Category Archives: Commentary

The Big Squeeze

11/25/2010 – 11:27 am

Happy Thanksgiving. The threatened “pat-down” protest at the nation’s airports didn’t materialize yesterday, so if you flew, that’s one thing you have to be thankful for. It’s not surprising, either. Regardless of how steamed you might be to read about full-body scans, I can’t think of anyone who wants to take more time getting through […]

By floegel | Also posted in Civil Liberty | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Vote for Me!

11/18/2010 – 6:56 pm

Now that election season is over and in the brief window before the jockeying for the 2012 presidential begins, I want to take a moment to talk about – elections. (Sorry. If you want to go do something else, you have my permission.) If you stick around, though, you might find it worthwhile, because you […]

By floegel | Tagged , | Comments (0)

The Five-Percent Solution

11/11/2010 – 5:31 pm

Happy Armistice Day, as we used to call it. I had a great uncle in the American trenches at 11:11 a.m. on 11 November 1918. (Although, I wouldn’t “have” him as an uncle for another 42 and a half years.) That was the “war to end all war” and/or “keep the world safe for democracy.” […]

By floegel | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

Now Lie In It

11/4/2010 – 2:29 pm

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 […]

By floegel | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

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 | Also posted in Civil Liberty, 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 | Also posted in 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 | Also posted in Energy, Global Warming | Tagged , , | Comments (0)