More evidence that the American Automobile Association (AAA) ought to have its license revoked comes in the form of “summer safety tips” offered to teenaged drivers from AAA’s Foundation for Traffic Safety.
Bet you can guess.
Observe speed limits –
This is a great way to be involved in an accident, since you’ll be causing a mobile pile-up all around you. You’ll be tailgated and passed with inches to spare by irate drivers whom you’ve irritated with your law-abiding but slow-motion, obstructive driving. Note carefully: It doesn’t matter that tailgating and abrupt passing maneuvers with inches to spare isn’t safe – or legal. People are going to tailgate and weave around you if you slow-poke. 
Also, if you drive the speed limit, cops will assume you have been drinking or are carting illegal wares. Because no one drives the speed limit. Therefore, driving the speed limit is a surefire way to get pulled for no legal reason – but because it is “suspicious.”
Be aware (no thanks to AAA) that car speedometers almost always read slightly faster than you are actually traveling – typically by about 3 or so MPH. They are set this way because the alternative – reading slightly slower than you are actually driving – would create massive liability issues for the car companies, who would be legally liable for speeding tickets issued to drivers who thought they were within the law but actually were not.
Point being, if you drive the speed limit, you are probably driving slightly below the speed limit – and this is absolutely considered suspicious by cops.The courts have even ruled along these lines.
Never drive the speed limit.
The reason almost everyone is “speeding” is because the posted limit is almost always under-posted by at least 5-10 MPH. People ignore stupid laws. If you obey this stupid law, other cars will be passing you – and bunching up behind you.
Which is . . . dangerous.
And obvious, to any thinking brain. Just like the fact that there are differences between the sexes that transcend genitalia – but just as politically incorrect to acknowledge, especially in an official pronunciamento directed at teen drivers. Rather than give them the straight dope, that the safest speed is the speed of traffic – whatever that happens to be and posted limits be damned – they must be fed dangerous nonsense for the sake of appeasing the PC powers-that-be.
It is exactly like the Reefer Madness idiocy of my youth. And the youth realize it’s idiocy, incidentally.
Or so one hopes.
Buckle up –
The holy catechism of the Safety Cult.
It is quite true that wearing a seat belt will generally – but not always – lessen injuries in the event you crash. They also sometimes kill you, though – and that fact is never talked about by “experts” in the presence of teenagers because, gosh, they might actually decide to weigh the risks against the benefits – and make up their own minds. Can’t have that.
Independent judgment must be smothered. Mindless rule-following must be instilled.
And seat belts confer no safety benefit whatever if you don’t wreck. It is very interesting that avoiding accidents is not among the AAA’s safety tips.
And most “accidents” are avoidable. Chiefly because they are not accidental. A tree struck by lightning at exactly the moment your car happens to be passing underneath a heavy bough – which then falls on your car’s roof, crushing it – that is an accident. A deer bounding into your car’s flanks is an accident.
Most wrecks, on the other hand, are the result of various avoidable incompetences behind the wheel and thus not accidental.
One wonders why the Safety Solons of AAA do not discuss maintaining a safe following distance between one’s car and the car ahead? Even with modern idiot-proofing technologies such as anti-lock brakes, a car needs “x” distance (and time) to achieve a complete stop. The closer you are – and the faster you are moving – the lower your chances of being able to stop in time. But not a mention of the old – but still ironclad valid – Three Second Rule.
Pick a stationary object such as a telephone pole or road sign and note when the car ahead reaches it, then begin counting seconds. If less than three seconds elapse before you reach the same spot, you are following too closely – ABS or not. Increase the following distance and you will have time to stop if the car ahead suddenly stops.
Why doesn’t AAA mention this?
Or, lane discipline?
No injunctions about the danger – or the obnoxiousness – of squatting like a toad in the left lane when it’s obvious – or would be, if you looked in the rearview – that there are cars stacking up behind you, probably tailgating.
Move right, let them by.
It is safe, it diffuses road rage. Why doesn’t AAA mention it?
Surely it is of more relevance as a saaaaaaafety issue than “…be sure to have current insurance identification in your car” and “… be especially cautious in construction work zones”… as opposed to running through them at Top Speed, drunk, with one hand on the wheel.
