interstate bicycle pathways

In the middle of the last century, American President Dwight D. Eisenhower envisioned a highway system ambitious in both scope and design. It pioneered new techniques (the clover-leaf interchange), spawned new ways of living (the suburb), and provided wanderlustig individuals with a relatively cheap method of traveling for both business and pleasure. But every silver lining has its cloud, and, today, Americans' dependence on petrol-carbohydrates is destroying the environment and helping to fund terrorism around the world. If we expect to keep breathing air and fitting into our jeans, we need to utilize a time-tested and reliable device largely ignored since the beginning of the automobile age: the bicycle.

Imagine ribbons of road stretching from Boston to Miami and from New York to Los Angeles, roads designed and built exclusively for bicycles. Imagine being able to bicycle to work each day without having to worry about getting sucked into the wake of a passing semi-truck. Imagine saving money and losing weight while pedaling a bicycle instead of spending money and getting fat while sitting in a car. The automobile isn't called the slave's chariot for nothing – it demands of its user ever and ever greater sacrifices without doing much to improve his financial or physical health or that of the environment. This author has been bicycling instead of driving for the past ten months in a town built around the car, and even though he contends daily with individuals who will pass him in the breakdown lane so that they can be the first in line at the next red light, he still feels sympathy for the poor fools who willingly trap themselves in mobile prisons of glass and steel.

Prosperity through sacrifice! Safety through knowledge! Happiness through exertion! These are the slogans that will drum up support for America's interstate bicycle pathways (IBP). Not only will the IBP create new manufacturing and service jobs in communities around the country (think of all those bikes breaking down and getting flat tires), it will cut this country's reliance on dirty, sadness-inducing oil and gas products. Furthermore, new developments in battery technology as well as cheaper and more efficient solar panels have prompted bike makers to equip velocipedes with electric motors for help on hills and super-efficient coasting. The author is not calling for the construction of an entirely new web of roads spanning from coast to coast, merely that the bike trails that already exist be linked to one another with dedicated, bicycle-only riding paths. In the Netherlands, roughly 27% of all trips are done on bicycle, whereas in the United States of America, less than 5% are. Difficulties of comparison aside, bicycling is a viable form of transportation even in places where the winters are harsh and the North Sea winds are strong. For the past year, the author has dreamed about being able to bicycle into Philadelphia from his house nearly a hundred miles away, but the most direct route – 30, the Lincoln Highway – is a traffic-choked road that was not designed to handle both driver and velocipedist. Adding insult to injury, the nearest commercial bus station lies more than twenty miles from his front door, and the most efficient method for reaching it is on a road even narrower and less bicycle-friendly than Route 30. Some day, fellow pedal-mashers, we will convince the slave's charioteers of the error of their ways, and get everyone back on the saddle. Until then, however, keep your clothes tight, your eyes and ears open, and your head on a swivel. Mahalo.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

gasoline: keeping the FUN in Funding Terrorism since 1938

We, the gasoline, kerosene, and crude oil sellers operating in the United States of America, would like to thank the consumers of this land for helping us to fund terrorism. A good portion of the gasoline and other crude-oil-based products we sell is pumped out of the ground by the government of Saudi Arabia, which uses the proceeds from the sale of this flammable black goo to finance terrorist training camps and to purchase weapons and matériel for terrorists cells all over the world. Ever since we first started doing business with the Saudis back in 1938, a hefty portion of every dollar given to us by good, honest, upstanding American citizens in exchange for the gasoline they use to move themselves around in automobiles we in turn have given to a state that sponsors or supports terrorism; therefore, each American who purchases gasoline in any form – be it diesel, jet-fuel, lamp oil, or regular old 87 octane – each of these supposedly patriotic Yankees is a ground-level, small-time fund-raiser for jihad-waging, freedom-hating, tower-toppling terrorist groups such as Al-Qaida and Al-Shabaab.

We here at Shell, Exxon-Mobil, BP, Amoco, Citgo, and Texaco are proud to assist the average American in perpetuating and funding terrorism around the world by continuing to do business with states that support the activities of cowardly, baby-killing mass murderers. So, dear American consumers, keep driving your cars – as much as you can and as far as you are able – and keep those dollars flowing, because the next Nine-Eleven attacks are not going to fucking fund themselves.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

what to do to help our war effort

Often over the past few months, while conversing with seemingly intelligent, apparently clear-thinking individuals, I have run into indifference and ignorance toward the fact that America is at war. For over a decade now, this nation has waged its wars in strange and distant places, battling fierce peoples in dusty villages, fighting a mysterious, shiver-inducing organization that, as would the hydra, grows new heads to replace any old heads that get lopped off, mozambiqued, or otherwise violently removed. During these conversations, my counterparts nearly always ask, “What is it that I can do, personally, to help our boys and girls win these wars that we have sent them off to wage?” To address this question, and to free my heart of much worry and consternation, here are two things that the person interested in helping America win the wars that she is waging can do: first, reduce the amount of gasoline consumed; and, second, plant a victory garden.

As to the first point, gasoline, a strategic national resource, is distilled from crude oil, which is pumped from the ground by states such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Yemen. These states not only promote and fund terrorist groups and terrorist activities, they also regularly violate their own citizens' human and civil rights. By burning gasoline in our own cars, we take it away from the cars, boats, and airplanes of the military; by burning gasoline, Americans fund terrorism, since the money we pay goes to the aforementioned states, which fund terrorism and violate basic human rights. The patriotic American wishing to avoid funding terrorism will stop driving his car.

As to the second point, ours is a fertile and rich land capable of producing great varieties of vegetables in abundant numbers. In the spirit of our forefathers, and of their father's fathers, the self-sufficient, self-respecting America will, wherever she is able to, erect and maintain a garden in which she grows anything and everything she can possibly grow. She does not purchase apples from New Zealand, cabbage from Brazil, or soybeans from the People's Republic of China – she grows these things herself, tending for her plants with loving care and patient foresight. It matters little if she maintains a single pot filled with herbs or a plot of raised beds running the entire length of her driveway; what does matter is that she honors our warriors' sacrifice by making a few sacrifices of her own.

These are but two, relatively simple things that persons can do to ween our country off of its addiction to foreign oil and artificially low prices and to free up logistical and manufacturing capacities for use in the general war effort. Perhaps we might later organize aluminum and steel drives, and set up Exchanges for Neighborhood Self-Sufficiency and Self-Reliance, but, for now, let us focus on these two primary objectives: to stop using so much damn oil, and to grow ourselves what food we ourselves consume. Please remember to spread the aloha, and to keep your heart light, and buoyant. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit