Category Archives: History

Food, History, Security

Chinatown Sues over Shark Fin Ban

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Chinese sentiment last year clearly turned against shark fin, as reported in xinhuanet.

A Chinese lawmaker has proposed that the country’s top legislature ban the trade of shark fin, a high-end delicacy consumed by wealthy people in China and East Asia.

Shark-fin trading generates enormous profits, but encourages overfishing and brutal slaughter of sharks, of which some 30 species are near extinction, said Ding Liguo, deputy to the National People’s Congress, the top legislature.

Just a few days ago, in a logical next step, China announced a shark fin ban at official receptions.

China’s Government Offices Administration of the State Council (GOASC) is to issue guidelines to ban serving shark fins at official receptions, according to a report by news website CNTV.cn on Monday.

An official with the GOASC said the guidelines, instructing all levels of government agencies to stop serving the delicacy at such events, will come out within one to three years, the report said.

Meanwhile, back in San Francisco the Chinatown Neighborhood Association (CNA) has filed a lawsuit against AB 376, the state law set to ban of shark fins in California by July 2013: Chinatown Neighborhood Association et al., v. Edmund Brown, et al.

CBS News points out that the lawsuit centers on racial bias.

Two Asian-American groups have challenged the state’s shark fin ban in a federal lawsuit in San Francisco, claiming it discriminates against Chinese Americans because it blocks cultural uses of shark fin soup.

“It discriminates against people of Chinese national origin by targeting and suppressing ancient cultural practices unique to people of Chinese national origin,” the lawsuit alleges.

[…]

Its use dates back to the Ming Dynasty in the 14th century, the lawsuit says.

The CNA arguments are not very convincing. First, as Chuck Thompson explains perfectly, the lawsuit fails rudimentary logic and simple historical checks.

“Shark fin soup is popular because it was learned from Hong Kong twenty years ago,” [Clement Yui-Wah] Lee told me. “And even if 500 years ago some Chinese were eating it, this doesn’t mean it’s a tradition we have to follow. Chinese people don’t bind women’s feet anymore because we know it’s wrong.”

Lee is right. The Chinese don’t bind women’s feet anymore. It is just as true that the menu for the wedding feast of the Guangxu emperor in 1889 included no shark product of any kind.

Eating shark fin is to Chinese what eating Caviar is to Americans. Refusing to eat shark fin soup because of documented harm does not make anyone less Chinese. It might actually be the opposite; a more traditional Chinese custom is to study, respect and honor nature. Here’s another perspective on this same issue from Chinese NBA star Yao Ming

While shark fins have been used to make soup for hundreds of years, until recently consumption was limited to a small elite, said Yao, who gave up eating shark fin in 2006 and says he avoids events where it is served.

Perhaps the California law should have been written to say “shark fin soup is prohibited unless you are the Ming Dynasty Emperor of China.” Since there just isn’t much chance of that happening might as well just say it is prohibited.

Second, how does the race card play if the Chinese are officially banning and publicaly avoiding shark fin soup? At this point we could say the California law supports and honors Chinese culture by calling for a ban. Kudos to California for supporting Chinese conservationists and trying to help prevent shark extinction.

Photo by me...swimming with friendly blacktip reef sharks.

Updated to add: A 2011 Pew report called “The Future of Sharks: A Review of Action and Inaction” gives some detailed market data and analysis

Sharks are particularly vulnerable to overexploitation because of their biological characteristics of maturing late, having few young and being long-lived.

Inside the report you can find who is killing the most sharks and who is buying fins

Given that the Top 20 account for about 80% of global reported shark catch, the future sustainability of shark populations is effectively in their hands.

The future of sharks?

Here is some of the data on U.S. shark kill, which emphasizes that fins are not well tracked but the exports primarily go to Hong Kong.

Frozen shark fin is not identified separately in U.S. trade data. However, Hong Kong import data indicate that in 2008, 251 t of dried and frozen shark fins were imported from the United States in 2008 (Oceana 2010). Given that only 8 t of dried fin were identified in the U.S. export data as exported to Hong Kong that year, it is assumed that the majority of fins is exported as frozen product and is included in the U.S. data as “sharks, frozen, nei.”

[…]

In 2008, the U.S. reported that of its 35 identified shark stock/complexes, four were subject to overfishing and four were overfished, and the status of about 20 others was unknown or unidentified (NMFS 2009). Shark finning was banned in U.S. Atlantic fisheries in 1993, and this ban was extended nationally in 2000. As of 2008, all sharks in the Atlantic Highly Migratory Species Fishery must be offloaded with fins naturally attached.

History, Security

Why Allies Spy on Each Other

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Blast from the past — The WSJ archive has some interesting perspectives on international espionage.

Why Is U.S. Spying on Friends? March 11, 1997

Germany’s discovery that an American diplomat was spying on its Economics Ministry raises an important question: Why is the U.S. spying on its friends?

The question is particularly pressing because the case is actually the third reported in two years.

In 1995, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had to suspend virtually all of its operations in France after four of its officers were accused of spying on French economic officials during world trade negotiations. Later that year, the administration of President Clinton again was embarrassed…

Obviously a string of incidents and controversy like this can give the US a bit of a reputation for spying on other countries. Much of the data was murky and accusations stood unanswered. A few years later, however,an ex-CIA director gave an in-your-face explanation:

Why We Spy on Our Allies, March 17, 2000

By R. James Woolsey, a Washington lawyer and a former director of central intelligence.

What is the recent flap regarding Echelon and U.S. spying on European industries all about? We’ll begin with some candor from the American side. Yes, my continental European friends, we have spied on you. And it’s true that we use computers to sort through data by using keywords. Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we’re looking for?

Victims of espionage are supposed to ask themselves whether the ends justify the means? He argues that we should consider his motive.

Why, then, have we spied on you? The answer is quite apparent from the Campbell report — in the discussion of the only two cases in which European companies have allegedly been targets of American secret intelligence collection. Of Thomson-CSF, the report says: “The company was alleged to have bribed members of the Brazilian government selection panel.” Of Airbus, it says that we found that “Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official.” These facts are inevitably left out of European press reports.

That’s right, my continental friends, we have spied on you because you bribe. Your companies’ products are often more costly, less technically advanced or both, than your American competitors’. As a result you bribe a lot. So complicit are your governments that in several European countries bribes still are tax-deductible.

Note the confidence in his second paragraph. When a competitor’s products were deemed more costly, less advanced or both then America’s intelligence agency was called in to look for bribes.

No, that’s not quite right. The intelligence agency was called in to document the bribes it knows it would find. What made America’s top intelligence agency so certain bribes would be found?

The European Parliament’s recent report on Echelon, written by British journalist Duncan Campbell, has sparked angry accusations from continental Europe that U.S. intelligence is stealing advanced technology from European companies so that we can — get this — give it to American companies and help them compete. My European friends, get real. True, in a handful of areas European technology surpasses American, but, to say this as gently as I can, the number of such areas is very, very, very small. Most European technology just isn’t worth our stealing.

[…]

Why do you bribe? It’s not because your companies are inherently more corrupt. Nor is it because you are inherently less talented at technology. It is because your economic patron saint is still Jean Baptiste Colbert, whereas ours is Adam Smith. In spite of a few recent reforms, your governments largely still dominate your economies, so you have much greater difficulty than we in innovating, encouraging labor mobility, reducing costs, attracting capital to fast-moving young businesses and adapting quickly to changing economic circumstances. You’d rather not go through the hassle of moving toward less dirigisme. It’s so much easier to keep paying bribes.

I’m not sure I understand this correctly…

A former official of the CIA says he justifies American spying on allies because the American economic model is superior; a model he believed was not dominated by government interference. What’s the best way he found to prove that superiority? He used American government interference.

That’s not the end of it, of course. He also has to take a swipe at the French.

The French government is forming a commission to look into all this. I hope the commissioners come to Washington. We should organize two seminars for them. One would cover our Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and how we use it, quite effectively, to discourage U.S. companies from bribing foreign governments. A second would cover why Adam Smith is a better guide than Colbert for 21st-century economies. Then we could move on to industrial espionage, and our visitors could explain, if they can keep straight faces, that they don’t engage in it. Will the next commission pursue the issue of rude American maitre d’s?

Get serious, Europeans. Stop blaming us and reform your own statist economic policies. Then your companies can become more efficient and innovative, and they won’t need to resort to bribery to compete.

And then we won’t need to spy on you.

Need? I missed the need part.

Update Nov 17 2020: Danish whistle-blower exposes NSA spying on European countries to win economic competition in airplane sales.

The American intelligence service NSA used a top secret Danish-American spy collaboration to purposefully spy on central ministries and private companies in Denmark.

[…]

The analysis of the data queries from 2015 reveals, according to DR News’ information, that the NSA at that time used the spy system to spy on targets in Denmark’s closest neighbors Sweden, Germany, France, Norway and the Netherlands.

According to the experts, the new information could strain Denmark’s relations with its closest neighbors .

“I would not like to be the political decision-maker who had to tell my colleagues in Germany or Sweden that ‘unfortunately, we have now learned that the Americans have used an access with us to spy on you'”, says Professor Jens Ringsmose from the University of Southern Denmark.

History, Poetry, Security

The Finnish Kalevala Runo

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Sweden began rule over Finland in the 13th century. As the ruling monarchy adopted Christianity in the 16th century they began to attack traditions in Finland and to destroy pagan rituals, as I also wrote last year.

Not all was lost. The following video is of Jussi Huovinen who is said to be one of the only people able to sing a traditional rune of Finland that could be as old as 1000 BCE.

National Geographic explains the significance

A collection of these runes, comparable to India’s Ramayana, or the Greek Odyssey, is known in Finland as the Kalevala, and those who sing its lyrical verses from memory are known as rune singers. These elders long carried in their minds the entire record of the Finnish language.

“In an oral tradition, the total richness of the language is no more than the vocabulary of the best storyteller,” Davis explains. “In other words, at any one point in time the boundaries of the language are being stretched according to the memory of the best storyteller.”

