Did You Know? Bonnie Donovan
Did You Know that the federal government can track your activities and speech without you knowing?
Back in the early 1990s I had guests from Germany, and during their visit we had deep conversations about Hitler. I was positive that never ever again could someone like him come to power. I thought that the world learned from the evil events in Germany in the 1930s.
Well, today some 30 years later I realize how naïve I was!
President Joe Biden plans to use the Pretrial Services Agency of the District of Columbia (an agency for tracking parolees) to register and track those who request religious exemptions to vaccine mandates. The Federal Register states that the new system will be effective upon publication on Feb. 10! Hardly enough time for the Supreme Court to intervene, as has been proposed.
That only allows a public comment period of 28 days. Why the rush since other federal agencies’ public comment periods often last months?
This is probably the most alarming indicator of the governments’ overreach during this never-ending pandemic.
This obscure agency, founded in 1997, is now being rebranded as a tracking agency for people who object to the vaccine mandate. Seriously? The sinister overtones are shocking. And in less than two years, since the COVID-19 lockdowns of America began.
Once the federal government has established the principle that it is legal for the government to track down people who oppose vaccine mandates, it is a small step to add people to this tracking process to build a list of others who oppose government-backed policies. This has already started in Virginia with the FBI being assigned to investigate parents who objected to racially-divisive dogma being taught to their children.
Is this a page out of Hitler’s playbook?
The PSA will process the religious request of every federal employee, volunteer, intern or contractor who falls under the mandate and requests a religious exemption. The records may include employees’ religious affiliation, date of birth, job title, home address, age and where they work, and notes on their requests.
From the first moments of the Hitler regime in 1933, IBM used its exclusive punch card technology and its global monopoly on information technology to organize, systematize and accelerate Hitler’s anti-Jewish program, step by step facilitating the tightening noose.
People and asset registration were only one of the many uses Nazi Germany found for high-speed data sorters. Food allocation was organized around databases, allowing Germany to starve the Jews. Slave labor was identified, tracked, and managed largely through punch cards. Punch cards even made the trains run on time and cataloged their human cargo.
Is anybody paying attention to history? You don’t even have to go to the archives for this. It happened only 80 years ago.
Popular social media platforms can track you, censor you and delete you from using their services, if they disagree with your expressed point of view, and they do.
Cookies that are used in every website appear on your computer when you access those websites. They are used to track all your internet surfing. Most of the cookies themselves don’t do harm. But they can be hijacked on your computer by criminals, or by the government.
Have you noticed how when you Google a website, for say a dining table, or a car that for about four weeks, you receive daily advertisements on your tablet, computer or phone for examples of the product you searched for? Somewhere there is an accessible database on your individual activities and preferences that can be tracked and used.
The Biden administration and the tech giants are building a tracking system far more sophisticated than what Hitler had. You do know what cookies are, right?
Back to California and why people are leaving: Gov. Gavin Newsom has allocated another $60 million dollars for three counties — Santa Barbara, Santa Clara and Kern — to create 267 housing units for the homeless. Why Santa Barbara County? Who asked for this money? Why not San Bernardino County, Los Angeles or Orange County?
In March 2021, Santa Barbara County had 2,194 people designated as “homeless.”
Approximately 90 homeless people in each of those counties, including Santa Barbara. will be housed for $20 million. The vast majority of the homeless are victims of substance abuse, mental illness or both.
Instead of approaching this issue with housing and employing wrapped around individual services for the homeless, why are we not using this money to fight the drug trafficking, by closing our borders, which allows the proliferation of these lethal drugs that prey upon the most vulnerable members of our society and destroy their lives? Instead, we put people into housing which is an expensive Band-Aid. We, as a culture, refuse to demand that our monies are spent to close our borders to illegal movement and protect our citizens and our way of life.
A recently published book entitled “San Fran-Sicko” on research into homelessness was written by Michael Shellenberger. It should be required reading for anyone connected to addressing homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction on the streets of cities and towns in California.
Here is a quote from the cover.
“Shellenberger had lived in San Francisco for about 30 years. During that time, he had advocated for the decriminalization of drugs, affordable housing, and alternatives to jail or prison. But as homeless encampments spread and overdoses skyrocketed, Shellenberger decided to take a much closer look at the problem.”
“What he discovered shocked him. The problems had grown worse, not in spite of, but because of progressive policies. San Francisco and other West Coast cities, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland had gone beyond merely tolerating homelessness, drug dealing and crime, to actively enabling them.
“He concluded that the underlying problem isn’t lack of housing, or money for social programs. The real problem is an ideology that designates some people by identity or experience, as victims entitled to destructive behaviors.
“The result is an undermining of the values that make cities, and civilization itself, possible.”
