EO: Bearing Witness in the Hell of Speciesism

by Randy Shields / December 11th, 2022

Once upon a time Dostoevsky wrote a passage in The Idiot (1868) about an abused donkey passed from owner to owner which inspired Robert Bresson’s classic 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar.

Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski, 56 at the time, watched the Bresson film and it became the first, last and only movie that ever made him cry.

Now, at age 84, Skolimowski and his co-writer and wife Ewa Piaskowska give the world EO, a partial homage to Au Hasard Balthazar and the most broad-based attack on speciesism in a feature film. EO is making plenty of audiences cry.

The title character EO is a small gray big-eyed Sardinian donkey (played by six different donkeys) who begins the film in a Polish circus and ends up in Italy. Animal protection legislation puts the circus out of business and splits up EO and his beloved human co-performer Magda which starts a worse series of events as no humans will take responsibility for EO unless they can exploit him/her. (Right with the times we don’t know if EO is a he or a she, although with six donkeys that definitely qualifies as a “they.” I’m going to refer to EO as a female in this article.) This sweet beast of burden is always looking for a friend – a horse, a human, a junkyard dog – and is frequently used to facilitate the enslavement of other animals.

There are echoes of Koyaanisqatsi and White God (a girl and her dog) in EO (a girl and her donkey) and the sensibility is very much like Okja (a girl and her pig) and Gunda. Stylistically, though, EO is the anti-Gunda: Gunda’s black and white minimalistic, music-less, human-less barnyard is replaced by a pulsating soundtrack, a slew of villains seen and unseen, great distances across Europe, tunnels, forests, windmills and mountains. Striking images of EO on a hillside at sunset, lost in a forest at night and standing on a small arched bridge in front of an enormous dam/waterfall and looking into the maelstrom will linger long after viewing.

When showing animal abuse on screen a director’s challenge is to keep people watching without overwhelming them. It’s a truism that many people are “too sensitive” to watch films of animal abuse but not sensitive enough to stop paying for the brutality, terror and injustice that goes into every piece of meat or a fur coat. Skolimowski skillfully navigates this by not showing most of the violence but simply showing the fear of the animals or letting us hear the violence. This will be a small comfort to many but I didn’t see anyone walk out of the movie.

After the circus folds EO is shipped to an equestrian center where a majestic white horse, tethered in an indoor riding ring, runs in circles with less freedom than a hamster on a wheel. EO accidentally knocks over a display case of equestrian trophies and is then shipped to a petting zoo where she’s ridden by special needs children. EO is visited one night by Magda who brings her a carrot muffin for her birthday. As Magda dances in the moonlight, thinking about the old days of the circus, we’re sure of EO’s love for her but Magda seems lacking as she obeys the commands of her jealous (of EO) boyfriend to leave and never sees EO again. The patriarchy is always seamlessly woven into speciesism. (See Green Paradise Lost by Elizabeth Dodson Gray or The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol Adams.)

Seeking Magda and escaping the petting zoo, EO walks through a Jewish cemetery, reminding us that there are all kinds of holocausts although only someone like Isaac Bashevis Singer can get away with comparing them: “In their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might makes right.” (Enemies, a Love Story.) And: “For animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.” (The Letter Writer.) For different but similar slaveries, see Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison.

EO then enters a forest at night but she’s out of place. Beautiful immersive cinematography by Michal Dymek follows fast and furious: a close up of a web-spinning spider, a swimming frog, an owl treating EO as an intruder. There are foxes and, hair-raisingly, howling wolves. Will the wolves attack EO? No, actually, because Satan’s minions are here too: green lasers from rifles start flashing throughout the forest like a rave and hunters begin blowing away the wolves.

EO then comes upon a soccer match and is made an unwilling mascot by the winning team and later beaten with 2 by 4’s by the losing team. In a broken bloody heap, EO seems to be dreaming of a robot dog moving through the grass, techno progress contrasted with a deficit of ethical progress. The human gods will try their damndest to recreate something that moves and performs like a real animal (almost exclusively to repress other humans) but they won’t treat real animals with even rudimentary respect.

(The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is currently torturing monkeys in his neuralink experiments. Fuck anyone who would attempt to “help” by torturing. George Bernard Shaw summed up Elon Musk a long time ago: “Any race of people who would use something as barbarous as animal experiments to ‘save’ themselves would be a race of people not worth saving.” EO stumbles into just about every setting of animal abuse except a vivisection lab.)

EO’s next stop is pulling a cart on a fox fur farm while a worker throws dead foxes into it. Skolimowsky doesn’t show the anal electrocution of the foxes but he does show their terror as each of them watch others being killed. The worker commands an unwilling EO to move and bends over behind her and gets kicked in the throat, definitely knocking him out and possibly killing him. The instant karma delivered to this speciesist brute is one of the rare feel good moments in the movie. Fuck the working class torturers too.

After an incredibly sure-footed and gripping 75 minutes or so the film loses its intensity with the introduction of many more humans, much more human dialogue, much less EO, a scene of random human violence at a truck stop and a countess (Isabelle Huppert) getting frisky with her priest stepson which seems like another movie altogether. Maybe with another viewing I’ll understand these puzzles. The strength of most of the film is that any dummy can get it.

I was expecting the film to do justice to EO’s character and struggles by building to a monumental emotional intimate denouement focused on EO’s last moments but, unlike Au Hasard Balthazar or Gunda, the movie pulls back emotionally, visually, artistically, politically.

A blurb after the film ends says no animals were harmed in the making of it. I’m against using animals in films but if directors are going to take advantage of its “legality” – and deliver pro-animal messages – they are able to simulate violence, suffering and death a la Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Amores perros.

