War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
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…
From Jason Ditz at antiwar.com: NATO is scrambling to do damage control tonight after a number of weekend incidents led to the deaths of Afghan civilians, including several children. US troops killed two civilians, including an eight year old girl in a shooting in Logar Province, while NATO air strikes in the Helmand Province killed…
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…
Insane or not: Why would the US shackle itself to a place that’s been called the, ‘graveyard of empires,’ and where most of the world’s heroin has its birth? Or as Marie asked: “Uh, he went out the window. Why would someone do that?” Yes, why indeed. So why with all the shit, would bullet…
Once again, and I couldn’t help, another post on Bob Woodward and the state of journalism as it covers national politics and war. As a nit-wit young reporter, in the original viewing of “All the President’s Men” in 1976, I was much-more captivated by Dustin Hoffman playing Carl Bernstein than Robert Redford as Woodward —…
Odd is history. What little of history I’ve seen, one truism for sure is that history does repeat itself — what comes around goes around. People who’ve had a strong hand in developing parts-and-parcel the world’s current shit-storm also enjoyed a role in events past — revealing a character study in nasty, carry-a-big-stick-and-use-it warmongering. Even…
In all the hullabaloo this week about Bob Woodward’s new book, “Obama’s Wars,” seemingly no one took notice of the big lies that led to that horrible, incoherent inheritance. According to documents released yesterday by the National Security Archive, in January 2001, in one of the first meetings of George Jr.’s administration, the newly-minted, nit-wit…
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…
Killing people from afar has always been the safest bet in any kind of murderous situation — the longbow ended the age of chivalrous knights, and the firearm put the archer out of work — even a rock in a sling could put bad shit on a much bigger, uglier opponent. In fact, an entire…
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…