The Strange Ones (1963) belongs to an
evergreen genre of classroom movie, the stranger-danger picture, in
which kids are taught tips for avoiding kidnappers and molesters.
Many films and videos have been made on this theme over the years,
some of them unintentionally
funny in dark, weird ways. But The Strange Ones stands
out.

That’s partly because of the sheer nightmarishness of it: the
shadows, the creepy music, the narrator who constantly wanders into
horror-movie territory. “Most people in the world are good and
nice, but unfortunately, there are some strange ones,” she tells
us. And: “You never know when there might be a Strange One around.”
And: “Even if this little boy had seen the man, how could he know
that he was a Strange One? There’s no way to tell. The Strange Ones
look just like everyone else.”

Yet watching this in 2014, that atmosphere of dread seems to
have settled in a world where people are remarkably level-headed
about
the risks families face. There’s no need here for someone like
Lenore
Skenazy and her Free-Range Kids movement: It’s
taken for granted that boys and girls will run errands for
their parents, walk home from school on their own, go to the park
or the movies without an adult, and play unsupervised in public.
Even when the narrator suggests that children should not go
someplace on their own, she doesn’t say they should stay close to a
grown-up; she tells them to “take along a friend.”

They’re also told they shouldn’t hitch-hike. This advice is
offered as we watch footage of a young boy thumbing a ride.
Evidently, half a century ago it was sufficiently common for
pre-adolescents to hitch-hike that someone felt the need to make a
movie telling them to stop.

The Strange Ones was directed by Sid Davis, a stuntman
turned classroom-film auteur whose movies have attracted a small
cult following. (His most infamous effort is probably Boys
Beware, on the threat purportedly posed by lurking
homosexuals.) After he died in 2006, I wrote that
he

occupies a gray area in mid-twentieth-century America.
On the one hand, he was an independent filmmaker with his own
vision, shooting ultra-low-budget pictures with few constraints. As
[film historian Ken] Smith wrote, “Society’s discomfort with
Davis’s dark world gave him the freedom to do pretty much what he
wanted. No committee of educational advisors oversaw his work, no
peer group condemned his excesses.” But it was educators who bought
his movies, and it was schoolchildren who watched them; his films
were frequently narrated by government officials or other authority
figures, and they weren’t averse to speaking the psychiatric
language of the time. Davis might not have been a part of the
social-engineering community, but he certainly was part of the
social-engineering complex. There’s a complicated relationship
between the supposedly scientific interventions of credentialed
experts and the more nakedly paranoid world of grassroots moral
panics. Sid Davis was a bridge from one to the other.

Bonus link: A few years after The Strange
Ones came out, Davis released a quasi-remake—the
soundtrack is the same, but the old black-and-white images have
been replaced by new color footage. Comparing the two will give you
a quick lesson in the evolution of American fashion, architecture,
and automobiles.

(For past installments of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

If U.S. goverment officials really want to
promote American business and give the economy a boost, forget the
crony-tastic Export-Import Bank;
they should just stop making
services based here look like
convenient extensions of snoopy government agencies. But that’s
not the tack they’re following. Instead, Chief U.S. District Judge
Loretta Preska ordered Microsoft to cough up emails stored in
another country, chalking up another win for tech companies based
anywhere else.

According to
CNet’s Charles Cooper:

A federal judge said Thursday that Microsoft can’t prevent the
US Department of Justice from obtaining emails stored in a data
center overseas in a case that has raised concern among Internet
privacy groups and technology companies.

Chief US District Judge Loretta Preska today ordered Microsoft
to comply with a December warrant allowing the DOJ to obtain a
customer’s email-account data stored in Dublin, Ireland. The US
government is seeking the emails in connection with a criminal
investigation.

The case isn’t over yet. Preska stayed her order while Microsoft
takes it to the next level. The company’s General Counsel Brad
Smith
commented, “We will appeal promptly and continue to advocate
that people’s email deserves strong privacy protection in the U.S.
and around the world.”

