© 1999,2000,2005 by Reptilian Associates. Reproduction of this complete document for non-commercial use is permitted as long as this notice is included and a pointer to this site is included. To reproduce this document for commercial use, whether for print or a for-profit Web site, request permission from alizard@ecis.com Finally, threatening / harassing e-mail will be reported to your Internet Service Provider, your feed site, or to law enforcement authorities. You are informed that responses to this page in e-mail or the guestbook I find offensive are likely to be posted in any of several newsgroups with a low tolerance for stupidity and your responding to this page via e-mail or in the guestbook given this notice is unlimited permission for reproduction by any means and in any media I choose to, edited as I see fit along with a copy of this notice. I determine what is considered offensive. 4/25/1999.
2005 addendum: (US ONLY) If you're a young person who has reason to believe that your public school or college campus is infringing on your freedom of speech, check out the FIRE organization and FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus. In America, the right to free speech does not end at the schoolhouse door (yet), though attempting to enforce it may be personally dangerous.
First, the fact that the kids who decided to reenact "Revenge of the
Nerds" with live ammunition chose to amuse themselves by shooting their
fellow students saved several hundred lives. If they'd detonated the
large fuel-air bombs they had planted previously on campus without
shooting anyone, the death toll would have been into the hundreds or
perhaps thousands. I have yet to see a proposal to ban the private
possession of propane canisters.
Any parent whose kid survived Littleton should thank (insert Deity of
your choice) for guns. If the kids hadn't had guns and decided to use
them instead of the bombs they planted, your kid would probably have
come home in a body bag. Or whatever pieces of him or her they managed
to find and identify. The bombs as described in the media would have
taken the death toll up to 1000 plus. It's even possible that no one
would ever have found out who set off the bombs, and every kid at school
who somehow survived or was home sick that day would have been under
suspicion for the rest of their lives. Brutal, yes. The truth usually
is.
I'll also add that figuring
out how to turn a propane canister into a deadly fuel-air bomb is very
easy. All you have to do is... never mind. Do your own websearch if you feel you must know, though there's no guarantee that what you find will work. You can find potentially
explosive devices in every home. Figuring out how to make them go boom
isn't rocket science. The trick with propane is making sure it does
NOT go off. That's why you use soapy water to verify that
connections aren't leaking and are real, real careful to keep them away
from open flame. Every year, a few homes and businesses are
blown up by propane without anyone making the slighest effort to make
them explode. Moreover, you can find information on explosives
in every public library, and it's far easier to do this without leaving
traces than it is online. You can't teach chemistry without teaching
about things that go boom. Of course, the people who want to censor the
Internet are generally the people who want to take "bad" books out of
libraries, too. To see where these people want to take us, look into the
Wired
News article.
Second, the problem at that school wasn't too many guns on campus, it
was not enough guns in the hands of responsible adults. If even
a significant fraction of the faculty and administrators on campus had
been armed, just how many students would have gotten shot? Here is a
link to a University of Chicago study answers this question. A quote
from the abstract,"our results find that the only policy factor to
influence multiple victim public shootings is the passage of concealed
handgun laws. We explain why public shootings are more sensitive than
other violent crimes to concealed handguns, why the laws reduce both the
number of shootings as well as their severity,"
In Israel, teachers,
administrators, and parent volunteers are customarily armed for
protection against terrorists. Ever heard of a kid successfully going
postal there? In fact, have you ever heard of a kid going postal at all there? In Switzerland, most households have a full automatic
assault rifle around the house, if not something heavier. A militia
callout by the government there means that the citizens show up armed
and ready, not the governmnent handing out guns. Heard of any kiddies
going postal there lately? A generally armed populace is a very effective deterrent to those who might be inclined to go apeshit with a gun.
Here's an article on the Swiss approach to guns. "Although Switzerland has local shooting contests for boys and girls ages 12 to 16, there have been no school massacres in the
country."
Despite the depictions of the American West in the 1800s, the usual causes of death in that place and time were disease and accident, not an armed neighbor. It was possible to order firearms via mail order right up until the 1960s without the government giving people trouble over it. Remember Leave it to Beaver? Are we any safer now?
"Liberalizing concealed carry laws won't lead to a return to the Wild West -- though it wouldn't be bad if it did. ... in 19th Century cattle towns, homicide was confined to transient males who shot each other in saloon disturbances. The per capital robbery rate was 7% of modern New York City's. The burglary rate was 1%. Rape was unknown."
However, the best allowing honest, law abiding citizens can accomplish with respect to preventing mass killings in schools, workplace, and society in general is to suppress the
symptoms of a problem. It isn't a solution. It's worth doing, though,
Anyone who thinks saving lives is a good idea should agree with me.
Third, in the first couple of days after Littleton, I've seen the massacre blamed on
everything in the list below.
Alleged Causes for Littleton
Killing: The "cures" for these "social problems", oddly enough, are
new forms of social control. How convenient. This list also demonstrates
that stupidity or a desire to limit people's freedom is not a monopoly
of either the political left or right. "Liberals" and "conservatives"
are alike part of the problem. Both sides of the political spectrum have
dropped the ball on public education. Both sides are using Littleton to
make political points at the expense of the kids.
Some bad news for anybody who wants to point to the Internet or violent video games as the cause for youth violence. Since video game consoles / computer videogames and the Internet became popularly available, i.e. in the period between 1995 and now, murders by young people dropped 46% and the victims of violent crime rate has dropped comparably. The numbers are based on US Department of Justice statistics. What are the media telling us? What are our politicians telling us?
I can say one thing definitely. Anyone who tells you he or she has
the key to preventing kids going postal at school in the future that is in any way related to the laundry list above either has a
personal or organizational agenda that doesn't have a damned thing to do with protecting kids or is
mindlessly parroting the agenda of some group or organization who is
attempting to whip up hysteria into legislation that will limit one or
another or all of our civil liberties. People who profess to lead us who push these kinds of proposals need to be kicked out of their leadership positions. People who aren't who want to "protect kids" by proposals relating to the above have just demonstrated that they are unfit to discuss public policy issues in adult forums. Why are you listening to imbeciles like that?
Look at the above list and think about this for yourself.
The primary agendas of the people who "know what must be done"
seem to be either right-wing censorship of freedom of speech /
expression or "liberal" gun control, except that both the "liberals" and
the Religious Right want to tell us what we are allowed to
say on the Internet. The rational person
rejects all of the above and the people who parrot these ideas.
Note how many of these awards have gone to public schools and school districts. Public schools are supposed to teach the values required for citizens to function in a democracy. Like how to express opinions and how to tolerate opinions that don't agree with yours. At least that's what they tell us we're paying for. Personally, I'm tired of paying the salaries of scum in suits (aka educational bureaucrats) that deliver something else entirely.
The secondary agendas of the people who know what must be done
basically translate to a feeling that there is political profit in dead
kids and that anything that can be conceivably related to "stopping the
violence" has a good chance of selling in the current political climate.
The most absurd example I've seen so far is Clinton's attempt to extend
Family Leave legislation on the grounds that it'll let parents spend
more time with their children. Since this bill is only intended to allow
parents to take time off in emergencies, it won't help much on a day to
day basis. This bill might be a good thing, but if it is, it shouldn't
need to be covered in high-school kid corpses to get it passed.
There aren't any easy answers to this, no matter who's easy answers
you're most politically inclined to accept, and anybody who says
there are is not your friend. A free country is a dangerous place
to live. It's supposed to be. Anybody who tells you that a "free" country can be made "safe"
is not only a liar, but has a bad product he or she is trying to unload on
you. Don't buy the lies.
Here's a good guide on spin
control as practiced by government, media, and business. If you
suspect that any of the above are lying to you about STOPPING TEEN
VIOLENCE, evaluate what you saw
against that template. Chances are that they probably are lying.
"Those who are willing to trade their liberty for security deserve
neither." Benjamin Franklin - 1763
Those willing to trade our liberty for whatever they think is
good for their security deserve contempt. Those who are elected
public officials deserve speedy removal from
public office by those who elected them by mistake.
Anyone who believes that gun control is about protecting children is
referred to the classic University
of Chicago study of effects of mass access to concealed weapons
permits on crime and violence. You'll need an Adobe Acrobat reader to
view it. You should already have one, if not, get it here. The conclusion that more guns in the
hands of law-abiding people reduces the incidence of violent
crime may be unpalatable to some. It's also the only conclusion
supported by the available statistical information. If you want to
analyze Department of Justice statistics and draw your own conclusions,
here
they are. Get your copy of Excel out and start cranking.
Gun control isn't about getting guns out of the hands of kids. Gun control is about making sure that only government employees,
those in power, and the people on the payroll of the powerful have
access to guns. Unfortunately, there is no historical evidence that the
powerful are any more responsible than the rest of us are. In fact, the
evidence points the other way. If gun control were about making society
safe, the first people disarmed would be the "security forces" of the "rich
and famous" and those of our elected officials.
More from the article, "The reporters, dignitaries and innocent bystanders packed into the room were too ignorant to be terrified as Feinstein swept the crowd with the muzzle of the automatic rifle, bolt closed, finger on the trigger, high-capacity magazine locked in place."
