Really old parenting skills: Teach the child to read, write, and use logic and give them access to a public library. Learn how to yell at kid for reading in the dark or under the covers after bedtime using a flashlight. If parents are illiterate and don't believe that reading and writing are useful skills, remind them that getting a civil service job requires a written test as does a driver's license. Really really old parenting skills: Turn child over to tutor and nanny (if you're rich) and send child into apprenticeship when he is five or six (if you don't have money, but have some contacts) or teaching him how to look pitiful and beg. Or just keep having more children so the older ones have to care for the younger ones and/or work in the fields. Really, really, really old parenting skills: send the kids to Grandma and the great aunts. Run off with handsome stranger. I've also finally figured out what the acronyms stand for: DNS = Depressed Nodal Syndrome IP = Ischemic Priority Urether-Renal Prolapse But now it all makes even less sense than it did before. My CC needs caffeine.

The original reason was false? So Al Quada wasn't hiding in Afganistan and using it as a sanctuary?

Al Quaida is a metastisized cancer. The supposed head guy of Al Quaida is either in Afghanistan or Pakistan or on the border between the two OR in Saudi Arabia from whence he came OR anywhere else in the world. No one knows for sure where HE is. Al Quaida, on the other hand, seems to be represented in just about every country in the middle east, and large parts of India, Turkey, Eastern Europe and possibly France, Germany, and Britain. Getting the top guy shouldn't take deployment of troops. The intelligence services of many nations have the capability of finding him and, if necessary, killing him. That won't stop the movement, however. Nor will wiping out Al Quaida stop terrorism. Relieving terrible living conditions and giving the ordinary man in the street some sense of security, stability, and freedom from fear and want takes care of most terrorist movements. These terrorist ideologies can take hold and flourish only where there is great economic and legal injustice. When everything is hunky-dorey, people don't want to shake up their lives.

Umm, Afghanistan != Iraq. You do remember why we are over there, right? Gosh! My world atlas shows Afghanistan and Iraq to be separate countries with entirely different terrain, resources, cultures, government, and histories. I really MUST update my world atlas to match yours. Oh, and as to why we are over there - that's a very good question. Now that the original reason given has been shown to be false, no one really does know why we went there. But we do know that it will be very hard to get out. Sort of like a, what's the word?, "quagmire."

It is obvious you have never worked for a government agency or any bureaucracy. Territoriality even between two offices of the same agency in the same city results in redundancy - always. Let us say, for example, the a lobby for red balloons gets funding for red balloons tucked into a multicolored balloon bill. Suddenly every agency dealing with balloons will stop producing blue, yellow, green, and white balloons and will say that they are best equipped to produce red balloons. They will all submit grant requests for money to make red balloons and most of them will get it even though their programs result in an over-abundance of red balloons and a critical shortage of balloons of other colors. That is just the way bureaucracies are.

The Libertarian central concept is quite simple and doesn't require a great deal of knowledge or concern with many aspects of society. Since some say nerds are highly functional autists, one can assume that being very very good at one thing (and earning good money from this trait)would make a simplistic political framework very attractive.