Fly Spy

The fight against mosquitos and West Nile Virus has taken to the skies. But what exactly can officials see?

If the satellite photos of your backyard arrive in time, there probably won’t be a need for the Santa Cruz County Mosquito and Vector Control (MVC) District to fly overhead and snap photos this summer. In a world thoroughly photographed (and the airbrushed free of humans) by Google, people are starting to come to terms with the idea that privacy ain’t what it used to be, but a few Santa Cruz residents may be alarmed to find out that the county is peering over the hedges in search of mosquitos, and promise they won’t look for anything else.

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Why parity is only an AL problem

It’s the DH, stupid

By now, I’ve heard just about every possible reason for why the American League is just a better league. This is based on the head-to-head interleague records and the streak of AL wins in the All-Star Game.

Now, personally I like to call the National League “baseball” and the American League “Disney on Ice” because of the DH, which destroys the integrity of the game’s strategy. But more than hampering the in-game strategy, I think what we’ve seen since the last expansion rounds — which added 3 teams to the NL and only 1 to the AL — is the more sinister effect of the DH, the one that occurs in the off-season.The media has been bemoaning the lack of parity in the league since the last expansion, that in baseball your wallet size trumps everything else. What they’re missing, because of the incessant focus on the New York/Boston rivalry, is that this is only true in the American League.

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Joe Stack’s sad plane crash A deranged pilot flew his plane into an Austin office building this morning, smashing through the windows of a local branch of the IRS. The crash happened in the vicinity of other offices, including the FBI and St. Edward’s University’s annex campus. Even though, if the suicide website is to be believed, I completely agree with the guy’s point about the insane vagaries of the IRS and the U.S. income tax law, terrorism is terrorism. In the tradition of Kamikazes, no great nation was ever formed, no brutal dictatorship ever defeated. For all the impassioned rhetoric, I find it tragic that Joe Stack turned toward solutions of despair and violence. I only hope that initial reports hold up and that nobody aside from the pilot lost a life due to his grandiloquent empty gesture. I’m left feeling dejected. What does this say about people like me who believe our taxation system is broken and wrongheaded? Far from bringing momentum and serious discussion to the movement, has Joe Stack, someone who obviously understood the issues the way I do, single-handedly marginalized income tax reform for years to come? The reason nonviolent protest is so powerful is not because it gains results quickly. In fact, nonviolent protest might be the slowest, most incremental way to make a political point possible. But a commitment to nonviolence allows opposition movements to sustain themselves, coalitions to form, events to transpire. I wish I had met Joe when he was alive. I wish I could have had a beer with him, shared his frustrations and grief, and maybe changed his mind about the prudence of his plot.