This has been something of an ongoing saga for several months now, where Nick Rolovich, head coach of the Washington State Cougars football team, refused to get the vaccine way back before the season started. However, today was the deadline for him to either get the vaccine, be admitted an exemption based on religious grounds, or be terminated. His exemption was denied and he’s been fired:

When Nick Rolovich left the sideline on Saturday after Washington State’s come-from-behind win over Stanford, there’s a chance that it was the final time as the Cougars’ coach.

Rolovich has been seeking a religious exemption to Gov. Jay Inslee’s mandate that all state employees either attain fully vaccinated status by Monday or receive an exemption with accommodations, and he indicated after the game that he does not yet know his fate.

“I’m waiting on an email,” Rolovich said. “That’s as far as I know. … I’m going to come to work tomorrow, I’m going to get ready for BYU and we’ll grade this film. I don’t think this is in my hands. I’ve been settled for a long time on it. I believe it’s going to work out the right way.”

Right way, as in staying the coach?

“Correct. Or, if that’s not what (athletics director Pat Chun) wants, then, you know, then I guess I gotta move on. But I like being here, I like being the coach here, I love these kids, and I just got faith in it.”

You can just tell how much glee Sports Journalist Pat Forde has in reporting that someone has lost their job due to not wanting a vaccine for a virus that poses virtually no threat to him.

It’s really amazing how craven and subservient so many people are. They’re on the side of the government, rather than the one guy who lost his livelihood for refusing to comply.

“hElLuVa cArEeR mOvE, RoLo.”

Does Pat Forde not understand the concept of standing up for what you believe in no matter what?

No, probably not. He, like so many people in this country, just want to go-along to get-along, not rock the boat, and are deathly terrified of being seen as different.

Look at these comments:

Even if those rules are increasingly draconian and unreasonable.

I’m sure he said the exact same thing about Colin Kaepernick, too.

Yeah, good for Wazzu: you show that bastard what happens when you refuse to submit to the will of the state!

There’s so many more comments just like this one: That’s what you get for daring to disobey the government!

Imagine applauding an authoritarian state and still somehow thinking you’re on the right side.

At some point in the past 5 years, it stopped being cool to be a rebel. Now, the predominant mindset, at least on social media (which we must remember is not the same thing as reality), is that it’s cool to a subservient little bitch.

It reminds me of this scene from Family Guy way back in the day:

Now the guy who says “It’s Obeying All the Rules!” is the cool one.

Hey everyone, you know what’s cool? Trusting the government! Doing exactly what the government tells you and never questioning it at all! Banding together and shaming people who deviate from the government’s orders!

Yeah!

It’s like in 21 Jump Street, when they go back to high school as undercover cops and find out that the “cool kids” nowadays are all about caring for the environment and being sensitive:

“gOoD fOr wAzZu!”

You show that rapscallion what happens when he defies the government!

Do these people have any idea how lame they are? How pathetic they are?

They’re gleefully obeying the government’s every command and then socially shaming anyone who doesn’t.

I say it all the time, but these people would absolutely, 1000% have been the most die-hard Nazis imaginable if they were alive in 1940 Germany.

And they don’t even realize it, either.

They just want to be on the side that they perceive is winning. They want to be in what they perceive as the majority. They want to be on the same side as all the celebrities.

It’s not actually about the vaccine. It’s about fitting in. It’s about being on the side portrayed in the media as moral. It’s all virtue signaling.

They don’t know the first thing about courage or standing up for your beliefs. Because all the beliefs they have are promoted and rewarded by the government, the media, social media and corporate America.

It never occurs to them that guys like Nick Rolovich and Kyrie Irving are some of the bravest public figures in America right now because of their willingness to sacrifice their careers and reputations to stand up for what they believe in.

Wasn’t that Nike’s entire Colin Kaepernick marketing campaign?

They ate it up then because Colin Kaepernick was saying things they agreed with–or, more accurately, were brainwashed to agree with. “America Racist!” “America bad!”

Nike and its multi-million dollar ad campaign is fighting for justice! Colin Kaepernick is oppressed!

Sometimes I wonder if they ever stop and ask themselves, “How can I be one of the good guys if I’m on the same side as the government and the big corporations?”

But either that thought has never occurred to them, or they have somehow been convinced that the government and the big corporations are the good guys.

I think it’s mostly the latter, sadly.

And I think it has a lot to do with Donald Trump, or rather the establishment’s reaction to him starting in 2015.

Because Trump was the outsider, they portrayed him as the embodiment of everything that was bad and evil. Racism, anti-intellectualism, “xenophobia,” etc.

When Trump became President, he was picking fights with all the biggest institutions: the FBI, the UN, the WHO, the media, the intelligence community, corporations outsourcing jobs, etc. Suddenly, because Trump was calling them out for becoming corrupted, they all became the Good Guys, in the media’s telling of things.

Remember when Trump fired James Comey, and there was that clip of Stephen Colbert announcing it live on his show, and his audience started applauding wildly, and he had to be like, “No, no, no it’s a bad thing now. Comey is a good guy now. We like Comey now. Stop applauding, people.”

The audience had been told for months on end that Comey was the bad guy because he’s the reason Hillary Clinton lost the election. And they reacted based on that.

But once Trump fired him, Comey suddenly became the good guy.

That’s how it works.

In order to oppose the Fascist Dictator Nazi Hitler Nazi AJFLEDKJFDSPOIFSD, Donald Trump, one must show support for and allegiance to all the big Institutions. The FBI and the Deep State became the heroes; they became the Good Guys in the eyes of the News Watchers.