(Some viewers will dispute that the film pulls back but your reviewer believes in seeing the captive bolt pistol, the futile attempts to escape the kill box, the expression in the eyes as the light and life goes out, the throat-slitting, the dismemberment and turning of innocent beings into blasphemous nothingness – and spiritual terms are correct because EO and Balthazar and all the other non-humans are being crucified every day. “Completely humble, completely holy,” said the great Bresson about his donkey Balthazar. That’s how a film would do justice to the life and character of EO – after all, the audience has come all this way, let them walk now — or explode their prejudices and reveal their complicity as they’re mortified in their seats. They should be bawling their eyes out. It’s a war – act like it.)

EO is the perfect guide through Skolimowski’s inferno but the film is not perfect. It is, however, the most comprehensive non-documentary attack on animal exploitation ever filmed. Despite its flaws, EO should be seen, applauded and promoted.

After a December 4 screening at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles, Skolimowski and Piaskowska discussed the film, saying it was “made out of love for animals and nature” and likening it to a “protest song.” The film does seem like the cry of an 84-year-old man sick to death of the cruelty in the world although he isn’t (yet?) vegan, or even a vegetarian, saying, “We reduced our meat consumption by two thirds and half of my crew stopped eating meat entirely.” And: “Do we really need to have bacon every morning?” No, my man, no more than we need to eat donkey every morning.

Despite my uneducated impertinent quibbles, EO has won many awards: Cannes Jury Prize, Cannes Soundtrack Award, New York Film Critics Circle Awards Best International Film and European Film Awards Best Original Score. Rotten Tomatoes critics rate EO as 96% fresh and the film is Poland’s Best International Feature submission for the 2023 OscarsFacebook

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Randy Shields can be reached at music2hi4thehumanear@gmail.com. Read other articles by Randy, or visit Randy's website.

The Absolute Worst People on Earth: War Profiteers?

by Paul Haeder / December 17th, 2022

Ahh, the lords of war, and the companies’ stocks going up up up. Look at these thieves, Lockhead Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman.

Ahh, petal mines dropped by Ukraine forces on the Donbass:

“The West is silent as Ukraine targets civilians in Donetsk using banned ‘butterfly’ mines” by Eva Bartlett (Posted Aug 18, 2022)

Ukraine has good reason to believe it will not be held accountable for using them against civilians, given its Western backers’ and their allies’ penchant for using prohibited weapons on civilians without repercussions–including Agent Orange in Vietnam, depleted uranium in Iraq and Syria, and white phosphorous and dart bombs in Gaza.

The fact the Western media turns a blind eye is also a boon to Kiev.

Here, the stock bonanza. The top military murder incorporated, listed above. That’s how Americans, and their retirement funds, and those pension funds, invest (sic) in. Respectively: Lockhead Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman.

This is what occurs with Empire, and we know the UK, USA, Five Eyes, EU, all bought and sold by the lords of war. The other gender, right there as Lords of War.

These people are the absolute worst people in the world, along with the engineers and technologists and scientists who will do anything to get a grant cool million here, fifty mil there, for research into the tools of war. Anything to play god, play with humanity, play with the lethality of their wet horror dreams. Do not let the skirts and skinny jeans fool you. These are hardened, cold-hearted killers.

You can read that again. The idea is to proactively guesstimate the character and timing of oppositional narratives, and for the algorithms to produce NARRATIVE COUNTERMEASURES to stifle these embryonic developments of potential political opposition before they can even be coherently formulated and disseminated.

If that’s not the exact image of a boot stamping on a human face forever, I really don’t know what is.

And perhaps the most disturbing thing is that this entire project is (quite effectively, I might add) being sold in connection with narratives of liberalism. Of narratives pertaining to the increase of freedom, to the supplementing of individual agency, and to the bolstering of progress and human flourishing. (source)

Until we get this — dialing for war lords. One WNBA star for one Russian war lord who does business with EVERYONE:

And, the rot gut that is remote work for General Dynamics and others, I can attest, is so dispicable, since I have a family member who worked on General Dynamics web crap, internal local web design, and he was laid off recently, terminated, at age 62, after more than 20 years with the company.

No severance, and in Arizona, General Dynamics forces those laid off to apply for Arizona unemployment, but, somehow, after six months or three months, GD will pony up something? This relative would have just given up, but he’s jumping through the ugly unemployment hoops, which make a person feel like he or she is a scab, a loser. And, then, the PTO check comes, and so his unEmployment was denied.

So many class action lawsuits against General Dynamics:

Former General Dynamics workers can move forward as a class in their suit claiming the company didn’t give them enough notice that they were getting fired, a Virginia federal judge ruled, finding their claims don’t require individualized inquiry.

U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne said Monday that the workers’ claims that General Dynamics Information Technology violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act by failing to provide them at least a 60-day notice they were getting fired can be resolved on a classwide basis.

“The GDIT policies in the record provide flexibility as to where the employees worked, and those policies apply to the class equally without the need for an individualized inquiry,” Judge Payne said. (source) (more)

Raytheon and Patriot missiles. I taught at Fort Bliss, home of the Patriot, “first to fire . . . .” English course, that is, effective writing as an Army contractor. Amazing how that $3.29 bolt for the shrouding, somewhere around 16 total, for each missile, ends up costing us hundreds of dollars each. The graft, the triple-dipping, the entire scam that is the revolving door of lords/murderers of war and the private welfare cheating companies is also part and parcel here.

https://youtu.be/4LCXKve29wg

The Ukrainian military is dropping anti-personnel mines over the city, violating: Protocol II of the Geneva Convention. Ottawa Treaty. Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Despite being banned under the UN Ottawa Treaty since 1997, thousands of anti-personnel mines litter the parks, streets, schools and homes in Donbass. Residents risk severe injuries and even death if they happen to accidentally stumble upon the tiny ‘petal’ mines.

