I was on the road filming a trailer yesterday and one of my fellow actors had a copy of The Washington Post. A story there caught my eye.
It seems that the California Air Resources Board wants to legislate against black cars starting in 2012 because it requires so much energy to cool them.
For the link-challenged, this is the Post story. There are others.
Greenies call it saving the planet. I call it government interference of my rights, an interference I categorize under the rubric of tyranny.
Will this regulation succeed? The mind-numbingly devotion to the truth of man-made global warming being even more intense than Obamadolatry, I think it has an outside chance, as insane as the proposal is.
That possibility aside for the moment, I'm inclined to ask, 'Who comes up with this s**t? in the first place? Certainly not conservatives.
But that aside, let's say it passes! No more new black cars after 2012. What then is one to do with all the black cars already on the road, black being the second or third most popular car color of all?
Presumably they'll be allowed to continue polluting our highways, but probably with a higher cap and trade tax than the cars of less offensive color, another tyrannical possibility not beyond the long arms of liberal lawmaking.
Given cap and trade, the selling of carbon footprints, etc., I can see one helpful concession for black cars on the road and it brings to mind the old joke about the golf foursome of a priest, a minister, an imam and a rabbi.
They finish the third hole and find themselves waiting several hours to get on the fourth. They complain. What is holding up the foursome ahead of them?
"Oh," says the course manager. "They're all blind. We allow them to play as a courtesy. You can play through, i f you want."
Our diverse clergy is mortified by their uncharitable selfishness complaining about being unable to complete their recreation when the foursome is suffering from their terrible handicaps. The priest begs god for forgiveness, the minister offers a prayer for the disabled everywhere, the imam praises the will of Allah and his glory and then all then look to the rabbi, who shrugs and says, 'Why can't they play at night?"
So, to save the planet, and save them some money, owners of black cars will be allowed to drive their menacing vehicles only at night. Black, indeed, will no longer be beautiful in the sun.
Of course, as happened in the Soviet Union and other socialist states, leaders, celebrities and the well connected will probably be exempt and allowed to drive their black limos and town cars anytime they want.
Leftist, totalitarian tyranny is happening everywhere, especially in the land of John Locke. The original Locke, not the one on Lost.
The UK Daily Mail had a story about thermal imaging cameras being used to create color-coded maps to enable council officers to identify homes that they feel are wasting too much energy. Here's one of several links, for the link-needy.
No mention of the carbon emissions made by the do-gooding plane. Ah, the head-up-the-ass insanity of the left.
Can this kind of tyranical monitoring be far behind here? In Obamasiah's press conference yesterday he praised the so-called smart meter, a thermostat, really, which is a device installed in one's house to determine the proper temperature necessary to save the planet.
From the Prompter-In-Chief:
We could set up systems so that everybody in each house have their own smart meters that, uhh, will tell you when to turn off the lights, when the peak hours are, can help you sell back energy, uh, that you've generated in your home through a solar panel or through, uh, eh, other mechanisms. All this can be done, but it also creates jobs right now.
It might go ding-ding-ding if you overuse your air conditioning or heating or electric lights, the way a car dings when you don't put on your seat belt. But given the penchant for greenies and lefties to control our lives, I can easily see where the state will control your usage by automatically governing the meters they've installed. If you want your house temp at 72, but the State deems the proper temperature to be 67, that's as high as it'll go.
Tyranny on the menu. Just put it on our tab.TIP:
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Comments
Forgive me, I am failing to get the connection.
I'm inclined to ask, 'Who comes up with this s**t? in the first place? Certainly not conservatives.
God forbid a "Conservative" would have to give up a black car or anything for the greater good. It would be such a hardship.
YOU MIGHT NEED A HOBBY.
Let's put it this way. We had to tolerate are the crooked contracts with Haliburton, lying about intelligence, tax breaks for those who don't need them, spying on the American citizens, illegal arrest and detention, torture, and too much else to name for 8 years. Now its your turn. It fucking cracks me up to listen to you whine.
when america comes to democracy, and a majority of your fellow citizens decide to get black cars off the road, that will be a 'left' decision, but you will get a vote first, so not tyranny.
at the present rate of political progress, you may drive your black car or have it driven for you, for the rest of your natural life. we humble motor scooterists content ourselves with knowing cars cost much more to run if black. but enjoy!
btw, good joke about the golf, but why does the rabbi always get the best lines?