The Huffington Post ran this classic headline back in 2017:

“The Deep State is a Very Real Thing” and it’s totally freaking AWESOMESAUCE!!!! 😍😍😍

Man, I was always under the impression that the Constitution was created to limit the power of the President, but maybe I’m wrong.

New York Times said something similar in 2019:

The Deep State is Good!

I love how the New York Times acts as if the “deep state” of the 1890s is the same thing as it is today. And as if the intent of creating the “Deep State” is the same thing as the practical reality of it today.

Because nothing that was created by the government with the best of intentions has ever been corrupted, subverted and weaponized over the years. Of course not, that could never happen.

The point is, all this state-glorifying propaganda got people into the mindset that they should be willing to accept heavy-handed and even authoritarian government if it means addressing the latest hyped-up media boogie-man.

“I don’t care what it takes, we need to Stop Trump!”

“I don’t care how many people lose their livelihoods, we need to Stop Covid!”

That’s the mindset.

These people will willingly give up their freedoms because they’ve been tricked by the media into believing Covid is going to kill us all.

That’s who these people are at the end of the day. Anytime you see or hear someone out there applaud the government or a corporation for firing an unvaccinated employee, just know that’s what’s at the base of it: prioritizing safety over freedom.

That’s where we just have fundamentally different outlooks on life than these people do.

I have no idea why a state media shill like Gupta would agree to go on with Joe Rogan, but Joe Rogan held his feet to the fire about CNN’s blatant, shameless lying about the drug Ivermectin:

The whole segment is fantastic. Gupta was squirming in his chair and looked like wanted to be anywhere else in the world than in that room with Joe Rogan.

Rogan: “The rest of them [at CNN] are all lying about me taking horse medication.”

Gupta: *laughs* “No, no, no–“

R: “We should talk about that.”

G: “That bothered you.”

R: “It should bother you, too. They’re lying at your network about people taking human drugs vs. drugs for veterinary–“

G: “Calling it a horse dewormer is not a flattering thing, I get that.”

R: “It’s a lie. It’s a lie on a news network, and it’s a lie that’s a willing lie–that’s they’re conscious of. It’s not a mistake. They’re unfavorably framing it as veterinary medicine.”

G: “Well the FDA put out this thing, did you see that? It was a tweet, it was snarky, I admit it. It said, ‘You are not a horse. You are not a cow, stop taking this stuff,’ or something like that.”

R: “Why would you say that when you’re talking about a drug that has been given out to billions and billions of people, a drug that’s responsible for one of the inventors of it winning the Nobel Prize–“

G: “Yeah, in 2015. Well–“

R: “A drug that has been shown to stop viral replication in vitro. You know that. Why would they lie and say it’s horse dewormer? I can afford people medicine, motherfucker. This is ridiculous. It’s just a lie. Don’t you think that a lie like that is dangerous, when they know that they know they’re lying? You know that I took medicine–this is Ivermectin.” [Rogan had a little box of it on his desk and held it up.]

G: *laughs nervously* “You’ve got it with you. Alright, hang on, we’re going so fast, I feel like I’m missing–“

R: “Do you think that that’s a problem, that your news network lies?”

G: “Well, I don’t, I don’t, uh…”

R: “Dude.”

G: “Well what did they say?”

R: “They lied and said I was taking horse dewormer. First of all, it was prescribed to me by a doctor–“

G: “Yeah yeah yeah. They shouldn’t have said it. If you got a human pill–because there were people that were taking the veterinary medication, and I.. you’re not, obviously, you got it from a doctor, so it shouldn’t be called that. Ivermectin can be a very effective medication for parasitic disease, and I think you said, what, a quarter billion people have taken it around the world?”

R: “More. Way more. Billions of people have taken it.”

G: “Can I just come back to the one thing, I want to talk about 2 things–“

R: “Before we get to that, does it bother you that the news network you work for out and out lied. Just outright lied about me taking horse dewormer?”

G: “They shouldn’t have said that.”

R: “Why did they do that?”

G: “I don’t know.”

R: “You didn’t ask? You’re the medical guy over there.”

G: “I didn’t ask, I should’ve asked before coming on the podcast–“

R: “They did it with such glee.”

G: “No, no, Joe.”

R: “I watched.’

G: “You watched?”

Joe then has Jamie pull up a clip of one of CNN’s many Frigid Bitch news anchor ladies saying that Joe Rogan took “a drug used for livestock.” CNN then showed the video Rogan himself made where he talks about the drugs he used to treat his Covid when he got it a few months back.

The whole video is just awesome, Joe Rogan absolutely goes after Gupta for his network’s malicious lies.

At the end, he really drives the point home:

“My point is, you’re working for a news organization. If they’re lying about a comedian taking horse medication, what are they telling us about Russia? What are they telling us about Syria? Do you understand that that’s why people get concerned about the veracity of the news?”

Gupta had no real answer. The video cuts off at that point. He says something about “nuance,” as if the problem was that CNN’s lies weren’t nuanced enough.

The point was made.

There are two broader problems with the media’s lies about Ivermectin:

1. Like Rogan said, if they lied about Ivermectin being a horse medication–knowingly, willingly, shamelessly, blatantly, deliberately–then what else are they lying about? What else have they already lied about? What are they lying about to us currently? And why are they lying? Just for the hell of it? Of course not. What else are they hiding from the American people?
2. Why is the CDC and the media trying to scare people away from Ivermectin? They all know it’s not a horse medicine. It can be used as an antiparasitic in animals–I know my dog gets it–but Ivermectin is a drug for humans. So why would the Powers That Be go to great lengths to lie about this?

