War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
Even as natural disasters confront the US at every turn — this morning Hurricane Irene is bearing down on the Eastern Seaboard, where a lot of folks are still recovering from an near-unprecedented earthquake a couple of days ago — Republican budget cutters are still all for gutting disaster relief. One asshole GOP senator was…
“Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me, it was not an accident.” — John Lennon (The FBI assembled around 300 pages of files on John Lennon in 1971-72, part of President Nixon’s effort to deport Lennon to silence him as a critic of the war in Vietnam). (Illustration found here). Yesterday, I posted about…
Even as quick downloads of extreme weather have become the ‘new normal‘ in the US — baseball-size hail yesterday in Nebraska, and drought conditions have spread to 12 percent of the country — and even as more reports come about global warming, any kind of fix is near-about impossible. A major problem is the blow-hole…
Even as big chunks of planet earth have undergone some extreme weather recently — right now there’s a climate-change-influenced furnace blistering the US heartland — some dumb-ass, and way-dangerous people have continued to deny the obvious, with the latest flack coming from GOP nit-twits who think they should be president. And, really, for some crazed…
Left my post for just a week and imbecilic chaos ensues. As if in a fevered nightmare, the peoples of the world, and especially US peoples have taken complete leave of any known sense, and have fully and absolutely embraced bat-shit crazy. On the far side of Wall Street, which had the wildest ride in…
In a time so awash in dramatic events, especially the last couple of weeks and the debt ceiling/financial markets bombast — worse Wall Street week in three years, the US downgraded from AAA to AA+ — and this morning came reports of 31 US GIs killed in an Afghan helicopter crash, a commemoration of a…
One standing cliche of horror movies is the old trope of the menaced babysitter being scared out of her most-beautiful wits by a killer via telephone calls, which as turns out, are being made “from inside the house.” The just concluded debt ceiling slasher/torture porn production in DC conjures up that same bromide as the…
There’s an absolute truism in the saying, ‘What Comes Around, Goes Around,” albeit for the vast amount time, we never see or feel this effect — what you do today will show up tomorrow. Open big mouth, insert .44 magnum, start blasting away. The horror this weekend in Norway: Right-wing websites quickly pointed the finger…
“Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It’s the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.” — Lily Tomlin (Illustration found here). Disappointment leads to disillusionment and then onto despair, finally overflowing into the deep well of anger. In viewing the happenings…
Lawyers apparently have always been legal assholes. From Roman third-century lawyer, Ulpian, on torture: “The strong will resist and the weak will say anything to end the pain.” Yet to torture is a righteous path: “…the torment and suffering of the body in order to elicit the truth.” Despite the recorded fact that torture does…