Fuck You, Regs

Longtime Readers will be familiar ad nauseam with my constant bitching against modern automotive design and how homogeneous the cars of today appear.  While a lot of it is driven by things like “wind-tunnel” performance, I’ve never bothered to talk about exactly why  car makers are so obsessed with streamlining and what have you, because I’d always thought people knew why they’re thus obsessed.

Allow me then, to address this shortcoming by pointing you to this excellent article, a snippet of which reads as follows:

It hasn’t happened all at once. It’s been a bit at a time, taking place over four decades in the name of safety and the environment. The whole thing began in 1966 with creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, followed by the Environmental Protection Agency and dozens of others. Every regulator wanted a piece of the car.
Each new regulation seems like it makes sense in some way. Who doesn’t want to be safer and who doesn’t want to save gas?
But these mandates are imposed without any real sense of the cost and benefits, and they come about without a thought as to what they do to the design of a car. And once the regs appear on the books, they never go away.

Truly, this cries out for explanation. So I was happy to see a video made by CNET that gives five reasons: mandates for big fronts to protect pedestrians, mandates that require low tops for fuel economy, a big rear to balance out the big fronts, tiny windows resulting from safety regulations that end up actually making the car less safe, and high belt lines due to the other regs. In other words, single-minded concern for testable “safety” and the environment has wrecked the entire car aesthetic.
And that’s only the beginning. Car and Driver puts this as plainly as can be: “In our hyper-regulated modern world, the government dictates nearly every aspect of car design, from the size and color of the exterior lighting elements to how sharp the creases stamped into sheetmetal can be.”
You are welcome to read an engineer’s account of what it is like to design an American car. Nothing you think, much less dream, really matters. The regulations drive the whole process. He explains that the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards with hundreds of regulations — really a massive central plan — dictate every detail and have utterly ruined the look and feel of American cars.

Here’s my suggestion to the Trump administration:  wherever the so-called “Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards” reside, go in there and take out 75% of them – I don’t care which ones, but I bet a random sample of my Petrolhead Readers would take care of the problem.

Here’s the money shot quote from the article:

No one set out to wreck the diversity and beauty of our cars. But that is precisely what has happened, as the political and bureaucratic elites have asserted their own value systems over the values of both producers and consumers. They are the masters and we are the slaves, and we are to accept our lot in life.

Maybe not.  This is a hill I’d be glad to die on — just for the sake of automotive beauty.  Here’s one example of a car that couldn’t be made in the U.S. today because regs, and we are the poorer for it:

More about Bizzarrini.


The title, by the way, is a play on a line of dialogue from Cheech and Chong’s Big Bambu  album.

Healing Powers

…because nothing says “Government Cares About You” more than a new tax:

Supermarkets are being urged to introduce a new 1p charge to use self-service machines as part of a plan to ‘heal divisions’ blamed on Brexit.
The proposal comes from a cross-party Parliamentary panel on social integration (APPG) which claims £30million could be raised by the scheme to help fund community projects to bring together people from different generations.
But retailers say it would penalise shoppers and effectively be a new tax to use the supermarket.

Read the whole thing to understand what’s going on here.

And do not think for a moment that this couldn’t happen Over Here, because if there’s one thing that’s common to all  governments it’s that when their money runs short, there is no limit to their creativity when it comes to generating new revenue streams.  Even something stupid like a soda tax.

Animals

And people ask me why I never go out without carrying a gun.  Here’s a little fun and games for you:

A mob of eight to 10 males wielding hammers descended upon bystanders at the East Bank Light Rail station on Friday night injuring several.

Just so everyone’s clear on this:  all ten* of the “males” were Somalis.  And it happened in Minneapolis, where carrying concealed handguns is not common.

Curious that this doesn’t seem to happen much in areas where a lot of people do  carry guns, e.g. in my neighborhood.

Wow.  Looks like Minnesota’s policy of allowing thousands of Muslim “migrants” from Africa to settle there is working out just as planned, huh?


*Ten?  Looks like I need to start loading the 1911 with these bad boys.  Good thing I have one or two on hand.

Major Affront, Meet Corporal Punishment

I think what pisses me off most about modern-day “petty” crime is not the robbery of cell phones from people’s hands, or the theft of cars for the sake of a “joyride”, or even the painting of graffiti on walls — although each one in its own way renders me irritated beyond belief.  Try these “petty” crimes, however, and see how they make you feel:

Arsonists destroy 250-year-old oak tree that has stood since George II was on the throne

Hunt for yobs who vandalised model town and brutally kicked a cat in the head as they made their escape

Mindless vandals wreck a charity model railway show

Correction to that last piece:  they’re not mindless;  they’re amoral, antisocial and spiteful, and their vile actions are those of childish anarchists.

Unlike a lot of people (especially on this website), I don’t think these little shits should go to prison for these crimes — although there’s a lot to be said for taking them out of society for a while.

What’s needed here is for these childish hooligans to be treated like children — but not in the modern manner of making them sit in the Penalty Corner or “grounding” them (whatever that means).

Prison’s too much punishment, they (usually) have no money to pay restitution, and “community service” is a fucking joke when by their actions they have demonstrated that they have no ties to the community whatsoever.

No.  We need to bring back flogging, because that ancient punishment is precisely what these kinds of actions call for.  We need to catch these assholes, make sure they’re guilty (of course), and then immediately  after sentencing lead them off to a punishment cell where they can be given ten lashes with a heavy cane.  (And for the feministicals:  female miscreants of this nature, although much rarer than their male counterparts, should get the same punishment, except with a light  cane.  Feel free to insist on equality for the womyns, however;  I’m not feeling too charitable at the moment.)

I know, corporal punishment is supposed to be barbaric and all that.  Remember, though, that the reason that these horrible people are called “vandals” is because their behavior is of a kind with the ancient and barbaric tribe named Vandals — and we should punish them accordingly.

The hell with them.

Monstrosities

…and I’m not just talking about the Modernist buildings, either.  My own loathing of this architectural form is, I think, well documented (here, here).

What Theodore Dalrymple talks about is how awful the first actual Modernist architects were:  Gropius, Van Der Rohe and of course, the execrable Le Corbusier (to name but three) were all either pure totalitarians (Le Corbusier) or Nazi sympathizers and supporters.  But we all knew that.

What Dalrymple explains further is how this “school” of architectural thought has turned into the leitmotif  of all modern architectural teaching (just as Marxism has infected the liberal arts disciplines):

[He] knows that he is arguing not against an aesthetic, but against an ironclad ideology. The architectural Leninists have been determined so to indoctrinate the public that they hope and expect a generation will grow up knowing nothing but modernism, and therefore will be unable to judge it. (All judgment is comparative, as Doctor Johnson said.) In Paris recently, I saw an advertisement on the Métro (a few days before the fire in Notre-Dame) to the effect that Paris would not be Paris without the Centre Pompidou—which, of course, has a good claim to be the ugliest building in the world. In the face of such an advertisement promoted by the cultural elite, what ordinary person would dare demur?

That description of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, by the way, is not egregious:

…and that’s the “pretty” side. Here’s the hideous one:

I am also heartened by Dalrymple’s characterization of the horrible Tour Montparnasse  as “said to be the most hated building in Paris” (and with good reason):

Never a jihadi-piloted airliner when you need one…

Read the Dalrymple piece for the full horror.