Why are they so determined to discourage people from taking Ivermectin?

It’s a safe drug that has been administered billions of times around the world over 3-4 decades now.

But the media and the CDC don’t want you to know that. They want you to think Ivermectin is for horses and if you take it you’re not only an idiot but putting your life in danger.

Why?

The state-run media has had, not a “love/hate” relationship with Florida, but more of an “ignore/emphasize” relationship with Florida based on how the state is doing with Covid cases at a given time. When cases in Florida are spiking, the media’s narrative is “See what happens when you have a Science-Denying Republican Governor!?!?!?! PEOPLE ARE DYING!!!!!!!”

But when Florida is doing relatively well with Covid cases, the media simply ignores Florida and pretends it doesn’t exist, because the media insists that lockdowns, masks and forced vaccinations are the Only Way To Stop Covid.

This is why you don’t hear about Florida anymore:

The key part here is “with no new policy interventions, no vaccine passports and no mask mandates.”

I know this is hard to believe for liberal technocrats, their state media propagandists and the News Watchers out there, but the government is not all-powerful. As hard as it may seem to comprehend, not everything can be fixed with a government policy or program. A viral pandemic is one of those things.

But let’s take a closer look at the Florida chart, because it highlights what a lot of people I follow have been saying about the spiking cases in Florida:

The two worst waves occurred not in the winter, but in the summer months. The 2020 wave started in late June and tapered off by late September.

The current 2021 wave also began in late-June/early-July and is now tapering off in early October.

That’s because, while in the North, people are outdoors more in the summer and indoors more in the winter, it’s kind of the opposite in Florida: people are indoors more in the summer months and outdoors more in the fall and winter.

The heat and humidity in Florida during the summertime is so oppressive and miserable that people tend to stay inside and crank the A/C. But from October to March, the weather in Florida is awesome.

The media doesn’t understand this because most of the media is based in New York and Washington.

Covid spreads indoors. It doesn’t spread outdoors. So it logically follows that when people are cooped up inside their homes, you’re going to see a spike in Covid cases, and when they start spending more time outdoors, you’re going to see cases decline.

It also logically follows that we’re about to see a spike in cases in the Northeast and the Midwest as it gets colders.

I wonder what the media will say then.

---

Another point I want to bring up is the presence of the vaccine. The conventional media narrative is that everyone in Florida is an anti-vaxxer and that’s the reason cases are spiking there. “WELL IF THOSE IDIOTS WOULD’VE JUST GOTTEN THE VACCINE THEN NONE OF THIS WOULD BE HAPPENING!”

Currently, according to Google, 66.1% of the US population has at least one vaccine shot, while 57% is fully vaccinated. On July 1, 2021, those numbers were 55% and 47.3% respectively.

In Florida, they are currently at 67.8% with one dose, and 58.5% fully vaccinated, meaning Florida is above the national average in terms of vaccines as of today.

On July 1, when cases began spiking in Florida, the state was 53.8% with one shot, 45.9% fully vaccinated. This means Florida was slightly below the national average back then.

Does it really make sense that Florida saw an outsized spike in Covid cases because they were fractionally below the national average in vaccinations? Of course not.

And, as we can see from the chart above, this current wave of cases in Florida was considerably worse than the wave it experienced in the summer of 2020, when 0% of the population was vaccinated.

Even if you’d counter by saying, “Well, a 45.9% vaccination rate isn’t going to stop Covid, it has to be at least 85-90%,” the obvious response to that is, “Shouldn’t the vaccine have at least helped somewhat?”

Even if herd immunity is 85-90% like the “experts” say it is, having 46% of your population vaccinated should at least help somewhat in mitigating the spread of the virus, right?

But it didn’t in Florida. In fact, the Covid situation in Florida was even worse after the vaccine was introduced.

I’m sure the fear porn consumers would respond that the summer 2021 spike would’ve been a lot worse without the vaccine, because that’s their last resort defense for the vaccine. But there’s no way of knowing this. It’s unfalsifiable. It’s unprovable. I don’t care what all the “experts” and their “models” say, there is absolutely no way they can prove that the Covid situation would’ve been worse without the vaccine. You cannot say “Well according to my model x number more people would’ve gotten Covid and x number more people would’ve died if there wasn’t a vaccine.” Models are not real life. Models are frequently wrong. And on top of that, I don’t trust the motives of the “experts” and their “models.”

The bottom line is that we now have Covid data for two full summers in Florida: one where 0% of the population was vaccinated, and one where 45.9% of the population was vaccinated (and of course that number increased by the day).

There were fewer cases during the summer where 0% of the population was vaccinated than there were during the summer where about half the population was vaccinated.

Now of course there are other factors here. People will say, “But the Delta Variant is more contagious!!!”

True. But what about the possibility that the virus only mutated into the Delta Variant because of the vaccines?

That’s a whole ‘nother can of worms, though.

This is from TIME Magazine yesterday:

If April 2020 was the month of pink slips—as the rapid spread of COVID-19 resulted in the loss of 20.5 million jobs—then Fall 2021 is the dawn of their revenge.

A record-breaking 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs in August across an array of industries, according to a report released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That’s the highest level since the agency started tracking such data in 2000, and the sixth consecutive month of sky-high quitting rates. Meanwhile, the 7.7 million people who remain unemployed aren’t, for the most part, jumping at the roughly 10.4 million job openings—leaving business after business with ‘Help Wanted’ placards in their windows.

