July 8, 2013
How to Tell if You Live in a Police State
David Galland
There is a saying that "good fences make good
neighbors," and I think there is some truth to
that. In our case, the "fence" between us and our
neighbors while our children were growing up was
a patch of woods serving as a no man's land between our properties.
Unfortunately, the problems with the neighbors,
whom to protect their identities I will call the
Lolos, didn't have to do with fences or even
patches of woods, but about the road running down
the side of their property – the only way in to
our small development. You see, even though they
had sold the road easement to the developer, it
seemed apparent that they never expected the road
to be built. Regardless, they still considered
the land it ran over as theirs (and, I guess, technically it is).
Now, I have always tried hard to be a good
neighbor, and so soon after moving in I invited
the clan up to our house and plied them with
finger foods topped off with their favorite
hooch. While I'm sure that at least a couple of
the Lolos warmed to us, it was always obvious
that the rather domineering matriarch held her blessings in reserve.
The result might be called an uneasy truce. A
truce which came undone after the farmer's
unmarried daughter adopted and brought home a
rescued dog from a shelter. Despite the fact that
the large dog was clearly insane and a serial
biter, in the eyes of the daughter it could do no wrong.
And by serial biter, I mean that I can personally
attest to four people, two of them residents on
the hill, being bitten by the mad dog. Showing
itself to be an equal-opportunity biter, the mad
mutt also bit the long-suffering husband of the
Lolo matriarch and viciously mauled our own dog,
the friendliest beagle mix you'd ever hope to meet.
The long and short of it was that the residents
on the hill were essentially limited to cars only
in order to travel down the short road running
down the side of the farmer's property. Any other
alternative, say walking, jogging or riding a
bike, required running a gauntlet with a very
good chance you'd be attacked by the
never-chained dog. The Lolos were, of course,
well aware of the situation, yet, for what I can
only imagine were purely vengeful reasons, refused to do anything about it.
Of course, the attacks were reported to the local
police, who duly sent over the animal control
officer, but the Lolo matriarch always made quick
work of them – denying any attacks, pointing out
that if there was an attack it took place on
their property and threatening to pull strings
with the local governing council to have them fired.
The final confrontation, regrettably, involved me
and my children, still quite young at the time.
The kids wanted to visit friends about a quarter
of a mile away, and as it was a nice day I
thought we should walk. While I can't recall my
exact mental state at the moment, I suspect I was
fed up with the fact that the equivalent of a
troll had for years effectively blocked walking
access on the road leading to and from our property.
Being indignant but not stupid, I armed myself
with an African war club I had traded a chief in
Botswana for (he got a cigar and a baseball cap),
handed one of the kids a bull whip, and off we set.
Despite walking as quietly as we could, right on
cue the berserk troll dog, growling a mad and
dangerous growl, came charging out of the
driveway of the farmhouse. Shifting into full
defense-of-family mode, I wound up and swung my
African war club with all the strength I could
muster, fully desirous of sending the hound to
the burning hell it deserved. Unfortunately,
instead of being rewarded with a satisfying thud,
or even better, the sight of the dog's head
bouncing down the road, I whiffed it completely.
Even so, the club passed close enough to its
snarling snout to cause it to pause in order to
better reflect on its options. At which point the
long-suffering husband of the matriarch rushed
out and managed to get hold of the dog's collar
without getting bitten himself (yet again).
Extremely unhappy at the attack, on principle and
specifically because it had put the kids at
serious risk, I did something I am loathe to do
and have only done once before in my life (when
my car was stolen) and called the police.
Well, it turned out that my complaint, coming on
top of all preceding it, fulfilled the allowable
per-dog maximum for attacks on humans. Based on
local regulations, the order went out for the dog to be put down.
Fighting the order, the matriarch forced the
issue to court, where I was to appear as the star
witness against the hellish hound. While I don't
want to drown you in the details, I will report
that I opened my statement by flawlessly
delivering a paraphrased line lifted from Paladin
of Have Gun – Will Travel fame.
"While I greatly regret having to appear in court
against my neighbors," I said with a dramatic nod
in direction of the Lolos, "I have no moral or
ethical compunction about having to do so."
During my testimony, the daughter who spared no
affection in her unremitting love for her
maniacal mutt, grunted, sighed and laughed
loudly. And while doing so, literally waved her
hands in the air as if appealing to god her own
self to smote me where I sat. In fact, she raised
such a racket that the judge finally signaled me
to pause in mid-sentence, leaned forward and
asked, "What the hell are you doing?"
"I am laughing so I won't cry," she replied,
raising her hands once again to the gods.
When it was her turn to testify, she stated that
I made the whole story up. When pressed for a
motive, she stated that I done so as part of a
nefarious plot ginned up by myself and the
neighbors up the hill to take revenge on the
Lolos because we were mad they owned the road up
to the development and so decided to take it out
on her misunderstood mutt. (If the logic
expressed in that last sentence seems convoluted, it's only because it was.)
