Hammer Mill Days

Back to Earth with us, in a manner of speaking. Gravity always brings you home, right? Stupid ass gravity! Oh, well ... where would we be without it? (In space, perhaps.) While we were away on our interstellar trip to nowhere-ville, we dropped another THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast - our annual Holiday Extravaganza, as it were. (And it were ... oh, it were!) If you've listened to it already, then you are among the few who truly understand Christmas cheer, let alone Christmas pride, Christmas joy, and all those other seasonal soap products. (We were sponsored by P&G this year. The really took a gamble!) Anywho, without any further ado, here's what's inside the Holiday podcast: Ned Trek 26: A Very Neddy Christmas. The Ned Trek crew re-enacts Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol with a more modern sensibility. Unprecedented? Certainly not. Nor is it un-presidented. It in fact features cameos by no less than two ex presidents and probably at least one future president.

Here we go headlong into 2016. It feels as if we've already had the year, since pop culture obsesses over the horse-race aspect of elections even if it rarely delves into the substance of what's at issue. Truth be told, the talk shows have been talking about 2016 since 2012, the day after election day. Evidently, it's an eyeball magnet for them, so they'll never stop talking about it, particularly now that we've entered the age of Trump. Good television will always trump (no pun intended) good politics, hands down. So, what are the substantive issues that we should be grappling with in this election year? Same ones as in practically every other year, and you can name them as credibly as I can. Here's my list: Capitalism's Failure. This is an issue that touches on everyone, young and old, working and unemployed or retired, poor and not-so-poor. The internal contradictions of American and, by extension, global capitalism came to a head in the crash of 200