Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.....
If you’ve seen “The Cove,” then you should be pretty familiar with some of the despicable tactics that Japan uses to create a pro-Japan voting block at the International Whaling Commission. In the film, the producers outline how Japan essentially bribes 3rd world and developing countries into joining the IWC and voting with Japan to pass or to block certain measures.
Well, Japan’s latest recruit is the Republic of Ghana, which recently became the 86th voting member of the IWC.
A total of 17 developing African nations have joined the IWC since 2001. These nations frequently support Japan’s laughable (at best) assertion that declining fish stock in the Earth’s oceans is due to the fact that too many whales and dolphins are eating all the fish.
Members of the opposition government in Australia are urging environment minister Peter Garrett to form an international coalition that will act against Japan under the International Law of the Sea. But for now, Garrett has offered to meet with Ghana and the other African nations to outline Australia’s position that the IWC can be reformed into a better conservation body.
This is a picture of Herman Melville, not Zach Galifianakis.
This Saturday, August 1st, would’ve been Herman Melville‘s 190th Birthday. Still don’t know quite yet what you’re doing to celebrate? Well, you’re in luck, because Margaret from Power Moby Dick has posted a great “Dickmas” activities list on the Sea Fever Blog.
For example, you could re-create an authentic meal (“‘beef’ of questionable origin and the alcoholic brew called flip, but “indestructible” dumplings and bread containing “fresh fare”—that is to say, bugs”).
Or, you could attend many whaling- or Melville-related activities, including a lecture at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, a Moby-Dick-a-thon at the Mystic Seaport Museum, an ice cream social at the house where Melville wrote Moby Dick, and an outdoor reading of Moby Dick on Staten Island (from a group called OutLOUD).
I know what I’m doing…and let’s just say I won’t be going to Staten Island, because I’ve lived in NYC for like a decade, and I’ve only been to Staten Island to either start the marathon or to eat at the Old Country Buffet.
A Greenpeace inflatable boat tries to prevent Japanese whaling fleet's factory ship Nisshin Maru from refuelling from the supply vessel Oriental Bluebird IMO number: 7818078 in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. (C) Greenpeace/Rezac 2008
It’s good to see the One World Government earning its keep. In a somewhat ironic development, the United Nations International Maritime Organization has approved measures aimed at cruise ship safety that would likely keep the Japanese factory whaling ship Nisshin Maru out of Antarctic waters.
The new rules would ban the ships heavy fuel oil, its single hull construction, and the way it dumps offal at sea. From 2005-2006, the Nisshin Maru dumped OVER TWO THOUSAND TONS of whale bones, blood and body parts into the ocean.
Some believe that the costs associated with complying to these rules are so high that they could actually keep Japan from “research” whaling for the first time in two decades.
Director of the Institute for Cetacean Research, Dr. Hiroshi Hatanaka, defends research whaling, saying that “birthing and mortality rates can only be obtained through lethal research and the number of whales taken in our research program is the smallest required to obtaining statistically valid information.” But he’s full of shit. Most anti-whaling countries and non-idiots believe that the ICR is just a front for illegal commercial whaling.
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