Later On

Slavery is difficult to eradicate because the slaveowners strongly resist any change in their situation. In the US, you’ll recall, we actually had to have a bloody war to stomp out slavery, and even then to this day many in the South long for those days—whites, of course. That is, they long for those days but deny it’s because of slavery. It’s really because of… what, exactly? The advanced plumbing then available? The conveniences of life in those days?

No, slavery is an evil institution because once it takes root the slaveowners will do anything, including war, to keep owning slaves. Very ugly.

Bought some organic strawberries (conventionally-raised strawberries are pesticide laden—worse than any other fruit or vegetable—and that’s after washing), a piece of halibut, more veggies, etc. I now realize that I must clean and ready everything as soon as I get home. I will be boiling a dozen eggs this afternoon and also poaching some chicken breasts. I first make a stock by simmering carrot, celery, and onion, along with star anise, etc. After half an hour, I remove the veg and poach the chicken, reserving the stock for other cooking (e.g., rice, quinoa, pilaf).

I’m also moving ahead with the kettlebells, but slowly. Today is a real exercise day, so I did some deadlifts and two-arm swings, both with the 20lb kettlebell. (My 1-pood kettlebell has still not arrived.) And I continue to face the wall and do the squat, getting every closer to the floor. Little by little. Later today I’ll do more deadlifts and swings.

Obama’s defense of—and extensions to—the extraordinary Executive powers claimed by the Bush-Cheney Administration is completely indefensible and runs counter to everything he promised in the campaign. (Of course, before he was elected he had already broken his promise to vote against telecom immunity, so we had fair warning of his true beliefs and his total willingness to break promises.)

The NY Times editorial on 6/15:

The Supreme Court’s refusal to consider the claims of Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian who was sent to Syria to be tortured in 2002, was a bitterly disappointing abdication of its duty to hold officials accountable for illegal acts. The Bush administration sent Mr. Arar to outsourced torment, but it was the Obama administration that urged this course of inaction.

In the ignoble history of President George W. Bush’s policies of torture and extraordinary rendition, few cases were as egregious as that of Mr. Arar, a software engineer. He was picked up at Kennedy International Airport by officials acting on incorrect information from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He was sent to Syria, to which the United States had assigned some of its violent interrogation, and was held for almost a year until everyone agreed he was not a terrorist and he was released.

The Bush White House never expressed regret about this horrific case. There was only then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s bland acknowledgement to a House committee in 2007 that it was not “handled as it should have been.” Since he took office, President Obama has refused to fully examine the excesses of his predecessor, but surely this case was a chance to show that those who countenanced torture must pay a price.

In Canada, the government conducted an investigation and found that Mr. Arar had been tortured because of its false information. The commissioner of the police resigned. Canada cleared Mr. Arar of all terror connections, formally apologized and paid him nearly $9.8 million. Mr. Arar had hoped to get a similar apology and damages from the United States government but was rebuffed by the court system.

Amazingly, Mr. Obama’s acting solicitor general, Neal Katyal, urged the Supreme Court not to take the case, arguing in part that the court should not investigate the communications between the United States and other countries because it might damage diplomatic relations and affect national security. It might even raise questions, Mr. Katyal wrote, about “the motives and sincerity of the United States officials who concluded that petitioner could be removed to Syria.”

The government and the courts should indeed raise those questions in hopes of preventing these practices from ever recurring. The Canadian police continue to investigate the matter, even the actions of American officials, though their counterparts here are not even trying.

The Supreme Court’s action was disgraceful, but it had stepped away twice before from cases of torture victims. There is no excuse for the Obama administration’s conduct. It should demonstrate some moral authority by helping Canada’s investigation, apologizing to Mr. Arar and writing him a check.

