War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
A fiscal reflection of the age. From CNN: Research presented this weekend reinforced previous findings that 90 percent of paper money circulating in U.S. cities contains traces of cocaine. “When I was a young kid, my mom told me the dirtiest thing in the world is money,” said the researcher, Yuegang Zuo, professor of chemistry…
Today forty years ago the Woodstock Music Festival started and although it was a supposedly major US cultural event, a big chuck of Americans were unaware of a revolution that started and ended on a farm in upstate New York — including yours truly. (Illustration found here). In the summer of 1969 I was 20-years-old…
One of the most-alarming aspects of climate/weather change/global warming is the science — the most current report is always worse than the previous one and sometimes the figures are amazing. Just a couple of examples can be found here and here. If this trend continues, and most-likely it will, the very-near-future will assure there will cease…
Although music didn’t die today, one of its real genius-producers did — Les Paul, dead at 94. Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer. He played guitar alongside leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby. … Mr. Paul’s style encompassed the twang of country music,…
On Tuesday, President Obama held a town-hall meeting on health-care reform at Portsmouth High School in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and after some opening remarks, he fielded questions from the audience. The second person called was a sixth-grader with an intelligent and observant query: All right. Let’s — this young lady right here. All right, this…
Today 60 years ago — Aug. 12, 1949 — was the fourth installment of what has been termed the “Geneva Conventions,” a series of documents meant not to stop war (what piece of paper could do that?), or define weaponry, but to set humanitarian standards for treatment of war victims. The first three ‘conventions’ —…
After months of bad health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister to JFK and Ted Kennedy, died early this morning at age 88. Shriver was a major champion for the mentally handicapped, founding the Special Olympics in 1968 — the first event, however, was in her own backyard in 1962. From the New York Times obit: “When the…
This morning the jobs report is better than expected even as AIG posts a second-quarter profit, the media continues to ignore the GOP reality behind the healthcare townhall disruptions and a DOS attack on Twitter, FaceBook and Google leaves techno-life flustered, the news of five US GIs killed in Afghanistan the past couple of days has gone almost un-reported.…
Bill Clinton hasn’t ever meant much to me, other than being a greasy political animal with bad taste, thus seemingly just an inadvertent knuckle-head. (Illustration found here). This past week, however, the old bubba-boy seemed to have pulled off a neat turn-of-the-hand, if the appearance is true, by bringing two US journalists home after they’d been…
Just a reminder, 64 years ago today Hiroshima was tagged. And Frida Berrigan at tomdispatch has a view this week on the Hiroshima legacy in today’s world: Keep in mind as well that the bombs which annihilated two Japanese cities and ended so many lives 64 years ago this week were puny when compared to today’s typical…