Blogger is Bloggered Today

flickr: Smithsonian
Most of the time I can't get on my own blog! Here are some good links/arguments/reads, hope they publish:

Bushco has been using ships to hide prisoners and break human rights laws. Maybe Bush can title his autobiography "Outsourcing Torture for Democracy". And he won't even get the contradiction in terms.

Who killed the salmon? Republicans killed the salmon.

John McCain's endorsed/renounced pastor from H E Double Hockey Sticks inspired this headline: Pastor Hagee: The Antichrist Is Gay, "Partially Jewish, As Was Adolph Hitler" (Paging Joe Lieberman!) There's a lot of hating rolled into that one headline.

Vanity Fair publishes a concern troll piece by Dee Dee Myers' husband Todd Purdum, questioning what Bill Clinton has been doing when out of office. (I'm not going to link it, it's on Vanity Fair's site.) If the corporate media EVER does a story about George H.W. Bush, The Carlyle Group and the dictators and thugs he has cozied up to, I'll eat my hat.

Coming Attractions: Booman Tribune tells us that one of the rabid-to-point-of-lunacy Clinton blogs is promoting a video that will bring down the Obama campaign; apparently it's all based on the difference between questions asking "Why'd he"" and claiming that those questions ask, "Whitey?" This will be on Fox/Faux News, Drudge, Politico and rest of the corporate media presently.

From the WaPo, President Head Cheerleader, according to General Ricardo Sanchez, gave this confused pep talk after the death of four contractors in Fallujah in 2004:

"Kick ass!" he quotes the president as saying. "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal."

"There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!"

He may as well have added, "I am stupid", but I'm sure the listeners got that point as well.

Steve Gilliard died a year ago today. Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast offers a tribute, and collects links from other bloggers remembering Steve. The News Blog was the first blog I read every day, and I miss Steve's powerful voice.

One Fish, Two Fish

Red fish, blue fish. The classic Dr. Seuss book for children. Simple! Unfortunately, it's complicated buying fish these days. Today Dr. Seuss would have to add "good fish, bad fish" to his rhymes.

salon.com: Drop that salmon!
With the days of indiscriminate fish consumption long gone, food writer Taras Grescoe explains how to eat seafood ethically. (Hint: Order mussels; skip shrimp.) (You have to watch an ad to read; questions are in bold)

OK, so we can eat sardines, anchovies ...

Oysters, pollock -- it's got a terrible name, but that's the stuff that goes into [McDonald's] Filet-O-Fish sandwiches. It's very abundant. There's trout, which isn't a bad fish. Sablefish and Arctic char are currently quite abundant. I love herring, and there's herring off the Pacific Coast as well. Try to the best of your ability to buy things locally.

And which big fish are we supposed to stay away from?

Avoid big predator fish -- shark, swordfish, Chilean sea bass, tuna, with the exception of skipjack, which is pretty abundant light tuna. Avoid farmed carnivorous species like shrimp, salmon and bluefin tuna. Avoid imported farmed seafood because domestic standards are a lot higher. The exception to that is [domestically farmed] salmon, which is terrible.

Can you explain what's so bad about salmon farms?

Salmon from these farms tends to be full of persistent organic pollutants, [some of which] are highly carcinogenic. Salmon farmers grind up smaller fish like anchovies, sardines and anchoveta to make the pellets -- all of which should be going to feed humans, not making deluxe fish, especially in the context of food riots -- and salmon farms have been proven to spread disease and parasites like sea lice to wild fish populations, among them sea trout in Ireland and wild salmon in British Columbia.

Some farmed fish aren't so bad: trout and Arctic char, which are raised inland so there's no risk of spreading parasites to wild fish; tilapia and carp, which are herbivorous species; and of course oysters and mussels, which actually help clean the oceans of their excess plankton.

So is there a way we can safely enjoy salmon?

