War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
Under cloudy skies this morning up here along California’s northern coast, but still real cool — not so everywhere. One weather/environment event this week that went near-completely under the radar — hot rain in Saudi Arabia of 109 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest known temperature that rain has fallen at, anywhere in the world. Mankind cannot…
Prices at the gas pump have taken the way-backseat in the old news cycle lately, but WTF — in the face of actual face eating, Chinese body parts mailed to all over by a Canadian (in Brazil, a wife kills, then cuts up husband, a “crime of passion,” she says), Scott Walker buying his way…
What a drag! When I got up this morning, switched on the laptop, pulled up CNN and saw that Scott Walker had eventually won in Wisconsin, a wailingly-loud, horrible, throat-clutching scream wanted to flee my lips — at 3:30 a.m., though, some real shit would have hit the fan. And on top of the noise,…
Ballot-box day across the US, including a primary right here in California and a nasty knock-down-drag-out fight in Wisconsin — 100-percent 24-hour political cycle. Four other states — Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota — are also holding primaries, but it’s all for show as President Obama and Mitt Romney have already cleared their…
Jeremy Scahill, noted national security correspondent for The Nation, spoke this past weekend on the bottom line for the US drone wars: It’s murder — it’s mass murder — when you say, ‘We are going to bomb this area’ because we believe a terrorist is there, and you know that women and children are in the…
History is relative. And in this 24/7 nowadays it’s way-hard to imagine any kind of life without electrical power. Hence, last week Leon Panetta spelled it out: “Well, there’s no question that if a cyber attack, you know, crippled our power grid in this country, took down our financial systems, took down our government systems,…
Obvious the strange, though, deviations are not that unfamiliar. In the wake last week of some nefarious-images of face eating and kitten strangling, the entire human system appears to be heading off into a bad direction in which there’s no happy ending. As people we tend to see tomorrow, or the future, in a sense…
Celestial crazy continued yesterday in New York City with “Manhattanhenge†— the rare, though not unheard of phenomenon when a setting sun perfectly aligns itself with the Manhattan street grid and invoked native daftness: “Taxi cabs and cars were all slowing down trying to figure out what these crazy New Yorkers were doing looking West…
In the outward appearance, the whole-wide world has gone bat-shit crazy, maybe as a run-up to some real-bad episodes coming for mankind and its immediate offspring. In Seattle, of all places, and in a “very mellow” coffee shop, this guy shoots and kills four people, later kills another during a carjacking, then later blows his…
A clear, quiet early morning here on California’s northern coast, and compared to the remarkable heat-wave blasting the eastern part of the country this week, the weather around these local parts is near-envious. The environment can change quick, though, as I was outside a minute ago on a smoke break and it’s getting a bit…