Seriously? Is this the new reality of not calling shotgun and having to sit in the back seat? I have to wait 2 or 3 seconds AFTER PUSHING A BUTTON before the door decides to open and let me out of the car? And if I try to open it myself — shoving it I guess, because I’m naturally kind of rammy anyway and I’m only used to riding in old cars which don’t try to hazard a guess as to what kind of door-opening process I’d most enjoy — if I try to open it myself, this door is going to get all butt-hurt and FREEZE UP and open even SLOWER?
And you’re telling me they make minivans this way ON PURPOSE now? So that mouth-breathing Americans, maladapted to a sedentary lifestyle, can push a button and start to rock back and forth until their stiff unexercised joints can move enough for them to swing their legs around and begin the laborious process of EXITING A VEHICLE while the door takes its sweet-ass time?
WHAT IF THE CAR CATCHES ON FIRE. There, I said it. I just want to open the door, and quickly. Doors are not supposed to argue with me. Also, modern cars look like bubbles that insects poop out onto the road. I know they have excellent mileage and efficiency and all that, but they’re also DESIGNED TO BREAK after a few years, and if you chip one headlight you have to replace the whole front end, and just TRY finding parts at the junkyard and fixing it yourself.
please click on this and look very closely at it
Before you go off on me about how my ’79 Delta-88 Royale is a gas guzzler, I’d thank you to consider the opinions of my friend Quiet Earp over on my favorite blog Love And Trash. I know I’d feel differently about it if I had a job 45 minutes away, but then again, I’d rather sell plasma 3 times a week than GET a job 45 minutes away. “Pre-cycling” is a real thing. Really.
And don’t even get me started on hybrids. Earp already pontificated on those too. My friend and mechanic Low Rent the Clown once told me it’s not very good for human bodies to sit on a gigantic bank of batteries for long stretches. His relative, a Vietnam vet, got really sick from driving around in his new hybrid, actually. When he returned the car, they gave him ALL his money back, no questions asked. He’s obviously not the only person who’s had this problem. Electrical and magnetic fields = two extra fields of energy to deal with. In a car. In a very small space that’s made of metal. Electricity, battery acid, magnetic fields, and a metal frame … I’m not going to turn down rides or anything, but yeah.
Also I’m not some elitist hipster who’s saying I’m better than you for driving an old car which is made of American steel, which can tow a full-size trailer with its monster, 30-year-old 403 V-8 engine, a car whose doors open and close when you open and close them… I’m just saying I’m not worse than you for driving an old car. Mine gets 20MPG but yours burns up just as many new resources to manufacture (probably not in this country, either) so our footprints are EVEN STEVEN. The old car philosophy has merit: If I run into a brick wall, the brick wall crumbles and the Delta-88 shrugs its shoulders. And if there’s a fire, I open the door, and the door opens, and I exit the car and I don’t catch on fire.
And my Mom just told me her eye doctor told her to get new glasses with more than just wire frames, because if the air bag in her car goes off, it could shatter her glasses, send the shards into her eyes, and make her blind. Instead of hitting her head on the steering wheel and bending it in half and getting maybe a concussion and a broken collarbone from the seatbelt (true story, happened to me). Also, another friend just got in an accident in which she was OK except for the CHEMICAL BURNS on her hands from the airbag.
So that’s your reward for a fuel-efficient hunk of plastic bug turd? An explosive device in your steering wheel which turns a fender-bender into potential handlessness and blindness?
No, *I* will get the door.
#newcarsfreakmeout
LINKS from a Corexit Refugee who’s disaster-fatigued but yall might as well see what I been readin’:
Washington’s Blog: Scientists confirm that dispersants are increasing contamination in the Gulf
YouTube: BP admits using synthetic microbes in Gulf
YouTube: A tale of two wells (dedicated to Matt Simmons R.I.P.)
YouTube: Beyond Petroleum? The real cost of offshore drilling
Star News Online: Positive step in breaking our oil addiction
RawStory: BP among companies Obama excluded from US environmental oversight
Dr. Mark’s Blog: Medical treatments for airborne poisons
YouTube: Gulf oil spill disaster music video – “A Hole in the Ocean”
PRFTG: The Gulf of Mexico is Dying – A Status Report on the BP Oil Spill, Dec. 1
Examiner explosive Gulf oil special report: Crime, PSYOP, global impact (slideshow) (an article about the article above)
PRFTG: An AUTOPSY of the BP Gulf oil well at the Macondo Prospect
Rense: Gulf Stream and North Atlantic current dying – Loop Current in Gulf of Mexico already dead
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: Abrupt climate change – should we be worried?
