War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
One of the key ingredients that formed the great “American Dream” was having your own home — king of the castle/manor/vast holdings. So it was for years and years: Hard work, thrift and owning your own home. And like dreams, daylight burned it all away. During the last decade or so, US peoples by the…
In a tanking US economy, finally a glimmer of an unusual sort. From CBS: The National Crime Victimization study, released Wednesday by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, showed violent and property crime last year reached the lowest level ever recorded in the survey, which was first published in 1973. The survey estimated that…
In a conflict that’s moving quickly from mismanaged to just plain foolish, Afghanistan is seeing a spike in civilian deaths, especially in the southern part of the country where US and NATO troops are attempting, once again, to drive out the Taliban. The International Red Cross, despite reporting the number of bystander injuries are “hitting…
In deep spaces of the dark side, there’s no daylight, ever. Dying! Dying in the night! Won’t somebody bring the light So I can see which way to go Into the everlasting snow? — Emily Dickinson The Dick apparently will not be denied and will not go peacefully into that ugly, ugly night. Although looking…
Last Thursday — Oct. 7, the ninth anniversary of the start of the Afghan War – Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Against the War gathered in front of the Walter Reed Hospital in DC to launch “Operation Recovery,” an attempt by the group to air the horror, and thus bring to a halt, the re-deployment of soldiers…
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…
Job hunting will apparently go from bad to worse and then beyond. From Gallup yesterday: Unemployment, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, increased to 10.1% in September — up sharply from 9.3% in August and 8.9% in July. Much of this increase came during the second half of the month — the unemployment rate…
A view of the future as the now: Hungarian sludge worker. (Illustration found here). A dam holding back acres of toxic red sludge from a metals plant in Ajka, located 100 miles southwest of Budapest, Hungary, broke on Monday and swept across miles and miles of countryside, killing at least six people and painting everything…
US politics creates some hardcore business deals, even unceremoniously dumping someone for an election. But one deal won’t die — an Obama-Hillary Clinton set-up for 2012. From CNN: “It’s on the table,” veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward told CNN’s John King in an interview Tuesday on John King, USA. “Some of Hillary Clinton’s advisers…
“…she has trouble acting normal when she’s nervous…” — ‘Round Here, Counting Crows Just to really, really wanted to brighten up your morning. First, the International Monetary Fund admits that Europe, and the US, is stuck in a nose-dive slump hung close to a depression. From the UK’s Telegraph: We are seeing a pattern —…