Forget negligence - try pressing charges for reckless endangerment, all the way up to the principal for implementing such a strict policy that it doesn't allow for exceptions to protect the health of the students.
For it to be reckless endangerment, the kidney stones would have to be "foreseeable". But after seeing some other portions of the policy- damn, I'd say letting a bunch of 16- and 17- year olds have an Independant Study period with *no* supervision comes damned close to raising this to a foreseeable circumstance that *something* would go wrong. I'm amazed that RK's family wasn't up in arms about this.
When was this, and what did your parents do when you told them that a teacher caused you the single most painful experience of your life?
I ask because I am suspicious that this sort of thing has changed *VERY* recently- that 20 years ago when I was a student, this would have caused a lawsuit, but 40 years ago when my parents were students it wouldn't have- and that 10 years ago apparently some people were so scared of upsetting the applecart that they failed to protect their children.
Will it now, 10 years after the fact? I don't know. If I understand correctly, medical records only have to be kept for 3 years after you turn 18.
That's another minefield that I mentioned, but might have been kind of drowned out. Different states have different standards for this- but there's a real question if the records are still around 10 years later; and without the records, you've got nothing.
The thing about a lawsuit is you have to prove damages. What damages can be shown from delaying her hospital trip?
Extra time stay in the hospital, PTSD, reduced earning ability.
Which only happened after a huge scandal broke out and the collective weight of all the abused kids came crashing down on the Church.
Bull- in each Diocese, it usually started with a single lawsuit- for instance in the Archdiocese of Portland it all started with a *single* complaint and lawsuit back in 1986 for an incident that had occured in 1973.
It's easy for 10 people all claiming the same thing to win a lawsuit against one person. But it's quite different when it's one persons word against another. Given the facts in this case- do you REALLY think RK's the only one out there? Once this hits her hometown newspaper, cases will come out of the woodwork.
You seem to have a belief that the good guys always win, and the bad guys will be punished. The system doesn't work like that most of the time. Ordinary people get burned all the time and there's not a damn thing they can do about it other than try to get past it.
All it takes for evil to win is for good to do nothing. Don't try and evil WILL win. Try, and evil MAY win. But it's worth trying- and a good lawyer would take this case on the bet that he wins.
And what education could have helped this? She was actually beat up by a rent-a-cop AND a kidney stone....with the kidney stone doing most of the heavy lifting.
I had no notable injuries from the "fight", so no, those weren't on the chart. You can be hit across the back with a baton and have nothing of value to show for it. Kicking my knee out from behind didn't cause any damage either, at least nothing that was noted by a hospital. Did it hurt? Yea. I fell in the parking lot and got clubbed across the back -- of course it hurt. However, she was obviously well trained, and I have no doubt that her technique was taught to her explicitly so it wouldn't show anything of value if she got in trouble. It probably didn't take a whole lot to subdue me either, as I was already using all of my energy just to stay focused enough to walk.
Then don't concentrate on that part of the case. Concentrate instead on the school nurses who failed to pay attention to your original symptoms- or better yet, the fact that the school was letting a bunch of 16-year-olds sit around *completely unsupervised* for a period every day. It was the combination of both of these that put your life in danger.
I look back on that day with the most extreme of hatred. I try and imagine a situation where I had the strength to fight back, could I have defended myself? What if I had brought a gun to school? I would give up every bit of money to a charity for home schooled kids if I could see that rent-a-cop go to jail.
That would depend on your state- statute of limitations on the assault ranges from 7 to 18 years, and like your Dad said, it's hard to prove when it's your word alone. But what you CAN do is get the school board that HIRED the rent-a-cop, and the nurses, and failed to have supervision for the Independant Study Course. That's negligence, which from what you just said and everything you've said in this thread, has led to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder on your part, so much so that you're still thinking of it 10 years later!
If we can really be honest with ourselves -- I am a product of that prison of a school. Still to this day and probably for the rest of my life, I do not believe that anyone in any position of authority will assist me in any fashion. This may have been an extreme example, but it wasn't isolated. The purpose of high school is to break your spirit and turn you in to a drone who doesn't question authority. No amount of intelligent knowledge or discussion can change the fact that that is how I feel inside now.
