View from the Loft

Afghanistan: past time to get out

I was one of relatively few lefties who opposed the military invasion of Afghanistan. At the time I thought, and still think, that those who leveled the Twin Towers should have been treated as criminals. They were not acting on behalf of any particular nation, after all. That they were said to be hiding in Afghanistan seemed to me no reason to bomb the hell out of that country. And when you consider the warlords we did, and are still doing, business with there, it all just seems unjustifiable. What the invade-Afghanistan crowd wanted more than anything was revenge, on whom it didn't matter. Americans felt vulnerable and they were angry, so it was easy to whip the populace, as well as the politicians and "leaders," into a frenzy of war lust..

But now here we are, eight years later, still mired in a losing battle.

Ask Russia about the "Soviets' Vietnam", as their decade-long war in Afghanistan has been called. You might also care to reflect on the British experience there a century ago.

And the mujahideen we're now fighting? We supported them during their fight against the Soviets. The Afghan government at the time was avowedly Marxist, so the U.S., doing what it usually does, supported whoever was seen as anti-Communist--in this case, Islamic rebels. Well, we know how that turned out ...

Now it looks as if Obama intends to send tens of thousands more troops into that country. As Jeff Leys writes:

War spending in 2010 will exceed $190 billion if indeed the Pentagon seeks-and Congress approves—$50 billion in “emergency” funding. That’s more than the $179 billion spent under President Bush in 2008, the previous high water mark for war spending. War spending in 2010 will also far exceed spending in 2009 (which is about $145 billion).

While Admiral Mullen did not announce a new war strategy for Afghanistan, it is difficult to conceive for what this additional $40 to $50 billion will be used if not used to expand the war in Afghanistan (and to perhaps continue the occupation of Iraq at near current troop levels without the substantive reductions promised earlier this year).

We know that General McChrystal has asked for 40,000 additional troops. Not only that, but he--or someone on his behalf--leaked word of such a request, based on his Initial Assessment to the press, no doubt to try to force Obama's hand, perhaps fearing that Obama was leaning toward rejecting requests for additional troops. In my opinion, McChrystal (or his people, on his behalf) acted insubordinately and ought to be stripped of his post as Commander of US Forces, Afghanistan. Let's not forget his role in the Pat Tillman coverup, either. Frankly, because of McChrystal's role in the abuse of detainees, I was horrified at his appointment to his current post. He seems to me a dangerous man, one who believes that the ends justify the means, whether the means are leaking sensitive information or torturing detainees.

It is to be hoped that Obama and his advisors deliberate carefully here without caving to the pressure being exerted by McChrystal and other officers. But the Democrats are super-sensitive to accusations that they're soft when it comes to foreign policy, so I don't hold out much hope.

The problem, of course, is that extra troops are not going to change the facts on the ground. Says Chris Hedges:

Success in Afghanistan is measured in Washington by the ability to create an indigenous army that will battle the Taliban, provide security and stability for Afghan civilians and remain loyal to the puppet government of Hamid Karzai. A similar task eluded the Red Army, although the Soviets spent a decade attempting to pacify the country. It eluded the British a century earlier. And the United States, too, will fail.

Further,

American military commanders in Afghanistan, rather than pump out statistics about enemy body counts, measure progress by the swelling size of the ANA. The bigger the ANA, the better we are supposedly doing. The pressure on trainers to increase the numbers of the ANA means that training and vetting of incoming Afghan recruits is nearly nonexistent.

The consequences are all too predictable:

American military advisers who work with the Afghan National Army, or ANA, speak of poorly trained and unmotivated Afghan soldiers who have little stomach for military discipline and even less for fighting. They describe many ANA units as being filled with brigands who terrorize local populations, exacting payments and engaging in intimidation, rape and theft. They contend that the ANA is riddled with Taliban sympathizers. And when there are combined American and Afghan operations against the Taliban insurgents, ANA soldiers are fickle and unreliable combatants, the U.S. advisers say.

So what is the U.S. role in Afghanistan? We're having no luck at all training an indigenous army; we've failed to stabilize the country or to keep corruption out of government; opium production continues unabated; the population is terrorized by the Taliban, the ANA, and U.S. bombings alike; the social fabric of the country has completely broken down--what was left of it after years and years of war; warlords rule the outlying areas of the country (i.e., anything outside of Kabal and perhaps one or two other cities); the population is starving; and we've now targeted parts of Pakistan, surely not a gesture toward a lessening of conflict.

I don't have the sense that anyone knows what we're really doing there any more, or what the goals are. Oh, wait--there's one group very clear on the matter: the private contractors that are raking in money while our soldiers, and the soldiers of other nations, and all too often Afghan civilians, die in vain.

 “American and Afghan soldiers are putting their lives at risk, Afghan civilians are dying, and yet there’s this underlying system in place that gains more from keeping all of them in harm’s way rather than taking them out of it,” the officer complained. “If we bring peace and stability to Afghanistan, we may profit morally, we might make gains for humanity, but moral profits and human gains do not contribute to the bottom line. Peace and profit are ultimately contradictory forces at work in Afghanistan.”

The wells that are dug, the schools that are built, the roads that are paved and the food distributed in Afghan villages by the occupation forces are used to obscure the huge profits made by contractors. Only an estimated 10 percent of the money poured into Afghanistan is used to ameliorate the suffering of Afghan civilians. The remainder is swallowed by contractors who siphon the money out of Afghanistan and into foreign bank accounts. This misguided allocation of funds is compounded in Afghanistan because the highest-paying jobs for Afghans go to those who can act as interpreters for the American military and foreign contractors. The best-educated Afghans are enticed away from Afghan institutions that desperately need their skills and education.

“It is this system that has broken the logistics of Afghanistan,” the officer said. “It is this system of waste and private profit from public funds that keeps Kabul in ruins. It is this system that manages to feed Westerners all across the country steak and lobster once a week while an estimated 8.4 million Afghans—the entire population of New York City, the five boroughs—suffer from chronic food insecurity and starvation every day. When you go to Bagram Air Base, or Camp Phoenix, or Camp Eggers, it’s clear to see that the problem does not lie in getting supplies into the country. The question becomes who gets them. And we wonder why there’s an insurgency.”

And that's what it all boils down to, as usual: profits for the few at a horrendous cost of lives and treasure for the many.

It's time to get out of Afghanistan and stop the murderous plunder. There's no way to "win." All we can look forward to is some really, really hellacious blowback.

Say no to military escalation in Afghanistan

I was in the minority at the outset of the post-9/11 U.S. military attacks on Afghanistan. While most lefties felt that military action was justifiable in the wake of 9/11, I was not convinced that making an entire country pay for the terrorist acts perpetrated by a few would be either morally defensible nor particularly effective.

Nothing has happened since to make me change my mind. We have achieved nothing in Afghanistan.

Due to corruption on a massive scale, the U.S. has failed to rebuild Afghanistan or to provide services like clean water and electricity, this despite early Bush administration calls for reconstruction and the building of a stable society.

The Taliban are regaining power and evolving as a fighting force: 

In the first ten months of this year, 255 US and NATO troops were killed in Afghanistan, more than all those who died in the first four years of the war in Afghanistan put together. Entire swaths of southern Afghanistan, in provinces along the Pakistan border south and east of Kabul, are controlled by the Taliban and their allies. Lately they have been able to strike with impunity even within Kabul, the Afghan capital. The CIA has been warning for more than two years that Afghanistan was spinning out of control. A forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate, representing the views of sixteen US intelligence agencies, warns that Afghanistan is in a "downward spiral" and, according to the New York Times, "casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban's influence there." The enemy has also evolved as a fighting force. Already by 2006, according to a report for West Point by retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the Taliban were fielding battalion-size units of more than 400 fighters. In some provinces the Taliban and their allies are creating a parallel state, appointing governors and provincial officials and establishing Sharia-style courts.

