Showing posts with label Nanny State. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nanny State. Show all posts
Monday, June 20, 2016
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Imaginary Bow and Arrow Leads to Three Day Suspension
Earlier this week a number of local news outlets reported that a first grader at a local Catholic school was suspended for three days for pretending to shoot one or more other students with an imaginary bow and arrow.
According to the boy's parents, Matthew and Martha Miele, the overtly hostile threat of extreme violence happened while their son was playing a game of Power Rangers during recess. A level headed teacher witnessed the brutish intimidation and responsibly brought it to the attention of Principal Joe Crachiolo.
That afternoon, Martha Miele said she was contacted by Principal Crachiolo regarding the matter.
"I didn't really understand. I had him on the phone for a good amount of time so he could really explain to me what he was trying to tell me. My question to him was 'Is this really necessary? Does this really need to be a three-day suspension under the circumstances that he was playing and he's 6 years old?"
"I didn't really understand. I had him on the phone for a good amount of time so he could really explain to me what he was trying to tell me. My question to him was 'Is this really necessary? Does this really need to be a three-day suspension under the circumstances that he was playing and he's 6 years old?"
It is more than apparent that the Miele's do not apprehend the seriousness of the situation. Of course all right thinking people understand that imaginary weapons can be just as dangerous as real ones and that childish horseplay is equivalent to threats of violence. Principal Crachiolo appears to understand this, based on a letter he sent to the Miele's which in part stated "I have no tolerance for any real, pretend, or imitated violence. The punishment is an out of school suspension."
So here's to you Principal Crachiolo. Kudos to your tenacity at maintaining your belief that zero tolerance is the best policy even against the flood of evidence that it doesn't make schools safer. Good for you for ignoring the evidence that suspending kids for seemingly frivolous things increases the likelihood that they would have to repeat a grade, which in turn increases the likelihood they will drop out. It's obvious you possess superior judgement skills and the school is fortunate to have you there to keep everyone safe.
WLWT: Child pretends to shoot student with imaginary bow, suspended for 3 days
WCPO: Catholic school suspends 6-year-old for pretending to shoot imaginary bow and arrow at recess
A Generation Later: What We’ve Learned about Zero Tolerance in Schools
So here's to you Principal Crachiolo. Kudos to your tenacity at maintaining your belief that zero tolerance is the best policy even against the flood of evidence that it doesn't make schools safer. Good for you for ignoring the evidence that suspending kids for seemingly frivolous things increases the likelihood that they would have to repeat a grade, which in turn increases the likelihood they will drop out. It's obvious you possess superior judgement skills and the school is fortunate to have you there to keep everyone safe.
WLWT: Child pretends to shoot student with imaginary bow, suspended for 3 days
WCPO: Catholic school suspends 6-year-old for pretending to shoot imaginary bow and arrow at recess
A Generation Later: What We’ve Learned about Zero Tolerance in Schools
Monday, September 1, 2014
Christin Milloy's Infant Gender Assignment Nonsense
I've read some pretty silly articles from Slate before but this one still has me shaking my head in disbelief. A couple months ago the rag published an article by Christin Scarlet Milloy titled Don't Let the Doctor Do This to Your Newborn.
The article begins with a fictitious scenario in which a mother is lying in bed holding her baby, recovering from labor. The doctor comes in to perform some mysterious but standard "treatment." The mother asks what the treatment is and if it's necessary. The doctor replies vaguely that it will help the child to be recognized and get along with the other children who've received the same treatment but warns that for 1 or 2 percent, there are terrible negative side effects which include depression, social ostracism, difficulty finding or keeping a job and suicide.
You might be thinking to yourself, how horrible. Thank goodness parents of newborns don't actually have to face such a scary situation. But according to Milloy, the imaginary treatment described above is real. "Obstetricians, doctors, and midwives commit this procedure on infants every single day, in every single country. In reality, this treatment is performed almost universally without even asking for the parents' consent, making this practice all the more insidious. It's called infant gender assignment: When the doctor holds your child up to the harsh light of the delivery room, looks between its legs, and declares his opinion: It's a boy or a girl, based on nothing more than a cursory assessment of your offspring's genitals."
