Lately there has been much tedious back and forth concerning child abuse. This has very little to do with cryptography. It has however something to do with privacy. Should they government meddle in peoples homes and make sure they are bringing up children in the proper government approved fashion? Regarding child abuse and Koresh: The government was fishing for stuff to get him on. The Davidians were charged, came to court, and were aquitted. The infamous warrant that led to the Davidian children being crispy fried concerned guns, not child abuse. If we look at famous child abuse cases in California they are mostly cases of gross abuse by government. Do children get abused: Yep, almost always by step parents, as in the wicked stepmother. We are unsurprised when someone murders a rival. We take for granted that two women under one roof will lead to grave trouble. Yet a stepchild is a more formidable rival for a spouses attentions than any lover could be. In fact, step parents are more strongly motivated to murder step children than they are to murder their wife or husbands other lovers. For this reason the evil step parent has for centuries been a stock character to make the plot move along. Until recently anybody who read a book would take for granted that step parents were a hazard to life and limb. And when I talk to a kid who is hanging out a long way from home, a common reason is to avoid being alone with a step parent. Step parents are still a hazard to life and limb. Yet in todays literature and TV shows and movies, it is generally assumed that step parents and step children will get along tolerably well. For a reason that is very unclear to me, this obvious fact is being systematicly denied in Western culture generally, and in American culture in particular. To support this fiction, it appears to me that "Child Protective Services" agencies make a deliberate effort to go after natural parents. It appears to me that they are trying to make some kind of quota so as to create the appearance that child abuse is not biologically driven problem. Similarly, when a natural parent abuses their child, this receives vastly more media attention than step parent abuse, in a disproportion similar to the extreme disproportion given to incidents of white racial violence against blacks as compared to black racial violence against whites. Yep. Its a conspiracy. But what is the point of such a conspiracy?