Extreme Solutions to The Housing Nightmare

Extreme Solutions to The Housing Nightmare 

 Extreme Frugal Housing - Low or No Cost Living. Housing can be the biggest cost in our society and reducing it, is one way to fast track your life to a "survive and thrive" stance immiedietly. There are thousands of options in reducing your monthly housing costs, I will be reviewing some extreme examples of frugality I have seen and experienced. Lets start with addressing the topic of low income governement housing. Relying upon government is the last option I would reccomend in any case, section 8 reduced rent has an extremely long waiting list, often 2 years or more. Being on a government housing program will often trap you in a dangerous community. It can also be a disencentive to earning more income, because you are penalized for penalized for making additional income.

If you choose this route, an unorthasox and very difficult way to circumvent the wait time is to enter an emergency homeless or domestic abuse shelter with your family and survive for 30 days. Usually you are fast tracked ahead of the masses and gifted all sorts of government hand outs like free vip (no copay) medical care, free public transportaion, free day care, free food stamps and job assistance. Now for the legitimate extreme ways to opt out of the mortgage rent based housing economy. 1. Stop Paying the Mortgage

Many Americans are participating in this program naturally. Depending upon the bank forclosing and your attorney, you may have 1 to 3 years of living free, if you can handle the mental stress of fighting the bank. 2. Rent Part or your whole house

Many people are renting a potion of there home and using the income to subsidise their mortgage payment or renting the entire house and moving to a cheaper location. 3. Extreme downsizing to a trailer.

This can be a temporay situation but long term huge savings generator. Inexpensive trailers tend to be in rural areas and may be a huge culture shock to your family. Many americans with low incomes are taking this route. 4. Moving in with Friends or Relatives

This should be one of your last options because the strain that it can put on family relationships. A recent census worker in Southern California told me that 90% of the families she spoke to were living in a shared housing situations. One of the ways you can reduce tension between family members is to add an extention to the house or build temporary structures in the back of the property, if you have enough land. Often times, home owners have exess property that isn't being used. Having a separate entrance can do wonders for a community living situation. 5. Living in your car

This is a last resort emergency option, usually reserved for one individual. This is not a good option. Parking spots should be surveyed and rotated. Pick places inbetween commertial and apartments properties and do everything you can to hide your situation. Work hard to step up you living situation immieditly because if you lose the car the street is your only next option. 6. Living on the Street - Homeless in it's pure form

The most extreme example of zero cost housing is being on the street. Usually if you are in this situation, there is something else going on besides trying to save money. Drugs, alcholol, gambling addictions, emotional & mental issues may be in play. I can not talk from personal experience but I've read that car living is light years ahead of street living. You may want to look into a local "tent city" development. Official and unofficial tent communities are common in southern California. In my area the unofficial ones are mostly in dry river bottoms. Following are not so common low or no cost housing options 7. Buying an RV or Van Conversion

This option is becoming a real option for the recently homeless in california. They are parked at camp grounds, rv parks, on the street and in Wal mart parking lots. Retired Americans have been living in RV's forever. Comfort is an issue, but is made up for with low costs and mobility. There are many low cost options for RV parking including BLM and parking on private land. This is a huge lifestyle descision and there are many resources on the web to get you started. 8. Building Shelter

Many Americans are learning aboriginal survival techniches and permaculture. Once again, this is a huge lifestyle change and requires a lot of knowlege investment but everything is readily available online. 9. Living in a Boat

This is a often not disscused but a hidden secret, especially for individuals or couples. In my area, slip fees run around $500 per month and a nice boat can be had for $5000 to $20000 dollars. Millionare living on a beer budget, not to mention free fish and crab meat You can help a Family with a gift  

By contacting our administrator of the projects mentioned here and in this artical @442 251 6553 or @760 643 6134  

 
EVERY DOLLAR WE SECURE GO 100% TO THE FAMILYS WE HELP WE DO NOT ASK FOR ONE THING IN RETURN FOR MANY OF US THIS IS OUR DUTY TO THE PEOPLE FOR THE PEOPLE AND BY THE PEOPLE

Marketing on the Blood of Innocents

Marketing on the Blood of Innocents

Companies severing ties with the NRA are really boycotting millions of their own customers.

