SOTU notes.

What most scares me about this speech is how Bush claims that he's increasing our liberty and our economic freedom - specifically stating both of these - he goes on to urge the reapproval of the PATRIOT act. Here are my notes from the speech:

I don't see it as a good sign that the commentators just announced that Cindy Sheehan has been arrested. Though I've stated before that I'm no fan of the woman, I don't think she should be arrested.

He starts the speech with a mildly religious tribute to Coretta Scott King. It's a nice gesture, though I have a feeling he'll renig on the spirit of it (saying that she brought us back to our founding ideals) in a few moments. A 9/11 reference has been fit in only a few moments into the speech, along with a reinforcement of the two-party system. He mentions “respect for one another”, though I have a feeling he doesn't think that will include privacy.

The end of tyranny of our world”, just stated as the long-term goal of the Untied States, seems to say that we'll be at war forever. I suppose this means more no-bid contracts for Halliburton, especially as he added Syria and Zimbabwe to the “Axis of Evil”, and has announced that “the United States will never retreat from the world.” He says that the decision to withdraw from Iraq will be made for military commanders, and he now is reading a note from some guy in Fallujah, using the usual theme of volunteer sacrifice for our freedom.

I'm also frightened by the fact that Bush just announced that the institutions of government must last longer than a single vote. Most of the speech now seems to be regurgitation, appealing to our fear and “patriotism”, now to reapprove the PATRIOT act. He's now citing nonexistent authority to conduct illegal, and citing “principles” to claim that America must proactively lead the world. China and India are now our competitors, leading him to rattle off a lot of stuff I like, like saying that immigrants are good and that we should put less power in Washington.

He urges tax cuts to be permanent, but only wants to cut the deficit in half by 2009 – no mention, of course, of the national debt. He went off on a long tangent about Social Security – drawing applause only from Democrats – and seems to be encouraging centralized health care. He is trying to increase centralization of education, training new teachers and complimenting NCLB. Social conservatism is the theme of a large section of this speech, hitting on abortion, embryonic stem cells, and “compassion”. AIDS is apparently a new target, along with briefly mentioned malaria.

In other words, he wants to proactively protect us (note the blatant oxymoron). I leave you with this gem:

There are children in our society who need direction in love.

Why are we so territorial?

I've wondered often why the LP folks down in US House District TX-14 (ie, Ron Paul's district) don't nominate him alongside the Republicans, instead of nominating their own guy (there's a thread at the TXLP forums where some guy freaks out about this.) Now there's a rut-ro in Arizona over whether some guy named Barry Hess, who's apparently quite popular, will run as a Libertarian or a Republican. Well, heck, let's nominate him and let the Republicans nominate him too, put "Libertarian/Republican" on the yard signs, and score an electoral victory. Sometimes I wonder how we claim to be the most rational party when we seem to demonstrate so little common sense.

UPDATE: Apparently neither Texas nor Arizona are "fusion states", whatever that means, so though I don't understand how any law could prevent us from nominating the same candidate as the Republicans, it seems it does.

Relative Grading Makes Me Look Bad

Let's face it--everyone gets bored sometimes. For me, Monday was one of those times. I found myself in an 11th grade English classroom trying to force Renaissance knowledge into my brain in preparation for Academic Decathlon. As entertaining as that sounds, soon enough I noticed I had ripped my fingernails off trying to claw through the door. Finding it staunchly fortified, I searched the walls of my own prison (insert Scott Stapp joke) for some sort of entertainment, finally settling upon the metaphorical refrigerator door, in this case a bulletin board with "exemplary" essays stapled to it.

The grades on their title pages ranged from 92 to triple digits, and, since I had so recently been a junior myself, I felt compelled to measure myself against them. I carefully pulled the nearest 100 of the wall and scanned its face. "AJ*...she's a volleyball player," I thought to myself, "Smart AND comfortable in spandex. Truly, she is any man's dream."

I settled into a nicely maintained plastic desk nearby for the four page read. It quickly became apparent that it was a personal essay, focusing on her recent trip to Paris and, hopefully, an epiphany she had encountered relating to it. The opening was a bit choppy, and it was painfully obvious that she wasn't comfortable using words like "plethora", as she sprinkled them into sentences in an attempt to seem worldly, but I was willing to let her redeem herself. After all, hadn't she garnered a perfect score? Sentence after sentence dragged by with awkward gerund phrases and little more than basic word choices. It wasn't until her second paragraph that I finally reached my breaking point.

The opening statement went something like this: "The Paris metro was fun most of the time, but some of the stops were inconvenient to our destination." And I wonder why people think all the kids at my school are stuck up. She wants to go to the f****** Louvre, and she'll be damned if you want to get off somewhere before it.

Why is it that her writing receives the same grades I earned last year? "It's the best one. You should see the others." Delivered with a sigh and a shrug, that was the only explanation I got. I've got finger paintings from first grade with more coherent morals. All I learned from that paper is...well...uhhh...get the point?

*I have no real problem using my own name, but I don't think people appreciate it when I call them dumb, so I used initials, and my sister's first two at that.

Google censorship in China? OK, move along...

A lot of people seem to be flipping out about Google agreeing to censor its Chinese search results, and many are even suggesting a boycott of Google. This doesn't really make sense for many reasons:

• Whatever Google does in China, it appears dedicated to protect our privacy at home (standing up to the Justice Department), which is what really matters.
• If you want to protest against China's policies, boycotting an American company making money in China (and bringing it back here) is the wrong way to go about doing it. Boycott actual Chinese goods instead.
• All of Google's competitors censor their Chinese search results as well (otherwise, the Chommunists wouldn't let them be there), so it's the pot calling the kettle black if you use Yahoo! instead.

Remember, we're supposed to be the rational ones.

So Hamas won the election.

Whoop-tee-f***ing-doo. Since I'm assuming that Diebold didn't sell the Palestinian Authority voting machines, one has to assume that the vote was somewhat accurate (especially since the opposition party won), and that in fact, the Palestinian people wanted Hamas to win. Since apparently we're trying to encourage democracy in the Middle East, we should allow it the people of Palestine to deal with the consequences of their actions (I'm not going to speculate upon what those might be), and not get our boxers all bunched up about the fact that it didn't go the way we wanted to. There's even a chance Hamas could deradicalize now that it has actual power - people like to stay in power. Besides, Israel/Palestine is none of our business, much as Pat Robertson would disagree.

State Standardized Testing 0, Apathy 1500

Today we (that is, all 9th, 10th, and 11th graders at my high school) wasted half the day doing a TAKS field test. They do these to help with the development of TAKS tests (I've been subjected to them since seventh grade), and we're reminded often that our scores don't count; these tests are simply given in representative districts to help the TEA. In fact, neither we nor anybody else in the school system ever even see what we get - the tests go straight to Austin for grading.

This year the field test assigned to HPISD was the "ELA" (English Language Arts) test, which consists of two sections: reading comprehension, involving both multiple choice and free-response questions (three short answer and an essay), and revising and editing, involving being presented with various rapes of the English language and choosing the least horrendous alternative. For some reason I have yet to fathom, the passages to be read in the first section are almost always about how much life in America sucks for immigrants or Native Americans. (This was the case back in the days of TAAS, TAKS's predecessor, too.)

I had The Grapes of Wrath in my backpack, and though I'm not a fan of communism, reading Steinbeck is a heck of a lot better than taking TAKS, so I quickly worked through the multiple choice questions without paying much attention to the stories, then wrote the same thing in each of my free-response blanks: "Have a nice day. Vote Libertarian. www.LPTexas.org".

I wasn't alone in my blowing off of the test. One friend of mine wrote in mirror image. Another wrote a story of love between a slice of pepperoni and an olive. (He might score highly. Last year on a TAKS that counted, I wrote a horrible sci-fi story involving some guy who gave up his body to become a robot, and got a perfect score.) Several wrote rants about what a waste of our time and our parents' money the test was, and one took the same approach he's taken to TAKS essays since freshman year: He writes the same essay, something involving shooting a sheriff, every year, and changes the last sentence to fit the prompt. He always gets a 3 or a 4 out of 4.

Ideally, the TEA will recognize that it gets no useful information out of these field tests (the tests themselves sure haven't ever changed) and will stop giving them, but most likely they'll just sic more people on their analysis in hopes of coming up with something.

Crime against the state?

