Holy crap.
Secret Service Questions Students
So let's say for the sake of argument that these kids really said something like "I want to shoot the President and kill him dead." So the teacher calls in the Feds (a) because the kids are a threat to national security? Or (b) just to teach them a lesson? My guess is that it was (b): the teacher(*)
(* And the teacher remains anonymous because...? And they won't quote anyone on what the students' comments were because...?) |
Then there's the whole other scariness of how the kids were held for questioning without parents or counsel, but that's nothing new. High school's been getting that way for quite a while. Unfortunately, the adult world is getting more that way all the time... kind of takes away some of the incentive to graduate.
(Reminds me—at my high school, when you got all-day detention, it wasn't called all-day detention; it was called Alternative Learning Program, or Alp. Not a bad name for, say, an offshore interrogation facility. "Dude, I got Alp again—that fuckin' Mr. Piper made me an enemy combatant...")
After I wrote that bit about high school, I went and read the rest of my old school's web site. Oh, man. Assuming this is accurate, it's not really like a prison now; it's like a cross between a cheap-ass community college and the Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Delta incubation system from Brave New World.
When I went there, they had these "tracks." You could be a college-bound smartass, and take lots of arts and math and languages. You could be a McDonald's-bound dumbass—or, if you were really ambitious, an auto mechanic... or cannon fodder—and take Vocational-Technical classes, that is, Shop. (No one else was supposed to learn any manual skills. I'm not sure if I was allowed to take Shop, but it wasn't the done thing.) Everyone in between would take sort of a mix of English, history, algebra and so on. You know, those regular classes they teach in high school.
Well, now J.P.M. HS has these super-duper tracks called Small Learning Communities. They divide the kids into all the important areas of life—Arts, Business, Hospitality and Tourism, etc... and Vo-Tech—so they'll learn everything they need to know, and won't learn anything they don't need to know. This starts in the 9th grade.
It's kind of an interesting view of life. Would-be doctors, nurses, carpenters, cops, and cosmetologists all go into the Vo-Tech "community"; they take one English class, and no arts. ("Communication Arts" might be sort of an English class, I'm not sure. I'm afraid it may involve making
(* ahh... PowerPoint. PowerPoint!!!) |
I don't know, maybe it all works beautifully. God knows most of us didn't get much out of our core classes. But are things so tough now that we can't even pretend that kids have it in them to do more than one kind of thing?
Eve Tushnet is one of the more interesting weblog writers I've run across, and one of the few self-described conservatives I've seen who writes not only thoughtfully and cleverly but also with some kind of humility. (I don't mean to say that that's entirely or mostly a problem with conservative writers, just that I haven't had a lot of luck with them. Humility is not a word I'd associate with online writing in general—I still find the whole enterprise often kind of creepy, especially when people are as prolific as she is.) Long, fascinating explorations of theology and Nietzsche... mixed with odd bits of the familiar bloggers-talking-about-each-other silliness and pop-culture riffs.
In this piece, discussing a book I'm now curious to read, she talks about the connections between addiction and ritual—from the perspective of a practicing Catholic who values ritual but sees it as a two-edged sword: "Rituals ... play on humans' love of fate, moira, the inevitable—our flight from responsibility .... It's a lot harder to stop a ritual process midway than to avoid the process entirely." She defines addiction loosely as "an action ... that disrupts your life and that harms you and/or your relationships ... and that you fail to resist time and time again." For me, sitting at the computer for (sometimes) hours and hours a day falls into that category, and I'm thinking a lot about why that happens.
Speaking of addiction... here's a well-written and depressing article about methamphetamine in Texas. There's no shortage of horror stories but there are some good, non-clichéd points too, especially from Jack Whittkopp (you may want to just scroll down halfway and read his part first). It all makes me almost able to imagine how one might in good conscience work for the DEA... almost.
Newly added to the photo album: I witness a turning point in local punk-polka history as a small crowd of accordionists holds a press conference and eats bratwurst pizza.
I may not have much to say here for a while. Just not in the mood. Also, I'm really busy being in this excellent play, and reading this depressing book.
Last weekend I watched three great movies where not a lot happens: My Dinner with André, Dead Man, and Rivers and Tides. Then I stood on Mission Street for a long time watching Carnaval go by (yes, SF celebrates Mardi Gras on Memorial Day weekend). I was going to balance out my motionlessness with lots of strenuous jumping around and beer at a Polkacide show, but I stopped to take a nap and... aargh. I showed up about a minute after the end of the show (at 9 PM?!), and Maggie, taking pity on my lameness, kindly gave me a CD.
As a caution to those who see the Internet as a great boon to free speech—here's a story about a really incredible abuse of power happening in my old home state, probably soon to be repeated elsewhere. This is not new news, but I don't think I'm the only one who's catching on late...
