This episode of the podcast features a list of six laws that you’ve probably broken without realizing it. This is followed by a discussin of why it seems necessary to overreact to everything these days, when the fact remains that it is impossible to completely follow the law.

Links:

Laws You Have Broken

Fresh Prince Causes Lockdown

Hurting Others Hurts You Just as Much

Counseling for Kids Who Saw a Pop Tart

Man Arrested and Charged with a Felony for Pointing His Finger

This episode of the podcast covers a variety of topics. First up is a discussion about antibacterial soap and our societal desire to rid the planet of all unpleasantries, which evidently includes things like RVs parking in front yards, kids passing gas in school, and more!

Some links of interest:

Code Enforcement Sweep

Kids Expelled/Jailed for School Discipline Issues

White Boards Double as Shields

More Germs Found at Water Fountain than Toilet

Triclosan in Fresh Water Lakes

Welcome to the latest episode of Technically, That’s Illegal.

In this episode, I talk about the baseball hall of fame, a school that went into lock down over a thermometer, paying it forward, and “dangerous” toys.

Here are some links that I discuss in the episode:

Bulletproof Kids Items

A Libertarian Take on Baseball and Steroids

Dangerous Kids Toys

Falling TVs Kill Children

Paying it Forward at Tim Horton’s

Thermometer Causes Lockdown

Welcome to another episode of Technically, That’s Illegal. This episode features my rant about new laws going into effect around the nation, a school that went into lockdown over something pretty trivial, people getting into a big legal battle over their garden, and why so many people accept the fact that government can protect us from ourselves without destroying liberty.

Links referred to in the podcast:

School Lockdown Over an Umbrella

Check Out the Garden that Is Causing Such an Uproar

Giant Burrito Sends School into Lockdown

USA Prisons for Profit

876 New Laws for the New Year in California

Which Careers Attract the Most Psychopaths

How Mandated Reporting Could Backfire

Why Do People Think Government Can Protect them Without Protecting Liberty?

Just a heads up: If a government bans something that is overall very beneficial for the citizenry, you can bet that the reason for banning it is because they enjoy having a monopoly on “helping” people. Governments are power hungry and crazy like that. If you don’t believe me, stick around, subscribe, and follow stories from around the country that prove my point over and over again.

The latest example of this phenomenon (governments banning something simply because they want to be in control) comes to us from the state of Minnesota.

Coursera offers free, online courses to people around the world, but if you live in Minnesota, company officials are urging you to log off or head for the border.

The state’s Office of Higher Education has informed the popular provider of massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, that Coursera is unwelcome in the state because it never got permission to operate there. (source)

Minnesota’s office of higher education claims to have best interests of the students in mind. They say that they have a “responsibility” to “protect” students. However, it’s clear to me that they simply feel threatened by Coursera. After all, if people can take free online classes taught by professors at the University of Michigan, Stanford, Emory, Johns Hopkins, etc., why would they pay to enroll as students in Minnesota’s public universities?

However, they don’t really need to feel threatened by this. People who complete Coursera’s courses don’t actually receive college credit (usually). Most of the students are high-school students or professionals trying to brush up in their work fields.

However, true to form, the banning of these courses in Minnesota has opened up a business avenue for anyone wanting to give it a try:

Referring to Coursera’s caution that Minnesotans who do enroll study outside the state, Robert Talbert, an associate professor of mathematics at Grand Valley State University, in Michigan, had a suggestion.

Writing in his blog on The Chronicle’s Web site, he said he sees “a strong potential for a cottage industry: Set up a chain of coffee shops with free Internet access and on-site tutors just across Minnesota’s borders…

Minnesota should be ashamed. Instead of feeling threatened and pretending to be concerned, they should encourage free education for their citizens. Doesn’t education empower all of us for a better life? That’s what governments want us to believe about their public schools. But, as soon as it’s not a public school, we’re supposed to believe that it’s somehow not in our best interest.

A friend on facebook posted this morning that she received a referral slip in the  mail regarding her daughter’s behavior on the public school bus. A referral slip is, evidently, their way of writing someone up. After you receive a referral, the next consequences are more severe. For her, it will mean being banned from riding the bus. Why? Because she made a mess with a Pop Tart on the bus.

The parent mentioned that, in the same school system, one of the bus drivers fell asleep recently while driving the bus! As far as she knows, nothing was ever done about that. But, they did bother to write a referral slip for a Pop Tart mess and say it was a “safety issue.”

Of course, nearly everything that government tries to do these days to take away our freedom or criminalize normal behavior is branded as a safety issue. If it was correctly labeled, it would garner very little public support. “Freedom sucking laws,” for instance, don’t really make it through for some reason. “Turn our kids into mindless zombies” rules also don’t tend to be marketed very often.

