New Hampshire’s one-man independent video journalist, Dave Ridley, is back producing regular content for his “Ridley Report“! After YouTube demonetized his channel, Ridley abandoned it in order to protect it from being deleted due to YouTube’s new habit of issuing “strikes” against politically unpopular channels, ultimately resulting in their termination. However, he was disappointed in the other competing services to YouTube and their comparative lack of viewers.
However, recently, fans and sponsors encouraged Ridley to get back to regular production and he’s stepping up, with new videos being recorded and released as I write this. Welcome back Ridley! You can follow his new channel on Odysee and Bitchute.
Here’s his latest “ambush” video where he confronts some surprisingly open and accountable Keene Library “trustees”:
Keene activists are ready for a new wave of activism. Riley Blake, a new mover and Free Talk Live host, is hosting weekly 420 meet ups in downtown Keene. Press NH Now, a police accountability activist recently moved to Keene. Most recently, I took a parking ticket to court.
In this video you’ll see the whole process of how to do it yourself. I’ll explain it here, although this is not legal advice as i am not an attorney. First, you have to contest the ticket which is done at City Hall. Bring your ticket and your ID and registration if applicable. Then you’ll get served a court date. That does mean a psychopath with a shiny badge and a gun will likely come visit your home to give you the ticket so make sure you film your encounter and warn any roommates about what you’re doing. Then, you show up to the court date they give you. You don’t need to hire a lawyer for this and they won’t give you a public defender for a fifteen dollar ticket. You could tell the judge you don’t understand the nature or cause of the charge so you cannot plea guilty. You can use that as an opportunity to ask him questions about why you’re there that day. I asked the judge in my case if I am entitled to a fair trial. He said yes. I asked him if I could get a fair trial if there was a conflict of interest. He didn’t answer my question. He lied and said he couldn’t answer that yes-or-no question because he’d have to know what the conflict of interest would be. That’s non-responsive but I didn’t object since I didn’t want to piss him off that early. The obvious answer is that it wouldn’t be a fair trial if there was a conflict of interest in the case. Next, I asked the judge who he represents. He lied and said he doesn’t represent anyone. That stumped me because I knew the judge could say whatever he wanted but I hadn’t expected a human being to stand in front of me and say he represents no one, not even himself. That doesn’t even make sense but we are in legal land when we are in court. So up is down and down is up as Marc Stevens would say. I dropped my questioning and he asked if I would like to plea and I still said no. He gave me a trial date in July.
The prosecution didn’t end up giving me discovery until the day before trial. So the day before trial I went to the court house and the police station to file a Motion to Dismiss with the judge. You have to go to the police station and file it there to because they give it to the prosecution and you must notify them as well. The day of the trial, the judge granted a continuance so I would have more time but didn’t grant my motion to dismiss. So a trial was rescheduled for two weeks later. I was actually happy it didn’t get dropped because I wanted to cross examine Jane McDermott, the old lady thug who wrote the ticket and left it on the car I was using. The day of trial I was able to do that. I got to ask her a lot of fun questions including how much she gets paid to be at court. She was on her day off but being paid twenty-five dollars an hour to be there. So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Writing parking tickets is objectively not just something the City of Keene needs to do in order to maintain parking spaces. If it was, they wouldn’t spend all of this money paying the parking enforcer, the prosecutor and the judge to be in court in order to get fifteen dollars out of me. I believe the real reason is to create an atmosphere of fear and make sure people stay obedient. No private company maintaining these parking spaces would waste so much money. But they don’t care, it’s your tax dollars they’re wasting so why be responsible with it? They’ll get more out of you, right? If you don’t pay them they’ll come to your house and shoot your dog and bring you to prison.
I won the case because when Jason Short, the prosecutor, rested his case I motioned to dismiss on the basis that he never showed any evidence that I was the one who had been operating the vehicle or that I owned the car, since it’s registered under a church for which I am a minister. But even if you try this yourself and your car is registered under your name, if the prosecution rests without showing any evidence that you were the one operating the vehicle or that the meter was actually out of time, you could motion to dismiss. The judge may just not like you and deny your motion. He may order you to pay the fifteen dollars. If you really want to be a stellar activist you can tell him you’re not going to pay the fine. He will either make you do community service or put you in jail for one day. But, (and this is especially true if you are able to film the trial,) they don’t want to be seen throwing people in jail over fifteen dollars. If enough people contest their tickets, they will be so backed up there’s no way they would be able to continue this racket.
