Hammer Mill Days

That's it, Lincoln. I'm tired of your get-rich-quick schemes. They always end up with trouble. Like that "Civil War" idea you had once. How did THAT turn out? Damn, I'll tell you ... sometimes I feel like a walking suggestion box. Every time I turn a corner in this cavernous abandoned hammer mill, someone starts pitching ideas to me about what we can do to generate income, filthy lucre, serious bank. Capitalists! All they ever think about is their money. What about MY money? When the hell is someone going to build an economic theory around THAT? If I hear one more hare-brained scheme about starting a theme park based on the history of hammer manufacturing in North America, I'm going to move to another kind of abandoned mill entirely. That said, this place really would lend itself to being a kind of theme park. They could do a kind of Gaslight Village or something equally fourth-rate - the vintage is about right, construction wise. Or it could be a life-sca...

Some good news (or at least not bad news): The U.S.-led airstrikes in Syria obviously haven't led to a terminal nuclear conflict; not yet, anyway. That said, this was another loathsome destructive exercise by three imperial powers intent on maintaining at least symbolic dominance over their erstwhile colonial possessions. We've heard all the flimsy justifications for this action - the need to enforce the prohibition on use of chemical weapons, the need to alleviate the suffering of innocents, etc. None of it holds any water. While it's good that a class of weapons is at least nominally banned, it's hard to see a substantive difference between gassing people and blowing their legs off, or piercing their skulls with fragments of depleted uranium shell casings, or dropping white phosphorus on them, or enforcing a medieval siege that results in more than a million contracting cholera (i.e. biological warfare). And if Trump, May, and Macron are concerned with the suffering...