That is very true. But usually it isn't so explicit- and like I said before, as the Roman Catholic Church is finding out, child abuse is illegal and actionable for *several* decades after the fact.
Just the fact I remember it with such vivid detail lends credibility
I wanted to point this out separately. The fact you remember it with such vivid detail also lends itself to lawsuit category- you're suffering from a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which can be worth millions in court.
This also affords me the chance to qualify all of the rest of my remarks in this thread: This only counts if the school district you were in growing up was: 1) in the United States of America and 2) an Independant School District- that is, one where the school board is elected rather than appointed by some central state educational agency or department.
YMMV with cases outside of the USA, though I've noticed that throughout the English Speaking World such cases have been quite successfull, especially against schools and churches. It's not THAT much different, as another poster mentioned, than the sex abuse scandals currently rocking the Roman Catholic Church, some of which are 7 decades away from the original incident.
It's #2 that could really trip you up though- you need permission from the State to Sue the State- and if the school board isn't independantly elected, the problem goes a step or two higher in government, which could be a problem.
All in all though, I think it's pretty clear that your civil and human rights were violated. Or at least, it's clear to me. Call the ACLU and tell somebody your story.
Wow! I'm amazed at this- in my high school Independant Study was MONITORED and MENTORED for exactly this reason- and that was 20 years ago. You've got a MAJOR case of negligence and child abuse on your hands that you've been sitting on for the past decade against the School Board. Now that you've revealed this bit of information- I'd strongly suggest that you do not settle out of court without a public appology published in the local newspaper.
No, they took care of me the next few days. They couldn't do anything to help me though, as to the rest of the story there was nothing to say I didn't start that fight. Think on it, I have many times. Just what exactly would they do? As my Dad says "you can't fight city hall on your word alone".
Your Dad is correct, as far as your word alone- but you can fight on the basis of a hospital report. Certainly your chart would have included your injuries from the fight as well as the diagnosis of your disease- and if you "started the fight" a good lawyer would have asked for a similar report on the guard (after all, if you started the fight, she must have sustained injuries too, right?). Not to mention there's always the start of your story- the negligence of the nursing staff, ignoring your obvious disease symptoms that engendered a potentially lethal diagnosis later, once again as proven by the hospital report. Better yet, even if your parents couldn't afford that level of legal advice, a letter to the editor of the local newspaper with the whole story would have likely gathered several concerned parents at the next school board meeting- at which point the school board would have to defend their decision to hire such incompetant staff. Ultimately, they are responsible for what happened to you- it's their policies that put you in danger.
There were actually a couple of different ways to go with this at the time- civil court or the court of public opinion- and like most abused kids in this day and age when you can cry abuse 10, 20, or 50 years after the fact, civil court is the path still open to you today, IF you can get your hands on those medical records (hope like heck that the hospital didn't destroy them- as long as your parents paid the bill, you have a right to those reports under HIPPA). The court of public opinion is a closed opportunity- you would have had to do that within a month of the original incident. But now that you're of the age of majority, I'm sure with those hospital records in hand you can find a lawyer who will work on contingency and take the case. Even if all you get out of it is a $20,000 pain-and-suffering award in an out-of-court settlement, it's well worth the attempt- and if by some chance you get a stubborn school board and a sympathetic jury, the payoff could be in the millions for PTSD.
Who said anything about the State? If they're organized anything like schools out here, school boards are a regulated, but autonomous independant unit of government. They have the power to tax- but they certainly CAN and HAVE been sued in civil court. Some of our most famous Supreme Court cases about civil rights and evolution started out in lawsuits against a school board.
The real question is- why weren't your parents on the ball enough to make sure the school district paid big time in a negligence lawsuit for this mistake?
If your job is so menial and simple that you can be replaced with someone who works harder and for less, then why should you not be replaced?
Because if we replace everybody who is working in menial and simple jobs, we end up removing consumers from our country. Remove the consumers, and you run out of customers. Run out of customers, you'll soon be out of business. National borders exist for a reason.
It's an unfortunate truth, but if you can't do something unique with your life, well, too bad, kay? Some of us actually have to think of ways to reinvent ourselves and do creative, individual things to keep our jobs. -An angry fashion designer.
When no ditch diggers are left to buy your fashions- where will you be?
Or at least, that's what we've been telling our teenagers for the last 4 years, as we put their parents, aunts, and uncles out of work so that we can make more profit in India. Is it any surprise to anybody that maybe they'd rather earn an additional $80,000 in their lifetime rather than waste time in high school when their future is dim no matter what they do?
How do they get the 360 degrees out of a single camera? Or is that just hopeful on the part of the article summarizer?
You're completely right though- the English in the article can be read two ways. Either each patrolman gets 8 cameras in their helmet (no great feat when your cameras are the size of a AA battery) connected to the beltpack, or we have 8 separate officers each with a single camera. But "Pack" seems to indicate the former rather than the later, but I also note that one of the articles says they're getting 12 hours of data retention. Must be using at least an 8 GB hard drive or better....
Actually, all the recent wars the West has been part of were ideologically based according to the governments, including the Kosovo campaign to stop the Serb genocide. The Gulf war, Afghanistan, Iraq.. all of it.
Ah, but none of those were particularily SECULAR wars. Except maybe Afghanistan and the Gulf War and Iraq- all of which were put forth as wars in defense of our interests against an agressor.
And if you are presumably correct, why should our materialist motives be held in any better light than their ideological ones?
Haven't you been reading the rest of this thread? Materialism is proveable. Ideology is not. Science is Objective. Religion is Subjective. Therefore, Materialism is SUPERIOR to Spiritualism- or at least is presumed to be so. All else is just superstitious myth to be done away with, at least according to the atheist that started the thread.
Look it up yourself. I'm playing devil's advocate because you are clearly biased, but for good reasons. I was the same, but I lived with these people and I have known religious ones (with nice long beards) and they are not what you seem to think. Don't watch the news too much.
I've been reading their websites rather than the news- and I'll still admit that the religious ones I have a problem with are the newer, minority sects that do not have that interpretation of the Koran. The reason they don't is the same reason why I dislike Protestantism: Once Sola Scriptura kicks in, you're free to ignore the verses that cover your own sins. If the dangerous Islamics control more than 100 million people worldwide, I'd be EXTREMELY suprised. But to them, infidels aren't worth actually caring about- killing one is not a transgression.
We need highly portable petabyte flash rom to make pentopticon a reality for everybody. While I have no doubt that (at least at the resolution my PDA displays) you can get 8 low res video feeds, with audio, at a cost of only 100MB/HR, and thus a 4GB compact flash could handle recording everything a police constable does for a half a shift (change the card at lunch, with a couple of spare card sto slap in after a crime occurs so that the original card could be "sealed" for chain of evidence purposes), this technology won't be widespread until you can go a month or more without changing the data storage card out.
Perhaps that is a good thing. Isn't that why we wage war in the secular world?
Actually,no. In the secular world we wage war over control of resources, or for defensive reasons when attacked. It's almost NEVER about justice- and certainly not a justice handed down from an autocratic God through a single prophet.
The two systems are as you said incompatible, but that does not make any two such countries enemies.
Maybe you don't understand just how incompatible they are. One has the avowed goal of bringing God's Justice to Earth- with a *very* strict definition about that Justice. That is the meaning of Jihad- a war that brings Justice.
I personally go by root words- civilization is the art of living in cities without killing each other- if you've learned to live in cities without killing each other- heck, even cooperating enough to build cities to begin with- then you are civilized. It's no great achievement anymore- but 10,000 years ago it was quite novel- and Sumeria was one of the places it happened first. Claiming that the arabs aren't civilized is ridiculous due to that.
Then we have to wonder if such fascists (who deny such a basic human right) can even be called civilized.
They can be- all you need to be civilized is to control cities of people under a single set of morality rules aka laws. As long as there are laws- they are civilized. "basic human rights" are not neccessary for civilization.
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Forget negligence - try pressing charges for reckless endangerment, all the way up to the principal for implementing such a strict policy that it doesn't allow for exceptions to protect the health of the students.
For it to be reckless endangerment, the kidney stones would have to be "foreseeable". But after seeing some other portions of the policy- damn, I'd say letting a bunch of 16- and 17- year olds have an Independant Study period with *no* supervision comes damned close to raising this to a foreseeable circumstance that *something* would go wrong. I'm amazed that RK's family wasn't up in arms about this.
