Eric Peters – Page 6 – The Burning Platform

Clovers… On the Road (and Otherwise)

Guest Post by Eric Peters

I’m often asked – what’s a Clover?

Technically, it’s a specific person – an incredibly persistent troll on these pages who identified himself (herself?) using that handle. After awhile, it stuck – became a general term, describing a mentality (reflexive authoritarian and collectivist) rather than one particular individual.

We all know Clovers.

They constitute the bulk of our fellow Americans. Among other things, they are terrible drivers.

Not so much because they are untalented behind the wheel.

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It is because they are controlling and deliberately inconsiderate behind the wheel.

Dealing with Clovers on the road is like dealing with a 300 pound oaf that sort of wanders around your house, randomly stopping and standing in the hallway (or suddenly walking out of rooms, unexpectedly). A Clover expects you to avoid him … and then gets mad when you attempt to maneuver around him.

The classic example of this is the Clover who pulls out in front of you suddenly but then accelerates slowly. He was in a big hurry to get in front of you – but in no hurry to proceed, once he does. He’ll take his time getting up to speed – and will often not even reach the speed limit (which is usually at least 5-10 MPH below the speed at which traffic normally flows).

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Vampire Cops

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Apparently, our money’s not enough.

They want our blood, too.

You may have heard about this. In Texas – one of America’s, uh, “freest” states – the cops have got the power to throw you over the hood of a cruiser and forcibly extract your blood if you decline to take a Breathalyzer test. After having been forced to stop for no specific reason at a “sobriety” checkpoint. Your refusal to cooperate – that is, to prove your innocence (that’s how it works in America nowadays) to the satisfaction of a cop is all the provocation necessary. Roll down your sleeve.

Or else.

Count (oops, Police Chief) Art Acevedo of the Austin PD wants to expand what had been a “pilot” program – weekends only – to a full time regular operation.

To make this routine. News story here.

Inevitably, other states will follow. Oregon already has. At some point, the Supreme Court will “affirm” the “constitutionality” of these blood draws. Why not? It has already affirmed the “constitutionality” of all sorts of obviously not constitutional practices – including the random and probable cause-bereft stopping of motorists to force them to prove they aren’t guilty of pretty much everything in the motor vehicle code (e.g., you’re forced to prove you have a license, the mandatory insurance, that your car is registered and has all the demanded stickers, that you are buckled up for “safety”, etc.). If these fishing expeditions are reasonable (as demanded by the Fourth Amendment) then what constitutes an unreasonable search?

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Warrants? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Warrants!

Guest Post by Eric Peters

America is becoming unrecognizable. The landscape is still familiar; the flag looks the same. But it is a changed placed.

And some places are more changed than others.

In New Jersey, the state Supreme Court has just ruled that a cop can search your vehicle if you are pulled over for any reason – and without a warrant.

A defective turn signal, for instance.

Or a seatbelt “violation.”

Basically, the NJ court has ruled that once a cop turns on his emergency lights, your Fourth Amendment rights have been forfeited.

It used to be (and still is, in other states) that more in the way of evidence or at least, “reasonable suspicion” that the car’s driver or occupants had done something else (besides the alleged traffic infraction) was necessary before the cop could – legally – search the vehicle.

Not buckling up for “safety,” for instance, was insufficient, by itself, to legally justify searching either the driver or his vehicle.

The cop needed a warrant.

“I do not consent to any searches.”

“Am I free to go?”

Not anymore.

It used to be that the cop was empowered to check the driver’s papers (license, registration, proof of insurance) but – absent some additional grounds for suspicion – that was as far as he could take it.

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Another Car We’re Not Allowed to Buy

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Would you be interested in a brand-new, fully warranted, five-door crossover SUV built by a major, name-brand automaker that gave you 50-plus MPG with a gas (not diesel or hybrid) engine, that has a top speed around 125 mph, is capable of getting to 60 in 12 seconds (about the same as a Prius hybrid) that stickered for less than $5,000?

