British army veteran is arrested 'for causing anxiety' after retweeting meme of swastika made out of Pride flags
Darren Brady, 51, has slammed Hampshire Police for 'impeding his right to free speech' after he was placed into handcuffs on Friday at his home in Aldershot for sharing a meme.
Footage of the arrest was widely shared on social media and showed an officer who told Mr Brady he was being apprehended because his post had 'caused anxiety' and been reported to authorities.
The image Mr Brady retweeted was of a swastika that had been digitally manipulated and was made out of four LGBT pride flags.
In the video, shot on a mobile phone, Mr Brady can be heard asking the three police officers: 'Why am I in cuffs?'
One officer responds: 'It didn't have to come to this at all.'
Mr Brady replied: 'Tell us why you escalated it to this level because I don't understand.'
The officer adds: 'Someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post. That is why you have been arrested.'
Harry Miller, a former police officer, was also arrested after claiming he had tried to prevent the former serviceman from being detained.
He told MailOnline: 'Hampshire Police showed a blatant disregard of the law. They approached Mr Brady and acted as summary judge, jury and executioner - but didn't know what offence he'd actually committed. They said he was being arrested for causing anxiety, which is utterly ridiculous!
'Mr Brady is a British Army Veteran and they were trying to extort him for money by making him pay around £80 for educational course so he could downgrade from a crime to a non-crime, which would still show up in a basic Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check. 'They thought they could get away with it. It was the world's worst shakedown.'
Mr Miller, who in December won a Court of Appeal challenge over police guidance on 'hate incidents', said police visited the man 10 days earlier and has informed him that he could take the option of attending an £80 education course to avoid being arrested and possibly charged with a criminal offence.
The veteran said he needed time to mull it over, before the officers agreed to return at a future date.
Writing on Twitter on Sunday, Mr Brady told his followers: 'It's nice to be able to enjoy a Sunday morning in peace without being harassed by Hampshire Police trying to extort money from me, or have me "re-educated" for sharing a meme on the Internet.'
In a statement, Hampshire Police said: 'Officers felt it was necessary to arrest a man at the scene so they could interview him in relation to the alleged offence'
Police Commissioner Donna Jones: 'I am aware of the video published on Twitter which shows the arrest of two men in Hampshire yesterday, one for malicious communications and one for obstruction of a police officer.
'I have taken this issue up with the Constabulary today and have been advised officers made the arrests following a complaint from a member of the public of an alleged hate crime.
'It follows a post on social media of Progress Pride flags in the shape of a Swastika.
'I am concerned about both the proportionality and necessity of the police’s response to this incident. When incidents on social media receive not one but two visits from police officers, but burglaries and non-domestic break-ins don’t always get a police response, something is wrong.
'As Police Commissioner, I am committed to ensuring Hampshire Constabulary serves the public as the majority of people would expect. It appears on this occasion this has not happened.
'This incident has highlighted a really topical issue which Hampshire Constabulary and other police forces need to learn from. In order to support this I will be writing to the College of Policing to make them aware of this incident and encourage greater clarification on the guidance in order to ensure that police forces can respond more appropriately in the future.'
Mr Brady shared the meme, which was originally posted by Laurence Fox, a 44-year-old actor turned campaigner, on social media. Mr Fox said the image reflected his belief that LGBT pride month is 'enforced with a sense of hectoring authoritarianism'.
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Alive and well and living on death row
THE GUNMAN charged with murdering 10 people two months ago in a racist shooting spree at a Buffalo supermarket pleaded not guilty to federal hate crime charges on Monday. But Attorney General Merrick Garland still can't seem to decide whether the government should seek the death penalty in the case.
In the eyes of the law, of course, Payton Gendron remains innocent until proven guilty. But everyone knows his guilt is not in question. Not only did numerous people at the scene see him open fire as he approached and then entered the busy store, sweeping his rifle right and left and shooting indiscriminately, but he wore a body camera and livestreamed the massacre on the online platform Twitch. When he was arrested, eyewitnesses said, he was laughing. CNN reported that he told authorities — in statements that "were clear and filled with hate" — that he had deliberately targeted the Black community. And if all that weren't enough, he had posted lengthy screeds online detailing his murderous intentions and the elaborate preparations he had made to carry them out.
