LINK: Uri Anvery's Weekly Column

http://avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html

Equal Protection Against School Corporal Punishment: Based On Admitted Lack Of Necessity

http://nospank.net/n-u88.htm

Admitted lack of necessity for school systems to use corporal -- admitted because the option is supposedly given to student (supposedly because outside circumstances often force the option against their will) is the easiest argument that physically beating violates 14th Amendment based equal protection of the law (against physically beating except in self defense).

The Equal Protection Clause was put in place to insure that 13th Amendment freed African Americans would not be treated as second-class citizens. Now children at school or home are the only class of persons exempted from normal criminal law protection against being painfully beaten with the paddle invented to torture slaves – while still sending them right back to labor.

There are two compelling motives that I know for exempting children at home from equal protection – neither of which has the slightest bearing on school administration:
First: keeping crackpot government rules and employees out of the familial sanctuary. Schools usually are the government – at least they are not the home.
Second – very esoteric psychological: children who get out of control of parents think nobody cares about them, don’t care about themselves (very strange, very true and very devastating) and become easy prey to every street temptation (talking robbery and burglary!). Boys remain fully in the emotionally dependent stage all the way until 18 1/2 (switches off over a week in my observation). Better for them to be beaten at home than to get totally out of (their own) control and end up behind bars – better for everyone else too. Teachers cannot have a supportive relationship with 25 or 500 kids.

If many equally situated schools admit no need for corporal punishment then the burden should be on schools which inflict on it’s kids what would be a serious criminal act on anyone else (e.g., adult convicts) to prove a compelling need. As I said above, schools that make it optional for students have no compelling interest case to make at all.

Fundamental right to equal protection against unbearably painful beatings = compelling interest needed to override this right. Roe v. Wade established this balancing precedent – a compelling interest test -- with the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. *

[ * Roe v. Wade side-stepped possible human life at any stage (admitted “judiciary is not in a position to determine when life begins”) which looks like a compelling state interest if ever there was one – switched off to “may not by adopting one theory of life override the rights”: a never heard of before or since "consensus test." Hint: medical consensus -- one week under which we find what Roe was hiding from.]

For a more comprehensive treatment click on: Corporal Punishment in Schools: Economic, Liable, Practical, Ethical, Constitutional?

Change Timex Easy Reader Battery -- How To Close Back

--First; to open the watch, look around the edge of the case (back) for a very lightly etched triangle shape – which points to the not very large slot into which to insert the point of a pen knife (thick enough, but not too thick) to pop it open. You will likely find the point at one o’clock, if the stem is nine o’clock – probably adjacent to one of the wrist band holding arms. This is because the opening for the knife point is so insubstantial that you really need to lean the back of the knife against one of the band arms for leverage to pop the watch open.

(Try to remember to line the insert slot – triangle point – up against one of the arms when you pop the watch back closed -- so you can open it again.)

--Second; closing the watch back up; the big problem.

If you try squeezing the back into the case from both sides you will end up in eternal see-saw with one side popping out when the other pops in.

The trick is to start with both thumbs together on one side and gradually work them around the back in opposite directions – without letting either side come up (this takes fierce pressure) until both thumbs meet again on the opposite side, at which point that side will pop in without the opposite side popping out.

This takes so much pressure that I faced the crystal down on a paperback book (to give the crystal a little protection from the little bit of give on the part of the book) and used the weight of my body to keep both thumb points fully pressed in as I worked my way around to the other side.

When I got a bigger Timex model with the same closing problem I had to use grip both ends of the handle of a substantial hammer to press down with enough pressure to pop it closed.


[I moved this post to its own blogspot a year ago but I now I have moved it back here because I think that a post gets more hits on a blogspot that gets other hits.]

Juvenile Delinquency: Causes and (quick?) Treatment -- and Prevention

Juvenile Delinquency: Causes, (quick?) Treatment -- and Prevention

Five or six weeks of intensive attention -- at least an hour a day (useful example, driving lessons) – during which six weeks the youngster’s crime spree will not slow down one iota – can turn the most out of control delinquent completely around -- only at the very end -- in my few experiences (no books, no magazine articles, no studies involved; just my personal observations of very unexpected reality).

