We have yet another case of a student being punished for remarks made on Facebook. Tenth-grader Donny Tobolski described one of his teachers as a “fat ass who should stop eating fast food, and is a douche bag.” He was promptly suspended.
The insult was written after Tobolski was given an unusually heavy amount of biology homework. He wrote the comments on his home computer and after school hours. The first amendment did not stop Mesa Verde High School Principal Rick Messer from punishing Tobolski.
There is no question that his comments were inappropriate and disrespectful. There is no question that Messer should have called the parents and that they should have assured him that they would punish Donny and guarantee that he remove the posting. However, the use of suspension raises serious free speech issues.
We have seen a steady erosion of the free speech rights of students in the last decade. The Supreme Court accelerated that trend in its Morse decision. Former JDHS Principal Deb Morse suspended Frederick in 2002 during the Olympic Torch Relay for holding up a 14-foot banner across from the high school that read “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” The case ultimately led to the Supreme Court which ruled in Morse v. Frederick ruling in 2007 for the Board — a decision that I strongly disagreed with and one that has encouraged over-reaching by school officials into protected areas. Frederick, however continued to litigate, claiming among other things that his first amendment speech rights were violated under the Alaskan Constitution.
For a copy of the Morse decision, click here.
Civil libertarians hoped that Obama would appoint someone with a strong commitment to free speech and student rights. However, he appointed Sonia Sotomayor who was heavily criticized on the Second Circuit for her role in the Donniger case where she ruled against high school student Avery Doninger who contested her punishment for posting an objectionable message on an Internet site about Lewis Mills High School. When she objected to the cancellation of a school event in vulgar terms, school officials barred her from running for Senior Class secretary. In Doninger v. Niehoff, the Second Circuit upheld the right of school officials to punish students for out-of–school speech in a major blow to both the first amendment and student rights.
Increasingly, school officials are assuming the authority to police the out-of-school statements of students and punishing speech that they find objectionable (here). Teachers have also been disciplined for their own after-hours postings (here) and here).
We are raising a new generation of citizens in this increasing authoritarian environment of unchecked and at times capricious authority.
Source: ACLU
Jonathan Turley
What qualifies me is, among other things, my having studied biological pattern recognition methodologies under my thesis advisor.
I do not do “controlled, double blind studies because, for the work I do, controlled double blind studies are hopelessly contaminated with experimenter-induced bias.
When the work is completed and published, such of truth of my work which exists will be available for those who care to peruse.
From Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Third Edition, page 97 (the following excerpt pushes the boundaries of research fair use, alas)
“…There are, in principle, only three types of phenomena about which a new theory might be developed. The first consists of phenomena already well explained by existing paradigms, and these seldom provide either motive or point of departure for theory construction…”
[My work of this type of theory construction.- J. Brian Harris]
Also, op.cit, page 97, “But if new theories are called forth to resolve anomalies in the relation of an existing theory to nature, then the successful new theory must somewhere permit predictions that are different from those derived from its predecessor.”
The prediction? The truth within my work, once well understood, will forever end human war mongering by demonstrating that the cause of war mongering is of the form of, in terms of brain function, addictive delusion.
I am not, absolutely not, attempting to persuade anyone about anything here on this blawg, neither am I making arguments in the traditional adversarial principle sense.
That I am not doing as adversarial principle devotees expect is quite precisely why what I do is as though without rhyme or reason.
I have much success sharing my work with people who are, in the socioeconomic sense, powerless.
Which may be why it is reported in scripture that Jesus worked only with the underclass and why the overclass murdered him.
I do not overturn the tables of the temple money changers.
The story of Jesus informed me as to the utter folly of doing that.
Brian sez: “I have set out to learn what I am able t o learn regarding how other people sense, perceive and interpret, regarding themselves.
Doing the sort of work of my research tends to bring forth people’s unresolved inner conflicts.”
**********************************************
Ya gotta be kidding me. What in your background qualifies you to do the kind of investigation that takes a neurologist, psychiatrist or psychologist anywhere from ten to thirteen years of graduate school preparation to do? You ain’t Sigmund Freud, sport. BTW, have you ever even READ Freud? And if you did, what was your level of understanding? You emphasize that you are an engineer, and your writings reveal a very limited understanding of both law and psychology as one would expect of someone trained in engineering, not the medical or behavioral sciences. You know what it is like to be you, but do not presume to do a psychological analysis of anyone else. What “research” are you doing, as you claim? Are you doing controlled studies of a Stanley & Campbell design? I think not! Not going to fly. You can bloviate all you want, but in the end, you are still blowing smoke.
Opinions may vary, but facts don’t, Brian.
In attacking the underpinnings of civilization you are attacking one of the true mechanics of peace and freedom from tyranny. Namely, using processes and rules to adjudicate disputes instead of force. The adversarial process can and often does prevent wars, both large as nations and inter-personally small.
Your opinions as expressed are inherently antisocial.
Your facts are lies bound to your faulty premises in a perpetual loop of petitio principii.
Your opinion, just like your “work”, is advocating the purposeful destruction of civilization.
Opinions may vary.
Who would not wisely seek to destroy every war mongering society by replacing every such society with a society which wages war no more?
Doing the sort of “work” you do spreads lies about what is required to maintain civilization, fight tyranny and promote justice. Since your “work” has but one focus – spreading the idea that adversarial process isn’t required to maintain the rule of law – it attacks the very foundations of civilized society. Ergo, your “work” is the purposeful destruction of civilization.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Please carefully observe that I did not include you.
Otteray Scribe included you.
I merely mentioned his inclusion of you.
I have known of and understood of how other people sense, perceive, and interpret me since long before I began kindergarten.
Learning how people perceive and interpret me has nothing to do with my comments, nor do I seek to learn what others sense, perceive, or interpret regarding me.
I have set out to learn what I am able t o learn regarding how other people sense, perceive and interpret, regarding themselves.
Doing the sort of work of my research tends to bring forth people’s unresolved inner conflicts.
Mr. Harris,
I dislike being included in your group of “anti-me” people. I am not.
I went out of my way to allow you to see how others perceive you, namely myself. I thought it may be of value to you. I’m sorry, my mistake.
Carry on please. Or not – as you wish.
Success at last!
To my mind, Buddha is Laughing, Nate, Otteray Scribe, and TonyC. now make a sort of barbershop quartet.
I wonder if they have an engagement to sing in Sweeny Todd’s barber shop?
I hope not.
Bridge is best played with a foursome.
Found it!
I play the bridge.
Beginning of Message!
What BIL and Nate said. EOM.
Awwww. Another version of “I know you are but what am I.”
What I do know is law and legal history, sport. Unlike you, Engineering Boy. And I know for a fact that you’re full of shit on the topic of law and legalism. Adversarial process is the alternative for self-help and/or violence in dispute resolution. To be against adversarial process is to be against one of the fundamental underpinnings of civilization – an underpinning as necessary as agriculture. Dispute resolution via adversarial process has been a key component of every civilization since Sumer. But please, try to throw in “what about those civilizations before Sumer” again. Arguing against legalism with unknown and unverifiable civilizations as your basis is just as hysterically funny as your circular logic and made up terminology. Maybe Big Foot can swing by and pick you up in the UFO on the way to get Elvis and you guys can discuss the legal system of Atlantis over fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
BiL,
What is funny is that my thesis committee found other than as you (in your blissful ignorance regarding professional engineering?) apparently believe with such intense sincerity as is characteristic, as I read the scientific psychiatry literature, as being purely of the realm of trauma-induced delusion.
Were I to believe you have demonstrated the slightest trace of any comprehension of the work I do, I would have to worship you as A God Beyond All Possible Gods.
You know about me as even, so I observe you words to plausibly portend, nothing of existence can know about me.
That does explain the Wall Street Catastrophe very well. And it does explain why common people may decide to dethrone Kings of Delusion as now attempt to rule the world through destroying it.
I consider the following notion to be profoundly false: “Buddha is Laughing, Grand Poombah Terrorist King of Absolute Self-Referential Delusion”?
That is not at all my view, yet I can imagine the remote possibility of someone, someone not nearly of such personal integrity as has been given to me, interpreting what you have been writing in your comments about my life work in some such bizarre sort of manner.
Bioengineering is neither law nor psychology.
You aren’t qualified to do research in either area no matter how much you insist you are.
Keep lying though.
It’s funny.
When you become sufficiently aware of that which you have yet to learn, and set about learning it, you may begin to have a clue as to what cutting edge bioengineering research can be.
Of course, I am perfectly qualified to do the work I am doing, and, if it can ever be shown otherwise, I deserve the harshest most despicably cruel punishment the universe can ever provide.
Demonstrate that my work is deceptive and I shall do whatever needed that I be given such punishment as I justly deserve.
Not an engineer, of the Registered Professional sort. By law, thou hast no lawful right to assert that my work is other than proper engineering.
