I'll Meet You in New Hampshire...

I've been wanting to move up to The Granite State for a while now, and this film just solidifies the feeling. I'm mired here right now, but, to paraphrase Peter Schiff in the film, I can't afford to die in New York (and don't intend to).

The video, "101 Reasons: Liberty Lives in New Hampshire" is a documentary adaptation of the Free State Project's list of 101 Reasons to Move to New Hampshire. It runs a full hour. It features quality, professional production values and can be viewed in 1080p high-def.  If you're a lover of liberty, and dream of escaping from under the thumb of the nanny state in your lifetime, you really need to take a hard look at this.

 

Don't wait for a politician or a political party to set you free; it's not going to happen. Do it yourself. I'll meet you there. I'll be wearing the smoke-colored Rand's Custom cowboy hat... Live Free or Die.

A Little Digital Housekeeping...

Already a self-professed terrible blogger, I'm actually just a little bit worse when it comes to the tending and upkeep of my website. It's been close to two years since I've spent any significant time checking things out over there. A lot of that had to do with technology, and how increasingly difficult it was trying to get things done on an eight-year-old, Windows XP Dell laptop, while trying to juggle Photoshop, KompoZer, Firefox, FileZilla and multiple working files with one gigabyte of increasingly twitchy RAM. An ill-advised Adobe Flash upgrade could render the computer dysfunctional for hours. The crashes were frequent and epic; productive work not so much.

I finally upgraded my hardware a couple of months ago - I got a nice, brand spanking new Dell Inspiron 7000 with an i7 processor, eight gigs of RAM (soon to be upgraded to sixteen), a terabyte hard drive, and a high-definition touchscreen. I fear no software.

That settled, I went out in search of some new tools. I've replaced Photoshop Elements with GIMP image manipulation software (a steep learning curve, but does seem to get the job done), and am now using BlueGriffon as my web editor. So far, so good.

Newly fortified, I've gathered up my state-of-the-art technology team and started doing some tidying up over at Anthony Lewis Books.com. I'm re-branding the logos (Literary Comfort Food for a Fed Up Citizenry - what do you think?), fixing the broken links, updating and fine-tuning the SEO keywords, and trying to clean up some formatting issues that have been bugging me for years.

No major changes are planned at this point. The site is simple, clean and functional - no-pop bullshit, and no rollover ads promising you a free ebook that you're never going to read in exchange for your personal information so I can put you on a mailing list for a newsletter that I'm never going to write. And none of that seriously ill-considered, incredibly rude "Are you sure you want to leave this page?" marketing suicide crap. You've got my books, each with their respective synopsis, sample chapters, a few reviews, and links to Amazon. Fast and simple...

There's still work to be done, but a few pages a day will get me where I need to be. I'm also working on a new (seventh) novel, tentatively titled: Free State. I'm only about six chapters in so there's not much to report except that it will likely include New Hampshire's Free State Project in a prominent role.

As always, thanks for your support...

Secession movement spreading...

I've been saying for a while now that my first book, The Third Revolution, was written as political fiction but is starting to look more and more like a history text. This article's not proving me wrong:

Fanned by angry contempt for Washington, secession movements have sprouted up in perhaps more than a dozen states in recent years. In Vermont, retired economics professor Thomas Naylor leads the Second Vermont Republic, a self-styled citizens network dedicated to extracting the sparsely populated New England state from "the American Empire."

And on the other side of the continent, Northwestern separatists envision a "Republic of Cascadia" carved out of Oregon, Washington and the Canadian province of British Columbia.

While most Americans dismiss the breakaway sentiments, sociologists and political experts say they are part of a larger anti-Washington wave that is rapidly spreading across the country. ...

More commonplace are states’ rights movements to directly challenge federal laws, a citizen revolt that one scholar says is unparalleled in modern times. Among the actions in which states are thumbing their nose at Washington:

■ Montana and Tennessee have enacted legislation declaring that firearms made and kept within those states are beyond the authority of the federal government. Similar versions of the law, known as the Firearms Freedom Act, have been introduced in at least four other states.

■ Arizona lawmakers will let voters decide a proposed state constitutional amendment that would opt the state out of federal healthcare mandates under consideration in Congress. The amendment will be placed on the November 2010 ballot. State Rep. Nancy Barto, R-Phoenix, said five other states considered similar versions of the amendment this year and at least nine others are expected to do so next year.

■ Nearly two dozen states have approved resolutions refusing to participate in the Real ID Act of 2005, which requires that driver’s licenses and state ID cards conform to federal standards. A similar resolution was introduced in the 2009 Texas Legislature but died in committee.

Read the entire article here: Secession movement spreads well beyond Texas.

The Free State Project's PorcFest...

Here's a one-hour-long video about the Free State Project's Porcupine Freedom Festival that was held in Lancaster, NH this past June. I understand that The Third Revolution and Middle America were for sale by vendors, so I want to do my part (and return the favor) by showing the flag here.