Here is why and how I think the process of intensive attention works:
--First crazy observation: Boys under 18 1/2 years of age are in the emotionally dependent stage for all practical purposes as much as if they were 12 years old.
--Second: The emotionally dependent stage turns off like a light switch, over about a week’s time (as nearly as I can observe -- a pure social instinct thing).
--Third: If kids in the emotionally dependent stage think (mistakenly about half the time) that nobody cares about them, they literally will not care about themselves: therefore cannot be deterred by any threat of punishment – more out of their own control than anything else (easier to imagine at 12 than at 18).
--Fourth crazy thing: Boys who are simply out of the control of loving guardians (e.g., weak mother’s or relatives) get every bit as what I call “hysterically alienated” as boys from the worst neglectful environments (again, easier to imagine with the worst neglected).
--Fifth: Unlike the two or three decades of positive socialization it takes to dissipate the paranoia that underlies heavy heroin or alcohol addiction, it takes a mere five or six weeks of intensive attention to turn the craziest, out of control delinquent completely around.
--Sixth: The change comes all in one day – I call it “Invasion of the Body Snatchers syndrome” – not gradually. This really drives you crazy near the end when you have established a great supportive relationship with the kid but he still goes out robbing every night – until.

How to get started establishing a supportive relationship (warning: you are adopting a child psychologically – full responsibility -- or it wouldn't work):
You have to start out kissing the kid’s behind and telling him whatever he wants to hear. Say anything opposing him for the first week to ten days and he will go running off: truly hysterical. Gradually you get the kid under your thumb: supportive relationship. Then wait for the new kid (possibly even a whole new personality) to wake up one morning! Crazy experience; nothing you could predict.


[I moved this essay on its own blogspot a year ago but I now have moved it back here because I think that a post attracts more hits if it is on a blogspot that gets other hits.]

If special education students receive corporal punishment disproportionately...

http://nospank.net/n-u88.htm

If special education students receive corporal punishment disproportionately, as is widely reported -- even though most all administrations would probably want to go easier on them -- that just proves their misbehavior is related to their developmental difficulties and therefore they should never be beaten at all.

PS. A disproportionate amount of school misbehavior may be linked to -- guess what? -- home grown behavioral impediments.

For a more comprehensive treatment click on: Corporal Punishment in Schools: Economic, Liable, Practical, Ethical, Constitutional?

Practical Reparative (Conversion) Therapy: Gay to Bi?

In the late 1970s, having a gay teenage boy lived with me for a year taught me that gays perceive what we see as the big male ego in women – and are dismissive of any such notion about men. He and his best buddies would be all salutes and careful stepping around any older woman but we think nothing of stepping on male toes. Since then, I have found that anyone who gets in my space with no idea they are getting in my face is always homosexual (should be easily observable to males – annoying :-]).

Exact reverse image definition: gays naturally expect any woman to come all over any girl friend who has the “temerity” to poke harmlessly into “HER (!) pocketbook” – but will never anticipate any such “MY (!) pocket” thunder from males (gay males can be ultra sensitive about behavior which aggravates males – reminds me of the story you only have to show something to a trained bear once – avoiding a lot of trouble).

Back then, only in curiosity, I asked a psychiatrist whom I was consulting on this boy and others whether gays could be switched straight. He response was: “I can treat a homosexual so he can make it with a sympathetic member of the opposite sex.”

Recently I was thinking what a fantastic boon it would be for 10% of eighth-grade boys and 5% of the girls if knowledge of, what I presumed to be widely understood half-way switch therapy, were widely known to the public. We could have orientation switching clinics like we now have head ache and back ache clinics (for more of my megalo notions see my blogspot noted below). Upon researching the internet I discovered the universal presumption seemed to be the very opposite -- generally relating to with switching all the way to straight; mostly for religious motives.

Two things argue to me in favor of routine switching to switch-hitter:
One: Why may not gay males, for example, to be instructed via some creative technique to…
…see in a match between their own personal craz ego behavior and the craz territorial ego they up until now see in other persons with female bodies -- and then, extrapolate some of that match to other persons with their own gender’s bodies…
…thereby automatically dialing down their territoriality ego image of females proportionately as they dial up their ego awareness of males – an innate sliding scale may be the key to success here. No one on earth sees the full craz ego in both males and females – nor zero craz ego in both males and females. AC/DC gender identification in my humble observations have always had this proportional-sliding scale characteristic.
Two: AC/DCs I have known whose same-sex attraction is based on identification (not paranoia of the opposite sex nor being cooped up only with their own sex) have had a wide range of in-ability to perceive my craz territorial ego – from almost gay level to almost straight – also leading me to suspect that any weakening of one-way sex identification innately leads to two-way attraction.

