"A decent respect to the opinions of mankind..."

That's my favorite part.  Probably because it's just so polite and proper.  I suspect that the fellas drafting that document couldn't have given a flying fuck about the opinions of mankind.  But, before they raised arms and invited all kinds of death and destruction, they decided to draft one last 'proper' declaration.

Then, when King George's Huns came over for a fight, at least we could note that we had tried to do it peacefully.  Then we could kill a bunch of those limey bastards with no regrets.  And then, 236 years later, pathetic fucks like me could sit at our computers and pretend that we had any claim to the achievement.

Winners all 'round, I say.  But really I just like that line about a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.

Fuck the opinions of mankind.  That's my take. But, like the Founders, I can appreciate the occasional need to pretend that you have respect for the people that you hate.  I don't understand why we have that need.  I don't understand what human characteristic created that need.  But I get it.

I hate (or at least despise) probably 90% of the people that I meet.  People are ignorant, selfish, and inconsiderate for the most part.  Yet, if I ever decided to make a blanket statement telling the general population to go fuck itself, I would need to start with something like the quote from this post's title.

"A decent respect..."

Then, hopefully before too long...

"Bombs bursting in air..."

That part is more my style.

Drip, drip, drip...

I was stopped for speeding once when I was a teenager.  I was sitting at a red light, minding my business, when the light turned green.  As I stepped on the gas, a car came barrel-assing past me on my right side.  I was in the right lane.  So yeah, a dude sped through the part of the road that would be considered the shoulder.  Unbeknownst to the other driver, and absolutely hilarious to me, was the fact that there was a cop sitting in a parking lot maybe 30 yards past the stoplight.

I was where the orange truck is.  He was where the other circle is.

I watched the cop turn his disco lights on and then I started laughing hysterically.  What kind of dumbass would pass on the right in that spot?

Then the cop pulled back out into the road, behind me, and turned on his lights again.  What the fuck?  Maybe he wanted a witness or something, I thought.  Nope.  He was actually stopping me for speeding.  Going 51mph in a 35mph zone, he said.  I stared at him for a moment and then asked, "Are you serious?  You saw that guy blow past me."

"Yeah, I saw you racing," he replied.  "You're lucky I don't cite you for reckless driving.  I'll probably get him (the other driver) for reckless."  So I got a ticket for going 45mph in a 35mph zone.  The pig cop was "cutting me some slack," as he put it.  (Disclaimer: Certain lines are used in jest on this blog.  No offense is intended to any mile-high public servants who may or may not have been kind to me up to this point.)

But yeah, that guy was a cocksucker.  I didn't always see the world the way I see it today.  I used to be blissfully unaware of the revenue structure in our cities and towns.  I decided that I would exercise my rights as a citizen and take my case before a judge.  I knew that the cop's version of events went far beyond falsehood and entered the realm of the absurd.  My only concern was that he hadn't seen me stopped at the red light.  My best guess was that he had been sleeping (or reading a newspaper or whatever), heard his radar beep, looked up, and saw two cars side by side.  So I spent my days thinking of a bunch of clever ways to trick him into admitting that I may have been stopped at the light.

And I did a lot of math.  I used to be something of a math whiz, believe it or not.

Then it came time for my court date.  The officer went first.  "For purposes of testimony, I am amending the citation to reflect that the respondent was traveling 51mph in a 35mph zone, rather than the 45mph listed on the original notice to appear."  That's how he began.  Next he recounted the events of the day in question.  "I was monitoring traffic on Fort Street.  I saw the respondent stopped at the red light at the intersection of Fort and Champaign..." 

BOOM! I got him.  That's all I needed.  I was stopped at the light.  I win.

Then he continued... "After I pulled this gentleman over, he informed me that there was no way he was going to let the other driver pass him..." Then he finished with a bunch of mumbo jumbo about calibrating his radar and such.

Then it was my turn to speak.  I had been thrilled to hear that I wouldn't have to establish the fact that I was stopped at the light.  Failing to prove that point would have been the only thing that could stop me from winning.  Since the cop had admitted it right off the top, this thing was in the bag.  But then I had become enraged by the outright lie that he told about what I had said when he pulled me over.  "First things first, your honor, I never said that I wasn't going to let the other driver pass me.  I told the officer that the other driver had blown past me."

The judge threw things back to the cop.  The cop responded.  "Well, maybe he didn't actually say that, but it was clear that's what he meant."

BOOM!  Confessing to perjury and defying the laws of physics.  I've got this fucker now.

I broke out some charts.  The exact numbers escape me at this late date, but the essence of my argument was that a car, starting from a standstill, is not physically capable of going from 0mph to 51mph in the span of [whatever I measured at the time] feet.  I had borrowed one of those measuring wheel things from my baseball coach and walked off the distance.  It was somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 feet.  A little more or a little less maybe.  It has been a long time, but that number wasn't the point.  The point was that it wasn't a very long distance.

Back then, in the mid-90's, the internet wasn't what it is today.  Finding information wasn't always a sure thing.  So, if one wanted the acceleration curve for a 1988 Dodge Shadow, he may not have been able to find it.  I couldn't find it.  I did find one for a '95 Dodge Viper though.  That'll work.  Whatever my girlfriend's shitty old Shadow could do, surely a brand new Viper could do - and then some.

