Hammer Mill Days

  I thought you said it was organic. What do you mean “all natural” – that’s a vacuous term. Everything’s natural, goddamn it. Yellow cake uranium is natural, but that doesn’t mean you should serve it at a birthday party. Cheese and crackers, I don’t know what’s the matter with my squat-mates. They think anything that’s not on fire is good for you, even if it was recently on fire. That’s what happens when you spend the better part of twenty years loitering in an abandoned hammer mill, staying three steps ahead of the property owning capitalists, two steps ahead of the bourgeois lawyers that represent them, and one step ahead of the police that guard their wealth with clubs and guns. It’s kind of like Stockholm syndrome, except that we’ve been taken hostage by our general lack of resources, and my associates are now trying to squeeze every molecule out of the toothpaste tube. (I don’t mean metaphorically – they literally want that last molecule!) Anyway, the...

The historic second impeachment of Donald Trump got under way this week. I have to say that it was more engaging than the first impeachment in some respects. The House impeachment managers seem a bit sharper to me, though they are working what seems like an open and shut case. At some level this is all performative, as it seems unlikely that a sufficient number of Senators whose constituencies are made up of rabid Trump supporters will vote to convict the man. Still, anything that reminds people of the shit show that led up to this last election and the rabid, racist attack that followed it can’t be bad. Trump himself said something like “never forget this day” to his supporters. I embrace that entirely: we should never let Republicans forget January 6, 2021 for as long as they live. That should be one of our political obsessions moving forward. If the jury (i.e. the United States Senate) in this proceeding were inclined towards acting in good faith rather than in thei...