Friday, June 10, 2005
UNSUSTAINABLE FISHING PRACTICES SEVERLY DAMAGE ECOSYSTEM - WELL NO DUH FELLAS!
Greedy industry rapes nature, fucks world over:
Marine ecosystem altered by disappearance of cod off Canada's East Coast
HALIFAX (CP) - An entire marine ecosystem is being restructured because of the collapse of East Coast fish stocks more than a decade ago and could make their recovery nearly impossible, according to a unique study to be published Friday.
Researchers who looked at data over a 40-year period found that the food chain in the North Atlantic has been significantly altered with the disappearance of large species, like cod, a finding never seen before.
Ken Frank, a scientist who co-authored the report in Science magazine, said the findings provided an unsettling picture of the marine ecology on the eastern Scotian Shelf and the future of once robust stocks that might never recover.
"It is worrisome," Frank said in an interview from his office in Halifax. "It kind of suggests that we're locked into this alternate state right now and unless there is some kind of unusual event, it may take quite some time for the cod domination to return."
Frank said the virtual disappearance of cod and other large species such as haddock, flounder and hake, led to what he calls a cascade effect. That is, large predators declined dramatically, but the fish they preyed on - herring, capelin, shrimp and snow crab - were allowed to thrive and eventually underwent a population explosion.
Cod, which used to sit on the top of the food chain, have now been replaced by smaller fish that are now dominating the marine world.
That also trickled down to the lowest members of the marine food chain - zooplankton and algae - which are being depleted at a faster rate because more and more fish are feeding on them. That has also raised the fear that the smaller fish species could diminish the nutrients they rely on.
"Their levels have now decreased because they're being eaten heavily by the exploding group," said Frank, who works for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography.
"It was always known that when you deplete a predator, its prey will increase. But it was never suspected that this would cascade or extend all the way down to the base of the food chain."
Scientists have also always known that the cascade effect existed in other bodies of fresh water, but they have never been able to prove until now that it could be found in the ocean.
The report raises concerns that the new environment will slow, if not prevent, the return of cod stocks, once the economic lifeblood of many fishing communities along the Atlantic coast. Fish that now dominate the food chain are feasting on young cod and making their recovery nearly impossible, said Frank.
The reshaping of the marine environment has benefited some, though. Seals have more to feed on since they're not having to fight for food with cod. And fishermen are landing lucrative catches of high-priced shrimp and snow crab, which are more abundant.
But Frank said the mistakes made in the cod fishery shouldn't be repeated with the shellfish industry.
"The collapse of cod should serve as a lesson that if you want to keep the populations sustainable you've got to have a conservation ethic in mind," he said. "You've got to resist the temptation to fish so heavily that the stock will deplete itself."
The research also indicates the phenomenon of cascading might be found in other areas of the North Atlantic where cod has diminished. Frank is exploring whether the food chain has been disrupted in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Grand Banks and the Labrador Shelf.Friday, June 10, 2005
FBI DROPPED THE BALL 5 TIMES IN PREVENTING 9/11
Keystone Kops in charge of things:
Report Shows FBI's Missed Sept. 11 Chances
By PETE YOST, Associated Press
WASHINGTON - In the weeks and months before Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI had some clues, but didn't see them. It had a lead from one of its own agents, but didn't follow it.
A sobering inside look at pre-Sept. 11 intelligence operations by the Justice Department's inspector general chronicles — in some instances in hour-to-hour detail — how the FBI missed at least five opportunities to uncover vital information that might have led agents to the hijackers.
"The way the FBI handled these matters was a significant failure that hindered the FBI's chances of being able to detect and prevent the Sept. 11 attacks," Inspector General Glenn Fine said in a newly released report Thursday.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged Friday that there were laws on the books before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that "discouraged the sharing of information" among law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Appearing on NBC's "Today" show, Gonzales noted that many of those laws "have now been dismantled" and said he thinks the government is in a better position than before to avert such attacks. "You have the ability to connect the dots" of terrorist plots, Gonzales said.
An FBI agent suggested to the chain of command two months before the attacks that there was a coordinated effort by
Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to study ways to take down U.S. aircraft.
Failure to fully heed the agent's theory was indicative of an agency that failed to accord strategic analysis the attention it deserved, the report said.
