Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

More Public School Constitution Shredding

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I’ve written before about public schools shredding the Constitution, and now I’m going to write about it again. This time, the madness comes from Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, CA.

Five students were sent home from school yesterday under threat of suspension for the grievous offense of wearing clothes with depictions of the American flag on them . . . on Cinco de Mayo . . . at a school with a large Hispanic population. Apparently, in the alternate universe of Morgan Hill, California, wearing an American flag in the United States on a Mexican holiday in a U.S. public school is a very serious offense and can be considered ‘incendiary.’ I would laugh at the stupidity if the erosion of students’ civil liberties wasn’t such a serious issue.

In the United States, we have something called free speech. Under the First Amendment, no government may limit speech or expression except in certain limited circumstances (e.g., yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater when there isn’t a fire). Public schools are government entities and are thus bound by the First Amendment. This simple concept seems to be beyond the comprehension of countless public school teachers and administrators. Sadly, the same people charged with teaching our students about civics, liberty, and history often seem to lack a basic grasp of the concepts themselves.

Even if wearing an American flag on Cinco de Mayo in the United States is somehow offensive (which seems pretty ludicrous to begin with), free speech includes the right to offend. If they want, those Hispanic students who were offended can wear Mexican flags on the 4th of July. Students can wear ‘Go Vegetarian!’ shirts on National Meat Day. Students can read from the Qur’an during the Christian Holy Week. That’s what free speech is all about!

We can say what we believe, whether the people around us agree or not. If they disagree, they can use their free speech rights to discuss it with me or make their own statements to the contrary. Public schools have a fundamental responsibility to teach students about these liberties and encourage their exercise, not to trample them.

Spam Madness!

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Spam is annoying . . . and I use ‘spam’ in its broadest possible meaning, excluding only the meat product after which it is named. I include unsolicited commercial email, telemarketing calls, junk mail, and countless variations thereof in my definition of ‘spam’ and I hate it all.

The U.S. government’s ‘do not call list‘ is one of the most useful things our federal government has done in decades, and it essentially eliminated the telemarketing calls when I signed up. I have yet to figure out any way of eliminating the others.

Probably 2/3 of the physical postal mail I receive is junk mail, and I see no way of stopping it. I get tons of spam email, though the vast majority of it is filtered out by my service provider and what little makes it through usually gets caught by the Thunderbird mail client.

Read more . . .

Nikola Tesla Predicted Cell Phones in 1909

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This is so cool. Nikola Tesla, the noted and influential inventor who contributed so much to early research and development of electricity, predicted cell phones . . . in 1909. It may have taken almost a century for his vision to come true, but it did.

Long before others were making similar predictions, Tesla said:

“It will soon be possible, for instance, for a business man in New York to dictate instructions and have them appear in type in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call from his desk and talk with any telephone subscriber in the world. It will only be necessary to carry an inexpensive instrument no bigger than a watch, which will enable its bearer to hear anywhere on sea or land for distances of thousands of miles.”

You can view the whole 1909 New York Times article over at Recombu.

Predicting the future is very dangerous work—you are much more likely to be wrong than to be right—but when somebody really hits the nail on the head, especially so far ahead of time, it’s always a little spooky.

‘Gallery Shortcode Style to Head’ Version 2.0

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Plugin Settings Screen

I just released version 2.0 of the ‘Gallery Shortcode Style to Head‘ plugin for WordPress. This is the first version with any major new features since I took over maintenance of the plugin.

By default, the plugin does the same thing it’s always done: when it’s activated, it moves the WordPress gallery CSS styles out of the body and into the head so it won’t break XHTML validation.

Version 2.0 gives you some additional flexibility though. There are two new options the plugin adds to Settings > Media in your your WordPress admin:

  • First, there’s a check-box that lets you disable the default styles entirely so you can control the gallery styles with your WordPress theme CSS, if you prefer.
  • Second, you can modify the default CSS styles to your liking right there in your WordPress admin.

Hope you like it. As always, contact me if you find any bugs or issues!

The Boy Who Cried ‘Car Bomb’

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Perhaps it is a sign of the times; when I got the report last night that New York’s Times Square had been shut down due to a suspicious vehicle, I ignored it. Suspicious vehicles and packages shut down public places all the time. It has become an inconvenient routine in New York and here in the D.C. metro area, and it is hardly newsworthy when it happens. When the reports were updated to say that the vehicle had been ‘smoking,’ I immediately thought the worst: maybe they had forgotten to get their oil changed.

It wasn’t until I woke up this morning and learned that the vehicle was loaded with flammable material like propane and gasoline that I finally believed this was an apparent attempt at a terror attack. Judging by the lack of media attention last night, most people had the same or similar thoughts to mine. We assumed it was nothing.

This proves to me that we’ve gone too far. Our supposed preparedness for attacks and disaster has rendered us numb, and thereby less able to deal with them when they really occur. This isn’t unique to terror attacks, though. Think about this: In most office buildings, people ignore fire alarms. Every time the workers have heard the alarm go off, it’s been a pointless drill or a false alarm that just inconveniences them for no reason whatsoever. One day, when the building is really on fire, people will sit at their desks ignoring the alarms until they see smoke or some other indication there’s a real problem—and by then it might be too late. Have regular fire drills made us safer?

Read more . . .

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.