Category: Government

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Could Someone please explain this?

You have to have ID to open a bank account. You have to have ID to buy cigarettes, beer or alcohol. You have to have ID to enter a bar or strip club. You have to have ID to purchase your prescriptions. You have to have ID to get on a plane, ship, or train for travel. You have to have ID when you see a doctor. You have to have ID when you go to an emergency room or hospital. You have to have ID to get a permanent job. You have to have ID to get an apartment. You have to have ID to set up utilities or get a mobile phone account, (unless it a burner, in some states even a burner phone requires ID at time of purchase.) You have to have a ID to purchase a gun, (In California even to purchase ammunition.) You have to have an ID to attend college. You have to have an ID to pick up your children from school (if they’re sick or have a Doctors appointment.)

Lest we forget, the country has enacted the “Real ID” act.

It should be fully in force by May 3, 2023. If you’re unfamiliar with this, you can look it up here. The minimum requirements for a Real ID are:

1) Full Legal Name; 2) Date of Birth; 3) Social Security Number; 4) Two Proofs of Address of Principal Residence; and 5) Lawful Status.

From the Real ID FAQ Section of the DHS website

I find it interesting that the authorities want to see a utility bill or something aside from just presenting my Old Driver’s license and for example, my passport. Both of which I’ve had for the past 40 years, and the address hasn’t changed in the past 30 years.

I’m honestly confused that I can’t simply show up to the DMV with my passport, have my fingerprints scanned & compared to those that were submitted 40 years ago as part of my passport application. If the fingerprints match it should be a no brainer. In fact when I got my driver’s license I was fingerprinted too. It seems that comparing all three would be proof enough that I’m really me.

According to Bernie Sanders, Stacy Abrams, and others, requiring an ID to Vote, is voter suppression? A threat to Democracy? Inherently racist? Jim Crowe???

With the implementation of Real ID nationwide and the minimum requirements of Real ID, haven’t we already laid the groundwork for requesting Voter ID? Isn’t Voter ID reasonable given the Real ID requirements?

By Sanders, Abrams, & others, logic it follows that no ID, or for that matter vaccination card, should be required at all, ever. It also begs the question; Is Real ID is pointless, as it sets the bar too high for an apparently large number of individuals in our nation?

It seems to me that, if Sanders, Abrams, et al. are so concerned about voter suppression, they’d simply make Federal funding available so that ID (Real ID or otherwise) was free to all citizens in all states.

How about simply issuing free passports to all Citizens? I’d certainly appreciate not having to pay $140 for a passport book + card. I’d also appreciate not having to pay $25 for a driver’s license.

If each citizen was issued a Passport and Passport card, then each citizen could simply use their passport card to vote. The cards have chips built in, they could be verified at the polls, much like a credit or debit card is today for transactions. And isn’t voting at its core really a transaction?

Upon verification the holder gets a printed ballot or accesses an ATM like machine that displays a ballot appropriate for their address of record. Once their vote is cast, the date and polling station id get recorded recorded on the chip and their ID cannot be used to vote again in that particular election.

That solves a bunch of problems, although it would mean that the verification and voting machines would have to be verifiably secure. The technology obviously exists otherwise no-one would have any faith in ATM banking or point of sale systems.

Imagine the chaos if everyone in a city asked to get $20 from an ATM and got their $20 bill but their account actually had $200 deducted. That just doesn’t happen, if it did, faith in banking would evaporate and everyone would demand to be paid in cash.

Such a system would ensure one vote per person. It would also negate the need for mail in ballots almost entirely. Any citizen could, on voting day, go to any polling place in their state, or for national elections, anywhere in the country and cast their vote.

In theory, a person traveling out of state could go to the county seat or registrar of voters office where-ever they were, and vote in their local elections for their home state. I’d imagine that particular functionality could be something that would come much later, since it would require some infrastructure connecting state registrars which is not available at this time.

But… you say, that all requires infrastructure we don’t have. People would still have to go to a polling place, having to show up is too hard for some people.

We actually do have most of the infrastructure already in place, which could be tasked for the purpose, and make voting accessible almost everywhere in a state.

Most banks have multiple ATMs at their branches. Those ATMs have chip readers, cameras, and touch screen displays. Surely in the interest of patriotism, banks could be prevailed upon to allow one ATM per branch, on one day a year to be programmed for voting by a duly authorized officer from the registrar of voters.

Instead of inserting your ATM card, you plug in your passport card. The ATM could even print a hard copy receipt showing your voting receipt number and perhaps your choices for various offices. I understand that after the last election people might be reluctant to use electronic means of voting. I personally have avoided electronic voting machines in my locality because they didn’t produce a printed receipt nor a copy of my voting selections. That being said, if I had both, I’d go electronic.

