Hammer Mill Days

Where did I put that bucket? Is that mine you're using? Well, give it back, damn it. Go find another one to carry your golf balls around in. Jesus H. Christmas. Yes, greetings from the one-man bucket brigade here at the abandoned and partially submerged Cheney Hammer Mill. Perhaps you heard about all the flooding we got here in upstate New York after that Halloween storm? Well, the old water kept on rising in our neck of the woods, and it ain't pretty. Trouble is, back when they built these old mills, they located them close to the water for a variety of reasons. Practical, yes .... back then. Now it's a positive nuisance! The canal behind the Hammer Mill sloshed over in the first 24 hours, and we've been flapping around in scuba flippers ever since. Why am I bailing this place out alone? Because everyone else, well ... bailed , frankly. Can't blame them - this sucks. They're all off to higher ground, except for Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who has b

It's not hard to see how Donald Trump's presidency could be good for the war caucus that encompasses parts of both parties. The deep neocon types oppose some of Trump's foreign policy decisions, thereby endearing themselves to centrist Democrats who are always eager to make new friends (on the right). Then if a Democrat wins the presidency next year, the neocons would hope, I'm sure, to ride into Washington with her or him. There are two, maybe three Democratic presidential candidates who would say no, but the others ... I'm not so sure. I have no doubt, though, that some of them would serve as a tunnel back to power for the hyper interventionists. That's not to say that Trump represents any alternative to an imperial foreign policy. A recent Nation editorial by Bob Borosage describes Trump's betrayal of the Kurds in Syria as giving peace a bad name - this is a fair point, but the Trump foreign policy bears very little resemblance to anything the anti-wa