Happy As Kings

Pray and think in one hand, bleed in the other. Which one gets full faster?

(those poor people. my god, those poor people.)

Texas Church Shooting Leaves More Than 20 Dead, Official Says

 

Compare and Contrast

The Illinois legislature seems to be more concerned with shaming women and putting them in more difficult circumstances than they're already in.  Contrast that with the German attitude of supporting all families to give children the best start possible.

 

Illinois HB6064: Short Description:  VITAL RECORDS-UNMARRIED MOTHER

Provides that if the unmarried mother cannot or refuses to name the child's father, either a father must be conclusively established by DNA evidence or, within 30 days after birth, another family member who will financially provide for the child must be named, in court, on the birth certificate. Provides that absent DNA evidence or a family member's name, a birth certificate will not be issued and the mother will be ineligible for financial aid from the State for support of the child.

 

German Kindergeld: an allowance provided to any parent in Germany to help with raising a child.

Just about any taxpayer living in Germany with children can get the Kindergeld, whether employed, self employed or independent. You get it as a rule until the children turn 18, though it can continue until they are 25 if they are still in school or meet other requirements for an extension. Starting in January 2016 the benefit has been raised to €190 per month for each of the first two children, €196 for the third child and €221 for each subsequent one.

Jade Helm 15

I had a blog post on my to-do list about the insanity in Texas concerning the military exercise Jade Helm 15. The combination of misinformation, paranoia, and provocation is staggering.

Garden-variety people-who-like-to-scare-themselves are one thing, but to have a governor sic the state guard on the United States military, and then to have a senator and a member of the House of Representatives responding as if the studied provocation of the people-who-like-to-scare-themselves is a legitimate event about which to be concerned (thus validating the fears), is irresponsible. The people in charge (elected officials) are supposed to have some statesmanlike qualities, not encourage fringe fears.

Luckily for me, I don't have to rack my brain for cool, calm, low-key point-by-point explanations. Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station wrote a response to the stoked lunacy that is scathingly hilarious, and five-shots-in-the-center-of-the-bullseye accurate. 

 Jade Helm: The Insanity that Ate Texas  

Look, maybe you haven't noticed, but we in the military are often called upon to operate in foreign lands, particularly in urban and suburban environments. How in the hell do you think we train for that? What? You think it’s just fucking magic? We get by on our charm and wholesome American looks? Do you have any idea what it takes to do what we do? Coordination, communication, navigation, talking to civilians, security, just finding your way around in a strange city, and a thousand other mundane things you've never thought of. How in the hell do you think we learn that?

You can't exactly send troops to Tehran to practice you know – well, you can, but it’s bound to get you talked about, especially that part involving, you know, military invasion of a foreign country. So we do it here, in our country, where we can concentrate on the skills necessary without being shot at - except given the rise in paranoid droolers here at home, maybe it would be easier to do it in a hostile foreign land. These days, Baghdad is far more sane and friendly than whatever the fuck is going on down there in Texas.

Honest to God, what the hell is wrong with you people?

 

But don't take my word for it, go on over there. Read the entire brilliant take-down of the alleged "patriots" who tell soldiers -- those service members they're always thanking for their service -- that they don't want them there at all (after 1:35).

Military children are Brats, not CHAMPS

The Brat heritage of growing up as the child of a military service member is not decided by people who've had nothing to do with military life, and especially not by people who are monetizing the identity. 

The background is that a young woman was moved by the situation of military children with whom she worked. She wanted to do something to "bridge the cultural divide" between Brats-who-are-still young, and the civilian world.  She did this through writing a book that started out as something along the lines of "The Little Brats" but which changed to "The Little CHAMPS," with CHAMPS being the acronym for "child heroes attached to military personnel."  Apparently, the organizations approached to support the effort didn't like the word "Brats." (although we Brats like it just fine) She, and her mother, have promoted the book through USO tours overseas and through various agencies that agreed to support CHAMPS.

I can't address the motives for all this activity concerning military kids.  I assume it is well-meant, but other than raising awareness in the communities in which military kids wind up, I don't know that the community in general needs that much "help."  Yes, kids whose parents are deployed can use understanding, but the "edu-taining" should be directed at the adults in the lives of the kids, maybe perhaps teachers in civilian communities.

