The worst tool ever made

There’s a thing that happens in a man’s brain, sometimes, when he steps in the door of a place like Harbor Freight, or opens a mail-order catalog.  It’s as if the air is a bit lighter, the light a bit brighter, maybe, there’s a willingness to suspend disbelief, perhaps, that’s the only way I can justify the decision in the cold light of day.  You see something, and it just speaks to you… it says, "buy me, and you and I can go off and have fun together…”

I suspect a similar process is at work when my wife steps through the doorway at Joann’s Fabrics, but, in the interest of continuing enjoyment of domestic bliss, which can be defined as the avoidance of spirited conversations, we won’t go there.

I was quick to adopt the multi-tool, when the concept first arrived, in the form of the Swiss Army knife.  They had the scissors, and the all-important but soon lost toothpick.  As the form mutated, the knife blades became less important and the main tool was now a pair of pliers, as in my Gerber.  But this!  This was truly something new.  A Combination claw hammer, pliers with pipe jaws and a wire cutter built in!  And it’s Red!  Just like a Swiss Army knife! What more could anyone ask?  So I bought one, of course.  Then I got it home, and really looked at it for the first time.  Ugh.  Whatta piece of junk…

Here’s a picture:

Yes, that funny bent rod sticking out the back is one handle of the pliers.  The back jaw with the claw is fixed, so only the hammer nose moves.  As you can imagine, that skinny square handle is not very comfortable. And the shape of the hammer makes it the opposite of needle-nosed.  Call it a hammer nose pliers. When you want to use it as a hammer, you capture the end of the handle in the little swivel clip at the bottom, which sorta matches with a hand-ground notch in the otherwise sharp-enough-to-stab-yourself end, if you haven’t already impaled the meat of one finger on the leaf spring that doesn’t go out quite as far as the handle.

Then when you secure the sharp ends with the clip and try to strike something with the blunt end of the hammer, you quickly discover another design feature.  The body of the hammerpliers is so short that the sharp end of the claw will rebound into the meat of your hand by your thumb and draw blood in two places at once.  You see the lengths to which I am prepared to go in order to bring you the results of scientific, thorough product testing, and I hope you’re grateful.

Then we get to the blades concealed in the handle of this wonder of modern tool design.  The first little short blade on the bottom is supposed to be a P-38 can opener with a screwdriver tip.  Unfortunately, the prisoner in whatever Chinese dungeon that produced this garbage did such a lousy job of grinding the P-38 edge that he wiped out half the screwdriver tip while making sure the P-38 was dull enough to have trouble with a cube of butter, let alone a tin can.  The blade is only .060” thick, which means it would have twisted in half the first time you tried to screw something with it, making you the screwee in this deal.  Opposite that is another weird little finger that is so stiffly locked in place it will pull your thumbnail loose and hurt for two days if you try to open it by hand, only to discover that it is a tiny little rounded finger that barely clears the hammer snout when deployed, bringing up the obvious observation that it has no useful purpose at all.  Maybe it’s for the reset buttons on a Gameboy.

The next blade is full length, about 2 ½”, and combines a sharp serrated edge with a crude nail file on one side and a tip that looks like a flat screwdriver blade but is only tapered on one edge, which means it is a scraper chisel for built-up crud on a flathead Ford engine block in a junkyard, or the guano deposited by a flock of seagulls on your garbage can lid the last time you made gumbo.  Be careful when using it, because there is no locking mechanism, which means it can and will bite you.

The adjoining full length blade is just that, a knife blade, albeit one that is only .070” thick and thus useful for only the lightest of whittling chores, and also lacking a lock.  And when you use this thing with either long blades deployed, the claw of the hammer fits nicely into the heel of your hand, where the sharp ends mark their spot and dare you to do something stupid.

On the back side of this egregious waste of steel is one slngle round Philips screwdriver blade, which, because it pivots from the middle of the handle, only sticks out a short reach from the handle on one side, and even then would only be useful if the immediate area around the screw on which you were trying to use it had room for the entire body of the hammpliers to swivel like an ice skater spinning in circles while balanced on one leg.

