I DISAGREE.  Bruce is wrong.   He may well have been dead wrong.  I believe that the purpose of parenting is two-fold.  First: It is to teach our children how to survive in the world.  Secondly:  It is to teach them how to be happy.

The Spartan theory of parenting is exactly what the Sunderland’s theory is.   In Sparta the child was to return either carrying his shield or being carried on it.  Certainly Sparta taught their children how to survive.  Many didn’t; many came back carried on their shields.   Today that is child endangerment.  The Sunderlands in their parenting style were Spartans.  Judging by their actions the life of Abby was of little value to them.  What was of value was whether or not she could survive.  Think about it: these idiots sent a sixteen year old girl out into the oceans where seasoned sailors with a lifetime of experience would have not dared tread.   She went where waves were thirty, forty, fifty feet high.  These were the sort of waves that tore the bow of a heavy cruiser in World War II.   These parents should sit in jail for a couple of years for needlessly endangering the life of their daughter.

Bruce, bless his heart, speaks of a 13 year old who climbed Mount Everest last month.   He forgets that this kid did not climb it alone.  There were adults with him.  He didn’t do it with a Sears pick axe and a summer jacket.  Abby was 16, thirty six months older, and alone in a 40 foot sailing vessel in heavy seas.  Her parents endangered her life…for nothing.

In growing up my parents heated the house with a pot bellied stove that stood four feet high and glowed red hot in the winter.  Getting close to it was perilous.   Proximity brought a whack on the knuckles until each of us learned that the stove was in no man’s land and to stay away from it.    Heat was necessary in 40 below weather.  Guidance was necessary to insure survival.   My parents did not throw me out in a winter storm, shouting “good luck” to my back side to see if I could make it to the corral and back.   That’s what Abby’s parents did.  This is not brave parenting.  This is the absence of parenting.  This is child endangerment.

Illegal immigration is a problem.  It is estimated that there are eleven million illegal immigrants from all over the world living in the United States.   It effects all of us in one way or another: negative and positive.  But a boy died.  He was shot an killed while playing in his country.     But wait, immigration raises  some pesky issues like who pays the cost of their medical treatment, social security,  jobs, their schooling?  It has been you and me.   Who should pay?  Hopefully not you and me.    But the Mexican  boy who died?  He really paid.  But why?

There are thousands of Border Patrol Agents.  Add to that number the National Guard soldiers the President is sending to the Rio Grande ostensible to watch the Border Patrol Agents shoot boys.  No?  Think about it.  How far does an Agent have to step back to avoid a thrown  rock?  How far can a fifteen year old throw a rock?  A half a mile?  How about twenty-five yards on a good day?  How far does a bullet travel?  A mile?  Under any analysis this boy was murdered.  Hopefully it wasn’t by an Agent for the United States Government.  A spent cartridge was found near the boy’s body on the Mexican side of the border.  What was the Agent doing there?  Was he there?   The agent is on admistrative leave for….what?  He must have done something…like shoot a fifteen year old boy.

History will say that a fifteen year old Mexican  boy died on the banks of the Rio Grande while playing.  Who is to blame for that?  Who had the gun?  Are these pesky issues worth the life of a fifteen year old boy?  Since when did that ever ring true?

One of the chief architects of the new, about to be enforced, legislation says it’s for officers that see someone of Mexican/Spanish descent running down the street waving a .44 magnum, screaming :  “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you.”  Experience has taught us that this type of law is for anyone that cops don’t like or think they don’t like.  Someone like you or me, someone they want to harass.  Who among us carries “their papers” with them.  Most  don’t.  I never do.  Now do we have to if we visit Arizona?   Arizona cops can ask for them.  What if you don’t have them?  Has the punishment become far worse then the scab that it hastens to cure?

Any man’s discomfort touches me.  It should touch us all.  To my undying amazement there are people that support this “well intended and poorly guided” effort to solve an immigrant problem.  You fools.  There is not one among you that within a generation or two were not  immigrants.    Some of you were illegal.  Going back far enough you were all illegal. Your fathers and mine came here to escape this sort of BS.  Not long from now that legislative sword will cut deep into your souls for it is never wielded but it wounds the handler and the persecuted.

