A Boy and His Whale

Orca ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason M. Colby

It was february 1966, and Richard Stroud had seal sex on his mind. A recent graduate of Oregon State University, the Portland-born Stroud had taken a job at the Marine Mammal Biological Laboratory in Seattle. For one of his first field assignments, he had come to Morro Bay to study the reproduction of northern fur seals in their wintering area off the California coast. The primary focus of the lab, which was still administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, remained the fur seal harvest on the Pribilof Islands, and its scientists retained close ties to US whaling firms, often chartering their vessels for research. For this seventy-day expedition, Stroud and his colleagues hired the 136-foot whaler Lynnann for the purpose of shooting and dissecting five hundred fur seals under the terms of the 1957 treaty. Stroud also had instructions to kill and examine killer whales when possible. So when the Lynnann passed six orcas off Morro Bay just before noon on February 12, he asked Captain Roy J. “Bud” Newton to follow them. Ordinarily, Newton wouldn’t have bothered with killers. His employer, the Del Monte Fishing Company, focused on fin, sperm, and humpback whales. Located in Richmond, a short drive from Berkeley, the station processed nearly two hundred whales per year. But the whaling season was months away, and the US government was paying for this voyage. Newton wheeled the Lynnann around, and after an hour-long chase, his crew harpooned and killed a large male killer whale. Measuring just under twenty-one feet, it was a healthy specimen, though its teeth seemed unusually worn. Stroud planned to examine the orca’s stomach contents and send its skull and organs to the Seattle lab. Yet he chose not to dissect the carcass in port. Instead, as one reporter explained, Stroud and his fellow researchers “planned to butcher their killer whale Sunday while far out at sea.” The reasons for this decision are unclear. Perhaps they hoped to spare Morro Bay residents the stench of orca innards.

2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA J. SHEPHERD

AbstractThis investigation explores the ways in which discourses of security functioned to allow military intervention in Iraq to become ‘thinkable’, and how these actions serve to reconfigure not only the identities of states – the US and Iraq – but also the characteristics of the international as a spatial and conceptual domain. In the weeks preceding the military intervention in Iraq, significant negotiations were conducted between the US government and the UN that were commented on extensively in press statements and other documents released by both parties. Drawing on UNSC Resolutions, public debates and academic analyses, in this article I analyse the relations between the US and the UN in the build-up to the Iraq war, making two related claims.First, I argue that each discourse is organised around a particular logic of security. By ‘logics of security’, I mean the ways in which various concepts are organised within specific discourses of security. That is, each competing conceptualisation of security has a distinct primary focus, referent object and perspective on the arrangement of the international system. The ways in which these claims are made, the assumptions that inform them, and the policy prescriptions that issue from them, are what I refer to as ‘logics of security’. Second, I argue that the intervention in Iraq, a violence undertaken in the name of ‘security’, has functioned to reproduce the international as a spatial and conceptual domain according to the logic of a highly conventional narrative of sovereigneity, and, ultimately, of state identity.


2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (143) ◽  
pp. 177-183
Author(s):  
Naomi Klein

Fitting to its doctrine of preventiv war, the Bush Administration founded a bureau of reconstruction, designing reconstruction plans for countries which are still not destroyed. Reconstruction after war or after a “natural disaster” developed to a profitable branch of capitalist investment. Also the possibilities to change basic political and economic structures are high and they are widely used by the US-government and institutions like the International Monetary Fund.


Author(s):  
Ana Elizabeth Rosas

In the 1940s, curbing undocumented Mexican immigrant entry into the United States became a US government priority because of an alleged immigration surge, which was blamed for the unemployment of an estimated 252,000 US domestic agricultural laborers. Publicly committed to asserting its control of undocumented Mexican immigrant entry, the US government used Operation Wetback, a binational INS border-enforcement operation, to strike a delicate balance between satisfying US growers’ unending demands for surplus Mexican immigrant labor and responding to the jobs lost by US domestic agricultural laborers. Yet Operation Wetback would also unintentionally and unexpectedly fuel a distinctly transnational pathway to legalization, marriage, and extended family formation for some Mexican immigrants.On July 12, 1951, US president Harry S. Truman’s signing of Public Law 78 initiated such a pathway for an estimated 125,000 undocumented Mexican immigrant laborers throughout the United States. This law was an extension the Bracero Program, a labor agreement between the Mexican and US governments that authorized the temporary contracting of braceros (male Mexican contract laborers) for labor in agricultural production and railroad maintenance. It was formative to undocumented Mexican immigrant laborers’ transnational pursuit of decisively personal goals in both Mexico and the United States.Section 501 of this law, which allowed employers to sponsor certain undocumented laborers, became a transnational pathway toward formalizing extended family relationships between braceros and Mexican American women. This article seeks to begin a discussion on how Operation Wetback unwittingly inspired a distinctly transnational approach to personal extended family relationships in Mexico and the United States among individuals of Mexican descent and varying legal statuses, a social matrix that remains relatively unexplored.