Even when the bureau had hard information shortly before the attacks about the presence in the United States of eventual hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, "the FBI's investigation then was conducted without much urgency or priority," the report concluded.
The investigation of Mihdhar "was given to a single inexperienced agent," the report said.
Responding to the IG's criticism, the FBI said it has since taken substantial steps to deal with the issues the report raised.
Today, "no terrorism lead goes unaddressed," and new policies are in place to share information among intelligence agencies, the FBI said.
The IG's review, a year old, is only now being released because of a court fight with lawyers for imprisoned terrorist conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui over how much of it should be disclosed. The portions on Moussaoui were deleted.
According to the report, CIA employees and four FBI agents assigned to the CIA's bin Laden unit on Jan. 5, 2000, accessed incoming cables containing a substantial amount of information about Mihdhar, including that he was traveling and that he had a U.S. visa. Those facts weren't disseminated to the FBI.
The information was written up that day by one of the FBI agents assigned to the CIA's bin Laden unit. The FBI agent sought, but was never able to get, the required go-ahead from the CIA's deputy chief of the unit to send the draft to the FBI. Ten days later, Mihdhar and Hazmi were in Los Angeles.
All of the CIA and FBI personnel who were involved in the matter now say they remember nothing about the document that wasn't sent. The document is called a Central Intelligence Report, or CIR.
"When we interviewed all of the individuals involved with the CIR, they asserted that they recalled nothing about it," the report stated.
Mihdhar came under CIA scrutiny because the National Security Agency had picked up communications that al-Qaida operatives were planning travel to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Mihdhar showed up at the meetings.
Once in the United States, Mihdhar and Hazmi lived openly in San Diego and "should have drawn some scrutiny from the FBI," the report said.
The head of the San Diego FBI office responded that the report greatly exaggerates the possibility that local agents could have prevented the attacks.
The two Saudis rented a room in the home of a longtime FBI terrorism informant, and also befriended a fellow Saudi who had drawn FBI scrutiny in the past.
The informant identified the two men to his FBI handler only by their first names, and the report criticizes the FBI handler as "not particularly thorough or aggressive" in following up.
The two men also befriended Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi who had established himself in the area. The FBI briefly investigated him in 1998 when the manager of his apartment complex reported that al-Bayoumi had received a suspicious package, had strange wires in his bathroom and hosted frequent weekend gatherings of Middle Eastern men.
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Associated Press writer Seth Hettena in San Diego contributed to this report.Wednesday, June 08, 2005
GET YOUR BUDDIES TO LIE FOR YOU, TOO!
'Downing Street memo' gets fresh attention
By Mark Memmott, USA TODAY Wed Jun 8, 6:58 AM ET
A simmering controversy over whether American media have ignored a secret British memo about how President Bush built his case for war with Iraq bubbled over into the White House on Tuesday.
At a late afternoon news conference, Reuters correspondent Steve Holland asked Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair about a memo that's been widely written about and discussed in Europe but less so in the USA.
It was the most attention paid by the media in the USA so far to the "Downing Street memo," first reported on May 1 by The Sunday Times of London. The memo is said by some of the president's sharpest critics, such as Democratic Rep. John Conyers (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, to be strong evidence that Bush decided to go to war and then looked for evidence to support his decision.
The Sunday Times said the memo is the minutes of a meeting that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had with some of his top intelligence and foreign policy aides on July 23, 2002, at 10 Downing Street, the prime minister's official residence. The story said the memo indicates that Blair was told by the head of Britain's MI6 intelligence service that in 2002, the Bush administration was selectively choosing evidence that supported its case for going to war and ignoring anything to the contrary. The war began in March 2003.
"Intelligence and facts were being fixed" by the Bush administration "around" a policy that saw military action "as inevitable," the newspaper quoted from the memo.
"There's nothing farther from the truth," Bush told reporters as Blair stood at his side. "Both of us didn't want to use our military," Bush said in response to a question about the memo. "It was our last option."
Blair added, "The facts were not being 'fixed' in any shape or form at all."
Bush said that at the time the memo was written, no decision had been made about going to war. He pointed out that it was written two months before he went to the
United Nations and asked for a Security Council resolution calling on
Saddam Hussein to give up his weapons of mass destruction or face "serious consequences."
