Friday, September 21, 2007

In Other News

THE SURGE, as described by Gen. Petraeus, has worked so well at suppressing violence in Bagdhad that the civilian overlords administering Iraq are now banned from leaving their fortress, known as the Green Zone. This even though it appears that the bastion of the Green Zone has been built with such poor materials that it's battlements won't withstand even the modest explosive power of the handmade weapons (and the U.S. supplied weapons that have been sold to the insurgents) being used to attack it. Meanwhile, the civilian guard corps known as Blackwater has been banned from operating in the country by the increasingly truculent puppets of the Iraqi government, allegedly for shooting several civilians. This has come as a shock to the U.S. State Department and the DOD, seeing as how Blackwater has been shooting civilians (aka Ragheads) for years now. It's come to be regarded as one of the perks of employment at Blackwater; you can kill and get away with it. Protected by the "Status of Forces Agreement" negotiated between the U.S. State Department and, umm, well, Sate Department employee L. Paul Bremer III, the Supremo-In-Charge of promulgating the laws of the Free and Democratic Nation of Iraq immediately after the occupation commenced.
A new Modest Proposal. It's a given that the soon-to-be unemployed Blackwater soldiers will be hired by Blackwater's replacement, and the Green Zone will have to be renamed in acknowledgement of the fact that nothing green remains in Bagdhad - how about replacing Blackwater with Greenwater, and the Green Zone with the Black Zone, thus saving a lot of money on new letters. Simply swap colors! Nobody will be fooled except George W. Bush and Condi Rice, but they're the ones that count, after all.
All in all, I think things are looking up, don't you?

Saturday, September 15, 2007

It Says In The Bible

Do not pray in public as the pharisees do, but pray in private (Matthew 6:1-6)?


Pharisee-In-Chief George W. Bush at prayer


Praying that he'll get credit for "Bringing The Troops Home" perhaps? Like a schoolyard bully hoping to get a student-of-the-month award because he stops stealing the other kid's lunch money? Only difference is, this man deals in death, not pocket money.

A Flash of Hindsight

This has to be the

The Biggest D'OH of The Twenty-First Century.

Or, perhaps, any century. Someone actually measured the actual nutitional value of the latest-and-greatest crops produced by the Green Revolution, and discovered Oh My! that the nutritional value was less per unit weight than those old fashioned plants from the days of yesteryear. Crop Yields Expand, but Nutrition Is Left Behind. Now, I never think of things like this, until somebody else points it out. I'm not very inquisitive, I guess. But, this kind of thing seems so obvious in hindsight, I'm shocked! shocked!, that it never occurred to me that this would be the case.
Question: How do you make something bigger, faster?
Answer: Simplify the process.
Question: How Do You Do That?
Answer: Throw out the complex steps in the process.


It's the Mad Man Muntz industrial method. For those (many I imagine) who don't remember, Earl Muntz (Motto: "I WOULD GIVE 'EM AWAY, BUT MY WIFE WON'T LET ME--SHE'S CRAZY!") Mad Man Muntz Bio. Muntz was a marketeer who created his own products. Like Ron Popeil, on steroids. If you can imagine such a thing. Among other Muntz'iana was the Muntz TV. It was the original cheap TeeVee. How did he do it? Simple. He threw out all those unnecessary circuits, like the V.Hold and the H.Hold (If you don't remember those controls, you're on your own now. Let me recommend Wikipedia to you). Simple. Inexpensive. Easy to make. Everything was fine. Until...
Until a Pigeon pooped on the antenna. Or flew past it. Or, well, pretty much any kiind of unhappy meteorological event occurred. Then the teevee became unwatchable. Didn't have enough vitamins in it's circuitry, so to speak.

Now, I kind of wonder; are these missing trace compounds perhaps an explanation (or partial explanation) of the highly publicized Obesity Epidemic? It's pretty well understood that there's a kind of mental trigger that is supposed to kick in when you've eaten enough food that says: HEY! ENOUGH! Could it be that the trigger isn't reset by volume, or weight, or calories, but by some trace compound(s)? If so, then, in addition to my earlier prescription for preventing obesity: Walk, Don't Drive; there's another way to avoid excess weight. Eat Good Food. If you can find it, that is.
Coming soon:

Energy: Part 3

- which may (or may not) include yet a third way to avoid obesity. Probably Energy: Part 3 will come after Energy: Part 2; but nothing is certain in these uncertain times.

Saturday, September 01, 2007

Swimming In Circles

This is a review of Swimming in Circles: Aquaculture and the End of Wild Oceans by Paul Molyneaux.
I cropped it from http://www.orionmagazine.org; which looks like an excellent magazine for an occasional browse. The particular review resonates with me because I too tried to make a living from the sea, but failed. Not entirely because of overfishing and fisheries degradation; but that certainly didn't help matters any. Anyway, here goes:

Swimming in Circles
Aquaculture and the End of Wild Oceans
by Paul Molyneaux

reviewed by Rebecca Goldburg
Thunder's Mouth Press, 2007. $15.95, 304 pages.

Review published in the May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine

Eighty percent of seafood consumed in the United States is now imported from all over the globe. The crab in “Maryland” crab cakes may come from Indonesia, “Cajun” shrimp from Thailand, “Caribbean” mahi-mahi from Ecuador. Almost half the seafood consumed globally is now from fish farms, or aquaculture, including all or most of the supply of such U.S. consumer favorites as shrimp, salmon, tilapia, and catfish. Acknowledging that the vast majority of our meat and poultry now come from farms, many experts ask, why should fish be any diffrent? In Swimming in Circles, Paul Molyneaux explores this very question.

As a native of working-class eastern Maine, Molyneaux paints a personal portrait of aquaculture, starting with his truck-driving job. Leaving the Maine-Canada border at midnight, Molyneaux rushes an overweight truckload of farmed salmon over icy roads to Logan International Airport in Boston at eighty miles per hour. Receiving only $120 for fourteen hours of driving, he does not have enough funds to bribe the airport stevedore, and unloads the truck himself. Like others in eastern Maine in the late ‘80s, Molyneaux expected the local aquaculture industry to grow. It did at first, but its growth ultimately was curtailed by salmon disease, controversy over environmental impacts, and low-cost farmed-salmon imports from Chile and elsewhere.

Molyneax goes on to detail the explosive growth of shrimp farms along the Pacific coast of Mexico. Following a law allowing privatization, many members of Mexican ejidos, or fishing collectives, sell their coastal land for the development of shrimp farms. But the shrimp gold rush proves ephemeral for many. The spread of virulent shrimp diseases closes farms, and coastal residents are left to seek jobs picking chilies, or in maquiladoras along the U.S.-Mexico border. The parallels between Maine and Mexico are inescapable. And yet Molyneaux describes a well-intentioned United Nations fisheries officer who pursues shrimp-farm development as a means to spur income growth in poor countries. One aquaculture “techno-optimist” even invokes Manifest Destiny as a reason for expanding fish farms in ocean waters.

Molyneaux also chronicles his brief career in Maine’s final “virgin” fishery, sea urchins. He makes a reasonable living catching urchins from a small hand-rowed dory. But other fishermen invest in bigger boats and bigger engines, which require a concomitantly bigger catch to pay for their equipment. When political pressure from fishermen stops the government from placing adequate limits on the urchin catch, the fishery spirals downward in less than a decade. Wild fisheries around the world have experienced the same cycle of decline; fishermen invest in technology that allows them to catch more fish, leading to overexploitation.

Given this troubling background, readers cannot help but ask themselves about the future of fisheries in a global economy. Some organizations, such as Environmental Defense (where I work), are pursuing a range of strategies to change the economic rules of the game. For example, allocating to fishermen a fixed percentage of the total allowable annual catch set by fishery regulators provides them with an incentive to conserve. Such “catch share” programs were recently made possible in U.S. waters by fisheries legislation passed by Congress in December 2006. Similarly, working with corporate seafood purchasers to establish policies that favor seafood farmed using environmentally preferable methods creates an economic incentive for better aquacultural practices. Although such initiatives are not discussed in Molyneaux’s book, they have resulted in a smattering of shrimp farms operated in a relatively environmentally responsible manner.

It is no surprise that Swimming in Circles is ultimately about current economic systems and globalization. What do these forces portend for the future health of the oceans and for the future livelihoods of coastal people who are too often dispossessed? Molyneaux asks a number of provocative and sometimes disturbing questions, many of them applicable to a wide range of human endeavors besides seafood production. But it is his vignettes, from Maine, Mexico, and elsewhere, that ultimately make this book a rewarding read.

Rebecca Goldburg is a senior scientist at Environmental Defense.