Once again, the left want to restrict our choices It's all for our own good, right?

I have said it many times before: today’s left are pro-choice on exactly one thing, prenatal infanticide. In everything else, they want the government to take control of your lives. William Teach noted that the Biden Administration are trying to shut down existing coal-fired electricity generation plants through emissions regulations which would force them out of business. The Democrats tried to force every American to take an experimental and long-term untested ‘vaccine’ against COVID-19, punishing those who refused with loss of their jobs. They have put in regulations designed to ban the sales of new gasoline-or-diesel-powered trucks and automobiles by 2035, even as the Administration threaten to shut down the coal-fired generation plants, even though 16.2% of our electricity is produced from burning coal. I’m not quite sure how the math works out in trying to push plug-in electric vehicles and concomitantly reducing our electric generating capacity.

Not only do they want to force people into plug-in electric vehicles, the government also wants to regulate the choices we have in those vehicles:

As cars and trucks get bigger and taller, lawmakers look to protect pedestrians

by Joel Rose | Friday, August 23, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

RUCKERSVILLE, Va. — In a cavernous white room full of bright lights, video cameras and microphones, a driverless cart hurtles at 37 miles per hour into the side of a large SUV.

Researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have crash-tested thousands of cars and trucks like this one over the past three decades at their facility in central Virginia.

But a few years ago, they noticed that those vehicles were getting bigger and heavier. So they decided to make the cart that crashes into them larger, too.

“It was meant to represent a small pickup or a midsize SUV, and those vehicles have gotten heavier and heavier over time,” says Becky Mueller, a senior research engineer at IIHS. “So it’s 500 kilograms more weight because that’s what the vehicle fleet now reflects.”

Americans’ cars and trucks are getting bigger and taller, while roadway fatalities have also climbed sharply over the past decade.

Why have cars and trucks gotten bigger and taller? Because those are the vehicles that the car-buying public have chosen to buy. American automobile manufacturers have moved to produce the vehicles that their customers want to buy. Article continues below the fold, because it contains an embedded video. Continue reading

The Biden Administration want to snoop into your private text messages, looking for COVID “misinformation”

President Biden and his Administration are planning to get tough on social media sources, including text messaging, and ‘conservative news shows’ which question the efficacy and safety of the various COVID-19 vaccines. Our good friend William Teach noted an article from Politico, a site I don’t normally check:

‘Potentially a death sentence’: White House goes off on vaccine fearmongers

The administration has shifted to a head-on strategy to dispel fear-mongering over its door-to-door efforts.

By Natasha Korecki and Eugene Daniels | July 12, 2021 | 1:22 PM EDT

The Biden administration is casting conservative opponents of its Covid-19 vaccine campaign as dangerous and extreme, adopting a more aggressive political posture in an attempt to maneuver through the public health conundrum.

The White House has decided to hit back harder on misinformation and scare tactics after Republican lawmakers and conservative activists pledged to fight the administration’s stated plans to go “door-to-door” to increase vaccination rates. The pushback will include directly calling out social media platforms and conservative news shows that promote such tactics.

Well, at least the authors wrote a good lede paragraph, something vanishing from a lot of journalism these days!

“The big misinterpretation that Fox News or whomever else is saying is that they are essentially envisioning a bunch of federal workers knocking on your door, telling you you’ve got to do something that you don’t want to do,” Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said in an interview on Sunday. “That’s absolutely not the case, it’s trusted messengers who are part of the community doing that — not government officials. So that’s where I think the disconnect is.”

What, the Administration don’t think that the “trusted messengers who are part of the community” haven’t already been talking to their friends? The displacements caused by COVID-19 and the federal, state and local governments’ overreactions to it have been topic number one among people, for five seasons now, whether over the phone, in people getting together — sometimes in violation of ‘gatherings’ limits[1]Petty dictator Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) issued orders that banned families from getting together during Thanksgiving and Christmas in groups of more than ten persons and from more than two … Continue reading — and people finally meeting people they had missed, people getting back to work, and people discussing the odious mask mandates. What the Administration want to do is to send not “trusted messengers who are part of the community” going door-to-door, but people who are not “trusted messengers who are part of the community,” because people have already been talking to the people they’ve known and trusted.

Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.

Really? And just what is an SMS carrier?

An SMS gateway or MMS gateway allows a computer (also known as a Server) to send or receive text messages in the form of Short Message Service (SMS) or Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) transmissions between local and/or international telecommunications networks. In most cases, SMS and MMS are eventually routed to a mobile phone through a wireless carrier. SMS gateways are commonly used as a method for person-to-person to device-to-person (also known as application-to-person) communications. Many SMS gateways support content and media conversions from email, push, voice, and other formats.

It’s not quite the same thing as sending text messages from your phone to one of your friends, or a group of friends, but it’s along the same lines. Unlike a service like Facebook or Twitter, where anyone can access your messages, SMS systems are messages sent directly to individuals or small, specified groups.

Translation: the Biden Administration believe that they have the right to, without a warrant, look into your private messages. This is a 21st century form of wiretapping. How could the Biden Administration know what “misinformation” might be in private messages you might send, or receive, over your phone or computer, unless they look, or get your email or SMS service or wireless telephone carriers to snoop?

We have noted it before: the greatest death threat from COVID-19 has not been to individuals but to our constitutional rights. And the sheeple will go right along with it.

References

References
1 Petty dictator Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) issued orders that banned families from getting together during Thanksgiving and Christmas in groups of more than ten persons and from more than two households. My family did not obey that order.