The Sunday Times' May 1 memo story, which broke just four days before Britain's national elections, caused a sensation in Europe. American media reacted more cautiously. The New York Times wrote about the memo May 2, but didn't mention until its 15th paragraph that the memo stated U.S. officials had "fixed" intelligence and facts.
Knight Ridder Newspapers distributed a story May 6 that said the memo "claims President Bush ... was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy." The Los Angeles Times wrote about the memo May 12, The Washington Post followed on May 15 and The New York Times revisited the news on May 20.
None of the stories appeared on the newspapers' front pages. Several other major media outlets, including the evening news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC, had not said a word about the document before Tuesday. Today marks USA TODAY's first mention.
Some activists who opposed Bush's decision to attack Iraq have been peppering editors with letters and e-mails to push the media into more aggressive coverage. Last week, a group known as Democrats.com offered $1,000 to anyone who can get Bush to answer "yes or no" to this question: Did he or his administration "fix the intelligence" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to terrorism?
"We want what the Michael Jackson, Paris Hilton and Star Wars stories have gotten: endless repetition until people have heard about it," says David Swanson, one of Democrats.com's organizers.
Robin Niblett of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, says it would be easy for Americans to misunderstand the reference to intelligence being "fixed around" Iraq policy. " 'Fixed around' in British English means 'bolted on' rather than altered to fit the policy," he says.
Ombudsmen at both The New York Times and The Washington Post have been critical of their newspapers for not covering the story more aggressively.
USA TODAY chose not to publish anything about the memo before today for several reasons, says Jim Cox, the newspaper's senior assignment editor for foreign news. "We could not obtain the memo or a copy of it from a reliable source," Cox says. "There was no explicit confirmation of its authenticity from (Blair's office). And it was disclosed four days before the British elections, raising concerns about the timing."Wednesday, June 08, 2005
YOU CAN FOOL ALL OF THE PEOPLE SOME OF THE TIME. HOW? JUST LIE!
US official edited warming, emission link
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A White House official, who previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute, has repeatedly edited government climate reports in a way that downplays links between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.
Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, made changes to descriptions of climate research that had already been approved by government scientists and their supervisors, the newspaper said, citing internal documents.
The White House declined comment on the report.
The report said the documents were obtained by the newspaper from the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that provides legal help to government whistleblowers.
The group is representing Rick Piltz, who resigned in March from the office that coordinates government research and issued the documents that Cooney edited, the Times said.
The newspaper said Cooney made handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, removing or adjusting language on climate research.
White House officials told the newspaper the changes were part of a normal interagency review of all documents related to global environmental change.
"All comments are reviewed, and some are accepted and some are rejected," Robert Hopkins, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told the the newspaper.
In a memo sent last week to top officials dealing with climate change at a dozen agencies, Piltz charged that "politicization by the White House" was undermining the credibility and integrity of the science program.Wednesday, June 08, 2005
GOOD NEWS FOR WORRIED GUYS - IT MAY NOT BE YOUR TINY DICK AND SLOBBERKISSING AFTER ALL!
Insecure men around the globe now have something else other than their lousy lovemaking skills to blame - genetics! Yep, boys, next time the beotch sez you just don't rock her world, you can blame it on her genes:
Study: Genes Play Role in Women's Orgasms
By EMMA ROSS, AP
LONDON - A woman's ability to have an orgasm is at least partly determined by her genes and can't be blamed entirely on cultural influences, new research suggests. Experts say that's likely to be interpreted as both good and bad news.
"It'll be upsetting because some women will think, 'Oh my God, maybe I just can't.' On the other hand it takes away a kind of guilt or pressure," said Dr. Virginia Sadock, director of the human sexuality program at New York University Medical Center.
Either way, specialists say the findings don't mean women who inherit an unfortunate gene package are doomed. They just mean that more work, or patience, is required.
The main benefit of discovering the genetic elements of sexual function, experts say, is to help scientists find better treatments for sexual problems. The study was reported this week in Biology Letters, a journal of the Royal Society, Britain's independent academy of science.
In the study, scientists from St. Thomas' Hospital in London sent questionnaires to 4,037 women who are part of the British twin registry. About half of them were identical twins and half were non-identical twins.
One in three of the women reported never or hardly ever reaching orgasm during intercourse and 21 percent said they hardly, if ever, achieve climax during masturbation. Those figures are consistent with other surveys conducted over the last few decades.
