Posts Tagged → kill
Careless speeding & Poor traffic controls take another friend
We lost a most wonderful friend yesterday afternoon. One of the nicest people you could ever meet in your life, needlessly lost her life, while trying to cross North Front Street in Harrisburg.
Three factors caused Dr. Holly Engelman (55 YO) to be struck and immediately killed by a car: Careless driving, at speed far above what is posted (40 MPH transitioning to 35 MPH), in a marked crosswalk that lacks sufficient traffic controls to make drivers slow down and give the occasional pedestrian the right of way.
The driver whose car collided with Holly as she crossed within the crosswalk was young, driving way too damned fast, like almost everyone drives these days. And instead of seeing the adjoining lane blocked by a car waiting for Holly to make her way across Front Street, and taking note of it, her killer simply sped around it.
As Holly stepped past the stopped car, she was hit by the other car. While she was in the marked crosswalk.
Yes, this crosswalk at Vaughn and Front Street is marked on the pavement, and yes, it has signs on both sides, and yes, it has a flashing light and signs hanging over the crosswalk. But what it does not have is a couple rumble strips on both sides. Rumble strips, or speed bumps, can force drivers to slow down, by dint of the discomfort they cause when driven over at high speed. If designed to really slow a car down, they will immediately remove the tailpipe when hit at high speed.
Otherwise, these crosswalks are dangerous enticements, death traps that promise safety, but deliver death and injury.
I always drive the speed limit on Front Street. It is a residential street and also a low speed artery into and out of Harrisburg City. And yet, no matter where I enter Front Street, with however much lead time between me and approaching traffic, my doors are always blown off by passing vehicles that are going between fifty and sixty MPH. Some faster than this. Never fails, everyone is in a huge hurry to get into Harrisburg or out of it.
Plenty of tailgating, plenty of aggressive zooming up behind a vehicle that is already going the posted speed limit. As if Front Street is a race track, the Autobahn, a highway. But it is none of those things. Front Street runs along the scenic Susquehanna River, and right along the walking/ biking path above the river bank. Very little margin for error in this corridor, really no room for high speeds.
And yet, drivers speed there, and crash there, all the time.
There is no police presence on Front Street. Zero speed enforcement. None, ever. Not even at this one crosswalk.
Holly was a gentle, kind, beautiful person, with an uninhibited, attention-grabbing Woody Woodpecker laugh that made everyone around her laugh with her. Big time community volunteer, while also holding down a regular science job. She had a PhD in some polysyllabic hard science field that involved test tubes, lab rats, genes, big buildings, whatever, the whole gemish. Brilliant person, always positive to be around. Her two sons are good kids, smart in their own rights, and also hard working. Ditto her husband Andrew.
There is no replacing a Holly when something like this avoidable killing “accident” takes place. Holly was one of a kind, a super person of tiny stature who gave much more back to the community and society around her than her tiny size would indicate. She was one of the Princess of Patience’s best friends here in Harrisburg, and our home has been in mourning all day.
Folks, slow down in your vehicles. I do not understand why the hell so many people routinely drive like a bat out of hell in parking lots, or on residential streets, where people are around and where the margins for error are tiny. Nothing “pressing” in your life or mine is worth taking someone else’s life over. Driving fast in these enclosed spaces isn’t getting you anywhere any faster, but your risk factors are going through the roof.
And for those who will debate me on this, consider the young lady driver who killed our friend Holly. She likely faces the serious charge of manslaughter, in addition to reckless driving, etc etc. Her young life will never be the same, and will probably be much worse for a long period of time, simply because she was in too much of a hurry to slow down for Holly walking in the crosswalk.
In 2019, a young guy crashed into my truck’s rear, at pretty high speed, as I was stopped at a red light in Lewisburg. For about forty miles on our drive up Route 15, I had watched him staring at the dumb phone in his lap. He kept on slowing down as he became more absorbed in what he later told me was “the stupidest stuff.” And he would then suddenly speed up when he realized that other vehicles were passing him. He yo-yo’d like this for forty miles, and never once saw me waving to him, looking at him, trying to get his attention. He totaled his brand new Mustang, and hurt me.
Nothing on your social media feed is worth killing a Holly over, and if something on your phone really is so important, then pull off the road and give it your full attention. You, me, Holly, and the other person on your other end will all benefit.
Goodbye, dear Holly, sweet Holly, smart and humble and gentle Holly, mom Holly, doctor Holly, wife Holly, good friend Holly. We miss you very much.
