Hammer Mill Days

Did you hear what I heard? Was that... sleigh bells? That can only mean one thing. That's right, children... it's the sound of jolly old fire alarm. The engines are burning up. Yes, yes... Christmas freaking day. Don't you just love this time of year? (Judging by your reaction, perhaps "love" was the wrong word.) Don't you just fireplug this time of year? (That's a bit better.) Over here in Big Green land, we have a reputation for keeping Christmas better than any virtual pop band you can name that traverses interstellar space and has a robot friend (and hangs out with Lincoln). Sure, that's mostly down to our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas , now a venerable nine holidays old and still available for purchase and/or download at a retailer near you (or not so near you ... check us out on the Russian mp3 download site Yanga.ru , which ranks us among "Best Artists" under Psychedelic Rock... and whose url sounds strangely like "kangar

Bhutto has been dead only a couple of days, and already the demagogic politicians and would-be presidents are spinning damage control for ex-general and president-for-as-long-as-he-likes Pervez Musharraf. Having invested so bullishly in this coup leader, Bush and company are reluctant to see his fortunes fall alongside the corpse of his chief political rival. In Pakistan as elsewhere, we build today's disastrous policies on those of yesteryear, compounding tragedy with farce and playing with whole nations as if they were mere instruments of our global ambitions. For decades we've supported strongman military leaders in Pakistan because it served our purposes to do so (one-stop political shopping, in effect - less haggling with popular leaders). The rationale in the 1970s and 80s was the fight against the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan, an effort that amounted to a kind of Ford Foundation for jihadist groups, funded in part by the Saudis and facilitated by the CIA and Pakistan's I.