If you think about it, such a system could conceivably negate the question of voting fraud.

The major problem is that what I’m describing is tantamount to a National Citizen ID. Many members of congress have historically been opposed to the idea. Much as those same members of congress are opposed to voter ID laws today.

So you can see my confusion.

We have the Real ID act . But some voters apparently can’t navigate the difficulties of getting ID. (How will these people carry on day to day life? Isn’t that also exclusionary, perhaps even racist?)

Which form of ID has a higher priority? A passport or a Real ID? I’d guess a passport, given the information I had to provide when I got the passport in the first place.

We’re concerned about election integrity, But we’re allowing essentially unverifiable mail-in ballots to be counted.

Somehow asking for ID at the polls is exclusionary and racist. But to exist in 21st Century America requires ID for even the most basic things.

It’s clear that I’m missing something.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why there’s such wailing and gnashing of teeth over simply asking for ID to Vote. As an aside, Real ID was written and passed after the 9/11 commission report, so it’s something that for once, Congress agreed was important.

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As I stated… I’m completely against COVID passports

It’s not that I’m an Anti-Vaxxer.

I’m concerned about the creation of two distinct classes of individuals. I’m concerned about the abuses that become possible. We’ve actually been down this road before.

Smallpox was technically eradicated worldwide by a vaccine push, according to The WHO in 1980 smallpox became a thing of the past. That is a good thing. It demonstrates that there are times when we can and should take action.

This got me thinking about HIV.

There was a time when people who had HIV were isolated and in some cases denied housing, medical care, jobs, or insurance.

At the time ethicists, rightly concluded that discriminatory practices on the basis of actual or supposed infection did not abrogate the rights of the individual. Granted, we learned over a period of years much more about HIV and its transmission routes.

During those early years however, testing positive for HIV was essentially the end of your life. Not only did you just find out your had an incurable mostly fatal disease, if that knowledge became public information you could find yourself looking at an ugly accelerated death living on the streets.

That was when I became aware of moves to create legislation designed to protect medical privacy and add more protections against discrimination.

At the time. we were teetering on the edge of allowing rules that actively discriminated based on a health condition.

Imagine what could have been. Camps of the HIV infected, men and women swept under the carpet, out of sight and out of mind waiting to die.

I remember religious TV personalities implying that HIV patients, due to their sin in the eyes of God deserved nothing better. IV drug users were only slightly more important in the opinions of religious pundits. (After all, at least they were having heterosexual sex…)

Fortunately cooler political heads prevailed, and researchers provided various methods to deal with HIV allowing patients to live with the disease.

There was even a brief flirtation with nationally mandated HIV tests for all citizens. This idea was shot down pretty fast because of privacy concerns.

In this age of COVID there are a lot of folks who have forgotten those early HIV years. Here we are again. Even if the government doesn’t step in and create a national Vaccinated Passport system, private institutions are embracing the idea.

Colleges requiring COVID vaccinations to enter campuses, restaurants in some cities requiring their employees to not only be vaccinated but to subscribe to a private database where they upload their status and receive a bracelet with a QA code linking to their records, other employers are requiring you be vaccinated before you return to in-person work.

This is only the beginning. Acceptance of these “Private” standards will eventually lead to the same outcome as a Government Passport. I strongly suspect that the Government will evaluate the various standards and then nationalize the one that works best. (Meaning the one that provides the most private information.)

My concern is that it won’t simply stop there.

Is it going to be okay for your employer to dictate what vaccines you take as a condition of employment? We already have to provide ID, our SSN, and Citizenship status to employers at the time of hire, what if next we must routinely provide our vaccination records too? How about our other health records?

15 – 20 years ago, I was in the hiring process with a company, their HR person noted that I have a motorcycle endorsement on my driver’s license.

She told me that the company couldn’t permanently hire me unless they saw a bill of sale showing I’d sold my motorcycle to another party and that I had 60 days to produce the bill of sale. “It’s an insurance thing,” she said. I asked her what about SCUBA Diving? “Oh no, you can’t do that either it’s too risky, and you can’t smoke while in our employment either. If we find that you’re doing any of these things it’s grounds for immediate termination.”

She was very confused when I said I no longer wanted to work for the company.

The pay was mediocre at best, and the insurance coverage was really crappy. I tore up the W-4 and associated employment paperwork and continued looking for a job.

Having my employer that deeply embedded in my life made me very uncomfortable. It was almost as if I was signing an indentured servant contract. Yeah, I wanted a job, but not badly enough to give up my personal freedom.