Unfortunately, the incoming administration's plans to increase troop levels in Afghanistan by 20,000 to 30,000 will have little effect on this situation. Derrick Crowe's diary on Daily Kos quotes The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency  Field Manual as advising that 20 counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents is considered the minimum troop density for effective operations. That would amount to nearly 655,000 troops! Does anyone reading this think the U.S. currently has the capability, let alone the will, to commit this many troops to Afghanistan?

General David McKiernan, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has warned

that the mission in Afghanistan will require a "sustained commitment" lasting many years, and the United States has announced plans to help more than double the size of the Afghan National Army (ANA), to 134,000 troops. "This is a decades-long project," says Ashley Tellis, a former National Security Council specialist on South Asia, who adds that it will take at least ten years before the United States can withdraw and let the ANA fight its own battles. "The transition alone will take a decade, until you can switch to the ANA," he says.

When I look at statements like that, all I see is a gigantic sinkhole down which too many American (and NATO, and Afghani) lives and billions and billions of U.S. dollars will disappear, to no avail. Look at the experience of the Soviets in Afghanistan, and of the British well over a century before them.

The idea of the troop increase in Afghanistan is to be able to weaken the Taliban militarily and then negotiate with Taliban leaders from a position of strength. I just don't see this happening. The "Taliban" are in fact a complicated and confusing mix of tribal alliances and religious extremists of varying stripes. The military has identified at least fourteen separate insurgent groups in Afghanistan. How do you know who to negotiate with? And how do you know whether negotiated terms will be honored? And will the U.S., with a mere 20,000 to 30,000 more troops, be able to weaken the Taliban? Recent events in Gaza have inflamed Muslims everywhere and recruited more jihadists; any intensification of U.S. military action in Afghanistan will almost certainly draw more extremists into the fight.

For all these reasons and more, I oppose any escalation of military troop numbers in Afghanistan and would urge the incoming administration to look for ways to extricate our troops from the deepening morass. Ideas for alternatives to escalation can be found here, here (RAWA), and here.

To believe that the only solution to the Afghanistan problem is a military one is to acquiesce in the johnny-one-note thinking of the past eight years. It's time to try some other approaches that will not drain lives and treasure in a prolonged exercise in futility.

(Please visit Get Afghanistan Right! for more on this crucial issue, including counterarguments to the pro-escalation talking points.)

Boycott, Divest, Sanction: Israel out of Gaza. Take action!

Naomi Klein writes:

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.

Amen to that.

The carnage in Gaza should appall anyone with a conscience, and yet, as Free Learner points out, our own Senate--on a voice vote, so there's no record of who voted which way--passed a resolution expressing unequivocal support of the Israelis. 

The Israelis have shelled ambulances, schools, and hospitals. They have refused to let humanitarian aid through to the wounded in Gaza. They have rounded people up into a single house and then shelled the house. Humanitarian workers have found emaciated children left for days, without food or water, near the corpses of their parents. The Israelis have used white phosphorus, which burns deep into tissue and, because the phosphorus is absorbed by the body, can cause multi-organ failure.

Yet Hamas is to be condemned as entirely at fault and Israel is to be lauded for "defending" itself.

Claims of genocide are said to be inappropriate, yet there is evidence that Israel's intentions are nothing short of genocidal. Yet we are never to say the word, never to levy the charge; there is a collusion of silence on this topic. John Pilger on the silence of "the Anglo-American intelligentsia":

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, "Israel's right to exist." They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine's right to exist was canceled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous "Plan D" resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as "ethnic cleansing." Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, "What shall we do with the Arabs?" Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, "made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, ‘Expel them'. The order to expel an entire population "without attention to age" was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world's most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya'ari noted "how easily" Israel's leaders spoke of how it was "possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy … who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war … we are appalled."

Pilger quotes Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, who wrote on January 2:

It seems that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as desperate events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system … Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology – in its most consensual and simplistic variety – has allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanize the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide].

So, as Naomi Klein says, the time has come--or came quite a while back--for boycott, divest, sanctions. 

(As I was writing this, I just saw a diary on Daily Kos that says Israel has now banned Arab parties from running in next month's election. So much for any idea that Israel is a democracy.)

