Presenting Day Zero of Free Concord’s Occupied Chicagoseries. The series features limited commentary over the raw video taken while traveling to and attending the NATO summit protests last May. This segment takes place in Boston, and begins with the group returning to its starting point eight hours after departure. After finding out that our bus trip would be replaced with a flight from Logan airport, some consumed their goods that were not approved by the TSA. This attracted South Station’s police, who in decriminalized Massachusetts chose not to act against the smokers. Once bus transport for the two or three among us who couldn’t fly is secured, an activist from Acton reads the subway guidelines for the week of the summit in Chicago. The video ends with a preview of Day One’s footage, to be released in the next week.
Recently published was a new Ridleo chronicling a history of arrests of Russell Kanning in New Hampshire. Russell is partly responsible for the reputation of Keene area activists as civil disobedients, as he had originally moved to that area of the state as he made waves over a number of victimless offenses.
Kat and Russell in Keene, NH
The video also features footage from Michael Fisher’s illegal manicuring event from 2005 in Concord. The headline-generating fingernail beautification by a Free State Project participant is referred to by Ridley as a “textbook act of civil disobedience”.
Russell currently faces federal chalking-related charges in Waco, Texas. Though he also had chalking charges from Concord, New Hampshire, Kat Kanning reports that the NH charges were dropped because, “[the] NH court said they thought he could be prosecuted adequately in TX, so they dismissed their charges.” Authorities may have prevented Russell’s legal adventures from taking him back to NH also because he would attract more supporters while in the Shire.
Yesterday was the inauguration ceremony at the state house and a number of other scheduled festive events to ring in the new administrations. After doing some promotional chalkings around the perimeter of the building, I headed inside and met with other independent media personalities visiting town from Keene. When we discovered a line outside of the governor’s office, we were struck with the urge to file in.
A staffer noticed our rolling videocameras and informed us that the line was for a photograph with governor Maggie Hassan, but that she would not have time to dedicate to a videotaped interview. Darryl, Kate, and James decided to find other items to film, while I perused the posters featuring the event’s corporate sponsors, which included everything from New Hampshire businesses to pharmaceutical multinationals.
It was a very rushed encounter, as most happenings with lines tend to be. I quickly asked after handing off my rolling camera and being flashed by still cameras, “Will you be doing anything to decrease New Hampshire’s dependence on the United States federal government?”
“Uh, well, I think that’s something we’ll all talk about, thanks.”
I picked up a cheesecake item and walked to the house chamber to listen to a colorful choir. Outside of the office, the line to see the new state president grew. In the lobby, chocolate bears were being distributed. It was a statist synthesis of Christmas and Easter, and there was free stuff to go around.
I’ve been working on a project to release my raw videos from the NATO Summit protests in Chicago and recently created an introduction segment. The videos will be released first as single videos featuring an entire day’s footage to Fr33manTVraw. From the single large video, a trimmed cut will be produced with audio commentary and released on the FreeConcordTV youtube channel. After creating the intro, I found that it worked very well as a trailer for the footage to come. It features video from both myself and other videographers, with channels cited in the video description.
A Keene-area state representative laments the fact that, “there is, legally, nothing we can do to prevent them from moving here to take over the state, which is their openly stated goal.” The Other; “them” in this instance refers to participants in the Free State Project, the political migration of liberty minded people to NH. Though the FSP has no central direction and amounts to little more than a promise to move together with like-minded others, freshly elected representative Cynthia Chase has classified her new neighbors as a threat. But not just any threat. “Free Staters are the single biggest threat the state is facing today,” she opens with on a blog featured at the Blue Hampshire website. Continuing,
In this country you can move anywhere you choose and they have that same right. What we can do is to make the environment here so unwelcoming that some will choose not to come, and some may actually leave. One way is to pass measures that will restrict the ‘freedoms’ that they think they will find here.
One wonders how Ms. Chase plans to make the state “so unwelcoming” for libertarians in such a way that would not be unwelcoming to others. She tips her hand by opening in regret that political purges are illegal, but then suggests that she and her ilk can try.
Al Jazeera’s Inside Story program today published a twenty five minute segment on United States police militarization. It is a fitting story in light of the recent acquisition of Bearcats around the state. The program had previously run a story on police brutality following the violent response to police brutality protests in Anaheim, California last July.
Presenting Day Zero of Free Concord’s Occupied Chicago series. The series features limited commentary over the raw video taken while traveling to and attending the NATO summit protests last May. This segment takes place in Boston, and begins with the group returning to its starting point eight hours after departure. After finding out that our bus trip would be replaced with a flight from Logan airport, some consumed their goods that were not approved by the TSA. This attracted South Station’s police, who in decriminalized Massachusetts chose not to act against the smokers. Once bus transport for the two or three among us who couldn’t fly is secured, an activist from Acton reads the subway guidelines for the week of the summit in Chicago. The video ends with a preview of Day One’s footage, to be released in the next week.
