So you think that they would freely let him waltz in carrying a case full of wires and electronic doo dads and assume all is well?
Ok…
But that’s stupid. Muslims would never use children or teens to deliver bombs to kill people.
Get him an exhibit at the next White House Science Fair.
I see no evidence at all that the kid did anything wrong. I see plenty of evidence that all the other people did the wrong thing.
Maybe you believe that there was a clearly communicated policy that a homemade clock can not be brought to campus? Is that it?
If so, do you think that such a policy would then instruct a teacher to tell the kid to just keep the device hidden in his backpack all day? I sincerely doubt it.
I imagine such a policy, if it existed, would then have some options. Maybe something like this:
- Do we think this device is dangerous?
If yes, then evacuate the school and call 911. (Probably best if this happens sooner than 2 or 3 hours after the device is discovered.)
If no, we have a few options. We could call the parent and have them come and get the device and take it home. Or we could lock it up in the office and make the kid pick it up at the end of the day.
But we don’t question the kid without a parent and have him handcuffed and arrested. Especially when the reason they finally called the cops was because he refused to tell them it wasn’t a clock.
Also, I’m baffled that you would think his desire to transfer from this school goes to prove that he did something wrong. Why on earth would he want to stay at a school where almost all of the authorities there jumped to the absolute worst conclusion about him.
But maybe there is no policy. In which case, the kid should not have gotten into trouble at all.
I hope you have to practice being that stupid, because this is some serious stupidity.
Nothing in any story suggests that the Secret Service would not examine any such device before the kid got near the president. So what? That does not mean that the idiots at the school and among the police could not tell it was not a bomb. They never called the bomb squad; they never evacuated the school; they let the kid stay in class for several periods before they bothered to call him down to the office to be grilled; at no time did the kid say it was anything other than a clock.
So claims of “possible bomb” are utterly stupid
and claims of “bomb hoax” are clearly lies.
What the Secret Service would do on a separate occasion with a device that might or might not even be the same device is irrelevant to anything that has happened.
Just stupid.
tom, I gave Slacker (and cannedmayhem, who is well past his sell date) a chance to employ Ockham’s razor some time ago in this thread…so far, they seem more interested in using it to cut off their own heads…
Once again, to get the result they want, the father and kid would have to cook up a complex plan that depended on several people they had no control over doing exactly what they wanted them to do. Or conversly, a kid does a kid-like tinkering, shows off, and various adults jump to what seems to them at the time reasonable conclusions that snowball into the current controversy.
Note, I do not dismiss the first option as impossible; but it needs more than inference and sly hints before I would prefer it to the simpler explanation. And so far all we have for it is hearsay and innuendo.
Ain’t enough by a long shot.
I don’t know what’s going through Slacker’s head, but I don’t think you need a “complex plan” from the father and kid to think something’s hinky about this.
On the one hand, you could have a kid who wanted to bring in a box of boards and wires to school to see if he could get a reaction out of his teachers while still being able to maintain an innocent puppy dog face. Why? For attention, from his father and sister, who he’d seen face bigotry in their own lives. That’s it. No conspiracy, the father needn’t be in on it, all he’d have to do is supply some entirely predictable and appropriate outrage in the event that something happened.
On the other hand, you need a seemingly intelligent 14-year-old to be completely naive about the perception of a box filled with boards and wires, to be dumb enough about electronics to think that plugging this contraption in during class was a good idea, and so completely delusional about his own abilities that he’d think that showing this thing off to his teachers would get him any sort of earned praise.
So many people in this thread have said that the second scenario is a foregone conclusion because there’s no evidence to support the first scenario (which I’ll grant) and, to paraphrase, teenagers do dumb shit all the time. But it’s precisely because of Occam’s razor that I think the first scenario has some plausibility – it’s built on the same logic of “teenagers do dumb things [for attention]”, but requires Ahmed to have been less dumb, and to have made fewer dumb decisions.
Slacker gives the first scenario, or whatever variation he believes, a 55% chance of being correct. I certainly wouldn’t go that far, even at the height of my skepticism. And now, after hearing a few of Ahmed’s latest interviews, I only give it maybe a 5% chance. I’m not taking it off the table, but he really does come off like a mediocre student who’s completely delusional about his own abilities.
