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Obama Invites Texas Teen To White House After "Bomb" Clock Incident At School
The Grim Reefer writes: In a followup to this morning's story about the arrest of 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed for bringing a homemade clock to school that was mistaken for a bomb, President Obama has invited the teen to the White House via Twitter. The President tweeted: "Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great." The Irving Independent School District in Irving, Texas sent an email to parents about the incident asking students to: "immediately report any suspicious items and / or suspicious behavior."
will the tsa / SS let him take the device in?
Would a kid of any other background gotten the invite though?
Sure. I'm "sensitive to this issue" because I saw the same sort of stupid abuse of authority, albeit in a minor way. Abuse of authority should get pushback. People make mistakes, and that's fine, but the people who screwed this up should have been told to knock it off before the kid was disciplined.
It should have ended almost immediately. Teacher suspects a bomb, someone competent determines it's a clock, everyone goes about their business, parents get a courtesy call to let them know what happened.
As the last linked article points out, rather than being contrite about the unwarranted treatment of Akmed Mohamed, the Irving Independent School District is doubling down. In addition to reporting "suspicious" activity (mentioned in TFS) the letter from Principal Daniel Cummings to parents included this gem:
I recommend using this opportunity to talk with your child about the Student Code of Conduct and specifically not bringing items to school that are prohibited.
Nice posturing. So, was the item he brought to school actually prohibited? Or is this just innuendo?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Would a kid of any other background been arrested?
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I bet every kid who ever took an electronics class in high-school made a digital clock. Why is it that nobody including teachers immediately thought OMG Terrorists!! back then? Because we became a nation of pussies. Scared of everything except the thing we should fear the most..
I just wish they handled this privately with the parents
You're talking as if he still did something wrong.
He made a "my first EE project" - something he should have been praised for. But instead even the teacher he initially showed it to (a geek like the rest of us) basically said "hide it."
The problem with this is that none of the adults involved in this stupidity outside of the parents and Obama, acted like adults.
And he's right in declaring that he won't bring his own projects to school anymore. They don't deserve to see creativity out of this kid. Because they're douchebags, every last one of them at that school district.
He should GTFO of that school and get home schooled. Better yet, the whole family should get out of Texas and move to Cambridge MA. And the school district should pay for it.
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BMO
Its just sad that that payout is gonna come from the taxpayer, NOT the idiots who perpetrated this. Theres a large number of people involved with this that should be behind bars, and have their pay garnished for the rest of their life to pay this kid for this...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
No, literally, good move Obama. Doesn't make up for all the other embarrassments & injustices, and there are many. But at least there's a line... at least being arrested for dumb shit, just this once, gets you a presidential apology. "I made a clock." "We think it's a bomb. Is it a bomb?" "No." "We think you wanted us to think it was a bomb." "But it's patently not a bomb." "Don't bother telling us it's not a bomb... that's exactly what you want us to think!" "I do want you to think that!" "Well then why did you build this bomb-looking bomb then?"
You seem to be insinuating that there was anything even slightly wrong with what Ahmed did (by claiming that he "needs guidance" or that it needed to be "handled," even privately). Let me assure you that there is not. Ahmed is totally and completely innocent of even the appearance of wrongdoing, and having the school officials apply any sort of "handling" or "guidance" (let alone the "threats" and "punishment" that actually happened!) would be wrong on their part.
This is not a situation where a student should be admonished "hey, that's too much like a bomb; don't do it again." This is a situation where a student should be praised that "hey, that's a cool project; keep up the good work!" What we have here is a model student who did everything right, but whose reward for that excellence was to be punished for it by bigoted, paranoid imbeciles. He should not have been arrested. He should not even have been "handled" or "guided!" He should have been celebrated!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Its just sad that that payout is gonna come from the taxpayer, NOT the idiots who perpetrated this.
Good. Because the part of the school that sets policy is the fucking school committee, elected by the public.
Elect morons to the school committee which does important things like set the budget and hire administration and you get stupid policies like this.