In fact, the Palestinians called for BDS back in 2005. Israel has ignored UN resolutions and the rulings of the International Court of Justice, building a wall to sequester the Palestinians, refusing them food, fuel, and humanitarian aid, and condemning the Palestinians to misery and death.

Visit this site to endorse the call for BDS and for more information.

Go here to find out how you, personally, can boycott Israeli-made products. A barcode of 729 indicates that the product comes from Israel. In addition, you can learn more about what companies draw on Israeli technology and components. In addition, some Western companies manufacture equipment used by the Israeli military against the Palestinians. It's time we educated ourselves about how we are complicit in the slaughtering of the Palestinians.

According to Naomi Klein, support for BDS is growing worldwide. The recent events in Gaza should intensify this movement. I hope my readers will do their part to join in this movement to make Israel understand that the enormity, unacceptability, and immorality of its actions have consequences.

 

Toxic trade

The Campaign for America's Future has a new report out called "Toxic Trade: Globalization and the Safety of the American Consumer" (the link will take you to a page from which you have to download a pdf file, and which will also show you how to take action). Every one of us should read it, and then we should contact our elected officials and demand that they seriously address the problem of unsafe imports. The problems arise from two trends:

On the one hand, global outsourcing of production and importing of goods is rapidly increasing. World imports have increased by 338 percent since 1974, with imports from China alone increasing nearly 3,900 percent just since 1985.

6 Yet the budget of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the government agency responsible for monitoring consumer goods in the United States, is less than half the level it was when it started in 1974. We have been disarming our ability to protect ourselves, even as the need to do so has been soaring.

A few days ago I wrote about lead levels in lipstick. How about lead levels in Halloween products meant for children, including candy buckets coated with lead-based paint, or a gag set of teeth with 100 times the legal level of lead?

Unbelievably--okay, not unbelievably, given that she's a Bush appointee--the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Nancy Nord,

has asked Congress in recent days to reject legislation that would strengthen the agency that polices thousands of consumer goods, from toys to tools.

On the eve of an important Senate committee meeting to consider the legislation, Nancy A. Nord, the acting chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, has asked lawmakers in two letters not to approve the bulk of legislation that would increase the agency’s authority, double its budget and sharply increase its dwindling staff.

Ms. Nord opposes provisions that would increase the maximum penalties for safety violations and make it easier for the government to make public reports of faulty products, protect industry whistleblowers and prosecute executives of companies that willfully violate laws.

Really, follow the link. You'll be enraged and incredulous. Nord's actions have rightfully prompted calls for her resignation. She obviously is head of the CPSC not to protect consumers, but to protect corporations. Again, that's par for the course with the Bush administration, which has sought to deregulate damn near everything in order to ease the "burden" on corporations. It's indefensible.

It's not like the CPSC couldn't use the help, as pointed out in "Toxic Trade":

As a result of budget cuts, the CPSC has closed more than 40 field offices and cut its port inspection staff to 15 people nationwide.

10 It has dropped child drowning from its strategic goals.11 It has not modernized its testing labs since 1975. 12 The agency’s toy-testing department consists of one man who drops toys on the floor in his office to see if they break.13

Please, read up on this issue and take a moment to urge your Congresscritter to co-sponsor the Safety Assurance for Every (SAFE) Consumer Product Act. Go here to have an e-mail sent. It's the least we can do.

Yaaaaaaay Al!

I just gotta express my joy that Al Gore was a co-winner, along with the International Panel on Climate Change, of the Nobel Peace Prize. And you can express your joy and gratitude here.

Really, there is no other award that one could win that would loom larger than this one. But I think that Gore--and the panel--deserve it and should celebrate deliriously.

Sure, I'd love to see Gore run for Prez, but he won't--and who could blame him? He's found another path of activism; he can't have fond memories of how the press treated him last time; and the mess he'd inherit would make a sane person back off. As someone once said, the only person worthy of being president is the one who doesn't want it--which makes Al eminently desirable. But he's not gonna do it, and i can't blame him.

