90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, December 29, 2022

EPA cracks down on trucking industry to push an all-electric fleet

Big government loves to trod on the little guy, the citizen, the tax slave.

As history would show, economic collapse ushers in absolute tyranny; no wonder "they" can barely hide their agenda for financial ruin. Just take a look at this breakdown of Rand Paul’s Festivus report which details nearly half a trillion dollars just in interest on the national debt because people like Nancy Pelosi and Mitt Romney remain beholden to self and special interests using our money.

Enter the newest EPA “regulations” — what a nice euphemism for the illegality of the Fourth Branch of bureaucrats making de facto laws! From a piece by Candace Hathaway at Blaze Media:

The Environmental Protection Agency announced it would enforce tighter pollution regulations on heavy-duty trucks, vans, and buses. The stricter nitrogen dioxide emissions standards could lead to higher operating costs for the trucking industry….

The EPA’s new regulations, which impact vehicles manufactured after 2027, aim to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by approximately 50% by 2045.

According to the EPA, the recently announced emission rule is the ‘strongest-ever national clean air standards to cut smog- and soot-forming emissions from heavy-duty trucks.’ The EPA boasted that the new standard is 80% stronger than current regulations.

The agency admits that the more stringent standards are meant to force the trucking industry to transition away from diesel-powered vehicles and replace fleets with electric vehicles.

You read that right: in a world where cold weather prevents EVs from charging, water exposure leads to spontaneous combustion, and inefficient technology leaves people stranded, comrades in the bureaucracy want to force the entire diesel trucking industry to comply with the Green agenda measures. For reference, a trucking industry website stated that there are “more than 15 million commercial vehicles” in the U.S., and “76% are powered by diesel engines.” Simple math would therefore show that the EPA set its sights on 11,400,000 commercial trucking vehicles that make our world go round.

An overwhelming majority of us are utterly dependent upon truckers and their diesel engines; they are the lifeblood of our First World (although rapidly deteriorating) economy… and the big government elites know this.

Forced compliance with the latest “regulations” from the EPA would see the entire fleet of the trucking industry switch to electric, and with that, the government would have unfettered control. Just take a look at what’s going on in Germany — from an article yesterday:

'The positive value of gender-affirming care is not in scientific or medical dispute'

President Biden’s top transgender-activist appointee says body-altering “gender-affirming care” for people attempting to live as the opposite sex is “not in scientific or medical dispute,” and is urging doctors to work with Big Tech companies to effectively help eradicate such “disinformation.”

In a newly surfaced video, Dr. Rachel Levine, formerly Dr. Richard Levine, describes the “onslaught” of conservative “anti-LGBTQI+” state legislative efforts, which mainly oppose the transgender youth agenda, as “dangerous to the public health.” He says there is “substantial misinformation” surrounding the issue and looks to tech giants to partner with health professionals “to create a healthier, cleaner, information environment."

Levine’s remarks touched off a cascade of criticism in social media: “Not in dispute. This is a lie,” tweeted one Belfast critic, who linked to a post about a leading Swedish hospital that banned “puberty blockers” and cross-sex hormones for minors in 2021.

Rachel Levine, courtesy Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf via Flickr

Worldwide, trans programs aimed at minors changing their “gender” are under more scrutiny than ever, with several nations following the lead of the U.K., which has moved to regulate cross-sex medical treatments for minors after a public outcry surrounding children victimized at the country’s leading "pediatric gender clinic.”

In the United States, many states are considering legislation banning cross-sex hormone “therapy” and body-mutilating trans operations (e.g., surgical removal of healthy female breasts) for underage children. And young “detransitioners” like Chloe Cole who say they were rushed into trans surgeries are speaking out and even suing pro-trans doctors and therapists, whom Cole calls “butchers and liars.”

Levine, appointed by Biden as assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, is hailed by LGBT activists as the first openly “transgender” presidential appointee to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Born male and having attended an all-boys school, Levine married a woman, psychiatrist Martha Peaslee, and fathered a...

Visage à trois #682

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Two Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #861

Strange Deep State Bedfellows

How long can the alliance between the surveillance state and what looks like an increasingly lunatic ruling class last?

Victor Davis Hanson’s recent mordant comments about the degree to which the FBI will go to influence elections and its shameless defense of this interference caused me to think about the surveillance state’s endgame. These somber thoughts came, not incidentally, after I had immersed myself in reading about the possible (perhaps likely) CIA involvement in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As Jim Douglass shows in JFK and the Unspeakable, a work to which Tucker Carlson recently referred in discussing the unwillingness of the Biden Administration to release CIA documents related to the assassination, the Warren Report released in 1964 to explain the killing in Dallas was a cover-up. Kennedy, it seems, was concerned about the CIA’s largely uncontrolled exercise of power and planned to rein it in or possibly even dismantle it. Plentiful hints lead to the conclusion that the agency knew of the planned assassination and then worked to cover up evidence about its origin and participants.

If the Left was correct in warning about the dangers of national surveillance agencies throughout the Cold War, I’m not about to award any prize to my former Stalinoid classmates and teachers at Yale. Leftist journalists and politicians like George McGovern were against our surveillance agencies because they scorned them as anti-Communist. I have noted throughout my life the Left’s fondness for communist dictatorships and their opposition to U.S. efforts to unseat such grisly tyrannies. Unfortunately, the Right in turn has exaggerated the “conservatism” of surveillance agencies, and even when countervailing evidence existed, persisted in viewing those who worked for these agencies as being uniformly on the right. There was no evidence for this generalization during the Cold War, even if the CIA funded the early National Review and may have lavished largesse on James Burnham and William F. Buckley. The same agency gave even larger sums to the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other left-of-center organizations that supported its anti-Communist activities. If the FBI surveilled Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1950s and 1960s, it was because that civil rights leader had communist advisors, and anti-communism was the big issue back then. Now surveillance agencies have switched targets and are warning against a “right-wing coup.”

I’m still trying to figure out where the close alliance between surveillance agencies and the woke Left, which has been evident since at least the Obama Administration, may lead. I have no doubt this friendship is based more on power considerations than ideological affinity.

Although John Brennan once voted for the Communist Party’s presidential candidate and James Comey’s wife and daughter were enthusiastic Hillary Clinton fans in 2016, I’m not sure the CIA and FBI will remain attached to the present Left come hell or highwater. There is no Nibelungentreue, the term drawn from Wagner’s opera and applied to the rash unconditional support the German government pledged to the Austrian monarchy on the eve of the Great War, which ties our surveillance agencies to our weird Left. Christopher Wray is not working for Adam Schiff or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Nor is there any compelling proof that the FBI cooperated with leftist-controlled electronic media to defeat Donald Trump because FBI agents are wild about the LGBTQ+ movement and Black Lives Matter. These agencies were assuring their own sphere of power by gaining the approval of those leftist ideologues in charge of the mainstream media and the administrative state.

One might ask whether a point will be reached where this alliance is no longer useful and when the surveillance state will have to act against onetime allies. Is it really in the interest of those who are trying to exercise power to remain permanently allied to dotty people who are subverting social order and running down public institutions? I’m not posing this as a moral question for those who give no signs of being ethical. My question is purely pragmatic. Do you really want as partners those who use the military to push gender reassignment and incite hatred against white Americans? What about cultivating allies who allow our borders to...