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This is why I eat steak. I’m saving the planet.

I have mixed feelings on the abortion issue. Medical science has blurred the lines of when a person becomes (and ceases being) a person. At least in my opinion, that is where disagreements over the abortion issue arise. I think both sides of the debate make valid points.

However, the law makes things even muddier. This guy here kicked a pregnant woman, causing her to miscarry. He is being charged with manslaughter, which means that the unborn child is considered to be a person. If it was the mother who decided to abort the pregnancy, then the unborn child is considered to be just a piece of tissue.

I think this is inconsistent, and the law shouldn’t have it both ways.

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.

I thought protesting was domestic terrorism

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.

This is how it’s possible: $7200 per child in free money.

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.