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The USDA and its partners maintain an invisible but permanent sterile fly barrier at the Darien Gap. What this means is that every week, airplanes fly over the Darien Gap, dropping sterile males by the millions to keep screwworms out of North and Central America.
The permanent sterile fly barrier just underscores the mind-boggling work it takes to not just eradicate an insect from a country, but to keep it away forever.
Increased trade with Cuba might have brought the little buggers back.
If the U.S. continues to open up trade and travel with Cuba, the screwworm is likely to cross those few hundred miles of ocean again. The best thing to do, says Hendrichs, is partner with Cubans to eradicate screwworms in their country, too. Screwworms don’t care about international relations, but they’ll exploit any holes in it to survive.
Source: Flesh-Eating Worms Have Returned to Florida – The Atlantic
For the third time since The Atlantic’s founding [in 1860], the editors endorse a candidate for president. The case for Hillary Clinton.
Today, our position is similar to the one in which The Atlantic’s editors found themselves in 1964 [Lyndon B. Johnson vs. Barry Goldwater]. We are impressed by many of the qualities of the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, even as we are exasperated by others, but we are mainly concerned with the Republican Party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump, who might be the most ostentatiously unqualified major-party candidate in the 227-year history of the American presidency.
Our endorsement of Clinton, and rejection of Trump, is not a blanket dismissal of the many Trump supporters who are motivated by legitimate anxieties about their future and their place in the American economy.
and our interest here is not to advance the prospects of the Democratic Party, nor to damage those of the Republican Party. If Hillary Clinton were facing Mitt Romney, or John McCain, or George W. Bush, or, for that matter, any of the leading candidates Trump vanquished in the Republican primaries, we would not have contemplated making this endorsement. We believe in American democracy, in which individuals from various parties of different ideological stripes can advance their ideas and compete for the affection of voters. But Trump is not a man of ideas. He is a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar. He is spectacularly unfit for office, and voters—the statesmen and thinkers of the ballot box—should act in defense of American democracy and elect his opponent.
Source: ‘The Atlantic’ Editors Endorse Hillary Clinton for President – The Atlantic
the actual price for building a “personal Google for everyone, everywhere” would in fact be zero privacy for everyone, everywhere.
in order to offer its promise of ‘custom convenience’ — with predictions about restaurants you might like to eat at, say, or suggestions for how bad the traffic might be on your commute to work — it is continuously harvesting and data-mining your personal information, preferences, predilections, peccadilloes, prejudices…
The adtech giant is trying to control the narrative, just as it controls the product experience. So while Google’s CEO talks only about the “amazing things” coming down the pipe in a world where everyone trusts Google with all their data — failing entirely to concede the Big Brother aspect of surveillance-powered AIs — Google’s products are similarly disingenuous; in that they are designed to nudge users to share more and think less.
And that’s truly the opposite of responsible.
Source: Not OK, Google | TechCrunch
the liberties designed almost a quarter-millennium ago by the Founding Fathers still turn out to be curiously well-aligned with the security of this country and the safety of Americans, while the government overreach of this era has proved to be anything but. As it turned out, those heavy-handed government policies meant to pry our lives open in an invasive and expansive way, torture information from suspects, and lock away people forever, it seems, without charges or trial, were remarkably counterproductive and ineffective—and that reality, rather than the concerns of civil libertarians, was essential to whatever backswing of the pendulum we’ve seen in recent years.
When civil libertarians defend their side of the liberty-security debate, they usually claim that liberties are just as important as security. Perhaps what they should be saying is that protecting our liberties means ensuring our safety; that surveilling everyone produces more but not better information and is not a national security measure; and that the informed interrogation of prisoners who have rights, including the right to a fair trial, is not only more consonant with the American way, but more effective than secret prisons and physical abuse.
It should by now be far clearer that needing to know everything to know something is a sign of weakness, not strength; that needing to be a bully instead of a smart operative is a sign of insecurity, not security.
What should be seen as incompatible with liberty and safety is the overreach of the state in the name of ensuring both of them. It was that overreach, not our liberties, which made us less secure. So let’s note it carefully: the Founding Fathers were right and the Bush administration, its Justice Department memos, and more recently, the candidate who has called for ever more extreme measures, supposedly to protect us and our country, will only endanger us further. Let’s take this lesson to heart: liberty is security for Americans.