Milloy continues the crazy narrative with explanations on how, beginning with the doctors gender assignment of your baby, the child's life is "instantly and brutally reduced from such infinite potentials down to one concrete set of expectations and stereotypes, and any behavioral deviation from that will be severely punished—both intentionally through bigotry, and unintentionally through ignorance. That doctor (and the power structure behind him) plays a pivotal role in imposing those limits on helpless infants, without their consent, and without your informed consent as a parent. This issue deserves serious consideration by every parent, because no matter what gender identity your child ultimately adopts, infant gender assignment has effects that will last through their whole life."
And just to drive home the point that Milloy is actually criticizing the doctors declaration of a baby's sex and isn't just using the gender assignment thing as some sort of metaphorical critique, I present this quote. "Infant gender assignment is a wilful decision, and as a maturing society we need to judge whether it might be a wrong action. Why must we force this on kids at birth? What is achieved, besides reinforcing tradition? What could be the harm in letting a child wait to declare for themself who they are, once they're old enough (which is generally believed to happen around age 2 or 3)? Clearly, most children will still turn out like we'd expect, but it's unlikely the extra freedom would harm them. On the other hand, we do know the massive harm caused to some children by the removal of that freedom...Think carefully. Infant gender assignment might just be Russian roulette with your baby's life."
If this article was written anywhere else, I probably would of had to do some research to verify that it wasn't satire. But this isn't satire and as easy as it would be to simply say "this is bat shit crazy" and move on, I feel it deserves some sort of reasoned response.
First, instead of clearly writing what she is arguing for, Milloy instead chooses to heavily saturate the article with rhetorical ploys meant to emotionally persuade the reader. Some of the examples I've already quoted above include calling the doctor's declaration of sex an "insidious" act and comparing it to playing "Russian roulette with your baby's life". Yea, that's right. Milloy seems to believe that a doctor stating "it's a boy" or "it's a girl" is analogically comparable to putting a bullet into a revolver, spinning the cylinder, putting it to the child's head and pulling the trigger.
Milloy uses a similar maneuver at the beginning of the article with his carefully constructed story. She presents a mother facing a somewhat authoritarian doctor ominously wanting to perform a treatment on the new born which may result in long-term negative side effects. It is then revealed to the reader that the hypothetical treatment is actually real and occurs ever day in the form of infant gender assignment. The problem with this, of course, is that a doctor stating the sex of a child is not a treatment. It is, well, just a statement of what is observed. The word treatment implies the use of medical intervention against some sort of illness or injury. That term obviously doesn't apply here.
This leads me to my next point. When a doctor states the babies sex, he or she is simply stating the child's biological gender. It's hilarious how Milloy describes this as an insidious treatment performed without parental consent based on nothing more than a doctors opinion. I'm guessing that for all of human history, whenever a child was born, one of the first things the doctor, midwife or parents have done is to look between the child's legs to see if it was a boy or a girl. But according to Milloy, this very act is to "instantly and brutally" reduce a child "from such infinite potentials down to one concrete set of expectations and stereotypes, and any behavioral deviation from that will be severely punished."
Generally speaking, looking at a child's genitalia is a good way to determine biological sex. It should be noted though that there are exceptions to this rule. Intersex is the term typically used to describe individuals with a congenital anomaly of the reproductive and sexual system. It seems there are some disagreements as to what should be included in the term intersex and there hasn't been a lot of work done to collect statistical information. According to a 2000 study by Anne Fausto-Sterling, up to 1.7% of babies are born intersex. This statistic includes a wide range of major and minor disorders, some of which are apparent at birth (ambiguous external genitalia) and some which are not (external organs appear male or female but there are internal or chromosomal differences). A second often used statistic is that approximately 1 in 2000 babies are born with ambiguous external genitalia. I found this stat used in a lot of different places but could only find one article which cited it to a 1998 paper by Kenneth Kipnis and Milton Diamond called Pediatric Ethics and Surgical Assignment of Sex. Anyway, taking these two statistics together it seems we can conclude that just over 1% of babies born may have some sort of major or minor intersex condition which would not be obvious at birth.
So after eliminating the rhetorical ploys, what are we left with? It is still not entirely clear what Milloy's argument is. It seems as if she is saying something like:
Anyway, the first premise, that transgenders and intersexed individuals experience higher rates of psychological distress and suicide, can be verified as true through available statistical information.
The second premise, that these problems are caused (mostly caused) by being assigned the wrong gender at birth, is where things go terribly wrong. I think it's more than a little naive to believe that the distress experienced by transgender people would all but go away if a transgendered child was given the ability to declare their own sex at a young age.
To demonstrate, lets do a little thought experiment. Imagine Milloy's world comes to pass and doctors cannot "assign" a child's sex at birth. A child is born, the sex has not been declared by the doctor and the parents even raise it completely gender neutral. At the age of three, the child, who is biologically a boy, declares that it believes it is a girl and the parents then allow her to wear dresses, play with dolls and do whatever other things little girls like to do. Now according to Milloy, the child has been spared the trauma of being assigned the wrong gender and therefore shouldn't experience the sort of psychological distress transgenders often do. Of course, this completely overlooks the elephant in the room. Namely that the child is still transgendered; identifying as a girl but having the biology of a boy. As such, she will still face prejudice from society at large and still have to deal with the confusion of having the body of a boy yet identifying as a girl. As such, I think it would be a safe assumption to believe that as a group transgenders would still have exceptionally high rates of psychological issues.
Though it's not addressed in the article, I think it can be assumed that Milloy is wanting more than just the banning of doctors declaring the babies sex. That alone would really change nothing. It seems that what Milloy really wants is for parents to also have to raise the child in a gender neutral way until the baby can decide for its self.
So how is all this to be carried out? Would there be laws making it illegal for doctors to declare the sex of the child? What would they put down for medical records? Would there be laws which forced parents to raise their child in a gender neutral way? If so, how would this be enforced?
Most importantly, how would raising children in a completely gender neutral environment effect those that do not have intersex issues? The truth is, we really don't know. While some so called experts say that it would allow a child to develop free of limiting gender norms, others believe that it can only cause confusion at a point in life when clarity is needed.
In the end I think it's plain to see that this is at best an ill-conceived idea on Milloy's part. But it does raise the interesting question of how we've gotten to the point that it could be taken seriously enough to be published in a major online news magazine.
Slate: Don’t Let the Doctor Do This to Your Newborn
The article begins with a fictitious scenario in which a mother is lying in bed holding her baby, recovering from labor. The doctor comes in to perform some mysterious but standard "treatment." The mother asks what the treatment is and if it's necessary. The doctor replies vaguely that it will help the child to be recognized and get along with the other children who've received the same treatment but warns that for 1 or 2 percent, there are terrible negative side effects which include depression, social ostracism, difficulty finding or keeping a job and suicide.
You might be thinking to yourself, how horrible. Thank goodness parents of newborns don't actually have to face such a scary situation. But according to Milloy, the imaginary treatment described above is real. "Obstetricians, doctors, and midwives commit this procedure on infants every single day, in every single country. In reality, this treatment is performed almost universally without even asking for the parents' consent, making this practice all the more insidious. It's called infant gender assignment: When the doctor holds your child up to the harsh light of the delivery room, looks between its legs, and declares his opinion: It's a boy or a girl, based on nothing more than a cursory assessment of your offspring's genitals."
Milloy continues the crazy narrative with explanations on how, beginning with the doctors gender assignment of your baby, the child's life is "instantly and brutally reduced from such infinite potentials down to one concrete set of expectations and stereotypes, and any behavioral deviation from that will be severely punished—both intentionally through bigotry, and unintentionally through ignorance. That doctor (and the power structure behind him) plays a pivotal role in imposing those limits on helpless infants, without their consent, and without your informed consent as a parent. This issue deserves serious consideration by every parent, because no matter what gender identity your child ultimately adopts, infant gender assignment has effects that will last through their whole life."
And just to drive home the point that Milloy is actually criticizing the doctors declaration of a baby's sex and isn't just using the gender assignment thing as some sort of metaphorical critique, I present this quote. "Infant gender assignment is a wilful decision, and as a maturing society we need to judge whether it might be a wrong action. Why must we force this on kids at birth? What is achieved, besides reinforcing tradition? What could be the harm in letting a child wait to declare for themself who they are, once they're old enough (which is generally believed to happen around age 2 or 3)? Clearly, most children will still turn out like we'd expect, but it's unlikely the extra freedom would harm them. On the other hand, we do know the massive harm caused to some children by the removal of that freedom...Think carefully. Infant gender assignment might just be Russian roulette with your baby's life."
If this article was written anywhere else, I probably would of had to do some research to verify that it wasn't satire. But this isn't satire and as easy as it would be to simply say "this is bat shit crazy" and move on, I feel it deserves some sort of reasoned response.
First, instead of clearly writing what she is arguing for, Milloy instead chooses to heavily saturate the article with rhetorical ploys meant to emotionally persuade the reader. Some of the examples I've already quoted above include calling the doctor's declaration of sex an "insidious" act and comparing it to playing "Russian roulette with your baby's life". Yea, that's right. Milloy seems to believe that a doctor stating "it's a boy" or "it's a girl" is analogically comparable to putting a bullet into a revolver, spinning the cylinder, putting it to the child's head and pulling the trigger.
Milloy uses a similar maneuver at the beginning of the article with his carefully constructed story. She presents a mother facing a somewhat authoritarian doctor ominously wanting to perform a treatment on the new born which may result in long-term negative side effects. It is then revealed to the reader that the hypothetical treatment is actually real and occurs ever day in the form of infant gender assignment. The problem with this, of course, is that a doctor stating the sex of a child is not a treatment. It is, well, just a statement of what is observed. The word treatment implies the use of medical intervention against some sort of illness or injury. That term obviously doesn't apply here.
This leads me to my next point. When a doctor states the babies sex, he or she is simply stating the child's biological gender. It's hilarious how Milloy describes this as an insidious treatment performed without parental consent based on nothing more than a doctors opinion. I'm guessing that for all of human history, whenever a child was born, one of the first things the doctor, midwife or parents have done is to look between the child's legs to see if it was a boy or a girl. But according to Milloy, this very act is to "instantly and brutally" reduce a child "from such infinite potentials down to one concrete set of expectations and stereotypes, and any behavioral deviation from that will be severely punished."
Generally speaking, looking at a child's genitalia is a good way to determine biological sex. It should be noted though that there are exceptions to this rule. Intersex is the term typically used to describe individuals with a congenital anomaly of the reproductive and sexual system. It seems there are some disagreements as to what should be included in the term intersex and there hasn't been a lot of work done to collect statistical information. According to a 2000 study by Anne Fausto-Sterling, up to 1.7% of babies are born intersex. This statistic includes a wide range of major and minor disorders, some of which are apparent at birth (ambiguous external genitalia) and some which are not (external organs appear male or female but there are internal or chromosomal differences). A second often used statistic is that approximately 1 in 2000 babies are born with ambiguous external genitalia. I found this stat used in a lot of different places but could only find one article which cited it to a 1998 paper by Kenneth Kipnis and Milton Diamond called Pediatric Ethics and Surgical Assignment of Sex. Anyway, taking these two statistics together it seems we can conclude that just over 1% of babies born may have some sort of major or minor intersex condition which would not be obvious at birth.
So after eliminating the rhetorical ploys, what are we left with? It is still not entirely clear what Milloy's argument is. It seems as if she is saying something like:
Transgender and intersexed individuals experience higher rates of psychological distress and suicide. These problems are caused (or mostly caused) by being assigned the wrong gender at birth by a doctor. Therefore doctors shouldn't be allowed to declare the sex of a baby.Again, there's a great deal of vagueness in Milloy's article which makes it difficult to restate her argument with complete confidence. This is apparent if you read through the comment section of the article where typically the few people that tried to defend her believed she was talking about infant gender re-assignment (when a baby is born with ambiguous genitalia and a doctor performs surgery on the child to make them look more like their assigned gender).
Anyway, the first premise, that transgenders and intersexed individuals experience higher rates of psychological distress and suicide, can be verified as true through available statistical information.
The second premise, that these problems are caused (mostly caused) by being assigned the wrong gender at birth, is where things go terribly wrong. I think it's more than a little naive to believe that the distress experienced by transgender people would all but go away if a transgendered child was given the ability to declare their own sex at a young age.
