Petersburg
I ended up deciding to drive out to Massachusetts this afternoon and do a short jot along the Taconic Crest Trail. I haven’t been out this way in years.
There are some nice homesteads out this way as you head out of Petersburg this way. Ramshackle but beautiful in that way. They’re real, not prentious. Blood, mud and manure. Wood smoke and diesel.
Some day I’ll have land like that, when, I do not know, but I can’t imagine living the suburbanites way of living. Obviously in a state with a lot more freedom then New York. Beautiful country but these mountain people are getting screwed at both ends.
Breaking Links and SEO Optimization
That’s what I am doing today. I have been running into issues with the blog performance lately, and a lot of broken links. The blog has just gotten too big after 25 or 30 years of posts and photos, and as much as I like human-readable filenames, keeping them up-to-date and unbroken has become an issue, so I am switching them off in favor of post ID number. This also makes it shorter and easier for linking. But it will break a lot of things for a while, but the blog was in need of a big clean up regardless.
The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.
– Thomas Paine and sometimes quoted by Edward Abbey.
True patriotism requires a crucial distinction between a nation and its leaders, elected or otherwise. Governments are temporary caretakers of power, while the nation consists of the people, the land, and the foundational principles of liberty. When Thomas Paine and later Edward Abbey argued that a patriot must protect their country from its government, they defined citizenship not as blind obedience, but as active, adversarial vigilance.
To Abbey, the government was not a protector of the American landscape, but an enabler of its destruction. Bureaucracies partnered with mega-corporations to strip-mine, dam, and deforest public property. Under this framework, protecting the country meant directly opposing the federal agencies—such as the Bureau of Reclamation—that prioritized industrial expansion over ecological preservation.
As they noted, power naturally seeks expansion. Even democratic systems face structural vulnerabilities that allow institutions to encroach upon individual liberties.
- Bureaucratic Inertia: Systems prioritize self-preservation over the public good.
- Authority Consolidation: Crisis often serves as a pretext to centralize control.
- Citizen Apathy: Compliance rewards bad governance and invites further overreach.
Protecting the country from its government is a preventative measure against democratic decay. When citizens treat state actions with uncritical reverence, they surrender the accountability necessary to maintain a free society. Blind loyalty to political leaders is a corruption of the patriotic ideal. True loyalty protects the foundational contract of the nation against those who wield state authority.
- Constructive Friction: Dissent tests the validity of laws and policies.
- Historical Precedent: The abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement succeeded by defying state-sanctioned injustice.
- Moral Obligation: Citizens retain the ultimate right to check state power when it violates natural rights.
Abbey’s environmentalism was permanently intertwined with his defense of human freedom. He firmly believed that an industrialized, fully mapped, and government-regulated landscape was the ultimate tool for totalitarian control.
Edward Abbey fundamentally redefined American patriotism. He stripped the word of its association with blind allegiance to flags, military ventures, or federal authority. True patriotism is rooted in the soil, the canyons, and the rivers. When the state engine threatens to pave over that natural inheritance, defending the country from its government becomes the highest possible civic duty. An activist society’s mandate ensures that the state remains the servant of the people, rather than their master.
Green New Deal champion AOC absent as New York weakens climate law – POLITICO
As Gov. Kathy Hochul unravels a signature climate law, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has remained silent.
Her reticence marks a stark change. Right after her first election win in 2018, the Congressmember joined protesters in the office of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call for aggressive action on climate. And for years, she’s championed the “Green New Deal,” an ambitious framework for transitioning the nation off fossil fuels.
New York lawmakers eye multiple redistricting amendments – POLITICO
As a result, lawmakers may pass multiple versions of a redistricting amendment and then take up a preferred measure next year for the required second passage. Any constitutional change must also be approved by voters in a referendum.
“Because our time is so short there’s some school of thought that maybe we pass multiple versions to create the options for second passage next year, but that’s still under consideration,” Deputy Senate Majority Leader Mike Gianaris said.
The changes may be simple, such as allowing mid-decade redistricting when another state redraws its House map. Or lawmakers may take an even more expansive approach and scrap the map-drawing commission entirely.