Hammer Mill Days

Whirl, whirl, twist and twirl... jump around like a flying squirrel. You pull my beard, I'll pull your'n. Pick him up and hit 'im in the head. Hit 'im again, that critter ain't dead! Dang! (I mean, damn !) You learn the weirdest little songs living in the alley. With this heat, everybody's got their windows open, and the fragrant tendrils of sweet country music waft out into the night and accost your unprotected eardrums. Right now I'm hearing some kind of a twangy ho-down emanating from about three stories up. Probably high time I show my appreciation - Oy! Oy! Toin it down, duh radio! That's better. (At least I feel better about it - the freaking music is still there...) Yes, well... if you guessed that the alien-mayor Gizmandiar has succeeded thus far in keeping us out of our adopted home (squat house) the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, then you are indeed correct. Matt, John, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), Mitch Macaphee (Marvin's person...

Looks as though the FBI has snagged some would-be terrorists - a group of Muslims originally from Bosnia, Jordan, and elsewhere allegedly crazy enough to want to attack a military installation in the U.S. Strange choice - kind of like planning to rob a police station, but never mind. A triumphal week in the never-ending, absolute total war against terrorism, right? Well... not entirely. This was also the week that Luis Posada Carriles was allowed to walk, his immigration-related charges having been thrown out by a federal judge. But this septuagenarian is not just somebody's elderly uncle who entered the country illegally to visit a sick relative. A former C.I.A. operative, Posada is one of the alleged masterminds of the 1976 bombing of a civilian airliner that resulted in the deaths of all 73 people on board. He was jailed in connection with this charge by the Venezuelan government - not the current one, mind you, but a very pro-U.S. administration - based on an international inve...

That's one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, now go, cat, go! Don't you step on my... ah, what's the use? Can't do covers... even when I'm panhandling. Welcome back. I almost said "to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill," but I caught myself in time. Actually, our august squat house is now, indeed, abandoned... in the sense that there is now no one in it. Yes, friends... our new extra-terrestrial mayor, Gizmandiar , has made good on his threat to evict us - call it a down payment on the opportunistic election campaign he's planning for this fall. This fucker's racking up empty promises so fast, you could swear he was born on the planet earth. (In fact, never having seen this creature, I can't say for certain that he wasn't.) Everywhere you turn in this town now, it's Gizmandiar's doing this, and Gizmandiar's in favor of that.... and one of those things he's doing is enforcing building codes and vagrancy ...

Glad to see that Naomi Klein is back on the job - last week's column in the Nation about the World Bank and Wolfowitz was a welcome antidote to the conventional wisdom that gets peddled in the mainstream media and on NPR. The World Bank in particular and the "international community" in general have a pretty heinous record with regard to anti-poverty initiatives (if forcing corrupt or corruptible to cut social services can be thought of as "anti-poverty"). So, as Klein points out, that particular pirate ship should go down with Captain Neocon, rather than set him adrift, Bly-style, while they move on to further plunder. What has the international development finance system accomplished other than consigning uncounted millions of people to ever-deepening misery? Think Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, and pretty much anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa - those are the poster children. Argentina was the textbook neoliberal test case up until its total collapse a few years a...

First there was day of the triffiids. Then there was night of the living dead. Now there's week of the homeless virtual rock band. And what do they all have in common? Space people. Mother-fucking space people. Hello again from sleepy upstate New York (formerly known as Sri Lanka). Last week as you recall, your friends in Big Green had made the fearful discovery that our local city hall was under foreign occupation. No, it hadn't been overrun by stormtroopers from a distant power - this was a far more congenial takeover. Space people, armed with sacks of cash and buckets of Miracle Grow bribed their way into the building and have taken the place of our entire city council. This could be a problem, folks. Got a tax dispute? Tell it to the space man. Need the street sweepers to do a once-over on your block? Better learn to speak Betelgeusean real quick. (And take it from me - it is not an easy language to learn. No vowels. Nada .) Someone set your house on fire? Contact the mo...

Look out, folks - here comes the straight talk express, charging down the track straight toward you. For what seems like the twelfth time in as many months, John McCain has launched (or re-launched) his presidential bid, trying to trade on any of his former selves that the public will buy - Mister Independent, Mister Inevitable, Mister Iraq Victory, etc. Pick your favorite McCain... or collect all three! At this stage, the Arizona senator's flagging campaign appears to be centered on his dogged support for the Iraq project, albeit a "better managed" variant of that catastrophe. The calculation is a simple one - McCain supports the troop increase because he believes it's right, even though it's unpopular; a position that is supposed to lend him an aura of integrity and moral authority. Everyone else is playing politics with the war, but not McCain. That's his card, and he's playing it for all it's worth, equating troop withdrawals with "surrender...

Spacemen to the left of me. Spacemen to the right of me. Spacemen above my head. And beneath my soles? Astroturf. That's right... astroturf. Welcome back, Big Green -ites, to a world turned upside-down. Well, not upside-down exactly... probably more like 180 degrees clockwise, with a slight southward dip on the "y" axis. Either way, things are not what they used to be. This neighborhood has gone downhill fast. Jeebus christmas - just three weeks after the first spaceship arrived and we're practically the only people in this village who were born on the planet Earth. (All except Big Zamboola, of course, who was born on... on... well, on him self , because he is, in fact, himself a planet... or planetoid.) Those strange, lawn-obsessed space people have brought their interstellar modular homes to our sleepy little town and set up their own community superimposed over ours. WTF! You know, it wouldn't be so bad to have all of these new neighbors if they had taken up r...