Tag Archives: Drugs

News

Husband sacrifices his life to save his pregnant wife

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Story here on AOLNews.

Excerpt:

“It breaks my heart and it also fills me with gratefulness,” a weeping Erin Wood, 31, told NBC’s “Today” show this morning. “If it would have been a head-on crash, we both would have been killed and our baby,” she said.

Brian Wood, 33, was pronounced dead at the scene Sept. 3 after an oncoming SUV careened across the center line on Whidbey Island in Washington state, and hurtled over the roof of Wood’s 2004 Suburban. His wife was in the passenger seat. The North Vancouver, B.C., couple’s first child is due in early November.

Her husband of five years slammed on the brakes and swerved hard to the right, ensuring that he would take the brunt of the impact, his wife said. She had been dozing and woke to see the Chevy Blazer racing toward them. She suffered a banged head and a black eye, which was still visible today, but is otherwise fine. The unborn baby boy was unharmed, she said.

The man was actually the lead game designer for a famous and highly-regarded game called “Company of Heroes”, which deals with the heroic actions of soldiers during World War 2. The game was well-known for the heavy emphasis on heroism and character. The expansion to the original game was called “Tales of Valor”.

And what about the cause of the car accident?

Excerpt:

Jordyn B. Weichert, the driver of the Blazer, was charged Friday with causing the three deaths and injuries while driving in a reckless manner under the influence of drugs.

Court papers filed Thursday also say that heroin, cocaine, marijuana, drug paraphernalia and a .25-caliber handgun were found in the Blazer after the crash.

According to court documents, the crash happened after Weichert decided to take off her sweater as she was driving north along the two-lane highway in a 55-mph zone.

Weichert’s front-seat passenger, Samantha R. Bowling, 22, of Oak Harbor, held the steering wheel while Weichert removed the article of clothing, court documents show.

During the maneuver, Bowling lost control of the Blazer. It swerved across the centerline, then back into its own lane as Bowling over-corrected, then back across the centerline, crashing into the Subaru, the State Patrol said.

The impact instantly killed the driver of the Subaru, Brian R. Wood, 33, of Vancouver, B.C., and injured his wife, Erin E. Wood, 31, who is seven months pregnant.

Also killed were two young men, Jacob D. Quistorf, 25, and Francis C. Malloy, 26, of Oak Harbor, who were riding in the back seat of the Blazer.

Weichert, Bowling and Malloy were all ejected from the Blazer in the crash. Quistorf was wearing a seatbelt but was killed by the impact.

Bowling suffered a fractured pelvis and Erin Wood sustained head injuries. She is recovering and her baby will survive.

Bowling also faces a possible vehicular homicide charge when she is released from the hospital, the State Patrol said.

[…]Troopers who responded to the crash said they could smell the odor of marijuana around the Blazer when they first arrived at the scene.

Weichert also told troopers she had smoked marijuana earlier in the day, according to charging documents.

I posted this because I think it is really scary how a good person just traveling to visit family can have their life snuffed out by punk kids looking for a good time. And I also wanted to remind everyone what men are really like when they’re good.

UPDATE: In a related story, you can learn about the soldier who won a Medal of Honor in Afghanistan, read this story and watch this video. The Medal of Honor is the most difficult decoration to earn in the US Armed Forces. I’m a huge fan of Medal of Honor recipients, and I’ve read many of their stories like Butch O’Hare and Audie Murphy. Most people who win the Medal of Honor die doing so – a living recipient is very very rare. Reading their stories is sad, because there is usually a sad ending. But this one has a happy ending.

News

New study analyzes the legalization of euthanasia in Belgium

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Wesley J. Smith analyzes a new peer-reviewed paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

First an introduction to euthanasia:

Belgium has followed the Netherlands in jumping off a vertical moral cliff by embracing legalized euthanasia.  The awful consequences that I predicted are now coming to pass; a steady increase in the number of cases, inadequate reporting, and a large percentage of non voluntary euthanasia deaths.  Thus, I am anything but surprised by the study I analyze below, which echoes an earlier one reported here at SHS, that nearly as many Belgian euthanasia killings are non voluntary as of those that are voluntary (the concept of “voluntary” in this context being highly problematic, but let’s not deal with that here).

Why might that be? Euthanasia consciousness rests on two intellectual pillars–that killing is an acceptable answer to human suffering, and radical individualism in which we all own our bodies and have the absolute right to do what we wish with it, including make it dead.   But interestingly, the latter idea–often reduced to that most effective of all soundbites, “choice”–turns out to be far less robust than the acceptance of active killing as a proper method of ending suffering.  In other words, once a society accepts killing as the answer to suffering, the request element becomes increasingly less important as doctors assume they are doing what is best for the patient by extinguishing their lives.

But does the new research paper justify his concerns? The paper finds that nurses administered life-ending drugs without the patient’s consent in 120 cases, as compared with 128 cases where the patient requested the drugs.

The paper says:

When the patient can no longer communicate, nurses are, by the nature of their work, more directly confronted with the patient’s suffering and may therefore wish to take a more active role in life-ending acts. We also have to consider that the administration of life-ending drugs without the patient’s explicit request may have included situations of terminal sedation or an increase in pain alleviation, in which the delegation by physicians to nurses to administer the drugs is considered common practice. Finally, although about half of the nurses’ reports indicated that there was no explicit request from the patient, it should be stated that the physicians and nurses probably acted according to the patient’s wishes.

The paper is here. (PDF)

News

How much does it cost to enforce immigration law?

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Story here from Byron York. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

On April 19, the same day the Arizona Legislature passed the immigration measure, the state’s two Republican senators, John McCain and Jon Kyl, unveiled a new plan to secure the U.S. border with Mexico. It’s a combination of completing and improving the border fence, adding new Border Patrol agents, expanding a policy of briefly jailing illegal border crossers, and several other programs already in existence. Although there is not yet an estimate of how much it would cost, the price would be vastly less than the sums going to bailouts, the stimulus, and the planned national health care system.

[…]Start with the fence. The Secure Fence Act, passed by Congress in 2006, specified 700 miles of the Southwest border to be secured with double-layered, reinforced fencing and other physical barriers.

[…]How much would it cost? Given that much of the basic structure already exists, perhaps $1 million per mile. Revamp the whole 700 miles and it’s $700 million.

[…]Kyl and McCain would add 3,000 new Border Patrol agents. A back-of-the-envelope cost estimate is about $100 million per 1,000 new agents, so the plan would cost about $300 million. The proposal also calls for hiring more U.S. marshals, clerks, and administrative staff, which would mean more costs.

[…]Then there is the jailing program, called Operation Streamline, which sends all illegal crossers to jail for a period of 15 to 60 days. When it has been tried selected areas, it has caused the illegal crossing rates to plummet.

[…]There are other expenses. For example, McCain and Kyl want to send a few thousand National Guard troops to the border. When this was done in 2007 and 2008, it cost a total of $1 billion.

The article is a nice little primer on border security measures and associated costs. Don’t forget that illegal immigration actually costs states money for things like increased emergency room usage, increased education costs, increased crime, increased prisons, etc.

We can recover a lot of the costs for border security measures by opening up the country to highly-skilled immigrant workers who pay more in taxes than they use in services, since they are (I think) not even eligible for unemployment, medicare, medicaid or social security – they have to leave when their work term ends.

It’s a national security issue. We have enemies, we need a secure border. Particularly with a naive, weak President whose policies of moral equivalence and appeasement have encourage several attacks on US soil in the past few months.