Welcome to America – 14-Year-Old Texas Student Arrested for Building a Homemade Clock

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Police detained a 14-year-old Muslim boy after a teacher at his North Texas high school decided that a homemade clock he proudly brought to class looked like a bomb, according to school and police officials.

The family of Ahmed Mohamed said the boy was suspended for three days from MacArthur High School in the Dallas suburb of Irving after taking the clock to class on Monday.

The boy makes his own radios, repairs his own go-kart and on Sunday spent about 20 minutes before bedtime assembling a clock using a circuit board, power supply wired to a digital display and other items, The Dallas Morning News reported.

– From the ABC News article: Muslim Boy, 14, Detained for Making Clock Mistaken for Bomb

America is a deeply fallen nation. I don’t know how obvious it has to become before people come to grips and start to do something about it.

We haven’t decayed into this tepid abyss of immorality and decadence because of illegal immigrants, no matter what a two-bit demagogue preaching to desperate hordes infected with what Huxley referred to as herd-poisoning tells you. It’s entirely own our fault. We’ve allowed criminals and professional crony capitalists to take total control of the reins of power, and rather than fight against them, we aspire to become them. We have allowed them to scare us into submission by exploiting the tragic events of 9/11 to consolidate the world’s wealth into an increasingly small number of hands. Immigrants didn’t do this. We did, or at the very least, we allowed it to happen.

I harbor nostalgia for the days when Americans were merely ridiculed as being obese, McDonalds eating slobs ignorant of world affairs. We aren’t viewed with this combination of amusement and endearment any longer. Rather, the world now shudders with a mixture of disgust and horror in contemplation of what we have become. A decadent, clownish, wealth obsessed, corrupt, aggressive, war-mongering multitude of brainwashed imperial subjects. Worse yet, it’s not just ignorance anymore. There appears to be a idolization of anti-intellectualism running rampant, something on full display as of late with the ascendence of Donald Trump as a uniquely American strongman-savior. Not only is this stupid, it’s pathetic and dangerous.

America used to celebrate its eccentrics. The strange, creative, iconoclasts who, when allowed to, will generally change society for the better. In modern America, we put them in handcuffs. To illustrate this point, here’s an excerpt from my 2013 post, Remembering Internet Prodigy and Activist Aaron Swartz (1986-2013): Your Life is an Inspiration:

Despite this horrible tragedy, based on the outpouring of disgust even from the mainstream media, I am optimistic that Aaron’s death might actually represent a turning point.  An event that can shake people out of their normalcy bias and force them to accept the sad reality they have been loath to admit.  That our criminal “justice” system has been completely and totally co-opted by a ruthless, greedy and immoral oligarch class that seems hell bent on throwing the American public into a neo-feudal nightmare of debt slavery and ignorance.

Aaron was a treasure and a gift to the species and only a very sick and dying culture would have led to his premature end.  We must look at ourselves in the mirror, accept this reality and change it immediately.

Unfortunately, not much has changed in these two and a half years. Our populace remains as fearful, paranoid and slavish as ever. More destitute, more desperate and more confused than ever before. Feverishly searching for a weak group to blame, and self-satisfied with their slobbering support for a casino billionaire who has opportunistically provided the easy target. This is the culture that attacked and killed Aaron Swartz, and it is the culture that led to the arrest of a brilliant 14-year-old boy for building a homemade clock.

From ABC News:

Police detained a 14-year-old Muslim boy after a teacher at his North Texas high school decided that a homemade clock he proudly brought to class looked like a bomb, according to school and police officials.

The family of Ahmed Mohamed said the boy was suspended for three days from MacArthur High School in the Dallas suburb of Irving after taking the clock to class on Monday.

The boy makes his own radios, repairs his own go-kart and on Sunday spent about 20 minutes before bedtime assembling a clock using a circuit board, power supply wired to a digital display and other items, The Dallas Morning News reported.

The school district said in a statement that Ahmed was detained by police. Irving police spokesman James McLellan told the Morning News that police are determining whether to file a charge of making a hoax bomb.

This is so typical of the U.S. power structure. Rather than admitting fault for traumatizing a little boy for being particularly smart, they regroup in order to charge him with an invented crime.

So what’s the lesson learned by Ahmed? That inventiveness and eccentricity are not only unappreciated in America, but that exhibiting such traits is dangerous. In contrast, when members of the so-called “elite” commit systemic theft and embark upon countless unnecessary and devastating wars abroad, they are rewarded with unimaginable wealth. This is the incentive structure of modern America, and it’s precisely why the country has morphed into little more than a neo-feudal imperial Banana Republic.

For a little more, here’s some coverage from the New York Times:

A high school student in Texas whose hobby was inventing thought he had a unique idea for a project: to build his own clock.

But the effort landed him in handcuffs and juvenile detention, accused of making a hoax bomb.

When Ahmed Mohamed, 14, brought the clock to MacArthur High School in Irving, Tex., on Monday, an engineering teacher suggested that he not show the invention to other teachers. But it beeped during an English class, prompting Ahmed to show his English teacher what it was, according to an account in The Dallas Morning News.

In a video posted on the newspaper’s website, Ahmed described how he was taken from school by the police. “They took me to a room filled with five officers,” he said. “They interrogated me, and searched through my stuff and took my tablet and my invention.”

He said he was fingerprinted, and mug shots were taken at a juvenile detention center. He was released when his parents came to retrieve him.

“It made me feel like a criminal,” he said. He was suspended for three days.

“It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”

Read this line again and again and again until you get it. “The concern was, what was this thing built for?” 

Perhaps it was built out of curiosity and passion, or perhaps it was just the spontaneous product of a creative and brilliant mind. So what? Why does it have to be built for a specific purpose? Instead of celebrating such a bright young boy, we criminalize him. It’s a symptom of a very sick and twisted society.

In his classic novel 1984, George Orwell wrote:

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

He was wrong. It actually, it looks like this.

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Ahmed’s arrest occurred in Texas. A state so proud of it’s small government stance, yet bizarrely ground zero for a multitude of statist practices. For example:

Police State Desperation – Texas Sheriff Proclaims “Authority Comes from God”

Don’t Mess with Texas – Police Raid and Shutdown Lemonade Stand Run by 7 and 8-Year-Old Girls

How a Department of Homeland Security Fusion Center in Texas Targeted Animal Rights Activists

Meet Jason Villalba – The Texas State Representative Who Introduced a Bill that Criminalizes Citizens Filming Police

Texas SWAT Team Raids Organic Farm for No Reason

For more related articles, see:

United Airlines CEO Walks Away with $21 Million Exit Package After Resigning Due to Corruption Probe

Is the Justice Department Finally Ready to Jail Corporate Criminals?

New Report – The United States’ Sharp Drop in Economic Freedom Since 2000 Driven by “Decline in Rule of Law”

Bilderberg 2015 – Where Criminals Mingle with Politicians

Baltimore as a Microcosm of America

The U.S. Department of Justice Handles Banker Criminals Like Juvenile Offenders…Literally

Cronyism Pays – Eric “Too Big to Jail” Holder Triumphantly Returns to His Prior Corporate Law Firm Job

Three Former SEC Officials Write Letter to SEC Chief Mary Jo White Asking Her to Stop Protecting Corporate Cronyism

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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