Yeah, me too.

It’s called the Renault Kwid (see here) and it looks kinda-sorta like a Nissan Juke or Kia Soul and is about the same size as those units.

It isn’t a latter-day Yugo either.

The Kwid comes standard with AC, power windows and a digital dashboard, a seven-inch LCD display in the center stack and most of the apps you’d find in a new Soul or Juke.

It also has a modern, fuel-injected engine and a five-speed overdrive transmission.

The difference is the Kwid costs about a third what a new Juke or Soul would cost you to buy: Its base price is just $4,700 (not counting taxes and tags).

Too bad we can’t buy one.

Not because such a vehicle isn’t available.

It’s just not available here.

Neither are other such cars, like the Suzuki Alto 800 (53 MPG and a base price of $3,870; $5,755 loaded) and the Hyundai Eon (50 MPG and $4,856 to start; $6,636 loaded).

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It’s Not Just VW’s Problem Now

Guest Post by Eric Peters

It’s not just VW’s problem now.

The company may go the way of the Dodo because of brutal fines and crippling lawsuits and media demagoguery that’s turning the VW brand into the automotive equivalent of NAMBLA.

But if you think it’ll stop there… .

So, where will it stop?

How about real-time monitoring of the emissions output of all cars, all the time? This would certainly put the kibosh on “cheating” – by owners as well as car manufacturers.

And it’s already in the works.

Has been, for some time. This VW debacle will simply provide the necessary justification for implementing it – much in the same way that a school shooting becomes the justification for taking everyone’s guns away.

It’s called OnBoard Diagnostics III (OBD III). The successor to OBD II – which your car already has, if it’s newer than circa the ’96 model year.

OBDII cars all have a universal plug-in “diagnostic” port – like an iPod’s USB hook-up – that’s used to connect the car (its computer controller, actually) to an external computer. The two electronic brains talk to one another, exchanging information. If your car has an issue with its emissions systems, a code (or codes) that have been stored in the onboard computer’s memory will be flashed over to the external computer, so that a technician can be made aware of the problem and – ideally – repair what’s wrong.

But, the OBD II system has a weakness. It can only transfer the information about a “fault” with the emissions system if it is physically hooked up to a testing computer (as at a repair shop or a smog check station). The most an OBD II-equipped car can do if you don’t take it in is illuminate the yellow “check engine” light in the dashboard. Which of course, you are free to ignore for as long as you like. Or at least, until the time comes to have the car smog checked – which might be only once a year or once every several years, depending on where you live. In some areas, those few that don’t (yet) have mandatory smog checks, a person could drive with the “check engine” light on indefinitely.

Enter OBD III.

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You’ve Got Mail!

You are nothing but sheep to be fleeced by the government and their police thugs. Every state, locality, and municipality in this country is essentially bankrupt due to their unfunded pension and health benefit liabilities to the millions of government drones who make your life miserable on a daily basis. Their solution is to abscond with more of your hard earned cash. This story below should outrage you. The government drones think it’s a huge success.

Guest Post by Eric Peters

You’ve heard about the automated car.

How about automated policing?

Instead of government drones (that would be cops) picking our pockets at gunpoint, the “work” (and profit) is being turned over to private contractors, who do the same at camera-point, using debt collectors to force us to stand and deliver.

This is not new – but it is becoming more blatant.

If you ever had any doubt that the issuance of speeding tickets was little more than another form of tax collection, consider what’s going on in Youngstown, Ohio.

The recently city signed a three-year deal with one of those Mussolini-minded companies that uses government to line its pockets and calls it free enterprise (another example of this being the insurance mafia). The company is going to make a lot of money by peppering the city with automated radar guns that eliminate the need for a cop to actually pull someone over – or for the courts to waste their valuable time proving beyond a reasonable doubt that each and every “speeder” is guilty as charged.

