Remember back in May of 2012, when we discussed how the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts, a school for special needs students, punished Andre McCollins, an autistic student, for not taking off his jacket? And do you remember how they punished him with hours of electric shocks, leaving him permanently brain-damaged, not to mention burned? Well, the FDA is now mulling whether to ban using electric shock devices in this manner, and former JRC worker Gregory Miller has started a petition on change.org to help you tell the FDA to ban such torture devices used on special needs kids. "Torture devices" is not hyperbole -- when schools' mania for discipline becomes such that they give kids electric shocks for (in Mr. Miller's words) "closing their eyes or tearing a paper cup," they're engaging in torture simple and plain, and maybe we ought to keep their toys from them when they do that. Obviously, no one opposes actual discipline, but abusing children like this is not discipline, nor is it "tough love," nor is it the fruit of "zero tolerance" policies. It's just evil.
Meanwhile, AT&T has been pushing state legislators to make community broadband networks illegal -- even in rural areas in which AT&T has no intention of building out. And toward this end they've apparently enlisted the aid of the dastardly ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, since ALEC has so much experience writing "model legislation" which somehow closely resembles state legislation designed to serve big corporate paymasters at the expense of good citizens just trying to make a better life for themselves. Again, I do not exaggerate: the ALEC agenda is anti-freedom, because when the law serves only big corporations, the rest of us have no freedom. And the push against local, government-owned broadband is a push against the people's broadband, because the people own their government. Thankfully, the people who actually own AT&T, their shareholders, are about as fed up with AT&T spending their money to keep rural areas broadband-free as the rest of us, so Sum of Us helps you tell AT&T to tell their shareholders about their war against rural broadband.
Comments