Hammer Mill Days

Think of this as a slow-motion commentary on the Republican debate from last week. None of this is particularly in-depth, but I think it's worth raising a few points about certain participants. Lindsey loves Georgie. At the kid's table, Lindsey Graham got a little carried away over his bro-mance with ex-president and hopefully future convicted war criminal George W. Bush, saying in essence that he misses W and wishes he were still in office to handle the big-as-the-sky threat known as ISIS, which Lindsey previously said wants to "kill us all!!" Not hard to work out why Senator Graham's poll numbers, even in a highly reactionary GOP primary race, hover somewhere between zero and zero point five. Not a majority position. War of the Cubans. Whoa - someone waved a red rag between Senators Cruz and Rubio. Either that or somebody called somebody else's mommy a commie. Fascinating how the supposedly "establishment" candidate Rubio is working hard to o...

  Big Green disintegrates into uncontrollable celebratory joy with a special edition of Ned Trek: A Very Neddy Christmas, four new recordings, and crackhead conversation. Fa-la-freaking-la.   This is Big Green - December 2015. Features: 1) Ned Trek 26: A Very Neddy Christmas, loosely based on Dicken's A Christmas Carol; 2) Song: Christmas Past, by Big Green; 3) Song: McBridy, by Big Green; 4) Song: Romney in Reserve; 5) Song: 40s Guy Christmas; 6) Put the Phone Down: Everything is Peachy Fine (song for George Washington Carver); 7) Corn in my hands; 8. The Beavers' Christmas Tree; 9) Smiling Jack Washington; 10) Cruz vs Rubio: the relative merits; 11) Secretary of State Keema; 12) We'll have to cancel Christmas; 13) Talking entirely in quotes; 14) Time for us to go. Podcast Page >

Not a lot to say this week. Been kind of busy. Don't know where to start. Stopped using personal nominative pronouns. Don't know why. Yeah, it was a week spent in hospitals, rehab centers, etc., etc. - suffice to say that there were no terrible outcomes, but it was an engrossing and exhausting experience, nonetheless. I hope to be posting the holiday episode of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN in the coming days, though I did get derailed this week, I will admit. We had a few mixes left to do, but Matt and I did them tonight and recorded the pointless voice track for the podcast, so .... it could happen. Miracles do happen. Anyway, keep your eyes open and leave some room in the stocking. Something tells me there'll be a podcast episode with your name on it dropping down the chimney. Or something. (I'll probably do a political rant as well, just because they're pissing me off so much lately.) More later, people.

I'm not a big fan of zero gravity typing. It's kind of hard to keep your fingers on the keys, frankly. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) - can you take dictation? There's a good chap. Okay, well ... as you may have surmised, we of Big Green are in transit this week. Our brief stint on GJ 1132b, the newly discovered world parked on the very edge of human knowledge was not hugely memorable. Thinly attended, let's say. Sure, we set up our gear and cranked through a few of our better known numbers. The venue was a cave. And I don't mean that it had bad acoustics, though it did; I mean it was literally a cave on a frozen world, populated by ethereal beings whose very existence is a matter of disputed mad science. (Mitch Macaphee tells me that they are real, but then he talks to elves and fairies, so it's hard to be certain.) Okay, so BIG GREEN’S CAPER BEYOND THE KUIPER (BELT) is kind of a bust. No surprises there. We played that one sorry gig, wearing our pres...

I'm guessing you don't need my opinion on Donald Trump's proposed ban of all Muslims from entering the United States - you've probably heard the full gamut, from Steve King to Bernie Sanders. My first thought was for all of the Muslim students I have known and met, both natural born U.S. citizens and visa holders from countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, and others. I hear this insane rhetoric, growing louder by the day, and I think of a young fellow from Afghanistan - about the nicest person you could hope to meet - and what his thoughts might be about the people who "liberated" his country, then overstayed their welcome for 14 years. This is what happens in America when anything like a foreign-inspired terror attack takes place: we want to corral all Muslims and start bombing some country most of us couldn't find on a globe with both hands. I've lived through many cycles of this, from the Iran hostage crisis through the first gulf war, ...

Break out the ice cube tray. I need to warm my hands up over it. Yeah, that's better. It's all relative, my friends. Well, here we are, out on GJ 1132b on the first and final leg of our Fall 2015 Tour, entitled BIG GREEN’S CAPER BEYOND THE KUIPER (BELT), brought to by Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (Slogan: If it says Hegemonic, you know it's for keeps.) Hey, nobody told us it would be this freaking cold out here, way beyond the limits of our solar system. That's probably because nobody asked. In any case, we're here on this frozen piece of real estate, some 39 light years from Earth, trying to chip a performance venue out of the rock-solid CO2, and having very little success I'm sorry to tell you. How is the tour going? Well ... let me put it this way. Have you seen the movie "The Martian", by any chance? How about "Marooned"? If not, the essential point is this: never rent a spacecraft from a dodgy neighbor of Mitch Macaphee. (If...

My first thought when I heard the name of the male shooter in the San Bernardino massacre was of American Muslims across this country. My primary sympathy is for the victims and their families, but this incident is a disaster for the killers' co-religionists, particularly in the midst of a political season that features major party candidates calling for registration of Muslims and attempting to incite blood vengeance for invented celebrations of the 9/11 attacks. I have to think that just about every practicing Muslim in America is cursing the name of this crackpot kid and his wife. In the current atmosphere, this could get very ugly. Much as the press is obsessing over the terrorism / not-terrorism question, this is in essence another story of the proverbial three-foot creep with a four-foot gun. That these people were prepared for some kind of attack seems clear, but what they had was not all that exotic except in the respect that there was an awful lot of it - something like ...

Glad that's over. Anything I hate, it's packing over a holiday weekend. But we're under way at last, back into the welcoming arms of deep, deep space. GJ 1132b, here we come! I suppose I should spare you the details of the last week - the rush job of putting this expeditionary gig together, the foibles regarding our interplanetary transportation, etc. (Just try booking a four-engine ion drive spacecraft on the weekend before Thanksgiving. Freaking impossible!) As you may recall from last week's post (particularly if you have nothing better to do with your life than to read this useless blog), Big Green has decided to pay a call on our newest neighbor in space - the recently discovered dwarf planet GJ 1132b - and see if we can discover some gainful employment there; namely, a one night stand for a terrestrial band. Okay, so we dubbed this BIG GREEN'S CAPER BEYOND THE KUIPER (BELT), which is literally true, as GJ 1132b is out there, man, really out there. We had ...

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump recalls seeing footage of "thousands" of Muslims in New Jersey cheering as the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001. Fellow candidate Ben Carson briefly claimed to have seen the same inspiring vision in his mind's eye, too, then backed off. (He seems to be recalling the clip of five Palestinians jumping up and down that was most likely a hatchet job.) Trump's claim is the ideal bookend to his recent suggestion of maintaining a federal database of Muslims in America, a component in his new post-Paris attack national security platform. It's a simple, time tested formula: call out a domestic population that you can term a fifth column and associate with a foreign enemy, then repeat your rhetoric and watch your polling numbers rise. Oldest trick in the book. The thing is, Trump is a mirror to the Republican base, as Sam Seder and others have pointed out. This is a mostly white minority of virulently anti-immigrati...

Next week? That's kind of short notice, isn't it? Usually we have a few weeks to arrange for interstellar transport, provisions, sound company, etc. But five days? Sheesh! Let me 'splain. A newly discovered planet 39 light years from here (and when I say newly discovered, I don't mean it was discovered by Anthony Newley, because he's dead and not an astrophysicist) named GJ 1132b has been described as Earth-like. And since we are natives of the planet Earth, we take that as an open invitation to go visit this strange new world, seek out its new life and new civilizations, and boldly try to book a gig there ... where no one has gigged before. Tall order? Perhaps. But frankly, we've been a little short on tall orders just lately here in Big Green land. This, of course, means scrambling. (For Mitch Macaphee, it means poaching - he HATES scrambled eggs before a rocket launch, HATES them.) We're having to pull a major interstellar journey out of our collecti...

It's happening again. A terrorist attack occurs somewhere in the developed societies and right-wingers are falling over themselves to prove that terrorism works. They start railing against Islam writ large, slamming the door shut on refugees from the Arab world, calling for bloody vengeance, and so on. The level of hysteria is almost shocking, given the fact that the attacks they're obsessing about happened in France, not America. (They don't seem perturbed by the Beirut bombing, as it was targeted on Hezbollah, which they hate worse than ISIS.) MSNBC's Morning Joe has become a bullhorn for invading Syria. I can only imagine what Fox News is like these days. Facebook has blown up with people defending (I kid you not) the crusades. This thing plainly goes up to eleven. It's hard for me to see how these calls for military action and pulling up the drawbridge aren't simply appeals to cowardice. Seriously - the vast majority of the loudest hawks and anti-immigran...