So then I take a good look at the body of the hamliers, which is quickly revealed as two formed rubber pads held in place by a cheap stamped tin cover that is secured top and bottom with two tiny bent tabs, like a cheap toy from the ‘50s that sparks and dies by the end of Christmas Day.  With the cover off, the true nature of this misbegotten excuse for a tool is revealed:  two thin stamped side plates held together with 5 little pins, guaranteed to fall apart within minutes of any attempt to accomplish any meaningful tasks.  The cheap covers are likewise guaranteed to fall off in your toolbox under the influence of gravity, which is where it should stay, unless you foolishly take it out and try to accomplish something with it and injure yourself instead.  Truly a jack squat of all trades.  One can only imagine the committee meeting at which this design was approved for production, and wonder at the quality and quantity of the drugs and alcohol that must have been involved in the process.

It would only be natural to give some thought to consideration of the type of person who would be foolish enough to buy something like this.  In my defense, I can only offer that it was red, very red. And it was for science!   And stay out of Harbor Freight!  :-{)}}

Blasphemy

There was an article in Sunday’s Times about a local Imam, Jawad Khaki, from Kirkland, who was quoted as follows when asked about his individual responsibility as a Muslim to respond to the radicals: … “Absolutely, because of the teaching in the Quran: When you kill an innocent individual, it’s as if you killed the entire humanity; when you save a person’s life, you saved the entire humanity”…

The point of his article was to say that most Muslims were peaceful and not extremist, but I noticed the very careful wording of his reply.  He said it was wrong to kill an innocent person, but what he did not say is, What about a guilty person?  Is it okay to kill them?

Furthermore, does not a statement like that automatically call up other questions, such as, What are the crimes that, when you are found guilty, receive the dispensation from God to ignore the First Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill?  Among those crimes for which God thinks you should be put to death, does the modern, moderate Muslim include Blasphemy and/or Heresy?  Therein lies the rub, as they say, because here in America, we have decided that Freedom of Speech trumps Blasphemy and Heresy every time.

It wasn’t always like that here.  Back in the days of the Pilgrims, while the Spanish Inquisition was going on about its campaign of genocide against native people everywhere, Heresy could get you hanged in the Colonies, and Witchcraft could get you burned.  And even in these relatively enlightened times in the West, there are still lots of Christians who fundamentally believe that it’s gonna come to blows at some point, and God is on their side.

Thoughts are energy, preserved in chemical reactions inside our brains, and when we remember them and transmit them to others by talking or writing them down we in effect send that energy out into the world to join the vast shifting flow of karma, or grace, or whatever your particular sect calls it.  Those thoughts can take the form of calls for Jihad, spread over the Internet, and set a person to action that causes innocence to die.  They can take the form of online bullying, and cause an innocent but fragile person to take their own life.  Perceived or not, all those negative thoughts from those whose minds are filled with hate are out there everywhere, a dark cloud over everyone.

Fortunately, there are positive things going on out there, too, that tend to counteract the bad stuff, a dialectical Yin and Yang of ebb and flow, action and counter-action, life and death.  The pendulum swings.

To a person with the ability to reason, it makes sense that the positive energy in the universe can be deliberately increased on purpose, by doing positive things like helping other people, having children, doing good useful work.  Quite often you see volunteers trying to directly save and heal the victims of the bad stuff right on the scene, as in the refugee camps throughout the world, the Habitat for Humanity builders.  Education is a positive thing, especially for those to whom it has been denied.  That’s why so many bad men, whose positions at the top of the food chain are threatened by it fight so hard to deny it, especially to their women.

So to our local Imam, and to all the others in the world who write articles and talk on TV about it, I ask for this favor:  Every Time some radical Imam in Pakistan, or London, or Paris stands in a pulpit and issues a fatwa calling the faithful to Jihad, would you please, all of you, promptly issue your own fatwa cancelling the Jihad!  Tell your faithful not to give those bad guys any money or help, and not to go kill anyone.

