Month: November 2005

Whaling And Me

Japan’s fleet sets sail to kill 1,000 whales off Antarctica. Do I care? I think that I do but why?

  • First, the excuse that this is science could only be accepted by those who could support intelligent design as science:

    The fleet sailed on Tuesday from Shimonoseki port for the first year of a “research” programme called JARPA-2. It envisages catching up to 935 minke whales and 10 fin whales during the southern hemisphere summer to “…monitor the Antarctic ecosystem, model competition among whale species… elucidate temporal and spatial changes in stock structure and improve the management procedure for the Antarctic minke whale stocks.”

    There is a high chance that the fleet of scientists will be successful in elucidating spatial changes in stock structure through killing 1,000 whales. That is pretty much a no brainer. High marks, scientists, high marks.

  • I grew up in Atlantic Canada in the anti-sealing times. Big news in 1979 in high school biology. I never bought it. Maybe I should of when the cod soon started to disappear after the sealing stopped. But if you think about where the seals and cod live and what is up river from their continental shelf home…maybe it was not the seals so much as the draino, the liquid plumber, the pharmacuticals and other stuff being flushed down into the great septic system of the eastern North America. Why is the killing of whales any less skewed by those not involved?
  • And it is not the animal rights aspect. I don’t mind the eating of any animal below a primate. I am Scottish and we’ll eat pretty much any thing. We push steaks aside to get to the stewed kidneys. But there is that lack of necessity. Why must half a world be crossed for the acquisition of a bun stuffing? Maybe it is gastronomic hegemony? The desire to have dominion over the world through consuming it all. I know I don’t get that.

So I am not against sealing or hunting with guns or arrows let alone fishing with a rod or a net. I eat meat. It comes from animals. I think about bossy over a pot roast – it’s only right. I’d probably chew on a muktuk or other rarer smaller sea mammal as well given a chance and the right dipping sauce. But when it is a whale and not a big harbour flipper-rat or the bleating little sheep, somehow it is different. It’s the Leviathan.

Have I bought into big media’s spin? Which big media’s spin – the pro or the con? Maybe I have just made sure I learned enough to feel guilt but just enough to learn a little less to feel a lot of guilt or actually do something. I do recall a time from before these little guilts mine and the world’s when I was very young and Dad mentioned that he had performed the burial of the guy or a kid of the guy who has invented the harpoon gun shown above.

CBC’s Freestyle

I listened to the first edition of the new afternoon Radio 2 to 4 show Freestyle as I worked away yesterday and I was not upset at all. New CBC things usually get quite upsetting but this did not.

To be fair, host Kelly Ryan was one of my favorite people in the undergrad gang and I like to hear her brightness mid-afternoon. People will get moany about things like the pop music being played seeing as it is just twenty years since they removed classical music – was it RSVP? – from the afternoons on CBC 1. That’s kinda breakneck whiplashy for Canada.

I hope that Kelly’s news background and interviewing strength will come through more and more especially with their use a technique of no introductions to interviews used on BBC radio which gives a bit of pace. It will find its place.

My Favorite Legal Article

I just came across the searchable, on-line, member’s only archive of the Canadian Bar Review which I immediately whirled into use to find my favorite law journal article of all time “The Early Provincial Constitutions” by J.E.Read from 1948. Classic nerd knowledge fills every page: The content of that ur-document the Letters of Patent for Nova Scotia from 1749, the fact that the British Empire was a unitary state without rival sovereignty, the cite for Re Cape Breton (1846), 5 Moo P.C. 259 confirming the use of Royal prerogative to unify two colonies into one.

Wow. Neato. I’ll be back to you guys later.

Canada The Powerhouse

There are plenty of folk who use blogs – imagine – to blindly criticize our fair land, saying it is a shame that we do not have standing armed forces of 250,000 to rattle our swords now and then, saying it is a shame that we are taxed for sensible public services looking with envy southward where conservatives get to spend but not pay for it, saying that it is a shame we let people actually live as and with whom and how they decide without asking for permission. So it is good to be reminded that Canada is doing very well these days as it has been doing for quite some time. We’ve even it the lowest unemployment rate for 30 years despite the dollar being now about 25% higher in relation to our largest customer compared to where it was about two years ago.

You wonder when some folk would ever be happy.