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The last of my brood is getting her license shortly, just before her 18th birthday. So now I’m working on the grandkids…
I tell them to “buckle up” due to simple physics…ergo, in a sudden stop, or frontal collision, your face will not impact the windshield (never mind that Preston Tucker came up with a pop-out windshield for his Tucker ’48 and ‘safety’ glass was already being quietly implemented by car makers at the time some 70 years ago), nor will you be thrown from the vehicle in event of a rollover or a “T-boning”…your odds of surviving a terrible accident and/or serious injury are indeed lessened by being properly secured. But that’s NOT the MAIN reason…
The MAIN reason is that the “Safety Nazis” have been so effective is the overall Cloverite propaganda which has resulted in “Click-It-or-Ticket” laws. As if that excuse to extract more dollars out of a motorist’s and/or PASSENGER’s wallet weren’t bad enough, at least when these laws were pushed some thirty years ago they were “secondary”, that is, a cop couldn’t just stop you if he ‘saw’ you driving unbelted, there had to be a reason (which any ‘good’ cop will readily find, of course) to pull you over and THEN he was authorized to ticket you for not wearing your belt. Shit, if that approach was taken to a young fellow and a pack of Trojans, probably half of us wouldn’t be here today! I knew then that it’d only be a matter of time before observing you w/o your belt on would give the cop reason ALONE to stop you (e.g., “primary” enforcement) and sure, enough, in the interests of s-a-a-a-f-t-e-e-e, that’s how it rolls. However, like the analogy of how to boil a live frog, that’s how these oppressive laws come about. Remember the campaign to give “highway workers” a “brake”? Some bright boy in the CA legislature got this straightforward idea, why not just DOUBLE the traffic fines in a “Construction Zone”? That ought to ensure ‘compliance’, right? I quipped at the time, soon, the legislature will just declare California’s highways a permanent ‘construction zone’ as some form of maintenance, though not as often as our confiscatory fuel taxes ought to be paying, takes place somewhere in the once “Golden” State! Sure enough, a few years ago, a proposal came forth to do just that! Fortunately, there was enough outcry that it was quickly withdrawn…however, take a drive on the weekend, especially in Nevada (my 34 y.o. #1 son, when we cross into NV from CA, usually quips, “Welcome to ‘Murica’!”, and when we re-enter CA, “now entering the People’s Republik of ‘Commifornia’…check your guns, your freedom, and hang up your testicles, you won’t be needing them!”) and notice how there seems to be along I-80, US 50, US 395, and US 95 some “construction zone” set up for several MILES, but NO “construction” going on? Ever had the feeling that it’s not merely ‘laziness’, but one of the best speed traps ever devised?
Man leads cops on low speed chase in stolen manual transmission truck. Didn’t know how to get out of first gear……….
http://ht.ly/eXWf30cAjPT
Still managed to ruin the transmission.
Probably the idiot never knew his father…the byproduct often not only that a useless miscreant is loosed on society, but the dumb sumbitch doesn’t know how to drive a ‘stick’!
Ask any 20 y.o. what “double-clutching” is and likely he’ll look at you like you’re some weird “pre-vert”, or worse, he’ll lick his lips at the though of whatever “pre-versions” you propose to engage in!
Our Royal Automobile Clubs in Australia are also shills for totalitarian government. Every time a speed limit is proposed to be lowered they are up there in agreeing with that or with using road funds to build bike lanes and other such shit. Never tell motorists their rights in fighting fines. The Australian governments colluding with private multinational companies, steal $10 billions in fines every year just from motorists. 95% of whom get tickets for going less than 10 km over the limit. And for the last 3 years since this policy was implemented the road toll has been rising by double digit figures each year. Companies like Redfucks, aka redflex, Civic Compliance Victoria, Transurban and Tenix are among the thieves who steal under the protection of governments the country over. And use government agencies to collect their private debts. There is just no honesty, ethics, morality, or humanity in government agencies. These people really are aliens and cannot be considered as humans. 2 of those above criminals are also doing business in the USA. Stealing from you as well as from us.
Hey Eric,
Keep an eye out for a care package from me. You should get it today. Make sure you don’t throw away the makeshift envelope.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Will!
I am at coffee dive, working on fresh rant…
“Point being, if you drive the speed limit, you are probably driving slightly below the speed limit – and this is absolutely considered suspicious by cops.The courts have even ruled along these lines.”
