Art, Activism, and the Plight of Humpback Whales

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Hello everybody.
This is Lidia Lupinto, lydialupinto.
I have 801 and I was supposedto appear live in uh in my group
uh, which is the um save thethe humpback whales from
windmill.
It's a brand new group that Istarted just a few days ago and

(00:40):
it's having fantastic responsesfrom people.
I think it's because the groupis designed to prevent all of
this nastiness that goes on inother groups.
There seems bullying andcyberbullying and trolling, and

(01:08):
this discourages people fromparticipating, and that is what
I'm trying to prevent.
I want to create a safe placefor you to come in and, most
importantly, I want artists inhere.
I don't care if you're an AIartist or if you like to paint

(01:29):
or if you like to takephotographs or videos.
I want you in here displayingyour art.
You can even, if you want,promote your art for sale.
I don't think there's a store,but I'll have to check into it.
There might be a storeassociated with groups and I'm
not sure, but you can definitelyput your link here where people

(01:53):
can find your art if they wantto purchase your photographs.
As far as authors like myself,I'm inviting anyone that is
doing anything regarding thewhales to come in and definitely
you can talk about your book orput in a blurb about it and you
can put in a link to your webpage or amazon.

(02:17):
I don't allow any other salesof nothing, that's if it's not
related to whales, I'm not gonnaallow it.
I also do take the the job of umapproving every single one of
the uh posts, which is a lot ofwork, and I make sure I read

(02:40):
them before I post them, and Iposted a group important notes
that in this particular group,you are not going to be allowed
to have discussions or argumentsabout big topics such as
climate change or anything else.
You can put your opinion, butyou're not allowed to respond to

(03:05):
that opinion in a way thatwould encourage a discussion,
and the minute I see that, Iwill remove the post.
If you attempt to criticizepeople or if you're trying to
start a conversation or even anargument, you will be suspended

(03:26):
for about 12 hours and if youpersist in that, you'll be
suspended permanently.
So this is hopefully adifferent type of group, a group
where you can feel safe andit's really meant for artists,
authors and it's really meantfor artists, authors, activists
If you're starting a newcampaign in your area for whales

(03:49):
, whether it's a fundraiser,whether it's a demonstration or
any other way that you can do tostomp for the whales.
You can share that informationwith us.
Let's exchange ideas of what arethe best ways to get people
involved about saving the whales.

(04:12):
How can we communicate withthem that we need to save the
whales from the windmills?
Of course we need to save themfrom things like illegal hunting
, which is still going on.
There's at least 700 of them ayear being killed by hunters,

(04:37):
and that's in Norway and anotherarea as well, where they had
traditionally hunted whales andthey don't want to.
Oh, japan, japan continues tohunt whale.
So there are internationalagreements that say that we
shouldn't be hunting the whales,particularly humpbacks, because

(04:58):
they're endangered.
Now some of the other whalesthat they hunt may have 10 times
as much the population as huntbats Hunt bats and I've checked
this number several times it'smore than 30,000.
I have trolls in here sayingthey're not 30,000.
There are so many more and thatthese whales are plentiful and

(05:21):
the windmills are doing no harmby killing a few, and the
windmills are doing no harm bykilling a few.
We need the energy more than weneed to save the whales.
These are the kinds of peoplethat come in here and I end up
having to ban.
If you can imagine, I don'thave tolerance for that.
This group is about savingwhales from any kind of harm,

(05:44):
including hunting, and it's amammal that not only is it
self-aware, it is moreintelligent than a human.
This thing is self-aware, it'sintelligent, it's a creature
equivalent to us, but with adifferent environment that it
lives in.
It lives in the water.

(06:05):
So we don't have, in my opinion, the right to invade their
habitat and put electrical powergenerators in that habitat
without proper study as to whatthat's going to do to their

(06:28):
population.
And already from the book thatI am writing, mourning Our
Whales, I have discovered thatthere is probably a total of 550
whales that die every year dueto windmill, attributed to
windmills Okay, are attributedto windmills.
Now the discussion as towhether they die from the

(06:50):
windmills or they die from netsor run over by boats.
My book goes into thosepossibilities.
For each whale I go through andI examine the data.
I go through and I examine thedata.
I go and find the localarticles that are posted by
actual journalists who actuallyhave a soul, people who care

(07:14):
about the community and careabout the whales and they post
what they perceive as the truth.
These are the articles that youneed to find and look for,
because those are most likelythe truth.
All right, and these arejournalists who check their

