From the ‘Everything Enjoyable Is Bad for You’ Files: New Car Smell Gives You Cancer

New in PJ Media:

The famed fictional advertising wizard Don Draper said it in Mad Men: “You know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car.” But that TV series was a long time ago and the time it depicts even farther from ours. Now we live in a sadder, more fragile age, in which even the smallest pleasures are to be denied us. The new car smell is no longer the smell of happiness; it is the stench of cancer, decay, and death. Welcome, Don Draper, to the enlightened twenty-first century.

The UK’s Daily Mail reported Friday that a new study has made a grim discovery: “The much-loved smell of a new car is caused by cancer-causing chemicals.” Well, of course! What pleasure, large or small, hasn’t been touched by the Left’s obsession with doom? Take weather reports. On warm, sunny days even just a few years ago, TV weather maps were green and pleasant, studded with images of smiling suns and blooming flowers. Now, for exactly the same temperatures, they are full of oranges and reds and images of extreme heat, working hard to sell climate change hysteria.

Major sports have not only been thoroughly politicized, but they have also become the vehicles for the same buzz-killing hysteria. Were you excited about the beginning of a new baseball season? Not so fast: AccuWeather wanted you to know that “MLB season is here: Experts warn lightning is a danger at games.” Now, maybe it really was true that “upwards of 90% of the lightning that happens in the United States, specifically the lower 48, occurs during baseball season,” but life is fraught with risks. Do the guardians of acceptable opinion want us to live in fear, cowering in terror at the prospect of a sunny day and forgoing a happy outing to a baseball game for fear of being struck by lightning? Why, yes. Yes, they do.

In line with the overall atmosphere of fear and gloom, the Daily Mail explains that “a cocktail of leather and plastics creates a gasoline-like odor which becomes more intense in the heat — due to an increase in energy available to odor-causing molecules.” And so if you’re enjoying your brand new car, pull over, stop, and get out of the vehicle. Quickly: “Sitting for just 30 minutes every day in a car exposes you to dangerous levels of carcinogens formaldehyde and acetaldehyde. These chemicals are linked to myeloid leukemia and rare cancers such as in the nose.” And so one day soon, when you step into your new electric car, you may find that the fabled new car smell has been relegated to the odiferous dustbin of history.

There is more. Read the rest here.