In August, some 892,000 workers quit accommodation and food services jobs and 721,000 quit retail positions, according to BLS data. The healthcare sector also took a hit: 534,000 U.S. workers resigned or quit from health care and social assistance positions.

Those stats may seem puzzling. After months of economic- and pandemic-fueled uncertainty, things are finally looking up: schools are reopening, the vaccine is widely available, businesses are expanding, and the economy is broadly resurgent. But, labor experts say, that rosy picture doesn’t take into account the national mood. Americans, they say, are simply burned out—and emboldened by the current labor market.

“[Employees] don’t want to return to backbreaking or boring, low wage, sh-t jobs,” Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, tells TIME. “Workers are burned out. They’re fed up. They’re fried. In the wake of so much hardship, and illness and death during the past year, they’re not going to take it anymore.”

Robert Reich is absolutely correct about this. It’s hard for people to find fulfillment in a primarily service-based economy. Service jobs fucking suck.

As much as people want to demean “backbreaking” jobs, at least in those jobs, a person can actually feel like they’re doing something. You work construction, you build a house where there was previously just an empty lot, and you can feel good about building something for someone. A plumber can feel good after a hard day’s work because he’s helped a family out that was dealing with a problem in their house. If you work in manufacturing, you’re creating something. It’s inherently more fulfilling than a service-sector job, even though it’s more physically strenuous and/or dangerous.

TIME continues to try to get to the bottom of this whole situation:

There’s no single factor driving workforce behavior, economists add. It’s more of a grab bag of diffuse burdens. Wages aren’t keeping up with surging prices. Low-wage jobs often lack opportunities for career growth. A crumbling childcare industry is driving up daycare costs, making work unaffordable. Those who have remained in jobs face increasing responsibility and grueling work conditions punctuated by fears of the next variant of COVID-19. And then there’s just plain old vanilla pandemic fatigue.

But here’s the problem: all those things were true before August 2021, and well before Covid hit. Washington Post ran an article back in August 2018 entitled “In US, Wage Growth is Being Wiped Out Entirely by Inflation.” Real wage growth in the US has been stagnant for decades:

And low-wage jobs have always been sucky, dead-end situations. Daycare costs have been pretty outrageous for a while now.

None of those things explain why people are quitting their jobs at a record pace now.

Why now?

I’m sure we’re both thinking the same thing: vaccine mandates.

We saw this past weekend what happened with Southwest Airlines, where 2,000+ flights were canceled because the pilots rebelled against the company’s unreasonable and draconian vaccine mandates (ironically, Southwest is the company that prattles on endlessly about “Love.” Even their stock ticker symbol is “LUV”.)

But TIME assures readers that, no, these mass resignations that are happening all around the country have absolutely nothing at all to do with the vaccine mandates:

Data from big employers across the country suggest that vaccine mandates aren’t playing much of a role. Roughly 99% of Michigan’s Henry Ford Health System’s 33,000 employees complied with its vaccine mandate, according to the local NBC affiliate. In Washington State, University of Washington hospitals reported 97% of staff were vaccinated by the end of September, according to local NPR station KUOW. More than 90% of Tyson Foods’ 120,000-person workforce were vaccinated in the same time frame.

So TIME cites data from three companies and concludes it’s enough proof that the vaccine mandate isn’t causing workers to quit at record-levels. It must just be a coincidence.

But can you see the problem with that paragraph above? It only counts people who are currently employed at those places.

In other words, it doesn’t count the people who quit their jobs due to, or were fired for not complying with, the vaccine mandate. It’s a classic case of selection bias.

This is like going to Fenway Park and asking 100 people what they think of the Yankees, and then concluding that everyone in America hates the Yankees.

The bottom line is, TIME magazine’s article provides no good explanation for why Americans are quitting their jobs in record numbers.

But we all know the real reason, even if it’s taboo to say it. It’s the vaccine mandate.

If we look at Google Trends, we can see that interest in the term “vaccine mandate” began spiking in late July of this year:

And then, in August, we saw a record number of workers quit their jobs.

You’d have to be pretty dense to believe this is just a coincidence.

Is it so hard to believe that there are people out there who are against the idea of being forced to take a vaccine for a virus with a 99.7% survival rate, or whatever the hell it is? The point is, people can see through the bullshit. They aren’t afraid of Covid, so they don’t feel like it should be mandatory for them to get the shot. They feel like there must be something else going on here. It just doesn’t add up.

Add in the fact that a lot of these workers are just plain sick of wearing masks all day, every day at work. Wearing a mask fucking sucks. That’s why nearly half of the Americans who quit their jobs in August were in the food service, accommodation and retail industries.

As I said above, I think Robert Reich was entirely right when he said Americans are sick of working bullshit jobs for shitty wages. But when you add on to that the fact that they now have to get vaccinated and wear a mask all day, well of course people are going to say “Fuck this.” Many of them already hated their jobs to begin with.

You make them get the vaccine in order to stay employed, and a lot of them are going to conclude that keeping their job just isn’t worth acquiescing to a vaccine mandate.

I guess it turns out that these companies don’t have as much leverage over their employees as they think they do. Americans don’t value their jobs enough to the point where you can force them to get vaccinated.

American workers are now starting to realize the power they have if they just band together and refuse to comply:

Recent months have seen a rise in labor activity, including October strikes facilitated by school bus drivers in Maryland and janitors at a Denver airport, and threats of strikes among film and television producers and John Deere employees.

Reich says the current BLS numbers already point at a nationwide walk-out. Workers, after all, don’t have to picket to flex their power in today’s job market.

