Some More News - Some More News: Gas Stoves, Murder Hornets, Spy Balloons, And Other Media Panics We Forgot About

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

SOURCES:

Hello, my gently suckling news babies. While you latch back onto my news teats, ow! Let me also take a moment to wish you a late happy 9-11 from the whole Some More News crew. Well, okay, sorry. Not happy, just we recognize it. Never forget to recognize, that's what we said. Unfortunately for all of us as a comedy show,

it's my sad duty to insert several flippant 9-11 jokes into the episode to stay topical. That's just comedy law. So, OK. 9-11. 9-11. That's that's 200 from 711, like the store 7-Eleven. And you want to talk about disasters, but with their, the hot dogs, I can do this.

9-Eleven, 9-Eleven, 9-Eleven times 12 is 10,932, which is also the manufacturer's number of the Hayco two prong number four, self tapping nylon stackable retaining spacer with a 0.875 inch chassis. Coincidence? All right, that's fine. So I don't know why it was all math stuff,

but we're through it. We survived with our dignity intact. Okay. And speaking of remembering and disaster and numbers, six media panics we all just kind of forgot about. Here's some more news. It's no secret that the media operates with the same nervous attention span

as your neurotic meth addicted grandmother. Boy, she has got to get her life together. And so it seems like every week we're bombarded with a brand new existential crisis zooming by like the ending of 2001, which is either a 9-11 joke or a Space Odyssey joke. It could be both. Doesn't matter. Point is, the media loves a flash in the pan freak out. So just as an example, if you're one of the folks wondering why the press love the Biden is mentally unable

to serve story, but have stopped hammering the Trump, obviously same, Biggley story, it's because everyone knows that about Trump already. That story, while still true and vital, is no longer juicy, it's time to bail. And the general public is left to assume that, whatever the panic, top men must have taken care of it, or else our worst fears have been realized

and we're living in a slightly more devastated tragedy-fueled world. But we thought, for fun, that it might be a good idea to look back and actually see if any of these problems got cleared up or were, perhaps, just left to get worse after the clicks subsided, or if they were even problems to begin with. Think of it like one of those, hey, remember the 80s? But it's for panic attacks.

Hey, remember VH1? What I guess I'm really asking here is, how are all the bees doing lately? The bees are all going extinct. Oh right, the bees. Not the bees! We all cried. So yeah, those RIP bee stories, otherwise known as Rip Bees Bee Leaving or Nots, first started appearing in the winter of 2006, when US beekeepers reported unusually high levels of hive loss. Experts were puzzled since many hives that were failing appeared otherwise healthy.

Beekeepers normally anticipate losses of around 10 to 15 percent of a colony in a typical year, but more than 28 to 33 percent of colonies were dying off in commercial US operations. Throwing Statham after Statham after Statham at the problem only made matters worse, with increasingly higher B casualty rates each year. Though answers remained in short supply, scientists did give the phenomenon a name, Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. Over the course of the next decade or so,

the media's overall take on this story progressed from whimsical scientific curiosity to full-blown crisis. A 2013 Time magazine cover story invites us to imagine a world without bees. They produced a video to go along with their report titled, Why Bees Are Going Extinct. Albert Einstein once supposedly said that if bees have appeared from the face of the earth, mankind would only have four years left to live. Now there's no evidence that they actually said that. Great, I feel more informed already.

So all of that was 10 years ago. Today, you might be tempted to think that bee-sitch must have resolved itself somehow. After all, there are still plants and flowers outside. I mean, not where I live, but, you know, on the planet. And yet, despite everyone moving on to other things, this crisis is still going on, essentially unchanged. According to The Guardian, 2022 was the second deadliest season

for US bee colonies on record, with nearly 50 percent dying off. In fact, a quick glance at headlines helpfully compiled by our researchers so I don't have to impair all these foppish, lily white hands, seemingly confirms that the situation is worse than ever with no real hope in sight. So how can something be such a huge problem for decades without stings ever improving,

but also never causing any kind of real world immediately noticeable consequences, honey. 9-11? Is it something to do with the failure of Ant-Man and the Wasp Queen to mania? I've found that the answer lies not at the box office, but in nuance, the kind I've just demonstrated. Rewind if you have to, it was subtle.

So if all the bees are dying, why haven't we actually noticed? Well, it turns out world honeybee populations are at an all time high. As of 2024, the US alone has added almost a million new colonies in just the last five years, bringing our total to 3.8 million. That makes bees the fastest growing livestock segment

in the country ahead of ducks, egg laying chickens and chickens for tendies, deer, bison, cattle, muppets, turkeys, and even alpacas, who fuck like wild. In fact, part of the surge in bee farming is almost certainly because of the nonstop reporting about how the population was dwindling, leaving a valuable natural resource market to be cornered if you were quick and evil enough. Bees are big

business not only for their honey, but also for their ability to effectively pollinate crops. Think of them as the hand that jerks the cow if the cow is trees. Think of it. For example, the American almond industry relies almost entirely on pollination by bees, and $4 out of every $5 we spend on bee fertility and assistance ultimately serves almond growing in some way. Almond acreage in the US has doubled since 2007, when everyone mutually agreed to start

pretending that they're a delicious snack and also produce milk? What? Another explanation for the surge in bee populations, greenwashing. Corporations and businesses that want to seem environmentally friendly or use green tech to look hip and relevant have started installing beehives and hiring their own beekeepers. We don't cover dental, but we do have bees! So why are bees both thriving and also in danger? Well, because there's more than one kind of bee. Like, yeah, it's so obvious when you say it out loud,

there's more than one type of bee. The ones that are thriving are honey bees, the big, fat, sexy, fuzzy guys we raise purposefully in captivity at scale to make our honey and pollinate our almonds and keep the proud tradition of interspecies slavery alive and well. Take that 13th Amendment, you failed to consider bees! Also prison labor.

