Excellent story in the Guardian, h/t to commenter cope. Read the whole thing.
The week-long operation in the Suez Canal had struggled to make progress and looked as though it might stretch for weeks until Sunday, when nature and logistics aligned, according to the boss of the Dutch salvaging unit that helped run the operation, who has given the fullest account of the mission so far to news outlets in the Netherlands.
For five long days and nights, the team of Egyptian, Dutch and Japanese workers dredged huge amounts of sand and attempted to pull the vessel free using nearly a dozen ordinary tugboats.
“[But] the real work could only begin once the two powerful seagoing tugs arrived,” Peter Berdowski, the chief executive of Boskalis, told NPO Radio 1. “We always thought that what happened until that point would help a bit but wouldn’t be enough.”
There had been few such tugs stationed nearby – the top of the Red Sea is usually a quiet environment – and with the canal blocked, they needed to come from the southern end, further reducing the available options.
The first, the Alp Guard, capable of pulling 285 metric tonnes – 75% more than the canals’ fleet of tugboats – arrived on Sunday morning. The dredging by crews including those on the Egyptian vessel Mashhour had helped to shift 30,000 cubic metres of sand over the past week. In the early hours of Monday morning, there was optimism on the banks of the canal, including among Boskalis’s team of 15 people onsite.
Martin
Learned that only the western ⅔ of the canal is dredged, so roughly the front ⅓ of the ship was beached. That’s why so much so much sand removal was needed.
Not sure if that’s a cost savings or just SOP for a canal like that.
SiubhanDuinne
1nd?
2rd?
3th?
4st?
Arclite
So, Matt Gaetz.
The DOJ is reportedly investigating Rep. Matt Gaetz over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old
WaterGirl
@Arclite: How creepy is this comment?
He brought his (charged with) sex trafficking buddy to the white house.
dmsilev
I have to imagine that this episode will dramatically increase the incentives to ‘double track’ the canal for its entire length and not just some segments.
Kudos to the salvage teams; talk about working in a high stress high stakes environment…
WaterGirl
@dmsilev: Science saves the day. Do you suppose anyone in the former guy’s administration even knows what a lever is?
dmsilev
@Arclite: And even still, that doesn’t make him the creepiest member of the GOP caucus. Madison ‘tree puncher’ Cawthorn comes to mind.
dmsilev
@WaterGirl: They know what financial leverage is, so maybe?
WaterGirl
@dmsilev: You give them more credit than I do. :-)
SiubhanDuinne
The international representation on the rescue team makes me happy. Well done, all!
HypersphericalCow
@WaterGirl: the Egyptian government put a ton of money towards expanding the canal in recent years, so it might. Suez Canal tolls are a major revenue source for the country, and they’ve been bleeding cash for the last couple days. That might spark them into action.
Suzanne
@Arclite: That would not surprise me in the slightest.
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGirl:
Isn’t Gaetz the one with a kind of mysterious “adopted son”? Or am I thinking of another sketchy and skeevy Member of Congress?
germy
@dmsilev:
Cawthorn is busy taking credit for the bill he voted against.
I’m serious, he’s on twitter extolling its virtues.
cope
“Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You can’t explain why the tide goes in.” Remember who said that? He probably thinks freeing the ship was dumb luck.
schrodingers_cat
So Mitch McConnell is no longer in the Suez then?
BTW I have a question for BJers. BJP is rewriting India’s history as Hindu vs. Muslim binary, through lies and half truths. India is a complex country with a complicated history as complicated as European history would be if Europe were a country. The British rule adds another layer of complication and victimization. There is a lot of ignorance about different regional histories because it is almost impossible for any person to know everything that is to know about the last 5000 years of subcontinental history.
BJP is using this distorted history to justify its current atrocities, and many even those who should know better are going along with it.
Is countering these distortions a worthwhile task?
Delk
Pizza-gaetz
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGirl:
This news sheds a great deal of light on this morning’s news that Gaetz was planning to retire early from Congress in order to take a job at Newsmax.