A very sour note in the enterprise is calling today's young Brats "heroes."  We Brats don't see ourselves as heroes, those people were our parents.  Don't give the kids the burden of stolen valor.  We weren't the heroes, we knew it, and we were just fine with that.  It's up to the grownups to manage that part, not the kids.

Otherwise, don't medicalize our heritage by acting as if we're abnormal.  From a Brat point of view, our way of life is normal.  All the rest of the country may think it's unique, off-beat, something to be adjusted to, but, to us, your way is what's strange.

I look at my youngest granddaughter, 10 months old, and I think about how I and my kids (all Brats) had all moved at least once by the time we were her age (for me it was 3 times).  My oldest grandson, 15, has lived in the same house his entire life -- how weird is that?  By the time I was his age, I'd had 9 different bedrooms in three different countries.  His dad bested me by the age of 3 (difference between Air Force and Army), by having as many bedrooms as I'd had by 15 -- only two countries, though, but way more states.  All my friends were the same way -- and so were the friends of my kids.

"When I was a kid" during the Cold War, I wondered (when I bothered to think about it) who paid civilians.  

• I wondered who issued them their houses.
• Where did they get their ID cards?
• What was the deal with sales tax?
• Where were their service clubs?  
• How could they tell who were officers and who were enlisted at their community swimming pools?  
• How did they stand living in one place so long?  
• Wasn't it boring having all your friends and neighbors be from the same place? 

Living at a distance from American civilians wasn't much different from living in another country -- for young kids, aspects of both kinds of cultures are foreign, and that's normal.  For us, normal culture was a military culture.  The subcultures of the various services were like different accents with each service having its own lingo and way of doing things, but understandable from a military perspective: go where you're told to go, don't get your dad in trouble by causing mischief and getting the MPs, APs, SPs or whatever other Ps there are, called on you, and when you hear To The Colors at 1700 hours (5pm), stop and face the music (or the flag if it's in view). We all knew this stuff.

As an adult who has, at the age of 64, now lived in one place as long as my grandson, I can see some benefits of no longer being a nomad. It's not as bad as I thought although the lifestyle's blunt edge of seeing the same people for years has been sharpened by the periodic addition of new people to the family -- grandkids are great.

The bottom line for those of us who care (not everyone's invested -- bell curves and all that) is to leave our heritage to us.  Our younger compatriots are not a population to be used for gain. They are the latest generation of our way of life. If schools and communities want to know how to make them feel welcome, look into Third Culture Kids. 

 

Additional information:

• Brats Without Borders 
• Bob Hollicker on Military Brats audio interview
• 25 Signs You Grew Up as a Military Brat I had no idea bowling was such a Brat thing
• Brats Stolen Valor/Stolen Identity Facebook group 
• We’re Military “Brats,” Not Heroes, Champs, Little Soldiers, or Fledglings 
• Operation Footlocker 

 

KC Royals

WOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  

should just about cover it.

 

Charles Krauthammer: GOP "incomprehensible" on border

Hell has not only frozen over [Mr. Krauthammer and I having the same general opinion], Hell now has a skating rink and a hot chocolate stand.

Fox's Krauthammer Derides GOP Flip-Flop On Obama's Executive Actions

It is ridiculous to sue the president on a Wednesday because he oversteps the law ... and then on a Thursday say that he should overstep the law, contradict the law that passed in 2008 and deal with this himself.

I'm happy to see that people who publicly promote the-party-I-used-to-vote-for and I are sharing more opinions.  I don't think it will change my current voting trend -- after all, the people who have astonished Mr. Krauthammer are the ones in office who don't impress me -- but maybe it indicates the beginnings of the winds of change?  A fresh breeze? 

 

 

David Brooks: No War is an Island

Concerning Gaza, it is hard, after living through the years of PLO terrorism that was hand-in-glove with Ireland's "Troubles", and Europe's terrorists, to separate one's long-standing views & biases from the shock of seeing the devastation raining down on the innocents. David Brooks seems to put the present tragedy for the people in Gaza into a perspective.

David Brooks: No War is an Island 

This whole conflict has the feel of a proxy war.

Turkey and Qatar are backing Hamas in the hopes of getting the upper hand in their regional rivalry with Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The Egyptians and even the Saudis are surreptitiously backing or rooting for the Israelis, in hopes that the Israeli force will weaken Hamas.

It no longer makes sense to look at the Israeli-Palestinian contest as an independent struggle. It, like every conflict in the region, has to be seen as a piece of the larger 30 Years’ War.

 

As usual, what you see probably depends on where you're standing. Wherever you're standing, the calamity for the innocent is heart-breaking.

 

Blink and Rorschach

Fresh, from their long run on the front of the refrigerator, the online debut of my niece's cartoon strip, Blink and Rorschach!

Running like the Red Queen: keeping up with technology

I think this blog would be more appropriately named "Running like the Red Queen," but I worry (at probably the mildest level of worry a person can have) that it would mess up the blog's URL or tinker with my all-but-nonexistent identifiability statistics with search engines.  Someday I may do it because, as time goes on, keeping up with things by running, runnning, running, and then running some more, seems a more accurate metphor for modern life than being happy as a king, ie, enjoying the richness of experience of the world.

The tech-item inspiring this blog post -- both to express omg, look at this!, and to complain about red-queen-running -- is a scanning app used to copy keys.

The App I Used to Break Into My Neighbor’s Home, Wired.com

Such services also enable jerks like me to steal your keys any time they get a moment alone with them. Leave your ring of cut-brass secrets unattended on your desk at work, at a bar table while you buy another round, or in a hotel room, and any stranger—or friend—can upload your keys to their online collection.

Burglary-for-dummies is another feature of 21st century life that the crystal-ball-gazers of the 1950s and 1960s never envisioned -- or, if they did, they didn't let on to the rest of us.  The Jetsons may have had a robot maid, Dick Tracy may have had a wrist-radio, and Disney may have shown us space travel, but any computers ever used in the visions of the future were always HUGE. Transistor radios barely fit in an actual pocket, so getting a computer that small? Unreal!  Smart phones for teens? Tablets that are cameras? Apps?  Nobody saw those coming.

So now a new worry is someone copying the house keys and walking right in. Running to keep up, I'd say a hasp and a Master lock (the kind kids have on their wall lockers) would do the trick, but then bolt cutters would be a simple workaround.  Next on the list (runnning faster) is a front door combination lock, but one's own short-term memory fritzes, and a resultant lock-out, would be as worrisome as thinking someone has scanned the house keys. It all seems to boil down, in one way or another, to a humorous personal axiom that has decorated many cross-stitch project: the hurrier I go, the behinder I get.

Run, Queenie! Run!

Hobby Lobby's Christian values

If Hobby Lobby objects to contraception as a routine part of health insurance because they say it may violate their religious objection to abortion, why does the store stock items imported from China? If the no-contraception policy were actually a deal-breaker because of religious principles, shouldn't the company find suppliers from countries that don't force women to undergo involuntary abortions?

I understand that finding products not manufactured in China probably would result in higher-priced craft supplies, but either Hobby Lobby's anti-abortion principles apply globally and the company refuses to buy products from a country that has an official policy of a single child per family (or else), or the company's commitment to those principles is situational.  

Do the people who own Hobby Lobby only object to American abortions?

Freezing Out the Bigger Picture

I'm feeling curmudgeonly today.

•  Freezing Out the Bigger Picture, International New York Times, 10 Feb 2014 
  Perhaps this is the real reason everyone is panicking about the cold: Winters have become so mild over the past 20 to 30 years that a blast of Arctic air feels extraordinary.

"When I was a kid ..."

We were our this evening at a Mexican restaurant that serves food tasty enough to appeal to even our non-Mexican-food eater (and that's saying something). When we came out, I took a big gulp of the air and thought, hmmm, not too cold. When we got home, the outdoor thermometer read 18F.

 

(same thermometer; different day)

My benchmark for the feel of cold wintry air against the back of my throat is probably from South Dakota winters in the 1950s, especially that one time I had to wait for Dad to leave work and pick me up after Brownies. I was so cold while waiting for him outside the school that I remember using my steamy breath to blow SOS signals -- as if he could see them from his office a good five or ten minutes away by car.