But see, honey bees aren't white rhinos. I mean, obviously, they're so tiny. What I mean is they're not a wild species that's in immediate danger of going extinct. They're more tiny. What I mean is they're not a wild species that's in immediate danger of going extinct. They're more like chickens. The overall population might fluctuate, but we're in no danger of losing them entirely. They're everywhere.

We raise them on factory farms by the millions. The incessant buzzing of their cacophonous horde must surely one day sunder the earth and wake the first dead from the deep places in which they slumber. Then over here, there's another other second kind of bee. The United States alone has over 4,000 species of native wild bees, most of which are nothing like honeybees

which we imported from Europe in the first place. Far from being tiny flying livestock, most wild bees don't serve a queen or produce honey, but they are very important pollinators for a lot of old timey uncool crops that aren't almonds, such as tomatoes, eggplants and peppers, to name a few. Vegetables. OK, boomer. Oh, they're actually fruits. OK, fact checker. The rapid vibrations that only wild bee bodies can produce

is what their flowers need to shake their pollen free. Honeybees don't have enough tea, soybeans. And importantly, crucially, some might say, these wild bee populations are in danger of extinction. Going back to that chicken analogy, as one entomologist said to the Washington Post, you wouldn't be like, hey, birds are doing great. We've got a huge biomass of chickens.

It's kind of the same thing with honeybees. Right, when you put it that way, it's kind of wild we all just stopped talking about bees. Because I don't know, a species exclusively existing as a crop feels way more depressing than it just dying out. Like if we're gonna trash an ecosystem, we should at least feel more consequences for doing that.

So what's real about the bees then? Well, the American bumblebee, once North America's most common bee species has all but disappeared from eight US states, leading to calls to protect them under the Endangered Species Act. And while so much of that initial reporting focused on the scientific mystery, experts being baffled and puzzled and stumped,

it's actually well understood what's happening to our wild bee population in the United States. Basically, we keep replacing their natural habitats with condos and top gulfs. Oops, lesson learned. Won't do that again. The bees are also succumbing to the stuff you'd probably guess, like climate change and the increased use of pesticides. To make matters worse, the honey bees,

whose numbers were purposefully boosting, often carry deadly viruses and mites that flourish in crowded industrial colonies and then spread to native bee populations, decimating them. So if you're really worried about ecosystem collapse in a weird DC injustice mirror universe kind of way, the problems we thought would be caused by the loss of honeybee populations could actually come to pass if enough

native wild bees get killed off by invasive homogenized farm bees. That would mean losing a significant amount of our biodiversity and could force growers to rely far more heavily on wind-pollinated crops like wheat, barley, and corn. Awesome! We definitely need more corn in our diet. And hey, at least we'll still have nut milk. Don't talk to me until I've guzzled my nut milk. So to sum that up, the media reported about the loss of bees, and so everyone started adding more honey bees, which was never the type of bee in danger. And in fact, that made the issue worse,

because the actual solution is just to stop plowing over forests and replacing them with miles of chemically treated lawns. It's actually a great microcosm of our relationship with climate change, where the actual solution is to limit industrial growth, but instead we keep trying to find ways to weasel out of it that happen to also be good for capitalism. Interesting. Anywho, while we're being all horny for bees and death, we may as well keep this honey train going. Murder Hornets, the 9-11 of Hornets.

Remember those? When our media coverage traded talking about killing bees for talking about killer bees, so much bee content. As if COVID-19 weren't enough to worry about, there is now a murderous hornet from Asia here. Mm, glad they managed to make it feel vaguely racist. You know the story. It seems that large Asian hornets had somehow made their way

to the United States. And boy, these are no ordinary hornets. They are true units with two inch queens and mandibles shaped like shark fins. They primarily used to decapitate their prey, but which can also penetrate human skin. They're also armed with stingers strong enough to pierce a beekeeper suit.

Statham, look out! Plus a fairly potent venom that makes getting stung not just dangerous, but also excruciatingly painful. They also know how to hack computers maybe. In Japan, these so-called murder hornets kill around 30 to 50 people annually, according to the New York Times and basically every other outlet.

Despite publicly available data from Japan indicating that death from hornets, wasps, and bees combined averaged 18 per year from 2009 to 2018. The 30 to 50 claims seems to come from the introduction of a toxicology paper from 2006, which was cited in a National Geographic article in 2020, which we assume was just sort of picked up by literally everyone else.