Slavery may be no longer tolerated in the US (save for economic slavery, in which a company has a community so by the throat that the people must accept the work, however dangerous and ill-paid it is: see the Massey Energy communities), but it’s still a global problem. From the Center for American Progress:

On Monday, the State Department released its 10th annual report on "Trafficking in Persons," which assesses the efforts that 177 countries are undertaking to combat human trafficking, or "modern day slavery." For the first time, the U.S. has been listed as a "suspect nation" in an analysis that experts describe as "candid" and "doesn’t pull any punches." "Human trafficking is not someone else’s problem," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. "Involuntary servitude is not something we think or hope doesn’t exist in our own communities." On a global level, human trafficking is rampant. Time magazine recently reported that "there are more slaves today than at any point in human history." The State Department estimates that the number of people in forced labor, bonded labor, and forced prostitution around the world hovers around 12.3 million. In last year’s report, the State Department warned that the global financial crisis was "feeding both the supply and demand for human trafficking." Though the global economy has improved since 2009, the problem of human trafficking has not diminished.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just stumbled across RoyalShave.com, a shaving vendor in California that I did not previously know about. This is another vendor who carries the Pils razor. Check ‘em out.

A commenter recently was urging me to move to the standard shaving products (multiblade cartridge, shaving goo in a can) before it was too late. I fear that it is already too late, but I can at least put his fears to rest that the shaving products I have will all grow old and die. I think they are likely to outlast me.

I don’t know the age of this plastic bowl of Paislay shaving soap. I would guess, based on the design, that it dates to the 30′s, but that’s a guess. Still, with the help of the Omega silvertip brush it produced a lovely creamy lather with a light fragrance, which led to a very nice three-pass shave indeed with the Gillette NEW (from 1921) bearing a previously used Bolzano blade.

Despite the quality of the shave, which is great, the real appeal for me is the enjoyment I now derive from the shave. I don’t want to return to what it was: a tedious chore that I dreaded and skipped whenever I could. I’ve experienced both enjoyment and dread, and believe you me, enjoyment is better.

Here’s a photo of the lid using available light (from the left) so that you can better make out the lettering. Click images to enlarge:

Watch this one.

I would say that Obama’s record on civil rights is the worst of any president in history.

My Healthy Way session this morning ended the "introductory" part of the program with a a tasting of the various food items that they sell at the office here: Ry Krisp, for example, various fruit spreads (good in yogurt), and others. One in particular was interesting: powdered peanut butter. Almost all the fat is removed, and if you add water to some of the powder and mix: instant peanut butter. To me, tasting there, it tasted exactly like regular peanut butter, but I didn’t do a side-by-side comparison. As The Wife pointed out, having it in powdered form also makes it easy to add—to a Thai-like sauce, for example. They also had a sinfully rich-tasting chocolate frozen dessert, much more intense in flavor than chocolate ice cream but along the same lines. Wonderful stuff. I bought a container for The Wife.

From now on, I just show up without an appointment on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to weigh in, get more of the Healthy Way supplements (mostly B vitamins and vitamin C), and talk about any issues that have cropped up. I like the on-going light supervision: exactly what I need.

On the kettlebell front, a clutch of books and DVDs arrived today, including Kettlebells for Dummies, which looks quite good. I think this may be the one I’ll start with. It’s by Sarah Lurie, an RKC-certified instructor, and I also have a set of DVDs by her.

In the book she highly recommends the use of a Gymboss, a device totally new to me but obviously needed for years. (Long ago, living in Iowa City, I programmed an early IBM computer to beep at intervals that I specified—this is infinitely better.)

Politicians on the Right, particularly in the South, love to preach that our government and our laws are based on the Ten Commandments. Judge Roy Moore of Alabama put a multi-ton granite slab engraved with the Ten Commandments in his courthouse, though he later was forced to remove it by a court decision. (Judge Moore apparently was unfamiliar with the idea of a separation between church and state.) Phil Platt in his blog:

As we ramp up to the mid-term elections in November 2010 — sure to be just a warmup to the insanity that will be the Presidential election in 2012 — you can bet your bottom shekel that we’ll be hearing from a lot of "family values" politicians decrying our lack of morality. That’s de rigueur for any election, but every cycle it seems to get worse.

A lot of these claim that the United States is either a Christian nation — a ridiculous and easily-disprovable notion — or that it was founded on Judeo-Christian principles (the "Judeo" part is a giveaway that these politicians are Leviticans: they seem to keep their noses buried more in the fiery wrath of the Old Testament than in the actually gentle, politically-correct teachings of Jesus… more on this later, promise). Specifically, they claim quite often that our laws are based on the Ten Commandments.