However, the questionnaires revealed a significant genetic influence on the ability to reach orgasm, said lead researcher Tim Spector, a genetic epidemiologist at St. Thomas' Hospital.
The similarity in orgasm experience was greater in identical twins than it was in non-identical twins, Spector said. Because the only difference between the two groups was genetic, the researchers concluded that the gap between the groups was the genetic component.
After taking into account other factors that could influence orgasm, the scientists estimated that 34 percent of the difficulty women face in reaching orgasm during intercourse is due to genes.
Problems in sexual response during masturbation seemed to be more genetically influenced than orgasm ability during intercourse. The study found that 45 percent of the difficulty women have in climaxing during masturbation can be attributed to genetic makeup.
The results were similar to those of a study on Australian twins published earlier this year.
The idea that orgasm ability has a genetic component makes sense, said female orgasm expert Laura Berman, a professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
"A lot of the women that I treat will tell me that when they talk to their siblings or mothers they very often have similar challenges," said Berman, who was not involved with the study. "One could make the case that it's nurture, not nature because these twins were brought up together, but you can't rule out the genetic argument."
But Spector said effects of the twins' shared environmental influences did not alter the study results significantly.
Even if women do inherit an unfavorable genetic mix, as with many other conditions, it does not mean they are doomed, experts said. Many approaches can help most women enhance their ability to achieve orgasm.
"Factors influencing the ability to (reach) orgasm vary from woman to woman. What we do know is that psychologically women are more complex sexually," Sadock said. "For women, being in a relationship where they feel loved and feel secure, is a big factor. Other big factors are how they feel about themselves and about sex and what their first experiences were."
"Maybe there are some women ... who can never. That is a possibility, but that would be a small amount," Sadock said.
And even if they can't, that doesn't mean there's no joy for them in sex, Berman added. A survey she recently conducted found that among women enjoying satisfying sex lives, orgasm did not rate as a key element for fulfillment.Monday, June 06, 2005
I KEEP TELLING MY REDNECK NEIGHBORS BEING A QUEER IS GENETIC
Gene change alters sex orientation in fruit flies
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Altering a single gene in a fruit fly can turn its sexual orientation around, causing male flies to lose interest in females, and females to display male mating rituals to other females, according to a study published in the journal Cell on Friday.
The research by Barry J. Dickson and Ebru Demir of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences into the workings of a "switch gene" touched on the scientific debate about whether genes or environment determine human sexual orientation.
Male courtship in Drosophila is an elaborate ritual and largely a fixed-action pattern easily identified by the researchers.
The male taps the female with his forelegs, sings a specific courtship song by extending and vibrating a wing, licks her genitalia, and then curls his abdomen for copulation.
Through gene splicing, they were able to swap the orientation of male and female fruit flies they studied in an observation chamber.
"Forcing female splicing in the male results in a loss of male courtship behavior and orientation," the study said. "More dramatically, females ... spliced in the male mode behave as if they were males: they court other females.
"A complex innate behavior is thus specified by the action of a single gene, demonstrating that behavioral switch genes do indeed exist."
Female flies with the male version of the gene also made amorous advances toward male flies expressing female pheromones, while altered male flies were more likely to court other males.
"We have been able to reverse the sex roles during Drosophila courtship," the scientists said.
So-called "switch genes" that trigger development of an anatomical feature such as wing structure have been extensively studied, but there a few studies of switch genes that control a complex behavior, the researchers said.
The researchers said they have already begun work with other scientists to test for switch genes that might be linked to other behavioral patterns like aggression.
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(This discovery does not, however, explain how rednecks happen. Nature or nurture? Hmmmm...)
Monday, June 06, 2005
HOW TO RECOGNIZE A RIGHTWING NUTTER
You Know You're a Neocon when you agree with these paradoxes…
..Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's
daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and
a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.
..trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is Communist, but trade
with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.
..A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable
offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which
thousands die is solid defense policy.
..Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary
Clinton.
..the best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in
speeches while slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay.
..providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing
health care to all Americans is socialism.
..global warming is junk science, but creationism should be taught in
schools.
..being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a
conservative radio host. Then it's an illness and you need our prayers
for your recovery.