Doug R
@dmsilev: I was thinking in the middle of this they could build a bypass around the stuck ship. Maybe double up in the easier sections, working towards a full double track.
topclimber
@schrodingers_cat: Yes. Looking for help?
KrackenJack
@Delk:
That’s one of the first things that occurred to me, too. There’s got to be a pizza parlor angle to this…
SiubhanDuinne
@Delk:
? Heh.
JPL
@SiubhanDuinne: Maybe he’s going to adopt a daughter now.
germy
@schrodingers_cat:
It might be worthwhile to counter their narrative. It’s up to you.
I’ve been reading a collection of essays by George Orwell. Here he is on Gandhi:
In another essay, Orwell argues for a European Union, but says it wouldn’t be possible unless the British gave India its independence.
Ken
Did I not say tugboats last week? If they’d listened to me… well, it wouldn’t have sped anything up since I see they already thought of it and just had to get the powerful tugs there.
Parfigliano
@SiubhanDuinne: Thats him.
CaseyL
Fascinating story! I’m so glad they got the ship freed in less time than the worst predictions, and think the process of coordinating so many tugs must be more complicated than one might assume. Great work!
Also, I didn’t know that JIT shipping had led to the “need” for megaships like the Ever Given. I’m still not real clear on how that works, since the whole point of JIT supply is to cut down on warehouse cost. If a megaship is needed to ship JIT items, then the stuff must be clogging up warehouses somewhere.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: I cannot answer that because I am unable to keep all the Republican perverts straight.
edit: And apparently that is him. Ugh.
debbie
How strong must those little tugs be to push that huge boat around? Pulling isn’t surprising, but pushing as far as they did is very impressive.
WaterGirl
@cope: I had to look it up. The Rs all say such stupid things, it’s hard to keep them straight.
Fuck it, I’ll do it live. That one, I remember!
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: Absolutely!
He is just thinking ahead. I mean, somebody needs to pay the legal bills!
debbie
@cope:
God, that Bill O’Reilly is such an idiot.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: Countering lies is always a worthwhile task. Always. Of course you know all the guidelines for debunking falsehoods without inadvertently reinforcing them.
debbie
@schrodingers_cat:
Don’t tell Hercules that any of his tasks were pointless. Do it if you think you can make a difference.
Ken
@CaseyL: The megaship takes the place of the clogged-up warehouse?
Another Scott
@schrodingers_cat: A quick Google search of “bjp rewriting history” (with the quotes) gives me 414 hits.
It’s hard to know any more whether one more person fighting the bad-faith arguments that the RWNJs around the world are putting up is worth the effort or not.
Dannagal Young argues that (paraphrasing) fear, distrust, and similar emotions make logical arguments, facts, etc., ineffective. One needs to appeal to calm emotions, shared personal experiences, etc., to build up trust and (my words) turn off the lizard-brain responses.
She’s got a TED talk, has been on NPR, etc.:
https://sites.google.com/view/dgoldyoung/home
Probably something to it.
HTH a little. Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@CaseyL:
No, they usually have all the logistics planned out and set up before shipping begins.
laura
I’m looking foward to the inevitable blockbuster movie of the unwedgening – a modern, international sideways towering inferno.
danielx
@Arclite:
Yep, and supposedly he is also considering
resigning from officenot running for re-election to take a job with Newsmax. I believe this is what Molly Ivins would have called a coinky-dink.WaterGirl
@laura: I just hope all the animals are safe.
debbie
@danielx:
Hey, as long as he leaves…
Roger Moore
@schrodingers_cat:
You have to do something to counter them, but you can’t refute that kind of lying by digging in and criticizing the details. You have to figure out a way to show they’re a bunch of liars in general so nothing they say can be trusted. Not that this is a lot easier, but at least it’s possible.
Another Scott
@laura: “Mike Mulligan and his
Steam ShovelTug Boat” – starring Tom Hanks.Cheers,
Scott.
