War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
Last Thursday — Oct. 7, the ninth anniversary of the start of the Afghan War – Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Against the War gathered in front of the Walter Reed Hospital in DC to launch “Operation Recovery,” an attempt by the group to air the horror, and thus bring to a halt, the re-deployment of soldiers…
Fear is a soft sounding word, nothing scary about it, at least until some circumstance is attached. Last week, my first post on fear concerned the quiet, unassuming fright in the storing of mega-dangerous spent nuclear fuel at reactor sites — fear without example. Although the message is low key — all that radioactive material piling…
Job hunting will apparently go from bad to worse and then beyond. From Gallup yesterday: Unemployment, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, increased to 10.1% in September — up sharply from 9.3% in August and 8.9% in July. Much of this increase came during the second half of the month — the unemployment rate…
A view of the future as the now: Hungarian sludge worker. (Illustration found here). A dam holding back acres of toxic red sludge from a metals plant in Ajka, located 100 miles southwest of Budapest, Hungary, broke on Monday and swept across miles and miles of countryside, killing at least six people and painting everything…
US politics creates some hardcore business deals, even unceremoniously dumping someone for an election. But one deal won’t die — an Obama-Hillary Clinton set-up for 2012. From CNN: “It’s on the table,” veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward told CNN’s John King in an interview Tuesday on John King, USA. “Some of Hillary Clinton’s advisers…
“…she has trouble acting normal when she’s nervous…” — ‘Round Here, Counting Crows Just to really, really wanted to brighten up your morning. First, the International Monetary Fund admits that Europe, and the US, is stuck in a nose-dive slump hung close to a depression. From the UK’s Telegraph: We are seeing a pattern —…
From Jason Ditz at antiwar.com: NATO is scrambling to do damage control tonight after a number of weekend incidents led to the deaths of Afghan civilians, including several children. US troops killed two civilians, including an eight year old girl in a shooting in Logar Province, while NATO air strikes in the Helmand Province killed…
News watching is a curious obsession. Among the many other neurotic proclivities living in my brain-matter’s attic, most likely the deep-set roots for this constant need for situational awareness is a fear of missing something — missing the bus, missing one of the kids’ birthdays, missing an appointment, missing a vital door key, even missing…
Insane or not: Why would the US shackle itself to a place that’s been called the, ‘graveyard of empires,’ and where most of the world’s heroin has its birth? Or as Marie asked: “Uh, he went out the window. Why would someone do that?” Yes, why indeed. So why with all the shit, would bullet…