Bricks and Mortars

  To the Editor: The incompetence of Nordic Aquafarms never ceases to amaze. This time Nordic's incompetence surfaced in a September 3 Republican Journal editorial entitled “Our News Coverage Is Not for Sale.” The editorial describes attempts by Nordic to extort more favorable Republican Journal coverage of its proposed $500 million industrial fish farm by threatening to stop advertising in the paper. This is staggering incompetence for a corporation that wants to build $900 million of industrial fish farms in Maine and California. But Nordic's remarkable incompetence extends well beyond its PR department. Indeed, there are many contestants in the Nordic Aquafarms incompetence derby. There's Nordic's failure to adequately assess the subsoil at the site of its Fredrikstad, Norway plant, which has caused that plant to sink into the ground and has apparently forced Nordic to abandon the unit's commercial production in favor of much smaller-scale “resear

 This was published September 16, 2020 at counterpunch.org Troubled Times at The Vaunted Intercept   By Lawrence Reichard               On September 13, the New York Times ran a 2,900-word article on the biggest fuck-up in U.S. leftist media in a long time, perhaps ever.               The piece covered The Intercept's fantastic and presumably unintentional sloppiness in handling the 2017 Reality Winner leak, the fallout from that sloppiness, and the unfortunate culture at The Intercept that seems to persist to this day, despite internal and at least quasi-external investigations into the monumental screw-up.               In 2017, at the age of 25, the unusually-named Reality Winner sent The Intercept a secret report on Russian cyberattacks on American voting software. Now, thanks in large part to The Intercept's gross negligence, Winner, a former linguist at the National Security Agency (NSA), is serving a prison sentence of 63 months. On July 20, 2020, it was

 Greetings.  Most unfortunately, some of these blog posts have formatting problems - there's no indentation or paragraph separation.  I'm trying to fix this.  If you have any suggestions, please email me at thedeftpen@gmail.com. Thank you. Lawrence Reichard

  This piece was recently published by the Anderson Valley Advertiser in Humboldt County, California. The Self-inflicted Wounds of Nordic Aquafarms It's been a tough year for almost everyone, but 2020 has been particularly hard on Nordic Aquafarms, the Norwegian company that wants to build a $400 million industrial land-based fish farm on the Samoa Peninsula in Humboldt Bay. In March, Nordic made a surprise announcement that it was converting its commercial production unit in Fredrikstad, Norway to a “research and training” facility. The company has been tightlipped about the reason behind the sudden change, but the move might have been less than entirely voluntary. As a Maine-based journalist, I have been covering Nordic Aquafarms since the company's February 2018 announcement of plans to build a $500 million industrial land-based fish farm in my small town of Belfast, Maine, population 6,700. Before the sudden March 2020 announcement of the Fredrikstad conversi

An open letter to the Belfast Planning Board: As members of the Belfast Planning Board, you are facing a decision with grave implications for Belfast, Northport and indeed the entire state of Maine: whether to allow Nordic Aquafarms to build a massive industrial fish farm in Belfast. The City of Belfast website states: “The Planning and Codes Department performs a variety of services intended to protect, maintain, and develop an attractive, safe, and healthy environment.” Nordic Aquafarms’ proposed project does none of this. The Nordic project would daily discharge into Belfast Bay 7.7 million gallons of warm effluent, more than 100 pounds of phosphorous and 1,600 pound of nitrogen, all of which threaten algae blooms and popular recreation sites. This threatens tourism, fisheries, and those industries’ jobs. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than any other marine body of water in the world. Species, including the economically vital lobster, are migrating north. It would be irre

An open letter to the Belfast Planning Board: As members of the Belfast Planning Board, you are facing a decision with grave implications for Belfast, Northport and indeed the entire state of Maine: whether to allow Nordic Aquafarms to build a massive industrial fish farm in Belfast. The City of Belfast website states: “The Planning and Codes Department performs a variety of services intended to protect, maintain, and develop an attractive, safe, and healthy environment.” Nordic Aquafarms’ proposed project does none of this. The Nordic project would daily discharge into Belfast Bay 7.7 million gallons of warm effluent, more than 100 pounds of phosphorous and 1,600 pound of nitrogen, all of which threaten algae blooms and popular recreation sites. This threatens tourism, fisheries, and those industries’ jobs. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than any other marine body of water in the world. Species, including the economically vital lobster, are migrating north. It would be