“People are quitting and they’re not taking jobs,” he says. “That’s tantamount to a strike. American workers have, in effect, called a general strike.”

And Americans are not going through the traditional labor unions to pull off this “general strike” we’re now seeing. They’re doing it organically and on their own. It’s grassroots. Many workers are banding together and rebelling against their employers even without being part of a formal labor union. And this is good because a lot of the big, well-known labor unions are corrupted and in thrall to the Democratic Party.

If organized labor in this country was still honest and committed to the workers, we would have seen the SEIU and all the big unions organize general strikes over the vaccine mandates months ago. Instead we haven’t heard a peep.

Someone with a bigger platform than me ought to organize a nationwide American Workers Against Vaccine Mandates Union and get workers from every industry to band together over this.

This report comes from Nikkei Asia, an English-language Japanese news outlet which is considered the “sister publication” to the Financial Times:

TOKYO — Purchases of PCR tests in China’s Hubei Province surged months before the first official reports of a novel coronavirus case there, according to a report by Australia-based cybersecurity company Internet 2.0.

About 67.4 million yuan ($10.5 million at current rates) was spent on PCR tests in Hubei during 2019, nearly double the 2018 total, with the upswing starting in May, according to the report.

Internet 2.0 collected and analyzed data from a website that aggregates information on public procurement bids in China. The analysis team consists of former officials from intelligence agencies in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and other countries.

The report casts further doubt on China’s official line about the origins of the virus, a topic that has fueled tensions between Beijing and Washington. China’s foreign ministry has disputed the report’s findings.

PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, tests are used to detect the presence of a particular genetic sequence in a sample, and they have applications beyond COVID-19 testing. But the report alleges the unusual uptick likely signals awareness of a new disease spreading in and around Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province.

PCR tests were invented way back in 1983, so it’s technology that has been around for a long time.

Orders doubled from universities, jumped fivefold from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and surged tenfold from animal testing bureaus. Purchases from hospitals declined by more than 10%.

Monthly procurement data shows a spike in orders in May, especially from CDC buyers and the People’s Liberation Army.

“We believe the increased spending in May suggests this as the earliest start date for possible infection,” the report said.

Purchases rose sharply from July through October as well, in particular from the Wuhan University of Science and Technology. The institution spent 8.92 million yuan on PCR tests in 2019, about eight times its total for the previous year.

“We can’t say for sure with just” the public procurement information, said Akira Igata, a visiting professor at Tama Graduate School of Business in Tokyo who examined that data independently, “but it’s strong information for making the case that there was awareness of a virus outbreak around Wuhan several months to half a year before that December.”

Of course, China denies the report. They’d never tell us if they were actually behind, nor will we ever believe their denials even if they actually weren’t behind it.

But it does seem as if the Fauci Virus popped up a lot earlier than we thought, and China knew it the whole time.

They are planning a new IRS rule that requires banks to report all transactions over $600. The current rule in place is any transactions over $10,000, so this is quite a dramatic expansion of the IRS’ power. And that’s what it really boils down to: power.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is defending a Biden administration proposal that would require banks to report data to the Internal Revenue Service on transactions over $600, calling the collection of information “routine,” after taking heat for the idea that is widely seen as an unprecedented invasion of privacy.

During an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday, Yellen was pressed on whether the IRS has the “wherewithal” to collect more information about taxpayers and bank accounts including cash flows, something many Republicans have called invasive.

“Well, of course they do,” Yellen said. “Right now, on every bank account that earns more than $10 a year in interest, the banks report the interest earned to the IRS. That’s part of the information base that includes W2’s and reports on dividends in other income that taxpayers earned. So collection of information is routine.”

What she doesn’t mention is that in order to make $10 a year in interest from a savings account, even with a high-yield savings account which pays out 0.5% interest, you’d have to have $2,000 in the bank to get $10.

But most people don’t even get 0.5% interest on their savings. The national average right now is 0.06%. The Chase Premier Savings account right now offers 0.01% APY, and that’s pretty standard for big banks, meaning you’re not getting $10 in interest unless you have $10,000 in the bank.

So it’s a pretty dramatic leap to go from $10,000 to $600 accounts.

Yellen cited the “enormous tax gap” in the US as the reason behind the proposed tax hikes and information collecting, blaming the gap on places where information on income “can be hidden.” 

Yeah, I’m sure the reason the federal government can’t pay its bills is because of people with $650 in their savings accounts.

“It’s just a few pieces of information about individual bank accounts, nothing at the transaction level that would violate privacy,” the secretary said. 

Of course it is.

The collected information would ostensibly help the Treasury Department determine which high-income wealthy individuals may be concealing transactions and income, and “these would be helpful indicators of where it would make sense for auditing to occur,” she added. 

Americans are now so broke that you’re considered “high-income” if you make a purchase over $600.

Buy a TV? Reported to the IRS. Buy a couch? IRS.

Get bottle service at a nightclub? IRS knows about it.

I wonder if the IRS will have some questions for Hunter Biden when he withdraws $600 from an ATM to buy an 8-ball of blow and some hookers. For some reason I doubt it.

Under the proposal, banks would be required to turn over aggregate inflow and outflow numbers annually to the IRS and would cover bank accounts with at least $600 or at least $600 worth of transactions, according to the Wall Street Journal.

When it’s worded this way, it makes it sound as if every bank account with at least $600 is going to be scrutinized by the IRS. In other words, the majority of Americans’ bank accounts.

