Wackadoodle News (Articles discussed by guest host Alan Myers)
Huge Increase in Coral Produces Third Year of Record Highs on the Great Barrier Reef
Haven’t we been told that the coral reefs are dying out?
Massive increases in coral across the Australian Great Barrier Reef (GBR) have been reported for 2023-24 making it the third record year in a row of heavy growth. Across almost all parts of the 1,500 mile long reef, from the warmer northern waters to the cooler conditions in the south, coral is now at its highest level since detailed observations began. The inconvenient news has been ignored in mainstream media which, curiously, have focused on a non-story in Nature that claimed “climate change” poses an “existential threat” to the GBR. “The science tells us that the GBR is in danger – and we should be guided by the science,” Professor Helen McGregor from the University of Wollongong told Victoria Gill of BBC News. The existential threat is “now realised” reported the Guardian.
Hill Dems try to tamp down backlash to Harris’ grocery price gouging pitch
In private, some lawmakers are telling voters and food industry officials her proposals will never pass through Congress.
Under pressure to defend Kamala Harris’ grocery price gouging plan, some Democratic lawmakers are delivering a quiet message to anxious allies: Don’t worry about the details. It’s never going to pass Congress.
The Harris campaign’s proposal, unveiled as part of her first big economic policy speech, has become a focal point for her presidential rival, Donald Trump, and fellow Republicans, who claim she’s pushing “communist price controls.” It has also alarmed food industry officials and even some left-of-center economists, who’ve warned such policies can hurt more than they help.
Just yesterday, a contributor to Forbes touted Swiss solar panel maker Meyer Burger as “one of many success stories made possible by the IRA.” Mr. Jack Conness, a member of a “nonpartisan energy and climate policy think tank” that (ostensibly) only uses “careful research” and “science-based” information to arrives at its conclusions and policy recommendations, highlighted the company as a tale of smart “investment” into the private sector for a cleaner and greener future, saying this:
Two days after the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law, Meyer Burger, a solar cell and module manufacturing company, announced they entered into a supply agreement with D.E. Shaw Renewable Investments to supply solar panels in order to meet the uptick of solar demand in the United States.
On the heels of their initial 2021 announcement to build a new 400 megawatt facility and create 500 jobs in Goodyear, Arizona, Meyer Burger then doubled down on their plans and their solar production capacity, thanks to the IRA.
Finally, two-and-a-half years after committing to a solar facility in the U.S., Meyer Burger’s Goodyear facility started production in June 2024. Their Colorado facility is expected to be online by the end of the year. Between the two facilities, nearly 1,000 American jobs were created, making the Meyer Burger story one of many success stories made possible by the IRA.
Only two years in, the IRA has already had an outsized impact on the U.S. economy.
Okay, fast forward to… less than 24 hours later, or today, from Reuters via Yahoo News:
Meyer Burger halts solar plant in Colorado, plans restructuring
Swiss solar panel maker Meyer Burger said on Monday it was suspending plans for a plant in Colorado as it announced restructuring measures and suggested profitability would be lower than previously expected.
‘Meyer Burger Technology AG announced today that the planned construction of a solar cell production facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA, is no longer financially viable for the company due to recent developments and that the project will therefore be discontinued,’ the firm said in a statement.
Looks like Conness was way off, and that Colorado facility will not be online by the end of the year—what laughable and horrendous timing. I mean, were none of the signs there? Well of course they were, but Conness and other energy and climate policy “experts” don’t really want to follow the facts when they conflict with personal biases, so allow me to help him out: When the product is insanely expensive to manufacture, and a major portion of the industry relies on slavery, as is the case with Chinese solar panel firms, companies not using forced labor are at a financial disadvantage, because they have to actually compensate their workers (as well as comply with environmental regulations to which China is not beholden).
WORLD NEWS
WATCH: China on verge of starting a war with its neighbors, including U.S. allies
The People’s Republic of China is on the verge of starting a war with its neighbors, and by extension the U.S., as it increases its aggression in a series of situations, close calls, over the past week.
The U.S. Naval Institute reported Monday that China violated Japanese airspace after it flew a Y-9 electronic intelligence aircraft over the Danjo Islands in the East China Sea, which is part of Japan’s territorial waters.
Japanese officials stated in response to the violation, Self-Defense Forces launched two fighter jets from its Western Air Command, and issued notices and warnings, and further released a protest against the airspace violation.
