Hammer Mill Days

I guess my alarm clock doesn't work. Don't understand it. I wound it up tight as a drum sometime last year. Stupid bloody thing. Oh, well. Sometimes it actually pays to be late. I'll give you a for instance. There was this gig on Mars we booked for next month, and we were planning to take a private rent-a-rocket up there, having lost contact with our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee. That's fine. Only the rocket is an Antares Orbital CRS-3. Yes, THAT Antares Orbital CRS-3. The same one that blowed up real good a couple of days ago. Oh, yes. That's the flight you WANT to be late for. I know what you're going to say. It's an orbital CRS-3, Joe, not an inter planet ary CRS-3. What the hell are you doing, taking an orbital ship on an interplanetary journey of this type? Well, my friends .... I'm glad you asked that question. My answer may surprise you. In fact, the reason why we're doing that is that, as I mentioned earlier, we no longer have our ...

We live in what's casually referred to as a democracy; more specifically, a representative democracy dominated by a "two party" system that is, in actuality, a single party with two wings. One wing is a wholly owned subsidiary of the wealthiest individuals and corporations on the planet. The other is an actual political party with a relatively broad base but that's sluiced full of cash from many of the same players. I am not going to sit here and suggest that voting makes all of the difference in the world - it obviously doesn't. But I will say that it's something we must do (among many other things) if only to keep things from becoming exponentially worse than they are right now. I know - that doesn't sound like a gee-whiz, hyper positive, up-with-people rallying cry of the sort we have all grown to expect since our kindergarten days. It's merely the truth - the vote is a right people have died defending in this country (see Schwerner, Goodman, and ...