No one is going to persuade me one trace of a whit of significant error regarding my work who obviously is totally unqualified by law to find fault with the work being questioned by those who have no legal right to question it.
Making a structure of purported law such that Judge Porteus was impeached and convicted is about a good an impeachment and conviction of the Adversarial Principle as I imagine will ever be needed.
How does the belief system, at its central, essential core, of those who practice adversarial law differ in any meaningful way from the belief system of those who implacably built the adversarial systems of Buchenwald, Sobibor, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Chelmno, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Kolyma, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Trail of Tears, the reservations for First Peoples of the “American Continent” (and the list is too long for me to attempt to make complete)?
I find no fault with people or with any other aspect of existence.
I find no fault with cruelty and destruction, no matter how dastardly.
I find no fault with existence, for existence creates itself through its own prior existence.
I live, as I have always been given to live as an ordinary person whose life is always given only within the world of the promised second coming of Jesus.
I so live now, here.
I tell of my life within the world of the real, actual, here and now second coming of Jesus, and so state as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer who is working only within his professional competence boundary.
In world in which the process existence is its own ultimate creative process, with ex-nihilo ultimate beginning, a world which is in actuality, as in the Paul Tillich book title, The Eternal Now, what is, as it is, is what is necessary and sufficient, including millenia of sincere contrary belief and its beyond-unspeakably terroist-driven ilk, the life I actually life as an ordinary person has, methinks, not before been possible.
It has (finally?) become possible as my mere existence has made irrefutable.
So in other words, you’re not qualified to do the “research” you claim in any way, shape or form. So you, in an overabundance of lack of proof for your assertions, fallback to religious tenets. They’ve got a word for that in legal and psychological circles.
Bullshit.
Which to be clear, antisocial/anti-legal bullshit is the true name on your banner.
RE: Otteray Scribe, February 17, 2011 at 3:20 am
Brian, you are neither a psychologist or a lawyer. You are an engineer–a field that does not lend itself well to the kind of “research” you claim you are doing. You wrap yourself in your assertion that you are autistic, a condition that further lends itself to difficulty understanding the kinds of things you purport to study. Obviously you struggle with language, since your writing is often next to impossible to follow logically for all the asides and irrelevant material you insert. I agree with Nate. Now you know, I hope.
################################
I am not a licensed psychologist, and have never represented myself as such.
I am not an attorney-at-law, and have never represented myself as such.
I am licensed by the State of Wisconsin as a Registered Professional Engineer, No. 34106-6, and I work as, and only as, a Registered Professional Engineer.
Methinks some clarifications may be of use.
According to my grasp of law as related to Professional Engineering, only another Professional Engineer is deemed plausibly qualified to critique the work of any Professional Engineer.
To critique my work done in my licensed capacity as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer, one needs be a Registered Professional Engineer, so is my grasp of applicable law.
In Wisconsin, a Registered Professional, as a licensed professional, is required to know and understand the boundary of the engineer’s professional competence and, if straying outside the engineer’s professional competence boundary, the engineer puts at risk the engineer’s license.
I state, and state from within the boundary of my professional competence, that I do not work outside the boundary of my professional competence; said competence being established through the peer review process which culminated in my being granted the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Bioengineering, in part through the successful writing and defending before my committee of scientist-peers, the dissertation titled, “Mental Health and Mental Illness: Cause, Purpose, Cure, and Prevention; A Bioengineering Perspective,” University of Illinois at Chicago, defended in 1997, degree awarded in 1998. I state this as incontrovertible fact, not mere claim, under penalty of loss of my P.E. license.
Those who truly critique my work as a Registered Professional Engineer, please supply your P.E. registration information and substantiate your qualifications as a Regestered Professional Engineer with a Doctorate in Bioengineering which established your professional competence boundaries as including my professional competence boundaries, such that you are actually qualified, as a Registered Professional Engineer, to lawfully critique my work.
When the need for Professional Engineer Registration became well-recognized within the engineering profession, engineers engineered the applicable law so as to make unlawful the claim by non-Registered Professional Engineers that the work of any engineer is deceptive in any way or manner whatsoever. In that sense, the engineers out-engineered the lawyers, because the lawyers were, with a few exceptions, not engineers.
Within the boundary of my competence as a Professional Engineer, using the principles appropriate to Professional Engineering, I hereby put forth a few of my observations in accord with my grasp of Professional Engineering”
1. Engineering is the solving of practical problems, efficiently, effectively, and economically, using scientific principles.