Information is fun. Anyway, however many people die from it, the people who don't describe the sting as similar to hot metal driving into their skin. Here's what happened when YouTuber Coyote Peterson of Brave Wilderness let a murder hornet sting him strictly for the lulls and ad revenue. One, two, here we go, three.

Ah! Oh, the sting's stuck in my arm! Searing pain! Absolute searing pain! Cool, man. Reminder again to please support our sponsors and Patreon so Katie doesn't make me start doing stuff like this. But it's important to point out that the murder hornets

always posed more of a threat to our honeybees than to us. Concerns that their rapid spread could impact agricultural output on the West Coast far overshadowed their actual danger to everyday people. Wait, is this episode secretly just about bees getting wrecked? Mostly. The hornet story became a thing in 2020, but it began in 2019 when the discovery of two dead giant hornets in Washington state

and a few in Vancouver set off a targeted search for more. The search led to the discovery of a nest in Washington in late 2020, but no new murder hornets were found until 2023 near Savannah, Georgia. Although technically there weren't murder hornets, the Northern Giant Hornet, Vespa mandarinia, but its cousin, the yellow-legged hornet Vespa velutina. So over several years, they found a murder hornet hive and some murder hornet cousins. Now, maybe this story was overhyped from the start.

After all, it almost seemed like some members of the press enjoyed piling on the bad news. And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, an invasive and potentially deadly hornet has been found in the US for the very first time. As if 2020 wasn't challenging enough, there is now new information on a dangerous insect called the murder hornet.

So what makes this a little frustrating is that along with the general fear mongering, a lot of these stories somehow also glossed over the actual danger the hornets would have caused to other bees, which in turn would have eventually caused a danger to us. They took a real threat, turned it into this other meme threat about how murder hornets are coming after people,

and then we all moved on when the pretend threat didn't happen. It's like saying that bears are going to steal our picnic baskets and then later concluding that bears must actually be safe since picnic crime is down. Anyway, speaking of moving on, we're gonna do that too right after this short break.

Seriously, so short. We'll be right back. Don't buzz off. I'm done, I'm done. I swear to God, I'm done. I'm gonna go write some more 9-11 jokes, so short. We'll be right back. Don't buzz off. I'm done, I'm done. I swear to God, I'm done. I'm gonna go write some more 9-11 jokes, I promise. Look, I'm doing it right now. It's good.

It's really, it's really funny. Boy, howdy. Like all of America, I got Chaney Mania. Dick Ch Boy, howdy. Like all of America, I got Chaney Mania. Dick Chaney, that is. All the kids think he's so brat. And I've been getting my Chaney Deets over at Ground News, which you can check out with this QR code. That's an also brat sponsor we at the show sought out.

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Again, that's simply safe.com slash more news. There's no safe like simply safe. Welcome back. I'm afraid I sold my final 9-11 joke to a wealthier comedian. So if you want to hear it, you'll just have to endure an episode of real time. I'm so sorry.

It's going to be in the one where you smug and out of touch. Listen for it. Maybe it'll get canceled again. That'd be neat. You're welcome. And oh my goodness you smug and out of touch? Listen for it. Maybe it'll get canceled again. That'd be neat. You're welcome. And oh my goodness, smug and out of touch? Shitty political takes.

That perfectly segues us into our next big media panic. How about that? The Democrats are coming for your stoves. Ah, yes, the libs are coming for your blank stove edition on January 12th, 2023. Ohio Republican Jim Jordan tweeted, God, guns, gas stoves. And while that might have confused a lot of normal people on Fox Business, Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy helped clarify by warning

that a new and insidious proposal from the Democrats was designed to take away your gas stoves. That this is really a backdoor way to go after natural gas. Let's just trip it away. Let's just take away the childhood asthma kind of, yeah, right. No, this is their kind of,

what can we do to inhibit the role of natural gas in our economy? Childhood asthma? Oh brother, give me a break. Kids don't have lungs. So weird and unhinged that the Democrats apparently just hate natural gas for no reason. A day earlier, chef and restaurateur Andrew Grool,

named for his signature dish, was on with an even more dire warning. They're gonna ban fire. The end of the day, you're not even gonna be able to light a fire, and that in and of itself is gonna be akin to, you know, like, I would say smoking crack in a public square, but that's actually encouraged in California.

That's right. The damn Dems want to outlaw fire itself, not since the Olympians of old, chain Prometheus, has anyone shown such audacity. And you know they won't stop there. What's next? Wind, water, earth, heart? With their powers combined,

Fox News contributors just kept the hit pieces coming. Here's Charlie Hunt suggesting the Democrats favored a gas stove ban because they hate, in order, humans, joyfulness, pies, and good food. And boy, that's a wild accusation to throw at Democrats. I mean, just look at Tim Walz. That's clearly a man who enjoys joy and pie.

Bill Clinton is canonically food motivated to back up this stellar reportage of what must be true facts. House Republicans even went so far as to pass a bill last June, preemptively prohibiting the use of federal funds to regulate gas stoves as a hazardous product. But as it turns out, wait for it, you're not gonna believe this.