There's apparently a district attorney race going on in Dallas County (between two Republicans, as far as I can tell from yard signs - not that that means anything), which sets me to wondering what kind of nutcase would like being a district attorney. DAs prosecute crimes against the state, and in the last election they winner bragged in radio ads about how many men he'd sent to death.

What's with the idea of a crime against the state anyways? Murder is a crime against the friends, family, and acquaintances of the victim. Naturally there will be times when these folks won't have the money to hire a lawyer, and that's what pro bono lawyers are for. The only other crime against the state that comes to mind are drug crimes, which if you're reading this blog, you probably recognize are ridiculous (if you don't, look here.) Obviously these guys can't rationally think they're taking the moral high ground and defending the people, so what are they looking for? It must be power, and it's power that there's not really a reason to exist. Let's fire the district attorneys and save ourselves some money.

Well screw you too, UIL.

In Texas, UIL, a state agency, runs all competitions between public schools. They've managed to really hack me off lately in the astonishing silliness of their rules. First, they told me a week before I needed a piece ready that in fact the one I had been playing wasn't on their approved list (which is very narrow). Then, they surprised our AcDec team by telling us that even if we won the regional competition (which was on Friday and Saturday, and yes, we won) that we'd have to have one of the top 12 scores in the state to move on, due to the small number of schools we're competing against. Not only is this nowhere in the USAD rules, but it wasn't fair to tell us this an hour before the competition started.

So there we are: overarching bureaucratic organizations suck. Nothing new, but one more example.

Nickel and Whined in America

I've been avoiding reading Nickel and Dimed in America for a while now, because I expected it to be a load of self-righteous bitching. But now I have to read it for school, and surprisingly enough, I was exactly right. If you've had the fortune to avoid it, here's what you have to look forward to:

• A whole hell of a lot of self-righteous bitching, including outrage at encountering pubes while working as a maid.
• Broad statements not backed up by statistics, or any form of proof.
• A belief that somehow her book is profound and will make a difference, along with a call for government to help the poor more.

She's good at writing a sob story, but why a Google search for "'nickel and dimed' site:.edu" (which should be indicative of how many schools are using the book) turns up around 24,700 results is beyond me. She obviously doesn't understand that minimum wages and such hurt the poor (though I don't dispute that Wal-Mart's treatment of its employees is ridiculous).

Don't treat the symptoms, cure the disease.

Though Congressional resolutions don't really do anything, they give you a good idea as to what's going through our legislators' little heads. H.CON.RES.329, introduced by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida (titled verbosely, as usual, "Expressing the sense of Congress regarding the activities of Islamist terrorist organizations in the Western Hemisphere"), after detailing vague suspicions of Islamic terrorist activity near the "tri-border region of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina", eventually asks President Bush to have the US representative to the OAS

"seek support from OAS member countries for the creation of a special task force of the Inter-American Committee Against Terrorism (CICTE) to assist governments in the region in investigating and combatting the proliferation of Islamist terrorist organizations in the Western Hemisphere and to coordinate regional efforts to prevent the spread of this threat."

Aside from the fact that those countries have other things to worry about, namely the people who elected them (as opposed to US interests), killing, arresting, or thwarting terrorists doesn't solve the problem: there are lots of people in the Muslim world who hate the USA. They do not "hate us for our freedom". (Just bask in the absurdity of that phrase for a bit.) They hate us because we've been dicking around in their countries for far too long.

Some will say that weneed to remove American corporations from foreign countries, since that seems to be the main object of their hate. But American corporate franchises in foreign countries are only attacked because far too often, after American corporations come into a country, Federal finagling isn't far behind. Interference in foreign countries wastes our money and makes other people hate us.

Surprise! I'm Health Literate!

I was never given "The Talk". For several years, I thought "The Birds and the Bees" was some type of horrific animalistic punishment. I would occasionally hear my friends converse in hushed tones about the terrible embarrasment wrought by this two-headed flying wraith. Then I turned eleven...and realized they were talking about sex. It struck me as a bit odd that something I had been aware of for almost half my life was so taboo, but after much thought, I came to the realization that I lived in a bubble composed of white conservative Christians, sprinkled with a minority or two for show. This meant, of course, that anything pertaining to sex or sexuality was to be briskly shoved under the rug, at least officially.

I bypassed health class in middle school, choosing instead to educate myself about the wonders of adolescense and sin (take that however you will...your words, not mine). Year after year, I "forgot" to select health as one of my electives until finally, the second semester of my senior year, I could push it back no further. Now, every morning at 9:10 or so, I make my way to the windowless cell I have affectionately dubbed "hellth". I suppose it wouldn't be such a tiresome endeavor had I not known everything in the curriculum before walking through the door January 4th, but I am not so lucky. Day after day, I am subjected to readings and lectures that only tell me things I've already learned, and as my attention flutters about the room in boredom, I can't help but notice how little the rest of the class cares. It seems to me that none of this information is new to anyone else either.

Why go to the trouble of paying a teacher to stand in front of me on the first day of class and say, "This will be one of the easiest classes you will take"? If all of the parents in town have already gone to the trouble of talking to their children about "risk behaviors", what is the point of the class? Suppose for a second that I don't live in a homogenous district. What then? How do we decide what approach to sex we teach our young? I say we leave this stuff to the parents. The state and local governments have no business telling me not to binge drink or sodomize a cow. It's in their better interest if I die early. After all, isn't it the informed citizen, which I hope to become, who is most able to see through all of their deception and spin?

There you have it, Rick Perry. If you want to stay in office, let me kill myself with chemicals. By warning me, you jeopardize your whole political career.

Tonight's LP chat

I was hoping to post a full script of tonight's chat (since what they give you at LP.org isn't complete), but somehow the software that they use for it doesn't allow you to highlight more than one line at a time - not an effort I'm going to go to. Now I understand why it takes Shane Cory so long to get the scripts up. A basic synopsis follows:

• The main subject of the chat was apparently "conventioneering", but nobody seemed to interested in that (What on earth is there to talk about?), so the chat pretty quickly moved from that to outreach.
• As usual, people talked about how the LP isn't doing enough for outreach, etc.
• Apparently the states are taking on the job of youth outreach, though Ohio is one of the few, if not the only, that has done so.

Not too exciting, but there you go.

Also, my friend Sam Wyman is now posting here. Sam is the only person I know whose car can accelerate faster than mine. He's also the one who's starting the Libertarian club at our high school with me.

New Author Intro: Meet And Greet

Four days prior to this balmy January 12th, my favorite high school dropout/all-around smart kid, Nigel Watt created this blog as the opening offensive in his campaign for Libertarianism. Halfway between then and now, he offered me a supplementary author position, and here I stand...er...sit, fumbling for words to introduce myself. My name, though nearly Eloy at birth, is Sam Wyman. I am an 18 year-old senior at a very affluent, very white Dallas area high school. If you have the time to search for "high school thug day" on Google, you will know which one. Reading that previous sentence and applying even the most basic knowledge of literary bias will tell you that I am not particularly enamored with my surroundings, and as such, I have to admit that more of my posts will focus on pointing out some of the savagely ridiculous happenings around me than intelligent political discourse. I will, however, make an effort to fit coherent thought and reason into my ravings, and every now and again, I assure you that I will address political issues, campaigns, etc.

Not everyone is a leader.

Like most high schools, mine has a chapter of the National Honor Society. A few hours ago, I had the "honor" of being inducted into it (along with my name getting an ovation - I have three middle names) with 180 other students out of a junior class of ~480. That's 38% of the class. Obviously that's ridiculous, and I see it as emblematic of a larger problem: there's a trend in society, especially with children, towards calling everyone exemplary, encouraged by the overuse of standardized tests - parents get offended when told that their child can't read, so the goal for reading is raised to third grade.

The four characteristics that are supposed to be exemplified in NHS members are Scholarship, Character, Service, and Leadership. Anyone who knows more than five people can tell you that 38% of any population will not possess all of those characteristics, especially that of a public high school.

• Scholarship: First of all, 38% is way more than the 10% of the class which gets automatic acceptance to Texas state schools just because they're in the top ten percent. Secondly, grade inflation is so rampant at my school that people who take fairly easy classes and suck up to their teachers can easily cruise by with all A's, which is plenty to get in to the NHS.
• Character: My high school is known citywide for its snootiness, cheating is rampant, and most students have no ambition because they're rich and they know it. Kids attend drunken parties Saturday night, frequently screwing random people they've never met before, and then go to church Sunday morning, hangover and all, and pray with the congregation. (I'm not religious, I just don't like hypocrites.)
• Service: I've got to hand it to my classmates here; no matter what else you say about them, HP kids to a crapload of service. Problem is, on the bus back from building a house for Habitat for Humanity, they'll crack racist jokes, the irony zipping miles over their heads.
• Leadership: Here's the really bizarre one: by definition, only a small percent of the population can be leaders. The encouragement of "leadership in all students" (a Google search for which uncovers frightening numbers of education institutions who apparently endorse it) is simply oxymoronic and absurd.
  

Note: I don't mean to give the impression that all Highland Park students are like this; there are a large number of intelligent and motivated students; however, they do not make up the majority, or anywhere even close to it.

A free market will help New Orleans rejuvenate best

According to this Financial Times report, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's commission on rebuilding the city claims to support "free market forces". Yet if you actually look at what they say, their definition of "free market" is highly corrupted. (Looks like the spirit of Louisiana hasn't died.) Here are a few gems:

The mayor’s commission is expected to recommend that neighbourhoods be given a year to rebuild a sustainable community before any are abandoned. If, at the end of that time a critical mass of residents and services had not returned to an area, the city would then declare it unviable and order people out.

Sounds more like Soviet Russia moving various ethnic groups around than laissez-faire.

Other plans expected to be unveiled by the commission include a light-rail system, an overhaul of the city’s troubled school system, and the creation of a new jazz district to revive the city’s cultural heritage.

There's so much land available, if a light-rail system would be economically effective, it'll show up, and dammit, New Orleans already has a jazz district.

In other news, a friend (who I may or may not convince to join this blog) and I are setting up a Libertarian club at our school (now that we're both done with college applications), so a website for that might eventually be going up.

Bird flu and limited government

I have yet to see a single article, post, or statement as to how, in a minimalist-government country, the people are to be protected from major disease outbreaks, which in the financially dichotomous and overpopulated world we live in are a given. The Turkish government is currently straining to keep bird flu from spreading, and indeed, at first glance, it would seem that if even entities as large as governments can barely keep up, people in minimally governed areas would be screwed. But that's not necessarily the case. Like computer viruses, you're less likely to contract a communicable disease if fewer people around you have it. (Thus, when companies such as Grisoft distribute excellent free antivirus software, they're benefiting themselves and the rest of the world.) In an environment where a certain disease outbreak seems imminent, companies, unhindered by years' worth of FDA regulations or the equivalent, could make vaccines or treatments quickly and sell them. Organizations would vaccinate those who they have a vested interest in (which in a modern society includes everyone) - private schools children, companies workers, etc. Since the treatment/vaccine would be so much cheaper (as a function of not having to pay for FDA crap), it would be available to far more people as well.

Undoubtedly some unethical (and stupid) folks would try to sell fake medicines. But it is also certain that companies or groups such as Underwriters Laboraties will test purported treatments; such testing would be beneficial to both customers and honest sellers.

Of course, such a system could not work for diseases without treatments, which though less and less likely to cause a major outbreak today (due to our increasing knowledge of disease) is still a frightening possibility. But in a nation where just about everything is privately owned, landowners would not allow potentially infected people to flee through their land and airlines would not take potentially infected passengers, creating effective quarantine zones.

Bill on House Floor may unintentionally prevent regulation of the Internet

From the "Global Internet Freedom Act":

(1) ...The first amendment to the Constitution guarantees that `Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble . . .'. These constitutional provisions guarantee the rights of Americans to communicate and associate with one another without restriction, including unfettered communication and association via the Internet. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations explicitly guarantees the freedom to `receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers'.
(2) All peoples have the right to communicate freely with others, and to have unrestricted access to news and information, including on the Internet.

I'm not a lawyer, but if this bill were to be passed, it would seem that it would prevent any regulation of the Internet which could be construed as "fettering communication". In fact, this virtually guarantees even the right of Islamic extremists to associate via the Internet.

Also, the folks over at Hammer of Truth are setting up a new site (details here), but they need funds to do so. I've already contributed my $25, and you can expect this blog to move to the subdomain I'll receive from that as soon as possible. Please do your part in advancing the cause of liberty and make a donation.

OHTEHNOES!!!!! Calm down.

