(Illustration found here).

Life appears becoming to an end via interesting ways.
What was considered true and old faithful, just might be a lie.

The huge volcano under Yellowstone National Park has been rising at an unprecedented rate during the past several years, according to a new study.
…
“It’s pretty exciting when you see something that’s five times larger than what you’ve seen in the past,” said Charles Meertens, director of the nonprofit UNAVCO facility in Boulder, Colo., which aids geoscience research. Meertens is a former postdoctoral fellow under one of the study’s authors, Robert Smith of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

In Afghanistan the slaughter is getting hotter — despite progress.
Apparently, to Dave Petraeus to die is to live.

“There’s been considerable progress in taking away from the Taliban safe havens,” Gen. David Petraeus said in an interview with NATO TV aired on Wednesday.
“They have to fight back, they’re losing momentum that’s quite clear,” he said. “They know they need to regain that momentum.”

A dangerous place, Afghanistan –  especially if you’re little: An average of two children per day were killed in Afghanistan last year, with areas of the once peaceful north now among the most dangerous, an independent Afghan rights watchdog said on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, just two days earlier, another tic on the statistic as another child had been killed inadvertently due to the fact the kid’s body was found dead in a compound near a NATO air strike.

And the US blaring slogan of ‘Support the Troops’ seems fairly shitty in reality:

Tens of thousands of the nation’s war widows find it perplexing and downright disrespectful to their late military husbands: In order to fully collect on insurance their husbands bought for them when alive, they must marry another man.
And to qualify, the widows must remarry when they are 57 or older. Those who remarry earlier miss out, as do widows who never remarry.

This off a horrible cruelty — the military “widow’s tax:” “I’ve never even wanted to date, much less remarry,” said Nichole Haycock, a mother of three teenagers in Lawton, Okla., whose 38-year-old military husband died in 2002. “I already married the love of my life. Why would you bring that as a factor?”

And just as cruel: President Obama’s proposed 2012 budget will cut several billion dollars from the government’s energy assistance fund for poor people, officials briefed on the subject told National Journal.
In the middle of one sonofabitch of a winter — The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, would see funding drop by about $2.5 billion from an authorized 2009 total of $5.1 billion.

Paradoxical cruel fuel.
Does it take a rocket scientist to learn to torture?

Egypt’s secret police, long accused of torturing suspects and intimidating political opponents of President Hosni Mubarak, received training at the FBI’s facility in Quantico, Virginia, even as US diplomats compiled allegations of brutality against them, according to US State Department cables released by WikiLeaks.

And The Boner‘s crying is great soap.
It was all in the affairs — via Firedoglake:

Boehner has been involved in extramarital affairs with at least two women, according to a new report in the National Enquirer.
We don’t normally cite supermarket tabloids as primary source material. But the Enquirer was first to write about the John Edwards’ infidelity, and the newspaper proved to be right on target. And back in the early ’90s, the mainstream press picked up on the Bill Clinton/Gennifer Flowers story after it broke in a tabloid.

Life is interesting and really, really ugly.