First of all, I’d like to just say one thing:

BONG HITS 4 JESUS

How many of you felt that this phrase was trying to convince you to use illegal drugs? What if it were on a banner held by teenagers?

The majority of Supreme Court justices thought this rather comical phrase was a sufficient enticement to encouraging illegal drug use that schools were entitled to confiscate such a banner and suspend a student for holding such a banner at “a school sponsered and sanctioned event” which was apparently to stand on the side of a street as the Olympic torch passed by.

When did we become such a nation of pansies? That the merest mention of something which which we might disagree requires that we squash it by rejecting all legal precedent and tossing our First Amendment rights onto the fire?

Justice Stevens writes in the dissent:

In my judgment, the First Amendment protects student speech if the message itself neither violates a permissible rule nor expressly advocates conduct that is illegal and harmful to students. This nonsense banner does neither, and the Court does serious violence to the First Amendment in upholding—indeed, lauding—a school’s decision to punish Frederick for expressing a view with which it disagreed.

Justice Stevens’ dissent is in fact very good, and (while I’m no law student) I think draws on precedent to a much larger and more thorough degree that the majority opinion. I urge you all to read this decision.

Morse v. Frederick – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[tags]First Amendment[/tags]

Addendum: BoingBoing has a replacement banner for you students that would seemingly avoid the issues that Justice Roberts raised in the majority opinion.

Over on Eric Wolf’s blog, he writes an interesting post about the Internet boom phenomenon: Lord, let there be one more tech boom, I promise not to blow it this time…

I have a slightly different take.

We all like to jump on the bandwagon when something is new and exciting. I’m a lucky man: I chose to be educated in a field which has been the source of many of these new trends, namely computer science. More than that though, I tried (and continue to try) to monitor what’s new, what’s coming down the pike, what trends are gonna be big. I’m an early adopter. I have yahoo and gmail identities without digits in them. I’ve been through six generations of cell phones. I created one hundred podcasts, and then got off the bandwagon. And you know what? It hasn’t really helped me make any money (other than perhaps my salary) because ultimately I don’t buy into the hype nearly as much as the masses.

As we sit poised on another of these “boom” product release (the impending release of the iPhone) and my livelihood continues to be dependent upon the boom of an impending movie release (Ratatouille), I can’t help but ask if we could develop a society which moved at a slightly more leisurely pace, which didn’t rely on the herky-jerky motion of “progress” to get us out of bed every morning.

In Japan, there are cultural movements which are a reaction to the breakneck pace of advancement that Japan has acheived over the last century. They want to adopt a different style of life, a slower pace, by choice. This “Slow Life” philosophy is governed by the following principles:

SLOW PACE:

We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.

SLOW WEAR:

We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).

SLOW FOOD:

We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.

SLOW HOUSE:

We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably, and ultimately, to conserve our environment.

SLOW INDUSTRY:

We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.

SLOW EDUCATION:

We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.

SLOW AGING:

We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes.

SLOW LIFE:

Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy.

(From this article).

We tend to admire growth. We crave the excitement of explosions, of boom and bust. We have accelerated our lives to the point that each of us will likely have multiple careers. We will make and squander fortunes. Marry, divorce and marry again. When we make a plea to have another boom, perhaps we should take a step back, slow down, and figure out what will really make us happy.

Oh, by the way, I’ve got $50 for anyone who will stand in line for me at AT&T…

[tags]Rants and Raves[/tags]