I know I say that a lot for comedic reasons, but this time I'm deadly serious. You're not gonna believe this, just wait. There haven't actually been any attempts by federal Democrats to ban gas stoves at all. Wait, at all. Like it's hard to parse what the fuck these people are even talking about.

But with much reverse engineering, I think I can say what happened. In early 2023, US Consumer Product Safety Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. told Bloomberg that gas stoves pose a hidden hazard to American homes, and he'd potentially consider barring the installation of new ones in favor of their electric counterparts. Gas stoves are used in about 40% of American homes, but they emit pollutants and fine particulate matter at levels that Nixon's EPA

and Earth's World Health Organization claim are unsafe and potentially linked to cardiovascular problems, cancer, and other chronic medical conditions. Consumer Reports urged readers to consider going electric after its own tests found many gas stoves on the market emit high levels of nitrogen oxide. This peer-reviewed 2023 study found that 12.7% of all childhood asthma cases in the US

can be attributed to gas stove usage. And that's legitimately all that really happened here. The head of one federal agency gave an interview in which he pointed to some well-sourced concerns about a possible safety hazard to children specifically in millions of American homes based on five decades of research and study. And the right-wing media was so obnoxious and wrong about it

that the agency was forced to issue a statement clarifying that they had no plans to ban gas stoves as if the right-wing media would hear literally anything and go, oh, oh, okay, I guess we were wrong and made a big deal out of nothing. We'll never do it again. Because the right-wing media, of course, had spotted an opportunity to open up a new front

in our endless national culture war by making this into yet another us versus them purity test for conservatives. In this alternate reality, they want to steal your stove because it's probably giving your kid asthma, thus making them worse at team sports, thus making you love them less. We want you to keep using the same stove,

a good godly American stove, the stove of our forefathers, okay? I just want our forefathers' stove. Some cities like Berkeley, Commie, Fornia have instituted their own bans on gas stoves. But for the most part, the national gas and propane industries have been successful installing or reversing these efforts through the courts.

Berkeley's ban, for example, was blocked after the California Restaurant Association sued. Perhaps learning from that, even though it happened like a year earlier in 2023, New York became the first entire state in the US to ban gas stoves and furnaces in all new construction projects. But that bill has an exemption for commercial kitchens.

So restaurants like Andrew Gruel's won't be impacted and organizations like the California Restaurant Association won't get all suey. It doesn't have to be a culture war political issue at all. It can just be a common health risk that we're trying to figure out how to reasonably mitigate more and more as time goes on. Like COVID, oh no, wait, fuck.

In terms of federal oversight, earlier this year, the US Energy Department announced new efficiency standards for ovens and stoves, but it hardly matters yet since 97% of the gas stoves currently in use meet the agency's requirements and don't need any changes. In fact, the Energy Department made more code upgrades regarding electric stoves this year than gas, and as many as 23% of current electric ranges

don't meet the new efficiency standards. God, this is so boring. I should have thrown in a few more 9-Eleven jokes. Why didn't I? I've got a great one right. Oh, I sold this one to Bill Maher, that's right. Well, damn. Whether or not great restaurant quality cooking

even requires a gas stove also remains a subject of intense debate among professional chefs, Jeffs, bears, foodies, and influencers. Chef and electric kitchen evangelist, Christopher Galarza, told the Washington Post last year that the fixation on gas stoves is largely based on tradition, marketing, and aesthetics,

along with what the Post describes as, the sheer machismo of cooking over an open flame. According to the National Restaurant Association, one in eight full-service U.S. restaurants already don't use gas stoves in their kitchens. Maybe your favorite restaurant already switched to electric and you didn't even know it. But as with every story that turns into part

of the culture war, attention desperate bad faith actors seize on the opportunity to get people stupidly riled up over nothing. I actually threw tomato soup all over my stove and I have actually taped myself to my stove. I've been here for 24 hours now. I haven't moved once.

I was six foot nine yesterday. I'm five foot 11 right now. And I'm gonna stay here until this is just completely abolished from anybody's mind. Sorry, wait, that's clearly a joke? So is he making fun of his own fake panic over the gas stoves? Like that is what that joke is about, right?

He's like acknowledging that they are purposefully exaggerating the outrage and that this whole thing is stupid. Like they're laughing at their stupid audience of rubes here. And of course, the fake gas stove ban was just one of a multitude of media panic surrounding fears that liberals want to regulate your diet, but not in the apparently fine RFK junior way in the,

uh, the, the, the bad woke way. That's right. Liberals want to take away your meat. Ah, shucks, those darn libs. What are they gonna take away next? The hole in the ozone? During his 2018 Senate campaign against Beto O'Rourke, Ted Cruz suggested that Democrats want to ban barbecue across the state of Texas.

Outrage! You may as well ban the stars from shining or Ted Cruz from being a weird little creep. Happy 9-11, Ted. You having a good day on your internet, Ted? Your little anniversary, the thing that you did on 9-11? Okay. The origin story here is basically the same.