You can find a picture of our favorite concealed weapons permit holder at the above URL. She could have added to the entertainment value quite easily if she had pulled the trigger and discovered that somebody had loaded the gun.
The mechanism for awarding concealed weapons permits in areas where access to them is restricted is intended to assure that only responsible people with training are allowed to carry handguns in public. The most important firearms safety rule is : DON'T POINT A GUN AT ANYTHING YOU DON'T EXPECT TO SHOOT. If you aren't planning to shoot, what is your finger doing on the trigger? Common sense. If an "ordinary person" with a permit had pulled this crap, that person would be behind bars and that permit would be revoked. Do you think the San Francisco County Sheriff will be pulling Feinstein's permit? Of course, the real problem with concealed weapons permit law other than "must issue" (to anyone who isn't a known felon or nut) is that the process of awarding such permits is invariably political, i.e. if you want a concealed carry permit in California, unless you've contributed substantially to your local sheriff's last political campaign, don't ask. Having your life in verifiable danger (say, from a ex-felon ex-husband) isn't good enough.
While the lawsuit that says that one of the kids allegedly killed by kids at Littleton was actually killed by mistake by a deputy sheriff, I'm not citing this as an example, at least not until a time when I have had a chance to review the evidence myself.
A number of years ago, a popular mayor of a major city was
assassinated by a lone nut. (George Moscone of San Francisco.) There
were screams from "liberals" about the need for gun control. The
assassin was a former policeman and had just lost his job as an elected
public official. He also had connections in the right-wing political
establishment. I just described a typical profile of a person who would
be a gun owner no matter what sort of gun "control" program gets
through Congress. Dan White was an "important" person.
However, if you're a member of a minority group who isn't wealthy or a politician, you are especially unimportant to OUR LEADERS. Little known fact: The roots of gun control as we know of are in laws which were written deliberately and consciously with racist intentions. Every black politician who stands up and tells us we need new gun control laws to "stop the killing" is continuing a KKK-style agenda. You can find this demonstrated The Racist Roots of Gun Control and Laws Designed To Disarm Slaves, Freedmen, And African-Americans. You may assume that any black politician or pundit who supports gun control either is an idiot and/or is advancing a personal agenda which has nothing to do with your civil rights.
From the second page: " 'Sullivan Law' enacted, requiring police permission, via a permit issued at their discretion, to own a handgun. Unpopular minorities were and are routinely denied permits. ('Gun Control: White Man's Law,' William R. Tonso, Reason, December 1985) There are only about 4,898 permits in New York City, down from 7,473 in 1997 and 29,000 in 1981. 'If you're a street-corner grocer in Manhattan, good luck getting a gun permit. But among those who have been able to wrangle a precious carry permit out of the city's bureaucracy are Donald Trump, Arthur Ochs Sulzburger, William Buckley, Jr., and David, John, Lawrence and Winthrop Rockefeller. Surprise.' (Terrance Moran, 'Racism and the Firearms Firestorm,' Legal Times)"
The rationalizations of the anti-gun lunatics would suggest that if the number of legal guns on a city's streets drops by a factor of 6, that violence should drop correspondingly. Didn't happen that way. Are you surprised?
No gun "control" program will ever be passed or even proposed which
will impede the ability of the "important" people to protect themselves
with guns. The only reason why gun control ever gets discussed is that
the people who are behind the people who front for it do not
consider you and me important. When "important" people call for police--
protection, the police don't tell them that they aren't in the business
of protecting individual citizens, which is what they tell you and me.
It's "yes, sir, we'll have someone over in a few minutes." If somebody
who can afford it wants to hire armed security, that person doesn't have
problems with gun control. All that person has to do is call an agency
and wait. And remember to pay the invoice. This is "equal treatment under law", it's just that some people are more equal than others.
One current malignant example of the above is the conversion of the
Rosie O'Donnell tabloid talk show into an anti-gun propaganda platform.
She says that any private citizen with a gun should be put in jail. Has
she gotten the armed security personnel who protect her at the studio
and at home to disarm? Is she going to? Rosie must think she's "more
equal than others", too. If this annoys you, there's a petition at Perfectunion you might want to
sign.
Finally, we found a people stupid enough to try "real" gun control along the lines of what our anti-gun nuts are demanding. Total confiscation. Here's what happened: Now.... based on a full 12 months of data: Australia-wide, homicides up 3.2 percent. Australia-wide, assaults up 8.6 percent. Australia-wide, armed robberies up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent.) In the state of Victoria, homicides-with-firearms are up 300 percent. Up until the government gun grab, figures for the previous 25 years had shown a steady decrease in homicides with firearms, as well as armed robberies...." - Vin Suprynowicz
You can read the rest of the article here. By the way, I recommend that you do read it, it has some interesting information about how the English experiment with extreme gun control is going. It appears that the NRA assertion that taking guns away from civilians means that civil liberties are next on the agenda is substantially correct. However, anybody who knows current UK political history with respect to Internet control will need no explanation.
Does effective gun control always lead to the disappearance of civil liberties? Here's another straw in the wind from the UK. I regard the writer's optimism that Mr. Straw actually bothers to review the wiretap warrant requests as totally unfounded.
For more of my comments about guns, click here. There's some duplication between these sections, which I'll probably do something about one of these days.
Finding that people
who you trusted lied to you because it was politically correct to do so
is disillusioning. Welcome to the real world. Deal with it. Now that you know beyond any reasonable doubt that you were lied to about gun control, what else are your "friends" in public office" lying to about? I don't know that all of the celebrities, politicians, etc. who tell us we need gun control are personally packing guns. However, that's the way to bet. (I'll find the URL for Curt Bakal, the person who wrote the book that started the gun control movement, "The Right to Bear Arms" later; the one that shows he got arrested for possession of an illegal handgun. I read the book in high school around 1970 and realized that what he was citing in support of a gun ban could more logically be read as good ideas to oppose it.)
Anybody who says that Internet censorship is about "protecting" kids
from learning how to blow things up either already knows that much more
complete, accurate, safer, and much less traceable information on
explosives is available in almost any public library or is being used by
people who know this. Would you try an explosives recipe with
obvious spelling errors in it? The ones in chemistry textbooks generally don't have spelling
errors. All a kid has to do to find out how to blow things up is find
the right book and drop coins into a Xerox machine. Learn how to use the
catalog at your local library, the encyclopedias, and ignore the
children's section to verify what I'm telling you. Anybody who says porn
sites make kids blow things up is invited to get out your credit card
and check out your favorite porn sites for information on explosives and
demolition.
As for entertainment media, including video games and motion pictures
as the cause of teen violence, in Europe, kids have access to either the
same movies / videos / games our kids have or "export only" versions
with even more sex and violence. European broadcast TV has much more
sexually oriented material than US television. (Most of the sex-oriented programming I saw when I visited Holland sucked, but I didn't have a sudden urge to shoot anyone over it. Not even once.) They have access to the
Internet, too. Are European kids shooting each other in multitudes
because of this? Even Swiss kids aren't doing this, even with assault
rifles as a common part of everyday life. Of course, our mass news media
and Congress have decided that something MUST be done. Here is testimony from a leading MIT media
scholar to a Senate Commitee about the roots of Littleton. He dismisses
entertainment media as the primary cause. Of more interest is his description of what it
was like to testify to a group of people (Not only the Senators on the
Committee, but our mass media!) who had obviously made up their minds on
how to use whatever he had to say to advance their own political agendas
at the expense, first of America's brightest kids and ultimately, at the
expense of all of us who aren't "important".
Here's more on the latest movie industry fallout from Littleton. . . how they are enforcing "adult" rating movie guidelines. Quote from the article: " 'This ratings bullshit is the last straw for me,' wrote JimB. 'I am going DVD. These people are so gutless. I have the right to see what I want. I don't believe for one micro-second they are worried about my morality or well-being. They are just trying to keep the religious crazies off their back. I'm old enough to be a camp counselor, but I can't watch a friggin' movie like American Pie. I've given these a-holes countless dollars over the last few years. No more.' JimB is 16." (Note: American Pie is about a group of high school kids.) The above link is to the third article in the series. These links will get you to the first story, Ticket Booth Tyranny Part One and Ticket Booth Tyranny Part Two. I wouldn't be surprised if one of these days, a kid, or possibly even a parent goes postal over this idiocy. However, a generation of kids who decide that movie theaters have nothing they want to buy would be far more painful for that part of the entertainment industry. Remember that you can always wait a couple or three months and rent the video or pay-per-view.
(there's a copy of this on my home page, if you've seen it, skip ahead) You've been seeing things about the horrors of teenage sexuality in the US mass media all your life. Note that US kids seem to be making better sexual choices than their parent's generation did at the same age, as witnessed by the declining teen pregnancy rate. What would you say if I told you there's a society a great deal like the US, that watches our mass media, in which it is perfectly legal for teens to have sex with each other and with adults that hasn't slid into the ocean over this. The name of the place is Canada. The age of consent in Canada is 14. The exceptions involve anal / homosexual sex, the adult can't be in a position of trust with respect to the minor, and there's no payment involved. This seems reasonable enough to me, with the possible exception of anal/homosexual sex. The Netherlands start teaching human sexuality in elementary school. Their level of teenage pregnancy is considerably lower than ours.
