Archives for May, 2003
Hungry polar bear samples new kind of sub sandwich
A polar bear gnawed on the rudder of a U.S. submarine and then attacked it after the sub surfaced in the ice pack during maneuvers between the North Pole and Alaska this spring, the U.S. Navy reported last week.The submarine Connecticut, a new Seawolf-class sub, had partly surfaced with its sail and rudder sticking through the ice on April 27.
“When an officer looked around outside via the periscope, he noted that his sub was being stalked by a hostile polar bear,” the Navy reported on its news Web site.
In a series of pictures captured on the periscope’s camera, the bear apparently chewed on the rudder, then batted it around. The Navy reported the damage was minor. “It wasn’t designed as a polar bear snack, but that’s how life is sometimes,” the story said.
No word on whether or not Polar Bears will be added into the Axis of Evil.
Olympic bombing suspect captured
Eric Rudolph has been captured by local police in North Carolina. I have watched probably 50 news features on him over the years and I have always thought he committed suicide. I would love to hear his story on how he evaded literally thousands of law enforcement officers, hunters, high tech equipment, and managed to stay alive.
Tory Leadership…
Am watching the PC Party convention. Warren Kinsella was right, the convention does look drab. The best convention to watch was the convention that made Jean Chretien Liberal Party leader. Paul Martin was giving out all this campaign junk, including frisbees. As I watching the interviews on the floor, all these frisbees were reigning down on the people. I don’t know about you but seeing Peter Mansbridge (who looks bored out his mind) ducking frisbees would make this better television. I am keeping the streak alive. I watched everyone of these things since 1983. (I am watching Jim Prentice lying through his teeth to the CBC about a conversation with Scott Brison).
Jays beat Red Sox 13-2
The Toronto Blue Jays sent another message to the American League East elite. Vernon Wells, Greg Myers, Carlos Delgado and Frank Catalanotto each drove in three runs as the Blue Jays tied a club record for most wins in a month with a 13-2 victory Friday night over the Boston Red Sox.
Star Wars Kid
This is the famous Star Wars kid video. The lesson to be learned from all of this is that if you are going to create a video of yourself looking really stupid, don’t post it to the net. The remix is even better.
Salam’s story
The Guardian tracks down Salam Pax.
U.S. ‘negation’ policy in space raises concerns abroad
First the Bush administration wanted Hussein out of Baghdad and now they want their allies out of space.
The nation’s largest intelligence agency by budget and in control of all U.S. spy satellites, NRO is talking openly with the U.S. Air Force Space Command about actively denying the use of space for intelligence purposes to any other nation at any time�not just adversaries, but even longtime allies, according to NRO director Peter Teets.
At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, Teets proposed that U.S. resources from military, civilian and commercial satellites be combined to provide “persistence in total situational awareness, for the benefit of this nation’s war fighters.” If allies don’t like the new paradigm of space dominance, said Air Force secretary James Roche, they’ll just have to learn to accept it. The allies, he told the symposium, will have “no veto power.”
The article goes on to say
Hints of such a policy showed up in the Rumsfeld Commission report of January 2001, which warned of a “space Pearl Harbor” if the United States did not dominate low-earth, geosynchronous and polar orbital planes, as well as all launch facilities and ground stations, to exploit space for battlefield advantage.
The European Union complained in no uncertain terms five years ago that the NRO and National Security Agency were using global electronic-snooping programs like Echelon outside the boundaries of mutual NATO advantage. The European Space Agency chimed in last fall, when the Defense Department tried to bully ESA into changing its design plans for a navigational-satellite system called Galileo.
In the aftermath of the successful Iraq campaign, concern goes much deeper and extends to the heart of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command inside Cheyenne Mountain near here. While Canada is supposed to be an equal member of NORAD, representatives of Canada’s military and civilian establishment are complaining that they are not allowed to use space-based communications and intelligence in the same way the United States can.
“We cannot address the way the U.S. views missile defense and weapons in space without dealing with their insistence on space negation head-on,” said Lawson of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs.
Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Judd Blaisdell, director of the Air Force Space Operations Office, said recently, “We are so dominant in space that I pity a country that would come up against us.”
Is it just me that this scares? I don’t care what kind of devotional literature the President is reading or how often they do Bible studies at the White House, something is seriously wrong with this administration when the need to overwhelm their allies from having space based intelligence happens.
postmoderism is dead - now what
I agree with what he is saying although I think he has too narrow of a view of what postmodernism. I am not sure postmodernism is an age but rather a time of transition from modernism to whatever comes next… in the same ways that first cars were called horseless carriages. The nextworking of society is part of the demise of modernity and the mass center but I am not sure if it is another age as opposed to contributing to the end of an age. He also mentioned 9/11 as the end of postmodernity but I would almost see it as another nail in the coffin of modernity. Interesting article nonetheless.
The…ummm… break from blogging here….
Okay, this break for blogging lasted far shorter then what I imagined it to be. Feel free to tell me how pathetic I am in the comments below. I started thinking this morning why I blog. Fred Peatross posted an essay on why he felt people posted. It really doesn’t cover why I post but I like to think I am not like most people anyways.
