Vangor: . I and many other people feel the same problems you do, but don't feel confined by it, we need to alter it and make it work more properly, agreed?

The people with power don't want it altered. And it's the people with power who are the only ones who have the legal means to do anything about it.

Howie_Feltersnatch: It's the batshiat crazy loons with the "The planes were really CGI special effects" theories that tarnish everything.

Yep.
And I wonder how many of them are shills on a payroll, purposely trying to poison the well. Along with the "let. it. go." people.

The thing that bugs me about the article is this: where does the school get off on deeming the visited sites "inappropriate"? They can disagree all they want, and they can present the inquiring student with opposing views. But this is censorship of the vilest sort. Pure indoctrination into mindless groupthink. The official story is also a "conspiracy theory".

Vangor: the psychiatric evaluation is disturbing to allow, and there is time set aside for web surfing.

The checkboxes on that school form are CYA for the school personnel filling in the paperwork. It's there to prevent lawsuits for when the kid comes in the next week with a handgun and starts plinking away at his school chums, so the school board can say , "look, we *told* you he needed counseling." It's to make the parents take an active response to events happening in school or accept whatever the school decides is proper.

The employee at the school filled out the form to get on paper what the problem was and what the employee thought was the solution. The employee was *not* a school psychiatrist. It's *not* a diagnosis, anymore than a school nurse calling home and saying, "Your child was injured at school - I think you should take him to see a doctor."

Actually, with the Democrats in control of Congress, they might actually have a prewar intelligence investigation about Iraq, and possibly a pre-9/11 intelligence investigation.


The democrats aren't going to do a damn thing. You have a country that is not only overwhelmingly against the direction in Iraq, they are completely fed up with lies and abuse and corruption. Not so much the acts themselves, as the having to hear about it part. People are sick of having no faith in their gov't. They want sunshine blown up their asses again. It felt good when everyone though everything was peachykeen. That's what the democrats are going to concentrate on. They are going to brand themselves as the party that is bipartisan. They'll brand themselves as the "uniters". It's an enviable position to be in because you get branded "the people that get things done". If they go on a republican style witch hunt with their own ken starr style douchbag, then they'll "be just as bad as the republicans". They can't risk that stigma. It would be shiatting away their excellent position. However....

If by some miracle, the public started demanding hearings, they'd comply. The last thing they can afford to become right now is "the new obstructionists".

bleh.. sorry about the bold.

If they were truly concerned with covering their asses then they shouldn't allow free internet time. They don't have to worry about what the kids are looking at and don't have to decide what is "best" for the children to be exposed to.

Easy solution. If it isn't related to classwork then they shouldn't be looking it up.

Q: Did any of you Austinites or anyone living in the vicinity who gets Austin stations recall seeing anything about this on the local news? I don't.

I just emailed KVUE's news department with the link and a run-down from that site.

Hopefully they'll see the stupidity in this, as well as how the school is over-reacting about this, and that they're out-of-bounds on what they're allowed to do.

Its not like he brought a gun to school, threatened anyone, or was researching explosives.

Sometimes I hate living in Texas. A lot of the shiat that goes on here is so backwater.

/Would move to Connecticut if I could afford it.
//Connecticut not known for their tech market.
///Sure is prettier though.

czarangelus

Oh, you're a scientologist? And all this time I thought you were a muslim...

czarangelus

You and everyone like you are living in a fantasy world.

I hope you're happy there, I really do, because all you're doing is wasting a lot of time accomplishing nothing, when you could be helping address real issues.

Kumana Wanalaia: Oh, you're a scientologist? And all this time I thought you were a muslim...

*LOL* I'm a Gnostic.

d000fus: You and everyone like you are living in a fantasy world.

One of us is. How much television do you watch?

What kind of 10 year old even cares about this kind of stuff. He must be messed up.

czarangelus

Heh, ok, I'll remember that. The things I hear you say are so beyond the pale that I never even bothered to look at your profile. I can't say that I have a sudden newfound respect for you.. but I'll remember that I had you pegged wrong.

Philosophy... ain't that somethin'.

czarangelus

One of us is. How much television do you watch?

The ad hominem attack is a sign of a weak position, and is irrelevant.

Do you have any statements of actual value to make?

/I don't have a T.V.

the_zodiac: I just emailed KVUE's news department with the link and a run-down from that site.