I’m not sure what that second sentence is supposed to mean, but if you look at the case summary that Eric links to (https://www.bhwlawfirm.com/reasonable-suspicion-for-traveling-below-the-speed-limit/), you’ll find that the opinion of the appellate court was that the evidence from the search after the traffic stop should be suppressed. That is, it was not enough that the driver was going slow – and contrary to Eric’s scenario, it wasn’t simply being a little below the speed limit, but going 52 in a 65 mph zone – but the driver also has to be impeding traffic. Since the record did not establish that the driver was impeding traffic, the appellate court overturned the trial court’s decision.
Now, of all the things cops pull people over for, you’d think Eric would agree with it in the case of holding up traffic.
There was a case where a motorist was pulled over doing a school zone speed limit at roughly 2-3am. The stop and the search held up. I don’t think any such case has reached the federal level so it’s probably state by state. But regardless driving the PSL or below is often considered suspicious and the avoidance of interacting with law enforcement.
So they can pull you over for driving under or over the speed limit? That sounds like them.
Only if you are precisely at the posted speed without variation, can you hope to be left alone for that reason.
Of course there are hundreds of other reasons to detain, question, and emasculate you as much as they please.
You can hear their inner joyful squeal. As they watch you squirm, and frolicking in their filthy privilege, truly they are the chosen pigs and all the world is theirs for the wallowing.
The cops can just make up a reason. I’ve been pulled over no reason given, the “a similar car was involved in a crime” reason, and of course the made up law that doesn’t exist reason.
Oh I forgot, the cop didn’t like how I looked at him reason but that’s usually backed up with one of the prior ones.
Since there are no units on speed limit signs, could you have speedometer calibrated in meters per second and get out of a ticket? 55 meters per second = 123 mph.
America is one of only three countries not on the metric system. I think that idea has legs.
(Other two: Burma, Liberia)
The Limeys must have some sort of bastardized system- them, and Detroit. No, wait, Detroit just has bastards…
But the Limeys weigh themselves in “stones”; still use MPH; but use metric for a lot else. They also call a line a queue; an elevator a lift, and botulism steak and kidney pie.
Ha.
Any one under 40 in UK uses metric. But there are exceptions. Can’t force people to use things.
Map of countries officially not using the metric system
http://www.zmescience.com/other/map-of-countries-officially-not-using-the-metric-system/
Most of whom have AAA. They love cloverization of our roads.
One of the main reasons we have Obamacare is geezers. Esecially the oldsters who belong to AARP and have shackled us with more tyranny for money and power.
How AARP’s support for ObamaCare was bought and paid for
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/08/24/how-aarp-support-for-obamacare-was-bought-and-paid-for.html
Fucking clovers. Maybe we should put them all in the worst retirement homes we can find, tell them we hope they die soon, and never visit them again.
Let them die in a diaper wih no visits or cards from grandkids. It would serve them right if we did.
Disclaimer: I too have elder loved ones. And this advice is of course for thee and not me. That’s how reasoning as the chosen people works. Right now the NAP Talmud is being compiled. And all those statists are our enemies.
Get them to do unto themselves, as they would otherwise have the state and community controller class do unto you.
I would never do that even though there are seniors in my family that Like Ike way too much. But mostly we are producers. Few of us Attilas. Some of us are Witch Doctor heroes that drive urban snowplows and other such public sector priesthoods like that.
When I take too many redpills I initially transform from Mogwai to Gremlin. But understanding myself after getting wet and feeding myself after midnight is part of the process of learning to be free.
Dr. Jekyll has to understand his Mr. Hyde appetites if he is truly going to have enough empathy and insight into himself to diagnose and cure himself first. Only when you’ve been your own doctor, can you treat what ails your likeminded family and friends. And maybe one day, even all of humanity.
I mostly bottle up and conceal all of my Mr Hyde activities and thoughts. Maybe release a few of them anonymously to the internet, and acquaintenances in real life that don’t know my official identity and where I live and work.
Gremlins from Tarsus named Saul
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcWJaHZBEw0
Mogwais now named Paul who’ have been saved and want to preach their good behaviors to the world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChjoDc_Y_tk
Mogwais and Gremlins are two sides of our nature. The cucking of our Gremlin nature is believed by most to be the key to our peaceful societies and wealth of properties. I am doubtful the story is so simple as our central religious authorities would like us to believe.
