Last week, Republicans who hope to be president stood silently by as their constituents cheered for the notion of letting uninsured people die needless deaths.  None of them had the courage to tell the morons in the audience to STFU.

At last night’s Republican debate, similar morons – or perhaps the same morons (the two debates were held 85 miles apart) – booed an American solider serving in Iraq because he asked if the candidates would try to circumvent his ability to serve his country because he is gay.

Whether or not you agree with our country’s wars, this man and thousands like him puts his life on the line every day on our behalf and when he says he wants to keep serving, he is booed by the very people he’s serving and not one – NOT ONE – of these so-called “leaders” will say a word in his defense.

Afterward, former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman called the boos “unfortunate,” providing yet another definition for “too little, too late.”

I am more ashamed of my country today than ever before and that’s going some.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

Fairewind’s principal – nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen – has posted a series of video updates, explaining what is happening inside the crippled reactors and what we can expect next. The news is not encouraging, but there is some small comfort in getting straight answers.

See his updates here.

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 the subsequent weeks of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from a mile beneath the ocean’s surface.

“I’ve been on a lot of rigs,” the Washington Post quoted Mr. Bartlit as saying “and I don’t believe people sit there and say, ‘This is really dangerous, but the guys in London will make more money.’ We don’t see a concrete situation where people made a trade-off of safety for dollars.”

He’s right, no one says, “The guys in London will make more money.” If they’re working on the rig floor, they say, “I’d better get this done cheap. If I don’t the boss will fire me and find someone who will.” If they’re a bit higher up the chain of command, they say, “My bonus and promotion depend on my bringing this project in under budget.”

No one wants to die on a rig or cause the death of others, but many of the automatic alarms and shut-off devices on Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon were shut down. If they had not been, 11 men who are dead might be alive today and the gulf might have been spared a supreme injury.

If cement contractor Halliburton had not been trying to cut corners, why did it authorize the use of cement known to be faulty to (unsuccessfully) seal the well?

If BP was not trying to drill on the cheap, then why – as marine conservationist Rick Steiner points out – did BP use a long string casing in the lower 1,200 feet instead of a casing liner? BP emails obtained by Congress say the decision was made to save time – three days time. Everyone – even Fred Bartlit – agrees, time is money and saving three days with a less substantial long string casing meant saving four and half million dollars.

For goodness sake, if cutting corners in a reckless attempt to send more money to the bottom line – if the managers and engineers on the Deepwater Horizon were doing their level best, to hell with what it costs – if that was NOT the reason for the blowout, then the alternative explanation is even more ominous.

If everyone is doing the very best they can do and no expense is spared and we still have a blowout and oil spill of this magnitude, then the only answer is: shut down offshore drilling, deepwater and shallow. Shut down onshore drilling, too because we are clearly operating beyond our capacity to control our technology.

There are a number of reasons why a guy who sits where I do might want to shut down drilling. (Global warming comes immediately to mind.) But it is precisely BP’s corporate policy of rewarding managers for keeping the costs down that killed 11 men in April and killed 15 men at BP’s Texas City refinery in 2005.

Unless and until that mentality changes, there will be more blasts, more spills and more deaths.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

So I was out early this morning, cutting clusters, hoping to get some juice pressed before the day’s (previously scheduled) activities began. The sun was just clearing the trees and it was already hot, having only gone down to 70 or so last night.

The bees were active, heading out toward the fields of goldenrod by the barge canal and hydrangeas of the neighborhood for pollen. The grape arbor is adjacent to the hives and the bee smell was strong in the air. (It’s the goldenrod pollen. My friend Bill says, “People think it stinks. Unless they happen to like it.”) Adrienne calls the bee smell sweet; I think it’s nutty. Either way, it was heavy and cloying in the close morning air. All the odors of the yard – flowers, vegetables, bees and compost – are heady these days with the final fullness of summer.

Grapes don’t ripen simultaneously, even those in the same cluster, so the idea was to find those bunches with the fewest unripe grapes. The big steel salad bowl was quickly filled and many left hanging, but I had at some point to find an accommodation between nature’s agenda and my own.

The grapes are Concords, for which I have a nostalgic fondness. My grandparents grew Concords, among many other things in their copious gardens, whose wonderful fecundity I did not appreciate as a child. We’ve been eating grapes at the table for a week or so, but I really wanted some juice.

I brought them in the house and pulled 348 grapes from the stems. (Yes, I counted. It soothes the OCD.) My neighbor Margaret gave me a conical strainer with a matching wooden pestle, just like the one my grandmother used to use, also nostalgic and I suppose set me up for what happened when I plunged the point of the pestle into the fruit.