When I got home, I probably was treated to the stories of Mom having to walk five miles to school across far fields (which was probably the truth), and to hurry up and set the table.

This weather in the U.S. has been strange, but not (to my mind) extreme.  It is February, after all, and February used to mean snowy.  Even as recently as the early '80s, but this time in Europe, I remember that in Munich, Germany, we didn't see the sidewalks until at least April.  The snowy groundcover was continuous.

The return of what I remember as normal, though, isn't that comforting.  Again, from the article:

No matter how cold it got in Wisconsin last week, the world really is warming up.

Military bases open their doors to home-schoolers

An article on military homeschooling popped up, so of course I had to read it.  It's an interesting article, but one that follows the pattern of most mainstream articles about homeschooling:  cautious observation but without any endorsement.

Military Bases Open Their Doors to Homeschoolers 

Military families move on average nearly every three years. The transition can be tough for children, and home schooling can make it easier, advocates say. The children don't have to adjust to a new teacher or worry that they're behind because the new school's curriculum is different.

 

Other points in the article are how it seems that only certain people can, or should, homeschool, how military homeschooling has only recently become acceptable, and how homeschooling may make deployment stress worse.

No, homeschooling isn't for every military family. Neither is bowling, or riding motorcycles, or cheeseburgers. Preferences vary across populations, as do results of schooling styles. Whether homeschooling's "long-term social and academic effects" are positive or negative can be weighed against overall developments such as the increase in the need for remedial courses in basic studies for freshman college students. Interested readers can Google "homeschool college acceptance" for a range of results on whether college admissions staffs see homeschooled graduates as good candidates for their schools.

As for the impression that homeschooling among military families is a recently-acceptable development, some parents homeschooled on military installations (and "on the economy" in USAREUR) from the late 1980s on. There were ups and downs, but overall the situation was fairly stable and parents were supported by local homeschooling groups.

It's good that more installations support the children who are homeschooled as well as those who are schooled. I know that I appreciated the work in the mid-1990s of the Heidelberg Youth Center when the staff developed an exceptional art program featuring museum tours and lessons in sculpting and drawing.

Concerning stress during deployment, it's a good bet that the deployment caused the stress (going by all the YouTube videos of children-in-school being surprised by a returning parent) and not the homeschooling. Parents in online support groups say that they are better able to help their children weather the separation because the parents can control when to forge ahead with new material or slow down to 'go with the flow' of the child's emotions.

 

Talking through delusions

Yesterday, the family went to the local Ren Fest.  It was fun, we ate different things than usual (burnt sugar almonds!), went on rides (mine was on a camel with the 5 year old), and admired all the olde curiosities.  

One small incident stuck out.

My daughter who is a veterinarian was checking her messages.  One of the Ren Fest actors stopped to half-jokingly admonish her about using her "magic box" and thereby miss the life around her.

Okay, I understand that the participants, this one a fellow in green velvet and wearing a gentleman's hat with a perky feather waving above it, are supposed to stay in character during their interactions with the public attendees.  It's fun when they do that. The fellow probably thought she was doping off in the middle of 'his' world, created by hard work to create an amusing alternative fiction. He felt protective of his project.  Part of me can see that.

With this exchange (and thinking over others during Ren Fest visits in years past) I had an odd feeling of déjà vu, but concerning political discussions, especially recently.  Reading what some of my Facebook friends share, much of it seeming to me to be willful hyperbole, outdated information, or partisan mockery, is like talking to a Ren Fest actor.  No matter how hard I try to explain a position in real-world discussions -- politely, I might add, but probably too earnestly -- I don't have the charisma that will make them stop and look up at the machine producing the fairy bubbles.

In real-world interactions, the harder I try to provide facts that feel objective (no highly partisan links, no 'shouting,' no links to Jon Stewart), the harder they try to maintain the 'character,' to stay in the world that feels so comfortable to them.  We must all do that to some degree because that's how people 'work.'  The denial of reality, though, gets scary when some of their vigorous (and well-funded) partners-in-thought have the federal government of the United States idling while the 'actors' ride along on their figuratively white horses, ready to joust, as if the Ren World were reality.

