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March 18 - March 20, 2021
That time he built on the political contacts he already had in place and netted about 3 percent of the vote—six times higher than Paul’s presidential bid, and better than almost any libertarian gubernatorial candidate, in any state, to date.
One of the pernicious obstacles to the growth of the party has been its commitment to following logic chains into whatever dark place they lead, regardless of social mores. That’s why, in one true sense, the philosophy is deeply ingrained with America’s founding principles but, in an equally true sense, still engenders earnest debates over whether consensual cannibalism should be legal.
he returned home and found inspiration in the writing of conservative politician Barry Goldwater
Yikes
Pendarvis was traveling under the pseudonym “Zack Bass,” possibly to prevent anyone from linking him with his time working an office job for a health unit within Florida’s Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. That job had been abruptly terminated when coworkers, suspicious of his secretive computer habits, found digital files that led to a conviction for 129 counts of child pornography.
Throw a rock at a group of libertarians, you have decent odds of hitting a child molester.
During his child pornography trial, the prosecutor showed the judge and defense counsel a list of words written on a large notepad that described Pendarvis with words like “shy” and “introvert.” Once the defense counsel had indicated it had no objection to the list being shown to the jury, the prosecutor surreptitiously used a pen to alter the word “introvert” so that the jury read it as “pervert.” When Pendarvis’s lawyer complained about the deception, the conviction was reversed.
Many libertarians feel a deep kinship with America’s early days, which they view as a utopian golden age when government was small and people lived freely.
Ahistorical assclowns.
If all went as planned, hundreds of Free Towners would concentrate their voting power to effect a political makeover, transforming a small American town from a stodgy and unattractive thicket of burdensome regulations into an “anything goes” frontier where, according to a website created by Pendarvis, citizens should assert certain inalienable rights, such as the right to have more than two junk cars on private property, the right to gamble, the right to engage in school truancy, the right to traffic drugs, and the right to have incestual intercourse. Oh, and also, Pendarvis sought to assert
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Most efforts at planned communities involve artificially populating an uninhabited place, like a stretch of desert or an island—as in 1972, when a Nevada millionaire and his libertarian friends declared independent ownership of an island off the coast of New Zealand (a claim that was promptly quashed by the New Zealand military).
Henry Ford, whose assembly line kick-started the automobile revolution, learned this the hard way when his planned Amazonian utopia, Fordlandia, succumbed in the 1930s to the threats of rainforest blight, disease, cultural clashes, and an unhelpful Brazilian government.
just as a rabies parasite can co-opt the brain of a much larger organism and force it to work against its own interests,
Helluva metaphor
In a country known for fussy states with streaks of independence, New Hampshire is among the fussiest and the streakiest. It’s one of only five states with no sales tax, one of two states that limit the governor to two-year terms, and the only state in New England that still allows the death penalty.
In all, they considered and rejected twenty towns—too cold,
Yes you need the right weathef in balmy NH.
The libertarians disembarked, stretching legs and cracking backs. They knew little about the town. The town, in turn, was equally ignorant about them. Though the would-be colonists were walking into a public building to talk about a matter that would have been of major public interest, the meeting itself was decidedly private. No one knew they were there—other than John and Rosalie Babiarz.
No longer tethered by rail lines and commerce to the broader world, Grafton had become a tiny fragment of civilization hidden away among the trees. And because Grafton had far more land than people, plenty of plots were available for would-be homesteaders.
Together, the colonists and their hosts strategized a naked power grab of the town government. Grafton had fewer than eight hundred registered voters, most of whom didn’t show up on election days. They figured that just a couple of dozen new voters could join an existing base of like-minded people to tip the scales in favor of a new order.
Might it be possible, Condon asked, to defund the local publ...
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Shit throw a dart at a map of NH dude.
Each town meeting is an opportunity for a small community to demonstrate that, given the reins of power, it can rise above the failings of Washington politicians. It is also an opportunity to flop spectacularly.