2. Bioengineering is engineering applied to the phenomenon of life.
3. The phenomenon of life is comprised of that deemed alive and its substrate.
4. The phenomenon of life as that deemed alive and its substrate is the entire totality of existence.
5. My having the doctorate I actually have, and my observing that the structure of the Anglo-American Adversarial System has become antithetical to the public safety interest through unwitting human blunders, and my being licensed with the mandate that I hold paramount the public safety while working in, and only within, my professional competence boundary, doing so without deception is what I find my being licensed as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer mandates that I do, else I put in jeopardy my P.E. license standing.
6. The law profession, through its Adversarial Principle based structure demands of me with cataclysmic, dastardly impact that I live my life in purely abject denial of my Constitutional Right, in accord with the Wisconsin Constitution, to worship “Almighty God” according to the dictates of my conscience.
7. In accord with the Wisconsin Constitution, Article I, Section 19, I find that the Anglo-American Adversarial System of Jurisprudence has become none other than of “the evil one,” as told in Matthew 6:9-13, to wit:
“This is how you are to pray:
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread;
and forgive us our debts,
as we forgive our debtors;
and do not subject us to the test,
but deliver us from the evil one.”
That text of “The Lord’s Prayer” is found in “The New American Bible, on the back of the binding of which is printed, “Official Catholic Bible,” and it bears the Nihil Obstat and the Imprimatur.
8. I further state, at the peril of my Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer license, that my observation that the Adversarial Principle is none but the Evil One is stated as incontrovertible, demonstrable fact as a matter of bioengineering as applied using the scientific methods of biophysics, including neurological biophysics, and so state without equivocation. Thus, I find, as a Professional Engineer, and within the boundary of my professional competence, that the effect of the Anglo-American Adversarial System of Jurisprudence is such as to be capable of using any degree and extent of terrorist coercion which humanity is capable of exercising.
Also, I state without equivocation as fact my finding as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer, that the Adversarial Principle is the essence of terror and terrorism and is exclusively so. And I so state in accord with the dictates of my conscience in accord with Article I, Section 19, of the Wisconsin Constitution, that Section of the Wisconsin Constitution granting to me that my right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of my conscience shall not be abridged. The Adversarial Principle does not abridge my constitutional right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of my conscience, were I to allow the Adversarial Principle into my life in any form, the Adversarial Principle would absolutely, totally, and forever, utterly obliterate my practical and practicable ability to worship Almighty God in accord with the dictates of my conscience.
I live my life in accord with the dictates of my conscience as my worship of Almighty God solely in accord with the Affirmational Principle, which is simply:
Whatever happens, as it happens, is both necessary and sufficient and whatever does not happen, as it does not happen, is both unnecessary and impossible.
Whatever differs with the Affirmational Principle, to the extent of the difference, is the evil one and/or is of the evil one.
Shall anyone in this world of human trials and tribulations ever persuade me to violate the covenant of my life with Almighty God? No. Never. Not in this world, not in forever, not in all of eternity, and not in whatever comes after that.
Demonstrate, in the manner of reproducible science, any error of consequence in, or associated with, the bioengineering research I have done regarding the biophysics of neurological trauma and its societal consequences, and I shall give it my duly diligent attention and shall seek to make amends to the absolute possible achievable limit.
Not making the effort to really and truly understand the research and research findings of the work of my life with a-priori blanket prejudice, as I observe as plausibly the principle theme of those raising objections is a, in actuality,a profound form of validation of the research and its findings.
I write as I do because of the limitations intentionally instilled in the various dialects of the language named Babel in Genesis 11. Again, from The New American Bible, Genesis 11:5-9, to wit:
The Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men had built. Then the Lord said, “If now, while they re one people, all speaking the same language, they have started to do this, nothing will later stop them from doing whatever they presume to do. Let us then go down there and confuse their language, so that one will not understand what another says.” Thus the Lord scattered them from there all over the earth, and they stopped building the city.That is why it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the speech of the world. It was from that place that he scattered them all over the earth.
And why did the Lord so scatter them all over the earth? That is told in the parable told by Jesus, of the Sower and the Seed.
It is told in the Bible of a broad path which leads toward perdition, and that path is the property of the evil one, for it is made of the Adversarial Principle.
It is told in the Bible of a narrow path which leads toward life, and that path is the property of Almighty God as I worship through the research of my doctorate and by living my life as covenant with the Lord as is given to me so to do, and the narrow path is made of, and only of, the Affirmational Principle.
