The Police State Is Getting Out Of Control

The Police State Is Getting Out Of Control

Every few days, I find something new that really just blows my mind. At first I thought society had reached a new low when NYC Mayor Bloomberg wanted to ban smoking everywhere in NYC, including public parks, boardwalks and beaches. But now Detroit wants to ban smoking inside people’s homes. I’m starting to get confused as to where I can legally smoke a cigarette without breaking a law.

Then I read about the state of NY wanting to pass a law making everyone an organ donor without their consent. Under this proposed law, if one is in a car accident or suffers a heart attack, they can rest assured knowing this law would allow all their body parts to be used to help someone they don’t even know, regardless of their wishes and without their consent. It’s really nice of the state to utterly ignore and possibly violate people’s religious beliefs. Screw the people who had plans to hold an open-casket funeral, and now can’t because their deceased loved one doesn’t have eyes. They have been pushing this law for a while; it’s doubtful that it will ever go through, but if it does, it would be a travesty. And don’t get me wrong – organ donation is a really great thing if you choose to do so.

Further evidence of the state’s paternalistic overreach is apparent in their recently successful effort to ban alcoholic drinks because teenagers might drink them. Again, this happened in NY, and you may be seeing a pattern here. The great state of NY recently banned Four Loko because teenagers were enjoying them. It’s still legal in my state, so I went out and bought one the other night just to see how horrible, dangerous and poisonous this stuff could possibly be, since according to the government, it is allegedly as dangerous as heroin, fake weed and dustoff. It tasted somewhat like a mix of Zima (remember those?), Mike’s Hard Lemonade and a wine cooler.

Why ban this horrible premixed alcohol and caffeine concoction? They say it’s because the combination can cause great harm. So using my degree as a rocket scientist, I found a way around this. In my genius, I discovered that I could buy a bottle of vodka, then a bottle a coke, mix the two together and create a caffeinated alcoholic drink. I have also seen people who wake up, brew a cup of coffee and slip a shot of their choice of alcohol in to start their day. As the combination of caffeine and alcohol has been around for a while with less than disastrous results, it seems that caffeine plus alcohol is fine as long as it is used responsibly.

Another reason they support a ban is allegedly because the logos on the cans are targeting kids. Supposedly, so were the Joe Camel billboards I saw as a kid, promoting Camel cigarettes. I did not start smoking because of this cartoon camel. My parents taught me smoking is bad, explained why, and I listened to them. If lawmakers really think a law will stop kids from drinking at college parties they either have not been following history for the past 100 years, or have absolutely no common sense and should not be in office making decisions like this.

Actually, the reality is even worse, it turns out that NY (again) wants to ban all caffeinated energy drinks, including the ones with no alcohol, for anyone under the age of 19, as they claim these are also dangerous. So you can drink 5 Pepsis but a 5-hour energy looks like it’s too dangerous in the state of NY for you college freshmen. Don’t worry if you don’t live in NY – then they are perfectly safe and legal and don’t do any harm. Why does this sound familiar – items are dangerous in one state but not another? Oh that’s right, this set of headphones may give you cancer or birth defects if you wear them in California, but are considered safe in every other state.

Moving on to a ban in San Francisco against McDonald’s putting toys in the children’s Happy Meals. All I can do is scratch my head and think, are you serious? This is only happening in one county. The officials say they will lift the ban if Mc D’s starts serving healthier options for kids. I always thought that in a free country, it would be the parents’ choices of what they want to feed their children, and the government would have no right to infringe on a business unless it was engaged in criminal activity.

A parent can walk down the supermarket aisle, buy and cook anything they want for their children – a bag of Doritos, pop tarts, some of the most unhealthy food imaginable – but it will be a crime to serve a toy with a cheese burger, fries and a coke. Amazingly the vote was 8-3, so if you live in San Fran be happy to know at least 3 people on your Board of Supervisors has a brain, while the other 8 are following Dorothy Gale and the scarecrow around the wizard of Oz looking for theirs. Fortunately, Mayor Gavin Newsome vetoed this ban.

Next come adult toys, and I don’t mean the sexual ones. I already covered this here but I am still amazed that I can own a handgun, .50 caliber rifle, crossbow, bow and arrow, paintball gun, taser (legal in my state), pepper spray, but it is illegal for me to own lawn darts. I actually don’t really own all of that but it is legal and I do have the choice if I ever wanted to reenact my own rendition of Rambo.

I understand some kid threw a lawn dart over a fence and it landed in a girl’s head and killed her. This is indeed very sad and I do feel sorry for the family. But what the hell does that have to do with me? I can take a .50 caliber rifle up to Alaska and run around shooting black bears from the front of a boat that’s bobbing up and down in ten foot waves, but I am a criminal if I throw a piece of plastic with a small lawn spike on it fifteen feet away into a circle on my own private property. You really have to be kidding me.

What else? What could possibly be next, you might ask. Rest assured – there is more. Now we have the NYC (again, note the pattern) department of sanitation trying to steal people’s hard-earned money. This week, they issued an 80-year-old woman a $100 ticket for – get ready for this – throwing her newspaper into a garbage can. I’m surprised they didn’t handcuff this violent terrorist and lock her up in a FEMA camp! After all, she threw her newspaper in a trash can instead of recycling it, so of course she got a ticket. She’s on a fixed income, has little extra money, and when she was confronted about her horrible crime, she offered to reach into the garbage can and take the newspaper out, but by then it was to late. You can also read about a guy who was given a $2,000 fine and had his car impounded for recycling plastic bottles (yes, NYC again). Yet another New Yorker, who had permission to pick up an air conditioner, had the car he was driving impounded, and was also given a $2,000 fine – even worse, so did his mom, because she let him use her car to pick up the air conditioner, totaling $4,000 in fines for the family. They actually beat the fines.

As long as this keeps up there are thee questions that will be addressed:

• How many more laws can politicians make that restrict our freedoms?
  
• How long before LEOs stop enforcing those laws?
  
• How long will people let politicians and LEOs have control over their lives?

Something will give. I hope the first two stop it before the third.