In case you haven’t heard, the guys from Freedom’s Phoenix are working with Copblock.org to produce a weekly newscast. It’s pretty good right out of the gate, so I added it to LRN.FM and replaced our old not-so-liberty oriented news service. However, weekly isn’t often enough, and news should be more decentralized, so what would be cool is to have 2:00 of news each hour come from the Freedom’s Phoenix crew and 2:00 of news come from NH (Free Keene, Free Grafton, etc). Or, if you’d prefer to do a full 5:00 news block, we could alternate hours – with the Phoenix crew one hour, NH the next, and so-on.
Are you interested in doing this? You theoretically could make money by selling a live sponsor for part of your 2:00. If we had enough people, we could split up the week and make the workload on each person involved fairly low, and perhaps have a daily newscast at some point, but starting at least weekly might be what needs to happen in the beginning.
Reports could be filed from anywhere, via a podcast which our LRN.FM automation system would pick up and put on-the-air nationwide, and of course people could also subscribe to the podcast.
The old Free Keene calendar was an extension of the forum, and while it was useful for what it was, it was time to put it to rest and introduce a new Google calendar for Keene-area liberty activism. Please visit Calendar.FreeKeene.com to connect with local goings-on. Should you like to add your event to the calendar, simply visit the Free Keene Forum and introduce yourself, then post a thread about your event. Should it be relevant, the Free Keene Crew will give you posting access to the calendar.
The joke is on you if you still think the “justice” system actually renders any. Case in point: Eight activists were charged with misdemeanor trespassing at the county jail earlier this year. (That one can “trespass” on property that is open to the public is another ludicrous issue, but I digress.) All eight activists were arrested together, so the circumstances of the cases were identical. The activists’ trials were broken up over multiple months. First, in August, was Jim Johnson. Jim was convicted of misdemeanor trespass and is currently appealing to a jury trial. Then, in September, was a multi-defendant trial involving yours truly, Lauren Canario, and fellow Free Keene bloggers Sean Murphy and Dale Everett. In this trial, the same man in the robe, Edward Burke, admitted that we couldn’t be found guilty of misdemeanor trespass, meaning it was not proven that it had been adequately communicated to us that we needed to leave. However, he convicted us all of violation-level trespass. Of course, this wasn’t what we were charged with at the start of the trial and unlike the misdemeanor charge, the requirements for conviction of this charge revolve around the defendant supposedly knowing he or she was not supposed to be in the place in question. Of course, we thought we could be there, as we’d been to the old jail countless times doing the exact same thing and had never been told to leave. However, we were not allowed to ask questions that would have been relevant to such a defense, because at the time of the trial it was still a misdemeanor, so the robed man ruled against those questions, saying they weren’t relevant to whether or not we were told to leave and didn’t, which is what needed to be proven by the state gang for a misdemeanor conviction.
If that wasn’t inconsistent and arbitrary enough for you, we come to the trial of Menno Troyer, who was quietly found NOT GUILTY of violation trespass a few days after his trial! (more…)