War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
One of the key ingredients that formed the great “American Dream” was having your own home — king of the castle/manor/vast holdings. So it was for years and years: Hard work, thrift and owning your own home. And like dreams, daylight burned it all away. During the last decade or so, US peoples by the…
In a conflict that’s moving quickly from mismanaged to just plain foolish, Afghanistan is seeing a spike in civilian deaths, especially in the southern part of the country where US and NATO troops are attempting, once again, to drive out the Taliban. The International Red Cross, despite reporting the number of bystander injuries are “hitting…
Last Thursday — Oct. 7, the ninth anniversary of the start of the Afghan War – Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Against the War gathered in front of the Walter Reed Hospital in DC to launch “Operation Recovery,” an attempt by the group to air the horror, and thus bring to a halt, the re-deployment of soldiers…
Fear is a soft sounding word, nothing scary about it, at least until some circumstance is attached. Last week, my first post on fear concerned the quiet, unassuming fright in the storing of mega-dangerous spent nuclear fuel at reactor sites — fear without example. Although the message is low key — all that radioactive material piling…
Job hunting will apparently go from bad to worse and then beyond. From Gallup yesterday: Unemployment, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, increased to 10.1% in September — up sharply from 9.3% in August and 8.9% in July. Much of this increase came during the second half of the month — the unemployment rate…
A view of the future as the now: Hungarian sludge worker. (Illustration found here). A dam holding back acres of toxic red sludge from a metals plant in Ajka, located 100 miles southwest of Budapest, Hungary, broke on Monday and swept across miles and miles of countryside, killing at least six people and painting everything…
News watching is a curious obsession. Among the many other neurotic proclivities living in my brain-matter’s attic, most likely the deep-set roots for this constant need for situational awareness is a fear of missing something — missing the bus, missing one of the kids’ birthdays, missing an appointment, missing a vital door key, even missing…
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…
One nefarious up-tick of a shit-bad economy is an increase in cannon fodder. The New York Times reported in January 2009: “When the economy slackens and unemployment rises and jobs become more scarce in civilian society, recruiting is less challenging,†said Curtis Gilroy, the director of accession policy for the Department of Defense. And a…
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…