There’s no doubt the company will continue to fight the
government’s effort to extract information from around the world
using the company as a proxy—out of survival instinct if for no
other reason. Communications companies elsewhere are already using
the long reach of the United States government as a marketing point
for services located outside of U.S. jurisdiction. After the
National Security Agency scandal broke last year, Daniel Castro of
the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
remarked, “Countries are competing to be the Cayman Islands of
data privacy.”

And yes, more than a few of these “data havens” are governed by
officials every bit as intrusive as ours. International telecom
Vodafone
recently clarified just how snoopy many governments can be. But
the U.S. is the country with the PR problem on the issue, whatever
the worldwide reality.

Microsoft has a chance of winning this case. Just how the Fourth
Amendment applies to data flowing around the globe is a matter
that’s still in flux. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues
that the government’s interpretation of search and seizure
protections is bogus, and glosses over the inconvenient (for
officials) reality that simply copying data from wherever it’s
stored is a seizure.

By continuing to treat U.S.-based services as wiretaps on the
world, American officials hammer civil liberties at home, and hand
a huge marketing win to companies overseas.

Did you know that the Office of National Drug
Control Policy (ONDCP) issued an
official response to Sunday’s New York
Times editorial urging
Congress to repeal the federal ban on marijuana? You did not miss
much. The ONDCP says marijuana must remain illegal because
“marijuana is addictive,” because “drugged driving is a threat
to our roadways,” because “marijuana use affects the
developing brain,” and because “substance use in school age
children has a detrimental effect on their academic achievement.”
Washington Post blogger Christopher Ingraham
judges this response “surprisingly weak,” noting that “it’s
built on half-truths and radically decontextualized facts.”
NORML’s Paul Armentano
calls it “utterly pathetic,” while New York Times
editorial writer David Firestone
points out that the ONDCP is statutorily obligated to oppose
legalization, regardless of the facts. That provision applies only
to Schedule I drugs, so one benefit of moving
marijuana to a less restrictive category might be smarter, more
nuanced arguments from the beleaguered pot prohibitionists at the
ONDCP—a possibility they are not allowed to discuss.

Or maybe this is about as smart as the case for prohibition
gets. The ONDCP statement exhibits two classic flaws of
prohibitionist arguments: 1) the failure to justify the legal
distinction between alcohol and other drugs, and 2) the failure to
justify (or even acknowledge) the use of force to stop people from
consuming psychoactive substances that politicians do not like. As
Ingraham notes, all of the administration’s concerns about
marijuana apply with equal or greater force to alcohol, which
President Obama himself
admits is more dangerous than marijuana. If these concerns do
not justify the prohibition of alcohol, how can they justify the
prohibition of marijuana?

As usual, the White House glosses over what that policy
means in practice. “The Obama Administration approaches substance
use as a public health issue,” the ONDCP says, “not merely a
criminal justice problem.” But no amount of quasi-medical rhetoric
can make up for the violence inherent in this system.
As long as the government tries to forcibly prevent
consensual transactions, it will be locking
people up (and occasionally killing
them) for things that should not be crimes.

“We agree that the criminal justice system is in need of
reform and that disproportionality exists throughout the system,”
the ONDCP says. “However, marijuana legalization is not the silver
bullet solution to the issue.” For the record,
the ONDCP also
rejects the idea that legalization is a “panacea.” The
ONDCP is right on both counts: Marijuana legalization is neither a
silver bullet nor a panacea. It nevertheless would be better than
prohibition, which is the issue I thought we were
discussing.