I'd stop, in order to save each of us a lot of irritation, if it didn't feel so important.

Priests threatened with arrest if they minister to military during shutdown

Regarding a report by a website named The Daily Caller (among many).

Priests threatened with arrest if they minister to military during shutdown

“With the government shutdown, many [government service] and contract priests who minister to Catholics on military bases worldwide are not permitted to work – not even to volunteer,” wrote John Schlageter, the general counsel for the Archdiocese for the Military Services USA, in an op-ed this week. “During the shutdown, it is illegal for them to minister on base and they risk being arrested if they attempt to do so.”

Catholic priests have been in short supply for the military for some time. When my twins were baptized in 1981 in Munich, the priest was a contractor. Part of the problem of the lack of priests was because of decreased vocations, and part of it was a "main line denomination" decrease in the number of priests and pastors choosing to be military chaplains in the wake of the war in Vietnam.

The "arrest" part might be entering a controlled area during the shutdown when access might be severely restricted to control any misbehavior on the parts of people who aren't happy about the shutdown of the government by the House of Representatives' refusal to govern.  The members of Congress grandstanding over this issue can solve the problem easily -- do their jobs and govern instead of having a tantrum.

The restriction against "ministering" probably has to do with the legal ramifications of the contracts.

When I was a new employee in the military community civilian personnel office in Fulda, Germany in the mid-1970s, I was the only American in the office. The office was new to administering the personnel actions of American civilian workers in the community and the three people already in the office were Germans who administered the civilian personnel side for the German employees. German employees of the American Army far outnumbered American employees because of treaty agreements, for continuity reasons, and because there were no American workers to be plumbers, electricians, maintenance people, or fill many other jobs.

Anyhow, I was a GS-3, and as a probationary employee I wasn't supposed to work unsupervised. The wrinkle was, German and American holidays.  As an American employee I would be working on German holidays while my German supervisors would be at home, holidaying.

To try to solve the problem, I volunteered to work on American holidays when my immediate supervisors were at work, and to take off on German holidays while they were off.  The problem with my solution was that would mess with the needs of the American employees, and it was illegal, as in against existing pay regulations.

My American boss (in a community 50 miles away -- we were a satellite office) worked it out by having me call her on the telephone at regular intervals throughout the day (a solution that seemed to last only for the first German holiday). The contracts with the priests probably have similar regulatory restrictions.

I'm guessing the restriction on ministering would apply only to services held in chapels on military installations. Catholic service members are free to attend any Catholic church and the contractors are free to celebrate mass in their home church.

This has nothing to do with the First Amendment and seems to have everything to do with members of Congress making a mess and trying to fix it by special exception "bandages" whenever someone they favor is inconvenienced or the "bandage" would make a good Tweet.

 

Update:

The law governing whether employees can "volunteer" their services is the Antideficiency Act.  This law was not passed to deal with the current government shutdown (has any law been passed recently?), but is from 1884 (according to Wikipedia).  Yes, eighteen-eighty-four.  

According to the Antideficiency page at the GAO site, 

The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from

• making or authorizing an expenditure from, or creating or authorizing an obligation under, any appropriation or fund in excess of the amount available in the appropriation or fund unless authorized by law. 31 U.S.C. § 1341(a)(1)(A). 
• involving the government in any obligation to pay money before funds have been appropriated for that purpose, unless otherwise allowed by law. 31 U.S.C. § 1341(a)(1)(B). 
• accepting voluntary services for the United States, or employing personal services not authorized by law, except in cases of emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property. 31 U.S.C. § 1342. 
• making obligations or expenditures in excess of an apportionment or reapportionment, or in excess of the amount permitted by agency regulations. 31 U.S.C. § 1517(a).

You'd think that lawmakers would know something about the laws they're tinkering with.

The Shutdown

Just as a matter of course, I'm registering my disgust at the shutdown of the federal government caused by the fit of pique in the House of Representatives.  

• The Shutdown in 10 Infuriating Sentences

Conservatives prefer Putin? Really?

I wonder if Hell has frozen over. The party of Ronald "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Reagan is siding with Vladimir Putin on the subject of Syria.