A ‘petal’ mine is a pressure-activated anti-personnel mine. It’s small and hard to see, making it the ‘vilest’ mine. Ukraine was reported to have disposed of some six million of these petal mines it had in service. But that is clearly not the case as it has been using them to bombard residential areas of Donetsk, Lugansk and other cities of Donbass for months. Dozens of civilians who accidentally came into contact with the landmines have been admitted to hospitals in Donbass.

Emergency services, sappers and humanitarian personnel have been working hard to clear the neighbourhoods of the insidious explosive devices, while the Ukrainian army continues to bombard cities with the mines. Brave civilians help sappers to spot mines, some of them even learn de-mining techniques themself.

It will take years to remove all of the mines, according to some experts. The Ukrainian army uses Uragan multiple launch rocket systems, which are able to throw more than 4,000 mines at a time.

The documentary takes a look at the arduous mission of the de-mining campaign in Donbass. Victims of ‘petal’ mines talk about the injuries they received, while sappers describe their work on the ground and underwater. (documentary, of course, banned on YouCIATube)

Again, I have mentioned this endlessly: the military industrial complex is the finance-insurance-retail-manufacturing-food-banking-education-pharma-ag-energy-mining-chemical-science-engineering-surveillance-et al COMPLEX.

Some of the largest companies that have declined to renounce future involvement in antipersonnel landmine production are General Electric, Alliant Techsystems, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Thiokol. Some companies that have declined to renounce future involvement in production are now involved in developing technology to detect, remove, and destroy uncleared antipersonnel mines, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Mohawk, and Ensign-Bickford.

In the U.S., no single company is responsible for the production of antipersonnel mines from beginning to end. The Pentagon will usually award a contract to one large company which will in turn buy component parts from many other companies. Final assembly of mines is often done in government-owned, contractor-operated Army Ammunition factories. Thus, the landmine industry in the U.S. consists more of component suppliers than “mine producers” per se. Some companies that have supplied components for antipersonnel mines objected to their inclusion in this report by claiming that they are not “mine producers.”

The seventeen companies that declined in writing to renounce future involvement in antipersonnel mine production are: AAI Corp. (Maryland), Allen-Bradley (Texas), Alliant Techsystems, Inc. (Minnesota), also representing mine producers Accudyne Corp. (Wisconsin), and Ferrulmatic, Inc. (New Jersey), CAPCO, Inc.(Colorado), Dale Electronics, Inc. (Nebraska), Ensign-Bickford Industries, Inc. (Connecticut), General Electric Company (Connecticut), Lockheed Martin Corp. (Maryland), Mohawk Electrical Systems, Inc. (Delaware), Nomura Enterprise, Inc. (Illinois), Parlex Corp. (Massachusetts), Quantic Industries, Inc. (California), Raytheon (Massachusetts), Thiokol Corp. (Utah),48 and Vishay Sprague (Pennsylvania).

The thirteen companies that did not respond in writing to Human Rights Watch are: Action Manufacturing Co. (Pennsylvania), Aerospace Design, Inc. (California), Amron Corp. (Wisconsin), BI Technologies (California), Consolidated Industries, Inc. (Alabama), Day & Zimmerman, Inc. (Pennsylvania),49 EMCO, Inc. (Alabama), Formworks Plastics, Inc. (California), Fort Belknap Industries (Montana), Intellitec (Florida), Mason & Hangar/Silas Mason Co., Inc. (Kentucky),50 Primetec, Inc. (Florida), and Unitrode Corp. (New Hampshire). (source)FacebookTwitter

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Paul Haeder's been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.

The (Re)Birth of Sol Invictus

by William Manson / December 15th, 2022

It is the month of December, and yet the city is at this very moment in a sweat. License is given to the general merrymaking. Everything resounds with mighty preparations–as if the Saturnalia differed at all from the usual business day!
— Roman philosopher Seneca, ca. 64 C.E.¹

Sol Invictus in marble

In the pre-Julian, Roman calendar, December was the tenth and last month (the sun’s annual circle of travel completed). In the Julian calendar, accepted with minor adjustments to the present-day, the two most illustrious Caesars were commemorated with the addition of “July” and “August.” Nonetheless, December remained the final month–when Saturn, a kind of Father Time, finished consuming the preceding twelve months.

Late December was a time of rejoicing and celebration in ancient Rome, the Saturnalia (December 17-23) being a time of festivities, gift-giving, and carnival-esque reversal of roles. In this brief rebellion against the regularity of social norms and roles, Romans reveled in a brief period of dis-order: masters, for instance, adopted the role of slaves and served them at table. Yet this brief reversal only served to legitimate the cyclical return of the cosmically-sanctified social order at the winter solstice.

The Greek historian Plutarch (ca. 46-120 C.E.) tells us that the cult of Mithras, an Indo-Iranian god identified with the Sun, was thriving in Rome before the early Christians had attained any significant following. Mithras was soon assimilated into, or syncretically fused with, the cult of Sol Invictus, whose cyclical rebirth, like that of Mithras, was venerated on–December 25. In the Roman iconography of the time, Mithras is often depicted as sharing the offering of a slain bull with Sol Invictus. This date of rebirth, within their imperfect calculation of seasonal cycles, was joyously affirmed as the “(Re)birth of the Unconquerable Sun.”