U.S. Dedicates $2 Million to Combat Corruption in Mexican Sports Betting
While Americans endure high inflation, soaring unemployment, and the enormous cost of an unprecedented illegal immigration crisis the Biden administration is dedicating $2 million to fight corruption in Mexican sports betting. That includes “crimes” such as match-fixing, betting and book making, illegal and legal gambling. The goal, according to a State Department grant announcement, is to disrupt the laundering of illicit proceeds by Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCO) while “undermining the integrity of sports at all levels.” Sports gambling is a vehicle of predatory betting, addiction, loansharking, and match-fixing, according to the agency’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), which is doling out the money to address the problem.
The U.S. government has long assessed that Mexican TCOs—drug cartels—are the greatest criminal threat to the country and that they are smuggling mass quantities of deadly illicit fentanyl into communities throughout the nation. Nine Mexican TCOs have the greatest drug trafficking impact on the U.S., according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Among them are the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels, Los Zetas, La Familia Michoacána, Los Rojos and Guerreros Unidos. The TCOs maintain drug distribution cells in cities across the U.S. that report to leaders in Mexico and dominate the nation’s drug market. At a congressional Homeland Security hearing last year various federal sources in counterterrorism, intelligence and drug enforcement testified that Mexican TCOs have seized unprecedented control of the southwest border. This indicates that securing the border would seriously impact TCO’s prime revenue source—drug smuggling, not sports betting.
U.S. NEWS, POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
‘Government pressure was wrong’: Zuckerberg confesses he censored Americans on Biden’s orders!
‘We made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today’
Mark Zuckerberg, the chief of Facebook’s parent company Meta, has delivered a letter to Congress stunningly confessing to censoring Americans on the orders of the Joe Biden administration – and in an effort to help him politically.
It’s the second major election influence scheme Zuckerberg now is known to have pursued during that time period.
The newest confession came in a letter to Congress in which he stated, “Senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor COVID-19 content, including humor & satire. … I believe the government pressure was wrong & I regret we were not more outspoken about it.”
Secret Service bombshell: Mike Pence escape car left its position during Jan. 6
A redacted portion of a federal report on the problems that developed when some protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, got violent, trespassing and vandalizing, reveals that then-Vice President Mike Pence’s limo driver left the area and his security detail members weren’t aware of where he’d gone.
A redacted portion of a federal report on the problems that developed when some protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, got violent, trespassing and vandalizing, reveals that then-Vice President Mike Pence’s limo driver left the area and his security detail members weren’t aware of where he’d gone.
A report from Just the News explains there were multiple incidents that gave the Secret Service “clear warning signs it was slipping on its zero-failure mission” long before its actions allowed a failed would-be assassin to take sniper shots at President Trump at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally July 13.
The report cited as among the many failures the simplest of issues: failures in radio communications.
David Plouffe, Architect of ‘Zuckerbucks,’ Now Advising Kamala Harris
David Plouffe, who managed President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and advised Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial “Zuckerbucks” effort in 2020, is now advising Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign.
A report in early August noted that Harris had brought several senior Obama veterans on board, including Plouffe. Many observers noted that Harris’s message improved remarkably from that point, including the emphasis on “joy” as a way to explain her odd laugh, and as a central focus of the party at the Democratic National Convention last week
Two Killed, One Injured After Delta Plane Tire Explodes at Atlanta Airport
Two people were killed and another left seriously injured Tuesday after a Delta airplane tire exploded while it was being changed at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
ECONOMY & BUSINESS
If Everything Is So Great, Why Are Millions Of Americans Sleeping In Their Vehicles?
Have you noticed an unusual number of vehicles in the parking lots of major retailers in your area at night? If you look closely enough, you will see that many of those vehicles actually have people sleeping in them. At this point, millions of Americans are sleeping in their vehicles every night. This is happening even though we are being told that the economy is just fine. But of course the truth is that the system is failing all around us. So if you get to sleep in a very warm bed in a very warm home, you should consider yourself to be very blessed, because vast numbers of people are really struggling right now.
The primary reason why so many people are living in their vehicles is because the cost of living has soared to unprecedented heights.
A year after a mainstream newspaper reported that the Biden administration lost track of 85,000 illegal immigrant minors welcomed into the United States upon crossing the Mexican border, a federal audit reveals that tens of thousands have subsequently vanished from the government’s radar and hundreds of thousands go unmonitored. It marks the latest in a multitude of scandals involving the nearly half a million Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC)—rebranded Unaccompanied Children (UC) by the Biden administration to be more politically correct—admitted into the country in the last few years. The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which operates under Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is responsible for caring for UAC, which are overwhelmingly males over the age of 14, according to government figures. They come from Guatemala (42%), Honduras (28%), El Salvador (9%), Mexico (8%) and “other” (13%).
HEALTH
Camu camu, the Amazonian superfruit, may help reverse fatty liver disease
Doctors have been stumped for years on how to effectively treat non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), a condition affecting over a quarter of the world’s adult population. However, a surprising new study suggests that the answer may lie in an exotic Amazonian berry called camu camu.
NAFLD is a serious condition characterized by a buildup of fat in the liver, which can lead to inflammation, scarring, and even liver failure if left untreated. It’s strongly linked to obesity, diabetes, and metabolic disorders, making it a growing public health crisis as waistlines expand worldwide. Unfortunately, there are currently no approved drug treatments, leaving lifestyle changes like weight loss and exercise as the only options.
Enter camu camu, a small red berry that grows wild in the Amazon rainforest. This superfruit is brimming with antioxidants, fiber, and other beneficial plant compounds called polyphenols. In a recent randomized, double-blind trial, published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine, researchers found that giving overweight and hypertriglyceridemic adults just 1.5 grams of camu camu powder per day for 12 weeks led to a significant 15.85% reduction in liver fat compared to a placebo.
“The microbiota metabolizes the large polyphenol molecules that cannot be absorbed by the intestine, transforming them into smaller molecules that the body can assimilate to decrease liver fat,” explains Dr. André Marette, the study’s senior author and a professor at Université Laval, in a media release.
The researchers also found that taking camu camu supplements decreased levels of two key liver enzymes, ALT and AST, which are elevated in people with fatty liver disease and indicate liver damage. Additionally, the berry appeared to beneficially alter the gut microbiome, increasing the abundance of certain bacteria linked to improved metabolic health.
Power Mall Products of Interest:
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
SURVEILLANCE STATE
Remote Biometric Surveillance and Policing – A New Frame of Reference?
In surveillance perspective is everything. Your viewpoint affects what you will see and therefore what you will miss. And we are missing a lot.
Whether you are contemplating a policy, practice or product, you will get a better overall view of the risks and issues by shifting between overlapping perspectives. In remote biometric surveillance the composite view from three specific vantage points can be helpful. Those points are: the technological, the legal and the societal and they can combine to create a richer, clearer image of what is coming and what is already here.
Viewing the relevant issue, challenge or proposition from the perspectives of the possible (what can be done), the permissible (what must/must not be done) and the acceptable (what people support/expect to be done) can enhance the relevant features and expose the relative weight being given or assumed from any one perspective. It can also reveal how we got to where we now find ourselves, helping build on successes while swerving some mistakes of the past.
ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT
GARDENING, FARMING & HOMESTEADING
2ND AMENDMENT
COVID RELATED NEWS
CANCEL CULTURE
Author of ‘White Fragility’ Accused of Plagiarizing Minorities
Robin DiAngelo, author of the book White Fragility, has been accused of plagiarizing minority writers.
The Washington Free Beacon recently obtained a complaint filed with the University of Washington outlining 20 instances of alleged plagiarism in her 2004 doctoral thesis, Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis. Per the New York Post:
Among the examples cited are two paragraphs reproduced almost entirely from Northeastern University’s Thomas Nakayama — who is Asian-American — and coauthor Robert Krizek, in which DiAngelo fails to provide adequate attribution.
Another example in the complaint shows DiAngelo allegedly playing fast and loose with a paragraph written by Asian-American professor Stacey Lee of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In it, rather than clearly delineating that Lee had summarized the work of scholar David Theo Goldberg, the information was presented in such a way to appear as though DiAngelo herself was providing the summary herself.
Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, said that DiAngelo’s work rises to the level of “forgery” in certain circles. “It is never appropriate to use the secondary source without acknowledging it, and even worse to present it as one’s own words. That’s plagiarism,” said Wood.
When questioned about the accusations, University of Washington spokeswoman Dana Robinson Slote told NY Post, “We are committed to the integrity of research conducted at the University of Washington. All complaints are carefully reviewed.”
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