Author(s):  
Danylo Kravets

The aim of the Ukrainian Bureau in Washington was propaganda of Ukrainian question among US government and American publicity in general. Functioning of the Bureau is not represented non in Ukrainian neither in foreign historiographies, so that’s why the main goal of presented paper is to investigate its activity. The research is based on personal papers of Ukrainian diaspora representatives (O. Granovskyi, E. Skotzko, E. Onatskyi) and articles from American and Ukrainian newspapers. The second mass immigration of Ukrainians to the US (1914‒1930s) has often been called the «military» immigration and what it lacked in numbers, it made up in quality. Most immigrants were educated, some with college degrees. The founder of the Ukrainian Bureau Eugene Skotzko was born near Western Ukrainian town of Zoloczhiv and immigrated to the United States in late 1920s after graduating from Lviv Polytechnic University. In New York he began to collaborate with OUN member O. Senyk-Hrabivskyi who gave E. Skotzko task to create informational bureau for propaganda of Ukrainian case. On March 23 1939 the Bureau was founded in Washington D. C. E. Skotzko was an editor of its Informational Bulletins. The Bureau biggest problem was lack of financial support. It was the main reason why it stopped functioning in May 1940. During 14 months of functioning Ukrainian Bureau in Washington posted dozens of informational bulletins and send it to hundreds of addressees; E. Skotzko, as a director, personally wrote to American governmental institutions and foreign diplomats informing about Ukrainian problem in Europe. Ukrainian Bureau activity is an inspiring example for those who care for informational policy of modern Ukraine.Keywords: Ukrainian small encyclopedia, Yevhen Onatsky, journalism, worldview, Ukrainian state. Keywords: Ukrainian Bureau in Washington, Eugene Skotzko, public opinion, history of journalism, diaspora.


Author(s):  
Christopher Hood ◽  
Rozana Himaz

This chapter describes fiscal squeeze in an era of high political volatility and major economic challenges, including mass unemployment, a sharp increase in oil prices, double-digit inflation (i.e. a period of ‘stagflation’), and high levels of trade union militancy. The most dramatic period during the episode occurred in 1976, involving a split Labour Government under two different leaders, with a leadership election following a sudden prime ministerial resignation. That government pursued fiscal squeeze against the background of a deep currency crisis and bailout deals with outside lenders (the US Government and the IMF). The squeeze episode also led to some important institutional developments, producing the first major privatization since the 1950s and a new system of controlling public spending through ‘cash limits’.


Author(s):  
Seth C Kalichman ◽  
Lisa A Eaton ◽  
Valerie A Earnshaw ◽  
Natalie Brousseau

Abstract Background The unprecedented rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines has faced SARS-CoV- (COVID-19) vaccine hesitancy, which is partially fueled by the misinformation and conspiracy theories propagated by anti-vaccine groups on social media. Research is needed to better understand the early COVID-19 anti-vaccine activities on social media. Methods This study chronicles the social media posts concerning COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines by leading anti-vaccine groups (Dr Tenpenny on Vaccines, the National Vaccine Information Center [NVIC] the Vaccination Information Network [VINE]) and Vaccine Machine in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic (February–May 2020). Results Analysis of 2060 Facebook posts showed that anti-vaccine groups were discussing COVID-19 in the first week of February 2020 and were specifically discussing COVID-19 vaccines by mid-February 2020. COVID-19 posts by NVIC were more widely disseminated and showed greater influence than non-COVID-19 posts. Early COVID-19 posts concerned mistrust of vaccine safety and conspiracy theories. Conclusion Major anti-vaccine groups were sowing seeds of doubt on Facebook weeks before the US government launched its vaccine development program ‘Operation Warp Speed’. Early anti-vaccine misinformation campaigns outpaced public health messaging and hampered the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 1209
Author(s):  
Mandar Khanal

The 20,000-student Boise State University campus is located about 3 km from the center of the city of Boise. There is a significant amount of travel between the campus and the city center as students and staff travel to the city to visit restaurants, shops, and entertainment centers. Currently, people make this trip by car, shuttle bus, bike, or walking modes. Cars and shuttle buses, which share the same road network, constitute about 76% of the total trips. As road congestion is expected to grow in the future, it is prudent to look for other modes that can fulfill the travel demand. One potential mode is an aerial tramway. However, an aerial tramway is not a common mode of urban travel in the US. This research describes how the stated preference method was used to estimate demand for a mode that does not currently exist. An online stated preference survey was sent out to 8681 students, faculty, and staff and 1821 valid responses were received. Only about 35% of the respondents expressed their willingness to choose an aerial tramway for various combinations of cost and convenience of the new mode. Respondents were also found to favor convenience over cost for the new mode.


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