Alphabet Soup for Stealing Your Soul

 

"Alphabet soups" are what we call the faceless organizations that hide behind an acronym, a series of initials, hell-bent on making busy-work for themselves, to make it look like they're doing something meaningful to save humanity.  I call it job security for useless people with little or no real-world skills.  A whole batch of GovernMental™ and insurance-industry-sponsored alphabet soup organizations have set out to kill motorcycling and steal away your soul in 2007. Essentially, they'd like to remove motorcycles from the roadways, period. But like all faceless entities, they won't just come out and say that. Instead, they slink around in the shadows and play upon public fears and misconceptions to perpetuate their nonsense through today's modern media, which is rancid with "journalists" that scoop their content directly from a press release.  The real problem is, alphabet soups and the journalists who serve them, rarely talk with anyone who actually RIDES a motorcycle.

 

One of my all time favorite alphabet soups is the U.N. (United Nations), a gaggle of mindless third world bureaucrats with bad accents that have never had a real job in all their lives, telling the rest of us how to live our lives by their utopian standards. What to eat, what God to worship (A Mother Nature based deity called "Gaia"), and even touting an international dress code for motorcyclists by using a bunch of Manson-stare-youth in the first United Nations World Youth Assembly on Road Safety. In April of 2007, the UN received assistance from the MIC (Motorcycle Industry Council) and the M$F (Motorcycle $afety Foundation) as they presented the UN with a completely moronic video titled, "Helmets: Get your head into it." YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =bHmRebeHvFo. Sheeesh, why they gotta make it so easy for us to get a laugh?

 

On 9/11/07 , the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) issued recommendations that states should require all motorcyclists and their passengers to wear Department of Transportation Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) 218-compliant helmets. The NTSB is an agency that usually concerns itself with airplane and bus crashes. Dunno why they suddenly feel compelled to jump on the motorcycle bandwagon - their mission statement does not contain the word "motorcycle" and they were excommunicated from the DOT (Department of Transportation) in 1975. Their recent conclusions about motorcycle safety have a tell-tell-fishy-smell about 'em, and I strongly suspect they've come on board because they haven't yet been banned from lobbying states to pass lid laws, like the chief source for ALL fishy smelling data, the NHTSA. (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) The NTSB press release was full of trite, " The facts are very clear- head injuries are a leading cause of deaths in motorcycle crashes," said NTSB Chairman Mark V. Rosenker. "The most important step riders can take in terms of protecting themselves and staying alive is to wear a DOT- compliant helmet every time they ride."   Technically speaking, if I were to take Chairman Rosenker's quote at face value, an objective scientific experiment would stick a monkey in a magic helmet and sit him on a bike and press the start button. Riding just got that much easier! Sorry, Mr. Rosenker, skills and training save lives, a helmet only makes for a safer crash. My fool notion is to avoid the crash to begin with; I'm not too hip on the helmet's ability to save me from an SUV driving soccer mom crushing my thoracic. But thanks, anyway.

 

The FHWA (Federal Highway Administration) held a three day Motorcycle Travel Symposium in October of 2007 with the purpose of improving the data used to calculate motorcycle VMT. (Vehicle Miles Traveled).   VMT is utilized by the NHTSA, DOT and the NTSB via FARS (Fatality Analysis Reporting System) to figure out how many motorcycle riders die per mile traveled. They calculate deaths by the number of miles traveled, which is an amazing feat when you consider that South Dakota (and MANY other states) submitted ZERO miles traveled for YEARS. I've done at least 6000 miles in SD in my lifetime, and nobody ever checked my odometer at the border. Maybe some geek in a white lab coat scribbled down my odometer reading while the bike was sitting on Main Street in Sturgis?  He musta added a few extra zeroes when he got flashed by Silicone Sue!

 

NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) has been our nemesis for years, and is STILL recommending that all states pass mandatory helmet laws. Blah, blah, blah. I'll never understand why people, who don't trust our government, completely swallow any gibberish spewed from a government agency. There. That was easy. Suggested reading would be their new and improved "DOT compliant" terminology utilized in DOT HS 810 840, "Motorcycle Helmet Use in 2007 – Overall Results" available at http://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsa /announce/810_840.pdf. I couldn't find the name, "Goebbels" in the document, but I know the Nazi propaganda minister has got to be behind the scenes at NHTSA, somewhere.

 

The AHAS (Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety) makes its money, in MY opinion, by serving as a cheap mouthy whore for the insurance industry. AHAS spit up "15 Laws" they want states to enact to reduce the number of deaths on the nation's roads, and Law #2 asks states to adopt an "All rider motorcycle helmet law." An article featuring the AHAS power-grab appeared in the Fall 2007 magazine sent to all Geico (Government Employees Insurance Company) insurance customers.   In 2007, AHAS also released a memo entitled, "Top Reasons Why Every State Should Pass an All-Rider Motorcycle Helmet Law" in which item #6 decries, "There is no scientific evidence that motorcycle rider training reduces crash risk and is an adequate substitute for an all-rider helmet law." Oddly, the AHAS website promotes the TOP TEN reasons to pass a dress code for motorcyclists, but click on the link and you'll only see 7 reasons.   I'm sure AHAS probably uses cheap overseas labor for their website data entry. And we're supposed to trust their statistics?  

 

IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) is another batch of limp-dick-do-gooders funded by the insurance industry. On 9/11/07 (is there a theme here?) IIHS released a slam against sport-bike riders; " Supersports have the highest death rates and worst overall insurance losses among all types of motorcycles, new analyses by the Institute and Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) reveal. Motorcyclists who ride supersports have driver death rates per 10,000 registered motorcycles nearly 4 times higher than rates for motorcyclists who ride all other types of bikes." Gee, kids, France is now limiting motorcycles to less than 100 horsepower, ya don't think IIHS will try to bring that to America? Darn tootin'. Maybe it's time to join ABATE. (American Brotherhood Aimed Towards Education)

 

The alphabet soups hope to remove ALL risk from life by making FUN into a nasty three letter word. They tout flawed studies and nonsensical surveys, but not once have they ever asked ME, what is right for ME. I guess I'm not responsible enough to decide things for myself. Well, I don't need any alphabet soup tryin' to save me from myself, I already have a mother. Just because they got fancy acronyms on their letterhead and they get paid to mimic the human sphincter muscle, doesn't make 'em any better at being mothers. But they're real "mothers", alright....they certainly got that part right.