Hammer Mill Days

Right, so there ARE gravitational waves after all, disturbing the peace of the space-time continuum. Uh ... I knew that. No news to me. Next question? See, here's the advantage of having a mad science adviser. (Every band should have at least one. Wilco, I believe, retains an entire gaggle of them.) Just casual hallway conversations yield amazing benefits. Turns out there are planets with negative gravity. True story. In fact, our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee claims that he was born on one. The negative gravity of his home planet was so strong that it immediately shot him like a cannon ball straight to Earth. Fortunately, he was wearing a heat shield poncho at the time (his first invention, innovated straight out of his mother's womb). Mitch has an idea about how to manipulate gravity waves for casual amusement - kind of like playing with a galactic yo-yo. Only now he's back in one of his funks, with the announcement of the gravity wave discovery by prominent phy

New Hampshire has refocused the race for president a bit, and now we're bracing for the contests to come. As I write, another Democratic debate is scheduled for this evening. My hope is that Senator Sanders will have worked out a way of speaking about foreign policy that will make him less of a target on that score. I'm not suggesting that he adopt more hawkish positions - quite the opposite. He just needs to articulate some of the quite nuanced views that he has held for many years. If ever we needed an alternative take on foreign policy, that time is now. {Later that evening ... } Okay, I did hear some encouraging words from Senator Sanders on war and peace. Not enough, in my opinion, but certainly better than last time. I am glad that he gave some historical perspective to a position that is just as relevant today as it was in the 1950s: the conviction that the United States should not be acting like an empire, overthrowing disobedient regimes whenever we feel like it, b