The horrific mass murder at Marjory Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida, almost two weeks ago elicited the same calls for gun control that we expect after every such incident. Leftists rush to blame the tool and law-abiding citizens instead of the cultural cesspool they themselves have cultivated. The National Rifle Association is always a leftist target, though this time the rate of fire has increased, and it’s yielding some results that will affect NRA members.

Dozens of companies offer partnership discounts to the NRA’s five million members — and many of those companies are caving to leftist pressure by cutting those ties. Allied Van Lines, Avis Budget Group, Chubb, Delta Air Lines, Enterprise (including Alamo and National Car Rental), First National Bank of Omaha, Hertz, Metlife, North American Van Lines, Paramount Rx, SimpliSafe, Starkey Hearing, Symantec, TrueCare and United Continental all announced within the last few days that they are discontinuing NRA discount or affiliate programs. More may follow in the near future. On the other hand, FedEx announced it will not succumb to the #Resistance … albeit while calling for a ban on semi-automatic rifles.

Make no mistake: These companies think they’re serving their own bottom line.

For perspective, here’s list of companies that have no trouble donating to Planned Parenthood, which kills more than 300,000 children every year.

As for the NRA, the panicked herd of companies stampeding for the exits was spooked by an organized leftist campaign of hate. These anti-gun activists and their fired up base of social media screamers want to pin responsibility for the blood of children on the NRA, its members, politicians who are on its side, and any company that has any relationship to the nearly 150-year-old firearms organization.

“Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA,” First National Bank of Omaha said. “As a result, First National Bank of Omaha will not renew its contract with the National Rifle Association to issue the NRA Visa Card.”

Translation: They got an earful from angry people who either have an anti-gun agenda or don’t know what else to do with their rage over the deaths of 17 innocent people in Florida.

But these companies are going to get some “customer feedback” from millions of NRA members as a result.

Georgia lawmakers are taking on Delta, refusing to restore the air line’s special tax breaks so long as it maintains its anti-NRA stance.

The NRA defended itself with a statement: “Since the tragedy in Parkland, Florida, a number of companies have decided to sever their relationship with the NRA, in an effort to punish our members who are doctors, farmers, law enforcement officers, fire fighters, nurses, shop owners and school teachers that live in every American community. Let it be absolutely clear. The loss of a discount will neither scare nor distract one single NRA member from our mission to stand and defend the individual freedoms that have always made America the greatest nation in the world.”

That statement hints at the reason this boycott is different from most. Boycotts are, of course, as American as the original Boston Tea Party. But most boycotts are grassroots efforts to change what people perceive as a company’s bad decisions. Conservatives, for example, boycotted Target after the retail giant changed its bathroom policy to allow a man to use the little girls’ room, so long as he says he’s a woman.

This purge of the NRA is different, however, because these companies are essentially boycotting their customers. When companies shoot down these discount programs, they are telling NRA members to shop elsewhere. In a free market, that is their right. It’s also our right to tell them to take a hike; we will shop elsewhere.

The NRA isn’t blameless in contributing to the current climate of Outrage™. As columnist Jonah Goldberg put it, “The NRA, not content with its public-policy and constitutional victories over the last decade, has taken to fomenting rage and resentment against ‘elites’ and the media with all the precision of an unmanned fire hose.”

But many of us in our humble shop are lifetime NRA members and we wholeheartedly support its mission to defend the Second Amendment.

No NRA member has committed mass murder — not at a school, a church or anywhere else. In fact, NRA members are often the ones who respond heroically to those atrocities. “Gun-free zones” are attacked by sociopathic killers who are generally fatherless, heavily medicated and simply bent on evil to make a name for themselves. They are not the kind of law-abiding Patriots who make up the ranks of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. So this boycott makes no sense.

