Category: ZT & PC

While Scott and I seem to be on different planets regarding Iraq, we can both heartily agree that this story is disturbing

India, her older siblings, Tyla and Garrett, and their mother, Sarajane, described how years of alleged verbal taunts, veiled threats and then finally physical abuse over their religious differences with other Union County residents prompted them to pull India from Horace Maynard Middle School in 2002.

“The last straw was when India was chased down the hallway by three boys who grabbed her by the back of the neck and told her she should change her religion or they’d change it for her,” said Sarajane Tracy.

But it’s not just a matter of intolerant students being given free rein by the school district to terrorize a pagan girl. While I think the scrubbing of cultural religious symbols from public fora has gone more than a bit overboard, these passages demonstrate just why that’s happened.

India’s older sister, Tyla, a student at Union County High School, said she was once punished for not attending a tent revival held during school hours by being forced to do extra classwork. “(My teacher) told me it would remind me to bring my permission slip,” Tyla said.

The tent revival, called the Area Wide Crusade, was started in 1998 by a Union County Baptist pastor and is slated to be held again later this month.

According to the Tracys, India was sent to the principal’s office twice because of her religion. The first time was triggered by her mother’s refusal of permission for her to attend the revival. The second visit took place when she declined to play Mary in a Christmas play.

Tent revivals as school events (requiring a permission slip and hanging out in the principal’s office)? And, for that matter, a Christmas Pageant complete with the Virgin Mary, also a school function?

Of course, we don’t know the whole story, since the district isn’t talking (they never do, do they).

But, to put it bluntly, school is not church. I don’t care if 99.9% of the local population is as Christian as Billy Graham — heck, I don’t care if they’re 100% churchgoers, you are asking for trouble, intolerance, and an inevitable clash if you incorporate denominational activities into your school curriculum.

Unfortunately, it usually takes a case like this — ostracism, threats, a law suit, and, inevitably, a big cash pay-out — to start to get districts like this in line. And, even then, it’s problematic.

Perhaps someone ought to teach a civics lesson there on the subject. They can start with the Tennessee state constitution, Article I, Section 3:

Section 3. That all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience; that no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or to maintain any minister against his consent; that no human authority can, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience; and that no preference shall ever be given, by law, to any religious establishment or mode of worship.

Pretty to think so.

Google is under fire for its opt-in porn filter. A new study says that it blocks a lot of non-porn sites.

Some of the URLs listed in the listings below might be construed as sexually-explicit — for example, for the purpose of providing information about health or sexual education, or describing efforts to regulate pornography. However, most of the URLs listed seem to be misclassified by Google as sexually explicit. For example, it is unlikely that there is sexually-explicit content on thomas.loc.gov (the Library of Congress’s index of federal legislation), pmo.gov.il (the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office), nmsa.org (the National Middle School Association), or neu.edu (the main index page of Northeastern University), but all four are excluded from Google searches using SafeSearch.

I’m a lot less upset about this than some other recent porn filter news, largely because the Google setting is an opt-in sort of thing. People have to turn it on explicitly (so to speak), and it reasonably tends to be overly protective in (through automation) blocking sites. I worry a lot more about when filtering is required by law than when it’s something voluntarily turned on — and while clearly there’s room for improvement in Google’s algorithms, better “safe” than “sorry,” if you really want to block out stuff from Little Johnny’s Eyes — though the report notes a number of false (or questionable) negatives, too.

(If you’re curious, the report includes a form where you can try your own site or search term to see if SafeSearch blocks it.)

The report does give kudos to Google for make it clear when SafeSearch is turned on.

Regardless, and despite Google’s press flacks, I think most folks would agree with the study’s conclusions:

SafeSearch’s errors confirm the author’s sense, reflected in prior research, that accurate Internet filtering is an extraordinarily difficult task still well beyond the reach of current algorithms and methods.

Andrew Sullivan notes:

More good news from Southern Iraq, where the Brits seem to be doing a fantastic job. One question: how did they manage not to collapse as a military force? After all, they allow openly gay soldiers in their units, thus undermining unit cohesion, destroying morale, wrecking troops’ privacy and making it impossible to fight. A miracle against all the odds, I suppose.

I don’t imagine anyone in the Pentagon will notice.

I think someone ought to check the coffee in the school office for illegal substances, because that’s the only possible explanation for insanity like this:

Sal Santana II, a 12-year-old Magoffin Middle School student, said he stuck his tongue out at a girl who declined his invitation to be his girlfriend. School district administrators viewed the incident as sexual harassment, suspended him for three days and are considering placing him in an alternative school.

Words fail me.

The district, naturally, declines to discuss any part of the matter. The boy’s father, though, notes that Sal has not been in any trouble this year, but that what he was told happened was:

“The teacher said he stuck his tongue out and moved it back and forth and waved at her like you were patting someone on the back and that that constitutes sexual harassment,” Salvador Santana said. “She said the girl was upset and scared.”

Yeah. Right.

Y’know, there are times when home schooling looks awfully attractive.

