http://keenesentinel.com/…

Published: Saturday, June 13, 2009

For those of you who don’t know me, allow me to introduce myself.

I moved to Keene in 2004 with my wife of 16 years and two children, now 7 and 8.

I have owned the same home in Keene since moving here. I attend Grace Evangelical Free Church in Spofford, am a DC-10 captain for an international charter airline, home-school our active children and play drums and other musical instruments.

I also serve as the president of the Free State Project.

Over the past several weeks, numerous news articles and opinion pieces have mentioned the Free State Project. I’d like to offer facts and opinions that I hope will shed light on the subject from an angle not yet covered.

I am in the unique position of being both a resident of Keene, a focal point of recent local and national press, and an official representative of the Free State Project.

First, as a representative of the Free State Project, I’d like to present several facts that correct or clarify inaccurate and misleading statements that have appeared in The Sentinel and other media outlets lately:

1. The Free State Project is very simple: It seeks 20,000 participants who agree to move to New Hampshire, where they will exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protections of life, liberty and property.

2. The Free State Project does not take positions on specific issues, legislation or candidates for office. It does not specify any area for participants to move to, and it does not specify tactics for achieving a “free state.”

The project itself does not exert the fullest practical effort. Participants in the project do so on their own.

3. The Free State Project does not own or control any radio shows, newspapers or magazines.

4. The Free State Project is funded through donations and does not have members, dues, or shadowy corporate backers. Its budget is small and financial reports are posted on the Web site.

5. The Free State Project’s most visible activity in New Hampshire consists of two events each year: the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, and the Porcupine Freedom Festival.

The 2009 Porcupine Freedom Festival will be June 25-28 in Lancaster. Those interested in learning more about the Free State Project, and meeting some Free State Project participants are encouraged to attend.

Though the project takes no position about the activities that have received so much attention lately, I do have personal opinions as a resident of Keene.

I, too, wish all the antics would stop.

It disappoints me that a mature group of people could be so foolish as to waste tax-funded law enforcement resources by initiating attacks against such nonviolent silliness as giving a manicure, holding a plant, or not meeting someone’s aesthetic preferences for outdoor furnishing.

Then, when performers of such nonviolent acts make audio or video recordings of the taxpayer-funded assaults, or choose not to cooperate with threats, the law enforcers get upset and initiate more acts of physical violence.

All this makes law enforcement look more like a gang of perpetually-adolescent thugs than civilized adults.

All of this generates news and opinion pieces, peppered with factual inaccuracies and slurs, that support the notion that it’s good to spend tax dollars assaulting nonviolent, non-fraudulent behavior, whether it be provocative or just plain goofy.

And that’s just plain goofy, or at least it should seem so to anyone who values liberty.

Maybe the question here is, who values liberty? Will the real liberty lovers please stand up?

VARRIN SWEARINGEN
President
Free State Project
2 Starlight Drive
Keene

http://www.libertydollar.org/…

The last two days have been amazing! Just shortly after midnight on Tuesday, the phone started ringing and I let the answering machine take the call. But very soon there was another call… with an even more urgent message! Very quickly, a friend of Kevin Innes, explained to me that Kevin had been “detained” by the local sheriff and was being held for the FBI to arrest him! Holy Cow!! The #2 supporter for the Liberty Dollar and co-instructor at the Liberty Dollar University training sessions was in deep trouble with the Feds! I was sure to be next. But would they arrive in a few minutes or would it be a pre-dawn Nazi style assault?

Finally, I got up at 4:00 AM. I was very concerned for Kevin and wondered when the FBI would hit me. Fortunately the morning was quickly filled with a flurry of calls from Kevin’s friend, other interested parties, the usual business calls and making preparations for the inevitable knock on the door. But nobody came. Then just after noon, Niles, who’s wife, Rachelle, manages the Liberty Dollar Fulfillment Office, called to tell me that Rachelle had been picked up by the FBI at the LD Office and was due to be arraigned in just a few hours! The FBI strikes again!

Luckily, I was able to talk to Rachelle via her cell phone while the FBI was holding her. I was pleased that the FBI agents were the friendly professional types and afforded Rachelle and I quite a few minutes of private conversation. Under the circumstances, Rachelle’s demeanor and resolve was right on target. And very quickly, I learned that a warrant had been issued for my arrest. And just a quickly, Rachelle was off to court to be arraigned.
Read More…

msg0091.wav

Ivy Walker, Free State Project participant and Sam Dodson’s current legal representative, has been arrested after being stopped at a speed trap by the New Hampton Police Department. She has been brought to  Belknap County Jail and will be arraigned in Laconia District Court tomorrow Friday June 5th, 2009 at 9AM.  She was arrested due to a warrant from Rhode Island regarding “various charges, three felonies, including welfare fraud greater than $500, false documents to public officials.”