• Twitter: Matt Drudge  
• The Blaze on Rush Limbaugh   
• Fox News  
• A Conservative family organization choosing Moscow for its next convention  
• Some yayhoo at Yahoo   

Mr. Obama has been derided for being a communist –- for articles, merely Google “Obama communist” –- and various groups feel he ought to be impeached for this (just add “impeach” to the previous search terms). Some of these same people are now agreeing with Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, and a former KGB lieutenant colonel. Within the USSR, you weren’t in the KGB unless you were a communist.

A few months ago, in the pages of the Washington Times, John McCain “blasted” Putin as an “Old KGB colonel apparatchik.” (definition of “apparatchik” is here) Apparently, enough time has passed since then that the Obamaphobic people are willing to be led by a Pied Piper.

The irony is surreal. The Right has gone so far around the bend that it has met the Left. Do they even know they’re being played?

A writer's revenge

A short story:  For Maurice 

Who Is Meinhof?

Busy at another blog with a short story:  Who Is Meinhof?

 

They Taste Like Chicken

Push comes to shove at a homeowners' association meeting when an angry ailurophobe goes toe-to-toe with a compassionate veterinarian.  Will the feral felines in the neighborhood lose their home, and their lives?  Or will someone else?

They Taste Like Chicken: a short story   (PDF: no e-reader needed) 

 

Germany and homeschooling: fact-checking the Romeike situation

The reversal in May of 2012 by the Department of Homeland Security of the granting of asylum to the Romeike family from Germany is emotionally upsetting -- no one likes to see children threatened with action from a government.  Hearing about it is distressing and makes people want to do something.

• Romeike v. Holder, Case No. 12-3641  (awaiting submission, as of yesterday, 12 Mar 2013)

Yelling about Hitler (just Google Romeike v. Holder) and President Obama, though, is not constructive action.  At this point, unless the topic is WWII, using the name Hitler to make a point is political spin using hot-button words to generate even more emotion, and perhaps also to raise more donations for a legal fund.

A goodly portion of German laws probably did carry over from the laws of the Third Reich, and many of the Third Reich's laws probably carried over from the Weimar Republic. Drivers still had to stop at stop signs, people expected that others who handled cash would not embezzle, and spouses' partners probably expected that their significant others should refrain from bigamy. To make entirely new laws would require the overhaul of an entire society. Schooling laws from one era to another also probably resembled each other, but the laws were not in themselves "Nazi-era" artifacts pointed at the hearts of homeschooling families.

• Modern History Sourcebook: The Federal Republic of Germany Basic Law, 1949

Is the Basic Law American in flavor?  No.  Is it democratic?  Yes.  The Federal Republic of Germany has a representative government in a similar vein to that of the U.S.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Claim:  The Romeike family was granted asylum by the Bush administration and the Obama administration has reversed that.

Fact: The Romeike family arrived in the U.S. from Germany in August of 2008, probably entering the country using regular passports and most likely clearing immigration as tourists would. President Obama took office in January of 2009 and a pre-hearing brief on the Romeikes is dated 16 December 2009. The decision granting asylum was issued in January 2010.

On January 26, 2010 ... Judge Lawrence O. Burman granted asylum to Uwe and Hannalore Romeike ...

... Uwe Romeike and his family arrived in Atlanta in August 2008, with little fanfare and only their suitcases.

Source:  HSLDA Court Report, March/April 2010

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Claim:  Hitler made it so German families couldn't homeschool, and the current German government won't change that.

Fact:  Organized schoolling in the lands that became Germany has a long history, and it is a source of pride.

Headline from the newspaper Ausburger Allgemeine, 23 December 2002

From Swabia and Upper Bavaria:   Without School, No Wedding

200 Years ago, Duke Max IV Joseph of Bavaria directed the compulsory schooling of children

The duke was serious about compulsory schooling, showed by how the graduation certificate was one of the keys to later life. It must be tendered if one wanted to establish a business in a trade, or if one wanted to buy a house. Also, one couldn’t marry without this certificate.

