Hammer Mill Days

Sure, you've played that one before. You remember. It's the one about the fascists dropping over for Christmas. Don't remember? Go back and look, dude! Hiya. As you know, we're still shut up in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, working diligently on the next episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN . And when I say "next", I mean the next couple of episodes, each of which is in a different state of non-completion. This is all about Ned Trek, of course ... that time-consuming mashup of space opera crossed with horse-based comedy and political satire. If I recall correctly, we dreamed that concept up on the planet Neptune, but don't quote me. Matt probably pulled it out of Uranus. Either way. So ... the most proximate of the "next" episodes is being edited and finished as we speak (are we speaking?). The second "next" episode hasn't been recorded (or even completely written) yet, but that one's a musical, so we've been ...

The California town of Paradise was wiped out by climate change this week. Now even network weather forecasters are saying that these wild fires that have now claimed 59 lives and counting are fueled in large measure by global warming. When I see the images of this catastrophe on television, it makes me wonder what the national response would be if these homes had been destroyed by a terror bombing or a hijacked plane. No doubt we would move heaven and earth to hold the perpetrators accountable (along with anyone even tangentially associated with them) and to prevent future attacks. What has the federal response been to these fires? Initially, blame the victim. Trump was in an election-related snit and so resorted to parroting his Interior Secretary on the matter. Classy, as always. Thousand Oaks, California - located in one of the wild fire zones - had to deal with three national policy failures in the same week. One was the lack of national gun control legislation and strong enough...