SiubhanDuinne
@JPL:
Ick.
danielx
@SiubhanDuinne:
The timing is…fortuitous. Yes, the very word.
As long as the slimy sonofabitch goes somewhere, preferably somewhere far away.
ETA: and yes, he has always struck me as particularly skeevy.
The Dangerman
@WaterGirl:
TFG couldn’t spell cat if you spotted him the C and the T. For lever, that’s definitely phone a friend territory.
Hurts me to go there as a Bruin but taking SC and the points tonight is easy money. Not buying what Gonzaga is selling.
The Pale Scot
@WaterGirl:
“Give me a pole long enough and a fulcrum to place it and I could move the world”
Some Greek dude way back in the day.
Who apparently knew the world was a ball floating along around 200 BCE, but then the Church got involved in science
topclimber
@Roger Moore: Hopefully, there is a counter-narrative of Muslim-Hindu cooperation or at least coexistence. You need to beat the lie with a better truth.
Ken
@laura: Tragedy! Danger! Passion! Tide Charts! Tugboats! And an ALL-STAR cast!
TOM HANKS as the Captain! IDRIS ELBA as the Salvage Expert! CHANNING TATUM and KRISTEN STEWART as the Separated Lovers! GEORGE CLOONEY as the Shipping Magnate! ANNE HATHAWAY as the Queen of Egypt!
The Moar You Know
So…the mystery of why Gaetz was babbling last night about leaving Congress for Newsmax is becoming a lot clearer.
That shit’s probably legal in Florida though.
SiubhanDuinne
@Another Scott:
No love for “Little Toot”?
mrmoshpotato
@cope:
That’s because he’s a dumbass – who committed 32 million dollars of sexual harassment.
topclimber
@SiubhanDuinne: I never did return that book to the library.
TomatoQueen
@Another Scott: We’re overdue for one of these.
Baud
@laura:
@Ken:
I hope the title will be Logistics!
Ken
@Baud: The world is ready for Logistics.
WaterGirl
@The Pale Scot: Oh, sure! First you want to talk about science and math, and now history. Good thing we have a new president. :-)
WaterGirl
@Ken: You had me at Idris Elba!
artem1s
gotta admire those tugboat guys – they are amazing. the pilot – ack – fecking amateur. try navigating this and see how it’s done.
http://sharetheriver.com/cuyahoga-river-user-faq
couple of time lapse videos of the ore boats on the Crooked River
Great Republic navigating Collision Bend
First freighter: Jan 1, 2018
I’ve been watching these freighters navigate the river for decades now and it’s still mesmerizing to watch them make those hairpin turns.
Roger Moore
@CaseyL:
I think the idea is that JIT is that your “warehouse” is all the stuff that’s in shipment. In traditional logistics, you would buy a bunch of stuff, put it in a warehouse, and draw down your stockpile as you needed it. When your stock was getting low, you’d order more. The warehouse served as a buffer to tide you over between occasional big deliveries.
With JIT, you get regular, small shipments instead. You no longer need a big warehouse because you are constantly receiving more of what you need. It’s supposed to save money because you no longer have to own a warehouse or spend your capital on the supplies in it, but it depends critically on having a reliable supply chain. Any small disruption can stop your production because you no longer have the warehouse full of stuff to tide you over until the next shipment.
Roger Moore
@The Dangerman:
I would dearly love to see a USC/UCLA championship game. It would be EPIC.
CaseyL
@Ken: A lonely megaship, sailing around and around, until finally someone in a land far, far away orders items in 60 of its containers.
The EverGiven can finally put in at port, and break its eternal solitude! Land! Friends! Other ships!
… and then it gets stuck in the Suez Canal.
