13 year old strip searched for Ibuprofin?

OK folks, get this:

A student at a junior high school is caught with Ibuprofen. The school has a zero tolerance policy for ANY medication. The student claims that the pills belong to another girl. The second girl is called to the principle’s office, and is subjected to a search. Not just her backpack and locker, but her body – a full strip search.

So, we all know that the whole “war on drugs” thing has gotten so extreme that it borders on insanity, but folks, this was IBUPROFIN, and I’m sorry, there just isn’t anyway to justify a strip search – especially based on the accusation of some other kid who is trying to stay out of trouble. Think about it – if YOU knew that you were facing the likes of a strip search, and all you had to do was point your finger at someone else (especially in middle school), how fast would YOUR finger be flipping out?

The thing that is even more amazing is that the courts have (for the most part)  supported the school’s right to carry out this search. Fortunately, the Supreme court had the decent sense to actually uphold the fourth amendment (which protects you from unreasonable search). Unfortunately, they also upheld a lower court ruling that the perpetrators could not be held personally liable for their actions. Sorry folks, even in the army in a war zone, following an order that you know is illegal will get you in a rash of hurt. “Just following orders” didn’t cut it at Nuremberg, and it certainly doesn’t hold water here.

I don’t know what has happened to the school officials involved in this incident – it took place in 2003 in rural Arizona. At the very least, I hope they lost their jobs. What SHOULD have happened is that every single school official involved (including the school board members and teachers union members that supported the perpetrators) should have simply been lynched. Now THAT is a nice clear message that no school official in the country could possibly misinterpret. Couple nice news pics of a bunch of bureaucrats hanging from the local live oak would make national headlines and make sure that any school official thought twice about this type of abuse of power. If lynching is too strong for you, I guess I could settle for burning them out of their homes, applying a liberal dose of tar and feathers, and running them out of town. Lets face it folks, in any other venue, these  thugs would have been labeled as sexual predators, face major jail time, and a lifetime of being labeled as perverts. Of course, in this case, it would all be justified.

Folks, our school systems suck, and they are eviscerating anything resembling our children’s civil and constitutional rights. As citizens, it is our responsibility to make sure that the legal system does not simply sit idly by and allow this type of abuse. If and when the legal system DOES let criminals like this off the hook, it is OUR job as citizens to protect our children from these predators.

“Rural Arizona” is an area that tends to have a large number of folks that understand the failings of the legal system, and I certainly hope that a few of them had the balls to polish off their shotguns and demonstrate that in some cases, vigilante justice is not only justified, it is necessary. Ladies and Gentlemen: lock and load. If I ended up sitting on the jury considering the prosecution of an individual involved in the appropriate disciplining of these perverts, I’d be proud to make a finding of “innocent”, and I’d be proud to to shake that persons hand.

Christian Fundies and Evolution – how stupid do you have to be?

Intelligent design, creationism, magic, call it what you will, the christian fundamentalists are at it again (or more accurately:  still). The same folks that have finally admitted that the Earth revolves around the Sun ares till trying to convince folks that creationism is real science. And if they CAN’T convince people that their particular fantasy is real, they’ll do their best to legislate it into existence.

Turns out that there are STILL places where the Fundies swing enough political power to force schools to teach creationism instead of evolution. A few years ago the pope finally admitted that Galileo was right. I guess god has been really busy because it only took him 400 years to get the message to the pope (the pope does, after all, talk to god). That particular message must have gotten lost in all that other important stuff – like how to hide the fact that priests are regularly buggering their alter boys, while pontificating about the evils of homosexuality. Ya know, it takes a LOT of effort to keep that kind of hypocrisy under cover, and even god had his hands full keeping all those alter boys shut up. ( I could go on for pages, but its just too easy to find the many places that the fundies get it wrong, and then make idiots of themselves trying to cover it up or justify it, so back to evolution.)

So, anyway, it turns out that in March the Texas School Board approved a new set of “science ” standards that allows the fundies to teach that evolution simply can’t be real because (get this) it is too complex. Yep, after having been shot down in every rational venue they’ve tried, the fundies have fallen back on the “I can’t understand it, so it CAN’T be true”. Of course, the whole basis of christian fundamentalism is to simply accept what you’re told without any thought or reality checks, so I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, these folks just realized that the Earth isn’t the center of the universe. Of course, the fault doesn’t lie entirely with the fundies. The folks on the school board, those that elected them, and pretty much anyone that happens to live in the state of Texas holds some responsibility. Makes you wonder how Texas manages to survive – either the rational people have all fled, or they’re so scared of the fundies that they stay quiet. Course, when they’re competing with idiots like these, it probably also means that they’re rich enough to send their kids to private school (where they’ll get something that resembles an education), and let the fundies wallow in their ignorance. If this is allowed to continue, we have potential for a truly ironic situation: social evolution driving the fundies into extinction. Think about it. In today’s world, you need to be able to operate at SOME level of rationality. The fundies in Texas are forcing their schools to teach fantasy, so the smart families are going to send their kids to private school, leaving the fundies in the schools that teach the kids that ANYTHING they believe is real. After a while, those kids will grow up, and base their decisions on the stuff they learned in school. “Really, if I just pray hard enough, god will fix my hard drive” “god will find me a job” “Don’t worry Timmy, god told me it was OK, now just drop your pants and bend over”. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will be living in the 21st century, and the fundies will end up living in trailer parks waiting for the next tornado.

