Terror

On May 22 at a concert venue in Manchester, a suicide bomber killed himself and 22 other people, some of them children, at the conclusion of an Ariana Grande performance. 

On June 5 two men drove a van at pedestrians on London Bridge, then attacked others with knives.  Eight died, including the attackers.

Last week two bombers in Paris and Brussels only managed to kill themselves.  A man who drove a van into a group of worshippers outside a London mosque is fine.  The imam protected him from the outraged crowd until police arrived.

This is how it's done:  You buy a highrise apartment block in the heart of London and "renovate" it with aluminum cladding and plastic insulation.  Provide no sprinklers or fire escapes.  This ensures that a small kitchen fire will engulf the entire 24-storey building within half an hour.  The exact number of victims may never be known, but is now close to 60.  Similar structures all over England are being evacuated even though there is no plan in place for housing the evacuees -- or for that matter, the survivors of Grenfell Tower (above).

Unlike the killers in Manchester and on London Bridge, these terrorists did not seek "martyrdom."  They were asleep in their beds while people jumped from high floors to escape the flames.  They did not want to establish a caliphate or punish Western decadence.  They just wanted the money.

When it comes to terror, all these angry young men and the organizations that inspire, recruit and train them are clumsy amateurs.  They can cut off hundreds, maybe thousands of heads, but they can't cut off health care for tens of millions.  That takes a terrorist like Mitch McConnell and his eager  stooges.  That takes Paul Ryan and Tom Price and Donald Trump, and those who put them where they are because they just want the money.

Americans will soon have a significantly better chance of dying because they were born with a heart murmur, or because the Planned Parenthood clinic closed before diagnosing their ovarian cancer, or because they can't afford their deductible, than from the actions of an amateur with a gun or an SUV.
Their children will die younger because of what is done, or not done, about climate change and environmental damage.  The only question is why we don't call this terror.