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...

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...

  Well, blown me down. I appear to be talking like a pirate today. Why? Damned if I know. Maybe it’s the weather. Or maybe it’s that scurvy crew who’s planning to make off with my booty. (That’s treasure , by the way, not some part of my anatomy). Well, as you know, Big Green has never been the best pirate ship on the high seas. We have scuttled very few corsairs over our time, whatever the hell THAT means. I guess what I’m saying is that, well, we are somewhat remuneratively challenged. In other words …. we are a freaking financial flop, full stop. (Take that , full stop twitter bot !) A balance lower than whale shit There was a time in our early years when we sought some advice on how to manage our finances. We were putting the cart before the horse, in a sense, as we didn’t HAVE any finances at the time. But like most bands, we expected riches to fall from the sky. Our fear was that, if such riches came in the form of gold or silver pieces, we might be...

There’s a real sense of frustration in center-left circles in the United States. It’s understandable why. The president has proposed a massive bill that will fund a host of badly needed programs. These are priorities the progressive wing of the party has long championed, so in that respect alone, the very fact of this reconciliation bill is a kind of victory. Now passage of this landmark legislation depends on approval by a 50-50 Senate, which means somehow convincing the likes of Joe Manchin and Kirsten Synema to vote for it. It is aggravating to watch two self-aggrandizing senators block a bill that has the support of a vast majority of Americans. But that aggravation is nothing new. And I think, despite the drawbacks, we have come a long way over the decades. The majority that wasn’t It’s best to remember that we’ve been in worse places before. Back in January 2009, when the financial crisis was in full swing, the Democrats had just sworn-in huge majorities i...

  Yep, they just keep rolling in. That’s what Mitch tells me, anyhow. We’re rich, baby, rich. Unless, of course, our mad science advisor is lying to us. For what reason? Madness has no reason, captain. But it can have a goal. Well, THAT got weird quick. No matter. Just living the dream here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s adopted home. Now that we’ve started performing again, at least in the digital space, we’re finding some small reason to celebrate. Not that we don’t have cheerful moments from time to time. We’re Big Green, after all, not Big Blue. That’s a whole different thing. Chasing the residuals Anyway, so we launched this nano solo concert featuring yours truly , Joe of Big Green. And, of course, we assumed that the residuals would start rolling in like oranges on a down ramp. Au contraire, mon frer! Not a farthing found its way to us, not a sausage. We shook the YouTube machine upside-down a few times, but it was no use. Now,...

The press constantly talks about how much the reconciliation plan currently under consideration in congress might cost. Of course, they know what the limit is, since the reconciliation process requires Congress to set one – it’s $3.5 trillion in spending. This is without consideration of the pay-fors, namely tax increases, savings on prescriptions drugs through national purchasing, etc. More importantly, they characterize this high-end number as impossibly large. In fact, Meghan McCain on Meet The Press even inflated the number by $1.5 trillion, and Chuck Todd (a.k.a. Fuck Wad) didn’t seem to notice. So there’s no upper limit on exaggeration. But WTF – is $3.5 trillion really that much when you’re talking about a ten-year plan? Lavish military spending Look at the Defense Authorization Act the House just passed 316-113. It is $768 billion for one year . If you did the same thing with military spending as we routinely do with domestic spending, we would be talki...

  What are we calling it? A mini concert? No, that’s too diminutive. A midi concert? Nah … that sounds like I’m running everything with a sequencer. How about a nano-concert? After all, Anti-Lincoln loves peanut butter and nano sandwiches. That’s as good a reason as any. Well, as usual, your friends in Big Green are putting the cart before the horse. in fact, we’ve gone so far as to actually put the horse in the cart and start pulling the cart around with our teeth. We’re giving him a fun fun horsey ride, only now we’re all going to need orthodontic care and neck braces. But I digress. What I’m really trying to say (and failing miserably) is that our September THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast includes a solo performance of some six Big Green songs, and instead of coming up with a snappy name for that performance, we just dropped it into the grand pachinko machine known as the internet and left it for you, our listeners, to decide what the hell is going on. So, w...