The race, as I see it, is on... To determine which will happen first-- the collapse of all the planet's ocean fisheries or the advent of a global warming induced catastrophe that will inundate us all. -- pubius maximus

Here in the U.S. if we cut our defense budget in half we could buy off about half the world's fisherman for a few years, put a Prius in every driveway, get classroom size down while sending anyone who wanted to go to college, create a renewable energy electrical grid while still having money left over for a few good bottles of wine.

Since WWII, this has been the 800-pound gorilla in the room for any national budget decision. This is the unspoken evil in the current debate on seeing that everyone who needs help with health care can get it - cut defense spending and all of a sudden we have all this money (don't cut taxes - too many Americans and corporations are grossly under taxed to begin with - please see Denmark for an example of how it's done) for education, energy development and health care. If you aren't willing to make that switch, which is of course the case with about 90% of the elected and appointed people in Washington, you really don't care about the overall health and well-being of the country. It's that simple.

Fortunately a great deal of the demand comes from the Japanese, a people who worship technology as much as we worship nature. While western leftists react with gibbering fear to the first problem that arises in applying any new technology, the Japanese try and try again until they solve the problem.-- agore

The Japanese are great at working out certain kinds of technical problems. However, they don't do well still with problems of nature because you can't always bend or shape nature to human designs without suffering "unforeseen" consequences. And in spite of the Japanese believing that they have a respect of nature unique to human kind, the fact that they are humans mean that they are vulnerable to the same avaricious tendencies as everyone else. Why the hell do you think that the Japanese fishing fleet for all kinds of fish ply every ocean in the world?

Do you know why the best toro sold at Tsukiji costs what it does? Beyond being prized as it is for it's flavor, etc., it's because a Japanese fishing vessel may have caught it off the coast of Spain, put it on ice and then had it flown to Japan with 24-hours of it being caught. Yep, that's certainly applying all available technology, except that it's the kind of technology that caused the problem in the first place.

I remember sushi. I remember being able to afford sushi.-- RD

Where do you live, Minot, ND? It's very affordability is part of the problem. Middling sushi is still relatively inexpensive. You can even get lower grades of tuna without having to make it your one meal out that month.

(Sardines, by the way, are a sustainable and healthy alternative to swordfish, salmon, shark, chilean sea bass, tuna, and other endangered species.) -- naturewoman

But sardines as a gastronomical substitute for swordfish or tuna is a bit like saying, "Possum - they taste like chicken."

(Shark? Who eats shark?)

There's a graduate study here in the making--nothing new or unique, I'm sure, but maybe worth investigating; how is it that certain physical attributes can mask, as it were, a repulsive "reality" that's being presented? This, after all, is the essence of FoxNews. -- Timothy3

Go back to all the Nazi propaganda films of the 1930s that show all the strapping blond men and buxom blond women that represented the Aryan ideal. It was carried to it furthest possibility in who was, initially, allowed into the SS.

Remember, this is the Rat we're talking about. The Church's enforcer sent to Latin American during the previous out-of-touch-old-guy's tenure to knock some heads together amongst all those commie-pinko liberation theologists.

Christianity is inherently communistic.-- pragma

But this is Catholicism we're talking about, which is inherently authoritarian and kleptocratic.