Hammer Mill Days

  Okay, here’s the thing. I’m too big in the frame. It goes against the theme of the series, dude. If there’s one thing Big Green doesn’t like, it’s inconsistency. Those are our principles. And if you don’t like them … we have other principles. Oops! Didn’t know anyone was reading this. You just caught me having a little disagreement with Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who is serving as my video producer this month. Nothing serious – just an obscure conceptual question that has vexed us since the beginning of this blog post: how nano is nano? What means this? Allow me to explain. A question of scale We’re doing a little side project called the Nano Concert. Perhaps you’ve heard us nattering about it in previous posts and on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN . You haven’t? DAMN IT! Marvin, did you forget to publish the blog posts again? Why have I been wasting my breath? What’s that? You DID publish them? Uh, okay. Never mind. What was I saying? Ah, ye

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating. As a society, we appear to be stuck in a holding pattern, circling our somewhat fractured collective memory of the Cold War. It seems we long for the illusion of a simple, good guys v. bad guys conflict, and we will stop at nothing to conjure one up again. The echoes of the previous Cold War still reverberate, sometimes in odd and almost laughable ways. For instance, this week my Congressional Rep. Claudia Tenney called Pope Francis a communist . She is, of course, an unreconstructed Trumpist just visible under a faded coat of John Birch Society lacquer. But putting aside retrograde small-fry politicians mired in the failed policies of previous decades, we face a much larger problem. Paging Howard Phillips! Back in the days before the Internet, crazy people could only make their voices heard on radio and direct access cable television. One of those crazy people was the late Howard Phillips , co-founder of the Ameri