War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
From Jason Ditz at antiwar.com: NATO is scrambling to do damage control tonight after a number of weekend incidents led to the deaths of Afghan civilians, including several children. US troops killed two civilians, including an eight year old girl in a shooting in Logar Province, while NATO air strikes in the Helmand Province killed…
News watching is a curious obsession. Among the many other neurotic proclivities living in my brain-matter’s attic, most likely the deep-set roots for this constant need for situational awareness is a fear of missing something — missing the bus, missing one of the kids’ birthdays, missing an appointment, missing a vital door key, even missing…
Insane or not: Why would the US shackle itself to a place that’s been called the, ‘graveyard of empires,’ and where most of the world’s heroin has its birth? Or as Marie asked: “Uh, he went out the window. Why would someone do that?” Yes, why indeed. So why with all the shit, would bullet…
Not! A new Gallup poll indicates a majority of US peoples don’t trust the mass media — Trust in the media is now slightly higher than the record-low trust in the legislative branch but lower than trust in the executive and judicial branches of government, even though trust in all three branches is down sharply…
We all remember what’s-his ass, Tony Hayward, whining last spring about this inconvenient oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: “The first thing to say is I’m sorry,†he told reporters, when asked what he would like to tell locals whose livelihoods have been affected. “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives.…
Once again, and I couldn’t help, another post on Bob Woodward and the state of journalism as it covers national politics and war. As a nit-wit young reporter, in the original viewing of “All the President’s Men” in 1976, I was much-more captivated by Dustin Hoffman playing Carl Bernstein than Robert Redford as Woodward —…
UPDATE BELOW The hard life of a modern journalist. (Illustration found here). In 1976, when the movie, “All the President’s Men,” was released, I’d been on the job about 18 months as a police reporter — a newbie nearly in the world of newspapers — and had discovered I was a natural at it, taking…
Odd is history. What little of history I’ve seen, one truism for sure is that history does repeat itself — what comes around goes around. People who’ve had a strong hand in developing parts-and-parcel the world’s current shit-storm also enjoyed a role in events past — revealing a character study in nasty, carry-a-big-stick-and-use-it warmongering. Even…
As anyone gifted should know, a cigarette and a cup of coffee is the maximus-a-mode in a perfect remedial coupling — no matter the clock face. And then, take that coupling, couple it with an environment of other like peoples and stuff, and faster-than-you-can-say-Kafka-three-times — innovative/enlightened speech and thought develops. (However, in these more-than enlightened,…
Beyond peak oil, climate change, the financial meltdown, peak soil, the GOP’s “Pledge to America,” the death of Eddie Fisher, the population bomb, etc., etc. — what else could possibly disrupt my golden years? From NASA: “The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see…