Line up.  Even now the ropes have been stretched for the hanging.  Even now the camps are being readied to house the Japanese,  I mean the Mexicans…and you, anyone with black hair and brown skin.

Who will save us from ourselves? Who will rescue us from the very prisons we build to capture ourselves?

The Democrats are still the majority.  Doesn’t the majority rule?  Both parties should be ashamed for this democratic robbery.  How is it that our own elected officials allow themselves to be fleeced by themselves.  How is it that in a democracy the majority doesn’t rule and the elected officials permit it?     Forty-one Senators are screaming joyfully, “We got you now.   We’ll show you!  The majority will not rule.”   And as a result, those forty-one  multi-millionaires in a senate of one hundred multi-millionaires will force the farce of the fifty dollar aspirin on the poor; the poor who cannot afford the hospital, let alone the aspirin that is made by the tens of thousands for less than a penny.    The irony:  These fat-cats have Cadillac Health Insurance Plans furnished by the very electorate from whom they are stealing democracy.

All of you Senators who are Democrats:  Shame on you!   All of you Senators who are Republicans:  Shame on you.  As I stated: I do not especially care for the Healthcare bill but I live in a Republic where the majority should always rule, where the majority of votes should always carry the day.  Shame on all of you for permitting the arcane filibuster to exist, where the majority are robbed daily by yakkers with nothing to say and nowhere to go.

You elected representatives of the people:  Just where are you taking Democracy?   Who is exactly stealing from whom?   A pox on all your houses!

We have this need to punish ourselves for the sins of our fathers.  I don’t like it.  I wasn’t at Wounded Knee.  Neither was my father or grandfather.  I didn’t imprison the Japanese Americans during World War II.  My father could have, but he didn’t.   He did spend three years concentrating on killing Japanese soldiers and sailors.  When he yelled for mother to call the Jap because  he had a sick cow,  I could understand his choice of words.  The fact was the  vet was of Japanese ancestry and we loved him.   At the same time it was difficult for Dad to forgive the Japanese for the boys that died in the bowels of the S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor.  It was difficult for him to forget.   But that’s not my problem.  It was his.

I surely don’t need to spend my life apologizing or suffering for Custer’s mistakes on the Little Big Horn.   It is not my fault that someone in history owned slaves.   I don’t need to apologize for what the Catholics did to all those women during the Inquisition or what the Mormons did at the Mountain Meadow massacre.   Or even more recent:  I don’t need to apologize for what Hitler did to entire sections of the German population.   It was horrible, yes, but it wasn’t my fault.   I wasn’t even born.  Most of us weren’t.

So in a few words, “It is not my fault.”  And at this point in history it isn’t anyone’s fault.  All of the perpetrators are dead.  It’s history.

Today isn’t history.  Whatever we can do something about and don’t . . . that is our fault. We are citizens of the world.  Everything we do directly and indirectly touches everyone living.  So yes, the starving masses on the Sudan are our concern.  They are our fault if we do not do something.   The millions dying and the thousands of women being sexually abused in Central Africa are our fault as are the children going to work this morning in the diamond mines of the Congo.   The twenty-two-year-old girl, named Amanda, sitting in the depths of an Italian jail simply because she is an American– that’s becoming our fault.

Let me shorten it up for you.  We shouldn’t waste our time commenting on Harry Reid having “politically correct” language and we should be spending our time  helping the one in need,  the one we can help.  Maybe if we all do it,  collectively we can help the world and get out of the mess our forefathers have put us in.

The folks in Dubai, the people who cannot afford to buy shoe laces for their laceless shoes,  have built a building 2717 tall.  It was called the Burj Dubai.  It’s empty.  There  aren’t enough people in the country to fill the first floor.  But it is the tallest building in the world and now they are broke.  North Korea, that mountainous prison north of South Korea, also has a 105-story building.  It, too, is empty and it was begun in 1987.   I don’t know how tall it is, but maybe it’s the second tallest in the world.  Their people are hungry and locked in the largest prison in the world, free from such worries as education, free thought, and biscuits in the morning.  They have two really large superlatives to brag about.  Both of them are buildings.  Both countries are broke.  Neither can identify, let alone intelligently solve, their problems.

