Hammer Mill Days

Run that one again. Yeah, that's right. Hmmmmm .... I forgot about that part. Okay, rewind it and let's hear it from the top. Yep, yep. Heard that before. Oh, hi. Joe of Big Green here. Just listening back to some old tracks. Every time we're in-between projects or waiting for something to happen, the amateur archivist begins to take hold within me and I start pulling out the old stuff. Some of it's on reel to reel, some on cassette, some on DAT, some just written on an old sheet of note paper. When you've been doing something for 30+ years, you have a lot of leave-behinds. While I've been waiting for Matt to finish the latest episode of Ned Trek (now in the works), I thought it might be a good time to back up the masters for Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , our 2013 album about cousin Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, 2012 presidential candidate, and once again a member of the Republican electoral field. Our Roland 2480, which we used to record that al...

The draft agreement with Iran represents a step away from yet another war in the greater Middle East / Southwest Asia region, but it is being presented and discussed squarely within the same imperial context that has defined our relationship with the Islamic Republic for my entire adult life. It is a little hard to see how Obama can inch this country away from its delusions about Iran without departing from them himself, at least in a small way. He has always been an incrementalist when it comes to human progress. Often, as the drones fly, I feel like we're moving incrementally in entirely the wrong direction, but even where I agree that we should have this kind of agreement with Iran, it is with the realization that we are still reaching substantially beyond anything that should be considered our legitimate concern. Before anyone accuses me of it, I am not a fan of the clerical regime in Iran. The Iranian people have, however, been subjected to sustained attack by the United Stat...