In addition to the problems that I cited in my earlier post, the law also forbids teachers who also happen to be parents from communicating privately with their own children.

While I fully understand the desire to protect children, and the desire to create legislation which will forge a safe society, the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act perfectly exemplifies a failing attempt to use a law to solve a problem which cannot be solved by government. The government can, and already has, made it illegal for adults and children to have inappropriate sexual contact. The government cannot force adults and children to only communicate “safely.” We adults, parents, teachers, etc., bear the responsibility to teach our children how to communicate safely. We teach our kids about secrets, safe and dangerous; about telling a trusted adult if another adult does or says anything suspicious; etc. Most importantly, we teach our children how to build appropriate relationships with other adults. Teachers, in addition to teaching academics, play a vitally important role in helping children learn how to interact with adults.

Here is a typical comment on implementation:

The Fort Zumwalt School District revised its electronic communications policy in June. “Basically our policy says that our teachers cannot have private conversations on a social network site,” said Superintendent Bernard DuBray. “You can have students on Facebook and other sites, but you don’t have a private conversation on them.”

Any communications between students and teachers has to be open and available to parents and administrators, he said.

From: http://www.stltoday.com/suburban-journals/stcharles/education/article_d45b61a8-b87b-5bb6-a641-9f143f6f4b3d.html#ixzz1Ud4qVBIn

The law prohibits social networking contact between students, past and present, and teachers. Here are just a few reasons why it is a bad law.

Teachers play a critically important role in the lives of many students. Often, kids will talk to teachers about things that they will not discuss with their parents. For instance, one of my high school friends trusted one of her teachers enough to have frank dialogs about sexual identity and pre-marital sex. These conversations happen in ways that are comfortable for the student. Most important, these conversations take place in private. If a student is comfortable talking on Facebook or via text messages, blocking that channel discourages the communication. I know a family of children suffering in an abusive home situation. (Yes, the local authorities are aware.) Can you imagine any of these kids talking to a teacher about it if the conversation was also open to the parents?

This law sends a whole host of bad messages to students. It tells them that, as a group, teachers are untrustworthy. It tells students that they are not skillful enough to judge safe versus unsafe private communication with teachers. It tells kids that they cannot learn about safe social networking with their teachers, though other adults are OK. It tells them that lawmakers and school districts can protect them in their on-line activities. None of these messages are true.

The Amy Hestir Student Protection Act overreaches any bounds of sanity. It forbids me, as a grey-bearded computer engineer, from having a private conversation on LinkedIn, a social networking site geared towards professional careers, with my high school physics teacher. It forbids a student from sending a text message to a teacher, even one saying, “Caught in traffic. Will be 5 minutes late. Don’t let the field trip bus leave.” It forbids a teacher from responding via text message, “OK.”

As adults, we certainly need to keep our kids safe. We do that by teaching them good judgement and empowering them to practice that judgement in reasonably safe venues. We encourage our children to grow into independent adults who can protect themselves. We fail completely with bad laws like the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act.

Due to budgetary constraints, the SSA suspended mailing the statements out in March. The Social Security Administration has a project in-process to put the statements on-line but that is not done, yet, and still has several issues to be addressed. So what can you do in the meantime?

You can use the SSA’s on-line Retirement Estimator to get some of the information from the missing statement. Enter a few bits of data about yourself (name, mother’s maiden name, birth date, SSN, etc.) and the program will look up your earnings history and present you with estimated benefits at ages 62, full retirement age, and 70. You can also create three additional scenarios where you enter your intended retirement age and your estimated earnings until then, so you can see how tweaking those items will affect your benefits.

Now if only the on-line estimator could gaze into a crystal ball and predict the outcome of future Congressional action on benefits!

Sales tax is used to pay for stuff that we want. Here in Missouri, it pays for things that I care about like schools and roads. I presume it is the same where you live, too, though you may call it a Value-Added Tax (VAT) instead of a Sales Tax. On the one hand, I want to avoid paying tax because it’s money out of my pocket. On the other hand, I have to realize — we all have to realize — that the more I/we avoid paying taxes, the bigger the funding crisis becomes for the functions that we expect of our government. How can you, for instance, demand the highest quality education for your children while at the same time starving your local school district for funds?

Sales tax, in and of itself, is largely revenue-neutral for a business. Sure, there is some accounting expense involved in remitting the monies to the various tax authorities, but the tax itself comes from the purchaser and the costs are pretty much evenly shared by all businesses. As a business owner, I readily admit that I would rather send sales tax to one place than 50 but that’s another story…. My point is that asking Amazon to collect sales tax is not going to significantly impact their business. Amazon might raise their prices a bit to cover their added accounting costs but that’s just business; all businesses charge enough to cover costs plus some profit.