I am not the one who struggles with language as denotation, the language of pure meaning. I struggle to communicate with those so gotten by the Boogeyman as to have become unable to parse meanings into intelligible connotations.
Ye are those with the communication problem and its struggle. Why else the insane battles of denial as expounded by many members of the Grand Old Party of NO? (for the slow witted, “NO” is a synonym for the “Adversarial Principle.”
I come in, and only in, the name, as in the truth of, The Law, doing so because adversarial law has become the common adversary of all of humanity, and especially the adversary of those of the law profession.
Brian, you are neither a psychologist or a lawyer. You are an engineer–a field that does not lend itself well to the kind of “research” you claim you are doing. You wrap yourself in your assertion that you are autistic, a condition that further lends itself to difficulty understanding the kinds of things you purport to study. Obviously you struggle with language, since your writing is often next to impossible to follow logically for all the asides and irrelevant material you insert. I agree with Nate. Now you know, I hope.
Folks who do the sort of work I do, though usually as psychologists (possible examples may include, but not be limited to such as Philip Zimbardo, David Rosenhan, and Stanley Milgram tend to run into a form of brick wall when studying the top tier of people in terms of social adaptation.
I decided to test whether the research method I used while living with the “bottom tier would generate useful data if slightly adapted to the study of the top tier.
It does.
It is in the nature of the socialization that enables those of the top tier to be there that produces the difficulties which have here surfaced.
That what I do is as though difficult to as-though outright impossible is an aspect of the data which has landed in my lap.
Of course, what has been happening is not what I expected would happen. As I had no expectations, because having them would tend to drive experimenter bias, I started with no expectations of any sort, such that, if anything happened, I would experience it as unexpected.
This has been a fascinating, if frightening, excursion into a form of passive-aggressive communication which I have encountered before, particularly during the first three days of kindergarten, and in terrible form during my second-grade time at Marshall School, in Eureka, California.
For what it may be worth, I plan to publish the data, but will not disclose that I gathered it through this blawg, not only to do what I can to protect those who comment here, but also because I cannot identify other sources because of their being confidential, which this blawg is evidently not.
One of the most scientifically astute of my thesis committee menbers checked with diverse people regarding my thesis before agreeing to be a member. The gist of what that member learned was of the basic form that what I was doing would be interesting except for being an “intractable” problem.
It no longer is intractable. My work is, in terms of social development, focused on the age range from around 6 months to 2.5 years, and on the effect of what happens during that time range on adult beliefs and behaviors.
I had already figured out that I would most likely encounter that top 1 percent of socially adapted people here. What is kinda surprising is it appearing to me that the social difficulty I found in the least adapted 1 percent is fully present in the most adapted; what is plausibly different is not the basic belief structure, but situational factors which are of socioeconomic status origin.
J. Brian Harris,
I had started to address you a number of times, and thought better of it.
“It is interesting to note that very few people are sending what I guess to be comments in reply to what i write.”
From my own observations, the times that people reached out to you, you somehow ended up leaving them hanging. Not a pleasant experience.
“The area of interest to me as a research bioengineer is of the one percent of less of people who adapt least well to contemporary society and to the one percent or more who adapt most well to contemporary society.”
May I be so bold as to propose that the people here are that 1 percent or more that adapt most well to contemporary society. That very few are sending comments your way ought to be a source of meaning for you.
On a personal note, we all inhabit realities unique to oneself. Thus the value in this blog; top-tier individuals offering glimpses into theirs. But, I find yours difficult to relate to, if not outright impossible.
I would have preferred not to speak at all. Now you know.
The Adversarial System is its own inverse function.
It causes neurological damage, as told by Dr. Robert C. Scaer and otherss, and the neurological damage is addictive in the sense of the Stockholm Effect.
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E. (and lions, tigers, and bears)
It is interesting to note that very few people are sending what I guess to be comments in reply to what i write. I am inclined to speculate that many blawg readers totally ignore what I write, others may find nothing I write to be even a bit meaningful, and a few may find a useful tidbit from time to time.
———————————————-
Your first sentence of the above quote says it all: “few people are sending . . .” The sentence itself is a contradiction because if “few people are sending” what you “guess” to be comments in reply to what you write then how do you know this?
Your posts are ignored by me because the rabbit hole that you inhabit is much too small. Your attempts at hiding your recursive thought, which by definition never arrives at a conclusion, with reams of words when a few would suffice tells me all I need to know.