Apparently a Republican Senator ripped Yellen for the plan, although one would venture to guess she didn’t do so on behalf of the average American, she did so on behalf of her wealthy donors and puppet-masters:

The proposal has been slammed by Republicans as an invasion of privacy. Last week, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) slammed the Treasury secretary during a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Development Committee hearing, asking if she was aware of “how unnecessary this regulatory burden is?”

“Do you distrust the American people so much that you need to know when they bought a couch? Or a cow?” the Republican senator asked.

“There are obvious privacy concerns for all Americans here and this represents a dramatic new regulatory burden for community banks and credit unions in Wyoming and elsewhere,” Lummis added.

“Bank customers are not subjects to the federal government. Banks do not work for the IRS.”

Yellen defended the plan, telling the senator, “Banks already report directly to the IRS the interest that they pay on accounts when it exceeds $10, and this is not a proposal to provide detailed transaction-level data by banks to the IRS.”

“Well, $600 threshold is not usually where you’re going to find the massive amount of tax revenue you think Americans are cheating you out of,” Lummis fired back.

“That’s correct,” Yellen admitted, “but it’s important to have comprehensive information so that individuals can’t game the system and have multiple accounts.”

Gee, Janet, it almost sounds like you’ve found the solution to your problem right there: capping the number of bank accounts an individual can have.

But it’s not about that. It’s about knowing every last thing about you. It’s about spying on you. It’s about having you by the balls every second of your life. It’s about making sure there is nowhere to hide. It’s about making sure Americans have no privacy whatsoever.

Look, I get the whole “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” angle, aka Communism. And while I have nothing to hide, it’s more about the principle. It’s the government taking a position where they inherently distrust the American people. It gives the more access into our personal lives.

I know there are a lot of people out there that are under this impression that the government is all-powerful and has the right to know literally everything about you. It’s just how a lot of people think, and they’ve always thought that way.

But the government should not be all-powerful. That’s the whole point of America, actually. That’s why the Constitution exists: it tells the government what it can and cannot do. The Founders never intended the government to have oversight over everything that happens in this country. Hell, when this country was founded, there wasn’t even a federal income tax. That didn’t happen until 1913.

The whole idea at the start of America was that we’d have a federal government for regulating interstate commerce, raising an army (and only in times of war, too, but that’s ancient history now), maintaining international relations, and imposing tariffs. That was basically it. At the very start of things in America, there were only three Federal Cabinet-level departments: State, Treasury and War (now Defense).

But then Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary, wanted to establish a central bank in America. The Constitution, however, didn’t say anything about a central bank, so it was believed that it was unconstitutional to create one. Establishing a central bank in the United States was not listed among the “enumerated powers” (i.e. explicit) of the Federal government.

Hamilton, however, pointed to the “necessary and proper” clause in the Constitution, which basically said that the government has powers that aren’t explicitly granted by the Constitution. That opened up the “implied powers” Pandora’s Box, and over the years, the government has taken more and more “implied powers” and continues to do so today. This is the “necessary and proper” clause, otherwise known as the “elastic clause”:

“To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”

So basically what this clause means is that the government has powers to do things which are not specifically listed in the Constitution, as long as those things are deemed “necessary and proper.”

Defenders might say that the “necessary and proper” clause gives the Constitution flexibility and an ability to change with the times. But isn’t that what the Amendment process is for?

As always with government, you give an inch, they take a mile. The “necessary and proper” clause now basically means the “unlimited power” clause because it’s been stretched and exploited over the years.

Nowadays, though, it doesn’t even really matter. It’s not even about Congress having theoretically unlimited power, it’s the executive branch now, which all the federal agencies fall under. Nowadays, unelected federal bureaucrats just make new “rules.”

However, the Biden invasion of privacy plan does still have to pass Congress.

While I’m sure the Democrats are all on board with it, because in their minds, All Your Money Belongs To Us, maybe the useless Republican Party will find a way to block it after pressure from its corporate overlords, who apparently are against it.

Still, though, I’m not hopeful. I’m sure the big multinational corporations don’t care one way or another since they already employ battalions of lawyers and accountants to find loopholes and skirt any rules they don’t like.

I have absolutely zero faith the Republican Party will do anything beneficial for the average American. Anything at all, ever.

I found more on this Biden proposal on Zero Hedge. Get a load of this:

Under the Bank Secrecy Act, U.S. financial institutions are currently mandated to report to the government all wire transfers over $10,000, as well as suspicious cash transactions, to prevent criminal activities such as money laundering.

However, Biden and Democratic allies in Congress claim the threshold needs to be lowered to close the “tax gap,” which is the difference between what current federal law requires to be collected by the government and how much actually goes into the Treasury.

The president has maintained that the new reporting rule will mean “the wealthy can no longer hide what they’re making and they can finally begin to pay their fair share of what they owe.”

“That isn’t about raising their taxes. It’s about the super-wealthy finally beginning to pay what they owe—what the existing tax code calls for—just like hardworking Americans do all over this country every Tax Day,” Biden said at a press conference on Sept. 16.

At that same conference, the president noted that 55 of the biggest and most profitable corporations in America paid no federal income taxes in 2020, on what amounted to $40 billion in profit.

“That’s not right. And my economic plan will change that. Not punish anybody, just make them pay their fair share,” he said.

Yeah, I’m sure the 55 largest corporations in the world are hiding their money in $600 savings accounts.

This is yet another step in the government’s war on privacy.

The News-Watchers will probably support it because they support big corporations Paying Their Fair Share, plus they figure they have nothing to worry about since they have nothing to hide.

And they’ll look at you sideways for opposing the government’s plan to monitor your bank account 24/7. What do you have to hide?