In 2023, after the European Commission approved the sale of protein-rich insect powder derived from mealworms and crickets, right-wing politicians in Europe started tweeting things like We will not eat the bugs! and suggesting that the long-term plan was to outlaw conventional meat entirely. Once American commentators realized that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration also permits small amounts of insect matter in our foods,

they jumped in on the fun. They really want it. This has become a meme. People will say, I will not live in the pod. I will not eat the bugs. I will not consume. And the ruling class keeps trying to force us to do it. We don't need to do the full,

here's why this is stupid on the bug powder stuff. Yeah, no one in the ruling class is trying to force anyone to eat bugs like they're your big brother. But since more people keep getting born and we're running low on fresh water and meat, I don't know, it might be good to have some alternate food sources on deck that require less land and water to produce. Or perhaps we should look into some lab-grown meats.

Using developing cell cultivation techniques, scientists are forever inching toward a reality where lab meat largely replaces the wide-scale practice of raising and slaughtering animals for consumption. The process is similar to 3D printing, but utilizes fat ink and muscle ink to build a steak from scratch. Unless the printer gets jammed

and it just poops out that dude from total recall. In June of last year, the US Department of Agriculture approved the sale of lab-grown chicken meat by two different manufacturers. We're still a long way from being able to produce lab-grown meat in the sale of lab-grown chicken meat by two different manufacturers. We're still a long way from being able to produce lab-grown meat in the kinds of quantities that would be needed to replace the barnyard variety. But even though this tech is very cutting edge

and nowhere near reaching actual grocery store shelves, it's never too early to start scaring people with so-called Frankenstein foods. I think it is fine to develop moon meat. I think they can make it on the moon and export it to Mars. And it's fine to have Martian meat, too. And if you go to the moon, if you go to Mars, you should be allowed to get it there. But you sure as heck shouldn't be able to get it anywhere in this country. And sure as heck not here in Florida.

That's Florida rep Dean Black talking just absolute gibberish. I mean, come on, Dean, I think we're all hoping to find life on Mars once we get there and then immediately start eating it, whatever it is, caramel filled, I hope. In January, climatedepot.com publisher Mark Murano told Fox News that lab-grown meat isn't actually intended to conserve water or feed more people.

It's actually a huge globalist conspiracy. Fox News that lab-grown meat isn't actually intended to conserve water or feed more people. It's actually a huge globalist conspiracy. You know, a real stove gate. They are trying to make meat a rare and expensive treat. And this has been the stated goal of United Nations reports. This is even the stated goal of people like Al Gore, who's pushing for all sorts of EPA regulations

on animal agriculture. But more importantly, it's a plan of Bill Gates, who literally is now America's single largest farmland owner, according to NBC News. They're cutting down high yield agriculture. So they're creating intentional food shortages. So a desperate, chaotic public is going to be more open to eating anything that's either

cheaper or more readily available. And hey, they are promoting insects as a great alternative protein to meat. Yeah, I'm not a fan of rich people buying up all the land. I guess to be fair-ish, Bill Gates has purchased around 300,000 acres, which is a drop in the bucket to America's 900 million acres of farmland. But still! What's more concerning is that he isn't the only rich guy who owns a butt-ton of farmland and land in general. And it seems very counterproductive to frame that concern around a globalist conspiracy to make you eat bugs so rich people can jerk off and watch. Alas, Republican governors and state legislatures all saw that segment apparently,

and immediately started banning the sale of cultivated and lab-grown meat. Upon signing his state's ban into law, Florida governor Ron Defeated said, quote, Florida is fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a Petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals. Thanks, Gandhi-Santis.

They're gonna make you eat fake meat, or bugs, whichever scares you more. Give me a break. Alabama has also joined suit, while Arizona and Tennessee are debating their own versions of the legislation, despite the fact that lab-grown meat is not currently available for sale in either state,

and probably won't be for some time. Also, if people want to eat bugs or lab-grown meat, shouldn't they have the freedom to do so? RUN! Also, also, apparently the Arizona bill was watered down and now lab-grown meat is fine as long as you properly label it. You know how conservatives are famously fans of warning labels on stuff and how they totally never complain about the nanny state if a Democrat suggested putting a warning label on something? Of course, all of this is not to say

there aren't legitimate concerns about the impact of this brand new technology. Not weird baby concerns like how the machines look scary. Thank you, John. As with many other potential climate solutions, growing meat in a lab saves resources, but only by sucking up a massive amount of energy, which I'm told is also a resource.

Many doctors and dieticians agree that it's still too early to know for sure whether lab-grown meat has equivalent nutritional value, or if there are other potential side effects from consuming it regularly. What about the risk of foodborne illnesses like salmonella and E. coli? A lot of questions remain,

which is why it's important to have serious people in charge in order to- Cultured meat is made by a man. Real meat is made by God himself. Or that, I guess. I mean, God made the original animal cells that we're using to 3D print more cells, right? So actually, you know what?

I'm not gonna entertain that. Because ultimately that's their goal, to make dumb and distracting arguments so that they can bog down progress for as long as possible because the states they represent have a large portion of their economy tied to meat production. Or in the case of Federman, they represent a swing state and want to appeal to moderates, I guess. But as we've discussed in other episodes about climate change, there's kind of a tipping point here. And eventually we'll probably have to eat less meat, either to mitigate disaster or because the disaster has done it for us.

