A simp by the name of Paul Hockenos of CNN thinks that driving on the unrestricted speed sections of the German Autobahn is a “chilling” experience for “the timid,” such as himself.
“It’s utterly disconcerting when, ticking along at a brisk 75 miles per hour, somebody blows by me on the left and then disappears over the horizon as if I were driving a lawnmower.”
Poor old Clover!
A “brisk” 75 MPH? This is the speed the designers of the U.S. Interstate System – modeled on the German Autobahn – had in mind. For the 1960s. It is also what most Interstate speed limits in the United States were, back in the ’60s – which was almost 60 years ago.
Today, 75 MPH is just barely keeping up with the flow of traffic on most U.S. Interstates. Where – at least – the speed limits are back up to just about what they were back in the ’60s. It’s better than what it was, but it’s still absurd – when you reflect upon the 60 years’ worth of improvements to cars that have made any modern car much safer (and far easier) to drive at a “brisk” 75 MPH than a ’60s car was at the same speed.
Put another way, we’ve retarded things – or allowed it.
What was the point, exactly, of the past 60 years’ worth of steady improvements in stability at speed, braking capability and so on if they were never meant to be put to use? We all pay much more for four wheel disc brakes, independent suspensions, grippy tires – things almost all modern cars, even the cheapest ones – have some or all of. Why not just stick with what was “safe” back in the ’60s – and not pay for more than we’re allowed to use?
Never mind – and back to this Hockenos character, about whom you can “learn” more, here. Including that he worked as a shill for Foreign Policy, the benign-sounding name for the publication emitted by the Council on Foreign Relations or CFR as t is better-known.
He – the term is used loosely – goes on to say that those who are not intimidated by the unlimited speed sections – probably because they know how to drive, as is expected in Germany and so (reductio ad absurdum) know how to – are “overwhelmingly” male.
A more feminine scenario is what he craves.
One in which everyone is limited to the same (low) speeds, as in the already-gelded United States. Or even less than that.
For the sake of something feminine. Literally.
Mother Earth.
Which he believes is in perilous danger from (you already know what’s coming) a “changing” climate. A bogeyman almost as dangerous as the “unmasked.”
Hockens says “the climate crisis” – the term has become a religious mantra, like Our Father, full of Grace – is “prompting Germans to rethink their relationship with the Autobahn, long feted as the creme de la creme of highways systems.”
He says that driving a car – rather than pedaling a bicycle – or driving a car any faster than a bicycle can be pedaled – accelerates the “change” he fears.
“The burning question in Germany at the moment is whether tens of billions of Euros earmarked for the new and broader Autobahn (sic) wouldn’t do more good building out cycling highways – like in the Netherlands – or an improved high-speed, densely networked rail service.”
Italics added.
“Cycling highways”? It must be that time of the month for Hockenos.
This is actually unfair to actual women – many of whom (unlike him) love fast cars and think “cycling” as a form of transportation is generally for kids not old enough to drive yet.
“Germany’s carbon sector emissions” – the latter a techno-sounding idiocy, since “carbon” is not an “emission” in the sense that it is not a pollutant and it is the latter that always defined “emissions” because that’s what caused actual problems, such as air pollution . . . until the word was oilily redefined to encompass what isn’t – “are attributable overwhelmingly to cars and trucks and the higher the speed of a car, the greater the emissions (sic).”
No, you tool – or are you merely a fool, in the useful idiot sense? – the “emissions” are not “greater” because they aren’t pollutants. Saying so does not make it so. Except to idiots, who are useful – insofar as guilt-tripping the populace into giving up the gas pedal for a pedal.
“Ultimately, the proclivities of the car zealots have no place in the 21st century when we’re racing against the clock to decarbonize our economies.”
Who’s “we,” Hockenos?
And take note of the characteristic mewly, passive-aggressive contempt that drips from the pen – well, the keyboard – of people such as he. “Car zealots.” It echoes of the “unvaccinated,” doesn’t it? And how much would you bet that Hockenos was among those saying exactly that – with the same air of condescension and know-it-best-ism.
This is what we’re up against.
It isn’t much, luckily.
The Hockenoses of the world are neurotics – and busybodies, who believe their neurosis ought to be binding upon everyone who isn’t neurotic. They are the secular Puritans. The people who cannot stand the idea that somewhere, someone might be having fun. They are only powerful to the extent we give in to them. This includes giving them a respectful hearing.
The time has come to give them something else.
. . .
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In 1973 my Mother got ticketed for breaking the 70mph limit on I-64, in a flaccid VW Bus, of all things. I was with her, and we were doing 80mph floored down Afton Mountain, just outside of Waynesboro, VA. We were being passed by everything else, semi’s included. An armed govt. worker decided “we” were being unsafe, forget about everyone else doing 85-90.
I suspect had he seen us slogging up the East side at 40mph, he would have pulled us for that, too! She had been using her CB radio, and the truckers were offering to push us up the mountain, lol!