It appears that freedom actually works. When are we going to have the common sense to try it in the good old USA? BTW, for a guide to teen sex law covering the world, go to ageofconsent.com. Check this before you have to know, and don't depend on anything I've said here, this kind of information is not the main purpose of this site or anything I regard as "need to know" [sorry, I prefer experienced adult women :-)] and that site is kept up to date. This link is presented as a public service for both young people and adults, given that of all tribal customs, offending cultural taboos about sex will get you into trouble fastest, and a kid generally has less legal protection from "justice" than an adult.
Here's another interesting article relating to young person's sexuality, Attack of the Devil Dolls. Sample quote: "In the wake of Littleton, a new panic is being sown in the fertile soil of fears about the young. Just as "juvenile delinquents" were a national obsession in the '50s, the specter of killer kids is now haunting America. And just as perverts were once thought to stalk the nation's schoolyards preying on the young, the culture is now imagined as a stalker of our children's souls. Meet Austin Powers, the new enemy within." . . . "Such is life in the land of promiscuous puritans, where wild shifts between freedom and repression are the norm. Children will always be caught on the horns of that dilemma -- and they will always find ways to escape."
This is hardly an endorsement of teen sex. It's a bad idea for a lot of kids. However, while I support the idea of government funding for sex education and birth control / safe sex practices and a medical safety net INCLUDING abortion services, I do NOT approve of spending a single taxpayer dollar for "protecting" any but the youngest kids from "porn" or keeping kids out of bed with each other. If parents want to persuade their kids to "wait until marriage" or whatever, fine. I'm just not interested in spending money to "help". The idea that taxpayer funds should be expended to preserve the "innocence", i.e. dangerous ignorance of young people is ridiculous at best. Teen sex is a fact of life now, just as it is when we were kids, when our parents were kids, and when our remotest ancestors were kids. If this makes you unhappy, click here, perhaps taking the advice will make you feel better.
If you have any remaining respect for American mass-market institutions, the following articles should cure you:
Quack! - The American Academy of Pediatrics is so worried about technology, culture and kids that it wants to ban TV for small children, restrict access for all kids and start recording media histories of all the young.
From Wired News
A new site for discussing the issues I discuss here is Hellmouth.They describe themselves as "an ongoing expose on peer and administrator abuse in the public school system".
Point a finger, get suspended.
This idiocy has continued, to the applause of the news media and deluded parents.
Drugs? Why don't you check the Netherlands, where marijuana is legal
for private possession (been there, seen it) for evidence of
drug-connected violence. You won't find much, and what you will find is
all connected with the drugs they have chosen not to
decriminalize. There's a perennial debate over there about whether or
not to decriminalize the "hard" drugs. While I wish them luck in making
the right decision, whatever it is for them, they still have a lot less
crime than we in the USA do even under current circumstances. This isn't
surprising in a place where an argument about payment for drugs can be
settled in a courtroom instead of with bullets.
But people are telling you that we need gun control and Internet
censorship and
entertainment media censorship and more money for the "War on Drugs" to
SAVE OUR CHILDREN. Could there be possibly be something going on
among these people other than a desire to protect kids? There are people
who honestly believe that some or all of this nonsense will protect
kids. Without exception, they are the tools of people whose agendas have
absolutely nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do
about persuading us to give up our freedoms without a fight. They have a right to speak. They do NOT have a right to have their opinions treated with respect.The great
majority of these "useful fools" aren't even getting paid for spreading
the propaganda of our enemies. Who will protect America's kids
against these fools and the liars they are working for? That's
our problem. Our elected leaders appear to be too busy
pursuing their own agendas to handle it, or worse, enacting measures and spending money on ways to make the situation worse.
Congress is about to pass a law that requires censorware filters on public school and library Web access. For how well it works and what it really blocks, go to Peacefire. Hint: the manufacturers are generally not only lying to the customers and the public , but their site "block" lists are often driven by a political agenda you probably don't share. If you do share it, this page is the wrong place for you, you should be a Stormfront with the rest of your stormtrooper wannabe brothers. Congress appointed a panel of experts on all sides of the debate to find out if censorware is a good idea.
It's not surprising that the public supports censorware, the media money that's been spent has all come from the companies trying to unload that crap on the public. Mostly without a whole lot of success.
Then, there are gutless imbeciles in media who are starting to censor
their own entertainment programming out of fear. Even as harmless a show
as Buffy the Vampire Slayer had an episode pulled from the US broadcast
schedule. The good news is that the program which did air in Canada was
videotaped and transferred to the
Internet. Were any kids protected by censoring this program in the
US? I rather doubt it. Just another stupid, inappropriate response to
Littleton.
If you are one of the people I described and you don't like being a
"useful fool" and honestly want to protect children, learn to think for
yourself instead of letting the mass media tell you what to think. Try
to find out for yourself what's really going on around you. Here are some of the resources I use for
this. Try reading Robert Anton
Wilson's books. While I don't always agree with him, reading his
books will help you figure out how to try to find out what the mass
media isn't telling you.
Read Underground History of Education. The first few chapters of the book are on the site. In fact, you should probably do this right now, reading the rest of this page can wait. It'll tell you more about how the public school system got this way than I can.
If you feel safer in a place where private possession of firearms is not
tolerated, where access to the Internet is censored, and where making
"bad" ideas and pictures means go to prison, move to China and don't
come back. Of course, the price you pay for that is ... if you don't
like how the government is run and say so, you'll have people in uniform
carrying guns kicking in your door. However, that's your problem. Giving
the government and criminals a monopoly on guns merely means that most
violence will be targeted at citizens who will have no choice but to
hope for mercy at the hands of the armed minority, whether by criminals
in uniform or free-enterprise criminals. The historical record shows
that governments are much better at killing their own citizens than
their citizens are left to when left to their own devices.
There have been various people whining in different places, "If guns protect people so well, then why did Littleton happen?" The answers are simple. Concealed weapons permits are practically impossible to get in most places and schools have been declared "gun-free" zones except for police by our elected officials. So the only people who generally carry guns on the street and schools are police, criminals, terrorists, and crazies. Any overlap between these groups is hopefully, coincidental. "There is never a policeman around when you need one" has been a proverb for generations. This effectively leaves the monopoly on private firepower to criminals, terrorists, and crazies. Ask your politicians why they think this is a good idea. At home where guns are currently still legal in the US, there are millions of incidents every year of people successfully protecting themselves and others with guns. I've had occasion to do this myself.
Ask yourself how long the Columbine killers would have been able to keep on killing if there had been any significant number of armed teachers or security guards. Right. The death toll would have been a handful at worst, someone would have dropped one of the killers within the first few seconds of the incident and the other one would probably have given up. Chances are, maybe one student would be dead, the first student shot by one of that pair would have alerted armed adults who would have shot one of the shooters. The community and the government wanted a gun-free zone, and the result was a bloodbath. If you are a gun control pusher, feel proud of yourself, you too have a part in these murders.
If you want to make America into the kind of place China is, you are
making yourself my problem, and you are a danger to anybody
capable of rational thought. If you're an elected official trying to do
this, there are a great many people who don't like you and that number
is growing. I'm doing what I can to help that process along. Add enough to that number and you'll be looking for honest
work after an Election Day sometime soon. The reaction to the
absurdities you are proposing, ostensibly to "protect children" is
already underway. You've made a big mistake. These kids you're
trying to "protect" are smart enough to know you're lying both to them
and about them. They'll be old enough to vote soon. If you're from the
mass media and want to ban guns and freedom of speech on the Net, the
next time you wonder where your organization's credibility went, take a
look in the mirror. Do you like what you see?
For the rest of you. . . there isn't one big conspiracy against our
freedoms. Nothing anywhere near that well organized is going on. Just a
lot of groups of varying sizes and power that cooperate on some things
and oppose each other on others. The only things these groups have in
common is that they want more power over people like us and they think that
exploiting fear of the different will get it for them.
So how do we reduce teen violence of the sort we've seen in
Littleton? The critical issue for stopping mass killings on public school
campuses is how to stop our schools from making their "different"
students into human timebombs. In the absence of that,
Littleton-style incidents will happen *over.
And over. And over. Without
real changes of the sort that take major reexamination of school
practices and values and habits, this is inevitable. This reexamination
is not happening at the public schools. Nor will it.
Teachers and school administrators generally get a reasonable salary,
pretty OK working conditions, and certain emotional rewards from the
system as it is. The great majority have no motivation to change it, and
if they believe that it takes "cracking down on the freaks" to preserve
a system works, at least for the paid staff, that's what they'll do.
That's what they are doing. It's easier than thinking... and they
figure the consequences will happen to somebody else if they get
enough armed security and metal detectors.
* - registration required. Since the registration gives you access to
the New York Times online, it's worth doing.
This doesn't make them consciously evil. Most honestly believe that
forcing "different", "weird" kids to "conform" and be part of the
"mainstream" will really do the targets good. If we had any choice about
being "normal", perhaps this would work. As people do with most unusual
events, the people who run our schools is using this event as
demonstration of the truth of their worldview. Normal, mainstream people
do not do creative and interesting things. I've worked with a
fair number of the people who create new technology over the years and
run across quite a few more on the Internet. Normal they are not.
Bright, interesting, literate. . . but they tend to have rather unusual
interests. I'm working on new Internet
technology myself. Figure out for yourself how "normal" I am.
