War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
Even as quick downloads of extreme weather have become the ‘new normal‘ in the US — baseball-size hail yesterday in Nebraska, and drought conditions have spread to 12 percent of the country — and even as more reports come about global warming, any kind of fix is near-about impossible. A major problem is the blow-hole…
Home from the holiday — nearly a decade since I’d had one of those ‘paid vacations‘ and it was a most-awesome trip. Since not a real trusting sort, and with my Jeep Comanche currently being in a most-mysterious mechanical condition (to me, anyway), I journeyed south by AmTrak last week to visit a couple of…
Today starts the first official vacation I’ve had in years — the last a near-decade ago while working for a newspaper — and the feeling is already weird. I’ll not be posting again until most-likely next weekend as this ‘vacation‘ is the first time I’ve been disconnected from the online world for any length of…
In a time so awash in dramatic events, especially the last couple of weeks and the debt ceiling/financial markets bombast — worse Wall Street week in three years, the US downgraded from AAA to AA+ — and this morning came reports of 31 US GIs killed in an Afghan helicopter crash, a commemoration of a…
One of the most-profound problems of humankind is the inability to see no tomorrow — or at least a tomorrow so unlike today. Life continues burns in the soul. Not so fast there, Sherlock. Humanity loves delusion if the alternative is unthinkable. Yet even as the morning starts to break here on California’s northern coast,…
One small glance at just about everything around us creates an Amy-Winehouse-induced sense of the blues, even while living in supposedly the greatest country on earth. As Miss Amy reveals, wealth, fame and all the things in between won’t bring happy to your front door — and as the twits in DC dance around each…
Knowledge is way-preferred over ignorance, even if that knowledge makes one want to blow chunks, shit-the-pants or go run-and-hide, or maybe all three right together. My post over the weekend was on peak oil, so today (via TheOilDrum‘s semi-daily-must-read Drumbeat) there’s a well put-together piece by noted writer/reporter Dahr Jamail at Aljazeera English on just…
Greased-nuts-and-bolts and impractical machinery — reality’s pixilated dream of an era coming quickly to an end. Peak oil appears to the naked eye less chaotic than climate change — a not-so-violent soft and gradual approach to cheap energy’s end without the visual horror and/or living through floods, tornadoes, fires, famine and drought as produced by…
Pure crazy is gaining momentum by the hour, even as the entire structure of mankind’s latest reincarnation of civilization is breaking apart like an Arkansas outhouse hit by an F5 tornado. And the crazies who are in charge of running this so-called civilization haven’t enough sense to scramble away from that outhouse, but instead scream…
Even as this debt ceiling fiasco flails about, slapping everybody in the face with its immature, self-centered, politically-charged dramatics, the planet earth itself is rapidly reaching its own ceiling, which once breached will make every-fuckin’-body forget all that fiscal brouhaha. Despite climate change being way-more dangerous than a bull-on-crack in a china shop, way-more perilous…