Of the three candidates in the race for NH Senate District 10, I was the only one to receive a recommendation from the Marijuana Policy Project, while the Republican and Democrat in the race received a middle “unknown, uncertain, or less favorable” rating. You can see MPP’s full state senate voting guide here.
I also received a “A” from the New Hampshire Firearms Coalition, once again, as they’d previously endorsed me in my 2016 run for the Democrat gubernatorial primary. Here’s their ratings PDF for Western New Hampshire.
For those unaware, libertarians believe in the non-aggression principle which says we don’t support the use of aggressive force. Prohibitions should therefore be ended and people who want to own/produce/sell weapons and chemicals or plants should be free to do so. Live free or die.
Bitcoin Embassy New Hampshire, which recently launched inside Route 101 Local Goods at 661 Marlboro Street in Keene, is not the first Bitcoin Embassy in the United States, but it is the second one! The first was opened earlier this year in Atlanta. There are others in various parts of the world but Bitcoin Embassy New Hampshire is the only one in the Northeast part of North America.
The Bitcoin Embassy will be a place for learning, with “Bitcoin 101” classes already available, teaching the basics of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Classes are pay-what-you-can-afford, which means if you can’t afford to pay, you can still attend for free. Drop in to take a tour at 661 Marlboro St in Keene and sign up for a class, or visit online at BitNH.me.
RT America contacted me Friday and asked for a quick comment on behalf of Cop Block regarding this week’s mass page takedown by Facebook. The takedown affected the facebook pages of major police accountability and pro-liberty sites including the Free Thought Project, the Anti-Media, Cop Block and others. I explained that Facebook is their property and they can do as they wish with it. Police accountability activists and other libertarians should be building alternative platforms rather than relying on those provided by political corporate behemoths like Facebook and Twitter. Here’s the segment that aired on RT America yesterday:
The good news is, such a platform already exists in the form of Mastodon, which is a decentralized, federated competitor to Twitter. Unlike Facebook and Twitter which are centralized platforms controlled by corporations, a Mastodon server can be run by anyone and worldwide there are thousands of Mastodon servers. Each server admin decides the rules for their server, including which other Mastodon servers to connect to – this is what it means when Mastodon is described as “federated”. Its decentralized, federated structure is why Mastodon is much more censorship resistant than the centralized, corporate platforms.
Cop Block’s new Mastodon!
I recommend you create an account on your preferred Mastodon instance. If you’re pro-liberty, then you should try out Liberdon, which launched this summer and houses various libertarians and voluntarists. I just made a CopBlock account there today, which you can follow here.
Facebook’s blog post explaining their takedowns basically admitted they were upset that pages like Cop Block were getting people to leave Facebook and visit their respective websites, meaning potential revenue for the sites in question and potentially less revenue for Facebook. Facebook doesn’t want you to leave Facebook. Whether there were political motivations behind the takedowns is more speculative, but it certainly reeks of it. Regardless of their reasons, perhaps you should consider leaving Facebook entirely and helping build the decentralized alternatives. It’s up to you.
The first car purchased at a dealership directly for Dash | AutoFair Nashua
Something big happened this week.
The famous “Bitcoin Pizza” story was overshadowed by a punky, lesser-known cryptocurrency quietly occupying the number 12 spot on CoinMarketCap. The implications of this week’s event will be felt for decades and change the way the mainstream views cryptocurrencies forever.
One question plagues cryptocurrency users everywhere. Whenever you talk with doubters about the numerous advantages of using digital cash over fiat, invariably the response comes:
“But what can I buy with it?”
This question drives you nuts. You explain that at first, there was nothing you could buy with it. Then, there was pizza. Then coffee shops and yoga studios started accepting it. Then you could use a handful of janky websites to buy some (sometimes expired) digital gift cards. But now there is something much more real. More tangible. More serious.
A brand new car.
Yeah, you read that right. This week, the largest chain of auto dealerships in New Hampshire, AutoFair, sold a vehicle off one of their lots in exchange for DASH (digital cash).
She’s a principled Libertarian who hosts a weekday afternoon talk show on LRN.FM named “The Call to Freedom“. She’s on the show daily from 4-7pm including the 5pm “Crypto Hour” which features her expertise on the subject of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. (You can watch it via the LRN.FM Twitch channel or listen at LRN.FM.)
The last-minute filing was thanks to the Libertarian Party of NH re-attaining major party ballot access on the level of the republicans and democrats for the first time in over two decades. That means that the party executive committee has the ability to appoint a slate of candidates to fill any races for which no one had yet filed or won enough write-in votes in the primary election. Parties have one week from the primary date to file such a slate.
It’s an interesting approach and throws a surprise libertarian challenger into a long-stale county sheriff’s race that has been a re-match for several terms between incumbent democrat Eli Rivera and longtime republican challenger Earl Nelson.
Aria DiMezzo, LPNH Chairman Chip Spangler, and Robert Call outside the NH Secretary of State’s Office
DiMezzo claims she’s going to be doing real campaigning and has already launched her campaign website which includes her opinions on ending the entire war on drugs. She admits to being a former opiate addict which means she’s got an insight into the world of drug addiction and the insane War on Drugs not shared by her republican and democrat competitiors. As she points out in her essay,
“Each addict has their own unique reason that they turned to drugs as an escape, and the only way to help any of them, if they decide they want help, will be individually and personally. There is no easy, convenient, one-size-fits-all answer. The folly of simplistic solutions like “Arrest them!” is that it allows us to feel like we are doing something about the problem, but we aren’t–at least, not anything beyond exacerbating it.”
DiMezzo, on her campaign site, also calls for the immediate release of peaceful, “victimless criminals”. She tells me she’s more than happy to do media interviews and appear at any local events to which she is invited. It’s refreshing to finally have a principled freedom-advocating candidate for which to vote in the upcoming Sheriff election this November 6th.
Robert Call and Aria DiMezzo standing outside the state house in Concord.
In addition to the surprise appointment of their first-ever candidate for Sheriff in Cheshire County, Keene’s Ward Four (Cheshire District Seven) has also received a libertarian challenger to democrat newbie Sparky Von Plinsky in the form of former Keene mayoral candidate Robert Call. Call is a free sofware advocate and programmer who lives in Keene. Curiously, his democrat challenger Von Plinsky is a former NSA agent. It should be an interesting race!
That gives the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire more candidates on the general election ballot in Keene than the Republican party who could only scrounge up one candidate for just the Ward 5 election. In order to help keep major party ballot access status, the libertarian candidate for Governor, Jilletta Jarvis must receive at least 4% of the vote. If you’re tired of government ruling your life and always growing more expensive and more demanding, you finally have a choice. You can vote for the multiple libertarian candidates that will be on your ballot in the general election on November 6th. Remember, if you’ve never voted before, New Hampshire allows same-day voter registration. Here’s a City of Keene webpage with information about where you should go to vote.
Stay tuned here to Free Keene for interesting libertarian campaign news.