The News-Watchers are under the impression that the increasingly totalitarian government isn’t coming for them, it’s coming for the “bad people.” The Trump supporters; the Racists, the unvaxxed. And that’s all fine with them.

But what they don’t realize is their dream of selective tyranny will ultimately just become full-blown tyranny. Was the Soviet Union only harsh to Capitalists and Subversives? No, it was harsh to everybody.

An increasingly paranoid and power-hungry government has an ever-growing enemies list, and eventually that list will grow to include everyone. Including the obedient News-Watchers, who will probably happily welcome every advance of state power and tell themselves “It’s for my own good.”

The propaganda they consume daily has them living in fear, and because of that fear they will give up any and every right they have if it means combating the media’s latest cooked-up bogeyman, whether it be Radical Islamic Terrorists, Russia, Climate Change, White Supremacists, Donald Trump, Covid-19, the Unvaccinated or what have you.

As if the Biden’s bank scheme wasn’t enough, now comes a report from Forbes that Google has been feeding people’s search history to the government:

Exclusive: Government Secretly Orders Google To Identify Anyone Who Searched A Sexual Assault Victim’s Name, Address And Telephone Number

The U.S. government is secretly ordering Google to provide data on anyone typing in certain search terms, an accidentally unsealed court document shows. There are fears such “keyword warrants” threaten to implicate innocent Web users in serious crimes and are more common than previously thought.

In 2019, federal investigators in Wisconsin were hunting men they believed had participated in the trafficking and sexual abuse of a minor. She had gone missing that year but had emerged claiming to have been kidnapped and sexually assaulted, according to a search warrant reviewed by Forbes. In an attempt to chase down the perpetrators, investigators turned to Google, asking the tech giant to provide information on anyone who had searched for the victim’s name, two spellings of her mother’s name and her address over 16 days across the year. After being asked to provide all relevant Google accounts and IP addresses of those who made the searches, Google responded with data in mid-2020, though the court documents do not reveal how many users had their data sent to the government.

It’s a rare example of a so-called keyword warrant and, with the number of search terms included, the broadest on record.

 Before this latest case, only two keyword warrants had been made public. One revealed in 2020 asked for anyone who had searched for the address of an arson victim who was a witness in the government’s racketeering case against singer R Kelly. Another, detailed in 2017, revealed that a Minnesota judge signed off on a warrant asking Google to provide information on anyone who searched a fraud victim’s name from within the city of Edina, where the crime took place.

While Google deals with thousands of such orders every year, the keyword warrant is one of the more contentious. In many cases, the government will already have a specific Google account that they want information on and have proof it’s linked to a crime. But search term orders are effectively fishing expeditions, hoping to ensnare possible suspects whose identities the government does not know. It’s not dissimilar to so-called geofence warrants, where investigators ask Google to provide information on anyone within the location of a crime scene at a given time.

Privacy experts are concerned about the precedent set by such warrants and the potential for any such order to be a breach of Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable searches. There are also concerns about First Amendment freedom of speech issues, given the potential to cause anxiety amongst Google users that their identities could be handed to the government because of what they searched for.

“Trawling through Google’s search history database enables police to identify people merely based on what they might have been thinking about, for whatever reason, at some point in the past. This is a virtual dragnet through the public’s interests, beliefs, opinions, values and friendships, akin to mind reading powered by the Google time machine,” said Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “This never-before-possible technique threatens First Amendment interests and will inevitably sweep up innocent people, especially if the keyword terms are not unique and the time frame not precise. To make matters worse, police are currently doing this in secret, which insulates the practice from public debate and regulation.”

The Wisconsin case was supposed to have remained secret, too. The warrant only came to light because it was accidentally unsealed by the Justice Department in September.

I mean, you’d have to be pretty dumb to not just assume Google has been working with the government the whole time. After all, Google was founded with CIA money. (Same with Facebook). When you use Google, you have to assume the government can see everything you search.

But now we have confirmation that this is happening.

To recap: they’re already monitoring your Google search history, and now they want to monitor your bank account.

This is from an article in Newsweek entitled “Macron, France reject American ‘Woke’ Culture That’s ‘Racializing’ Their Country.”

After French President Emmanuel Macron recalled his ambassadors from the U.S. in the wake of a submarine deal with Australia that was torpedoed by President Joe Biden‘s administration, French media are now reexamining everything about America.

The latest target? “Woke” ideology.

One of France’s leading magazines, Le Spectacle Du Monde, ran a cover story titled “The Suicide of America.” The magazine blamed America’s retreat from Afghanistan on “a woke dictatorship” and questioned whether the American “empire was collapsing.”

In the same issue, an article faulted U.S. universities as islands of extremism, where even students’ Halloween costumes are policed, citing Yale University as a place where “offensive” costume-wearers were punished.

When even France says you’re too lib, you have a major problem.

But that idea of the “suicide of America” is bang-on. You can’t destroy America with an invading army or an explicit assault. It’s impossible. We’ve got two oceans separating us from anyone who wishes harm upon us. Our military, even as corrupted as it has been by woke generals, can still kick ass.

You have to destroy America from within. And that’s the point of all this “woke” stuff that has turned the young generations into blue-haired pansexual communists and turned the clock back on race relations to the 1950s.

Just think about it: if you were a hostile enemy nation and you wanted to destroy, or at least severely weaken America, how would you do it?

Well, first you’d want to sow discord and division from within. You take America’s diversity, which for many years was a strength, and turn it into a weakness. Instead of relative racial harmony, you provoke racial resentments and conflicts.

