Happy As Kings

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.

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.

 

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.

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.