Baltimore, MD: A City With No Future

I met a couple once years ago that had traveled to Obscurity, MA where I live. They had previously lived in Baltimore. They had left because of the crime, the poverty and lack of jobs. And this was in the 1980s.

They didn't have two nickels to rub together and she was pregnant and the story they told of their treatment at the hands of Baltimore's Social Services Department and the squalid conditions they had to endure made me vow never to set foot in the place. They finally resorted to packing one suitcase each and heading for the highway. They literally stuck out their thumbs on Interstate RT 95 to get out of town and when the trucker who picked them up and drove them to the Massachusetts line dropped them off, he drove off with the rest of their suitcases, which was what was left of their worldly possessions. It's a story you never forget. 

Baltimore was NEVER a good place to live as far as I could tell. Never wanted to go there and I didn’t even like to drive by it on my way to somewhere else. 

Baltimore represents all that is wrong with the welfare state. Like any of the crappy big cities like Philadelphia, PA, Cleveland, OH, Camden, NJ or Washington, DC, they'll give you what you need to survive but that ain’t living. And in order to get the money to fund these respective welfare states, they tax and regulate away real opportunity. Then they wonder why nobody wants to open a business in Baltimore. The money has to come from somewhere. It’s a Socialist Paradox. They take your opportunity and give you welfare and food stamps because, well, you can't find a job but there are no jobs so you quit looking and just take the short money and lump it. 

There are plenty of stupid people in Baltimore. They have voted for the Social Democrats for decades and nothing ever seems to get better and they can’t figure it out. It must mean that they aren't throwing enough money at the problem. It must mean that GOVERNMENT is not doing enough!

Anyone who stays in Baltimore and thinks it’s going to get any better is a FOOL. It hasn't and it won’t. If you stay there the odds are very good you will never get anywhere in life. You have to get your ass out of Baltimore or you will only ever get what the government gives you. You’re a slave to the State. What’s the difference who your Massa is? You still have a Massa!

No opportunity, no future. The government can’t give you a future. They can’t manufacture a job without taking from others with jobs and putting the burden on THEM to support you. Without self-reliance, you can never be free. You own yourself so now what are you going to do with yourself? You going to go loot a chain drug store? That’s your future? You're just waiting for the bullet. 

And it looks like the local police force are all too happy to help you out with that final exit. Yes, it seems that one of the six policemen or perhaps ALL of the six policemen tried to twist poor Freddie Gray’s head off for being, for the most part, a wise guy. It is not up to the police to decide the Mr. Gray’s fate like that, it’s for the courts and all six of them should be arrested and tried. Only in this fashion will the truth come out.  Will it happen? Most likely no, since we still have an unapologetic unaccountable police force and this is starting to lead to some big problems nationally.

But that has nothing to do with why Baltimore is a DUMP.  A dump made worse by recent lawlessness permitted if not condoned by the Leftist Mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who mistakenly believed that by letting these home-grown Hooligans run rampant in the city streets unchecked that it would somehow lessen the damage in the long run. Did you see all those cop cars burning? With all the technology in those cruisers, they must cost $70,000 apiece. Where is the money to replace them going to come from? Oh, they’ll just raise taxes on businesses and property owners so no worries there.

And people are calling the cops and none are coming. If the mayor let’s this sort of mayhem happen when unrest breaks out, who is going to invest in Baltimore? Like we will see in Ferguson, businesses and people will be on the move…out of town.

And it will be a good move. Life is too short to hang around waiting for change that never comes. Better to walk away and seek opportunities elsewhere. Or they can stay and take the short money and waste their lives on a Baltimore street corner, dealing drugs and “Fightin’ the Power”.

Good luck with that. 

The U.S. a Prison and the Police Our Jailers

Even before 9/11/2001, being a police officer in one form or another has been a growth industry in the United States. Practically everyone who wants to be a cop gets to be one. Cops in this country come in all shapes and sizes and people you’d never even think were cops are, indeed, part of law enforcement either by chosen profession or government edict. Here are a few examples:

The Postman. People who work for the Postal Service are part of law enforcement. They work for a government agency and do pay attention to what’s going on at your house and who lives there.

