Howdy y'all.
Found this place from a web address in Boston's excellent "You and the Police", and am pretty damn fascinated. Since I've only been looking at the site for about an hour, I'm not ready yet to place hand on heart and commit by oath, I but wanted to introduce myself so I'm not just a lurker.
I've always been into liberty, dig Jefferson and Goldwater, but didn't know what liberty (or lack thereof) meant until I became a lawful gun owner in California. Yikes. Reading mountains on that subject, in books and online, opened my eyes. To a lot of truth. (And also to a lot of really nutty stuff....I find that with most sane talks of Second Amendment issues, they're always about two clicks away from "ACTUAL SPACE ALIENS HAVE INVADED CONGRESS AND ARE MORPHING OUR DNA THROUGH THE WATER SUPPLY!!!"-type stuff. But I take it all with a pound of salt, and learn a lot.
My wife, Debra Jean, is my best friend. She's pretty damn smart, and a paralegal, and we both love and study and discuss the Constitution. In fact, we produced a really good audio recording of her reading the Constitution and gave it away for free for people as a study aid:
http://www.debrajeandean.com
Debra Jean and I talk often of more or less "dropping out of society." We're increasingly dismayed at unseen (and seen) hands making US citizens more and more powerless. We are really saddened from the current election. We ended up voting for Bob Barr, and even that felt like "the least of three evils" (he DID push for the so-called "Patriot Act", but not voting felt worse. Maybe next time, we won't. Hell, I dunno....
Feeling dismayed Obama becoming president. Had nothing to do with him being black. As Jim Goad says, racism is something that rich people made up so poor whites and poor black won't band together and kill all the rich people. If Ron Paul were black and had been in the final election, I'd have been going door to door to help get him votes.
I think the capper was Bush's cronies mugging me and you for a trillion dollars using a three-page memo as a weapon. That just made me ill.
Debra Jean and I started talking a few years ago, jokingly, about "retiring early and getting 40 acres somewhere." The more we said it, the less it became a joke and the more it became a PLAN. Now it's solid.
Don't know if we can do it in seven years. Also don't know how well we'd get along in a community of people doing that...we're very much a "nation of two." But I'm so damn intrigued by your ideas that I'd love to lurk a little, maybe post a little. If it irks more than one or two, I'll go away. I'm a busy guy, and have my own micronation to run. But I do really like the IDEA of your thing, even if I might not be a good candidate for the reality of it.
I think your plan can work. I just don't know if I'll be able to be there. Aside from the "any club that would have me as a member would eventually become very irritated by me", it's the weather. We're wimps about that, having been in Southern California so long.
We made a short list of places to live, starting with the 50 states, and using process of elimination to strike states with undesirable gun laws, no Castle Doctrine, hurricanes, expensive land, high crime, earthquakes, tornadoes....we whittled it down to a very short list of
--West Virginia
--Wyoming
--Idaho
--Western Texas.
I think we've got it finally down to West Virginia or Texas, but if I stick around this forum, I think I might want to add Wyoming back on that short list.
Anyway, just wanted to check in and say 'Hi!"
-- Michael W. Dean
