Initiating Children Into The Coming Police State

Imagine my surprise that this was local.  Wyoming, MI is maybe a mile from my house.  The title is melodramatic, but the events are still disturbing.  (Summary: with no warning to students or parents, there was an “evacuation” drill which involved police in full riot gear announcing a “threat” to the school, and running around the school with weapons and ordering kids around, searching their pockets and the like — which I don’t think is even legal.)  The police say they didn’t know that the kids had not been told about it.

Maybe it’s just me but I have a hard time imagining any scenario that’s statistically likely to happen that this would be useful preparation for.

Unless there’s something to that “new law that makes it easy for Bush to declare martial law” story that’s going around.

National news, local paper.

Bush planned Iraq ‘regime change’ before becoming President – [Sunday Herald]

I’m not sure this is news — PNAC stuff has been publically available for some time — perhaps it’s the explicit plan to use Saddam Hussein as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq when the actual reason is to establish a permanent American military presence?

The stuff about “decisively winning” wars on multiple enemies simultaneously sure seems to have turned out a lot harder than it was supposed to be.

The stuff about trying to bring democracy to China is chilling.  Imagine that instead of picking a fight with Iraq and discovering it was nigh impossible for us to end that fight in a way we were happy with, we’d done the same thing with China.  Holy crap would we be hosed.  Remember way back before 9/11, when the first kind of scary incident in the W. Presidency was us sending out a spy plane to China and the Chinese shooting it down?  I wonder if military rivalry with China would have been a much bigger part of the first W. term if 9/11 hadn’t forced everyone’s attention to the Middle East….

If so, I’m grateful.  Iraq is bad enough, but we can pull out whenever we choose to.  I don’t think we could “choose to” end a war with China if we’d started one.

Via digg.com.

FoxTrot‘s sunday strip is awesome.

People are always asking me, “Oh, Ed that Goes Ping, what did you and your friends look like when you were little more than half your current age, and hung around in basements which had been decorated with bizarre vaguely tribal-looking creatures, wearing a trenchcoat?”

Now you know.

In Teens’ Web World, MySpace Is So Last Year – washingtonpost.com

I blame myself.