Instead, the tickets – the fines – go out automatically.

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Crippling Technology

Guest Post by Eric Peters

So much would be possible – if it weren’t for the government.

Government, remember, is not composed of experts in much of anything – except control and manipulation. Politicians and bureaucrats are not people who do things.

They force others to do things.

In the car world, you have the ridiculous spectacle of non-engineer mechanical imbeciles dictating functional parameters of engine design to people who actually do know how a four-stroke engine works, the meaning of stoichiometry; who understand that there is an inherent conflict between fuel economy and “safety.” That the more a car is designed to meet the first objective, the less it will meet the second.

And the reverse.

Result?

The engineers are told to deliver both in equal measure – and we end up with cars that are heavy and thirsty.

It’s a tragedy – a comic one, when you put it in context.

Here we are – almost 2016 – and the typical new car is about as economical to drive as the typical car of 1985. This is hard to believe, but you should believe it because it’s true. The typical car of the early-mid-1980s was averaging mid-high 20s – just like today. There were numerous models available that approached or even exceeded 40 MPG on the highway. A few (like the diesel-powered VW Rabbit) got into the 50s.

They did this without direct-injection or even port fuel-injection. Many still had carburetors. Eight and nine-speed transmissions (with the top three gears being overdrives) were unheard of. Most automatics of this era had four speeds. Some still had just three.

But the one thing the cars of that era did have was less weight – about 500-800 pounds less of it, on average, than comparable cars have today. And the sole and only reason for all this additional weight is the increased demand for “safety” eructing from the solons in Washington. Well, so we must presume. Because the people who actually buy the cars were never offered the free choice. It would be interesting to find out what they’d choose if they did have that choice.

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The Bio-fuels Boondoggle

Guest Post by Eric Peters

If something’s desirable it ought not to be necessary to force people to buy it.

Chipotle, for instance, doesn’t need to spend millions in de facto bribes (“campaign contributions”) to wheedle Congress into passing burrito subsidies. Nor are you forced to eat at Chipotle if burritos and bowls are not your thing. The market has voted – freely, without being prodded or pushed – that Chipotle is a good place to eat and so people go there willingly, part with their money gladly.

Why doesn’t the same standard apply to “renewable” fuels, specifically – ethanol and biodiesel? If, as we’re told, they are viable alternatives to gasoline, why must people be forced to subsidize them?

Required to buy them?

It’s a question that ought to be asked more often – which might result in crony capitalist hog-troughers (this time dressed in “green” livery) shoving their hands in our pockets less often.

But that’s probably just why it’s not asked.

You probably know all about the oceans of money ($6 billion annually; see here) diverted from taxpayers to a handful of massive agribusiness cartels – not mom and pop family farms – to “encourage” the production of ethanol (corn alcohol) which is then mixed in with the supply of what used to be gasoline – but which is now 10 percent ethanol (E10).

The agribusiness cartels get rich. In return, American drivers get adulterated fuel that has less energy content per gallon, is corrosive to the fuel systems of older cars and power equipment such as lawn mowers – and causes newer cars to be less fuel-efficient than they’d be if they were fed pure gasoline.

The diversion of cropland to the production of ethanol feedstock has also made food more expensive.

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Bad Karma

Guest Post by Eric Peters

What if you build it – and they don’t come?

Send the bill to the taxpayers!

Twice.

This is how you make money in the New America. Well, the green America.

Don’t earn it.

Steal it.

The “business model” is simple enough: Glom on to a politically high-fashion issue – electric cars, for instance. Then obtain government (meaning, taxpayer) “help” to fund their design and manufacture. When no one – or not enough – people buy your electric wunderwagen, simple declare bankruptcy and walk away.

With your pockets full of other people’s money.

Then, when the smoke clears, do it again.

This is exactly what electric car company Fisker – which produces (well, produced) the $110,000 Fisker Karma – did.

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