Never mind the facts, though. As the NRA said in its statement, “The law-abiding members of the NRA had nothing at all to do with the failure of that school’s security preparedness, the failure of America’s mental health system, the failure of the National Instant Check System or the cruel failures of both federal and local law enforcement. Despite that, some corporations have decided to punish NRA membership in a shameful display of political and civic cowardice.”

The leftist outrage machine isn’t about making Americans safer or securing our Liberty. It is indeed shameful cowardice. Don’t stand for it.

A couple of footnotes:

Guns don’t commit crimes on their own. If you doubt that, just check out the 2ndVote Gun Cam.

If Republicans should stop taking money from the NRA, which advocates a constitutional right, then Democrats should certainly stop taking money from Hollywood, which fills our culture and young minds with increasingly violent content.

You Can Own A Machine Gun"

You Can Own A Machine Gun"

…and Gun Facts For The Newly Uninformed

For those of you who are new to the public debate about All Things Guns that has sprung up since the Parkland, FL tragedy, this brief primer is for you whether you are a mommy, daddy, guardian or teacher of school-age children. Most of all, if you are a politician or reporter, this one has your name on it.

A basic Google search for “guns” returns 299,000,000 results in 0.52 seconds. So why another gun article? The cacophony of stultifying idiocy polluting media outlets via the Evening News, talk radio “commentary”, wasting untold newsprint and bandwidth demands it. Never has the old saw, “He only knows enough to be dangerous” been more evident than in the blatherings of those who have swallowed whole the mistruths, half-truths and outright lies on everything from “firearm terminology” to the “gun show loophole.” Indeed, many of the spouting pundits hosing audiences with their indubitable certitude are motivated by an evil political agenda that has been marinated in decades of gun grabbing propaganda, fear mongering elitism. And worse. (See MSDNC’s “Morning Joe”)

Sadly, strewing scary stuff stifles any rational discussion about guns. Anti-gun groups are using “NRA!” as the new pejorative replacing “RACIST!” as their trump card to shut down dangerously productive conversations. Claiming “we need a public debate about guns” really means “STFU and do it my way!”

To navigate this swamp of polluted palaver, here are just a few of the 372 Unadulterated Truths you can memorize and deploy in next big argument at work or Chuck E. Cheese. They are also suitable to Cut ‘N Paste or carve into other suitable persuasive materials for more formal situations.

Note: the following assumes the Reader knows the absolute minimum about guns, i.e., they go BANG! propelling a projectile at Warp speed toward whatever lies immediately ahead. This is true of rifles, pistols, and shotguns– also cannons, bazookas, mortars, RPG’s and other weapons of destruction,”mass” or otherwise.

Let’s get started

First, despite the MSM and members of the phylum “moron” dedication to mislead you, there is no such thing as “gun violence“. “Gun violence” is code from the Aggressively Ignorant for “It’s not my fault; the gun did it.”  As an inanimate object, any firearm is no more intelligent or self-actuating than a rock (an early ancestor). All firearms require some level of participation from a human to function. This phase of the interface, loosely described as “human intelligence”, is where problems begin.

Next, for purposes of accuracy and sanity, you must understand once and for all time, the indelible, incontrovertible difference between “Automatic” and “Semi-Automatic” firearms. Simply put “automatic” is the defining function of the “machine gun” like the one that did in Sean Connery in “The Untouchables“. One pull of the trigger keeps the weapon firing until the trigger is released or ammo runs out. “Semi-automatic” describes weapons requiring one trigger pull for each “BANG!”. Period. This is all you need to know at this level. Further details will either confuse you or turn you into an expert who embarrasses their friends at parties by winning all the arguments. Refusal or inability to comprehend this simple distinction qualifies you to be a Network TV News Reporter where ignoring such technicalities are encouraged in order to keep the viewer petrified and even more ignorant than the reporter.

