Meander

A few of the news stories that have caught my interest in recent days involve violence by uniformed representatives of our society.  There are some people who will beat others given the chance, and some of these people manage to get a job where they wear a uniform. That’s inevitable, but what shouldn’t be inevitable is that the people who lead uniformed service accept and protect these people.

In East Vancouver, police beat a man after being called to a domestic dispute. After they’d broken fractured bones around his eyes and handcuffed him, they realized that they were at the wrong residence. Not only is that very bad luck for the guy with the fractured bones, but really, if they had been at the right address and beaten up someone there would that have been any better?

“They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” That’s what Rear Admiral Harris, in charge at Guantanamo Bay, after three prisoners supposedly hung themselves. Well, it appears that the warfare was indeed asymmetrical, but not against the U.S. Four American soldiers have come forward to say that they were on guard duty in Guantanamo Bay the night that three prisoners supposedly committed suicide, and contrary to the official report, they saw no one, alive or dead, pass between the prisoner’s cellblock and the camp infirmary where the bodies ended up. What they did see earlier in the evening was a government van usually used for transporting prisoners move between the cell block and a separate installation widely believed to be used for torture. The van returned several hours later and stopped at the infirmary. Since the Obama government has taken office, these guards have been cooperating with federal authorities in investigating what really happened that night, but federal investigators have declined to continue the investigation.

And ABC is reporting that the scopes on U.S. military sniper rifles are being stamped with New Testament references by the manufacturer.  That’s not strictly a beating, but it sure breaks the rules.

The Irish Parliament passed a blasphemy law that came into force at the beginning of the year. In response, Atheism Ireland has published twenty-five quotes that it believes are blasphemous on its website. The quotes are taken from various sources, including the New Testament, the Koran and George Carlin.

Alternet has a great article about the difference between activism and organizing, and what this means for people who want to make change happen.

I attended the Waterloo Region Food Summit keynote last night and learned quite a bit about food banks and farmers. One speaker was from The Stop, a food bank  in Toronto and she talked about a new campaign to make policy change on poverty in Ontario. It’s been a long time that politicians have been talking about reducing poverty, but very little is happening.

The current recession makes the need more urgent, but also makes the decision to spend more to reduce poverty more financially responsible. Economists are quite clear that the best way to get more money into circulation in the economy is to give it to the poorest people you can find, because they will spend it, while those of us who are well-off are more likely to dump it into a savings account. And yet governments are still not putting the money where it is most needed, and food bank use is increasing rapidly.

There’s an old argument that guns make us safer because law abiding citizens can use them to stop crimes. It’s a hard argument to refute, even with the data on your side, because most of us watch movies and television shows where people with guns stop other people with guns. The reality is that it’s difficult to stop someone with a gun, even if you have a gun. That’s why the news today is telling us about a U.S. army major who shot 46 people, killing 13 of them, on an army base in Texas. There are plenty of guns on army bases and plenty of people who are well trained to use them, but that wasn’t enough to stop this tragedy.