Funny- I always thought that software engineering WAS creative and individualized- until the Indians started doing it for $2/hr.
When was this, and what did your parents do when you told them that a teacher caused you the single most painful experience of your life?
I ask because I am suspicious that this sort of thing has changed *VERY* recently- that 20 years ago when I was a student, this would have caused a lawsuit, but 40 years ago when my parents were students it wouldn't have- and that 10 years ago apparently some people were so scared of upsetting the applecart that they failed to protect their children.
Where is "Junior in High School" = 8th Grade? Or are you dyslexic and were thinking "in Jr. High School"?
Will it now, 10 years after the fact? I don't know. If I understand correctly, medical records only have to be kept for 3 years after you turn 18.
That's another minefield that I mentioned, but might have been kind of drowned out. Different states have different standards for this- but there's a real question if the records are still around 10 years later; and without the records, you've got nothing.
The thing about a lawsuit is you have to prove damages. What damages can be shown from delaying her hospital trip?
Extra time stay in the hospital, PTSD, reduced earning ability.
Which only happened after a huge scandal broke out and the collective weight of all the abused kids came crashing down on the Church.
Bull- in each Diocese, it usually started with a single lawsuit- for instance in the Archdiocese of Portland it all started with a *single* complaint and lawsuit back in 1986 for an incident that had occured in 1973.
It's easy for 10 people all claiming the same thing to win a lawsuit against one person. But it's quite different when it's one persons word against another.
Given the facts in this case- do you REALLY think RK's the only one out there? Once this hits her hometown newspaper, cases will come out of the woodwork.
You seem to have a belief that the good guys always win, and the bad guys will be punished. The system doesn't work like that most of the time. Ordinary people get burned all the time and there's not a damn thing they can do about it other than try to get past it.
All it takes for evil to win is for good to do nothing. Don't try and evil WILL win. Try, and evil MAY win. But it's worth trying- and a good lawyer would take this case on the bet that he wins.
And what education could have helped this? She was actually beat up by a rent-a-cop AND a kidney stone....with the kidney stone doing most of the heavy lifting.
I had no notable injuries from the "fight", so no, those weren't on the chart. You can be hit across the back with a baton and have nothing of value to show for it. Kicking my knee out from behind didn't cause any damage either, at least nothing that was noted by a hospital. Did it hurt? Yea. I fell in the parking lot and got clubbed across the back -- of course it hurt. However, she was obviously well trained, and I have no doubt that her technique was taught to her explicitly so it wouldn't show anything of value if she got in trouble. It probably didn't take a whole lot to subdue me either, as I was already using all of my energy just to stay focused enough to walk.
Then don't concentrate on that part of the case. Concentrate instead on the school nurses who failed to pay attention to your original symptoms- or better yet, the fact that the school was letting a bunch of 16-year-olds sit around *completely unsupervised* for a period every day. It was the combination of both of these that put your life in danger.
I look back on that day with the most extreme of hatred. I try and imagine a situation where I had the strength to fight back, could I have defended myself? What if I had brought a gun to school? I would give up every bit of money to a charity for home schooled kids if I could see that rent-a-cop go to jail.
That would depend on your state- statute of limitations on the assault ranges from 7 to 18 years, and like your Dad said, it's hard to prove when it's your word alone. But what you CAN do is get the school board that HIRED the rent-a-cop, and the nurses, and failed to have supervision for the Independant Study Course. That's negligence, which from what you just said and everything you've said in this thread, has led to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder on your part, so much so that you're still thinking of it 10 years later!
If we can really be honest with ourselves -- I am a product of that prison of a school. Still to this day and probably for the rest of my life, I do not believe that anyone in any position of authority will assist me in any fashion. This may have been an extreme example, but it wasn't isolated. The purpose of high school is to break your spirit and turn you in to a drone who doesn't question authority. No amount of intelligent knowledge or discussion can change the fact that that is how I feel inside now.
That is very true. But usually it isn't so explicit- and like I said before, as the Roman Catholic Church is finding out, child abuse is illegal and actionable for *several* decades after the fact.
Just the fact I remember it with such vivid detail lends credibility
I wanted to point this out separately. The fact you remember it with such vivid detail also lends itself to lawsuit category- you're suffering from a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which can be worth millions in court.
This also affords me the chance to qualify all of the rest of my remarks in this thread: This only counts if the school district you were in growing up was: 1) in the United States of America and 2) an Independant School District- that is, one where the school board is elected rather than appointed by some central state educational agency or department.
YMMV with cases outside of the USA, though I've noticed that throughout the English Speaking World such cases have been quite successfull, especially against schools and churches. It's not THAT much different, as another poster mentioned, than the sex abuse scandals currently rocking the Roman Catholic Church, some of which are 7 decades away from the original incident.
It's #2 that could really trip you up though- you need permission from the State to Sue the State- and if the school board isn't independantly elected, the problem goes a step or two higher in government, which could be a problem.
All in all though, I think it's pretty clear that your civil and human rights were violated. Or at least, it's clear to me. Call the ACLU and tell somebody your story.
Wow! I'm amazed at this- in my high school Independant Study was MONITORED and MENTORED for exactly this reason- and that was 20 years ago. You've got a MAJOR case of negligence and child abuse on your hands that you've been sitting on for the past decade against the School Board. Now that you've revealed this bit of information- I'd strongly suggest that you do not settle out of court without a public appology published in the local newspaper.
No, they took care of me the next few days. They couldn't do anything to help me though, as to the rest of the story there was nothing to say I didn't start that fight. Think on it, I have many times. Just what exactly would they do? As my Dad says "you can't fight city hall on your word alone".
Your Dad is correct, as far as your word alone- but you can fight on the basis of a hospital report. Certainly your chart would have included your injuries from the fight as well as the diagnosis of your disease- and if you "started the fight" a good lawyer would have asked for a similar report on the guard (after all, if you started the fight, she must have sustained injuries too, right?). Not to mention there's always the start of your story- the negligence of the nursing staff, ignoring your obvious disease symptoms that engendered a potentially lethal diagnosis later, once again as proven by the hospital report. Better yet, even if your parents couldn't afford that level of legal advice, a letter to the editor of the local newspaper with the whole story would have likely gathered several concerned parents at the next school board meeting- at which point the school board would have to defend their decision to hire such incompetant staff. Ultimately, they are responsible for what happened to you- it's their policies that put you in danger.
There were actually a couple of different ways to go with this at the time- civil court or the court of public opinion- and like most abused kids in this day and age when you can cry abuse 10, 20, or 50 years after the fact, civil court is the path still open to you today, IF you can get your hands on those medical records (hope like heck that the hospital didn't destroy them- as long as your parents paid the bill, you have a right to those reports under HIPPA). The court of public opinion is a closed opportunity- you would have had to do that within a month of the original incident. But now that you're of the age of majority, I'm sure with those hospital records in hand you can find a lawyer who will work on contingency and take the case. Even if all you get out of it is a $20,000 pain-and-suffering award in an out-of-court settlement, it's well worth the attempt- and if by some chance you get a stubborn school board and a sympathetic jury, the payoff could be in the millions for PTSD.
Where were your parents in all of this? Did they too think that the kidney stone was just a kid trying to skip out on a day of class?
Who said anything about the State? If they're organized anything like schools out here, school boards are a regulated, but autonomous independant unit of government. They have the power to tax- but they certainly CAN and HAVE been sued in civil court. Some of our most famous Supreme Court cases about civil rights and evolution started out in lawsuits against a school board.
The real question is- why weren't your parents on the ball enough to make sure the school district paid big time in a negligence lawsuit for this mistake?
If your job is so menial and simple that you can be replaced with someone who works harder and for less, then why should you not be replaced?
Because if we replace everybody who is working in menial and simple jobs, we end up removing consumers from our country. Remove the consumers, and you run out of customers. Run out of customers, you'll soon be out of business. National borders exist for a reason.
It's an unfortunate truth, but if you can't do something unique with your life, well, too bad, kay? Some of us actually have to think of ways to reinvent ourselves and do creative, individual things to keep our jobs. -An angry fashion designer.
When no ditch diggers are left to buy your fashions- where will you be?
Why waste 4 years of your life in high school, 8 more years in college, just to be told that Americans are too stupid to make money even in menial IT work and end up serving fries for minimum wage anyway?
Or at least, that's what we've been telling our teenagers for the last 4 years, as we put their parents, aunts, and uncles out of work so that we can make more profit in India. Is it any surprise to anybody that maybe they'd rather earn an additional $80,000 in their lifetime rather than waste time in high school when their future is dim no matter what they do?
How do they get the 360 degrees out of a single camera? Or is that just hopeful on the part of the article summarizer?
You're completely right though- the English in the article can be read two ways. Either each patrolman gets 8 cameras in their helmet (no great feat when your cameras are the size of a AA battery) connected to the beltpack, or we have 8 separate officers each with a single camera. But "Pack" seems to indicate the former rather than the later, but I also note that one of the articles says they're getting 12 hours of data retention. Must be using at least an 8 GB hard drive or better....
Actually, all the recent wars the West has been part of were ideologically based according to the governments, including the Kosovo campaign to stop the Serb genocide. The Gulf war, Afghanistan, Iraq.. all of it.
Ah, but none of those were particularily SECULAR wars. Except maybe Afghanistan and the Gulf War and Iraq- all of which were put forth as wars in defense of our interests against an agressor.
And if you are presumably correct, why should our materialist motives be held in any better light than their ideological ones?
Haven't you been reading the rest of this thread? Materialism is proveable. Ideology is not. Science is Objective. Religion is Subjective. Therefore, Materialism is SUPERIOR to Spiritualism- or at least is presumed to be so. All else is just superstitious myth to be done away with, at least according to the atheist that started the thread.
Look it up yourself. I'm playing devil's advocate because you are clearly biased, but for good reasons. I was the same, but I lived with these people and I have known religious ones (with nice long beards) and they are not what you seem to think. Don't watch the news too much.
I've been reading their websites rather than the news- and I'll still admit that the religious ones I have a problem with are the newer, minority sects that do not have that interpretation of the Koran. The reason they don't is the same reason why I dislike Protestantism: Once Sola Scriptura kicks in, you're free to ignore the verses that cover your own sins. If the dangerous Islamics control more than 100 million people worldwide, I'd be EXTREMELY suprised. But to them, infidels aren't worth actually caring about- killing one is not a transgression.
We need highly portable petabyte flash rom to make pentopticon a reality for everybody. While I have no doubt that (at least at the resolution my PDA displays) you can get 8 low res video feeds, with audio, at a cost of only 100MB/HR, and thus a 4GB compact flash could handle recording everything a police constable does for a half a shift (change the card at lunch, with a couple of spare card sto slap in after a crime occurs so that the original card could be "sealed" for chain of evidence purposes), this technology won't be widespread until you can go a month or more without changing the data storage card out.
Perhaps that is a good thing. Isn't that why we wage war in the secular world?
Actually,no. In the secular world we wage war over control of resources, or for defensive reasons when attacked. It's almost NEVER about justice- and certainly not a justice handed down from an autocratic God through a single prophet.
You were off by a factor of 10. Considering there were only 80 million Germans in 1939 that is a massive amount of "EXTREME Islam" types.
You're right- that's a *VERY* scary thought.
The two systems are as you said incompatible, but that does not make any two such countries enemies.
Maybe you don't understand just how incompatible they are. One has the avowed goal of bringing God's Justice to Earth- with a *very* strict definition about that Justice. That is the meaning of Jihad- a war that brings Justice.
"civilization" and "civilized"
I personally go by root words- civilization is the art of living in cities without killing each other- if you've learned to live in cities without killing each other- heck, even cooperating enough to build cities to begin with- then you are civilized. It's no great achievement anymore- but 10,000 years ago it was quite novel- and Sumeria was one of the places it happened first. Claiming that the arabs aren't civilized is ridiculous due to that.
Even I know the difference between the 19th and 21st centuries! The pendulum swings- right now it's against religion, back then it was for it. Ted
Then we have to wonder if such fascists (who deny such a basic human right) can even be called civilized.
They can be- all you need to be civilized is to control cities of people under a single set of morality rules aka laws. As long as there are laws- they are civilized. "basic human rights" are not neccessary for civilization.