#5 says: "But let’s be sensible about this. "

I don't know if you've noticed, but those days are over. :-)

It's an indication of how far to the right that the left has moved that the current "left" is falling all over itself admiring Buckley. All I can remember from those years is what a heinous person he was. Barry Goldwater has had the same revisionist treatment: in today's context, he looks rational and is being promoted as a great man. Let me assure you that at the time he was not. Too bad Nixon couldn't have hung on long enough to have been rehabilitated, too. The modern left would have loved him.

Uh, roboprof, perhaps you could provide an appropriate link? It seems that additional comments might be forthcoming....

"school's president insists that the lockdown procedures worked. I'd submit that there's no way of knowing if they work or not, as there wasn't actually a threat."

I'd submit that the procedures definitely didn't work, since they were triggered by a false alarm. A good procedure identifies threats correctly.

http://www.wholistichealingresearch.com/completelistrandomizedstudies.html
There's no shortage of research in this field. To imply otherwise is very disingenuous.

"I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as fraud." - Carl Jung

There's quite a bit going on in the field that debunkers maintain has no evidence. One interesting source is http://noetic.org/ , working in research of what you might call fringe phenomena, who published, a year or so ago, a study in which subjects were able to anticipate by several seconds, by internal signs such as heartbeat, the showing of upsetting photos shown randomly by a computer.

Homeopathy didn't work for me, and I don't have an opinion on it, but in Europe it's a covered (insurance, public health, whatever) treatment, and doesn't get the distain it does in the US. How the American AMA took over medicine, and forced out all competition, at the beginning of the last century would make a good organized-crime novel, and is worth reading about.

Dean Radin, of noetic.org, has a minor treatment on uninformed skepticism on his website:
http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2007/02/debunking-debunkers.html

I don't know what I personally believe, because I'm smart enough to know I don't know everything, so I like to keep an open mind and follow this stuff so that I don't miss things like the noetic.org photo study. Most of my friends regard me as a skeptic, but I'm not a stupid, blind one.

In my twisted syntax, above, the "himself" is not the entertainer. Sorry for the language. :-)

"M, what exactly are you proposing might exist that mentalists claim doesn't exist? I'm genuinely curious."

I'm proposing that the person who allows a stage entertainer to define the limits of reality for himself is, indeed, a fool.

Or to put it another way: skepticism as a tool is healthy; as a way of life, it's just another form of mental disease that materialists are prone to.

I think I get it now, Tom: everything was earth, air, fire, and water until something better was found, just as the atom didn't exist until it was discovered by man. At least when real scientists approach this problem they realize that unproven does not mean non-existent, and they keep an open mind.

Debunkers, especially the magician type, seem to specialize in generalizing that because there is no tree in my house today, therefore never, on any December 25th in the past, could there ever have been any tree in my house. Is this guy just another of those who think that because they can prove it's possible to fool people some of the time, that the people they disagree with are ALWAYS fooling people?

I love cases like this. It separates the posters who truly believe in constitutional rights from the hypocrites who believe in them until it's inconvenient, or until it gores their own horse.

Make no mistake of it, this action is not *among* the public: we're not scared of each other, and it's an error to state it that way. The government is scared of us, and is in the process of making sure we're scared of them--more scared of them than they are of us, too. Where this is headed should be clear as a bell.

@29, also--"It's as if you just want to be outraged, so you're deliberately ignoring the ability of citizens to act sensibly. Consider all the street photographers who HAVEN'T had their film impounded, or been harassed."

Yeah, consider all of the people in any situation who don't actively squeal. I'm not impressed: that, alone, never seems sufficient to prevent abuse when the "authorities" are on a roll. In fact, when bad things happen, good people with brains hide. [I had a personal Chicago story to tell here, but I decided that I'd better leave it out, beause I don't want trouble, and that fear, in itself, is the problem here]. I don't care if 97% of the populace act properly--the've NEVER been the ones we need to worry about, anyway.

If you live in Chicago and read the paper these days, you will realize that this is simply the Chicago police department's attempt to keep the cops away from their normal work of beating up citizens in bars while being recorded by security cameras.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49kgG0s7lVk
http://cbs2chicago.com/topstories/Chicago.Police.police.2.336027.html
http://cbs2chicago.com/local/special.operations.section.2.341295.html

My favorite book this week is available free from
http://theauthoritarians.com

One of the points of the book is the disproportionate fear and excessive response of authoritarian followers to perceived threats, an issue which is currently involved in allowing the US government to create a fascist system within the United States. Everyone should read this book. Seriously, I mean it.

Does anyone remember the 50s? My brother and I disassembled mercury hearing aid batteries, and collected and played with the mercury. You can easily plate a penny to look like it's silver. It does funny stuff when you hit it with a hammer.

We rode tricycles that, heaven forbid, could tip over, and had, heaven forbid, sharp edges. We had scissors with points. My wife, at 11 or so, rode the city bus alone into Philadelphia to visit her grandmother (child abduction figures are, believe it or not, no higher today than they were then---I bet you didn't know that).

Need I say it, all of us are still alive.

All the time I run into people who are afraid of their shadows. I pity them.

My preliminary grazing is notifying me that it was a very good idea for me to follow nixar's link, above, and you should probably take a look, too.

Just for fun, google "best buy customer service" and "amazon customer service" and see what you get. I realize that no company is immune from criticism from fruitcakes, and that this creates a certain mass of flack, but one company is obviously MUCH better at this than the other.

As little as possible (the laptop I'm using right now is pushing six years, and I hope to get anothyer three out of it), but never from Best Buy, who has a horrible reputation in this type of thing. Sure, you can't avoid buying from bad people, but you certainly can avoid buying from the ones who consistently do stuff like this as a matter of apparent policy.

My vendor of choice is Amazon, though if you show me enough similar nonsense from them, I'll drop them.

Todd is right, and MichaeW is right. Which is why I don't buy stuff from people like that.

@ Svein Olav Nyberg:
Everything I've downloaded recently from E-Music appears to be 320-floating, or close to it.

The thing that bothers me about the discussion above is that no one seems to expect the security people to think at all--they are being completely given a free pass to react semi-violently to anything that isn't personally familiar to them. I expect this from dogs, but not from human beings. . . and dogs can be trained, so shouldn't security people, at a minimum, have the IQ of dogs, and be minimally trainable?

The personality of the student shouldn't be an issue at all: what's an issue is hysterical response and fear of the unknown. This situation reminds me a bit of those police training exercises where dummies pop up and police are EXPECTED to be able to judge which one are harmless, and which to shoot at--not just kill everything that moves.

The way I'm feeling today after browsing the news this evening, she's lucky they made her go somewhere else, anywhere else.

What does the National Biscuit Company have that we would want on the web, anyway? I like their vanilla wafers, but beyond that. . . ?

Really, though, does anyone here watch TV?