One of the things I realized is how much I use this blog as a communication tool to those I know who read it. Today for lunch, some friends of mine were talking about world affairs, politics, church, and theology. What has driven some of that conversation in the past is what has been posted on the blog. I have had this assinine conversation with a church leader a couple of times who “won’t read blogs on principle” that it destroys communication. She is nuts. It drives communication. Today we chatted for a while about this post. What am I supposed to do, print it out and give out copies when we go for coffee? I know around 500 people a day wander in looking for a variety of things but this blog serves and important job for the 20 or so people that I interact with day in and day out.
This blog is also a communication tool for some of the projects I work with. It is read more than Lakeland Church, the Worship Freehouse, and PrairieFusion combined. While we use their sites to communicate important things, this is an easy way to get that message out to people that might not read it.
It is also my online filing cabinet. John G. Diefenbaker, former Prime Minister of Canada, had rows upon rows of filing cabinets to keep his papers straight and a staff to be able to keep track of it. I don’t have a research staff but I do have this place. If ever you are reading something and you go, “what does that have to do with anything?”, it probably is there because I wanted to be able to track it down later.
I am an extrovert. I also think outloud. That is why things get reworked and redirected here. A lot of times they are part of public process looking at theology, life, sports, or work. Maybe that is why I like this space. It is my thoughts in motion.
Finally, I live in a pretty wired house. Broadband connection, WiFi so I can blog on my deck or anywhere in the house, it is pretty easy to put up something here.
There, I finally have RSS.
US plans death camp
THE US has floated plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a death camp, with its own death row and execution chamber.
Prisoners would be tried, convicted and executed without leaving its boundaries, without a jury and without right of appeal, The Mail on Sunday newspaper reported yesterday.
The plans were revealed by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, who is in charge of 680 suspects from 43 countries, including two Australians.
The suspects have been held at Camp Delta on Cuba without charge for 18 months.
General Miller said building a death row was one plan. Another was to have a permanent jail, with possibly an execution chamber.
The Tony Campolo quote about slaying the dragon without becoming the dragon comes to mind.
Tribute to Joe Clark
Okay, this isn’t a post (but we all know it is) but I saw this tribute to Joe Clark and I had to publish it.
Now a word from our sponsers…
So much for the blogging break… but this isn’t a post but an add for the Worship Freehouse.
If you are in the Saskatoon area, I thought I would let you know that the Worship Freehouse is meeting this Sunday night at 8:00 p.m. at the Bassment. More information is on the website. If you are interested in receiving e-mail updates, send an e-mail to ontap@worshipfreehouse.com. Now back to my break.
A Run on the Banks: How "Factory Fishing" Decimated Newfoundland Cod
A century after Cabot, English fishing skippers still reported cod shoals “so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them.” There were six- and seven-foot-long codfish weighing as much as 200 pounds. There were great banks of oysters as large as shoes. At low tide, children were sent to the shore to collect 10-, 15-, even 20-pound lobsters with hand rakes for use as bait or pig feed. Eight- to 12-foot sturgeon choked New England rivers, and salmon packed streams from the Hudson River to Hudson’s Bay. Herring, squid and capelin (a small open-water fish seven inches long) spawning runs were so gigantic they astonished observers for more than four centuries. Today, Newfoundland’s fish are gone and the seas, streams and rivers lie quiet and empty.
It goes on to say this
In 1951, a strange ship flying the British flag arrived on the Grand Banks. It was enormous: 280 feet long and 2,600 gross tons, four times the size of a large side trawler. It’s superstructure, tall funnels and numerous portholes, suggested an ocean-going passenger liner, but its aft deck confirmed it to be a fishing vessel. Gantry masts supported cables, winches, and gear the scale of which nobody had seen before. Its stern was marred by a gigantic chute, a ramp from sea to deck such as whaling ships use to drag aboard the 190-ton carcasses of blue whales. But the ramp was meant not for whales but for equally large nets filled with cod and whatever else happened to be in the water.The Fairtry’s arrival marked the beginning of the end for the Atlantic cod fishery, indeed for many of the world’s fisheries. She was the world’s first factory-freezer trawler, a multi-million-dollar vessel equipped with all the technological breakthroughs of the war. Below deck was an on-board processing plant with automated filleting machines, a fish meal rendering factory and an enormous bank of freezers. She could fish around the clock, seven days a week, for weeks on end, hauling up nets during fierce winter gales that could easily swallow the Statue of Liberty. With radar, sonar, fish-finders and echograms she could pinpoint and capture whole schools of fish with chilling effectiveness.
The ships grew bigger. They eventually reached 8,000 tons, towing nets with openings 3,500-feet in circumference. In an hour they can haul up as much as 200 tons of fish, twice as much as a typical 16th century ship would have caught in an entire season. Re-crewed and supplied by ocean-going tenders, the ships could pursue fish anywhere in the world for months on end without ever visiting a port or even sighting land. Plying international waters, they were outside the jurisdiction of the nations off which they fished. By the 1970s the Soviet Union had 400 factory trawlers on the high seas. Japan had 125, Spain, 75, West Germany, 50, France and Britain, 40, and dozens more were operated by East Bloc nations. They plied the Georges Banks of New England, the hake stocks of South Africa, Alaskan and Baring Sea Pollock, Antarctic krill and, most of all, the northern cod off Newfoundland and Labrador. They were strip-mining the sea.
The catch peaked in 1968 and has been dropping ever since.
In 1977 Canada followed Iceland in unilaterally extending its territorial waters from 12 to 200 miles offshore. Foreign factory trawlers were kicked off the Banks except for a small portion called “the Tail” that lies beyond 200 miles. But by this time the groundfish stocks were so depleted that many factory trawlers had already moved on to strip-mine elsewhere. Still, the decision was greeted with euphoria in Atlantic Canada. Finally the Banks would be used for the benefit of Canadians. But in a remarkable display of shortsightedness, Canada proceeded to build a deep-sea trawler fleet of its own. Foreign fishing had shattered the ecology of the Northwest Atlantic fisheries. The Canadian government proceeded to finish off the survivors.The expansion of the domestic industry created an economic imperative that more fish be caught. “Under-utilized” fish stocks had to be captured to keep processing plants busy. So while the new fleet was under construction, joint ventures were set up with foreign factory trawlers to capture fish on the banks; the trawlers would land part of their catch at Newfoundland fish plants and keep the rest to land at home. The collapse of the Banks was right around the corner.
Then it hit
The shock came in 1988. New modeling techniques and the latest stock survey revealed that many groundfish stocks were on the edge of collapse. The northern cod stock–by far the largest and most important–was in the worst shape of all. Fisheries scientists concluded that quotas had to be more than halved in order to prevent this stock’s collapse. Politicians were appalled; the proposed quotas would have caused economic chaos throughout Eastern Canada. So the politicians compromised what could not be compromised. Quotas were cut by only 10 percent.More frightening data poured in confirming the stock was in serious trouble, that fishermen had been capturing as much as 60 percent of the adult cod every year for several years running. Plants closed and 2,000 people were out of work. Canada released $584 million in emergency assistance. Fishermen tried as hard as they could, but could only catch 122,000 of the 190,000-ton cod quota for 1991. The stock was in free fall.
When the 1992 fish surveys were released, politicians finally realized that regardless of what quotas they set, nature had spoken: there would be no fish to feed the plants and working families of Atlantic Canada. The estimated combined weight of the adult cod population was a mere 1.1 percent of its historic levels of the early 1960s. In 1992 the government finally closed the Banks altogether to allow the stock to recover. But by then it was far too late.
Too Little, Too Late
Even if left alone, the northern cod may never recover. Industrial technology and human greed may have so decimated these hardy fish that they can no longer hold onto their ecological niche. The crash could be irreversible.
It appears the damage has been done…
There is growing evidence that the trawlers may not only have scooped up all the fish but also laid to waste the entire seafloor environment those fish required to survive. In the late 1990s marine scientists began assembling evidence that modern fishing gear causes massive physical and ecological disturbances. The continental shelf–where most ecological and, thus, fishing activity takes place–is not a featureless plain of mud. Rocky outcroppings, boulders, cobbles and pebbles provide “structure” on and around which living communities can thrive. Here, juvenile cod and other fish can hide from predators and find small crustaceans, crabs and other creatures to eat.Modern bottom trawls destroy these structures like gigantic plows. Dragging the bottom for cod or flounder, nets are spread open by a pair of metal “doors” or “boards” weighing tens to thousands of pounds. The bottom of the trawl mouth is a thick cable bearing the weight of 50- to 700-pound steel weights that keep the trawl on the seabed. Many drag tickler chains to scare shrimp or fish off the bottom and into the net. Scallop, oyster and crab dredges consist of steel frames and chain-mesh bags that plow through the seabed to sift out target species. With each pass, trawls and dredges overturn, scrape or sweep away boulders and cobbles, crush or ensnare bottom plants and structure-building animals, and kill or disrupt worms and other animals in the sediment. Most species take months or years to reestablish themselves, some take decades or centuries. None are given that much time.
I posted this with Fusion Publisher and meant to post it back here before I quit blogging. Believe it or not, this article was a major reason why I am stopping posting here for a while. Thomas Homer-Dixon talks about this in the Ingenuity Gap but looks at it from far more angles than just fishing. It gets sadder and more scary.
It’s the readers…
My friend Scott Williams is blogging again. He is smarter, cooler, and a way better pastor and leader than I. Enjoy his blog. I am taken a short break.
Too much stuff to write, read, and think about. See you when I get some stuff off the ground (it will be worth the absense). (will try to post some stuff if it is really good)
Our Cabin Weblog- Recently listened to music
- David Gray – Be Mine October 19, 2008
- David Gray – December October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Knowhere October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Real Love October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Last Boat To America October 19, 2008
- Recently additions to my library
- Messy Faith: Daring to Live by Grace by A. J. Gregory October 28, 2008
- Rediscovering Church: The Story and Vision of Willow Creek Community Church by Lynne Hybels October 26, 2008
- The Teeth of the Tiger, A Novel by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell October 26, 2008
- The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
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