The aroma that rose into my face was something I hadn’t smelled for 40 years. It was the same burst of grape I last enjoyed in my grandparents’ kitchen in Fairport, NY. If someone had been smoking a cheap cigar in the basement, the mood would have been complete.

The skin of the Concord grape is Phoenician purple, the meat bright green. The color of the juice somewhere between pink and purple. The taste is tart and rich and distinctly grape.

That the taste of a grape is grape should go without saying, but a backyard Concord in season is miles away from those bland little bags of water, imported from all ends of the Earth, that are displayed in produce sections year-round.

The flavor of Concords is the flavor grape candy and grape soda once attempted to mimic, before they were bastardized into incoherence. When Homer Simpson tells Lisa, “Purple’s a fruit,” he means Concord grape.

I strained the juice a second time (lots of sediment) and offered the first cup to Adrienne. She lifted it in both hands like a chalice and inspired the bouquet, then took a slight sip.

“Wow. That really brings back memories.” Yes, there was a day before high fructose corn syrup. Concord juice is heady stuff, best cut with the juice of white grapes or some other fruit.

These are the best days of the garden. Tomato salad every night, chile rellenos next week, fresh broccoli and cucumbers. I was recently treated to zucchini cobbler. It was delicious — and you’ve got to use the massive brutes up somehow.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

The dispersant goes by the trade name “Corexit.” It’s supposed to be a pun on the words “corrects it.” Marine conservationist and oil spill expert Rick Steiner says “Corexit” is called “Hidez-It” by insiders because its purpose is not to correct but deceive.

Oil is toxic to marine life. Dispersant is toxic to marine life. Together, their toxicity exceeds the sum of their parts. The people running the spill response for BP are geologists, but what needs protection in the gulf is not geology, it’s biology.

One active ingredient in Corexit is 2-butoxyethanol, which in laboratory tests has been shown to reduce fertility, increase embryo deaths and increase birth defects in animals. Animals are the primary marine inhabitants of the Gulf of Mexico.

Another ingredient is propylene glycol, which you may know as anti-freeze or airplane de-icer. It has high biological oxygen demand, or BOD. This means that as it degrades in the water, it removes oxygen via biological processes. The more propylene glycol in the water, the less oxygen for plankton and fish.

In all, Corexit acts like a surfactant, the same thing that’s in your dish or laundry soap. The oil is more attracted to the surfactant that to the water it’s floating in. The oil forms globules and sinks to the bottom. This is a boon for BP, because it creates less of a photogenic oil slick on the surface of the gulf to be filmed by television news crews.

As we’ve seen in Prince William Sound in the two decades since the Exxon Valdez spill, oil that sinks to the bottom tends to be re-suspended in the water column by storms and with the frequency of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, we’ll see BP’s oil belched back up – with damage to the environment – for generations to come.

Why would anyone in their right mind pour chemicals that poison and suffocate fish into an oil spill that already threatens their lives? I think BP executives – in their long and sorry string of explosions, spills and mishaps – have demonstrated clearly that they are not in their right minds.

I’ll hazard a guess, though. The fewer dispersants you use, the more dead, oily birds and turtles you’ll have washing up on shore. The more dispersants you use, the more dead fish you’ll have – some of which will wash up on shore, many of which will sink to the bottom of the gulf and never be seen again. I imagine the PR department at BP prefers dead fish to dead birds and turtles.

If, when the lawsuits come, the plaintiff attorneys show up in court with plastic bags full of dead, oily sea birds, the jury is likely to award a bigger verdict than if the plaintiffs show up with plastic bags full of dead fish. Fish just aren’t as cute as birds. So I imagine the legal department at BP also prefers dead fish to dead birds.

Of course, what do shore birds eat? Fish and shrimp and other marine life and if one kills a good portion of the marine life it inevitably follows that the species that depend on that marine life for sustenance will also die. Just make sure they don’t get oily doing it.

Twenty-one years after Exxon’s huge spill, 20 of the 30 most affected wildlife species have not yet recovered.

People ask me: “Is BP doing enough?” My answer is that there is no “enough.” The tools we have to respond to oil spills are orders of magnitude too small to combat the damage they do. We can’t fix oil spills; we can only prevent them. And we can only prevent them by not drilling in the ocean.

© Mark Floegel. 2010

If you haven’t clicked the link above, it will take you to a story about the United Nations Environment Program announcing that even if every government takes every greenhouse gas-abating measure proposed to date, the average Earth temperature will rise 6.29 degrees Fahrenheit between 1900-2100.

That’s about twice as much warming as had been previously predicted. That’s enough warming – say the climate scientists we’ve been ignoring for 20 years – to launch runaway feedback loops, meaning that if we let things get that hot, we will have lost the ability to stop the warming from increasing.