Of course, this entire discussion about the merits and motive of the actual clock are dwarfed by the absolutely moronic and completely inexcusable decision to arrest him by grown adults, which nobody is in disagreement about. But I don’t think that means we need to shut down any discussion about other aspects of the situation.
Nice post. I will trust your judgment of these interviews (I have seen none myself) and knock my odds down to 20%.
Hahahaha. Are you the word-police? Have you been authorized to decide which words/descriptions are acceptable? You’re a hoot.
This poorly made timing device is definitely a fire hazard. The exposed wires, connections, and the copper strips on the circuit boards, could result in a short circuit or burn someone stupid enough to actually handle this device. Not having the components securely mounted increases the chance of a short or failed component. Not having the timing device mounted inside a proper, and safe, enclosure increases the chance of injury. You may not be up on the latest information concerning electrical safety but contact with 110vac can stop your heart. Oops.
This was not a class project. The kid says he wanted to show it to his teacher. The first teacher told him to keep the device in his backpack. Is that school policy? With zero-tolerance being pretty much SOP in schools, I assume the first teacher should have confiscated the timing device when he saw it.
The second teacher did confiscate the timing device when “kid stupid” plugged it in during English class. Was that the wrong thing to do? Was the teacher following proper school protocol?
The 2nd teacher contacted the Principle. Was that the wrong thing to do? Was the teacher following proper school protocol?
The Principle contacted the police. Did the Principle follow school district protocol? I doubt that the Principle had a choice. If you see something, say something.
Why did the police interrogate “kid stupid” for as long as they did? I have no idea. Maybe the answers “kid stupid” gave didn’t convince the police that the kid was telling the whole truth?
Have radical, fanatical Muslims stopped making IEDs? Have radical, fanatical Muslims stopped calling on their followers to make, and deploy, bombs? I wasn’t aware of that. Thanks for calming everyone’s fears.
I know he’s only recently learned English, but that sort of gibberish about having built “very complicated” stuff like “CPUs and soldering them” is pretty telling. Either’s he’s doing a world class job of keeping up this “I wanted to show off my awesome clock” act or he’s just completely clueless.
eta: There’s also this fantastic picture that really needs no explanation.
All of this escalation is because he has brown skin, is a Muslim, and has a Middle Eastern name. The administrators looked at the clock through their personal prejudices and came to the conclusion that it was a bomb, he was trying to make a bomb, or that he was making a hoax bomb. To them, there was no other possibility because that’s all that Middle Eastern Muslims do with electronics that look like that. If he said it was a clock, he was clearly lying because he’s a bomb-making Muslim like they all are.
To try and justify any of the administration’s actions based on potential issues with a disassembled clock is missing the point. There’s no way the police get called and the student arrested just for a minor potential fire hazard. If the student was white and non-Muslim none of this would happen.
The outpouring of support for Ahmed isn’t because he’s a great inventor. It’s because people are ashamed of the racism he’s being subjected to and they want to let him know that not everyone thinks that. They want to let him know that some people think it’s impressive and that they see him in a positive light.
The first scenario requires Ahmed to decide to bring something he thinks will be perceived as a bomb, understands that he may get a racist reaction to bringing it in (since that’s his motive) but trusts that “Brown Muslim kid bringing a fake bomb to school to get a reaction from racists” will all be okay if he just calls it a clock after getting the reaction.
I wouldn’t call that “less dumb”.
Well, some explanation would be nice since I don’t know what your point of linking to it is. But looking at the Re/Code site it was taken from, it’s an NBC News photo so I’d assume the photographer said “Quick, do something science-y” before snapping a photo.
Natch…
That’s fake, right? Please tell me that is shooped
Agree to disagree. It’s dumb in that there’s potentially catastrophic repercussions if everything goes really south, but that’s less “dumb” than it is “characteristically short-sighted for a 14-year-old.”
I’d assume the same. And yet, that’s what he chose to do. <shrug>
Sure, it’s an “active” thing as opposed to staring at a CPU. I suppose it’s possible that the kid had a soldering iron handy but no idea how to use it or what it’s used for. This would be the same kid with the foresight to purchase a soldering iron in case he needs one for a photograph in his house but couldn’t noodle out to buy a DIY clock kit for his clock-bomb-clock to cover his story.
OMG, he actually is some sort of an idiot. Does he not know how he is coming across?
Well, he’s an early teen shoved into the spotlight so… probably not.