Hammer of Truth's "Anonymous" recently posted about the recently presidentially signed "Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act", which essentially forces those who use communication mediums to "annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person" to not be anonymous. Superficially, this is a grave danger to our civil liberties, but going on the assumption that brain-eating zombies haven't attacked the nation's courts, I see the stunning incompetence of our legislators in writing this bill as a good thing: a better-nuanced version could have passed by judicial scrutiny as a "justifiable" infringement upon our rights, but such a broad and groping assault on free speech as this law couldn't stand up in any court.

Additionally, the law literally requires "offenders" to disclose "his identity". Since it uses "identity," not "given name" or "name on birth certificate," I can decide that in fact, my identity is 2821912874023880091284009823740982134, which though a really pedantic thing to do would at least give a little more work to the investigators. Also, the delay caused by appealing to successive courts might last long enough for a more rational Congress to come into power and pass something less ridiculous.

Folks, everything Congress does can be interpreted in multiple ways. Crying wolf at each and every thing doesn't make you the guardian of the people, it makes you somebody who's lost all his sheep.

Surprise! Public schools suck.

I go to one of the best public high schools in the country. Newsweek ranked it #12 overall in its recent survey of American high schools. I am currently ranked #1 in the junior class of my high school, so one would think that I wouldn't have too much of a beef with it. Yet I'm leaving a year early to go to college. There are personal reasons behind this as well that aren't worth going into, but the main reason is that another year of public school won't help me accomplish anything.

Why is this? My major at Cornell will be environmental engineering. But I can only take two years of biology at Highland Park (the second of which I completed last year), and though an environmental science class is offered, it uses materials designed for elementary school classes (I'm not kidding) and is horribly taught. Technically, I could have done an independent study in biology, but because of the weighting system used for GPAs (5.0 for a 97+ in an AP class, 4.5 for that grade in a pre-AP or Honors class, 4.0 for a regular class, 2.0 for a "locally developed course") it would have absolutely destroyed my GPA, canceling out any benefits to my resume.

The school thus discourages students from learning things that will be useful for them, instead being forced by the State of Texas to follow the TEKS requirements for education so that students can pass the TAKS tests, which are required to graduate. The TAKS tests are insanely easy, but do I seriously need to be able to deconstruct bad writing in order to be an effective environmental engineer? No, and all preparation for TAKS will do is waste my time.

Unfortunately, most students who recognize how pointless most of their education is don't get out. They just stop paying attention, and start getting bad grades, then getting in to drugs and so forth. I hate to sound like a doomsayer, but I've seen it happen to so many very intelligent people that I can't be optimistic. Public education does more to get kids addicted to drugs in middle-class and well-to-do areas than any other factor. Then, the War on Drugs and minimum wage laws keep them down even if they want to get out, the first by putting them in prison, the second by making them impossible to hire.

Nutjob alert.

Like, I assume, all Libertarians, I was excited to hear that the Texas LP (see link at right) has gathered a record number of candidates for the year's elections - 211 including local offices. The Lone Star Liberty newsletter celebrating this also contained the URLs of some candidate's webpages. Most seemed to detail the positions of fairly straightforward LP folks, but that of one N. Ruben F. Perez scared the bajesus out of me. Let me count the ways:

1. Seriously, pay the $3 for a domain name.
2. Is it really necessary to have THREE pictures of yourself, the outside ones of which are negatives?
3. You're running for District 32 according to the candidate list, but District 23 on your site. Which did you screw up the numbers on, your form or your site?
4. "We should not give away our jobs to foreign workers!" You're about 180 degrees away from both the official LP position on the matter and the TXLP position. Perhaps you meant to join the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party. (I really wish such a thing didn't exist.)
5. "Support Right to Life!" "Support Definition of Marriage as only between a Man and a Woman!" Once again, the LP's just not for you.

Even more frightening is that the District 32 mentioned above is my district. While the guy's probably still less onerous than Pete Sessions, he's no friend to any real libertarian.

Who I am, what I'm doing

It's easy to guess from the title what the general theme of this blog will be - libertarian perspectives from a youth. The youth in question is me, a 16-year-old high school student in Dallas who owns a "Texas Libertarian" bumper sticker and will begin attending Cornell University in August. There will be no regular posting schedule; pretty much I'll post whenever I have time and something rouses the Libertarian within me.