Getting rid of the "weird" and "different" actually has been tried on
a national scale. Hitler tried it. He mostly succeeded. The weird,
different people (mainly Jewish nuclear scientists) he ran out assisted
in the building of the A-bomb, radar and the other technologies which
turned his nation and those who allied with it into smoking ruins. If the US somehow succeeds in running out the "freaks" and the "nerds", what's left of US economic
dominance will disappear the same way and for the same reasons Hitler's
military dominance did.
In the events which allegedly happened in response to 9/11 combined with the export of US technology jobs via outsourcing, this reverse "brain drain" is already starting.
The new technology center will be wherever the
"different" people went. The things the US has to sell to the rest of
the world of greatest economic importance isn't manufactured goods
anymore. It's the software that runs the rest of the world's computers
and that people plug into their VCRs and DVD systems. The kids who take
high school football and "school spirit" seriously are not the
people who write that software, though the smartest among those may be working for those people someday.
If the creative people of America can't
write the entertainment and productivity software the rest of the world
wants to see, we'll have to go somewhere where we can. If this happens,
this will be with the full support of the multinationals. If you didn't
know it, even the multinationals headquarted in the US have only very
nominal allegiance to the USA. If the USA is no longer a cost-effective
place to write software, the major software companies, particularly the
entertainment companies will find some place else.
Like to see Hollywood become a museum filled with
closed studios and the businesses that sold things to them part of
history? Want to have to make an international long distance call to get to a help desk for the software package you can't make work? Civil liberties isn't just about
being able to say nasty things about the government or make dirty
movies. Freedom of expression now means you get to live in an economy in
which you can make enough money to pay your bills. This means freedom of
expression implemented in products you don't like as well. I'm not fond
of Christian music, but every dollar worth of Christian music sold
overseas has the same impact on our balance of payments as a dollar paid
to an American company for a copy of DOOM. For the latest experiment
in thought control, would you believe that there's a new bill before the
Senate to ban violence from TV between 6 AM and 10 PM? Does it apply to
TV news? Interesting question. Find out more about it here.
You don't hear a lot about any of the above from our "experts" and
our political leadership. Nor will you. Calling on people to think
doesn't work well for people with a hidden agenda, even if the hidden
agenda only constitutes of hiding their incompetence. It's too easy for
people to start thinking "bad" thoughts. Calling for people to think and
ask "What the hell is really going on?" is what this page and this Website is
all about.
Here is a sample of what we'll be seeing in the next election from
the GOP, "GOP strategist Mike Murphy advocates 'goth control' not 'gun
control.'" While that statement speaks for itself, do you want a
government run by his employers to be the only people running around
with guns? We as a nation need to be able to protect
ourselves from idiots in public office that use people like Murphy to do
their thinking. Sooner or later, the word is going to get around to the
masses that we need a complete cleanout of the Washington DC sandbox.
When this happens, will they accept the judgment of the ballot box? I
don't know and neither do you. If
the GOP discovers that the "natives" are getting restless, look for a
sudden disappearance of resistance to gun control laws. If both parties
believe that their political rule is about to end, look for terrorist
incidents and more school massacres coming out of nowhere and calls from
both parties for "improved security" and telling us to accept a few
"temporary inconveniences" to secure the "safety of our children".
Listen to what GOP elected officials are telling you. They want you
to. So do I. Unlike them, I want you to go on to thinking about what
they said. You'll learn that they are no more
in favor of freedom for individual citizens than the social control
"liberal" "New Democrats" like Dianne Feinstein and Bill Clinton are.
The Republicrat and Demopublican common idea of freedom is freedom to buy
consumer products as their corporate masters tell us and think what that
segment of the mass media they consider "responsible" tells us to think. Their agenda is no longer either "liberal" or "conservative" in the classical definitions of either term. Jon Katz coined the word "corporatist", and I rather like it.
To them, the Internet should be a shopping mall in which the only public
expression is allowed is filtered by "responsible" people, a place where
not just anyone is allowed to say what he thinks. A place where you
won't be seeing Web pages like this.
Here is what passes for thinking among Clinton
and his friends. Clinton is described as having "the worst record on
civil liberties in this generation." I'll source that quote later.
Speaking of "bad" thoughts, it appears that the response in many
schools to "stop the violence" is a "geek witchhunt" where kids who
express "bad" thoughts on campus, are known to be Internet users, or who
play computer video games suddenly find themselves suspended,
threatened, harassed, by the school administation. Check the article
series, Voices from
the Hellmouth, More Stories
from the Hellmouth, and
The Price
of Being Different and Hope from the
Hellmouth and
the comments by young people (look around) . These
may be Jon Katz's best articles. The continuing coverage and
comments will be around the site somewhere. One of the better examples
of the sort of insightful coverage you won't find in mass media.
Finally, collected comments on the Hellmouth series. You'll have to follow the onpage links to get to all of the content.
The above was unduly optimistic. Anonymous (from a point of view of accountability for what one says) "rat out your friends and enemies" programs with "Rewards" programs for kids (they will know who those kids are) and automated psychological computer profiling, both coming from corporations who want to make hefty profit out of trouble in the schools are a bit closer to the future our "educators" and elected officials have in mind for us. Keep reading.
The good news, other than voucher initiatives in Congress. Serious violence in schools has been dropping for years. You wouldn't believe this from what the media is telling you, would you?
Here's the lead paragraph of the second in the series,More Stories from
the Hellmouth, "In the days after the Littleton, Colorado
massacre, the country went on a panicked hunt for the oddballs in High
School, a profoundly ignorant and unthinking response to a tragedy that
left geeks, nerds, non-conformists and the alienated in an even worse
situation than before. Stories all over the country embarked on
witchhunts that amounted to little more than Geek Profiling."
A comment on the article, "How bout blaming a system that
takes smart or weird kids and drives them crazy?... They pretend to want
to have a 'dialogue' but kids should be warned that what they really
want to know is who's dangerous to them."
This was true when I went to high school. (class of 1972) This
process seems to have drastically worsened over the years. Thinking
back, I'm certain I would have been one of the targets of school harassment
described above were I in high school today. I listen to "Sisters
of Mercy" occasionally, though I don't own a trenchcoat. I started
listening to "heavy metal" back in 1970 (I find Metallica too
mainstream) and I also listen to "modern rock" (Hole, Nine Inch Nails,
for instance). I use the Internet a lot. I have a personal Website. I
play violent computer games and have ever since they became available. I
know how to find "anarchy" sites, and just how unreliable much of their
information is. I like wearing all black. I'm not and never was a Goth,
black clothes just work well with my complexion, white makeup doesn't .
. . and I've never been all that fond of Anne Rice.
I don't have any delusions about being young, I merely refused to
allow my musical tastes to become canalized in adolescence as most
people do. I've also expressed quite a few controversial ideas over the
years. I've annoyed people across the political spectrum.
Before now, I never warned high school kids that quoting me in
school reports might get them in very serious trouble, because the idea
that my opinions might do this simply never occurred to me. An e-mail I got
from a high school student asking permission to print this page for use
in a school report caused me to rethink this. I never thought I'd be
telling kids in America to watch what your teachers and
school adminstrators hear you saying and to be careful about letting
them know what you think.
WARNING: If you are a high school student, using this page in a school
report or publically agreeing with any idea expressed herein may be
hazardous to your academic record and make the remainder of your high
school tenure even worse than it has been. Check my links to the Jon Katz
articles above if you want to know why I think so. If you still want to
anything from here, catch me in e-mail.
I've refrained from comments about high school for the last 10 years
or so, before starting this page because I've been too long out of the
scene to have any sort of clue as to what's going on there. It was
obvious that things had changed, but I really didn't know what to. I've
recommended voucher programs before this simply to improve the quality
of public education, which is well known to be the worst among the
industrialized countries. It hadn't occurred to me that being bright,
creative, and a bit different was enough to put a person in physical
danger on and off campus.
Littleton ripped off the lid. I not only ran across ugly stories from
anonymous high school kids, I heard the same and worse in various
newsgroups and e-mail from my friends just out of high school. I now
know why my younger friends haven't talked about high school earlier, and I
can't blame them for not wanting to think of it. When one is force-fed
enough clues, getting the idea isn't exactly difficult. Fixing the
system isn't just about turning out better educated kids, it has finally
gotten to the point where fixing the system is needed to keep our best
and brightest sane and alive.
Be very careful about letting school authorities know what you think. More Bad News from the Hellmouth". Would you believe computerized geek profiling? "a government-sponsored computer program (Mosaic 2000) offered by a law enforcement agency and a private security firm to enter school systems and track down certain types of students in schools". Since the site of the company offering Mosaic 2000 isn't linked to either the slashdot or the New York Times article referred to in the slashdot article, information Gavin de Becker Inc's package from the people who are trying to unload it on schools can be found here. The use of computers deliberately programmed to find and stamp out "deviants" is straight out of George Orwell. The bad news keeps right on coming. . . write a "creative writing" story for class, go to jail
"Columbine. That word never fails to dredge up thoughts of misery and terror since the student massacre left 15 dead just over one year ago. And there's nothing quite like fear to open up the path for new rules and regulations, new policies and plans.