Gulf Restoration Network: Bird’s Eye View – Quick update from Gulf, new photos
YouTube: Scientific access in the Gulf — BP & Gov’t stand in the way of discovery
BBC News: Louisiana oyster beds remain empty after BP disaster
YouTube: “BP F**ked the World” by Blanco and MC Bizz (so it’s not as danceable as “F**k Katrina” by 5th Ward Webbie – warning, graphic images there – but it’s the jam anyway)
NPR: BP spill psychological scars similar to Exxon Valdez –
“Aaron Hofer, 27, of Bayou La Batre, Ala., has been largely out of work since the BP oil spill. The Iraq veteran and fourth-generation shrimper says if it wasn’t for his children, he probably would have already committed suicide.
“Everybody comes out after a hurricane. You clean up. You bond together,” Maumenee says. But the opposite is true of a man-made disaster like the oil spill … “What you see are families against families, brothers against sisters, neighbors against neighbors,” she says. “The community becomes quite corrosive.”"
“People are stealing, lying, cheating, doing anything they can to make it. I don’t want to end up like that. I really don’t”. – Lena Hofer
NPR: BP oil well capped, but trauma still flowing
Onearth.org: These Men Don’t Cry – Hard times for Gulf Coast Vietnamese
NWF: Removing oil from marshes not without risk
YouTube: Boat engine causes oil to rise from seafloor – “just dead, everything’s dead”
temperature comparison from last year to this year -- the Gulf, the "central heating system" of the Western half of the world, is COLD and NOT SPINNING
YouTube: Proving Corexit Poisoning – civil engineer Marco Kaltofen –
“Watch step by step as WPI Chemical Engineer Marco Kaltofen performs an experiment using actual crude oil from the BP well and Corexit 9500A, the oil dispersant used by BP in the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Mr. Kaltofen demonstrates how Corexit suspends the most toxic hydrocarbons in the water column by a factor of about 35X more than absorbtion from crude oil alone, which floats to the surface in its natural form. BP used close to 2M gallons of this dispersant at the base of the blown out oil well and at the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, allowing this substance to mix into 5000 feet worth of water from the base of the well.”
Nola.com: Offshore drilling regulation overhaul appears out of reach
TakePart: Hey, it’s ‘Gulf Coast Seafood Night!’ … but is Gulf seafood safe?
MNN: Satirist and New Orleans resident Harry Shearer talks about the Gulf oil spill and more
Bridge the Gulf Project: In the Bayou, husband and wife battle oil disaster and fish for survival (different husband and wife) –
Eventually Darla became seriously depressed and she says she even considered suicide. It’s a tragedy experts say occurs with more frequency after major oil disasters. Even tough-as-nails fishermen have their limits. Darla is one tough fisherman, but she admits the oil disaster has nearly pushed her over the edge.
“I hung a hangman’s noose on the back deck of my boat and my husband said “What are you doing with that on the boat?” And I said, “Well if I don’t have no way to live I might as well stick my head upside in it and climb up on a box and jump off.” And he said, “You got to be crazy.” I was depressed and suicidal for a long time until I met a man who was very helpful and told me, “Well, you can go kill yourself, but that’s exactly what BP wants –because dead people don’t talk, dead people don’t complain, dead people don’t sue, and dead people don’t fight. You want to give BP what they want, go ahead and kill yourself.” And I decided right then and there to stand up and fight for my land. And it’s time for everybody else to stand up and fight for their land.”
YouTube: BP Gulf oil spill and the Matt Simmons truth / theory
The Encyclopedia of Earth: Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
ROFFS Deepwter Horizon rig oil spill monitoring: Current Analysis Dec. 1, 2010 (“Some people have stated that the oil has degraded to the point that it is more like asphalt, i.e. rock-like in composition and no longer is a problem. We have asked these people if they would take freshly laid asphalt and put it in their vegetable gardens to grow food that they would want to eat.” – plus very cool graphics)
FOSL: Warning — Dispersant / Surfactant eats through water filters & fish gills – via Gasland
BBC News: US oil spill in Gulf ‘making dolphins act drunk’
NOLA.com: BP oil disaster was avoidable, commission staff says
ThePopTort: All is not well in the Gulf
Discovery News: How crude oil can harm you
Sciencecorps.org: Chemicals used on spills
Reuters special report: How BP’s oil spill costs could double
Life Abundantly: The new Gulf War syndrome – is the oil spill a war?
