Jay Haynes

Light Brown Apple Moth

Metroblogging San Francisco.

Be on the look out for these moths.

The quarantined counties are Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Contra Costa, San Francisco and Marin but last month one of the buggers turned up in Napa as well.

The Light Brown Apple Moth doesn't just like Apples, and could prove troublesome for wineries who are already battling the Glassy Winged Sharpshooter.

The LABM as officials have abbreviated it, has also been found feasting on over 200 plants in 120 plant genera including trees like pear, peach, apricot, nectarine, citrus, persimmon, cherry, almond, avocado, oak, willow, walnut, poplar, cottonwood, coast redwood, pine, and eucalyptus. For an appetizer he also digs common shrubs and herbaceous hosts like grapes, kiwifruit, strawberry, berries (blackberry, blueberry, boysenberry, raspberry), corn, pepper, tomato, pumpkin, beans, cabbage, carrot, alfalfa, rose, camellia, jasmine, chrysanthemum, clover, and plantain.

AppleTV gets YouTube

GigaOM.

What we are going to do today, introduce something we announced in the morning. Incredible things is YouTube. It would be great if they can get YouTube on your living room TV. We worked on them, and we are announcing that YouTube as an add-in to AppleTV, and it is a MENU ITEM. (LOOKS GREAT)

DeLay's vs. Gingrich's Adultery

Sometimes I really love Republicans:

DeLay explains how his adultery was different than Gingrich's.

Bush Admin INCREASES Taxes

The myth that the Republicans are for lower taxes needs to be put to rest forever.

The federal government recorded a $1.3 trillion loss last year — far more than the official $248 billion deficit — when corporate-style accounting standards are used, a USA TODAY analysis shows...

Taxpayers are now on the hook for a record $59.1 trillion in liabilities, a 2.3% increase from 2006. That amount is equal to $516,348 for every U.S. household. By comparison, U.S. households owe an average of $112,043 for mortgages, car loans, credit cards and all other debt combined.

Bush Admin Outed a Covert Agent

Valerie Plame: Covert Indeed.

Ms. Wilson “was a covert employee,” Mr. Fitzgerald wrote, according to Newsweek. “The CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.”

Glenn Greenwald compiled the right-wing noise machine lies about her covert status.

Venus in the Sky

We could see Venus very clearly the past veiw weekends.

David Brooks Dumbs Down Democracy

David Brooks never says anything really offensive, but he almost always dumbs everything down including his "we will be greated as liberators in Iraq" pre-war opinion.

Here are the choice phrases in his attack on Al Gore's book:

nobody ever died from contact with pomposity

reacts to machines

graduate school manner

imperviousness to reality

bizarre view of human nature

simplistic pseudoscience

flee from discussions of substance

utterly at a loss when asked to talk about virtue and justice

I don't think anyone has criticized Brooks for being a visionary. His counter argument to Gore is basically, "the Internet consists of unreasonable people with complex feedback loops for brains, therefore the Internet cannot advance reason, logic and the meritocracy of ideas."

Thankfully David Brooks has never run a company, an organization or had to motivate people. The world would never have progressed at all if his ideas were true.

Trashing Organic Standards

Link: Firedoglake.

To protect the public and organic farmers, four California counties banned GMO crops. Rice farmers in Arkansas and California protected their crops with laws preventing contamination by GMO crops. In fourteen other states, local and or state laws ban GMO’s.

GMO’s banned in part or all of sixteen states - almost a third of the US is protected from mutant food, right?

Not any more – the GMO labs did an end run yesterday in the House Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry, and the GMO labs won. Sec 123 of the new Farm Bill effectively precludes local control over GMO contamination.

If the Farm Bill passes with Sec 123, our sole protection against toxic GMO foods will be the USDA organic standards.

Caging and Karl Rove

Greg Palast via 10 Zen Monkeys.

Caging works like this. Hundreds of thousands of Black and Hispanic voters were sent letters — do not forward. Letters returned as undeliverable (”caged”) were used as evidence the voter didn’t live at their registered address. The GOP goons challenged these voters’ right to cast ballots — and their votes were lost.

But whose letters were caged? Here’s where the game turns to deep evil. They targeted Black students on vacation, homeless men — and you’ll love this — Black soldiers sent overseas. They weren’t living at their home voting address because they were shivering under a Humvee in Falluja.

Not Your Father's Pay

Why Wages Today Are Weaker - WSJ.com.

American men in their 30s today are worse off than their fathers' generation, a reversal from just a decade ago, when sons generally were better off than their fathers, a new study finds.

The study, the first in a series on economic mobility undertaken by several prominent think tanks, also says the typical American family's income has lagged far behind productivity growth since 2000, a departure from most of the post-World War II period.

The findings suggest "the up escalator that has historically ensured that each generation would do better than the last may not be working very well."