(07:35):
facts and, uh, if you go tomainstream media, I call it
mainstream or, I guess, nationalmedia, that would be called
national media.
They aggregate stories from allover the country and pick and
choose which stories they thinkare going to sell the most, or
which stories they think theirsponsors are going to want to

(07:57):
show to the public.
And sponsors are going to bepeople selling windmills.
Okay, so they're not going topost anti-windmill information
when their very sponsors want towant to, uh, put up the
windmills.
So you see how they're alreadycompromised because they're

(08:18):
working based on advertisementsin the big numbers, big amounts
of advertisement in the millionsof dollars of advertising keeps
their paychecks going, and soif they say, no, we can't post
any anti-wind propaganda, putinformation, then they cave in

(08:42):
because if they go against theindustry, they're not going to
have a paycheck, are they?
So that's why it's skewed, it's, it's just capitalism and how
media is by paid advertisers,and so it can't be really a
totally, I guess truthful, it'salways going to be labeled as

(09:09):
propaganda.
Propaganda meaning advertisement.
Paid advertisement ispropaganda.
Propaganda is not alwayspolitical.
It's the way that you send it.
It's like an advertisementwhere they tell you this gadget
is the best gadget in the world,when you know there are
probably 25 gadgets that arecheaper and better, you know

(09:32):
that's propaganda.
So when you go to the localgroups, the local reporters,
you're going to find people thatare interested in serving their
community.
You're going to find peoplethat are interested in serving
their community.
So if dead whales are bad fortheir community, such as they
spoil the beach or they spoilthe view, or the windmills are

(09:53):
spoiling the view or many otherreasons, they're going to post
articles that are more forhelping the community and
they're going to be mostly forthe whales because they don't
want them dying, because a lotof ecotourism relies on the
existence of these animals, sothey have an interest in keeping

(10:18):
them alive.
So you're going to get more ofa balanced view from the local
community newspapers and that'swhat I concentrate on in this

(10:40):
book called, let me forget, mmscMarine Mammals Stranded.
It's a catalog of them, but Ialso take data from other
sources because they don't haveevery mammal that has been
stranded and other sources don'thave every mammal that's been

(11:03):
stranded.
So I need to create bigspreadsheets.
I extract all that data, createmy own spreadsheets and
actually go through and makesure they're not duplicates.
And then what I do is I takeeach whale when it died, I find
the town and the local newspaperthat responded on it, and then

(11:27):
I go and find the nationaloutlet that responded and then
any articles related toactivists who might have
complained about that there'stoo many strandings, or articles
from industry saying that, no,they didn't have, uh, too many

(11:48):
strandings.
So I try to be a balanced it'sa balanced book and I show you
what the industry says and whatthe um, the people that are for
the whales say.
It's always the same pattern.
However, this always seems tobe a cover-up about the fact
that the windmills are close by.

(12:11):
One of the things that I neededto do in order to create this
book, which is like a databasein a novel, in two different
ways.
I had to figure out how fareach whale died from the

(12:32):
original windmills, and thattook some doing.
I also had to figure out howold they were and many other
data that isn't that oftenshared by the news outlets.
They seem to leave outinformation like that and that's

(12:55):
what creates the confusion frompeople.
If they leave out informationstrategically to avoid a public
outcry, then you're not going toget the right information and
you're not going to really knowwhat's going on.
The other problem that I see isthat national news outlets cover
one out of 10 of these and theycover them so briefly that the

(13:23):
results are basicallyprioritized so that you don't
see these deaths.
On Google and Bing, which arethe search engines that most
people use, this is doneintentionally by the people that
propose wind as an alternativeand it's definitely a paid

(13:46):
effort of propaganda.
In other words, people likeMicrosoft, like Bill Gates or
other people that are pushingfor wind, or Democrats or many
other groups that push for windpower, are going to pay Google
to prioritize their story overthe story of the local, small

(14:13):
local newspapers who can tellyou how many whales have died.
So it has taken me an enormousamount of work and computing
work, database work to try tomerge all the data,
cross-reference the data withthe local articles.
And there's 100 whales, sothere's 100 local articles they

(14:51):
were and any necropsy resultsthat could have given you a clue
as to what these whales couldhave died of and show you how
far they were from the windmills, and after 100 of these, you
start to see the patterns.
Then I'm going to, of course,have charts and different
graphics at the end as anappendix, but I wanted to give

(15:11):
each whale its own space, itsown story.
Treat them as individuals,because all the data that I have
seen shows that these areself-aware, actual intelligent
individuals, as intelligent andas self-aware as we as humans
are, and this is really hard forpeople to believe they are.

(15:38):
If you've seen videos of marinemammals playing with balls and
these I'm talking wild animalsplaying with balls with you and
interacting with people, you'llknow that these are not just any
animal.
These are intelligent animals.
I had the amazing experience asa teenager of walking by uh in

(16:05):
an area where they had a dolphinshow and walking by the uh the
the pool where they kept them.
As you know, they they wereactually in jail, the poor
animals, but they were bored.
So I had the um amazingexperience of one of the animals

(16:28):
interacting with me throwing aball at me.
I mean a distance that wasseveral, you know, 20 feet high.
It threw the ball at me and itmade sure I caught it, which was
?
It just blew my mind and then Ithrew it back and he threw it

(16:49):
back and this went on for quitea while.
This animal wanted to play withme and this animal had an
amazing ability to throw a ballright into my hands.
I mean the aim of this thingand his eyes on either side of
his head.
I don't even know how he did it.
Okay, but that was my firstexperience with marine mammals
and how they can interact withyou.

(17:09):
And then I've been on numerouswhale watching trips.
I've went on cruises that wedid whale watching.
I did, of course, swimming withthe dolphins.
I've done any number of thingslike that, and all those
experiences have added to mylove of these animals.
I think I have to say that Ilove my dogs, and they're not

(17:34):
even as intelligent as a whale,and I absolutely love my dogs
and because I know that theyhave an intelligence, that they
respond to me, that they knowwhat I'm saying.
Okay, so these animals,considering that the numbers say
30,000 in the entire world ofhumpback whales, the largest

(17:58):
mammal on the surface of theearth, and for us to install
electrical machines that causeunbearable noise to their very
sensitive ears and systems iscriminal, especially since I
have seen the studies that theypresent to get the permits for

(18:23):
these machines and they don'teven talk about the harm they
could be doing to marine animalssuch as whales.
Okay, I just downloaded MrMurphy's presentation and it was

(18:44):
awful.
They didn't really even talkabout what it's going to do to
the whales and we depend in NewJersey on whale watching.
This is a business and peoplego on them all the time.
This is an ecotourism businessand for them to ruin it like
that for a few kilowatts thatare going to feed the hotels and

(19:09):
really the gambling casinos,seems criminal to me.
Ok, the other thing I wanted totalk about is today I posted
about the astroturfing.
If you're not familiar withthat term, that is a practice by
politicians in industry tomanage a particular

(19:36):
environmental organization sothat it only reports things that
are useful to them.
And unfortunately I found thatthis marine mammals stranding
center is astroturfed and a lotof the activists accused them of

(19:57):
because they've been angry atthem.
I could see from the groupsthey've been angry at them.
I could see from the groupsthey've been angry at them
because they continuously denythe effect of the windmills on
the health of these animals andkeep covering up.
As I look at the numbers thatthey publish, they are

(20:21):
increasing on a monthly basis.
The more of these windmills wehave, the more deaths are going
to be.
Why is that?
Because the whale can basicallyswim over 100 miles in one day.
A humpback whale, it is anamazing machine, it's a, it's

(20:43):
like a speedboat.
It has enormous power.
It can.
It can go fast, a hundred milesin a day.
So it's not going to meet justone wind farm, it's going to
meet all of them, becausethey're all the way down of the

(21:07):
coast, so from the top to thebottom, they're going to meet
windm their ears continuously.
Uh, have them have problemswith echolocation.
Then it's basically as mr trumpsaid, it's driving them crazy,

(21:32):
which, if I were just boating inthat area with those windmills,
it would drive me crazy becausethe noise would be unbearable.
Okay, uh, mr trump just saidthat it drives these whales
crazy.
He has a way to make thingsvery direct and easy to
understand, so I think that'sprobably a good, a good thing to

(21:55):
say, uh, and as they go downthat coast and I have a list of
all the windmills, from the veryup north all the way down to my
area in Atlantic Shores,atlantic City.
There's many, many windmills.
There are about 30 of them andthey're all listed and in each

(22:19):
one there's been deaths.
But also the whales aretraveling from top to bottom, so
they're going to meet up morethan one windmill.
And unfortunately, when theydid their studies I don't think
they had the correct pathwayswhere the whales travel,
pathways where the whales travel.
They do travel through, kind ofa road, you might say, where

(22:51):
they always find the food, andyou can see them traveling those
areas.
Well, I think they're in thepath of the whales.
That's why they keep runninginto them.
They either had to put thesewindmills further out in the
ocean or maybe not put themthere at all because they seem
to be running into them.
Ok, so they just came out a newdocumentary that explains

(23:14):
exactly how these whales arebeing affected by the windmills,
and it's a paid documentary.
I posted the demo of it and I'mgoing to try to make some time
to see it.
It looked very good, well puttogether and that shows also the

(23:38):
electrical cables.
Now we have cables in the oceanfor Internet.
We have those, they usually putthem in kind of a trench in the
ocean, so they really don't getto the whales and usually
they're not magnetic,electromagnetic.