After the late autumn harvests, the Sun of course would noticeably begin to wane, decreasing in power and duration as Saturn consumed the remaining weeks of the annual cycle. (Saturn also consumed every week; thus, even today, the final day is of course “Saturday.”) The long winter months meant hardship: cold, illness, and sporadic food shortages. But the Roman astronomers, in their crude calculation of the endless, inexorable cycle of Nature’s regenerative return, heralded December 25 as a rebirth. In a sense, Time was merely cyclical, not linear; the celebration of Natalis Invicti was the renewed birth, not of a Christian “messiah,” but of the life-giving forces of Nature itself.

The veneration of the Sun, as the endlessly regenerative source of all life, was of course much older than the early Roman empire. Possibly the first monotheistic ruler, the visionary pharaoh Akhnaten (reigning ca. 1353-1336 B.C.E) abolished all rival gods and celebrated the solar disc Aten as the source of all life and renewed fertility in his poetic “Hymn to the Sun.” (The elderly Freud, in his final book Moses and Monotheism (1938), even maintained, probably inaccurately, that Moses was actually an Egyptian who brought a revised monotheism–more ethnic-nationalist with an exclusive tribal god–to the subjugated Hebrew people.)

The Roman emperor Aurelian, as late as 274 C.E., proclaimed Sol Invictus as his primal state-god. But the cult of the Christians, after having suffered terrible persecution and torture for three centuries, finally attained a decisive triumph when the Emperor Constantine, around 313 C.E., officially announced his own conversion to the rapidly growing Christian creed, and mandated tolerance toward the religion and its followers. Ironically, within decades the newly-sanctified and officially supported Christians began a campaign of persecution against the now-fading Mithraic cult.

What was lost? A sanctified awareness, and daily affirmation, of the endlessly regenerative cycle of life-giving power, originating from the Sun. In that sense, despite the invalid Ptolemaic model of the motions of sun-and-earth, daily experience was grounded in a pre-scientific recognition of human dependence upon the life-giving Sun and its seasonal cycle of fertility and abundant flora and fauna, all of which co-existed interdependently. In short: an ecological consciousness.

Image credit: Mythology.net.

1. “On Festivals and Fasting.” In: Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic (p. 40). Dover Publications. [FacebookTwitterReddit

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Intellectual historian and psychoanalytic anthropologist, William Manson (Ph.D., Columbia) has published numerous scholarly books and papers, and is a longtime contributor to Dissident Voice. Read other articles by William.

Israeli lawmaker tables bill to limit banks raising mortgage rates

FILE PHOTO: The Bank of Israel building is seen in Jerusalem


By Steven Scheer

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The head of Israel's powerful parliamentary finance committee submitted a bill on Monday that would limit banks' ability to raise mortgage rates after central bank interest rate increases.

The Bank of Israel has raised its benchmark interest rate by 3.15 percentage points to 3.25% since April, with more hikes likely. Monthly mortgage repayments have soared by more than 1,000 shekels ($291), with high inflation an additional factor.

"To ease the financial burden, it is proposed that the interest rate set in a housing loan for the purchase of a single apartment used for living not change," Knesset Finance Committee chairman Moshe Gafni's bill said.

"And if it be decided to raise the interest rate at an annual rate exceeding at least 1%, the bank will be allowed to raise the interest rate on the loan at half the rate, and this in order to ease the financial burden placed on the borrowers."

If ratified, the new law would go into effect on the first of the following month, and apply to new loans. Gafni's United Torah Judaism party is in the incoming conservative coalition government of Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu.

The aggressive interest rate increases are aimed at countering inflation that has topped 5%, exacerbating already high costs of living.

Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron has warned lawmakers not to interfere with monetary policy decisions, saying the "magic solutions" they proposed to blunt the impact of interest rate hikes would hurt the weakest sectors of the economy.

He said any legislation to get around the higher rates would create risks for banks.

Netanyahu's presumptive finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, also caused a stir last week when he said his economic strategy would be infused with religious beliefs laid out in the Torah, predicting this would help the country prosper.

The Māui dolphin seafood ban is a rare win for conservationists – but just how significant is it?

Māui dolphin and the New Zealand sea lion are on a countdown to extinction – so why do politicians drag their feet?

The list of victories in marine conservationists’ never-ending struggle to halt the degradation of oceans is very short.

And so the decision of a United States court to place a temporary ban on New Zealand seafood exports from Māui dolphins’ habitat was greeted with first astonishment – taking even litigants Sea Shepherd by surprise – and then celebration.

But the courtroom win was not just a much-needed morale boost: it may be an important milestone in the battle to save other threatened native marine species.

“It is such a big deal,” says Liz Slooten, of Otago University’s zoology department. “This is probably the biggest thing that’s happened for Māui and Hector's dolphin conservation in decades.”

READ MORE:
* Only 54 Māui dolphins remain, leaked Department of Conservation report shows

* DoC faces questions over ‘hidden’ Hector’s catch

* How New Zealand's 63 Māui dolphins hold the key to a $263m export market

“To my knowledge, this is the first time that a major trading partner said to New Zealand: we're happy to buy your products, but only if your environmental standard’s the same as ours. And won't be the last time.”

Ever since we have known about them, Māui dolphins have been in peril.

IAIN MCGREGOR/STUFF
Māui dolphins, swimming between Port Waikato and the entrance to the Manukau harbour.

In 2002, the North Island Hector's dolphin was re-classified as a separate subspecies. Giving them their new official name: Cephalrynchus hectori maui, then-conservation minister Chris Carter warned there were perhaps only 100-150 still alive “making them as rare as the kākāpō”.