What the hell, Mitch. That's just a little speck. No way that's big enough for us to play on. No way in frozen hell. When astronomers stumble upon some new deep space option, like that dwarf planet recently detected some three times more distant than Pluto is to the Sun, they think, "eureka!" To us, it's just another potential gig. We're that proverbial hammer, always looking for a nail. Appropriate metaphor for a band that lives in an abandoned hammer mill. I know, I know ... all the planetoid-huggers out there are going to accuse Big Green of being money-hungry, selfish twits. Not true. We are crazy motherfucker selfish twits, in point of fact, and when we see another ice world out there, we can hardly wait to pile into some poorly designed space craft and slip the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of our cold hard money god. So, yeah ... on second thought, I guess we are money hungry selfish twits as well. It's the crazy motherfucker part tha...

This week saw stories about campus uprisings (some successful) relating indirectly to the Black Lives Matter movement and yet another Republican debate about practically nothing. These seemingly distinct phenomena are not entirely unconnected, particularly when you consider the economic focus of the G.O.P. debate and the very racially exclusive history of the expansion of the middle class during the second half of the 20th Century. Living in my hermetically sealed white man's world, I am witness to a lot of head scratching about why students at, say, University of Missouri are so upset. Of course, all my white companions know of this is what they hear on the evening news or via online sources, which only brings them the events of the past few days. The long history of abuse, exclusion, marginalization, incarceration, injury, and in some cases killing is not encapsulated in these very brief reports. So naturally, it seems nonsensical. My life isn't exactly typical, but my fa...

That's kind of an odd sound. Did you hear it, Anti-Lincoln? What's that? No hearing aid? I didn't know you were hard of hearing. Huh. Explains a lot, really. I think we all just sort of assumed that you were obstinate and disagreeable. And manic depressive. And a total asshole. Oh - well, you heard THAT now, didn't you? It's hard to 'splain what it's like living with a bunch of freaks like the entourage surrounding Big Green. I know that if you're a rock music fan, you have probably read all the stories about the folks who hung around with the Beatles or Justin Bieber's posse or whatever. Yeah, our group is nothing like that. Though I suppose we have the rough equivalent of "Magic Alex" in our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee. Just call him Magic Mitch. (Not to his face, of course.) Once caveat: his version of the "nothing box" would probably be explosive. Maybe it's just that you get more sensitive with age. You know, ...

My plan was to continue my comments on the CNBC Republican debate last week, and I will do some of that, but given the events of the past week it seems appropriate to broaden that discussion a bit. There are some troubling signs about the upcoming election and, more generally, the trajectory we're on as a nation and - yes - an empire. Starting with the debate, probably the most telling moments of that sorry spectacle were the attacks against the event moderators - the calls of unfairness most effectively delivered by Ted Cruz, who (as Sam Seder has pointed out) really owns that sense of grievance that has become such a central part of the Republican/Tea Party narrative. There goes the "liberal" media, ripping into us after having given the Democrats the kid gloves treatment. Several of them - Christie, Trump, Carson, Huckabee - took turns revealing their inner Gingrich, whining at such a pitch that their grievance grew legs and very nearly derailed the entire GOP debate...

What is this ... another carton? This one's from Madagascar, no less. What the hell. Does it rattle when it shakes? Does it roll? If when it shakes it both rattles and rolls, it might be Jerry Lee Lewis. For the life of me, I don't know who's ordering all of these packages. They just show up at the door of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (Big Green's longtime squat-house) and subsequently disappear. At first I thought it might be Mitch Macaphee, but he has long since abandoned the notion of ordering goods from various merchants. He just invents whatever he needs, which is a handy skill to have. (Perhaps the handiest!) Then I thought maybe anti-Lincoln was behind all of this mail order, since some of the boxes came from Urban Outfitters. (He's taken to a more cosmopolitan wardrobe of late. Very smart.) I know, I know - I tend to get a little suspicious, living in a condemned post-industrial hulk like I do. A few months here and you start to see conspiracies aro...

