GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread

[marsh]

More excerpts from "Moment of Truth Summit"

There's No More In Between: "You're Either Gonna Go Down as a Traitor or a Hero" 1;04 min

There's No More In Between: "You're Either Gonna Go Down as a Traitor or a Hero"​

Red Voice Media Published August 20, 2022
Mike Lindell: "They will never be able to play the plausible deniability card ever again — any of them."

^^^^^^
'The Big Lie' Is the Biggest of Lies: John Gordon 2:27 min

'The Big Lie' Is the Biggest of Lies: John Gordon​

Red Voice Media Published August 20, 2022
"We estimate that in an election decided by 11,780 votes that there were 40,000 illegal, illegitimate, duplicate fraudulent ballots in Fulton County alone. We haven't even gotten outside of Atlanta yet!"

^^^^^
More Votes Than VOTERS in Pennsylvania: "You Don't Certify Until This Is Investigated and Certified" 4:28 min

More Votes Than VOTERS in Pennsylvania: "You Don't Certify Until This Is Investigated and Certified"​

Red Voice Media Published August 20, 2022
Attorney Kurt Olsen: "What isn't known is that on November 24 [2020], when Secretary Boockvar certified that vote, there were over 700,000 more votes than people who were recorded in this voting. The excuse was that the counties had not finished reporting, and there was a delay. That was their excuse..."

^^^^

Mike Lindell Receives a Standing Ovation for His Unrelenting Courage to Get to the Bottom of the 2020 Election

Jenna Ellis: "The reason that Mike is here doing this is because he cares about this country, and he cares first and foremost about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and the truth! And so few people

rumble.com

1:18 min

Mike Lindell Receives a Standing Ovation for His Unrelenting Courage to Get to the Bottom of the 2020 Election​

Red Voice Media Published August 20, 2022

Jenna Ellis: "The reason that Mike is here doing this is because he cares about this country, and he cares first and foremost about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and the truth!

^^^
“This Doesn’t Make Sense!” - How They Stole Antrim County, Michigan 9:54 min

“This Doesn’t Make Sense!” - How They Stole Antrim County, Michigan​

Red Voice Media Published August 20, 2022
The audit didn’t reveal a 12-vote swing; it really was a 7,060-vote swing for Trump.

^^^^
Mike Lindell: The Only Way the Moment of Truth Summit Fails Is If People Don't Watch .52 min

Mike Lindell: The Only Way the Moment of Truth Summit Fails Is If People Don't Watch​

Red Voice Media Published August 20, 2022

^^^^^^^
Caught on Video: Auditor Harri Hursti DELETES Memory Card During Windham, New Hampshire Audit .47 min

Caught on Video: Auditor Harri Hursti DELETES Memory Card During Windham, New Hampshire Audit​

Red Voice Media Published August 20, 2022

 

[marsh]

(Australia)

Senator Malcolm Roberts: Climate Fraudsters Hijacked A Normal Climate Cycle For Political Benefit 1:24 min

Senator Malcolm Roberts: Climate Fraudsters Hijacked A Normal Climate Cycle For Political Benefit​

SettingBrushfires Published August 20, 2022

 

[marsh]

World Economic Forum Suggests There Are “Rational” Reasons to Microchip Your Child

The latest highly controversial technology/policy that the World Economic Forum (WEF) has set out to normalize is the idea of implanting tracking chips into humans. It wasn’t that long ago that those speculating on a future where this is happening would get dismissed as conspiracy theorists, but...

basedunderground.com

World Economic Forum Suggests There Are “Rational” Reasons to Microchip Your Child

WEF suggests there are ways to "ethically make these amazing technologies a part of our lives."

by Didi Rankovic August 20, 2022

Microchip Children WEF
The latest highly controversial technology/policy that the World Economic Forum (WEF) has set out to normalize is the idea of implanting tracking chips into humans.

It wasn’t that long ago that those speculating on a future where this is happening would get dismissed as conspiracy theorists, but now the world elites’ most vocal outlet is predicting that chip implants will eventually become just a commodity.

And the WEF makes a case that implanting chips into children could be viewed by parents as a “solid, rational” move. All of this crops up in a blog post on the organization’s website dedicated to the future of augmented reality (AR), and what is referred to as “an augmented society.”