That might explain why North Carolina has quietly launched a program (WaveAmerica) that allows students to call in anonymously or fill out a Web-based form to report on classmates who might appear depressed or angry -- or who just scare them." Read A Chilling Wave Hits Schools at Wired News.
From another article: "W.A.V.E., a profit-making program ramping up in the southern U.S. and soon to go national, will use Web sites, toll-free numbers, T-shirts and cash to encourage students to anonymously turn in classmates they consider depressed, dangerous or potentially violent." In other words, the idea here is to make sure that kids can't even talk to each other without fear of being turned in to the authorities. For more about this brilliant idea, click here. Sounds like a great way for kids to get back at each other without fear of reprisal, i.e. some guy gets dumped by a girl? Call the WAVE hotline and the police and the school will start taking her locker, home, and computer apart. This program has government support, of course. Another reason for favoring a voucher system to unplug the public education bureaucracy from the educational process. The only good news is that if enough of the wrong people get turned in, the program will be unplugged. If schools find their student government under investigation, the football team shut down because "they were plotting to . . .", you get the idea?
Encouraging citizens to rat each other out anonymously is a bad idea. "just yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Florida law that permits police to search people for firearms solely on the basis of anonymous tips. Citing the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure, the court ruled that such a law would enable "any person to harass another to set in motion an intrusive, embarrassing police search..." Authorities, the court ruled, needed some corraborating evidence before they could invade the privacy of any citizen. " Apparently the North Carolina state government doesn't think this applies to kids.
The program described in the article certainly is consistent with the kind of idiocy we are coming to expect from the public schools. If you've already seen enough on what's wrong with public schools, click here to find out what my final solution to educational bureaucrat incompetence is. If not, keep reading.
Jon Katz interviewed some Pinkerton officials for more information on WaveAmerica. They stated that they neither know nor care what schools will be doing with the anonymous information that their WaveAmerica hotline site, complete with a rewards program for the kids who use the site, will be collecting for them. It is clear that the Pinkerton employees responsible for this corporation have abdicated their personal responsibility to their corporation, which by definition has no personal conscience, only an obligation to maximise profit for the corporation no matter who gets hurt. The only counterbalance to this other than massive protest or companies dumping their services for the competition is that if enough people get hurt, Pinkerton will get sued, hopefully, out of existence. Since this program looks profitable, the only question with respect to stopping the program is how much damage the company and its employees will take before they decide it has to be stopped.
The only good news in the article is that:
Public school administrators, teachers, and teacher unions are conspicuously absent from this protest so far. I suggest that this shows that the public school establishment has shown themselves morally unfit as a group (I'm sure that there are individual exceptions) to care for the young. If you agree with me that something needs to be done about it, check my voucher initiative draft and discussion page.
If your company uses Pinkerton for security, I suggest finding a local competitor and letting Pinkerton know why you switched. You'll probably save money (national chains generally charge more) and you might even get better and more personalized service.
These are my
conclusions: Here's a quote from a Time Magazine cover story: Maybe they saw the kids who flicked the ketchup packets or tossed the bottles at the trench-coat kids in the cafeteria. But things never got out of hand, they say. Evan Todd, the 255-lb. defensive lineman who was wounded in the library, describes the climate this way: "Columbine is a clean, good place except for those rejects," Todd says of Klebold and Harris and their friends. "Most kids didn't want them there. They were into witchcraft. They were into voodoo dolls. Sure, we teased them. But what do you expect with kids who come to school with weird hairdos and horns on their hats? It's not just jocks; the whole school's disgusted with them. They're a bunch of homos, grabbing each other's private parts. If you want to get rid of someone, usually you tease 'em. So the whole school would call them homos, and when they did something sick, we'd tell them, 'You're sick and that's wrong.'" Even shooting that fuckhead wasn't enough to make him question his beliefs and actions. It is difficult not to wish that the Columbine killers had put an extra round into that imbecile, in the interest of improving the human genetic pool.
Kids, try a march to demand the firing of
your principal if you know he's part of the problem (or so removed from
student reality that he doesn't know what's going on) or for that matter, the Columbine High School principal
and see how much support you get from the school system at that
point.
The stupidity continues: "A seven-year-old boy in Cahokia, Ill., is suspended for having a nail clipper at school. A 10th-grader at Surry County High School in Virginia is booted for having blue-dyed hair. A Minnesota high school nixes a yearbook photo of an Army enlistee in the senior class because it shows her sitting atop a cannon outside a Veterans of Foreign Wars post."
May 24, 2000 - 07:59 AM
Brian Agnew, an Eagle Scout, was sent to the principal's office
May 9 after school officials were tipped off to the items in his
car.
Brian said he had used the ax the night before at a Boy Scout
meeting, where he demonstrated the proper handling of scouting
tools. In his car's glove box, there was a pocketknife his father
gave him for advancing in scouting and a cell phone for
emergencies.
I used to have a "Boy Scout Knife". It's a folding multifunction tool, like the Swiss Army knife. It's a tool kit with a blade that doesn't lock. I wonder if a multifunction tool (like the Leatherman) of the new generation based on folding pliers would be considered a "dangerous weapon", but I can't advise anyone in school to try it unless they've already got a good lawyer lined up.
Have you figured out the caliber of the people running our schools yet? The people who run public education should be our best and brightest. Would you trust these school administrators to run your business? Would you trust them to run a hot dog stand unsupervised if you owned it? These brain-damaged fools deserve public contempt, unemployment with blacklisting to insure that they will never be allowed to supervise young people again. I am not sure whether they are more or less dangerous to the health and welfare of their charges than convicted pedophiles are, and keeping both kinds of people off school payrolls and booting their asses out when they are found is a good way not to have to find out.
If a school administrator thinks Marilyn Manson is frightening, I
recommend a few hours of GWAR videos with the audio played at very high
volume to them. If music expresses "bad" ideas, the way to handle them
is to make better ideas available to the targets. . . and to get across
the difference between entertainment and reality. Or to quote from a current popular music song, "The thin line between entertainment and war".
I'm not sure if the
problem here is a lack of comprehension of the "marketplace of ideas"
concept as the Founding Fathers understood it or a nagging fear that the
ideas they believe are "good" can't hack it in an open market. It
appears obvious that the method that administrators are using with media
and political backing is an attempt to tighten up control over students
with no comprehension as to just what it is that they are trying to
control. Here's a bit more documentation, from the San
Francisco Chronicle. The practices can be summarized as thought
control as practiced by inept people who simply do not how and worse,
can't admit to themselves what they are doing, and supported by the
faction of students that the schools have reconfigured themselves to
support. This is one place where ineptitude on the part of
administrators probably benefits the students.
Those who wish to argue the above have to come up with a better
explanation of what made the kids kill in Littleton that accounts for
all the complaints I've heard from agonized kids and the adults who were
once agonized kids who by and large say, "there but for the grace of
[insert Deity] went I." The deaths by themselves could be explained
quite adequately by individual aberrations. That is what I originally
believed. I was wrong, of course. There's something else going on.
The explanations from all over the US from people who are going
through the same things that turned what might have been sane,
functional kids into killers can NOT be explained that way and
anybody who says anything in the "Alleged Causes for Littleton" list is why kids killed kids at Littleton
has confessed to being a liar and/or fool. Anyone who is pushing these
substitutes for answers either has an agenda that has nothing to do with
protecting kids or is a "useful fool" letting his strings be pulled by
people who don't give a damn about kids. There are no exceptions to
this, there is no longer any middle ground. Anyone who tells you
personally that anything from the above list is the solution should have
forfeited your trust and confidence as soon as you heard that person say
that. He is a liar, a fool, or probably both. While whoever says this to you probably has the very best
intentions, good intentions are no substitute for common sense and a
clue, and above all, they are NOT a substitute for an honest
effort to find out what the hell is really going on, directly
from the involved parties if possible.
For those who do not know this, it is already illegal for kids
to go to a store and buy a firearm. You must produce a legal ID
and it must say that the owner is of legal age. Those who don't
believe this are, if they are under 18, invited to go to any gun store
and try this for themselves, if they don't mind getting reported to the
local police or to their school for attempting to perform an illegal
act. Try a phone call to any local gun store. They're in the Yellow
Pages. The persons who sold those kids the guns deliberately and
knowingly broke laws that already existed. Hopefully, a long vacation
behind bars will teach those people the error of their ways.
Hopefully, not all of the above institutionalized child abuse is true
at all public high schools, but I don't see anything going on
that leads me to believe that the ones where all or most of the above is
true will be fixed or closed down. Do you hear of any school
administrators getting disciplined over their failure to protect the
"weird"? Don't hold your breath.
Here is what's
going on instead.That article demostrates incompetence as well
as paranoia; every hands-on oriented electronics magazine I've ever seen
has a classified ad section, and they often contain ads for explosive
recipies. Most readers of these magazines don't even know those "how-to"
bomb ads exist. A sane high school principal would be happy that kids
are learning electronics with their own money and on their own time, especially if the school doesn't support an electronics program of its own, which is usually the case.
Even if orders come down from the top
to protect the "different" from harassment, people are not going to
change their habits without a reexamination of their beliefs or a
credible threat to their lifestyles. People will simply pay lip service
to any such orders or new laws or simply ignore them and threaten anyone
who might feel a need to "blow the whistle", whether student or teacher.