Again, a serious percentage of desperate eighth-graders would kill for part-way switching of their sex orientation. I have no idea how the psychiatrist I was consulting accomplished what he accomplished (was not going to ask him to make me a doctor either).

I have looked up “reparative therapy” web sites and their convoluted explanations for homosexuality: e.g., “pseudo self-affirmation.” Perhaps transfer is how their therapy gets some results. Limbic law: repress any emotion (anxiety, eros, whatever) and it will surface in another form – innate feelings, like anything else, cannot be made to just fade away and disappear into nothing.

Occam’s razor: the image of a dichotomy of craz territorial ego between the two genders is genetically preset. Homosexuality is simply the reverse polarity of heterosexuality in the dichotomy department.

Only therapeutic question that may remain: can somebody conjure up a way to at least partially get across to homosexuals that the male gender possesses more substantial craz territorial than they perceive now and the female gender less than they perceive now (keeping in mind that, in so far as such ego resides in females heterosexuals are totally blind).

Limbic law: A male is unable to sexually “take possession” of the entire body of a person who will go out of his mind merely over “WHOSE (!) pocket” – or pocketbook -- that is and a female can only “yield possession” of her body by the same species of territorial ego. Blur the sex identification line of gays and we may open up for them the option between marrying straight and burning (in the closet). :-)

Lincoln no way avoided the Civil War

Upon reading in Bruce Catton’s book “The Coming Fury” that the North could not go to war over an abstraction – but that it took at least one military flashpoint (e.g., retaking a captured federal fort: Sumpter? – I haven’t gotten that far) – it occurred to me that if others understood this principal then Lincoln of all people surely did.

IOW, Lincoln’s protestations that he had no interest or intention of interfering with slavery where it already existed (only wanted to prevent slavery moving to the territories – possibly to hold off secession, which could potentially make ending slavery much more difficult?) deliberately took the North into civil war by not avoiding said flashpoint.

Lincoln showed equivalent psychological understanding after the New York draft riots when he warned off creating a commission to discover its origins – to avoid reminding its violating perpetrators why they rioted and chance starting them up again – in his humorous way with: “One rebellion at a time is all we can handle conveniently.”

The way cloudy human motives work may be very difficult to start a war over an abstraction: succession. But once a small action results and leads to more actions building up people have no trouble getting into it gung-ho. An equal twentieth century example of blurry war motives is how bombing German cities in desperation to survive (not without moral qualms – the chief of the RAF strategic bombing was pointed left out of post-war celebrations) led to massive bombing of populated cities in totally helpless, surrounded by water Japan.

600,000 killed could mean as many as 3,000,000 killed, maimed or wounded. That represented about 40% of the military age males in the nation. This also gives the lie to idea that more than preserving the union was more at stake in Northerners' minds than ending slavery. If the South had broken off over live style differences – no slavery existed – in the manner of French Canada breaking off from British Canada, it seem unlikely that the North would have been willing to get into such a bloody fight.

Not that people would think either scenario through consciously. It is just that breaking away to commit a grave crime on millions of people represents a bigger inherent threat to our sense of social security than breaking away over cultural differences.

Repeat, Lincoln more than anyone else would have understood how to avoid civil war – if he really did not want to free the slaves at any cost.

Reading how the South was faced with a situation where its peculiar institution must come to an end in 1860 – no matter how wrenching it would be to them reminds me of Israel’s situation today on ethnically cleansing the so-called West Bank and making life as impossible as possible in so-called Gaza (IOW, the 20% left of the Palestinian homeland after Israel squeezed most of them out of the other 80% -- when the UN said take only 55%).

Their way of life must surely end in a nuclear armed Arab world. I am sure that if nuclear war starts in the Mid-East (today’s Israelis have become just as crazy as any Arabs) that it will come here to the USA. It can’t be avoided; they amount to the 51st state to all Arabs not just the crazy ones (see 9/11).

