Slashdot Mirror
Mom Arrested After Son Makes Dry Ice "Bombs"
formfeed writes "Police were called to a house in Omaha where a 14-year-old made some 'dry ice bombs' (dry ice in soda bottles). Since his mom knew about it, she is now facing felony charges for child endangment and possession of a destructive device. From the article: 'Assistant Douglas County Attorney Eric Wells said the boy admitted to making the bomb and that his mother knew he was doing so. The boy was set to appear Tuesday afternoon in juvenile court, accused of possessing a destructive device.'" She's lucky they didn't find the baking soda volcano in the basement.
Lest one think of me as doing a projection of things...
"The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be interdependent."
-John Dewey
“Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed customs. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”
-William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889-1906.
"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role."
-William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889-1906.
“Individual talent is too sporadic and unpredictable to be allowed any important part in the organization society. Social systems which endure are built on the average person who can be trained to occupy any position adequately if not brilliantly.”
-Stuart Chase, The Proper Study of Mankind, 1948.
"A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare."
-Justice H. Walter Croskey, 2008.
Both sides are very guilty of fostering their agendas and neither side of that crowd is going to be at all helpful towards the American Intellect; and it's been ongoing for a long, long time if you look at the comments from Harris and Dewey.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Criminal Division
1701 Farnam Street
Hall of Justice, Suite # 100
Omaha, NE 68183
(402) 444-7040
In situations like this, public outcry and shame against those who infringe on freedom is a useful tool. Shame is underutilized as a form of social change. We should change that and complain to anyone connected with this charge. Loudly. So rather than posting here impotently, Call the Douglas County Attorney's office and state that this charge is an assault freedom
And if the cops ask you to delete photos, play along, because recovering the deleted photographs is trivial compared to what can happen when arguing with a cop.
After the cop leaves, swap out the memory card for another. Make sure you set the card aside and don't take any more pictures on it, because taking new pictures could potentially overwrite some of the deleted data. When you get home, download and run PhotoRec (it's GPL/open source, available on multiple platforms, and runs almost without regard to what the underlying filesystem is).
"The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be interdependent."
-John Dewey
A quote deliberately removed from context and sensationalized by Ann Coulter, of all people.
Dewey also said this about education: "To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently. It is impossible to reach this sort of adjustment save as constant regard is had to the individual's own powers, tastes, and interests."
Hardly reconcilable with Coulter's intended misinterpretation of that first quote now, isn't it?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I hate to say this, but: this. It isn't conservatives, it isn't liberals, it isn't even anything that would be today recognized as "progressive", because all political philosophies have shifted so far in the past hundred+ years as to be unrecognizable.
What it is is a hundred-year-old meme program still running in an environment that falsifies every underlying assumption the program is built on, and until we flush it out of our system, we're not going to have any radically different results.
I strongly recommend The Underground History of American Education. You do not have to agree with the author's prescription to understand and agree with the diagnosis, which I find well-researched.