HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM - if you don't know about this, perhaps you should.

Crazy ants are the new fire ants (and possibly worse)

By Marty Toohey

 

Hoping to underscore his point about a new pestilence that has arrived in Central Texas, ant researcher Edward LeBrun pointed to a Mason jar in his office.

The jar looked like it was filled with blackberry jam. But it was actually filled, top to bottom, with ants, roughly 181,000 of them. More specifically, tawny crazy ants — a bug causing such a problem that it has supplanted the fire ant atop the list of pests that researchers say Texas needs to get under control. Several Houston-area suburbs can attest to crazy ants’ destructive habits: swarming across the landscape, nesting in virtually every cavity they can find, along the way ravaging electronics, taking up residence in drywall and disrupting local ecosystems.

Crazy ants are now one of the main topics of study at the Brackenridge Field Laboratory, a University of Texas facility on Lake Austin Boulevard where LeBrun works. His point with the jar full of crazy ants: All the researchers had to do was leave nine 50-milliliter tubes on the ground in an area infested with crazy ants, then collect them a day later. The ants swarm in such vast numbers that the researchers didn’t even have to bait the tubes.

“An invasion of these can be so extreme,” LeBrun said, “that it’s hard to call it just a nuisance.”

Houston, we have a problem

Have you ever heard anyone talk wistfully about fire ants?

Some people in Pearland do. That was where crazy ants were first spotted in 2002. Exterminator Mike Foshee found them around the time his air conditioner stopped working. He fired up the Shop-Vac to clear the vents in his living room floor and, by the time he had finished, he had sucked out five gallons of ants. They got inside the television, making the picture go cattywampus, and streamed frantically across the kitchen floor. He poisoned them, only to see them come streaming back. The subdivision remains overwhelmed by crazy ants.

“When you talk to people who live in the invaded areas, they tell you they want their fire ants back,” LeBrun said.

Crazy ants are now found in 23 Texas counties, including Travis, Hays and Williamson, according to Texas A&M’s Center for Urban and Structural Entomology. LeBrun named, off the top of his head, crazy ant populations near Briarcliff (west of Austin), the Met Center (Southeast Austin), Convict Hill (South Austin) and McNeil High School (North Austin).

Before you panic, crazy ant populations expand slowly, perhaps a couple of hundred yards a year. It’s humans who appear to be spreading them across vast distances, LeBrun said – first by bringing them up from South America, then letting colonies sneak into potted plants or plywood or hay bales and hitch a ride.

Rock, paper, ants

Telling the story of the crazy ant requires bringing fire ants into the conversation.

They are natural rivals in parts of Brazil and Argentina, and both probably came to the southeastern United States as stowaways on ships. Invasive fire ants arrived in the 1930s and spread at an alarming rate across the South, in part because their venom is so potent that most biological rivals have no chance.

Crazy ant venom is far less toxic, and their bite at most causes “a minute of pain that quickly fades,” according to A&M’s experts. But crazy ants can wipe out fire ants. Researchers at UT found crazy ants do this by smearing themselves in a secretion that neutralizes fire ant venom, essentially rendering them invulnerable to it. No other Texas ants appear adapted to take on crazy ants, either. They drive out almost all other bugs, including spiders, through sheer weight of numbers, LeBrun said. Even nesting songbirds can be overrun by crazy ants, A&M experts say.

Crazy ants are also remarkably difficult to drive out. When hurt, they emit a pheromone that, like a battlefield radio, calls in nearby reinforcements. This means the ants will swarm into electrical sockets in which their cousins were just fried, or march across yards that pesticides had just turned into a crazy ant killing field. LeBrun said such efforts often just create “a tiny little gap in an ocean of ants.”

Nature does have a way of keeping crazy ants in check in South America, though. Several other species of ants tend to kill crazy ants by outcompeting them for food. UT science writer Marc Airhart compares the situation to a game of rock-paper-scissors: crazy ants beat fire ants, fire ants beat other ants, and other ants beat crazy ants.

The big problem in Texas is that no local species appears to beat crazy ants. Bringing in the South American ants would only create another problem, LeBrun said, because many of the ants in that habitat could turn out to be highly invasive.