That's how institutions work.
People may even argue that there's no need for change because "the
system works for most people and we can't please everybody". The
minority these people dismiss is the source of all of our
technological and social progress. More important, this marginalizes
people with the capability of literally and physically destroying any
public school that annoys them sufficiently. Or less lethally, simply
wiping out the databases on which public school administration depends
to receive future funding (attendance). Or student grades. Or payroll. This kind of electronic terrorism can do far more damage to an educational system than bombs and guns. Given the inadequacy of most computer security in the educational community, I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet. Of course, this may have happened and carefully kept out of the media.
There is
no way to prevent via restriction short of putting all the
"freaks" under 24 hour surveillance or turning off the technological
infrastructure that keeps us all alive. There are too many devices in
the average home or business we think nothing of on a day to day basis
that can be turned into "infernal" machines to make safety via "school
security" possible. There are probably at least a couple in the room
you're sitting in. (most aerosol cans, for instance) Even Department of
Defense computers can't be made 100% safe against unwanted outside
intrusion. The IT (Information Technology) people in public schools
aren't in the same class with respect to knowledge of computer security
as the people who secure DOD facilities. Some of the kids in those high
schools are in that class. While there are some who might support
24 hour surveillance of bright, "deviant" kids, the rest of us aren't going to pay
for it.
The really bright people I've known got their primary education from
6th-12th grades in spite of the educational system. It was a matter of
wasting time in classes because one has to, and getting a stack of books
from the library back when I was in public school. 95% or so of the reading I did in high school was in addition
to assigned homework. Now, of course, it's a matter of getting the books
and getting on the Internet, where one will find a lot of things
which will get into the textbooks in a few years. Why does public
school have to get in the way of educating the people who ultimately
make it possible for the rest of America (including educators) to make a living?
There are even people stupid enough to think that restricting kids'
access to personal computers and the Internet will help. While this is a
good way to make sure that kids are unable to compete for jobs with kids
supervised by adults with functioning brains, this isn't supposed to be
what education is about. More to the point, people who find community,
who find like-minded people on the Internet are a lot less likely to
become the kind of lonely and alienated people who think of suicide or
mass murder as a solution to their personal problems. You want more kids
to kill their classmates en masse? Taking their friends away from them
is as good a starting place as any. Taking away the information that
allows them to get ahead of the school textbooks is a good starting point. Being unplugged from
cyberspace is like losing a portion of one's brain. Being unplugged from
computer access is even more so. Of course, people who are stupid
enough to do this are probably stupid enough to find other ways to push
kids already on the edge a little harder, as the current evidence
demonstrates. Most man-made disasters are the result of too many good
intentions and too little wisdom in their implementation. In education,
this is generally good intentions and mind-numbing stupidity as to their
implementation.
A solution that doesn't result in addressing the main problem that
created the Littleton mess, i.e. a school environment that makes
people smart enough to do massive damage to their schools want to destroy their schools is a complete waste of taxpayer funds.
The schemes elected officials and school administrators are trying can
be summed up accurately as a stupid waste of our money. Some are not only
stupid, they are actively dangerous to us all.
Anybody who wants to argue that "system ain't broke" should click to
A
Gauge of Distress With Public Schools. 1.25 million low-income
parents applied for a chance to receive educational vouchers which pay
for K-8 education at the place of the parent's choice from a private
organization to get their kids out of public schools. In Washington, DC,
1/3 of the eligible families applied. This demonstrates that the desire for freedom of choice in educational
problems aren't just for parents of smart upscale kids for anybody who's managed to
forget it.
If you support freedom of choice with respect to a woman's body, you should support it with respect to parental choice of schools. If you don't support freedom of choice with respect to abortion rights, you probably support parental choice of schools anyway and I certainly won't try to talk you out of it.
There are too many political and emotional interests involved in protecting the
status quo to make changing the system via repairs possible. That's why
there are so many screams that "We need to protect kids from bad
ideas on the Internet" from politicians and media. They don't want the
masses to start asking each other "What the hell is really going on
here?", especially in public forums they do not control. This is the
real core of the efforts to censor the Internet in the wake of
Littleton. It isn't about protecting kids. It's about leaders who don't
want their actions questioned, leaders who know their actions
don't deserve public support in areas which mostly have nothing to do
with public education.
The Role of the Mass
Media In general, their role since Littleton has in support of those who
want to limit civil liberties from both alleged ends of the political
spectrum. The hard questions they should be asking politicians who want
us to trade freedom for security are not getting asked. What
passes for "thought" in opinion pieces generally mindlessly parrots the
"liberal" or "conservative" arguments as to why SOMETHING must be
controlled to PROTECT THE CHILDREN. Nobody asks "Are kiddie control measures part of the problem?"
There are a very few good pieces coming from the mass media that ask the
kids themselves what is really going on. See the above Chronicle piece.
Identifying the good articles isn't all that difficult, they're the
articles that don't quote "leaders" on the need for gun control or
regulating (read as censoring) entertainment media including video games
"protecting" kids from the bad things on the Internet. They're
the articles that are not reporting without critical analysis
what "leaders" and "experts" are saying who are trying to deliberately
foment mass hysteria about young people for political advantage. They're the ones written by people who are honestly trying to figure out what's really going on and who don't have an axe to grind.
Here is a good piece that goes back 50 years to look at kid-on-kid mass rampages in American schools. The main common denominator isn't drugs, guns, rock music, Goths, or the Internet. With the exception of drugs, none of the above existed 50 years ago. It's the obvious. Mental illness. The article is on the New York Times site, registration is required, it's probably worth the trouble.
One problem with writing a decent piece about why Littleton happened
is that young people who are most at risk from their educational system
are afraid to talk to the press, fearing reprisals from the school,
their fellow students, their parents. They should be. Most of all, they fear that
they'll be used as part of a freak show intended to whip up mass
hysteria directed at them in person. Their fears are realistic.
If you are a teen and find that someone wants to interview you for an
article about teen violence, think long and hard about whether to
cooperate or not. Telling the truth can make you a target.
Even honest journalists (I know some) can't control what happens to their articles
in the editing process, and articles that don't reflect their news
organization's party line frequently never get print space or TV time.
The fact that some actually do is largely because the word got out
anyway via the Internet and other channels and not to report it would be
another nail in the coffin of their credibility. This is why you are
seeing so much bad news about the Internet, why it's often depicted on
page 1 and in lead stories on TV news as the place where children meet
pedophiles. More favorable news gets buried in the back pages.
The people who operate the media don't want competition. This is not to
say that news found on the Internet is more likely to be true than any
other, just that it isn't filtered and the biases of the writer are
generally fairly obvious.
The further up one goes in the media hierarchy, the closer one gets
to people whose interests are directly linked to those whose lives would
be made easier with a much greater degree of social control at the
expense of individual liberty. "Liberal" and "conservative" are
irrelevant in this context. The people who actually own the media have a
lot more in common with each other than they have with people with more
normal incomes who identify with people on the basis of political labels
falsely implying common interests. That's why the myth of the "liberal"
media is not taken seriously by informed people and why people are
encouraged to believe it. The agenda of mass media can only be described as "corporatist". That's why you can find support in it for the social control measures from both left and right, except for the ones which might interfere with their profits.
The idea of "liberal" and "conservative" entities within the mass
media is generally a carefully fostered delusion generally aimed at making the network or newspaper
or magazine appeal to a specific target demographic. These labels say
nothing about what the owners believe or what they want us to
believe. The most interesting thing about media is the stories
that don't get printed in the mass media because they don't fit the agenda of the owners and often, are things which given public knowledge, might get the herd angry enough to start bleating at their elected officials.
While I've been known to write for print myself, the pieces I've
written have been semi-technical articles about the Internet or computer
software where political interests are generally fairly irrelevant. What
I say here is based on observation of the mass media, who owns the mass
media, and discussions by working journalists in articles on the Web,
newsgroups, BBS conferences, and e-mail. None of these journalists are
responsible for the use I've made of their remarks in this portion of
this document.
Worth a Try? When you read about what schools are doing to "protect" kids, remember:
Incompetence and general stupidity at the school board level has been a known problem for over a century and we're STILL putting up with it? We now have an alternative. Given the political will, we can make them obsolete.
A voucher
system making real school choice financially possible for everyone
might reduce the kind of alienation that made mass murder look like a
solution to a couple of students. A kid who helped pick out his school
from a bunch of radically different alternatives would be more likely to
be happy with his choice. The shooting should be a wake-up call for all
of us that "one size fits all" public education doesn't work for
everybody. How many more kids are going to have to die before enough people get that point and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who feel that their jobs and / or their company profits and / or their getting political support from teachers unions and others who profit from the system as it is and the "extra secure" system it is devolving to are more important than education or protecting kids from real hazards.
Kids should have the option of going to a school where
there's no football team, no "hallowed traditions", dumbed down mass
market courses, or mindless conformity and no school administrators paid
for by our tax dollars trying to beat conformity into the heads of kids
to whatever today's party line says people ought to conform to today. Political correctness? The favorite delusions of the Religious Right? ("Creation Science", for instance) In some schools, kids get hammered with the worst ideas of both sides. Some kids and parents like this. There are kids who are happy with "school spirit" and other nonsense
that schools have invented over the years for reasons I've never
understood. The part I understand least is why we as taxpayers are
expected to pay for it.