Nowadays my choice could be viewed as selfish, because I didn’t want to give up hobbies or activities that I took pleasure in.

Where is the proverbial line? Would it be reasonable for an employer to say you can’t engage in oral sex because you might develop TMJ, thereby raising the cost of their dental insurance?

How about a celibacy clause in your contract? After all, if you’re not married, you don’t need to be having sex and the insurance premiums could be lowered because there’s less risk of the single employees catching STDs?

Would it still be thought of as selfish to say, “No, I will not give up these activities?”

Having experienced several companies (to greater or lesser extent, a couple of which for whom I did work,) using health insurance as a pretext for dictating to employees what activities they may participate in, I perhaps am overly concerned about mandated vaccinations and vaccination passports.

It’s very much like employers monitoring employees social media accounts. Once the employer has the ability, they will inevitably use the ability to press their advantage.

Would it be right for an employee to be denied a well deserved promotion because of a social media post from a decade before, when they didn’t work for the company? It’s clearly not right on the part of the employer. Yet I suspect that scenario is happening or will happen in the very near future.

Can you imagine being questioned about why you didn’t get a COVID vaccine sooner than you did? What happens if your reluctance to get vaccinated is conflated with an assumption that you’re an insurrectionist? Unpatriotic? A Trump supporter? How about just not enough of a team player?

What impact might any one of those assumptions have on your life or employability in this culture of compliance & conformity?

It’s because I’m wondering about these things and realize that there is zero protection against them that I’m against a vaccine passport. By the way, have you noticed that now it’s just called a Vaccine Passport? Most of us think it’s still just about COVID but already the naming convention is less specific and more inclusive of Vaccinations in general.

To my way of thinking, this loss of specificity is the next step. I have a vaccination record on paper. It won’t be long until the Vaccination Passport will be marketed as a convenient and secure method to maintain all your vaccination records. People will flock to the idea for convenience and put all those records voluntarily into databases sponsored by the Government or not. At that point we’ll lose another bit of privacy.

Does my school, the mall, or my employer really need to know that I’ve been vaccinated against Hepatitis?

When I was younger and traveling for work a lot, I was often sent on trips because I was single. The other guys had families and needed to be home for various reasons. They too were paid a lot more than I was but I always drew the short straw. At one point, I was traveling so much that I simply asked my employer to keep me on the road all the time and told them I’d give up my apartment, (which I wasn’t using anyway.) This inadvertently caused my employer to evaluate how much traveling I was actually doing. When they got the report they were very disturbed. (About 48 to 50 weeks a year.)

When my supervisor was questioned, he said plainly I was young and single so I didn’t have family obligations.

He wasn’t wrong. What he failed to realize was that with that kind of travel schedule, I was never going to have a family because it was impossible to actually date.

I’ve wondered how a vaccine passport might be used in a similar fashion to determine who gets sent to third world countries.

Imagine your boss looking for someone to send to India. They’d pull up their employees vaccination records and filter for everyone who’d had, say COVID, and Hepatitis vaccines. From that list your boss could decide to send you. You probably wouldn’t get any more pay, you might not even get any better chance at promotion. You’d be their India person though.

That might not bother you the first or even the tenth time you got sent to India. Being chosen based not on your skill but on vaccinations might not be the best career path. When you did get tired of it, and asked for a different assignment, you might find that you didn’t ever have a choice. Much as I did when I asked to just stay on the road.

I’m not saying that Vaccination Passports will be abused, I think it is likely they will, because they’re ripe for abuse.

The other concern is that Vaccination Passports inevitably create a two caste society. I’m not alone in this line of reasoning. There are a lot of folks (a lot smarter than me,) writing opinion pieces expressing their concerns over this issue.

Florida’s Governor DeSantis spelled it out pretty concisely when he signed Florida’s law outlawing vaccination passports. However he can only outlaw them for State business or State contractors. What private companies in Florida do is their own business.

Other Governors are requesting similar legislation for their states for the same reason. Generally the reasoning seems to be, The imposition of a two caste system defined by vaccination status is asking for trouble. These Governors want no part of the legal challenges that are sure to happen.

In my entire life, I’ve never been asked for any of my vaccination records, not even smallpox.

When traveling to other countries. As a responsible person, I’ve always checked with the State Department to find out if there was anything special I should be protected against. I’ve also checked with my doctor before traveling outside our borders. Otherwise with the exception of my Passport, and visas being required on the issue of diseases it’s been caveat emptor.

I find it ironic that inside our own country we may be required to produce “papers” to attend sporting or musical events, or perhaps just engage in our normal daily lives.

This concerns me greatly. I just don’t like the NAZI-esq feel of it.

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And Here it is Folks!