A year and a half ago, while we all had some other scary things on our minds, Pennsylvania passed a law allowing the Attorney General to suppress web sites that offer child pornography. Sounds like a straightforward free speech vs. obscenity issue, right? Well... read the details here and even if you don't know the technical part, it should be pretty scary.
What it boils down to is, the state AG can issue secret orders for Internet providers to deny access to any web site; he doesn't have to produce any evidence of kiddie porn (and after using this law 300 times, he hasn't produced any—incredibly, the state argues that if they showed the pictures or even mentioned where they could be found, they'd be helping to distribute pornography), and there's no judicial review. It's a "voluntary" system, in the sense that if the providers comply, they won't be hit with a court order. Apparently, everyone has chosen to comply.
If you do know the technical side, it's even scarier. This law is not aimed at the (alleged) creators of kiddie porn Web sites, or even at the people who host the sites; apparently, they haven't brought any charges against any such people—I guess that would be too much like old-fashioned police work. Instead, the law blocks access to the sites by viewers in Pennsylvania, by pressuring the people who operate the wires through which evil content might flow. Thus, in one of the few cases that's been reported on, the AG gave WorldCom a list of Web addresses—none of which were related to WorldCom in any way; some were outside the country—and ordered them to make those sites invisible to their customers. Here's an analogy: say phone sex becomes illegal, but rather than shut down the people who run 1-900-PATHETIC, the state tells your local phone company to make that number impossible to dial.
It gets a bit worse. The law says that the AG will identify these pariah sites by URL, e.g., http://whitehouse.gov/hotbush. But it's impossible for Internet providers to block sites in this way. Nearly all web sites exist on shared systems, with many sites residing at the same IP address (an IP address is basically the point at which the site is connected to the overall Internet); when you access a page, it connects to that shared system first, and only then does it request the specific content. So trying to block one particular site is like telling the phone company to prevent people from calling your house, but only if they want to speak to your sister; can't be done—that is, unless you listen in on every conversation, which the state doesn't have the will or the resources to do, so far. But the state won't take no for an answer, so they are just blocking the entire IP address of every target. Thus, for every (alleged) evil site that's blocked, hundreds of others may be blocked as well, and the people affected by this have no recourse (they can't even find out that they've been blocked); nor do any Net-surfers have a clue that the sites aren't just out of order.
I usually avoid writing or talking much about the Internet; my thoughts about it usually amount to, "fun and impressive, but does everyone have to be on it all the time?"—an uneasy feeling, but I usually feel like there are ten million more important things to have feelings about. Still... recently I've been reading the ferociously pro-good-old-paper writings of underground publishers like Fred Woodworth and Violet Jones, who believe that the trend of more and more information being available only on the Net is a serious threat to free speech, and they're right. Jones describes the Net as a highly centralized system subject to corporate control, and the first time I read that, I thought "Well, that's a technical misunderstanding—it's decentralized by design." But most of the access points and nearly all of the infrastructure are now controlled by telecommunications companies of disturbing size (I mentioned MCI/WorldCom earlier, a particularly ambitious, corrupt, and politically connected bunch who are now making hay in Iraq), and typical Internet users rely on jobs, school, or libraries for access—venues that are already subject to censorship, with no way to tell what has been blocked or why. Books and newspapers, on the other hand, don't require you to buy any hardware to read them; they don't change their content retroactively; and if a bookstore owner can't or won't carry them, you have some idea who to complain to.
The Center for Democracy and Technology report points out that this kind of censorship attempt didn't start with the Internet: a similar state scheme aimed at book distributors, where certain books were labeled "objectionable" in secret orders, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1963. Is the computerized version more dangerous? I think so: it requires less effort by the state, it's harder to tell when it's happening, and it affects a system that people increasingly rely on to find out the most basic information about current events. Sure, the technically savvy will find ways around it, but if you can control what the vast majority of people see, a small underground of better-informed techies is not a huge threat.
(The CDT also points out that the PA scheme can actually cause technical difficulties with Internet traffic in general, since the designers of the Net's routing system did not anticipate having to pretend that certain addresses don't exist. Unfortunately, I don't doubt that some people in the government are well aware of this and would use it as an excuse to revamp the Net infrastructure, to make it more conducive to both censorship and surveillance. This Wired News article also discusses the practical difficulties, but accepts the claim that this is really about pornography, which I think is a red herring.)
What's to be done? I don't know. People should be aware that this is happening, though. This is not just about crazy local governments, it's part of a very dangerous trend.
[added: Ampersand picked this up and has some thoughts to add. I also clarified and expanded on a few things in his comments area.]
[added (September 2004): A judge finally listened to reason.]