Apologies for the lack of posting lately. Been on a road trip to a dry climate state - more on that another time.

My trip-mate Edie just couldn't stop talking about the oil disaster at significant intervals along our two-day jaunt through a few states these past few days - maybe it was the effect of retracing the drive she, her daughter, and their dogs took in a small Japanese car in order to run away from another man-made disaster in New Orleans nearly five years ago. ANYway, she just had to see what Obama said to the folks in Grand Isle yesterday, and I checked the NOLA blogpocheh's posts while we were all at it only to find news that Mr. Bean, aka Frodo, aka, the Lord of the Rigs, aka BP CEO Tony Hayward was performing some surgery on his corporation:

It's so sad. We live in a time when the criminal dishonesty of our institutions which leads directly to widespread death and destruction is viewed first and foremost as an opportunity to build a more effective lie. The problem here is not that BP is too British or that their corporate communications have been ineffective. The problem is that they have been criminally negligent and our coast is dying as a result. What kind of people are we who prioritize the maintenance of our bullshit above the preservation of our lives and the world we live them in?

The too-simple answer is that what's happening here is not human behavior at all.

What it reminds me of is something my tree man pal Justin once told me concerning the efficacy of the Sentricon system for handling Formosan termites underground. The reason why it isn't as effective as a certain fungus he uses for sending the li'l wood-eating goobers to kingdom come is that Sentricon's bait works too quickly - the colony sees significant numbers of their comrades dying and it gives the healthy termites a head start on walling themselves off from the affected members of the colony. Hence, the bait doesn't really kill them all off....so it keeps Sentricon system developers and termite control companies that install Sentricon and its bait in business.

So just when we thought the oil disaster was going to tank BP for good - they decided to wall themselves off. It's America's problem now.

I think I'm going to see if some of Justin's termite fungus works on some of these BP execs. Then we'll really know what we're dealing with.