(24:00):
Okay, because the internetcables operate a little
differently than electricalcables, but these are electrical
cables and, as you know, whenyou wrap a wire around a magnet
or something, you getelectricity.
Sometimes you may handle yourphone like this and if it's

(24:24):
charging, you will feel like alittle tingle in your hands.
Okay, that's the electricalenergy.
It's going through your hands.
It's hurting your hand.
You shouldn't be doing that toooften because it might harm you
Anytime.
You have high-powered wires, ofcourse there's going to be an

(24:47):
electromagnetic field aroundthem and whales are extremely
sensitive to electromagneticfields and this is also hurting
the whales.
And these could be the cablesthat transfer the electricity
from the windmills, which is agenerator.
It's the same as your generatorat home.

(25:09):
It spins around and generateselectricity in a cable down to
an area where it's distributedto other places.
Well, as they generate thiselectricity, there is electrical

(25:30):
wires that transfer it andthose have electromagnetic
fields.
The other issue is that,because windmills are not
constant, they are intermittentSometimes there's more wind,
sometimes there's no wind thiselectromagnetic field is going
to keep changing and so thewhales are going to detect this

(25:54):
and it's just another item intheir environment that they
weren't used to thousands ofyears ago.
Just another item in theirenvironment that they weren't
used to thousands of years agoand that they may not be able to
adapt for the next thousandyears and they may kill them for
the next thousand years.
So all of these considerationswere not made before they put in

(26:18):
these windmills, because awindmill is big business,
because there was a climatechange lobby that pushed these
windmills and there was some,you know, they were all coming
from China and there was bigbusiness going on and big
contracts and lots of money.
That's why they paid verylittle attention to the fate of

(26:39):
our whales, because that wouldhave killed their business, of
course, if they had consideredthe whales.
Okay, what do you want?
My dog is here.
I promised you that I wouldshow you licorice and see if I
can grab her.
I have your.
She doesn't want me to grab her.

(27:01):
Okay, let me explain to youabout licorice.
Let's just talk about somethinga little bit more interesting.
I have about 22 children'sbooks and they're all
environmentally minded.
This book here is aboutGraveling Point Beach.
Graveling Point Beach Okay, Iwant people to see you.

(27:32):
This is Liquish.
Liquish is my little cockapoo.
Liquorice is my little cockapooand she is about a year old.
Come on, say hi, say hi, say hi, my baby.
Okay, okay, you want something?
Want to eat something?
Okay, good girl.
Okay, she's the star of many ofmy books.

(27:55):
What are you doing?
Okay, okay, come on.
Okay, okay, okay, she's thestar of many of my books, and

(28:17):
here's one Lucrish, okay, are ofmany of my books, and here's
one, licorice, okay, and uh,this is another book I did about
the local area, and this isleon's body.
This is about a spotted seal.

(28:38):
Okay, so you can look at allthese books in Cloverleaf
publications.
I don't just publish reportsabout whales, I publish books
about all kinds of environmentaltopics, including children's
books.
This one was a special projectthat I created that it's about
honoring each of the whales, soit's going to be a pretty thick

(29:00):
book.
It's going to have an articleabout each whale and it's going
to also trace the issues as theyevolve, because as we go
through the many whales' deaths,okay, what happens is they
become more intense and everytime there's a whale there is a

(29:23):
death.
People realize that this isbecoming more and more intense
and so there's more and moreoutrage, and the book goes
through that process of how theoutrage increases, until just
this month when there were twomore whales and probably even

(29:44):
three.
I think I saw a third one.
I tried to get to the point thatI document well the January
whales before I release the book.
Then I'm going to have a QRcode in there so that when you
get to all the whales that died,there will be a webpage in my

(30:09):
book website that's going toshow you any new whales.
Okay, I may post them here inthis group, but I'm going to
post them on my website as acontinuation of the book.
So if you buy the book, you'regoing to get 100 whale deaths.

