Back Again

posted by Armadillo Joe

Hey, you kraz-ee, kookie Blog-O-Maniacs, Armadillo Joe here again after a long stint away due to assorted life-stuff. Moved to tears and to post on the ol' blog-o-roonie today by the awfulness in The Gulf of Mexico. My lack of faith in the ultimate success of the "top kill" has me in something of a spiral.

I know most of you don't live in huge, crowded cities rich in public transit, that most of you depend on your cars for most or even all of your transportation needs, so I step gently here. One of my favorite websites, theoildrum.com, recently sported on their masthead an anonymous quote from an oil exec:

“Considering the many productive uses of petroleum, burning it for fuel is like burning a Picasso for heat.”

We haven't done a great job in this country over the past generation or more -- at least the entirety of my lifetime or more because I am old enough to remember waiting in the back of my family's 1974 Ford station wagon in gas lines -- of moving our country in a direction that won't ultimately wreck the planet, leaving a charred, polluted, burned-out husk upon which future generations will pick through the ruins to eck out a subsistence-level economy.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm just feeling a tad blue. But the news from the Gulf has been so relentlessly bad for so long, I'm running low on positive outlook chits. Because I have to ask you, all of you, is this:

...or this:

...or this:

...or this:

...or this:

...or this:

...or this:

...or this:

...or this:

...an acceptable price to pay so that we have the luxury of doing this:

...or this:

...or this:

...or this:

...or this:

...or this:

...or this:

...or this: