"Margaret Thatcher’s government spent £100,000 on a top-secret plan to 'bomb' Peru with voraciously hungry moths in a radical attempt to destroy cocaine crops."

The London Times reports.

The method is relatively cheap and simple. From what is known of Eloria [noyesi] it might be thought of as a ‘smart bomb’ with a very short range."...

 
"The moth is indigenous to Peru and is highly host-specific to the coca bush. There is no evidence of it feeding on other plants … Its use as a control agent could, therefore, be concealed."

I wonder what else has been going on in the use of tiny animals in warfare. I found this, at the History website: "Bugs of War: How Insects Have Been Weaponized Throughout History/For millennia, six-legged soldiers have been conscripted to torment enemies."

At the end of the 2nd century, the Roman emperor Septimius Severus was on his way to wresting control of Mesopotamia from the local monarchs.... As the Roman legions advanced on the desert stronghold of Hatra.... The defenders crafted earthenware bombshells loaded with scorpions.... As Severus’s men reached the walls of Hatra, scorpion bombs rained down....

More recently: 

During the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong dug a network of underground tunnels allowing them to decide when and where to fight.... Feeling his way through a dank passage, [an American] “tunnel rat” might overlook a trip wire and have a load of scorpions rain down from a hidden cavity in the roof. The Viet Cong also conscripted the Asian giant honeybee.... Soldiers gingerly relocated colonies to trails used by the Americans and then attached a small, explosive charge.... For their part, the U.S. military funded a research program to devise an apparatus to spray the Vietnamese enemy with the alarm pheromone of bees, thereby converting the local insects into fierce allies.... But the “weapon” was never deployed....

AND: Wikipedia has an article, "Entomological warfare."

Entomological warfare (EW) is a type of biological warfare that uses insects to interrupt supply lines by damaging crops, or to directly harm enemy combatants and civilian populations. There have been several programs which have attempted to institute this methodology; however, there has been limited application of entomological warfare against military or civilian targets, Japan being the only state known to have verifiably implemented the method against another state, namely the Chinese during World War II. However, EW was used more widely in antiquity, in order to repel sieges or cause economic harm to states. Research into EW was conducted during both World War II and the Cold War by numerous states such as the Soviet Union, United States, Germany and Canada. There have also been suggestions that it could be implemented by non-state actors in a form of bioterrorism. Under the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention of 1972, use of insects to administer agents or toxins for hostile purposes is deemed to be against international law.

A poster from 1942:

"The euphoria of the first moon landing was directly connected to our ambivalence about the science that made it possible."

"Rocket technology, which lifted man to the moon, could also hurl hydrogen bombs across the planet. Like the promise of artificial intelligence and bioengineering, the promise of space was shadowed by the possibility of planetary annihilation.... The original space program had fierce and cogent critics in the United States, but the allure of the technology, the bravery and telegenic decency of the astronauts, and the symbolic power of winning the race to the moon eventually won out.... [O]n a nervous night, the world watched us again... wondering whether there might be nuclear bombs.... Trump backed down, but...[t]he distant, wide-eyed wonder of unprecedented achievement of the Space Age had been eclipsed by a deferred promise to return an entire people to the Stone Age...."

Writes Philip Kennicott, in "Trump’s dark rhetoric eclipses the new wonders of the Space Age" (WaPo).

I'm a little older than Kennicott, who was probably a young child at the time of the first moon landing. I was 18 and completely disaffected because of the Vietnam War. I didn't experience anything like "wide-eyed wonder." The boys my age were all in danger of being drafted and sent to fight in a war people were justifiably pessimistic about. Nixon was just as horrible to us as Trump is to the Trump-haters of today. I declined to respond with the awe the news shows told us to feel because I didn't want to see anything going well for Nixon. Less than a month after the moon landing, there was Woodstock. Who was a sucker for "telegenic decency" in the summer of 1969? Were we conned by "the symbolic power of winning the race to the moon"? Five years before the landing, we were laughing at Bob Dylan's sarcastic lines, "I ask you how things could get much worse/If the Russians happen to get up there first/Wowee! pretty scary!"

"The Summer of Love became the template: the Arab Spring is related to the Summer of Love; Occupy Wall Street is related to the Summer of Love."