UPDATE: Local news is covering this well. Here is a good example, and the reader comments are illuminating.
The scene of the crime. Killing a pedestrian here is no “accident.” It is negligent homicide, manslaughter.
How many signs and lights do drivers need? Apparently a lot
Another view. Northbound. People blasted through here while I tried to cross. Supposed to yield, a couple vehicles stopped, but most paid no mind
Is this the skid mark at the strike location?
Dr. Holly Engelman, on the left, as always
Hunting season is always glorious
To a lot of American hunters, including me, hunting season is a unique and special combination of extended holiday, camping trip, hiking trip, family gathering with the family members you like being with, nature viewing, rest and relaxation in pretty places, occasional deep naps way out in the woods, and opportunities to talk with God in remote spots that probably only see humans once every year or two when some hunter clambors his way out there for an hour.
Even for the urbanites who will be joining me over the coming weeks, simply hanging around “hunting camp” has a special role in re-charging personal batteries long depleted in bumper-to-bumper traffic and urban clutter with endless noise. Some urban guys are real go-getter hunters, while others enjoy sleeping in, drinking coffee and catching up with old friends, and having a cigar inside. Yes, this is a guys-only, cigars-permitted environment. People also say naughty things and tell politically incorrect jokes.
Comparing hunting knives, blade sharpening techniques, and new rifles is of course de rigeur.
After all, where else can a guy go and hang about with a bunch of other guys and talk about guns and knives all damned day and night long, while eating way too much food that their wives would never approve of: Only at hunting camp.
And whether you actually get something big and hairy, or not, the time spent there is always glorious. Believe it or not, there is plenty of Bible study, too.
I am looking forward to this hunting season, as I always do, and perhaps more so now that I am in my early sixties. Decades have flown by, some friends have died along the way, some have moved too far away to join me, and some of them were never really into the hunting anyhow, while others have jobs and businesses that absorb every waking moment of their lives. Which is a way of saying that I am appreciating this special time even more so this year.
We have not killed a bear here since 2006, not that our guys have not tried, and missed, since then. Nor have I killed a big buck here in years, despite having many opportunities. Seeing a big trophy buck in the woods gives me great pleasure, and 9.9 times out of ten, I will sit and let him walk by. Does, almost never.
Hunting season is not really about the killing; it is more about the hunting. Our hunting camp tee shirts this year say “One hunts not in order to kill; rather, ones kills in order to have hunted.”
Just being here, and being afield in the Big Woods with friends, is a deeply satisfying feeling. I hope the hunters who read this have a successful and safe season. And to the as-yet non-hunters reading this, get with it. We can mentor you, and show you the way of being a complete and whole human being.
Hunting season is also about running into old friends. Pam Mould was our township tax collector for decades, and our neighbor until about five years ago. Ran into her at Wolfe’s General Store in Slate Run today, while getting milk etc
Roe v. Wade was never about abortion
Like so many other far-reaching court decisions, or laws, or executive orders emanating from Washington, DC, Roe v. Wade was originally cast publicly as something it actually wasn’t.
Yes, on its face Roe v. Wade was about abortion, the termination of human life while still inside the mother’s body. But in fact, the way the court’s decision was structured, it was the exuberantly creative legal theory behind the Roe decision that was most important. And it was that legal theory that laid the ground work for so much of the openly political activist behavior we see emanating from way too many judges and federal bureaucrats across America.
Roe v. Wade was decided within a time of great social turmoil and cultural change, and a lot of the contemporaneous political activism pressure from the Left is visible in Roe. Especially the twin evil sisters of moral relativism and intellectual relativism. One example is the in-artfully creative use of the word “penumbra,” a sort of shadowy shadow that reputedly lay over so many different amendments to the US Constitution that clearly listing them all was just too tiring to Roe’s authors. Yes, the Court majority invoked aspects of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and went on to stitch together a pseudo- logical framework for legal decision (then using the 14th Amendment) making that is still with us today.
Vagueness as a reason for heavy handed policy is now the Left’s standard. “Because we told you to do it” is the way that is spelled out.
Every professor who taught me constitutional law was a liberal, and every single time any one of them delved into Roe, a smirk was on their face. Lots of eye rolling and chuckling accompanied these professors’ analysis of the poor legal reasoning behind the decision. Which meant to me then, and even more so now, that no one with real constitutional law training believed Roe was a legitimate legal decision based on actual logic, law, and fundamental constitutional principles. Rather, all the liberals who exulted in Roe did so because it backdoor-attained a policy goal they could not achieve through the legislative process, and because it established a mush-headed standard for all future legal decisions.