Please enjoy the video of the whole process. It’s fun to laugh at how ridiculous of a situation we are in while in court trying not to be harmed by these freaks who believe they are superhuman. They wear suits, badges and robes. They speak in ritualistic patterns. They will reprimand you for getting frustrated with someone who is lying under oath about you. They pretend it’s fair that all of them are on the same team against you. But that’s the “fair and just” legal system we are forced to not feel contempt for!
The saga of the State Thugs vs the Peaceful Noone Family continues with this sentencing hearing after Shalon Noone was found guilty of the bullshit “Child Endangerment” charge earlier this Summer. If you missed the trial video, see it here.
Since it was charged as a “Class A” misdemeanor, Shalon is appealing the charge “de novo”, which means “from the beginning”. That means she’ll get a whole new trial in “superior court” in front of a jury this time. So, this sentencing hearing will not really mean anything unless she decides to not move forward with the appeal.
Several libertarian activists gathered in Manchester recently for a “gun buyback” event where they attempted to persuade Manchester police to trade their guns for $25 gift cards. Organizers and attendees said they wanted to bring attention to police violence and “qualified immunity” which protects officers from responsibility for their actions. Kudos to Justin O’Donnell for being there and getting video:
No one dislikes the government more than I do (although some may equal my disgust with the institution), but even so it would be silly and unfair to accuse the BOP (Bureau of Prisons) of being anti-trans, in exactly the same way that it would be absurd to accuse the rain of malice because it erodes the hills. The water does not hold enmity toward the dirt; the rain only does what it does, and there are simply effects to that. In actuality, the treatment of the BOP in regard to trans people is both a stark contrast and an alarming analog to the conversion therapy camps that were more common in the 90s; by holding none of the enmity and sharing none of the intentions of the “pray the gay away” camps, the BOP is more subtle in its erasure of trans identity, but this doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Just as the rain does not try to destroy the hillside, and is merely a result of weather patterns much greater in scope than a mound of dirt, so is the assault on transgener identity only an effect of a larger phenomenon: a widespread tendency to glance at a newborn’s genitals and map out large sections of their life for them, and then becoming irate and hostile at the suggest that an infant’s gentials may not be the best way of grouping adults into relationships, friend circles, or prisons.
It is simple, when a patient complains of a cough, for a doctor to prescribe some cough syrup, but nearly no doctor would do this, because it is myopic and narrow to treat a sympton rather than the underlying illness that causes the symptom. By treating only the cough, a doctor could easily miss the pneumonia, lung cancer, or asthma that is causing the patient to cough. Similarly, there is a Buddhist story where the Buddha is traveling with students when one of them is shot by an arrow, and begs the Buddha to pursue the attacker, so they might be held to account. The Enlightened One responds that he could do that, or he could remove the arrow and dress the wound, but he obviously could not do both. Similarly, shaking our fists angrily at the torrents or clouds that produce them has a tremendous opportunity cost and is a waste of emotional energy; instead, we could devote our time and efforts to halting the erosion, and then preventing it from recurring.
The issue at hand is not that the BOP maliciously denies transgender healthcare, because it doesn’t; the BOP fails to provide adequate care to transgender inmates, but it is because the society behind the prison industrial complex routinely fails the transgender population, largely due to apathy, although there is occasionally malice shown to these people who declare themselves to fall into the cracks of the social construct of gender, which, in the estimation of the bigoted, is sufficient for “everyone else,” and thus must work for all. It is the equivalent of telling a person who is cold to remove their coat because the speaker isn’t chilly, so how could anyone else be?
Even under the best of circumstances, being transgender is difficult. Transgender people already know in their hearts that they will never be indistinguishable from a cisgender person, but there are plenty of people who enjoy reminding trans people of that anyway, to say nothing of the myriad of minor, incidental, and accidental ways in which this is made clear to a trans person. No one ever said, “I’m going to make my life easier by dressing as the opposite sex,” because, despite bigoted claims to the contrary, such a monumental step serves only to make one’s life more challenging, at least for the foreseeable future, when it is less readily apparent that a person is trans at all.
