War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
Surrealism is alive and well in Japan. Early Wednesday, according to CNN, Japanese authorities found traces of radiation in tap water in Fukushima city, 50 miles from the nuclear plant at Daiichi — odd, however, a check of tap water later in the day found nothing. Meanwhile, South Korea’s Astronomy and Space Science Institute reported…
“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.” – George Orwell, 1984 (Illustration found here). The US Department of Homeland Security (a near-perfect Orwellian title) via its Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in a $3.5 million study is seeking…
Expect more intense weather such as the repeating winter storms in the eastern US in the immediate future and for decades to come “until the climate grows so warm that we pass the point where it’s too warm for it to snow heavily.” (Illustration found here). A daughter lives in a small town just south…
In the annals of warfare there’s most-likely not been a most-obvious display of immoral lying than the case of George Jr.’s adventure into Iraq. Not only 4,436 US military people have been killed, nearly 33,000 wounded (estimates there top 100,000, not including the number of GIs suffering from PTSD and other problems), the illegal, murderous…
During these uprisings across northern Africa, a lot of talk has been about national security, or the nearly-mechanical catch-phrase, “police apparatus,’ which is just a soft-lotion locution for an ugly, nefarious secret cop operation. All strong-armed, dictator regimes must have these organizations or they couldn’t exist for very long — the Soviets had the old…
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, wrote in 1993 that in the last century (the 20th, if you don’t remember) 167 million to 175 million men, women and children had their “lives deliberately extinguished by politically motivated carnage.” And, of course, the first decade in this new century has been nothing but war. (Illustration…
As the GOP pulls his head out of the ass of dumb, they seem ready to crush that horror of President Obama’s health care reform — as Republicans dub it, “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act” — and have it at the top of its so-called agenda. The Tucson shooting and its heated talk…
‘Peace upon earth!’ was said. We sing it, And pay a million priests to bring it. After two thousand years of mass We’ve got as far as poison-gas. — Christmas: 1924, Thomas Hardy (Illustration found here). In shame, the US has become another asshole nation. Despite the overwhelming evidence to the absolute contrary, the NATO/US…
The so-called war in Afghanistan will apparently never end. Just when one thinks there’s a light at the end of the IED-blasted tunnel, it turns out the flicker is just military commanders flicking their Bics. UK’s Defense Chief Gen. Sir David Richards stoked the never-ending war fires last week, invoking a conflict that could last “generations:”…
One of the things I’ve always wondered about is how do people who’ve done obvious shitty stuff in public handle themselves? How do they view themselves in a mirror, how do they sleep at night knowing they caused needless horror and suffering — despite my disbelief, I have to keep in mind a lot of…