I’m basing this request on the guess that, if one Imam can issue a fatwa any time they want, why couldn’t you also?  Do Imams have levels, like, say, you gotta be a Bishop or higher to issue a fatwa?  And if a majority of Muslim priests, just like a majority of Catholic, Bhuddist, Hindu, Baptist, and any other one you want to name would be glad to do all jumped on those bad guy fatwas every time they came out, well, you’d think that would be pretty effective.

And it sounds reasonable to me, like something a reasonable person would do, and they’d have no reason not to.

So how about it, can you get that fatwa out pretty soon?  While you’re at it, be sure and tell them that Heresy and Blasphemy are not a big deal anymore, it’s just people exercising their God-given right to speak their minds, and, if you don’t like it, their Constitutional right to pick up their arms and blow your shit away!

Oops, I think I just commited Blasphemy… :-{)}

Collections

We’ve all seen the pictures of the homes of the hoarders, the out of control individuals swallowed by the mountains of garbage that they have accumulated, but were unable to dispose of, teetering piles of rubbish concealing walls that have not seen the light of day in years.  We all agree that no, that’s not us, no way, unh uh; just keep your nose out of my garage.

Some people are compulsive sorters, labelers and shelvers in their attempts to bring their hoarding under control. My father was one such, and I have inherited those tendencies, but I like to think they are under control.  When he passed on, I looked in his garage and found shelves full of labeled compartmented trays for nuts, bolts, screws, springs, washers, set screws, cotter pins, you name it.  As a small boy I remember going to McLendon’s with him every Saturday, and every time he needed one, he bought two, just in case. I still regret sending the pop rivets off to auction.

Half the battle of collecting stuff is being able to lay your hands on it when you need it, a battle that is lost when you spend hours or days digging through your pile looking for something you knew you had, but don’t quite remember where you put it.  With tools, it’s who you loaned them to.

Half the reward you get when you sell or give away some little gubbin you’ve been sitting on all these years, like those clear yellowed Lucite Stanley replacement plastic mallet tips in the original box that have lived in my toolbox for twenty years or so, comes from the justification that you were right, see?  Let the significant others of the world roll their eyes as they will, one successful placement of a part back in the tool to which it belongs, or one new home found for the odd Harley part, even if it means transportation from one pile to another, means all the rest of them could do the same, right?  It’s even better when you make a profit on the deal!

Beyond that, though, we also benefit society when we scoop up others’ discards and preserve them for the moment they regain their value.  Each finished part represents a certain amount of labor on someone’s part, which takes energy, which can neither be lost nor destroyed as long as the part avoids the landfill or the smelter.  The trick is in knowing where to draw the line.

Every swap meet I ever attended as a seller always winds up with the pack-up-and-head-for-the-barn load, and there is always a small pile of stuff there that just doesn’t deserve to go back in my pile; I’m tired of looking at it, and nobody is ever going to want that anyway, so where’s the nearest garbage can?  One of my favorite tricks was to go to one of the other sellers and say, “Hey, I gotta go, but I want to leave this pile here in my booth as freebies that anyone who wants can take.  Would you do me a favor and toss the remainders in that garbage can over there for me when you leave?”  They’d always say, “Sure, no problem!”, but they’d also have that look on their face that said, “Yeah, sure, after I dig through it first and see how much I want!”  Either way, the stuff would be gone and I’d be happy.

But the thing to remember is that everything you keep in your house or garage has a story, and everything has a hook that latches on and drags you down.  Some things, like your favorite motorcycle, have big hooks in deep while others, like the spare part for a tool you no longer own, have small ones that are easily dislodged.  When you pick up  a thing and consider it, and can’t remember where you got it and why you kept it, that’s a sign that you kept it too long, or never needed it in the first place, and an invitation to send it on down the road.  The beauty of Ebay and Craigslist and all their competitors is that they give people ways to get rid of stuff the best way, by turning them into cash.  The problem is when you can’t quite figure out how to do that. 

