War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
Monday again and after not posting any freakin’ thing over the weekend, the catch-up is on the bun, or words to that effect. And the world continues to twirl away toward oblivion without so much as a pause, rendering this truism in our memory hole: If you want to make something memorable, you first have…
Prices at the gas pump have taken the way-backseat in the old news cycle lately, but WTF — in the face of actual face eating, Chinese body parts mailed to all over by a Canadian (in Brazil, a wife kills, then cuts up husband, a “crime of passion,” she says), Scott Walker buying his way…
History is relative. And in this 24/7 nowadays it’s way-hard to imagine any kind of life without electrical power. Hence, last week Leon Panetta spelled it out: “Well, there’s no question that if a cyber attack, you know, crippled our power grid in this country, took down our financial systems, took down our government systems,…
Obvious the strange, though, deviations are not that unfamiliar. In the wake last week of some nefarious-images of face eating and kitten strangling, the entire human system appears to be heading off into a bad direction in which there’s no happy ending. As people we tend to see tomorrow, or the future, in a sense…
Celestial crazy continued yesterday in New York City with “Manhattanhenge†— the rare, though not unheard of phenomenon when a setting sun perfectly aligns itself with the Manhattan street grid and invoked native daftness: “Taxi cabs and cars were all slowing down trying to figure out what these crazy New Yorkers were doing looking West…
In the wake of another attempt this morning to fight modern life in Afghanistan — 160 girls were poisoned at a north Afghan school, the second such incident in a week — the conflict there is a telling example of failure, and the dodge-ball concept of leadership. Not only is Afghanistan been considered “the graveyard…
Although recent prices at national gas pumps are down 16 cents from a year ago, there’s no real sense behind it all, as this genius comments: “We might move a little lower, we might move a little higher,” said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst of the Oil Price Information Service, the firm that compiles the…
In the wake of last weekend’s big NATO Afghan pow-wow, the war in Afghanistan has to be considered finished, kaput, wiping-hands-clean, get-the-shit-out-of-Dodge over with and a debacle for history scholars. Except for the Afghan people: Aleema, a sad-eyed girl in ragged clothes, is one of the 447,547 “internally displaced persons†who have fled their homes,…
In these pre-dog days of pre-summer, the days are getting longer, and to me anyway, the nights are also getting longer — I suffer from a mild dose of insomnia on occasion, a pain in the ass that effects the eyes and head. And the environment continues to suffer a kind of insomniac problem, too…
As if on cue late yesterday afternoon, a thick, moist portion of coastal fog descended upon my little stretch of northern California coastline and eliminated any view of the rare annular solar eclipse which swiped across these parts on its course from Asia. In the quick descending fog, which filled a sunlight sky in a…
