{"id":252,"date":"2005-01-20T00:39:03","date_gmt":"2005-01-20T05:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scaredpoet.com\/wordpress\/?p=252"},"modified":"2005-01-19T21:41:53","modified_gmt":"2005-01-20T02:41:53","slug":"darwins-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/?p=252","title":{"rendered":"Darwin’s Best"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are people in this world who are very unhappy with laws that were meant to protect us, yet (in their opinion) strip away our personal liberties. Derek Kieper was once such person. He argued strongly against laws that required such things as passengers wearing seat belts in moving vehicles<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In a column written for the Daily Nebraskan in September, Derek attacked seat belt laws as intrusions on individual liberties and expensive to enforce. <\/p>\n

“It is my choice what type of safety precautions I take,” he wrote. <\/p>\n

“There seems to be a die-hard group of non-wearers out there who simply do not wish to buckle up no matter what the government does. I belong to this group.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And boy, did he belong. Mr. Kieper died on January 4, in a car accident. The other two people in the same vehicle survived with only minor injuries, while Kieper was thrown from the vehicle. Need I say<\/em> why his life wasn’t spared?<\/p>\n

For the record, I agree with Mr. Keiper. People should be given the right to eliminate themselves from the gene pool when they prove too stupid to engage in simple self-preservation, and take stands on the wrong side of pithy, blatantly obvious issues like this. If you refuse to to strap in and be safe in a large moving hunk of metal that travels at high speed, go right ahead.<\/p>\n

Just don’t do it in my car. I like to keep the upholstry clean, thanks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Derek Kieper believed strongly in individual liberties, even when it came to safety. And he died with those convictions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}