If you have kids or know someone that does the best driving habits to establish are the UPS 10 point commentary and 5 keys to space and visibility.
5 Keys
Aim High in Steering
· Imaginary target — baseball/dart board.
· Centers car in traffic lane. Safe path on turns.
· “Find a safe path well ahead.”
Get the Big Picture
· How wide and deep? What’s in it? Objects and ground.
· Keeps you away from billboards. Smooth stops and turns. Buys time.
· “Stay back and see it all.”
Keep Your Eyes Moving
· Move eyes. Front: 2 seconds. Rear: 5-to-8 seconds.
· Keeps you alive at intersections. Keeps eyes ahead of car.
· “Scan — don’t stare.”
Leave Yourself an Out
· Have an escape out. Take path of least resistance.
· Space on all four sides, but always in front.
· “Be prepared. Expect the unexpected.”
Make Sure They See You
· Communicate in traffic — horn, lights, signals.
· Establishes eye-to-eye contact.
· “Don’t gamble. Use your horn, lights, and signals.”
10 point commentary
1. Stopped in Traffic – leave car length in front of vehicle
2. Start up at intersections – Look left, right, left & check mirrors
3. Count 123 before proceeding from start up – creates space cushion, check mirrors
4. pulling from curb – left blinker, mirror, look left, watch tail swing
5. following distance – 4-6 under 30 mph, 6-8 over 30 mph (this one is silly but for a new driver it’s great)
6. eye lead time – 8-12 seconds
7. scan steering wheels – look for occupied vehicles, use horn
8. make eye contact – use horn, lights, signals
9. check mirrors in the triangle fashion (left, rear, right) – every 5-8 seconds
10. stale green lights – set a decision point to safely stop or proceed
If one follows those you will never ever have a wreck unless it’s something Eric mentioned or someone blasts into the rear of you while stopped. Thanks again for the site Eric!
Those all look like really solid behaviors to ingrain. Well put.
If you really want to help teens, volunteer at the Tire Rack Street Survival School near you. THAT’S how you can save a teens life.
http://www.streetsurvival.org/
I noticed in the linked article that the testimony given at the outset of the piece used the term “prima facia” speed limit.
I thought that was done away with long ago…when Nixon signed the 55 NMSL executive order(he also created the EPA and OSHA the same way…Republicans…if that’s “conservative” I’d hate to see “liberal”).
I recall a Sunday morning in ’72 when I got pulled over on the road near my house. The deputy that pulled me asked me how fast I was going, “about 50” was my response. He informed me that it was a 35 zone. I told him I never knew that and from looking at my license he knew I lived just off that road. He then informed me that I was about the 12th person he’d stopped in the last half hour and that no one he clocked was doing under 45. Yes, Sunday morning when all the hellions are out and about. He gave me a warning as he had the others but, seemed a bit miffed that NO ONE was under the limit.
I long for those days.
I also wonder why, if safety is such an issue, you rarely see anyone pulled over for tailgating or lack of lane discipline, whereas in Europe, those are fairly serious offenses.
Wherever possible, I set the cruise control to 5 MPH over — I’ve gotten several tickets for 15 over — none yet for 10 over, but in the overcopped states in the south, it’s asking for a mobile tax assessment unless you’re in a pack all doing that speed.
I have often thought about having a bunch of stickers made to cover up the “LIMIT” part of the speed limit signs around my area. The stickers would read “SUGGESTION”. Speed suggestion signs.
I observe speed limits. That is, I observe how stupid they are; and how they are used as just another boondoggle for Uncle to ream us out of more money and have his armed goons interfere with us.
That “AAA” still exists is a mystery. As you’ve mentioned before, they are nothing more than an insurance company that will agitate for every conceivable bad traffic law. All the while engaging in massive cop-sucking.
At every opportunity I tell anyone that will listen, the motorist’s best friend is The Nation Motorists Association.
The hook for most people is the towing and roadside assistance package, and discounts at motels, etc. The vast majority of brainswashed Bubis Americana don’t look any further than that.
