Toilet Safety Raid at the KAC

It was a strange morning at the Keene Activist Center on Thursday, June 14, when Fred Parsells, Gary Lafreniere, and a slick videographer named John walked their unwelcome way into the private residence. With a warrant for a dubious inspection, and asking vague questions about tenants from years past, the uncomfortable fire captain and the ever-mcgruff housing inspector creeped their way around the house. Looking for smoke detectors, they awoke the sleeping Darryl, who was ignored thereafter when he requested an explanation and apology for why he was woken up. Darryl works a late shift and has a long commute, so his sleep cycle began earlier that morning, and he had to go to work later that day. He has since filed suit against the bureaucratic interrupters of his rest.

Here is the video of the Keene city bureaucrats invading the KAC, with the assistance of the Toilet Safety Administration, a homeland security program with offices in South Park, Colorado. Original raid video w/out TSA (youtube).

Chalking Protest Attacked by Police in LA

From freeconcord.org:

Riot police responded to the scene of a Chalk Walk celebration in Los Angeles last evening and forcibly disbursed a crowd. Unfortunately, some in the crowd responded to the police’s violence in kind, escalating the situation, and motivating the better armed aggressors to deploy rubber bullets and batons on civilians. Seventeen people were arrested in total, nine for chalking (including a juvenile), two for failure to disperse, one for receiving stolen property, two for simply resisting arrest, and three for assaulting a police officer. Two of those charged with assaulting the police also received the subtitle ‘with a deadly weapon’. One officer was reportedly given a minor concussion by a bottle smashing against her helmet.

The chalking protest itself was a response to the arrest of twelve Occupy LA chalkers over the past four weeks in the United States’ second largest city. Organizers of the Chalk Walk scheduled the event to coincide with the annual Art Walk occurring simultaneously nearby. Free chalk was made available to those who cared to participate.

Journalist Nancy Casanova tweeted this picture of the night’s violence kicking off. (more…)

VIDEO: Ademo Caged, Trial Denied Over Clerical Error

At best, it was a clerical error that sent Ademo Freeman’s notice of jury selection from Manchester superior court to 47 Schultz Street, an address that does not exist in Keene. At worst, it was a deliberate attempt to deny his right to a jury trial in the Chalking 8 case. Though the post office informed the court that the notification was not delivered, no further attempt was made to contact Ademo about the hearing that he had requested. As a result, on Wednesday, Judge Lyons ordered him caged for 60 days without consideration of the court’s error. He passed the buck to the supreme court, advising that the only challenge to the imposition of the sentence could be made through the third, and highest layer of NH judiciary.

Unless the supreme court intervenes, Ademo will serve sixty days, possibly forty if afforded all of his good time. Video of the scene in the courtroom is embedded below.

Bearcat Rejected by Berkeley, Albany CA

It was in the cards that Uncle Sam would be delivering a Ballistic Engineered Armoured Response Counter Attack Truck for dual use to the communities of Berkeley and Albany, California. The respective city committees had earlier in the year approved the measure at the behest of the police. But since Berkeley Copwatch released the details in May, city officials have distanced themselves from the expensive war machine, and on July 4th, the news broke that the cities would be rejecting the Bearcat, with Berkeley mayor Tom Bates and Albany mayor Farid Javandel signing cancellation statements.

The news is a major victory against police militarization in those communities, and comes months after Keene city officials’ controversial decision to accept a free Bearcat. The UC Berkeley Bearcat was to have been purchased under the (Orwellian) Urban Area Security Initiative. The UASI is a Department of Homeland Security program that has its own creepy blog and funnels money from federal tax dollars to fund the domestic military industrial complex. Keene is certainly not the high density urban environment Berkeley is, and it is encouraging that such a metropolis was able to resist the introduction of offensive weaponry into their neighborhoods.

The news has been covered by the Daily Californian, Berkeleyside, and CBS San Francisco.

PorcFest 2012 Panels from Free Concord

This year’s Porcupine Freedom Festival was more photo and video recorded than any prior gatherings of the liberty-loving community of NH and beyond. Officially the action was captured by PorcFest Chronicles, working on behalf of the organizers to videograph panels and discussions.

I captured some of the sessions I found to be most interesting on the Free Concord HD camera. Here’s the Austrian Economics panel, featuring Bob Murphy, Dan D’Amico, Anne Rathbone Bradley and Benjamin Powell.

This panel early on Saturday morning was entitled ‘Atheism and Liberty’, and featured Adam Kokesh, Stefan Molyneux, and Ernie Hancock.

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