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Brian Kresge of Winterport, senior application developer with RKL eSolutions LLC of Lancaster, Pa., and former director for Jewish outreach for the Johnson/Weld 2016 Presidential campaign, has declared his candidacy for Maines 2nd Congressional District as a Libertarian.

I am excited to announce my candidacy for the House. My wife, Leah, and I, have found our place in the world in our move to Maine," Kresge said. "Our friends and neighbors believe in smaller, more effective government, and I want to represent that vision in this race.

My candidacy could focus on the failure of Republicans and Democrats to adequately represent Maine in Washington, but I would prefer to focus on what I, as a Libertarian, would do to be successful in the role.

Kresge served in the United States Army as a paratrooper, Pennsylvania Army National Guard as a paratrooper and Stryker infantryman, and the Maine Army National Guard in varying capacities, with three years total overseas service. He's been a mentor with veteran's court programs and served on executive boards and other leadership roles in synagogues and various Jewish organizations, he said. Kresge also has served on a zoning hearing board and as a judge of elections as well as running for municipal and state office.

Equally relevant are my experiences as a business software developer," he said in a press release. "Ive written tax and accounting software, invoicing systems for private and public state health care exchanges, discrete manufacturing integrations, and a wide variety of business mobile applications. Understanding regulatory compliance is a key component in my job.

We face serious challenges in healthcare and economic growth that are organic to our states evolution as well as byproducts of hyper-partisanship. Now, more than ever, we are ready for a third way in politics, one that respects civil liberties and your wallet. The House must reassert its role as a coequal branch of government that represents the people and stands firmly against abuses of executive power.

I look forward to a positive, issues-based campaign, meeting citizens, and building on Governor Johnsons success in Maines 2nd Congressional District. The Libertarian Party is here and is serious about representing your interests.

For more information on Kresge, visit kresgeforcongress.com.

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Winterport Libertarian declares candidacy for 2nd District - Republican Journal

Transhumanists are curiosity addicts. If its new, different, untouched, or even despised, were probably interested in it. If it involves a revolution or a possible paradigm shift in human experience, you have our full attention. We are obsessed with the mysteries of existence, and we spend our time using the scientific method to explore anything we can find about the evolving universe and our tiny place in it.

Obsessive curiosity is a strange bedfellow. It stems from a profound sense of wanting something better in lifeof not being satisfied. It makes one search, ponder, and strive for just about everything and anything that might improve existence. In the 21st century, that leads one right into transhumanism. Thats where Ive landed right now: A journalist and activist in the transhumanist movement. Im also currently a Libertarian candidate for California Governor. I advocate for science and tech-themed policies that give everyone the opportunity to live indefinitely in perfect health and freedom.

Politics aside, transhumanism is the international movement of using science and technology to radically change the human being and experience. Its primary goal is to deliver and embrace a utopian techno-optimistic worlda world that consists of biohackers, cyborgists, roboticists, life extension advocates, cryonicists, Singularitarians, and other science-devoted people.

Transhumanism was formally started in 1980s by philosophers in California. For decades it remained low key, mostly discussed in science fiction novels and unknown academic conferences. Lately, however, transhumanism seems to be surging in popularity. What once was a smallish band of fringe people discussing how science and technology can solve all humanitys problems has now become a burgeoning social mission of millions around the planet.

At the recent FreedomFest, the worlds largest festival on liberty, transhumanism was a theme explored in numerous panels, including some I had the privilege of being on. Libertarian transhumanism is one of the fastest growing segments of the libertarian movement. A top priority for transhumanists is to have freedom from the government so radical science experiments and research can go on undisturbed and unregulated.

So why are so many people jumping on the transhumanist bandwagon? I think it has to do with the mishmash of tech inundating and dominating our daily lives. Everything from our smartphone addictions to flying at 30,000 feet in jet airplanes to Roombas freaking out our pets in our homes. Nothing is like it was for our forbearers. In fact, little is like it was even a generation ago. And the near future will be many times more dramatic: driverless cars, robotic hearts, virtual reality sex, and telepathy via mind-reading headsets. Each of these technologies is already here, and in some cases being marketed to billions of people. The world is shifting under our feetand libertarian transhumanism is a sure way to navigate the chaos to make sure we arrive at the best future possible.

My interest in transhumanism began over 20 years ago when I was a philosophy and religion student at Columbia University in New York City. We were assigned to read an article on life extension techniques and the strange field of cryonics, where human beings are frozen after theyve died in hopes of reviving them with better medicine in the future. While Id read about these ideas in science fiction before, I didnt realize an entire cottage industry and movement existed in America that is dedicated to warding off death with radical science. It was an epiphany for me, and I knew after finishing that article I was passionately committed to transhumanism and wanted to help it.

However, it wasnt until I was in the Demilitarized Zone of Vietnam, on assignment for National Geographic Channel as a journalist, that I came to dedicate my life to transhumanism. Walking in the jungle, my guide tackled me and I fell to the ground with my camera. A moment later he pointed at the half-hidden landmine I almost stepped on. Id been through dozens of dangerous experiences in the over 100 countries I visited during my twenties and early thirtieshunting down wildlife poachers with WildAid, volcano boarding in the South Pacific, and even facing a pirate attack off Yemen on my small sailboat where I hid my girlfriend in the bilge and begged masked men with AK47s not to shoot me. But this experience in Vietnam was the one that forced a U-turn in my life. Looking at the unexploded landmine, I felt like a philosophical explosive had gone off in my head. It was time to directly dedicate my skills and hours to overcoming biological human death.

I returned home to America immediately and plunged into the field of transhumanism, reading everything I could on the topic, talking with people about it, and preparing a plan to contribute to the movement. I also began by writing my libertarian-minded novel The Transhumanist Wager, which went on to become a bestseller in philosophy on Amazon and helped launched my career as a futurist. Of course, a bestseller in philosophy on Amazon doesnt mean very many sales (theres been about 50,000 downloads to date), but it did mean that transhumanism was starting to appear alongside the ideas of Plato, Marx, Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Sam Harris, and other philosophers that inspired people to look outside their scope of experience into the unknown.

And transhumanism is the unknown. Bionic arms, brain implants ectogenesis, artificial intelligence, exoskeleton suits, designer babies, gene editing tech. These technologies are no longer part of some Star Trek sequel, but are already here or being worked on. They will change the world and how we see ourselves as human beings. The conundrum facing society is whether were ready for this. Transhumanists say yes. But America may not welcome that.

In fact, the civil rights battle of the century may be looming because of coming transhumanist tech. If conservatives think abortion rights are unethical, how will they feel about scientists who want to genetically combine the best aspects of species, including humans and animals together? And should people be able to marry their sexbots? Will transhumanist Christians try to convert artificial intelligence and lead us to something termed a Jesus Singularity? Should we allow scientists to reverse aging, something researchers have already had success with in mice? Finally, as we become more cyborg-like with artificial hips, cranial implants, and 3D-printed organs, should we rename the human species?

Whether people like it or not, transhumanism has arrived. Not only has it become a leading buzzword for a new generation pondering the significance of merging with machines, but transhumanist-themed columns are appearing in major media. Celebrity conspiracy theorists like Mark Dice and Alex Jones bash it regularly, and even mainstream media heavyweights like John Stossel, Joe Rogan, and Glenn Beck discuss it publicly. Then theres Google hiring famed inventor Ray Kurzweil as lead engineer to work on artificial intelligence, or J. Craig Ventures new San Diego-based genome sequencing start-up (co-founded with Peter Diamandis of the X-Prize Foundation and stem cell pioneer Robert Hariri) which already has 70 million dollars in financing.

Its not just companies either. Recently, the British Parliament approved a procedure to create babies with material from three different parents. Even President Obama, before he left office, jumped in the game by giving DARPA $70 million dollars to develop brain chip technology, part of Americas multi-billion dollar BRAIN Initiative. The future is coming fast, people around the world are realizing, and theres no denying that the transhumanist age fascinates tens of millions of people as they wonder where the species might go and what health benefits it might mean for society.

At the end of the day, transhumanism is still really focused on one thing: satisfying that essential addiction to curiosity. With science, technology, and a liberty-minded outlook as our tools, the species can seek out and even challenge the very nature of its being and place in the universe. That might mean the end of human death by mid-century if governments allow the science and medicine to develop. It will likely mean the transformation of the species from biological entities into something with much more tech built directly into it. Perhaps most important of all, it will mean we will have the chance to grow and evolve with our families, friends, and loved ones for as long as we like, regardless how weird or wild transhumanist existence becomes.

Zoltan Istvan is the author of The Transhumanist Wager, and a Libertarian candidate for Governor in California.

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The Growing World of Libertarian Transhumanism | The American ... - The American Conservative

VCU poll results

The predictable headline of the new Virginia Commonwealth University poll is that Democrat Ralph Northam has a five-point edge, with a five-point margin of error, among likely voters over Republican Ed Gillespie in the gubernatorial race. You can read all about it in the Washington Post article filed this morning.

The more interesting story is how well the Libertarian Party candidate, Cliff Hyra, is faring. Among registered voters, he scored 8%. Among likely voters, he snagged 6%.

Thats in the same ballpark as the 6.5% vote that Robert Sarvis won in the McAuliffe-Cuccinelli match-up four years ago. The difference is that Sarvis was thought to have benefited from a large none of the above sentiment among voters who found Terry McAuliffes wheeler-dealer persona and Ken Cuccinellis strong cultural conservatism to be off-putting. By contrast, the Northam-Gillespie match-up is a battle of the bland. Both candidates are cautious and inoffensive. No one has to hold their nose to vote for them.

