It is that time again….another Saturday and another news dump…..
Personal news….nothing I would like to talk about right now….maybe later.
Locally–we dodged yet another bullet here on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi with a hurricane….Helene hit East of us and has brought very little effect to my region…thank you.
Now moving on to the real important stuff…
A whistleblower has told the world that a big dramatic story will break soon….
A UFO whistleblower, Charles McNeal, has made some startling claims about a significant event in human history set to occur in the coming months. He alleges that he was part of a top-secret US Air Force intelligence unit responsible for upholding a 70-year truce between the American government and an alien civilization.
According to McNeal, who offers no proof of his credentials on his YouTube channel, this truce is due to expire at the end of September 2024. He suggests that a series of planned events will follow, including the partial or total destruction of Israel, a brief global conflict, and a staged alien invasion using reverse-engineered UFO technology.
He also suggests that a gradual release of information through news outlets and fictional portrayals of extraterrestrial contact in films and TV has been part of a campaign to ready the world population for the shock of encountering an alien species. “This is known as the Public Acclimation Program,” he oddly states.
https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/major-ufo-announcement-whistleblower-aliens-33742511
Seriously? Isn’t there at least one of these ‘stories’ monthly or so?
Romania has a new way of carbon capture…..
The European Bison, wiped out from Romania over 200 years ago, has been brought back thanks to efforts by Rewilding Europe and WWF Romania. Since their reintroduction in 2014, the population has grown to 170 individuals. Grazing over a 48 square kilometer area, these bison are not just surviving but thriving, transforming the landscape and its ecological dynamics.
New research from Yale University indicates that these bison significantly enhance the ecosystem’s ability to capture carbon. Evidently by grazing, they promote plant growth, recycle nutrients, and compact the soil, which helps prevent carbon release. This process results in the capture of an additional 54,000 tonnes of carbon each year, roughly equivalent to the emissions from 43,000 US petrol cars.
https://www.animalsaroundtheglobe.com/how-reintroducing-bison-in-romania-is-capturing-co2-2-223864/
It is Autumn and those pesky leaves will start to fall and the pain in the butt will begin….
Nature experts have a message for anyone with a lawn heading into autumn: Step away from the rake.
As the weather turns cooler, trees change, leaves begin to fall, and homeowners embark on one of the most back-breaking chores of the year. But if the thought of spending hours combing your property has you dreading the return of fall, there’s good news: You don’t have to.
Scientists are debunking the myth that a layer of leaves is bad for our lawns. Rather, the practice of ignoring plant debris—which they’ve labeled “leaving leaves”—offers numerous benefits. Instead of piling and burning or bagging a tree’s leftovers when the seasons change, experts suggest letting your soil reap the rewards of the decomposing organic matter.
“A forest has the richest soil there is, and that happens because leaves are falling off the trees and decomposing right there and organic materials are going back into the soil,” Susan Barton, a professor of landscape horticulture at the University of Delaware told The New York Times. “We should be doing that in all of our landscapes, but we’re not.”
https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/why-you-should-not-rake-fall-leaves
I do not rake….I mulch up the leaves and leave them where they fall.
Food stuff….I love asparagus either roasted or grilled but why does it make my pee smell….well funky?
Asparagus has a long and storied history: It was mentioned in the myths and the scholarly writings of ancient Greece, and its cultivation was the subject of a detailed lesson in Cato the Elder’s treatise, On Agriculture. But it wasn’t until the turn of the 18th century that discussion of the link between asparagus and odorous urine emerged.
In 1731, John Arbuthnot, physician to Queen Anne, noted that asparagus “affects the urine with a foetid smell … and therefore have been suspected by some physicians as not friendly to the kidneys.” Benjamin Franklin also noticed that eating asparagus “shall give our urine a disagreeable odor.”
Since then, there has been debate over what is responsible for the stinky pee phenomenon. Polish chemist and doctor Marceli Nencki identified a compound called methanethiol as the cause in 1891, after a study that involved four men eating about three and a half pounds of asparagus apiece. In 1975, Robert H. White, a chemist at the University of California at San Diego, used gas chromatography to pin down several compounds known as S-methyl thioesters as the culprits. Other researchers have blamed various sulfur-containing metabolites.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24731/why-does-asparagus-make-your-pee-smell-funny
Just a short FYI for this Saturday.
More food stuff….
Thousands of chemicals used in food packaging and food production are leaching into food itself.
“It’s [from] your soda can, your plastic cooking utensils, your nonstick frying pan, the cardboard box that your fries come in,” says Jane Muncke, a toxicologist based in Zurich. “It’s retail food packaging, but also the processing equipment, and your [kitchenware] and tableware at home.”
More than 3,600 chemicals found in food packaging are also found in human bodies, according to a paper published Tuesday in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology. The research was led by Muncke and her colleagues at the Food Packaging Forum Foundation, a nonprofit research group focused on hazardous chemicals in food packaging.
The paper synthesizes data from other published sources that document the presence of certain chemicals in humans from samples of blood, urine and breast milk. Of the 3,600 chemicals found in both food packaging and in humans, the researchers say about 80 are known to have “hazard properties of high concern” to human health.
As they say “we are what we eat”….scary huh?
This does it for me…..I have much to consider so this Saturday is a bit short….sorry about that.
Enjoy your weekend and as always….Be Well and Be Safe….
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
I hope you and Sue are ok. I’m at the point in my life where I say that no one gets out alive and probably have been for a while. Take care and thank you.
We are fine thanx for asking….have a good day chuq
Thanks and you too.
😎
Oh, brother, more UFO nonsense… Back in the dawn of the internet I ran a website for a loosely organized research group that delved into this kind of nonsense. We’d get crap like this all the time. One fellow we looked at claimed he was a scientist at Area 51 and worked on reverse engineering alien technology. On the surface he looked legit until you started to dig deeper. He thought that since Area 51 is “top secret” no one could check up on him. Unfortunately for him I knew people who actually did work there on early drone development experiments and other things and asked them to look into it. Turns out he did work there. Not directly for the research facility. He was a contract employee working for a cleaning service. He was a janitor. Apparently we were the only ones who actually investigated him because he kept making the same claims for years afterwards turning up from time to time in those late night TV “documentaries” about ancient aliens and that nonsense.
The question is, why does anyone pay any attention at all to these people? Why does the media even give them print space or air time?
As for lawn raking, I agree 100%. It annoys the hell out of me when I see people bagging lawn clippings and leaves and lugging them down to the compost site (or worse, burning them), and then dumping $$$ worth of fertilizer on their lawns. They are hauling away and disposing of the nutrients that the soil needs every time they do that. I just run over the leaves with the mower to chop them up so they break down faster or use them for mulch in the gardens.
I don’t put anything on my lawn. Sure, it’s half creeping charlie and other weeds. Don’t care. From the street it looks just fine. One of my neighbors spends thousands of dollars on fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and I don’t know what all else, has a $40,000 John Deere lawn mower (seriously, $40K he paid for that stupid thing). And when it comes right down to it my lawn looks better than his from the street.
I hate a leaf blower the most irritating sound for an early Saturday morning….my lawn is mostly weeds but green so all is well….I do not understand the fascination with UFOs and aliens…I mean think about it if you were a space traveler would you stop off on the planet? chuq
Your point about what space travelers would do if they found Earth is a good one. If I were traveling between stars and I found a civilization like Earth’s I’d run in the other direction just in case what Earth has is contagious.
While it’s possible there are other civilizations out there, IMO they are few and far between. While there are hints that the development of life could be a common phenomenon, there is no indication that intelligence is common. In fact, there are a lot of arguments that human like intelligence is not a survival factor at all. The longest surviving species on the planet, creatures like, oh, ants, let’s say, sharks, and the like, who have survived virtually unchanged for millions of years, are not ‘intelligent’ in the way we are. They get along quite nicely without human type intelligence.
And even if there are creatures out there who are intelligent in the way we are, what is their incentive to travel huge distances that would take them decades or even centuries to travel? Interstellar travel would take up an enormous amount of a civilization’s resources, for little or no return on that investment.
Earth is the ghetto of the universe…..avoid at all risk. chuq
Well, another week of fascinating news…can’t wait for the “explosive” UFO/space aliens among us news…and as for the leaves – yes, funny how people have composted for decades now for the good of our environment but don’t realize that mulching, which you do, returns nutrients to the earth….and as for the asparagus…I love the short scene in the film “Election” when one teenage girl narrates how she and her best friend liked to eat asparagus and then see whose pea smells first! Happy Saturday!
Thanx John I am pleased that you liked this weeks collection….have a good day chuq
Great stuff! As for aliens, I have waited all my life to see them, so I for one am hoping he got this right! 😉 Asparagus was something I ate 3 times a week at least for over 20 years. I tolerated the pee smell because it was my favourite vegetable. (My wife didn’t like it, so had a different vegetable) Then I started to get back pains and painful urination on the nights I ate it. I read that it can affect the kidneys, so I reluctantly stopped eating it two years ago. That definitely helped. Great news about the Bison in Romania. They are re-introducing Beavers to England, and that has been a great success too.
Best wishes, Pete.
And I forgot to add that I stopped raking leaves three years ago, and my grass seems to benefit from leaving them to die off on the lawn.
Leaves are a great fertilizer…..people should think about that when using the accursed leaf blowers. chuq
I am glad you liked the collection…it is one of my favorite veggies……chuq