(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

True Tales of the Trade War: Part I: The Tale of the Wandering Sorghum.

From Bloomberg, we learn of the saga of the RB Eden, a ship that loaded up with American sorghum in Corpus Christi and set sail for China. Then, the trade war broke out.

The bulk carrier RB Eden was loaded with the grain at Archer-Daniels-Midland Co.’s terminal in Corpus Christi, Texas, and was initially bound for Shanghai. When China announced a 179 percent tariff on imports of sorghum in mid-April, it performed a U-turn in the Indian Ocean, according to vessel data tracked by Bloomberg, and sailed back around southern Africa toward Europe. The vessel’s destination was changed to Cartagena, Spain, but according to the data, it never docked. On May 18, China scrapped its anti-dumping and anti-subsidy probe into sorghum. The same day, the RB Eden began sailing back toward the Atlantic. It’s currently bound for Singapore.

The RB Eden was not the only Flying Dutchman of the sorghum trade, either. From Reuters:

The Peak Pegasus loaded U.S. sorghum from trader ADM’s Corpus Christi grain elevator in Texas and departed on April 3 for Nansha in southern China, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. The cargo is one of almost two dozen bought by China but now stranded after Beijing said it would impose a hefty deposit on U.S. shipments of the grain in an anti-dumping probe. Importers now facing losses of millions of dollars on their cargoes are trying to resell the grain to buyers elsewhere but are being forced to offer steep discounts.

Won’t somebody please think of the sorghums?

True Tales of the Trade War: Part II: The Tale of the Lobster Fleet

It seems that we have been squabbling with our Good Neighbors to the North over some fishing rights since before we unfortunately started invading them. But, this is the United States in 2018, so, naturally, everything is worse. From the Globe and Mail:

In the past two weeks, at least 10 Canadian fishing boats from New Brunswick have been intercepted by U.S. Border Patrol agents while fishing in the disputed waters around Machias Seal Island, a spokesperson for the fishermen says.Laurence Cook, chairman of the advisory board for Lobster Fishing Area 38, said Wednesday that some Canadian vessels were boarded by American agents who asked about possible illegal immigrants. “There’s been a bit of a misunderstanding there somewhere,” Cook said in an interview. “They’re in international waters, so border patrol shouldn’t be boarding Canadian vessels.” Machias Seal Island, which is about 19 kilometres southwest of Grand Manan Island and east of Maine, is in a disputed area known as the Grey Zone, where lobster fishermen from both Canada and the United States have long fished side by side.

“Neither country accepts that there is a Grey Zone,” said Stephen Kelly, a research scholar at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and a former American diplomat who served in Canada. “That’s created more tension in the area over the last decade.” Kelly said both countries have done very little to assert their claims. “Sometimes doing nothing is better,” he said. “But in this case, just because it looks like it’s not broken can be very deceiving — especially with our new president in the United States. The last thing Canada wants is for Donald Trump to seize on this as an example of U.S. sovereignty being challenged.” The suggestion that the border agents were looking for illegal immigrants seems improbable, he said.

Improbable? In the United States? In 2018? Unpossible!

Won’t somebody please think of the lobsters?

True Tales of the Trade War: Part III: Let’s Hear It for the Soy

The plucky soybean, and its many friends, are the primary collateral damage so far in the trade war here in America. From Minnesota Public Radio:

There, thousands of bushels of Minnesota-grown soybeans are dumped into rail cars, headed for the Pacific Northwest and then out for export. Assistant general manager Bill Doyscher doesn't know exactly where the beans will end up, but since China is the biggest buyer of U.S. soybeans, it's a fair assumption that some of his trainloads will end up there. China is scheduled to make good Friday on something it's threatened for months: A 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybeans. "If export business tails off, then the volumes don't move, and then the efficiencies are less, and your opportunity for income is less," Doyscher said last week. So far, he said, his elevator's export business is good, but he's seeing signs of a slowdown. Orders for future delivery have already begun to lag. Some Minnesota farmers fear these ongoing trade issues will make it impossible for them to stay in business: That the new tariff will hurt U.S. soybean exports to China, reduce what they're paid for the soybeans they sell and, ultimately, reduce their profits. Some of those fears have already become reality: Because the market tends to respond ahead of changes, prices have already been dropping for several weeks in anticipation of the move.

Won’t somebody please think of the soybeans?

