Free Talk Live host and Shire Free Church minister Zephan Wood began holding sermons at his house three months ago. Crowds have gathered at each event to listen to the sermons and then stay for hours after to discuss everything from cryptocurrency use as a religious practice (the main topic of the sermons) to consciousness, religion and DMT trips. The conversations usually start around his sermon and evolve through out the night, set around a fire.
Most of the attendees have been Free Staters but some have been locals invited out. It is very nice to see a Shire Free Church minister taking up a mission on their own to spread the ideas of peace. My own experience at these events has been welcoming, inspiring and mind-expanding. Conversation among like-minded and non-judgmental people is one of the most important activities for a community.
On tonight’s Free Talk Live broadcast from Porcfest, host Mark Edge said he’s been to a lot of Porcfests, and the attendance this year is already exceeding the levels of a typical Friday from past years. That means Rogers Campground is already packed, on day number two of a weeklong event that tends to build its attendance as the weekend approaches. Posts to social media reveal a variety of vendors who are accepting Goldbacks and Cryptocurrency, as is to be expected at an event packed with libertarians, voluntarists, and liberty-loving anarchists.
Last year’s Porcfest was the first-ever sellout at 2,500 tickets. This year – the nineteenth annual – the event sold out again, and they maxxed out the tickets to 3,000! Every campsite in the park is completely sold out. The record-setting attendance in the last two years is no chance event – interest in the Free State Project has shot up dramatically since the insane COVID crackdowns in 2020. In fact, 2021 also saw more people migrating to New Hampshire as part of the FSP, than any previous year. 2022’s NH freedom migration numbers will likely eclipse 2021.
The nearly two-decades the FSP has been encouraging libertarian migration to NH has paid off as earlier movers have laid an amazing groundwork of activism organizations and resources for later migrants. NH libertarians are winning elections, with dozens of Free Staters in state house seats. We have built the largest community of freedom-loving activists on Earth. It is no longer a pie-in-the-sky idea, but a longterm, proven success. The more people move here as part of the FSP, the stronger the libertarian influence in the state. Success breeds success.
Free Talk Live at Porcfest 2022
Meanwhile, the statists in New Hampshire are freaking out over our tremendous successes thus far, as the FreeStateNH account on Twitter is constantly pointing out. Statists in positions of power ignore libertarians in every other state, because they have no influence and will never threaten the status quo. More liberty activists are realizing that concentrating activism works and are picking up and moving to New Hampshire. Porcfest is the premier excuse to come visit NH and experience what it’s like to be around more freedom-loving people that you can count for an entire week.
Whether you can attend or not, you can tune in every day to Free Talk Live for the latest discussion and interviews from the campground. Our broadcasts will continue through the end of Porcfest and the following week for Forkfest. Forkfest is the decentralized follow-up to Porcfest. Entering its sixth year, Forkfest has no tickets so in order to attend, one need only reserve a tent site, RV site, or motel room from Rogers Campground between June 27th and July 3rd.
Sadly, due to the insane bail restrictions on me because of the Crypto Six case, I can only go up for the day, as I have to be home each night by 11pm. However, last year I couldn’t even leave my home at all, so going up for one day is better than zero. This year, I’ll be at Porcfest on Friday where I’m honored to be able to speak on the pavilion main stage at 1pm. I hope to see you there!
HB 1349 is a bill that would decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms sponsored by Amherst Representative Tony Labranche. The bill had its first hearing in the Criminal Justice committee on January 11th, but while all the other bills heard that day got voted on, HB 1349 had a new hearing date scheduled. That means you have another chance to go and show your support for the bill on Thursday, January 20, 2022 in the Legislative Office Building in Concord at 9am. Alternatively, if you can’t make it you can email the committee and tell them to vote Ought To Pass.
The bill is very interesting because it is modeled word for word after the bill that decriminalized marijuana in New Hampshire. What argument does a member of this committee have against this bill? Psilocybin mushrooms are even safer for people and society than marijuana, according to Dr. David Nutt, former chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in the UK.
I spoke at the hearing on January 11th and so did 4 others. The only person who spoke against this bill was a police lieutenant. How typical. The only person who didn’t want to see Granite Staters gain more freedom was a person who personally profits from the war on drugs.