They also began working to convince a critical mass of libertarians to move to this backwoods area without hairdressers, movie theaters, pizza parlors, tennis courts, concerts, cell-phone service, or jobs, to take just a few examples from the endless list of things that Grafton lacked.
But of course, they were not really breaking ground on some hitherto undiscovered frontier. In much the same way Englishmen had once crashed through the bramble of what they thought was a New World, they were actually inserting themselves into a long-established community of natives who regarded them not as benign colonists, or liberators, but as invaders.
The project remained under the radar until a local author named Lisa Shaw noticed the plan, which was spelled out in detail online, and sounded the alarm. In a mailing she sent out to every address in town, she described the project in unfavorable terms.
Though the accusation might have been seen as an early sign of trouble, most Free Towners still assumed that the tax-phobic Graftonites would treat them as liberators and political brothers.
Selfish assholes always do.
Grafton’s minority of liberals and pro-government folks were predictably aghast, but there was also an unexpected twist in local attitudes: many small-government conservatives, the Free Towners’ presumed political allies, also seemed angry.
In libertarian circles, calling someone a “statist”—one who prefers a large and active government—is a real insult, one that ranks right up there with “racist” in its ability to provoke heated defenses.
“All of a sudden people saw what he was saying,” said Babiarz. Like many Free Towners, Babiarz implied that it was grossly unfair for people to judge the Free Town Project by the views expressed on the Free Town Project website.
“These are the kind of people that you would be proud to have as neighbors, I gotta tell ya,” said Lorrey. But rather than placate the crowd, his words just touched off a wave of derisive laughter that rolled across the sea of angry faces.
Though the logicians were armed with buckets of well-reasoned arguments (and probably guns), they quickly realized that the meeting wasn’t really primed for teaching moments.
“I never knew till that point how Hitler could get people all riled up to support him in war,” John would later say. He called it a mob mentality. “It was interesting, because it was all emotion-based. Logic and reason was out the door.”
Hitler thought he was logical, dipshit.
Condon, using his best lawyerly voice, sought to reassure the public that no organized effort was afoot to take such measures as privatization of the roads (under which each person would spend the money or labor to take care of the stretch of road that ran past their home).
The state’s Libertarian Party, which considered itself a different entity than the Free Town Project, sent Pendarvis a strongly worded email accusing him of poisoning the well in Grafton. “The people of Grafton are armed, dangerous, and extremely pissed at you,” wrote John Barnes of the state party. He instructed Pendarvis to stay away from New Hampshire.
Maybe what they had witnessed, they reasoned, was a unified faction of Grafton. Condon said that it was obvious who turned out for the meeting. The Democrats.
Siiiiiiiigh
Though they had very little evidence to support the notion, they thought that, if the Free Town Project moved forward, these were the people who would help them undermine the local governmental structures. Grafton could still be liberated, they concluded. It could still become America’s first Free Town. In this, as it turned out, the logicians were completely correct.
As the Moon family continued to build its business empire, one of the sons, Kook Jin Moon, proved to have aptitude as an executive. In 1993, he founded a small arms company, Kahr Arms, that sited its main production facility in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Tensions with the town ratcheted up over the issue of whether the Moonie House was a tax-exempt church or a taxable residence for Soule. Eventually the Unification Church, which was by then a well-established religious organization, prevailed, and relations began to ease once again.
At first, the bears went unseen in the nighttime, like mischievous elves descending from the woods. But instead of mending shoes or spinning straw into gold, they cracked compost bins, tore open beehives, and licked small traces of beef tallow from backyard grills, only to disappear with the first hint of the rising sun.
Bungtowners watched uneasily as a series of raids in a century-old barn reduced a feral colony of hardy barn cats from a population of twenty to zero.