Contrary to Media’s Favorite Myth, fully automatic weapons (“machine guns”) are not illegal unless acquired outside NFA requirements and regulations. With a Federal Class III Special Occupational Tax license application, fingerprints, pictures, license fee ($200) and hacking through additional red tape, you may (after a typical 10-12 month “processing” period) receive the government’s Permission Slip to take delivery of your very own “machine gun”. If this makes your leg tingle, be advised there are a mountain of other regulations imposed on the new Owner. If you live in one of the  States that specifically prohibit Class III weapons (CA, IL, NY, NJ, CT, RI, DE, IO, WA, DC, HI), you’ll have to move. Be sure to check your Sate’s peculiar restrictions. Oh – FYI:  right this minute, a Colt M16A1 like mine is currently available for $33,000. (Less expensive makes/models are also available). Bottom Line Media Mythbuster: Full auto firearm ownership is legal in the majority of these here United States.

Finally, there is no also such thing as “the gun show loophole”. Like the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and Ethical Politicians, it is just more liberal media effluvium. Depending on the archaic, freedom-snuffing status of laws in your state or gulag, there are two ways to purchase a firearm at a gun show: through an FFL licensed dealer or a private citizen walking his Iver Johnson. The dealer will require you to complete the BATFE form 4473 which requires your answers to several mildly intrusive personal history questions, show some state-approved picture ID and some accepted medium of exchange (FRNs, MC/VISA or similar wampum). He will then call your info into the NICS System. Assuming you are not a convicted felon or similarly disqualifying lowlife, you will eventually be “approved” and off you go with your newly acquired shootin’ iron. The Private Citizen transaction is infinitely easier inasmuch as it is a simple negotiated exchange of Personal Property: haggle the price with the seller, agree, pay, leave. State laws vary, but even in the most lenient, it’s a damn good idea for Buyer and Seller to show each other some form of picture ID. Be thoroughly familiar with State and Local laws. The world is full of (insert profane noun here) and no principled person wants to be party to a transaction that could have dire consequences of any form. While there is no “gun show loophole”, there are always ways, knowingly or not, to circumvent any law. Unless you’d like a tiny room with metal doors, a lousy view and hangin’ out for a few years with some dude named “No Ky”, best to be intimately familiar with them instead of him.

There is a boatload of scary fairy tales about guns floating around – usually on TV around 6p and, even worse, 24/7 on Social Media. Do your homework. Avoid becoming another brain-dead zombie, spouting clichéd, erroneous and terminal dumbness. Like free speech, guns are as beneficial as they can be dangerous. Be certain Intelligence is loaded before shooting mouth off. The Parkland shooting has released a frenzy of adrenaline-fired, fact-challenged, politically distorted, Freedom-killing propaganda. Know the truth – it just might keep us free.

 Brian Wilson

Pro Deo et Constitutione – 
Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis 
Paratus et Fidelis 

Joseph F Barber

The Supreme Court's Deferred Action for 'Dreamers'

The Supreme Court's Deferred Action for 'Dreamers'

The DACA program will continue indefinitely, which is a political win for both sides.

Back in September, President Donald Trump moved to rescind Barack Obama’s unconstitutional order to bypass Congress and enact the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Trump even gave Congress six months to act, while negotiating with Democrats on immigration reform that included legalizing so-called “Dreamers,” the illegal alien children affected by DACA. Instead, Democrats shut down the government last month over it — a battle they lost. Democrats don’t want a deal, they want a campaign issue, though they’re overplaying their hand.

Meanwhile, legal challenges have continued. On Monday, the Supreme Court declined the Justice Department’s request to intervene, leaving the issue to be decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which previously blocked Trump’s March 5 deadline for ending DACA. That means the 700,000 people in the program can continue applying for work-permit renewals indefinitely, though no new applicants must be accepted. Legally, Trump has an open and shut case — except for the judicial despots occupying the Ninth Circuit. Without a deadline, however, even congressional Republicans have little motivation to settle the matter with an actual bill.