It was my turn to laugh, but I did so in a
quieter and more dignified fashion (I like to think).
Unfortunately, due to a tight court schedule, the
judge had to postpone the rest of the hearing to
another day. And that gave the single-minded
matriarch the time she needed to cajole members
of the local council into giving her daughter's
dog a free pass. Leaving the dog free to bite
another day. In fact, a few days after the
hearing, an acquaintance of mine was bitten while
biking by the farm. According to him, the
daughter rushed out and asked him please not to
report it. Unaware of the situation, he kept mum.
And so, pretty much for the entire childhood
years of our kids, they and all of the residents
on the hill remained unable to freely walk down the road.
By now, if you're not asking what the point of
these meanderings is, there's something seriously wrong with you.
Well, here it is.
First and foremost, it is always worth
remembering that humans can adopt very warped
attitudes, even to the point of falling in love with mad dogs… and mad rulers.
But more to the actual point of mad dogs and all
that, the mindset of all the various branches of
what is currently lumped under the moniker
"Homeland Security" – from the top right down to
the domestic police force – has devolved to the
point where a growing swath of the general
population is now actively afraid of them.
In essence, we the people have stood passively by
while our government has done the equivalent of
falling in love with a REALLY BIG mad dog and set
it by the side of every road leading from every house in America.
Previously, it was only black people who had been
trained by bitter experience to fear "the man."
Now the rest of us are beginning to understand
what they have been complaining about all these years.
(It strikes me that I am uncertain as to whether
there is another more politically correct mot du
jour than "blacks." Having moved my primary
residence to a country where political
correctness has yet to take hold and never really
having paid attention to the linguistics of
racial typing any way, I fear I'm out of the loop.
But wait, I'll look it up! Clicking over to
Google and typing, "What is the acceptable term for black people?"...
The crowd-sourced Yahoo Answers sheds light by
asking readers to answer the following question from a user:
What is the acceptable term for black people?
I'm just a little confused, because the NAACP is
National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, yet it's not politically correct
to say colored. Now black is "bad"... but I don't
know why, "white" is still used for Caucasian
people. Why does this term change so much?
Surprisingly (because it actually involves some
logic), the "Best Answer" according to those who
cast a vote on Yahoo Answers was the following
from a user named "Evolving Squid"…
How about "people", and "man" or "woman" when referring to individuals?
Calling people with dark skin "African" or
"African American" is really stupid for a number of demonstrable reasons:
1. Not all people with dark skin come from
Africa. Many people from south Asia and the Caribbean have dark skin.
2. Not all people who come from Africa have dark
skin. Across north Africa and minorities in the
southern bits of Africa tend to be white.
3. Almost no dark skinned Americans come from
Africa, nor have had any relatives that have been
within 500 miles of the African coast, let alone
being from Africa, within the last 100 years.
Calling someone with dark skin "African American"
makes as much sense as calling a blonde-haired
person "Viking American" because he had a
Norwegian relative hundreds of years ago.
4. A good many Americans who came from Africa
(hence real "African Americans") are light
skinned, having been chased out of South Africa,
Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, Tanzania, etc. by the
dark-skinned majority.
I continued to poke around the font of all
knowledge, the web, but it seems that no one is
actually sure what the correct term is anymore.
Paula Deen, however, could tell you one term that
is very much not correct. Oh well. Having dawdled
long enough, I will now yank hard on the wheel and return to the thread…)
The stats show that an increasing trend of police
abuse
(<http://www.graphs.net/201207/police-brutality-statistics.html>here's
a link to one interesting infographic that, using
the comments from the police themselves, should
give you a sense of the scale of what's going
on). And it's not just the beat cops people worry
about: a
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3qDgEqtDNg>number
of polls show that a majority of Americans now
see the federal government as a direct threat to
their personal rights and freedoms. All that has
come to pass since the passage of the Patriot Act
through Snowden's recent revelations reveal that threat as real.
Speaking personally, unlike the idyllic country
town in Argentina we now live for most of the
year (a town where the police tend to follow more
of the Barney Fife archetype), when I see a
policeman here in the US I reflectively ratchet
my threat assessment level to "code orange" – be
on guard against a possible assault.
It may just be that I am becoming a paranoid, but
if so it is because not a day passes without
receiving emails from correspondents with stories
about out-of-control members of the Homeland Security apparatchik.
Proving the point, a quick dip into my email box for just the past few days:
* Police kill dog. The story, which has gone
viral as I have received it from a number of
correspondents, has to do with a black man who
was being rousted for no good reason when his
dog, which he had put into his car but jumped
out, was gunned down by the harassing officers.
In fairness, I can accept that the police felt
threatened by the large Rottweiler, but the fact
remains they were in the process of roughing up
its owner over filming them roughing someone else
up. In other words, rather than having a quiet
chat with the dog's owner, who was so cooperative
that even before the police reached him he had
docilely assumed the recommended position – hands
behind his back in order to facilitate being
handcuffed – they felt compelled to start pushing
him around, thereby creating the situation in the
first place. If you want to watch the video, it's
available all over the Internet. It's disturbing.
* Police terrorize Belgium diplomat and his
wife over breastfeeding. It happened at a New
York golf club when the wife began discreetly
breastfeeding their baby and replied in the
negative to a manager who asked her to do it in
the bathroom. After which, according to the NY Post…
* Minutes later, the Greenburgh Police Department arrived.
* Detective Scott Harding allegedly yelled,
"Close the doors!" and two other diners were told to leave the terrace.
* "He was walking as if he was acting in a
Western movie," Neijens said. "He had one hand on
his gun, one hand on his Taser."
*
<http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/mom_terror_bust_n1BftwpraCJSSBW1xjf2aO>Here's
the story.
* US Army blocks access to Guardian website
to preserve "network hygiene." After all, can't
have our fighters for freedom learning the truth
about the kind of freedom they are actually
fighting for.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/28/us-army-blocks-guardian-website-access>Story
here.
* US post offices taking pictures of all our
mail for database. According to an article just
published in Reason… "The Mail Isolation Control
and Tracking program, in which Postal Service
computers photograph the exterior of every piece
of paper mail that is processed in the United
States – about 160 billion pieces last year. It
is not known how long the government saves the
images...."
<http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/03/us-post-office-taking-pictures-of-all-ou>Full
story here.
* US mother loses baby over poppy seed bagel.
Giving birth in a US hospital apparently now
requires submitting to a blood test for illegal
drugs. In the case of Elizabeth Mort, the test
came up with a false positive – the result of
having eaten a poppy seed bagel prior to heading
to the hospital. And so, with zero due process,
the authorities snatched her three-day-old
daughter and held her captive for five days.
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23153685>Story here.
* College student arrested after buying a
carton of bottled water. And I quote, "Undercover
Virginia police pulled a gun and tried to break
through the car windows of a 20-year-old college
student, suspecting that the underage girl's
sparkling water was a 12-pack of beer. She was later jailed.
* "When agents from Virginia's Alcohol
Beverage Control (ABC) division saw college
student Elizabeth Daly leaving a supermarket with
cookie dough, ice cream, and a 12-pack, they
assumed that she had purchased beer as an
underage student and took extreme actions to stop her.
* "The seven plainclothed agents approached
the vehicle in which the girl and her roommates
were sitting, and one officer allegedly jumped on
the hood of the car. Daly claims another officer
pulled out his gun, which scared the students and
prompted them to drive away."
Just in this small sampling, we have police
harassing a peaceful individual – then shooting
his dog – for recording them on his phone camera…
a police squad led by a detective is sent out to
roust someone for breastfeeding… the US
government applying cyberwarfare techniques
against a media outlet… a baby taken from its
mother for a false positive drug test… and seven
undercover officers, with guns, aggressively "investigating" underage drinking.
In the case of the latter, I would have loved to
hear the radio chatter, though I suspect it went something like this…
"Alpha team, we have a probable coming out of the
door of the Jiffy Mart. It looks like she's got a package!"
"Roger that, Bravo team, we have eyes on target."
"Roger that, Alpha team. Can you see the package?
Say again, can you see the package?"
"Bravo team, hold one. Officer Lipshitz is moving
into position to identify the package."
"Lipshitz, Bravo team leader here, Alpha team is
asking if you can see the package."
"Bravo team leader, Lipshitz here, hold one.
Wait, it's blue. Some beer cans are blue. It must be beer!"
"Alpha team, we have a confirm from Lipshitz – it's beer!"
"All units, all units, we have beer! Move in, I
say again: we have beer, move in!"
Is it just me, or does anyone else surveying the
purported inability of the US government to
reduce its massive budget by any real amount
concur that paying seven officers to man a
stakeout designed to arrest college students for
drinking beer is money poorly spent? That they
then mistakenly identified water as beer only
adds inanity to the insults and injury.
But seriously, somebody could have been killed
during this incident, and someone – a 20-year-old
college student who had done nothing wrong – did end up in jail for the night.
You how you can tell you live in a police state?
How about when people have to start worrying that
they might end up dead or in jail as a result of
breastfeeding in public, or buying water at a convenience store?
As one regular correspondent put it in an email
to Doug Casey with a copy to me…
Doug:
You have often made the paradoxical observation
that it will be worse than you think it will be.
While the context was economics and the financial
hardships that would manifest, I think it is safe
to say that culturally your quip has already
played out. It is certainly happening way faster than I thought.
