War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
Hack into the matrix: The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing†for random consumers’ information, but “whaling†for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities. It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling…
Bow-tied and all business, long-time TV news journalist, Irving R. Levine, died Thursday at the age of 86. Levine was an original, who like Murrow, Cronkite, Howard K. Smith, to name a few, were themselves a trademark for excellence in news gathering — trench journalists. Despite looking urbane and all-sophisticated up with a bow tie,…
This so-called “financial meltdown” is indeed a down, but a descent from the base-bottom up — Close to 70 percent of the current unemployed in the US are blue-collar workers despite all the Wall Street blubbering and Rick-Santelli rants about the financial industry. “This is a blue-collar recession, just like we saw in ’81,” said…
News people working the White House are way-too-cool for school — Last night, they acted the arrogant clowns displaying delusional as opposed to actual smarts during President Obama’s press conference. (Illustration found here). Obama is a slick guy and the slick comes from within — Josh Marshall at TPM hit the eye-tooth right on the…
A side effect of continuous bad news on the doorstep. This morning in the New York Times: The recession seems to have a sweet tooth. As unemployment has risen and 401(k)’s have shrunk, Americans, particularly adults, have been consuming growing volumes of candy, from Mary Janes and Tootsie Rolls to Gummy Bears and cheap chocolates,…
If not for the way-pissed-off feeling I have, coupled with a sense of nothing-you-can-do despair, maybe this would be sad, or least wouldn’t appear so freakin’ obviously stupid: Mr. Haas walked on, his pink shirt a burst of color on a slate-gray afternoon. The words came haltingly. “You have to understand,†he said, “there are…
Ironic in an age of such brain-busting technology, such a simple device can cause such horror. Four US soldiers were killed last Sunday in a roadside IED blast in eastern Afghanistan, three of those from the Illinois National Guard — 11 from its ranks have now died since the unit arrived in country last September.…
Today six years ago, one of the most dumb-ass and dangerous operations in all of history started up and despite all kinds of processes to the contrary, is still going full banana with no end in sight. Just as the eyeballs of the whole US was focused Wednesday morning on DC — AIG CEO Edward…
Gail Collins, who writes for the New York Times editorial pages, has penned a right-on, nail-’em-to-the-wall piece this morning on the AIG/banking/finance clusterf**k of a freakin’ mess. Collins is way-pissed: Angry. So very, very angry. Unable to speak due to mega-anger washing over every pore and fiber of my being. Anger is in. (Hope’s so…
In the past few years, a lot of people and organizations who should have been the standard bearers for news gathering and reporting have dropped the ball big time — Journalism sucks nowadays. Despite all kinds of media available, the exciting journalistic genre of “investigative reporting” has nearly disappeared off the mainstream radar. Except sadly…