It is also true that, even if you give stuff away or send a load to the scrap metal yard, it feels almost as good as if you had sold it, because the hooks pulling out of your shoulders lighten your load an infinitesimal but noticeable amount.  Giving something to a friend who needs it returns double the pleasure to you as you do good and feel good about it.  That’s better than money.

We are marked by the things we collect as we become known by them.  Just let one Singing Bass show up on your wall, and the avalanche of beer bongs, fishing plaquards, NASCAR posters and cutesy country sayings on softwood is inevitable.  It’s like clickbait on Facebook.

And then there’s the problem of what happens to your collection after you die.  That old saw about “I want to live long enough to become a problem for my kids” takes its meaning posthumously.  The real difference, I suspect, is that one departed person’s pile is dealt with by use of an auctioneer, while another one requires a dumpster.  It could be considered a measure of success in your accumulation, an affirmation, if you will, of your judgement and discriminating taste if the auction catalog is larger than the dump load.

So the wisdom nuggeted here, if any, is that collections are nice, when they bring you pleasure and increase in value (hah!), but it is also nice to thin them from time to time.  There was a guy, who made a good living hauling garbage in Portland for many years and accumulated a collection of motorcycles, mostly Harleys, that he rode for around 500 miles each before stashing them in his collection in original unmolested condition.  As you can imagine, the auction when he died drew a lot of attention and brought many high prices for the bikes when they sold.  You could also imagine the costs associated with storage of that many bikes in a way to preserve them, and how that alone would force the heirs to dispose of the collection, let alone the buildings that housed them.  You can imagine what will happen to Jay Leno’s Garage when he passes on.
There’s a collection of cars down in Punta Gorda, Florida, on display in a museum euphemistically called the Muscle Car Museum, even though it’s mostly GM cars, few Fords or Mopars.  It’s one man’s collection that outlived him by becoming large enough to draw a crowd in its own right, like the LeMay Collection in South Tacoma.

But it’s probably safe to say that most of our collections are not going to wind up in a museum.  It’s also probably safe to say that most of our collections are too large, and could stand to be thinned a bit.  I tell my kids that, if they’re lucky, I’ll get the dump run done in advance.  The rest is up to them.  He who dies with the most toys wins, right?

Toll Lanes

Having driven I-405 a few times now since the implementation of the new "Express Toll" lanes, I have formed a perception about this new idea, who it benefits, and how it is being received.
And, as a wise woman taught me, you can't deny anyone's perception - they own it!
I just got my first toll bill, inadvertently, when the two of us were traveling south through Bellevue, in the fast lane because our former car pool lane has been taken from us when the minimum number was raised to three. We waited until we thought we were safe and crossed into the car pool lane just under the first underpass in Downtown Bellevue by the sign that said that the Express Toll lanes were ending. Apparently, we were still too soon, and got a bill for $.75 plus $2 for failing to open an account and give them the money in advance.
I had already decided that it was clear that the new fast lanes were created, with public funding, for one reason: to ease the passage of Society's Elites through traffic. As the income gap between rich and poor in this country has widened, we are slowly and inexorably being molded into a society of Lords and Ladies, in their sequestered, gated communities and their Ivory Towers, and the rabble clustered around the bases of the towers in their festering, teeming slums where only the strong survive, fairness and justice have been abandoned, and the police are the enemies of the poor.
You can see the start of that attitude in the new "Express Toll" lanes. As we crawled northbound in heavy traffic, while the rich people in their BMWs and Audis flew by on the left, it occurred to me that the reason there were so few people in that lane was not the cost - it was only $.75, after all -, it was a form of protest! The vast majority of the commuters and travelers in the other lanes were just like me, hunched behind the wheel and fuming as those arrogant jerks swept by in the the former car pool lane that we used to be able to use, but damned if we were going to go along with the obvious ripoff and accept the injustice of our elected government hiring faceless bureaucrats who then decided to take our rights away and give them to anyone willing to pay the toll.
Adding insult to injury was the introduction of computerized cameras operated by for - profit companies to rake money out of the pockets of the public, first through school zone and intersection tickets, and now tolling the people to pay for driving on roads they already paid for the construction of. The latest word is that the system is going to be expanded across the country! Think about that! You can drive across the country throwing dollar bills out the window, electronically. How soon before there is a border tax every time you cross a state line, or a county?
I just wonder, sometimes, how long we are going to continue to put up with this? Fortunately, the Seahawks will be playing again this Sunday, and there's lots of new shows on TV... :-{)}

