“I’d have killed a thousand if I had bullets enough.”

Well, an army psychiatrist purportedly went off his rocker and shot a bunch of folks in Fort Hood, Texas. I say purportedly, because there is only one thing about this case we can be absolutely certain of. The army will lie. The US military is under absolutely no obligation to tell the truth about anything, [...]

Politically Charged Current Events Post

The feedback on my “letter to my readers” post has been useful so far, spartan, but useful. Current events posts do tend to be popular, and even better, they are relatively easy to write. On the other hand, as was pointed out, they tend to get stale rather quickly. On the gripping hand, they are [...]

“That look really hurts when you see it in your wife’s eyes.”

I had an impromptu conversation last night with a vet who served in Iraq, I thought it was worth sharing:
[Spence] : not to wallow but 6 years military with a deployment goes a long way to explain divorce. was is rough on marriages.
[Spence] : war is rough on marriages
[Doug]: Understood, it’s rough on all the [...]

Obama wins Olympic Gold Medal in Pole Vault, what’s next for our plucky president?

The Olympic committee stunned the world this morning when they awarded US President Obama a gold medal in the Pole Vault event. Explained the committee’s spokesman when asked how this could be, considering that President Obama had never pole vaulted nor competed in the Olympic,  he said the committee was sure that if Obama put [...]

Today’s mainstream media: “Based on true events.”

A reader suggested that mainstream news broadcasts these days should be preceded by a disclaimer like one sees in TV shows: “Based on true events.” Because that’s pretty much what’s going on. This latest business with Iran demonstrates that to a tee, while it is true that Iran revealed a nuclear fuel processing plant last [...]

I applied for Federal Stimulus Funds, and they sent me a clunker that had been crushed into a cube

Well, I guess I should have expected that. It’s been pretty much the story of my life lately. There comes a point where one gets really tired of making lemonade out of all the lemons zinging their way, and I never much liked lemonade in the first place. Life goes on though, as does Doug’s [...]

“Paranoia is reality on a finer scale.”

It’s been a weird week. And the high strangeness in the world is weirder too. The more I study world events and politics these days, the more disconnected from reality they seem. I suppose it’s always been the case to one degree or another every since the rise of the mass media in the nineteenth [...]

“”This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity”

I haven’t written a whole lot recently about our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Partly because it’s a depressing topic, and partly because I am wrestling with some new insights about such wars and the people who support them. President Obama’s latest pronouncement on the war in Afghanistan pushed me over the edge though, so [...]

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is [...]

27 July 1880, the British have a very bad day near Maiwand, Afghanistan

129 years ago today was the Battle of Maiwand, a big deal at the time, now almost forgotten. This was during the second Anglo-Afghan war as once again the British attempted to conquer Afghanistan at gunpoint to give them the benefits of being British subjects, whether they liked it or not. However, this is not [...]