Their discovery sparked a long, futile battle to stop the species teetering into extinction. And the nocturnal, flightless parrot has fared much better: an intensive recovery and breeding programme had already started to show results when Carter made the comparison.

Two decades later, the kākāpō population now sits at 252. Māui went the other way – the population has crashed to about 50, collateral damage in our insatiable drive for economic growth.

Commercial set nets (or gill nets) are deemed to be the main human activity that threatens their survival as they roam shallow coastal areas and forage in harbours and estuaries along the West Coast of the North Island. (There are other possible threats – pollution, littering and a parasite found in cat poo).

It’s a gruesome death for a winsome, gentle creature. When a dolphin swims into a fishing net, often invisible in murky waters, it becomes entangled. Its lungs are small, roughly the same size as humans’, and within minutes it begins to suffocate.

Desperate to avoid drowning, it thrashes and struggles, breaking teeth or fins. The nets cut into its flesh.

BRUCE MERCER/WAIKATO TIMES
Twenty years ago, comparisons were drawn between the plight of the kākāpō and Māui dolphin. But the parrot population now outstrips that of the tiny marine mammal.

Over the years, successive governments have implemented plans to protect Māui, now recognised as the world’s rarest dolphin. Many marine conservationists agree these measures – mainly restrictions on commercial fishing – are half-hearted.

Deeply frustrated, Sea Shepherd began looking for other avenues. Direct action – the campaigns they are famous for – wasn’t an option in domestic waters, where authorities could arrest protesters and impound vessels.

Onshore, efforts were thwarted at every turn by a well-connected and politically savvy fishing industry, and a complex debate about a property right in fisheries for Māori, which is entrenched in law.

“It's very, very hard to get any more protection for marine life in New Zealand,” says Michael Lawry, managing director of Sea Shepherd New Zealand. So campaigners looked overseas, learning of legal action taken by conservation groups against the Trump administration.

In 2018, activists secured a ban in the US courts on seafood imports from Mexico caught with gill nets that were wiping out the critically endangered vaquita porpoise. With just 15 left, almost half the population drowned each year.

Inspired, Sea Shepherd took on the might of the US Government, with a lawsuit against the Department of Commerce, Department of Homeland Security, NOAA Fisheries, and the Treasury Department. Jacinda Ardern’s Government joined the US defendants in fighting the case.

The marine conservationists petitioned the US Court of International Trade, adopting a similar argument: that New Zealand is not applying protections equal to those in place in US waters for critically endangered marine mammals.

They got lucky: the New York-based judge assigned to the case, Gary Katzmann, also oversaw the vaquita porpoise proceedings. Three years later, he granted a preliminary order immediately banning the import of snapper, tarakihi, spotted dogfish, trevally, warehou, hoki, barracouta, mullet, and gurnard caught in the dolphin habitat. In a ruling totalling more than 70 pages, he said the case is “likely to succeed”. It could take months to come back before the court. The ban could cost up to $2m a year in exports.

Lawry says the decision sends a strong signal that stronger regulatory control is needed. But the $4bn industry was quick to dismiss the ruling as procedural.

STUFF
With only 10-15 vaquita porpoise left, there’s a sad probability they’ll disappear in our lifetime.

Jeremy Helson​, chief executive of Seafood New Zealand, said: “Any assertion that this ruling in any way is a criticism of the Ministry for Primary Industries risk management decisions around Māui dolphins is not reflected in the court documents. The court has yet to issue its ruling on the substantive issues of the case.”

Teall Crossen​, an environmental barrister, doesn’t agree. She says the judge’s opinion was engaged on the substance of the case.

That comes down to how the two countries deal with the human-caused deaths of marine mammals.

The US has a zero mortality goal – and imposes strict requirements if the number of those deaths start to have an impact on the sustainability of a population.


BRADEN FASTIER/NELSON MAIL
McDonald’s in the US buys a lot of hoki, the main ingredient of its fish sandwich.

In New Zealand, any action is at ministerial discretion. The Government also chooses to use the Fisheries Act to make decisions about restrictions – not the stronger Marine Mammals Protection Act.

“Basically, the US law says you have to do something ... in New Zealand, it’s quite extraordinary that there’s no legal requirement,” Crossen says.

“If you want to protect marine mammals you have the ability [under the Marine Mammals Protection Act] to prohibit activities, and you can only do that if it's reasonable. When you’ve got 50 or 60 dolphins left, that would be reasonable. Under the Fisheries Act that you have to balance it with the utilisation of the fisheries resources. It gives them an escape clause.”

Crossen says the case may do significant harm to New Zealand’s international reputation.

“It exposes that the Government is not doing everything it can to protect one of the world’s rarest marine animals. It does seem that the US law is stronger.”

Slooten, who has been studying Hector’s dolphins since 1984 and was an expert witness in the case, says other countries are starting to take notice of where their fish comes from.

It is likely the US will require a traceability programme – and if New Zealand cannot prove where fish are caught, that could cost upwards of $200m worth of exports.

The European Union – one of the world’s largest markets for seafood – already has strict rules about product tracking and in recent years has taken a firm line on countries it believes are failing to deal with illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.

International environmental organisations are now putting pressure on the trading bloc to ensure that imported products are not contributing to the depletion of endangered species, such as sea turtles.

Slooten says the International Whaling Commission has already judged New Zealand’s measures inadequate, and has asked independent experts to review the model it is based on.

“To be blunt, the fishing industry don't seem to care very much for the dolphins, but they do care about dollars. Finally, someone has thought of an incentive that will get them to pull their finger out and solve this problem.”

