Who Would Win?

 Recently, I saw a bumper sticker that read, “My stick-figure family can beat your stick—figure family.”

I wondered, “At what?”

A bike race, perhaps?

Will Giant Bikes Be Banned In The US?

What does bicycle manufacturer Giant have in common with a Chinese fishing company and a South Korean salt farm?

Aside from being in Asia, this: They are have been tagged with the only Withhold Release Orders issued this year.

A WRO, per a 2011 law, allows US Customs and Border Protection to bar goods from entering the country if they were made with forced labor.

Based partly on a report in Le Monde Diplomatique, Giant allegedly employed guest workers who paid as much as $5500 to recruiters in their home countries. Those workers, who were then signed to three-year contracts, had to pay additional fees that amounted to as much as two months’ pay.

The order bans all bikes and other goods made in Giant’s Taiwan factories, whether they are sold under Giant’s own name or those of the brands they own, or made for other companies. Interestingly, products from Giant’s factories in China and Vietnam are not affected.

Giant is appealing the order, claiming that they have been paying recruiting and other fees and providing housing for workers. In the meantime, the company has made contingency plans so supply chains can continue with “minimal disruption.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I couldn’t help but to notice that the US President most openly hostile to bicycles and cyclists targeted a bike company for one of the first WROs of his second administration.

Pity The Poor, Downtrodden Automobile

 Some time during my childhood, I saw a cartoon in which the automobile was on trial for its life. (Ironically, it was released the same year—1957–as “Twelve Angry Men,” perhaps, to this day, the best argument against capital punishment.) The point of the story—the reason why countless American kids have seen it in drivers’ ed classes—is the automobile is blamed for the dangers caused by its driver.

Another kid, who probably saw the cartoon a decade or so before I did, seems to have taken a different message from it. Instead of seeing reckless drivers as true villains, he saw the automobile as the poor, aggrieved victim, much as he sees white cisgender heterosexual men 

By now, you’ve probably figured out that I am referring to the Fake Tan Fũhrer, a.k.a., El Cheeto Grande, the Mango Menace or Golfin’ Golem.

His apparent belief that transgender leftist environmentalist cyclists like me have it in for his self-beloved self, I mean automobiles is expressed in his rationale for rescinding Federal funding for bike lanes, pedestrian malls or anything else that can make it safer to pedal or walk through American cities. In notices (which, one wonders, whether FTF himself dictated) to local officials, the US Department of Transportation declared such projects as “hostile” to automobiles and claimed they run counter to the DoT’s priority of “increasing roadway capacity for motor vehicles.” I have to wonder whether such a statement is written anywhere in DoT’s policies or simply another impromptu fiction from our “Dear Leader.”

So, boys and girls (I am trying not to run afoul of FTF’s decrees about the language of gender!), just remember that all those poor, picked-on SUVs and pimped-out pickup trucks are simply getting the room they need to breathe—just like those dudes you see on the subway who sit with their legs spread across the width of two seats. Overcompensation, anyone?