Author Archives: floegel

Ask a Stupid Question

The presidential commission on the BP oil spill seems to be fulfilling the task of all such blue-ribbon commissions: ask the wrong questions, draw the wrong conclusions. The commission’s general counsel, Fred Bartlit, burst across the media Monday with his claim that he could find no cost cutting leading to the April 20 blowout and […]

Now Lie In It

I’m so glad the election is over; I can only imagine how bad it must have been for people who have tee vee. There were surprises, but every permutation of the race was called by some pundit or other – it’s a variation on the hundred monkeys theory and not that far off, either. (You […]

The Lunatic Fringe

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 […]

Low Incidence, High Consequence

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 […]

Broken in Two

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 – […]

Cleanup Theater

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. […]

A Pointless Waste of Time

The old canards just wear new clothes. “Sure, I have a tee vee, but I don’t watch it much. Public television, educational shows, really.” (Translation: “American Idol, The Biggest Loser, Glee, The Office, for starters.”) “The cell phone – God, I hate it. But it’s good to have in case of emergencies.” (“I’ve never had […]