highway safety – Lee Duigon

Chocolate Labrador retriever in car in driver's seat Stock Photo ...

This story is a bit hard to believe–well, more than a bit–but it seems to be true.

After a high-speed chase, sometimes at 100 mph, Washington State police had to use spike strips to stop a car that had already smacked into two other cars without stopping. Only then did they find… a dog in the driver’s seat (https://news.yahoo.com/us-man-teaching-dog-drive-arrested-high-speed-001940478.html).

The pit bull’s owner was in the passenger seat so he could reach over and steer, sort of, and work the gas pedal. He admitted he was trying to teach the dog to drive. Police charged him with several offenses, including driving while under the influence of drugs. The dog has been placed in an animal shelter.

Are we to feel encouraged because there are still daft people doing daft things, never mind the stupid pandemic?

I don’t know how to answer that.

“Leave the driving to us!”

Automobile and traffic experts recently told the government to slow way, way down in its push to put us all into driverless, computer-guided cars ( http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SELF_DRIVING_CARS_CAUTION?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-04-08-15-37-19 ).

Granted, there are an awful lot of people who shouldn’t be allowed even to touch a steering wheel. But as always the government favors a one-size-fits-all approach. For the sake of the ninnies who are a menace on the highway, they want all the cars to be “self-driving.”

Because that way they can hook your car up with Big Brother and then they can control it instead of you.

The experts warned the National Highway Safety Administration that the robo-cars are not anywhere near as safe as the government thinks they are: there are still a lot of bugs in the system.

Do you think our beloved leaders care if the cars are safe or not? The very idea of exerting that much control over ordinary people’s ordinary lives is, to them, pure ecstasy.

Tell you what. Let’s save tons of time and effort, and ask our beloved rulers just to list the things they don’t want to control.

You could probably fit it onto the back of a fortune cookie slip.