I was going through old posts, and I found a pretty funny one: How to simulate Paramedic life, from 2010. It’s pretty hilarious.
Have your mother-in-law write down everything she’s going to do for the day, then have her make you stand in the back yard at 7am and read it to you.
A teacher in Osceola county is in hot water for making several third grade boys clean a dirty bathroom as punishment. Now this initially makes you think that the teacher was being unreasonable, until you find out that the mess that they boys were made to clean up was made by the boys in the first place.
That isn’t a punishment, that is called making it right. you destroyed the bathroom, so now you get to clean up after yourself. The parents didn’t think so:
“I wouldn’t punish my child like that, and I wouldn’t expect the school to do that either,” parent Gustavo Serrano said. “It was too far, it was definitely too far.”
That is part of the problem right there.
The Republican who runs the FCC is writing regulations by doing exhaustive research, including repeated viewing of science fiction movies.
Our laws are being written by morons.
All employees who work at my hospital must provide proof of vaccination by November 24, or they will be terminated. A third of my department remains unvaccinated. I can only assume that this is true of other departments as well.
Since my hospital is already in the midst of a staffing shortage crisis, I have no idea what this will do or how they will manage to enforce this.
I want to make something clear with regards to my disagreement with Aesop’s opinion on the Rusty Baldwin shooting. The disagreement that I have with him is about his opinion on this topic. Yes, he and I have disagreed in the past. We have also agreed on topics in the past. That is the nature of human interaction.
I still believe that he and I agree on more topics than not. Don’t take our little discussion as anything other than a disagreement between colleagues.
I don’t have a problem with him or his blog. It’s the nature of human interaction- we don’t always agree. We also have a tendency to circle the wagons when we want to defend our own opinions, which MUST be the correct opinion, or we wouldn’t have it, would we?
Let’s burn another post on the Baldwin Rust shooting and get some legal opinions. We will start with a quote of New Mexico’s manslaughter law:
Involuntary manslaughter consists of manslaughter committed in the commission of an unlawful act not amounting to felony, or in the commission of a lawful act which might produce death in an unlawful manner or without due caution and circumspection.
There was a death, and I think that we can all agree that SOMEONE didn’t show due caution and circumspection, or else a woman would not have been killed by a supposedly unloaded gun. In a case like this, one or more people could have contributed to the incident.
Erlinda Johnson, a practicing New Mexico criminal attorney and former state and federal prosecutor said that Baldwin could face possible criminal liability for involuntary manslaughter. “All the state needs to demonstrate is that he was engaged in a lawful, but dangerous act and did not act with due caution,” she said.
She speculated that Baldwin may rely on the defense that someone handed him the gun, “but then, well it was incumbent upon him, since he was handling the gun, to make sure there were no rounds.”
Johnson continued: “Clearly someone didn’t do their due diligence. They should have been checking those guns to make sure there were no live rounds.”
So the key question is not one of law, but of fact. That is, did Baldwin, as the one holding, pointing, and shooting the gun, have a responsibility to check to ensure that the gun was not loaded before he pointed it at another human being and pulled the trigger? Or was it sufficient that he relied on someone else to check the weapon for him?
As we have demonstrated in the blogging world, opinions are split on that.
In the American legal system, the jury is the primary finder of fact. That is what a jury is for. Put the case in front of a jury and let them decide whether or not Baldwin was criminally negligent. The proper place to try this is not in the court of public opinion, or on various blogs. The place to try this is in court.
In either case, Baldwin and the movie’s production company will still face civil liability. There will still be a lawsuit. From another article:
“There’s no explanation where you have this happen on a set where there’s not civil negligence,” said attorney Jeff Harris
The only people who win in this case will be the attorneys. The biggest issue that I have here with all of this is that we all know that, as an ‘A’ list celebrity, Alec Baldwin will get special treatment and will not get nearly as many repercussions from this as one of us would.
That really burns my ass.
Aesop has taken exception to those of us in the blogosphere who think that Baldwin should have inspected the firearm he was handed before he pointed it at a living person and pulled the trigger.
I dont normally call out other bloggers here, but since he referred to us as “Jasper and Billy Bob,” and I tried to post further comment on his blog but the comment was moderated away, here it comes.
People pointed out to him that, as a nurse, he checks medication vials that are handed to him before he gives them, rather than simply taking their word for it, so why shouldn’t an actor check to ensure a firearm isn’t loaded, even if the prop master says it’s not loaded. He replied that the medication is different, because ensuring it is correct is the nurses’ job, but actors are different because they aren’t trained.
He then goes on to claim that we aren’t qualified to judge him, because we don’t work in Hollywood on movie sets. He even brushed aside Branca’s opinion for reasons.
Aesop believes that since actors are busy, rich, and experts in making movies, that they are too busy and important to be bothered with mundane things like firearm safety, so should be permitted to pick up a firearm that a flunky tells them is uploaded, point it at someone, and pull the trigger. If someone is killed, well that’s just unfortunate, but at least the famous actor wasn’t inconvenienced with having to learn firearm safety.
So if he won’t listen to us, nor even to an actual attorney, maybe he will listen to the guy at this link, who DOES make movies. HE thinks that Baldwin messed up. An actual quote:
“Loaded or unloaded, a weapon never gets pointed at another human being,” said Bryan Carpenter, who heads Dark Thirty Film Services, “Even on a film or TV set,” he said “you never let the muzzle of a weapon cover something you don’t intend to destroy.”
The weapons consultant cited what he called “Colonel Jeff Cooper’s four fundamentals” of gun safety.
“All guns are always loaded. Even if they are not, treat them as if they are,” reads the No. 1 rule by Cooper, an influential gun safety expert who died in 2006.
The consultant also said that for safety purposes, live firearms used in TV and movie productions are typically aimed at a dummy point, not at equipment, cast or crew members, as was the case with the weapon handled by Baldwin.
Or you could take the word of a prop expert from this article, who said:
“There should be a number of people on-set checking,” said one prop assistant, who has worked on a big-budget Hollywood thriller. “If it were me, I would also have the actor check.”
Just because someone else is paid to do something doesn’t absolve you of responsibility. To use Aesop’s own example, if a pilot is told the plane was fully fueled by the maintenance crew, he is still responsible if the plane runs out of fuel mid flight.
No one is saying that the actor should be the only one to check the firearm, but he should be the last.
Here is a story about Venezuelans who are using gold in the wake of the Bolivar’s collapse. At today’s exchange rate of $1784 an ounce, a gram of gold is worth about $63.
Food for thought. Instead of gold flakes, it is a good idea to have silver for small purchases. Fractional gold is a good idea as well.