LF: OJ and Air Bags … vs. Oliver Schmidt

OJ – who almost certainly killed two people and definitely got away with it – didn’t get away with participating in an armed robbery and kidnapping.

He got 33 years, served about 9 – and is scheduled to be released this fall.

Oliver Schmidt – the VW engineer who “cheated” Uncle – is looking at 169 years. He didn’t kill anyone or even trip them up. Yet if convicted, he will be taken out of circulation for life.

Several of them.

Who would you rather have running loose?

OJ? Or Schmidt?

It gives you a sense of the government’s priorities.

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe says: “We can’t put companies in jail (he means prison) but we can hold their employees personally accountable.”

Unlike, say, the employees of the government.

Who routinely and deliberately get people killed and are almost never put in prison and rarely even scolded.

Forget “accountable.”

Consider the Takata air bag scandal – which by the way gets much less in the way of media coverage than the Oh, the humanity! coverage given Dieselgate. And not just Takata bags but airbags generally.

They have killed. Not “probably,” like OJ.

Actually.

Hundreds of times (see here).

And hundreds of those victims being kids.

These deaths were not “accidental,” either. An accident being defined as some unforeseeable event, an act of God, etc.

The government regulators who issued the original air bag fatwa knew air bags were dangerous. They were told – by engineers, guys who know stuff – that air bags were certain to hurt people, especially kids and older people. The government regulators deliberately ignored the engineers in furtherance of what, to the bureaucrats, was a Greater Good.

Unless, of course, it happened to be your kid or elderly mother who wound up dead because an air bag snapped their neck. How is it that this is not considered to be criminal and worthy of prosecution?

What was it OJ said?

It happens!

Yes, it does. But when the government does it, there are almost never consequences, particularly criminal consequences.

Consider:

The Chimp – George W. Bush – deliberately lied to the public in order to confect the war hysteria he and his bloodthirsty allies needed as a pretext for their pre-arranged agenda to invade a country – Iraq – that had not attacked the United States nor threatened to attack it. A manufactured war, exactly like the German (and Soviet) invasion of Poland in 1939.

Tens of thousands of people were killed and an entire country wrecked.

A war crime. German leaders were hanged for theirs.

But The Chimp is comfortably retired, free to paint appalling John Wayne Gacy-like watercolors and appear occasionally on the stage with Clintigula – another murderer who (unlike OJ) not only got away with it (Kosovo, Waco, Somalia) but never even got charged with it. Colin Powell – who presented the fabricated “evidence” on live TV – is likewise going to seed somewhere that isn’t an 8×12 cell. Ditto Rummy and Wolfie and the rest of the gang.

But Oliver Schmidt will be hounded to the gates of hell, those gates to be slammed shut behind him.

Over what, again?

Schmidt (and some other VW engineers) “conspired” to wiggle VW’s diesel engines past the EPA’s tailpipe emissions tests. They encoded software – “defeat devices” – to make the engines run just so for the duration of the test, but then run differently once out on the road. The difference amounts to fractions of a percent of a compound – oxides of nitrogen – which has yet to be shown caused tangible harm to anyone.

Keep in mind the “cheating” diesels have been on the road for more than a decade. If these cars were gassing people, Buchenwald-style, by now someone should be able to produce a corpse or at least a bad cough.

None such.

And the beyond-belief thing is, the government didn’t need to produce a corpse – or even a coughing complainant – before frog-marching Schmidt to the clink for the rest of his natural life and several lives beyond that. He stands accused – and will plead guilty to – violating a statute, end-running government rules.

His “crime” amounts to a larger scale version of using a radar detector – illegal in some states – to avoid a speed trap. The speeder hasn’t harmed anyone, but the law alleges he might, by driving faster than a number painted on a sign. It is not necessary to prove that anyone was harmed or even plausibly endangered by the guy caught doing 42 in a zone posted 35. Nor even establish that the posted speed limit accords with some tangible traffic safety engineering principle.

The mere fact that he got caught doing 42 is all that’s necessary to hang a fat fine around his neck.

In Schmidt’s case, it’s not even a whole number offense. The “defeat devices” he engineered allowed a fraction of a whole number’s worth of NOx emissions to escape the tailpipes of the “affected” VW vehicles. This was done not out of malice – but for the simple reason that the engineers could not make the TDI engine both “complaint” and acceptable to buyers. The test regime had become too severe.

And so, they “cheated.”

Exactly in the same way – and for the same reasons – that people use radar detectors.

Maybe they’ll be frog-marched to prison soon, too.

As OJ might say… Look out!

They deliberately defrauded the federal government in legally required emissions testing. They did this to make their vehicle pass the emissions tests but then provide a lot more sporty performance on the open road. And other car manufacturers had to compete against these cheaters.

If VW wanted better performing vehicles, they should have been producing gasoline engine vehicles instead of dirty diesels with crooked software.

I can't get worked up over this guy. I think he should be joined in prison by a large number of VW executives. I think he is being used as VW's scapegoat so the big execs walk away from this.

The main problem is that Americans will not wear seat belts and local PDs won't enforce their seat belt laws. The EU has universal compliance with seat belt laws and they use the smaller safer air bags which don't kill and injure. But in America, lots of people won't wear seat belts so the manufacturers installed big honking dangerous air bags that pose almost as much danger to elderly/children as having no air bags at all.

We should install the smaller air bags and force PDs to enforce the seat belt laws. Then the air bag problem would go away in just a few years. And it would drop the price of American vehicles by a few thousand dollars per vehicle. The giant airbags used in American cars aren't just dangerous, they are very expensive and place American car makers at a competitive disadvantage to EU and Asian manufacturers. They also make foreigners more reluctant to buy American vehicles because their airbags are rightly perceived as dangerous to passengers.

Do NOT include me in any police state scheme to save people from themselves. Adults should be the ones to make their own damn decisions about using or not using safety equipment.