Hammer Mill Days

Is it coming round again? Hah. Some mad scientist YOU turned out to be. I could get better weather reports from an open window. Stupid Macaphee. Yes, hello and welcome to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, located in upstate New York, once a land of relatively stable weather, but now ... rollicking storms. Sometimes I feel like we're living in a bowling alley, our sorry asses parked in the lanes. I keep wondering if all this atmospheric upheaval is in anyway related to that massive gizmo Mitch Macaphee is always messing with. He just built it last month, and it's got dials and levers and wheels and lights, and it belches black smoke into the air above the mill. Just like old times, really. Then it rains like hell. If my suspicions are correct, I suppose that means I owe you all an apology. Or at least Mitch does. Understand - we do not control Mitch, we just utilize his expertise from time to time. He can be quite handy with minor repairs on spacecraft, for instance, like th...

This is one for the veterans. I felt I had to write about this because of a story I heard on DemocracyNow! this week about wounded and PTSD soldiers receiving less-than-honorable discharges based on behavior attributable to their injuries ... and in some cases, based on virtually nothing at all. This is one of the most maddening stories I have heard this year, but I guess it shouldn't surprise me. It's pretty much a given in this country that many of the people who fight our wars will be discarded after they've sacrificed dearly on our behalf. These past twelve years have brought us back to a place we hadn't been since the end of the execrable Vietnam war - dealing with the aftermath of a prolonged, highly destructive conflict, and doing a very poor job of it. Why do we - in the age of magnetic yellow ribbons - still suck so badly at this? A couple of things come to mind. First, this war is not broadly shared, so any improvement in our basic humanity since the end of...