Massacres and a failure of empathy

Liberals are describing the shooting at Newtown, Conn., as horrific, unimaginable until reality hits.  We are described as a nation in mourning. We are described as having a Culture of  Violence which must be checked.  Liberaals are right, but fail the test of empathy.

Conservatives prise what they think the 2nd Amendment means;  they include a justification for arsenals of assault weapons sas necessary to protect against a National government bent on taking away our freedom.  Conservatives may be right about the progressive loss of freedom but fail to  explain the utter futility of opposing, say, drones carrying tactual Atomic Bombs if a full-scale war were to break out against the superior Federal force.


Millions of children are massacred every year in every country except the Republic of Tuvan, Russia.  Millions more are left in shock, destitute, from the massacare of their parents.

Millions of replacement children are created every year; too many replacements, sad to say.

Millions of assault rifles and guns are used throughout the world to kill and would millions.  This chart, from

 http://www.juancole.com/2012/12/how-america-is-filling-up-itself-and-the-world-with-guns.html

shows where those weapons come from:

Made in the USA.  Home of the, er, brave.

Liberals focus only on American slaughter.   They ignore our contribution to the slaughter of the Not-Us.  If you care about anybody beyond your skin, there is no reason except an atavistic tribalism to limit the caring to one bit of land.

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge?

William Shakespeare, 

Merchant of Venice, Scene I  

And so it is with every race and nation.   Shakespeare wrote some years ago.  We have learned nothing.

I have been told to reason by the heart,

But heart, like head, leads helplessly;

I have been told to reason by the pulse,

And, when it quickens, alter the actions' pace

Till field and roof lie level and the same

So fast I move defying time, the quiet gentleman

Whose beard wags in Egyptian wind.

I have heard may years of telling,

And many years should see some change.

The ball I threw while playing in the park

Has not yet reached the ground.

Dylan Thomas, Should Lanterns  Shine

There are a lot of shootings, torture, maiming, dismemberment, dead bodies in our popular entertainment.  We pay a lot of money to enjoy 'em.  Are we a violent nation?

There are, in the lives I know, a lot of love, joy, hear-break, sex, sunrises and sunsets to be enjoyed, good food and lots of it, anger, forgiveness, creativity, commerce, dreams of a better world.  We may be violent but we're not only violent.

For the drooping of homes
That did not nurse our bones,
Brave deaths of only ones but never found,
Now see, alone in us,
Our own true strangers’ dust
Ride through the doors of our unentered house.
Exiled in us we arouse the soft,
Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks.

Dylan Thomas, There was a Saviour

Images of foreign children in war, to prick the shell of your indifference if any such shell have ye.  After the jump.

Knives or guns

Many innocents have been slaughtered in our history.  In more civilized eras -- say, in 4 BCE in King Herod's Jerusalem -- when it was deemed appropriate to slaughter a lot of children, knives were used. Times were slower back then, and this image of the event wan't painted for some 1,500 years later, so it may have missed some detail.

Cornelis Cornelisz Van Haarlem, 1590, Dutch Baroque painter

China remains relatively civilized.  Just now a man in China's southern province of Guangxi axed three school children to death and wounded 13; and at about the same time, a man in Chenpeng village in Henan province, wielding a knife, killed 2 elementary children and wounded 22.

Contemporaneously, in Newtown,Connecticut, Adam Lanza shot 20 elementary school children and six adults:  all are dead.

A few points, out of many possible points:

∼  We lead the world in mass shootings.  We also have more guns per capita than any other nation.  [A curious phenomenon:  the number of gun sales rise; the number of gun owners shrinks; perhaps arsenals are being built by fewer and fewer folks.] We are followed in gun ownership closely by poor, mad Yemen.  [Probably a non-sequitur, but I note that we also led the World in the number of folks, per capita, in jails and prisons, with Russia a close second.] 

∼  What we know or believe about the youngmen who kill dozens at a time is that they are severely depressed, suicidal,  and furious; that they mask their misery from their parents; that they will talk to a  non-censorious adult about feelings of depression and urges toward suicide; and that many can be helped with appropriate interventions.  Members of Congress have cut appropriations for appropriate interventions.

∼  The youngmen frequently wear black as if in uniform.

∼  The youngmen are not unusually skilled or strong.  Without the advantage guns afford they would be unable to kill many.

∼  As many are killed wit guns on the streets of our great cities and our around our bucolic prairies as are killed in our mass slaughters, but the individual deaths doe't draw much media attention except when famous athletes are involved.  There is a murderous culture of machismic [my word] violence going around that is pandemic.  Perhaps an over-reaction to the great successes of the feminist movements.

∼  My friends and their friends who favor the present interpretation of the Second Amendment are more likely to get beneficial changes in public policy than my friends who are already in favor of  increased gun safety.  Write your Congresspersons, please, and telephone them.  The Country needs your help. If you don't act, action that will be taken is likely to be ill-conceived and maybe harmful to the Body Politic.

Benghazi, Ansar al-Sharia, democracy supporters, confusion, and pathetic John McCain

To get some idea of the complexity of discovering what happened in the attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi, read the Reuters' September 22, 2012, article, published after the jump.