Vengeance is whose?

I have an interesting book I picked up one day at a thrift store.  It’s called “Wars of National Liberation”, by Daniel Moran.  Here is just one tidbit from the Introduction:

Wars of National Liberation are disproportionately associated with irregular warfare, guerilla insurgency, and terrorism, … Such methods testify … to military weakness.

In other words, until the revolutionaries are successful in gaining control over a population and an area, they are terrorists.  Once they succeed, they are a country.  North Korea is one example of this, Israel is another.  Viet Nam is a little different; they had their own country, but the white folks kept making decisions for them, and they had to kick out several versions of imperialists before they got their own country back.  As Americans, we were the imperialists, and the fallout of those historical mistakes are part of what’s haunting us today.  We are the Great Satan to much of the Mideast, and part of the reason why that is has to do with oil.  Part of it has to do with weaponry.

So these ISIS guys are terrorists right now, and they certainly have the world’s attention.  Like everyone else, I have been following the news reports, wondering where they are going to hit next, and what is going to happen when they do.

But it seems to me that there are questions that should be asked, and I’m not seeing them on the internet.  Maybe they are out there, but I haven’t seen them, or their answers.  Maybe you have, which is why I’m putting these questions out and asking for answers if anyone has them.  Questions like these:

How many people were killed in Paris, including the members of the strike teams that did most of the killing?    Whatever the final number turns out to be, we do know one thing – that most of them were innocent bystanders who had nothing to do with causing the grievances which were used as an excuse to kill them.

How many people have already been killed in response to the Paris atrocities, and how many more will be killed by the French in direct response to the attacks?  How many more will die before somebody figures enough is enough?  And how many of them will be able to be found to be innocent bystanders who had nothing to do with causing the grievances which were used as an excuse to kill them?

It appears the ISIS idiots killed some Russians, too, in the name of God.  How many will the Russians kill to make up for their own folks?  How many of those will be innocent?

What do you think the families of those unfortunate victims in Paris, or Moscow, or Egypt, or Raqqa will think of the perpetrators of the violence against them?  How long do you think it will take for the damage to be repaired, the memories to die, and the resentment to be forgotten?  How many generations will it take for the stories to fade away?

How long has this been going on?  Who profits, no matter who wins or who loses?

How many rounds of ammunition were expended by all sides in Paris?  What private company will make money when those expended rounds are replaced?  What about the rockets and bombs dropped on Raqqa by the French Air Force?  Who made them, and will make their replacements?  Whose guns were used in France, by both sides?  Were they American, French, Israeli, Russian or Chinese weapons?  Who sold them?  Who bought them, and what did they use to pay for them?

I see ISIS uses lots of Toyota pickups, but Toyota has no idea how they got their hands on whole fleets of identical white trucks with machine guns mounted in the beds.

What if you looked at all the international cashflow generated by people killing each other for all their various reasons, and followed all the trails laid down by the flow of materials and labor and money to see where they lead, would it surprise you to find, at the root of it all, some gross ugly toad of a monster bureaucracy whose sole function is to profit from death and destruction?

I believe this monster exists.  It encompasses all governments all over the world, and operates outside their controls.  It uses lobbyists, bribes, murder, torture and force to get what it wants, and what it wants is for people to keep on dying, the more the merrier.  Expend that ammunition.  Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, Darfur, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, there are truly no end to the locations where the toad operates.  If you dig deep you will find corporations with no fixed addresses, offshore holdings, and anonymous boards of directors.  You will also find well-known names of public corporations operating all over the world:  Boeing, General Dynamics, Halliburton, Raytheon, and all their Russian, Chinese and European equivalents.  You’ll find the CIA, and the KGB, Mossad, and the Red Army.

I suspect if you look around the world and see which places are relatively unscathed by the killings, that’s where the members of the bureaucracy live, mostly in gated, secured communities with private security teams.  There are lots of those in Russia and America, but it’s a universal phenomenon.  The more blood they have on their hands the more security-conscious they become.

What are we, the rest of us, the vast majority of the inhabitants of this planet, the ones who are doing the majority of the dying and the paying, going to do about that toad?  At what point do we finally say, “That’s it, we’re done!  No More!”?  When are we going to do something about it?

One thing for certain:  When we do, we will start out in the minority of people who are ready to sacrifice their lives if necessary to get this monstrous toad off our backs once and for all.  We’ll probably have to become terrorists out of necessity, until the rest of the people come around to our way of thinking on this.  I’d like you to think about that.   :-{)}

Missed Connections

Hey, You!  Yeah, you, the guy in the MGB GT cruising down Park Avenue about 11:30 this morning!  I wanted to talk to you.  I had a story for you.

You pulled a U-turn without warning into the curbside spot outside Panera Bread, and, by the time I took a left and tried to find a way around the block in that labyrinthine mess that is the Renton Landing, you had already bought a sandwich and left.

I wanted to tell you about my friend, who had accumulated over the years a 1976 MGB, along with the usual pile of parts, spares and stuff that accumulates around British sports cars.  Any old sports car, especially the British ones, brings with it a shared responsibility to keep it up and running like any old classic automobile.  The common problems with SU carburetors, electric overdrive transmissions, Lucas Prince of Darkness wiring systems and the overcomplicated way British engineers liked to do things also pushes the owners into groups of like-minded individuals commiserating and kvetching and sharing parts and know-how, which is why I figured if you didn’t want a look at this pile, you might know someone who would.

I wanted to tell you how I went out there last week and wandered around the back yard and in the shop, and gazed at the piles of bodies and fenders and wheels and tires, and how there was part of an old horse trailer out there, inside of which were drivelines and grilles and bumpers and seats and tops and door panels and this and that kind of related stuff.  How in the shop there was more interesting stuff, including some engines under the bench, and a stack of transmissions, with rear ends out in the yard.

I could have told you that most of the pile appeared to be MG stuff, but there was some Triumph goodies in there, too, and even some Chevrolet stuff in the pile, the surface of which was all I saw, the rest being buried under stuff.

I wanted to say that the car has a title, but has not been licensed since 1998, and somewhere along the line someone replaced the power train with a Nissan engine and a five-speed transmission, which probably would be considered an upgrade among all but the most diehard aficionados of the marque.

I could have told you that all she wants is for everything to go away, including the horse trailer itself and all the junk tires, and that a guy could probably get the whole pile including the car for a very nominal sum and a crew to come out and turn that part of the back yard back into something you can mow.

I was gonna tell you that I have pictures, if you were interested.

But none of that is going to happen.  You got away.  Now you’ll never know how close you came to a score.  Maybe you should be relieved.  Maybe not.  Maybe next time.  Drive careful in that old beauty.  There’s only so many of them left out there.  Next one I see, I’ve got a story for them.  :-{)}

Speed Traps

I went for a motorcycle ride on a Tuesday in October.  It was a beautiful fall day- bright sunshine, crisp clean air, leaves still on the trees and not the road; in short, a perfect riding day.  The two of us used the back roads as much as possible as we circumnavigated Mount Rainier in the widershins direction, counter-clockwise.  The only downers we encountered were police vehicles, lots of them, all doing the same thing: raising revenue in the name of traffic safety.