Can't you imagine it if he did? The harpies, vultures, and sadistic predators of the right would be all over him and how he was exploiting his Nobel Prize for low, political reasons. Even though we know that if any of their favorites had been chosen, they'd have been selling tickets to watch the Great One blow his nose.

But Al isn't going to want to sully such a great honor with political aspirations, and I think he's right in this, despite the fact that I really wanted him to run. As a Nobel Peace Prize winner, he needs to be beyond politics, at least for this cycle, and continue to focus on what is really the great problem confronting the entire planet. I believe that he feels he can do more outside the political arena, reaching out globally to challenge people to become aware of the dangers to our planet.

But boy howdy, am I geeked that he won! Not too many leaders I can admire these days, but he is definitely one. Oh yes.

Really, a small amount of diethylene glycol is GOOD for you!

The Chinese--what entrepreneurs! They're the envy, I'm sure, of many of our own corporate CEOs and CFOs, since they're unencumbered by the pesky laws that interfere with profit-making on the sentimental grounds that the ordinary American citizen shouldn't be poisoned, choked, or otherwise harmed by manufactured products.

First we admired the enterprising folks who had the brilliant idea of adding melamine to wheat gluten (or wheat flour, who knows) in order to make a cheap, lower-protein product look like it contained a higher protein level. Melamine is cheap, that bottom line looks better, and those Chinese who add melamine routinely are convinced that there's nothing harmful about it. The best of all worlds!

The the US Consumer Product Safety Commission posted recall information for a line of children's jewelry and a separate line of children's rings made in China that turned out to have toxic levels of lead. You can read about it here and here. No doubt there was all this unusable lead lying around and someone saw money to be made getting rid of an undesirable metal while getting paid for cheap kids' jewelry. I'm sure they told themselves that all this uproar about lead poisoning is just an overblown American paranoia.

Now it's toothpaste. Those clever entrepreneurs substituted the much-cheaper diethylene glycol for food-grade glycerine in toothpaste sold in Panama and the Dominican Republic, and the US will now be sampling and testing all shipments of toothpaste coming from China. I loved this part:

Chinese toothpaste makers have said small amounts of the chemical are harmless in toothpaste.

But not, apparently, in cough syrup, as more than 50 people in Panama died of cough syrup made in China that contained diethylene glycol.

Free trade. Globalization. Ain't it wonderful?

Nobel Peace Prize goes to microloan pioneer [with UPDATE]

I was extremely pleased to see the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus. He's the man who established the Grameen Bank project, which allows people to borrow small sums of money with no collateral.

The arrangement, known as microcredit or microfinance, can mean the difference between starvation and subsistence for those who don't qualify for conventional bank loans and services. The Grameen Bank has lent an estimated $5.65 billion to 6.6 million Bangladeshis -- and 97 percent of the bank's customers have been women, according to the Associated Press. The average amount the bank's customers borrow is $200, and the bank has a 99 percent repayment rate.

The original project has inspired others in developing nations.

As an article in the NYTimes states,

The selection [of Yunus as Peace Prize winner] seemed to embody two connected ideas that are gaining ground among development experts: that attacking poverty is essential to peace, and that private enterprise is essential to attacking poverty.

The article also notes that this marks the first time that the prize has gone to a profit-making business. Since the bank's creation in 1983, Grameen has shown a profit in all but three years, including $15 million in 2005.

Isn't it great to see such an honor go to someone who took a simple idea and used it to benefit millions of poor people? Yunus and his project have made all the difference to the (mostly) women struggling to pull themselves out of poverty.

Thinking small, in this case, was thinking big.

[UPDATE: If you'd like to help someone in a developing country establish economic independence, please consider Kiva, an organization that makes person-to-person small loans possible. You can loan various amounts to those who need it in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere. h/t Freelearner--many thanks.]

Caution on the recent NIE

Robert Dreyfuss makes an interesting point in his warning about getting too excited about the recent leaks concerning the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism. (Emphasis added in the passage below.)

But is the war in Iraq producing more terrorists? I don’t think so. And until I read the whole text of the NIE—which hasn’t been released—and until I sort out the politics of how it was produced, I’m not convinced that the U.S. intelligence community think so, either.

It’s important to remember that the NIE, begun in 2004, took two years before it was published, in its current classified version. It went through several iterations, pushed and pulled by Bush administration politicos. The Times, in breaking the story, reported that “some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document.” According to my sources, those unhappy with the document were mostly at the Pentagon, and centered around the neoconservatives, who undoubtedly used their influence with the White House, Vice President Cheney, and intelligence czar John Negroponte—who approved the final version of the NIE—to make changes they wanted. It’s not as if an NIE is a pristine, values-free report. Instead (remember the bogus NIE on Iraq’s WMD in 2002) it is often a highly politicized document, especially in the Bush administration.

He goes on to say that, while the war in Iraq has increased anti-Americanism around the world and has damaged US interests, it is not at all clear to him that there has been an escalation in terrorism, and he worries that

In their eagerness to knock down Bush’s war in Iraq by using reports about the NIE, the Democrats risk giving another boost to the president in the “other” war, namely, the so-called war on terrorism. By embracing the NIE’s reported conclusion that the war in Iraq has made the threat of terrorism worse, the Democrats play into Bush’s strong suit. While most Americans think that the war in Iraq is wrong and not worth fighting, polls continue to show that support for President Bush as the commander in chief of the Global War on Terror. Ironically, by endorsing the idea that radical Islamist terrorism is a major threat to the United States, the Democrats could end up driving U.S. voters into the arms of the president once again.

The more credence is given to the necessity of a "war" against terrorism, the more this plays into BushCo's fear-generating tactics in the service of garnering votes. There is thus a utilitarian value for the Bushies in claiming that we face increased threats of terrorist acts, even if such an increase comes from the war BushCo itself wanted and executed.

Dreyfuss leaves us with a bit of advice for Democrats:

The use of the word “terrorist” instantly dehumanizes the other side, making it into something devilish, or insane, or maniacal. The Bush administration has perfected this technique to a fine art. Rather than joining in, the Democrats need to stop talking about terrorism at every turn and refuse to join the Republicans in their facile use of the demon-word, terrorism. It’s time to change the subject.

Homeschool as treason

Whatever one thinks of homeschooling, it's hard not to be shocked at this (via Freelearner), if true [warning: this is a Christian site with an unconcealed fundamentalist agenda] :

The Brussels Journal reports that Katherina Plett responded to a knock on the door from an undercover police woman Thursday morning at 11:00PM. Once the Baptist woman opened the door, police officers, hidden outside the house, stormed into her home and arrested her for the crime of homeschooling her children. The female officer insisted that she watch Mrs. Plett as she changed her clothes claiming, “She would arm herself and shoot us all.”

[snip]

The arrest of Mrs. Plett came as the latest act in struggle between 7 homeschooling families in Paderborn and the local education board of the county. According to the board’s director, Heinz Kohler, “The parents’ right to personally educate their children would prevent the children from growing up to be responsible individuals within society.”

[snip]

Manfred Müller, governor of Paderborn country, has also justified charging homeschoolers with “High Treason,” saying “the obligation to attend school is a civil obligation that cannot be tampered with.”

According to the Brussels Journal, Landrat Müller threatened to charge Hermann Stücher, a 68 year old man giving aid to these families with “High Treason and incitement of the people against the authorities (Hochverrat und Volksverhetzung), the same charge used by Nazis to squelch any resistance to their absolute power.

Yes, the last sentence of that last paragraph is a bit of editorializing. But don't let the article's emphasis on comparisons to Nazism obscure the fact that here state power is brought to bear against parents who wish to raise their children as they see fit, and moreover, that such parents are accused of treason.

While many decry the Christian fundamentalists who seek to "protect" their children from the blasphemous and worldly ways of the public school, it should be remembered that the invocation of state authority over the rights of parents can be used against parents of any religious or political stripe, and not just in Germany. In the past, such authority has been used in the US, Canada, and Australia to justify separating aboriginal children from their parents in boarding schools--even to the extent of kidnapping them and imprisoning parents who refused to send their children to the white man's schools. And I've run across at least one modern-day American homeschooling critic , Carrie Luce (whoever she is), who believes that all homeschoolers are guilty of treason:

Homeschoolers say they have many reasons for what they do, but it all boils down to one simple thing:  Treason.

