Christmas double-tap

Yesterday morning, Christmas Eve, a man in Webster, NY set a housefire so that he could shoot and kill firefighters that responded to it.  He shot four, killing two and severely wounding two others.

It is policy for the American drone-bombers to come back after a strike to come back and double-tap rescuers, as well as those attending the funerals of the innocent people that the Americans kill.

So once again, people will be outraged and horrified by what happened in Webster, NY, while they're OK with the conduct of these shooters as official policy in other places.

But, really, as Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians, God is not mocked.  If Americans don't like it coming around, a good start would be to stop having it go around all over the world.

The past instructs the present

Last week Irish history came up somehow, and my wife and I looked into the Irish Republican Army and the British invasion force sent in 1920 to keep Ireland under British control - the Black and Tans.  Pretty soon, she wanted to know about the Easter Rising of 1916, about Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera.

Anybody that likes hillbilly music, like my wife, is going to like Irish music.  A short tutorial from Youtube on the Black and Tans, featuring "Come out, ye Black and Tans:"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJv8QVRT09s

I was born on a Dublin street where the Royal drums did beat,

And the loving English feet walked all over us;

And every single night, when me Da would come home tight,

He'd invite the neighbours outside with this chorus:

 

Oh, come out ye Black and Tans;

Come out and fight me like a man;

Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders;

Tell her how the I.R.A. made you run like hell away

From the green and lovely lanes in Killeshandra.

 

Come, tell us how you slew

Them ol' Arabs two by two;

Like the Zulus, they had spears and bows and arrows;

How you bravely faced each one,

With your sixteen pounder gun,

And you frightened them poor natives to their marrow.

 

          Chorus

 

Come, let us hear you tell

How you slandered great Parnell,

When you thought him well and truly persecuted,

Where are the sneers and jeers

That you bravely let us hear,

When our heroes of sixteen were executed.

 

          Chorus 

Oh, come out ye English Huns;

Come out and fight without yer guns;

Show yer wife how you won medals up in Derry.

Ye murdered free young men,

And you'll do the same again,

So get out and take yer bloody army with ye. 

 

How little has changed!  Isn't this how occupied populations feel everywhere?  You can find fault with the Irish Republican Army just as you can with the Taliban or anybody else that stands up against an empire, although the empires accusing them of "terrorism" never seem too concerned about their own conduct.  But if the Chinese army ever occupies the USA, I'll bet real money that the American resistance won't follow Miss Manners either.

 

The British defeated the Easter Rising in 1916 in about a week, but they lost by executing the leaders.  The Americans lost in Iraq, thrown out of the country by the puppet government they had installed, because no one was willing to put up any longer with the wanton murders and torture carried out by the occupiers.  Nobody in Iraq was willing to offer immunity from prosecution to these guys - who like the Black and Tans are so undisciplined that they can't even be restrained from regularly raping their own female comrades.  See here, for instance, from Stars and Stripes.

 

The reference in the song to Arabs was the rising against the British occupation of Iraq in 1920.  Not much has changed there either.  

 

And as it was for the Zulus in 1879, so it is today, when the resistance in various bombed and invaded nations is resisting the most powerful armed forces in the world with small arms, RPGs, and roadside bombs - and yet, although at great cost, they are holding them off.  As the Black and Tans "ran like hell" from the IRA, it seems that the American forces are preparing to run from Afghanistan as they had to run from Iraq and Vietnam.  Greater force and wealth does not always win the day for injustice and pride.  If the American forces had to meet the resistance equally armed - no tanks, no missiles, no helicopters or other air support - how would they fare, do you think?  The righteous are as bold as a lion.  Not so, the servants of injustice.

 

So let's learn from the past and from the follies of others.  The British found nothing but shame and humiliation in Ireland, and the American empire will find nothing else in the various nations all over the world that it is now tormenting.  Truly it is written, "Let none of you suffer as a murderer, a thief, an evildoer, or as an overseer of the affairs of others."  If we take that advice, pulling the plug on the American empire as the British and French did before us and letting the rest of the world live in peace, we might even manage to save the American republic from the cancer of empire. 

 

 

Christmas Cops

We heard a great clatter this evening, sirens and flashing red and blue lights.  The cats were displeased.

So we went out to look, and the Chino cops had arrived - cars, vans, and a Christmas float playing Christmas music. 

I think there is great wisdom in this.  Probably more is done for law enforcement through acting human like that than by dressing up like robocops or exercising what the police academy calls "command presence."  And someone in the Chino Police Department has figured that out.

Children slaughtered here, slaughtered there

Yesterday, a 20-year-old man killed 27 people, mostly kindergartners, along with his mother and himself, at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.  Americans are understandably shocked and horrified.

But a couple of points do spring to mind.

Most of these distraught Americans are indifferent at best to such slaughters committed at least weekly in Pakistan and Afghanistan by the servants of the Drone-bomber in Chief - and unlike Americans, millions of people are compelled to live in daily dread of their children being killed in such massacres.

I got myself unfriended on Facebook for making the observation that the really unfathomable thing is not the one-time massacre by this nut case, but that Americans should be so horrified at it while at the same moment utterly indifferent to the same thing being done continually in their names all around the world, and usually with their active approval.  Indeed we're urged to be thankful to the soldiers sent to defile us with all this innocent blood.

And of all people, America's Afghan puppet, Hamid Karzai, was dancing on his strings yesterday, making the same point:

"I express my sorrow and condolences to the American people for this painful accident and I hope that nobody around the world suffers from such incidents. Afghanistan, especially, feels the pain of such incidents and almost every day such pains come to our people and we are dealing with it."  Hence his punch line that in 2013: "There will be no military activity of foreign forces in Afghanistan".

Here's another enlightening comparison.  In which way are more students killed in American schools each year - by school shooters, or by school staff?  Well, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), school staff killed 143 students in school in 2009, and that's about what it is every year.  School shooters don't come close, in any year.

And what is being done about that?  Well, since George Brown first introduced legislation in 2009 to protect kids from this violence - besides the 150 deaths every year, tens of thousands of kids maimed or otherwise traumatized - the superintendents' associations, the school boards associations, and the other education industry lobbyists have managed to fend off any legislation to protect these kids.  Their institutions and the butts of the perps, they're not slow to protect.

Here we see how how profound the word of God can be, "Whatever you want men to do to you, do so to them, for this is the law and the prophets," or in Rabbi Hillel's formulation, "Whatever you hate, do not to others.  This is the whole law.  Now go study."

Hillel's last word is life-changing.  Now go study.  You that are grieved and horrified by those school shootings, now go study those feelings.  Know that three times a week in the United States, a family experiences the same murder of their child by school staff, the same grief and horror - and the sadistic perps are protected by the school districts, by the indifferent cops and Child Protective Services agencies that refuse to investigate child abuse in schools, the state and federal education agencies that don't want to do anything about it, and the legislatures that don't want to upset the education industry lobbies that want to keep things as they are.

And you know - and you do know! - parents in Pakistan and Afghanistan are just as distraught when their kids are slaughtered by American drone bombers as Americans are when their own kids are slaughtered by a school shooter.  If you don't think American parents ought to suffer thus, how long will you go along with inflicting such torment on others?  "What you hate, do not to others."