To understand how pervasive this practice has become, we must consider the implications of the speed traps, where they are set up and why and how they operate.  In order to protect the officers who take on the risk of traffic stops, it is necessary to factor in the weather, the location, and the likelihood that enough speeders will drive by that location to make economic sense to the police departments.

So, on that Tuesday, the weather was perfect for a speed trap.  The first location we stumbled on was just past Orting on the Orville road cutoff to Kapowsin and Electron, where a county Sheriff SUV was parked on a wide spot in the road headed back the way we came, just far enough around the bend that the oncoming speeders would not see the cop until it was too late, and the radar had them in its sights.  That’s rule number one for a successful speed trap: hide in plain sight.

Just past the cop the road widened out for quite a ways, leaving plenty of room on the side for them to pull over their victims safely, which illuminates rule number two:  have a convenient wide spot to pull them over.  That is why, even though we blew past the cop at approximately 10 over the posted 45mph zone, he ignored us, as did his backup who was waiting a little further along in a yard off the road to our right.  We were headed into a winding narrow stretch of the road with no shoulders to speak of, leaving the police rigs exposed to traffic if they pulled someone over.  Whew, missed the hook that time!

The old unwritten rule used to be: Six you’re fine, seven you’re mine, referring to the number of miles above the speed limit that they caught you doing.  I’ve recently read a post from a police officer online that said that the new rule is: twelve you’re fine, thirteen you’re mine, which explains most of California and large stretches of I-5 through Seattle.  I know from unfortunate experience that seven over on a photo-op ticketing camera is worth $125, where 15 over is more like $265 in this state, so that also helps explain the rules.  Follow the money…

There is also an interesting phenomenon apparent these days, in that entrepreneurial Law firms have adopted a new business model in reaction to the increasing prevalence of speeding tickets.  It goes like this, at least at Heidi Hunt’s law offices, which I have used:  If you get a radar speeding ticket, just send us your paperwork and $250 for the first instance, $200 for any subsequent tickets, and we will guarantee dismissal of your ticket.  If we do not win the case, we will pay your fine out of the money you sent us.  Furthermore, in most local courts, if you are represented by an attorney you are not required to show up in court for your own contested hearing, we’ll be there for you. 

The way it works out, the lawyers send in discovery requests for the officer, the maintenance records on the radar gun, the car, anything that might help the case, which also lets the jurisdiction know that there is a lawyer involved.  Typically, and I have not heard one single instance where it worked out otherwise, the prosecutors fail to respond to the discovery and the officer fails to show up at the hearing, so the attorney moves to suppress the evidence and the judge tosses the ticket.  The fact that this happens every time is further evidence that the police are being used to extract revenue on the false pretense of highway safety, that the fact that it would cost more to prosecute the offender than it would return in revenue is the deciding factor in the case.  That is what passes for justice these days.

So if you get a ticket, and send the money to the lawyers, you are almost guaranteed to get a call from a young attorney informing you that your case has been won.  You’re still out the same amount of money, more or less, but your driving record stays clean, and the City, County or State is denied the revenue.  The downside of this is that, in order to meet their budget assumptions for “other” revenue, they have to send the police out to issue even more tickets!  I mentioned this to the Renton police Captain in charge of traffic, and he made it clear that they were well aware of those law firms and how they work.

The second speed trap we encountered on the road around the Mountain was in beautiful downtown Greenwater.  We had pulled in to the Greenwater store for a water and candy bar break.  As I stood outside the store on the covered porch, I saw a new SUV pull up on the side of the road across from the parking lot.  The rig was completely unmarked, and even the lights were hidden.  The only clue that it was a WSP rig was the heavy duty push bar attached to the front bumper.