The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro aptly sums up where things stand: “So, what’s changed? Not much. The media will be able to claim that Trump lost in court; Trump will be able to avoid beginning deportations, and blame the courts for it. While the media champion this ruling as a loss for Trump, on a political level, Trump didn’t lose anything at all.”

In related news, it appears Democrat Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf committed a federal felony by warning illegal aliens in her city of upcoming ICE raids. Let’s see if she faces any consequences.

The Broward County Sheriff Is Everything That's Wrong With American Authority

The Broward County Sheriff Is Everything That's Wrong With American Authority

The sheriff is an outsized figure in the American imagination. He is Wyatt Earp, shooting it out with outlaws at the O.K. Corral. He is John Wayne, a lonely instrument of frontier justice. He is Rick Grimes, the resourceful survivor of a zombie apocalypse in “The Walking Dead.”

Now, along comes Scott Israel to remind us, despite the legend, how a sheriff can be a hack politician whose primary concern is protecting his own political reputation and little fief.

The Broward County sheriff, whose disgraceful performance in the Stoneman Douglas shooting has been a master class in evasion of responsibility, is the latest entry in why we don’t trust our public institutions.

It’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive and catastrophic failure from beginning to end than that of the sheriff’s office in the Parkland massacre. It ignored warnings that were specific and chilling about the shooter, and at least one of its deputies waited outside the school while the shooting occurred (and perhaps others did as well in the immediate aftermath).

Sheriff Israel appropriately pronounced himself disgusted with the deputy, who has lost his job. But asked in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday if he acknowledges that had his department acted differently, the shooter might have been foiled, the sheriff responded with a flip rhyme, “ifs and buts and candy and nuts.”

It’s not as though the sheriff, mindful of the need to get a handle on his department’s conduct, has been quietly tending his own shop. At the CNN town hall last week, he turned in a crowd-pleasing performance. He opined about the new authorities that the police require and joined in lambasting National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch to cheers from the audience.

He was emphatic about everything not touching on what officers under his authority did or didn’t do. When attention turned to that, he suddenly became mincingly precise and demanded to know more detail about reported warning signs.

When Loesch cited media accounts of 39 calls to the police, Israel denounced the figure as categorically false. And the lawman was right — it was at least 18 calls.

What were these warnings? In 2016, a caller to the sheriff’s office said the perpetrator “planned to shoot up a school.” More recently, last Nov. 30, a caller told the sheriff’s office that the shooter was amassing weapons and “could be a school shooter in the making.”

The motto is that when we see something, we should say something. In the case of the Parkland shooter, people said something, over and over again, to little or no effect. The cliché after disasters is that no one “connected the dots.” In the case of the Parkland shooter, the dots were connected with bright lines.

Yet nothing happened, and the sheriff’s office had a large hand in that. Israel’s performance at the CNN town hall was even more shamefully dodgy when considering it is likely that he already knew one of his deputies had done nothing to stop the shooter at the scene.

The sheriff’s theory of leadership apparently doesn’t extend down to the people working for him. “I gave him a gun,” he said of the deputy in another interview. “I gave him a badge. I gave him the training. If he didn’t have the heart to go in, that’s not my responsibility.” The buck doesn’t stop with the sheriff, in other words; it stops with whomever he happens to give a badge and a gun.

Some supporters of gun control want to look away from the failures of law enforcement to keep the focus on the guns. But this is foolish for their own purposes — politically, there is no chance of significant new laws if no one is held to account for glaring mistakes under the status quo.

If we take the imperative to do better seriously, Sheriff Israel and all his bureaucratic excuses should get the hell out of town.

The Left Wants to Confiscate All of Your Firearms

   
A few days ago I warned you on my radio program that the Left would use the survivors of the Florida school shooting as propaganda pawns in a nationwide gun grab.

I warned you to be prepared because it was about to mount an ugly assault on the Second Amendment, smearing every law-abiding gun owner as bloodthirsty monsters.

And that’s exactly what happened Wednesday night during CNN’s repulsive town hall meeting.

CNN shamefully exploited a terrible, terrible tragedy in an attempt to smear the National Rifle Association as a domestic terrorist organization and law-abiding gun owners as child killers.

Sen. Marco Rubio and NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch were subjected to a verbal flogging. They tried to engage in a thoughtful discussion, but they were shouted down by the angry crowd.

“I had to have a security detail to get out,” Loesch told a sympathetic crowd at CPAC. “I wouldn’t be able to exit if I didn’t have a security detail.”

Others in the crowd screamed that she was a murderer and a bad mother to her two children. It was, quite frankly, repulsive.

“There were people rushing the stage and screaming ‘burn her,’” she said.

Let’s be clear about something — Sen. Rubio and Ms. Loesch had absolutely nothing to do with the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. They are not the bad guys.

What about the Broward County Sheriff’s Department? Why wasn’t it grilled by parents and students? What about the school district? What about the mental health department? What about the FBI?

Yes, there are plenty of bad guys, but Rubio and Loesch are not the bad guys, and neither are the millions of law-abiding gun owners who were slandered by CNN.

But that wasn’t the point of CNN’s town hall gathering. It really wasn’t about giving the students a voice; it was about declaring war on the Second Amendment.

There was a moment when Sen. Rubio pointed out that a ban on semi-automatic firearms would mean a ban on every semi-automatic rifle sold in the country.

The crowd of about 5,000 people roared with approval.

“Some people want all of us to disarm,” Loesch said. “You heard that town hall last night. They cheered the confiscation of firearms.”

Consider this warning from the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre.

“Socialism is a movement that loves a smear. Racists, misogynists, sexists, xenophobe and more,” he said at CPAC. “These are the weapons and vitriol these character assassinations permanently hang on their targets because socialism feeds off manipulated victims.”

And that’s exactly what happened at CNN’s disgraceful town hall meeting.

So buckle up, Americans. The Left has already declared war on free speech and religious liberty. Now it’s coming after the Second Amendment.


Todd Starnes

Pro Deo et Constitutione – 
Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis 
Paratus et Fidelis 

Joseph F Barber

Dems: Hey, Let's Ban All Semi-Automatics

Dems: Hey, Let's Ban All Semi-Automatics

Their gun-grabbing efforts are nothing new, though this one goes pretty far for a campaign issue.

Democrats have always hated the Second Amendment. When they were the party of slavery and Jim Crow, they invented gun control to keep firearms out of the hands of blacks. Over the past few decades, as Democrats have increasingly moved hard left, the party’s position on the Second Amendment has become less about race than an ever-growing vitriolic anti-gun animosity. Once again, exploiting the recent Parkland atrocity, Democrats are going all-in by declaring themselves the party for “banning guns.”

On Monday, 156 House Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) introduced their latest anti-gun measure. The legislation, dressed up with the faulty language of “assault weapons” and “weapons of war,” was marketed as “sensible policy.” Of course, Democrat “common sense” is a non sequitur. In introducing the bill, Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) insisted, “Assault weapons were made for one purpose. They are designed to kill as many people as possible in a short amount of time. They do not belong in our communities.”

While Democrats’ gun-grabbing efforts are nothing new, this bill, far from being “sensible,” would essentially ban all semi-automatic firearms. The Washington Examiner reports, “The bill prohibits the ‘sale, transfer, production, and importation’ of semi-automatic rifles and pistols that can hold a detachable magazine, as well as semi-automatic rifles with a magazine that can hold more than 10 rounds. Additionally, the legislation bans the sale, transfer, production, and importation of semi-automatic shotguns with features such as a pistol grip or detachable stock, and ammunition feeding devices that can hold more than 10 rounds.”

Democrats and their cohorts in the mainstream media seek to demonize firearms and individual gun ownership rights, banking on the further polarization of the issue helping their election chances come November. Democrats know their bill won’t see any vote, but they aim to make “sensible gun control” an election issue for their campaign. And should another mass attack occur at another school or similar “gun-free zone” before the November elections, Democrats will be quick to point out how they are the only ones serious about “solving” the problem. However, the issue is so polarizing that it may prove to backfire against Democrats, as many Americans see this for what it is — a direct attack on Americans’ constitutional rights. Needless to say, it appears that Democrats are eager to take the political gamble.

Thomas Gallatin 

Pro Deo et Constitutione – 

Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis 

Paratus et Fidelis 

Joseph F Barber

Armed and Dangerous:

Armed and Dangerous: 

If Police Don’t Have to Protect the Public, What Good Are They?

“After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”—Author William S. Burroughs

In the American police state, police have a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.

In fact, police don’t usually need much incentive to shoot and kill members of the public.

Police have shot and killed Americans of all ages—many of them unarmed—for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

In recent years, Americans have been killed by police merely for standing in a “shooting stance,” holding a cell phone, behaving oddly and holding a baseball bat, opening the front door, running in an aggressive manner holding a tree branch, crawling around naked, hunching over in a defensive posture, wearing dark pants and a basketball jersey, driving while deaf, being homeless, brandishing a shoehorn, holding a garden hose, and peeing outdoors.

So when police in Florida had to deal with a 19-year-old embarking on a shooting rampage inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., what did they do?

Nothing.

There were four armed police officers, including one cop who was assigned to the school as a resource officer, on campus during that shooting. All four cops stayed outside the school with their weapons drawn (three of them hid behind their police cars).

Not a single one of those cops, armed with deadly weapons and trained for exactly such a dangerous scenario, entered the school to confront the shooter.

Seventeen people, most of them teenagers, died while the cops opted not to intervene.

Let that sink in a moment.

Now before your outrage bubbles over, consider that the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed (most recently in 2005) that police have no constitutional duty to protect members of the public from harm.

Yes, you read that correctly.

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, police have no duty, moral or otherwise, to help those in trouble, protect individuals from danger, or risk their own lives to save “we the people.”

In other words, you can be outraged that cops in Florida did nothing to stop the school shooter, but technically, it wasn’t part of their job description.

This begs the question: if the police don’t have a duty to protect the public, what are we paying them for? And who exactly do they serve if not you and me?

Why do we have more than a million cops on the taxpayer-funded payroll in this country whose jobs do not entail protecting our safety, maintaining the peace in our communities, and upholding our liberties?

Why do we have more than a million cops who have been fitted out in the trappings of war, drilled in the deadly art of combat, and trained to look upon “every individual they interact with as an armed threat and every situation as a deadly force encounter in the making?

I’ll tell you why.

It’s the same reason why the Trump Administration has made a concerted effort to expand the police state’s power to search, strip, seize, raid, steal from, arrest and jail Americans for any infraction, no matter how insignificant.

This is no longer a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

It is fast becoming a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations,” and its rise to power is predicated on shackling the American taxpayer to a life of indentured servitude.

Cops in America may get paid by the citizenry, but they don’t work for us.

They don’t answer to us. They’re not loyal to us.

And they certainly aren’t operating within the limits of the U.S. Constitution.

That “thin, blue line” of loyalty to one’s fellow cops has become a self-serving apparatus that sees nothing wrong with advancing the notion that the lives—and rights—of police should be valued more than citizens.

As one commentator remarked, “‘Protect and Serve’ are the words we see on the side of many police cars and is the motto of most police forces. The words define the mission of the police, which is to ‘protect’ citizens and ‘serve’ the public. However, it has become increasingly clear that in far too many police forces those words have been twisted beyond recognition. Too often they appear to mean, ‘to protect officers and serve the police force.’ ‘Force Protection’ has become the primary motivating force for many in the Police. That term is actually a military concept which means that you do everything you can to protect the troops when planning and executing a combat mission.”

The myth of the hero cop really is a myth.