Some people are starting to notice the things that I notice…and the things that are being written about in this blog and elsewhere. For instance, in the facebook status where my friend described her daughter’s Pop Tart incident, one person said that similar things are happening to her kids at school, and she feels like the schools are too busy nitpicking the kids’ behavior to actually supply an education. She went on to say that it feels like they are trying to turn the children into perfect little robots instead of people who can think for themselves. Well, some would argue that she has actually articulated the position of the public school system since its inception. I don’t tend to be that conspiratorial, but it sure looks like she’s hit the nail on the head in terms of how they are acting in this day and age.

Although my friend’s daughter was not arrested, her story reminds me of one that made headlines recently. A girl’s wrist was broken and she was arrested on multiple charges after she dropped some birthday cake on the floor at school. Her mother was also arrested for battery when she suggested that the officer who broke her daughter’s wrist be held accountable. The entire thing was caught on video, and the person taking the video was also arrested.

After you watch the video, you can choose to believe her story or not, but the fact remains that our kids are being told that they are bad for participating in normal behaviors. To read up on incidents involving schools, click here.

A school district in Wisconsin has banned “I <3 Boobies” bracelet.

The very purpose of the bracelets is to educate other young people about cancer prevention, testing, research and treatment.

The ACLU saw this as a free speech issue, which it is. The school district maintains that they distract students and are sexually provocative.

A federal district court judge recently agreed with the school.

I once saw a shirt that said, “These boobs are fake. My real ones tried to kill me.”

The funny thing about issues like this — booby bracelets in school — is that they usually diffuse themselves when those in “authority” ignore them and make no big deal about it. But, now that attention has been drawn to it, it’s a huge, silly, giggly, middle-school type deal.

Don’t forget…we live in the home of the brave, where people can’t even handle a borderline inappropriate bracelet.

When I was in high school, I played sports. I went to work after my team’s after school practices. I ate a lot. Also, my school’s lunch time through high school was 11:00am. I almost always ate a school lunch. By the time I was ready for dinner, I was very, very hungry.  I was not overweight.

I’m glad that was the late 90s and not now. I would be in even worse shape if I had to go to high school these days. Some states are adopting the federal guidelines that limit school lunches to 850 calories. That might be fine for some people, and even the majority of people. But, that does not mean that this one-size-fits-all approach is a good idea. Of course, it’s almost always a one-size-fits-all approach when the government gets involved.

The solution to the problem of hungry kids, according to a school’s nutrition director is (emphasis added):

We need to encourage breakfasts at home or at school. We need to encourage students to take all of the items at lunch and then to plan for after-school activities by packing a healthy snack.

School districts that once financed bigger lunches could continue to offer extra food and comply with the calorie restrictions by establishing an afternoon snack program, Johnson said.

Parents of athletes and other active children should make sure they have a healthy snack between school and practice, Johnson said.

I totally agree that parents should become involved. Responsible parents probably already were involved. But, I think it’s ironic that the school is acknowledging there are hungry kids, which is a problem they caused, and then asking for parental involvement to solve the problem. Maybe we should just trust parents and kids to regulate their own behavior at lunch to make the best choices for themselves and their children. If the problem is that we can’t trust parents and kids, then how are these regulations helping when they require MORE parental involvement in order to make sure kids don’t go hungry?

And, of course, the supposed problem of having school lunches contain too many calories is not even solved with these guidelines. Even Witicha schools (one of the schools following the guidelines) has set up “share tables”:

Wichita schools cut down on waste by setting up “share tables,” where students can leave items such as bananas, oranges or packaged foods they don’t want.

So, in other words, a hungry kid can go up to one of these tables and a banana (at 110 calories a pop) and easily go over the 850 calorie limit, anyway. And what are these “packaged foods” they mention? Isn’t the idea that the lunches should be healthier? Isn’t “packaged food” just a synonym for “processed food?”  Anyway, they don’t elaborate on that, so I guess I’ll leave it alone.

The fact is that the government continues to try to protect you from yourself. Of course, you could always bring a brown bag lunch to protest these rules, and many kids have, but don’t forget the fact that some schools forbid this. And then there was the case of the child who was forced to eat a school lunch when it was deemed that their home-prepared lunch was too unhealthy.

Do I think childhood obesity is a problem? Yes, I do, actually. I think obesity is a problem in general in this country. However, I think the government has got it all wrong one how to solve it. Diet is a big part of it, but restricting calories isn’t a good idea. It slows your metabolism and causes you to want to binge later in the day. It decreases performance and alertness. It can even cause bone loss. Anyway, I’m no nutritionist, but I think the best way to get “cure” obesity is to eat less sugar, including processed breads.