If you want to make a canned salmon sandwich or something like that, look for any can that has Alaska stamped on it. They should be all over. It's fantastic for you, and it's really clean protein. Don't buy Atlantic salmon. That's definitely farmed, because Atlantic salmon is commercially extinct right now. Those that appear in streams and rivers are actually escaped fish from salmon farms. Chinook and certain runs of salmon in California and Oregon are doing really badly this year. Nobody's quite sure what's going on -- it could be dams, fertilizer, ocean conditions. In British Columbia, they're not doing as well either, but Alaskan stocks are pretty good. And there's organic farmed salmon. I want to give those guys some credit. If you go to a restaurant and the menu says "organic farmed salmon," then the fish was raised under higher standards and it's probably better for you. The question is whether the fish are still spreading parasites to other fish. You can eat that in sort of "half-conscience." It's important to realize that right now about 45 percent of the seafood we get is farmed. And this is having a huge impact on the livelihood and well-being of people in other cultures. In the book I talk about how salmon farms affect native people in British Columbia and people who are affected by shrimp farms in India.

Chinook Salmon Fishery Collapse

FILE/THE OREGONIAN
Prized chinook salmon would be off-limits to fishing this year under a unprecedented proposal to halt all salmon fishing from Point Falcon in Oregon south to the Mexican border.

In the long term, the collapse of the salmon stock in the California rivers is a far graver threat to the world than the Bear Stearns (and the Bush economy) collapse. This year's Chinook salmon fishing season off the coasts of Oregon and California is likely to be cancelled, because the fish have disappeared. While no one is completely sure of the cause, the scientists who have been consulted believe changing ocean patterns, caused by global warming, are to blame.

NYTimes: Chinook Salmon Vanish Without a Trace

But federal and state fishery managers and biologists point to the highly unusual ocean conditions in 2005, which may have left the fingerling salmon with little or none of the rich nourishment provided by the normal upwelling currents near the shore.

[]

Bill Petersen, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s research center in Newport, Ore., said other stocks of anadromous Pacific fish — those that migrate from freshwater to saltwater and back — had been anemic this year, seading him to suspect ocean changes.

After studying changes in the once-predictable pattern of the Northern Pacific climate, Mr. Petersen found that in 2005 the currents that rise from the deeper ocean, bringing with them nutrients like phytoplankton and krill, were out of sync. “Upwelling usually starts in April and goes until September,” he said. “In 2005, it didn’t start until July.”

Mr. Petersen’s hypothesis about the salmon is that “the fish that went to sea in 2005 died a few weeks after getting to the ocean” because there was nothing to eat. A couple of years earlier, when the oceans were in a cold-weather cycle, the opposite happened — the upwelling was very rich. The smolts of that year were later part of the largest run of fall Chinook ever recorded.

Yahoo News: Salmon fishing ban possible this year

In most years, about 90 percent of wild chinook or "king" salmon caught off the California coast originate in the Sacramento River and its tributaries.

Only about 90,000 adult salmon returned to the Sacramento River and its tributaries to spawn last year, the second lowest number on record and well below the government's conservation goals, according to federal fishery regulators. That's down from 277,000 in 2006 and a record high of 804,000 in 2002.

Biologists are predicting that this year's salmon returns could be even lower because the number of returning young male fish, known as "jacks," hit an all-time low last year. Only about 2,000 of them were recorded, which is far below the 40,000 counted in a typical year.

Other West Coast rivers also have seen declines in their salmon runs, though not as steep as California's Central Valley.

Experts are unclear about what caused California's collapse.

Some marine scientists say the salmon declines can be attributed in part to unusual weather patterns that have disrupted the marine food chain in the ocean along the Pacific Coast in recent years.

Dailykos: Don't Mess With Mother Nature

Back in the late 1960's it was possible to walk across the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers on the 14ft, open boats, each with 1 or 2 fishermen hauling in their limit of salmon swimming up stream to spawn. Freezers all over the Valley were filled with cleaned, dressed salmon that weighed 35 ot 40 lbs. each. By the mid 80's the size and the weight of the catch had decreased by half. Early in 2000 a salmon that weighed 15 lbs was cause for celebration.

Farmed Salmon Killing Wild Salmon

Young salmon infested with sea lice. Adult salmon can generally live with the lice, but wild juveniles migrating out to sea are particularly vulnerable because they are small and thin-skinned.
Alexandra Morton - Salmon Coast Field Station

Remember this the next time you are tempted by that pasty pink stuff in the grocery case:

WaPo: Salmon Farming May Doom Wild Populations, Study Says