Hammer Mill Days

Look, I know it was a hard assignment, but frankly ... you're more cut out for that sort of thing. Why don't you sit and relax for a while. Oh, right ... best stand. The squatters upstairs got a bit louder this week. Of course, it was the fourth of July holiday, so they started shooting off bottle rockets, M-80s, and what sounded like quarter-sticks of dynamite. We sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) up to read them the riot act, and he got his ass handed to him. I mean literally - they removed his ass and handed it to him, then kicked him down the stairs. Not sure who to send next ... maybe anti-Lincoln? Well, with all that going on, I did squeeze in enough time to post another installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN, though it's kind of a clip show, frankly. Some of the material will seem familiar to longtime listeners, some not. What can I tell you? It's a little hard to mix new Ned Trek episodes with gun-happy muleskinners living upstairs, keeping us up all night...

Happy Independence Day, everyone ... and welcome to the next phase of our slide towards authoritarianism. It's a track we've been on for decades, frankly, and our pace has accelerated with the dubious election of Donald Trump (a.k.a. Drumpf) as our president. Trump is taking the concept of the unitary executive, popularized under Bush II, to a whole new level, testing institutional constraints on presidential power, many of which apparently boil down to voluntarily-observed norms of behavior, ethical standards, etc., but very little in the way of black-letter law. Even in the case of explicit legal constraints, this president is demonstrating that there is very little in the way of available recourse to a chief executive that ignores or even violates the law. Who holds the president accountable, particularly if the Senate is a perennial no-show? Now, as Trump prepares for his big, honking, tank-infested fourth of July show in D.C., his administration is contemplating an execu...

Oh, Jesus ... not again. If you don't quiet down, I'm going to call the police! What? Of course they'll come. The cops don't hold a grudge. And besides, I doubt they even remember that little note l left on their cruiser last year. It was a joke , for chrissake. Ah, hello out there. Back to domestic bliss here in the formerly abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. I say "formerly" because in our absence during our Ned Trek Live Springtime Tour Extravaganza 2019 , not only did snapping turtles move into our basement studio, but some even more combative creatures took up residence on the third floor of the mill. I send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) upstairs to find out what the commotion was all about, and he came back with an upside-down pitcher on his head. We then sent him back up there with a bundt cake Anti-Lincoln's aunt Mildred made, but they weren't having it. They threw our peace offering into the courtyard! (It made a crater on impact. Auntie ...

I'm starting this post while watching the first Democratic debate. Too many candidates, of course - I think that's obvious. It's kind of dizzying, frankly. John Delaney wants to double the earned income tax credit ... whoopdee doo, right? What the hell is that fucker doing there? He wants to keep what's working, like ... private health care? What the fuck. This is like some kind of game show. Highlights? Well, on night one, Elizabeth Warren put in a strong performance, but with nine colleagues to compete with on time - and sixty second answers - it's hard to get to a substantive level on any issue. Foreign policy was, as always, a rough spot, with questions about "red lines" and "duty to protect". In my mind, this points to one of the biggest drawbacks of these corporate-sponsored, major network hosted candidate forums. The questions strongly reflect what the mainstream media considers the broadly held political consensus on major issues. Wi...

I thought I told you to pay the bill before we left. Well, if you did, why the hell is it sitting here on the counter? Riddle me that, Batman! WHAT? Well, of course you can't see it. The lights aren't on ... BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T PAY THE BILL. Man god damn, now I have to give lessons on household finance. I ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do one thing, ONE THING, before we set off on our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 , and he screwed it up. I put the electric bill in front of him, hooked a pen into his prehensile claw, and told him to cut a check to National Grid, post haste. Nothing. And now we've come home from our less than triumphant interstellar tour to a dark hammer mill with a leaky roof and a family of turtles living in our studio. And no, they're not subletting. Yes, friends, we are back on terra firma, and none too soon. No, we didn't get to the Small Magellanic Cloud. We kept flying towards it, hoping it would get a li...

Despite the occasional bleat that no one wants war and that we are not seeking conflict in the Gulf, the United States continues to move closer and closer to some kind of clash with Iran. Administration officials are blaming the Iranian government for attacks against tankers owned by nations who still do business with Iran, citing non-existent evidence of sabotage by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard - evidence contradicted by the owners of the Japanese ship that was attacked. Right wing blowhards like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas are advocating for strikes against Iran, and this is treated as a serious policy proposal. Various spokespeople for the administration's ever-emerging policy even raised the possibility of the U.S. providing naval escorts for commercial ships in the Gulf, modeling it on the tanker war phase of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. This last bit fascinated me. It's so unusual for our leaders to even mention the Iran-Iraq war, I suspect largely because w...

Okay, so what are you saying, Mitch? I thought you knew how to drive a space ship. This is a hell of a time to tell me you were just pulling my leg. No, I don 't have any prayer cards on me. What a stupid question! For crying out loud, why ... why does this happen every time we go out on tour? We map out an itinerary, we hire a spacecraft, we commandeer a space commander of some description, we set off with confidence, and then BOOM - everything goes to hell. Before we know it, we're bobbing around uselessly in intergalactic space, light years beyond the outer reaches of the Kuiper Belt, hoping some alien freighter takes pity on us and trains a tractor beam on our pathetic, rusting hull. And I ask myself, is this why I got into this business? Right, so ... now that I got that out of my system. Someone (could be anybody ... but probably was me) suggested that as part of our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 we play this gig in the Small Magellanic Cloud, some...