Government is just another word for "things we do together"

Like not letting other people's 10-year-olds walk around without an adult escort.

Some thoughts:

1) Apparently the parents were forced by CPS to sign a "safety plan" agreeing not to let the children play unsupervised until CPS could marshal their full administrative resources to review the case. When the father at first refused, the CPS official said they'd take the kids if he didn't sign the contract. This is a strange sort of "agreement." Obviously, it's not voluntary in any sense of the word, and coercive in every sense of that word. Kafkaesque.

2) The Washington Post leaves out the details of what happened when the police came:

The police asked for the father’s ID and when he refused, called six patrol cars as backup. Alexander went upstairs and the police called out that if he came down with anything else in his hand “shots would be fired,” according to Alexander. (They said this in front of the children, Alexander says). 

At least they didn't specifically threaten to kill the kids.

3) In America, black people get shot for walking in the street. I guess white people might get shot for letting their kids walk alone where there might be black people.

Mixed messages

Not too long ago, I noted here the backlash against "Four Loko" -- a malt beverage containing a lot of caffeine.  I lampooned the idea that this combination is particularly pernicious.  But today the Food and Drug Administration of the United States federal government saw fit to intervene in this space, basically banning the malt-beverage-energy-drink category.

As I read through the story of this administrative action in the New York Times online, I couldn't help thinking back to another story I read in the New York Times recently:  a story about coffee-based cocktails.  Although the author of that piece noted the controversy surrounding Four Loko (et al.), there was no sense of the moral panic that for some reason surrounds the spiked energy drinks. 

How to explain this discrepancy?  I'm sticking with that old standby:  hysteria.