My friend Patrick Wilkinson has put together a fine video about the upcoming spraying of large parts of California in the ongoing war on the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM, pronounced el-bam).

As Patrick's film suggests, there'd better be something mighty scary about this moth to warrant monthly aerial spraying over most of Northern California over the next five years.

So what's the danger? Will the moth summon forth the apocalypse? No. Is it the harbinger of some strange Africanized disease? Not even. Will it ravage California's agriculture? Kinda. But not actually by eating anything or laying anything or causing anything to be damaged.

The reason LBAM is a menace is, er, NAFTA. ... read more »

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Posted on 31 May, 2008 - 04:03

Goodness. Seems like every post today has an imperative title, and a reference to innocent causalties in needless wars. This post is something that came up a few weeks back at my Cody's reading in Berkeley.

One of the questions was about Binayak Sen, and while Preeti Shekar from ASATA gave a fine answer about the situation, we were both swimming a little on the details.

The short version of the story is this. The government of Chhattisgarh, a state in India, is fighting a war against Naxalites, the Mao-inspired rural agitators, whose bretheren have recently succeeded in overthrowing the monarchy in Nepal. Land reform is never far from the surface of trouble in rural areas, and this is one such case. ... read more »

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Posted on 31 May, 2008 - 04:40

Fer real.

Full details here. Via The Virtual Stoa.

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Posted on 31 May, 2008 - 04:49