Wednesday, February 15, 2006

More wailing about whales

In another you-just-can't-believe-they'd-do-that attempt to deal with the whale meat mountain, it's getting fed to schoolchildren again. Of course there has been a full and frank discussion in the media about the astonishingly high level of mercury routinely found in whalemeat, as any search on a major news site will show. Perhaps the real goal of this "whale research" is to look into Minamata disease.

This is the same Japan that is currently banning USA beef imports due to the supposed threat of BSE!

5 comments:

Hank Roberts said...

http://www.consumerfreedom.com/pressRelease_detail.cfm/release/142

Japanese kids eat fish.
Japanese kids are smarter than your kids.
Whales eat fish.
QED

James Annan said...

I'm not sure what your point is, "ankh", but there's a big difference between the amount of mercury accumulation in fish and whales (which mostly eat krill, not fish, but never mind).

I'm sure that any intelligent reader will immediately realise that your link is an industry-funded disinformation site, so I'll leave your post up.

Hank Roberts said...

I realized that was too terse. I was reacting to the original post's ironic link to Japanese press coverage of mercury in whale meat:

"Your search - whale mercury source:the_japan_times - did not match any documents."

I removed the "source" restriction and searched again, and came up with that "consumerfreedom" nonsense high among much other disinformation -- almost all based on funding in opposition to the draft controls on power plant particulate and mercury emissions, I gather).

'Information flak' -- vast amounts of chaff, scattered to confuse and overwhelm any targeted search.

But I forgot my /irony on/ and /irony off/ flags. My mistake.

Hank Roberts said...

Certainly you're correct about what fish eat. That's another irony:
http://www.peggy-oki.com/environmt/whaling.html

"Japan's claim that the purpose for their "scientific research" is to calculate how much fish the whales eat. They claim that they need to gauge the impact of these whales competing against their own fishing fleets."

James Annan said...

ankh,

that's ok, we all know that email is hard to interpret.