The Fireman. Firemen are cops too. They report what they see in and around your house just like the Postman.

Your Banker. Bankers are cops but not because they want to be. We all know that they have to report transactions of $10,000.00 or more to the government under the Money Laundering Control Act of 1986. The War on Drugs has failed but the act remains making your banker a conscript in the government’s monitoring of average American citizens.

Your School Teacher. Yep, they’re cops too. They work for the government and are bound by law to monitor and report what they hear from you or your kid should it not sound on the level regardless if it’s on the level or not.

Your Neighbor. Especially if there's a Neighborhood Watch program going on in your town. Nothing like a little authority to go to someone's head. Just think George Zimmerman.

Then there are the uniformed police: State Police, Park Police, Environmental Police, Town Auxiliary Police, Mass Transit Police, Town Police and the Sheriff’s depart/Department of Corrections.

Then we have the Federal police forces: IRS, NSA, FBI, CIA, FCC, DHS, ICE, DEA, ATF, USPM, USDA, USCP and the USPIS to name just a few.

We Have Too Many Cops

There was a car accident in front of my tenement here in Obscurity, Massachusetts. You know how many cops showed up?  Four cruisers, an ambulance and a fire truck. This was a two car accident with no injuries. You would have thought that someone took a shot at the president over here.

This town, like a lot of Massachusetts towns, has an awful lot of police officers in it. The amount of cruisers that serve this town is quite noticeable. There are a lot. Obscurity, Massachusetts is not a high-crime town. Can’t remember if there ever was a shooting in the last couple of decades. Since Obscurity University is nearby there are the usual incidences of loud drunk students every now and then and fender benders, lots of fender benders. But real crime on a scale that someone would notice, nope.

But we have a large police force never the less and when there isn’t enough real crime for them to justify their existence they they’ll MAKE crime.

Uniformed Accountants

This is why the police are so aggressive. They will goad you into an adverse reaction so they can make an arrest and cost you a boat-load of money. They’ll bully you and make you feel small ask you a bunch of stupid questions and never wait for an answer because it’s not an answer they want, they want you to make a mistake so It’ll cost you. That’s they’re raison de entente. They could give a shit whether you’re a wiseguy or not. That’s not the point. The point is they got you by the balls and want to have some fun even though you don’t have a record and were minding your own business.

They scan every license plate in every parking lot in town. They scan every plate on every car parked on the side of the road. SOMEONE somewhere is BREAKING THE LAW and by Jesus they’re going to find them and write them a ticket.

I have a friend who suggested long ago that the Registry of Motor Vehicles should issue license plates with a barcode on them so all the cops have to do is swipe a reader over the plate and charge you for an infraction. It can't be long now. And what are you going to do about it, huh? Shut up and sit down!

The cops in the suburbs are mainly just shakedown artists with a badge. Every now and again they hit us with a “road tax” because of some infraction that 800 people before you just did but today YOU did it. That’s the way it works. We have too many police for too little actually crime so when business is bad, and crime has been down for ages, someone has to drum up some business. They treat the American taxpayer like shit.

To them EVERYONE is a criminal. All they have to do is prove it.

A Prison State

We are constantly under surveillance. The United States has become an open air prison and the police are our jailers. We are always monitored. Your license plate is always being scanned. Your phone conversations are monitored for “catch words” and there are cameras everywhere.

The United States today is a land of over-policing, over-regulation, over-the-top law and order and too many people in charge. With so many cops, why don’t I feel safe? With so many public police organizations supposedly looking out for us, why are we being told that we are in more danger now than 9/11?

It's all a justification to grow the Police State. Nothing like having more and more people tell you what to do and where to stand, OR ELSE. It is THEY who are in control and it will be THEY who run our prosperity into the ground. The last thing we need is to have cops run this country. They will turn it to shit. They already have.

