Get real

On the Wednesday night BBC 10 o'clock news, they had a feature within the topic of the week 'mad about food'. The story went that Scottish langoustine shrimps were formerly packaged close to where they were fished into scampi, but now travelled 17,000 miles to Bangkok and back to end up on British supermarkets. The defenders of this new way of processing scampi said that because the shrimp were deshelled by hand in Thailand it provided better quality for consumers and jobs for Thais and also it was ecologically more friendly as carbon emissions would have been greater at the British factory, than a slow boat to Thailand and back.
But where did the BBC show this slow boat going? The first map was heavily zoomed out to get an appreciation of how far in the world it has to go, but distinctly crossed the massive land barrier called the Isthmus of Kra that connects the Malay peninsula to Asia. The computer programmers compounded their ignorance of geological obstacles, by zooming in on South-East Asia for the return leg before zooming out, as again the route involved cutting through the Isthmus.
So are we meant to believe that only does the shrimp boat travel halfway around the world but also has not one Fitzcarraldo moment but two, on a regular basis? I know that the South-China Sea is plagued by pirates and that Sumatra is politically unstable, but all the rest of the tonnage heading that way doesn't obviate the Straits of Malacca in order to avoid this. Furthermore, to take the route the BBC suggests, the sailors would have to haul their boat not just through Thailand, but also Burma (Myanmar) to boot. Political as well as physical difficulties. What a boob from the Beeb.

Allied in a way to that story, is the Japanese whaling controversy. They've now decided to keep their whaling fleet intended for Antartica in harbour for one to two years after massive international pressure to avoid hunting the endangered humpback whales. The new Australian government garnered even more of my admiration by threatening to send a flotilla to closely shadow the Japanese fleet, as if the latter were a bunch of shady characters (which they kind of are). The Aussies have called the Japanese official motivations a sham in order to get whalemeat into sushi bars. They are right. Japan calls its whaling scientific. How? The 'science' comes in when the whalers kill the whales to see how many there are. That seems like a counter-intuitive argument. If you count the whales after they are already dead, then you will only know how many there really are by wiping them all out. Then you would never have to count them again. It just shows that if we can't persuade Japan to abandon its preference for whalemeat (Japanese children who were losing their taste for whalemeat have been virtually forcibly made to eat it to keep up the 'national culture'), what hope to persuade China to stop its manufacture of homeopathic medicine from vulnerable species? Japan needs to come clean and 'fess up over its real motives. It must lead East Asia by example. Shame that isn't going to happen. Pity the animals.