War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
In just a few words, the current plight of mankind: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.†— Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe Despite some scientists saying humanity will take true…
Little GTO, you’re really lookin’ fine Three deuces and a four-speed and a 389 Listen to her tachin’ up now, listen to her why-ee-eye-ine C’mon and turn it on, wind it up, blow it out GTO — Little G.T.O., Ronnie and the Daytonas (Illustration found here). One of the great cool, and violent cars, of…
In the release by WikiLeaks of its batch of Iraq war logs Friday, and a quick, rapid look-see, the biggest sense is of frustration, and a tightening of the conscience, in the horror and misery caused by a small group of arrogant assholes who will never, ever receive true justice in this life. (Illustration found…
The future has been downloaded into just about right now. “If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.“ —…
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…
(Added stuff below) News this morning that one of the great assholes of our time (on the rock-face with Dick Cheney), damn-dumb Don Rumsfeld, will release his “autobiography” early next year and will tell the tale straight — as if the sonofabitch could say anything with a straight face. The book’s working title? “Known and…
In Vietnam, so many, many years ago, the US employed a “search and destroy” tactic, but it failed big time: As one marine captain explained: “You never knew who was the enemy and who was the friend. They all looked alike. They all dressed alike.” Innocent civilians were often killed by mistake. As one Marine…
What a complete, horrible mess the US nine years and some 24 hours following the attack on the World Trade Center, an event apparently which has become a turgid line drawn in the sands of time — we’ll always be caught nasty-faced in the before and after. In the front-page explosion off the San Francisco…
One of those extremely-dramatic moments, though, executed in easy, slow steps: Scientists studying an Indonesian tropical glacier witnessed first hand life with climate change: The glacier was literally melting under their feet. From NPR (including the highlighted sentence above), a piece on a research team’s two-week outing earlier this summer on Puncak Jaya Glacier in…
Even as thousands of documents reveal a beyond-quagmire US entanglement in Afghanistan, the core entity of any kind of peace or accord in the war — Afghan police and soldiers — is a nothing more than a deadly, brutal joke. A joke, however, without a punchline. Check this video from Aljazeera English as a couple of…