(30:30):
You're going to get articlesabout something called
astroturfing.
You're going to get articlesabout how ships protect
themselves from running intowhales and why the narrative
that mostly it's ships runningthem over is a total lie.
And you're going to getnumerous articles, lists of the

(30:52):
various wind farms that are inthe area.
You're going to get a list ofthat and then I'm going to
continue it so that once, onceyou get to this qr page, you'll
be able to see the other uh, theother whales.

(31:15):
It'll probably be a documentthat you'll be accessible
publicly and in there it'llcontinue with the new whale.
So if I have, in february,three more, you'll have three
more stories and I'll just keepgoing with that.
So it'll be be an evergreenbook in that if you buy this one
, you don't have to buy anupdate.
The update's going to be onlinefor you, but it's going to be

(31:35):
in a location that only thereaders will know, because it'll
be a QR code.
Okay, so it's going to be asick book.
I plan to send it to variousnewspapers and organizations,
and definitely a congressman,for them to realize that no,

(31:56):
it's not true that they get runover by ships.
It's not true.
The people saying that in theMarine Mammal Stranding Center
are paid by Mr Murphy.
From her statements I justdocumented her statements they
seem like she's just followingthe narrative and she's not even

(32:20):
considering any one of thosewhales have died from a windmill
.
If they have died fromsomething other than a boat or a
net, they don't even want tomention what it is.
So if it's other, they don'tsay it could be the windmills.
It's the big elephant in theroom.

(32:41):
You know, it's unbelievable tome how they lie and they get
paid to lie and these peoplehave a soul.
The activists are so upset thatthere's a lot of fighting going
on in these groups.
I had to leave because theythought I was one of those other
people that are astroturfing.

(33:01):
They didn't know who I am fromAdam, because I'm an author.
The problem is that, as anauthor, I don't work with any
organization.
I want you to know this is justme and AI.
I use AI to help me.
My husband is here to cook andmy dogs are here to support me,
but I do all the writing.

(33:22):
I've been writing for now 40years as a technical writer, as
an author.
I ran a newsletter for 12 yearspublished by Elsevier
Publishing.
I have a lot of experiencewriting and publishing and now I
have, I would say, 30, 40 booksright now in my catalog of

(33:47):
books that I've written,including 22 children's books,
two large six novels and thesereports that I do in all kinds
of topics, mostly highlytechnical topics.
I have nine right now and thisone's going to be kind of a

(34:10):
hybrid between a story and enddata book because I wanted to
give you a sense of who thesewhales were, what family did
they have, how old they were,what is their role in their pod,
how do they communicate withthe pod all kinds of information

(34:32):
that you might not get anywhereelse, and I think this will
make you feel closer to thesewhales.
Okay, so I wanted to say goodbyenow and thank you for listening
.
It is now 9.38 8.35.
I've been talking for about 35minutes and I wanted to welcome

(34:55):
you, everyone that is cominginto this group.
Please don't hesitate to emailme.
I get a lot of trolls, I get alot of pro-wind people that hate
me, and I get a lot of hatemail for publishing this book.
You will not believe thatsomeone can actually come in and

(35:17):
spew hate in vitriol againstthe book Mourning Dead Whales.
It's unbelievable to me, okay,how this happens in the United
States, and I've had to takesome measures to keep these
people out.

(35:38):
So I'm very cautious.
When I let you in, I check outall of your groups.
I make sure you're not in anyof the AstroTurf groups I made a
list of them and make sureyou're not one of them, and I
also just if you post something,even a comment, it doesn't get

(35:59):
posted right away.
I have to go see it first.
So it's hopefully going tobring make this group very safe.
It may not get very big, butit's going to be very safe and
you'll find a nice community oflike-minded people that you'll
be able to converse with andyou're not going to be attacked

(36:23):
by trolls or things like that.
The minute I see any of thatnonsense, he's gone.
There's no three strikes,you're out.
There's one strike and you'reout.
Okay, none of this trollingnonsense is acceptable here.
The minute you start a trolling, you know try to.
You know provoke people intosome conversation, you're gone.

(36:47):
I don't care what it's about.
Okay, you're gone.
So welcome everybody to thisgroup.
I'm going to put this video upfor you to review other times
and I'll continue having thesetalks I think once a week is

(37:08):
more than enough right now andthey're also going to be
published on my podcast.
I do have a podcast.
I'll post the link.
Thank you very much, everybody.