Hammer Mill Days

Beard and glasses are no good. You've already got a beard and glasses, remember? Maybe you should just shave and squint more. Not sure anyone would recognize you anyway, but there's no point in taking chances. Oh, hi. I was just attempting to help our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, with a little problem he's experiencing with law enforcement. No, he didn't get one of those threatening IRS calls demanding thousands of dollars in iTunes cards on pain of arrest. Nothing that exciting. Apparently, Mitch has been running a side-hustle. He built some kind of interstellar surveillance drone, and it's been spotted by NASA and disseminated to the press. Now he thinks the feds are after him for horning in on their game. Yes, I know. He's got nothing to worry about. But Mitch's nerves have been kind of raw just lately, and he wants to go into hiding ... a kind of witness protection program, only the kind that shields you from the government. His probe - named...

There were some hair-on-fire moments on talk television this week about Trump acting as a Russian "agent" or "asset" or something similar. I have my own thoughts on this issue, which I've shared previously on this blog, but what I find kind of interesting about this discourse is the degree to which it reveals the state of mainstream opinion on national security issues. Mind you, I don't mean popular opinion; rather, "articulate" opinion of the kind you find on Morning Joe and other similar platforms. The ability of the American imperial project to repackage itself in such a way as to appeal to another generation of gullible subjects has always fascinated me, and we're seeing it play out again on screens large and small all across the nation. One of the points of outrage regarding Trump came from a newspaper piece that reported on the president floating the idea of pulling the U.S. out of NATO. The reaction went beyond just the usual tropes ...