If fire ants are rock, and crazy ants are paper, there are no scissors here.

All happy families are alike

Still, the old truism about a greatest strength also being a greatest weakness could apply to crazy ants. Again, a comparison with the rival fire ants is useful.

One type of fire ant spreads over great distances in part because, when a new queen is born, it flies off and either dies or establishes its own colony. But that colony doesn’t generally get along with other colonies. The single-queen fire ants tend to build their mounds and keep to themselves. That behavior limits cooperation between colonies, but it also buffers many fire ant populations against outbreaks of disease.

Crazy ants are difficult for precisely the opposite reason: Their colonies get along. They’re like one big, happy family.

Crazy ant queens don’t fly off to breed or die. Instead, they stay home and breed alongside other queens. LeBrun said having eight queens isn’t unusual, and researchers have even found upward of 100 of them in some colonies. The tendency to stay home slows the spread of crazy ants.

Nature might also provide relief for the rest of the country. Crazy ants are subtropical and, though researchers aren’t sure how far they could spread, the best guess is they won’t get north of Oklahoma or past West Texas, LeBrun said.

But beware: when crazy ants arrive, they are probably at the leading edge of a “super colony” of many, many nests – wave upon wave of reinforcements to send in if one nest is injured. LeBrun said the super colonies he has studied tend to be circular and can be a kilometer or many kilometers in diameter.

A super colony is susceptible to contagion, though. The UT lab is now testing a fungus that appears to spread quickly among crazy ants and, under certain circumstances, devastate them. The lab is still testing whether the fungus could harm other creatures.

The UT lab is also testing a type of tiny phorid fly that could be lethal to crazy ants. The fly would swoop in, plant an egg in the head of a crazy ant, then fly away; a few weeks later, the hatched larva finishes eating the ant’s brain and crawls out of its skull.

A similar phorid fly helps keep fire ants in check by disrupting their ability to forage. But LeBrun said the flies’ success in curbing crazy ants will depend on how effectively the flies disrupt the ants’ foraging pattern.

The work is promising, LeBrun said. But, he added, until it is proven successful, “There is no silver bullet.”

 

My rant for today. February 6, 2019

The 1930’s

Some of you will make the connection some of you won’t…

Obviously I read a lot; in fact so much that I have difficulty retrieving that which I should remember and that’s why I take notes.  This commentary is one such note.
In his recent book, THE PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT, Lee Smith writes the following: (From Chapter 2 ~ describing the qualifications of Svetlana Lokhova, a Moscow-born British historian of Soviet intelligence.)

Lokhova escaped post-Cold War Russia by moving to England in 1998.  “There were breadlines and the violence was so bad that the boys in my school brought guns to class,” she says of mid-1990’s Moscow.

When I arrived here, she says, “I did everything possible to integrate myself into British society and distanced myself from that, I celebrated when I became a British citizen.”

In 2012, after a career in London’s financial sector in the mid-2000’s she returned to academia, where she’d already started to make a name for herself.  Her book, The Spy Who Changed History: The Untold Story of How the Soviet Union Won the Race for America’s Top Secrets, is based on documents from the Soviet archives dating back to the 1930’s.

So a little bell went off in my head when I read that…what do I know about the 1930’s, heck, I wasn’t even born yet!  But then I remembered something in Dr. D.L. Cuddy’s Chronological History of the New World Order.  A lot was going on back in the 30’s; it appears they were laying the groundwork for their future conquest of the West. Here, take a look:

            1931 -- Students at the Lenin School of Political Warfare in Moscow are taught:

"One day we shall start to spread the most theatrical peace movement the world has ever seen. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent ... will fall into the trap offered by the possibility of making new friends. Our day will come in 30 years or so... The bourgeoisie must be lulled into a false sense of security."

1931 -- In a speech to the Institute for the Study of International Affairs at Copenhagen) historian Arnold Toyee said:

"We are at present working discreetly with all our might to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local nation states of the world. All the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands...."

