Hammer Mill Days

Interstellar Tour Log: February 19, 2014 An unnamed rock garden in deep space, somewhere east of Jupiter Well, once again, we were sold a bill of goods. I think we've got some canned peas in there, maybe a little hard tack, some burlap sacking material (in case we have sack races), a jar of peppermints for the children, and an oil lamp. Who knew there was a general store on Ceres? Aside from that, though, we were given bad advice. That Mr. Nerim character wasn't telling us the truth at all. Apparently, hydrofracking is not utterly harmless. My evidence? Ceres, the alpha asteroid - the big brass buckle in the asteroid belt - is now a little smaller than it was when we arrived. Fact is, part of the asteroid was blown to bits and hurled into deep space. And as luck would have it, it was the part that we were camping out on. So when old Nerim pushed the plunger on his cartoon-TNT detonator rig, it sent that side of Ceres (and our sorry asses) on a journey of undetermined le...

No, I won't employ the convenient Yogi Berra-ism that the press has been so fond of since its coining, but I can't help but feel like we're treading the same ground we did decades ago during the height of the cold war. It seems like every time I hear a news report, whether on NPR or some network television outlet, there's talk of Russia, Russia, Russia. The uprising in Ukraine is really a Russia story here in the States. NBC's Brian Williams describes it casually as a "personal" matter for Vladimir Putin; an artifact of the ongoing demonization campaign against the Russian president, who is no saint and has dictatorial tendencies, but is not the monstrous freak our government/corporate media complex seem determined to make him out to be. The national corporate media conversation on Ukraine seems to center on what we are going to do about it, but the fact is, we are supporting the opposition in that country - likely not because our government has overridi...