Hammer Mill Days

  Did the mail come in yet? Oh, right. Looks like bills and solicitations. Again. Not a single handwritten missive in the entire pile. What was the name of that short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? “No One Writes to the Colonel” , or something like that? Well, somebody best tell the colonel that we’ve got him beat. When it comes to postal neglect, we’re number one, amigo. Hey, you know what they say, right? Every complaint is really about something else. So if we’re complaining about our lack of fan (or hate) mail, what we’re REALLY complaining about is the heat or somebody’s sore toe or the price of sorghum in Madagascar. The sorry fact is, we wouldn’t know what to do with fan mail if it was dropped on us via helicopter. It’s been so long since we opened the mail bag, I doubt that any of our current readers even remember that that was a thing. Hey, newbies – that was a thing! First tune, then play … the tune. Part of what makes people cranky around the a

As I’ve mentioned more times than I should have, I have had very low expectations for the Biden foreign policy since the beginning. By “the beginning”, I mean well before his election, when you couldn’t find foreign policy positions on his campaign web site for love or money. Biden’s fifty-year track record on foreign affairs is not a particularly good one. I remember him saying he was “ashamed” of Reagan’s “constructive engagement” policy towards apartheid South Africa back in the 1980s. Um …. that’s about it. These past two weeks have done little to change my mind on this. The drone assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al Qaeda leader, prompted a lot of fist-pumping on the part of mainstream Democrats and some never-Trump Republicans. A similar amount of jingoism accompanied House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, as well. I’m not certain what the expected takeaway is for either of these decisions, but it the point was to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a do