If thats the case, how does one explain the strong showing of Hyra, a political novice who is campaigning part-time on a shoe-string budget? Maybe, just maybe, his libertarian principles are resonating with voters. Could Virginia become a three-party state? Its not impossible.

See more here:
Libertarian Hyra Cracks 8% in VCU Poll - Bacon's Rebellion

There are certain situationswhere results matter more than intentions.

An engineer who builds a bridge, for example, may have intended for it to be successful, but a faulty design would render him liable if someone lost their life while crossing said bridge.

A CEO who intended to make his company richer only to end up declaring bankruptcy is again remembered for his results, not intentions.

The idea that actions are judged by their outcomes and not by their intentions is something that is seen in the real world all the time, and yet people feel anxious and ambivalent in using this as a medium to judge law-makers and politicians.

We then make the mistake of believing that the egregious outcomes of some laws should be excused provided that they were originally written in good faith.

The death penalty is one such law. Although written with seemingly good intentions, it has still brought about more harm than good.

Yes, everyone wants to hang murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and the rest of societys scum as it seems to be the right thing to do and it appears to be with good intentions.

The reason why civilized countries have abolished the death penalty, however, is because they realized that it is actually not as just as the self-righteous claimit to be.

More specifically, the death penalty is not justified because of its high cost for the taxpayer, and its incompatibility with an individuals natural and universally-understood rights. These two affronts to liberty an assault on the taxpayer and an assault on civil liberties is why libertarians are the only ones within the right-wing community to despise capital punishment.

To begin, the death penalty is not justified (i.e. it is not reasonable or fair) because it is both highly inefficient and highly ineffective for the taxpayer. Primarily, the death penalty is ineffective because it neglects to do its job as a punishment in a civilized legal code: deter crime. There is not a single nation-state in the world that has, through implementing capital punishment, achieved a lower crime rate.

In fact, American states that still have the death penalty have, on average, a 25% higher homicide rate than states that do not have such a punishment (Deterrence: States Without the Death Penalty Have Had Consistently Lower Murder Rates).

We see in the above citation that everyoneloses when the death penalty is in effect, and that this punishment only brings about more pain and sorrow for our society, not less. If a penalty only serves to perpetuate a problem that it was meant to solve, then it has no business being included in the criminal code.

On top of not being effective, the death penalty is simply not efficient even if you believe the end goal isnt to deter crime but to instead exact revenge.I say this because the death penalty curses society with an unfair financial burden.

The State of Maryland is just one of many places where the death penalty serves as a colossal waste of tax dollars as the death penalty cases cost 3 times more than the non-death penalty ones.

On top of this, we see a similar complaint with law professor, JeffreyFagan, who estimates that the cost of an individual state execution can range anywhere between $2.5 million and $5 million.

Both Fagan and the State of Maryland teach us that the death penalty is a more expensive alternative than simply incarcerating a violent felon because defense lawyers will seek a lot more appeals for court cases if their client is otherwise faced with certain death.

These appeals combined with the time and money needed to hear and file them all cost the taxpayer extra money.

I think it goes without saying that we, as libertarians, have a very low tolerance for taxation as we can often be heard equating it to theft (which it is), and that is why we can never advocate for a policy that only triples the amount of theft we allow our robbers politicians to get away with.

Furthermore, when the taxpayer is really paying for a system that does not benefit them at all, it is easy to realize that the death penalty really isnt worth paying for.

With regard to the economic argument here, something can also be said about the issue of opportunity costs because the death penalty diverts resources from more effective programs that have actually been proven to reduce crime, i.e. money spent on taking a life (plus the tedious legal work behind it) is money that could have been used on the families of murder to accommodate psychological healing.

The money could have also been used for mental health research that could preclude others from going down a criminal path or even be used to uplift poverty-stricken communities and provide them with the resources and education needed to make crime unnecessary for ones survival.

Moreover, introducing the death penalty would be in violation of ones rights as declared in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

In particular, article 3 of the UDHR states that everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of the person.

The reason why this creed is so important is because it shows that life is an unalienable right bestowed on to every human being and that taking away this right would not only violate constitutional law, but also natural law.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are supposed to, in theory, be immune to positive law passed by humans. What this means is that no legislature is supposed to be able to draft a law that strips away any of these rights nor can an independent judiciary order one to surrender them. The state, in theory, is not even supposed to be the one to dispense the right to live but rather, they are obligated to protect and defend it.

A failure to protect and defend this right, even for societys most unwanted, will mean that the state is stooping down to the very murderers that they wish to hang.

