This is a repost for those rudely interupted yesterday.
rich Weighs in on the Great Icelandic Fishing Expedition
Anyone that knows me also is aware of the fact that I ain't no vegetarian. Having said that, it might be construed as a wee bit hypocritical to criticize and appeal for an entire country's castigation based merely on the fact that Icelanders apparently do very much savor a good whale blubber steak from time to time. (As one who assiduously cleaves every last molecule of fat from my pork chop, I can assure you that without ever having tasted whale blubber - I'm not a fan.) But if you like whale blubber - that's alright too. Why, then, does this sound so darned ignominious?
Iceland plans initially to catch[sic] 38 minke whales as part of what it says is scientific research on the impact of a growing whale population on fish stocks vital for the livelihood of Icelandic fishermen.
Oh I get it now. This is only a big science experiment....
Why thirty-eight whales? Why not thirty-six or forty-one? Since no one knows how many Minke whales live in those waters, no scientific quantitative conclusion can possibly be determined of the percentage of the whale population that the thirty-eight culled whales represents. Extrapolating this a bit further one could state emphatically that no scientific conclusions can come from this "experiment" whatsoever. I will bet dollars to doughnuts though, that thirty-eight whales is the total perceived capacity of whatever outfit is processing them in the allotted time period.
A vast majority of Iceland's 290,000 people support whaling, opinion polls show, and Iceland's President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson called the hunt legitimate.
"The whale population...is a consumer of vast quantities of fish stocks. But we don't really know what is the extent of that because we have not been able to do the sufficient research," he told a news conference in Anchorage, Alaska.
I'll explain why this guy Olafur could be GW's cousin in a bit. But first I'm not a man wholly immune to that high-fallutin' science stuff. Let's all indulge shall we? How much does a whale eat? I couldn't find any data for Minkes specifically so we'll take fish-consumption data for an Orca. After all, they're about the same size. Thirty-eight Orcas would consume 3500 tons of fish in a year. Admittedly, that's a lot of fish. The Minke whale, however, is simply a small cog in a much larger eco system to which it is a member. People aren't a part of the ocean's eco system - save, of course, for the negative impact we have on that environment. How much fish did people eat last year? 88 Million Tons. Suddenly, when put in perspective, those bad ole thirty-eight whales don't seem so bad. It's we who have fished 90% of large commercial fish out of the entire freakin' world's oceans.
Back to the crack I made about poor Olafur being a potential Bush cousin. You see, it seems that Minke whales are Baleens. The whales' sum total of fish eaten last year: ZERO.
2:33:53 PM 
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