Like in many of WEF’s other takes on the future of various types of technology, the emphasis is put on inserting the “right,” i.e., its own “vision” in the direction these should be developing, with the inevitable mention of undefined society stakeholders who will hold the key to the ethics issue of it all.

The WEF is talking up the allegedly broad usefulness of AR going forward in fields such as healthcare, education, and professional settings, with the underpinning notion of providing guidelines as to how to “ethically” regulate this vast potential power – and therefore, when all’s said and done, control it.

The WEF calls AR and similar tech transformative – but in need of “the right support, vision, and audacity.”

Once again it isn’t at all clear why “audacity” is thrown in, unless it is a euphemism to sell some pretty outrageous “visions” that the WEF is expressing, such as replacing drugs with brain implants that will manipulate the body with electrical pulses, and pairing all sorts of chips put into humans through surgery, with sensors one might find in a chair.

And so, with the human and the chair “seamlessly integrated,” the quality of life across the board shoots up, the Davos-based group promises.

“As scary as chip implants may sound, they form part of a natural evolution that wearables once underwent. Hearing aids or glasses no longer carry a stigma,” the blog post reads. “They are accessories and are even considered a fashion item. Likewise, implants will evolve into a commodity.”

But critics of these trends say their opposition has nothing to do with “stigmas” – rather with serious concerns about civil rights, privacy, and the very concept of human autonomy.

Article cross-posted from Reclaim The Net.

 

[marsh]

Infowars Article

Infowars: There's a War on for your Mind!

www.infowars.com

Must Watch: Alex Jones Lays Out The NWO’s Great Reset Takeover & How To Fight Back

Infowars.com
August 20th 2022, 2:04 pm

CD Media founder gets Jones' take on America's accelerating deterioration under Joe Biden in this powerful interview.

CD Media founder L. Todd Wood interviews Alex Jones to get his take on the globalists’ controlled demolition of America and to explain the World Economic Forum’s dastardly plan to bring the world to its knees outlined in his new book “The Great Reset and the War For The World.”

LIVESTREAM REPLAY: L Todd Wood Interviews Alex Jones! 47:19 min

LIVESTREAM REPLAY: L Todd Wood Interviews Alex Jones!​

CDMedia Published August 19, 2022
CDMedia Founder L Todd Wood interviews the fascinating Alex Jones of Infowars on his new book, 'The Great Reset and The War for the World.

 

[marsh]

Sacred Cows and the Dangers of Eating Bugs ⋆ The Liberty Daily

The globalist elites want us to stop eating beef and start eating bugs. They, of course, will continue to eat beef because only the desperate would willingly eat bugs instead of a juicy ribeye, but for the sake of The Great Reset, we must do our part on their behalf. Supposedly, cows are...

thelibertydaily.com

Sacred Cows and the Dangers of Eating Bugs​

By J.D. Rucker • Aug. 20, 2022

The globalist elites want us to stop eating beef and start eating bugs. They, of course, will continue to eat beef because only the desperate would willingly eat bugs instead of a juicy ribeye, but for the sake of The Great Reset, we must do our part on their behalf.

Supposedly, cows are destroying the climate. But that appears to not be true based on modern research. Infowars’ Greg Reese broke it down in his latest video.

The technocrat controllers have decreed that we must begin consuming bugs to save the Earth, but what they neglect to mention is that many insects are not only incompatible with the human digestive system, but also detrimental to our physical health.

Video on website 6:11 min

 

[marsh]

EXCLUSIVE: Joe Biden Enlists China Owned TikTok to Partner with Federal Voting Assistance Program in 2022 Midterm Elections

It is well-known TikTok is owned by Beijing-based technology company ByteDance, which was founded in 2012 by Chinese billionaire Zhang Yiming. For this reason, President Trump announced he was going to ban TikTok. Trump wisely issued three Executive Orders banning American businesses from...

www.thegatewaypundit.com

EXCLUSIVE: Joe Biden Enlists China Owned TikTok to Partner with Federal Voting Assistance Program in 2022 Midterm Elections

By Jim Hoft
Published August 20, 2022 at 3:00pm



It is well-known TikTok is owned by Beijing-based technology company ByteDance, which was founded in 2012 by Chinese billionaire Zhang Yiming.

For this reason, President Trump announced he was going to ban TikTok.

Trump wisely issued three Executive Orders banning American businesses from working with TikTok (or WeChat).

President Trump did not allow any branch of the Federal government to use the CCP’s TikTok.

Joe Biden revoked President Trump’s TikTok Executive Orders in June of 2021.

Even the head of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requested Apple and Google in June to remove TikTok from their app stores due to ‘serious national security threats’ posed by the said mobile app, as reported by The Gateway Pundit.

In a letter dated June 24, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr told Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores as it “harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data” from its American users.

Now this…
Joe Biden just welcomed TikTok into a formal partnership with the Federal Voting Assistance Program, a U.S. government agency set up to help overseas voters in the upcoming US midterm elections.

TikTok just launched their U.S. “Midterms Election Center”.



Users of their App will be fed “election information”, not to be confused with what the CCP labels “Election Misinformation” in 40 languages and hopefully English is one of these. Among other things, the CCP’s TikTok will instruct people here on how to vote by mail in their respective States.

You simply cannot make this up.

“We believe the world will be a better place if every citizen has access to accurate, unbiased and non-partisan election information — who is on the ballot and what they stand for — so they can make informed decisions about their vote. We are pleased to work with TikTok to help their community not only understand the candidates and their positions but also to empower them to feel confident when they cast their ballot.” – Leslie Graves, Ballotpedia Founder and CEO.

Read more here. Our commitment to election integrity

This should be a crime!

 

[marsh]

Victor Davis Hanson 'The Left Are the Revolutionaries'

Victor Davis Hanson joined Pete Hegseth on ‘Jessie Watters Primetime’ to discuss what is really behind the Left’s belligerent behavior. Pete Hegseth: Tonight we got the right guy to break down where we are. Let’s bring in Victor Davis Hanson, the Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institute. Victor...

www.thegatewaypundit.com

Victor Davis Hanson ‘The Left Are the Revolutionaries’

By Maggie Flavin
Published August 20, 2022 at 6:03pm

Victor Davis Hanson joined Pete Hegseth on ‘Jessie Watters Primetime’ to discuss what is really behind the Left’s belligerent behavior.

Pete Hegseth:

Tonight we got the right guy to break down where we are. Let’s bring in Victor Davis Hanson, the Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institute.

Victor, we immediately thought of you as the right guy to talk about…when you see the way the left is talking about who we are as a nation. Who their political opponets are and now what they’re willing to do about it. It’s scary for people. Can we walk back from this type of precipice?

Victor Davis Hanson:

Yeah, I think we can…but remember the left projects. So if Christopher Steele draws on sources like Danchenko and Dolan, a Clinton operative, they draw on Russian sources to smear Donald Trump and then they call it Trump collusion. They are talking nonstop about civil war. They really are. And they do things that are revolutionary.

I mean, nobody on the right said let’s junk the 233-year-old electoral college. The 180-year- old filibuster. The 150-year old nine person supreme court. Nobody said let’s bring in two more states and end the idea for 60 years of a 50 year union.

And then when you look at what they have actually done, they have failed at that, but nobody in the Republican party tore up the State of the Union address on national TV like Nancy Pelosi.

No Speaker, not Newt Gingrich, not anybody else, Paul Ryan, they never said you can’t to the minority party ‘You can’t have these people on committees.’ That was a revolutionary thing to do in the House.

Nobody goes outside the homes of Justice Kagan, thank God, or Justice Sotomayor. There’s not right-wing assassins that show up out there. And when you look at the literature that’s coming out, if you look at The New Republic, The Nation, these leftwing venues, all you hear is ‘Blue Exit’ and ‘It’s time for secession’…and ‘We can’t live with each other.’

Or if you read Time Magazine, that classic article by Molly Ball in February 2021, where she gushed, she was giddy, outlining what she called was a conspiracy to change radically the voting laws to inject $400-500 million to alter the way we voted for a century so that 70% of the votes would not be cast on election day even as the rejection rate would decline by a magnitude of 7 or 8 of the individual ballots.

These are revolutionary things they are doing.

Watch the full video:

View: https://youtu.be/mGgc_Qh1Zrg
4:16 min

 

[von Koehler]

Question: If the Democratic party pulls off stunning election victories in 2022, will you...

