What's This In My Garden?

Can you name this bug?

When working the soil of my garden I occassionally uproot th is disgusting bug that I've been told is a grub.  It's about 2/3 the size of a man's pinky and will explode if hurled from a garden spade against a brick wall.  If left out on a small plastic cup in the sun it will soon shrivel up and die.  The former is much more satisfying but messier.

It will also produce all manner of problems with your plants root system.

I Revoke David Brooks Pundit License

David Brooks, a one-time respected conservative pundit, must simply be mailing it in.  Based solely on the first sentence of his column on the Harlem Miracle, his license is hereby suspended.  

Sayeth Mr. Brooks:

The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results.

Did Mr. Brooks forget that the proper measure of any program should be based primarily on the extent to which it achieves its stated goals?  Thus, programs designed and implemented for the express purpose of reducing poverty should actually reduce poverty.  The standard conservative belief is that the intentions behind a program matter very little when compared to the actual results.  The liberal conceit is to invest greater weight in the goodhearted intent behind the panoply of failed social programs.

 

There is typically little that is "great" about any program that produces "disappointing results," except for those whom it affords the ability to flex their moral superiority. 

Hostage and Ransom in Cyberspace

This is the first time I've heard of something like this happening:

Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.

On Thursday, April 30, the secure site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP) was replaced with a $US10M ransom demand:

"I have your shit! In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh :(For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password."

We are fucked.  Welcome to the modern world.

LUNCH: 5/11/09 (Monday)

Rules are the same... under $20.  Today's menu is: 17th Street Cafe.

I chose 449