Hammer Mill Days

I don't know, Mitch. It could work, or maybe not. Let's give it a shot, then. Just promise me one thing - no launch tests in the courtyard, okay? Last time you tried a stunt like that the neighbors called in the local SWAT team. It took all of our collective savings to get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out of jail. Oh, hi. Just settling a few details with our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, recently repatriated from the dwarf planet Ceres. Mitch is helping us plan the launch of Big Green's newest venture. Let me give you the background. You've all heard of Bas Lansdorp's Mars One project, no doubt. Lansdorp is inviting volunteers to go on a one-way mission to colonize Mars. He says he can get the whole thing going in time for a 2025 launch date. Well, here at Big Green's abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we way that's pure bullshit. Lansdorp is obviously engaging in gross exaggeration - an exercise in self-aggrandizement, no doubt. 2025 indeed! T...

As you can see, Netanyahu (I won't call him "Bibi", as cute nicknames seem kind of inappropriate for mass murderers - like calling Suharto "Susu", etc.) won re-election again. Predictions of his political demise were somewhat premature. As Ali Abunimah pointed out , he basically pulled the same tactic he used in 1996: wait until the last days of the election, then make a big push for the bigot vote, crying alarms about the Arabs "voting in droves" and how the Israeli center-left is a bunch of surrender monkeys. Works every time, apparently. Likud pulled down 30 seats in the Knesset, considerably more than was predicted and against most of the polling (including exit polls). What's ugly about this is that the man who ordered the killing of more than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza last year, including many children, and destroyed much of what was left of Gaza's already distressed infrastructure, that man has been rewarded by the voters in Israel. A...

He's screaming about "the probe" again. It's like he's the Six Million Dollar man or something. Does anyone have smelling salts? Maybe we should just hit him with one of the leftover hammers. Any other good ideas? Well, as you can see, we have had a house invasion. The perpetrator? None other than our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee. When NASA's Dawn spacecraft started orbiting his adopted home world of Ceres, he became extremely agitated. Smoke began to pour out of his ears and mouth, like VOL, from Star Trek. He simply could not live with the idea of being spied upon by the space agency. What if they stole his ideas? he thought.... then his plan to (dare I say it?) RULE THE WORLD would be scuttled. Shot down by a measly little, tin-pot space robot. THAT MAKES ME SO MAD .... ! Ahem. Sorry - I was channeling Mitch for a moment. Anyway, he denounced the NASA probe as a space invader and started bombarding it with deadly baritold rays. Deadly, that is, f...

The letter sent to Iran's leadership by 47 Republican Senators was both condescending and idiotic. It recalled to mind our erstwhile president George W. Bush, an obvious dumb-ass who had an irritating habit of talking down to you. It's a bit gob-smacking to think of the likes of Tom Cotton schooling Iran's government ministers - most if not all of whom earned degrees at universities in the west - on the American constitution, but that's exactly what he and his colleagues attempted. Based on the negative response on this side of the ocean, more than a few of the signers have backed away kind of rapidly. "I sign a lot of letters," said John McCain. Per Daily Kos, others have suggested this was some kind of big joke . Funny, huh? The mainstream media portray this as a kind of battle royale between the President and Congress, Democrats and Republicans, extreme left and extreme right. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the one-party state we call politic...

Look ... they were bound to find out sooner or later, right? I mean ... you can't commandeer a whole planet ... even a dwarf planet ... without someone taking notice at some stage. Mitch? Mitch, are you still there? Hello? Right, well ... I was just talking to our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee via Skype, and it seems he has a problem. And when Mitch has a problem, frankly, we all have a problem. That's the thing with mad scientists. One day they're inventing something dumb and innocuous, like Marvin (my personal robot assistant). The next they're assembling the elements of some plane-smashing behemoth or a diabolical extreme weather machine (though I think that last one has already been invented by the mad "scientists" we call America's Oil and Natural Gas Industry). As you may recall, we've been wondering what Mitch has been up to for the last couple of years. Last we'd heard he'd gone on an extended mad science bender in Madagascar...

The Affordable Care Act went before the Supreme Court again this week, subject to a suit by a Koch brothers-funded right wing organization. The point of contention this time is some wording in the bill that suggests, in isolation from the rest of the bill, that only States can establish exchanges, thereby calling into question federal subsidies for coverage obtained through the federal exchange. Of course, the bill was structured to allow for the States to opt for having the feds set up an exchange if they choose not to do so. Badly drafted? Perhaps. But any bill the size of the ACA is bound to be full of technical errors, contradictions, etc. Now, technical issues like this have historically been corrected by an act of Congress. This was the case with many major pieces of legislation, such as Medicare. But because our Congress is ideologically driven and dysfunctional in the extreme, this is not even a remote possibility. So it is left to the courts, thanks to the determination of m...

Well, that's finished. Took us long enough. I swear, this takes more effort every time, and here at Big Green, we're built for comfort, not for effort. At least I am. Matt's the one out in subzero temperatures at the crack of dawn, dragging tree limbs to struggling beavers. Me? I write stuff and bang on the piano. And shit. I guess I could blame our slowness on the cold, like everyone else, but hell, we were born into this frozen hellscape, raised in its nurturing embrace, and will likely finish out our days frozen to the ground from whence we rose. In other words, yeah, hell ... it's sure cold outside! So where was I? Oh yeah. The February podcast. Here's what we've got in this installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN: Ned Trek 22: Mitt's Brain. Though there is never a one-to-one relationship between Ned Trek episodes and those of classic Star Trek, this one is based on the ludicrous Season 3 episode called "Spock's Brain". It's as asinine as...