And, like any police state, the authorities will
find any number of willing accomplices within the
populace. In the case of the brazen Belgian
breastfeeder, shown here, apparently the manager
was concerned that the black backpack containing
the baby's necessities might also contain a bomb.
Reading even the local paper in this very small
town, it is notable how many of the reports in
the police blotter these days are the result of
the police being called out by "concerned"
citizens as a result of paranoia or a bad case of busy-bodyness. A sampling…
June 18, at 3:31 p.m., complaint about people
partying on a vacant lot on Jones Hill Road. No one was found.
June 19, at 10:16 p.m., a suspicious vehicle was
seen at Maggie's Bridge. It had mysteriously
disappeared by the time police arrived.
June 21, at 7:42 p.m., report of two employees at
a local bar having a verbal argument; no arrests were made.
June 23, at 9:33 a.m., a caller reported a Quebec
RV parked next to the construction site for
Stowe's new ice arena. The caller was worried the
campers were about to "dump their tanks" on the
site. Police spoke to the owners of the RV, who
said they were headed home and hadn't planned on dumping their tanks.
June 24, at 12:18 a.m., report of an underage
drinking party at Maggie's Bridge. Police found
two people, who were not underage and were not drinking.
June 26, at 2:36 p.m., a man was "making people
uncomfortable" at the Union Bank on Smith Street.
June 28, at 8:08 p.m., a woman on Homes Lane
complained about a neighbor's child "being loud."
Police spoke with the child's parents.
June 29, at 12:38 p.m., police were told a stop
sign went missing at the intersection of South
Hollow and Lane Hollow roads. It was there when police arrived.
Going back to the
mad-dog-waiting-on-the-side-of-the-road analogy,
it seems to me that the risk of misadventure at
the hands of the overzealous state is escalating to a perilous point.
I'm not talking about just being beaten up or
gunned down, but also about being made a social
outcast or financially ruined for tripping over
some law that shouldn't have been enacted in the
first place. Even wishing to peacefully trade
goods and services using private currencies –
such as the Liberty dollar, whose founder Bernard
von NotHaus was labeled a "financial terrorist" – can get your door kicked in.
In terms of a specific roadside threat, the
classic example is provided by the alcohol blood
level which, if exceeded even a little, tips you
into the category of hardened criminal. In most
states, the allowable alcohol blood level is .08,
well below what the original scientific studies
on how much is too much to drive recommended.
Nevertheless, if you are in an accident and you
have had even a single drink, it will invariably
weigh against you – and in a big way.
Even the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving
has turned against the organization, accusing it
of adopting a "neo-prohibitionist" attitude when
the original mandate was to address the specific
problem of drunk driving. And so it is that even
a single drink at your favorite restaurant means
passing the equivalent of a mad dog on your way
home. You can only hope it doesn't bite you.
(A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: During the period
around the Fourth of July holiday, celebrating
American freedom and all that, the police are
particularly active with road blocks.
As the breathalyzers used at these
unconstitutional road blocks are notoriously
inaccurate, if you are stopped and asked to blow,
it is within your rights to ask that the analysis
be performed with a blood test. The police don't
like the inconvenience of having to transport you
to the local hospital for the blood to be drawn,
but don't be afraid to ask. Just do it politely or they could shoot your dog.)
This same mad dog lurks by the side of every
road, watching in every airport, data center and
pretty much everywhere else you turn in the US
these days. That it is supposedly owned by we the
people makes the situation the height of irony.
Even walking quietly is no guarantee you won't be attacked.
While I wish it were otherwise, the authoritarian
trend that has escalated so surprisingly since
9/11 will, I am sure, run its full course. Which
is to say that the trend is likely to slow and
maybe turn down again only after something akin
to Kent State happens that finally awakens a
level of righteous indignation sufficient to send
the public en masse into the streets.
When might the tipping point be reached? Looking
at the litany of abuses of power – to which you
can add widespread domestic spying and the
prosecution of whistleblowers – and the lack of
public reaction, I think we are a long way off.
Speaking of whistleblowers, I have a whistle to
blow. A business associate of mine who has a
sister in the New York police force showed me a
card that is issued by the police union to the
immediate families and even just friends of
police officers in that state. If pulled over by
the police for pretty much any reason, simply
show the card and the police officer will send
you on your way. In other words, it's a "get out of jail free" card.
Oh wait, I just did a quick search and the
whistle was already blown on these cards
<http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/get_out_of_jail_now_it_for_sale_mIuVPyS5xsZRVY6ilEk9BI>earlier
this year. Yet it appears to have had no
consequence, as the cards are still being issued.
You want to know how else you can tell you are
living in a police state? How about when regular
folks get harassed and the relatives and friends of the police get a free pass?
http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/how-to-tell-if-you-live-in-a-police-state
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