When the WSJ Attacks

A shonda fur di goyim. Who did her face?

“The all powerful bicycle lobby.” Say what?

It is obvious that if Dorothy Rabinowitz were around a hundred years ago she would be decrying the banning of horse drawn carriages & trucks as an elitist attempt to”ban pollution” and force the streetcar and the horseless carriage on the appalled & resisting citizens of NYC. Getting rid of those 120,000 horses and their feces from city streets was an elite conspiracy and a despicable attempt to force New Yorkers into some progressive “utopia”.

Along with her representing the economic top 1%, I would suggest she also represents the intellectual bottom 1%.

Is she dating Michael Savage?

Dorothy, Dorothy
Spew us your ranty poo
She’s quite crazy
All because of bikes for you

She wants those bikers discouraged
’cause she can afford a gold carriage
But she’ll look sweet
Knocked off her conceit
By a bicycle ridden by you!

@Dodgerblue: Escape From Planet of the Apes?

What a weird, disconnected set of comments to make. However, she has a point (and I’m a daily biker, agreeing with this): bikers who don’t show respect for the people around them are generating ill will. Blowing through traffic controls and arbitrarily jumping around without signalling is obnoxious behavior, and it is a right many bikers seem to feel is conferred upon them by being part of the righteous green anti-car revolution. Really, it’s just being an entitled prick. Ride your bike like you’re a part of traffic, not the enemy of it.

The rest of her paranoid conspiratorial ramblings are pretty rich, though. Do they keep her for her rapid succession of clueless, inadvertent one-liners?

T/J: so is Bud Selig going to take down A-Rod?

@IanJ:
Ride your bike like you’re a part of traffic, not the enemy of it. Bikers who don’t show respect for the people around them are generating ill will.

As a bicyclist, pedestrian, motorcyclist & car driver I have to agree with you. Too many bicyclists drive like suicidal lemmings and get entitled & pissy when you either try to point out their foolishness or reality intrudes and they barely avoid causing an accident.

My particularly “favorite” fools – people who ride their bicycles at speed down sidewalks or bike-lanes in the opposite direction of the nearest driving lane. A car pulling out of a driveway is unable to see them, unlike a slow moving pedestrian going the same way. In those rare occasions when I ride my bicycle on the sidewalk I make sure that I am going at a walking speed and recognize that I have no legal right to be riding on the sidewalk anyway.

Better than 1 out of 3 bicycles driving down my heavily traveled bike-laned street are going in the wrong direction.

Another pet peeve involves bikes on single-track multi-use trails. A simple bell on the bike would warn hikers that there is a bike approaching. I always use a jingle bell whenever I am trail riding (mine is a backpacker’s bear bell), the constant jingle is loud enough to be heard yet quiet enough not to annoy. Some such warning device is legally required on all bicycles yet I have rarely (2 or 3 times?) seen one used on any off-road bike except my own.

@IanJ: I’m all for biking (Mr Cyn got a bike this last weekend) but the entitled–or just oblivious–riders who refuse to stop at stop signs make me so nervous. If I see a cyclist approaching an intersection, I just act as if they’re going to run the stop sign. They do, more often than not.

@Mistress Cynica: If I see a cyclist car approaching an intersection, I just act as if they’re going to run the stop sign. They do, more often than not, but I’m alive today because I wasn’t hit by the one that did.

Fixed, for me. I detest arrogant bicyclist attitude – and the commuter scene here in ONC is especially aggro – but I live (literally) by the reminder that when car meets bicycle, car wins, every time. So I ride assuming that every single motor carriage out there is determined to get me.

@Beggars Biscuit: Ditto from me. Not currently a biker, but as a walker I just assume every car is out for me. If they want me they will have to go up on the sidewalk. Too many impaired, distracted and careless drivers around.

I thought the WSJ liked folks like Bloomberg because he represents all that they aspire to — or is it because Bloomberg News is their competition? Ditto you think they’d like the idea of Citibank paying for the project and slapping their corporate bank logo on everything.

I don’t bike in SF anymore after a bad encounter with a cable car track. When I biked, I seemed to be the only person wearing a helmet, reflective vest, and lights who stopped at red lights.

@ManchuCandidate: Bravo!

@jaycubed: Yes, yes to what you said about bicycle bells . . . At least three times now I have narrowly escaped being run down by bell-less bikes on the sidewalk. You’d think a cyclist would be concerned about what might happen to herself and her bike if she collided with a pedestrian, not to mention does she know any good lawyers.

@jaycubed: It is obvious that Dorothy Rabinowitz was around a hundred years ago. FIXED

@Dodgerblue: Messugenah tsutcheppenish.

The fuggin’ bikes, fuggin’ fascist crap from the econazi fugger, fuggin’ Bloomfugg. Gonna get everyone fuggin’ killed and shit because they hate normal people like me.

That’s right, Dorothy and the fuggin’ wogs comin’ here to take our jobs and rape our kids are gonna be fuggin’ blowing lights and crashing into shit with these fuggin’ nazicycles.

What kind of ‘interview’ is this? I can imagine the assignment editor calling out to a staff journalist: Hey, you, you, yeah, you, we got this crazy old lady who thinks bikes are a nazi conspiracy and Bloomberg is a nazi cycle fascist tool. Go talk to her for a while and get it on tape.

I’ll bet she has no interest in the fact that the NSA is spying on her cell phone activity and that of millions of other Americans. No, that’s perfectly OK. But those commie fascist nazi homo community bicycles? Burn them at the stake!

@gunnergoz: What’s up with this cell phone info going to the feds? Is this new?

@Dodgerblue: It’s the latest thing: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily. Frequently suspected, but now proved, court order in hand.

Whether it’s new or not is still speculation. I know from my own recent jury experience that “mere metadata” is enough to convict someone of a number of pretty horrible things (mostly by proving that testimony #1 was accurate where testimony #2 was clearly a lie, in my recent experience). I don’t think cell phone metadata should be considered “public” in the same way envelope information is considered “public” under current US law. But the law is out of date, and the spy agencies will fight hard to see that it stays that way. And they’ll probably win.

@IanJ: I can’t believe that it’s limited to Verizon. And I saw info today that the feds are snooping around the interwebs, which doesn’t surprise me. I hope they’re enjoying my links to the Brazilian womens’ beach volleyball team.

@Dodgerblue: Honestly, I tend to do everything online with the assumption that someone else is looking over my shoulder. I still think privacy laws need to be strengthened, though.

T/J: President Obama and former Big Dog Bill Clinton will both be in L.A. tomorrow. You know what this means: trafficapalooza.

Hi NSA!

@IanJ: Does this mean there’s finally a good reason to be an AT&T customer?

@matador1015:
No. Everyone’s handing over data.

@matador1015: The best take I’ve heard is that the FISA order seems routine — and routinely renewed — and it’s just chance that Verizon was the one exposed.

But with the NSA hoovering everything else, that’s already passé.

Jon Stewart featured this dumb box of rocks on Thursday night. I kept yelling, “Bloggie broke this story on Tuesday, give him some Stinquing credit!”

@SanFranLefty: If by “broke” you mean typed 14 or so words and pasted in a YouTube embed code whilst on my lunch break, then yes I did.