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Wednesday 07-31-24 Bill Meyer Show Guest Information
(Podcasts on www.BillMeyerShow.com)
6:35 Eric Peters, automotive journalist with www.EpAutos.com and today’s Wheels Up Wednesday talk includes:
https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2024/07/31/how-theyll-win/
https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2024/07/26/2024-mini-clubman/
https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2024/07/30/toyota-has-a-problem-and-so-do-we/
7:10 Jo County Commissioner Herman Baertschiger countering an editorial in the Daily Courier from the other day.
7:35 State Senator and Secretary of State Candidate Dennis Linthicum
8:10 Keith Hanson, CEO of QUX Technologies, www.qux.tv and www.quxpay.com . We talk about the largest banks in the US are denying the majority of fraud disputes, despite these being no fault of their customers.
IMPORTANCE:
*Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo only reimbursed 38% of unauthorized payments, leaving American customers responsible for $100 million in fraud losses.
*The Electronic Fund Transfer Act legally requires these banks to reimburse consumers, which they fail to do by large numbers every year.
*Zelle has been especially targeted by scams, with its popularity skyrocketing between 2018 and 2023, growing from $75 billion to $806 billion in annual transfers.
*QUX’s new box is 100% secure and they have vowed to never make any decisions that could compromise user privacy.
About QUX:
QUX Technologies, Inc™ has designed a revolutionary new box which allows users to host everything from TV subscriptions, payment and digital wallet platforms, all media apps, and merchant store hosting, with absolute security not offered anywhere else. QUX maintains a “Know Your Customer” (KYC) standard designed to protect financial institutions against fraud, corruption, money laundering and terrorist financing. QUX Technologies, Inc™’s KYC policy involves several steps to 1) establish customer identity; 2) understand the nature of user’s activities and qualify that sources of funds are legitimate; and 3) assess money laundering risks associated with users.
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Tuesday 07-30-24 Bill Meyer Show Guest Information
(Podcasts on www.BillMeyerShow.com)
7:10 Gregory Wrightstone, is a geologist and the Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition in Arlington Virginia. He is bestselling author of A Very Convenient Warming: How modest warming and more CO2 are benefitting humanity
Kamala Harris One of the First Supporting Green New Deal
Kamala Harris Sought to Eliminate Gas-Powered Cars by 2035
7:35 Herman Baertschiger, Jo County Commissioner – we talk about recent reports indicating Herman doesn’t support a Fire District…he corrects the record.
8:10 Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, reacts to President Biden’s proposal to reform the United States Supreme Court:
“Politics has always been part of debates over Supreme Court nominations and machinations and Biden’s ‘reform’ proposal is no exception. Term limits are popular—that they’d increase public confidence in the Court is the strongest argument for them—but they wouldn’t change how the Court operates and there’s no lawful way to do them without a constitutional amendment. Ethics reform sounds good, but in this context it’s a solution in search of a problem and the justices earlier this year unanimously promulgated a new ethics code anyway.
And the Court’s presidential-immunity decision wasn’t so broad or groundbreaking to justify either Trump supporters’ crowing or his opponents’ wailing—and certainly doesn’t merit a constitutional amendment to change. In short, this is a case where a weakened president has been pushed by left-wing activists to propose radical changes to an institution that still enjoys more public confidence than any other at the federal level save the military. Each time Democrats have broken norms in this area in the last two decades—from blanket filibusters of judicial nominations under Bush, to removing the lower-court filibuster under Obama, to forcing Mitch McConnell to end Supreme Court filibusters under Trump—it was unwise and redounded to their detriment. This will be no different.”
For more insight into Supreme Court politics, explore Ilya Shapiro’s 2020 book, Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court, with a paperback edition updated through the 2022 confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
8:35 Diana Anderson (in studio)
Vision 2040: A socialist agenda for your neighborhood.
Slide Presentation Wednesday July 31 @ 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm
Central Point Library 116 S 3rd St, Central Point, OR, United States
Learn more of the socialist planning directions the Vision taskforce is taking our communities in Southern Oregon – “planned in such a way so as to fit the model of a communist ideal”. ( J.C. Fisher, Prof of City and Regional Planning at Cornell Univ.)
See event announcement on the Jackson County Republican Party web site.
Medford 2040 Vision and Action Plan for Southern Oregon is “recommending an implementation framework that: (1) ensures the Vision and Action Plan is a “living document” adjusting for changing dynamics, resources, and trends while maintaining the course toward the preferred vision . . “
Are we witnessing the creation of a highly statist form of urban planning?
Is Vision 2040’s “preferred vision” taking us in preferential directions
towards a socialist society?
Vision 2040: A socialist agenda for your neighborhood.