However, a properly designed voucher system allows
kids who are happy and comfortable in that kind of reality to stay in
it, at least in any school that can deliver that and an education as
well. I do have doubts about a kid who spends his / her time at
or organizing football games, pep rallies, spirit events being prepared
to enter a real world where yesterday's high school football star is... Al Bundy.
(the ex-football hero and shoe salesman from Married With Children) I've got even more doubts about teachers and administrators with emotional investment in that kind of absurdity.
In
a voucher system, many public schools will exist pretty much unchanged,
except that the kids who really don't want to be there will be
going to school somewhere else, along with the best teachers. The kids
amd teachers voluntarily going to these schools are the ones least
likely to want to rock the boat. Of
the political ideas regarding education I've seen in the last few years, this and the closely related charter school programs are the only
one I can think of that might accomplish anything positive.
Better, there is at least one group in society that has consistently
supported voucher education. That group is everybody who has already decided that
public education sucks for whatever reason and has put their kids into
private and parochial schools instead. This is a fairly respectable
political base to start with, though given its politics, which are
generally right-wing and often Religious Right Wing, which would ordinarily be
unlikely to work with people in the high-tech community. Another group
that appears to favor vouchers in large numbers is low-income families.
(see above) This suggests the possibility of the most unlikely political
alliance in American history.
The primary opposition will be the teachers' unions, backed mainly by the
Democratic party politicians and the Republican politicians who owe
these unions the most favors. This is mainly because largely due to
moral and ideological bankruptcy, the most important power base of the Democratic
Party at the present time is public employee unions. Anything that
reduces the power of public employee unions reduces the probability of
Democratic (and more than one Republican) elected officials getting
reelected. You may also notice that those elected officials who can
afford it generally send their kids to private schools. You may ask
Chelsea Clinton why if you've got her e-mail address.
Anybody who thinks this is an "easy" answer is invited to try turning
the contents of my voucher page or anything
like it into either law or a
ballot initiative that actually passes and to tell me just how "easy" it
was afterwards.
Freedom of choice of education if it is made possible isn't going to
eliminate violence in schools. We live in a violent society, and schools
are going to reflect this whether we like it or not. However, it is at
least an attempt to answer the right questions. Every element in that
"Alleged Causes for Littleton" list demonstrates that the people who say "THIS IS THE
ANSWER" don't have the slightest clue as to what the questions really
are.
Anybody who still thinks that public school educational bureaucracies have any business being allowed to play with real kids are invited to click here and get a look of the sort of typical callous stupidity we have gotten to expect from public school authorities. One of my friends has kids in that school district, that's why I didn't find the article content that surprising.
There may be better answers than voucher schools to get the whole
range of kids into educational environments that best suit them. If
there are, I'd very much like to know what they are. My e-mail address
is at the bottom of the page.
This page has been up for around a year. I'm still waiting for these "better" ideas, though I have gotten a couple of e-mails that suggest that there is still hysterical denial that there is really a problem.
The new California voucher initiative can be found here. The weaknesses are that it only provides 1/2 the average per-pupil funding as vouchers for non-public school students and I think it's weak in accountability, I don't know as yet if I'll support it or not. It does have a real chance of passage, the dot.com billionaire funding has more money than the combined opposition PACs.
Final Thoughts IMPORTANT: If you are planning to buy guns for self-defense or emergency
preparation, buy them right now. The first gun control laws that
people managed to use dead Littleton kids to front for have
already passed. Here's a SF Examiner story
about the next batch. One of the proposed bills was for banning sales of
all guns without the specific approval of the Secretary of the Treasury.
Also note that some of the bills have GOP support as well.
I have seen comments from kids with respect to Littleton that indicate
that the public schools that is supposed to be teaching "democratic
values" to young people are teaching the opposite. "Student government"
was a joke back when I was in high school and it's no funnier now. I was
part of it one semester, and it was a complete waste of time both for me
and the people who voted for me. I say give the kids involved some real
authority and accountability or disband it. While I saw a report in
Parade Magazine in all places that said that back when I was in
high school (around 1970), this situation hasn't been fixed since then.
This is one of the trivial examples of institutionalized stupidity I can
cite.
Are you a high school kid thinking of suicide or going postal?
Furthermore, while you might find killing school administrators a
pleasant exercise, they'll only be replaced with worse ones who will
have a mandate to "CLEAN UP THE SCHOOL", i.e. given a hunting license to
get rid of, stigmatize, harass, and make life hell for anybody who's
"different." Think of people even worse than the ones who drove you
crazy with the power to permanently enter whatever amuses them into
school files can damage kids in a way that will follow them for the rest
of their lives. Their targets probably includes just all of the friends
you'll be leaving behind.
You think of high school as a jail. There are people around today
which want to make all America into a jail, where people do as they are
told or else, where people who think "bad" thoughts will fear to
discuss them with their best friends and where freedom of speech even on
the Internet will be called a memory of "the bad old days". They have been using the kids at
Littleton, both the shooters and the targets in an attempt to get what
they want.
A year later, the above statements look uncomfortably like prophecy. The "solutions" I've seen and tried to document elsewhere on this page are indeed stupid and repressive and worse, non-responsive.
The step from taking advantage of a bad situation to trying
to create more bad situations is a real short one. They
would like to use you to get what they want. How far will they
go? Depends on who "they" are. Some "theys" are a lot crazier and more
dangerous than others. Unfortunately, this is a game almost anybody can
play. Most likely would be that you'd find yourself
getting busted with a group of your friends with a cache of explosives
and that your new found friend was a paid informer or police officer.
While this would probably be preferable to being the guest of honor at
an explosion, the publicity impact would be very useful to a fair number
of people and groups we do not like. More to the point, explosives really are fucking dangerous, people who do this for a living with all the training occasionally blow themselves up. The kind of training one needs to make reasonably certain an explosion you have in mind will happen when, where, and at the level you intended really doesn't come just from books, one needs experienced teachers. A high school kid is not going to find them. unless the intelligence agencies of terrorist nations decide to play this game here and can find American kids stupid enough to work with them, or some of the ex-militia types the militia groups have figured are too dangerous to play with decide to recruit kids.
It's safe to say that if a new student at your school suggests a
violent solution to your school's problems, treat that student with
deep suspicion. Particularly if he seems to have amazing access
to automatic weapons, explosives, and other unusual things. If he has
that kind of amazing access, he may be on somebody's payroll. Or he may be working for or with a political group you don't want to be within several hundred miles of.
Agent provocateurs were invented somewhere around when covert action
was. (There's a covert action story or two in the Bible.) Police?
Government spook shops? Private organizations? Foriegn governments with
an interest in destabilizing the US, or reshaping it into something
easier for them to deal with? Or he may just be a lone nut. Don't give
him company if he is. If you run into this sort of thing, here is a
keyword that will point you at some interesting information: CONINTELPRO on any major Internet search engine. (I recommend FastSearch.)
Find out for yourself what CONINTELPRO means. Student movements have happened before, and generally got used by the bad guys due to lack of awareness on the part of the people involved.
If you can find a fake student promoting mass violence on campus and
tie him to a government agency, private organization, foriegn government
or whatever with solid, verifiable information, find the right contact
in the media and lay out the evidence. Done properly, the media will go
after them like sharks after raw meat. You can imagine how much this
kind of backfire would help the program of the various people who don't
like America as a free country.
Sounds paranoid, doesn't it? When a group's list of organized enemies
hits laundry list proportions, a certain amount of paranoia is necessary
to a realistic world view. Guess what, kids. Your list of organized
enemies is laundry list size. The "freaks" in my generation became
political targets in the '60s, the GOP ran against us in several
elections. It's your turn in the barrel this time. The part you may find hopeful is that many of those "freaks"
are now running the country. The bad news is that it appears that our
country is being run by the least competent scam artists among my
generation's political types. Try to do a better job when you get into power, will you? The mistakes my generation made are better documented than any other in history. Try to learn from them.
Something you can do now for yourself. Find out about early
graduation. This is something your counselors will not tell you
about, your school administrators will discourage you, and it may not be
possible where you go to school. Generally, if you can pick up enough
units through summer school and longer days, you can get out. My senior
year was one semester long. I graduated. You might be able to do the
same or better. Some states will allow you to get out of high school via
examination, in California, it's the High School Equivalency Test. (not
available back when I was in high school) Just be sure to get some sort
of clue about the test content before taking it and do some studying
first. If you can find out how to make this work at your school, tell
all of your friends. I did this myself back in 1971, and over 20 people
applied for early graduation. Not all employers will accept this as the
equivalent of a diploma, so if you're smart enough to be in college, you
might as well start going to one. After college, people won't care a
whole lot about your high school grades.
The best time for real revenge is after you've grown up,
against the people who are really responsible. The kids who harass you
are merely tools of a system and aren't bright enough to know this. The
keepers of the zoo you are in figure that you'll either forget or only
remember the best memories of your high school career. This is based on
experience. The people who make serious money in high tech are the least
likely in US history to participate in community politics and are the
least likely to actually do anything about the educational
systems that made their adolescence a living hell in quite a few cases.