New York has rolled out a vaccine passport. The Article is here.

Yes, at this point it’s only New York. But the plan is to roll this kind of dystopian nightmare out across our country and across the whole planet.

I’ve got just a few questions…

How the heck does anybody think this is a good thing?

At a time when a law requiring a citizen to produce ID to vote is “racist“, and has been described as akin to Jim Crowe. It’s apparently it’s A-Okay to require someone to produce proof that they’ve been vaccinated so that they can enter a venue, or shopping center?

At a time when the stratification of our society is by far, worse than it’s even been in my memory (figure 50 + years), we’re fine with saying some people are not able to enter some buildings, shops, etc?

What happened to equality? Not everyone will get the vaccine for various reasons.

Some people literally can’t take the stuff. They’re to be excluded from participating fully in society? Shopping, Travel, Sporting events, concert halls, you name it, all due to a quirk in their biology?

One could easily describe higher or lower quantities of melanin in the skin as a biological quirk.

Will we see “Vaccinated” and “Un-Vaccinated” Water Fountains?

Will we be okay with “Vaccinated” and “Un-Vaccinated” Subway trains, or Buses?

Will we be more okay with marginalizing a segment of our society for supposed “Bio-Hazard” reasons instead of racial reasons? What does that look like?

People in tattered clothing with a pink Bio-Hazard label on their lapels?

Homeless, destitute, hungry, but otherwise completely healthy people, excluded from society? Will we force these people into the bowels of our cities to work in filth (regardless of their intellectual ability,) becaus they’re presumed to be; diseased, carriers… expendable?

Or will we just opt for leper colonies that look more like Hitler’s concentration camps?

Trouble is, no matter how much you want these assumed “pariahs” to die, they probably won’t.

They’re likely to become stronger, healthier, and because they won’t have the benefits of an easy life where their feelings aren’t being hurt, they’ll be tougher mentally too. Quite likely, they’ll be much more clever at survival.

See, I have a lot of faith in biology and the adaptability of the species. Apparently a lot more faith than what passes for “Science” these days.

I reiterate, COVID-19 has a survival rate of 97% or higher.

The next question is;

Might we be over-reacting a bit?

We’re still learning a lot about this virus. New discoveries are being made, peer reviewed, and published papers, show up in reputable medical journals almost daily.

A lot of those discoveries are actually pretty good news. The human race may have dodged a bullet this time around.

Would it not be better to consider this a dry run? Learn from this experience what works, and what doesn’t, then lay down the groundwork necessary to mitigate the next, likely more deadly pandemic?

Say something like an airborne Ebola, or the Black Plague, that kills in 6 hours? (Come on… You know some insane government or military somewhere on the planet has thought about it.)

I’m simply not ready to go to a GATTACA, The Walking Dead, Omega Man, or other dystopian nightmare scenario just yet.

I don’t think it’s right or reasonable to demand vaccination records to transact business.

Politicians have been attempting to spin shame for those people who choose not to wear a mask.

What’s the saying, “You’re not wearing a mask for your protection. You’re wearing a mask for the protection of others.” Implicitly stating that you’re a selfish bastard for not wearing a mask.

The spin machines have been trying to conflate wearing a mask as an act of patriotism, when in reality it’s probably more likely government mandated virtue signaling. A way of reenforcing that “We’re all in this together…“

If the shaming, spin and conflation continue to their logical conclusion. Things will be a lot worse than someone at a dog park being maced.

Picture the poor schmuck standing in line at a grocery store who discovers too late, that they don’t have the “Correct” vaccine de jour.

Crowds who believe they’re right, and just, get very ugly, very quickly.

I could see someone being beaten to death because their vaccine scan failed. (Sadly, they’d be counted as another COVID-xx death.)

Being the cynical and dark fuck that I am, the following scenario occurs to me.

Because the vaccine is essentially free, and the vaccine passport is also free I could see a scenario where the next 3 – 5 years is a period of adjustment.

A “New Normal” where everyone scans their vaccine passport to enter everywhere. Once people aren’t thinking about it anymore big pharma starts charging for the booster shots.

Picture the level of non political control a government or company could exercise on an entire population. “Oh, we’re sorry, you can’t cross the state line, or enter this city, or corporate office, without a booster shot. It costs $2200 for nonessential people, and we can give it to you right now if you can afford it…”

If you were one of the people in control, you could create an immediate two caste system, and easily control who was elite and who wasn’t simply by controlling the price of a vaccine or booster shot. All you need to do is keep fear alive.

No bullets, no war no political systems or parties… just simple absolute control.

If that doesn’t scare the hell out of you, it should. History has shown us repeatedly that control is the goal