Hammer Mill Days

Where are my thumbs? Without my thumbs, I can't type. Or at the very least, make spaces between what I type. Wait ... did I say that? Is someone speaking? Sorry. You'll have to forgive me. I'm hip deep in finishing the script for our next episode of Ned Trek, as featured on the THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. And though I write for a living, writing has always been a teeth-pulling process for me, resulting in sleepless nights, even more sleepless days, and other trepidations too numerous to ... to enumerate. Am I making sense? (Possibly not.) I know what you're going to say. (Either that or lack of sleep is causing me to hear voices in my head.) Why the hell am I concentrating on a script for a stupid, knock-off podcast horse ballad instead of spending my time working on new songs, producing an album, preparing for another interstellar tour, etc.? My response? Meh. No man can say. I do it because I do it. And because Matt tells me to, which should be enough for anyone. (...

The full-court press is on. The Obama team has been channeling Bush/Romney for the past couple of weeks, delivering on the promise of a more aggressive foreign policy on several fronts, most ominously (in my humble opinion) in far eastern Europe, on the indefensible frontiers of U.S./European capitalism and military hegemony. Obama has announce that we will be taking part in NATO exercises in western Ukraine; roughly the equivalent of Russia or China or Iran doing the same in western Cuba, except that Russia has been attacked ruinously by foreign alliances via their western frontier twice over the last century. (The same, of course, cannot be said of us and our southern frontier.) At the close of the Cold War, it was understood that expansion of NATO would be seen as provocative by Russia, but because Russia was in a weak position, their economy destroyed by massive privatization, shock therapy structural adjustment, guided by some of our Chicago-school fanatics, we felt free to igno...