Since I wrote this a year ago, Tim Draper, Silicon Valley venture capitalist and billionaire got a voucher initiative put on the ballot. While I'm not all that impressed by it due to some problems (see my voucher page for specifics) it's a good start. Hopefully, this is the start of a trend which will reshape the educational landscape. If that trend doesn't happen, fixing what's broken will be YOUR problem.
All you have to do to see that the changes that need making, whatever
you decide what that need to be get made, is to remember and when
you're in a position to do so, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Like
organize for permanent change. You want to be really dangerous to
your school system? Do you want to really frighten your current
high school principal? This will do it, though be warned that if you
happen to yourself have kids in that school by then, this puts them in a
certain amount of risk. Going postal only puts your principal's life at
risk. Going after the system that put him in place puts his lifestyle
at risk. WARNING: Come up with a way to make real change in
education and the people who benefit from the current systems will fight
like cornered rats.
We of the high-tech community collectively have the political power
to reshape the political landscape in any manner that amuses enough of
us pretty much regardless of opposition. The draft voucher initiative. I
linked this page to by itself would put a lot of your least favorite
school administrators and teachers out of work if enacted. The time bomb
built into that one is . . . if a school doesn't educate, it doesn't get
funded. Teachers that don't teach will be a drag on the bottom line and
will last rather quickly.
Vouchers may not be the answer, either, but if
you want real changes in education, you've got to invent or find better
answers than my generation have handed you. You can't leave this to
other people, my generation being willing to "leave education to
the experts" got you into the position you are in to begin with.
Are we having fun yet?
The other side of this is that my generation also gave you the
information management and acquisition tools you need in order to make
it possible for you kids to put things right, by yourselves or with the
help of the members of my generation who have our heads screwed on
straight. That personal computer you're staring at right now and the
Internet you're reading this page through make apologies from my
generation unnecessary and largely meaningless. Anybody in my age bracket (mid-40s) who seeks to apologize for my generation to you guys given that, is clueless and probably wants something out of you that you do not want to give them. Starting with your attention. Power and money now come
from the intelligent use and management of information now, and on the
average, you kids are better at it than most people in my age bracket. That's why I don't apologize for my generation. We're the first generation in history to have put the tools for cleaning up our mess in the hands of the next; that's you.
You kids will come into power at a much earlier age than the people
in my generation did. Some of you already are in power, if you're a dot.com millionaire who has to get adult help to sign a contract, you know exactly what I mean, discuss it with me in e-mail if you feel like it. What are you going to do with your power?
Get into the right software or other high-tech company, make some
real money and the bosses of those school administrators will be kissing
your ass right after the IPO (Initial Public Offering - the first chance
to cash out) in hopes of contributions to your old school and political
support. Find out who their opponents are, which ones you can work with,
and what you can do to help them. Hints: School board are generally
politically vulnerable and their members are often personally
vulnerable. People who aren't members of teachers unions generally
despise them. Many members of teachers unions despise them, only
tolerating them because they know what their pay level would be like
without unions on their side. Nobody is telling them that they might make a lot more money in a voucher-funded free market, particularly if they decide to run their own school.
Note: if you are planning to make your mark on the "dot.com" world, particularly if you plan to do so before graduating from high school, read the book on this site. It will teach you what the hell the money types are talking about, and it taught me a few things. To put it bluntly, knowing the shit in this book will help you get your company financed. Understanding the concepts of Internet business financing is no worse than learning Javascript... ok, maybe Linux. If you're reading this after September 2000, if you have what you think is a killer new idea for the Internet, catch me in e-mail. While I wrote this page for the public benefit, getting in on the ground floor of one good new Internet idea would certainly pay for the time and effort I've put into this page. :-) Do a Websearch on your idea first, it's less embarassing if you find out that there are a couple of dozen companies working on your idea than if I find it out. In most cases, my answer will be "forget it". Use a secrecy agreement if you think it's called for. By September 2001, I may be in the position to finance your idea myself if I think it doesn't suck, making the happy assumption that my own "dot.com" idea works out as I intend it to.
You can find a Littleton discussion at Littleton Tragedy
Discussion.
The Dangers of Video Games
To parents of the kids who died in Littleton:
Ever hear of anyone going postal in a place full of armed people?
There are 200,000,000 guns
in the US right now. This is one genie that can not be put back
into the bottle. Only citizens who are willing to obey even laws that
make no sense are going to turn in their guns. Only law-abiding citizens
will find their ability to purchase firearms impeded by these laws. Are
your friends and neighbors the people who ought to be disarmed? Are
you too crazy to be trusted with a gun?
Now look at the list of "causes" for
the death of your kids. This isn't about guns. The composite agenda
of these people is an attempt to limit the freedom of all of us in order
to make the stupid among us feel safe and our "leaders" feel that they
are in control. If these people get out of government even a
significant part of what they
are asking, the legacy of your dead children will be a police state. Is
that what you want them to be remembered for?
So think long and hard about doing what anyone asks you to do in
order to prevent the deaths of kids. If anybody thinks they have the
answer this early in the game in the form of new laws, they are
lying to you, either conciously or because they are too stupid to
realize that they, too are being used by people who are not your
friends or mine. Treat them as you would anyone who decided to take a
dump on your kid's grave.
Get a lawyer if anybody offers you a book / movie deal. You are
in no condition to review such a deal intelligently, not only in terms
of extracting the most money out of it, but in terms of getting enough
of a handle on the situation so portrayal of your kids in the book /
movie / TV show won't be an ugly surprise with the same resemblance to
reality of the usual Hollywood product. There is already enough
propaganda seeking to sell things no sane American wants to buy that has
come from the Littleton incident. Don't be part of it.
I wish you good luck and recovery. Hopefully, it'll be possible to
have schools someday that kids who go to them won't want to destroy.
Perhaps voucher programs are the way to make this happen.
Disclaimer
You can add your comments to my guestbook
here.
You can view my guestbook
here.
-- David Kopel - quoted in the Wall Street Journal, February
28, 1994 in "Have Gun, Will Eat Out"
The above is from an essay called The Tao of Gun. It's a New Age / libertarian perspective on guns and taking individual responsibility for one's own safety.
"I know the urge to arm yourself because that's what I did. I was trained in firearms. I'd walk to the hospital when my husband was sick. I carried a concealed weapon. I made the determination that if somebody was going to try to take me out, I was going to take them with me."
Dianne Feinstein
"Australian gun owners were forced to surrender for destruction 640,381 personal firearms (including semi-automatic .22 rifles and shotguns.) This program cost the Aussie government more than $500 million, and produced heart-stopping photos as veritable boneyards full of Browning A-5 shotguns and other beloved collectors' items were surrendered up to be crushed by steamshovels in a kind of steel-and-walnut charnel field.
All Eyes on Columbine
Kristen Philipkoski
3:00 a.m. 14.Aug.99.PDT
Columbine High School students will be watched by video cameras and carrying photo IDs as they enter school on Monday. All the same, students hope to have a normal year. . .
The
last article shows that the news isn't all bad, some adults are
beginning to listen. The optimism expressed in that last sentence was premature, real
change is needed and I suspect that once the public attention span has
run out, that all we're going to be left with is a bunch of new gun
control laws and a few suspensions and expulsions of kids who spoke
their minds. At least until the next killings happen. Then we'll get to
find out what more bits of individual liberty we "need" to give up to
"stop teen violence".
Eagle Scout Suspended for 'weapons' in Car
The Associated Press
SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) - An honors student and active Boy Scout has
been suspended from his high school for having an ax, a
pocketknife and a cellular phone in his car - objects banned from
school property.
First, God made an idiot for practice. Then he made a school board."
..................................................Mark Twain
Despite appearances, high school isn't forever, though it seems that
way. If you stay alive, think of the fun you'll have with the tards who
have been harassing you once you're on the 'boss' side of the desk
giving job interviews. Moreover, if you hang on long enough to make it
to college, you'll probably find lots of people like you. In fact, with
any reasonable luck, you'll find people who like you. You might even
find courses that aren't dumbed down with content that'll keep you awake
in class. You might even start getting laid reasonably often for a
change.
"The government-funded study by the British Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), finds that computer games are giving 'young Britons a level of co-ordination and powers of concentration equivalent to those observed in top-level athletes.' Beyond that, gamers are smarter, more likely to go to college, have more friends, read more, and get better-paying jobs than non-gamers."
Yes, I do
sympathise. However, you've got bigger problems, and some of you have
already been duped into making them even bigger. The first gun control
laws built on the dead bodies of your kids have already been
passed. (4/24/1999) Soon, politicians and representatives of anti-gun
organizations, pro-censorship organizations will be coming to your door
to express their "sympathy" for your untimely losses and to ask you to
lend your name and the names of your children to the "fight" for
whatever brain-damaged cause(s) they represent. One parent of a dead kid
has already let himself and his kid's death be used that way.
(5/2/1999) Doing as they ask will not bring your children back. The
laws they want to enact will not prevent a single death of a child. In
fact, they will cause the deaths of more children. Making schools
gun-free zones simply makes your kids targets for crazies and
terrorists, both homegrown and imported, who have guns and bombs.
If you're in need of expert professional Web search service, click Site Page Index
here.(link to my commercial site)