Bob Braun The Star Ledger

May 3, 2010

Bob Braun
The Star Ledger
One Star Ledger Plaza
Newark, NJ 07102

RE: “The folly of off shore drilling” - Some comments from the quintessential, I dare say the paradigmatic template of a transplanted Jersey Guy, about your column today

Mr. Braun,

I was reading your article about the friendships formed in Newfoundland - the one in Canada, not the one in New Jersey - on September 11, 2001.

I got to your comment on “the folly of off shore drilling”.

There is no sense being a wee bit trite. It is a profoundly teachable moment.

Pay attention. I’ll write slowly.

25% of the gasoline used in this country comes from oil produced in the Gulf of Mexico. I bet that a mush brained modern American Liberal ink stained wretch, someone like you, has a car. The first thing you can do is give it up for 7 days. Do it for the oysters. Do it for the Panhandle red necks even though they all belong to the local Tea Party. I’ll bet they have lots and lots of guns.

The mantra, the siren call, of mass transit never sounded more inviting.

As we approach the summer months I suggest, expanding my “teachable moment”, that the world HQ of the Star Ledger give up A/C. Do it before the government makes you. A government that can force you to buy health insurance can force you to give up A/C. Get some of those hand held fans from the local undertaker.

Further, coal is the fuel that produces the most electricity in this country. Although I was Bayonne born and raised it’s been some time since I looked at the power make up of Public Service Gas & Electric. Thus, I don’t know the percentage of electricity that is consumed to air conditioning. I am certain of one thing.

It ain’t small.

Turn it off. Open the windows. Think of the 29 dead coal miners. Do it for them.

Speaking of windows, the last time I saw the Star Ledger HQ it had more barbed wire around it than Camp Gitmo. Does it still have as much? Did you ever put the proposed moat in? I was never sure whether those security measures were meant to keep people in a la the Berlin Wall or out a la Hadrian’s Wall. Did you have to produce documents, your papers, to get in or to get out or both?

I guess it’s OK in Newark but not in Arizona, right?

After a summer of no A/C, like the NFL training camps, the Star Ledger should ban the use of personal cars for employee commuting. Turn your parking lot into a home for displaced bi-valves and hydro-carboned red fish. They’ll be blackened red fish before they hit the grill. Maybe you can raise tofu bushes for your unicorns to graze on.

By Thanksgiving you’ll be editorializing in favor of each county in New Jersey having its own nuclear reactor.

Speaking of “folly”, France gets 2/3rds of its electricity from nuclear power and, mirabile dictu, Japan gets 3/4ths of its electricity from those wily neutrons. What do they know that we don’t? It rankles my backside a bit that these two countries, one of which we twice saved from the Hun and the other we turned the other one into goo, don’t have to worry about such “folly”. We took the advice of that noted nuclear engineer Jane Fonda on nuclear energy more than 30 years ago, years before she became a model for Bart Simpson. Res ipso loquitur.

The height of “folly” may soon be on us when Cuba begins its off shore drilling program. They have cleverly contracted with China to do the drilling. We have just finished Naval Fleet Week in Fort Lauderdale. Maybe some of those ships can monitor how well the drilling goes.


Kevin Smith



PS – It was lucky that the plane landed in Gander rather than Montreal. 15 years in Florida has convinced me that the word merde was invented for les Quebecois.