This is America in 2018. Everything is weird and terrible.

I suppose I should have something to say about this story involving alma mammy. By and large, I think campus speech codes are trash. But, then again, so is doxxing people online, which is one of the things John McAdams likes to do. But before we start saving him a seat in John Peter Zenger Land, let’s take a closer look at his lawsuit.

For all his self-gratification, free-speech-wise, McAdams and his legal team took Marquette to court and argued that Marquette’s disciplining McAdams constituted a breach of his contract, and it was on those grounds that the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided in his favor. However, it’s quite clear that if, say, a FoxConn employee gets fired a couple of years down the line for criticizing Scott Walker on his personal Facebook page, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty will have an unbreakable dental appointment and, alas, be unable to take the case. From The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:



Many conservatives argue universities should have more latitude to fire tenured faculty, but this case played out differently. The McAdams case favors job protections because conservatives believe their viewpoints are being stifled on college campuses. McAdams, who had continued through his suspension to blog as Marquette Warrior, has not shied away from criticizing his employer over campus matters with political overtones. Local and national lobbying associations for businesses and manufacturing lined up against McAdams. They filed "friend of the court" briefs in support of the private Jesuit university and its right to discipline employees under provisions of an employment contract. Marquette argued the case wasn't about academic freedom or free expression, but contractual rights of a private employer to discipline an employee who acts unprofessionally through a mutually agreed-upon disciplinary process.

And the Wisconsin Supremes, it should be noted, are possessed of a conservative majority because of a noxious flood of dark money over the past several election cycles. (An elected judiciary continues to be the Second Worst Idea In American Politics.) Justice Rebecca Bradley, who read the decision in favor of McAdams, is a Walker appointee who wrote some really ugly stuff when she was a student at Marquette and who was recommended to Walker for appointment by the lawyer who represented McAdams before her, and who won election to the seat to which she had been appointed with the Koch apparatus behind her campaign.

The Wisconsin Supremes are so loaded with conservatives that Justice Daniel Kelly wrote the majority opinion and then wrote his own concurrence with himself. Not that they were anxious to rule on this case or anything.

So, hurray for free speech, I guess. I’m sure McAdams will be filing an amicus brief for Ward Churchill, or actively opposing Walker's attacks on academic freedom at Wisconsin's flagship university.

WWOZ Pick To Click: “Ballade d’ Emile Benoit” (Zachary Richard): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.



Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Montana was in the news this week during a massive heat wave, so here’s Montana in 1937 in the middle of a drought. (“Central America,” the Brit announcer calls it.) The Dust Bowl years were brutal in Montana. That, and the yearly descent of clouds of grasshoppers. Children killed sage grouse with rocks for food. Farmers and ranchers killed cattle that had grown too weak to stand. History is so cool, but the weather and the times certainly were not.

One of the reasons I decline to drop my subscription to The New York Times is that the newspaper still has the will and the resources to do right by stories like this one, about a renegade zoologist in the Rockies who has run up against the local agribusiness powers and livestock czars in his effort to study and protect apex predators—specifically, the gray wolf. Rob Wielgus is his name, and he’s worth knowing about.



He first became interested in carnivores when he embarked on graduate school and received an offer to join a grizzly-bear research effort in Alberta. “The danger of grizzlies really turned my crank because I was an adrenaline junkie,” he told me that night at the bar in Republic (where the evening’s chief threat turned out to be a bartender who didn’t have Wielgus’s preferred whiskey). He got his doctorate studying grizzlies in western Canada and northern Idaho, then went to the Pyrenees for a year to help with bear recovery. In 1997, Wielgus took a job as an assistant professor at W.S.U. He started the Large Carnivore Conservation Laboratory and began to study mountain lions. Through their work, he and colleagues discovered something fascinating: Killing adult males actually increased cougar sightings and also the number of cattle and sheep killed by other mountain lions, as younger cougars showed up in the old cat’s territory. The studies later played a part in a decision not to expand the hunting of mountain lions in the state.

In 2012, the state asked Wielgus to calculate a population model for Washington’s wolf-recovery plan. Wielgus had never studied wolves before, but he had a successful ongoing collaboration with the state’s wildlife agency, and the job aligned well with the lab’s overall focus. The agency was pleased with the modeling work and came back with a much larger offer: to oversee a multimillion-dollar research project as part of wolves’ return to Washington. Funded by the state Legislature for at least four years, the work would try to get to the bottom of the age-old conflict between wolves and livestock.

