Hammer Mill Days

There’s always the chance it could be legitimate. Why not? Must we always be so damn cynical? What happened to those happy-headed funsters we used to be back in 1978? Wait … we were never happy-headed funsters? Well … at least that explains what happened to them. Once again, you catch us in the midst of a philosophical debate, an exquisitely complex conundrum that has confronted us in our COVIDian solitude. Well, perhaps I’m being too generous. Let’s just say we’re having a little difference of opinion. Nothing too weighty, you understand – after all, these are austere times, and we’re trying to be economical with our emotions (as we have little else to be economical with). Why don’t I describe the debate we’re having here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, and you can decide whether it rises to the level of a philosophical discussion? That I shall do. As you know, when it comes to the matter of commercial success, Big Green is a smoking failure. We are so obsc...

While you were looking over there, Donald Trump, our racist five-year-old drunken Twitter-troll of a President, pulled out of yet another arms control treaty with the Russians. Signed in 1992 by then president George H.W. Bush, the Open Skies Treaty allowed for short-notice, unarmed reconnaissance flights as a way of verifying compliance with other arms control treaties. As he always does when announcing the end of an international agreement, Trump breezily claimed that the Russians were not adhering to the treaty, and that by pulling out we will eventually end up with a new agreement that’s better than the current one. This announcement comes in the context of: Withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty , which removed extremely destabilizing and dangerous medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe; Trump’s reluctance to renew the New START treaty next February when it expires. The accord provides for inspection of nuclear forces in by both pa...