LINK -- 'Cash for...' and the year's other clunkers by Allan Sloan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/16/AR2009111603775.html

Corporal Punishment (Paddling) in Schools: Economic, Liable, Practical, Ethical or Constitutional?

[3 second illustration: http://nospank.net/paddler3.wmv]

Corporal punishment in schools: economic, legal, practical, ethical or constitutional?

Economic: internet discussions on corporal punishment are replete with parents relating how they intended to move to a particular locale only to learn the school systems physically punished children there and switched to safer area.

In the now famous TV episode an otherwise progressive principal delivers gasp producing paddle blows to not especially disobedient kids; somewhere on line last summer I read an elementary school handbook (cannot to track it down now – changed under public attention?) that required younger children to carry demerit on their person and prescribed they would be paddled for even one lateness, as if they had gone over the limit, if they lost their card; a former Booneville, Mississippi special education teacher is now suing in federal court for not having her contract renewed over refusal to beat autistic children.

What educated, progressive parent (the kind every community works hard to attract) would move their children to a locality with such systematically callous school punishments? * And the more corporal punishment dies out the more objectionable it can seem to progressive parents wherever it is left.

[late note: ...all of which could affect teacher's salaries...]
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Legally liable: according to a Booneville school handbook that I also read on line a student will be advised in person that the next infraction may result in corporal punishment -- if they are about reach their quota. Arkansas state law (6-18-503) prescribes that schools must follow published rules for corporal punishment including, and I quote "follow warnings that the misbehavior will not be tolerated."

As I see it statutes allowing corporal punishment are a an exception to normal prohibitions against assault with a weapon -- making any step outside the published rules a step into criminal assault culpability – in easy reach of law suits, even if not likely to see prosecution.

The boy in the TV episode made all his tardy infractions in one day (had a silly day escorting a girl too far to her class before trying to make it on time to his own class). There is no way he could have been warned before the last infraction because the administration could not have known in time.

The class president girl may not have been warned personally before her last tardy -- she was normal faced weekday detention for her next offense. She ended up with Saturday school with the half-day off corporal punishment option because she got sick at the end of the school day. Nobody might have expected she would need a warning – just speculation on both; but both illustrate easy legal slip up potential. ***

Beating younger kids for a lone infraction because they do not have their infraction card in their possession could plausibly be seen by a court as beating a child for no real infraction (normal expectation should be a number of lost cards a school year); even parents may not legally hit for nothing) – you never know how courts will see things until you get to court.
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Practical: concealed psychological trauma. Cops and psychiatrists can tell you there are a lot more damaged individuals around than psychologically naive school teachers and administrators might ever guess – cops because they deal with such folks and the problems they cause all day long. I don’t know how much shrinks really know about what goes on in patients’ heads or what to do about it but they see nothing but such problems all day long.

Paranoids (potential serious alcohol abusers and heroin addicts) fail to perform tasks because in their super-self conscious state they do everything to satisfy others – never for their own satisfaction; robbing them of the satisfaction of accomplishment. Substances liberate them from we “heavy supervisors" so they can normal gratifications (the real addiction). To use hold'em poker nomenclature: a kid who perpetually fails to do homework or show up on time may reasonably be put on a paranoid hand. Last thing in the world you want to give such is violent beatings.

Kids who don’t care about themselves because they perceive (about half the time incorrectly) that nobody adult cares about them is the classic description of a juvenile delinquent (talking robbery and burglary) -- more out of their own control than anything else. Boys are in the emotionally dependent stage until 18 1/2 and are very prone to this level of what I call hysterical alienation (dependence switch off seems to come over about a weeks time in my observation); girls mature a year or year and half earlier. More wrong candidates for adult beatings.

Girls who think take paddling as sexual abuse (maybe even with female paddlers and witnesses) are another no-no category (striped much more invasive stripped?). Kids who formerly lived where corporal punishment was out of the question often take it (subjectively) as the most violent of personal insults (parents too!) – even some kids who aren’t new to it (striped more outrageous than stripped? -- how many hate teachers all their grown lives for “over quick” punishments?"). **** In poker terms we are building up a lot of inside straight and three-flush draws; not one thousandth of one percent stuff -- and I do not even have professional training to make up a comprehensive list; just reporting what I have seen in my personal 65 years.

