Creature Feature: Le retour de Henri, le chat noir

Avez-vous peut-être soufrir de paralysie auto doute? Regardez ensuite Henri partage ses sentiments intérieurs sur Halloween:
Thank you, Will Braden for your wonderful video series. Oú decouvrez-vous un chat de tuxedo qui lit Camus? Formidable.

Entanglement Tortures Whales

cutting to the bone

Scientists think that 82% of whales living in the crowded North Atlantic between Nova Scotia and and Cape Cod are entangled in fishing gear at some point in their lives. Some manage to free themselves, a few are helped by humans to get free, and the unlucky ones die a death that can be slow and very painful. Call it torture for whales. A study published in Conservation Biology examined 1762 documented deaths and serious injuries in eight large whale species between 1970 and 2009. Forty-three percent of the deaths were caused by entanglement. The problem is well known along the North American coast but the problem is world-wide. A line can take up to four months to work its way through thick whale blubber to the bone. Such an injury will kill a large whale in six months by drowning, starvation, infection, or hemorrhage. Assuming fishing gear will be lost or simply dumped overboard as long as humans eat fish, the question arises: is it morally right to euthanize a whale that cannot be disentangled? Trying to free a thrashing multi-ton whale at sea is dangerous for humans. But if the whale species is critically endangered, like the North Atlantic right whale, who number less than five hundred individuals, euthanizing an individual contributes to the extinction of the species. The suffering is stopped but the end is advanced.

"Noc" attempted human speech

Of course neither euthanasia nor disentanglement fixes the problem. Prevention is the key. One reason prevention is not effective is because individual accountability is lacking for gear that traps a whale. Along the East Coast gillnets and pot fishing appear to be the worse offenders. Current regulations have modified fishing gear in the hopes whales can break free of it or have kept it out of critical areas. What needs to be added is indelible identifying information so that individual fishermen or companies whose gear takes a whale can be held accountable. Equipment modifications and restrictions have been expensive and onerous according to fishermen representatives. The National Marine Fisheries Service and an advisory group are now considering how to limit the amount of vertical rope and the use of sinking ground lines. Labeling gear seems a draconian measure for an industry that already faces great risk for sometimes little reward, but whales species are recovering only slowly despite a global moratorium on whaling largely in effect. Seafood consumers were able to alter the way tuna fishing mangled and killed thousands of dolphins each years.  They could do the same for whales.

Chart of the Week: Two Maps to Win

US Person suggests there are two maps the Obamarama has to pay attention to in the last week before Election Day. One of these the last Occupant ignored and it cost him re-election:

[credit: AP]

The map above is fairly obvious. Obama must hang on to Ohio while a win in fence-sitting Colorado would help him breath easier. The bottom map is also self-explanatory, but as the Charlatan found out, it's political implications are no less important:

US Person does not think it an exaggeration to posit the outcome of this presidential election depends in great part on the size, speed, and efficiency of the federal government's disaster response to a storm rivaling in destructive scope the great 1938 hurricane. Sandy came ashore near Atlantic City, N.J. on Monday evening bringing a tremendous storm surge with it. The President has already declared New York and Massachusetts eligible for federal disaster aid. Hurricane Katrina was a huge natural disaster exacerbated by a federal administration that prided itself on allowing poor people to fend for themselves. The "horror dome" and New Orleans police anarchy were the result of his totally inadequate social philosophy. Does the Currant Occupant need to be reminded that if his administration does another "hell of a job" in the aftermath of this frankenstorm, he will be looking for new digs in Chicago come the New Year? Sandy is an "October surprise" of another kind.

Weekend Edition: UK Badgers Get Reprieve

The British government gave the go-ahead for a badger cull over year ago, but the killing was delayed by the Olympic Games according to officials. Now it appears badgers in the two target areas of Gloucestershire and Somerset will be safe for the rest of this year at least. Planners have realized that it would be impossible to achieve the 70% kill rate for the cull to be considered successful. New estimates of badger populations indicate 5,530 badgers would have to be killed within six weeks. Farmer organizations have asked the government to postpone the cull until the summer of 2013. Conservationists have taken the opportunity to step up their bovine TB vaccination programs. The results so far indicate vaccination is a viable alternative to culling. The head of the RSPCA said the postponement should not be a temporary reprieve since "a cull is no answer to bovine TB."

Virunga Rangers Die Protecting Gorillas

Mai Mai rebels attacked a ranger patrol in Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo on the morning of October 25th killing two rangers and a soldier. Three other soldiers were wounded, one critically. The civil war has brought the battle zone into the Park threatening the safety of the local human population and poaching the 200 endangered mountain gorillas and other forest animals that live within its boundaries. The ambush took place at Mwiga Bay near the fishing village of Vitshumbi on Lake Edward. Virunga is Africa's oldest national park established in 1925 and has been a UNESCO world heritage site since 1979. The Park has set up a fund to assist the widows and orphans of rangers killed in the line of duty. The United States and the EU contributed to starting the fund. One of the rangers killed leaves behind a six month old son and 14 year old daughter, both orphaned since their mother died in childbirth. From the beginning of the civil war in 1996, 130 rangers have been killed on duty protecting the 790 mountain gorillas remaining in the world. Since September the Mikeno sector of the Park has been under rebel control and Park authorities have been prevented from monitoring the gorillas. Chief Warden de Merode asked for donations to support the rangers families.

Toontime: Strange Partners

[credit: Steve Sack, Minneapolis Star-Tribune]

The Commander-in-Chief has an obvious advantage going into a foreign policy debate in which his opponent never commanded anything more than a state militia. So Romney spent a lot of time in the final debate agreeing with the Obamarama. The President's single most important foreign policy accomplishment, if you can call it that, was the execution of America's worst nightmare, Osama Bin Laden, after a decade of war that has alienated most of the Muslum world and sacrificed American morale, if not its civil liberties. His foray into Libya has come back to haunt him with the death of the American ambassador in Benghazi; he has been unable to obtain the support of Russia to end the Syrian Civil War, he has increased the killing of civilians in northern Pakistan by remote control; and his China bashing has done nothing to stop the bleeding of jobs from the American economy. Only against an opponent as disingenuous and inexperienced as Mitt Romney could he appear to be a poised leader of a great nation.  And in a game where content does not matter, appearances are everything.

[Nate Beeler, The Columbus Dispatch]
Wackydoodle sez:  Ya done bombed out their hearts and minds!

The End of the 13th B'ak'tun

Guatemalan Maya people are protesting the commercialization and exploitation of their "long count" calendar by western business and entertainment interests. US Person posted about the 13th B'ak'tun ending on December 21, 2012, the winter solstice. According to popularized interpretations of the Popol Vuh corpus from the western highlands of Guatemala (known through the 18th century manuscript of Father Francisco Ximénez, left) and the Mayan codex Chilam Balam, December 21st is characterized as "doomsday". Modern Mayans object to this characterization, thinking it a distortion of their cultural tradition. Native objections have not stopped the government's plan to cash in on popular expectations by organizing a huge fiesta in Guatemala City where as many as 90,000 are expected to await the predicted end of the "fourth world". A leader of the Guatemalan Maya said all the Mayan time cycle predicts are "big changes on the personal, family and community level so there is harmony and balance between man and nature." Some interpretations of the relevant glyphs at Tortuguero, Mexico indicate the end of the 13 B'ak'tun when the diety B'olon Yorke' ascends to power will occur on December 23rd, not the 21st.  Recently, archeologists discovered astronomical tables on a wall in Xultun, Guatemala which calculate the movements of the moon and other heavenly bodies over 17 B'ak'tuns, hardly consistent with an earlier date for the end of time. Whichever date appeals to your western new age notions, let us hope the modern Mayans are correct because mother Earth is in sore need of more harmony and balance.