Generally speaking, I choose to shop locally rather than buy from Amazon. Yes, I pay more. But I also know that I am supporting business owners and employees within my local community. My taxes get used here in my county to pay for stuff that I care about. There is real value to me in being able to walk into a store, pick up the item that I want, perhaps test it, and bring it home with me. I want these stores and my neighbors (the employees and business owners) to stay here so I vote with my dollars. You vote with your dollars, too. I am not telling you how to vote, just encouraging you to vote consciously to nurture the businesses and services that matter to you.

Paying taxes is not the solution but it is part of the solution. As a members of this society, I think that we all have as much responsibility to fund our society as we do to oversee how those funds are spent.

The bicyclists need to stay on the trails that were made for bikes and off the roads in southwest St. Charles County.

Why, Joe?

I get more complaints about this single issue than any other issue. The speed limit is 55 mph. You come around a corner and there are two bikes in your lane. You can’t pass them, and it becomes a hazard.

This sounds like an opportunity for education on sharing the road and respecting all persons’ rights to use the roads within the limits of the law. 55 mph is the speed limit; there are no minimum speeds on the proposed county roads. It is perfectly legal to drive a car or ride a motorcycle at 15-20 mph; so why ban bicycles? If you are in a car behind two bikes, or any kind of slow vehicle, I would hope that a polite toot of the horn or flash of the headlights would encourage the slower vehicle to move over and let you by.

We live in the 21st century, Joe. Segregation is “out.” Coexistence and cooperation are “in.” There is plenty of room for all of us here in St. Charles County. Won’t you join us?

If you live in St. Charles County, I encourage you to contact your council representative.

Immigration has always been contentious for us. My great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, came to the US from eastern Europe. I do not know their individual experiences but, as a group, eastern European immigrants were not well received in these United States. The immigrants were seen as dirty, poorly mannered, uneducated, and generally offensive to polite society. There was great debate about whether these kinds of people should be allowed to come to the US; how much it would cost the US citizens to house them, feed the, educate the, and transport them to cities away from the eastern seaboard. It does not matter what period of our history you examine; you will find that immigration was a contentious topic. Yet despite all that contention, most of us are here because of our forefathers’ compassion.

Hold that compassion dear. Use your heart and your mind to choose a “solution” to the immigration “problem” which serves you, your neighbors, your community, and future Americans.

P.S. Though you may consider me poorly mannered and generally offensive to polite society, I do bathe regularly and I am well educated. Two out of four ain’t bad.

I thought you couldn’t patent prior art? Clearly, I’m wrong.

From LiveScience.com, U.S. Life Expectancy May Have Peaked:

A team led by Harvard’s Majid Ezzati published these findings today in the online medical journal PLoS Medicine. The analysis — the first to look at mortality trends county by county — is based on mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau between 1959 and 2001.

…

[The team found that] life expectancy rates rose for most of Americans over the last four decades by about six years, from an average of about age 71 to age 77. Yet a sizeable portion of the population, mostly in rural regions, saw those modest gains level off and even reverse starting in the 1980s. This is in contrast to all other industrialized nations.

It is disturbing that our government has assured that all Americans have access to electricity and telephones and we are working hard on getting broadband internet access into every home but we do not assure that everybody gets good health care.

If you are a member of a grocery insurance program, you will show your membership card at the cash register and will pay a fixed amount of money for your week’s groceries, regardless of how much you need that particular week. Based on some research that I have been doing, I believe that through careful negotiation and the buying power amassed by a large membership, the grocery insurance programs ought to be able to obtain groceries from local supermarkets for as little as 35-45% of “list prices.” These savings will be passed on to members through lower membership fees and lower weekly at-the-cash-register fixed payments.

Membership in the grocery insurance programs will be a neat perk which businesses can offer to their employees. I know that, as a business owner, I am always looking for ways to compensate my employees which do not impose additional income tax burdens on them. The grocery insurance program membership fees would be deductible expenses for the business and, I hope, would be “carved out” by the IRS and not considered taxable income to the employees.

All in all, I think that this will be a tremdously adventageous program which will help Americans.

I can only think of a couple of small problems but I’m sure that we will quickly get them straightened out.

1. About 46 milliion Americans, about 18% of us, will not be able to join a grocery insurance program, primarily for one of three reasons: 1) they are unemployed, 2) they have jobs but their employers do not choose to offer this perk to them, or 3) they have reputations for eating too much food and are ineligible.
2. Grocery list prices, the prices marked on the shelves and actually paid by the 46 million people who are not grocery insurance program members, will be 2-3x higher than today’s prices.
3. Individuals who want to join a program on their own (not through an employer) will need to pay significantly higher membership fees and won’t receive the tax benefits.

Let me reiterate that these are tiny problems. About 82% of us will be unaffected by them and will actually see our grocery bills go down so, in the balance, this is all for the good.

Does this sound ridiculous? Why? We Americans buy health care exactly as described here.

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.

A decade ago, I was a strong proponent of OpenPGP-encrypted email. I gave up when I got tired of trying to push that rope uphill. Maybe it’s time to try again.

Did you know that, unless you encrypt your email, it is as easy to read as a note written on a postcard? Now before you say, “So what? I don’t care,” consider how you would feel if NSA wanted to listen to all of your phone calls or wanted to read all of your regular mail. I suspect that, even though you are a law-abiding citizen and have nothing to hide, you might object a tad to that invasion of your privacy.

I have published my PGP key on this web site (and it is in the popular key servers). Using this key, you can send encrypted messages to me and you can confirm that messages which I sign electronically actually were signed by me.

I sign and encrypt my email messages using EnigMail and GnuPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) with Thunderbird, all highly reliable and free software. If you use something other than Thunderbird for your email (like Outlook or Eudora), here is a list of other mail user agent frontends. And if you use Gmail or any of the other email systems though a web browser, FireGPG is just the ticket.

Setting up the software is a little bit of work, but you will probably be done in less time than it would take you to drive to Office Depot and buy a box of envelopes. Once you have the software installed, you can encrypt an email message faster than you can lick and seal an envelope.

In plain language: According to the Obama administration, if the US government spies on you and you do not like it, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot even sue in federal court.

Details in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s article, In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ’s New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush’s.

Sad as that is, it’s the Department Of Justice’s second argument that is the most pernicious. The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.

This is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented. No one — not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration — has ever interpreted the law this way.

Trite though it may sound, it is not safe to assume that “we’re from the government and we’re here to help you” is anything  short of misleading. We emperil ourselves if we allow the executive branch to place itself outside the system of checks and balances of the judicial branch.

1. Close the Guantanamo Bay prison
2. Immediately stop the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.
3. Obama issued memos and an executive order instructing federal agencies to make information public as much as possible, reversing a 2001 Bush memo instructing agencies to generally withhold information.

I am going to dress up as a voting United States citizen.

Yup; you read that right. I am going to dress up as a voter because voters are so potentially dangerous that several school districts (Ft. Zumwalt, Francis Howell, and Wentzville) have canceled classes on election day, November 4. I blogged about this last February, in Paranoia is Not Safety. Since then, I forgot about it, figuring that this was so ridiculous that nothing would come of it. Wrong!

When I look around my county, I see students coming into contact with voters all over the place all the time: in stores, in shopping malls, at movie theaters, on sidewalks, at public libraries, in public parks, etc. Of course, no one recognizes these voters as the predators that they are because 364 days of the year, the voters are cleverly disguised as ordinary people including trustworthy neighbors. Thank goodness that for one day of the year, all of these perpetrators are unmasked and gather at polling places so that we can keep our children away from them.

Someone should make a list of all of these voters. If it is not safe to let our children be in the same building with them on November 4, I cannot imagine how it would magically become safe on November 5. If any of the school teachers, administrators, and support staff happen to vote, by no means should they be allowed back into the schools the day after election day. Someone should also check for 18 year old voters who are still enrolled in high school, a particularly pernicious bunch. These heinous fiends intermingle with teenagers on a daily basis and might never be spotted if we do not catch them at the ballot box.

Here are a few tidbits from “Several Schools to Close on Election Day,” published in the Suburban Journal, October 29, 2008, page C1. I cannot link to the article because it did not appear in the on-line edition of the paper.

Fort Zumwalt School District Superintendent Bernard DuBray said,

They’re expecting a huge turnout. We’re concerned with that kind of turnout about the security in the building, so it just made sense to close the schools.

What kind of turnout is that, Dr. DuBray? Do voters become a marauding pack above a certain critical mass? Is there evidence of such behavior? Has it been observed in the wild?

Rich Chrismer, director of elections for St. Charles County responded to phone calls from people “wondering why he would allow strangers to vote in a school building” by getting the superintendents “to agree to shut down their schools on November 4.” Mr. Chrismer, did you ever think to point out that these voters are not strangers? Did you mention that the voters are people who live within the same voting district as the school? Did you tell the callers that these voters live in the same neighborhoods as the kids who attend the schools?

[Added 11/4/08] I sent a copy of this posting to Dr. DuBray. He was kind enough to reply and point out that the newspaper misreported this item. All of his schools are closed on election day. The make-up day is Friday, November 7. It gets more absurd: The same Dr. DuBray who decided that voters are too dangerous also decided that they are not too dangerous if the students have already missed a day of school recently. Some of the Ft. Zumwalt schools will hold classes on November 4 because they had been closed on October 9 and those students need to make up the day. Are the voters dangerous or not, Dr. DuBray?

This foolishness will not stop until we citizens, that would be you and me, loudly voice our opinions. We deal a hard blow to our children and ourselves and our country when we pretend that students need to be physically separated from American citizens exercising the right to vote.