It is thought that a militia, Ansar al-Shariah, headquartered in Benghazi, may have been responsible for the attack.  Benghazi citizens, angry at the attack on the US mission, stormed the two (or five) compounds of the militia and ran the militia membeers out of town.  Other militias were also attacked, including one pro-democracy one.

John McCain, who is lusting after the chairmanship of a special Benghazi committee (which will not be created) lest he fall irretrievably into a well-deserved obscurity, would have Americans untangle this mess.  Only one crazed by a lust for the public stage would make such a fuss.

A small illustration of the complexity:  A doctor in a hospital where Ansar al-Sharia had been providing security for the past six weeks is reported to have said the group had prevented anarchy. “I don’t know about their religion or ideology, but they solved problems,“ said Abdulmonin Salim. “I don’t care if they come from another planet. I want a secure hospital."

Ansar al-Sharia is one of many islamist brigades in Libya .  It opposes democracy as being contrary to Islamic principles.  Islamists in Turkey Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and other pro-democracy nations in which Islam is he principal religion, disagree.  Most Libyans support democracy and strongly and violently disagree.

Here are some images of the US investigating team and of Ansar al-Sharia:


If more need be aid about the difficulty of forensic discovery, here is a team of US investigators at work in Benghazi.

Demonstrators chanted "No more al Qaeda!" as they entered the Ansar al-Sharia compound on Friday night

Ansar al-Sharia brigade members guarding the hospital in Benghazi.

The city of Benghazi, as shown in Google:

 Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii, trnsported to Benghazi

 And, of course, football, eveerywhere in the world:

Present status of the Iran-Pakistan Pipeline

On March 5, 2012, I wrote a post on US efforts to prevent Iran and Pakistan from constructing the Iran-Pakistan Pipeline.  The effort focused on blocking sources of money for financing the pipeline.

The pipeline would start in he Pars natural gas field in Iran -- the largest in the world and currently blocked by US Warships -- and would bring a new energy source to Pakistan, which Pakistan desperately needs.  It would also provide Iran with cash, which it desperately needs because of Western efforts to starve it into agreeing not to construct an Atomic Bomb.  Such as Israel has.

The Western effort, now joined by Russia and China, has so far been a success:  there is no pipeline and there is no Bomb, and Iran has not been Bombed by anyone.  The effort is also wasteful and unstable, not nearly as good as working out an agreement with iran.

Here is a report on the current sate of developments:

From  The Express Tribune with the International Herald ATribune

Zardari visit delay raises questions over Iran-Pakistan project

By AFP

Published: December 11, 2012

ISLAMABAD: 

President Asif Ali Zardari has delayed a visit to Iran to discuss a huge gas deal despite Tehran’s offer of a loan to help finance a project which the US opposes, officials said Tuesday.

The $7.5 billion pipeline project has run into repeated difficulties – over US opposition because of Iran’s nuclear activities and Pakistan’s difficulty in finding funds.

It was originally reported that Zardari would visit Iran last Friday and that the final agreement would be likely signed during the visit.

Pakistani officials denied that the visit had been cancelled, claiming it had never been officially scheduled due to Zardari’s engagements in London and Paris.

“The visit may materialise on his way back from the ongoing foreign tour or he may visit Tehran after coming back home,” a petroleum ministry official told AFP.

Iranian officials said that the visit had been postponed at Pakistan’s request and would happen “soon”.

“It has been agreed that the visit would take place with a bit of change. Iranian assistance to build the peace pipeline in Pakistan will be one of the issues on the visit’s agenda,” said Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mahmanparast.

Negotiations are reaching a critical point, the Financial Times said, because it will take two years to build Pakistan’s sections of the pipeline and Islamabad would have to start paying Tehran for the gas two years from now.

The newspaper said an increasingly desperate Pakistan is struggling to overcome strong opposition to the project from the United States, which has clamped economic sanctions on Iran because of its nuclear programme.

In 2010 Iran and Pakistan agreed that Iran would supply between 750 million cubic feet and one billion cubic feet per day of natural gas by mid-2015.

Islamabad has said that it will pursue the project regardless of US pressure, calling it vital to overcome the country’s energy crisis that has led to debilitating blackouts and suffocated industry.

But in March, it was forced to review sources of funding after newspapers said a Chinese bank pulled out over fears that firms involved will face sanctions.

Pakistani officials said Tuesday that Iran had promised a $500 million loan and that Islamabad would meet the rest of its $1.6 billion share.

“There are impediments in view of the US opposition to the project but we are determined to complete it to meet our fast-growing energy requirements,” said one government official on condition of anonymity.

But the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said Iran has confirmed it can finance at least $250 million, despite Pakistan asking for $500 million.

“This is a technical issue,” Mahmanparast said.

Analyst Imtiaz Gul said the deal would probably be signed only if the United States backs down over its opposition to the deal, possibly in exchange for Pakistani cooperation on Afghan peace efforts. [Emphasis added.]

So Pakistan has something we want and we have something Pakistan wants.  An agreement might lead to a broader agreement with Iran that would end the present stalemate.  That larger agreement might make all nations but Israel, currently controlled by mad hawks, happy.  A change in the Israeli government might result in a two-state solution, which would make Palestinians happy; which would mak Egypt happy.

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast."  Alexander Pope.

Happy Palestinians: