NC Renegades

According to The Detroit News, officials hopes that a four-year, $200 million upgrade to the city’s decrepit power grid will help avoid more system-wide shutdowns like one that occurred Dec. 3, resulting in forced evacuations, people being trapped in elevators and hospital rooms and public buildings being left in the dark.

The massive, widespread outage was yet “another reminder of how much work we still have to do to rebuild the city,” said Mayor Mike Duggan.

The Detroit News further reported:

The city and DTE Energy are in the early stages of the project to update the city’s electrical grid, which hasn’t been modernized for decades. DTE is paying for the upgrades during an 18-month inspection of the system. Work began in July; when the transition is complete in about four years, DTE will run the system and the city will be out of the power business.

“Everybody is aware the system has not gotten the attention it needed over the past several decades because of the city’s ongoing financial problems,” Randi Berris, DTE Energy spokeswoman, told the paper’s online edition. “One of the key reasons why this migration is happening is because DTE can provide the reliability and affordability to the customers that are on the (Public Lighting Department) system.”

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Friday’s jobs data proves it – America is back baby!!! Or is it all totally manipulated statistical shenanigans? A quick glimpse at the following charts two rather uncomfortably ‘non-recovery-like’ lines – of structural unemployment and the percent of the US population of Food Stamps – would suggest that for much of America, the recovery never happened… and in fact has got worse…

Source

h/t WRSA

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Our history has given us many iconic slogans. Two from our Revolution are “No Taxation Without Representation” and “Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death”. How often do we consider the meanings of these two statements. No one can honestly state that our “elected leaders” represent us. How dear is freedom to us today?

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but “to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER” and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

Thomas Paine

Instead of debating important issues that impact us, our children and our future, people are distracted by the “crisis of the day” imposed upon us by the government and the media. So let us consider this statement:

Is there anything that I can personally do that will impact the future of America?

Probably not. Events are now in play that cannot be stopped. Our pResident may feel that he is in control but that is not the case. Russia and China now have the world’s future in their hands. This includes our country: on a financial and war front. I will never speak for others: it is a privilege of free will that individuals make their own decisions. I know that I will not submit to tyranny in any form. As we now see, submission to tyranny never has positive outcomes for the enslaved.

Our forefathers fought a revolution against excessive taxation, we are now taxed to the point where we cannot breathe. I understand this is a figurative statement but I will follow in the footsteps of greater men than I. I will breathe freely or I will die.

David DeGerolamo

h/t Brock T

Day By Day

“Blood Feud”–John Singer vs. The State of Utah reported by Mike Watkiss

by Jacob G. Hornberger

The last words out of the mouth of strangling victim Eric Garner are actually a metaphor for how libertarians feel about the entire welfare-warfare state under which modern-day Americans have been born and raised.

Don’t his words express precisely how we libertarians feel? Leave us alone, we say to the state. Get out of our faces. Get out of our lives. You’re suffocating us. You’re killing us — literally, spiritually, financially, and economically.

Thomas Jefferson described this phenomenon in the Declaration of Independence: His government was sending “swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

There is hardly any part of our lives that government officials aren’t involved in. They just won’t leave us alone. Drug laws. Economic regulations. Income taxation. IRS audits. Asset forfeitures. Home raids. Secret surveillance. Draft registration. Permits and licenses. Minimum-wage laws. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Terrorist blowback. Checkpoints. Perpetual crises and chaos.

It never stops.

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