If you’re bored or just want to play with a soundboard, check out PALINdrome, which allows you to drag and drop Sarah Palin soundbites like so many refrigerator poetry magnets and then hear the results.

News out of New York state shows that Governor David A Paterson has signed into law a bit of legislation regarding video games.  Specifically, the law compels the state government to conduct a study of video game violence and its effects on children, requires consoles to have parental lockout controls by 2010, and requires games to show ESRB ratings.

Sounds pretty reasonable, except for three major things.

1. A couple thousand (might be exaggerating here) studies have already been done about video game violence.  Why can’t NY reference those?

2. All modern consoles already have parental controls built into them.  The industry has already addressed that concern, so legislating it makes no sense.  They had that one taken care of four years before the 2010 deadline.

3. All games sold at retail already carry an ESRB rating.  Most retailers require it.  Again, legislating a practice currently in practice.

So what did this legislation achieve?  Absolutely nothing aside from letting politicians look productive and fooling the public into thinking something will be done about this video game menace.

Well New Yorkers, you just paid for fluff legislation.  If you’re hoping it will reduce youth violence, you’re in for a surprise.  You see, poverty is a much larger contributor to youth violence than video games could ever hope to be, but nobody is trying to outlaw poverty.  No, let’s go after the inconsequential targets and hope the public doesn’t notice the dodge.

The good news is that this law doesn’t actually change anything.  The bad news is that making a law just to make it is asinine.

A couple weeks ago, I took a good chunk of my library into Webster’s for cash.  Before boxing them all up, I decided to rifle through and make sure there weren’t any old bits of paper and such between the pages.

Wouldn’t you know it, stuck in a copy of Conduct Unbecoming was a prize voucher from QuakeCon ‘97.

I guess there’s very little chance of claiming my prize now.

I can’t help laughing every time I look at this, and I don’t know why.

Members of the Alaska Wilderness League, dressed in polar bear costumes, sit in the last row during U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne’s press conference in Washington on Wednesday, May 14, 2008. (AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Today is an important day for two reasons:

1. It’s votin’ time
2. It’s also business time

Yep, the primaries for PA are today, but way more important than that, today is the release day for the full Flight of the Conchords album.

As eloquently as I would like to state this, the direct route is rather preferred: this is fucked up.

MotherJones.com has an amazing and infuriating story available that looks into the Judge Rotenberg Center, a school in Massachusetts that specializes in behavior modification for both low and high functioning children with mental disabilities and/or behavior disorders.

That there is a school specifically for this is not that amazing, but that this school relies almost exclusively on electroshock aversion therapy is! One child was shocked upwards of 5,000 times in a single day before staff at the school concluded that he was not likely to respond to such methods.

Give the entire article a read. It’s definitely worth it. When you’re done, come back here for some other gathered info.

Obviously, this school hasn’t just been doing this recently. It has been going on for decades with little ongoing public outcry. The school has been challenged several times and has managed to come out the victor. Interestingly, New York as a state has outlawed the use of electroshock therapy for these types of treatments, but the state itself facilitates the placement of some of its children across the state line for admission into the JRC. The Massachusetts legislature has recently introduced a bill that would also eliminate electroshock, but it has yet to go anywhere. Judging by the potential political influence of the multi-million dollar center and the vocal advocation of the parents of attending students, it is possible that said legislation could die and the JRC could continue on its merry way.

Of interest are the following links:

http://www.kevinleitch.co.uk/wp/?p=374 - A blog entry that discusses a number of topics regarding the JRC. Be absolutely certain to scroll down to the comments and check out the information left by “Jeff”, and then scroll down further to “ann”, a one-time JRC employee, who talks about why the JRC isn’t as bad as everybody thinks. Another former JRC employee then pipes up to let “ann” know that things aren’t as rosy as she remembers them being.

http://www.judgerc.org/ - The Judge Rotenberg Center home page. Looks pretty pleasant, doesn’t it? The image at the top of this entry is from the site. It shows two kids out enjoying a bike ride in the sun, which would seem a pretty happy thing until you notice that both are wearing backpacks chock full of batteries and the devices that administer electric shocks to their limbs and stomach.

http://archive.seacoastonline.com/news/06012006/health/105752.htm - An AP article from last year covering largely the same ground as the Mother Jones article. Again, we see the electroshock backpack on a student. This photo, however, seems to show that there is a shock device attached to the straps themselves to ensure that the student receives a jolt if he attempts to remove the pack.

http://www.wbur.org/news/2006/JRCReport.pdf - A report put together by the New York State Education Department of what was observed at the JRC during an unannounced visit in 2006. Half of the students sent there by the state of New York were approved for shock aversion therapy.

http://judgerotenbergcenter.blogspot.com/ - A blog of testimonials from JRC supporters.

http://www.judgerc.org/ResponsetoGonnermanArticle.pdf - And here is Matthew Israel’s response to the Mother Jones article!

It’s chilling to know that there are parents out there who approach their children like a lot of people approach their dogs - by strapping them with a shocking collar to punish bad behavior - but I guess the larger question is this: when a child becomes a severe danger to him/herself and every one around them, what is the final recourse? Medication to the point of constant sedation? Severe physical isolation? Does this level of aversion therapy have some degree of utility?

As I’m married to a special education teacher who has focused on autism in her career, I can imagine I’ll get some first hand input as soon as she reads this or as soon as I bring it up in conversation. I’m curious to get her take on it from the educator’s perspective.

Speaking of perspective, let’s close this out with a picture of a JRC student receiving a gift from Santa Claus … while he’s wearing a fanny pack containing his electroshock gear.

Well, I stirred up another shitstorm on the CRBC list.  You know, the one I was quitting?  I tried, but for some reason, the removal request hasn’t been going through.

The CRBC recently penned a letter to a government official to lambaste her for declaring that federal transportation projects should not be used to fund anything friendly to bicycling.  This riled the CRBC who responded by accusing said official of changing her stance due to her close proximity to a “cadre of oilmen”.

That’s not usually the best way to convince somebody to change their mind again and another CRBC lister pointed that out.  That person was then accused of being out of touch with reality, at which point I stepped in to not only defend that person but to also add that I, too, thought the “cadre” comment was inappropriate and ineffective.  Then the mailing list exploded for a few days.

But I’ve not read any of the responses.

See, there are some times when I want to get my opinion out there but then not deal with any of the fallout.  This was one of those times.  I’ve done the same elsewhere, but not all that frequently.  I usually wait a few days, go back, and see what the responses were, but I almost never just wholesale delete the responses sitting in my inbox, destroying messages of both agreement and disagreement before even opening them to see which they are.

When I know that I might be starting a flame war, I have little desire to come back in to be burned in turn.  And that’s why I’m an internet coward.

Gizmodo had a story up today about a woman who got a $1 million bid on her late husband’s Transformers collection. Follow the link and check out the photos - it is a truly impressive cache of vintage Transformer goodness.

What struck me, however, was the mention that this woman could not legally sell the original Megatron as it resembled a Walther P38 and lacked the blaze-orange barrel tip. As a result, she is “giving” those items away with the auction.

Surely it can’t be illegal to sell vintage goods that bear a mild resemblance to a pistol? That can’t be right. Turns out though that it is. You pretty much have to read the entire chapter 76 of 15 USC to understand it, so go check that out.

If the toy gun is a replica of a firearm manufactured after 1898, it must have the orange tip. If it doesn’t, it can’t be sold after November 5, 1988 (reselling the item, even if it was manufactured before that cutoff, qualifies as “entering commerce”). It’s worth noting that this version of the restrictions implies that toys whose manufacture and initial sale predate May 5, 1989 are exempt from the requirement in perpetuity.

Interesting, then, that there are no restrictions for selling real firearms in a private sale beyond believing that the buyer is 18 or older and that the buyer claims to have no legal restrictions regarding the purchase and ownership of said firearms (eg, no prior felonies).

Let’s recap: toy gun from early 80’s that turns into robot - possibly illegal to sell to anyone; real gun from any year that can put a hole in a target at 300 yards - legal to sell to nearly anyone.

I’ve been puzzling this out a bit and here’s the only conclusion I have reached: the sale of real guns is acceptable because at least then police will know it’s a real gun and can shoot at will. The sale of unmarked toy guns is unacceptable because then police will have to think twice about shooting and that would be awful. As long as only real guns are in the hands of the public, we’ll know exactly who to shoot.

Assuming gun owners don’t paint their firearms orange. Oops.

One of the things I did once I got back into biking was look into local resources for cycling. The big kahuna group was easily the Centre Region Bicycle Coalition, so I joined their mailing list.

Before too long, I pissed off everybody in the group with my outsider perspective on an emotionally charged topic (the death of Bohdan Kulakowski and the resulting light sentence of his killer), but I stayed in there and defended my position. Eventually, things quieted down.

Then, this week, one of the group posted a note about a citybike program in Tulsa and how it was the first in the US. Well, it sounded a lot like the Yellow Bike programs, so I responded with that info along with info about a “green bikes” program in Oregon and the Free Wheelin’ program in Annapolis, MD. What followed was a response from this person basically calling me out for having not gotten the point and providing bulleted lists of why the Yellow Bikes programs are nothing like the European citybike programs, on which the Tulsa initiative is based. Ah, okay, sorry for not keeping up on European urban bicycling programs. How lax of me.

Of course, it’s tough to read intent and tone in any electronic message, but I’ve decided that I’m having too much fun actually riding bikes to want to deal with folks who are militant about them. It’s a real shame, too, because I would like to think that there are other casual riders out there like me who could really benefit from access to a centralized resource of information but who might also be scared away by the prevalent attitudes among individuals in the community.

Bike-in Movie night, while more relaxed, still carried with it a social message of the world’s reliance upon oil and how it drives men to madness (hence the movie choice of The Road Warrior). I just thought it was cool to be parked in my trike at the top of a garage watching a movie and eating popcorn out of my panniers. I didn’t really go for social commentary.

So, I removed myself from the CRBC mailing list tonight. There’s enough strife in my everyday life that it makes little sense to have to worry about who I might set off next with a well intentioned though possibly naive submission to the list.

Certainly, I respect and support the CRBC’s mission to make Centre County a more bike-able place, but I just don’t have a skin thick enough to actually walk the walk and talk the talk among those folks.

I don’t want to join an army. I just want to ride my bike.

UPDATE: The discussion has now spread to other list members and has taken a more even tone.  Still quitting the list, though.