Arclite
@danielx: I wonder if this will tank his job at NewsMax. I doubt it would, but everyone’s got their red lines: “She was 17, that’s practically 18! No problem, Matt! Now, if she was 12, we wouldn’t be able to hire you.”
burnspbesq
@debbie:
Gaetz’s district is overwhelmingly R. The next person could be worse.
burnspbesq
@The Dangerman:
After tonight, we shall never again mention that you sang along to “Fight On.” But Gonzaga is all that and then some.
debbie
@Roger Moore:
But when the suppliers also are JIT, you can run into real trouble.
JIT became a thing when I worked in book publishing. Children’s books were printed in Japan or Hong Kong. Publishers ended up having to purchase massive quantities of paper to have on hand (so no savings there) or the shipment would get caught up in customs when it was shipped to the U.S. (no savings either).
I feel like JIT should be filed away in the same cave as credit default swaps.
debbie
@burnspbesq:
True, but the entertainment value in the meantime!
laura
mostly a lurker
laura
@WaterGirl: I cannot….just cannot countenance the suffering on this ship and all the ones waiting behind it.@Ken: Billie Eilish and BTS unite to revise “There’s Got To Be A Morning After!11!
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@schrodingers_cat: not sure worth it in English, since these distortions are not being directed at an English-speaking audience.
Unfortunately, as with Serbia or the Middle East, it’ll probably have to be the case that “if it bleeds, it leads” before anyone outside of India pays any attention.
Bonnie
I think Mother Nature had a big role in solving this problem–high tide. Amazing!
mostly a lurker
@schrodingers_cat: Yes! India has been one of the most religiously pluralistic countries for over 2000 thousand years. Hindu Nationalism was fomented, at least in part by the British, during the period leading up to Independence. BJP nationalism, with its Hindutva (=Hindu-ness: the catchphrase term popularized in 1923 that conveys the ideology that the only ‘real’ Indians are Hindu [or at least Hindu-adjacent]) and its anti-Muslim (and anti-Sikh [and anti-any non- acceptors of the Vedic tradition as authoritative]) views have been on the rise especially over the past quarter century. The new laws undermining farmer’s abilities to sell their food commodities at a set price, in favor of ‘free’ market neoliberal policies is part and parcel of the political (BJP), and cultural (RSS and VHP) ever-increasing rise of nationalism in India.
Also @germa: Without diminishing all that Gandhi did for India, it’s well worth noting how his time in South Africa implicates him in the codification of the apartheid system, via his insistence that ‘colored’ people should be differentiated from black people.
(I study South Asia, and, if there’s interest, can gather multiple links to newspaper and journal articles regarding all this — though even a google or Wikipedia search would yield decent results on all these matters).
cckids
This is why every store ran out of toilet paper, hand soap & everything else all at once. Stop asking grocery workers if “there isn’t some in the back”. No. There never is. “The back” is now a truck or train or ship somewhere. It ain’t here.
mostly a lurker
@Chacal Charles Calthrop: the farmer’s protests have been receiving international coverage. And discussions of the rise of the new nationalisms and tribalisms should surely include India as a preeminent example
trollhattan
Egypt makes a metric buttload from the canal and one hopes after this affair they invest in some giant-ass tugs (talk to the Dutch and Norwegians, for starters) to keep on site and either dredge moar canal or…maybe use pilots to guide ships through?
Another Scott
@SiubhanDuinne: Hmm… (Googlie-goo)
Ha! That works too!
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: I’d be a semifinal game, if both UCLA and U$C win tonight, they’d play each other next.
mostly a lurker
@Chacal Charles Calthrop: Also, English is one of the official languages of India
Another Scott
@artem1s: Neat. Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
mostly a lurker
sorry for the duplicate posts and for not getting the @germy: right. This was my first response and I don’t know how to properly tag a second person.
Bill Arnold
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes. But the cost might be too high if one is easily doxxable, and it is probably best to focus on high-leverage countering.
Wikipedia can be edited pseudonymously, or anonymously if you’re careful. The main cost is time and attention.
WaterGirl
@mostly a lurker: I can help with that!
Hit reply for the first person. Click the x in the box that pops up. That closes the box, and you can go to the other comment you want to reply to, and hit reply on that one.
You will see both of the @names. You can delete the extra line between them and put the names on the same line. Or, if the replies are specific to each person, then don’t remove the extra space and add your remarks after each @name
edit: P.S. Welcome to commenting!
Another Scott
@mostly a lurker: You can have multiple @links simply by clicking on them and closing the Leave a Comment box until you get to the last one you want to include. (The Leave a Comment box remembers all the @s until you hit the Post Comment button.)
(You can delete the extra white space between them as you wish.)
HTH!
And thanks for your input. It’s appreciated.
[eta:] or, what WaterGirl said. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
mostly a lurker
@Another Scott:
@WaterGirl:
Thank you! I think I just did it (almost?) right!
Barbara
@trollhattan: They do use pilots. I read that high winds overwhelmed efforts to navigate and that the containers on the deck were so tall they acted like sails that reinforced the misdirection. It seems for now to be a freak occurrence.
Bill Arnold
@Bill Arnold:
e.g.
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross
an account that has been editing wikipedia 24/7 with right-leaning edits for many years.
Amir Khalid
@Arclite:
“Well, she was just seventeen, you know what I mean, and the way she looked was way beyond compare …”
The Beatles got away with that in a song lyric; but it was a rather less enlightened 1962, and they weren’t much older than that at the time.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: But you said it shorter and better!
WaterGirl
@mostly a lurker: You did!
dm
Dick King-Smith can tell you how it was done:
https://twitter.com/DickKingSmith/status/1376777291292934144
mostly a lurker
@germy: (purposefully reposting this time [b/c messed up the tag the first time]; promise to return to lurking after this, but think it’s important to recognize where even the good ones like Gandhi have their blind spots):
Without diminishing all that Gandhi did for India, it’s worth noting how his time in South Africa implicates him in the codification of the apartheid system, via his insistence that ‘colored’ people should be differentiated from black people.
Miss Bianca
@schrodingers_cat: I would say, “yes”, but I say that as someone ignorant of India’s history who would like to know more, so…take that in what sense thou wilt, as the Bard said…
Dan B
@schrodingers_cat: A few questions:
Are you trying to reach a small number of people or trying to stop the BJP spreading propaganda to rewrite history for Hindus worldwide? In other words: How big a target audience and where?
What is your measure of success?
Do you want to maintain an accurate history or change group perception?
Do you have some strategic areas or facets of distortions? In other words, if you had to pick a couple deceptions to start with what might they be?
Do you know other Indian nationals and transplants who could be allies?
P.S. What you stated, that Modi and the BJP are rewriting the history of India as Hindu vs. Muslim is a perfectly good message to propagate, especially as a beginning or a foundation. Make them disprove it. Don’t get into the weeds with people who repeat the lies.
Dan B
@Matt McIrvin: I agree 100%. Pointing out BJP is lying and spreading propaganda to increase their power by dividing Indians who have built a great civilization together is enough. There is ample physical evidence in the great architectural gems gracing the subcontinent. Just focusing on what is in Delhi alone would provide potent images. The Red Fort, Humayan’s Tomb, Lodhi Gardens, and so much more are very prominent.
Dan B
@Another Scott: Stories / narratives that evoke memories and images are also valuable.
The other means to reach the “Lizard Brain” is humor, hence Court Jesters. Their value is to break through rigid narratives and keep the group mind on track. There are drawbacks to missing the target with jokes that step over the line. There are plenty of stories of Jesters whose careers were cut short, as in losing 12″ off the top…
See Obama poking fun at TFG at the correspondents’ dinner. Good thing TFG wasn’t in the White House (or anything but a useless fool).
L85NJGT
@Barbara:
As they say, accidents are chains of events. Eliminate one and they don’t happen. Maybe bad pilot, plus weather, plus poor communication between captain and pilot, maybe radio down, etc. etc.
Worth considering that this ship was on the low cost route vs. using the Panama Canal. Global trade is a very complex web.