Buying the farm

Chi Trib has a Wash Post piece on the left column, front page, and an NYT piece on the right, which is what you call cost efficiency — they bought the services, why not use them? — in an age of shrinking circulation, worse than reported, by the way.

The first story has the head “Study: A world without seafood,” which is alarming, to be sure.  We have until 2048, say 14 researchers from Canada, Panama, Sweden and the U.S. writing in Science mag.

"We really see the end of the line now," said lead author Boris Worm [sic], a marine biologist at Canada's Dalhousie University,

It’s not that bad, say some, including a fishing industry group that suggests “aquaculture,” farming fish as we farm grain, as a solution.  Bad idea, say the scientists, one of whom objects to its artificiality:

"It's like turning on the air conditioning rather than opening the window," said Stanford University marine sciences professor Stephen Palumbi, one of the paper's authors.

But we do that sort of thing and live better because of it, do we not?  Was the argument used once against farming in general because people lived on what they could gather? 

Anyhow, assuming the problem is as urgent as they say, it would be solved if only . . .  If only what?  Article doesn’t say.

The NYT story is about our government’s posting nuclear-weaponry info on a web site which the Iranians viewed and learned from.  It’s a story broken by NYT and widely distributed — Google News says in 351 articles.  So Trib’s going with it may be a sort of cost-efficiency windfall for which no man should blame them, least of all one as fair-minded as I.

On the other hand, the top half of page three — and this is a broadsheet, remember, with lots of page three to be half of — is NYT with “Iraq investigator’s job eliminated,” about ending oversight of construction work; all of page six except a big ad, given to two AP stories, “Russian Tea Room hopes for . . . “ and “Evangelical Leader quits . . . ,“ followed in the rest of Section one by seven more AP and two LA Times stories, not counting shorts.  All nicely presented, with pix galore. 

Maybe this has been standard for some time, but it does seem that farming out is rather important to Chi Trib, if not to scientists with an eye to our fish supply.