 

[marsh]

Thomas Massie Drops Truth Bomb About Carbon Dioxide - The Liberty Daily

If you love the news, check out The Liberty Daily's homepage. According to climate change crackpots, carbon dioxide is destroying the planet. And while they pretend this is based on scientific consensus, there are many true scientists who object to the notion that attempting to suffocate plant...

thelibertydaily.com

Thomas Massie Drops Truth Bomb About Carbon Dioxide

By J.D. Rucker • Aug. 20, 2022

According to climate change crackpots, carbon dioxide is destroying the planet. And while they pretend this is based on scientific consensus, there are many true scientists who object to the notion that attempting to suffocate plant life is somehow beneficial.

Lest we forget, plants “inhale” carbon dioxide and “exhale” oxygen. It creates a perfect symbiosis with oxygen-breathing animals that exhale carbon dioxide. When there’s balance, all is good. But the climate change industry wants to tear down what we know to be true and replace it with what they know to be false.

Congressman Thomas Massie took to Twitter to briefly explain the consequences:

Irrespective of any linkage to temperature and weather, most plants, and animals which rely on those plants, would benefit from more CO2 in the atmosphere. We aren’t even close to the optimal concentration of CO2 for plant growth yet.

Regardless of what may cause it, if the earth heats up a small amount, vast swaths of the globe and thousands of species will be much better off. Some areas and some species will not be better off.



There are millions of true believers in the cult of climate change. But at the top of the hysteria food chain are the powers-that-be who see climate change as an opportunity to push their Neo-Marxist agenda. If everyone is at risk, everyone can be controlled, so they’ve manufactured the infamous claim that we only have ten years to solve the problem or we’re all dead. Of course, they never mention that we supposedly only had ten more years in the 1970s. And 1980s. And 1990s.

This isn’t new. It has just been rebranded to recruit the Greta Thunbergs and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes of the world so they can indoctrinate impressionable young people who wouldn’t recognize Al Gore if they bumped into him at a Tesla charging station.

The climate change scam isn’t really about reducing carbon dioxide. It’s about producing the so-called threat that carbon dioxide represents so they can take control of the economy. When businesses are held down by climate change regulations and beholden to ESG gatekeepers like BlackRock, the “green economy” can be realized in all of its destructive glory.

“Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Green New Deal architect Saikat Chakrabarti said in 2019. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

In normal times, we could assume common sense would prevail over illogical hysteria. But these aren’t normal times so it’s imperative we get the truth out there about the climate change agenda, also known as The Great Reset.

 

[marsh]

Beware of the E.S.G. Scam

Remember when corporations focused on business?

thebullelephant.com

Beware of the E.S.G. Scam​

written by Dr. Robert Warren August 20, 2022

Ever hear about companies that have gone “woke” and invest accordingly.

There are a lot of them and they are more than will to sacrifice corporate profits to brag about their “social justice” activities. Many of these companies now have diversity, inclusiveness and equity division within to pay for these activities. What is quickly lost are concerns for building stockholder equity and investment to advance the fundamental worth and competitiveness of the company.

The other day, I was listening to Tucker Carlson. He was interviewing an individual who had started an anti-E.S.G ETF (exchange traded fund.) Well, what did E.S.G. mean seemed to be appropriate question so I looked up a simple definition online. Here it is from Wikipedia:

“Environmental, social, and corporate governance is a theoretical approach to evaluating the extent to which a corporation works on behalf of social goals that will supposedly go beyond the role of a corporation to maximize profits on behalf of the corporation’s shareholders.”

To simplify all of the gibberish, this is just another, more complicated way, of saying “woke”.

As the discussion with Tucker Carlson continued, two things became immediately obvious. First, this anti-E.S.G.ETF was focused on making money.

Forget all the “woke” stuff, and focus on good investments that maximize profits. Second, the majority of investors are small dollar folks. A $5000 investment was normal unlike many pro-E.S.G. ETFs where multi-million dollar investments demonstrating “wokeness” are the norm. Notably, this new ETF has now raised $100 Million in a very short period.

I am not here to shill for a particularly anti-E.S.G. ETF nor do I know whether it will be a success. What intrigued me was the return to the “bad old days” where corporations focused on business.

 

[marsh]

Surprise! Up to 90% of all new taxes in the Biden inflation bill could come from small businesses making less than $200k per year

Gee who would have ever imagined anything like this ever, ever happening?

notthebee.com

Surprise! Up to 90% of all new taxes in the Biden inflation bill could come from small businesses making less than $200k per year

Daniel Payne
Aug 20, 2022 · NottheBee.com

Gee who would have ever imagined anything like this ever, ever happening?



Small business owners may soon be in for a lengthy and expensive battle with the IRS, tax experts warn.

A key provision in the Inflation Reduction Act — which throws an extra $80 billion to the IRS to improve the agency's collection of under-reported income — will end up targeting small business owners to pay for the legislation, according to nonpartisan watchdog the Joint Committee on Taxation.

The group estimates that between 78% and 90% of the estimated additional $200 billion the IRS will collect will come from small businesses making less than $200,000 annually.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1559632579770388485

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1559632579770388485
.36 min

View: https://youtu.be/3HmFnp-jgfw
3:04 min

Wow. Just wow. Complete shocker. Never could have seen it coming.

You may not be aware of it, but there are perverse incentives for the IRS to go after lower earners:

"The IRS will have to target small and medium businesses because they won't fight back," Joe Hinchman, executive vice president at National Taxpayers Union Foundation, told The Post. "We've seen this play out before … the IRS says ‘We're going after the rich' but when you're trying to raise that much money, the rich can only get you so far."

In fact, going after the lower and middle class can actually be more lucrative for IRS auditors than trying to get more money from the wealthy. "The rich have their lawyers and fight it — that's why the poor are easier to go after," Hinchman adds.

In other words, the IRS as it rolls up to your small business door is thinking:

Didn't Biden promise over and over and over that there would be no new taxes on anyone making under $400,000?

Guess that doesn't apply to money we make on our own.

We don't have to be weak, though. One way to start is by voting very well in November.

(COMMENT: It is clear that they are using various strategies to eliminate small business, which is the economic driver of the US.)

 

[marsh]

VIDEO: CA Farmer Worried About Production amid Inflation, Drought

A farmer in Colusa, California, voiced concern on Friday about being able to produce enough tomatoes for hungry consumers.

www.breitbart.com

Nearly 5 Million Illegal Immigrants Crossed Border During Biden Administration

SPENCER LINDQUIST 20 Aug 20221,223

A whopping 4.9 million illegal immigrants have crossed our border since Biden has taken office, a report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) found.

The president of FAIR Dan Stein discussed the report, that “Roughly the equivalent of the entire population of Ireland has illegally entered the United States in the 18 months President Biden has been in office, with many being released into American communities.”

He continued, saying “In that time, the Biden administration has blamed an unprecedented surge of illegal immigration on all sorts of external factors, except their own sabotage of our nation’s immigration laws.”

The nearly 5 million illegal immigrants who have entered our country since Biden took office includes nearly 200,000 that crossed the border in July of 2022.

With 199,976 illegal immigrants entering in July, the figure marks a whopping 325 percent increase over the average number of July apprehensions across former President Trump’s four years in office. Of the 199,976 illegal immigrants, 134,362, or 67 percent, were single adults.

There were also 10 individuals on the terror watch list who were stopped on our southern border last month.

Perhaps even more startling, July is the 17th straight month in which border patrol has had 150,000 encounters or more. In addition, 2,071 pounds of fentanyl, the equivalent of 469 million lethal doses, and 12,989 pounds of methamphetamine were seized at the southern border in July alone.

Thomas Homan, the former Acting Director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the Trump Administration, joined Alex Marlow on Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM to discuss the border crisis.

He said that the number of illegal immigrants entering our country under Biden “blows every other record out of the water” despite the fact that the Trump Administration “handed this administration the most secure border we’ve ever had.”

FAIR president Dan Stein also criticized the Biden Administration, saying “The endless flow of illegal aliens and the incursion of lethal narcotics pouring across our border will not end until this administration demonstrates a willingness to enforce our laws.”

 

[marsh]

VIDEO: CA Farmer Worried About Production amid Inflation, Drought

A farmer in Colusa, California, voiced concern on Friday about being able to produce enough tomatoes for hungry consumers.

www.breitbart.com

VIDEO – California Farmer Worried About Producing Tomatoes amid Inflation, Drought: ‘A Tough Year’​

Video on website 3:41 min

AMY FURR 20 Aug 2022154

A farmer in Colusa, California, voiced concern on Friday about being able to produce enough tomatoes for hungry consumers.

It is shaping up to be a difficult year for Mitchell Yerxa of River Vista Farms, Yerxa explained during an interview with Fox & Friends.

River Vista Farms’ website its crops also include foods such as almonds, corn, rice, watermelons, and wheat.
But inflation, combined with drought that also caused prices to rise, could result in a shortage of tomatoes and tomato products, the Fox report said.

