It has been several months since I contributed to the Free Keene blog regarding my transition to liberty or my opinions about stuff that is happening in the government world. In fact, my second to last post here was about how I, for the first time in 30 years crawling this planet, got arrested. I was arrested at the US/Mexico border in Nogales, AZ by United States Customs and Border Protection for exercising the 5th Amendment.
Well, I finally got my “arrest report” from the feds (after 4-5 months of notarizing forms, mailing things back and forth, and begging) and it sure looks like they let me off easy for the pure evil I unleashed at the border station. It looks like I misled you in my July blog in that that I failed to mention that I, according to the federal officer who arrested me, murdered one of their co-workers.
Among the two things I “could have been arrested” for were 18 USC 111 and 18 USC 1114. That would be forcibly impeding and murdering a federal officer. Now verbal warnings are given out every day for things like speeding and rolling through a stop sign… but I never imagined I’d get a verbal warning for violating a law that I could get the federal death penalty for. I went straight from never having been arrested or convicted of anything to the lethal injection.
Here’s the report. It is so ridiculous, I believe it deserved its own meme.
Now, having written a police report or two myself, I’ll point some things out that are happening in CBP Officer Aldrich’s weak attempt of a report he came up with.
This year’s fifth of November celebration in front of the state house drew a larger and more motivated crowd than last year. After demonstrating in front of the placid capitol building Saturday evening, a group of activists marched to the liquor store, and once inside, began performing Weeda Claus’ Chronic Christmas Carols, which are songs about the harms of the war on drugs set to the tune of popular Christmas jingles.
A great portion of the festivities were captured by numerous still and video journalists from around the Shire. See the initial demonstration in part one, and the liquor store serenade in part two.
Occupy New Hampshire survived four complete nights as an intentional community. The first two in Victory and the final two-plus in Veterans Park had such a spurious air about them. The environment created by the occupation was that of a foreign presence upon a national ground. A presence foreign in that it was a horizontally organized competitor to the established order in Manchester. And while the occupiers were claiming no ground but that which they’d camped upon (and demonstrated a willingness to shuffle between parks to accommodate previously scheduled events), it still seemed so apparent, and would be confirmed through arrests, that there was something fundamentally challenging to the status quo by people camping out in a park that they are forced to pay for.
The quiet Elm Street in front of Veterans Park on October 19, approx. 2:00am.
I spent two long periods of time at the occupation (more…)
As I mentioned in one of my blogs from jail, I was asked “Why Keene?”. My inspiration was because this was the area in which Russell and Kat Kanning and Lauren Canario were living, also Dave Ridley. These early movers set the pace for civil disobedience and noncooperation in NH and they were all living in the Keene area. I thought it would be a good time to re-release some classic videos from NHFree.com, courtesy of Tom Sawyer. Tom’s videos of the earliest movers were a big motivation for me to move here. I hope you find them as inspirational as I.
This one has over 236,000 views at the time of this writing:
It was a brisk and sunny October evening in the Shire. I drove down to the Cheshire County Jail where Freedom Activist Michele Seven would be turning herself over to the House of Corrections and serve time rather than pay the State a fine for driving without a State-approved “Registration” for her vehicle.
Having driven all around the continent without registering her cars with any State Agency for years, it was New Hampshire’s finest who finally put a halt to the Freedom Activist’s years-long crime spree of driving her vehicles without carrying Government-required papers.
When I met up with Michele, she looked composed and focussed. She has a sentence of 2.5 days which she will serve in consecutive Friday-Saturday overnight caging until time is served. She faces 8 more tickets of this kind and could face the same time for all of them. That’s every Friday night in jail for half a year—as punishment for not paying fines and registration fees to the Government.
About 8 Freedom Activists came out to send Michele off with hugs and words of appreciation, and the atmosphere was defined by a lightheartedness tempered by occasional reminders of the heavy-handed State.
I, for one, feel uplifted by Michele’s fortitude when facing the State. She lived her life as a free human until the agents of the State intervened, and now she’s choosing the lesser of two evils by aiding in her own caging rather than paying to perpetuate the State’s bad behavior.
Michele’s story is another powerful reminder of the depth of the saying, “Good people disobey bad laws.”
This year’s fifth of November celebration in front of the state house drew a larger and more motivated crowd than last year. After demonstrating in front of the placid capitol building Saturday evening, a group of activists marched to the liquor store, and once inside, began performing Weeda Claus’ Chronic Christmas Carols, which are songs about the harms of the war on drugs set to the tune of popular Christmas jingles.
