The Shire Dude Show Is Back
Shire Dude’s absurd YouTube show is back after a two-year hiatus!
If you’re not familiar with show, you can watch all of season 1 here.
Check out season 2’s premier:
Shire Dude’s absurd YouTube show is back after a two-year hiatus!
If you’re not familiar with show, you can watch all of season 1 here.
Check out season 2’s premier:
Chris Waid (right), safely demonstrating for NH independence, in the median on Main St. in Keene in 2016.
Longtime Manchester Cop Blocker Riaz Kahan stated that the interdiction was a major success, with 90% of cars that were intending to turn towards the checkpoint being redirected to another route, avoiding unnecessary police harassment. Manchester police conduct at least a few of these checkpoints per year and activists from all over the state are attracted to help. It’s another unprecedented level of activism that happens easily and regularly in New Hampshire, since there are active migrations of libertarians moving here. (Check out 101 reasons why, here.)
However, for the first time in the history of Manchester’s checkpoints, an activist was arrested. Not for DUI, but for crossing the street, walking toward the checkpoint.
Keene-based activist and privacy-centric computer hardware entrepreneur Christopher Waid was the victim of the police’s most recent attack on freedom of the press. We were merely trying to cross the street so as to better observe the police’s unconstitutional checkpoint activity. However as we began to approach the median multiple police shouted at us including officer #1, Robert Harrington, who you may remember as the cop who popped Derrick J Freeman’s car door open without permission several years back. Here’s the video of Chris’ arrest and post-bail interview:
Chris is a weekly co-host on syndicated radio show Free Talk Live, where we discussed the arrest on last Friday’s show. He’s a rare breed – a business owner who is willing to put his very freedom on the line. If more business owners had this level of courage, they could just ignore the government rather than obey them, and the government would have to go away.
In addition to standing up for freedom of the press, Chris is an active police accountability activist, with many hours logged in the streets, recording cops. It is his right to stand where he wants, so long as he’s not actively interfering in police investigations. By standing in the median, he’s taking his risk and the police have no obligation to protect him, especially from himself. If they try to use the argument that them yelling at him was for his own safety, that hopefully won’t hold up in court. We’ve been in medians frequently for activism in Keene and police here have been mostly respectful towards us. By the way, Chris is a homeowner in Keene, to which he moved his linux hardware business, Think Penguin in early 2016.
He’s currently facing a “Disorderly Conduct” Class A charge – the police’s favorite catch-all to target people they don’t like. Of course, we’ll continue to follow Chris’ case closely here on Free Keene, so stay tuned.
Last weekend, Manchester liberty activists gathered downtown for a protest aimed at US military intervention in Syria. While libertarians support self-defense of the individual, they also support consensual methods of paying for group defense. If someone wants to go attack people in other lands, those supporters should be the ones who pay for it. People who want peace should not be forced, through taxation, to foot the bill for violent adventurism. Hopefully, secession will help disconnect the people of New Hampshire from the depredations of the evil federal government in the future.
The protest did attract some media attention as WMUR-TV reporter Siobhan Lopez filed this video report. Thanks to Kathy Peterson for the photo.
As reported over at Photography is Not a Crime today, a veteran of the US Marines, Billy Spaulding, recently attempted to pay a parking fine in pennies at Manchester city hall. Initially, police responded and lied to Billy’s cameraman, claiming he wasn’t allowed to record them without informing them. The cop claims, “You have to advise us that you’re recording us. You can’t record audio.” The reality is that recent New Hampshire court precedent says otherwise – not only can you record police in New Hampshire, but you can secretly record them. Unfortunately the videographer appears to have shut off the camera as a result of the cop’s lies. Based on the comments on the youtube video, he now knows better.
After the police apparently escorted them out, they returned a few days later with a bucket of $75 in pennies and this time were unmolested as they successfully paid the fine: (more…)
Free State Project early mover and now State Representative Amanda Bouldin has done a lot of good in her activist career. She created Shire Sharing, which for years, has fed hundreds of families in New Hampshire over the Thanksgiving holiday. She also created the Narcan bill that has helped save lives of opiate addicts across New Hampshire.
However, like many politicians, it turns out she’s a coward… and worse, a snitch.
You never know who is going to break under the pressure of the state. It could be your lover, your brother, or your “friend”. However, one might expect more from a libertarian, who should know better. One would be wrong.
In this case, the NH Attorney General’s office released an audio recording of Bouldin being interviewed by their agents. She consented to the interview after being given a “proffer letter’, which presumably offered her immunity for some minor possession charge if she’d testify against State Representative Kyle Tasker, the state house cannabis dealer arrested for victimless crimes earlier this year.
In the over hour-long interview (click for redacted PDF transcript) she throws Kyle, whom she describes as her “friend” under the bus and reveals much of what she knows about his cannabis-dealing business. She also gossips about various state reps, claiming Libertarian candidate for Governor Max Abramson is the most hated in the state house.
She rolls on fellow liberty state rep Pam Tucker, claiming that Kyle named her as one of the state reps he’d sold cannabis to, in addition to an unnamed elderly rep in the state house parking garage.
After talking about how she was his “friend” and wanted to help him she says this about Kyle:
“He seemed like he was trying to be more legitimate than it deserved to be. Is what I remember thinking about it. That he. Um. He seems to derive some. Um. For sense of self-worth from doing it. You know what I mean? Like, he felt important. And. He also felt, um, invincible. Like, um, when he was using his vape in the State House, they said – you can’t do that in here; you’re going to get in trouble. And, he showed me, like, on-line, um, like, on his IPad, or something, ah, the law. It apparently says that the State House is, like, this bubble of immunity. I don’t know. So. I was, like, okay. It’s not? So, Seth thinks that Kyle is really stupid. “
During the lengthy and revealing interview, the full audio of which is available on the NH1 site, she goes on in a moment of lucidity to tell the interrogators: (more…)
Yesterday, I needed a ride. Looking to test Cell 411’s new “ride hailing” feature, I requested a ride across town, expecting to sit on my hands for the next two hours.
(Free Keene has already reported about the Cell 411 app, as well as the app’s new ride hailing feature. If you are unfamiliar with Cell 411, check out this video.)
I set the request radius to 15 miles. According to the app, there were 100 drivers within 15 miles.
Within a couple minutes, I received a driver’s offer. It’s a reasonable price, but I don’t immediately accept it.
A minute after that, my neighbor (who lives in my building, across the hallway) undercut that price by $1.
A couple minutes after that, my friend sent a Facebook message: His girlfriend saw my request. She’s not available to drive, but he is. Even though he hadn’t set up the app, he became part of Cell 411’s ride hailing experiment. I got the ride, paid my friend and I even tipped him with a double almond milk latte.
Have you tried hailing a ride with Cell 411 in your area? You may be surprised with the results.