Most modern cars of any brand can safely, and easily, get to 100mph nowadays, and use 1/2 the fuel that it took cars of the 70’s, to do so. Like I said in my last comment the other day, most of the male population of 35 and under, have been brought up as a bunch of dickless cucks.
I wish it was curious how Carbon Dioxide has been changed to simply Carbon. When most people think of Carbon, they (incorrectly) think of a black nasty hard to dispose of thing, instead of an inert gas, Carbon Dioxide, that all life on the planet has to have. In the simplest demonstration, without Carbon Dioxide, you would die in about 5-10 minutes. It’s what triggers your respiration. Without it your body would never know it needed to breath. It’s why free divers often hyperventilate before going down. To flush all the Carbon Dioxide out of their lungs, and delay that breathing reflex.
Good thing they call the carbon in pencils “lead” or we’d be seeing a war on pencils!
[Anyone reading this who was born after c. 1995: “What’s a ‘pencil’?”]
‘Good thing they call the carbon in pencils “lead”.’– Nunzio
Like carbon, “lead” is evil, Nunzio. It’s a trigger word, and a micro-aggression.
As the regulators warn us, any pre-1978 house may contain deadly lead paint.
In my 1930 house in the NYC suburbs, the first coat and probably several more on every wall and ceiling was lead paint.
The original pipes leading to bathroom sink were lead, too: with every tooth brushing, I lost an IQ point.
And to top that, the asbestos insulation on the steam pipes still bore the original Johns-Manville label!
It is a wonder that I am here to type this. /sarc
Hi Jim,
Our house, built in 1865, must have many layers of lead paint underneath whatever paint we’ve applied since buying the house. What matters is we made sure our kids didn’t chew on the woodwork; not sure how that even became a thing.
A funny thing happened on the way to the theater. We have created a society of weak minded, scared incompetents. And somehow they have been placed in charge.
The weak should stay home & let the grown ups live life.
Well said Dan,
It’s time to “just say no!” to the busybodies of the world; better yet ignore and mock them.
Right on Dan and Mike, been doing it for 5+ years and it works like charm. They assume you’re just going to fall in line. When you don’t, they get nasty, argumentative, but have nothing in response. Just ‘No, I won’t’ and walk away.
It was accelerated during corona times, was awesome. The sad thing is I actually enjoyed it.
I had always hoped that in a public setting, others would follow my lead, but it never happened. I knew we were in trouble.
I am old enough to remember the heady days in the UK when there were no such things as “Speed Limits” on the open road. We bought our cars and ‘bikes. we stripped and modified, tweaked and tuned, fiddled and fettled, lowered and improvised negative camber according to the tenets of our individual tuning gurus. My gurus were Clive Trickey for tuning minis – an 850 mini that would comfortably out perform a Cooper S anyone, I built one – and Phil Irving for both bikes and cars. Oh, not forgetting David Vizard. Sadly the diaper flooding namby-pambys of this world want nothing more than to reduce us to a fearful, blubbering shadow of what we could be were we given the freedom to live as full blooded humans.
Oh! and I forgot – those were the days when there were no bloody annoying bells, whistles, chimes, no ABS, ACC, AEB, EBA, EBD, ECU, ESP, eCall, BSW, DSC, FCW etc, etc, ad nauseum.
‘the proclivities of the car zealots have no place in the 21st century when we’re racing against the clock to decarbonize our economies.’ — ‘Hockenos,’ quoted by eric
Contrarianism means going against prevailing opinion, when the crowd’s frenzy reaches an extreme.
Paul Macrae Montgomery, of Newport News, Virginia, proposed the magazine cover indicator in the 1960s. Whenever a social or economic issue made it to the cover of Time magazine (in his day), the crisis was already over.
It still works today. The Mainstream Media amplifies popular manias and fears, usually at the exact moment they are about to reverse and dissipate.
What Paul Montgomery never imagined was governments worldwide, climbing onto a goofball, fruitcake bandwagon like ‘climate change.’ This introduces enormous inertial delay into the subsequent reversal, as governments (like aircraft carriers) execute U-turns v-e-r-y slowly.
Net zero — the War on Carbon — implicitly requires culling human population to 0.5 billion from 8 billion today. When net zero starts to actually kill, its inventors and proselytizers are the ones likely to get ‘culled,’ quite suddenly and violently.
The clock those jackasses are racing against is the one where the average schlub points both digits of their IQ at the situation long enough to figure out that they’re getting JACKED!
Same thing with the kill shots. They had to race to get it all in place, in lockstep, no outliers — long enough, loud enough, and relentlessly enough — before the fools figure out the scam.
And they only pull the trigger on the u-turn IFF there’s absolutely, positively, no way to stay the course using other people’s money along with heaping gobs of bullshit spewed by relentless media bullhorns.
Then they’ll take the widest swing around for that U-turn, circling the smoldering pit of failure, misery and destruction left in the wake, while congratulating themselves on what fucken fine piece of work it all was. And how right they were and how they do it all again.
