Oil and Dispersant filled crabs showing up on the Gulf seafood market. BP is playing the jobs card here the same as they do on the Gulf. They're wanting to re-open "extraction" of the oil shale beds near Guffey and Florissant CO.. Park County... near the non-fiction town of Southpark. To do it they'll be basically mining the oil, taking rocks, crushing them and boiling the oil out. Using the really scarce water resources, every drop of which is claimed by people as far east as the Mississippi and all the way to the West Coast, Brownsville, and Mexico. The watersheds from here flow to everyplace lower than here, which means, everyplace in the Western two thirds of the United States. Which was why the Shale Oil enterprises were shut down before they could even get started back in 1974. We've got at least 8 candidates on the ballot who say that cost Colorado jobs. They neglect to mention the jobs which will be destroyed when the ecosystem is destroyed, when more water than is actually available is used for cooking the shale, and the runoff from it is going to be Toxic. BP and Exxon-Mobil are the biggest contractors wanting to do this. The ones who say their little Ooopsie Moments aren't destroying every non-Oil job in the gulf either, the ones Sarah Palin "Stood up to" in Alaska, the ones who the Government of Alaska "negotiated a tough settlement" with over Exxon Valdez, real tough, about a penny on the dollar worth of tough. Spill, baby, Spill. The same kind of "Tough Negotiations" that Tancredo, or Maes, perhaps, would do. Maybe have a bankrupt and imprisoned for life ex-Exxon employee held responsible for the rest of the money. Real tough... tough on the Non-Oil Corporation workers who will be displaced by such a disaster. Speculative? Until late this spring the Oil Spill in the gulf from Deepwater drilling was "speculation". Nothing to see, citizens, keep moving, nothing to see... Oh, and they've got Halliburton involved. Not surprising, Halliburton is the largest Oil Facility construction company in the world. Halliburton which cut loose its subsidiary Industrial Labor Services just before they broke my feet up. Neat little idea, subsidiaries. The CEO of ILS was taking out Social Security employee payments, the FICA tax, but not paying it to Social Security, nor of course the Employer Contribution. And got busted. So rather than the whole corporate umbrella, who were also beneficiaries of the scam, walked away from it unscathed. A very few financial officers of ILS actually did "hard time" -- three years at Club Fed, for their theft. Compare that to comment 15 about a person getting a Life Sentence for a different money fraud, a $750 hot check also perpetrated in Texas. Rich folks get all the breaks because they own the courts and the cops. Just like they own the Colorado judges, prosecutors and cops who will be responsible for deciding their liability when they do an Oopsie-moment in our water
Tag: Fisheries
BP Says “top-kill” worked, but drilling wells right next to it
Supposedly to ease the pressure. How about THIS supposition instead. BP trashed the ocean very thoroughly, the bottom-up killoff of marine life is in progress, the species that are being more than merely decimated provide the food for every other life form. There's an investigation supposedly happening in the area of the well collapse. An investigation BP has stalled for months by "fumbling" around "trying" to stop the oil. Knowing full well that in doing so they were stomping all around the Crime Scene. Which is what it IS. Even cutting out the obvious crime of destroying what looks like the damn how to put this? OK so I'll put it where a Far Right Profit-is-God Money Worshiper like Rush Limbaugh can understand. Economic crime in the theft of Trillions. Put a dollar value on what's going to happen to just the Seafood Industry. The fisheries are trashed and going to get worse. Rush was on the air just before the non-enforcement of existing regulations and cutting even those down to where they wouldn't make a difference... WHINING that regulations to protect some of the species that form the web of life in the sea would limit "Sport Fishing". And screaming like the bitch that he is about how "all those poor Fishing Boat outiftters and Fishing Tour providers were going to be losing money". Where's the concern for them NOW, on the far right? And that's just one small facet of fisheries management. The corals, not pretty rocks on the bottom but the living coral, the organisms that build the reefs. Endangered by a shrimping practice that was destroying the reefs, killing the living coral, and in a chain reaction, was killing off the shrimp. Not So? Read on... One of the processes was to promote the growth of organisms that the coral normally feed on. Some of which are to shrimp what anthrax is to humans. And of course the whole food web. Maybe food web is too complex for a Right Wing so-called "mind" to fathom.<<nautical joke. So we go with their more familiar linear Food Chain. Which goes straight up, never sideways and of course, never down. The part of the "bottom" supposedly magically regenerates itself, and placing one species on the "top" is kind of chauvinistic. Which affected every other aspect of the food linear "chain" including the Sport Fishermen that Rush boo-hooed about so much. Oh, that's right, it's Glenn Beck who does the fake crying. The process is just beginning, the vast majority of the oil is still in the water, combined with chemical dispersants... which are Toxic. Hidden away where most people won't see it. Trillions of dollars later they'll see it. And of course, in the Right wing so-called "mind" nothing that happens in the sea could ever possibly have any effect on the Food Chain web of life on land. According to their screed, events on LAND don't affect life on land. Just ask the bees, bats and frogs before they all
Obama ate a fish who knew Lincoln
Fishermen have always called it the Slimehead fish. It's sorta-scientific name is Darwin's Slimehead. But when bottom-of-the-barrel scraping began for the ocean's remaining fisheries, fishmongers created a market for the never-thought-palatable deep bottom feeder by renaming it the Orange Roughy. That much you've probably heard before. Really, what's in a name? A fish by any other name will smell too. Is there a fish story without hyperbole, that does not smell fishy? The idiom comes from the experience-honed doubt that the fishmonger's catch is not fresh. People know steak is dead cow, so does it matter that Orange Roughy is Slimehead, Monkfish is Goosefish, Rock Salmon is Spiny Dogfish, or Tilapia is Mouthbrooder? Actually Israeli exporters wanted to give Tilapia a biblical makeover, asserting the Tilapia from the Sea of Galilee, should be called St. Peter's Fish, but US regulators intervened. In the Gospel of Matthew 17:27, apostle Peter tells tax collectors where they can go. In more than that many words he tells them to go fish, and from the mouth of the "first fish they catch," they will find the four drachmas he owes them. The FDA didn't buy it either. By the way, if you doubt Wikipedia has Zionist preoccupations, sniff the first paragraph of their entry for Tilapia. Maybe we are about to see whether Wiki momentum can surfeit the vernacular. The US government also intervened when fish wholesalers wanted to rename the Patagonian Toothfish as Chilean Sea Bass. It's not a Bass. And the poor Teethfish, like the Slimehead, are now endangered. Because man's traditional food fishes have become depleted, we're having now to make meals of the dregs. And the populations of these deep sea dwellers have less resiliency than the coastal stocks. In the case of the Toothfish and the Slimehead, it's because they grow very slowly. The Slimehead can grow to be 150 years old. They don't become sexually reproductive until they are 33, and that's not in dogfish years. Fishing operations which harvest entire sea mounts decimate every generation at once, leaving none who can spawn. Would it give you an unsettled feeling to consume something so ancient? If we're talking a pre-Phylloxera wine, it could be a great thing. But a fish that old has been absorbing mercury from the height of the industrial revolution onwards. So there might be a health benefit for showing deference to your fish elders. It recently upset me to learn that with modern agriculture we eat cattle before they're two, when they're barely adolescent. Now I wonder what's too old. We revere elephants and tortoises for their longevity, such ancient beings we don't eat. I'm old enough to remember learning about the old carp in the fountains of Paris, who also lived quite long. French schoolchildren could marvel that some carp still lived who might have glimpsed Napoleon. A Slimehead Orange Roughy caught today could have lived in the time of Lincoln. Certainly those fish drag-netted in the 1970s, when the Orange Roughy exotic star
Somali pirates make black Blackbeards
Gilbert and Sullivan pointed it out: One man's captain of industry is another man's pirate. Which is the pirate depends on who's making the law. The global corporate media is up in arms about the Somali pirates, in actuality a militia mounted by Somalia's fishermen to protect their fisheries from international predators. Elsewhere, illegal commercial fishing ships are considered "pirates." The Somali protectors are called the Central Regional Coast Guard. Elsewhere in the world, when national fisheries are threatened by lawless fishing, privateers can capture illegal fishing ships and earn bounties of approximately one million dollars per ship. What a coincidence that's the figure we're given about the ransoms demanded by the Somali "pirates" who are seizing international ships off their coast. Setting aside of course the opportunistic actions by the Somali renegade entrepreneurs to prey upon ANY international vessel, on the pretext that NONE are licensed in Somali waters, since even the temporary US-backed government there is unlicensed, here's the reason Western warships can't just blow them out of the water. Setting aside too, that even as Somalia is lawless, the waters inside Somali's maritime boarder are sovereign. A foreign navy may declare its helpful intentions, but it has no jurisdiction to order Somalian boaters about. I've seen many varieties of fishermen skiffs. So I puzzled at the uniformity of the pirate raiders in their long white open boats. Have you? Because the pirate enterprise is a uniform flotilla of 100 of such boats. It's how they can tell each other from would be interloping privateers, and it also gives them their cover of legitimacy. Foreign would-be sheriffs can't target the Central Regional Coast Guard because it is basically a militia mounted by the local fishermen, to enforce their claim to their home waters. Fisheries the world over are regulated. Wherever a government is not capable of enforcing its laws, predatory opportunities arise. Since Somalia fell to war and lawlessness, foreign fishing boats have been poaching the Somali coast without limit. Local fishermen complain that the fisheries are being depleted, but there is no authority to save them.