She’s being held without bail. Her and her husband’s truck was towed and the plates taken off.

New Hampton Police Department : (603) 744-5423
Belknap County Jail: (603) 527-5480
Laconia District Court: (603) 524-4128

More as it becomes available.

https://docs.google.com/View?id=dhbvr2gz_18gk9wt8gt

Note: the below was created from OCRing screencaps of a Flash based chatroom. Excuse the mistakes.

Xaq Fixx 3:39 pm
Alright… Question 1:
Political Identified Profile field, when will it return

Lee Doren
As soon as I get confirmation to add it back—it was my intention to add at asap Friday, but then it was unclear what my authority was to do so
The only reason why it was removed was so I could add something else asap
Like an open-ended political affiliation
Read More…

http://www.ft.com/…

The Federal Reserve has been hobbled by at least two major shortcomings that were primarily responsible for the current and several previous credit crises. Its failure to spot the importance of changing financial markets and its commitment to laisser faire economics were big mistakes and justify a fundamental overhaul of the Fed.

Bill Bonner puts it well over at FleetStreetInvest.co.uk:

How about that? America’s largest car company is going to be state-owned… nationalized… presided over by the federal bureaucrats.

It’s just a part of the shift away from the free market and towards an un-free market. Free market capitalism has failed, say the pundits. Let’s give the feds a chance.

Even Henry Kaufman, writing in today’s Financial Times, says that the Fed’s “libertarian dogma” prevented it from controlling the banks properly.

But the Fed is hardly a libertarian organization. It’s a banking cartel. As a cartel, it looks out for its member banks – and doesn’t hesitate to use state power to do so. There is nothing libertarian about it… and no dogma associated with it – except as Greenspan’s eyewash – that is even vaguely libertarian.

The Fed colluded with member banks to fix interest rates. In so doing, it helped create the biggest bubble in credit the world had ever seen. It was a terrible thing for the average fellow – who was lured deep into debt by rising house prices and cheap credit. But it was a great thing for the members of the Federal Reserve cartel. Profits in the financial sector – notably, the big Wall Street investment banks – soared.

But bankers are vulnerable to too much of a good thing – just like everyone else. Soon, they made the classic Wall Street mistake – they came to believe their own hype. Not only did they gin up trillions of dollars’ worth of preposterous financial instruments… they actually bought these debt bombs from each other.

This posed a grave danger to the nation’s economy… and to the banking system. Henry Kaufman claims the regulators dropped the ball because they put too much faith in the free market. But the regulators were little more than front men for the banks themselves. After Alan Greenspan came Henry Paulson as head of the Fed. He was probably still replying to messages at his old address when the crisis began. And the head of the New York Fed – now, US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner – was elected to his post by the very institutions he was supposed to be overseeing.

Neither of them was about to stop the party; they and their friends were having too much fun.

I agree it was inconsistency which helped lead to this. You can’t supercharge an industry and remove the governors (regulations) and not expect shit to hit the fan eventually.

Let’s be consistent. Remove the supercharger. Remove the governors. Stop tweaking with a system you can’t possibly control and leave it be. Get rid of the Federal Reserve and it’s monoply on interest rates and money and credit creation. Remove it’s monopoly on legal tender. Treat fractional reserve banking as the fraud it is (in its current form anyway). Allow the bubble created “too big to fail” failures to fail and go into bankruptcy. Oh and stop handing out our grandchildren’s future tax dollars on failed institutions.

Speaking of which… yesterday Obama said that the government should spend as much on R&D as on the military. On Slashdot someone asked why when we are already in debt would we be spending money on something that would help us but costs would be placed on our children. A response was that it would more likely help them because the advancements would come out later.

My question is… what moral authority does this guy have spending future generations money (which will be forcefully taken from them) regardless of who it will directly effect? Is that not taxation without representation? They have had no say in the matter. Why not let the bureaucrat tyrants of their own time decide how best to steal from them?

http://www.lewrockwell.com/…

Writes Stephen Fairfax: “Today on page A5 of the War Street Journal, the FDIC has a full-page ad. They have the gall to display a $100,000 Series 1934 Gold Certificate, with the words ‘One Hundred Thousand Dollars in Gold’ plainly visible.

“Of course, the FDIC has never paid an atom of gold to any depositor, and was created as part of the gigantic theft and fraud associated with FDR’s gold confiscation. Wikipedia reports that it is still illegal for private citizens to own the gold certificate whose image leads the FDIC propaganda.”

Things like this make it seem more plausible that some of the many conspiracies surrounding the Federal Reserve are true.