War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
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.…
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…
(Illustration found here). “Dawn“Â by Miss Emily Dickinson When night is almost done, And sunrise grows so near That we can touch the spaces, It ‘s time to smooth the hair And get the dimples ready, And wonder we could care For that old faded midnight That frightened but an hour. Another day, another time…
What a complete, horrible mess the US nine years and some 24 hours following the attack on the World Trade Center, an event apparently which has become a turgid line drawn in the sands of time — we’ll always be caught nasty-faced in the before and after. In the front-page explosion off the San Francisco…
One of those extremely-dramatic moments, though, executed in easy, slow steps: Scientists studying an Indonesian tropical glacier witnessed first hand life with climate change: The glacier was literally melting under their feet. From NPR (including the highlighted sentence above), a piece on a research team’s two-week outing earlier this summer on Puncak Jaya Glacier in…
Ocean water all over is apparently getting warmer. Above the Bering Strait, in the Chukchi Sea, northwest of Alaska, the water there is nearly pool worthy as recorded in this captain’s blog: “The water temperature is 7.5 degrees. If we weren’t sailing, it would be a great temperature for a swim!” (via ClimateProgress). And in…
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…
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…
Just as I figured: Computers are intolerant, racially discriminatory and just creepy. Figuring out African-Americans was a problem for HP’s newest face-recognition gear: In the video, Wanda (Caucasian) and Desi (African American) — two employees at what appears to be a computer electronics store — expose a flaw in the webcam software. As depicted, the software…