This November, one of the interesting indicators of a political shift could come from New Hampshire. Why New Hampshire? While pundits have always watched this state for one reason or another, this year it has an extra added dynamic. Last October, the Free State Project chose New Hampshire as their state to focus on relocating 5,000 activists, with the goal of growing to 20,000 and organizing towards political reform in that state. While not all are Libertarians, a good number are, includin...

OK, folks...this is where I need your help as more veteran bloggers. I want to launch a good google bomb, just to say I've done it. Can anyone give me good articles on how to do this? I would appreciate your input. signing off, Gideon MacLeish

OK, folks, in the words of Dave Barry, I swear I am not making this up. Members of Devizes cricket club in Wiltshire, England were quite surprised when a rabbit burst out of a pile of rubbish they had been burning and bolted, aflame, into their equipment shed, lighting the shed on fire and destroying equipment worth 60,000 pounds ($110,000). Firefighters arrived on the scene to extinguish the blaze and found the rabbit's skeleton inside the destroyed shed. signing off, Gideon MacL...

OK, folks, in the words of Dave Barry, I swear I am not making this up. Members of Devizes cricket club in Wiltshire, England were quite surprised when a rabbit burst out of a pile of rubbish they had been burning and bolted, aflame, into their equipment shed, lighting the shed on fire and destroying equipment worth 60,000 pounds ($110,000). Firefighters arrived on the scene to extinguish the blaze and found the rabbit's skeleton inside the destroyed shed. signing off, Gideon MacL...

One of the first road trips I remember took place under less than optimal circumstances. My grandfather had died, and we were making our way from Oklahoma to Indiana to attend the funeral. Our transportation means at the time were humble: a little Opal Cadet with a penchant for breaking down with startling consistency. My younger sister and brother stayed behind with our stepdad on this trip, partly because there really wasn't time for the pit stops that were necessary, and, really, who wa...

I was wondering this question today as I was contemplating the role of print media versus "real time" news. Almost everyone I know gets their news from cable TV or the internet; I get all my headline news from reliable net news sources, my weather from a compendium of sources including the local radio (weatherchannel.com tends to be less reliable for my area of the country), and my sports via yahoo! sports and espn.com. Fortunately for us, our local paper concentrates on city and county is...

Friday the 13th has always been the bane of my existence. Over the course of my life, I have one broken humerus bone, seven stitches, various cuts, bruises and sprains, all occurring on, you guessed it...Friday the 13th. So, I started out today thinking, no, hoping, it would be different. And it started out that way. We had two water lines, two sewer lines, and two phone conduits to lay today...not a terribly hard job, except that we were working on postage stamp sized lots in the ritzy se...

Warning: this is just another rant. If it's not to your liking, you may want to move on...lol. I recently put up an article that was a bit more of a piece of "me" than some of my regular pieces. It sunk like a stone. It seems to me fascinating that there are numerous blogs that are posted on the way JoeUser is going downhill, and yet, the articles that get the points aren't the insightful, well written articles. They're the "shock blog" articles with the inflammatory titles (Two such "a...

Having five females in the house (one wife, four daughters), has led me to the conclusion that there are some food differences that us males with the "Y" chromosome just don't have. Of particular instance to me is my two year old, who, I have recently discpvered, can actually hear a slice of cheese being unwrapped from two rooms away (I'm actually not kidding here!). The thing that really stands out about the five females in my house is: the whole stereotype about women and chocolate...is ...

I am a road trip afficianado. Even having children hasn't decreased my yen to hit the road, if anything it has INCREASED, because now I have a whole carful of little acolytes to proselytize to the joy that is the open road. I would have to say, however, that the coolest road trip I ever took was in June, 2001, to a bluegrass festival known as Smilefest in western North Carolina. We loaded up our kids, hitched up the popup camper, and hit the open road. About halfway through Indiana, we ...

I have just gotten through what seems like the 5,000th blog on the mudslinging that has been the hallmark of this election. Of course, political mudslinging is as old as politics itself, the only difference lately is the politicians are using third party shills to do their dirty work for them. Every election brings with it the same tired promise of campaigning on the issues. And while the candidate may solidly address the issues in their speeches, the ads FOR said candidate are anything bu...

One standard question was brought up on another thread that has gone on far too long asking a very old, very valid question about why God allows innocents, especially children, to suffer (this was not the exact context of the question, but it does hit on the high points). I have wrestled with this question for years, until I realized that, in my personal opinion, it has to do a lot with what God is teaching us. Our capacity to kill is matched only by our capacity to heal; in the same years...

I have been meaning to write a blog on penal reform for a long time. This article will only touch on some of my feelings, and I will write more in depth later. One of the key problems with our penal system in America is that it is largely revenge based, rather than rehabilitation based. We think that, by removing the criminal from society, by executing them or demeaning them, we are somehow "dealing with" the crime problem in this country. The fact is, that is just not the case. We are "de...