On the home front, the Democrats and the Republicans are fighting over healthcare, immigration, and the length of their Christmas vacations.  Of these one hundred senators, all of them vote along party lines.  None of them vote for ideas, or seek bipartisan participation in solving problems, as much as they seek to discredit each other’s political party.  Instead, they are the problem, demagogues whose rhetoric ranges far and wide, ignoring solutions.  One senator charged 100 million dollars just to talk about healthcare.  Neither party, not one of the one hundred senators, truly cares about the two-year-old baby girl living in St Paul, Minnesota without adequate health care, afflicted by the fifty-dollar aspirin her parents are forced to pay in our hospitals. Nor are they willing to address the eleven million illegal immigrants living within our borders.  It’s not the immigrants living here that bothers me but that we’ve arranged it so they aren’t, can’t, or won’t pay their own way.  Get real. It’s not as if we are going to evict eleven million people.

There is no one to solve the problem.  It’s just Republicans not wanting to be caught with a Democrat, and vice versa.  Appearances are horrific.  What would the people back home think?  Especially if you tried to solve a problem, rather than beat someone up?  It’s people spending money without thinking where the money is coming from when the bill comes due.  Do we need a 230 million-dollar bridge in Alaska that serves fifty people?  Do we need the new million dollar bike path in Monterey?  Do we need guns in Afghanistan?  What don’t we need?  What can we do without?

Do we need to build a skyscraper in Wade, Montana, population zero?  Dubai did.  North Korea did.  What does it take to solve real problems like immigration, healthcare, and how to pay for these wars?  Is there anyone willing to work?   The Beatles said it best, “Help!”

The TSA is another half-feathered bird altogether.  Are they heroes or buffoons?   The Transportation Security Administration (TSA)”protects the nation’s transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce.”  (Their definition.)  In December 2009, they read or were told about the terrorist flying to Detroit with Jasper stomping on his head.  They overreacted as usual, and instigated a book of new rules, not remembering that if they’d enforce the ones they’d already instituted, we’d be plenty safe.

Cut to David H. Steinberg flying out of Aruba to the United States with his two-year-old daughter.  The TSA, in their infinite wisdom and serious rule making capabilities, decided that the two-year-old must be separated from her pillow and blanket an hour prior to landing.  Note that the pillow and the blanket were furnished by the airline and were on board before the passengers struggled to their seats.  Note that an airline pillow and blanket are not considered a dangerous weapon.  Yet, the sleeping two-year-old with a pillow and a blanket was deemed by TSA as a serious threat to God knows what.  The fact is they don’t know why they made the rule other than they could . . . so they did.

One thing is clear.  The fellow that runs TSA is a classic idiot, even if he graduated from Harvard with an advanced degree in serious rule making.  He sure isn’t in the same category as Chesley B. Sullenberger, or Jasper Schuringa, or for that matter, Ted Williams.  Those folks are heroes who can think on their feet and are not in fear of  a two-year-old sleeping girl wrapped in her pillow and blanket.  Come to think of it isn’t an outfit that would wake a two-year-old to take her pillow a terrorist organization?  I ask what do we do about them?

In the last thirty years there probably has been no more forcefully poignant  photograph than that of the solitary figure standing in Tiananmen Square in  front of tank after tank after tank  during the 1989 protests.   That lonely figure is certainly far from the twenty-eight-year-old mother attending P.T.A. in St. Paul, Minnesota last Tuesday.  And it is certainly far from the smoke, terror, and turmoil in the streets and the campus riots in Tehran, Iran.  There, university students were objecting and dying over the issue of legitimate elections  and whether the state should support any religion, especially a religion that excludes all other beliefs and forcefully hides women under burkas and cloaks them in ignorance.