Americans grappled with higher food prices last month even though the Biden White House claimed inflation ran at zero throughout that time, Breitbart News reported August 11.

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index showed on Thursday that consumer food prices charged by U.S. producers rose two percent in July compared with the previous month. Compared with a year ago, consumer food prices are up 15.8 percent, the highest year-to-year rate of inflation since 1974,” the outlet said.

Meanwhile, water is the most important element when it comes to producing tomatoes, and “if you don’t have enough of it, you can’t get the crop you need,” Yerxa said of the drought plaguing the West Coast.

In April, severe water restrictions were implemented in Southern California as the state endured a third year of drought, Breitbart News reported.

“The Democrat-run state has not built new water infrastructure since the last severe drought, which ended in 2017,” the outlet said.

Yerxa’s state grows 96 percent of the tomatoes consumed by citizens across the nation and a quarter of those consumed around the globe. He said there are only 232 family farms that produce tomatoes for that whole population.
Yerxa continued:

If you double the cost of fertilizer, you increase the cost of all the chemicals [needed for production] by more than 30%, you increase the cost of our labor, you double down on overtime costs — every single one of those things — and then you take away water availability, it’s going to make it very hard on those family farms to continue to keep pushing forward year after year.

Yerxa also told Fox that beginning in January, “Every single cost we saw across the board just started jumping tremendously.”

 

[marsh]

(UK)

BBC Dismayed by Brexit Blow to 'Eat the Bugs' Agenda

The BBC has expressed dismay that Brexit has temporarily delayed efforts to normalise the consumption of bugs to achieve "net zero".

www.breitbart.com

BBC Dismayed by Brexit Blow to ‘Eat the Bugs’ Agenda

JACK MONTGOMERY9 Aug 2022283

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has expressed dismay that Brexit has temporarily delayed efforts to normalise the consumption of bugs to achieve “net zero”.

The state-owned news organisation, funded by a compulsory licence fee which all television viewers and all consumers of BBC iPlayer content online must pay on pain of fines backed by imprisonment, noted that the sale of edible insects in Great Britain became illegal after the end of the so-called Brexit transition period — although not in Northern Ireland, which was surrendered to the European Union as a kind of customs and regulatory semi-colony — in a short video report focused on two so-called “insect farmers” with a clear commercial interest in the “eat the bugs” agenda.

The BBC described bugs as “superfood” that “release far lower CO2 emissions than livestock farming”, with their two insect farmers also focusing on their potential contribution to achieving the ‘Net Zero’ ambitions of outgoing prime minister Boris Johnson and globalist institutions such as Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF).

“[E]xperts tell us that, if we want to save the planet, we should eat more insects,” the broadcaster asserted, before lamenting that “selling insects as food in the UK was essentially banned following Brexit, leaving the insect industry in limbo.”

Their two insect farmers, Tiziana Di Costanzo and Leo Taylor, pushed a similar green agenda narrative in the advertisement-like report, with the former arguing that a switch to bug-eating “will, for example, allow the oceans to replenish”, and the latter arguing that it would “drive the UK towards Net Zero more rapidly.”

Britain’s Food Standard Agency has reportedly said that it did not intend for edible bugs to be banned at the end of the Brexit transition, and it now looking at a law the legalise them again — indeed, Taylor said he hoped Britain might go further than the European Union has and “make it easier for us to bring new species to the market” — so they may be back on the proverbial menu again before long.

 

[marsh]

(Germany)

Green Fail: Germany to Reconnect First Coal Power Plant to Energy Grid​

KURT ZINDULKA
3 Aug 2022791

In a demonstration of the failure of Germany’s pursuit of so-called “green energy” and its policy of relying on Russian gas in the meantime, a coal-fired power plant will be reconnected to the nation’s electricity grid.

While the economic powerhouse of Europe — so called — scrambles to secure energy sources before the winter months, the previously shuttered Mehrum coal power plant in Lower Saxony will become the first to once again be connected to Germany’s grid.

On Monday, the manager of the Czech-owned EGH operating company, Kathrin Voelkner said: “We have declared the return to the electricity market. We assume that we will return to the grid in the short term,” according to the Frankfurter Neue Presse newspaper.

The move was preceded by the federal government implementing an emergency ordinance to allow mothballed oil and coal-powered plants to open back up until April of next year, as the country faces a shortfall in its energy amid the conflict in Ukraine.

