In December, a New Jersey schoolboy was arrested for drawing in class.

In the post-Sandy Hook rage to blame anything (guns, video games, internet-addicted youth) the easiest thing to blame is always the kid who fails at the blankly inoffensive ideals of childhood. This 16-year-old drew a glove shooting flames. The police searched his house. They found the sort of gutted machines that hint at a proclivity for engineering. He was arrested on December 18, and was still in juvenile hall when papers ran the story on the 28th.

This handily sums up what's wrong with the way administrations are handling kids. I feel lucky in that when I was in high school, administration really didn't know what to do with me other than sit watchfully and be thankful I would make it through my senior year's classes without even needing to look up from whatever non-class-related thing I was reading or working on at the time.

Some kids differ from other kids. Surprise, surprise--they're a lot like actual people in that respect. The only thing that comes from treating kids like there's something wrong with them when they do things that the adults around them aren't smart enough to do or comprehend is disenfranchisement. They very quickly stop giving even one single fuck about what the adults want and will not only actively ignore them but rebel against them just as hard as the adults try to reshape their activities into something 'more normal'. More importantly, it teaches them to distrust authority of all kinds, because "authority" perpetually distrusts them and never demonstrates any unwillingness to break it's own rules or any remorse at having done so "for the sake of the children".

Nevermind that there's a substantial body of "normal adults" running around loose in the job market with less mental maturity than they had when they graduated from high school.

Case example: One of the more level-headed kids I know sports a mohawk and is going to an "alternative" school because of a rather minor transgression that I'm suprised they did more than give him a stern look and perhaps a day of suspension over. The lesson he's learned is to not trust them, and that he's actually not nearly as fucked up as even he thought he might be. Thankfully he's going to be spending his senior year in a regular high school, where administration will hopefully not try to pigeon-hole him. He'll give them A's and B's easily if they just let him be.

Shooter Boys and At-Risk Girls | VICE

Absolutely. This is pure hilarity. :)

YouTube - ‪My Drunk Kitchen Ep. 4: Not Easy, Bake Oven‬‏

The same people who brought you these horrible changes — rising wealth discrepancy, massive unemployment and a crumbling infrastructure – have now further institutionalized the policies that will keep the causes of these problems firmly in place.

Its quite another thing entirely to have this sort of stuff said to you by a professional wall street economist.

Wall Street Reform: Politicians Lie, Media Applauds, America Suffers | The Big Picture

@#$!$$@~! I thought you were joking about this.

*sigh*

The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate calls his new book "Three Felonies a Day," referring to the number of crimes he estimates the average American now unwittingly commits because of vague laws. New technology adds its own complexity, making innocent activity potentially criminal.null

L. Gordon Crovitz: You Commit Three Felonies a Day - WSJ.com

The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

Andrew Lahde bows out in style

possibly noteworthy wrote:
Bellovin on Decius's HOPE topic

He seems to be searching for reason and order in an area that is patently unreasonable and hypocritical. In the case of U.S. citizens, the information customs agents are digging through their laptops for would be protected by a warrant requirement if it was transmitted Internationally over the Internet instead. The FISA update signed yesterday by George Bush makes this even more the case than it was before, as now warrants are required to monitor the communications of U.S. persons even if they are overseas. These searches are not part of a comprehensive approach to preventing the smuggling of information. No comprehensive approach is possible because warrant requirements and encryption stand in the way. The fact that neither of these things stand in the way of customs officials at the border is an accident of time, space, and technology, and not a willful result of policy.

These facts completely undermine the arguments made in the senate hearing, particularly by the Heritage Foundation's representative, that these searches are necessary for some sort of policy reason and legalistic objections to them miss the point. There is no policy reason. If there were, then you'd have to allow warrantless law enforcement monitoring of all international communications and you'd have to require cryptographic key escrow. We don't. We're not going to. We don't need to. And so we don't need to do these searches either.

RE: FISA and Border Searches of Laptops

Unfortunately its a narrow margin.

It doesn't matter. The ruling came down. "We the people" won. This should put us a step closer back to the "right" way of things--the government afraid of it's people, instead of the other way around.

The argument that was being made by pro-gun-elimination advocates was that the Constitution supposedly meant that a militia had the right to bear arms, but "the people" didn't. The problem there is that militias are usually controlled by the local governments (or they're declared terrorists and infiltrated and destroyed), which are controlled by the etc etc. Being that this section was put in there specifically because we'd just shed the British from our soil--and needed a lot of guns to do it--their "people shouldn't have guns" viewpoint would make the 2nd Amendment less than useless.

The Supreme Court very rightly decided that the only sane interpretation of the 2nd Amendment was that it was there to make sure that individuals could bear arms in order to be able to fight back against their government, should circumstances make this necessary.

This is especially important stuff since we've got King George in the White House. I'm still not wholly convinced he's actually letting go in November. I certainly don't want to see anyone get shot, but a few hundred thousand people showing up in DC asking politely with guns for him to leave office would probably not be such a bad thing.

Gosh, guess which area has a strict "you can't have a gun" policy.

Supreme Court upholds 2nd Amendment [PDF]

Un-freaking-believable. Who is it we call to ask why that police captain still has a job?

The cops came, searched and left a mess for puzzled homeowner | Philadelphia Daily News | 06/17/2008

She's extremely lucky she followed the instructions or deadly force would have been used," Pare told The Associated Press. "And she's lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue."

The quote above is a Massachusetts State Police Officer publicly threatening to murder an MIT student who accidentally showed up at the airport wearing an electronic art project. She has, yet again, been charged with carrying out a hoax. Remember kids, anytime a Massachusetts police officer is confused, its your fault for confusing them, and not theirs for being fucking stupid and paranoid, and you are likely to go to prison or worse if it happens.

MIT student arrested for entering Boston airport with art project