War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
As the economy tanks, the more wealthy of us are also going down the drain, albeit in slower, easier fashion. From the New York Times yesterday: But economists say — and data is beginning to show — that a significant change may in fact be under way. The rich, as a group, are no longer…
UPDATE BELOW “I’m glad you’re not overreacting. What do you wanna run?” “I don’t know. What do I wanna run? — They didn’t do it.” “They didn’t do it? You don’t have close to that. You have unattributed cops.” “She doesn’t have ‘Gotcha!’” “You don’t have “Gotcha!” for page one until you have a shot…
UPDATE BELOW The war-worn and weary Afghan people go to the polls tomorrow for a national election amidst Taliban scare tactics and a weak central government unable to comprehend the inevitable. In October 2004, Moqadasa Sidiqi (left), was the first Afghan to cast a ballot in the first national election post-Taliban, but she did so in…
A shitload of cows standing around farting — Not! Another brick in the wall as a research team has found that a powerful global warming component, methane gas, is seeping from the Arctic seabed, which is nothing new (a study last year revealed the methane time bomb), but for the first time the process appears…
A fiscal reflection of the age. From CNN: Research presented this weekend reinforced previous findings that 90 percent of paper money circulating in U.S. cities contains traces of cocaine. “When I was a young kid, my mom told me the dirtiest thing in the world is money,” said the researcher, Yuegang Zuo, professor of chemistry…
Today forty years ago the Woodstock Music Festival started and although it was a supposedly major US cultural event, a big chuck of Americans were unaware of a revolution that started and ended on a farm in upstate New York — including yours truly. (Illustration found here). In the summer of 1969 I was 20-years-old…
One of the most-alarming aspects of climate/weather change/global warming is the science — the most current report is always worse than the previous one and sometimes the figures are amazing. Just a couple of examples can be found here and here. If this trend continues, and most-likely it will, the very-near-future will assure there will cease…
Although music didn’t die today, one of its real genius-producers did — Les Paul, dead at 94. Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer. He played guitar alongside leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby. … Mr. Paul’s style encompassed the twang of country music,…
On Tuesday, President Obama held a town-hall meeting on health-care reform at Portsmouth High School in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and after some opening remarks, he fielded questions from the audience. The second person called was a sixth-grader with an intelligent and observant query: All right. Let’s — this young lady right here. All right, this…
Today 60 years ago — Aug. 12, 1949 — was the fourth installment of what has been termed the “Geneva Conventions,” a series of documents meant not to stop war (what piece of paper could do that?), or define weaponry, but to set humanitarian standards for treatment of war victims. The first three ‘conventions’ —…