Hammer Mill Days

CQ, CQ ... come in, Rangoon. This is ground station Hammermill calling all ships at sea. If you read me, come in. Ahoy, ship! Damn it. Turn the crank a little harder, Marvin. There's a good chap. Yeah, well ... just trying something a little different this week, since our latest episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN is still under construction and I'm too freaking lazy to post any songs or other media files. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) dug up an old radio transmitter down in the basement of the mill, and we've been trying to fire the thing up ever since. This should come naturally to us, as Matt's and my father was a Ham radio operator, but alas ... I spent my childhood assiduously avoiding the acquisition of any useful knowledge or skills, and if I do say so myself, I was remarkably successful at that endeavor. Anyway, the old radio works like this. I pick up the microphone, put on the metal headphones, and tell Marvin to start turning the crank in the side of the...

Very nearly speechless after the heinous massacre of Jewish congregants in Pittsburgh. I am glad, at least, that reporting on this atrocity has attempted to capture the motivations of this neo-fascist killer. He was driven to attack the Tree of Life Synagogue by his outrage over the work of HIAS, a century-old Jewish organization dedicated to resettlement of refugees from around the world. The president's, his party's, and conservative media's fulminations about the approach of an "invasion" of Honduran refugees, supposedly funded by "globalists" like George Soros, no doubt contributed to the shooter's sense of urgency. And, of course, he had an AR-15 handy. Why not, right? How did Trump meet this outrage? By doubling down on his anti-immigrant tirade. By sending hundreds of troops to the border to stop a group of poor people a thousand miles away. And by launching an attack on birthright citizenship, the principle at the core of the fourteenth ame...