Hammer Mill Days

I tried calling them this morning. What was my response? Well ... have you ever shouted down an abandoned mineshaft? It sounded kind of like that. Except hollower. Less content. Oh, hi. Welcome to the land of the great ideas. I'm Joe Perry (not of Aerosmith) of Big Green, and well ... I am responsible for many of the "great" ideas. Why "great" in quotes? Those are litotes, and I use those when I'm being painfully ironic. Which is to say ... our great ideas are not great at all. In fact, most of our ideas are just plain STUPID. But hey, if we let THAT stop us, we probably wouldn't get out of bed in the afternoon. (Did I say afternoon? I meant ... uh ... morning.) Right, so ... the latest "great" idea was Mars Zero - our answer to Mars One, the private initiative to land a group of humans on Mars by the year 2025. Our first reaction to Mars One was, hell, we've done that already, and dozens of times. Just read our blog, folks. But of cour...

Though you probably didn't hear about it on the evening news or NPR, the group International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (of which Physicians for Social Responsibility is a member) released a report on casualties of the so-called "war on terror" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The toll is conservatively estimated at 1.3 million in total, with 1 million in Iraq killed as a result of our 2003 invasion. Anyone familiar with the figures breezily tossed around by the last two administrations might be surprised by this total. (I recall W. Bush casually offering 30,000, as if guessing the number of marbles in a jar.) Actually, the number is roughly in line with what the Iraq Study Group estimated in 2005-06. No matter - this wasn't worthy of comment, except on Democracy Now! That's not surprising. We can't acknowledge the magnitude of our own crimes, only those of our official enemies. Assad is an execrable mass murderer, right? Sure he is. B...