The slaughter in Buffalo was evil at its most unspeakable. If any accused murderer personifies the "worst of the worst" — the sheer, remorseless malevolence for which death is the only conceivably just punishment — it is the man who wantonly gunned down those shoppers at the Tops supermarket in May. So why is Garland hesitating? Of course prosecutors should ask for the death penalty. It would be indecent not to.
Yet suppose Gendron is sentenced to death. Then what? Even if the jury returns verdicts of guilty on all charges and then unanimously recommends that he be executed, the likelihood of the sentence ever being carried out is negligible.
Homicidal mass killers like the Buffalo gunman are almost never put to death in the United States any more. Dylann Roof, the neo-Nazi murderer who in 2015 calmly shot nine Black parishioners dead during a Bible study at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., was sentenced to death in 2017, and the sentence was unanimously upheld on appeal. But he remains alive today and will for the foreseeable future. So does Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon terrorist whose death penalty was upheld months ago by the US Supreme Court. So does Nidal Hassan, the Army major-turned-Islamist terrorist, who was sentenced to die by a US military court for his 2009 rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, which left 13 innocent victims dead and 32 others wounded.
A majority of Americans have long favored the death penalty for murder. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 60 percent of US adults support capital punishment even though they acknowledge the possibility of executing an innocent defendant by mistake. That support climbs even higher in the most infamous cases. In the wake of the Marathon bombing, for example, 70 percent of Americans said they supported the death penalty for Tsarnaev. Under the Constitution, even such monsters as Roof, Tsarnaev, and Hassan, whose guilt is absolutely certain, are entitled to due process of law. Yet once due process has run its course — once these depraved butchers have been fairly tried, fairly convicted, fairly sentenced to death — what justification is there for flouting the dictates of justice and disregarding what for many of us is a deep-rooted moral intuition about punishing evildoers?
On the same day that Gendron was being arraigned in Buffalo, the sentencing trial of Nikolas Cruz — the gunman who killed 17 people at a Parkland, Fla., high school four years ago — was getting underway. He too is guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt. Cruz admitted his guilt nine months ago; the sole purpose of his trial is to decide whether he should be punished with death or with life imprisonment.
Again, though — what is the likelihood of any death sentence actually being imposed on Cruz? Or on Patrick Crusius, who gunned down 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 and announced "I'm the shooter" as he was arrested? Or on Robert Bowers, the defendant charged with murdering 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018?
In all these cases, the public devotes enormous sums of money to ensuring scrupulous impartiality in judging accused mass killers, even though their guilt is open and shut. But when the judgment so conscientiously reached is that the perpetrators should die, what almost invariably happens afterward is — nothing. A rare exception was Timothy McVeigh, who was put to death in 2001 for killing 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
It has become the norm, in the wake of horrific massacres like the ones mentioned here, to expend torrents of words in heated debates about guns, racism, and mental health. Rarely is the focus directed to what ought to be society's first priority: doing justice. It is a disgrace that barbaric assassins like Roof, Tsarnaev, and their ilk remain on death row for years, getting three square meals a day and endlessly evading the punishment that judge and jury agreed on. Perhaps one of the reasons mass killings have been multiplying is that mass killers, even when sentenced to death, go right on living.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26341/alive-and-well-and-living-on-death-row
********************************************Government Forcing Man To Pay $30,000 In Fines For Tall Grass Or They Will Steal His House
Jim Ficken is not a criminal, has never been in jail, and is a model citizen in the town of Dunedin, Florida. However, the government dealt a massive blow to property rights by fining him $30,000 and threat of foreclosure — because his grass grew too tall while he looked after his mother’s estate.
The entire police state overreach began for Ficken in 2018 when he was out of town trying to take care of his late mother’s estate and his grass did what grass does, it grew. Knowing that it is unpleasing to neighbors to grow long grass, Ficken hired a friend to cut it for him while he was away, but that friend died and Ficken had no idea.
”The grass did what grass does… and a code inspector saw it was more than the 10 inches the city allows and Jim was on the hook,” said Andrew Ward, one of Ficken’s attorneys from the Institute for Justice.
This month, a judge with the 11th Circuit Federal Court ruled against Ficken and demanded that Ficken pay $30,000 in fines for his tall grass. These exorbitant fines could cost Ficken his home.
“If a $30,000 fine for not mowing your lawn isn’t excessive, what is?” Ward said after the ruling. “A city or state cannot pass an unconstitutional law, and argue that because it is the law, it’s constitutional.”