We were treated to the spectacle of another Republican debate last night. I'll dispense with my usual comments about the format, style, and proprietary nature of the event - suffice to say that as a wholly-owned property of CNBC, it met the usual low standard of reality television production values. That said, on to what might be referred to euphemistically as "the substance". First off, it's worth noting that there are way, way, WAY too many candidates on that stage to allow any kind of reasonable debate. Setting politics and policy aside for a moment, I have to wonder what the hell is wrong with the Republican party that they can allow this to continue? The policy distinctions between these ten are minor, at best. Hasn't it occurred to any of these people that, for the good of their party, it might be best to just sit this one out? In other words, sacrifice your own petty political ambitions so that there might be ample opportunity for substantive debate? Appa...

What are you going to be for this year's Christmas pageant? A reindeer? A slice of gooseberry pie? As small pile of pine cones? So many possibilities. I don't imagine that anyone reading this blog is unaware of the fact that the holidays hold a special resonance for Big Green. God knows, when they start blowing those freaking carols through every available loudspeaker, my head starts resonating like a church bell at Noon. That's what I call old time religion. And sure, we did do a whole album of Christmas songs, entitled (not surprisingly) 2000 Years To Christmas (2KY2C) - our first formal album. When I say "formal", I don't mean that we appear in tuxedos with massive red cummerbunds and top hats. I mean that we released a number of collections on cassette tape prior to 2KY2C that were anything BUT formal. More than a few of those were Christmas themed albums, from which we drew the 13 songs that appeared on 2KY2C . Okay, so ... as we have in previous ye...

I'm beginning to dread the next administration, whoever wins the upcoming election. It's hard to dispel the notion that we are heading into a period of increasingly bellicose foreign policy, in response to circumstances that are the direct result of our previous decades of bellicose foreign policy. Ugly as these circumstances are, they do not justify the further application of American military power in places like Afghanistan, where we've been blowing things (and people) up for 14 years, and Syria, where we appear to be fighting on both sides of the ongoing conflict. And yet virtually every presidential candidate sounds ready to keep the imperial ball rolling, even though the policy is an obvious failure in every sense of the word. The trouble with approaching these issues with an imperial mindset is that we are blind to our own failures while expressing righteous indignation over the failings of others. Russia's military action in Syria is a good example. They are p...

That doesn't sound right to me. Twist the knob a bit further. No, no - not that knob! The one below it. Give it a good twist. Wrong way! That sounds horrible. Try the next knob down. Oh, man ... these sound consoles are so confusing. All those knobs and buttons and sliders and levers, each one doing a whole different thing. And then there's the analog/digital thing, so a lot of the knobs and switches are assignable, which means they do DIFFERENT things for DIFFERENT people. Holy shit, that's complicated. My brain hurts. You see ... that's the trouble when you spend most of your life writing and playing songs and very little of your life learning the complex technologies involved in putting those songs across. Like most musicians, our reaction is ... you mean I have to learn TWO things? That's outrageous! Double duty, indeed. (As you can see, we are truly in the mainstream of American thought and sensibility.) I think about this every time I listen to old tracks ...

A couple of comments about the Democratic primary debate this past week. First of all, CNN is an amazing crapfest. Why the hell do we allow corporate media to turn this process into a property to be marketed like some cheap-ass reality show? And reality show it was, in both its tone and its production values. The ridiculous opening sequence, with hyper-dramatic music, the rumble of drums, and introductions torn straight out of some WWF bout or America's Top Chef. The only thing missing was a fully loaded clown car (though they did have that at the G.O.P. match-up). Okay, that was a sobering sign, to be sure. Even more infuriating than the sideshow atmospherics was the framing of the questions, delivered for the most part by Anderson Cooper. While the Democratic field is decidedly to the left, at least from a rhetorical perspective, of where they were even eight years ago, the corporate media questioners proceeded through the lens of Reagan's America. The signal example of thi...

The morning came up like thunder today. That was something. It poured so hard it felt like it was raining in my bedroom. Which, in fact, it was - the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill roof has some issues, as you've probably heard. Hey - over a century old, abandoned by its owners, neglected for decades ... you'd have a leaky roof too. So I'm sitting here at my superannuated mixing console, laptop open and running, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) holding an umbrella over me as I type. What better time is there to give a rundown of the recently posted October installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN , our podcast. Here's what's on deck for October: Ned Trek 25: Not the Children One, Please! - Based on the original Star Trek episode, "And the Children Shall Lead" (one of the most annoying episodes ever), the Ned Trek version features the current crop of demon spawn circling the drain that is the modern presidency. Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz appear as the...