Liked the golf joke, but isn't "tyranny" getting a broad meaning lately?
You mean, like racist?
Good example. I've heard plenty of people confusing racial and racist. Simply put, racist involves hatred of a race. Racial has to do with race.
I can't count how many Goobers claimed blacks voting for Obama was 'racist." It's an outright tyranny!
People actually think you care about black cars.
Hey Candisverybad, WorkingClassDemocrat & icemilkcoffee!
"It's the tyranny stupid". Your "greater good" comment is disheartening and revealing. Who decides what we can legislate away for the greater good? Is it just those who hold the office, or do the people have a choice. It's only a matter of time before Obama starts to regulate, other inalienables. Pretty soon McDonalds, candy, religion, traveling more than 20 miles a day, more than 2 kids, your fuel consumption……..what else can they decide is not good for us?
You have written a great post which should be another call to arms for all freedom loving people has been met with ridicule and attack. Wow…..
And then of course there is the "I operate in my own correctly defined universe. P.J., who is so out of touch with the mainstream because he knows what things "really' mean. He uses black cars as an example of racism because he actually believes that conservatives are racists. How does he sleep at night......taking money from those awful conservatives? Rated
Yeah, I didn't expect much else here, but the most disheartening thing of all isn't that people have disagreed with the post, they disagreed with ideas not even argued in the post. They disagreed about the wrong things, but this is a classic liberal trope, I think. They don't have the integrity to deal with the issue because if they did they would have to say, one way or the other, it's GOOD that the government can mandate things like these. I like it and it's good.
Otherwise, they would have to think twice about the structure of their political philosophy and maybe see the deep flaws in it. They are unlikely to do THAT.
Oh, the California Air Resources board, I hear -- have to check it out, is mandating that tire pressure on California cars be what they should be, to save gas.
It will never end.
In defense of John's point, which it seemed a lot of people didn't address directly:
I can say that yellow cars are actually more energy inefficient in a year because oh, they absorb less heat in the winter; whoops,black cars are better after all, all things considered.
I have no problem as a Burkean conservative giving things up for the community; man is a social animal.
What is problematic is nit-picking. Nit-picking about the color of a car, or someone's house paint in a planned community in California, those things are privately owned but monstrous tyrannies sometimes because they indulge the unlovely fact that we are dominance oriented creatures who like to boss others around, and rules like this probably ought not to be tolerated lightly, not because the rule itself, whatever it is is bad, but because it acclimatizes us to bossing others around, which if you do it enough, is a recipe not for socialism, I don't think there really is such a thing, but for living in a militarist society, which is not good for Liberty, even the little Liberty that we can really ever have because we are social animals.
Conservatives lament that the government has no right to tell me what color my car can be.
Liberals, at least me, wonder if it's actually true that black cars somehow harm the environment.
If it actually makes a difference then we should look at it.
I wouldn't be surprised if the difference is negligible.
Rated (I do like your writing)
The reason I am drawn towards humor instead of "discussing the issue" is it's a for crap issue. You take what somebody proposed, and, through the art of 'conservative' extrapolation decide it's a harbinger of totalitarian tyranny. It's kind of funny, actually.
Philos takes that to the max. He likes to tell people what they believe, then argue against the straw man of his own creation. To convenience his prechewed and regurgitated rants, he reads far more than what people write. Just saw a comment today that perfectly illustrates that. Philos, it's simple. You don't know half of what I do. You're terminally stuck in ideological sloganland. What do you want? Affirmative Action?
I rated this yesterday. I want credit for being the first one to do so!
Philos didn't like my joke. Here's another original:
What do you call a Republican fundraiser with a 10% minority attendance?
Catered.
