Happy New Year!
Partying hard, especially the one on the far right
Misinformation spreads: On a phone call yesterday, my sibling mentioned an article by a car site called motorious. It commented in an article about mandatory kill switches to be sold in all new cars:
According to an article written by former U.S. Representative Bob Barr, hidden away in the recently passed infrastructure bill, the very one I warned before would negatively impact drivers across the country if it were to pass, is a measure to install vehicle kill switches into every new car, truck, and SUV sold in this country.
The motorious article, which was also mentioned again here in a comment, pointed to the horrors of police and hackers being able to turn off a car’s engine for good or bad reasons. The story piqued my interest. I checked out the morotious article and it linked to an article that the fascist, propaganda source Daily Caller had posted (fact and bias rating here). As we all recall, in congress Bob Barr was a Christofascist jackass and shameless liar. Following up, I found that the highly reputable AP wrote this about the kill switch story:
CLAIM: President Joe Biden signed a bill that will give law enforcement access to a “kill switch” that will be attached to ALL new cars in 2026.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. While the bipartisan infrastructure bill Biden signed last year requires advanced drunk and impaired driving technology to become standard equipment in new cars, experts say that technology doesn’t amount to a “kill switch,” and nothing in the bill gives law enforcement access to those systems.
.... in the months since the law passed, some social media users have misrepresented the provision online, falsely claiming it will give police access to data collected by the technology or allow the government to shut down cars remotely.
“Joe Biden signed a bill that would give law enforcement access to a ‘kill switch’ that will be attached to ALL new cars in 2026,” read several posts shared widely on Twitter and Facebook.
Experts who have for years been involved in creating and studying impaired driving prevention technology say that those claims don’t accurately reflect what these tools do, nor what the law says.
The point here is obvious. One has got to take sensational information like this with a grain of salt. Content on the internet is chock full of liars, grifters, fascists, Christian Taliban zealots and the like, all of whom have a self-serving agenda, usually money and/or power.
Yeah, maybe hackers will figure out how to shut a car down some day. And maybe in time, law enforcement will weasel its way in and try to get control of every car on the road. But we're not there yet. The shamelessly mendacious Christofascist right is using this to foment irrational fear and to slander Biden and Democrats in power generally.
From the It’s not a conflict of interest files: The NYT writes: “A Charity Tied to the Supreme Court Offers Donors Access to the Justices. The Supreme Court Historical Society has raised more than $23 million in the last two decades, much of it from lawyers, corporations and special interests.”
It’s not a conflict of interest. It’s just free speech.
Fossilized climate change denier retires from US Senate:
Farewell To The Senate’s Biggest Climate Denier. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) leaves behind a legacy of climate disinformation, and a small army of pro-industry contrarians.
Inhofe, 87, will retire in early January after nearly three decades in the Senate. He leaves behind a legacy of climate denial that might be laughable if it weren’t so embarrassing and dangerous. There are few members of Congress who have done more to sow public doubt about the mounting, deadly impacts of fossil fuel-driven planetary warming, or to block policies and regulations meant to confront the threat.
I recall Inhofe once saying that climate is God’s work, not something that humans can possibly ever affect. He was chairman of the Senate Environment Committee. The Republican Party, what can one say? Anti-inconvenient truth, anti-inconvenient science and anti-rationality, among some other bad things.
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