If we don’t enact all those proposed measures, it’s predicted temperatures will rise 8.13 degrees F by 2100.

The reason we have yet to see significant effects of global warming in suburban American neighborhoods (believe me, we’re seeing them at the poles) is because of the moderating effect of oceans. It takes a long time to warm the oceans, just as it takes time to heat a pot of water on a stove. Like a pot of water on a stove, however, once the oceans get warm, they heat everything around them and they won’t cool quickly. (In this case, “quickly” means thousands of years.)

Ocean temperatures are beginning to rise, which will cause their waters to expand, glacier and icecap and permafrost melting to accelerate.

In the summer of 2006, NASA scientist James Hansen told us we have 10 years, at the most, to act. Not to think, but to act. All the actions we’ve taken in the last three years have only made the problem worse.

This constitutes the single worst piece of news I’ve ever seen in a newspaper. Why it has not been permanently chiseled on page one is a mystery, but it suggests that we will not take all the greenhouse gas-abating measures that have been proposed.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act, better known as Waxman-Markey, passed the House of Representatives last spring and will soon be taken up by the Senate. What came out of the House was far too weak, far too riddled with giveaways to polluters. And the Senate will make it worse.

© Mark Floegel, 2009

The radio came on with the engine, it sounded like someone giving a campaign speech. I paid more attention to backing around some pine trees than to what was broadcast and I was driving down the road before I realized Ted Kennedy was being eulogized.

I turned the car around and headed back to the cottage. No point going to Hyannis today.

Later, I sat under the pines with a book, breathing the salt air, watching the sunlight play on the surface of a freshwater pond, but Sen. Kennedy kept coming into my mind. I am, after all, in his neighborhood.

He’d been in the upper house of Congress since I was two and a half years old and however one remembers the man, he was a fixed star in the political firmament, his position as unvarying as Sirius. He was the least gifted and most burdened political Kennedy of his generation, but for all his faults, he was dedicated to public service in a way I doubt we shall ever see again.

I hope he finds the repose that always seemed to elude him in life.

Watch both segments of the interview and take note of the good points Jon Stewart makes. There is, however, one point he didn’t make is that Jim Cramer’s network – CNBC – is owned by General Electric, as is NBC. When Mr. Cramer and his colleagues get on the screen and scream “BUY! BUY! BUY!” or “SELL! SELL! SELL!,” there are people at GE who are giving them their screaming orders because they think that manipulating the market via CNBC will help GE’s corporate bottom line.

This notion is not disproved by the fact that GE stock has lost three-quarters of its value since last October, it just shows that the GE stock jocks, like so many of their Wall Street fellows, don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

Jim Cramer was a rich man before he got his own tee vee show. He’s even richer now. That he chooses to act like a buffoon on his show is his choice, but why does he let his bosses at GE destroy his reputation for mere money?

It’s a disease.

Justin, my web guru (whose Green Galoshes is linked down there to the left), sat me a down over a cup of coffee last fall and tried, as he periodically does, to help me improve this page.

He told me to add tags and categories and hyperlinks and I’ve done all that and will continue and I am grateful. It’s not that.

Justin’s main advice, however, was: “Try to post something every day, or a couple times a day.” I did that for a while and the number of views this page gets went up. It makes sense, the more you post, the more tags and categories and hyperlinks, the more likely you are to be run down by someone’s search engine.

I’ll admit, blogging has its upside. Those half-formed thoughts that will never grow into full-on commentaries or bits of ephemera that will be pointless by the time next Thursday rolls around are perfect for blogging.

On the other hand, most half-formed thoughts deserve to die that way. Constantly chattering about the ephemera passing through my mind seems neurotic. A grandfather once advised me never to miss an opportunity to stay quiet. He had a point.

It is nice to have the opportunity to talk out of turn, as I’m doing now, but there’s something about gestating for a week and then trying to bring forth seven or eight hundred coherent words on a single subject. There’s a rhythm to it that works for and against me. I missed a few weeks last month, for the first time in 11 years, and I felt uneasy until I filled in (and fraudulently dated) those gaps.

So if you’re reading this, you’re among the relatively few who will. Hope you like it.

As it transpires, it wasn’t all his fault he got blown out by Ronald Reagan in 1984. Part of the problem was his boneheaded, run off at the mouth vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro.

It only took 48 hours and multiple, abrasive appearances on national tee vee for the Clinton campaign to throw Ms. Ferraro overboard for her repeated racist remarks about Barack Obama.

First Hillary supporter Eliot Spitzer gets caught paying for what Bill used to get for free and now this.

Is the momentum really shifting in Hillary’s direction?