I can't decide whether the Syrian conflict is becoming more like the Afghan war of the 1980s or the Lebanon civil war (1975-90). It certainly has elements of both. Great and regional power proxies. A U.S. ally that is also a conduit for extremists (Pakistan in the 1980s Afghan war; Turkey in today's Syria). Multiple armies running up against one another in a relatively small space (Lebanon when the Israelis, Syrians, and U.S. were all operating there at once). Rich Saudis bankrolling fanatical foreign fighters (Afghanistan). Now Syria has the misfortune of having drawn the interest of two great powers, one the global hegemon (us), the other its former and increasingly current rival (Russia). It is a bit maddening to see Defense Secretary Ash Carter denounce the Russians for being the gang that can't shoot straight (which they apparently are) when only days ago our forces in Afghanistan blew up a Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital - an accident, of course (we seem to have ...

Do you really want to go? I don't know. It's a pretty inhospitable place. Very hot and dry, I'm told, and almost absolutely nothing grows there ... not even mold. Though that's a good thing, sort of, right? Still ... I'm less interested in Mars after having played there a few times. Not our crowd, really. Oh, hi. Just having a momentous discussion with our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, about what to do this weekend. What's that you say? A trip to Mars is too ambitious for the sabbath? Not sure I agree. In any case, we weren't talking about going to the planet Mars; we were debating over whether or not we should go see "The Martian". I was complaining about the condition of our local movie theater. Arid as sandpaper in there, and the seats are twice as rough. Then there's the foul aroma of popcorn - uuuhhl ... As you know, we're not particularly big on movies or other forms of entertainment, frankly. Mitch likes to go to science ...

United Nations week is always entertaining on some level. Probably the best moments of this go 'round involved the usual great power hypocrisy. Putin talking about Assad's "valiant" fight against the terrorists - that's a bit over the top. But no one beats the U.S. in this category. Obama delivered cautionary rhetoric about how a world that can countenance Russian interference in eastern Ukraine would be setting a dangerous precedent: ... we cannot stand by when the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a nation is flagrantly violated. If that happens without consequence in Ukraine, it could happen to any nation gathered here today. Imagine, great nations feeling as though they can intervene in other nations at will, in service to their own purported national interests. Whoever heard of such a thing? One can only guess what was running through the minds of so many members of the General Assembly when they listened to this balderdash, particularly those who ...

Well, there's absolutely no doubt about it. A song is a thing. I think we can all agree on that. And I can also say, without fear of contradiction, that every song, no matter how insipid, is about some thing. That's a no-brainer. With that in mind, what's the best way to make an album based on the melodramatic story arc of what can be described as a spacebound horse opera? Simple - break out the thingmaker! What is that, a hot plate, right? Anybody out there on the internets old enough to remember thingmakers? Sure ... you plug the thing in, heat it up, pour goop into a mold, cook the mold on the hot plate, then chew on the plastic junk you create or electrocute yourself by pouring the cooling reservoir water on the thingmaker. Great fun. Anyway ... what we do is not that dissimilar from playing with a thingmaker. Let's say that our overactive idiotic imaginations are the "goop", if you will. I suppose the "mold" is the usual genres we work withi...

Wow, what a week. I had to laugh at NBC at one point, trying to pivot between the papal visit and the Boehner resignation. So much news, so little air time! Nothing the mass media loves more than information overload ... you can hear the squeak of joy in their voices. Not sure where to start, but I'll dive right in and let's see where we go. Carson's law. Am I alone in thinking that Ben Carson is a truly creepy individual? He's way too quiet, for one thing. And when he does talk, he says stuff like this response on Meet The Press to a question about the importance of a president's faith: DR. BEN CARSON: Well, I guess it depends on what that faith is. If it's inconsistent with the values and principles of America, then of course it should matter. But if it fits within the realm of America and consistent with the constitution, no problem. CHUCK TODD: So do you believe that Islam is consistent with the constitution? DR. BEN CARSON: No, I don't, I do no...

Gather 'round, kiddies ... ol' grampa Big Green is going to spin a few tales about the glory days of yesteryear, when it was us against the world, gas was 35 cents a gallon, and love was just a buck forty-three away. Heh heh. (Get off my lawn!) Yeah, the truth is, Big Green is pretty short on war stories. That occurred to me today as I was driving along, listening to an old Fresh Air interview with Keith Richards. (In truth, the most interesting parts were when Terry played some of the old Stones hits, which I still like o'plenty.) You expect some of the pillars of rock and roll to have the ripest, pithiest tales about backstage exploits, drugs, women, men, asteroid wrangling, pretzel bending, and so on. But bands like us, clinging to the clammy underbelly of pop music ... well, we don't have a lot of that. Sure, there are stories. But nobody wants to hear about riding back from Middlebury College on NY Route 8 in the dead of winter, in a battered old van that had n...