So today, some fifty years after Roe v. Wade-type legal analysis has wafted its way throughout the legal profession, the courts, and the bureaucracy, we see the ultimate and inevitable result of such a “creative” legal approach: Although the Second Amendment says crystal clearly that citizens may both keep and publicly bear firearms, and that this right shall not be infringed, a zillion policy makers and courts blatantly ignore 2A’s plain wording and just start throwing anti-gun policy ideas into the pot. These judges give no respect to what the Constitution actually says; rather, they use their court rooms purely for writing policies that fit their political views. Same goes for ATF bureaucrats.
I blame Roe v. Wade for where our court system is now. And where it is now is not just political policy shops in black robes, but we have defiant leftist activists in black robes, who simply ignore the Supreme Court’s precedents and make their own damned ruling. Even if their damned ruling is totally contrary to a US Supreme Court decision from just weeks or months ago. This approach is junk law, and it calls into question the entire field of jurisprudence. It highlights in just one more way how the Left is hell bent for leather to implement its political policy goals, at whatever cost to America’s legal and cultural fabric.
In case you don’t know it, when a lower court openly defies the Supreme Court, the entire court system is thrown out the window. We then have nothing but anarchy.
So, when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two weeks ago, it was not surprising to see the Left melt down, as if their ability to kill babies had in fact been fully deprived of them. After all, when a person sees every branch of government as nothing more than a policy shop devoid of logical process, then everything becomes about winning or losing the policy war. Here the Left feels they have lost, when in fact, all this recent Court decision did was turn the issue over to the various states (No, Barack, there are not 57 states). Where actual voters get to choose how they want their state government to address what should be a sensitive subject.
(The same 1960s and 1970s people who had just protested against American soldiers as “baby killers” in Vietnam then became the biggest champions of killing babies…go figure).
To its proponents and supporters, Roe v. Wade was never really about abortion or babies, it was about introducing a weak-minded, unprincipled, grab-what-you-can “by any means necessary” approach to forming government policy. And in fact one of the main reasons I left my US EPA policy job in Washington, DC, was because I personally witnessed many regulations and rules being formed exactly this way, where (liberal/ Left) agency staff would literally just imagine a bunch of shit and put it in the regulation or rule. Justified or no, or extra cost to industry and consumers be damned. It is a terrible way to run representative government. But it is the way that Roe taught liberals and Leftists to think about government.
As a proponent of good government, where transparency and accountability are everyday occurrences for the taxpayers, I am glad that Roe is gone. Now the politically difficult part of democracy is upon all of us: Figuring out how many babies people can kill, when, and where. Based on my principles, I would expect this democratic process to follow a certain logic path. But we are not dealing with principles here, but rather a passion on the Left for absolute control. And they don’t like losing control. Or thinking hard. Or debating issues with evidence and cross-examination and due process.
Should be interesting going forward.
The real masks come off
Over the past month or so, a national debate about whether or not to wear face masks, and under what conditions, has dominated the media headlines. Masks are said to be needed in order to prevent or reduce the transmission of Wuhan Flu. A lot of that mask debate was shaped by the ongoing public argument about whether to go back to work or to stay at home; again, allegedly to stop or slow the spread of the Wuhan Flu; or at least to spare the hospitals from being overrun.
States run by liberals, like Washington, Oregon, Michigan, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, are still largely shut down, regardless of their low Wuhan Flu deaths or hospitalization rates. Their economies are in shambles, probably by design. Their leaders emphasize even the smallest of risks, and the wearing of masks is symbolic of concurring with their grotesque risk assessment and their not-American approach to dealing with a disproven public threat. Liberals promote staying at home and wearing a mask in public as a symbol of deference to government fiat; really, a sort of face-worn sieg-heil salute to whoever the Dear Leader is in that state. Actual risks may vary by locale, but according to liberals every place is ground zero New York City.
Suddenly in a time of heavily engineered “social distancing” and compulsory mask wearing, with food shoppers everywhere carefully mincing about one another like planets on wobbly orbits, a very controlled American society indeed, an eruption of long engineered social chaos arrives. Fires, violence, looting, vandalism, insane barbaric destructive behavior, from coast to coast. Kaboom.
Flu masks off, vandal masks on. The real mask has just come off, because this is political theater to one political party. It is how they advance their political agenda. Their thinking is Trump could not be dislodged through a bunch of hoaxes, so now let’s try some serious street violence. Overwhelmingly, the graffiti, signs, and riotous behavior are anything but peaceful, with messages like “F–k Trump” etc leaving no doubt what this is really about.
If I were black, I would be upset about the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. Heck, I am “white” and I am very upset about their murders. I don’t know any “white” people who are not upset about them. These men were murdered in cold blood, and we need to make America so that it doesn’t happen again.
Like any normal American who watches the snuff video of ironically named and now former police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling heavily on Floyd’s neck until he dies, I am also concerned about the so very obviously widespread problematic culture of policing that has evolved out of hiring young combat-hardened military veterans to Protect and to Serve. If you watch enough online videos, it seems that even normal encounters with police provide an abnormal result. Law-abiding people conducting themselves lawfully are videotaped being officially manhandled, or even shot to death in their own home as they confront non-uniformed, unannounced intruders in the dead of night. So many police encounters result in an innocent civilian being unlawfully detained, unlawfully restrained, unlawfully injured, and then unlawfully charged, that if these videos are any indication of a wider theme, a police culture problem really is heavily upon all of us. And apparently it is because ‘contempt of cop’ is such an affront to the folks in blue that some of them act like they are fighting against everyone else. Us vs. Them, red vs. blue, crips vs. bloods, cops n’ robbers, Officer Chauvin vs. George Floyd… and so on.
But if I were black, I would especially be most upset about the dozens of shootings and killings that occur hourly, daily, weekly in Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, month in and month out, year after year. Cities run by white liberals for decades have the worst black poverty and violent crime. Young black men are killing each other by droves all the time, and yet…no rage. Not even upset. Not even headlines. No protests, no nothing. Silence.
So when the lid now comes off in these communities, allegedly because of George Floyd’s murder, and stores and churches are looted and destroyed, a normal person asks Why?
Why are law-abiding citizens told to stay inside, stay home, wear a mask, and God forbid if they go surfing or sun bathing or swimming or cutting hair, then they are arrested and shuffled straight off to jail, while truly masked vandals are ransacking American cities at will, with little police response?
The answer is uncomfortable. For decades, liberals have encouraged people, maybe even trained them, to act out their anger in violent ways. In many places violent vandals have been bused in, like St. Louis , Missouri, a few years ago. It is political theater to liberals. It is how their political goals that cannot be met through legitimate political channels are advanced. Nancy Pelosi used the Wuhan Flu to achieve political outcomes the American people would not otherwise grant her, except under extortion and coercion. Now how will these violent street mobs be used?
“No justice, no peace,” “By any means necessary,” “Question authority” are just a few of the confrontational battle cries that liberals have said through megaphones and loudspeakers over my lifetime. Whenever something happens that liberals don’t like or that they can exploit, out come the arsonist marchers and the destructive mobs. It is easier than working through the plodding checks-and-balances political process established in 1787.
A lawless political culture has resulted, and it is to this lawlessness that the police culture has responded in like kind. Like two planets orbiting in each other, locked in an unstable embrace.
It is said that liberalism is a mental disease, and while it is tough to argue with that, given the evidence of it right in front of us right now, it is also easy to point out that liberalism is a well considered political movement. It has lots of shaming and false outrage, as well as effective tactics and strategies, lots of lying, hypocrisy, official violence, and street mobs. Social distancing applies to law abiding middle income families, and not to the people who are destroying their businesses. Presently it seems that America’s youth have been indoctrinated to act like the young Chinese fifty years ago under Mao’s guidance, in the Cultural Revolution.
Out in America’s streets right now, the liberal mob is turning our nation upside down. The White House is literally under siege. Though obviously defective, lawless Liberalism has come to dominate almost all of America’s institutions and organizations – the media, academia, the schools, government bureaucracies, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen and Conservationists, etc. Liberalism is ascendant, while republican constitutionalism is in retreat.
The mask is off right now for all to see what liberalism is actually about. And despite its known problems, despite its ugly, scary face staring us normal people in the face, it is doing really, really well.
Liberalism is doing not too bad for a mental disease.
America, You’ve Got a Problem…
How does this happen? Do Americans believe this is funny? Is it funny if a white supremacist says it?
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/12/10/jamie-foxx-jokes-about-killing-all-white-people-his-new-movie