You know the old formula that says distance equals rate times time, right?  Well, on an acceleration curve, the rate starts at zero and then increases.  [Edit to add: A quick and not completely detailed estimate seems to indicate that the Ferrari in the linked test would have taken somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 feet to hit 51mph - with its 530 horsepower engine and aerodynamic design.]  The slope of rate increase slows over time, but the absolute rate keeps rising.  Anyhow, the area under that curve represents the distance traveled by a given object.  The x axis is time and the y axis is rate.  Multiply the two, refer back to the old formula, and voila - you have distance.  But you need more than a simple equation to calculate the distance under a curve.  10mph for 1 hour equals 10 miles.  That's easy.  A constantly changing rate is not so easy.

We're gonna skip some calculus here, but suffice to say I didn't have an equation to describe that curve.  Without the exact equation, I couldn't simply take an integral and give an exact distance.  I don't think the judge would have understood integrals anyway, so this wasn't such a bad thing.  Given what I've explained here regarding distance, rate, and time though, Riemann sums should be easy enough to grasp.  The judge certainly seemed to grasp it all when I presented it to him on a series of graphs that I had traced on poster board.  I don't know if we had Kinko's back then but, if we did, I sure couldn't afford it.  I had to draw my graphs the old fashioned way.

It's too late to say I'll make a long story short, as this one has already gotten way too long, but in any event it would have taken some huge number (several hundred feet) for the Viper to go from 0mph to 51mph.  I was driving a much less powerful car.  I was stopped at the light.  The cop was around a hundred feet ahead.  His claim was a physical impossibility.  The judge, according to his own words, understood this.  "So with a lower slope you would get a longer time at a lower rate, but the bulk of the rate increase still comes at the beginning?"  Yes, your honor.  That's correct.  Larger area - longer distance.

It wasn't even close to being a possibility.  Plus the fucking cop lied about what I said and then admitted that I hadn't actually said it.  This was a slam dunk.

At the end of it all, the judge looked right at me.  He said that I had made a very compelling case and that it was hard to disagree with my points.  (No mention of the cop being a lying bastard, natch.)  Then... "Unfortunately, this officer is sure that he saw you traveling at 51mph.  I find you responsible of speeding at 51mph in a 35mph zone.  Your fine is $140.  You can pay at the cashier's window.  Next case."  They dicked me over and they raised the damned ticket by 6mph.

Over the years my level of respect for the people in charge of upholding our laws hasn't held up very well.  I'd have to say that my opinion has now deteriorated to the point that I find them only slightly distinguishable from those who make the laws.  For reasons that I don't care to belabor on this blog, I could say that my view of the cops and lawyers is more fact than opinion, but we'll just go ahead and stay in the opinion world.  Opinions are way more fun anyway.

So yeah, cops and judges are part-time law enforcers and full-time revenue raisers.  Dig into your own state and local budgets and ask yourself where they would be if they couldn't profit from crime.  What if they simply had to lock up those who were guilty and let go those who were innocent?  No fines and court costs and all of that shit.  Jail or no jail.  10 hours in jail for speeding, life in prison for murder, etc.  All about accountability instead of profit.  See who's a criminal then and who is just someone trying to live life without being squeezed.  Do you think the justice system would operate the same way it does now?  Hint - it would not.

Since they would have to concentrate on crime fighting instead of fundraising, there wouldn't be nearly as many of these people.  And the ones that remained would be wholly funded by - wait for it - tax revenue.  So your politicians would be forced to have an honest discussion with you about what they can afford to promise and what you can afford to demand.  But no, we'd rather live in a country where the cops can set up "seat belt enforcement zones."  Then they can stop people who aren't violating any traffic law, aren't harming anyone, and aren't trying to harm anyone.  Why?  Sixty bucks a pop, man.  That's why.

If you've managed to make it through this rambling opus thus far, you're likely wondering what prompted it.  I've been compiling my views on the topic over a series of decades, but today I read a news story that painted the whole thing in clear bright colors.  A lady saw a cop pulling people over for speeding, so she made a sign warning people about the speed trap.  And she was arrested.

Two things about this story leaped right off the page at me.  First, why would the cops care if this woman was warning oncoming drivers?  If the concern was speeding, and if she was getting people to stop speeding, where is the problem?  It seems to me that she was helping public safety, regardless of her motives.  Ahh, but the revenue...  That was the first and the most obvious.

The second is a little further into the story and is even more insidious.

The Houston Police Department refused to talk to the station about the issue, with a spokesperson saying only that Plummer "was in the roadway" and "was a danger to herself and others...which is an arrestable offense."

I don't believe she was a danger to anyone. I'm virtually certain that she wasn't a danger to anyone.  But she's a fly in the ointment.  This is a finely tuned operation we have running here.  Citizens to try who upset the order of things must be brought down.  All the way to the top.  Truth be damned.

Drip, drip, drip.  There's precious little left in the tank.  And we do precious little to safeguard what is left.