Hammer Mill Days

Is that the time? Right - time to close up for the day. It's 4:20 in the afternoon and I've been slaving away for nearly half an hour. Shut it down. Woe is he who must labor in vain. I don't know what that means, but whatever... your friends in Big Green are proprietors for the nonce. That means we have proprietary interests, perhaps for the first time in our lives. And you know what they say... as soon as you get a stake in the world, it's all over. Kiss your altruism goodbye, my little scaly friend. Forget your deeply held values - this is cash, Jimmy-boy, cold hard cash! To hell with all that other stuff. All we care about is pushing product out the door at a tidy profit. What products? Hey.... whatever comes flying out of that hole to China. Mitch Macaphee burned a tunnel through the earth so clean, it doesn't even whistle when it spins (and it should). Now it's like one of those air-tube delivery systems in an old department store. On the other end, proba...

Know what I hate? Well, I'm going to tell you. It's when people intrude upon your deepest personal life, and then when you object, they accuse you of denying their right to - I don't know - have everything exactly their way, I guess. That's how I see the hyper-religious crowd who have been complaining about the mandate in the Affordable Care Act requiring employer-provided health insurance to cover contraception. Obama carved out an exception that should satisfy anyone - one that goes way beyond any necessary relief from what's required, in my view. And still they are crowing about it, comparing it to religious persecution, even Nazi-ism in the more extreme cases. The latest round has been in state legislatures from Georgia to New Hampshire, where the crackpot tea-party majority has proposed a "conscience" exception so broad it practically guarantees legal challenge. (These are the freaks who insisted, bizarrely, that all legislation be rooted in the Magna...