The irony, if there is one, is that these scenarios and a thousand like them were being played out yesterday, last year, in 1969, and every year in between.  Since time immemorial, the United States has been trying to export democracy, trying to save the world from totalitarian powers, dictators, unruly despotic kings, and just plain old war lords ranging from the mountains of Afghanistan to the jungles of Southeast Asia and the killing fields of Cambodia.  Lives have been terminated and blood spilt, all in the name of something called world peace.  Unless you are plain deaf, dumb, blind, and totally ignorant, locked inside a cave, and fed ravioli all of the days of your existence, you must realize there is no peace.  There never has been.  Men everywhere eventually will rebel against rule under the thumb of violence.  People just don’t like prison whether it has walls or not.

Ever since  1945 our government has been going about its foreign policy all wrong.  I think all of those wars and those deaths of our eighteen-year-old kids have been in vain; not that their courage under fire should not be praised and admired and eulogized in song, their names  etched on tall black marble walls.   The end result is always more blood, more death, more sacrifice.

We should do something diabolical.    We should simply educate the young of any country, any person that wants an education.  Imagine for a moment that the streets of Tehran were filled with kids educated in Norman, Oklahoma, Alabama State University, Yale, MIT,  Harvard ,and the ten thousand college campuses spread across the United States.   Look at our Berkeley experience.  Look at Kent State.  No government is safe from their young.  Imagine if we’d been educating these kids since 1945.  The foreign policy for world revolution:  Educate their young.  Give them an education and send them back to their countries for a mandatory sentence of five or ten years.  Give it to them free, if they’ll just study.   If we’d done that . . . well, they could run their own governments, provide for their own domestic tranquility as well as the common defense of what people everywhere hold sacred.  I know it’s simplistic, but didn’t the student riots in Berkeley eventually get us out of the war in Vietnam?  Simple works.

Shouldn’t we get started so that our young people don’t have to spill their sacred blood in the poppy fields of Afghanistan and the dozen other Afghanistans that are sure to follow?  Shouldn’t we get started so we don’t have to shoot the hell out of the citizens of Iraq Vietnam, and  Cambodia?  When will we ever learn?   If we started today, in four years the first group of domestic insurgents would be going back to their own countries from our universities.   Isn’t such an educational gift cheaper than the life of even one American soldier?  Isn’t it a gift that keeps on giving?

What government can withstand the collective will of their own people, especially if we educate them at their request?

]]> http://idisagreeblog.com/?feed=rss2&p=154 0 http://idisagreeblog.com/?p=141 http://idisagreeblog.com/?p=141#comments Sat, 19 Dec 2009 17:48:27 +0000 ghowe http://idisagreeblog.com/?p=141 As a defense to being sued, the Bush, and now the Obama, administrations have been quick to raise the specter-defense of “state secrets.”   It is a backdoor defense meant to protect American interests and secure military secrets at home and abroad.   It is meant to protect the lives of men and women in the Armed Forces and those in the secret business euphemistically called the CIA.

In the name of “state secrets,” case after case brought by victums of torture has been dismissed from the courts at the request of the federal government.  These cases generally involved individuals tortured in prison camps for information the CIA and the military already knew.  The fact is, these prisoners were kept in Cuba and in other countries so they could be “safely” tortured.    George Bush raised this “defense” more than any other administration in history.  Bless his heart, Bush felt that torture is all right if the purpose of the torture is to get information.  It is ironic that his namesake, King George, felt the same way in the 1700’s.  Ask Nathan Hale.  Recently, the Obama justice department reasserted the “state secrets” privilege in Mohamed, et. al.  vs. Jeppesen DataPlan Inc., et. al.   “The administration wanted the case, which had been brought by five alleged victims of torture, dismissed on the grounds that if it went forward it would require the disclosure of sensitive classified information.”  The only sensitive information they wished not to disclose is who conducted the water boarding, who did the torturing, and lastly, who approved of it.   Anything else is subject to this qualified defense.