But, I’m not here to spout my nutritional theories. I’m here to remind you that the government is intruding once again. Even though I think sugar and processed foods cause big problems, I don’t believe in totally restricting them, even in my own house.

On the flip side of this, if we don’t want government regulations, we need to stop requesting assistance from the government on these issues. When we see a problem in our country (like obesity), we need to resist the urge to think the government should do something about it. The fact is, we won’t be satisfied (as a whole) with what they decide to do, anyway.

If we think obesity is a problem, we are most likely referring to “those other people” we saw at the buffet the other night. If we were worried about our own obesity, we would do our own research, start our own exercise regimen, and get cracking on it. We wouldn’t sit around and wait for the government to do something about it. And, lastly, if we’re not worried about obesity at all, we’re really going to be mad when “those other people” tell us we can’t have our large sodas.

One of the points I like to make on this blog and in public talks is that our societal impetus to create laws for everything has actually led to more paranoia instead of the safety that we covet. Unfortunately, people are no safer with the accumulation of more laws, we just think we are safer and that all accidents can be prevented.  Along with that is the constant paranoia that happens when we see something slightly suspicious or dangerous.

Today’s example of that is a man who was forced out of a Barnes and Noble store because he was committing the horrible crime of shopping in the children’s section.

Omar Amin, 73, said store worker Todd Voris told him that a female shopper had complained about him being in the children’s area May 4 in the store at Shea Boulevard and Loop 101 in Scottsdale.

Amin, who was alone at the time, said he was in Barnes & Noble to buy books for his two grandchildren who live in Wisconsin.

“Men alone cannot be by themselves in the children’s area,” Amin said he was told, adding that Voris said other bookstores had encountered problems with child molesters.

Being a man while shopping for kids’ books isn’t, technically, a crime.  But, it is somehow suspicious enough for someone to complain to management?  And somehow the management agreed that this was suspicious enough to ask him to leave?

We should keep our kids safe, no doubt.  We should do so by teaching them the difference between normal and abnormal human interaction with people you don’t know.  Evidently, the woman who complained has never been taught the difference because I think encountering a person browsing books would fall under the “normal” category.  Did this man attempt to lure kids into a secluded area of the store (a restroom or something) with the book?  No.  Did this man touch any children in any way?  No.  Did this man even speak to a child?  No.

I’m tired of all of this paranoia in society.  Personally, I would find it refreshing to see a man in a children’s section of a book store.  Similarly, I would find it refreshing if men started teaching elementary school from time to time.  Our kids need adult interaction from men and women.  But, some people will always be against this because they see every man as a potential molester even though the news is riddled with stories of female teachers having inappropriate relationships with male students.  I’m tired of it.  I’m tired of our society giving up our freedoms for some nebulous feeling of safety.  It has to stop before we’re all suspects.

If kids these days are hyper sensitive to rejection and disappointment, it is probably because the adults in their lives have not allowed them to feel disappointed.  While nothing I am discussing today is, technically, illegal, the “protect-kids-at-all-costs” mentality that we have when we make some laws is bleeding over into school policies.  When you combine these hyper sensitive policies with the fact that kids are being hauled off to jail for misbehavior in school, you’ve got a problematic situation to say the least.

Today, I learned that NYC prep schools have banned their students from announcing their acceptance to top-tier colleges.

At the hyper-competitive Horace Mann School, students are not permitted to wear college apparel, including status Ivy League sweatshirts, on campus until after May 1, when most students have settled on what school they’ll attend.

And at the Packer Collegiate Institute, students are instructed not to update Facebook with university news until after school lets out.

Last time I checked, there was a first amendment.  I can understand the implementation of a dress code to a degree, but for a school to tell a student what they can and cannot put on their facebook status is a violation of free speech for sure.

Instead of shielding students from possible disappointment and stifling the joy in others, why not prepare students ahead of time for the feelings they will experience in either of several outcomes?  Do we think they can handle ivy-league colleges and not disappointment?  The college staff will probably not be protecting them in this manner.  They will be unprepared for disappointment there.

My very first college class (honors composition) started with a somewhat intimidating woman telling us to prepare our minds for the rigors of college.  She told us to expect to be rejected.  She told us that we will not receive As on all of our work throughout college with the same ease we did in high school.  I don’t remember the rest of the words, but she scared more than a few of us with her tone.  I’m sure she’s not the only one giving that speech first thing in the morning to freshman students on the first day of classes.  Then again, maybe she is. If someone were to give that speech today, someone would probably phone home with an idea for a law suit.

Actually, I take that back.  Kids are a lot more resilient than we give them credit for. We don’t think they can handle anything because we’ve never let them try.