A lot of talk the past few weeks about refugees flooding into southern and eastern Europe, mainly people from the hell that is Syria and the catastrophic landscape of post-revolution Libya. First reaction of the right-wing government in Hungary was to thug them with riot police and hastily build a border fence. One of the more memorable videos was the one where Hungarian officials are tossing baloney sandwiches into a corral filled with hungry migrants, including young children. Then there was the Hungarian broadcast journalist who deliberately tripped a fleeing refugee. Nice. People. The thing is, you need to listen to their rhetoric. They're talking about "illegal immigrants". They're echoing the applause lines of our own crackpot politicians. No surprise, because we're witnessing the same experience on our own southern border. People fleeing from the neoliberal aftermath of our bankrupt Central America policy, starting with support for decades of regressive, ...

What the fuck, was that a week just then? I know I've said this before, but time seems to be speeding up. I should ask Mitch Macaphee if the Earth is spinning any faster than a few years ago ... and if HE has anything to do with it. (Always worth asking.) Well, it's been kind of quiet around the abandoned hammer mill for the last week. Just the sounds of quiet toil. Ah, the joys of wage slavery! Not much to report. Matt's been out in the field, tending to his various populations of beast and bird. We're working on the next album, punching up some of the Ned Trek numbers, albeit slowly. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is learning Swahili in his spare time (or perhaps Kinyarwanda ... he can never make up his little battery-driven mind about anything.) Besides recording, what have we been doing as a "band", specifically? Well, if you REALLY want to know, probably the best way is to listen to the second half of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN - the part wh...

Well, it was quite a week for the right. First the dramatic jailing of the county clerk in Kentucky and her equally dramatic release into the arms of Mike Huckabee and Tony Perkins (not the actor). Then there was the non-satirical version of the Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington, headlined by Ted Cruz, who was shut out at the Kentucky celebration of bigotry. Lots of posturing, quite a bit of screeching (particularly on the part of the estimable Sara Palin), and some very bizarre opinions being aired - tirades that speak of a truly distorted view of reality; noises from that airless box the reactionary right spends all of its time in. I think the part that's most flabbergasting is the level of hysteria over the Iran deal. You expect to hear overheated rhetoric at an event that features Michelle Bachman and some dude from "Duck Dynasty," but this was way the fuck over the top. Ted Cruz suggested that the Iranians, once they have acquired the nuclear weapon they so LUS...

Hey, presto. Pulled a fast one on you last week, didn't we? Just when you least expect to see a new episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, there it freaking is, plain as paper and twice as thick. As has been our practice, this featured another "musical" episode of our warped space opera Ned Trek, the only Star Trek parody that features an all-neocon crew, a Mormon captain, and a talking dressage horse as its first officer and moral compass. What's inside the podcast? Well, the best way to find out is to suffer through it. You can do it! Short of that drastic step, here's a brief guide to August's TIBG: Ned Trek 24: Whom Gods Deploy - This episode of Ned Trek is loosely based on the third season classic Star Trek episode, Whom Gods Destroy, the one with Captain (a.k.a. Lord) Garth, the inmate who takes over the space insane asylum and plans on conquering the universe. In our version, the inmate is George W. Bush, former imperial president, who spends his days on an...

Another one of those weeks. Seems like there have been a lot of them just lately. In any case, it was notable that the President spent part of the week up in northern Alaska, getting his picture taken in front of melting glaciers. This represents political jiu-jitsu of positively Clintonian proportions, as it was only last week that Obama's administration gave the nod to Gulf Oil to start drilling in the arctic - a region so remote that even the inadequate remediation services available in places like the Gulf of Mexico are unavailable. Gulf's business plan, I assume, relies on a lot of good luck (as well as a steadily warming climate). Their disaster response plan is probably the same boilerplate bogus document BP used. Right, so ... Barry let Gulf oil start drilling in ocean recently freed up by the effects of burning hydrocarbons, but that's okay, because he renamed Mount McKinley and talked about how we're not moving fast enough on climate change. Yeah, no shit, M...