Hammer Mill Days

Another Web bucket to fill. Good grief, tubey! How many Web sites am I supposed to maintain? I'm the one with the arms, remember... and the cerebral cortex. Oh, hi. Yeah, I was just in the process of dressing down the mansized tuber. Why? Well, it's simple - he keeps making more work for us bipeds, signing us up for these aggregator sites like Reverbnation and the like. I can't keep up with it, man! And my bandmates want nothing to do with it. I'm the janitor here in Big Green land. (My brother Matt is the cinematographer, I should mention.) But what the hell, I'm complaining again, aren't I? I should be grateful to have a roof over my head, three square meals a day, two round ones, and a couple of hexagonal snacks. That's more than most can say these days. As always, money is a challenge. Copies of One Small Step are not exactly flying off the shelf on this planet (though I hear it's moving quite briskly on Kaztropharius 137b, that nasty little planet...

A year ago this time, on the eve of Earth day, millions of barrels of oil began spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, accompanied by millions of gallons of a toxic dispersant banned for use in the U.K. (but still, apparently, okay to use over here). Both substances were disastrous by-products of a rush to profit by multinational corporations tied to our seemingly unbreakable addiction to fossil fuels. As was pointed out at the time and many times since, such catastrophic events are inevitable at this stage in the depletion of global energy resources. All of the easy-to-get oil is gone or spoken for, so expanding this highly profitable extraction industry requires brinkmanship of the type that has soured the waters of the Gulf beyond the sorry point to which they had sunk previously. This is generally true of the extractive energy industries. Oil is being sought from ocean depths far more profound than either drilling or safety technologies can facilitate. It is being rendered from the tar ...

Paul Ryan has come up with a remarkable innovation - gradually bring elderly and disabled folks back to the standard of living they enjoyed in the 1930s. Brilliant! Obviously the idea behind moving Medicare to a voucher system is to save the government - and, therefore, the collective "us" - money. But it's only a savings if you don't count the vast, vast majority of elderly people for whom that voucher will be worth very little in terms of health services. This is a very serious issue for anyone planning to become elderly one day. (Note: if you care nothing about the elderly and disabled and plan on jumping off a cliff when you turn 65, the Ryan plan will probably be fine by you.) I've blogged about this before, so forgive me for covering the same ground - it's just that when a person of influence advances a legislative plan that overtly calls for the dismemberment of Medicare and Medicaid, I feel compelled to repeat myself. This isn't a question of savi...