This proposal is aimed at forcing car manufacturers to use paints that reflect a certain percentage of sunlight. The idea is that if interior vehicular temperatures can be kept down, car owners will feel less compelled to blast the air conditioning the instant they get in the car, thereby reducing the amount of gas they use and CO2 they release into the atmosphere.
The report has a bullet point stating that the likely achievable reflective range for dark-colored vehicles is 20–25%. The very next bullet point says that yes, “jet black remains an issue, even at this level.” At NO POINT WHATSOEVER in this proposal (or in any of the other pdfs I read on the website) does the Air Resources Board of the California EPA (which made the proposal) recommend banning the sale of black cars. Nowhere. The report simply notes that even if these standards went into effect, jet black cars might still not be able to meet them.
Now, the second paragraph of the story on WaPo: “The problem isn't the color per se, but the reflectivity of the paint overall. And dark colors just don't reflect well, so they are likely out.”
“Likely out.” The report does not say this. The writer just makes an assumption. But what if car manufacturers can come up with a jet black paint that meets a certain level of reflectivity? Or what if the California Legislature waters down the ARB proposal by determining that the achievable reflective range can be much lower than 20-25%? And that’s assuming this proposal even gets before the Legislature at some point. The ARB has dozens of proposals aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions in California. Some will be adopted, some will not. I don’t know if this particular proposal truly has merit, but as a Californian I appreciate any effort to make the air cleaner in my state.
This is an example of lazy journalism. The writer actually originally wrote it for a tech blog called techcrunch.com and used his lack of understanding to make some snarky comments, instead of perhaps writing facts that might have helped illuminate the issue. The fact that the WaPo used it on their site is not a credit to that paper.
And then John, like a mindless lemming, used it as an excuse to write yet one more shrill, nonsensical attack on liberalism. Because God forbid you should miss the opportunity, no matter how devoid of facts the article may have been. You also apparently got some of your readers riled up for absolutely no reason.
Now why some old jackass in North Carolina even cares what we do out here is beyond me. This regulation would not be a federal mandate; it would come from an individual state, and aren’t conservatives usually in favor of states rights? Hey, I think those drive-thru liquor stores I saw on the Outer Banks a couple of years ago are a horrible idea, but if the citizens of NC are okay with them, who am I to say anything?
People differ, I differ. I don't call people names. Certainly not something like "old jackass."
I expect an apology. I don't refer to you as an unemployed loser. At least I'm not anonymous, the garbage can of the coward.
You can do it here or in private mail.
I wonder what the "past eight years" crowd is going to do in 2012. I guess they'll talk about the eight years prior to the last four.
I find it amusing that liberals, particularly the environmentalist sub-cell, are always focusing on limitation and conservation rather than enhanced science and production. We're always being encouraged by this lot to move backwards towards a simpler, more primitive life style. Imagine the frustration of professional recyclers when they discover there's nothing left to recycle.
Of course, the irony is that those who would lure us back into the trees we've saved through recycling like to refer to themselves as progressive. Some progress.
I loved the yellow car point. It seems that instead of a chicken in every pot we're going to have a car for all seasons.
Wonderful distinction between what would be socialist and militaristic. Yes, as dominance oriented creatures, there is the danger of, well, dominating. Whatever you want to call it, it's still domination, in the many little ways that eventually add up to being tyranized, IMO. These nit-picks accumulate, I fear.
Sorry I zipped by your reponse until now.
JB
Hey all you damn kids! Everyone get off of John's lawn!
My comments targeted ideological groups, not anyone personally. That's what YOU did. You attacked me and my age. And called me a name. That's what most progressives do. Go after the poster personally.
That you don't see the difference between that personal, direct ad-hom and my general comments about liberals as a group aborting themselves out of existence and them having their heads up their ass only displays your inability to think straight and clearly.
My general remarks should be equal to those here who make equally disparaging, crude remarks about Republicans and conservatives as a general group.
And I didn't send you a PM. I put it out here for anyone to see. Another example of your faulty, distorted thinking. But who cares what an unemployed loser thinks about anything, right?
You people want it all your way. Well, no.