(via Doyce, who relates some other parallel cases which are terrifyingly plausible)

Child porn is an awful, horrible, icky, and revolting thing. Let’s just get that out of the way to begin with.

The Internet, of course, has served as a new avenue for child porn distribution among the sick sorts that get off on it. Various governments have taken various steps to try and stop it. Though ostensibly well-intended, some of them are pretty crappy laws.

Pennsylvania, for example, has a state law that allows the attorney general to force ISPs to block certain sites it deems to be child porn. That includes Internet providers such as AOL and Earthlink.

While I appreciate the efforts of the attorney general of Pennsylvania to safeguard his residents from the viewing of child porn (and note that the law itself doesn’t do anything about the trash itself — a lot of these sites are offshore — only the mechanism by which people can access it), since I didn’t help elect him, I’m not particularly sanguine about his making those decisions for me.

Because, after all, if Earthlink blocks site X, it can’t narrow that to just its Pennsylvania subscribers. All of its users are blocked.

Which might still be okay, except that sometimes servers that host child porn sites also host innocent non-porn sites. Which then get blocked by the ISPs.

What innocent sites might be being blocked? Wouldn’t you like to know? Well … you can’t. The Pennsylvania state attorney general’s office won’t tell anyone the 423 sites it has asked ISPs to block.

Why?

Fisher’s office said disclosing the list of blocked Web sites would itself be disseminating such pornography, which is illegal.
“The documents that you seek contain the Web addresses of Internet sites that contain such depictions,” wrote L. Kinch Bowman, director of management services for the attorney general’s office.

But, you may ask, how then can we ever have oversight over the implementation of such a law? How do we know that sites that somebody in the AG’s office simply dislikes — political opponents, minority religions, alternative lifestyles — aren’t being targeted for harrassment.

Well, we can’t.

Well, then, if someone wanted to challenge the law, contend that it was adversely affecting innocent people, beyond the value of what it was designed to do, wouldn’t they need to be able to compile a list of affected sites?

Yup, they sure would. But they can’t.

We’re from the government. Trust us — we’re here to help you.

Various school councils in Britain are banning the traditional Hot Cross Buns from the cafeteria menu at Easter time.

Some councils are refusing to hand out the traditional treats because they fear that the symbol of the cross will spark complaints from Jewish, Hindu and Muslim pupils or their families.
Officials in the London borough of Tower Hamlets decided to remove the buns from menus this year after criticism over its decision to serve pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. A spokesman for the Labour-run council claimed that there had been “a lot” of complaints but did not have a figure.
The spokesman added: “We are moving away from a religious theme for Easter and will not be doing hot cross buns. We can’t risk a similar outcry over Easter like the kind we had on Pancake Day. We will probably be serving naan breads instead.”

Instead, there’s a popular outcry among folks who enjoy the tradition, religious or not. And some of the potential offendees think it’s awfully silly.

The Muslim Council of Britain called the decision “very, very bizarre”. A spokesman said: “This is absolutely amazing. At the moment, British Muslims are very concerned about the upcoming war with Iraq and are hardly going to be taken aback by a hot cross bun.
“Unfortunately actions like this can only create a backlash and it is not very thoughtful. I wish they would leave us alone. We are quite capable of articulating our own concerns and if we find something offensive, we will say so. We do not need to rely on other people to do it for us.
“British Muslims have been quite happily eating and digesting hot cross buns for many years and I don’t think they are suddenly going to be offended.”

*Snort*. Perhaps the sorts who think that libraries (if not everywhere else) should be required to use site blocking software on their Internet connections don’t mind that among the sites blocked by one major brand is the White House (because it “contains hate speech”).

A high school student was briefly suspended, then re-admitted (upon advice of lawyer to the school), for wearing a pro-war T-shirt.

Derik Rosario, 15, whose mother is a Marine master sergeant fighting in Kuwait, wore a T-shirt that read, “War: Justifiable Homicide” to school Friday morning, the same day an anti-war protest was scheduled at the school.
According to the school, he and a few other boys wearing pro-war T-shirts were asked early Friday morning to turn the shirts inside out or face suspension in order to prevent conflict with the war protesters.
“I looked at the shirts, and I pictured the protest that morning, and I saw a situation that could turn ugly or dangerous,” said Principal Ron Briggs. “So I asked them, for safety reasons, to turn the shirts inside out.”

First off, why would the principal be worried about an “ugly or dangerous” situation with anti-war protesters?

Secondly, why should the political statements of pro-war students have to give way to anti-war students? Why should the rally trump a t-shirt?

I suspect it was the latter point that led a district lawyer to suggest that the principal might want to reverse the suspension.

And, for what it’s worth, the shirt did not cause a disturbance. And the principal says he’s “proud” of Derik for standing up for his rights.

The Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council has rejected a complaint from a woman, accusing Bugs Bunny of misogyny.

The incident was triggered by an episode of the Bugs Bunny and Tweety show aired in July 1998. It featured a short cartoon entitled Bewitched Bunny, in which Bugs escaped a witch by detonating a bag of so-called magic powder.
A beautiful female rabbit emerges from the cloud of dust and takes Bugs by the arm. As the two of them walk off into the sunset, Bugs turns to the camera and says: “Ah sure, I know! But aren’t they all witches inside?”

Who would think that such a bold statement about feminine spirituality and the power of the Goddess Within would irk anyone?

The final chapter, evidently, of the Mall T-Shirt Flap: the guard who signed the police complaint at management request has been fired.

What a bunch of maroons.

(via InstaPundit)

I love it.

In a follow-up to the story earlier this week about a first-grader being suspended for having a plastic knife in his backpack — a plastic knife he was given in the school cafeteria to butter his bread, which feat he was so proud of, he wanted to show his mom …

if the school insists on upholding the suspension, his parents reportedly will seek criminal charges against the school for supplying weapons to children.

Sauce for the goose …

(via PlumCrazy)

In yet another example of the ZT insanity gripping our schools, a six year old, who was so proud that he’d learned to butter his bread in the school cafeteria that he slipped the little plastic knife from there into his backpack to show his mom, has been suspended for ten days for carrying a “weapon.”

Yeesh.

The Supremes today heard arguments regarding CIPA, the latest attempt by Congress to mandate Internet content filtering at libraries and schools.

Congress tried to get around two previous judicial rejections by simply saying that libraries were only required to use the filtering if they accepted federal funds to buy PCs and Net access in the first place. Given that libraries almost never have enough money, the pressure to accept is almost impossible to resist.

But given that Internet filters still, frankly, suck at blocking just porn, using filters is highly problematic. On the radio this a.m., one of the reps of a filtering software company was bragging about how their product coiuld catch 90% of the adults sites (meaning one out of ten sites get through) and “only” 1% of sites blocked is a legitimate site.

Making things worse, the filtering companies refuse to reveal what material they block, using what criteria. On the one hand, that makes sense, since adult sites would love to reverse-engineer how to avoid detection. On the other hand, it means that legitimate sites have no way of knowing why they might be blocked.

Sure, maybe the library can set up rules to let an adult come and ask a librarian to override blockage on a given site. That’s fine, as long as the adult in question doesn’t mind letting the librarian know that she’s looking up material about breast cancer, or he’s researching material about homosexuality, or …

Would you want to have to ask the librarian permission to read all the books you’ve ever read? Would you like to let anyone know about what you want to look up on the Internet?

What’s most irksome about the Bush Adminstration’s case is that they’re presenting CIPA as empowering the libraries. Say what?

Ted Olson, the Justice Department’s solicitor general, told the justices on Wednesday that librarians “are simply declining to put on their computer systems the kind of content they have chosen not to put on their bookshelves…The First Amendment does not require libraries to sponsor the viewing of pornography.”

That’s true. But libraries aren’t getting a choice here, are they? It’s not that Congress is offering them filtering software, it’s mandating it. If libraries want to pursue a different route to keeping kids from downloading skin pics (like, say, requiring kids to use Internet stations in view of librarians), they don’t have that choice.

(And I’ll note, parenthetically, that while I never visited a public library that stocked pornography per se, I certainly, ah, found books in my youth with rather, um, racy scenes that quite appealed to my adolescent prurience, both fiction and non-.)

Justice David Souter suggested that CIPA was different, because it turns over decisions about which Web sites to block to software companies that view their blocklists, or lists of off-limit sites, as trade secrets. “The companies that do prepare them (blocklists) will not even disclose what they are blocking,” Souter said. “When libraries have historically made these decisions, they have known what they’re blocking.”
“Libraries have known that they don’t stock pornography,” Olson countered.

Puh-leaze.

Man buys “Give Peace A Chance” t-shirt from a vendor in a mall.

Man wears t-shirt.

Man sits in food court, wearing t-shirt, eating lunch with his son.

Mall security approaches man, tells him he has to either take off the shirt or leave the mall.

Man refuses.

Security calls the local cops, who arrest him for trespass.

Man turns out to be a prominent local lawyer who’s not afraid to talk to the press.

D’oh!

Assuming the facts of the case are as presented …

Malls usually have signs up around them indicating that they are private property and permission to access the mall may be withdrawn at any time, but it’s not clear how enforcable such rules are, especially when you’re dealing with pretty innocuous behavior (not to mention behavior which entailed wearing a shirt that was bought at the mall in question).

Somebody’s going to have egg on their face — if not a law suit — before this is all over.

(via BoingBoing)

A West Yorkshire nursery school has banned books with pigs in them from the classroom.

Sixty per cent of the school’s pupils are of Pakistani or Indian origin and 99% of these pupils are Muslims.
Mrs Harris said in a statement: “Recently I have been aware of an occasion where young Muslim children in class were read stories about pigs.
“We try to be sensitive to the fact that for Muslims talk of pigs is offensive.”

This is not censorship, Mrs Harris hastens to add: the books are still (at the moment) in the school library.

Next up: banning books with cows in them from classes with Hindi children, banning books with men in them from classes with feminist children, banning books with cars in them from classes with environmentalist children, and banning books with words in them from classes with children from cultures with strong oral storytelling traditions.

Wilbur wept.