There'll be less meat. So it seems perhaps wise to get ahead of that, you know, like an adult would, as opposed to blocking every attempt to get ahead for immediate political gain, perhaps. Just a suggestion. Also, and this is neither here nor there, but if we can not kill things to eat versus killing things,

it seems better to not kill things. Also, do we want to live in a Star Trek future or not? What do you think Commander Riker is eating in Ten Forward when he's using his abuse of power to date some hot ensign? I mean, I know what he'll be eating later, wink, wink. Inappropriate, Cody. Inappropriate, not okay. All right, let's take another ad break

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Hey, wow. We're back. We've been counting down all the hip panics of yesteryear. By now, you're hopefully seeing a pattern emerge. Some new changes proposed or a problem is explained. Then this revelation triggers a round of spicy takes. And then before the public even has a chance to wrap their heads around the story

and its deeper implications, the press begins reporting on the controversy rather than the story itself. This isn't just a US trend either, just a global media obsession. Damn globalists! In fact, let's take a break from laughing at America's embarrassing politics

and laugh about someone else's embarrassing politics in it. ["Bread and Cheese"] Wasn't Brexit a thing? That's right, you adorable lobster backs. I see you over there across the pond. Look at you doing politics in between playing King Lear and eating beans on toast. Adorable. I see you over there across the pond. Look at you doing politics in between playing King Lear and eating beans on toast.

Adorable. Back in June, 2016, the British people narrowly voted to leave the European Union following the historic and hotly debated Brexit referendum. Prime Minister David Cameron, who had opposed the move, resigned from his post and was replaced by conservative party leader, Theresa May, who immediately named fellow Leave proponent

and pit of despair employee, Boris Johnson, as the country's top diplomat. The Brexit vote came at a time when right-wing populist movements were gaining traction across Europe. And based on the messaging around the Leave campaign and initial exit polling, it certainly seems that concerns about immigration

into the UK were motivating a lot of the voters. U-Kip's last poster, which depicted refugees crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border was widely criticized, with some comparing it to 1930s Nazi propaganda. All eyes were on the revealing of today's poster. Basically, this was the European version of the scary Central American migrant caravans

that somehow only approached the United States in election years. That's interesting. That photo behind right-wing disrupter Nigel Farage, by the way, doesn't depict the UK. Those are migrants crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border. Aside from xenophobia, the marketing campaigns promoting the leave option

also helped to convince many members of the British public that the transition would be relatively straightforward. Voters were told Brexit would boost the UK's economy and make it more globally competitive by untangling it from the wider European market. In actuality, it was an incredibly intricate and involved process for which the leave proponents had not even started to prepare. In a 2020 policy paper, authors Darren Baines, Sharon Brewer, and Adrian Kaye refer to the entire Leave movement as an empty vessel,

and voters who believe this alternative was a real, viable policy pathway were misled. As for our perception back across the pond again, by 2020, when the EU withdrawal bill was finally passed by parliament after years of complex interconnected deals, overhauls and negotiations, Brexit had functionally disappeared from American discourse. An insider poll from 2019 revealed

that only 11% of Americans felt confident they could explain Brexit, even while it was still going on and before the formal split had taken place. Meanwhile, Brexit by by all accounts, sucks. A 2024 report by Cambridge Econometrics and commissioned by London City Hall suggests that Brexit shrank the UK's economy by 140 billion pounds and London's economy by 30 billion pounds.

Earlier this year, the UK's Office for Budget Responsibility projected that Brexit would reduce the country's long run productivity by around 4% versus staying in the EU, and significantly contributed to high levels of inflation by making European imports more expensive. A study by the London School of Economics suggests that from December 2019 to March 2023, the nation's grocery bills increased by around seven billion pounds due to Brexit.

The actual amount is even higher than that. But still, I mean, come on. Look at these migrants entering Slovenia. Oh my gosh. Except sadly for the forces of evil, even the racism part didn't come to pass. Post pandemic, the UK was facing a pretty serious labor shortage.

So the conservative government opened up the country to additional immigrants to replenish its workforce. So immigration into the UK actually increased post-Brexit, hitting a new record of 750,000 arrivals in 2022. Even as former prime minister Rishi Sunak warned that migrants are threatening to overwhelm the country and vowed to stop the boats, actual real-world immigrants are, right this moment,

keeping British hospitals and nursing homes operational. One fifth of full-time National Health Service employees in the UK are non-British. Immigrants, we get things done while you scream at us. Oh great, the title monkey finally saw Hamilton. Even just visiting the EU is more expensive now for a British citizen than it was pre-Brexit, and they can't stay anywhere there for more than three months within a 180-day period without permission. Accordingly, polling from Ugov now indicates that a majority of British citizens

would vote to rejoin the EU if they could, while 57% think the original 2016 Brexit vote was misguided. Last year, members of parliament and the press started seriously entertaining proposals about undoing Brexit, though current Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose left-wing party would be most likely to lead the charge, suggests that's not really in the works.

And importantly to our story, the American media only really reported the first half of everything I just said. Britain opted to leave the EU, and after four years of negotiation and complicated legal wrangling, it happened. And then, well, those murder hornets were found. Soon, something else. And it's kind of a shame we didn't pay attention, you know, since immigration is kind of a hot topic here.

And perhaps we'd learn a thing or two about what happens when politicians are allowed to harness racist fears to make everything much, much worse. Because if you didn't notice, a lot of these media panics are very obviously driven by a fear of scary foreign things. Even when they're domestic news stories, they're still often a xenophobic or foreign invasion ankle.

They aren't just murder hornets, they're Asian murder hornets. It's not just Democrats who want to take your gas stove away. It's an international globalist conspiracy to make you eat bugs. So just imagine what the press would do if some kind of mysterious Chinese surveillance balloon floated over the entire country,

at times low enough to be visible to the naked eye. Wait a second, we don't have to imagine. Did that Chinese spy balloon kill us all? Great question. I certainly feel dead. This of course happened back in February, 2023 while you were too busy smooching your Valentine sweetie to defend yourself from the communist invasion.

There's a photo yesterday last night. You can see it there. I mean, it's visible to the naked eye. You can see right there from a photo taken at ground level in Kansas surveillance equipment here. And we'll talk about the size of this balloon in just a moment because it's not small. It's not small folks. You can totally see it right there in that photo where you can't actually see it at all. But imagine if you could. It was spotted over Montana and other northern states. Montana, of course, home to several sensitive nuclear sites.

Obviously, this has raised tensions at a time when they're pretty much already sky high. We are literally just learning in the last few seconds, the Pentagon is confirming there's actually a second Chinese surveillance balloon. This one is transiting over Latin America. Not two balloons? Oh, the two manatee!

I mean, look, I'm not saying we shouldn't be a bit concerned over Latin America. Not two balloons. Oh, the two manatee. I mean, look, I'm not saying we shouldn't be a bit concerned about another country invading our airspace, but it's a balloon. China claimed it was just a weather balloon that blew off course, but no matter if you believe that or not, it's not very helpful to start stoking

a lot of irrational fears. So I'm sure the media played it really cool. My concern is that the federal government obviously doesn't know what's in that balloon. Is that bioweapons in that balloon? Did that balloon take off from Wuhan? We don't know anything about that balloon. The balloon's just sucking up all our secrets,

watching your wife change. Is the Chinese spy balloon secretly gooning over your family? Find out tonight at six, right after Chinese spy balloon secretly gooning over your family? Find out tonight at six, right after you look up what gooning means. So while the pervert spy balloon was capturing the hearts and minds

of some of the worst news goblins imaginable, a lot of pressing, urgent, hyper-relevant debate centered on whether or not President Biden should order the military to shoot it down. The Pentagon suggested that the unpredictability of its flight path, potential landing sites, and unknown payload made it unsafe to shoot down over land. Calling it a balloon makes it sound harmless,

like it would just float away cartoon style if you popped it. But this thing was built out of metal frames and contained bulky solar panels. It weighed thousands of pounds. Still, this perfectly reasonable explanation didn't satisfy everyone, especially if they were on the afternoon's eighth Pinot Grigio.

Republicans say Biden looks weak with each second he keeps this communist balloon in the air. Come on, guys, it's not hard to understand this. Have you never tried to knock something off of a high shelf only to have it smack you in the face? Things that are above us tend to fall on us. It's not communism to acknowledge what gravity is yet. Anyway, a US fighter jet finally did shoot the balloon down

off the coast of South Carolina because Biden had naturally ordered the military to simply wait until it had safely reached water and presented no danger to people. China still condemned the strike, continuing to insist that this was a meteorological device and they had sort of hoped we'd return it. And that was basically that. Was it just a weather balloon?

Absolutely not. Of course it wasn't. It was in fact a really, really embarrassing spy balloon. NBC reported in April of 2023 that the balloon had made multiple passes over sensitive American military bases and other sites, and was able to gather some intelligence about weapons and communication systems.

But in June, the Pentagon claimed it had been incapable of transmitting anything it was picking up back to China. Though it had apparently been designed for spying and even included some commercially available technology purchased from the United States, it had either malfunctioned or been prevented from transmitting information

by American military countermeasures. We're still not 100% on it. It's even possible the balloon wasn't meant to fly over the continental United States at all. Speaking to CBS News, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said he thought the balloon was destined for Hawaii, but had been blown off course

by unpredictably high winds. The Pentagon now believes that this was, in fact, part of a global surveillance program by China, albeit an ineffective one. Additional balloons were detected over Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and there had likely been a few others that went undetected or unreported. Of course, America has been sending spy planes over the Chinese coast

and monitoring the country from orbit for quite some time. So I guess turnabout is fair play. Balloons do have a few advantages as surveillance tech, too. They're much cheaper than satellites. They're closer to the surface so they can capture better, higher quality images, and their relatively slow speed makes them trickier to spot on radar.

Scholar Steve Tsang suggests it may have even been a symbolic move, an attempt by the Chinese to simply demonstrate that they're still in the game and coming up with new ways to scope out the opposition. The benefit of hindsight also demonstrated that the Biden administration was almost certainly right to wait until the balloon was over the water to shoot it down.

Despite Jesse Waters' repeated insistence that Montana doesn't matter, and you might as well fling debris at it. And so Biden was against the Bin Laden raid, and now he's against the balloon pop. He missed his shot over Montana. I mean, what's the worst that can happen? It hits a guy's barn?

Fuck those ranchers, who we love and respect by the way. God, all these guys have such obvious disdain for their audience, it's wild. This guy specifically, someone should throw up on him. And as an additional aside, if your career demands that you have to say, quote, Biden was against the Bin Laden raid and now he's against the balloon pop with a straight face.

It's probably time to turn it in buddy. And that's coming from someone who made a gooning joke earlier. NASA estimated that shooting down the balloon over land could have created a 70 mile wide debris field sending thousands of pounds of debris falling 65,000 feet down onto hopefully just the ground, but maybe people in buildings, right?

I mean, those buildings would be barns, so who cares? I don't live near one of those. But most of this is an afterthought anyway. That NBC report containing NASA's advice to President Biden, which completely and rationally explains his administration's real-time response to the balloon situation didn't come out until December 2023. By that time, the whole Chinese spy balloon incident was long gone from the media. Most Americans probably never heard any of the real updates and explanations around the whole balloon thing. And likely, whatever they chose

to believe when it first happened is what they still believe now, including, but not limited to, barn-hater propaganda. Why do you hate barn so much, Jesse Waters? Seems like somebody who's trying to get thrown up on. Clearly Cody is in the pocket of Big Puke. I'm not saying that people are ferrets with zero attention span. There's just a lot going on. We gotta clear out the garage this weekend, you know?

So it's sort of up to the media to put things into context, even when that thing has left the spotlight. Otherwise, people are going to just assume whatever they assumed when the story first broke. But alas, we're talking about the media. So, you know, tale as old as a bookworm fucking a castle monster. Tale as old as that.

And while this obviously speaks to issues in the media that have only gotten worse with the internet, the less evident damage of this cycle of seemingly existential threats that suddenly vanish is that it not only numbs us to actual problems, but it often omits the solutions that did happen. And that's probably why it's so easy to ignore current threats. We just assume they're not real

or they will go away somehow. Take Y2K, now a hip new movie from A24. It's often discredited as a hoax or a media panic, but that's because the press didn't do a good job following up on the story. For example, in order to praise all of the computer programmers and developers behind the scenes who actually fixed our computer systems

in time and prevented a crash. From the public's perspective, it was months of worry about planes falling out of the sky and then nothing happened. Fake news. But that's not the reality. Or like how sometimes doofuses, including but not limited to professional doofus Matt Walsh, will post things, whatever happened to the ozone layer hole? I bet scientists just made it up. That one guy brought a snowball inside

and it didn't melt right away. It's so facto. But in fact, that situation only improved after unified international action. In 1987, 24 countries signed the Montreal Protocol, limiting the use of harmful chlorofluorocarbons and thus actually fixed the problem. See how easy that was to look up, Matt?

You can even glance immediately under your stupid tweet that's still stupidly up to see everybody, including the website itself, patiently correct your wildly ignorant misinformation, you incurious dolt of shit. Learning is fun, Matt, you should try it sometime, because that's how we grow, actually. And if a politician or a pundit or a news outlet

seems completely uninterested in actually explaining these things, then we probably should ignore them, because it means that the full story doesn't benefit them. That actual context is like poison to their success, and they'd rather ride that wave of media panic to get by like 9-11. Everyone was really upset at that, but that turned out. What? We did what?

In two countries, and they changed the name to Freedom Fries. Freedom Fries. Wait, OK, wait. So the camera pulls back and it's revealed that it's Robert Pattinson, like on 9-11 in the building. The whole like what? That's he's Batman now. That that can actually work. 9-11. You put glue in my ear?

Wormboat, did you put glue in my ear? You're back for one week and you- oh my god, I'm panicking now, I'm panicking. Oh my god, it stuck to my ear! This is panic! This is what panic is like! Oh my God, I'm panicking now. I'm panicking. Oh my God, it's stuck to my ear. This is panic. This is what panic is like. Oh my God, I finally get it. Oh my God, oh no, oh no. We're all gonna have glue in our ears.

We're all gonna have glue in our ears. Look it up online, help! Hey everybody, false alarm. I was just being silly. Thanks for watching. Make sure to like and subscribe. We've got a Patreon dot com slash some more news you can check out. We've also got a podcast called Even More News.

You can listen at the podcast place or you can watch it on this channel. We're there on camera talking on the podcast. We've also got this show some more news you can listen to as a podcast on the podcast place. So it's just it's just full on synergy. We love it. We've got a merch store with merch like they'll get there. I'll look at him.

We got merch from that. Or this is just one of my shirts. So check that out. And oh, no, it happened again. It didn't happen again. Bye. Oh, Katie says hi. I'm so sorry.

Katie is on the Zoom. She says hi. Hi.