Misconception

I see variants of this story Why You Should Fight an Out-of-State Speeding Ticket from time to time.  I especially get a kick out of the common example of Wyoming highways, both the interstate and state highways being a hot bed of eager cops waiting for a chance to write you a speeding ticket.

It’s summer, and you and your family have packed up your RV for a road trip to Yellowstone. You hit the open road and have clear blue skies for the entire drive. Along the way you stop to see a few famous sights, including the Devil’s Tower — that mountain in Wyoming that many people may recognize from the Steven Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

It’s a little later than you had planned when you leave the Devil’s Tower, and you still have several hours of driving before you get to Yellowstone. You want to make it in time to get settled and have dinner at your campsite, so on a stretch of highway with no other cars around, you hit the gas pedal a little hard. The next thing you know, you’re being pulled over for speeding by a Wyoming trooper.

I'm calling BS on this.  Crook County Wyoming has maybe 2 to 4 troopers stationed in it.  All of those guys are in Sundance.  The county is patrolled by the sheriffs department.  As it happens I have meet 6 of the 8 or 10 guys who work in that department over the years.  I've met them at various gun related events, one of which I travel to Sundance to shoot in.  There is one deputy that in his 25 plus career has written two, count them two speeding tickets. 

It's very hard to get a traffic ticket in Crook County. Incidentally I've gotten one.  Not for speeding, for failure to stop, and for being a smart ass.  I've been pulled over 3 times in that county since 1994.  Two of the times were for a rolling stop (in town more on that latter) once was a South Dakota cop who pulled me over just east of Sundance for speeding.  We had a little argument about his authority in Wyoming.  Long story short, no ticket that day.

I'm not claiming to be an excellent driver.  I would like to point out how it works here.  Rural interstates are posted as either 75 mph or 80 mph.  State highways are posted as 65 mph.  In Wyoming the Sheriff is the chief law enforcement officer.  Sheriffs department policy is what controls traffic stops.  In most counties the departmental policy is that 10 mph over the posted limit a traffic stop is left to the officers discretion.  At 11mph over the limit a traffic stop is recommended, but writing a ticket or giving a warning is discretionary.  At 15 mph over you are getting a ticket. 

In the example cited, this means that the person in the RV was going 91 mph.  Let that sink in, 91 mph in a RV.  That means someone was able to get one of those busses up to and exceed highway speed.  Most of the time I see these clowns on the interstate they aren't doing 55.  The real question isn't if a cop pulled them over, the real question is how do we get the guy driving to teach other RV owners how to accelerate up to the speed limit.

Lots of Wyoming communities don't like the cops writing tickets to folks from out of state. They are dependent on the tourist industry and have a policy of giving warnings.  Crook County is one of those places.  If you are from Wyoming and they catch you speeding, different story.  FWIW unless they changed the policy in Crook county, its still one of the places you can have a open beer in your truck.

In practice it is rare that you get pulled over unless you are driving more than 85 mph on the interstate or 75 mph on a back road.  That's how it works out of town.  In town it's a much different story.  Wyoming's 3 largest cities are Casper, Cheyenne and Gillette.  Cheyenne is the state capital and the city cops tend to be better behaved towards out of state plates.  Casper and Gillette are different stories.  These two towns have the most militant police forces in the state.  The situation is so bad that other counties and cities don't (some refuse to) hire cops that have been on force in these towns.

That's those towns in particular.  In general, the cops don't care to much about a couple of mph out in the country where no one is going to get hurt.  In town they watch it.  If you go 10 mph over in a school zone, you will get a ticket, and you should.  There aren't a lot covert speed traps in Wyoming.  For the most part we post things clearly and you should be more careful in town anyway.

The other place I hear about cops targeting tourists is Montana.  I've lived there and traveled a good deal in that state as well.  Until 2000 they had no daytime speed limit.  None.  While having out of state plates I did get pulled over once.  I was doing about 110 in a 55.  The ticket cost me $5.  I understand they have changed the law since then and that they do enforce speed limits but they are liberal about giving a bit of leeway.

Since 1994 (when I first moved to WYO) I've gotten pulled over in WY with out of state plates 3 times and been ticketed twice, both times I was ticketed inside of city limits.  Both tickets were BS.  In each case when I received a ticket I had a Wyoming drivers license and was in a rental car.  Both tickets were in a city known for its unethical police.  With the exception of getting pulled over by a SD cop in WYO  I have only once been pulled over for speeding outside of town and was given a verbal warning.  It's hard to get a speeding ticket in Wyoming and if you're on vacation playing tourist and happen to exceed the posted limit by a couple of mph out on the road some place its not likely that anyone is going to be around to notice, but if they are you are really going to have to be flying to get a ticket.

FWIW according to the same website that published that story I linked to, another story rating Wyoming as the best place for motorists.

Prayer Request

Our church has an automated prayer request line.  You can get it via email, or I think text too.  I just have the email version.  Anyway this one came across and I thought I'd share it.

(Church member whose name I'm withholding)'s brother-in-law was in a motorcycle accident last night.  He has a broken neck, cuts, and bruises.  He is 80.

 

Some thoughts:

 

The person who made the request is pushing 90.

 

I'm sure we all feel bad for a man wrecking his bike and being seriously injured.

 

He's 80 years old.  He's still out running the roads on his motorcycle. 

 

I don't feel that sorry for him, not out of animosity, I don't know the man.  I don't feel sorry for him because at 80 years old he is still out living a man's life.  He isn't cowering in a nursing home.  He isn't sitting in his own piss hoping someone will take pity on him and wash him up.  He wasn't waiting for the grim reaper and watching Jeopardy.  He wasn't in an easy chair wondering why the kids hadn't called.  In his eighth decade of life, he was out living. No Jell-O cups for this man.  He was out getting bugs in his teeth.

 

I realize that a broken neck at 80 most likely means it's curtain time.   I do feel horribly sorry about that.  As much as I wish it hadn't happened, it did.  It sucks.  It really sucks.  What would have sucked worse was not taking that ride.  Motorcycles are risky contraptions.  They are also fun.  Real men have fun and take risks.  EVEN. IF. IT. KILLS. THEM.

 

Anything else isn't living, even at 80.  Probably especially at 80.

 

Revelation

A little while back I was having a conversation with a young man who reminded me a little bit of me, 20 something years ago.

This young man was very concerned about a situation heralding the decline and fall of America.  After much haranguing over the topic of evil du jure he was astonished to realize that not only did I agree with him but that I had several points of contention that he had not considered. 

He had assumed incorrectly, that I was simply an old bastard of his uncle's generation that might be sympathetic to his politics, if only he could reeducate me.  (his uncle and I are friends)  It blew him away that not only had I fully grasped the situation at hand, but that I had already analyzed it more in-depth than he had.  I think he was surprised by the fact that what he considered MAJOR points were to me minor indicators.  In short, not only did I not need his help in seeing the situation correctly, I already fully understood the matter and could explain why things were worse than he thought.

This set him off in a minor funk.  Not only was he not able to win a convert to his POV, but he had been shown that his point of view was only the tiniest tip of the iceberg. I threw his public school educated psyche a bone and asked him about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.  To his credit he had heard that there was a Roman Empire.  He knew next to nothing about it.  However I talked history for a bit (no doubt boring the boy near to tears).  He had never heard of Gotterdammerung, but he instantly grasped the concept.  Once he understood that I moved on to comparisons to the USA.

All in all he is a good kid.  Smart even.  Frankly I was a bit amazed that a kid of 22 had escaped the public schools with as much of his intelligence intact.  The amazing thing is that he reminded me a bit of, well me.

Several years ago, before the internet was off the ground, we had a national wake up call.  It didn't wake many people up, but we had the call.  There was this incident in Idaho reported in the media as Ruby Ridge.  Back then if you believed Randy Weaver was in the right and the FBI was in the wrong you were likely to be called a conspiracy theorist or nut job.  This was before Gary Spence beat the US government in open court and won Randy's freedom and lawsuit. 

As it happens, I was the eager young patriot who had researched and knew the facts of the story.  I was the righteously indignant young man with his fist in the air.  One night I was spouting off about the out of control, morally corrupt, insert long diatribe of adjectives here, behavior of the federal government.  I was doing this to a person whose respect and validation I very much wanted.  He hit me between the eyes with a verbal 2x4.  He interrupted me and said something along the lines of, "stop with the indignation BS and tell me what happened".  I was a bit crushed.  I didn't want to be thought of as a conspiracy theorist or nut case but that's how it was starting to go down.

So I told him the condensed and unemotional facts of the story.  He shook his head and said something like, "it figures".  My mentor agreed with me.  We talked about Ruby Ridge and the evils of our government.  I  was surprised and relived in my little moment of validation. 

I had forgotten all about that conversation until tonight.  My host that night was not surprised or shocked by Ruby Ridge, just like I wasn't shocked over current events.  It didn't shock him because he had his wake up call a couple of decades before at Kent State, or Woodward Ave, or any of a list of civil incidents when he was 20 or so years younger.

America has been getting wake up calls on restraining the government for decades.  We are no longer shocked by the misdeeds of our officials.  We keep hitting snooze.  Pretty soon we won't even hear the alarm.

How to Be Rescued

Two men were stranded on an island. One man just sat down under a tree and did nothing. The other man looked all over the island. When he came back, he said, "There is nothing here -- no food, no shelter, no nothing. We're going to die."

The first man said, "I make $10,000 a week," and continued to sit.

The other man again looked all over the island and came back dejected. "We're going to die," he said.

The first one again replied, "I make $10,000 per week." And he sat.

The other man took one more look all over, returned, and said, "There's no way we will ever get off this island. We're going to die."

Once again the first man replied, "I make $10,000 per week, and I tithe. My pastor will find me."

Regaining Ground

I'm almost back at 100% blogging ability.

I had been knocked out of access to my blogger account.  This was very strange because I utilize the "stay logged in from a trusted computer" option.  After clearing all my cache and deleting all my browser history and waiting 48 hours, I suddenly had access again.  I have no idea what caused the problem in the first place or how to keep it from happening again.  It may be the result of "bx-coding" issues.  I don't know.  If that's the case it seems that the problem is IE and not blogger.  There is still an issue which is keeping me from resetting my account password.  For the time being I can access my blog and hopefully in the next 24 hours or so the folks at blogger will resolve the password issue.

So far my experience with the blogger help people has been very good.  Blogger is a free service and accessing assistance is only done via a help forum.  Considering that we pay nothing to use this service, the help desk people do a great job getting to your problem quickly.  Yes it might take them a little while to get to your question, but all things considered its a reasonable process and the response is generally helpful.

As soon as they get me 100% squared away I'll let you know.

Old People