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The Troubled Teen Industry / John Taylor Gatto interviewed for High times
« on: November 23, 2003, 03:17:00 PM »
In the current issue of High Times, John Taylor Gatto has a 4 page interview/article.

For those who don't know he was NY state teacher of year 3 times and is one of the biggest critics of mass public schooling.



Here is one of his old articles:

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
 
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
 
We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.
 
The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover t~at all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insightsimply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
 
But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?
 
Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
 
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
 
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
 
1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
 
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.
 
Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
 
The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to render the populace "manageable."
 
It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
 
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
 
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
 
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
 
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
 
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
 
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

 
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
 
Tre you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, lib, erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.
 
There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.
 
Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
 
It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.
 
Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.
 
First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

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If I go to http://fornits.com it sends me to one of those generic search engine cybersquater sites.

www.fornits com works though.

Maybe your dns got hijacked or maybe mine did.

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New Info / MOONIES run Teen Celibacy club with federal funding thanks t
« on: September 24, 2003, 01:37:00 PM »
http://salon.com/news/feature/2003/09/2 ... index.html

This guy believes American democracy is Satanic and we are funding him. C'mon conservatives you don't need money that badly.

It is one thing to hold opposing views on what America should be like. I can respect a conservative, liberal, green, libertarian, or social democrat because their views are based on what they think is best for our nation but people like Moon want to tear up the constitution and install themselves as world dictator.

There is a big difference between the Loyal Opposition and a violent Moony takeover.

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http://www.freerick.org/blog/carcar716/casaentries.txt

I found this around the web. Its a journal written at Casa supposedly by what appears to be a pretty level headed and complacent client who sees right through the program and is trying to convince her mother to let her out. According to her journals she spent 4 months there.

It thoroughly depressing but a must read all the same.

This is what we are fighting against. Freedom is not just a word to be shouted at rallies and then put back in the dictionary. (unoriginal but it works :smile:

In the end this cause is about individual liberty and the right to be free from imprisonment. Because if the line between being free and being imprisoned is just a birthday or two then none of us are free. All it takes is a few keystrokes on a computer or a change in a law and any of us could be kidnapped and imprisoned for a profit.

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New Info / Kidnappers/Escort Rules and Regs? Emancipated Minor?
« on: July 25, 2003, 02:58:00 AM »
I was talking to this girl and she seemed to think that since these escorts are not cops and what they do is only semi-legal at best they can't legally touch you unless you touch them first.

She said that when they came for her she told them she was not going and that she knew that that was the law and was careful not to touch them.

Then they said they were leaving and reached out to shake her hand and she shook it without thinking and was in handcuffs on the ground pretty quick. Then she said she was flown across the country in handcuffs and her pajamas and then left at the destination airport still in handcuffs alone for 3 hours and then the program (which she says was not abusive but definitely had all the classic cult lingo like feedback and "my experience of you...") did not have handcuff keys to let her out until the next day.

Anyone know if this is true in Maryland about escorts? And anyone know if anything they did was illegal like leaving a minor in an airport in restraints in her pajamas? I mentioned to her that she could still technicly sue until she is 21 for anything that happened before 18.

Also she said she was an emancipated minor at the time of her abduction due to her parent's divorce. Would that mean that it was legally kidnapping?

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Last I heard Alldredge academy had changed its name to Ayne Institute and seperated from its primary owner L J Mitchell.  That was part of its plea agreement with the state.

A kid I know in the neighborhood just got back from 3 months there and told me it was still operating as "Alldredge"

He also mentioned that a lot of the staff there are the same as the ones who let that kid kill himself. Guess what they are also charging a new sale price for their services, $29000 for 3 months.

And get this he went in with a D average in highschool and with his alldredge "transcript" he has a 3.15 now. Apparently Alldredge makes quite a living off of running a straight A school and writing recomendations for the kids when they are done with the wilderness part of the program.

Also it seems their website is still http://www.alldredgeacademy.org

Anyone know if this violates their agreement with the state?

[ This Message was edited by: FaceKhan on 2003-07-14 10:15 ]

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Front Page New York Times May 9th 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/09/inter ... XI.html?th

or

http://nytimes.com/2003/05/09/internati ... &position=

This is really big. A very good article on WWASP programs overseas and the UTAH group that runs them.

This may be why the wwaspies have been going nuts lately with the legal threats, and sending their minions out to harrass. They must have known this was coming.

We all know that wwaspies are gonna be sending hundreds of letters to the times now so we need to send a lot of our own to keep it balanced.

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The Troubled Teen Industry / What happened to boarding school truth
« on: March 13, 2003, 01:06:00 AM »
Anyone know why the website was taken down, they just moved a few months ago and now they are down again. It looks like the host cut them off or something.

http://www26.brinkster.com/bs4/

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Straight, Inc. and Derivatives / Anyone heard of this guy: Doug Thorburn
« on: February 08, 2003, 12:27:00 AM »
Take this guys little quiz http://www.equalparts.com/thorburn/tsari.html

Basically one yes answer and you are immediately 25-50% chance of being an addict. Answer just 2 or 3 and he claims that you are almost certainly an addict. He insists that "experts" consider him to be redefining the science of addiction and treatment. He claims that just about anyone who acts badly or irrationally, immorally or self-destructively is an addict.

He is a self-appointed expert on addiction although he really is a tax professional/financial planner. Or at least that seems to be a claim he can back up.


He is advertising in Randy Cassinghams this is true newsletter which seems very odd since he is staunchly against the drug war.

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The Troubled Teen Industry / Sexual Abuse at Carolina Springs Academy
« on: November 19, 2002, 11:03:00 PM »
I was on the boarding school truth chat and a girl named "jamie" (16) reported being sexually abused there. I think she said it was the husband of a director. She is home for a "homepass" and is going back friday. Since I don't know what part of North Carolina she is from (the school is in SC) I doubt my call to the child services in NC will do much good in getting to her before she is sent back. Her parents are telling her that she will graduate in another month but she knows that if she goes back they will probably keep her there to prevent her from talking. Her Mom is trying to stop her from calling the police. That makes her an accessory (and of course subject to being drawn and quartered if I were in charge)

It is good to know that the girl has not been so throughly thought reformed she does not know which end is up anymore but if she is sent back they will probably keep her till she is 18. I have her ip address (an aol registered one) so if anyone thinks they can get aol to release that information on what account was using it at the time I will send it to you.

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Joe's Apartment / A little tidbit for the conspiracy theorists
« on: November 12, 2002, 08:16:00 PM »
http://www.darpa.mil/iao/index.htm

Notice the new military internet surveilance project has a logo that includes the Illumanati pyramid and the motto "Scientia Est Potentia": "Knowledge is [behind the scenes] Power"

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New Info / Erlich? Hmm Could be interesting
« on: November 06, 2002, 01:58:00 AM »
Well Erlich has won the governors race in Maryland. I was hoping for Spear Lancaster (Libertarian) myself but I am glad KKT did not win. She was the driving force behind the abusive state boot camp and had openly campaigned to reopen it. Lancaster questioned why there has yet to be a Grand Jury investigation of the abusive guards even after the State settled with the teens for millions of dollars for abuses suffered by sadistic guards.

In all likelihood a Republican Governor in Maryland (a very democratic state) will probably be quite weak and have a hard time getting any rabidly conservative changes made. Neither of the major candidates were worth voting for but maybe with the first black luitenent governor we might see some drug war reforms or at the very least some police accountability.

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New Info / Pure aka http://www.helpyourteens.com? Good idea or bad idea
« on: October 27, 2002, 06:00:00 PM »
I recently began seeing a lot of activist links to http://www.helpyourteens.com



Supposedly it is a free consultant service to help refer parents to legitimate programs for teens. They are rabidly anti-wwasp which I take as a good sign. My only questions about them come because they use a lot of the same language as other pro-program sites and they use the same kinds of vague criteria for assessing whether a teen needs  "treatment". They also seem to regard "behavior modification" as treatment. Now there is some confusion over the use of this term, since it has become rather generic but behavior modification originally came from methods of brainwashing that are completely repugnant to mental health. I can't remember the "inventors" name but I do remember that his own daughter killed herself after being subjected to his idea of parenting.



So the question becomes is PURE a good idea or not. Is there a place for a kinder gentler teen treatment industry? Or is this just a group of parents who despite recognizing the dangers of this kind of involuntary "treatment" will not let go of the assumption that they, the parents, have some kind of moral highground in settling family problems by having their teen kidnapped and sent to some kind of program whether good or bad.

[ This Message was edited by: FaceKhan on 2002-10-27 15:03 ]

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New Info / new WWASP school in NY, Ivy Ridge
« on: October 27, 2002, 05:15:00 PM »
Acadamy at Ivy Ridge

5428 State Highway 37

Ogdensburg, NY  13669

 315-393-5930

 

Since I am going to school in NY now I am informing the NY child protection authorities, mental health agencies, and the local police in St. Lawrence County about this place and urge them to investigate. I really don't like the prospect of WWASP in the state I am living in.



[ This Message was edited by: Facekhan on 2002-10-27 14:43 ]

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The Troubled Teen Industry / How to be a cult leader video
« on: July 13, 2002, 03:32:00 PM »
http://www.rickross.com/video/mindcontrolvideo.rm

This is a disturbingly humourous video about how to start your own cult.

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