Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

"Cruise Ships Are Unregulated Trouble on the High Seas." Excerpt:

Cruise ships have become the symbol of all that’s gone haywire in the tourism industry.
    The largest of these floating hotels are the size of horizontal skyscrapers and carry as many as 6,000 passengers. They cross the seas polluting the water and air and overwhelming their ports of call....
    Every day the average cruise ship dumps 21,000 gallons of human waste, one ton of solid waste garbage, 170,000 gallons of wastewater and 8,500 plastic bottles in the ocean. That’s according to the Environmental Protection Agency – cruise ships are under no regulatory obligation to monitor or report what they release.

The avalanche of plastic reaching our ocean is as destructive as it is unnecessary....
    In rapidly industrializing countries, plastic consumption is continuing to outpace waste management. In September, [an Ocean Conservancy team] traveled to Peru to join more than 300 volunteers at a beach called Marquez. Together, they picked up 26,000 pounds of trash in just 2 hours. Our coordinator on the ground, Vida Peru, told us that in just a week or two, much of the removed litter would be replaced by a new wave of debris.
    The problem in Marquez, and places like it around the world, isn’t as simple as people littering on the beach. In fact, in many places it is about the rivers and streams filled with trash that funnel into our ocean.

[The reality in] Pilar, a 35,000-person city located at the southwest corner of Paraguay, is [that] there is no recycling truck. There isn't even a garbage truck. There is no official trash collection system.
    If people want to dispose of their trash properly, they have to take it themselves to the poorly-structured landfill on the outskirts of the city, where citizens dump their trash without any sort of control or proper management. Some items don't even make it to the landfill, resulting in trash-strewn streets surrounding the dump. Some people aren’t able to make it to the dump and are forced to burn their trash or use the waterways surrounding the city as a disposal system. Can you imagine, day after day, not having an option to properly throw away your trash?
    This problem is something we see in industrializing communities around the world. A lack of even basic waste collection services is flooding our ocean with plastics, and leaving billions of people to live in unsanitary conditions that can have devastating health consequences.

More than half of the coastline of the entire United States is in Alaska.

"The Five Myths (and Truths) About Plastic Pollution in Our Ocean." Excerpt:

Myth 1: There are floating islands of plastics in every ocean.
    Fact: Only a small percentage of ocean plastics float at the sea surface. Most plastics are dispersed throughout the water column, resting on the seafloor, trapped in Arctic ice, or inside ocean animals. The plastic gyres you hear about in the news are primarily composed of tiny plastic particles that are the degraded fragments of their original form (i.e., bottles, containers, toys)—many are the size of a grain of rice.

Myth 2: Ocean plastic primarily comes from ocean dumping and industry, such as cruise ships or container ships.
    Fact: Most of the plastics in the ocean come from items we use every day—bags, bottles, caps, food containers, etc....

Myth 3: Ocean trash gyres, large areas of the ocean where currents concentrate trash, can simply be cleaned out of existence.
    Fact: While some surface trash can be cleaned, many plastics break down and become dispersed. Only a small percentage of total ocean plastics inputs rest at the surface. The rest is distributed throughout the ocean or winds up inside animals. We don’t have a realistic, efficient way to remove these plastics from the system (yet).

Myth 4: Ocean plastics are just a trash problem.
    Fact: Plastic particles are now found inside animals and throughout the ocean food chain—from mussels to fish to turtles to whales.

Myth 5: There is one, simple solution capable of solving our ocean plastics problem.
    Fact: Bans, fees, recycling, nor product redesign alone can fix this. The ultimate solution is a combination of all of these and more. The biggest impact will come from stopping the massive amounts of plastic litter before it travels over land, and into our waterways and ocean.

The story of Audubon is that its members have protected millions of acres of critical habitat, brought endangered birds back from the brink, and passed the torch of conservation commitment on to our children:


Brazil got its name from the nut, not the other way around.

An old but timely article on the new age of plutocracy and the diminishing middle class in America by Paul Krugman (NY Times Magazine, October 20, 2002): "For Richer." Ruminating on his growing up in the 50s and 60s, when middle class life was ubiquitous, he provides alarms of a New Gilded Age with new robber barons, like Jack Welch, on the top of the pile.
    Krugman's concluding paragraph still seems to apply, maybe moreso:

Am I being too pessimistic? Even my liberal friends tell me not to worry, that our system has great resilience, that the center will hold. I hope they're right, but they may be looking in the rearview mirror. Our optimism about America, our belief that in the end our nation always finds its way, comes from the past – a past in which we were a middle-class society. But that was another country.

Here's to a great 2015, from Robert Reich:

"A Piece of Yale’s Library Is Brought Back to Life":

Some paraprosdokians – figures of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected:

• To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.
• I thought I wanted a career; turns out I just wanted pay checks.

Your review of Black Mirror was timely. Last night the whole family went out for Mexican. As we walked back in the door our son asked us if we would visit for 30 min or so before retiring to our garage apartment. We said "sure." We put our stuff away and went back into their living room to find every single person, daughter-in-law included, on the phone texting someone or just looking at Facebook to see what "friends" were talking about. Or what pictures they had taken of their dinner plate, for crying out loud! Communication priorities have been so badly eroded. I sat there, no one paying any attention or saying a word for a few minutes and left. I don't think anyone noticed.

A shot of whiskey: In the old west a .45 cartridge for a six-gun cost 12 cents, so did a glass of whiskey. If a cowhand was low on cash he would often give the bartender a cartridge in exchange for a drink. This became known as a "shot" of whiskey.

Some things Albert Einstein is believed to have said:

• The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
• Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
• Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
• The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Another road to admire. Great Ocean Road, Australia:

    The Great Ocean Road is an Australian National Heritage listed 243-kilometre (151 mi) stretch of road along the south-eastern coast of Australia between the Victorian cities of Torquay and Warrnambool. The road was built by returned soldiers between 1919 and 1932, and is the world’s largest war memorial; dedicated to casualties of World War I. It is an important tourist attraction in the region, which winds through varying terrain alongside the coast, and provides access to several prominent landmarks; including the nationally significant Twelve Apostles limestone stack formations.

Edward Snowden:

Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it. ["Edward Snowden: NSA whistleblower answers reader questions"]

"Freeze Frames of Canada’s Ice Huts." Excerpt:

Richard Johnson likes ice fishermen just fine. He has shared drinks with them. He has learned a bit about their lives while crammed into the huts where they carve out small patches of warmth from the bitter expanse of cold outside.
    But when Mr. Johnson grabs his camera gear and heads out over the ice, he is — nothing personal — happy to find no one home. As a rule, he is there to photograph the huts, not the people who use them.

Limerick of the week:

Often when Rick talked, he would articulate
with abandon, he would gesticulate;
    we feared he'd knock his crystal,
    with a hand could be a pistol,
prompting it to fall and particulate.

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean