Carting Caitlin: “One problem with a lot of the green movement is that there’s no sense of perspective, no under­standing that all the basement hydroponics in the world won’t help us if we’re still driving Caitlin five miles each way to soccer practice. You also get a lot of arrogant ‘experts’ who get bona fide green credentials for stopping an open-pit coal mine and think that that entitles them to declare that the only transportation fix we need is fuel cells.”

An excellent finish to Copenhagenize’s Fear of Cycling series: “The mass media is very alert to the potential of the cyclist’s stigmatised identity to make ‘a good story’, especially in a social context which inc­reasingly encourages people to reflect on transport choices and question their own automobilised lives (see below). Newspaper editors are attuned to knowing what their readers and advertisers want (and we should note how a high proportion of those advertisers belong to the system of automobility, on whose revenues news­papers depend). Media accounts are therefore likely to reproduce dominant representations of the cyclist as a ‘yob’, law-breaker and outsider (for example, Hoey 2003).”

Police helpfully lament all those “collisions between distracted pedestrians and vehicles.” It’s just like the famous ‘collisions between’ nails and hammers.

New Anti-Smoking Ads Warn Teens: ‘It’s Gay To Smoke’ (Video)

So guess what there are repercussions to treating foreign guests like dirtbags, such as not being selected to ‘host’ the olympics. Okay the games are b.s. but perhaps their loss is something tangible for our ethics-free countrymen to consider when they ask themselves why we should treat them well, seeing as they are not us, etc.