To demonstrate, lets do a little thought experiment. Imagine Milloy's world comes to pass and doctors cannot "assign" a child's sex at birth. A child is born, the sex has not been declared by the doctor and the parents even raise it completely gender neutral. At the age of three, the child, who is biologically a boy, declares that it believes it is a girl and the parents then allow her to wear dresses, play with dolls and do whatever other things little girls like to do. Now according to Milloy, the child has been spared the trauma of being assigned the wrong gender and therefore shouldn't experience the sort of psychological distress transgenders often do. Of course, this completely overlooks the elephant in the room. Namely that the child is still transgendered; identifying as a girl but having the biology of a boy. As such, she will still face prejudice from society at large and still have to deal with the confusion of having the body of a boy yet identifying as a girl. As such, I think it would be a safe assumption to believe that as a group transgenders would still have exceptionally high rates of psychological issues.
Though it's not addressed in the article, I think it can be assumed that Milloy is wanting more than just the banning of doctors declaring the babies sex. That alone would really change nothing. It seems that what Milloy really wants is for parents to also have to raise the child in a gender neutral way until the baby can decide for its self.
So how is all this to be carried out? Would there be laws making it illegal for doctors to declare the sex of the child? What would they put down for medical records? Would there be laws which forced parents to raise their child in a gender neutral way? If so, how would this be enforced?
Most importantly, how would raising children in a completely gender neutral environment effect those that do not have intersex issues? The truth is, we really don't know. While some so called experts say that it would allow a child to develop free of limiting gender norms, others believe that it can only cause confusion at a point in life when clarity is needed.
In the end I think it's plain to see that this is at best an ill-conceived idea on Milloy's part. But it does raise the interesting question of how we've gotten to the point that it could be taken seriously enough to be published in a major online news magazine.
Slate: Don’t Let the Doctor Do This to Your Newborn
Friday, April 4, 2014
No good deed goes unpunished
Last month, Virginia Beach middle-schooler Adrionna Harris saw a boy at school cutting his arm with a razor blade. She convinced him that he shouldn't be doing it, took the razor away and threw it in the trash can. The next day she told a teacher what had happened. But instead of applauding her efforts, school administrators at the Bayside Middle School decided to give her a 10 day suspension with a recommendation of expulsion.
It seems the decision was the result of the school's zero tolerance policy which states that a student in possession of "any weapon...shall automatically be recommended for long-term suspension or expulsion." Never mind that she only had possession of the small razor blade for the brief moment it took her to throw it in the trash. Never mind that she was trying to stop a friend from harming himself. What's important, at least from the school systems point of view, is that they follow their ridiculous zero tolerance policy in the most draconian way without any thought given to the context of the situation.
Frustratingly, Adrionna's mother stated that she wasn't getting any sort of response from the school to her calls until she got the press involved. "It is amazing. They are listening to us now … she should be back in school tomorrow and that would be fair,” said Rachael Harris." Thanks to pressure from the press and social media, Adrionna's suspension hearing was held the next day and ultimately her suspension was dropped and the incident cleared from her record.
http://wavy.com/2014/03/19/student-suspended-for-taking-razor-from-self-harming-classmate/
It seems the decision was the result of the school's zero tolerance policy which states that a student in possession of "any weapon...shall automatically be recommended for long-term suspension or expulsion." Never mind that she only had possession of the small razor blade for the brief moment it took her to throw it in the trash. Never mind that she was trying to stop a friend from harming himself. What's important, at least from the school systems point of view, is that they follow their ridiculous zero tolerance policy in the most draconian way without any thought given to the context of the situation.
Frustratingly, Adrionna's mother stated that she wasn't getting any sort of response from the school to her calls until she got the press involved. "It is amazing. They are listening to us now … she should be back in school tomorrow and that would be fair,” said Rachael Harris." Thanks to pressure from the press and social media, Adrionna's suspension hearing was held the next day and ultimately her suspension was dropped and the incident cleared from her record.
http://wavy.com/2014/03/19/student-suspended-for-taking-razor-from-self-harming-classmate/
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Anti-Gun Hysteria in Schools
Last year I sarcastically blogged about a boy being suspended from elementary school after fashioning his hand into a gun during a game of cops and robbers. Of course, this wasn't the first nor the last incident of school officials making irrational decisions regarding even the most benign references to guns:
Administrators respond to reporters as if they are reading from a common playbook. It goes something like "due to confidentiality issues, we cannot comment on the specifics of the matter but we want to emphasize that student safety and security is of the utmost importance to us." I would love for someone to explain to me how this is a matter of safety. What line of thinking concludes that children playing cops and robbers could somehow put students in harms way? As far as I know, no child has ever been injured by hands, paper or pop tarts that have been shaped into guns.
