War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
As this summer carves its way through the year, any dumb-ass can see something fishy is going on with the planet’s weather systems, like an old, old radiator busting its seams — heat and more heat. Global warming might be beyond the “tipping point.” (Illustration found here). Climate change has always been a serious subject…
The horror of these things — cluster bombs. Sunday, Aug. 1, marks beginning of an international ban on those terrible weapons — Cluster munitions explode in mid-air to release dozens — sometimes hundreds — of smaller “bomblets” across large areas. Because the final location of these scattered smaller bombs is difficult to control, they can cause…
As the economy tanks, people seem to be drinking their financial problems away, as research indicates more US peoples are hitting the bottle, with more white guys getting bombed than any other ethnic group. Free, white and drunk: Whites are more likely than blacks and Hispanics to get drunk. Twenty percent of white men drank…
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…
Lack of friendship is supposedly worse on your well being than a Quadruple Bypass Burger from the Heart Attack Grill. From Reuters on a report released Tuesday by a research team at Brigham Young University: Having good social relationships — friends, marriage or children — may be every bit as important to a healthy lifespan as…
The US is getting the shaft in war making. Two invasions and two bloody, nasty quagmires. Rare is the Maureen Dowd column that is more than pancake face powder, or a shoe-horned turn at national politics, and rare still is a piece with insight into the US’ two beleaguered faraway wars. In her column this…
Long ago, when in high school, I lost almost $100 somewhere after a shopping trip. My mother — always aware of how a bit means a lot, and even with the money being my own hard-earned cash — went nearly ballistic. Nowadays, nothing of the sort happens, no fits pitched, no hand-wringing, no talking about…
Massive toxic leaks into the environment can be horrible, whether it be the Gulf of Mexico or a horrible, incompetent-run war in Afghanistan. On Sunday, WikiLeaks (my laptop won’t load the group’s website) released a shitload of formerly-classified documents on the Afghan conflict, and the result ain’t pretty. From the the New York Times: The…
What? Me worry? (Illustration found here). Since the last time I’d posted, there’s been a shitload of weird, dangerous and dumb stuff happen, but most of it apparently hasn’t had enough stupidity involved to really get me spiking the old keyboard again — this past week’s adventure via the Internet, though, has caused a return,…
Writing society: I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You’d walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it’s just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak. (Illustration…