Cops are no more noble, no more self-sacrificing, no braver and certainly no more deserving of special attention or treatment than any other American citizen.

Yet, as journalist David Feige explains, “For the last three decades, police unions have managed to portray their members as indispensable heroes in a deadly and dangerous war. [In] the years since the Sept. 11 attacks, the story of the hero cop has become so powerful and pervasive that even questioning police behavior is decried as disloyal, un-American, and dangerous.”

This misplaced patriotism about police and, by extension, the military—a dangerous re-shifting of the nation’s priorities that has been reinforced by President Trump with his unnerving knack for echoing past authoritarian tactics—paves the way for even more instability in the nation.

Feige continues:

“There are real-world harms that follow from the myths perpetuated by police unions. Arguments about the dangerous nature of police work drive the increasing militarization of police departments. The life-and-death nature of the job is used to push for extremely generous medical leave, overtime, and pay packages. Most insidious of all, the exaggerated danger and trumped-up heroism drives an us-versus-them mentality that suffuses contemporary big-city policing and bleeds into the criminal justice system, causing systemic imbalances that chronically favor the police over citizens. Together, this creates a sense of invincibility and righteousness among the police that is used to justify even outrageous behavior while simultaneously creating the perception among the public that the police are untouchable.”

For years now, we’ve been told that cops need military weapons to wage the government’s wars on drugs, crime and terror.

We’ve been told that cops need to be able to crash through doors, search vehicles, carry out roadside strip searches, shoot anyone they perceive to be a threat, and generally disregard the law whenever it suits them because they’re doing it to protect their fellow Americans from danger.

We’ve been told that cops need extra legal protections because of the risks they take.

None of that is true.

For the record, any police officer who tells you that he needs tanks, SWAT teams, and pepper spray to do his job shouldn’t be a police officer in a constitutional republic.

Unfortunately, “we the people” don’t get to call the shots anymore. And we no longer live in a constitutional republic.

Welcome to the American police state, funded by Corporate America, policed by the military industrial complex, and empowered by politicians whose primary purpose is to remain in office.

It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from the police state we’re operating under right now to a full-blown totalitarian regime ruled with the iron fist of martial law.

The groundwork has already been laid.

The events of recent years have only served to desensitize the nation to violence, acclimate them to a militarized police presence in their communities, and persuade them that there is nothing they can do to alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation: the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers.

The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.

Few seem to care about the government’s endless wars abroad that leave communities shattered, families devastated and our national security at greater risk of blowback. Indeed, there were no protests in the streets after U.S. military forces carried out air strikes on a Syrian settlement, killing 25 people, more than half of which were women and children.

And then there’s President Trump’s plans for a military parade on Veterans Day (costing between $10 million and $30 million) to showcase the nation’s military might. Other countries that feel the need to flex their military muscles to its citizens and the rest of the world include France, China, Russia and North Korea. 

Connect the dots, people.

This stealthy, creeping, silent coup that is the same danger that writer Rod Serling warned against in the 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May, which put the military in charge of a coup that would institute martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

On the big screen, the military coup is foiled and the republic is saved in a matter of hours. In the real world, however, the plot thickens and spreads out over the past half century.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.

The question is no longer whether the U.S. government will be preyed upon and taken over by the military industrial complex. That’s a done deal.

We’ve allowed ourselves to be acclimated to the occasional lockdown of government buildings, Jade Helm military drills in small towns so that special operations forces can get “realistic military training” in “hostile” territory, and  Live Active Shooter Drill training exercises, carried out at schools, in shopping malls, and on public transit, which can and do fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers and bystanders into thinking it’s a real crisis.

Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned.

Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

Meanwhile, the government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

All of this has taken place right under our noses, funded with our taxpayer dollars and carried out in broad daylight without so much as a general outcry from the citizenry.

It’s astounding how convenient we’ve made it for the government to lock down the nation.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.

John Whitehead

Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors 

Semper Vigilans Fortis 

Paratus et Fidelis 

Joseph F Barber