The use of common sense tells us that there must be something more happening here than a desire to keep kids safe. In actuality, this seems to be an effort by some schools to indoctrinate children at a young age to view anything that even remotely relates to a gun as being evil. It is an ideology that some on the far left hold that any sort of reference to firearms is somehow directly connected to the atrocities of Columbine or Sandy Hook.
No one would disagree with the desire to keeps children safe in school. What people are angry about is the attempt by some schools to force their views onto their students even when it leaves rational decision making behind. Parents do not send their kids to school so that they can be indoctrinated with the teacher's or administrator's ideology. They send their kids to school to learn about reading, writing and arithmetic. I think it's well past time they get back to that.
- Pop Tart Pistol - Last year in Maryland, seven year old Joshua was suspended from Park Elementary School for two days for allegedly chewing a pop tart into the shape of a pistol and dangerously waiving it around. The school later sent the students home with a letter informing parents of the incident and citing the violated code of conduct. The letter also told parents that they should talk with their kids and help them express their feelings if they were troubled by the incident. It also said that the school counselor would be available if needed.
- Pencil Pistol - In Virginia, two second graders were suspended from a Suffolk elementary school for pointing pencils at each other and making shooting noises. A school spokesperson said "A pencil is a weapon when it is pointed at someone in a threatening way and gun noises are made." No really, she actually said that.
- Talking About Nerf Gun - In Washington, six year old Noah Aguirre was suspended for talking about guns. According to his father, the guns his son was talking about were Nerf guns they had recently purchases. The suspension was later overturned and cleared from his record.
- Cowboy Cap Gun - A kindergartner wet his pants after a two hour interrogation by school officials at Dowell Elementary School for showing another student on the bus his cowboy-style cap gun. Along with the interrogation, the five year old was given a ten day suspension. The mother said the principal told her that if the cap gun had been loaded with caps, it would have been considered an explosive and the police would have been involved.
- Quarter Size Lego Gun - A Massachusetts kindergartner was forced to apologize to the bus driver, serve detention and threatened with suspension after he was found with a Lego toy gun the about the size of a quarter.
- Another Hand Gun - School officials at a North Carolina school levied a one day suspension on a five year old boy after he made a gun gesture with his hand on the playground.
- Airsoft Outside of School - Three seventh graders were given long-term suspensions from a Virginia Beach elementary school after shooting airsoft guns near a bus stop. School officials state that there was a student hit by a pellet only 10 feet from the bus stop which implies that this was enough to give them jurisdiction on the matter. The thing is, Aiden, one of the boys involved, lives only 70 yards from the bus stop. According to the boys, they never left his yard.
- Clear Plastic Toy Gun - Six year old Naomi McKinney was expelled from a South Carolina elementary school for bringing her brother's clear plastic toy gun to school. School officials considered her such a threat that they even sent a letter to her parents that if she’s caught on school grounds she’ll be “subject to the criminal charge of trespassing.”
- Hello Kitty Bubble Gun - In Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, a five year old girl was suspended for two days after making what the school called a "terrorist threat." Allegedly she told another little girl that they would shoot each other with her pink "Hello Kitty" bubble gun (which she didn't have with her at the time).
- And Another Hand Gun - The latest incident happened a couple of weeks ago in Columbus, Ohio. Ten year old Nathan Entingh was suspended for three days from Denvonishe Alternative Elementary School after making his hand into the shape of a gun, pointing it at another student and saying "bang."
Administrators respond to reporters as if they are reading from a common playbook. It goes something like "due to confidentiality issues, we cannot comment on the specifics of the matter but we want to emphasize that student safety and security is of the utmost importance to us." I would love for someone to explain to me how this is a matter of safety. What line of thinking concludes that children playing cops and robbers could somehow put students in harms way? As far as I know, no child has ever been injured by hands, paper or pop tarts that have been shaped into guns.
