Hammer Mill Days

  Cold as hell in here. Haven’t you got that fire going yet? Put some of that kindling around the bottom and let’s see if that catches. Okay, okay – nice. Hey … why does that kindling have an F-hole. MARVIN!! Hello, friends. Well, winter is upon us again. This is the time of year when Big Green most deeply regrets squatting in an abandoned hammer mill. (Sounds like a good album name: Big Green most deeply regrets …. or not.) Squatters don’t get energy hookups. They just flat out ignore us, man. It’s like we’re not even here …. which is good if they’re the cops, but not so much if they’re delivering pizzas. (If cops start carrying pizzas, we’re all in trouble.) The ghost of El Kabong Okay, so we rely on Marvin (my personal robot) for many things. This week, it’s tending the fire. So I told him to go get some kindling wood so he could get the damn fireplace started. He came back with an odd but acceptable assortment of maple, rosewood, and birch fragments. ...

I heard a few moments of oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health while they were underway. I didn’t, however, get the chance to dig into it until about a week later, when Michael Moore ran the full audio feed on his podcast, Rumble . You can also read the transcript posted on the Supreme Court’s web site , if you prefer. Either way you access it, it’s pretty ugly, but that’s not surprising. The fact is, we’ve been seeing this slow-motion train wreck coming for decades, and many, many of us chose to do nothing to stop it. But before I get into that familiar diatribe, I want to comment briefly on some of what was said during these oral arguments – specifically, a few reactionary hot takes as analyzed by someone who is not a Con Law expert. Being neutral on a speeding train If you listen to the entire proceedings, you will hear Justice Kavanaugh dive into a discussion of precedent. Kavanaugh cited cases like Brown v. Board of Education as fodder for his argu...