Satellite imagery that Obama’s administration withheld shows “under the gaping chasm spewing oil at an ever-alarming rate is a cavern estimated to be around the size of Mount Everest. This information has been given an almost national security-level classification to keep it from the public,” writes Wayne Madsen.
Human suffering in the Gulf is increasing from the world’s latest and largest toxic oil kill as BP lies and government remains silent about human health risks and associated military interventions. Most immediately damaging of the operation’s withheld information pertains to toxins breathed since the explosion.
Southerners reporting illnesses with symptoms reflecting Benzene and Corexit poisoning have had to face some leaders suggesting the cause to be mental illness, “stress”, while others, such as BP chief Tony Hayward, blamed the illness on rotten food.
Hayward is the guy who sold his £1.4 million shares in BP one month before the Gulf “spill.” This in turn caused a collapse of value and a saving to him of over £423,000 when BP’s share price plunged after its predicted destruction in the gulf according to the Telegraph. (Since Hayward’s pay package of £4 million a year had been insufficient, cashing out enabled him to pay off the mortgage on his family’s mansion in Kent.)
….
For this operation to succeed, mainstream media must participate in the PR campaign, (propaganda) since most Americans still believe and even center their lives around their TVs. An example of mainstream “news” propaganda presented was the reporting of BP containing one of the leaks. Madsen stated it was “pure public relations disinformation designed to avoid panic and demands for greater action by the Obama administration, according to FEMA and Corps of Engineers sources.”
…
Soon after the Gulf explosion, oil workers requesting anonymity report that they heard a telephone conversation in which the head of the rig was crying while telling the other party on the phone, “We knew this was going happen. Are you satisfied now?”
YouTube: China, Russia, and the Dollar
Red White & Blue News: Obama blocks US companies from drilling off coasts – Cuba and China move in
World News Heard Now: A billion dollars for Mexico’s PEMEX to drill, but the Gulf is idle
YouTube: Stealing the World with Paper
YahooNews: Brace for the post-Wikileaks information big chill
Yahoo News: The 9 most shocking Wikileaks secrets
ABC Australia: WikiLeaks site down, Assange close to arrest
Gawker: US Military in Iraq tries to intimidate soldiers into not reading WikiLeaks
Yahoo News: Companies beware – the next big leak could be yours
YouTube: Calls for Assassination of Julian Assange (real Christian of ya there, Huckabee)
YouTube: FBI — Bureau of frame-ups, bullying, and intimidation… the Feds are terrorists!
Prison Planet: Lieberman has power to shut down Websites with a phone call
Yahoo News: Dick Cheney to be charged over Halliburton … in Nigeria?
Zunguzungu: Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy: “To destroy this invisible government”
“Most of the news media seems to be losing their minds over Wikileaks without actually reading these essays, even though [Wikileaks founder Julian Assange] describes the function and aims of an organization like Wikileaks in pretty straightforward terms. But, to summarize, he begins by describing a state like the US as essentially an authoritarian conspiracy, and then reasons that the practical strategy for combating that conspiracy is to degrade its ability to conspire, to hinder its ability to “think” as a conspiratorial mind. The metaphor of a computing network is mostly implicit, but utterly crucial: he seeks to oppose the power of the state by treating it like a computer and tossing sand in its diodes.
The problem this creates for the government conspiracy then becomes the organizational problem it must solve: if the conspiracy must operate in secrecy, how is it to communicate, plan, make decisions, discipline itself, and transform itself to meet new challenges? The answer is: by controlling information flows. After all, if the organization has goals that can be articulated, articulating them openly exposes them to resistance. But at the same time, failing to articulate those goals to itself deprives the organization of its ability to process and advance them. Somewhere in the middle, for the authoritarian conspiracy, is the right balance of authority and conspiracy.
His model for imagining the conspiracy, then, is not at all the cliché that people mean when they sneer at someone for being a “conspiracy theorist.” After all, most the “conspiracies” we’re familiar with are pure fantasies, and because the “Elders of Zion” or James Bond’s SPECTRE have never existed, their nonexistence becomes a cudgel for beating on people that would ever use the term or the concept. For Assange, by contrast, a conspiracy is something fairly banal, simply any network of associates who act in concert by hiding their concerted association from outsiders, an authority that proceeds by preventing its activities from being visible enough to provoke counter-reaction. It might be something as dramatic as a loose coalition of conspirators working to start a war with Iraq/n, or it might simply be the banal, everyday deceptions and conspiracies of normal diplomatic procedure.”
“To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.”
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.”
-Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”
TechDirt: The 19 Senators who voted to censor the Internet
Petition: Stop Comcast from blocking Netflix
Natural News: Top ten lies about Senate bill S-510
KMIR 6 Palm Springs: Food Safety Bill 101 – Sifting the facts from the myths (the Tester Amendment makes it better but still. the FDA lies just like the EPA. Why is our food regulated by the same administration as our legal narcotics and other drugs, anyway?)
“You may be disposed to embrace a genetically modified, enhanced, and altered food chain, but for those of us who eat our foods unadulterated, raised naturally, and without benefit of the federal government mandating what we can and can’t eat, SB 510 is one more giant step toward consolidating total power over the lives of free citizens,” writes Michael Geer on the American Thinker blog.”
SOTT.net: When Truth Is Scarier Than Fiction
American Psychosis: What happens to a society that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion? –
It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Michael Jackson, from his phony marriages to the portraits of himself dressed as royalty to his insatiable hunger for new toys to his questionable relationships with young boys, had all these qualities. And this is also the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. It is the nationwide celebration of image over substance, of illusion over truth. And it is why investment bankers blink in confusion when questioned about the morality of the billions in profits they made by selling worthless toxic assets to investors.”
Physorg: High-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain
Natural News TV: Dr. Gary Null – Vaccine hearing
Activist Post: MUST SEE — A Radical Experiment in Empathy, by Sam Richards (VIDEO)
YouTube: Sen. Bernie Sanders – Amazing Speech!
Truthout: The New American Oligarchy
Wikileaks’ Julian Assange wants to spill your corporate secrets
CNBC: Members of Congress get richer despite our sour economy
The findings—based on federal financial disclosure data released earlier this year—paint a wealthy bunch in Congress, with more than half of all members—261—were millionaires. About one in five of those had average calculated wealth in 2009 of at least $10 million. Eight of the 261 were in the $100 million-plus range. …In another context, however, Beltway watchers might find it unsettling that some of the most widely-held stocks are those of companies at the center of the financial crisis in 2008-2009. The most popular investment among congressional members reads as a who’s who list of the most powerful corporate political forces in Washington, D.C. — companies that each spend millions, if not tens of millions of dollars each year lobbying federal officials,” states the CRP report.
HuffPo: Blowing billions on war while American workers go under
Common Dreams: A real jaw-dropper at the Federal Reserve
YouTube: Who Owns America’s Wealth?
Politicus USA: Foreign press says what America’s won’t — Sarah Palin is a traitor –
By attacking the democratically elected President of the United States of America at a sensitive time in her country’s history, she shows the tact of a boorish drunkard bawling obscenities at a funeral…. Ms Palin cloaks her myth in her flag, but one has to question just what that symbol represents to Ms Palin, given that she won’t stop attacking this country’s sitting President during each crisis that presents itself. … One wonders, can Sarah Palin can see what the Russians see: a shrill, desperate demagogue more interested in making money and getting famous than in the best interests of her country; a woman so jealous of a sitting President that she takes every blow her country faces and exploits it, turning it into an even more negative, frightening moment while distracting from the real work – never once stepping into the debate to lead, to soothe, to unite.”
Al-Jazeera English: Environmental Protection Agency? – In Depth
TPM: Oil spill commission’s missing document adds insight to Gulf investigation
Greencelebrity: Oil spill whistle blower says EPA is hiding data on BP dispersant damage
GulfLive.com: Oil spill response remains a daily affair on islands
Al.com: Fungus outbreak hits Alabama marshes; could oil spill sheens be to blame?
HuffPo: After the Arctic Spill — Shell, Palin, and Obama
NPR: How to ‘thrive’ – Dan Buettner’s secrets of happiness
(“people are happiest when they spend their time and money on experiences, as opposed to objects”)
Julian A. is an Anarchist.
yeah!
(oh, are you saying that’s bad?)
http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/12/armed_services_are_urged_to_st.html
Nice huh, I think we need to send some free shrimp and seafood to the BP execs for their Christmas Bonus Party, While we are at it send some to the CDC who walked away from this mess.
Trisha Springstead RN
Holy shit, I love you. My first and only car was a ’76 Delta 88 Royale.
“Also I’m not some elitist hipster who’s saying I’m better than you for driving an old car which is made of American steel, which can tow a full-size trailer with its monster, 30-year-old 403 V-8 engine, a car whose doors open and close when you open and close them… I’m just saying I’m not worse than you for driving an old car.”
Bam, you nailed it. Kinda like when people fake cough and give me dirty looks for smoking cigarettes, and yet they drive cars and I don’t. Oh well. Sustainability = shopping spreeeee yay lolz!!!!!1