Awesome. Might get some coverage.

d000fus: The ad hominem attack is a sign of a weak position, and is irrelevant.

I don't see whereas that was an ad hominem attack... people who watch a lot of television live in a fantasy world, since what's on television is generally nothing but mythology (including and especially the news.)

Maybe you just don't know as many upper middle class idiots as I do, because I can assure you that the problems I'm talking about are endemic.

d000fus: The ad hominem attack is a sign of a weak position, and is irrelevant.

um... *scrolls up a few comments*

You and everyone like you are living in a fantasy world.

And that little ad hominem/blanket statement without a shred of evidence to back it up.

czarangelus

"upper middle class idiots"

Interesting.....

On a similar note, I remember in 8th Grade I was nearly kept from graduating because one of my classmates saw me browsing a website that happened to have a tiling background of some Dante's Inferno-inspired paintings and had the word "Hell" in the title. It was a website full of one of my friends' artwork (which wasn't depressive, encouraging of suicide or satanic activities in any way, a lot of it was just stuff a sane 13-year-old would draw... animals, cartoon character and junk).

I was literally INTERROGATED for two hours by the vice principal, who then badgered me, told me I was sub-intelligent, told me I didn't have any friends because God didn't want me to, blah blah blah...

Once she was satisfied with the amount of insulting she did and that the website I found had absolutely nothing incriminating in it, she sent me out of her office.

Four years later, she was at my high school graduation. She made a comment about how shocked she was to see me in the top 10 of my graduating class. I told her that she was wrong about a lot of things, including myself and God, then promptly gave her the finger. She seemed too shocked by it, really. Almost as if she had fogotten she did that to me, as if she'd done it so many times to so many students that she just deluded herself to thinking that I was "such a nice girl" and a wonderful example of Alumnus from her hell-hole school.

....

Long story short, a lot of principals/vice principals are full of shiat, and I think a big part of growing up to being something more than a sheep is the war you wage against their ideas, policies, and opinions of you and proving them wrong.

what the school did was ridiculous. a typical overreaction by "educated" noobs.

what the "loose change" crowd does is a seperate issue. spreading ridiculous agitprop innuendo that discredits any kind of alternate thinking.

czarangelus, go out and get drunk, smoke some weed, hit on a hot babe and try and get laid if you're lucky. maybe then you'll get over this "it's 1984" paranoia BS.

//gives secret handshake to DarthBrooks

HowlingFrog

And that little ad hominem/blanket statement without a shred of evidence to back it up.

Opinions don't need evidence, statements of fact do.

czarangelus

Perhaps your knowledge of history is a bit fuzzy, but voluntary ignorance of disturbing truths by the masses has been a feature of society for a very long time.

Albino Wino: what the "loose change" crowd does is a seperate issue. spreading ridiculous agitprop innuendo that discredits any kind of alternate thinking.

Who said I was throwing in my lot with the loose change crowd? I didn't talk about 9/11 at all.

czarangelus, go out and get drunk, smoke some weed, hit on a hot babe and try and get laid if you're lucky. maybe then you'll get over this "it's 1984" paranoia BS.

Right, that's exactly what the government, big corporations et al want you to do. Channel your energy into mundane, materialistic pursuits so you don't see the rotten superstructure holding it all together.

Dusk-You-n-Me: Uh oh. Two independent thought alarms in one day. The students are overstimulated. Willie! Remove all the colored chalk from the classrooms.

I warned ya! Didn't I warn ya?! That colored chalk was forged by Lucifer himself!

I'm with czarangelus

All of the housewives on my street are medicated and the elementary school activly pushes parents to get an ADHD diagnosis and medication for their kids.

School administration being subbed out to Rupert Murdoch. "Principal Fox Nues, call for you in the Main Office"

czarangelus: Right, that's exactly what the government, big corporations et al want you to do. Channel your energy into mundane, materialistic pursuits so you don't see the rotten superstructure holding it all together.

Balance is what's important. Spend all your time seeing "the rotten superstructure holding it all together" and you lose your perspective. You start seeing patterns in random coincidence. Obsession does not free your mind, it consumes your mind.

czarangelus

Right, that's exactly what the government, big corporations et al want you to do. Channel your energy into mundane, materialistic pursuits so you don't see the rotten superstructure holding it all together.

I get it. You're just a forum troll.

No one with any sense can actually believe such incredible nonsense.

