2012 has been a whirlwind year for me with so many successful projects. I finished Free Keene TV with my 52nd episode in July. I finished Porcfest Chronicles in October with 51 individual videos. I had a lot of fun working with Gary Johnson, John Babiarz and Hardy Macia making the zombie videos for political campaigns. Shire Sharing and the Free State Project round out the year with a few more videos documenting the hard work carried out by liberty activists.
I enjoy producing and publishing videos for the expressed purpose of spreading the ideas of liberty. It is a labor of love. At the same time I have spent hundreds of hours creating this content and it is always nice to get a little cash for the work. Bills, food and all that! So I created a chip-in for anyone that wants to give me a few bucks for my efforts:
This video is perhaps my last for the year. I visit the Maine Liberty Summit with Antigone Darling who gives a speech about liberty and secession. We network with neighboring liberty lovers and talk about the Free State Project.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6nGQiilshA
Some of my stats for 2012:
27 Episodes of Free Keene TV
51 Porcfest Chronicles videos
3 Zombie videos for Libertarian Party Candidates
2 Shire Sharing Videos
6 Videos for NH Gubernatorial Candidate John Babiarz
Santa Claus, also known by his friends as James Peterson, was arrested after spreading holiday cheer and chalk with young people in front of the Texas capitol building on the 21st. An occupy activist who was giving out chalk to children while dressed as Santa was well received in the plaza, but as he left, Texas DPS officers chased him down and handcuffed him. The crowd appears shocked, one woman yelling out in confusion, “You’re arresting Santa Claus?!”
The jolly red man asks numerous times, “Why am I being arrested?” After a minute, they tell him that he was chalking the sidewalk. A few in the crowd having filmed the entire time tell police that everyone was chalking, to which a female officer states, “You’re the only report that we got of chalking.” (more…)
The Ridley Report has recently been publishing continued analysis of the court victory for the independent journalist following his arrest in May of 2011. Three months later, Ridley was acquitted at a bench trial of a misdemeanor charge of trespassing, and a detailed summary of the trial was posted to Free Concord the following day.
A playlist on the Ridley Report youtube channel documents all of his own coverage beginning with the arrest and protests shortly thereafter, and continuing with analyzed video from the trial of key moments. On December 1 of this year, a video published which described a possible continuation of the case into legal land, this time in the form of a civil lawsuit against the Nashua police. Illustrated with claymation produced by another youtube content creator, the video entitled, Nashua police reject demand for groper’s dismissal linked to this information posted to a public forum by Ridley.
As you may recall, Nashua police arrested me while I was trying to film their actions outside a hotel in which Joe Biden was speaking. In the process of searching me, the arresting officer Denis Linehan touched my genitals. After our defeat of trespassing charges in court, my lawyer Stephen Martin has helped me issue a pair of demands. If met, we would drop suit. The initial demand called for monetary damages in the $15,000 range. When the city rejected that we represented that firing Linehan would be enough to prevent the suit. As expected, city attorney Brian Cullen has rejected that offer too. The city has however indicated a willingness to accept some other non-monetary settlement.
Throughout this month, four additional videos of highlights from the criminal trial have been uploaded. You can see even more edited portions of the trial created in 2011 on the playlist. (more…)
November 2011 – I am pulled over for speeding on the way back from some activism in Concord with a car full of activists. Trooper Kelly Healy asks my passengers for ID – I remind her that as passengers they are in no way obligated to show her ID. As I reach for my car registration she asks about my driver’s license and why there was an NH address on a FL license. I decline to answer her probing questions, instead asking her questions of my own, like, “Am I being detained?”. Healy returns to her car and later comes back with a speeding ticket, to which I ask her if she really wants to go to court, and she claims that is my choice. I remind her that it was her choice to aggress against me and tell her I’ll see her in court.
Or, maybe not. Trooper Healy never showed up to a court hearing scheduled for this week and the case was dismissed on my motion to dismiss for failure to appear on the part of the complaining party. I “won”! Here’s video from the pullover and court hearing:
I put quotes around the win because it took many hours of my time, for which I will not be compensated. Allow me to detail the process: (more…)
This post was originally published to KeeneCopBlock.org on Dec. 19th, 2012.
Many folks who reside in Keene are aware of the petty harassment doled out by Fred Parsells.
A former Keene police employee, Parsells now claims a “legitimate” right to be a nosy bother to his neighbors due to his occupation as a code enforcer.
Fortunately a lot of thinking individuals have concluded that when the initiation of force or its threat is utilized, whether “officially” sanctioned or not, the person initiating is in the wrong.
There’s much I love about Keene. Yet I could do without the countless iterations of force threatened or initiated by Fred Parsells.
Ridley has released the second half of his ambush interview with Department of Homeland Security spokesman Aaron Snipe. Part 2 begins where the first left off, with Snipe denying that US forces tortured a taxi driver in Afghanistan to death. Ridley responds emotively when Snipe repeats, “That’s not true” with, “He wasn’t tortured to death?! He’s dead!” The suited handler, who at this time is walking in advance of Snipe calls over his shoulder, “Do you really want to respond to this?” While Snipe continues to play politician and give fluffy, pro-US policy answers, Ridley lets his frustration show but surprisingly does not cause the spokesman to flee into the camera-free zone. He gets another 90 seconds of dialogue, including a response noting that “President Obama has banned torture, the United States does not torture. That’s core to American foreign policy.” Text flashes on the screen interjecting that if he were thinking on his feet, he would have asked how Obama’s supposed torture ban meshes with the mistreatment of Bradley Manning.
The remainder of the video features polite security guards, and Dave considering on camera whether to conduct a second ambush interview after the closed event or consider the first complete. Walking out, he explains his reasoning. Independent of how Snipe painted roses around the empire, he maintained the utmost professionalism doing it.