You promote political figures and political polices that will weaken America. And you corrupt the youth by promoting hatred of America, rather than pride. Well, maybe pride isn’t the right word. The young generation has “pride,” just not in America:

That’s all by design. You don’t just go from a historical norm of 2-3% of the population being gay to 17% in one generation. There’s a concerted effort by Hollywood and the Masters of Culture to make it “trendy” to be LGBT, and it’s aimed directly at the young generation, who are the most impressionable and receptive.

I’ve said it dozens of times before but it bears repeating: Leftism is America’s Achilles heel. It’s the downfall of this nation.

And now America is now too woke and leftwing for France:

In an interview with Elle magazine earlier this summer, President Macron said American-imported “woke culture” is “racializing” France and creating more division among minorities. Macron’s comments are seen by some as an attempt to cultivate moderate voters in France, as he is up for reelection in April 2022. The election is expected to be close.

Macron’s anti-woke sentiment is widely shared in his government, even by the delegate minister for gender equality and diversity, Elisabeth Moreno, a [b]lack woman born in Cape Verde, off the coast of western Africa. In a televised interview with Bloomberg, she praised the increased awareness on social issues, but rejected cancel culture because it can “kick out people from ongoing debates because they think otherwise.”

Notice the term “American-imported ‘woke culture.'”

We are exporting our cancerous wokeness to the world. As much as the rest of the world claims to hate America, there’s a hell of a lot of people in other countries obsessed with emulating American culture. What else could explain the BLM protests in France last year?

There was even a BLM “solidarity rally” in South Korea last year!

There are virtually no black people in South Korea. I went on the Wikipedia page for the Demographics of South Korea and did CTRL+F for “black” and “africa” and nothing came up.

The only explanation for a BLM rally in South Korea (and granted it looks like there are barely 50 people in that picture) is that American culture has a worldwide reach and influence.

And American popular culture, unfortunately, is wokeness.

If only it were just a joke:

Interesting:

National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins plans to step down by the end of the year after nearly three decades at the agency, including 12 years at the helm, the agency announced Tuesday.

The 71-year-old physician-geneticist led the agency under three consecutive presidents — making him the first presidentially appointed NIH director to serve in more than one administration and the longest-serving NIH director.

His departure, first reported by POLITICO on Monday night, had been in the works for some time, one person familiar said.

“I fundamentally believe … that no single person should serve in the position too long, and that it’s time to bring in a new scientist to lead the NIH into the future,” Collins said in a statement.

Now this report comes from Politico, which is basically a state media organ, so of course they’re going to take the “No big deal; nothing to see here,” angle.

But I just don’t believe this has been in the works for “some time” and that Collins is only stepping down out of the goodness of his own heart, just like George Washington voluntarily stepping down after two presidential terms. Collins just cares about democracy too damn much, we’re to believe.

Sure, 12 years is a long time, but George W. McCoy served as NIH director for 22 years: from 1915 to 1937. It’s not as if Collins has been in his position longer than any of his predecessors.

And Anthony Fauci has been at the helm of NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) since 1984. Why doesn’t Fauci share Collins’ purported concerns about holding power for too long?

Why would the director of the NIH step down in the middle of what we’re told is the greatest public health emergency in over 100 years? Why now?

That’s like a general retiring in the middle of a war: it just doesn’t make sense, unless there’s some other reason for it that we’re not being told. Like Abraham Lincoln said, “it’s best not to swap horses while crossing a river.”

Does it make any sense for the director of the NIH to suddenly say in the middle of a global pandemic, the worst since the Spanish Flu of 1918, “You know what, I’ve been in this position for too long. It’s time for me to step aside and let someone else take the reigns”?

No, it doesn’t.

Now, Politico’s article alluded to a potential explanation here:

“This is the way it ought to be,” Collins said about the Food and Drug Administration’s decision late last month to limit boosters to certain vulnerable populations for now, despite the Biden administration’s pledge that boosters would launch broadly by Sept. 20. “Science sort of playing out in a very transparent way, looking at the data coming from multiple places, our country, other countries, and trying to make the best decision for right now,” he said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Maybe he was pushed out by the Biden White House for being at odds with them on the booster shots. Or maybe he’s resigning because the Administration is going forward with booster shots anyway, despite the SCIENCE advising against it.

It could also have something to do with the recent release of documents, facilitated by The Intercept, which showed that the NIH, Anthony Fauci in particular, were, despite previous denials, engaged in funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China. That’s what Breitbart is saying.

Raheem Kassam and Natalie Winters at National Pulse wrote an article about the “6 Scandals The Media Wont’ Tell You About Involving Outgoing NIH Director Francis Collins.” I’ll just summarize the headlines, you can click the link if you want more in-depth information:

1. Francis Collins Advises Chinese Military Proxy-Linked Group Working Alongside COVID-19 Gene Storage Firm.
2. Collins Admits Funding Wuhan Lab: ‘We Had No Control Over What They Were Doing.’
3. EVIDENCE: Fauci’s Bosses Signed Research Deals With Chinese Communist Military Front.
4. INVESTIGATION: U.S. Has Funded Over 250 Studies for Chinese Communist Military Researchers.
5. America Has Given Millions for ‘Research’ At Chinese Communist-Run Facilities Since COVID Outbreak.
6. U.S. National Institutes of Health Fires 54 Researchers As Ongoing Investigation Reveals 93% Failed to Disclose Links to Chinese Communist Party

At any rate, Collins’ sudden departure from NIH means he’s now the third high-ranking health official in the past several weeks to step down. Two FDA officials resigned over the booster shot not long ago.

Something is afoot.