And we haven’t even gotten to teachers with bad motives. One out of 14 Catholic priests has been accused of molesting children (incurable molesting does not come from the strain of celibacy – it is better to marry than to molest – these guys brought their problems to the seminary with them). How many teachers have some interest in seeing their own or opposite sex children bend over? How many are just plain mean (“many are called but few are chosen” applies everywhere) – or just neurotic – or something else this nonprofessional cannot conjure up (or all of the above)? More gut shot draws adding up.

First to no harm: given all the potential serious harm of school beatings -- if they are optional to the student, therefore admittedly not needed by the school – there is no excuse to continue the practice. Even students who are never struck complain of “living their school years in fear”: yet another developmental risk.
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Ethical: The same principal who smashes away on kids for being late (not usually an animal) might feel unable to beat an adult the same way for breaking into school, breaking into lockers and spray painting cars in the parking lot all at the same time. Something goes missing when we are not beating social equals or something (we are talking dumb social instinct here).

If the principal's boss paddled him for the above mentioned crimes the principal would not hate him. If the principal's boss paddled him for being late the principal would hate him -- a violent assault over efficiency, mere office management.

Let principals contemplate these contradictions (and why some kids hate them forever).
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Constitutional -- equal protection: To justify use of what is ordinarily considered a violent felony beating to discipline students, several students would have to be acting up so disruptively -- in many classes; not just one -- that the school could no longer perform its function: a legitimate self-defense argument.

If just one student is acting up in just one classroom, that class may be protected -- may be able to continue performing its function -- by removing the student either by suspension or expulsion.  Whether beating is better for the student than suspension or expulsion is not the proper equal protection concern -- would at least be a completely different equal protection question than self-defense in the face of an immediate threat.

It should be obvious that beating kids for being late for school or not doing homework, etc. should be a complete equal protection non-starter.

Courts these days are mostly sacrificing individual rights in fear of harming bureaucratic interests.  Whether beating or suspending is better for the student (talking about one-student disruption) is not likely to be a motivating concern for them.  In any case how can legislatures -- in the light of equal protection concern -- legitimate violently beating one class of people for their own good?

There are two compelling motives that I know for exempting children at home from equal protection – neither of which has the slightest bearing on school administration:
First: keeping crackpot government rules and employees out of the familial sanctuary. Schools usually are the government – at least they are not the home.
Second – very esoteric psychological: children who get out of control of parents think nobody cares about them, don’t care about themselves (very strange, very true and very devastating) and become easy prey to every street temptation (talking robbery and burglary!). Boys remain fully in the emotionally dependent stage all the way until 18 1/2 (switches off over a week in my observation). Better for them to be beaten at home than to get totally out of (their own) control and end up behind bars – better for everyone else too. Teachers cannot have a supportive relationship with 25 or 500 kids.

Fundamental right to equal protection against unbearably painful beatings = compelling interest needed to override this right. Roe v. Wade established this balancing precedent – the compelling interest test -- for the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. *
PS. If special education students receive corporal punishment disproportionately, as is widely reported -- even though most all administrations would probably want to go easier on them -- that just proves their misbehavior is related to their developmental difficulties and therefore they should never be be beaten for it.



http://nospank.net/n-u88.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bclr5oMk3DE

Ureka! Easily and safely divert or even vaporize any size giant asteroid?

Eureka! How to easily and safely divert and even vaporize any size giant asteroid?

Gently land a nuclear reactor core on the side of the asteroid you want it to move away from. Withdraw control rods and allow the reactor to melt down. As the core evaporates everything below the shaft it is boring the gaseous rock will shoot out the top: moving the asteroid in the opposite direction with equal force.

An asteroid of the size that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs has a gravity is about 1/600 of earth's. (Such an asteroid would be about the size of Mt. Everest. The pull is seemingly out of proportion to the mass of the earth because the surface is so much closer to the center -- the gravity does not have a chance to "spread out.")

When the core reaches gravitational center it will continue to evaporate rock all around it which could conceivably keep sinking into the superheated core instead of the other way around. If the size of the reactor core relative to the size of the asteroid were sufficient it might be possible for one or many superheated cores to evaporate an entire asteroid if the core or cores don't run out of fuel before the asteroid runs out of rock -- sort of like a reverse black hole.