Hammer Mill Days

Lots going on these days. New podcast, new album, new burnish on Marvin (my personal robot assistant) ... everything is new around the hammer mill these days. This might be a good time to talk about our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick ... namely, what's on it, what complex themes, tortured melodies, and convoluted stories are behind each track. Isn't that the era we live in? The age of the "back story", where every reality show has interview sequences in which the stars talk about how they feel about the bogus melodramatic scene they were just in? Yeah, well ... we're not doing that. Here's a little run down of the tracks, until I run out of breath. (There's twenty-one of them, for pity's sake!) Fed Up - This is the opening manifesto, the raison d'etre for Cousin Rick Perry's political ambitions, in which Rick lays out his grievances with the federal government, creeping socialism, intrusive gravity, and what-not. Styl...

Bradley Manning is guilty, per his military proceeding. That's the way it's going to be. The government did not manage to pin the "aiding the enemy" charge on him, but because we live in the era of massive prosecutorial over-charging, he was convicted on about 20 other counts. It's likely that, on top of abusive pre-trial detention amounting to at least psychological torture (and probably physical torture as well - exposure to extreme temperature, sleep deprivation, etc.) Manning will be treated to decades in prison for the crime he committed; that dastardly crime for which there can be no excuses given, no quarter offered. "Justice" has been served. What was the crime again? Oh, yes. Exposing the sprawling criminality of our foreign policy, namely the Iraq war and the Afghan war, plus releasing a raft of diplomatic cables relating to prosecution of the global war on tactics ... I mean, terror. Heinous indeed. Perhaps someone needs to remind me again w...