The New Hampshire Supreme Court already decided that psilocybin use was constitutionally protected if you’re using it for religious practice or to worship god. My spiritual beliefs include worshiping the god in myself by allowing myself the ability to ascend beyond what and who I am now. Psilocybin is a great tool to do that and more people experiencing this medicine would help heal our community which is in part damaged by the war on drugs.
Porcupine Day is the day the Free State Project reached its goal of 20,000 signers of their pledge to migrate to New Hampshire as a liberty activist.
The original Porcupine Day was in February 2016, which marked the beginning of the FSP’s five-year-long moving window. February 2021 marks the close of that window. However, the Free State Project will not be shutting down and is instead going to continue recruiting more liberty-minded people to make the move to the Shire.
I attended the event and recorded the various speakers. Four full speeches appear below.
First up, Jeremy Kauffman, the founder of LBRY and current member of the Free State Project’s board of directors made a couple of proposals to those watching.
1. That “Free Stater” should be redefined to mean any libertarians in New Hampshire
2. The FSP should return to being a member-voted board of directors.
Reopen NH founder Andrew Manuse discussed organizing Reopen NH and encouraged more libertarians to follow the tremendously successful example he’s set. Reopen NH – now Rebuild NH – was originally built by a petition and has morphed into an organization that endorses candidates and has organized multiple successful rallies in favor of freedom: (more…)
With Forums, Chat, and Social Media, Shire Society Shields Users from Big Tech
More than a decade ago, Facebook was still growing into the social media behemoth they are today. If you were around back then, you remember when it was actually useful for reaching friends across the world and keeping-in-touch.
There was a time, for instance, when you could create an event on Facebook and click an “invite all” box to invite all your friends to the event. Super handy! Every friend received an invite in their inbox and could make the choice to attend or not. The previous activist method of organizing – forums – did not have this calendar event feature, and understandably the activists migrated to Facebook as it seemed more useful for making things happen.
That was the first clue that things were not going in a good direction. At the time, you could still download a third-party browser plugin that brought the invite-all option back, but eventually Facebook changed their code so the plugin no longer worked. That was the end of easily being able to organize events on Facebook.
You’re leaving now, right?
Later, Facebook made it so you had to pay them if you wanted all your followers to see your posts. In more recent years we’ve seen anti-state events being taken down entirely and in recent days blanket bans applied to people with certain political views.
With record numbers of people leaving megacorporate state-worshiping sites like Facebook and Twitter for less-big-but-still-centralized communications platforms like Signal and Telegram, it’s finally cool to get off “Big Tech”.
Naturally, your friendly freedom-loving activists here at Free Keene have been encouraging this for more than a decade. It started when we launched the Shire Forum over a decade back. Originally the Free Keene Forum, it transitioned to become the Shire Society Forums after the Shire Society was formed in 2010. As one of the forum’s founders, I never cared for Facebook’s groups and wanted to keep forums alive as they were independents, self-hosted and open source.
Eventually the Shire Society Forums expanded to include other things like cryptocurrency discussion and non-Shire NH activism and media threads, so it was renamed simply “Shire Forum“. For the last few years it’s been running some super-modern forum software called Discourse. If you are a liberty-minded person considering a move to New Hampshire or already living here and you haven’t been on forums in many years – or ever – give the Shire Forum a try.
Join at Matrix.LRN.FM
Keene-area liberty activists have also been on the Telegram platform for chatting for most of the last decade. It’s long been the top-of-class of all centralized chat platforms on the planet. Slick, easy-to-use and great for group chats. However, while the source code for their clients is open-source, it’s not decentralized and so several years back we evaluated the Matrix – a decentralized, federated chat server system – and put its main client, then called “Riot” through the paces. It was good, but not great, and not easy-to-use like Telegram was. After about a year of trying it out, most of us gave up.
However, in 2020 we launched our own Matrix server after the centrally-hosted Discord corporation unceremoniously booted the LRN.FM chat server from its centrally managed platform. We knew it was coming and I’d heard that Matrix had a new client out called “Element” and that it was way better than its original “Riot”, so we launched our own Matrix server at Matrix.LRN.FM. It has been great, and the increase in freedom is palpable. No corporate masters are holding an axe over our heads.