"And it became the new status quo. The Aquarian Age! They all want sex. They all want to have fun. Everyone wants hope. We opened the door, and everybody went through it, and everything changed after that. Sir Edward Cook, the biographer of Florence Nightingale, said that when the success of an idea of past generations is ingrained in the public and taken for granted the source is forgotten."

Said Country Joe McDonald, quoted on this blog 12 years ago, here, and repeated today, because I'm reading the news that Country Joe has died. He was 84.

Here's his famous set at Woodstock:

Well, come on, all of you big strong men/Uncle Sam needs your help again/Got himself in a terrible jam/Way down yonder in Vietnam....

"The pink forests of the northern pre-spring."

"To day is a tree found in several communes in Mu Cang Chai such as Kim Noi and Mo De, and in Pung Luong Commune. The trees bloom at elevations above 1,000 meters. The H'Mong people there call them pang to day, or wild peach blossoms. It is one of the most distinctive flowers in Vietnam's northwestern mountains when spring approaches."

Reports VnExpress. Nice photos at the link. Great name for the tree — "to day." I love the idea of pre-spring, but it wouldn't apply very well to the forests of the Upper Midwest of the United States.

I'm seeing "Exploding trees possible across Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota" (KKRC Sioux Falls). That does not mean "exploding" with flowers. "[S]ap and moisture inside trees freeze rapidly... it expands, creating immense pressure within the trunk. If temperatures fall quickly enough, this pressure can cause the tree to split or explode with a sound like a gunshot or thunderclap...."

"Vietnam Offers to Drop U.S. Tariffs to Zero. Will That Be Enough for Trump?"

A New York Times headline reports the good news for Trump but the good is not enough for the New York Times. The good news must be balanced with bad news, even if it's just a nudging toward amorphous doubt. You know that Trump. There's always more disruption and chaos coming. 

What will the NYT say if Trump's tariffs have this effect across the board and all countries drop their tariffs? Will the NYT credit Trump for his success — for his audacious, clever move?

I see that yesterday, the NYT had this headline: "Musk Says He Hopes Europe and U.S. Move to a ‘Zero-Tariff Situation’/The billionaire adviser to the Trump administration appeared to part ways with the president in a videoconference appearance with Italy’s far-right League party." I give the Times credit for slipping in that weasel word, "appeared." The 2 men appeared to part ways. And it appears different today. Now that Vietnam has responded to the incentive — oh, look at that! — the 2 men seem to be going the same way.

Well, they looked like that yesterday too, but the NYT needed to continue on its way, making trouble for Trump. There's always bad news inside any good news.

I need a phrase that's the reverse of "Every cloud has a silver lining." Maybe: "Every pong-pong fruit has its deadly poison seeds." I mean, to hell with the agitation in New York Times headlines! Tonight is the finale of Season 3 of "The White Lotus." Those seeds are getting into one of those protein smoothies Patrick Schwarzenegger keeps whipping up, right? 

Congressman Al Green is censured — for yelling and waving his cane at Trump — and House Democrats respond by singing "We Shall Overcome."

“Democrats burst out singing “We Shall Overcome” after Rep Al Green was censured pic.twitter.com/bCJ0SWWm7U

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 6, 2025

ADDED: I remember when Democrats sang "We Shall Overcome" to protest the pro-war platform at the National Convention in 1968. Here's Norman Mailer's description, from "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" (commission earned):

"By Saturday, July 20, former President Barack Obama was deeply involved, and there was talk that he would place a call to Biden."

"It was not clear whether Biden had been examined or just what happened to him in Las Vegas.... 'On Sunday morning,' [a senior official in Washington told me], with the approval of Pelosi and Schumer, 'Obama called Biden after breakfast and said, "Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment."... 'It was clear at this point... that she would get the nod.... But Obama also made it clear... that he was not going to immediately endorse her. But the group had decided that her work as a prosecutor would help her deal with Trump in a debate.... [Obama] had an agenda and he wanted to seek [sic] it through to the end, and he wanted to have control over who would be elected.'"

Writes Seymour Hersh, "LEAVING LAS VEGAS/Inside the last tortured days of the Biden campaign" (SubStack).

Hersh suggests that Harris continues to be under Obama's control, and "she had better perform." She's not the nominee yet.

Hersh also writes that Kamala Harris "often showed little interest" in "the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified summary of current intelligence that is prepared overnight by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and delivered by hand to the most vital offices in Washington, including the vice president’s." Hersh says that Harris even "asked the agency to stop delivering it to her."

Speaking of Seymour Hersh... his name came up in a NYT obituary published yesterday, "William Calley, Convicted of Mass Murder in My Lai Massacre, Dies at 80/Hundreds of Vietnamese civilians died at the hands of American soldiers, but Lieutenant Calley was the only one found guilty":

"It's a rare verdict - she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime...."

"Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank.... The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case.... They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify.... Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.... Her loans made up 93% of all the bank's lending.... According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement. That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes."

From "Truong My Lan: Vietnamese billionaire sentenced to death for $44bn fraud" (BBC).

"If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with, no more appeasement."

Said Ronald Reagan, in 1970, talking about dealing with unrest on college campuses, quoted at the time in "Ronald Reagan Is Giving ‘Em Heck" (NYT)(free access link).

Later he said the remark was a "figure of speech" and that anyone who took it seriously was "neurotic." Within a few days, four students were shot at Kent State.

I ran across that because I'd noticed that the NYT was spelling "bloodbath" as 2 words — "Trump defends his warning of a ‘blood bath for the country" — in its current reporting. I had 2 theories about why:

1. A compound word takes a long time to become standard. When we see "bloodbath" as one word, it feels more like a stock term. Trite. By spacing it out as 2 words, you might get people to think that Trump put it together in his own fervid brain. But maybe...

2. The NYT has a style guide, and it decided long ago that "blood bath" was the correct configuration, and people at the Times are meticulous about writing it the same way every time.

To narrow my 2 ideas about twoness and oneness down to one, I searched the NYT archive for the 1-word form. I found many examples of "bloodbath," including Reagan's crazy idea of sticking it to the students. There was also Russell Baker making jokes about Richard Nixon's "bloodbath" theory of Vietnam (in 1970, deploying a fictional character he called "Dandy"):

"He advised 12 presidents — more than a quarter of those who have held the office — from John F. Kennedy to Joseph R. Biden Jr."

With a scholar’s understanding of diplomatic history, a German-Jewish refugee’s drive to succeed in his adopted land, a deep well of insecurity and a lifelong Bavarian accent that sometimes added an indecipherable element to his pronouncements, he transformed almost every global relationship he touched.... He was the only American to deal with every Chinese leader from Mao to Xi Jinping. In July, at age 100, he met Mr. Xi and other Chinese leaders in Beijing, where he was treated like visiting royalty even as relations with Washington had turned adversarial. He drew the Soviet Union into a dialogue that became known as détente, leading to the first major nuclear arms control treaties between the two nations. With his shuttle diplomacy, he edged Moscow out of its standing as a major power in the Middle East, but failed to broker a broader peace in that region. Over years of meetings in Paris, he negotiated the peace accords that ended the American involvement in the Vietnam War, an achievement for which he shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize...."

Writes David Sanger, in "Henry Kissinger Is Dead at 100; Shaped Nation’s Cold War History/The most powerful secretary of state of the postwar era, he was both celebrated and reviled. His complicated legacy still resonates in relations with China, Russia and the Middle East" (NYT).

With an eye fixed on the great power rivalry, he was often willing to be crudely Machiavellian, especially when dealing with smaller nations that he often regarded as pawns in the greater battle. 

"What 'Beans' says, basically, is that people don't listen at all."

That's Len Chandler, who "never achieved the name recognition of some of those with whom he shared stages and causes" but "did write at least one song with lasting appeal: 'Beans in My Ears,' which the Serendipity Singers turned into a Top 30 hit in 1964."

"Meta has adopted an internal list of Vietnamese Communist Party officials who should not be criticized on Facebook..."

"... said two former employees in Asia, who, like the others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. This list, which is kept private even within the company and has not been publicly reported on before, is included in guidelines used in controlling online content and was shaped in large part by Vietnamese authorities, the former employees said.... Meta is preparing to tighten content controls further after being told by officials in recent months that it would otherwise have to store data on servers inside Vietnam, raising alarms about privacy and information security, according to people with knowledge of the company’s internal discussions.... In a statement, Rafael Frankel, Meta’s director for public policy in Southeast Asia, said the company is proud of its investments in Vietnam. 'Our focus,' he said, 'is ensuring as many Vietnamese people as possible are able to use our platform to build community and express themselves.'"

Writes Rebecca Tan in "Facebook helped bring free speech to Vietnam. Now it’s helping stifle it" (WaPo).

"In August 1969, he went to a War Resisters League meeting at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and heard a speaker, Randy Kehler, proudly announce..."

"... that he was soon going to join his friends in prison for refusing the draft. Profoundly moved, Mr. Ellsberg had reached his breaking point.... 'I left the auditorium and found a deserted men’s room,' he said. 'I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. The only time in my life I’ve reacted to something like that.'  Mr. Ellsberg began to oppose the war openly.... He also resigned from RAND, under pressure. With Anthony J. Russo Jr., a RAND colleague he had met in Vietnam, Mr. Ellsberg, who had a top-secret security clearance, photocopied the 47-volume Pentagon study. Still believing he could work within the system, Mr. Ellsberg in 1970 gave partial copies to Senator J. William Fulbright, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and others in Congress. All cautiously refused to act. Frustrated, disillusioned and aware that he might be committing a crime and could be sent to prison, Mr. Ellsberg approached Neil Sheehan, a veteran New York Times correspondent he had met in Vietnam, with the documents....."

From "Daniel Ellsberg, Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers, Is Dead at 92/Deeply disturbed by the accounting of American deceit in Vietnam, he approached The New York Times. The disclosures that followed rocked the nation" (NYT).

"That’s nice. But many of my generation will not make it to 100 … in fact did not make it to 25 … because of your father. They died in Vietnam."

The top-rated comment — one of many similar and utterly predictable comments — on "My father, Henry Kissinger, is turning 100. This is his guide to longevity" (WaPo).

"We’d go around, do this dog and pony show, and I would open up for him, singing, and people would all get together to hear David Harris talking about how we’re going to change the world."

Said Joan Baez, quoted in "David Harris, Leader of Vietnam Draft Resistance Movement, Dies at 76/An activist who went to jail for refusing to serve in the military, he teamed with and married Joan Baez and later became a journalist" (NYT).

"This Biennale, which runs through Sept. 18, is serious. Very serious. It verges on humorless...."

"[The curator's] statement notes that today’s 'profusion of sprawling, monumental exhibitions' mirrors 'the material excesses' of global capitalism, and asks: 'So why add yet another exhibition to this?' The answer he reaches is that art — perhaps uniquely — can reclaim our attention from algorithmically enforced social control.... Mai Nguyen-Long’s 'Vomit Girl' and 'Specimen' sculpture series... grapple with the aftermath of Agent Orange bombings in Vietnam.... Even blunter are Mayuri Chari’s vulvas sculpted from cow dung... address the shaming of women’s bodies in India amid conservative Hinduism’s obsession with purity.... This Biennale is... all over the place — one must study the scatter in an attempt to understand the collision that produced it. Its contradictions, I suspect, reflect those of the 'decolonial'.... Whereas decolonization in the classic sense was a political, territorial project with no inherent grievance against modernity, today’s 'decolonial practice' is about changing systems of knowledge — a woolier, potentially endless project. This Biennale is presented as a gathering of 'decolonial strategies.' The task... is tending 'all of the wounds accumulated throughout the history of Western modernity.'... This Berlin Biennale feels... overloaded by its own conceptual apparatus...."

From "Berlin Biennale Wrestles With Big Issues (and Itself)/A powerful and relentlessly political exhibition takes on all the world’s crises — at the risk of conceptual overload" by Siddhartha Mitter (NYT).

"Many young people have an unfortunate perspective derived from coming of age amid national humiliations in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"In school, they’ve learned more about the United States’ shortcomings than about her triumphs and the nation’s indispensability as a global force for good. The crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed that blind spot.... The Cold War generation better understands the stakes.... It’s prudent to be cautious about drawing World War II analogies, but it’s proper to recount the carnage that followed America’s turning inward during the 1930s...."

From "Why Biden should deliver a European history lesson during the State of the Union" by James Hohmann (WaPo). 

How old is Hohmann? I wondered. It wasn't easy to Google, but I think he graduated from college in 2009, which might make him about 35. It's safe to say he's a millennial. 

I went looking for his age when I read "The Cold War generation better understands the stakes." Usually, we're called Baby Boomers, and our understanding of "the stakes" was powerfully shaped by Vietnam, and that took place under the compulsion of the military draft.

You'd better take that into account when you say we're different from these kids today who grew up under "the national humiliations in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"Most voters believe it’s likely that President Joe Biden won’t finish out his term of office, and don’t think Vice President Kamala Harris is ready to step up to replace him."

"A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that only 43% of Likely U.S. Voters think Harris is qualified to assume the duties of the presidency, including 29% who think she is Very Qualified. That’s down from April, when 49% said Harris was qualified to become president. Now, 55% say Harris is not qualified to assume the duties of the presidency, including 47% who say she is Not At All Qualified.”

Rasmussen reports.

Meanwhile, Harris is on a trip to Singapore and Vietnam. AP reports:

A longtime district attorney and former senator, Harris is largely untested in international diplomacy and foreign policy. Her swing through Vietnam could draw unwanted comparisons between the humiliating withdrawal of U.S. troops there in 1975 and the tumultuous effort this week to evacuate Americans and allies from Afghanistan. 

And it’s all happening in the shadow of China, whose growing influence worries some U.S. policymakers. “She’s walking into a hornet’s nest, both with what’s taking place in Afghanistan, but also the challenge of China that looms particularly large in Vietnam,” said Brett Bruin, who served as global engagement director during the Obama administration and was a longtime diplomat....

"Some fun fact about these little creatures: In Vietnam we eat them"/"How dare you come here and say that. Oh nonooooooo."

"those were delicacies in someplace in VN,some are just plain street food,some are expensive high class dishes, I’m sadly have to announce to you that." 

 From "A Little Vietnamese Mossy Frog" (Reddit).

ADD: There's a truly adorable photo at the link, which is the reason I'm blogging this. Please don't think I'm blogging this to attack the animal-eating choices of people in a foreign country. Unless we're vegetarians, we eat the animals we're used to eating, and we don't give a reprieve for cuteness. We eat lambs if we like lamb. 

Here's video of a lamb dreaming, presumably not of becoming a chop.

"Fixating on the R number isn’t real science/The pandemic response should be based on judgment, not a figure that’s only an educated guess."

Writes Ed Conway at The London Times. 

Science is a discipline predicated on constant doubt and reassessment and contemplating the evidence through alternate prisms...Taking a number, stripping it of context and uncertainty and using it to justify policy is something else altogether. 

The economist Friedrich Hayek had a word for it, “scientism”, a kind of bastardisation of science which amounted to “the pretence of knowledge”. He was writing in the mid-20th century about socialist governments attempting to engineer economic planning by assuming complex society could be distilled into a few key metrics, but since then scientism has only grown. 

It came of age with Robert McNamara, US secretary of defence under Kennedy, whose data obsession meant the White House paid far more attention to the body count in Vietnam than more subjective questions like: have we any chance of winning this war? But, as the American historian Jerry Muller wrote in The Tyranny of Metrics, McNamara was only bringing to the Oval Office what had long been the mantra at business schools and management consultancies: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”...

Wikipedia has an article, "The McNamara Fallacy." It features this quote from Daniel Yankelovich, "Corporate Priorities: A continuing study of the new demands on business" (1972):

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide. 

That article has a great "See also" list: Allegory of the cave. Goodhart's law, Newton's flaming laser sword, Occam's razor, Streetlight effect, Truth, Verificationism, Verisimilitude. I can't read — or even link — all of that right now, but I am interested in Newton's Flaming Laser Sword:

In its weakest form it says that we should not dispute propositions unless they can be shown by precise logic and/or mathematics to have observable consequences. In its strongest form it demands a list of observable consequences and a formal demonstration that they are indeed consequences of the proposition claimed.

And who even thought about looking up "Truth" in Wikipedia? But that's a subject for a separate post, because it charmingly converges with something else I've been planning to blog about.