Although they say otherwise, it isn't because of "better academics" (which they tout through flawed research) or fear of violence (which is just as likely to occur at home as it is at school - and if they ever DO let their children out into the real world, they are exposing their children to other threats - just like the rest of us). Homeschoolers, quite simply put their own selfish biased agendas above the well being of the society and community that supports them.

I get pretty nervous when someone claims the right of the state to exert its authority at will over the rights of individuals, and when those who rebel against such a claim are accused of treason and of undermining the social order. That smacks ot Stalinism and fascism (and probably a whole lot of other isms).

The idea of police storming a private home at night, frightening the entire family and hauling a mother away to jail, is damned scary.

Unfortunately, the way things are headed in this country, it doesn't seem all that impossible here in the United States, especially with such brainwashed "thinking" as that of people like the above-cited Ms. Luce.

BOOOOO!

Just today I was talking to my spouse about the fearfulness of Americans, particularly consevatives: What is so patriotic about fear, for goddess's sake? Whatever happened to "Give me liberty, or give me death!" Whatever happened to "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself?"  How in hell can they call liberals wimps, cowards, etc., when they're the ones who continually tell us how afraid we should be? Whenever Cheney goes out and does his boogaboogabooga! routine, we're all supposed to fall in line and forget our Constitutional rights and stuff like that, yet it's not the Repugs but the Dems who are the cowards. Huhhh??

And what's so macho about it, while we're at it? What about all those warhawks struttin' their stuff, who won't go off to war to protect what they tell us is so vulnerable and precious? (Not the Constitution, of course--that's an outdated piece of paper. What they mean is their right to unlimited wealth.) 

Plus the chickenhawks never, but never, enlist so they can participate in the glorious slaughter they routinely cheerlead. What's up with that, fer Chrissakes??

These yoyos wouldn't know patriotism and bravery if they stumbled over 'em on the way to a Cheney quail hunt.

Anyway, Tbogg had the best snark around on the topic of right-wingers who think we should all capitulate to fear and simply Obey Our Masters:

Apparently Ace is whining that there are Americans who don't act like seven year-old girls at their first Kiwanis Halloween Haunted House who screech and go,"Omigawdomigawdomigawd" and do the pee-pee dance every time that CNN or Fox jumps the gun on a "breaking story". Quite frankly, I would have thought that the death-dealing Ace of Spades would be a tad more butch than that, but no:

The sinestrosphere reacted with chuckles over this event, as the right covered it (taking information directly from CNN, which in turn came directly from a Logan Airport spokesman), once again playing the "We're Too Brave To Be Afraid of Terrorism" card, along with the "Look at the Righties Playing This Up" card, along with the "Bush Is Just Fear-Mongering" card.

Tbogg goes on to explain that those of us skeptical of these terror alerts are not unaware of the reality of terrorism; it's just that

They don't jump on the computer and go Full Metal ALL-CAPS!1!! at the first sign of trouble. It's not that we don't take terrorism seriously, it's that we don't take hysterics seriously. A word to the wise: no one is going to get a blogging Pulitzer for being the fastest to post what they just saw and heard on the TV. Yesterday it was the Vaseline Woman, today it was Facial Scrub Lady. And if you thought the Fearbloggers would have learned their lesson after only twenty-four hours, well, you'd be wrong.

It's not that Ace isn't a brave man (bear with me, I'm entering my "fictive universe" here and God knows where this will take us) I think he's just one of those quick-on-the-trigger deciders; a man of action.

For example, say you're going to go fishing with some friends on a lake and just after you push off from the dock, the motor dies. While you or I might attempt to restart the motor or get the oars out to keep the boat from colliding with the dock or another boat, Ace would immediately start eyeballing his companions and identifying the weakest one for the orgy of shipboard cannibalism that is sure to come.

That would probably explain the wetnap he keeps in his wallet.