Matrix is open source, self-hosted, and federated, which means that all of the Matrix servers on the planet are by default connected together, so users from one Matrix server can reach the rest of the planet’s Matrix users on other servers. Unless, a server admin disfederates, or blocks another server for whatever reason. Matrix is way more decentralized than Big Tech monsters like Discord. Technically, Matrix is polycentric – with many centers. If you don’t like one Matrix server, you can join another, or start your own. Element is indeed way better than Riot. If you want to try freer chat, join the LRN.FM Matrix server where you can join existing rooms or create and moderate your own, private or public. All freedom lovers are welcome, not just NH people.
Join the “FTL Social” Mastodon
The decentralizing liberty activist communications story doesn’t end there, however. Just this week we also launched our own federated, self-hosted social media platform called “FTL Social“. It’s running the open source Mastodon software which is also federated and polycentric, like Matrix. It’s open to voluntarists, liberty-loving anarchists, and libertarians from around the world who are looking for a place where their posts won’t be subject to the whims of statist Big Tech admins and their snitch users. Please join at social.freetalklive.com and check it out. It’s a killer replacement for Twitter and works great.
Don’t forget one of the most important decentralized change we’ve seen in our lifetimes – cryptocurrency! If you want to contribute to these projects I’ve listed here, please use the cryptocurrency addresses you can see in the right column here at Free Keene. Longtime readers here already know that crypto is the killer decentralized solution for money and can’t be shut down by greedy, evil politicians.
Last, but not least is LBRY. It’s the decentralized blockchain-based media protocol that has been hosting Free Keene’s videos since 2018. They recently launched a cool new video site called Odysee that has seen a big jump in activity in the last week. LBRY is based in Manchester and run by liberty activists.
I hope this article gave you some ideas about better options to protect your communications from the tech giants who hate freedom. See you in the decentralized, open source, polycentric fediverse!
Tonight, New Year’s Eve, while government goons are threatening people and telling them to stay home, over one hundred revelers are together in a secret venue in the Keene area for “QUARANKEENE Space Disco”! Organizers of the party say it will feature now-prohibited activities like karaoke and dancing. Featuring multiple live DJs, delicious food, good times, and all donations at the door will be given to the NH Liberty Defense Fund. The Liberty Defense Fund is of course accepting cryptocurrency as well as Goldbacks. Here’s the official event flyer:
QUARANKEENE Space Disco 2020
Event co-organizer “Soundwave” said, “2020 has been a soul-crushing year for people across the planet. With lame-ass stay-at-home ‘dance parties’, drive-in concerts with zero crowd energy, and inhumane mask mandates, people have been unable to sing, dance, and connect with other humans. We’re not afraid of a virus that doesn’t show symptoms in the supermajority of the people it infects and kills a small fraction of the elderly, obese people who do actually show symptoms. This whole COVID thing has been a massive excuse to expand government control over people’s lives and transfer more wealth to the elite, while destroying small businesses. We decided the best thing we could do to fight this insanity is to throw a killer party.”
Indeed, tonight’s venue is a previously successful Keene-area restaurant that was closed permanently early on in 2020. The courageous venue owner, Malaise Lindenfeld, is also one of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit against the statewide mask mandate as well as the City of Keene’s mandate. Lindenfeld said, “Our most basic freedoms have been coopted by politicians who forget that they serve at our pleasure and not the other way around. If each of us were to take a stand and say “I will not comply”, it will go a long way towards the fight against tyranny.”
QUARANKEENE is the latest in a series of Space Disco parties that began in August 2019, co-founded by DJ Capital Interest. The goal is to eventually throw an epic party in space, but until then build excitement by throwing space-themed parties here on Earth. DJ Capital Interest explained, “The Space Disco is literally going to outer space. Our life mission is to open the solar system’s first discotheque outside of Earth’s atmosphere by joining forces with the world’s leading space and party companies.” Regarding tonight’s party, DJ Capital Interest said, “Space Disco Summer 2020 was by far the best dance club in the country and Space Disco NYE 2020/21 is shaping up to be the best Winter dance club, thanks to so many independent thinkers concentrated in New Hampshire.”
UPDATE: The party raised over $1100 in cash plus a bunch of Goldbacks, a few ounces of silver, and multiple different cryptocurrencies for the Liberty Defense Fund! It was a smashing success.
Free Talk Live host and Shire Free Church minister Zephan Wood began holding sermons at his house three months ago. Crowds have gathered at each event to listen to the sermons and then stay for hours after to discuss everything from cryptocurrency use as a religious practice (the main topic of the sermons) to consciousness, religion and DMT trips. The conversations usually start around his sermon and evolve through out the night, set around a fire.