What good is calling ourselves a free country when you can't HAVE any freedom?

Too Much Television

I grew up with nothing but cop shows on the television. There was Hill Street Blues, Police Story, The FBI, Hawaii Five O, McCloud, Colombo, Quincy right up to CSI, Bones and Law and Order. It's easy to write these stupid "Law Enforcement Dramas" and people never get tired of seeing some holier than thou cop character who "Keeps his search warrant in his shoe" and kicks down somebodies door because he KNOWS he's a "perp" etc. This is why nobody gets a fare shake in court. You have to be guilty, they arrested you didn't they?

Cops Are Above the Law

Recent events have only proven what we’ve known all along: Cops can do anything and get away with it. They can drive drunk, crash into you on the highway, site you for being in an accident and they don’t even get suspended. That's because they're better than you are. What are you to them other than a paycheck?

They can shoot at your new boyfriend, pull him over, pistol whip him and they don’t even lose their jobs.  It was just a misunderstanding is all.

They can pull their service revolver, wave it at their neighbor in a threatening manner and NOTHING HAPPENS to them. They can act with impunity regardless of whether it presents a danger to the public. The public they took an oath to protect I might add. Nothing happens to a cop if they should violate that oath.

They can flash their badge and get what they want. I've seen it done too many times.

As a young man I washed dishes at a local restaurant and two or three cops would come once or twice a week in the back door and eat for free. I was wondering why the fire department didn't come too since it takes more than one fireman to put out a fire.

The police can’t police themselves

It’s time for a civilian review panel.  It’s time somebody was able to fire a negligent cop. The police department has proven incapable of doing it and forget about a grand jury.

It’s time that a panel of either neighborhood, town or state peers sit in judgment of the police departments in their area and get the bad ones out of the department and clear of any of the protections that they enjoyed to run roughshod over the civilian working taxpayer. It’s time the harassment of law abiding citizens as well as the beatings and outright murders not only end but that punitive measures be enacted for when they do occur. Yes, criminal charges and loss of employment should be meted out.

We pay the police a princely sum and for the most part put them above the law and we should thereby hold them to higher standards of conduct.

But who will Bell the Cat?

Jackbooted Police Attack Press in Ferguson, MO

The Press is outraged!

How ironic.

Visiting journalists have had teargas canisters shot at them, had real guns pulled on them , been shot by rubber bullets, arrested and released with no charges, been manhandled, shoved around and bruised, forced out of areas for their own “safety” and generally threatened and harassed as the enemy.

How did it come to this?

Perhaps it is because they ARE the enemy.

Isn’t this the same esteemed people of the press who have looked the other way and underreported the Obama administrations flouting of the U.S. Constitution?

Are these the same people who have attacked every Tea Party political candidate and orchestrated smear campaigns against the people of the Tea Party, regular working-class folks who sincerely have concerns about the power of our federal government, and branded them as “Kooks” in their left-leaning publications and jokingly referring to them as that homophobic slur “Tea Baggers”?

Could these be the same “Journalists of the People” who have never bothered to take to task the criminality of the National Department of Justice, repeatedly giving Attorney General Eric Holder a pass on his felonious activities such as running American arms to the Mexican drug cartels resulting in hundreds of deaths on the border including U.S. boarder agent Brian Terry and issuing orders to not deport illegal aliens? The same press corps that has not taken President Obama to task for not enforcing the nation’s immigration laws?

Is this the press corps that is now shocked to discover the same disregard for the Bill of Rights has been applied to them?

How pathetic.

In some degree the police are getting the chance to do what many taxpayers would have liked to do but I’m afraid that there is more to this action than a little comeuppance for our honored American press corps.

The tear gassing and manhandling of the press in Ferguson, Missouri  a small suburb of St Louis with a population of 21,203, will serve as a training ground for the future as our government ramps up their troops which used to just be the local and state police forces. Manuals will be written and future police training classes will be initiated in the art of "Handling the Press". But it will not stop there.

