Ross Ulbricht faces decades in prison for allegedly running the Silk Road underground online market.
Join Derrick J and dozens of liberty-loving folk for the first-ever HALLOWKEENE Costume Dance Party on November 1st from 9pm through Midnight at the Best Western Sovereign Hotel ballroom! This is a costume dance party and there will be three prizes for the top three costumes! You can indicate you’re coming via this facebook event.
More importantly, this event is a fundraiser for Ross Ulbricht. He’s been accused of running the Silk Road black market website, and he needs your help to avoid life in prison. Whether or not you attend the party, you can give to Ross’ legal campaign here.
If you don’t have your Keenevention badge with you, please have at least $10 (or BTC) to donate to Ross at the door of HALLOWKEENE to get entry to the party. See you on Saturday, 11/1 from 9p-Mid. Boo!
Pumpkin Fest organizer Ruth Sterling made international headlines this weekend when during a live broadcast from her event on Cheshire TV by local newsman Jared Goodell, she stormed onto the set, grabbed at his microphone and threatened to take him off the air. With over 100,000 views and climbing, the original clip is one of the top five most popular videos of all time on the Free Keene youtube channel.
Sterling was interviewed this morning on WKBK by Dan Mitchell where she complained that the original viral clip did not show the context of what made her storm the set. If you recall from the clip, she alleged that Jared had been “inciting” people, “alarming” pumpkin fest attendees, and “self-promoting”. As you can see in this clip which shows what came before the original, he’s doing none of those things – he’s merely reporting what he’s heard and reading a statement from the president of Keene State College. All I’ve edited out of the following clip is the commercial break, which lasted for about 1 minute:
After I got off-the-air from my live Saturday radio program (on which we discussed the initial Pumpkin Fest 2014 riots), I headed back down to the college. At the time, there was a helicopter broadcasting a message to disperse or be arrested. I arrived at the gateway to Keene State College – Winchester St. to witness a huge throng of police marching down the street. I quickly pulled out my camera and began to record:
After walking around the nearest building on campus, in full view of the line of police, activists walked onto campus and right back over to Winchester St. We continued walking west on Winchester and no cops said anything to us there. However, we again went on campus and came back out on Madison St., on the west end of the college. Here there were several police standing around the intersection and one of them told me we couldn’t pass, despite college students walking down Winchester St. immediately behind them. (more…)
Rather than only arresting people who were causing violence and destruction, the police were targeting people crossing arbitrary lines and partying on private property. In this excellent ten-minute video, Alex is right there when cops create all kinds of unnecessary mayhem: (click links below to jump to that part if you are short on time)
They shoot pepperballs at party houses on Winchester St – completely unnecessary – those people were on private property and not in the road. It’s arguable that pepperballs are useful to clear a crowd who won’t leave a street and indeed, blocking streets is one of the reasons the “disorderly conduct” statute exists, but the people at these houses were just enjoying themselves. The use of pepperballs in this situation is just aggressive.
Guy walking down sidewalk is violently arrested by a throng of cops – This guy is literally just walking down the sidewalk. He’s hasn’t threatened anyone and is not blocking the street. The reason he can’t walk down the sidewalk is, well, because the men with guns say so. The reason the cops decide to jump him like he’s strapped with a bomb is, because they can.
It’s behavior like this from police that alienates them from average people. This is why Cop Block is so popular on campus. Here are the students’ sensible responses to the violence that was visited upon them by the police:
“We’re not terrorists. We love America. We just like to drink! Don’t shoot us!”
There’s a reason why the young ladies in the video think that the police are “pieces of shit” (more…)
Jared Goodell is a Keene native and local independent journalist. Yesterday he was the host for EIGHT hours during Pumpkin Fest 2014 on Cheshire TV, the local public access channel. Jared also put thousands of dollars of his own money into producing the all-day event coverage. For this amazing effort to cover the yearly festival (it would not have been covered on CTV without him), he is rewarded with an evening visit by Pumpkin Fest organizer Ruth Sterling who behaves in a ridiculous manner:
Sterling attempts to grab his microphone multiple times, as well as block the camera’s view of Jared, accuses him of frightening the guests of the festival and demands he stop talking about the riots happening just a few blocks away in the college neighborhood.
Since Jared is a newsman at heart, he feels obligated to report on what is happening in-town, and tangentially related to Pumpkin Fest. He defends his right to be the media and she responds by telling him she’ll “pull the plug” (which she has no control over) and that he should behave because she gave him the physical location for the CTV remote studio. As though she somehow was doing him a favor – he’s the one who spent over $5,000 of his own money to make the coverage of her event happen!
At one point in the beginning of the video, Sterling accuses Jared of being a “Free Stater”, this is the new pejorative to describe anyone who stands up for their rights. It’s not Jared’s first time causing controversy for reporting the news. Earlier this year he stirred it up for reporting from the scene of this Summer’s suicide and on the resignation of a despised school principal. Jared is not afraid to break the official city narrative of Keene being a perfect, blemish-free New England town, and is willing to take the heat. Keep up the good work, Jared – we’re all Free Staters now!
A name change costs just over $100 through the probate court in New Hampshire. It involves a simple form and a super fast hearing in front of a judge. (So fast it was over just after I got my camera rolling! Literally, less than 30 seconds.) However, when you are a known activist with a message of ending the idea of the violent monopoly state, a simple name change could get far more expensive. This one is going to cost 100 hours of community service, plus having a year of jail hanging over my head for two years, the arrest, bail conditions, and time blown in court.
While judge Edward Burke of Keene district court should have dismissed the ridiculous case against me for victimless ID “crimes” outright, he ultimately issued a sentence today that from his perspective, made sense to lay out. The state police prosecutor asked for a $500 fine, 60 days in jail, and 10 months suspended. Since I was facing two “class A misdemeanors”, Burke could have gone draconian and hit me with two years in prison. Ultimately, after statements from me and my business partner Mark Edge, Burke sentenced me to 100 hours of community service (50 per charge) and hung twelve months in jail over my head for two years.
His sentence was also smart from Burke’s perspective because it still appeases the state’s power over others while at the same time disincentivizes me from appealing the case to a de novo (“from the beginning”) jury trial. Why not appeal? Well, it was my plan to appeal if I was hit with significant jail time (more than a couple weeks). Consider my experience in 2011, where despite beating one of my two charges at a jury, the robed man there sentenced me to a 50% greater sentence than Burke had for both of the charges at the initial bench trial! So, jury de novos have their own risks, at least until NH statute can be changed to prevent de novo trial judges from sentencing harsher than bench trial judges.
Burke has in recent years made some pro-freedom rulings when he threw out the outrageous “NO TRESPASS FOREVER” order banning from the entire Cheshire superior court property several liberty activists (including myself) as written by the Sheriff. Burke later tossed out (more…)
