On December 23, 2015 The Rebel Love Studio was visited twice by agents of the state, specifically the Merrimack County Sheriffs department. They had a warrant for the arrest of a porcupine that they assumed lived at the location. The first visit I was not present at the location, I was for the second. I arrived at the location while on my lunch break from my day job. The purpose of my visit was to bring coffee to Ann Leverette, my fiance and cohost of the Rebel Love Show and Flaming Freedom. She was there for the first visit and I wanted to check in to see if she was doing alright. Now being the voluntaryist that I am, I do not consent to give such men authority over me, regardless of what shiny badge they are representing. I will not help them kidnap anyone. I decided to no cooperate in their hunt when they informed me of why they were there. As punishment for not complying with the sheriffs, I was threatened with arrest(kidnapping) and given a summons(letter of extortion) for my car that I wasn’t even driving at the time I was confronted.
Within a few minutes of being approached by the sheriffs, multiple other porcupines including one of the cohost of the Anarchics, Renee Kate came to my aid. Now to be perfectly honest, I feel as if we did not handle this interaction with agents of the state well. There were positives and negatives from my perspective. The negative being we simply spoke too much. The more and more interactions I have with the police, which seems to never end, the more I am leaning to only saying what needs to be said without being arrested. The positive being that we did have plenty of people recording and had back up within minutes. That is something I would wager a bet on is not something that most people can say when interacting with police officers.
It has been one year since the 2014 Keene Pumpkin Festival and subsequent riot which spilled into the streets through the following morning. While snipers perched above the festivities for the second year in a row, no one was aware at the time that the riots would spell the end of PumpkinFest as a downtown Keene tradition. This saturday, the Cheshire Fairgrounds in Swanzey as well as the city of Laconia will be hosting their own independent Pumpkinfests. With few places to position snipers at the fairgrounds, unless special towers are brought in, there will likely not be such a militarized presence there. The situation in Laconia is more likely to host police with rifles, as also the organizer of previous Keene Pumpkinfests, ‘Let It Shine’ is also coordinating this year’s Laconia event.
In the time since last year’s chaos, I had since discovered two different articles hosted by the Blaze and Vocativ which feature content from facebook posts I had made that day. While I was unsure whether or not I had in fact captured an image of someone pointing a firearm in my direction, upon seeing the image as presented in the Vocativ piece, it appears to very clearly be a rifle aimed at the are where I was filming from (which was a heavily populated area at the time).
Laconia police are likely stocked up on riot gear as part of their preparation for the motorcycle weekend sponsored there each year. With luck, the relocated festival won’t deteriorate into a glass bottle war, and riot squads will not make an appearance.
Robin Hood gets thrifty, for the people • Sign ordinance 101. Like getting punched in the d**k • Derrick J “unsuitable” to conceal carry • James goes on trial for recording the police • Messages from the folks • Rapsher, Shaunna, and James join • Show notes at: BlackSheepRising.org
During the lengthy trial, the state called several police witnesses to testify that in order to keep James safe from a gunman who was threatening to take his own life, that they needed to arrest James and put him in a cage for two years. Of course, the police really wanted to keep themselves safe from James’ camera and were willing to crush the supposed freedom of the press to do so.
Stay tuned here to Free Keene for the verdict when it’s available.
The hell is Pumpkin Fest and why should we care? • Local reporter accosted by Pumpkin Fest organizer for simply speaking the truth • Higher education: not worth it. Gonna drink instead • Overqualified? Underqualified? Not gonna work with either • Snipers and Homeland security keeping us safe from EbolaISIS • No date tonight? how bout starting a bottle Fight • Jimmy from AZ pushes the envelope • Cussing on the show and radio hosts we hate • Liberty Tits • Shuanna’s new found love: yelling at folks • Eric’s dog is a murderer • Darryl, Eric, and Shaunna join • Show notes at: BlackSheepRising.org
As you may be aware, Free Keene provides the Keene Police Scanner 24/7 audio stream as one of our methods of serving the community. You can listen live anytime, and many people were tuned in during Pumpkin Fest. So many in fact, it caused issues for our server and it went down for a couple of hours during the night. We got those remedied and were streaming again around 11pm (the stream jumped to around 100 listeners right as soon as I reconnected it, and ultimately peaked at over 340 listeners at once!) Though those couple hours of down-time are missing from the audio, all the rest of the scanner audio from Pumpkin Fest and the morning-after are now compiled into two handy MP3 files for you!
The anonymous activist who provided the files has also done the work of removing all the blank spaces from the scanner audio – making them much easier to listen to. Here are the files:
