Civil Disobedience Thanksgiving at the Un-permitted MALIC Center in Keene, NH
Will Coley, new mover to Keene and imam of the soon-to-open MALIC Center – Keene’s new mosque – recently made headlines over the city’s demand he obey them and ask permission to exercise his right to religion. Here’s the Union Leader story and the NHPR piece about the conflict.
Will originally made the mistake of trying to ask the city gang’s blessing to install a sign. He should have known that asking for permission to exercise a right never ends well. The answer is almost always no, and fees and hoops galore are demanded by the bureaucrats. Unfortunately, despite telling the city gang that the sign was going up, after consulting with the local Muslims he is serving, they asked him to try to go through the city’s demands for the sign permission slip. So, the sign is not up.
MALIC Center Imam Will Coley Speaks to City Committee About Immigration
However, now that an inch has been given, the city gang is ready to take a mile of obedience, fees, meetings, and paperwork. In a letter addressed to Will by the city’s “Planning Director” Rhett Lamb, Lamb tells Will he’ll need a “change of use” for the building and an “certificate of occupancy” to gather in the structure, neither of which have anything to do with a sign. However, they have everything to do with submitting to a group of strangers who think they have a right to control your life and property.
Will has told me that the local Muslim community may be willing to bend on the sign issue, but not on the right of assembly. No one should ever have to ask permission to exercise their right. A mosque or church is created because we say so, not by asking some officious bureaucrat’s permission. The right to property and to seek happiness is a fundamental right ostensibly protected by the New Hampshire constitution – the very same document the people calling themselves “the City of Keene” supposedly operate underneath. Here’s its Article 2 regarding property: (more…)
Recently I wrote the eulogy for Cop Block, the national police accountability activist news website. Nothing lasts forever, especially in the world of activism, where doing the right thing rarely means one can make a living at it. Burnout is real and has happened to some of the brightest activists to ever hit the Cop Block scene.
Cop Block as a national organization may have died, but it’s not dead here in New Hampshire, where it was incubated – according to founder Pete Eyre – in Keene.
Though regular Cop Blocking patrols are more rare these days and more likely to happen in Keene than anywhere else, large numbers of activists still participate in the ongoing DUI checkpoint countering that happens multiple times a year in Manchester.
Toward the end of this summer, state and local police set up DUI checkpoints in Cheshire county for the first time in five years. Thomas Parisi from The Jail Paper came out with the group to document the checkpoint. It was set up just a few hundred feet from the bridge to Brattleboro, VT so we had multiple Cop Blockers on both points of entry to the checkpoint with multiple reflective signs alerting peaceful motorists to the upcoming harassment. Not surprisingly, state police statistics reported zero DUIs were found during the checkpoint, though they did write a bunch of motor vehicle violation tickets and make a few drug possession arrests. So, all victimless “crimes” – another huge waste of taxpayer dollars.
Luckily, thanks to an NH-based upstart from the Seacoast called Anypay, now merchants can accept DASH at point-of-sale. In fact, here in Keene, New Hampshire, local mom-n-pop retailers Corner News, Hot Hogs BBQ, D’s Cafe, and Route 101 Local Goods all now accept DASH at the register via the Anypay app.
It’s a relief to be able to use cryptocurrency again retail in real life, with fees that are sane. Fees for sending are usually no more than 1-3 cents’ worth of DASH per transaction, and they’re expected to get even lower with DASH’s next upgrade. Compare that with Bitcoin’s recent, insane $10+ median fees recently. Over the last couple of days they’ve dipped, but are still over $6 worth of BTC just to send a transaction. It’s sad – Bitcoin is broken, yet amazingly continues an upward trend in value, just today setting a new record high of over $8,000 USD per BTC.
Right in the midst of the DASH retail explosion happening in both Portsmouth and Keene, Lamassu, the manufacturer of Keene’s first Bitcoin Vending Machine released a long-awaited system update that has expanded their software to allow for multiple cryptocurrencies to be vended. Since DASH is uniquely positioned as “digital cash” and has growing point-of-sale support in the Keene area, it is now the first additional cryptocurrency besides bitcoin to be offered as a vended product in this region. (more…)
Billions in remittances are annually sent from folks in the USSA to their friends and families elsewhere. For decades, firms like Western Union and MoneyGram took a hefty fee for this service. But today, with the emergence of peer-to-peer digital currencies like Dash, money transfers can be done more speedily and with a much lower fee. This latter route can now be pursued by residents of San Antonio, Texas thanks to the existence of a Dash-enabled General Bytes Machine at LOL Liquors.
Brandon Pinney Awaits Trial in a “Fuck Cops” Handmade Shirt
After being found guilty last year in Keene District Court of “disorderly conduct” for telling state police to “fuck off”, NH-native Brandon Pinney appealed to a jury trial. I’m happy to announce that thanks to a hung jury, Brandon is victorious, as the state has decided to not retry the case. In an email, Brandon says:
Just letting you know that the deadline has passed for the state to retry me and the hung jury stands. While i am disappointed I was not fully exonerated i am glad and fortunate that in my case a jury of my peers was able to see that the situation did not unfold as the state presented it.
For the full initial district court trial video, you can check out this post. At the time, he heroically wore a “FUCK COPS” homemade t-shirt into court. Free speech includes the right to say unpleasant things to government officials. The district court judge, Edward Burke, was wrong to uphold the charge against him and it was good to see some jurors could see the situation clearly. This is a clear free speech issue, and in the long run the state would have lost in its own courts. Brandon stated further: (more…)
NH’s Top Newspaper Regularly Features Libertarian Activists
I’ve long stated that libertarians in New Hampshire are making a bigger impact than anywhere else. That’s because we’ve concentrated our efforts here as part of an ongoing NH Freedom Migration, and turns out – concentrating activists in one geographic area actually works! Besides the haters who target our activists, you can also tell we’re effective because the media not only writes about our activism regularly, but also reaches out for comment on other issues that don’t even directly involve us.
This happens here because libertarians in New Hampshire are a relevant political force and we cannot be ignored, like happens to libertarians in other states.
Today, I had the honor of being included in two different newspaper articles, in two different newspapers.
“Apparently the chief (Suokko) and town council just can’t let go of the insane war on drugs and just have to keep pushing to extract more money and obedience from peaceful cannabis users who are our neighbors, co-workers, and friends,”
Will Coley, Imam of the soon-to-open MALIC Center in Keene, NH recently made the mistake of asking permission to put up a sign for the mosque he’s opening in Keene. Realizing that asking for permission only gives bureaucrats reasons to create hoops to jump and fees to pay, Will went in to inform them he intends to move ahead with or without their permission slip, per the freedom of speech and religion.
During the interaction one particularly rude bureaucrat insults me and then issues an even bigger insult to Will, as a Muslim. She actually asserts that he smells of alcohol, a ridiculous claim, given it’s been over a decade since he’s drank any. Here’s the full video of his interactions with authoritarian bureaucrats on Thursday afternoon:
With the story already hitting the one of the Sentinel’s front pages yesterday, it’s already looking like the people calling themselves the “City of Keene” are going to be an international laughingstock again! With such insulting and threatening behavior not long after suffering defeat after defeat, all the way to the NH Supreme Court in the Robin Hood case where they tried and failed to crush the free speech of activists who have rescued thousands of motorists from parking tickets.
Enjoy the video and subscribe to FreeKeene.com for the latest on the MALIC Center and any further threats or aggression from the city gang.
