Looks like whaling is making a comeback

I can't even be sarcastic about this one, it's just so fucked and saddening. We are going to need another Rod Coronado, and Sea Shepherd is going to need way more fucking money. Fuck these people. Fuck. Dirty, piece of shit humanity. I have no respect. At least Australia's trying to do something about it. They are pretty much the only country telling these people (Japan, Norway, Iceland) to go fuck themselves. Indignant assholes.

Here's an article about what's going on at the moment.

A fragile plan to resolve the global feud on whaling is coming under attack from all sides, with Australia seeking more concessions from whalers and Japan vowing never to end its hunt completely...

The plan would let Japan, Norway and Iceland hunt the ocean giants openly despite a 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling. In return, whaling nations would agree to reduce their catch "significantly" over 10 years...

But Japan and Australia, whose relations have been stained over Tokyo's annual whaling missions in the Antarctic Ocean, remained deeply at odds.

Japan, which says whaling is part of its culture, said it had been seeking a compromise despite "extremely difficult domestic coordination" and deplored that other nations sought an eventual end to whaling...

But Australia said the draft plan offered nothing from whaling nations.

"The draft 10-year compromise falls well short of a result that Australia could accept," wrote its commissioner to the IWC, Donna Petrachenko.

"To date there has been no tangible engagement from whaling nations to define 'significant reductions'" in their catch, she said.

This is so profoundly troubling. Lately, I haven't been able to help but feeling that pretty much everything is getting worse, that I am/we are living through a serious period of human decline on the way to the bottom, much more rapid that anything seen before, and this only serves to confirm it. Talk about a fucking step backwards. We're going from a whaling ban to "regulated" whaling. WHAT THE FUCK. But only for ten years, and then they'll stop. Except Japan says right now that it won't ever stop.

Do you know why? If you've read this far, yes, you do. They say it's part of their culture. FUCK YOUR CULTURE. As though any piece of any culture is immutable or necessarily good. Racism is a part of American culture. So is rape. So was slavery. So was women staying home and not being able to vote. Let's bring all those back, just for the fuck of it. It was part of American culture, so it must be good. It's culture, after all. It will be great. We'll have so much fucking culture that we won't know what to do. Maybe we'll choke on it. If only.

Yeah, so anyway, other governments are foaming at their filthy mouths to start their own whaling programs, like South Korea:

South Korea was unusually vocal in its comments, saying it "strongly" opposed language that would restrict whaling to those nations that currently catch the ocean giants.

"The draft is unfair and unduly restricts (countries') rights to sustainable use of whale resources without reasonable grounds," it said.

South Korea officially does not allow whaling. But whale meat is sold legally in South Korea if the mammals are accidentally caught in fishing nets, in what environmentalists say is an easily exploitable loophole.

"South Korea's position is a clear indication that this is a slippery slope," said Phil Kline, senior oceans campaigner for Greenpeace USA.

"If you restart commercial whaling, you know that others are going to be waiting in line," he said.

I wish there were an actual line. Cause then someone could do a drive-by on it.

And of course, that line would be leading to an office (which would be amenable to fire), which would be staffed, at least in part, by the wonderful government of Iceland, where I'm sure whaling is part of their "culture" too. Their bankrupt, penniless, produce-nothing fucking government is just so angry that anyone try to tell them that they cannot sell the butchered pieces of stolen whale lives abroad. They aren't satisfied with being able to murder and keep the bounty domestic. No, they want to try to dig themselves out of their massive, self-made financial greed hole with whale bones.

Read as one of them blames everyone else for Iceland's potentially unrestrained whaling:

“If US authorities won’t budge on this issue it is clear that we cannot reach an agreement and, if so, we will declare that they are responsible for it,” Tómas H. Heidar, Iceland’s main representative on the IWC, told Morgunbladid.

Yes, of course, it makes perfect sense. Everyone knows that Icelanders have a genetic predisposition to kill whales, and that it is patently unfair to hold them accountable for it in any way. We have to coddle them and be gentle. Arrogant fucks. What will they do when they've killed all the whales? Be broke again? Good. I hope you all fucking starve and watch your children suffer.

Fuck anyone who supports this, in any way, for any reason.

Obviously bad ideas

Man, so flights in/out/around Europe have basically been grounded since Wednesday, due to a massive ash cloud taking up about 20,000 vertical feet or so of airspace over most of the continent. The idea is that the ash will fuck up jet engines and cause them to stall out. It turns out, though, that business is much smarter than science. Who needs knowledge when you have/need money? Not people running airlines, that's for sure:

Several major airlines safely flew test flights without passengers over Europe on Sunday despite official warnings about the dangers of a volcanic ash plume, fueling a corporate push to end an economically devastating ban on commercial air traffic...

The announcement prompted some airline officials to wonder whether authorities had overreacted to concerns that the tiny particles of volcanic ash could jam up the engines of passenger jets. The possibility that the ash had thinned or dispersed over parts of Europe heightened pressure from airline officials losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day to end a flight stoppage that has thrown global travel into chaos and left millions stranded far from home.

Here we can see an excellent example of (I am about to hijack a phrase from Bad Religion and insert my own concept into it) the voracious march of capital. This is obviously a fucking dangerous situation, and the people running these companies are plainly declaring their will to chew up bodies in their relentless pursuit of money.

I don't really understand how the airline companies could spin this one. What could they possibly say, that the aviation authorities across the continent are too cautious? Like that's a bad thing? They don't want to send many thousands of people a day into conditions that are patently hazardous? If it were America, a bunch of right wing fucks would be crying about how the people in charge of aviation regulation are freedom-hating, socialists/communists who wish to stop capitalism. Maybe that's going on in places over there, too. Don't know.

Anyway, yeah, the people running these airlines don't really give much of a fuck. They want/need their money and are willing to risk just about anything for it. They are saying now that there is no danger, all because they flew a couple of planes around without crashing them. Assuming that they really did fly the planes and there really were no problems, a couple of flights is absolutely no indication of what would come if all flights were to resume.

How deliberately shortsighted. What a shitty, evil attempt to fool people into false comfort. You can't run an experiment ten times and accurately cite it as representative of the results of performing it thousands of times a day.