The video and the article both speak of how the information is written permanently to memory. It begs the question of the strength of controls in poetry and story-telling (alliteration, consonance, rhyme, rhythm, hymn, repetition).

Kalevala has eight syllables per line, stressing every other one (using rules similar to trochaic tetrametre).

Syllables fall into three types: strong, weak, and neutral. A long syllable (one that contains a long vowel or a diphthong, or ends in a consonant) with a main stress is metrically strong, and a short syllable with a main stress is metrically weak. All syllables without a main stress are metrically neutral. A strong syllable can only occur in the rising part of the second, third, and fourth foot of a line.

Amazing how we can have confidence in this data storage integrity method; that a story remains the same over thousands of years when no one but a few, or even just one, can remember them.

Energy, History, Security

Scofflaw Cycling and Multi-Tenancy

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The SF Bicycle Coalition has dedicated its latest journal to the issue of scofflaw. It makes a typical plea for everyone to be perfectly law-abiding in shared space.

We’ve been hearing from an increasing number of our own members, as well as political and community leaders, about this issue.

We know that most people are riding safely and courteously, but those who are not are making it less safe for all of us. Following the rules of the road and yielding to pedestrians is paramount to keeping our streets safe and inviting places for everyone.

A few tenants impact the safety of others and cause concern about all tenants. When enough tenants complain then law enforcement will step in to perform a typical show of force or a checkpoint or a sting. That seems like the usual cycle of things (pun not intended).

What is most interesting in the journal is the guidance to law enforcement by the SFBC:

The SF Bicycle Coalition is urging the SF Police Department (SFPD) to focus their efforts on the most dangerous behavior by road users at the known, most dangerous intersections. We know that drivers are responsible for the huge majority of injuries and fatalities to pedestrians on our streets, so this problem should receive the huge majority of enforcement attention.

We’ve heard troubling accounts of the SFPD setting up stings to catch people on bicycles rolling through stop signs on quiet streets where no one else is around. This isn’t focusing on dangerous behaviors at dangerous intersections, and these tickets are not prioritizing the actual goal of making our streets safer for everyone. We agree with your phone calls, e-mails, tweets, Facebook posts, etc, complaining that these tickets should not be prioritized at a time that limited enforcement resources should be aimed at actual dangerous behavior.

There should be an easier way to differentiate what is meant by “actual” dangerous behavior.

Data driven analysis is one way. The data on cars, in other words, shows a high rate of pedestrian accidents and fatalities treated as normal.

…none of these fatalities caused by people driving received even one-tenth of the attention that the high-profile Market/Castro incident involving a person biking fatally hitting a pedestrian last March drew. Why? Precisely because the latter is so rare. Equally tragic, absolutely heartbreaking, but undeniably rare.

Within just one week of that crash at Market and Castro Streets, there were two other pedestrian fatalities, both reportedly caused by people driving. Did you read anything about those?

Scofflaw Bus Rider
This is not to say that cyclists should kill more pedestrians to make people forget about the risk. No, it actually brings to light the classic dichotomy of civil disobedience during segregation. Those practicing scofflaw may increase resistance and fear, but at the same time open up a path to reform that is far less troubling than continuing down the same road. Perhaps scofflaw cyclists will be the catalyst that helps pedestrians throw off the shackles created by drivers. Did Martin Luther King practice “actual” dangerous behavior by dreaming? Was Rosa Parks “actually” a dangerous person when she resisted segregation?

[Kyra Phillips on CNN] asked Reverend Joseph Lowery, an African American civil rights advocate, how Parks’ memory made him feel about all the current-day commentators who are “always on the TV set complaining and shouting.” […] “It takes all approaches,” Lowery said. “I do not condone violence, but I do condone militancy.”

The bottom line is that stop-signs and stop-lights are not intelligent controls for segregation of traffic. They also were not designed with the best interests in mind for pedestrians or cyclists. In fact, red and green signals are a poorly thought-out adaptation from sailboats in the water (starboard and port). The colors operate smoothly when used on the water without stopping anyone; boats have no real brakes. Traffic signals should be about flow such that we can define “actual” dangerous behavior by harm (severity) but also obstruction (likelihood).

It would seem that cyclists are bringing to light (pun not intended) that relics of an endless-petroleum model of energy consumption can not last forever. Idling on empty streets with an engine that burns $5/gal gasoline in a new 10mpg engine seems like an incredibly bad idea today. Likewise, pushing pedals only to have to pull on the brakes and wait on an empty street makes little sense.

The modern round-a-bout was supposedly invented in America. Why not reconsider them with their modern improvements such as yield-at-entry?

The solution is undoubtedly in thinking about the purpose of signals and controlling movement. Avoiding collision is the goal, not re-enforcing wasteful and inefficient designs or in trying to develop an artificial and contrived definition of “good” behavior. I have personally watched the SFPD chase down and hand out tickets to cyclists that coast through stop signs yet they allow vehicles to run through the exact same signs without a reaction. At one point I approached the officers and asked about the inconsistency in enforcement. They simply said the department was responding to public concern about cyclists.