And they wonder why the rest of the world is laughing at them. Just god’s will, I guess.

What every kid needs: a visit to poverty.

Most of the kids I know (including mine) are spoiled rotten. Their concepts of “normal life” are insane. I spend a lot of time in elementary and middle schools, and a good bit of time dealing with high school and university students, and none of them have any idea what ‘normal’ life really is.

This is because they have all lived in the first world their entire life. This is not a bad thing. Personally, I rather appreciate the fact that my kids have never had to live in the third world. Lack of the amenities we all take for granted is a real drag. The problem I have is that the kids have no idea what the word “need” means – not just in a language sense, but in a sense of true survival. Kids “need” cell phones, video games, pizza, the latest fashion, braces for their teeth, conditioner for their hair, zit cream for their faces, and a school trip to some far-away place (usually in late middle school or high school).

I think the kids should be a whole lot better served if they skipped the Spanish club trip to Mexico or Spain or wherever, the Band trip to Disney, and class trip to DC. Instead, pack the kids onto a plane, and send them to Malawi, Nicaragua, The Comoros, or Congo. Let them spend a month in an environment where they can see how the vast majority of people in the world live. I’m not saying that they should necessarily LIVE the life, but be close enough to it to start to understand that the real definition of “need” is “If I don’t have this, I will suffer great physical harm, and might even die”.

By exposing the kids to true poverty – real poverty – they are forced to take a look at their own lives. I certainly don’t expect the kids to completely change their lifestyles, but by simply opening their eyes to how good they have it, we can help them put things into perspective. By opening our kids eyes, we can set the stage to begin to make a difference. don’t get me wrong: poverty will ALWAYS be there. All I want is for kids to recognize that its there, and to have some understanding of what it really means.

A bit more about Swine Flu and media hype

Well folks,

It’s been a few weeks, and the Killer Swine Flu pandemic has fizzled out into yet another overblown media hype fantasy. This raises two questions: why they hype, and what really happened?

1: why the hype?

This is too easy. Hype generates ratings, and ratings are what the media is all about. Of course, we COULD give the media the benefit of the doubt, and credit them with ‘trying to keep the public informed’, but they don’t. If the public really understood what was going on, they H1N1 hype-up story would have fizzled in a day or two instead of cranking ratings for almost a month. Instead of providing accurate information, the media (all of the media) chose to stress the bits of the story that would increase their ratings, and leave out the bits that would close the story down. The result? misinformation causing a lot of stupid decisions that cause a lot of problems (how many schools were shut down?).

2: what really happened?

Once again, this is too easy.

Yes, there was an outbreak of H1N1 influenza, and it MIGHT have originated in Mexico. There was an outbreak of something in Mexico that resulted in a number of people being hospitalized, and a few died. Of course, we don’t know how many people were actually infected, and never bothered to go to the doctor, so we don’t know what percentage of the people that got sick actually required medical care, and of course, we don’t know how many died because of the H1N1 virus. Mexican officials, WHO, and the CDC are all admitting that a lot of the deaths and hospitalizations that were attributed to H1N1 were really caused y something else.

What the media reported (even after we knew it wasn’t true): a whole lot of people in Mexico got the swine flu, and a lot of them died.

Of course, every year a lot of people get the flu, and every year thousands of people die from it. We’ve known that ever since we started tracking disease outbreaks back in the late 1800s. The current H1N1 virus isn’t any more deadly than most of the other flu strains – almost all of the people that get it recover without medical intervention. H1N1 is also no more contagiouse than a ‘normal’ flu strain – something else that we’ve known since very early in the ‘outbreak’.

What the media reported: If you get swine flue YOU’RE GOING TO DIE! Swine flue is SO contagious that if you’re anywhere near someone that has it YOU WILL DIE FROM IT!

Now don’t get me wrong, Swine Flue is real. There IS a new strain, and it certainly unpleasant to get the flu. But lets be realistic about this: the flu makes the rounds every year. Some people die from it, most don’t. Big deal. The current H1N1 does have some scientific interest – it is another demonstration of how viruses can jump from a host species to a new host, and how carriers of multiple viruses can act as a breeding ground that allow the viruses to swap DNA. This is all stuff we already know, but it is a great “in the field” example of stuff that we normally see in the lab under controlled conditions. So what that really means is that the real news story about H1N1 is really something that would interest a small population of virologists (people  that study viruses). Of course, a 20 second “science is cool” news bite doesn’t generate ratings, and this is a story that can be twisted into a media frenzy. It will be interesting to see if this particular media lie lasts as long as the stupidity surrounding the Large Hadron Collider.