Hammer Mill Days

Hello, this is central control. Central control to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Do you copy, Marvin? Of course not. Who on Earth would copy Marvin? Well, I seem to have the mill to myself today. The place is as quiet as a grave, albeit a very drafty one. Dank, too ... or maybe the word is acrid. Musty ... that's what I'm looking for. Anyway, everyone seems to have taken the week off. I hear it's spring break week for the kiddies at all the local schools, so maybe my various associates all have secret lives involving school age children and tickets to Disney World. Can't say for certain - Anti Lincoln has been looking a little extra suburban just lately. For my own part, I have filled my time with something very unproductive - watching TV. I binge watched all ten episodes of the new Lost In Space reboot, and I think I'm ready for some kind of high tech media purge. Since I have no self-control and even less in the way of formal responsibilities, I will ...

Trump and Macron had their meeting of the tiny minds this last week, and it doesn't look good for the Iran nuclear deal (a.k.a. the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action - JCPOA). The French president appears to think he can save it by expanding it, but that's not likely to happen; Iran may be less than a democracy, but its leaders have constituencies just the same as ours do, and I can't think the Iranian people are going to be willing to trust this process a second time - not when they've checked every box, met every requirement, and continued to suffer as Trump calls them every name in the book and hires a National Security Advisor who gave a regime change address to the terrorist MEK last year. There are also the other parties to the agreement to consider, two of whom (Russia and China) are adamant against changing the deal. As Juan Cole has pointed out , the Russians are calling bullshit on Trump's vacuous claim that the U.S. gave Iran $150 billion as a kind of ...