I was planning to write about my electric fence and the difficulty of driving an 8-foot ground rod into rocky soil, but that exciting topic is postponed because of my need to comment on the new vaccine mandates which cover all federal employees and contractors, healthcare workers, and many others.
As I have said before, I am not taking a position on whether the vaccine is good or bad. I give my readers credit for having enough sense to make up their own minds. However, I consider mandates forcing people to get vaccinated to be a huge example of government overreach, especially when they are done by executive orders rather than being passed by the legislative branch.
It’s Official
With today’s announcement, President Biden officially confirmed that he is tougher on Americans without vaccines than he is on the Taliban. Not only do they get out of jail, but the Taliban gets free automatic weapons and cool military vehicles. The unvaccinated lose their ability to make a living and may lose their seats to the big game.
I can’t help wondering if this new mandate is a way to shift the media focus off Afghanistan.
This is the same president that said he wouldn’t mandate vaccines when he was a candidate. (As Keven McCarthy says below, Biden lied.) His vice president even considered not taking the “Trump vaccine.” (As if Trump was in a secret lab mixing mRNA concoctions together.) They apparently have no problem pushing the “trump vaccine” now.
He also showed that he has no sense of irony. While he believes the slogan “our bodies our choice” when it comes to a woman’s right to have an abortion, he doesn’t support it the slogan if the same woman refuses to put the vaccine into her body.
Government Gets More Invasive
For further proof that we are moving closer to the future envisioned in George Orwell’s 1984, the government is also considering requiring banks and payment processors (from credit cards and PayPal to cryptocurrency exchanges) to report all transactions over $600 to the IRS. This immediately raises the question, what about the Fourth Amendment and its prohibition against unreasonable searches?.
I halfway hope they proceed, get sued, the Supreme Court strikes it down, and it also ends the current requirements to report any transactions over $10,000. There are just too damn many laws about money, so do like I do and spend cash as much as possible.
The only silver lining I see in this payment tracking scheme is that it will inundate the IRS with data that they are in no way prepared to manage. They are still using software that was written during the Kennedy Administration. Unless they hire AWS (God forbid) they probably don’t have the database architecture or storage capability to manage the billions of transactions that would represent. With the way inflation in growing, a family of four will probably spend $600 every week at the grocery store before the IRS gets its systems modernized.
Government is also becoming more invasive at the municipal level. The LAPD has told its officers to collect social media accounts and email address of everyone the stop. Not everyone they arrest, but everyone they stop. That’s another example of government overreach and violates both our Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. Hey, it’s California, so we shouldn’t be surprised.
There is absolutely no reason to give your social media account handle to the cops. This is another example where our recent suggestion to quietly non-comply should be used. Don’t turn over your phone over the police either.
Bad News Prevails
When I wanted to get depressed in the old days, I’d read a few prepper websites which always seemed to look at the worst case scenario. Now I fear I may becoming one of them. Then I turn to any media outlet and, with the exception of those that focus on celebrities and entertainment news, most of the news is bad most of the time. What’s even more frightening is that the news they ignore is often even worse. And Europe is worse still.
The entire EU is sliding down hill, which I don’t think should be a huge surprise. The only question is will they reach rock bottom before or after we do. I predict it will be a tight race, but they will beat us in the last few laps of the death spiral.
