For those wanting to connect with others in the Manchester community to discuss activism opportunities, volunteering, and socials events, the forums at ShireSociety.com provide a complete section dedicated to our region of ‘The Shire.’

Also featured are subforums focusing on New Hampshire independent media, the evolving marketplace, and charity. You can even sign the declaration stating your commitment to a free and independent ‘Shire.’

Have an idea for a local event? Join the discussion and get others aboard on the forums!

It was recently announced that the Manchester police department would be participating in a new civilian communications venture. Utilizing smart phone technology and GPS triangulation, the ‘citizen’s alert’ feature of the Ping 4 app will send alerts from MPD to anyone running the app based on their geographic location around the city.

The Ping 4 Deals app debuted last July as the project of former US senate candidate Jim Bender and entrepreneur Gerry Boucher. At that time, Ping 4 Deals was marketed solely as a connection mechanism between area businesses and potential customers. While the app is free to consumers, participating businesses subscribe in order to advertise their deals. A separate app called Ping 4 Alerts was reported to alert for “weather and other emergencies” and was said to be launching last fall. At present, the company’s single available app has been shorted to Ping 4, and the budding police alert system has been incorporated into nationwide app.

With its origin here in New Hampshire, Ping 4 is giving Manchester law enforcers a unique opportunity to incorporate modern technology into their repertoire. It likely won’t be long before more departments begin utilizing Ping 4′s feature, but in the meantime, the app’s users visiting Manch from out of state may be surprised when they begin receiving geographically specific alerts from the local police. Similar notification systems do currently exist in other communities, but they rely on fairly expensive infrastructure and can cost departments thousands, in addition to requiring participants to sign up manually.

On March 19, Ping 4 uploaded two videos to its YouTube channel, both from a press conference earlier in the day promoting their product. The press conference was held with Manchester police in association with the governor’s office in Concord. A few pro-police websites had the scoop on the details that day, and in the day following, some NH newspapers ran coverage of the announcement.

According to Manchester chief David Mara, “Ping4’s Citizens Alerts app is yet another resource for us to provide our citizens with alerts and notifications of emergency situations.” In the video posted to Ping 4′s channel, Mara explains how similar technologies implemented by other departments had a limited following. Because the alert feature being offered to Manchester police is coupled with an already existing retail consumer app, the police don’t have the difficult task of motivating people to opt-in to their service. “We get to be on the cutting edge of technology. Usually law enforcement catches up afterward, but this was exciting to be involved in.”

The chief described the alert system activating as people entered what he called geofences, which would be areas designated by MPD to receive a specific alert message if a phone running the app is within that area. One source indicates that the designated area could be as small as a parking space. The citizen’s alert also has the ability to “wake up the phone in extreme emergencies with an audio alert”. Perhaps Manchester police have already crafted a policy for when they’d use the option to awaken sleeping phones for extra special alerts.

“What I’m excited about is that we can put a geofence around any particular area in real time,” Manchester police captain Nick Willard explained. As he expressed his excitement over the app, he iterated how digital images, including mug shots of suspects believed to be in a particular area, could be transmitted via the app. “It’s only useful to us if people download the app and put it on their phones.”

The tenth Alternatives Expo will be holding speakers on subjects related to left-libertarian philosophies, such as agorism.

As the Porcupine community gears up for Liberty Forum 2012, another New Hampshire tradition kicks off its first big event of the year. The Alternatives Exposition, better known as AltExpo, will launch AltExpo X, a four-day event in Manchester, Nashua and Milford for those in the liberty movement who swing to the left.

AltExpo works in collaboration with various groups within the liberty movement to offer workshops, lectures and other opportunities for participants to learn new things and meet like-minded individuals. One such group is the Alliance of the Libertarian Left of New England (ALL-oNE), which is cooperatively run by AltExpo founder Jack Shimek and Nick Ford. Both Ford and Shimek, who are also the organizers of this year’s activities, will be among several speakers when AltExpo X holds a string of lectures at the Quill Writers Guild in Manchester from 10am to 4pm this Friday.

Other scheduled speakers include Theresa Warmke of Fr33 Aid, which provides first-aid at liberty-related events, and Kevin Innes, who served 23 months in federal prison for distributing the Liberty Dollar. Additional topics to be discussed will include left-libertarianism, the New Libertarian Manifesto and the Vote for Nobody Campaign.

