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.
It’s truly an honor to be attacked. They say you don’t take flak unless you’re over the target. No one should be surprised that there will be vehement opposition when libertarians actually start making an impact as we have done here in New Hampshire. Most libertarians don’t understand what it’s like to be hated, because outside of New Hampshire, the libertarian movement is little more than a sideshow. They have near-zero impact with their political campaigns, and that’s about all they do besides argue on the internet.
Prominent Haters’ Home Foreclosed, Sold Under $48k
Here in the Shire, libertarian activists regularly get mainstream media coverage in newsprint, on TV and radio. Here we matter, despite the online trolls who spend their precious time trying to convince us we don’t. Of course, the fact that they spend such inordinate time on us is evidence against their own claims.
Every now and then a hater will get out from behind their computer monitor and actually make a real life appearance. Sometimes they are memorable and hilarious, like the time Sam Dodson was assaulted by a former coffee-shop owner wielding a coffee cup (both have long since left NH). Sometimes they are threatening and violent. However, very rarely are their efforts sustained for any meaningful amount of time. Every hate group that has risen has also fallen away, however one couple really stood out above all the other haters, Matthew and Jennifer Schmidt. (more…)
Libertarian Colin Gibson was elected to Ward 4 Moderator on November 7th. Colin won 738 to 331. There were 8 write-in votes. Colin is an advocate of crypto currency, police accountability, and agorism. Colin is known by many in the liberty community, and presumably by some in the anti-liberty community. However, there is no indication that he is known by the population at large, and he states that he did not run a campaign. Colin ran against Inbal Rejwan-Day. She was not an incumbent as Woullard Lett was the outgoing moderator according to a phone call to the Manchester City Clerk on November 9th at 1pm.
I do not consider this an achievement of republicanism (more commonly, but less accurately known as democracy). (more…)
Is the Bitcoin geek war finally over, or just getting started?
After months of buildup, fighting, and controversy, the potential forkers of Bitcoin have blinked. Thankfully, they’ve called off their plans to cause a potentially damaging and very contentious schism to the Bitcoin network. Today, several of the “Segwit2X” developers appear to have written an email canceling the much ballyhooed “upgrade” that was attempting to become the “real” bitcoin.
I wrote a very detailed article explaining what was happening with this potential fork and you can read that here to get caught up. Here’s a brief recap of how we got to where we are:
Bitcoin has been going through some ugly growing pains. Its network is full of transactions. Fees have been skyrocketing as a result. Bitcoin transactions that a few years ago were no more than a few cents are now regularly $3-5 dollars. This has killed Bitcoin’s usefulness for small transactions. After arguing online for years about how to solve the issue technically, a group of dozens of companies and mining pool operators came together in May to propose a compromise called “Segwit2X”. This would implement “Segregated Witness” and then three months later increase the block size to 2 MB from 1 MB. Both of these changes were supposed to increase capacity.
Do you take the road less traveled?
Segwit was implemented by late August via “soft fork”, which means that nodes on the network who don’t update their software are still okay, because soft forks are backwards-compatible. New features added in the fork still support all the old features in the previous software version. The fork that was coming next week and is now supposedly canceled was to be a “hard fork”, which means software prior to the fork would no longer be compatible with the changes made, in this case increasing the block size to two megabytes. In theory this should have doubled the headroom in the network, decreasing fees. However, the plans are now off, after multiple original signers of the “New York Agreement” have backed out. (more…)
New Hampshire’s Committee to Study Cryptocurrency meets for its required 2017 meeting. They question state regulators after the Cryptocurrency Protection Act has been in place for a few months. They ultimately decide to recommend no further actions against or for cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. Here’s the full hearing video:
I explained to the panel that Bitcoin businesses had opened or moved to NH because of the buzz about the cryptocurrency protection act that passed this summer. Regardless of whether the statutory change would have affected those businesses, the publicity surrounding it was good for NH’s image in the crypto-sphere.
Looks like it’ll be a while before New Hampshire has financial freedom across-the-board. When I offhandedly suggested to the panel that all money transmitter regulations should be repealed, they unanimously acted like their rules somehow stop terrorism and drug dealers. Pointing out that South Carolina has no money transmission statutes made zero impact.
It wasn’t the place to take the discussion any further, but it’d be great to see a libertarian state rep introduce such a repeal. South Carolina doesn’t have any more drugs or terrorism than anywhere else.
