Walmart Sues Tesla Over Solar-Panel Rooftop Fires
August 20th, 2019
Via: MarketWatch:
Walmart Inc. is suing Tesla Inc. over a spate of roof fires at several Walmart stores that the retailer alleges were caused by Tesla solar panels.
Walmart is suing for breach of contract and alleges “gross negligence” on Tesla’s part for the fires, which it says all started on the rooftops of several stores in California, Maryland and Ohio that had Tesla solar panels.
“To state the obvious, properly designed, installed, inspected, and maintained solar systems do not spontaneously combust, and the occurrence of multiple fires involving Tesla’s solar systems is but one unmistakable sign of negligence by Tesla,” according to the complaint filed on Tuesday.
CEO Compensation Increases vs. Average Worker Compensation Increases
August 20th, 2019Via: CBS:
The chasm between what the country’s corporate leaders and their workers earn is widening to Grand Canyon-like proportions, according to new research that shows CEO compensation surged 940% between 1978 to 2018 while the average worker saw a meager 12% pay hike over the same 40-year period.
…
Last year chief execs got $278 for every $1 a typical worker earned, according to Mishel and Wolfe. Back in 1965, top corporate chiefs earned $20 for every dollar a typical worker earned, with that ratio rising to 58-to-1 by 1989. The gap widened dramatically in the following decades, they noted, due to a shift in the 1990s and 2000s to compensate CEOs mostly with stock options, restricted shares and other incentive-based pay fueled a spike in their earnings.
Collapse in Los Angeles
August 19th, 2019China: Researchers to Grow Replacement Organs for Humans in Genetically Modified Animals
August 18th, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
Recently, a Chinese startup named Qihan Biotech raised $20 million to develop replacement organs for humans. The smallish deal would hardly have rated a headline, except for the fact that the Hangzhou-based gene-editing company is aiming to grow those organs in pigs and other animals. If successful, such transplants could well transform medicine. And, thanks to a unique confluence of need, money, timing and culture, China is poised to lead the way in developing them.
…
Xenotransplantation has since become a recognized branch of medicine. Heart valves from pigs, for instance, are commonly used to replace faulty human ones.
However, transplanting a complete, functioning animal organ such as a heart presents far more formidable barriers, the most crucial being the need to suppress or fool the human body’s immune response. China’s scientists have become world leaders in editing the pig genome to do just that. The hope is to produce organs that can help people with a range of illnesses, from heart disease to blindness.
Forensic Pathologist, Dr. Cyril Wecht, On Epstein “Suicide”
August 17th, 2019Via: Fox:
Trump Administration Shutting Down JASON Advisory Group
August 17th, 2019Despite relatively prosaic disclosures about the JASON group’s activities, most of their work is classified. I’ve always wondered if the main, and unspoken, purpose of the JASON group was related to the UFO situation. After World War 2, the U.S. government was definitely struggling to understand the nature of UFOs; their flight characteristics and their fascination with military (specifically nuclear weapons related) installations. My guess is that JASON was tasked with looking into this in some capacity. UFOs were such an inscrutable enigma that whoever was in charge of trying to understand the issue might have come up with the idea of drawing top scientific personnel from around the black world to consider it.
UFOs or not, it would be very interesting to know what the actual motivation is for closing JASON down. The Reuters piece below offers some explanations, cost cutting and personal axes to grind, but given the decades long links of the JASON group to the black world, these seem laughable.
Via: Reuters:
They’re members of a prestigious academic panel with top-secret clearances who’ve advised the Pentagon on some of America’s most vexing national security issues since the Cold War. Over 60 years, they’ve won 11 Nobel prizes and conducted hundreds of government studies.
The advisory group, known as Jason, is a team of some 60 of America’s top physicists and scientists who spend each summer in La Jolla, California, conducting studies commissioned by the Pentagon and other U.S. government agencies.
On March 28, Trump appointee Michael Griffin – the Pentagon’s chief technology officer – unexpectedly moved to terminate the group.
Research Credit: Pookie
Sperm Sorting Method Could Reduce Chances of Girls Being Born, Scientists Warn
August 16th, 2019“Like most Asian nations, China has a traditional bias for sons.”
Via: New Scientist:
The finding that some chemicals slow down sperm that carry the X chromosome could lead to gels for home use that make a couple less likely to conceive a girl, scientists have warned.
“I am concerned about the social impact of this,” says Alireza Fazeli of Tartu University in Estonia. “It’s so simple. You could start to do it in your bedroom. Nobody would be able to stop you from doing it.”
It was thought that the sperm of mammals that lead to male and female offspring are identical except for the DNA they carry. But Masayuki Shimada of Hiroshima University in Japan and his colleagues have found that 500 genes are active in sperm that carry the X chromosome, which give rise to female offspring, that aren’t active in sperm that carry the Y chromosome, which lead to male offspring.
Of these genes, 18 code for proteins that stick out from the sperm cell’s surface. The team has found that chemicals that bind to two of these proteins can slow down the movement of X-carrying sperm without affecting the Y-carrying ones.
This discovery makes it simple to separate sperm according to the sex of the offspring they could produce. When the researchers used this method on mouse sperm, they found that selecting the fastest swimmers for conception led to 90 per cent of the resulting pups being male. When they used slowed-down sperm, the pups were 81 per cent female.
Dayton Gunman Had Cocaine, Xanax, Alcohol in His System During Attack
August 15th, 2019Flashback: Xanax Link to Mass Shootings Confirmed Yet Again
Via: Reuters:
The gunman who killed nine people outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio, had cocaine, Xanax and alcohol in his system at the time of the shooting rampage, the county coroner said on Thursday.
Ghislaine Maxwell Spotted at In-N-Out Burger Reading Book About Deaths of CIA Operatives
August 15th, 2019Update: Maxwell Staged Photo
—
Fascinating.
Book: The Book of Honor : The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives by Ted Gup
Via: New York Post:
Jeffrey Epstein’s former gal pal Ghislaine Maxwell isn’t holed up in her British manor or summering on the Massachusetts coast.
The Post found the socialite hiding in plain sight in the least likely place imaginable — a fast-food joint in Los Angeles.
Maxwell, 57, the alleged madam to the multimillionaire pedophile, was scarfing down a burger, fries and shake al fresco at an In-N-Out Burger on Monday while reading “The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives,” a nonfiction best seller by journalist Ted Gup.
Sitting alone with a pet pooch, she was surprised to be found and told an onlooker, “Well, I guess this is the last time I’ll be eating here!”
GE Shares Fall On Report That Its Finances Are Worse Than Disclosed
August 15th, 2019Bigger fraud than Enron or WorldCom.
Via: Reuters:
General Electric (GE.N) shares fell as much as 15% on Thursday after fraud investigator Harry Markopolos, who blew the whistle on Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, said GE was concealing deep financial problems.
In a 175-page report, Markopolos accused GE of hiding $38.1 billion in potential losses and asserted that the company’s cash situation was far worse than it had disclosed.
“GE’s true debt to equity ratio is 17:1, not 3:1, which will undermine its credit status,” Markopolos said.
The report says GE is insolvent and asserts that its industrial businesses have a working capital deficit of $20 billion.
…
The report alleges that GE faces $38 billion in future expenses that it has not disclosed. “GE’s $38 billion in accounting fraud amounts to over 40% of GE’s market capitalization, making it far more serious than either the Enron or WorldCom accounting frauds,” the report says.
