getmygoat

I just read this article by Glenn Greenwald about how President Obama doesn’t appear to dissent from a Bush Administration decision which essentially moved the prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to a place in Afghanistan called Bagram. The way it works is this: after the Boumediene v Bush ruling in 2008, Guantanamo Bay prisoners were given habeus corpus rights (what a novel idea), which was a great inconvenience to the War on Terror, so
a new prison in Bagram, outside of United States constitutional jurisdiction, was established. It makes sense that the Bush administration would want to carry on business as usual; the top priority during that presidency was fighting terrorism. I do not understand why Barack Obama thinks it is a good idea to support the previous administration’s decision. While I never toted President Obama as a savior of any sorts, I am quite disappointed in this decision. This is a bad call.

My objections are simple ones: The United States of America is not supposed to police the world. If people are doing bad things in other countries, we have no right to step in, arrest people, and imprison and torture them. I don’t believe the government has the right to wrongfully imprison and torture its own citizens either - that would make us just like the terrorists and despots we have been fighting with for the past decade.

Leaving that aside, I do not see how it is appropriate to arrest people and then ship them to Afghanistan to be imprisoned. First of all, if the United States does not have to follow its own laws there, how can it maintain a prison? Logically, this does not make sense, and it looks like a formula for disaster. Eventually someone at Bagram will wonder why the Americans are in charge even though they have no legal bearing in Afghanistan, and the result will be a terrible mess.

As Greenwald posits in his editorial, it’s one thing to capture people in Afghanistan and imprison them; it’s another thing entirely to capture people elsewhere and move them to this super prison.

If you have a problem with the current disregard for civil liberties and basic human rights, please contact the White House and express your concerns.

The other day I read this article about some questionable practices in military mental treatment centers.  In short, the military discourages Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnoses in favor of other, less severe disorders which require less intensive treatment.  The piece hit home for me especially because one of my goats came home from a tour in Iraq with PTSD.  His case was severe enough for him to be diagnosed properly, and after pumping him full of a variety of drugs, the Army sent him home.  That particular goat is in pretty bad shape, despite the support he received.  I can only imagine how difficult it is for the soldiers who do not get treatment due to intentional misdiagnosis.

I talked about this with another goat in my field, one who holds a graduate degree in psychology.  She was the one who told me about the alternative diagnosis of “adjustment disorder;” on the surface it seems appropriate because it manifests itself after trauma, yet fades over time.  It would be very easy to justify an adjustment disorder diagnosis for a man or woman who recently returned from a combat zone because enough time would not have passed to truly diagnose PTSD.  However, there are plenty of soldiers out there who resist seeking treatment until their symptoms are almost unmanageable because of the stigma attached to mental illness.  After being trained to be “Army strong,” it’s hard to go to someone and confess a mental illness.

It’s hard to prove the exact extent of a mental illness.  I understand this.  I also understand that what the government is doing to these brave men and women is wrong.  I have a problem with a mentality which refuses treatment to some and causes damage to more: “every dollar the Army spends on a soldier’s benefits is a dollar lost for bullets, bombs or the soldier’s incoming replacement.”  Essentially, the Army and the VA are telling people that soldiers are another expendable resource, one that is less important than money to be spent on creating more war-torn minds.

In the end, the Army will protect itself: “after the Army became aware of the tape [exposing the order to military psychologists to avoid diagnosing PTSD], the Senate Armed Services Committee declined to investigate its implications, despite prodding from a senator who is not on the committee. The Army then conducted its own internal investigation — and cleared itself of any wrongdoing.”  The people who are wronging these sick individuals are hiding behind a veil of plausible deniability by claiming that the condition is too hard to prove or that the symptoms are indicative of other disorders.  There is uncertainty in medicine and diagnostics, but no other doctor would be able to intentionally misdiagnose a large number of patients without answering to a malpractice suit.

My rant here is not a tear on the military in general or the Army in particular.  While I oppose this particular conflict, I support the troops, and I believe that the United States needs an armed force to protect its citizens.  I also believe that the United States should take care of that armed force as best it can, especially when its soldiers are injured in the line of duty.

It’s crunch time, and people are scrambling to do their taxes on time.  Despite all the talk about bailouts and economic stimuli, my goat finds that she’s in the same boat she was in last year.  Except this year there’s a bigger hole in it.

My goat managed to go up a pay-grade, which, in these turbulent economic times is still barely enough to make ends meet, which in turn means we have to pay back a significantly larger sum of money than we ever have before.  I know that there are other ungulates in similar pastures having the same difficulties.

Now I am not going to get into debating tax cuts here or throw out the cliche line that the current system “punishes success.”  I disagree with that claim.  I understand that the government needs money to pay off the massive debt it incurred by supporting an overseas war that I did not support, so I know taxes aren’t going to drop any time in the near future.  We cannot undo what has been done, but I would like to think that somehow we can improve the imbroglio in which we find ourselves.

I would like to see the Obama administration take stringent action against companies who are receiving and misusing stimulus money.  Even moreso, I would like to see more stimulus money go to the people who elected him into office.  And this time, I don’t want that government money factored into my income.  This year when my goat did her taxes she discovered that the stimulus check she received last year (and which she spent on paying taxes on her pasture) was a part of her income and therefore taxable.  Sure, she received a meager follow-up stimulus payment, but this time it’s going directly back to the IRS.

In the end, my goat is wondering exactly what she has to do to avoid this same situation next year.  She’s cutting back on the expenses she can, but she’s already buying her hay at a discount store.  One option is to pay more out during the year, but that makes day-to-day life more difficult during the rest of the year.  Each goat can only do so much to stay afloat in today’s economy.  Sooner or later the herders will need to pitch in, or the whole pasture will end up going to pot.

It’s been sunny for two days, but the ditches are all still full of water. No, I don’t live in North Dakota. I live in Northwest Florida, and it rained here for about a week and a half straight. I certainly needed the break from the weather, and not only because the car I drive often hydroplanes (plus the windows have this awful tendency to get stuck in the DOWN position).

No, heavy rains on the Gulf Coast can cause dangers of the strangest kind. Floods are nothing new to Milton; it is submerged in water even more frequently than it is on fire, but I digress. I am more interested in the alligator farm a few counties west of here which lots many of its residents during the storm. Apparently the water rose so high the alligators simply floated above the five-foot tall fence and are loose someplace in Alabama. One of the alligators is eighteen feet long. The news reporter told all viewers that if they encounter any of these loose gators to leave them alone and call the gator farm.

I think this is amazing - not that there are 18-foot alligators loose - I come from an area where, assuming the people encountering the gator are not armed and/or hungry (What? They’re tasty!), folks would actually call the gator farm to rescue them from rogue alligators. I have no doubt in my mind that people took down the number and started calling in gator sightings almost immediately.

As a Floridian, I know quite a bit of gator-evading maneuvers (TIP: they’re too fast to outrun, but they don’t change direction very well). Fortunately for me, my neighbors, and my pets, the worst threat in my neighborhood was a crayfish rising up from the pavement when I took my goat for her evening walk (catching crayfish is easy - simply place a Styrofoam cup behind it and scare it until it backs up). No gators in sight.

We survived this storm. And we made enough progress building our ark that we should have it completed by the start of Hurricane Season (I consider worthy of capitalization, even if it isn’t proper).