The use of common sense tells us that there must be something more happening here than a desire to keep kids safe. In actuality, this seems to be an effort by some schools to indoctrinate children at a young age to view anything that even remotely relates to a gun as being evil. It is an ideology that some on the far left hold that any sort of reference to firearms is somehow directly connected to the atrocities of Columbine or Sandy Hook.
No one would disagree with the desire to keeps children safe in school. What people are angry about is the attempt by some schools to force their views onto their students even when it leaves rational decision making behind. Parents do not send their kids to school so that they can be indoctrinated with the teacher's or administrator's ideology. They send their kids to school to learn about reading, writing and arithmetic. I think it's well past time they get back to that.
Monday, February 24, 2014
Consumer Product Safety Commission Demon Regulatory Overlords vs Craig Zucker
I just finished reading an interesting article in Reason magazine chronicling the demise of Buckyballs at the hands of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the followup lawsuit against the products creator Craig Zucker. For those who aren't familiar with the story, here is a quick rundown. Buckyballs were a popular desk toy comprised of a number of small, powerful magnets about the size of the pellets used in bb guns. The product was a big hit with sales reaching $10 million in 2009.
In July of 2012, Maxfield & Oberton, the company which produced Buckyballs, received notice of an administrative complaint filed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to stop the production and sale of Buckyball magnets due to several incidents of injury to children that had swallowed them. The complaint states that the magenetic forces could pinch or trap the intestinal walls causing long-term health consequences, including the potential for inflammation, ulceration or perforation of the intestines. At the time of the complaint, CSPC indicated that approximately 22 children had been injured by the product but no fatalities were reported. It is important to understand that the product isn't marketed toward children. This was overtly expressed through the five prominent warning labels which came with each little package of the product. Also, as pointed out by Eli Federman of the Huffinton Post, banning the product was statiscally ridiculous. If there was 1 incident of Buckeyballs out of 100,000 sets sold requiring emergency medical treatment then that would mean dogs, tennis, & skateboarding were 129 times, 1228 times and 890 times respectively more risky.
Due to the ability of government regulators to make life difficult for business people, it isn't often that they openly resist such demands but that is exactly what Zucker did. He went to the public with the snarky "Save Our Balls" campaign in an attempt to win over support to stop the CPSC from shutting down his business. Some of those ads included cartoonish pictures of members of the CPSC as telephone psychics.
These ads were a response to the CPSC's predetermined decision to shut down buckyballs even though they were supposed to be given time to propose a corrective action plan first. On their Buckyballs webpage, they provide the following timeline of events:
Reason. The Feds vs. Craig Zucker: Are Regulators Carrying Out a Personal Vendetta Against the Creator of Buckyballs?
Huff Post: Banning Buckyball Magnets Is Statistically Ridiculous
Buckyballs
Wall Street Journal: Irrational War on Buckyballs
In July of 2012, Maxfield & Oberton, the company which produced Buckyballs, received notice of an administrative complaint filed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to stop the production and sale of Buckyball magnets due to several incidents of injury to children that had swallowed them. The complaint states that the magenetic forces could pinch or trap the intestinal walls causing long-term health consequences, including the potential for inflammation, ulceration or perforation of the intestines. At the time of the complaint, CSPC indicated that approximately 22 children had been injured by the product but no fatalities were reported. It is important to understand that the product isn't marketed toward children. This was overtly expressed through the five prominent warning labels which came with each little package of the product. Also, as pointed out by Eli Federman of the Huffinton Post, banning the product was statiscally ridiculous. If there was 1 incident of Buckeyballs out of 100,000 sets sold requiring emergency medical treatment then that would mean dogs, tennis, & skateboarding were 129 times, 1228 times and 890 times respectively more risky.
Due to the ability of government regulators to make life difficult for business people, it isn't often that they openly resist such demands but that is exactly what Zucker did. He went to the public with the snarky "Save Our Balls" campaign in an attempt to win over support to stop the CPSC from shutting down his business. Some of those ads included cartoonish pictures of members of the CPSC as telephone psychics.
These ads were a response to the CPSC's predetermined decision to shut down buckyballs even though they were supposed to be given time to propose a corrective action plan first. On their Buckyballs webpage, they provide the following timeline of events:
- July 10th: We were requested by the Commission to propose a Corrective Action Plan to make our products safer, with a deadline of July 24th.
- July 24th, 4pm: We submitted a comprehensive Corrective Action Plan with numerous suggestions concerning the safety of our products and further educating consumers and retailers. Then we waited for feedback…
- July 25th, 11am: CPSC filed an Administrative Complaint and ran to the media. In the hours between 4pm and 11am, the staff allegedly “fully” reviewed and rejected our CAP, the Commissioners voted, their lawyers drafted and then filed a lawsuit.
- Here’s where it gets just plain spooky…Through a Freedom of Information request, we’ve discovered this document showing that the vote to sue our company was presented to the Commissioners on July 23rd, a day before our Corrective Action Plan was to be submitted. The vote to put us out of business was due before July 25th, giving the Commissioners or staff little or no time to actually consider our Corrective Action Plan submitted at 4 p.m. on the 24th. The vote was requested before they even received our plan.
- So, how to explain this overlap of such a crucial timeline? How could the CPSC say they considered our Corrective Action Plan when they may never have actually read it? We can only conclude one thing: Miss Inez & the Consumer
ProductPsychic Safety Commission can see into the future!
Unfortunately, with lost sales due to the CPSC shutting down their retail chain and mounting legal expenses, Zucker decided to close the company in December of 2012.
Now here is where it gets really outrageous. A few months after the company was dissolved, the CPSC decided to make the unprecedented move to include Zucker and his business partner as parties to the complaint thus making them personally liable for the cost of the recall. The agency initially estimated the cost at around $57 million though a spokesperson later said it would probably be less.
According to Reason, "The case has drawn widespread attention in legal circles because it's the first time the Commission has attempted to hold a former officer personally responsible for the actions of a defunct corporation." Could you imagine what effect this would have on business and entrepreneurship if this became the norm? No one would ever want to develop new products out of fear that they would be held personally liable for a unpredictable future complaint by the CPSC.
So is this the start of the CPSC's new method of regulating producers or is there another explanation. Zucker thinks there is. He believes that the CPSC is using its power to carry out a personal vendetta against him by being the first company in 11 years to defy their orders. I'm guessing those funny ads they put out really pissed them off too.
So is this the start of the CPSC's new method of regulating producers or is there another explanation. Zucker thinks there is. He believes that the CPSC is using its power to carry out a personal vendetta against him by being the first company in 11 years to defy their orders. I'm guessing those funny ads they put out really pissed them off too.
Reason. The Feds vs. Craig Zucker: Are Regulators Carrying Out a Personal Vendetta Against the Creator of Buckyballs?
Huff Post: Banning Buckyball Magnets Is Statistically Ridiculous
Buckyballs
Wall Street Journal: Irrational War on Buckyballs
Monday, November 4, 2013
Nanny State: Watch Where You Point That Thing!
I guess zero tolerance also means zero brains. According to this local news story, eight year old Jordan Bennett (pictured bellow) was suspended from Harmony Community School in Osceola County Florida after fashioning his hand into a gun during a game of cops and robbers.
The boy's mother, Bonnie Bennett, stated "There was nothing in his hand. He used his thumb and index finger. It was a game. He made no threatening advances or threats to harm anyone. No words were said.”
Using way too much common sense for the school to handle, Bennett said that she would have been fine with the school giving him a warning or even a lighter punishment but feels the suspension goes too far. “They took a child that has never been in trouble before and went to the extreme...A child that has no history of violence is now classified as a violent offender.”
The school won't comment specifically on the incident due to confidentiality but says that after reviewing the incident, the boy's actions violated the code of conduct.
I personally think that there must be other considerations which we are not privy to. For instance, what sort of gun was it that he fashioned his hand into? Did this gun have a high capacity magazine? Did it hold illegal hollow-point bullets?
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We need tougher regulation over the use of the thumbs up. There is ample
evidence to demonstrate how easy it is to convert such a gesture into a
handgun by simply extending the index finger.
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