Hammer Mill Days

What the fudge. Mother of pearl. Is that the phone again? Take it off the hook - I'm busy, damn it. Busy as John Henry. What am I doing? Working on our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. A decidedly low-tech collection, recorded in the clammy basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill hear in soggy upstate New York, hammered out with great care and aplomb, dropped out of a three story window, and tied in a bow for your enjoyment. We hope you will be pleased, most pleased. Or at least, not angry, like our landlord, who is demanding all of the proceeds from our album sales in return for 47 months of back rent. (Turns out someone owns this dump after all. Who knew?) Anyroad, yes, yes, I'm working on a CD package for the limited run we will be burning, mostly for giveaways. Cowboy Scat is going to begin life as a digital release, for the most part. We'll send a copy to Nashville, one to Texas, one to Wyoming, and a few more of those big, square states out th...

I'm going to do a brief post about false equivalency, and I want to preface this by saying that I am against the Obama drone war and the ongoing program of detainee detention and (I'm certain) abuse. This would be wrong under any president, and no less under this one. In addition to being morally bankrupt, it is strategically incoherent; worse, detrimental to our long term security. We are, in essence, investing in future generations of terrorists, determined to do us harm based on the carnage we have carried out on their persons, their families, their communities. That said, I also want to take issue with this argument I keep hearing that this administration is as bad as the last one with respect to extralegal killing, aggressive foreign policy, etc. It is bad enough to be against, bad enough to protest, but if we are comparing Obama with Bush II, there is simply no comparison. It was Bush who started both the Afghan and the Iraq wars, one of which we are still engaged in. ...