Stupid should hurt.
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BMO
Yes. Ordinary whitebread suburbanite kids with chemistry sets have been hassled by the authorities in this country, and Slashdot has indulged outrage about it too, as recently as last June. Put away your little group-think grievance detector.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
You don't handcuff and perp walk kids for a 'misunderstanding'. Everything up to that point was fine (except for the little bit of forgetting to move people out of harm's way should this have been an actual weapon).
The subsequent arrest and persecution of the kid is flat out paranoid insanity.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
He needs to take his toy home and grow up a bit...
Maybe so, but nowhere near as much as the faculty and cops need to grow up. They didn't even let him contact his family before questioning, and you're making excuses for them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The war is being waged with cell phone cameras and is going very well.
The police have resorted to putting cameras on themselves to defend. Not realizing that was the desired outcome. Morons that they are.
They are not primarily being killed, they are being denied their right to kill with impunity.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
there is no war on police.
merely a growing movement that wants them held accountable for when they fuck up (particularly if someone gets hurt/killed as a result), and a growing suspicion that they have been covering up past fuckups by writing false reports, as several have been caught doing in recent news.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Absolutely not.
He wasn't doing anything dangerous looking. People overreacted. Fine, I can forgive that. Go ahead and determine that the kid didn't have a bomb, apologize for the misunderstanding, and make an end of it. That didn't happen. The kid was interrogated, arrested, fingerprinted, suspended for 3 days, and might be charged with an actual crime, and he did nothing wrong.
It's time to grow up and accept that punishing people who didn't do anything wrong is never acceptable.
The idea that the school suffers if this child does not display creativity troubles me. The school does not suffer either way, the only one who suffers is the child. The immediate lesson he has learned is that he must keep his head down and be just like every one else. Creativity will be punished.
That is a hell of a thing to teach a child.
Way to go
In fact, it wasn't a dangerous-looking thing. If it was, the teacher would not have confiscated it, put it in a desk drawer, and continued teaching the class. If it had actually scared the blank out of the teacher, the teacher would have left it where it was, gotten the school evacuated, and had the bomb squad handle it.
People like the teachers and police officers need to learn what appropriate behavior is. The behavior was inappropriate no matter what they thought.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
In which case you must be appalled at the teacher's actions, which were to confiscate the device, put it in a desk drawer, and continue teaching the class. If it could have been a bomb, the teacher was endangering the life of everyone in the classroom.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Obama did the right thing, IMO. The people who did this need to be embarrassed, personally.
Inviting the kid to the White House immediately shows how fucked up the school district is.
Were I president, I would have done it even if I had to pay out of pocket.
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BMO
I dislike the term "taxpayer" - it implies that there are people who don't pay tax. But everyone who buys anything, let alone earns money, ends up contributing toward government coffers. Even if you've always been completely reliant "on welfare" - a very unusual scenario, relative to the whole population - you're acting as a conduit for money into private hands. The latter will generate wealth by investing that money (hopefully), and that means more tax is paid.
So, it's the people that will pay - all of them.
Now, the government is elected by the people - really, it is! there might be a lot of lobbying going on, but ultimately it's democracy that determines whether corruptible people are elected or not.
The government is responsible for the police force and the school system.
Working backward, the police/school answers to the government answers to the people.
So, who is ultimately responsible for this? The people.
The party responsible is going to end up paying for the damage done.
Cynic as I am, I won't deny when something is working right. And if you go all, "I know a better system of government than a democratic republic!" good luck enforcing it - because the two options are will-of-the-people and force. Even the Objectivist arch-capitalist and the purest of Marxist communists agree that each final system develops out of the consent of thinking people - they just have different ideas on what the choice of people acting in their interests ends up being.
Cell phones can be used as bomb triggers.
Cell phones look like cell phones which can be used as bomb triggers.
Cell phones sometimes go off in class and make weird sounds, ie. ring tones.
Do you know what I expect to happen? The teacher asking the owner of the phone to turn it off.
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I would home school him or her.
Not because I don't want them to learn about evolution
Not because I think Jeebuz thinks the road to hell is paved with Global warming or that that allow gay kids in school.
It would be because School administrators are stupid reactionary fuckwads who can't tell the difference between a circuit board and an IED, because little children get arrested for sexual assault for kissing another child, because now that police are patrolling the schools, causing little kids getting arrested for resisting arrest and assault felonies and a million other stupid things.
The solution is homeschooling? I thought it was work with your community to improve your schools so that EVERYONE benefits. We've become a society of not only "me first," but "only I matter."
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
This kid built, knowingly or not, an actual triggering device out of an alarm clock.
No he didn't.
He built a clock. A clock is not the same as a bomb trigger. If you keep on insisting it is, then literally every watch and phone the kids are wearing/carrying is a potential bomb trigger.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Heck, I've seen pictures of the thing and I'm not sure I could, at a glance, be sure it wasn't going to explode and I'm an electrical engineer
You're also a very disingenuous engineer. There is no battery powered circuit you could tell unequivocally "wasn't going to explode" and that includes a laptop. Being an electrical engineer, I'm pretty sure I could rig up a laptop replacing half the battery with explosives so that from the outside and even an opening and reasonable inspection it looked for all the world like a laptop.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Zero tolerance policy
Zero tolerance of what, precisely? I though zero tolerance was meant to be zero tolerance of breaking rules. Not zero tolerance of random shit made up on the spot by mad people.
Last I checked, clocks weren't against the school rules.
Plus who builds a two foot by two foot portable clock that looks like a bomb?
It only looks like a bomb because oooh scary circuit boards!!1111one1!oneONE1!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It's washington's terrorism paranoia (or convenient excuse to clobber liberty) that created this situation in the first place, and now the president is trying to make up for it with some publicity stunt? A solution fixes the problem. It does not brush it under the rug and hopes it goes away.
At this point, you could probably cause widespread terror with post-it notes with the word "bomb" written on them. For under $10, a terrorist wannabe could cause major panic.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
There were lots of terrorists involved in this incident. The terrified child vowed never to bring another invention to school.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
But admit that this device, while not an explosive, was EXACTLY the same as a bomb trigger.
This device was not the same as a bomb trigger. One obvious difference is that a bomb trigger is attached to a bomb. If it's not attached to a bomb, then it's not a bomb trigger. Just like the fact that the cell phone in your pocket is not a bomb trigger until you decide to attach it to a bomb. Once you attach your cell phone to a bomb, then instead of being a cell phone it's a bomb trigger. A clock is not a bomb trigger, it's a clock.
This kid built, knowingly or not, an actual triggering device out of an alarm clock.
A "triggering device" is also not a bomb trigger. Note the distinct lack of a bomb to trigger.
We cannot loose sight of what this device COULD have been used for
Your car can be used to intentionally strike and kill a person. Should you be allowed to drive it? What about the knives in your kitchen? Do you perhaps own any guns? I hope you don't use acid to help maintain a pool, and god help you if you fertilize your lawn.
This wasn't just an innocent shop class project the kid says he intended it to be
Actually, yeah, it was. Would you be fine if he 3D-printed some fancy plastic case so that you couldn't see the wires, would that calm your heart rate and make your palms stop sweating? Because that's the only real difference between what he built and what sits on your nightstand.
until the authorities could firmly establish what his intent was their actions where justified.
They could have firmly established his intentions by talking to his electrical engineering teacher and hearing that the kid showed the clock to the teacher. It would have been pretty obvious what his intentions were: to build a clock and show his EE teacher. They weren't interested in that though, they had a narrative that they wanted to reinforce and only had the evidence that he possessed something that had wires in it, his skin is brown, and he's Muslim. So instead of looking for actual evidence and intent, they just decided to arrest him. It's the lazy way to go, which is something that cops are pretty good at.
That some stupid teacher shoved the thing into a desk drawer, not withstanding.
Seriously. Obviously a clock goes on the desk, not in it.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black