Like at all AltExpo events, ALL-oNE will display its usual array of booklets on topics of interest to the liberty community for sale at the Quill this Friday. Liberty Books of Concord plans to have copies of many libertarian and anarchist favorites for sale, as they have in previous AltExpos. One such selection includes The New Libertarian Manifesto by Samuel Edward Konklin III, arguably the bible of the agorist faction of left-libertarianism.

For those in the liberty community who may be unfamiliar with left-libertarianism or even think it is an oxymoron, it is actually an umbrella term for many philosophies including mutualism, left-Rothbardianism, agorism, and voluntaryism. Some left-libertarians are advocates of communal ownership of property while others are more supportive of individual property rights and homesteading. For more essays related to and by left-libertarians please visit ne.leftlibertarian.org and all-left.net.

AltExpo X is open to all members of the liberty community and offers them a chance to learn about an alternative to civil disobedience and political activism. The goal of the Alternatives Exposition is to share information on establishing alternative institutions to replace the existing ones that have been corrupted by corporatist, state influence, or direct control. For more information on AltExpo X, check out their page on Facebook.

Get your fill of local liberty media for your daily commute:

Sex, Lies & Anarchy …where liberty gets personal. This week the three liberty-loving ladies ask: Is ostracism an effective response to crime? How should we deal with obnoxious neighbors? Kellie talks about “voluntary government.” Is that an oxymoron, or is Kellie just a moron? This and more in “Ostracism, the Bull-Crap Panacea”

On Flaming Freedom, your hosts Dale, Neal, and Chuck discuss a 7-year-old who says he’s gay, the screwed generation, the Westboro Baptist Church picketing Whitney Houston’s funeral, and more!

On the School Sucks Podcast, Brett devotes some time to the threat of NARCS and informants infiltrating public schools, with the consent of administrators, of course.

Gardner Goldsmith from Liberty Conspiracy discusses the 70th anniversary of the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, and looks at other areas where people are interned, and how people don’t notice. Also in his latest episode, Gardner looks at the pop media’s attempt to convince people that government “bailouts” are somehow good “investments” and help the economy.

Ron Paul comes in second in New Hampshire primaries.

Yes, primaries. Plural. As in Republican and Democratic.

There’s no real surprise that Dr. Paul garnered a credible second-place finish in the Republican primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday. But he also came in as the second-place finisher in the Democratic primary as well.

As expected, Barack Obama was the clear winner, garnering 49,480 votes, about 81% of the total cast. Ron Paul received 2,273 write-in votes, or 4%, while the next runner-up, Romney, received 1,808 votes. Remarkably, almost a full 10% of the Democratic primary vote went to Republicans. The converse cannot be said about the Republicans, where only a tenth of a percent wrote in a Democrat.

The stunning performance by Ron Paul in the Democratic primary is due to a combination of New Hampshire state election laws and the adaptations that voters have made to deal with them.

New Hampshire law prohibits any registered voter from changing parties – including from “Undeclared” to Republican or Democrat – for a range of approximately three months before a presidential or state primary through the day before the primary election. On election day, that changes. According to state law, a person can choose to re-register in another party to vote in that party’s primary if the party’s rules permit it. Clearly, both the major parties have decided that while they don’t mind having Undeclared voters participate in their primaries, they certainly do mind having party crossover.

So many New Hampshire voters have adopted the strategy of registering as Undeclared voters. On election day, they walk into the polls, declare a party, mark their ballots and on the way out the door, they re-register as Undeclared voters. Thus they always retain the choice of which primary to vote in. Over 40% of New Hampshire voters are Undeclareds, and it’s pretty clear that a significant proportion of those simply want to retain their capability to decide which primary they wish to vote in.

So what does this have to do with Ron Paul coming in second in the Democratic primary? Simple. About half of those who are not Undeclared voters are registered Democrats. And apparently some of them wanted to vote for Ron Paul, and could not. So these voters, deprived of the chance to vote for the person that they really wanted to vote for wrote in Ron Paul’s name.

This spontaneous and unplanned action on the part of thousands of people scattered across the state has some stunning implications:

1. Barack Obama can’t hold onto his own constituents. It appears that Ron Paul has enough appeal to some of the disaffected in Democrat ranks that the argument that he’s not electable is baseless.

2. Because most people don’t (and won’t) bother to write in any candidate on their ballots, it’s likely that Democrat Ron Paul voters in the primary will translate to more committed Paul voters – relative to Obama voters – in the general election next November.

3. Obama clearly has no appeal for the vast majority of Republicans, who appear to be far more likely to support whichever nominee their party selects.

Bottom line: This election’s results tell a very different story about Ron Paul’s electability than what the media pundits are putting out there.