But the industry disagrees that fishing is the problem – and says restrictions are working. Helson says vessel camera monitoring in the last two years “has seen no Māui or Hector’s dolphins at all, let alone any captures”.

Sanford chief executive Peter Reidie says his company – the country’s largest – withdrew from Māui habitat in 2016 “to avoid fishing where these beautiful creatures might be”. The company also supports a drone tracking programme.

He says remaining crews have changed their fishing methods.

“All this good work might be overshadowed by an attack via the courts by an organisation that has not been in touch with us as fishers to understand all the measures we have in place to keep all dolphins, but particularly Māui, safe from any risk presented by fishing.”

IAIN MCGREGOR/STUFF
Could court action in the US extend to other threatened species – such as the New Zealand sea lion?

Buoyed by the win, advocates are already eyeing the decision with a view to future action. Lawry says Sea Shepherd believes there is scope for a similar case involving the plight of the NZ sea lion, or rāpoka, the world’s rarest.

With only 12,000 left, the commercial squid trawl fishery overlaps with foraging territory of the sea lions which breed at the Auckland Islands, and has led to the accidental capture in fishing gear. In 2019, Sanford voluntarily pulled all of its fishing vessels after catching five in the first eight weeks of the season.

Leatherback turtles are also captured in the surface longline fishery off the east coast of the North Island, and activists are also hoping a door may open for New Zealand’s imperilled seabirds – four native penguin species are already on its endangered species list.

The Antipodean albatross, likely extinct within 2-3 decades is also a casualty of the huge US tuna market.

Dec 12 2022

Japan picks 'war' as kanji character of the year

Agence France-Presse
December 12, 2022

The character is chosen in an annual event © STR / JIJI PRESS/AFP

Japan chose the kanji character for war on Monday as the symbol for 2022 after a year marked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the assassination of former leader Shinzo Abe.

The public votes in the annual event for the written character they think best represents the past year. Olympic-themed choices dominated 2021.

The mood was darker this year, however, according to the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation, which organises the vote.

"The invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the shooting of former Prime Minister Abe, and the rapid yen depreciation and inflation faced in daily life have caused anxiety for many people," the group said in a news release.

Japanese TV stations broadcast the announcement live, with Seihan Mori, master of the ancient Kiyomizu temple in Kyoto, writing the character on a large white panel with an ink-soaked calligraphy brush.

"I was surprised, frustrated, angry and sad by the war in Ukraine. I am also angry at myself for not being able to do anything about it," said one voter who picked the character.

Abe was shot in July by a man who reportedly resented the Unification Church over massive donations his mother made to the sect.

War -- also picked to represent sporting battles in baseball and at the World Cup -- was followed in the rankings by a character meaning both cheap and safe, with the weak yen and inflation adding to feelings of insecurity.

The character for fun and easy was ranked third, with one voter citing the opening of the Studio Ghibli theme park.

Japan chose "gold" as kanji of the year last year in honour of the Tokyo Olympics, which took place after a Covid-19 virus postponement.

The 2020 winner was "mitsu", meaning dense, crowded and close: three situations people in Japan were urged to avoid to prevent Covid-19 infection.

© 2022 AFP

France bets on tech and transparency to beat Chinese caviar

Agence France-Presse

France wants its caviar to become the gold standard 

At the fish farm near Bordeaux, Christophe Baudoin is running an ultrasound device over the belly of a large sturgeon to check its eggs.

"Caviar!" he shouts as the monitor shows the right sparkle around each little round ball.

"Over-mature!" comes the next shout, indicating the fish's pregnancy cycle has gone too far and the eggs have softened -- losing the crucial crunch. It will go back in the lake to await another cycle in two years.

For the company, Sturia, it's an incredibly laborious process -- they ultrasound some 20,000 fish a year for a total of 300 tonnes of caviar -- but climate change has made it vital.

Many fish are coming out "over-mature", in part because warmer waters have accelerated the pregnancy cycle.

For the guys standing in the water, scooping up the huge fish for inspection, the winter days when 10 centimeters (four inches) of ice coated the lakes are not entirely missed.

But the change is still shocking.

"It's been 10 years since we've seen any ice on these lakes," said Baudoin.

One in five of the fish died in 2021 when water temperatures hit 30 degrees, five degrees above a sturgeon's comfort zone.

"You might not know each one by name, but it's never nice to pull out a dead fish -- and of course the cost for the group is enormous," said Sturia boss Laurent Dulau.

Extinction threat

Fished to the brink of extinction in the wild -- including the once-rich Russian and Iranian waters of the Caspian Sea -- sturgeon now exist almost exclusively in farms, most of them in China.

Sturgeon were fished in France's Gironde river for centuries, but their eggs were given to children, old people and pigs until Russian nobles fleeing the Communist revolution a century ago showed locals their potential.

It became a delicacy in Paris after Armenian emigrants Melkoum and Mouchegh Petrossian convinced the Ritz Hotel in Paris to serve caviar in the 1920s.

Farming only started in France in the 1990s, and since it takes up to a decade to raise a sturgeon, progress is painstaking.

Unable to compete with China on quantity, French producers focus on sustainable and healthy farming.

The ultrasound avoids unnecessary killing and Sturia sends the meat to be used for rillettes pate, the collagen-rich gonads for cosmetics, and the skin for leather and a specialist glue favoured by violin-makers.

'Produce better'

Dulau said the focus on traceability and quality is rebuilding caviar's image after the over-fishing crisis.

"The idea is to produce less, but produce better," he said. "People will eat less because it's a lot more expensive, but it will be so good that they'll be satisfied."

But Michel Berthommier, of nearby Caviar Perlita, is frustrated that "nine out of 10, maybe 10 out of 10" French restaurants still source from China. He blamed middle-men for preferring the mark-up on foreign eggs.

"It's bizarre at a time when restaurants are always saying they source their products locally. We sell more to Singapore than restaurants 10 kilometers down the road," he said.

But he said the transparency of French production will win over buyers.

"There used to be a mystery around how these fish were raised and harvested. We have opened our books on how our fish live, how they are fed and selected.

"We can't be number one in production, but we can lead the way in creativity and science."

Hungary: What's Viktor Orban's problem with Ukraine?
Keno Verseck
12/12/2022

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Hungary has been blocking EU support for the war-torn country. This is nothing new: Ukraine has long been a hostage of Viktor Orban's domestic and foreign policies.

"A veto game," "a foreign policy low," "running amok" — these are just some of the phrases used by independent Hungarian media in recent days to describe Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's veto of EU financial assistance for Ukraine. The weekly newspaper HVG even asked, "What does the Orban government actually have against the loan for Ukraine?"

For months, there has been speculation as to whether Hungary really would veto the bloc's planned €18 billion loan ($19 billion) for Ukraine. Right up to the end, many European politicians hoped that Orban was bluffing.



But on December 6, Orban really did carry out his threat and blocked the financial package in Brussels. A short time later, he took to Twitter to deny Hungary had used its veto: "This is fake news. [...] No veto, no blackmailing." He also said that Hungry was willing to support Ukraine on a bilateral basis.

Whether it was a real veto or not, Hungary's blocking of EU aid for Ukraine is the most recent low in an already problematic relationship between the two countries. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, there has been a whole series of such lows.
Hungary's stance on Russia's invasion of Ukraine

To begin with, Orban and his government were slow to condemn Russia's aggression and describe it as contrary to international law. To this day, Orban speaks of a "Russian–Ukrainian war." He also repeatedly emphasizes that "this is not our war" and says that it is a "dispute that the relevant parties should settle among themselves."

Viktor Orban caused consternation in Ukraine and Romania when he wore a scarf with a map of Hungary's pre-World War I territory, which included parts of modern-day Romania and Ukraine

Image: facebook.com/orbanviktor

Orban recently said that Hungary was interested in having a "sovereign state between Russia and Central Europe that we will, for the sake of simplicity, now call Ukraine." A short time later, he was photographed at a match involving the Hungarian soccer team wearing a scarf with an image of "Greater Hungary" — the territory covered by Hungary until the end of World War I, which included parts of modern-day Ukraine.

Orban's strategic use of Hungary's veto in the EU

Although Hungary has for the most part gone along with the EU's sanctions against Russia, it did veto planned sanctions against Patriarch Kirill, who is the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and a notorious warmonger.

Orban has, however, negotiated sweeping exemptions for his country such as on the boycott of Russian oil. He has also repeatedly voiced harsh criticism of sanctions against Russia. Indeed the government in Budapest is currently running a campaign in Hungary that accuses the EU of destroying Hungary's economy with its anti-Russian sanctions.

In June, Hungary threatened to veto the adoption of the EU's sixth sanction package to have Russian Patriarch Kirill removed from the EU's sanction list

Image: Alexander Nemenov/AFP

What's more, Orban has rejected the delivery of arms to Ukraine, refusing to allow the transit of weapons shipments through Hungarian territory.
Viktor Orban: Former supporter of Ukraine

So what is Orban's problem with Ukraine? It is worth noting that Hungary's prime minister was once an emphatic supporter of a democratic Ukraine with Euro-Atlantic ambitions.

At its summit in Bucharest in April 2008, NATO decided not to admit Ukraine and Georgia to the military alliance. A few months later, just after the start of Russia's war against Georgia, Orban said that this had been a bad decision. At the time, he was still a member of the opposition.

Support for Ukraine's Hungarian minority

But Orban sang a very different tune once he became prime minister in 2010. There has been considerable ill-feeling between Hungary and Ukraine because of the Hungarian minority living in the western Ukrainian region of Transcarpathia. When Orban became prime minister in 2010, just under 200,000 ethnic Hungarians lived there; today, this figure has dropped to 130,000.

At the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, the alliance decided not to admit Georgia and Ukraine to NATO, a move Viktor Orban later described as a bad decision

Image: Vladimir Rodionov/dpa/picture-alliance

Budapest was, for example, unhappy about a planned Ukrainian language law that was primarily intended to reduce the influence of the Russian language in Ukraine. Orban's government felt it also targeted the Hungarian minority in the country.
Accusations of separatism

The welfare of Hungarian minorities living in Hungary's neighboring counties has been a continual concern of governments in Budapest in the post-communist era. But after 2010, Orban took things several steps further.

Just a few weeks after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Orban gave a speech in which he called for autonomy, collective rights and the right to dual citizenship for the Hungarian minority in Ukraine. His choice of words left him open to accusations of separatism.

Secret citizenship

Hungary has on a number of occasions since 2017 — and most recently in early February 2022 — vetoed NATO cooperation with Ukraine because of Ukraine's policy on minorities.

In September 2018, the issue of dual citizenship caused a major diplomatic rift between the two countries. At the time, a leaked video showed Ukrainian citizens at the Hungarian consulate in Berehove (Beregszasz) secretly being granted Hungarian citizenship, which was against the law in Ukraine.
Courting far-right voters in Hungary

Ever since, diplomatic relations between Hungary and Ukraine have been icy. The visit to Kyiv by Hungarian President Katalin Novak, a loyal Orban supporter, at the end of November is unlikely to have changed this.

