War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
Irony is today’s word. Just as ‘The Artist,’ an ode to silence, won Best Picture at last night’s Oscars, the organization known for anti-silence, WikiLeaks, dumped another load of classified files onto the public — this batch emails from US-based intelligence firm Stratfor, supposedly depicting the company’s “web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and…
(Illustration found here). Today is a kind of watershed moment when the Internets respond to attempts to censor shit by banging down the back door, but a load of ‘Net peoples have chosen instead to go black. Daily Kos has an action line to protest the twin online-control orbs SOPA ‘Stop Online Piracy Act,’ (US…
I have given my whole life to newspapers. I am convinced that they have abandoned their functions, and in an abject and ignominious manner, in the present war. Nine-tenths of them, and even more than nine-tenths, print the official blather without any attempt to scrutinize it… It is a disgraceful spectacle, but I do not…
“Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried…
Another thin-skinned GOP asshole caught being an asshole — Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback got his panties in a bind when a high school student Tweeted that the good governor, “#heblowsalot:†Emma Sullivan, 18, was hauled into her principal’s office and ordered to write letters of apology after one of Governor Sam Brownback’s office contacted the…
(Off my post this morning) The case against that guy arrested in New York City yesterday and charged with plotting to blow up U.S. targets, including American soldiers returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of preparing to launch a one-man holy war in New York City — 27-year-old unemployed ‘lone wolf‘ Jose Pimentel…
The zealous approach to law enforcement in this age of protest and terror has created a strange and dangerous notion that a shitload of stuff is bad, when in reality, bad is self-perpetrating. Last night, a new ‘lone wolf’ terrorist, Jose Pimentel, was arraigned in a New York court on charges of targeting U.S. Iraq…
Headline-writers at the New York Times found a verb this morning in the middle of the third graph of a story on the US Census Bureau and its new measure of gauging just how bad the epidemic of being poor: Perhaps the most startling differences between the old measure and the new involves data the government…
Ralph Waldo Emerson, America’s greatest philosopher, visited Thoreau in jail. Emerson asked: “Henry, why are you here?” Thoreau replied: “Why are you not here?” — In protest of the Mexican War, 1846 In those crackdowns this week on the OWS, a deep, sinking feeling of nefarious, dark workings: Questions about the Department of Homeland Security’s…
Another anniversary this morning, and a sad day indeed for US peoples. Ten years ago today, George Jr. signed into law the infamous USA/Patriot Act, a move which revealed the end game for the great American experiment in democracy — nowadays the US is closer to George Orwell than George Washington. And although George Jr.…