P.Wellington

I'd move if I were you.

Kumana Wanalaia: /poke poke
//I'm messing with texas

Don't.

Mess.

With Texas.

people who watch a lot of television live in a fantasy world

It really depends on what you choose to watch.

Maybe it's more accurate to say that those who watch too much escapist television are just willingly ignorant.

Albino Wino: what the "loose change" crowd does is a seperate issue. spreading ridiculous agitprop innuendo that discredits any kind of alternate thinking.

Your "loose change crowd" includes physics professors, civil engineers, airline pilots, several former government officials and at least one former CIA chief.
No, Martha, it's not all crackpots living in one-room cabins in Montana and gullible kids who "hate the President".

Nightjars: Balance is what's important.

I agree with that. What makes you think that I'm not also pursuing a kind of balance? But I don't seek anything to mitigate tyranny.

d000fus: I get it. You're just a forum troll.

No one with any sense can actually believe such incredible nonsense.

Maybe the fact that you don't have a television is the problem. Watch a solid thirty minutes of television, commercials and all, and just see how they want you to act, what they want you to buy, what kind of person they think yo u should be. Your success is dependent on what kind of car you drive. Your talent is dependent on how much money you make. Eat McDonald's, but try our new diet pill to lose weight! And if it gives you cancer, hire me to sue the company that made it! It's sick.

HowlingFrog: Your "loose change crowd" includes physics professors, civil engineers, airline pilots, several former government officials and at least one former CIA chief.

I find the most credible "conspiracy theory" to be the idea that it's blowback from all our meddling in the region in the 80's and 90's. I can't, however, come up with an explanation for 9/11 in which the USA does not have culpability.

I don't think this is conspiracy theory time at all. The psychological eval is probably for ADD meds I would guess. The sites are called "inappropriate" most likely because they're not something that's part of the teaching curriculum, so it's not work for an assignment. I doubt the teacher is reporting him to Fatherland Homeland Security.

Here's the scenario. Kid's in class, and the teacher is crawling along at the pace of the slowest moron, showing them step by step how to navigate a freaking website. The kid mentioned in the article has more brains than a cabbage, and gets bored, so he starts surfing sites. What he surfed isn't the issue here, it's the fact that he wasn't paying attention like a good little boy. You can see this in the last written section of the report card where the teacher says he was lectured about not surfing around to satisfy his curiosity during class and if he can't he'll lose computer access. Par for the course AFAIK.

With teachers who write things like "All staff... have worked continuously with Mark throughout the school year to help him have a successful school year." combined with the atrocious handwriting suggests to me he's in a school with 3rd rate educators, and he's bored off his ass because of weakest link syndrome.

He doesn't need counseling, and he doesn't need meds. He doesn't need to vanish to Gitmo, he just needs to go to a better school where they don't bore him to death.

Unlike Loose Change, 9/11 Press For Truth doesn't make assumptions about what happened. It's people who lost loved ones on 9/11 raising TONS of UNANSWERED questions.

czarangelus: Maybe the fact that you don't have a television is the problem. Watch a solid thirty minutes of television, commercials and all, and just see how they want you to act, what they want you to buy, what kind of person they think yo u should be. Your success is dependent on what kind of car you drive. Your talent is dependent on how much money you make. Eat McDonald's, but try our new diet pill to lose weight! And if it gives you cancer, hire me to sue the company that made it! It's sick.

Yes.
And that is precisely why I shut the tube off for good over 11 years ago.

"Right, that's exactly what the government, big corporations et al want you to do. Channel your energy into mundane, materialistic pursuits so you don't see the rotten superstructure holding it all together."

-----------

geez, guy, who peed in your oatmeal this morning? admittedly there are enormous changes and challenges ahead of us as a society, but if having a good time and appreciating feminine pulchritude is a mundane, materialist pursuit, sign me up!

life is short: be concerned, be active, communicate, be forever willing to learn, but there's something wrong if we don't take the time to drink a beer, hit a ball, bounce a baby on your knee etc. Seriously, guy, put down the action figures and the Emma Lazurus Biography and embrace the chaos.

//drinks glass of fresh children's blood while chanting the secret word...

Howie_Feltersnatch: Unlike Loose Change, 9/11 Press For Truth doesn't make assumptions about what happened. It's people who lost loved ones on 9/11 raising TONS of UNANSWERED questions.

GREAT link, everybody should really watch this.
Not knocking Dylan's work, but it's hardly definitive. More of a primer, and it has it's flaws.

And I wanna say something seperate from my 8th grade memories up there.

I used to work at my college Library. And wow, College Library! Yanno the amazing range of crap you can find there? Great stuff, really.... several copies of "Mein Kamph" to the entire range of Michael Moore's books, a bunch of stuff written by various Religious crazies... dozens of books about how being Gay will send you to hell, some other books about the history of Homosexuality in Western culture, stuff written by all the notable Marxist/Socialist/Communist leaders of the 19th and 20th centuries so on. Then there were all the books about "art", pictures detailing some of the 'Performance Art' of the 60s and 70s where some crazy chick unravels a scroll out of her vagina and reads it, standing naked and covered in paint before a huge audience. Books of photographs full of naked boys curled up with Mannequins, houses on fire and Japanese Prostitutes showing off their labias.

A lot of it would be crap you'd think should be banned by an educational institution. Some of it I wish I could have grabbed and thrown in the dumpster, hoping no one would remember it ever being in the library.

But then I realized, that the stuff written by the "crazies" and the anti-government flag-wavers and revoltists need to be circulated. As is the Bible, Mein Kamph, and so on.

This stuff needs to have wide access, if anything but give those who are trying to learn about the wide scope of Human ideas. If the one who seeks is smart enough, they'll know not to fall into line with the ideas that they're researching and gleam their own ideas about what they're looking at. This is how one's girth of Human understanding and personal knowlege grows.

And that's why we should be glad we have the internet. God forbid the 5th Grader gets punished for looking at websites with opinions that oppose the mainstream ideals. Sure, it's not very likely that he was looking at the sites for research or educational purposes, but what purpose does it serve if the sites he was looking at get blocked? Dissenting opinion is not censorable material. Ever.

HowlingFrog: Your "loose change crowd" includes physics professors, civil engineers, airline pilots, several former government officials and at least one former CIA chief.

There are plenty of people with flawed theories in all fields of work.

Albino Wino: life is short: be concerned, be active, communicate, be forever willing to learn, but there's something wrong if we don't take the time to drink a beer, hit a ball, bounce a baby on your knee etc.

What makes you think I don't do these things? I just understand them in context - that they are fleeting pleasures in a world full of uncertainty and evil. I certainly won't sacrifice my ethos just to enjoy these pleasures for a few extra years.

czarangelus: I just understand them in context - that they are fleeting pleasures in a world full of uncertainty and evil.


Oh man.

TOTALLY.

>>>Clandestine Plans>>>

"What kind of 10 year old even cares about this kind of stuff. He must be messed up."

No. My older brother was interested in the JFK assassination and had many books on the subject. At 10 years old I was allowed to look at these and became interested too. After years of viewing all that evidence I came to a conclusion. Oswald acted alone. My brother still believes that their were others involved. I do too, but haven't found real evidence to support it.

Now with 9|11, that is a different story. I investigated that too. And for a while I was on the "Loose Change" side. But again, I dug deeper and realized that the terrorists acted alone. Yet I still believe that this administration left the door open for it to occur.

This all takes curiosity, investigation, reading and knowledge. Something any 10 year old should be doing and acquiring.

untrustworthy: There are plenty of people with flawed theories in all fields of work.

Absolutely.
And there are trained experts that answer directly to this administration, like NIST.

Scrophulous Barking Duck
Weird. I just don't understand why the school is upset. Do they think he's going to go berserk because he visited sites that question authority?

Public elementary school?

Yes.

Joe: But who would benefit from arresting a little kid?
Frank: Oh... ooh!... I'm getting a clue!

HowlingFrog: And there are trained experts that answer directly to this administration, like NIST.

NIST? You mean the National Institute of Standards and Technology? They support the official theory that the planes weakened the structures and caused the collapses.

on that we are in agreement. i would never want you to sacrifice your "ethos" for anything. unless it involved a priest, a lawyer and some captured Palestinian children.

on 9/11 of course there are unanswered questions that need to be addressed. but use the Socratic method, not the George Orwell one.

//that's not a plumber's van in front of your house, czar; we're watching you!

Albino Wino: but use the Socratic method, not the George Orwell one.

Dialectic is not better than rhetoric, they just have different purposes.