I don’t need AAA and don’t want them. I can change my own danged flat tire if needed, and given the very few number of times I’ve needed towing over the last, say, 40 years I’ve come out way ahead paying cash for a few towing jobs as needed rather than paying AAA every year. Not to mention I don’t want to support their anti-freedom, statist political agenda. (For much the same reason I refuse to join AARP despite the “benefits” they offer. They are shills for massive governmental intrusion, theft, and fraud.)
Screw ’em.
Yeah, AAA and AARP are a lot alike- and people eat that stuff up because they’re good communists, and get “a benefit”.
Someone saw me tearing up a letter from AARP wanting me to join, and they were like “Why’d you do that?! Dude! You should join! You get BENNNNNEFITZ and stuff!”- LOL. I tried to explain to them that I wanted nothing to do with some organization which lobbies for tax-funded freebies, and advocates supporting politicians who will give preferential treatment to people because of their age-group, and who support and want to even INCREASE Socialist Security and other such welfare programs…. but to no avail- the brainwashed idjit just couldn’t be made to uinderstand, and instead thinks that I “fear growing old” LOL!
Agree about AAA and AARP, but I will be gladly be collecting my SS payments starting in a couple of years. Of course, I would also accept a full refund of every penny that I have contributed for the last 40+ years, with interest.
Of course. As will I in a decade in a half.
The NAP is an ideal to attain to.
Not another Holy Cause to hone into a sharp spike and then impale yourself with like you’re some kind of sacrificial animal for others to slow roast and feast off of.
Our Enemy, the State (1935) Albert Jay Nock
The mentality of a philosophical army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence; it remains persistently, incorrigibly and notoriously infantile.
The nature and intentions of government are social. Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention, making justice costless and easy to access; and beyond that it should not go.
As far back as one can follow the run of civilization, it presents two fundamentally different types of political organization. This difference is not one of degree, but of kind. It does not do to take the one type as merely marking a lower order of civilization and the other a higher.
Still less does it do to classify both as species of the same genus — to classify both under the generic name of “government,” this has always led to confusion and misunderstanding.
A good understanding of this error and its effects is supplied by Thomas Paine. At the outset of his pamphlet called Common Sense, Paine draws a distinction between society and government.
While society in any state is a blessing, he says, government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
Elsewhere Payne speaks of government as a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world.
It would seem that in Paine’s view the code of government should be that of the legendary King Pausole, who prescribed but two laws for his subjects, the first being, Hurt no man, and the second, Then do as you please.
The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime.
Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.
There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man’s needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means.
The primitive exercise of the political means was, as we have seen, by conquest, confiscation, expropriation, and the introduction of a slave-economy. The conqueror parcelled out the conquered territory among beneficiaries, who thenceforth satisfied their needs and desires by exploiting the labour of the enslaved inhabitants.
The feudal State, and the merchant-State, wherever found, merely took over and developed successively the heritage of character, intention and apparatus of exploitation which the primitive State transmitted to them; they are in essence merely higher integrations of the primitive State.
The State, then, whether primitive, feudal or merchant, is the organization of the political means. Now, since man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion, he will employ the political means whenever he can – exclusively, if possible; otherwise, in association with the economic means.
In every civilization, however generally prosaic, however addicted to the short-time point of view on human affairs, there are always certain alien spirits who, while outwardly conforming to the requirements of the civilization around them, still keep a disinterested regard for the plain intelligible law of things, irrespective of any practical end.
They have an intellectual curiosity, sometimes touched with emotion, concerning the august order of nature; they are impressed by the contemplation of it, and like to know as much about it as they can, even in circumstances where its operation is ever so manifestly unfavourable to their best hopes and wishes. – This is who we are here at EPAutos, IMO.
AAA is worth it with 1 single tow. I needed my project car towed and after calling around the cheapest I found was $100 however a membership to AAA is under $80 and includes unlimited towing up to like 200 miles. Adding to that I have a car that the manufacturer was kind enough to not burden with extra weight such as a heavy spare (sarcasm) that I’ve had to have towed twice because of flats. I’ve saved $220 by contributing to the jerk offs over there.
I joined AA by mistake. Now when I need a tow or lock myself out, a recovering alcoholic shows up….
Good show. A much better class of losers. Also can usually score a cougar at the meetings I Hear…
…but I only like fillies….