Hammer Mill Days

Okay, now where does the signature go? Ah, yes - the line which is dotted. Okay, okay. Right, now... where is that dotted line? Sure, sure... on the con tract, sure... Oh, hi blog-o-files (or perhaps merely ultra-patient Big Green -o-files). You're probably thinking you may have stumbled in on some kind of trade negotiation, perhaps the latest upgrade of NAFTA. Not so, though it is coercive, expropriative, and downright nasty, so I can understand the confusion. Yes, indeed... after several days (or was it weeks?) in the back of some grimy delivery van, bound and gagged by belligerent strangers, we arrived at our destination. T'was a strange and lifeless place, cold as the grave, its chalky brick facade crumbling beneath the groaning burden of decades of neglect and abandonment. This was the grim place our captors had intended for us to see when our blindfolds were removed. The abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill - just as I pictured it! I know what you're thinking. What the hell a...

I feel like Rip Van Winkle in reverse; like I've awoken years in the past instead of years in the future. Dubya Bush going from VFW to military academy assembly selling the Iraq war. Democrats hedging their positions, hoping to land on the winning side. Pro-war ad campaigns funded by arch-reactionary swift-boaters. Improbably optimistic National Intelligence Estimates, at least in their highly redacted declassified form. What is this, 2002? Are we starting from scratch yet again? This is the product of our political culture's "ballgame" approach to foreign policy adventures, wherein the central question becomes "will it succeed?" Is this the question we ask when someone commits murder and holds a family hostage? Do we console our consciences with the notion that, well, he did kill that old man and that baby, but at least he's finally got that household under control? (Right - before someone jumps all over my shit, let me make it clear that I don't ...

Mmmbbgh. fffmmmprphhh dblffffmmmbfff. mmfmnfb! Okay, okay... so I'll stop dictating. Awfully hard to make yourself understood with a sweaty bandana tied over your gob. Must... reach.... ENTER... key.... nnghh.... There ! New paragraph. Hello again, Big Green aficionados, and welcome to another installment of Hammer Mill Days, that mentally fractured, unspeakably pointless journal of our travels from nowhere to nowhere fast. As many of you may recall, we were in the process of hitchhiking our way across the placid countryside of upstate New York, towards our adopted homestead a.k.a. the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, when the lot of us were cruelly abducted, bound, gagged, and stuffed into the back of a panel van. That's the bad news. The good news is that I think we're traveling in the right direction... and we're making pretty good time. Now... that ENTER key again... nnnghh... (click!) Yes! As you can well imagine, this has been a bit of a morale-buster, what with ...

The ample-assed "brain" of Dubya, Karl Rove, announced his departure from the White House this week, and the air waves were thick with pundit-wisdom on this supposed genius of the modern political arena. How easily public figures earn such designations. I always think of Henry Kissinger, hailed in his time as a brilliant geostrategist and practitioner of cold war realpolitik, whose ham-fisted policy of stalemate in the middle east contributed very substantially to the outbreak of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war (not to mention the continuing disaster in Israel/Palestine) and whose Nobel Prize-winning Paris Peace Accord was sabotaged by the man himself before the ink was dry. Rove's reputation is similarly inflated, and we often hear about his meticulous district-by-district, precinct-by-precinct analysis, his get out the vote strategies, etc., but honestly - what did the guy really accomplish? He basically lost the 2000 election against Gore, who was about as flat-footed a cand...

Sittin' in a railway station, got a ticket for my destina-shun. Oooooooh. Ah yes, that brings me back. Back to all those lame gigs I played as a twenty something. Damn that sucked! Well, hello, my friends, and welcome to the Big Green saga on the Web, now in its... let's see... eighth year? Good god, man - that's nearly old enough to type . I could practically put this blog to work in an electronics factory in Nogales. (What's Spanish for, "One more electrocution and you're fired"??) The least it could do is key itself in. Work, work, work, that's all I ever do. That and sleep. And run from dinosaurs. Dinosaurs! That's right - the nauseating circumstances of our most recent posting. It seems the saying is true... that one about music soothing the savage beast. (Though it is taking some license to refer to that Dino song as "music", still... the principle applies.) We found that singing the Dino song was just comforting (or perhaps co...

Just call them Fido, because they rolled over again. Yes, friends... our Democratic controlled Congress handed Dubya Bush (mister 28% himself) a bill that in essence rewrites the foreign intelligence surveillance laws that have been in place since just after the Church committee back in the mid-1970s, enabling the Administration's intelligence services to listen in on phone conversation, read e-mails, etc., without a warrant, subject only to the approval of two guys appointed by the president - the attorney general (!) and the Director of National Intelligence. It was triangulation, of course, in the House - conservative and "centrist" Dems voting with Republicans to gain a majority; similar story in the Senate. Liberals voted against it, but the leadership could have scuttled it... and didn't. So there you go. As with the Iraq war supplementals, Congress has signed on to a very destructive and unpopular policy because they're afraid of being terror-baited by a pr...

If this is prehistory, what the hell was yesterday? And if the universe is infinite, where the hell does it end? And if God is both infallible and omnipotent, how come s/he can't make mistakes? Questions, questions, questions ! Oh, how you vex me with your endless inquisitiveness! What was that? I was asking those questions? I ? Hmmm... I do remember muttering something a few moments ago, and my utterances did end in an upward lilt. So perhaps you're right - I guess I am the inquisitor, not the inquisitee. (Inquisi tee ?) My apologies. I'm a bit disoriented, I admit. Driven from my home by a titanic battle of extraterrestrials. Shot into space and dropped into an inhospitable ocean whose evil currents deposited us onto the shore of a strange and foreboding land. Lashed to an oar like a galley slave (hard work, few breaks, but you meet some very interesting people), then winning my freedom at enormous personal cost... only to face the wrath of a gorgon-like creature from the...