Monthly Archives: October 2010

The Lunatic Fringe

10/28/2010 – 12:23 pm

Do you remember the incident, two years ago, as the presidential election campaign was winding down, an old lady at John McCain rally got a hold of the microphone and said she didn’t trust Barack Obama because “he’s an Arab.” Senator McCain pulled the mike away from her and said, “No, ma’am, he’s a decent […]

By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Electoral Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Low Incidence, High Consequence

10/21/2010 – 11:53 am

To date, NASA has launched 132 space shuttle missions. Two – Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 – were catastrophic failures, killing all the astronauts onboard each shuttle. Low incidence, high consequence; it doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it’s bad. So it is with deepwater and/or high pressure oil drilling. Most […]

By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Oceans, Oil | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Broken in Two

10/14/2010 – 12:33 pm

I attended the Gulf Gathering at Weeks Bay, Alabama last week. It was a conference of grassroots groups from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, coming together to try and figure how to put their region together again after the BP oil disaster. This being the gulf, implications from the other recent disaster – […]

By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Energy, Global Warming | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Cleanup Theater

10/7/2010 – 6:37 am

BILOXI, MS – I’m back in the Gulf of Mexico, nearly six months after BP’s Macondo well blew out and spewed 4 million barrels of oil into one of the northern hemisphere’s most fragile and fecund ecosystems. The government and BP will both tell you things are going great. They want this to be over. […]

By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Energy, Oil | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (1)