Hungarian President Katalin Novak's visit to Kyiv in late November is unlikely to have thawed the icy relations between neighbors Hungary and Ukraine

Image: Szilard Koszticsak/AP Photo/picture alliance

Overall, however, Orban's Ukraine policy is less likely to be about the country itself and more about other domestic and foreign policy priorities. With his ambivalent words about autonomy for the Hungarian minority in Ukraine or the statehood and sovereignty of that country, Orban is above all targeting far-right voters in Hungary who still dream of a "Greater Hungary" and its pre-1918 boundaries.
EU politicians believe Orban is blackmailing the bloc

On the foreign policy front, Hungary's close ties to Russia are more important to Orban than a good relationship with Ukraine. The reason for this is simple: Hungary is dependent on Russian energy supplies. In other words, every anti-Ukrainian statement from Budapest is also an indirect declaration of loyalty to Moscow.

Hungary's close ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin (right) are more important to Viktor Orban (left) than a good relationship with Ukraine

Image: Sputnik via REUTERS

Such statements include Orban's repeated insinuations that the West is to blame for Russia's war on Ukraine. He seems to be increasingly of the conviction that "the West" — and in particular the USA — pushed Russia into the war against Ukraine and is now waging a proxy war there.

But for Orban, it is also about having a means of exerting pressure on the EU in the matter of the yearslong dispute about the rule of law in Hungary. The EU will soon be deciding whether to withhold billions of euros in funding for Hungary because of corruption and deficiencies in the rule of law there. Even if Orban disputes the fact, there is hardly a politician in the EU that doubts that Hungary is blackmailing the EU with its veto on financial assistance for Ukraine.

In short, Ukraine has long been a hostage of Orban's domestic and foreign policies. But the person who benefits most from all this is not Hungary's prime minister himself, but someone else entirely, namely Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This article was originally published in German.

Robots Set Their Sights On A New Job: Sewing Blue Jeans

By Timothy Aeppel
12/12/22 

A worker uses a sanding block to distress the surface of new blue jeans at Saitex's factory in Los Angeles, California, U.S. September 21, 2022. REUTERS

Will a robot ever make your blue jeans?

There is a quiet effort underway to find out -- involving clothing and technology companies, including Germany's Siemens AG and Levi Strauss & Co.

"Clothing is the last trillion-dollar industry that hasn't been automated," said Eugen Solowjow, who heads a project at a Siemens lab in San Francisco that has worked on automating apparel manufacturing since 2018.

The idea of using robots to bring more manufacturing back from overseas gained momentum during the pandemic as snarled supply chains highlighted the risks of relying on distant factories.

Finding a way to cut out handwork in China and Bangladesh would allow more clothing manufacturing to move back to Western consumer markets, including the United States. But that's a sensitive topic.

Many apparel makers are hesitant to talk about the quest for automation -- since that sparks worries that workers in developing countries will suffer. Jonathan Zornow, who has developed a technique to automate some parts of jeans factories, said he has received online criticism -- and one death threat.

A spokesperson for Levi's said he could confirm the company participated in the early phases of the project but declined to comment further.

THE FLOPPY CLOTH PROBLEM

Sewing poses a particular challenge for automation.

Unlike a car bumper or a plastic bottle, which holds its shape as a robot handles it, cloth is floppy and comes in an endless array of thicknesses and textures. Robots simply don't have the deft touch possible with human hands. To be sure, robots are improving, but it will take years to fully develop their ability to handle fabric, according to five researchers interviewed by Reuters.

But what if enough of it could be done by machine to at least close some of the cost differential between the United States and low-cost foreign factories? That's the focus of the research effort now underway.

Work at Siemens grew out of efforts to create software to guide robots that could handle all types of flexible materials, such as thin wire cables, said Solowjow, adding that they soon realized one of the ripest targets was clothing. The global apparel market is estimated to be worth $1.52 trillion, according to independent data platform Statista.

Siemens worked with the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute in Pittsburgh, created in 2017 and funded by the Department of Defense to help old-line manufacturers find ways to use the new technology. They identified a San Francisco startup with a promising approach to the floppy fabric problem. Rather than teach robots how to handle cloth, the startup, Sewbo Inc., stiffens the fabric with chemicals so it can be handled more like a car bumper during production. Once complete, the finished garment is washed to remove the stiffening agent.

"Pretty much every piece of denim is washed after it's made anyway, so this fits into the existing production system," said Zornow, Sewbo's inventor.

ENLISTING ROBOTS

This research effort eventually grew to include several clothing companies, including Levi's and Bluewater Defense LLC, a small U.S.-based maker of military uniforms. They received $1.5 million in grants from the Pittsburgh robotics institute to experiment with the technique.

There are other efforts to automate sewing factories. Software Automation Inc, a startup in Georgia, has developed a machine that can sew T-shirts by pulling the material over a specially equipped table, for instance.

Eric Spackey, CEO of Bluewater Defense, the uniform maker, was part of the research effort with Siemens but is skeptical of the Sewbo approach. "Putting (stiffening) material into the garment--it just adds another process," which increases costs, said Spackey, though he adds that it could make sense for producers who already wash garments as part of their normal operation, such as jeans makers.

The first step is getting robots into clothing factories.

Sanjeev Bahl, who opened a small jeans factory in downtown Los Angeles two years ago called Saitex, has studied the Sewbo machines and is preparing to install his first experimental machine.

Leading the way through his factory in September, he pointed to workers hunched over old-style machines and said many of these tasks are ripe for the new process.

"If it works," he said, "I think there's no reason not to have large-scale (jeans) manufacturing here in the U.S. again."