UK Activists Attack Angling

When the House of Commons voted to outlaw fox hunting in January, many of those who voted for the law dismissed claims that fishing and other pursuits would be next on the animal rights agenda. Guess what? People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is funding an anti-angling campaign scheduled to kick off later this year in Great Britain.

“As well as an advertising campaign, we are planning demonstrations at fish and chip shops across the country,” PETA’s Andrew Butler told The Sunday Times (UK).

Although it hasn’t received the same attention the anti-hunting movement has, the Campaign for the Abolishment of Angling has been busy protesting fishing. At a European angling championship, CAA activist Clare Persey broke a competitor’s fishing rod and then jumped into a river to disrupt the championship.

Source:

Animal activists target anglers. The Sunday Times, February 11, 2001.

Discovery Channel’s Bermuda Triangle Documentary

About 90 percent of the television watching I do is divided between three cable channels: the History Channel, Discovery, and The Learning Channel. The one thing that really annoys me about all three is that along with a lot of good material they occasionally run features that are too credulous of pseudo-scientific claims.

At first I thought Discovery’s recent Science Mysteries feature on the Bermuda Triangle was cut in just this mould, but they actually managed to demolish the whole Bermuda Triangle nonsense. PBS’ Nova did a thorough debunking of the Bermuda Triangle myth many years ago, and the Discovery documentary felt like an update of that debunking. To illustrate that what happens in the Bermuda Triangle is hardly unique, Discovery humorously invented their own “Casablanca Triangle” around the northern coast of Africa. They then proceeded to recount all of the mysterious and unexplained loss of ships, planes and people in the “Casablanca Triangle” over the years (this area, for example, is where the Mary Celeste disappeared).

But the coup de gras was the part that had me fuming at the beginning but laughing out loud at the end. The documentary began with a recounting of a mysterious yacht that was found floating, completely abandoned, in the Bermuda Triangle. The last log entry was over a year ago and when the naval vessel that discovered the yacht tried to salvage the ship and sail it to a nearby port, they experienced all sorts of mysterious electrical failures.

At the end of the show they revealed that in fact the yacht had been stolen while in port and apparently abandoned by the unknown thieves. The mysterious electrical problems? Somebody, probably the moron thieves, had managed to reverse some of the engine wiring so that rather than charging the battery, when the motor was running it was actually discharging the battery.

The point, of course, is that this is exactly how most of the alleged incidents of mysterious disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle morph from rather boring incidents into outright science fiction (the layer upon layer of myth and outright lies that have piled on the rather boring story of the disappearance of Flight 19, for example, is a perfect example of just how much mileage can be milked from an incident simply by omitting the relevant facts).

Quake 3 Hustlers Up Next

Just what the world needed. Zoogi’s web site is impossible to navigate, but it’s a buddy list application targeted at gamers with a twist — gambling is built into the application as a core feature.

According to the promotional material,

Fact is, a game get’s much more exciting when accompanied by a friendly wager. Zoogi acts as an impartial matchmaker, hooking you up with buddies for friendly wagers and supervising the outcome. You can play any game from any gamesite whenever you want with whomever you want, for fun or a real money bet. Whether you put your money on the line or just play for fun, everyone can earn Zoogi points on our loyalty reward program. Zoogi points can be spent at the z-store, where we offer a wide variety of goodies.

Personally, I’ve always found that gambling tends to detract from the fun of a contest unless the money is very small (okay, I confess, I won a $1 bet on the Super Bowl).

Anyone want to bet on how long it will take before members of Congress start denouncing this product and calling for investigations?

Wall Street Journal on ELF Guilty Plea

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran an unsigned piece of commentary about the guilty plea recently entered by a young man who admitted to burning homes in the Long Island, New York, area in the name of the Earth Liberation Front.

The Journal worries that,

…despite ELF’s extraordinary run of arson, public outrage hasn’t caught up with the crimes, which the group boasts about on various Internet sites. Because its targets have been corporations, construction sites and research labs, there has been an inclination to dismiss the group as misguided idealists.

…think of the reaction had that been, say, an abortion clinic or an African-American church.

Regardless of why the ELF doesn’t have a higher profile in the media, a more interesting question is whether the FBI plans on taking action against the ELF web site. In all the news reports about the plea bargain, prominent mention has been made of the fact that the arsonists in Long Island downloaded everything they needed to know about how to torch the luxury homes from the ELF site.

In fact the ELF web site distributes an Animal Liberation Front manual in PDF form, Arson Around with Auntie ALF, describing in detail how to go about committing acts of arson. Although they have standard “don’t try this at home” warnings, those are unlikely to be a very solid defense against criminal conspiracy charges, possibly under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization statute, and even more likely a |Racketeering Influenced and
Corrupt Organization| civil suit by developers.

Source:

Review & Outlook. Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2001.

Wired’s Neal Adams Profile

It’s not online yet, but the latest issue of Wired has a long profile of comic book artist Neal Adams. That wouldn’t be so bad, except that the profile is largely about Adams’ pseudo-scientific view that the Earth is growing in size.

And no, Adams doesn’t just think that the Earth is growing in volume, but that it is also growing in mass. While he’s at it, Adams thinks matter is constantly being added to the universe and even invented his own particle, which he calls “primal matter,” to explain the allegedly fattening Earth. He rewrites practically every other area of physics while he’s at it to fit his growing Earth hypothesis.

Neal Adams the comic book illustrator is rightly a legend (remember the furor over the Green Arrow/Green Lantern cover with Speedy shooting heroin? That was Adams’ work). Neal Adams the scientist, however, is a nut. An 8 page story on Adams the artist might have been interesting, but the 8 page story on Adams the pseudoscientist was a pointless waste of paper.

Make Colleges NBA Franchises

Salon’s Allen Barra notes that the biggest problem the National Basketball Assocation has is that it relies on colleges to act as a minor league system. Unfortunately it doesn’t pay athletes in its minor league system like other sports do.

The solution is to recognize reality: Division I college basketball is a farm club for the NBA and its time to start paying the athletes. The NCAA needs to abandon its view that the only good college athlete is an impoverished one and allow the NBA to pay college athletes.

The best way to do this would be for all the NBA teams to contribute a small percentage of their total player salary to a central fund which then gets distributed equally to all Division I teams, who then decide for themselves within their programs how to divide the money up between players.

In addition, the NCAA should remove all restrictions on booster contributions directly to athletes. Some rich alumnus wants to buy the star center a Ford Explorer? More power to him.