1932 -- New books are published urging World Order:

Toward Soviet America by William Z. Foster. Head of the Communist Party USA, Foster indicates that a National Department of Education would be one of the means used to develop a new socialist society in the U.S.  (Note from Norm: It has no bearing on the content of this summary, but Foster was from my hometown of Taunton, Massachusetts)

The New World Order by F.S. Marvin, describing the League of Nations as the first attempt at a New World Order. Marvin says, "nationality must rank below the claims of mankind as a whole."

Dare the School Build a New Social Order? is published. Educator author George Counts asserts that:

"... the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest" in order to "influence the social attitudes, ideals and behavior of the coming generation... The growth of science and technology has carried us into a new age where ignorance must be replaced by knowledge, competition by cooperation, trust in Providence by careful planning and private capitalism by some form of social economy."

1933 -- The first Humanist Manifesto is published. Co-author John Dewey, the noted philosopher and educator, calls for a synthesizing of all religions and "a socialized and cooperative economic order." Co-signer C.F. Potter said in 1930:

"Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?"

1933 -- The Shape of Things to Come by H.G. Wells is published. Wells predicts a second world war around 1940, originating from a German-Polish dispute. After 1945 there would be an increasing lack of public safety in "criminally infected" areas. The plan for the "Modern World-State" would succeed on its third attempt (about 1980), and come out of something that occurred in Basra, Iraq. The book also states,

"Although world government had been plainly coming for some years, although it had been endlessly feared and murmured against, it found no opposition prepared anywhere."

1934 -- The Externalization of the Hierarchy by Alice A. Bailey is published. Bailey is an occultist, whose works are channeled from a spirit guide, the Tibetan Master [demon spirit] Djwahl Kuhl. Bailey uses the phrase "points of light" in connection with a "New Group of World Servers" and claims that 1934 marks the beginning of "the organizing of the men and women... group work of a new order... [with] progress defined by service... the world of the Brotherhood... the Forces of Light... [and] out of the spoliation of all existing culture and civilization, the new world order must be built."

The book is published by the Lucis Trust, incorporated originally in New York as the Lucifer Publishing Company. Lucis Trust is a United Nations NGO and has been a major player at the recent U.N. summits. Later Assistant Secretary General of the U.N. Robert Mueller would credit the creation of his World Core Curriculum for education to the underlying teachings of Djwahl Kuhl via Alice Bailey's writings on the subject.

1932 -- Plan for Peace by American Birth Control League founder Margaret Sanger (1921) is published. She calls for coercive sterilization, mandatory segregation, and rehabilitative concentration camps for all "dysgenic stocks" including Blacks, Hispanics, American Indians and Catholics.

October 28, 1939 -- In an address by John Foster Dulles, later U.S. Secretary of State, he proposes that America lead the transition to a new order of less independent, semi-sovereign states bound together by a league or federal union.

1939 -- New World Order by H. G. Wells proposes a collectivist one-world state"' or "new world order" comprised of "socialist democracies." He advocates "universal conscription for service" and declares that "nationalist individualism... is the world's disease." He continues: “The manifest necessity for some collective world control to eliminate warfare and the less generally admitted necessity for a collective control of the economic and biological life of mankind are aspects of one and the same process." He proposes that this be accomplished through "universal law" and propaganda (or education)."

So the conspirators take the long-term approach in dismantling our Constitution and some of you are still calling it a conspiracy theory when in fact it is a conspiracy period!

And by the way, the conspirators are amongst us as we speak, they just tried to take down the President of the United States.  That’s my rant for today thank you, Norm.

Is Hillary Clinton looking for Safe Harbor?

News you may have missed.

 

The following headline with accompanying video was posted over at YouTube on Jan 4, 2020:

 

“Is Hillary Clinton Trying to Create Safe Extradition Harbor in Northern Ireland?”

(Video link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5eP9_tsFks)

 

Now this kind of news is not welcomed by the Democratic Party but it’s important for the rest of the country to know what goes unreported by the main stream media.  The question posed by the narrator or maker of the video is certainly viable for Hillary Clinton knows that sooner or later she will be held accountable for her crimes against America. 