Ultimately, the death penalty is not just breaking some abnormal right or privilege it is breaking a universally-understood right. And to violate such a right in its rawest, most natural form is grounds for an outcry from the libertarian community.

In the end, if there is one thing that libertarians will go to war over, it is, as their name implies, liberty. I then assert that the community should continue on with its crusade against things like the death penalty for it violates both the financial liberty of the taxpayer and the natural liberty of the individual.

We must remember that just because it may sound good to finally get revenge on those who have raped, murdered, or committed acts of terrorism against their fellow citizens, the greater injustice will always be allowing that thirst for revenge to trivialize both the taxpayer as well as the sacred possessions of life and liberty for all.

See also:

https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-and-innocence/

http://facade1.law.columbia.edu/law_school/communications/reports/summer06/capitalpunish

* Christopher X. Henry has just graduated high school and will be attending the University of Toronto to study political science. He wishes to become a lawyer, writer, and politician and has taken up writing as a hobby for both Being Libertarian and his own blog and Facebook page, Freedom Papers.

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A Libertarian Case Against the Death Penalty - Being Libertarian

LINCOLN, NEBRASKAThe shebeen has relocated for a few days to keep an eye on the hearings being conducted by this state's Public Service Commission into our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel and conservative fetish object. At its roots, the fight over the pipeline is a fight over the limits of corporate deregulation as it affects ordinary citizens, and over the obligation of elected officials to enforce those limits. (The PSC here is an elected body.)

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In that spirit, we should look at this sadly hilarious story from another state. The Texas Observer brings us the tale of a small place called Von Ormy, where the citizens voted themselves into a state of libertarian paralysis.

For the last few years, Von Ormy has been in near-constant turmoil over basic issues of governance: what form of municipal government to adopt, whether to tax its residents, and how to pay for services such as sewer, police, firefighters and animal control. Along the way, three City Council members were arrested for allegedly violating the Open Meetings Act, and the volunteer fire department collapsed for lack of funds. Nearly everyone in town has an opinion on who's to blame. But it's probably safe to say that the vision of the city's founder, a libertarian lawyer whose family traces its roots in Von Ormy back six generations, has curdled into something that is part comedy, part tragedy.

In 2006, fearing annexation by rapidly encroaching San Antonio, some in Von Ormy proposed incorporating as a town. But in government-averse rural Texas, incorporation can be a hard sell. Unincorporated areas are governed mainly by counties, which have few rules about what you can do on private property and tend to only lightly tax. There's no going back from what municipal government brings: taxes, ordinances, elections and tedious city council meetings. Still, the fear of being absorbed by San Antonio with its big-city taxes and regulations was too much for most Von Ormians.

Look out, Mother. It's government! Head for the root cellar!

Initially, the city would impose property and sales taxes, but the property tax would ratchet down to zero over time. The business-friendly environment would draw new economic activity to Von Ormy, and eventually the town would cruise along on sales taxes alone. There would be no charge for building permits, which Martinez de Vara said would be hand-delivered by city staff. The nanny state would be kept at bay, too. Want to shoot off fireworks? Blast away. Want to smoke in a bar? Light up. Teens wandering around at night? No curfew, no problem.

Good morning, suckers.

Today, there is no city animal control program and stray dogs roam the streets. The Bexar County Sheriff's Office patrols the town instead of city police, and City Hall resides in a mobile home with one full-time staffer though that's a step up from the dive bar where City Council met until the owner bounced them out. If you go to the city's website, you'll be informed that it's still under construction. If Von Ormy is a libertarian experiment with democracy, it's one that hasn't turned out as expected.

I would argue that, except perhaps for the dive bar part, the experiment has turned out exactly as expected, at least as expected by anyone not raised in a baby farm at the Cato Institute.

What ensued was a confusing series of boycotted meetings, obscure loopholes and eventually a possibly illegal hearing that landed the three women briefly in jail. In September 2014, Martinez de Vara had formally proposed zeroing out the property tax, but Goede, Hernandez and Aguilar voted it down 3-2 and, at least for five days, kept the property tax in place. However, to formally ratify the rate, per state law, at least four council members needed to hold another meeting to vote, but Sally Martinez and Debra Ivy refused to show up to any hearing with ratification on the agenda. The result: Martinez de Vara got his way and the property tax rate was eliminated.

The idea that you can run a self-governing republic with minimal government is one of the more pernicious (and persistent) lies of American history. (Ask Jefferson Davis how his experiment in that hypothesis turned out.) They're going to be playing out that same old drama here in Lincoln this week. I'm not sure, but I don't think we all want to live in a Von Ormy of the mind.

Even the Senate Is Fed Up with President* Trump

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page.

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This Texas Town Went Full Libertarian and Hilarity Ensued - Esquire.com