(translation)

The need for the "village helping to raise the child" runs deeply in German society. I once had a woman (a cleaning lady in the military guest house soon after we arrived) take a bottle from my year-old son's mouth to warm it under a stream of hot water in the sink. Given my knowledge now of how Germans viewed cold drinks I'm assuming she explained, as I didn't yet know any German, that the cold milk would give him a stomach ache.  Years later an older German woman on a bicycle chided me and my children's piano teacher for crossing the street on a red light that had changed while we were walking.  Apparently, we were setting a bad example for my kids who were with us.  You can also read the light-hearted account in Planet Germany about strangers' concerns for children not wearing hats:  "Of course, it is disconcerting for a first-time British mother that strangers will accost her on the street and express concern about the child's upbringing." (p. 206)

Communal concern for kids isn't seen as interference, but as a responsibility. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Claim:  Germany persecutes Christians

Fact:  Where to start?

• With compulsory schooling under Charlemagne (Karl der Grosse, in German) -- in the year 813 -- being rooted in the desire to "develop the understanding of Christian teaching in the people"?
• With the present language, "High" German, stemming from Luther's translation of the Bible?
• With the compulsory religion classes in school, depending on whether you're Catholic (Katholische), Protestant (Evangelische), nondenominational Christian (Freireligioese), or atheist?
  
  Lehrplan Katholische Religion 2010
  Lehrplan Evangelische Religion 2010
  Lehrplan Freireligioese Religion Sek. I (and Sek. II)  
  Lehrplan Ethik 2010  
  (taken from the Teaching Plan, linked above, for the state of Hesse in college prep schools)
  
  
• With taxes used to support churches? 
• With the legal religious holidays, all of which are Christian? (document of school holidays and school vacation schedules for the various states; vacations are staggered so that everyone isn't off at the same time -- schoolkids and workers -- clogging the already busy highways into gridlock)
• With the network of religiously-oriented schools (in this case, those in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg)?

Is the German expression of being Christian identical to the American expression of it?  Of course not. In the U.S. the various versions of Christian expression differ, so why wouldn't there be dissimilarities between countries?  Whose "Christianity" is the right one?  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Claim:  The Romeikes will be thrown in jail after leaving the U.S.

Fact: Deportation is not extradition.

Theoretically, the family could still move to any country they want.  Deportation means they must leave the U.S., not that they will be extradited to Germany. 

• Extradition in International Law (Google Books)
  
   Theoretically there should be no confusion between extradition and deportation.  They are clearly distinct in purpose.  The object of extradition is to restore a fugitive criminal to the jurisdiction of a State which has a lawful claim to try or punish him for an offence. ... Deportation, on the other hand, is the means by which a State rids itself of an undesired alien.  Its purpose is achieved as soon as the alien has departed from its territory; the ultimate destination of a deportee is of no significance in this respect.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Is homeschooling a perilous undertaking in Germany?  It can be, and probably is more so since the American campaign to demonize Germany for their constitutionally legal laws -- the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany is not identical to the constitution of the United States of America, but it is a constitution.  Americans seeking to change the German constitution are probably as welcome in Germany as any constitution-changers are in the U.S.

Any change in the compulsory schooling laws of the various German states will have to come from within the culture of Germany and not as a result of exporting American culture.  Foreign shouting about schooling laws will probably have as much effect on the average German voter as the rantings and flag-burnings by angry young Muslim men do on Joe Six-Pack, soccer moms, or helicopter parents.  

The Romeike family could have moved to another country within the European Union with fewer long-term uncertainties for their children.  If they had moved to Austria, the language would have remained reasonably the same (perhaps the difference between Brooklyn and Alabama?), and they would have been able to continue homeschooling.  The Neubronners moved to France (3rd paragraph; translate here).  Jonas Himmelstrand of Sweden fled to Finland.  

Why did someone think that the Romeikes moving to the U.S., specifically to claim asylum, was a better idea than moving within the E.U.?  Was the purpose for the Romeike family to merely be able to homeschool, or were they to serve as a symbol within the U.S., as a rallying point here?  Is this situation about generating fears for American homeschooling?  Whatever the reason for suggesting that they come to the U.S. and helping them move here, they're in the thick of it.

I wish the Romeike family good things in whatever comes. They look like nice people who want only what's best for their children and they remind me of the Germany I miss.  I hope they find someplace to live where they won't need special conditional permission to continue homeschooling their children.