One night in Bungtown, a Vietnam veteran named Dave Thurber, feeling uneasy, tweaked his living room curtain and saw a bear lumbering across his front yard, leaving deep claw marks in the snow. Right off the bat, this was a bit unnatural. During a New England winter, a bear—or to be more precise, a normal bear—is in the middle of a season-long slumber. For five or more months, the bear lies in a den, its heart rate lowered to a somnambulant eight beats per minute; it does not eat, drink, defecate, or urinate until the warmth of spring signals the promise of new vegetation to eat.
As the bear began to eat, a car bumped up the rutted dirt road, high beams sliding across the lawn like prison searchlights scanning a jail yard for escaping convicts. And indeed, Thurber saw that the bear acted like a convict, deftly avoiding the light streams by flattening itself just beyond their reach, in the shadowed lee of a large snowbank.
Thurber’s experience with the bear was surprising, because the bear wasn’t simply seeking cover when humans approached. Rather, it seemed to be specifically avoiding the light. Which suggested that the bear knew human passersby could only see where the light struck.
New England’s Eastern Gray Tree Frog, on the other hand, can survive being frozen nearly solid; all winter its organs sit like tiny hunks of beef jerky in an icy slurry of body fluids.
With their enormous strength (they can bend a car door in half) and size (hunters have killed quarter-ton black bears in New Hampshire; the national weight record is 886 pounds), they can prey opportunistically on a wide variety of smaller creatures, including young deer and moose. Outside of human hunters, the only things that eat bears are larger bears (though researchers are at a loss to fully understand the reasons behind black bear cannibalism).
If escaping a bear’s notice is unlikely, so is escaping the bear itself. Humans can dive into water to flee cougars, climb trees to evade raging rhinoceri, and outrun alligators. But the average black bear swims speedily and climbs quickly. It could spot Usain Bolt 25 meters in his world-record-setting 100-meter dash and still pounce on the world’s fastest man well before the finish line.
bear attacks are very rare. From a statistical standpoint, you’re more likely to suffocate in a giant vat of corn than be injured by a bear.
Kilham (featured as the “bear whisperer” in a panda bear documentary narrated by actress Kristen Bell) employs many of the controversial methods employed, famously, by the primatologist Jane Goodall. He names the bears he studies, attributes emotional motivations to their behavior, and probably wouldn’t have to work too hard to get a nod from Guinness as the world record–holder for enduring the highest number of nonfatal bear bites.
Kilham credits bears with self-awareness, the ability to count to twelve (primates can only manage a three-count), and cooperation to enforce a bear justice system.
Soon after moving to town in 2008, Ploszaj (it’s pronounced rarely) decided to hike a trail from Hardy Hill Road to the Pinnacle, a high peak that overlooks the valley in which Grafton is situated. Ploszaj (really, it’s pronounced “PLO-zhay”) knew of a crumbled concrete platform at the top and the remains of a few historical homestead foundations along the way.
Grafton is like that—those who know where to look can find artifacts of a bygone era hidden in the woods, like shipwrecks submerged in an arboreal ocean. There are cemeteries in various states of senescence, stone walls that echo farms long since abandoned, schools shuttered, mills decommissioned, and mines whose hollowed bones of stone stud the mountains—all demonstrating the abject failure of three centuries of attempts to subjugate wild nature.
Partway through his hike to the Pinnacle, Ploszaj sat on the ground to consult a compass and topographic map. He thought he was alone, until the silence was broken by a humanlike snort. If not for that sound, he never would have seen the bear standing less than fifty feet away, its black fur and lighter brown nose blending into the treescape.
Ploszaj had just experienced what I was beginning to think of as “the assessment.” It was described to me many times: rather than bolting, an apparently unafraid bear would stare and consider its options before sauntering away.
Those who moved to Grafton under the banner of the Free Town Project between 2004 and 2009 were free radicals, unbonded to existing living situations, because they had either too much money or not enough.
A few months after the shouty town meeting, the project got a boost when no less a personage than New Hampshire governor Craig Benson came to a $25-a-head barbecue at the home of John Babiarz and shook hands all around,
Of course that dumbfuck would show up
