American Innovation

R.O.F.L.

Weirder and Weirder

drive-up mass photo — from **The New York Times**, May 23, 2020

Sign o’ the Times

parked suvs image — New Automobiles Stored at Port of Los Angeles, April 2020

Image of the Day

Mobile Privatization

An image for these thoroughly weird times:

New Angles

COVID-19 arrives, despite a couple decades’ worth of their self-praise about the fit between BAU and data + information + technology, as a huge surprise, not just to us commoners, but to TPTB.

This — the discombobulation of history’s greatest power elite — ought to be among the things we progressive survivalists mull in these weird and momentous times. All is definitely not what we’ve been told.

Meanwhile, as today’s contribution to your cranial recalibrating efforts, we here at DbC would direct your gaze to this image from BuzzFeed news.

Contemplate, if you will, the utter centrality of the automobile, even in one of the most iconic spots for non-automotive locomotion in this very, very troubled and unprepared empire.

cable car street in sf jammed with parked cars

Pushing the Message

Here is a hallway snapshot I took on my visit to the local car dealership this morning. Fascinating that car dealerships still get away with such shameless things. Also amusing to see that, in the “high tech”status-monitoring graphic here, there are no automobiles parked in the dealership’s lot! Paging Dr. Freud…

This Exists: Retractable Hood Ornament

And get the name of the thing: “The Spirit of Ecstasy”

Mexican Auto Industry Association

This post is no endorsement of any of the extreme dangers nationalism, Trumpism, or automobile manufacturing. Nevertheless, get a load of the membership of the “Mexican” auto industry’s trade group:

It would be fascinating to see a proper accounting of how money flows into and out of this industry, and to whose benefit.

But its speaks volumes about our world that such groups exist.

Self-Driving Cars

Seems like the new boss is pretty much the same as the old boss:

The corporate technocrats’ big open secret is that they, being worshippers of money, computers, and bossing, insist on underestimating the complexity of human reason, especially the reality of tacit knowledge.