Did you know that the Office of National Drug
Control Policy (ONDCP) issued an
official response to Sunday’s New York
Times editorial urging
Congress to repeal the federal ban on marijuana? You did not miss
much. The ONDCP says marijuana must remain illegal because
“marijuana is addictive,” because “drugged driving is a threat
to our roadways,” because “marijuana use affects the
developing brain,” and because “substance use in school age
children has a detrimental effect on their academic achievement.”
Washington Post blogger Christopher Ingraham
judges this response “surprisingly weak,” noting that “it’s
built on half-truths and radically decontextualized facts.”
NORML’s Paul Armentano
calls it “utterly pathetic,” while New York Times
editorial writer David Firestone
points out that the ONDCP is statutorily obligated to oppose
legalization, regardless of the facts. That provision applies only
to Schedule I drugs, so one benefit of moving
marijuana to a less restrictive category might be smarter, more
nuanced arguments from the beleaguered pot prohibitionists at the
ONDCP—a possibility they are not allowed to discuss.

Or maybe this is about as smart as the case for prohibition
gets. The ONDCP statement exhibits two classic flaws of
prohibitionist arguments: 1) the failure to justify the legal
distinction between alcohol and other drugs, and 2) the failure to
justify (or even acknowledge) the use of force to stop people from
consuming psychoactive substances that politicians do not like. As
Ingraham notes, all of the administration’s concerns about
marijuana apply with equal or greater force to alcohol, which
President Obama himself
admits is more dangerous than marijuana. If these concerns do
not justify the prohibition of alcohol, how can they justify the
prohibition of marijuana?

As usual, the White House glosses over what that policy
means in practice. “The Obama Administration approaches substance
use as a public health issue,” the ONDCP says, “not merely a
criminal justice problem.” But no amount of quasi-medical rhetoric
can make up for the violence inherent in this system.
As long as the government tries to forcibly prevent
consensual transactions, it will be locking
people up (and occasionally killing
them) for things that should not be crimes.

“We agree that the criminal justice system is in need of
reform and that disproportionality exists throughout the system,”
the ONDCP says. “However, marijuana legalization is not the silver
bullet solution to the issue.” For the record,
the ONDCP also
rejects the idea that legalization is a “panacea.” The
ONDCP is right on both counts: Marijuana legalization is neither a
silver bullet nor a panacea. It nevertheless would be better than
prohibition, which is the issue I thought we were
discussing.

With $40, a bus ticket from L.A. to Fresno, a
backpack, and a sleeping bag, California’s Republican gubernatorial
candidate, Neel Kashkari, kicked off a week of job-searching while
homeless. Sort of.

“This has been one of the hardest weeks of my life,” Kashkari
said. “I came to Fresno expecting to be able to find a job and take
care of myself but it’s been a week and I found nothing. I’ve run
out of money and had to turn to the homeless shelter for food.”

He really did sleep on park benches (and even got hassled by
cops and private security), but one has to wonder how much his job
inquiries were affected by the fact that he was mic’d and had a
cameraman in tow.

Either way, Kashkari concludes, “The solution is simple — it’s
jobs. It’s not more welfare. It’s not more food stamps. It’s jobs.
And we know how to do this.” He’s skeptical of how much
California’s economy is actually recovering under Gov. Jerry Brown,
and there’s merit to that. California ranks 44 in the U.S.
for unemployment, about
9 million people, or 24 percent of the state, live in poverty,
and some in the state are pushing for even
higher taxes on the already-tax-heavy
state.           

Although he served as Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury for Financial Stability under both Bush and Obama,
Kashkari’s got limited name recognition and an “R” next to his name
that isn’t making it easy winning over the golden state. Polls

show that throughout June and July he’s steadily held onto
about 33 percent support compared to incumbent Brown’s 55 percent.
Notably, Kashkari campaign is fueled by pretty modest budget: he’s
spent about $4 million and has less than $200,000 in the bank,
compared to Brown’s
$22 million.

The former investment banker isn’t the first person to make a
politically-motivated dive into blue-collar blues this week.
Yesterday I noted how ex-Gov. Ted Strickland (D-OH)
“tried” (and predictably failed) to live on the minimum wage.
That was a gimmick and so is this. Kashkari’s gimmick is a bit more
creative and interesting, though, and it might just have the viral
power to boost this multimillionaire’s image in California, and may
help magnetize donors nationally. 

Here’s the video:

Hat tip:
Jim Swift