From an all-campus email this morning:
A non-specific bomb threat was discovered overnight in [Building]. A note was discovered at 4:16 a.m. Following our emergency response plan, the Schenectady Police were immediately notified. A sweep of the building was conducted by the Schenectady Police, State Police and the Sheriff's Department and it was determined there was no immediate threat and the building was deemed safe to reopen for classes at 8 a.m.
However, in light of the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech, we have decided to cancel or move all classes scheduled to meet this morning in [Building] and conduct a second sweep of the building to ensure there are no potential threats to the campus community. Once authorities determine there is no threat, we plan to reopen the building in time for classes beginning at 1:50 p.m.
It's depressing to think that I share a species with someone who thought this was a good idea.
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Gonna be a lot of those around the country as terms draw to a close.
Local high school had one last friday, they closed the whole school district for the day.
Fortunately the weather was nice and I was in town...
Never seen so many bored 16 year olds in town before.
Curious thing is that a friend of a friend of a friend sort of thing told us that the police had been expecting a threat and that for extraneous reasons they took it seriously; I got the impression the local police were tracking facebook chatter or some such.
Not sure if I'm impressed, worried or paranoid about hearing this.
In high school, shortly after 9/11 and the anthrax scares, we had some asswad put pixie-stick powder on a piece of paper and leave it in a bathroom. We waited outside in freezing temperatures for hours until it was cleared. Then there were a couple more bomb threats, and more waiting outside in freezing temperatures. For some reason my school would only be under siege from idiot threats during the worst days of winter. So I sympathize.
My point is that assholes will always use tragedies to do stupid things.
One does not place the improvised explosive device (oh what merry Official jargon) inside a building with dilute targets. One communicates the threat, perhaps with a simulacrum emplaced, and locates the shrapnel-sheathed charge as a waste container by the peripheral staging area to be densely packed with targets by the authoritarian decree. Leverage - one pair of poxy sneakers in an airplane reverberates as perpetual $billion/year strip searches at airports. Who is the fool?
One cannot bung a funnel at its broad end. Either kill the hatchery or stop complaining about alligators. Social advocacy vigorously decoupled authority from liability. Where there is no personal responsiblity there is no civic virtue. Such a society dies of its own hand.
Sorry, Chad. I've been watching an array of our high schools close or suspend classes over the past few days for the same thing. Good news/bad news that each threat has to be taken seriously. Ya just never know/an incentive for the next cretin. We'll all be happy to see this school year close out. Still, there isn't much to prevent the next one as you made so clear in an earlier post. Thanks for exploring that, btw. Hang in there.
Yup. I had one last week at my university. No one was evacuated, but we were asked to "be alert" for "suspicious packages" and the like.
It probably wouldn't even take one in ten thousand people being 'scum' for this frequency of stupidity. There's a lot of worse things going on.
"assholes will always use tragedies to do stupid things"
It's easy to say this, but consider the planning involved in any expression of resentment against society. The asshole in question needs to think through the consequences well enough to get a satisfying degree of disruption. It may seem pointless to those who play by the rules, but the perpetrators know what they're doing. These are not random impulses. It's not stupidity. It's anger.
A year or two ago I was watching local TV coverage of a police chase that ended on the side of the interstate with the bad guy holding a gun to his head, threatening suicide. Police stopped traffic in both directions while they talked this guy into accepting arrest. It took some time. One of the other guys watching yelled,"Just shoot him". He meant it, too. There were even some letters to the editor complaining about the traffic jam.
For every alienated guy who takes out his resentment against society, the majority of people express their resentments against that misfit even more, and it's society that starts the conflict. No child sets out to be a pariah. Both the mainstream media and the blogosphere are full of angry people verbally assaulting others. It's not just conservatives writing off the 20% or whatever it is of people who need help from others. It's people calling anyone who disagrees with them or frustrates them demeaning names.
I've noticed it's not as bad in real life, but in real life it's not just name calling. As long as people follow their nature to point at other people, resentfully saying that they're the problem, that they should be fixed, instead of looking at our own anger, this won't change. The solution of looking at oneself first has been around for thousands of years. It's not that unnatural. Kids tend to blame themselves too much for trouble, but whether it's the biology of anger or our culture, we start blaming others soon enough.
So yes, people are scum, but the potential to do better is also in our nature, and part of that requires us to discipline our own anger, or nothing will really change.
I just got word that our medical library also had a bomb threat emailed in this morning, and they cleared everyone out of there. They closed the library at 8AM--the email went out after 3PM. Very efficient...