As the story makes clear, the conflict between farm livestock and wolves goes all the way back to the days when the white settlers were pushing the Nez Perce off in the general direction of Saskatchewan. Wolves were hunted to near-extinction, and brought back through the efforts of conservationists and the Endangered Species Act. It was Wielgus’s job to study the effects of the reintroduced species. Which a number of the local landed gentry didn’t like.

All sides got a taste of Wielgus in the summer of 2014 after wolves from the Huckleberry pack in northeast Washington killed dozens of sheep that belonged to a single rancher. (Packs are usually named after a nearby mountain or other feature, in this case Huckleberry Mountain.) As events unfolded, there was plenty of blame to go around, said Carter Niemeyer, a well-regarded wolf expert who worked with Wielgus at the time: The rancher didn’t take prudent efforts to safeguard his sheep, which fomented the chaos; then, a government shooter made the critical mistake of killing the wolf pack’s breeding female. Afterward, at a meeting of the Wolf Advisory Group, a regular convening of ranchers, hunters, local politicians and environmentalists that helps guide the state’s wolf policy, Wielgus stood up and criticized just about everyone involved, recalled Niemeyer, who was at the meeting. “Some of the stuff Rob is doing is what a lot of us would like to do, but we know better,” Niemeyer told me. “He walks in and doesn’t respect the politics of wolves.”

If you can’t be fascinated by a story that includes the phrase, “the politics of wolves,” well, I don’t know what to tell you. As the kidz say, read the whole thing.

We ran our Special Holiday Edition of the Laboratories of Democracy this morning, and it dealt solely with that amazing corruption trial in Alabama—here’s the latest from Al.com, by the way—but Blog Official Gypsum Sniffer Friedman of the Plains sent along his usual contribution anyway. He sends along a True Tale of Journalism from The Frontier, which was looking into the financial difficulties of a local non-profit.

Later on Friday, Frontier reporter Clifton Adcock attempted to speak with interim Gatesway CEO Gloria Morton at her office in Broken Arrow. The Frontier has made multiple unsuccessful attempts in the last 10 days to speak with Morton in person, over the phone and via email. Morton told Adcock to “Quit coming back here.” Morton said she “might even talk to one of the other TV stations and we will answer your questions.” She will not, however, grant an interview with The Frontier. “No. Not with you,” Morton said.

In my experience, telling reporters to “quit coming back here” generally guarantees that reporters will keep coming back there, like the grasshoppers to Dust Bowl Montana.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Science Daily? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

"This tiny beetle lived during the Cretaceous Period, it saw actual dinosaurs," says Shuhei Yamamoto, a researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago and co-lead author of a paper describing the beetle in Cretaceous Research. "The amber the beetle was found in is like a time capsule." The new beetle, the earliest member of its family to get a scientific name, is called Kekveus jason. "Jason" is a reference to the Greek hero who sailed the world in search of the Golden Fleece; "Kekveus," meanwhile, doesn't mean anything -- co-lead author Vasily Grebennikov of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, picked it because new genus names for little-known fossils often wind up changing when the species is later reclassified as scientists learn more about it. "From my perspective, I always believe that an animal name should not have any meaning (except when named after a person), since if the authors are wrong, it might be odd to have later species 'chinensis' endemic to Europe, or something similarly absurd," says Grebennikov.

That seems a bit harsh. Millions of species walking around through history anonymously rather than just getting their name changed? I remember when we had to learn all those new countries that popped up after the Wall fell. That wasn’t hard. No matter what you call them, dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

The Families Belong Together March brought us this week’s Top Commenter of the Week. Top Commenter Kathleen Schultz gets 92.11 Beckhams for bringing us the remarkable stories of both sides of her family.

My paternal grandfather came here in the late 19th century to avoid being drafted into the German army - Polish boys were cannon fodder and his parents had no intention of letting their 3 sons be killed for a government that despised them. My mother's ancestors came here in the mid 17th century as Anglo-Irish Catholics looking to escape Cromwell's persecutions.

My grandmother came in the early 20th century. To her, “Cromwell” was still a curse.

We’ll be back on Monday, breathlessly awaiting which of the carefully nurtured creatures of the wingnut welfare terrarium gets the big job on the big bench. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline, and please pray for the soybeans.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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