I was thinking about this recently. People seem to accept that our laws are based on the morals of the Old Testament laid out in the Commandments, but as a proper skeptic, I decided to take a look myself. Why not go over the Commandments, said I to myself, and compare them to our actual laws, as well as the Constitution, the legal document framed by the Founding Fathers, and upon which our laws are actually based?

So I did*.

For those of you not familiar with the Bible — which includes many politicians most willing to thump it, it seems — what follows is the relevant passage from Exodus 20 in the King James Version^†. I found it online at the University of Michigan’s Digital Library, which matches other online versions I found. Note: apparently, God said some other stuff interspersed among the Commandments, a sort of legal commentary to stress the aspects He felt important. I have highlighted the actual Commandments below.

Let’s take a look:

[1] And God spake all these words, saying,
[2] I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
[3] Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
[4] Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:
[5] Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
[6] And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
[7] Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
[8] Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
[9] Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:
[10] But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
[11] For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
[12] Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
[13] Thou shalt not kill.
[14] Thou shalt not commit adultery.
[15] Thou shalt not steal.
[16] Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
[17] Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.

So let’s take these one at a time, and see how many points of U.S. law that overlap the Ten Commandments shalt rack up.

---

1) I am the LORD thy God… Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

OK, that’s clear enough. Obviously, God is saying He’s the only one, and all other religions that have other gods, or other versions of The One God, are wrong.

So let’s take a look at the Constitution, specifically the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

Right away, we have a problem. That’s the very first thing laid out in the Bill of Rights, and I mean the very first sentence. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

What this says to me, and is pretty clear about it, is that we cannot make laws saying this god or that god is The God. Not only that, if you want to worship a god, any god, you have the legal right to do so.

Clearly, this very First Right of all Americans is in direct contradiction to the very first Commandment sent down by God. So people saying our laws are based on the Ten Commandments must never have even gotten to the first one of the ten. I guess they got to Exodus 19 and stopped.

Points: 0

Running total: 0 …

Continue reading.

I do not believe that the TSA is set up or staffed to do a good job—their main responsibility seems to be to do "security theater" and hassle passengers whom they take a dislike to. But finally a judge slaps them down. Ed Brayton:

A federal judge from California has delivered a major smackdown to the Obama administration on the subject of laptop searches at the airport when returning from a foreign country without a warrant. The case involves in American citizen returning from South Korea who had his laptop seized and held for six months without a warrant for suspicion of child pornography.

The government argued that they had "reasonable suspicion" to seize the computer because the defendant, while being questioned by DHS agents, "began to show signs of behavioral and physiological indicators, such as perspiring, stuttering when answering questions, and asking why he was being inspected." No kidding? He got nervous when being questioned by federal anti-terrorism agents? He’s obviously guilty!

Oh, and he had condoms and Viagra with him. Is that enough for reasonable suspicion to trigger a search without a warrant? The judge in the case said no:

Because the agents did not find contraband while the laptop was located at the border and, in light of the time and distance that elapsed before the search continued, the court concluded that the search should be analyzed as an extended border search. Given the passage of time between the January and February searches and the fact that the February search was not conduct(ed) at the border, or its functional equivalent, the court concludes that the February search should be analyzed under the extended border search doctrine and must be justified by reasonable suspicion.

When the court examines the totality of the circumstances, including Officer Edwards’ description of the Image, her observations that Hanson appeared nervous, the discovery of the condoms and the male-enhancement pills, and Hanson’s statement that he had been working with children, the court concludes that the government has met its burden to show the February search was supported by reasonable suspicion. Accordingly, Hanson’s motion is DENIED IN PART on this basis…

The government also argues that because Officer Edwards properly seized the laptop, and because the laptop remained in law enforcement custody, she was entitled to conduct a more thorough search at a later time. However, the cases on which the government relies for this argument address the right to conduct a more thorough search of a container as a search incident to a valid arrest, another recognized exception to the warrant requirement… Hanson was not arrested on January 27, 2009, and for that reason the court finds the government’s reliance on the "search incident to a valid arrest" line of cases to be inapposite. Accordingly, because the court concludes that June search required a warrant, and because it is undisputed that the search was conducted without a warrant, Hanson’s motion is GRANTED IN PART on this basis.

Bear in mind also that this was done by DHS agents, not regular law enforcement. Child porn doesn’t have anything to do with terrorism and it shouldn’t have anything to do with DHS. The man may well be guilty of child pornography, but the government cannot conduct searches without probable cause or, in certain circumstances, reasonable suspicion.

The CNET report here includes more info. This aggressive attitude against civil rights seems typical of the Obama Administration.

Situations like this drive me crazy: the guy is trapped until he can prove he is innocent of whatever it is that the FBI imagines. This is not how things are supposed to work. We are letting our terror of terrorism make us nuts. Scott Shane in the NY Times:

As a 26-year-old Muslim American man who spent 18 months in Yemen before heading home to Virginia in early May, Yahya Wehelie caught the attention of the F.B.I. Agents stopped him while he was changing planes in Cairo, told him he was on the no-fly list and questioned him about his contacts with another American in Yemen, one accused of joining Al Qaeda and fatally shooting a hospital guard.

For six weeks, Mr. Wehelie has been in limbo in the Egyptian capital. He and his parents say he has no radical views, despises Al Qaeda and merely wants to get home to complete his education and get a job.

But after many hours of questioning by F.B.I. agents, he remains on the no-fly list. When he offered to fly home handcuffed and flanked by air marshals, Mr. Wehelie said, F.B.I. agents turned him down.

“The lady told me that Columbus sailed the ocean blue a long time ago when there were no planes,” Mr. Wehelie said in a telephone interview from Cairo. “I’m an innocent American in exile, and I have no way to get home.”

Mr. Wehelie’s predicament reflects the aggressive response of American counterterrorism officials to recent close calls with major terrorist plots: last year’s foiled plan to blow up the New York City subway; the failed attempt to take down an airliner headed for Detroit on Dec. 25; and the fizzled car bombing in Times Square on May 1. The case also illustrates the daunting challenge, both for people like Mr. Wehelie and for their F.B.I. questioners, of proving that they pose no security threat.

Accused after the Dec. 25 near-miss of failing to keep the would-be bomber off the plane to Detroit, the government’s Terrorist Screening Center has since doubled the no-fly list to 8,000 names, according to a counterterrorism official who discussed the closely held numbers on the condition that he not be identified…

Continue reading. And, of course, the only way to learn that your name’s on the list is to attempt to fly—the government doesn’t want to tell you in advance, of course, because that would help your planning. And there is no due process at all: you cannot be told the reason your name is there or who put it there, you cannot face your accusers, you are presumed guilty until you can prove your innocence. This is a complete travesty—once again a reminder of the Soviet Union under Stalin. No wonder some on the Right hate the government: the government is often hateful.

Sounds like a Turkish costume, doesn’t it? In fact, it’s a kettlebell exercise, and I thought this would be a good goal: to get myself fit enough that I can do this exercise 10 times in a row. Here’s what it looks like:

Politics leads to strange positions. A story by Mark Arax in Salon:

Some of the most powerful leaders in the American Jewish community have stepped forward in recent days to acknowledge the 1915 Armenian Genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turkey.

On the surface, this would seem unremarkable. As victims of the Holocaust, Jews might be expected to stand beside the Armenians and their tragedy. After all, the massacres and death marches across Anatolia during the fog of World War I became a model for Hitler himself.

But this sudden embrace of the Armenian Genocide actually marks a shameless turnaround for the major American Jewish organizations. For decades, they have helped Turkey cover up its murderous past. Each year, the Israel lobby in the U.S. has played a quiet but pivotal role in pressuring Congress, the State Department and successive presidents to defeat simple congressional resolutions commemorating the 1.5 million Armenian victims.

Genocide denial is not a pretty thing, they now concede, but they did it for Israel. They did it out of gratitude for Turkey being Israel’s one and only Muslim ally.

Now the game has changed. Israel and Turkey are locked in a feud over the Palestine-bound flotilla that was intercepted on the high seas by Israel. Turkey is outraged over the killing of nine of its citizens on board. Israel is outraged that a country with Turkey’s past would dare judge the morality of the Jewish state.

So the Armenian Genocide has become a new weapon in the hands of Israel and its supporters in the U.S., a way to threaten Turkey, a conniver’s get-even: Hey, Turkey, if you want to play nasty with Israel, if you want to lecture us about violations of human rights, we can easily go the other way on the Armenian Genocide. No more walking the halls of Congress to plead your shameful case.

If I sound cynical about all this, maybe I am.

In the spring of 2007, I wrote a story that revealed how genocide denial had become a dirty little pact between Turkey and Israel and its lobby in the U.S.

The story, as it turned out, was my last story at the Los Angeles Times, the only story in my 20-year career that was killed on the eve of publication.

Three years later, I can still hear myself framing its contours to one of our editors in the Washington bureau:

Read the rest of this entry »

This will be entertaining, except for the catastrophe in the Gulf. NY Times story by John Broder:

The chairmen of four of the world’s largest oil companies broke their nearly two-month silence on the major spill in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday and publicly blamed BP for mishandling the well that caused the disaster.

Seeking to insulate their companies from the continuing crisis in the gulf and the political backlash in Washington, the leaders of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell and ConocoPhillips insisted at a Congressional hearing that they would not have made the mistakes that led to the well explosion and the deaths of 11 rig workers on April 20.

“We would not have drilled the well the way they did,” said Rex W. Tillerson, chief executive of Exxon Mobil.

“It certainly appears that not all the standards that we would recommend or that we would employ were in place,” said John S. Watson chairman of Chevron.

“It’s not a well that we would have drilled in that mechanical setup,” said Marvin E. Odum, president of Shell.

The hearing was an opportunity for three dozen members of Congress to vent their frustration at top executives of the world’s largest privately owned oil companies. The occasion was reminiscent of the 1994 hearing before a panel of the same committee — the House Energy and Commerce Committee — at which the chief executives of the major tobacco companies were ritually grilled on the dangers of their products. Top banking executives recently got the same treatment.

The oil company leaders presented a similar tableau on Tuesday — a group of middle-aged, dark-suited executives raising their right hands in preparation for nearly five hours of hostile interrogation.

Democrats generally were seeking confessions of error and expressions of regret. Republicans focused more on the economic impact of the spill and the moratorium on most offshore drilling that President Obama imposed in the aftermath of the disaster. They sought assurances that deepwater drilling could resume safely.

But even some Republicans were moved to join the attack on Lamar McKay, president of BP America and designated scapegoat of the day, who was seated at the witness table with the other executives. Representative Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, told Mr. McKay that he should resign; another Republican, Representative Joseph Cao of Louisiana, said, “In samurai days, we would just give you a knife and ask you to commit hara-kiri.”

Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, chairman of the energy and environment subcommittee that convened the hearing, demanded that Mr. McKay apologize for what Mr. Markey termed the incompetence and deceit that led to consistently low estimates of the size of the spill and the resulting damage.

After weaving for a bit, Mr. McKay said meekly: “We are sorry for everything the Gulf Coast is going through. We are sorry for that and for the spill.” …

Continue reading.

After adjusting slightly for greater comfort:

One more shot:

This morning I used the other Gentlemens Refinery shaving cream, Black Ice, which, as the name suggests, is quick slick. I like its anise fragrance, and I got a good working lather—not the big fluffy kind, but the low-key kind that sticks close to the beard. (The same was true of the other GR shaving cream.) The Emperor 3 did a fine job, and the Pils, still using the Swedish Gillette blade that I loaded several shaves ago, was wonderful. A splash of TOBS Bay Rum and I’m good to ready the apartment for the cleaning ladies.

A correction to an earlier Pils comment: I had written that nowhere on the razor is any mark: no manufacturer name or logo, no country of origin, no patent number, no model number: a tabula rasa so far as identification was concerned. The gentlemen at Razor Emporium kindly pointed out that I am not quite right. There is indeed a manufacturer’s name:

Click to enlarge. So far as I know, Razor Emporium is currently the only US Pils dealer, though some items (the travel brush, for example: a wonderful brush for the traveling guy) are on back-order right now.

On the diet side, things are going swimmingly. Though I may in time tire of it, cooking up tasty dishes to fit a fixed set of daily criteria fun and I’ve had some extremely nice meals. Tonight was a beef stir fry sort of thing:

1 tsp pepper sesame oil
1/2 chopped Vidalia onion
4 crushed/minced garlic cloves
4 oz lean beef (this was the last of a piece of London broil), cut into small strips

Heat the oil in large cast-iron skillet, add onions, and sauté until onions are transparent. Add garlic and beef and continue to sauté, occasional stirring/turning, until beef is close to done. Add:

1 bunch chopped asparagus (these were thin stalks, very young)
1 c cut-up green beans, steamed
1 c cooked kale

Continue to stir and sauté for a few minutes, then add

1/2 c beef broth
dash soy sauce
dash Chinese black vinegar
1 tsp turmeric (anti-inflammatory)

Bring to boil and simmer over high heat, stirring, until liquid evaporates.

That was tasty, with loads of veggies and the occasional bite of beef. I should have added some reconstituted dried mushrooms, come to think of it. Tomorrow.

As I ate it and thought about the sharp increase in food costs expected over the next 2 years—and what they will be when oil hits $200/barrel—and about the increasingly anomalous weather, I contemplated my plate. This sort of meal will soon be the rule: the meat as a condiment. And I bet within a decade young people will be uncomfortable eating with someone having a common meal of today: a big steak, with a baked potato (cheese, sour cream, chives, and bacon, no doubt) and string beans. The enormous cut of meat, sitting out alone on the plate, will seem somewhat obscene.

At any rate, the eating according to rules and the food journaling to prove it (with an independent review: it seems important somehow that someone check up)—my God, this is infantilism: it’s a grade-school format with little write-in workbooks. But, hey! if it works, which it’s doing at a good clip, I’m all for it.

On the exercise front, I realized that I now can give my trainer some guidance: I want to learn kettlebells and the basic kettlebell exercises, and get fit enough so that I can do them. Now we have a goal, a destination, so now the sessions can take a better structure and the assignments become more targeted. But I had to get started without knowing that, figuring that things would show up along the way, as they do.

I saw The Four Feathers the other night. It’s a Technicolor movie, though in my memory it was black and white—and indeed some scenes are lit rather flat. But it was the scenes of pulling the boats along the Nile that I recall being in black and white, along with the scenes in the prison. This effect—my memory of a color movie having it in black and white—has happened with other movies of this same era. Weird.

It’s actually a pretty good movie, though the tool for the big escape is silly: a file to get 50 or 60 men out of shackles and chains? Come on!

I’m now watching Cosi and enjoying it a lot. Very funny and causes some thinking to occur, not a bad thing.

It’s a collaborative video in which every frame is drawn by an individual person, in honor of Johnny Cash. Take a look.

Amazing. Reported at ThinkProgress by Brad Johnson:

BP has rejected the help of thousands of volunteers, many with expert training and experience in handling offshore oil disasters and oil spill cleanup. Yesterday, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd interviewed Don Abrams of OilSpillVolunteers.com, who collected the names of nearly 8,000 volunteers in the first weeks after BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion, and tried repeatedly to contribute their expertise to mitigating this national disaster. Many of the volunteers Abrams had organized have certification in the federal government’s official Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response Standard (HAZWOPER), and were ready and able to train others:

On May 13, we turned over a list of about a hundred highly qualified people to BP, including people with two to three decades of offshore oil experience, people with experience in spill clean ups, people who are HAZWOPER instructors. As of about two days ago, I contacted about half of those people, and none of them have been contacted by BP.

Watch it:

Abrams explained that he has turned over his list to state agencies and local non-profit organizations, after BP failed to respond. The Center for American Progress recommends that the government, not BP, run the volunteer hotlines and cleanup efforts. “People actually just want to be called to service,” Center for American Progress fellow Van Jones said on Sunday. “‘What are we supposed to do, Mr. President? And we will do it.’ That’s what’s missing.”