Everyone has struggles, though, and it would be inaccurate to suggest that this is unique to trans people, or that the hardships of a trans person are unduly difficult. Rather than somehow being “worse” than the challenges other people faced, the tragedy of the trans plight lies in how utterly and easily preventable–and harmlessly so!–the difficulties are. In prison or larger society, it brings no risk or hurdles to anyone else for a person of any characteristics to present themselves as they need to in order to look in a mirror and be reasonably happy with the reflection.
The existence of transgender people, without a doubt, creates challenges for society that it is not equipped to handle, but putting trans women into a men’s prison and trans men into a women’s prison should be regarded at least as catastrophic to the involved people as placing trans men into a men’s prison and trans women into a women’s prison is regarded by those who have run out of real problems to deal with and so instead spend their time seeking trivialities about which they can be upset.
For more than a month, I have been waiting on basic items, not necessarily to reaffirm or bolster my identity as much to simply maintain it against the unrelenting, subtle forces that exist within a men’s prison to oppress, deny, and erase all non-masculine traits, with men’s prison obviously being the peaks of testosterone and toxic masculinit: emotions are not expressed, oether than anger. Imagine trying to maintain femininity in an environment entirely ruled by testosterone, much less attempting to enhance one’s feminine side such that behavior more closely matches the interior. Even if I had every resources that I’ve collected over the last decade in my life as a trans woman, simply existing as myself would be a challenge; with those resources denied me by policy, and with the meager substitutes taking now more than a month to reach me, the task is utterly impossible.
This shouldn’t be taken as necessarily the fault of the BOP, just as rain is not really to blame for the erosion of soil; rather, that it is this way is a reflection of social values. Though society increasingly recognizes the rights and needs of transgender individuals, the government always lags behind, and then always fails to actually meet the needs that are recognized–someone with a malignant growth will have to wait months to have it addressed, because the prison industrial complex is not equipped to act with grace and compassion. Given that this is the case, perhaps our first goal should be to not have the largest prison population on the planet, and, in so doing, we would lessen the hardship unnecessarily placed on all people, transgender or not, and that could only ever be a positive thing for us all.
One of the biggest frustrations with the federal court system is the fact that recording hearings in any form is completely forbidden, and has been since 1946. No audio, no video, no photographs can be taken. Only pen/pencil and paper are allowed. We tried to get the judge to provide at least an online/phone audio feed as the federal civil courts had done since COVID. The courtroom is wired for sound and video at least since COVID, but alas, we were not successful in our request.
Free Keene blogger Chris Waid did an amazing job taking and transcribing notes every day and those were posted here, but no one sitting in the audience can capture all that is said. Thankfully, the court does offer an official record, which of course one must pay for. Since I plan to appeal my ridiculous convictions for victimless “crimes” regarding selling bitcoin, we have to have the full transcripts. Now we do and I’m legally able to share them publicly.
To make them easier to search and copy, I’ve put them all through Optical Character Recognition, so you can easily select blocks of text you might want to use for whatever purpose. Certainly there are many ridiculous moments that were hopefully somewhat captured by text, though obviously you don’t have the benefit of the witness’ facial expressions. Hopefully someday cameras will be allowed into federal courts, but for now full transcripts months later are the best we can do.
You can download all the trial transcripts in PDF form here as a ZIP file. It also includes the following index as a TXT file, showing the witnesses called on each day. Each PDF also has its own index up front showing the witnesses and pages on which their direct, cross, and any redirect examinations of them took place. Each day usually has two files, one for morning and one for afternoon. You can click each individually below if you don’t want to download them all at once in the ZIP file. (Depending on your browser, you may need to right click and save as to get the download working.)
Day 1 PM – Opening Statements Day 2 AM – PROSECUTION – Alexandra Comolli Day 2 PM – Alexandra Comolli, Theodore Vlahakis Day 3 AM – Theodore Vlahakis, Kathryn Thibault, Kevin McCusker, Derek Feather Day 3 PM – Christopher Rietmann, Colleen Fordham Day 4 AM – Hope Cherry, Bruce Sweet, Pavel Prilotsky Day 4 PM – Pavel Prilotsky, Renee Spinella Day 5 AM – Dustin Wong, Nicholas Nathans, James Rossell, Patrick Brown, Harold Jones Day 5 PM – Harold Jones, Melanie Neighbors, Karla Cino Day 6 AM – Kendall McBrearty Day 6 PM – Dannela Varel, Kendall McBrearty Day 7 AM – Kendall McBrearty, Rebecca Ault, Kate Eyerman, Nancy Triestram Day 7 PM – Nancy Triestram, Diane Cacace, Thomas Connolly, Colleen Ranahan Day 8 AM – Renee Spinella Day 9 AM – DEFENSE – Keith Murphy, Max Santonastaso, Edward Forster, Adam Mosher, Dael Chapman, Carolynn Urbanski, Melinda Cambiar, Ian Freeman Day 9 PM – Ian Freeman Day 10 AM – Mohammed Ali, Paul Niwa, Closing Arguments Day 10 PM – Jury Instructions Day 11 – Verdict
The latest on the case is both sides are currently arguing over the motion to dismiss that my attorney, Mark Sisti, made during the trial at both the close of prosecution and at the end of the defense. Presuming the judge does not throw out all eight counts, we will move to sentencing that is currently set for August 17th, though there is a good chance that will be delayed yet again. Should you wish to write the judge on my behalf, you can find instructions and an address here.
Meanwhile, my co-defendant Aria DiMezzo is in a federal prison camp in Devens, MA serving an 18-month sentence for the completely victimless paperwork violation of operating a “money transmitting business” without a government permission slip. Sadly, but understandably – it’s scary to face down a dozen charges in front of government-biased juries – she took a plea to the charge despite the statutes not mentioning cryptocurrency in any way and despite the fact that bitcoin is never “transmitted” at all, by the government’s own definition of “transmitting”. Unfortunately one cannot appeal a plea deal under most circumstances, so she’ll have to serve some as-yet-undetermined amount of the 18-month sentence. However, you can help her make the time go faster by writing her letters, sending books, or money for commissary. Instructions are here at AriaDiMezzo.com.
As always, stay tuned here to Free Keene or Free Talk Live for the latest.
If you’re an old-school Cop Block supporter, you surely remember Cell 411. It was a killer app that allowed the user to send GPS-based emergency alerts out to friends and family and also allowed for live streaming video from the scene, among other useful features for police accountability activists.
For instance, a Cop Blocker could be getting pulled over, send an alert to a “cell” including other Cop Blockers in the area, and then others would know the sender’s location and what was happening, and could mobilize to the scene to provide support. Meanwhile, the Cop Blocker who sent the alert could also stream live video from the pullover that his cohorts could watch while they were en route.
The app also had alerts for other categories such as fire, medical emergency, breakdown, and others. The idea being that when something bad is happening in your life, it’s better to have friends respond instead of armed psychopaths who might shoot you, your family, or your dog. In case you’re not already familiar with Cell 411, here’s a video that Cop Block’s co-founder Pete Eyre made showing the app’s various features several years ago:
Unfortunately, after years of useful service, Cell 411 fell into disrepair due to its founder falling on hard times due to some family difficulties. He reached out to me and the Shire Free Church took over the project in 2020, but by that time the software was essentially broken.
The first thing I wanted to do was open source Cell 411’s programming, which we have done. The project’s new head programmer, “Nobody”, is an old-school Cop Blocker and has spent the last few years – minus six months in jail when he was targeted by the feds for selling bitcoin – trying to refactor and improve the code. However, he needs help. It’s more than a one-man project and he’s getting burned out and needs some people with programming experience for Android and iOS who are willing to help make Cell 411 great again.
If you don’t know how to program, you can still help us test the app.
If you’re willing to help, please join our Matrix or Telegram support chats to get connected, and introduce yourself. You can also find our code at our Gitlab here.
Please share this story if you value Cell 411. Thank you.