With the militarization of the world come the militarization of our nations police forces who now have a wide arsenal of weapons at their disposal including full body armor, night vision goggles, gas masks, stun grenades, semi-automatic shot guns, hollow-nosed bullets in their high-capacity 9mm handguns, fully automatic machine guns and armored personnel carriers with mounted machine guns. 

The pictures coming out of Ferguson, MO right now with people standing with their hands in the air while police in military armored vehicles train machine guns at their heads is a most wondrous sight. 

Now every American town can have their own little Tienanmen Square or Czech Occupation and finally get to know what it's like to be looking down the barrel of a loaded high-powered automatic weapon just like everybody else in the world has. That's a new experience for many U.S. citizens but one I'm sure they will take in stride like they have with everything else that's been going on in the country. Just pay your taxes and shut up and sit down. 

Ferguson, MO looks to be a dress rehearsal for what awaits us all in this country after the shortages our governments “Borrow and Spend, Tax and Spend, Print and Spend” monetary and regulatory policies will bring if allowed to continue. They have made their power grab now let’s see if they can keep it. There will still be a vote come this November.

But the guns are just there to remind us all to keep in line.

Perhaps a bread line.

Surveillance Drones and the Right to Privacy

The proliferation of surveillance drones and the legal right to use them will be the next hotbed of legal wrangling. Recently it was reported that a PETA-like (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) organization named SHARK (Who Gives a Rats Ass) put a private surveillance drone in the air over a privately owned plantation that was going to have a pigeon shoot. Now I don’t shoot pigeons myself and consider the critters more or less “rats with wings” but if someone wants to organize a pigeon shoot on their own land with presumably their own pigeons, as a Libertarian I would have to say it’s their right to do so.

But during this event was coined a new maxim: "Never bring a drone to a pigeon shoot." because after SHARK broke up the event by their presence, they launched their drone anyway and SURPRISE, somebody on the property in South Carolina shot the fool thing out of the air. The culprit was never found or identified. Now SHARK wants to make a federal case out of the incident which I think is a good idea but for a different reason.

I don’t think SHARK has much of a case but I do think the Broxton Bridge Plantation near Ehrhardt, S.C., the real victim in this affair, certainly does. Can anybody just fly a surveillance drone over my property? Isn’t this a form of harassment? This incident is an open and shut case of invasion of privacy.

Can my neighbor hover a drone over my house to see if I get the morning newspaper in my underwear? This is a hypothetical question of course because who reads a newspaper anymore? But the question is a valid one. Who has the right to fly over my house? Technology will eventually allow everybody to have a drone and I suppose I could probably cobble one together myself with a small camera and one of those toy helicopters they sell at the local Mall. Perhaps I can catch the woman next door sunbathing in the nude. Wait, I’ve got to make a quick run to the Mall, I’ll be right back!

Anyway, I see a new legal frontier that should give many an underemployed ambulance chasing lawyer the chance to finally pay for that private school education that they promised their wives they’d pony up for the kids. The establishment of boundaries and certain “fly-over” rights will need to be established. How can what SHARK was doing be construed as perfectly legal? If so, I should be able to fly my freshly purchased Mall “Heli-drone” over my local Police Dept. Or perhaps over my local Town Office building on a Friday to see who cuts out early. Perhaps I can even catch some local town workers sleeping on the job. This sort of thing cuts both ways.

Of course, government can just establish rules for itself which is what will most likely happen first. THEY are already exempt from laws banning talking on the phone while driving so it stands to reason that they would ban drones over “Town Property” even though it was bought with taxpayer money and should be technically construed as “Our Property”. But such is the rule of our overbearing and obtrusive government. Rules and laws are now for others and not for them.

But at any rate, this issue will have to be addressed at some point in the not too distant future. There should and will be challenges to the supposed legality of flying a drone and the rights to privacy one expects on their own property.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some flying to do.