May the Swartz be with you

I've been trying to avoid posting political stuff here, but the silly White House Petition site may actually prove to be of some use if it results in a very, very small measure of posthumous justice (not that there is such a thing).

“A prosecutor who does not understand proportionality and who regularly uses the threat of unjust and overreaching charges to extort plea bargains from defendants regardless of their guilt is a danger to the life and liberty of anyone who might cross her path,” said the petition.

tagged: Obama, Aaron Swartz, Carmen Ortiz, harassment, tyranny, big government

Misty morning

News came out yesterday that no charges will be filed in the death of Misty Horner or her child.

The deaths, you may recall, occurred after the difficult stillborn delivery of the baby Sydney Horner in the family's home after they opted not to go to a hospital for the delivery. According to Misty's husband, who happens to also be a Lee's Summit police officer, the family refused medical help based upon their religious beliefs.

Misty's family said this refusal of medical help is what led to her death a month later from septic shock.

The KC Star reported that

Jackson County Prosecutor Jim Kanatzar said there were insufficient grounds for criminal charges in the deaths of Misty Horner and her baby, Sydney.

Kanatzar said the decision was made in part on the findings of a medical examiner who ruled the deaths were the result of natural causes, he said. But his decision also was based on standards behind Missouri’s involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment laws, he said.

Some people will be tempted to rant against this miscarriage of justice. Certainly it's easy to get emotional about this kind of story. If not for the backwards beliefs of a few misguided individuals, a mother and daughter might be alive and well today.

But few will take the macro view of this episode. Few will see that these events, while tragic, might well be for the better good of the human race.

Try to look at this from an evolutionary standpoint. The belief that prayer in the absence of science is the best hope for survival has proven in this case to be false. The baby ended up dead, and the ability of the mother to procreate was removed.

As for the father, something tells me his ability to find a suitable mate has been seriously diminished. He has essentially removed himself from the gene pool.

I know it makes me sound like an asshole. And don't get me wrong, I can imagine how upset Misty's family must be.

But let's be brutally honest. The fewer of Caleb Horner's ilk we have around, the better for human evolution.

tagged: Misty Horner, Caleb Horner, religion, science, evolution, natural selection, survival

Right on target

The hot topic of conversation in the KC blogiverse today is yesterday's 3-death massacre at Ward Parkway Mall.

My good friend Xavier Onassis is taking a particularly rough comments beating for his point of view:

I think we should limit gun ownership to one narrowly defined hunting rifle per adult and round up and confiscate everything else.

He's suffering the usual slings and arrows of the slack-jawed knuckle-draggers who think the constitutionally guaranteed right to own firearms guarantees them the right to own firearms.

Well I'd just like to come to XO's defense on this one.

He's right. Just because the constitution says we should have something, doesn't mean that we really should. After all, what do we know. We elect people to congress and White Houses to tell us what we need so that we don't have to think about it.

XO make a valid point that, since we've given up so many of our other constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, we should give up this one as well. Who needs rights anyway? Isn't our society advancing to a point where we can rely on the Morlocks to provide for us at the relatively low expense of sending them one or two of our Eloi now and then?

No, I'm with Xavier on this one. In fact, I think his ideas don't go far enough.

Sure, restricting the types of guns people can own is good. Absolutely we need to have government troops round up and confiscate all non-approved firearms. But that's only the beginning.

As a next step, we need to create a government registry of all people who want to own a firearm, or have views sympathetic to firearm owners. As XO points out, these kinds of people are obviously mentally defective. So they do need to be tracked and controlled.

We should probably designate certain areas within each city for these people to live and, for the safety of the public at large, restrict their movements from these areas.

To be doubly safe, we should make sure all of us right-thinking, non-insane non-gun-owners know when we're dealing with a "gun nut" by requiring them to wear some kind of insignia that identifies them as the sub-humans they really are. I'm thinking a red and white target, or perhaps a six-pointed star or something.

Anyway, I'm sure there a more ideas out there to help us come to a final solution on the gun owners problem. Maybe since gun owners like to hunt in the woods, we can send them all camping. Of course we would have to fence in the camps to make sure innocent people don't stray into these concentrations of gun owners. But it could work.

It's clear that after the last few weeks, we have to do something.

tagged: Kansas City, shooting, Ward Parkway Mall, gun control, eloi, morlock, constitution, rights

The cure is worse than the illness

It's a shame and a travesty.

A Kansas City, Kan., nurse's aide pleaded guilty to the other day to first-degree murder in the 2005 stabbing death of a 77-year-old man who had once been in her care.

Turns out she had been embezzling money from him for years. When he finally caught on, she stabbed him 40 times to keep him from spilling the beans.

What a waste. I think we can all agree that this kind of elder abuse, while all too common, is completely uncalled for and causes untold loss to our society as a whole.

The elderly, such as my friend Xavier Onassis, shouldn't be harmed or abused, they need to be isolated and studied so that it can be determined what nutrients they have that might be extracted for our personal use.

tagged: Kansas City, nurse , stabbing , elderly