Unfortunately for Ficken, the court disagrees and stated that Florida statutes allow the fines for repeated violations of local ordinances and municipal code.
Because Ficken’s grass was over 10 inches, the city government claimed Jim owed them money. Every day that Ficken kept his grass over the “legal limit,” the government would steal $500 from him. This went on for 57 days, and now, the government claims Ficken owes them nearly $30,000.
“I was out of town when code enforcement officials first noticed my grass was too tall,” Ficken said. “They came back almost every day to record the violation, but never notified me that I was on the hook for fines. By the time I found out, I owed them tens of thousands of dollars. Then, they refused to reduce the fines and voted to authorize the foreclosure of my home. I am disappointed that the court sided with Dunedin, but what happened to me is wrong, and I will continue to fight.”
“The city’s behavior toward Jim is outrageous,” said IJ Attorney Ari Bargil. “This ruling emboldens code enforcement departments across the state to impose crippling financial penalties and it empowers them to do so without first notifying a property owner that they are potentially going to be fined.”
Ficken, who is retired and on a fixed income, cannot pay this insane amount of money. Being unable to pay immoral fines imposed on one’s private property by goons in the local government is of no concern to said goons and they intend on getting their money—by any means necessary. So, they are going to take his home.
Ficken and the folks at the Institute for Justice plan on fighting this case all the way to the Supreme Court if they have to.
“I’m astounded the court agreed the city could fine me $500 per day, without my knowledge, and then try to take my house — all to settle a bill for tall grass,” said Ficken, in a statement included with a media release issued by the Institute for Justice. “The court’s ruling is outrageous. If this can happen to me it can happen to anyone. That just can’t be right, and I’m looking forward to continuing my fight.”
While these excessive fines and theft of property may seem over the top, force, extortion, and theft is how the government maintains its power. As Ficken is learning, anyone who stands in the way of that power pays a heavy price.
Indeed, as TFTP has previously reported, the government has gone so far as to issue arrest warrants for elderly women for tall grass. Seventy-five-year-old Gerry Suttle was stunned when she received a call from the local police chief, informing her that she had a warrant issued for her arrest for tall grass.
In an extreme case in Austin, Texas last October, a man was killed over his tall grass. Austin police attempted to serve a warrant to man whose grass was too long and it resulted in a standoff, shots fired, a house fire, and that man’s death.
Insanely enough, that was the second story last year in which a Texas resident engaged in a standoff with a SWAT team over their tall grass.
In July of 2021, a man in Fort Worth, Texas decided that he wasn’t having it anymore either. When police were dispatched to his home over grass that was too long to meet the city’s arbitrary requirements, the homeowner had a message for them — in the form of bullets.
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Plans to light up one of Australia’s most famous war memorials in rainbow colours are SCRAPPED after ‘hateful’ threats and abuse aimed at staff
Plans to light up Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance in rainbow colours have been abandoned after staff were subjected to 'hateful' threats and abuse.
The display was intended to commemorate LGBTQI people in service as part of the upcoming exhibition Defending with Pride, which chronicles their stories of denial and exclusion, along with recognition and inclusion.
The Shrine of Remembrance organisation announced on Saturday afternoon that while the exhibition and Last Post service scheduled for Sunday would go ahead, the lighting of its colonnades would not.
'Over several days, our staff have received and been subject to sustained abuse and, in some cases, threats,' chief executive officer Dean Lee said.
'We have seen something of what members of the LGBTIQ+ community experience every day. It is hateful.'
In the interests of minimising harm, the shrine sought guidance from partners and others including veteran associations, the Victorian government, and representatives of the LGBTQI veteran community.
Some media commentators and members of the community opposed the light show.
Mr Lee noted that, 50 years ago, creating a memorial to women's service was controversial and opposed by many, as was the introduction of an annual service commemorating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
'We are proud to recognise and celebrate the history and service of LGBTIQ+ people, something that has traditionally been absent or under-represented within Australia's war memorials,' he said.
'A decade ago, conversations around veteran suicide were taboo, yet today it is the subject of a Royal Commission.
'Society's values change, and the Shrine is a participant in that change and will continue its efforts to honour the service and sacrifice of all who have served Australia.'
The shrine's pride exhibition officially runs from August until July 2023.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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