National Lampoon’s Deteriorata in 1972 did a send-up of Les Crane’s 1971 hit, Desiderata, which was promoted as sage advice from antiquity found in an old church.
The Lampoon’s version offered this advice.
Go placidly amid the noise and waste,
And remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof.
Avoid quiet and passive persons, unless you are in need of sleep.
Rotate your tires.
Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself,
And heed well their advice, even though they be turkeys…
Back then, “rotate your tires” was advice we goofed on.
36 years later, Barack Hussein Obama was serious when he said, “Making sure your tires are properly inflated, simple thing, but we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups. You could actually save just as much.”
By June 30, 2008, when he made the statement, most cars no longer had spark plugs to tune up. Even Fact-Check.org gagged on that claim that inflating tires would save the world saying, “Motorists could save more than 1 billion gallons of fuel a year, right now. But expanded offshore drilling would eventually produce even more.”
A billion gallons of gasoline requires 50 million barrels of oil.
But horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking had by 2012 added 550 million barrels of oil a year to American production.
18 years after Obama’s lame alternative to drilling—“we can’t drill our way out’’—the state of California is about to save the world by regulating spare tires, and not the kind some of us have around our waist.
The California Energy Commission on Monday unanimously approved a new power to regulate spare tires using a 2003 law. The commission claims without independent verification that its Replacement Tire Efficiency Program will save Californians $1 billion a year on gasoline.
(In snobby British accent) they spend $58 billion a year on petro.
The commission could save Californians $8 billion a year by eliminating gasoline taxes but then the state would have to cut back on handouts to the homeless and the illegal aliens that give it extra congressmen and extra federal funding.
Regulating replacement tires would impose new costs. The commission says the costs will be but $1.50 a tire. OK, $6.50 tops.
But tiremakers say the estimate by a politician and her bureaucracy are out of touch with the reality of making tires.
The commission also said this will reduce the production of carbon dioxide, a molecule essential to life on Earth. It would be like taking 400,000 vehicles off the road, the commission claims without evidence.
There are nearly 36 million motor vehicles in California. That’s a reduction of a little more than 1%.
That’s a small result for taking over an entire industry. The campaign began last summer when the Appliance Standards Awareness Project issued a press release, “Burning Rubber and Cash,” which said replacement tires are inefficient. This costs Californians more than $1.1 billion a year!
Or so they claimed.
Once again, the left created a problem out of thin air and gave only one solution—regulation. The left allowed no discussion of the validity of the problem and no discussion of alternative solutions.
The person behind the spare tire rules in Nancy Skinner, a former state legislator who landed a $199,380 a year job on the California Energy Commission.
Katy Grimes of the California Globe reported:
Nancy Skinner is the same lawmaker who tried to ban “Bullets, the very thing that make guns deadly,” she said in a hearing in 2013 that I reported on. When she couldn’t ban guns, she tried to ban bullets.
In 2013, Assembly Bill 48 by then-Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) passed the Assembly by a 46-26 vote and moved over to the state Senate.
Her bill would have banned the sale of magazine parts kits that can hold more than 10 cartridges, and require mandatory reporting of law-abiding citizens who purchase more than 3,000 rounds of ammunition within a five-day period.
So naturally, when she can’t get you out of your car and onto public transit, she will make tires more expensive and difficult to get.
But while Skinner wants to regulate your cars and guns, there is one area she believes government should never regulate—pedophilia
Grimes reported:
In 2024, when Senate Democrats rejected a bill to make purchasing a child for sex a felony, Senator Nancy Skinner actually attempted to offer cover to perps for buying and selling sex.
“Selling sex has been within human cultures for millennia,” Skinner said. “It is a very difficult area of law to get into.”
Really? Was Skinner serious? The short answer is Yes.
Now we know why Democrats say they want to save the children—because they want sex partners.
The serious Desiderata poem, written by Max Ehrmann 99 years ago, said, “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”
Christians believe that.
National Lampoon’s Deteriorata said, “You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here.”
Liberals believe that.
Rotate your tires.
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This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
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