Bummer bulletin . . .

WHY I DON'T BUY JAPANESE ANYTHING: according to the Washington Post, the Japanese have sent a fleet to Antarctica to kill 1,000 whales, if they can. Their fleet has been found and is being harassed by The Sea Shepherd Society.

Japan's whaling fleet set out for Antarctic waters in December. Sea Shepherd has been searching for them since, and spotted the first whaling vessel on Friday, Watson said. By Saturday, the group had tracked down three of the fleet's ships in an area about 1,700 nautical miles (3,200 kilometers) southeast of New Zealand, he said.

"We got them before they started whaling and now that we're on them, we're hoping to make sure they don't kill any whales for this season," Watson said.

Brave people. Why can't the Japanese make whale-flavored Tofu or something?

Yes, I know Mr. Liddy....

.... With no money to invest, they mean nothing.

Guess who's not getting a bonus this year?

The Right Whales off New York harbor have just received their pink slips.

Monitoring for endangered right whales off New York harbor is ending because the project has lost funding in the state's current budget crunch.

Acoustic monitoring by Cornell scientists shows the rare right whales swimming off the harbor, where federal officials have recently lowered ship speed limits to help protect the slow-moving mammals during migrations from Florida to New England and Canada.

[...]

Gov. David Paterson has ordered spending cuts from the DEC and other state agencies as New York faces an estimated $14 billion budget deficit in the fiscal year that starts April 1.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Nobody foreclosed on their home and they didn't have their retirement ripped away.

I wonder how far one AIG bonus would go to support a project to save species which threatened extinction is entirely the fault of humans?

Oh well... back to that house in the Hamptons and the Lincoln Navigator.

H/T Edstock.

Whales - 1; Bush - 0

Via Moderate Man, a federal judge has ruled that President George Bush does not have the authority to grant an exemption to the US Navy from the provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act.

The USN had sought an exemption from the requirement to remain clear of whale and dolphin habitats when conducting mid-frequency sonar operations off the southern California coast.

A federal judge rejected on Monday President Bush's attempt to exempt the Navy from environmental laws protecting endangered whales from sound waves caused by underwater sonar blasts during anti-submarine training off the Southern California coast.

Bush issued an order Jan. 15 that sought to override the judge's order limiting the Navy's use of sonar in Channel Islands waters frequented by whales and other marine mammals. The president said the restrictions would interfere with military exercises that are essential to national security.'

But U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of Los Angeles said Monday that Bush lacked authority in this case to suspend the National Environmental Policy Act, on which her earlier order was based.

That law requires federal agencies to examine environmental damage that their actions might cause and propose measures to prevent the harm. Cooper - who had found that the Navy failed to follow those requirements - said federal regulations, in place since 1978, allow the president to override the environmental law only in an emergency.

"The Navy's current 'emergency' is simply a creature of its own making ... its failure to prepare adequate environmental documentation in a timely fashion," Cooper said in a 36-page ruling. The only thing that has changed since environmental groups sued the Navy in March 2007 to protect the whales, she said, is that the Navy lost a court ruling that it wants the president to overturn.

The judge also called Bush's order constitutionally suspect because he cited no new arguments, other than those the Navy had already offered in court, but simply reached a different conclusion from hers - a task that the Constitution assigns to appellate courts, not the president or Congress. But Cooper said she didn't have to decide the constitutional issue because the order was invalid on other grounds, that the president lacked the authority to suspend environmental policy.

The mid-frequency active sonar used by the USN is irritating even at a distance. If you get close enough to an SQS-53 it'll eventually drive you mad. Given that marine mammals, particularly whales and dolphins, rely heavily on sound and echolocation to both navigate and locate food, there is every possibility that the high power emission of a shipborne sonar, particularly the higher powered SQS-53C, would interfere significantly with marine life.

Dolphins and smaller whales use frequencies for echolocation and communications estimated to be in the range of 0.1 to 200 kHz; the AN/SQS 53 sonar uses a frequency range of 3 to 192 kHz.

So, it looks like Bush has just had his imperious ego whacked by a bunch of activist whales.