Is Hillary’s choice of countries to escape to perchance the halls of justice begin to close in on her simply random?  Not hardly.  For one, her most likely first choice of countries is that they speak English, and equally important, that she will not be extradited for her crimes. And has the video rightly states Northern Ireland’s extradition treaty with the United States would protect Hillary and her friends (including her husband) from ever getting prison time in a federal prison here.

Article 4(3) requires that, notwithstanding the terms of paragraph 2, extradition shall not be granted if the competent authority of the Requested State determines that the request is politically motivated.

Not to take away any credit from the video, if I may give myself an atta-boy, the news is a bit outdated for Hillary has done some previous shopping.  In fact I think I called it, “Country shopping” back in March of 2018 when Hillary began to feel the heat.  She even brought her confidant Huma Abedin along with other friends to India, another country that offers similar protection.  India’s Extradition Treaty Article 4(1) states generally that extradition shall not be granted if the offense for which extradition is requested is a political offense (It’s also interesting that her husband, Bill Clinton signed this treaty while he was President of the United States thus establishing more proof of a long term planning strategy in case his New World Order scheme failed).  ~ Norman E. Hooben

Cape Cod Merry Christmas

Think gain my friend, if you thought '1984' was far out get a load of this.

Occasionally I will ride shotgun with my friend Ron while he makes his scheduled rounds at various industrial stops in the Florida panhandle and southern Georgia…it’s just one way we keep in touch since we left the radio station some years ago.  On one recent road trip Ron pointed to various surveillance cameras that were mounted on buildings, traffic lights, and telephone poles and described the forecasts pointed out in “1984”, a dystopian novel by George Orwell published in 1949.

Well Ron is not within earshot at the moment but if he were I would probably say, “Think gain my friend, if you thought '1984' was far out get a load of this.” ~ Norman Hooben

Driving surveillance: What does your car know about you? We hacked a Chevy to find out.
By Geoffrey A. Fowler / the Washington Post
Dec 17, 2019

Behind the wheel, it’s nothing but you, the open road — and your car quietly recording your every move.

On a recent drive, a 2017 Chevrolet collected my precise location. It stored my phone’s ID and the people I called. It judged my acceleration and braking style, beaming back reports to its maker General Motors over an always-on Internet connection.

Cars have become the most sophisticated computers many of us own, filled with hundreds of sensors. Even older models know an awful lot about you. Many copy over personal data as soon as you plug in a smartphone.

But for the thousands you spend to buy a car, the data it produces doesn’t belong to you. My Chevy’s dashboard didn’t say what the car was recording. It wasn’t in the owner’s manual. There was no way to download it.

To glimpse my car data, I had to hack my way in.

We’re at a turning point for driving surveillance: In the 2020 model year, most new cars sold in the United States will come with built-in Internet connections, including 100 percent of Fords, GMs and BMWs and all but one model Toyota and Volkswagen. (This independent cellular service is often included free, or sold as an add-on.) Cars are becoming smartphones on wheels, sending and receiving data from apps, insurance firms and pretty much wherever their makers want. Some brands even reserve the right to use the data to track you down if you don’t pay your bills.

When I buy a car, I assume the data I produce is owned by me — or at least is controlled by me. Many automakers do not. They act like how and where we drive, also known as telematics, isn’t personal information.

Cars now run on the new oil: your data. It is fundamental to a future of transportation where vehicles drive themselves and we hop into whatever one is going our way. Data isn’t the enemy. Connected cars already do good things like improve safety and send you service alerts that are much more helpful than a check-engine light in the dash.

But we’ve been down this fraught road before with smart speakers, smart TVs, smartphones and all the other smart things we now realize are playing fast and loose with our personal lives. Once information about our lives gets shared, sold or stolen, we lose control.

There are no federal laws regulating what carmakers can collect or do with our driving data. And carmakers lag in taking steps to protect us and draw lines in the sand. Most hide what they’re collecting and sharing behind privacy policies written in the kind of language only a lawyer’s mother could love.

Car data has a secret life. To find out what a car knows about me, I borrowed some techniques from crime scene investigators.

Jim Mason hacks into cars for a living, but usually just to better understand crashes and thefts. The Caltech-trained engineer works in Oakland, California, for a firm called ARCCA that helps reconstruct accidents. He agreed to help conduct a forensic analysis of my privacy.

I chose a Chevrolet as our test subject because its maker GM has had the longest of any automaker to figure out data transparency. It began connecting cars with its OnStar service in 1996, initially to summon emergency assistance. Today, GM has more than 11 million 4G LTE data-equipped vehicles on the road, including free basic service and extras you pay for. I found a volunteer, Doug, who let us peer inside his two-year-old Chevy Volt.

I met Mason at an empty warehouse, where he began by explaining one important bit of car anatomy. Modern vehicles don’t just have one computer. There are multiple, interconnected brains that can generate up to 25 gigabytes of data per hour from sensors all over the car. Even with Mason’s gear, we could only access some of these systems.

This kind of hacking isn’t a security risk for most of us — it requires hours of physical access to a vehicle. Mason brought a laptop, special software, a box of circuit boards and dozens of sockets and screwdrivers.

We focused on the computer with the most accessible data: the infotainment system. You might think of it as the car’s touch screen audio controls, yet many systems interact with it, from navigation to a synced-up smartphone. The only problem? This computer is buried beneath the dashboard.

After an hour of prying and unscrewing, our Chevy’s interior looked like it had been lobotomized. But Mason had extracted the infotainment computer, about the size of a small lunchbox. He clipped it into a circuit board, which fed into his laptop. The data didn’t copy over in our first few attempts. “There is a lot of trial and error,” said Mason.

(Don’t try this at home. Seriously — we had to take the car into a repair shop to get the infotainment computer reset.)

It was worth the trouble when Mason showed me my data. There on a map was the precise location where I’d driven to take apart the Chevy. There were my other destinations, such as the hardware store I’d stopped at to buy some tape.

Among the trove of data points were unique identifiers for my and Doug’s phones, and a detailed log of phone calls from the previous week. There was a long list of contacts, right down to people’s address, emails and even photos.

For a broader view, Mason also extracted the data from a Chevrolet infotainment computer that I bought used on eBay for $375. It contained enough data to reconstruct the Upstate New York travels and relationships of a total stranger. We know he or she frequently called someone listed as “Sweetie,” whose photo we also have. We could see the exact Gulf station where they bought gas, the restaurant where they ate (called Taste China) and the unique identifiers for their Samsung Galaxy Note phones.

Infotainment systems can collect even more. Mason has hacked into Fords that record locations once every few minutes, even when you don’t use the navigation system. He’s seen German cars with 300 gigabyte hard drives — five times as much as a basic iPhone 11. The Tesla Model 3 can collect video snippets from the car’s many cameras. Coming next: face data, used to personalize the vehicle and track driver attention.

In our Chevy, we likely glimpsed just a fraction of what GM knows. We didn’t see what was uploaded to GM’s computers, because we couldn’t access the live OnStar cellular connection. (Researchers have done those kinds of hacks before to prove connected vehicles can be remotely controlled.)

My volunteer car owner Doug asked GM to see the data it collected and shared. The automaker just pointed us to an obtuse privacy policy. Doug also (twice) sent GM a formal request under a 2003 California data law to ask who the company shared his information with. He got no reply.

GM spokesman David Caldwell declined to offer specifics on Doug’s Chevy, but said the data GM collects generally falls into three categories: vehicle location, vehicle performance and driver behavior. “Much of this data is highly technical, not linkable to individuals and doesn’t leave the vehicle itself,” he said.

The company, he said, collects real-time data to monitor vehicle performance to improve safety and to help design future products and services.

But there were clues to what more GM knows on its website and app. It offers a Smart Driver score — a measure of good driving — based on how hard you brake and turn, and how often you drive late at night. They’ll share that with insurance companies, if you want. With paid OnStar service, I could, on demand, locate the car’s exact location. It also offers in-vehicle WiFi and remote key access for Amazon package deliveries. An OnStar Marketplace connects the vehicle directly with third-party apps for Domino’s, IHOP, Shell and others.

The OnStar privacy policy, possibly only ever read by yours truly, grants the company rights to a broad set of personal and driving data without much detail on when and how often it might collect it. It says: “We may keep the information we collect for as long as necessary” to operate, conduct research or satisfy GM’s contractual obligations. Translation: pretty much forever.

It’s likely GM and other automakers only keep just a slice of the data cars generate. But think of that as a temporary phenomenon. Coming 5G cellular networks promise to link cars to the Internet with ultra-fast, ultra-high-capacity connections. As wireless connections get cheaper and data becomes more valuable, anything the car knows about you is fair game

GM’s view, echoed by many other automakers, is that we gave them permission for all of this. “Nothing happens without customer consent,” said GM’s Caldwell.

When my volunteer Doug bought his Chevy, he didn’t even realize OnStar basic service came standard. (I don’t blame him — who really knows what all they’re initialing on a car purchase contract?) There is no button or menu inside the Chevy to shut off OnStar or other data collection, though GM says it has added one to newer vehicles. Customers can press the console OnStar button and ask a representative to remotely disconnect.

What’s the worry? From conversations with industry insiders, I know many automakers haven’t totally figured out what to do with the growing amounts of driving data we generate. But that’s hardly stopping them from collecting it.

Five years ago, 20 automakers signed onto volunteer privacy standards, pledging to “provide customers with clear, meaningful information about the types of information collected and how it is used” as well as “ways for customers to manage their data.” But when I called eight of the largest automakers, not even one offered a dashboard for customers to look at, download and control their data.

Automakers haven’t had a data reckoning yet, but they’re due for one. GM ran an experiment in which it tracked the radio music tastes of 90,000 volunteer drivers to look for patterns with where they traveled. According to the Detroit Free Press, GM told marketers that the data might help them persuade a country music fan who normally stopped at Tim Horton’s to go to McDonald’s instead.

GM would not tell me exactly what data it collected for that program but said “personal information was not involved” because it was anonymized data. (Privacy advocates have warned that location data is personal because it can be re-identified with individuals because we follow such unique patterns.)

GM’s privacy policy, which the company says it will update before the end of 2019, says it may “use anonymized information or share it with third parties for any legitimate business purpose.” Such as whom? “The details of those third-party relationships are confidential,” said Caldwell.

There are more questions. GM’s privacy policy says it will comply with legal data demands. How often does it share our data with the government? GM doesn’t offer a transparency report like tech companies do.

Automakers say they put data security first. But I suspect they’re just not used to customers demanding transparency. They also probably want to have sole control over the data, given that the industry’s existential threats — self-driving and ride-hailing technologies — are built on it.

But not opening up brings problems, too. Automakers are battling with repair shops in Massachusetts about a proposal that would require car companies to grant owners — and mechanics — access to telematics data. The Auto Care Association says locking out independent shops could give consumers fewer choices, and make us end up paying more for service. The automakers say it’s a security and privacy risk.

In 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Act will require any company that collects personal data about the state’s residents to provide access to the data and give people the ability to opt out of its sharing. GM said it would comply with the law but didn’t say how.

Are any carmakers better? Among the privacy policies I read, Toyota’s stood out for drawing a few clear lines in the sand about data sharing. It says it won’t share “personal information” with data resellers, social networks or ad networks — but still carves out the right to share what it calls “vehicle data” with business partners.

Until automakers put even a fraction of the effort they put into TV commercials into giving us control over our data, I’d be wary about using in-vehicle apps or signing up for additional data services. At least smartphone apps like Google Maps let you turn off and delete location history.

And Mason’s hack brought home a scary reality: Simply plugging a smartphone into a car could put your data at risk. If you’re selling your car or returning a lease or rental take the time to delete the data saved on its infotainment system. An app called Privacy4Cars offers model-by-model directions. Mason gives out gifts of car-lighter USB plugs, which let you charge a phone without connecting it to the car computer. (You can buy inexpensive ones online.)

If you’re buying a new vehicle, tell the dealer you want to know about connected services — and how to turn them off. Few offer an Internet “kill switch,” but they may at least allow you turn off location tracking.

Or, for now at least, you can just buy an old car. Mason, for one, drives a conspicuously non-connected 1992 Toyota.

______

 

 Note from Norm: You can read the original article here where a video and other pictures can be viewed.