It is easy to see that there are secrets that need to be protected; such as how many troops are in Afghanstan, where Private Mulholland is stationed in Iraq, and what exactly he is doing, not to mention what type of weapons he is carrying.  But torture to extract information or for any other reason never ever needs protecting.   The act of torture is not  a “state secret.”  It is a crime.    It is a citizenship concern and that of any human being.    Where torture is used for whatever reason, the torturer never ever needs to be protected.  Instead, he or she needs to be apprehended and  prosecuted to the full extent of the law.   (As the Army did in Iraq.)  Any government which allows torture of its captives should have to pay restitution damages.

The government is using the “state secret” defense to protect criminals.  Those who participated should be tried and convicted and thrown into jail, the key melted down and never reconstituted.   To the person, he or she knew better.   It is simply wrong.  In these cases there is nothing to protect and nothing worth protecting.  These cases should be allowed to proceed.   It would be a miscarriage of justice for them not to. The American public has a very large need to know, if for no other reason than that they may be next unless they put a stop to it.

Since 2001 the national budget has not been in balance.  Bill Clinton’s administration was the last one to balance  it.   He kept spending at less than what the government took in more than once.   He had surpluses.   George Bush didn’t even attempt it.  Instead, he cut taxes and send the National debt through the proverbial ceiling and got us into a costly war over weapons of mass destruction that didn’t even exist.  (Of course being the past Director in Chief of the CIA, he didn’t know that, did he?  Not at the time, he says.  It was a secret.)   The budget has been out of whack since 2001.  Thanks, George.  You’re a real genius, a true American, and the worst president since Harding.   I can’t believe I’m saying this because I’m a dyed in the wool, true blue Republican.  But truth is truth.

The debt has increased 12 trillion dollars since that year.  Something our kids and grandkids get to pay.    I happen to know they haven’t got any money.   So how’s it going to get paid?   When exactly does our credit run out?

In 2009 Obama is faced with two wars (Afghanistan and Iraq), a world wide recession that has twelve million Americans out of a job, and healthcare legislation that isn’t supposed to cost the government anything, but inevitably will.   Additionally, this year we’ve given billions and billions and billions of dollars to GM  and Chrysler to make automobiles we can’t afford and aren’t going to buy, and billions to Wells Fargo and Citibank to bail them out of loans they shouldn’t have made, and that they knew they shouldn’t have made when they were making them.   In case you haven’t heard, they lent 120% to value on house purchases to people who couldn’t pay the loans once they got them.   Of course the government, through Fannie Mae, purchased those loans as a real good investment.  On top of this, Congress, within the last ten days,  has  laid 1.2 trillion dollars on the government exchequer for pet projects: a million or so for a hiking trail on the California coast, and a hundred million to a certain Louisiana Senator  just to talk about healthcare, etc.  It does go on and on.  Talk about taking responsibility,  statesmanship,  doing what is necessary, sacrificing.  No, don’t.  There’s not much to talk about and it wouldn’t take long anyway.  It’s not going to be from the five hundred suits that sit in Congress, conveniently not paying a dime’s worth of social security into a system that’s going into the toilet,  who  safely provide two hundred billion just to pay the interest on the twelve trillion–soon to be fourteen plus trillion–dollars of national debt.   And this is debt we absolutely had to have, all without raising taxes to pay for it.

We all have heard of John Keynes and Keynesian economics.   Although much debated, it is an economic theory that works, though not if the budget isn’t brought into balance sometime and somehow.   The fact is, Congress can bankrupt this country by continually raising the national debt but not without destroying it. It has been raised three times in the last twenty four months.  This will be the fourth time.

Something needs to be done before the five hundred suits spend the country into oblivion by building hiking trails in Carmel  and giving the good senator from Louisiana another one hundred million dollars to talk about healthcare legislation.  Where’s Thomas Jefferson? Where’s Ben Franklin?  Where’s George Washington when we need him?  Someone needs to step up.  There are simply too many Aaron Burrs sitting in Congress.  We’re in trouble.  And I’ll bet the good senator from Louisiana is still more than willing to take another one hundred million dollars to talk about something…say immigration  or  raising the national debt.