That particular stretch of road, if you haven’t been on it, is perfect for a speed trap.  Not only does it have plenty of parking space on both sides, but it is on Highway 410, where the speed limit is 55 mph all the way from Enumclaw through the Federation Forest, then drops to 35 as you come around the corner and into Greenwater itself.  Most people have drifted down to the low 50s by then, meaning they are doing at least 15 over, good money for little effort on the cops’ parts.  Then the road curves again on the way out and the speed limit goes back up to 55, meaning the pigeons are coming in fast from both directions.

Within seconds, the officer nailed his first victim, pulling a dangerous U-turn in the middle of the street to chase them down into the gas station parking lot.  While we watched, he wrote them up quickly, then immediately nabbed another one going the other direction, with another unsafe U-turn across two lanes of speeding vehicles.  We chose that moment to depart, while he was tied up, and got the hell out of town, with one eye out for confederates and the other on the speedometer.

Why, you might ask, would you not just ride the speed limit all the time, and not have to worry about speeding tickets?  We followed a line of cars doing just that out of Greenwater, about a dozen of them bunched up behind a single motorcycle who was scrupulously keeping at the limit, until they got so close behind him that he pulled over at a wide spot on the road and let everybody get by.  The speed naturally went right up to the usual real limit, which is about 10 over the posted one.  If you can’t keep up with traffic on a motorcycle you are risking your life, and forcing others to risk theirs as they desperately get around you any way they can.

And so to anyone who defends speeding tickets as a way to control traffic and reduce average speeds, I say, “Who do you think you’re fooling?  If that old saying - the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again when you already know how it is going to work out - applies to speeding tickets, how can you stand there with your bare face hanging out and try to pretend it’s not all about the money?”  If all you wanted was to slow people down, why not put up a big sign that says, “Speed Trap ahead, slow down!” and station an empty marked patrol car in the parking lot?  No money in that, eh?

Another fact that supports my contention that speeding tickets are about revenue generation is the number of private companies that have figured out a way to milk this public cow for all it’s worth.  Every school zone or intersection photo-op ticket machine that you see out there gets something like $3500 a month rent off the top, plus 20% of any excess revenue generated at each location.  For a school zone at $125 a pop, that means they have to write 28 tickets a month before the City sees a nickel, yet the City of Renton website claims that 11,990 tickets were written from 2008, when they started the program, until the end of the study, at one location alone!  Do the math.  That’s a cool $1.5 million.  Most of it went to American Traffic Solutions, Inc., out of Phoenix, AZ.

They also hasten to assure us, the general public from whom this revenue has been generated, that any ticket you get in a speeding zone or for running a red light at an intersection will not go on your driving record.  Gee, thanks, that’s nice to hear.  Now tell me the answer to this, if you can:

How many kids have been run over by cars in those school zones you are so zealously protecting?  Are you sure you’re not a solution in search of a problem?  How many of the people to whom you issued those tickets would have been the one to run over the occasional child?

It seems to me that society begins to break down when we find it necessary to punish people, not for what they did, but for what might have happened, but did not.  That decay accelerates when we outsource the revenue extraction to private companies, and pay them on a piecework basis, thus giving them incentive to steal money from as many people as possible.

And when we take our force of police officers, who are sworn to protect and defend the public from criminals, and assign them to do much of the direct revenue extraction personally, how do you think those officers will be regarded by that same public?  Just how dumb do you think we are?

I could go on and on about this issue, and there is much more to be said, like why the City of Renton abruptly removed the hugely money-making photo-enforcement camera from in front of Renton High School, but started the summer school cameras in front of some, but not all of the elementary schools a full hour before school started all last summer.  Think about why an obscure little Christian school along Carr Road between Valley Medical Center and Benson has a 20 mph flashing light that slows traffic on a major 4 lane road twice a day at a location that you never, ever see a kid on the street.

I think any rational person looking at this situation would conclude that there is a problem or problems that need to be addressed.  The question is, “Who is going to step up and take this on for the benefit of all the neighbors who have paid those tickets, and will pay those tickets in the future?”  Is that you?  We’d sure be grateful if you did.  :-{)}