I17 from the valley to Flagstaff, on any given afternoon, turns into a maddening bumper to bumper shit show around bloody basin. With hundreds of cars and trucks, two lane for 50 plus miles it only takes a handful of the bugmen in your picture to ruin everything.
65-70 most of the way, the combination of truckers who have to pass another truck, along with the safety Saul, who guards the left lane and wont get over even though he’s driving 5-10 under is going to be the seen of a mass murder some day. At the top of the 5 mile uphill grade all it takes is one of these ACME truck driving school graduates to ground traffic to a halt, On an interstate. Its like nothing I’ve ever seen.
If you ever headed north on I-85 from Atlanta on a Friday afternoon, you’d better be doing 80 or else drive on the shoulder.
100+ seems rather common at that time.
Unless it starts raining or a few drops hit even, then its 30mph time. Still, it’s hammer time once you clear the Gainesville split mostly. Up past Commerce, Winder, and then hit the border where you have to slow down for a bit.
At 75, he was driving slower than the “recommended” Autobahn speed of 130 km/h (81 MPH).
Retarded indeed.
Those who bleat about how we need to “DECARBONIZE” or go to “NET ZERO” have become useful idiots for the Klaus Schwabs of the world.
German unification led to Angela Merkel being elected Chancellor. Born in West Germany but raised and educated in East Germany, she did her best to hasten the implementation of a series of year plans to destroy the west. Now it may be too late to turn back.
I have to wonder what the circumstances were that caused her father to move the family to the Soviet zone. Time and time again the intellectual classes are bamboozled by the communist Potemkin village. Did he “see the future, and it works” as so many in the west? At least in her case she had the connections to actually be in charge, unlike so many other liberal elites who assume they won’t be food for the Marxist grist mill.
Pete Buttigieg has already declared highways “WAYCIST.” I can’t even think what he might seek to do to them in the name of “EQUITY”!
You won’t be going 125 mph on I-25 in Wyoming unless you want the wind to push you off the road.
If you hit an elk on US 85 at 125 mph, you’ll be going to heaven or hell, whichever is the most desirable.
No beer in heaven.
Up in northern British Columbia there are highways with bridges that are one lane with a traffic light. You wait for it turn green before you cross the bridge. One traffic rule you obey, no question.
Not every road is as level and as smooth as the Hockenheimring.
Has to be lots of paraffin in the asphalt.
Its funny…just last night I was thinking of the 1980s….back then I had a Porsche 911, and I would often “test” it on the interstates of the great southwest…its amazing how much ground you could cover in those days with a good radar detector. I was also thinking of all the EEEEVVVV fanboys/girls with their ludicrous acceleration, you might have beaten me to 0-60 by a couple of seconds, but I don’t think they could have kept up for long and after 400 miles, at “test” speeds, I could recharge in about 5 minutes and continue on. In my mind even high end EEEEVVVVs are a joke when comes to actual on the road performance.
In the 80’s I was afraid of driving more than 70-75 mph on the 55 mph roads. When the limit went to 65, I didn’t become afraid until about 80 mph. I did test a couple of cars, but only for a very short period. Driving from 1974 to 1995 was stressful.
To be honest, it’s not the “speeders” that are dangerous, it’s the “drivers” who insist on driving slow in places where you should be driving fast. It’s far too often you have to pass on the right, because some moron is camping out in the left lane. Why is that never seen as rude, but speeding and being “impatient” is?
If you can’t go that fast, stay off that road. Simple.
It’s one of those things that society is getting @** backwards now-a-days.
> To be honest, it’s not the “speeders” that are dangerous, it’s the “drivers” who insist on driving slow in places where you should be driving fast.
I had one of those assclowns just the other day…was probably doing 55-60 in a 65-mph zone, with most traffic doing 70+. After coming off an on-ramp at speed, I had to jam on the brakes and wait for passing traffic to clear before punching it to get around him. Bastard should’ve been pulled over by the fuzz for obstructing traffic.
If it wasn’t for the meat-sacks behind too many steering wheels, we could have 100+mph interstates right now.
Here in Austin, the toll road around the perimeter of the city has proven so unpopular and unprofitable for the Spanish (!) company who owns the road that they resorted to an 85 MPH speed limit to generate business.
There is much kvetching inside the city about that speed limit being dangerous and irresposible, even in regular feature stories appearing on the local Faux News.
Indiana Toll Road bankrupted the first operator that leased it from the state (for 75 years!). It seems to be doing it to the second as we speak. May even be the same Spanish company as Austin.
Yeah, it’s ridiculous. The 85 mph limit is right for the road. The Spanish company wanted no speed limit. The Texas legislature gave it 85 mph. It’s only 44 miles at 85. That’s out of over 78000 paved miles of highways in Texas.
North of the airport and Tesla factory, 130 is so congested at rush hour anymore that no one is going 85, all the way up to Georgetown.
Maybe this sinecure can write a white paper at the CFR to propose to Bite-Me to blow up the Autobahn in the name of climate change. We’ve already blown up their natural gas lines, WTFN.