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Monday 07-29-24 Bill Meyer Show Guest Information
(Podcasts on www.BillMeyerShow.com)
7:10 Greg Roberts, Rogue Weather Dot Com with today’s outdoor/fire report
8:10 Dr. Dennis Powers
Josephine County’s Hop Fields
By Dennis Powers
Used as a flavoring and stabilizing agent in brewing beer, hops were first grown on the East Coast and brought into the Mid-West and then Pacific Northwest as farmers migrated westward. The female flowers of the hops are used, and these help to prevent spoilage by retarding the growth of bacteria, along with imparting a taste depending on the type of hop vine.
The Rogue River Valley between the Cascades and Coast Range was found to be fertile with mild temperatures and just right for growing the hops. The industry in this region centered in Josephine County, dating back to 1875 when hops were first grown six miles west of Grants Pass on the J.Z. Ranzau farm. Other farmers followed to where in 1905 a total of 365 acres of hops were under cultivation, and then nearly 600 acres by the early 1930s were being grown in Josephine County.
The hop plants were planted (taking at least two years to mature), and the vines worked upwards onto wires strung between poles, sometimes ten feet high, like a rose that grows over a trellis. One to two inches long, the conical fruit were light as a feather and turned into a yellowish-green color when ripe. Pruning of the vines began in January, followed by repairing the trellises. The vines were cultivated, twined, and the fruit picked when ripe during the short summer season. The hops were then dried and processed.
Picking hops was hard work, and workers had to get used to the tedious work of “dust and sweat, scratchy vines, and sand in your shoes; dirty hands and the bitter taste that remains, even after washing one’s hands; filthy outhouses and community drinking cups.” Locals mainly worked in the hop yards, stripping the pungent flowers off the vines into a hamper, a heavy canvas bag hung on a round metal frame. It was estimated in the 1930s that an average picker made $1 per day, based on the number of pounds picked.
Weighers worked through the field to hang sacks onto a scale and record the weight on a ticket. The sacks were then thrown onto a trailing truck, which transported the hops to kilns for drying; air blasts of 140- to 180-degrees Fahrenheit with a sulfurous acid gas fumigation followed that killed the plant lice, pests, and blue mold. The dried hops were then cooled, compressed into large bales, and stored in a cool, dry place for future shipment to a brewery.
Since pickers were not paid by the hour, laborers could choose when to work, such as in cooler hours and stop to eat or take a “potty” break when they wanted to. Thus, kids on summer vacation could pick hops to earn money for themselves or to help the family out.
In the 1950s at their peak, nearly 5,000 acres of hops were being cultivated in this region. Most of the hops were being grown in the states of Oregon, Washington, California, and New York, with the Willamette Valley being a competitor to Josephine County. The hop industry in Southern Oregon, however, dramatically decreased over time by the eighties, due to the mechanization of farms in other locations, overproduction with low hop prices, and the changing tastes of beer drinkers into preferring light beers that didn’t use the hops grown here.
The 250-acre Sunny Brook Hop Yards by Grants Pass was the last, large hop grower outside of the Willamette Valley. In the late 1980s, it announced that it was stopping production; the property was sold in 1989 to the Naumes family’s Wild River Orchards, who planted the site with pear trees. The City of Grants Pass purchased the former hop yards in early 2006 for a future park, and called it the “River Road Reserve”. However, in 2020 the City sold it to Travis Boersma, the co-founder of Dutch Brothers, as it was next to his Dutcher Creek Golf Course and is now still undeveloped.
Hops are now trained on low trellises, and technology has replaced the hand pickers with hop machines. As every agricultural product has cycles of low and high prices, hop costs tripled in a short time during the late 2000s. Oregon with its Willamette Valley was still the second-highest commercial producer of hops in the country behind Washington State, and this price increase caused different farms to consider going back into the business.
For example, the Pierce family decided to start a producing hop farm. Once growing hay and raising cattle in the Valley, they launched a commercial hop yard with different varieties to meet the different producer requirements. In 2009, they planted 1800 hop plants; in 2012, they added another acre of two other varieties. Located across I-5 from Ashland on Butler Creek Road, their “Alpha Beta Hops” is currently supplying hops to local micro-breweries.
There is a cycle for everything and this region is no different.
Sources: Michael Oaks, “Hops: A One-Time Thriving Industry in Josephine County, Grants Pass, Oregon,” Josephine County Historical Society: June 2002/January 2013; Harriet Smith Guardino, “Of Hops and Men”, Josephine County Historical Society, June 2002; Jim Hays, “Is a hops resurgence brewing in Southern Oregon?” The Oregonian, May 25, 2008, at More on Hops (updated).