An excellent group, as always, OGC!! Ending with Sylvester - and ain't that one the truth! Also enjoyed my wife's friends - although that one usually is costly in the end!!

This illustrates a principle much broader than the automobile: Regulations of any line of business exist in order to create effective monopolies for the giant corporations by preventing anyone else from being in that line of business. In other words, regulatory capture happens in the lobbyist's office before he has even written the regulations on his clients' behalf.

BTW, he is supposedly a relative of Sydney.

There is a player named Trey Sweeney who plays for the Detroit Tigers. I think that the Tigers should let him play for an inning in jeans. A lot of people would get a laugh. However, I know it won’t happen.
Thank you for my Friday chuckles.

vegans should be happy that i am eating all the critters that eat their food (except bugs)

Bada-bing bada-boom! Nice ones, OUC! Ohhhhh, #5 is such a peeve of mine I'd like to deflate their tires (and their selfish arrogance) and leave them stranded in a work zone traffic jam for hours to come. Yers, Trump seems to be rather adept at driving stupid people crazy, LOL! Thanks OUC!

Was it Dosteskvy who said the way to prevent escape from prison is to not let the prisoner know he is in prison. America traded chattel slavery for being enslaved by the state a long time ago. The slaves are comfortable and believe they bring freedom to others by killing them.

Remember it well.

Recall me a teenaged dino and some other guy without parental permission seeing nude scenes of Jane Mansfield in some movie at an outdoor drive-in theater during the early Sixties.
Me dino having that long forgotten now awakened recollection, all I can say is~~~Abaco, you're really one very lucky guy!

Methinks lots of TDS pinheads stay pissed off because Trump NEVER chickens out be it about this, that or any other thing.
That would include some consistently frustrated extremist Muslims also.

It's been my observation that many are not asking the obvious questions in order to get at the truth is because they believe the lies they have been fed.
That sadly includes all the Sciences . . .

The one that still makes me laugh is the "supreme" leader all pissed off at the libs cause Trump didn't chicken out!
WTF?

I know that one with the lib angry at Sydney Sweeny. My wife looks a lot like Jayne Mansfield. I'm a fan...

Me a bad dino.
The purple passion one that had nothing to do with politics made me laugh the hardest.

Between environmental regulations and insurance company profiteering, it spelled doom for the auto industry, particularly the US auto makers by the early 1970's.
It's been all downhill since.
There are literally 100's of computers and computer related components in even the simplest and cheapest vehicles.
CAN Buses make it impossible for an average owner to diagnose and fix.
The last of your local garage "fixable" cars rolled off the assembly line in the 1990's.
The chances of any car or truck made today making it to a 50th year car show are.... zero.
Support for their computers and sensors will evaporate shortly after the warranty expires, until their production stock is depleted.
Worse yet, critical components such as cooling system components, intake manifolds, and all the clips and support brackets that hold it all together, are made of plastic.
The kind of plastic made to disintegrate in a specific time frame.
And I am not talking about an entry level Kia.
Porsche, Alfa-Romeo, Maserati, Audi all suffer from this self-destructing plastic.
Cars that cost six-figures new are now selling for $5k, less than ten years later, because the cost of replacing all the broken plastic exceed the cars value.
That plastic won't last either, because Chances are, it's as old as the ones that were originally made.
I saw a video of a man who bought a 7-year-old Porsche Cayenne for $5K and showed, detail by detail, why he regretted buying it.
He dumped another $7K into it before he had to give up on it.

He should have bought a 1995 Oldsmobile Cutlass. He'd still be driving it ten years from now.

"Let automakers build the cars people want rather than the ones authoritarians seek to force upon us."

Great idea, but it's never gonna happen. Big Brother knows what's best; just ask him. That genie is never going back into the lamp.

All of those "enhancements" have their places, but the important part is that they should be voluntary.

Whenever hubs and I go anywhere, I drive. We go in his car, though, because it's newer and safer. But the first thing I do when I get in the car is turn off that damned lane assist. That thing scares me to death. Hubby likes it and uses it when he's driving by himself. But that's not even important. What IS important is to have the choice.

So, even though my choices would be different, I'm with you in that we should get that choice.

A response that's more direct than the one I left on Freedoms post:

"The Many are Punished, because of a few and in Favor of a few, by those of the few and not of the many."

With freedom of choice, many of these items may have become a wanted standard feature but most importantly, should never be considered illegal to be without those features.
Both choices get worked out in a free market, To Have or Have not . . .

And here again, it's been my observation that as an entire population on this planet, we are not ready for complete un-regulated freedom.
Make no mistake, there is a large swath within the population that IS or at least very close to being deserving of complete freedom, but we are not the majority. The majority is not consciously introspective and cannot fully appreciate personal property, which includes the individual, his mind body and life.

So, we're back to a little ditty I wrote in the beginning pages of "The Fight for Conscious Human Life": "Man made rules, punish the many, because of a few, in favor of a few and to aggrandize the man that made the rule".

Problem is, the men that make the rules, are not deserving of total freedom either, leaving the 40% that are . . . up shits Creek without a paddle

Lord Tytler Woodhouselee appeared eerily prophetic as the Scottish judge, writer, professor, and historian described the cyclical stages of democracy. He portrayed societies moving from bondage to spirituality to courage to liberty to abundance to complacency to apathy to dependence, and back to bondage. From the late ’90s to the tragedy of 9/11, my intellectual inquisitiveness reignited, and I realized we were fast approaching the latter stages of his insightful observation.

Heh heh. Cynical me expects DOGE to be soon forgotten and dismantled so DC business as usual can move forward, but in the meantime maybe some good can come out of it.

RE: your last comment:
Don't count on DOGE. Buy more ammo.
D.C. is a target rich environment. ;^)

Eric Peters hits the nail on the head every time I've read any of his articles.

Indeed. I absolutely HATE vehicles that shut off at every stop regardless of how short the stop may be as I was forced to have when renting a vehicle on a trip. On another trip I ended up with a vehicle that had lane correction and almost had a sideswipe collision. I was in the second lane on a four lane section of highway when the person on my right started encroaching on my lane so being clear I just started to move to my left to avoid collision - the damn car "grabbed" the steering wheel and tried to force me to the right back into the lane. Scary piece of Schiff!!! At least I was able to override the computer and force the car to the left anyway. I was later told if I put on my left signal the computer wouldn't have taken over - yeah, right, I'm about to get smacked and I have to worry about an effing signal to appease a computer.

Way too many busy body control freaks allowed to run lose in government. I hope DOGE fires them all!!!

no
but they do have prisons and most people are too clueless to understand that the Bill of Rights is a limit on government, not We the People