

There is also the question of what to do about it if science really does eventually prove beyond a reasonable doubt that human activity causes climate change. In essence, "so now what do we do?"

Doing some simple math might help put it all in perspective.

That said, solar power is in my future and I practice recycling to a greater extent than most "greens" I know.

I think practicing enviro "harm reduction" should be done by individuals at the individual level -- rather than at the collective level:

- Have fewer children (of course, the responsible already do; the irresponsible are still having huge families and don't care what they do to the planet as a result)

- Stop buying new Toyotas and Buicks, and bike, walk, or ride the bus. "recycle" an older car by fixing it up and using it until the seats fall through the floor.

- If government is going to force people to reduce their emissions, it is government that should lead the way.

- Grow your own no-till garden, without pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

- Stop using chemicals and pesticides on your lawn. [Our neighbors -- who include a number of Democrats and at least two families who are Green Party supporters -- use them and many have perfect monculture lawns as a result. We don't. I am slowly expanding our tree, bush, and flower plantings to cover more of our yard, so I can stop mowing it. I regard mowing lawns as a very strange habit that we Americans have gotten into due to cheap oil.]

Some of this I do because I find the idea of [essentially] giving my money to 8th century racist, sexist, violently intolerant religious bigots in the Middle East utterly repugnant.

But some of it I do because I really see no point in stripping the planet to the point where it can no longer support the population we have. I recycle because I consider burying perfectly good raw materials in landfills to be a complete waste.

Label me a skeptic of global warming if you wish. But before you throw stones, you'd better clean up that glass house of yours.

• If you DRIVE to an environmental rally, YOU are the problem.

• If you don't recycle, YOU are the problem. Yes, even if your county or city does not offer pick-up recycling, YOU can still recycle -- even counties that don't offer curbside recycling still have recycling units at their landfill; so get yourself a bunch of large garbage bags to store recycling in until it makes sense to take them to the dropoff yourself. Heck, You don't need curbside pickup -- most Targets and Wal-Marts now have a bunch of recycling bins in the front of the store, so you can just combine recycling with shopping. Some of the recycling centers even pay you for your trash!

• If you have a new or new-ish car, even if it's a Prius, YOU are the problem. Buy one of the millions of small cars from the 80's and 90's still out there, and use it until it drops dead beyond all repair.

In the meantime, I remain a skeptic.