Economy Minister Robert Habeck, a leading member of the German Greens, has described the decision to turn back on coal plants as bitter” but a necessary evil.

While the government has allowed for the return to coal power, the socialist SPD-led traffic light coalition government has so far refused to abandon its decision to shut its remaining nuclear power plants by the end of the year, a move that followed years of anti-nuclear policies from former Chancellor Angela Merkel following the Fukushima meltdown in Japan.

The co-leader of The Greens, Ricarda Lang has said that a return to nuclear power “will not happen, on our watch at least.”

Lang said that there was a “lack of seriousness” in the debate surrounding nuclear, which she described as a “highly risky technology,” despite nuclear power being one of the safest major energy sources in the world.
“But we need answers that actually suit the problem,” the Green politician continued. “We have a warmth problem, not an electricity problem,” she claimed, despite gas still being used for energy production.

Others have disagreed with the anti-nuclear stance of the government, including Saxony Prime Minister Michael Kretschmerhas, who declared last week that the green agenda has failed.

“The energy transition with gas as the base load has failed,” he while calling for the remaining nuclear power stations to remain open during the crisis.

Despite longstanding warnings from figures such as former President Donald Trump, the country has remained heavily reliant on Russia for gas. While Russia has claimed that the current shortfalls in gas shipments have come as a result of technical issues with the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, others have suggested that it is a retaliatory strike in response to sanctions levied against Moscow over the war in Ukraine.

Presently, the biggest concern facing Germany is potential blackouts during the winter, which could lead to dangerous situations, particularly for elderly people. However, some cities have already begun putting rationing measures in place, including Hanover, which became the first major European city this week to place limits on hot water use in public buildings.

 

[marsh]

(UK)

Majority of Britons Expect Cost of Living Crisis to End in Riots

A majority of Britons fear the energy and cost of living crisis will end in people unable to heat their homes in winter dying and riots.

www.breitbart.com

Majority of Britons Expect Cost of Living Crisis to Cause Energy Poverty Deaths, Riots

JACK MONTGOMERY2 Aug 2022307

A majority of Britons fear the energy and cost of living crisis will end with people unable to heat their homes in winter dying and riots on the streets.

Polling commissioned by the More in Common group — whose director Luke Tryl said the results should be “a wake-up call to our next Prime Minister” that “people want help now” — found that some almost nine-tenths of Britons believe the crisis will impact their day to day lives. Shockingly, around three-quarters believe there will be deaths this winter as people find themselves unable to afford their heating bills and succumb to the cold.

Eighty per cent believe people will resort to shoplifting to keep their heads above water, 70 per cent believe people will simply refuse to pay their bills, and over half — 51 per cent — believe things will degrade to the point that their are riots in the streets, The Sun reports.

Some Members of Parliament (MPs) for the government’s governing Conservative (Tory) Party appear to be live to the potential for social unravelling, with The Sun quoting Alec Shelbrooke, MP for the Elmet and Rothwell constituency in West Yorkshire, as saying that “[w]hat I’ve been seeing on the doorstep for the last six months is absolute fear in people’s eyes.”

“They are terrified as to what is coming down the line — they don’t know how they’re going to pay it,” he said.

Shelbrooke even said he was “not sure how in my family we’re going to pay if it carries on going up this road” — a remarkable statement, considering MPs are paid a salary of £84,144 with very generous expenses.

 

[marsh]

Emails, Wayback Machine Gem Confirms: DiCaprio, Other Private Funders of Governmental Climate Litigation Paid Millions to “Climate” Lawyers Via Pass-through Charity

Did the law firm disclose to its clients, e.g., Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, that it was already being paid to conduct this litigation?

wattsupwiththat.com

Home 2022August20

Emails, Wayback Machine Gem Confirms: DiCaprio, Other Private Funders of Governmental Climate Litigation Paid Millions to “Climate” Lawyers Via Pass-through Charity

CLIMATE LAWSUITS

WEBEDITOR

New revelations solve mystery whether wealthy donors are actually paying millions for lawyers to file massive “climate” lawsuits, despite contracts with taxpayer-clients set to pay same lawyers scores of millions as “contingency fee” out of clients’ alleged damages

‘Double-dipping’ at play? What did these generous politicians know and when did they know it?

Archived web post shows DiCaprio Foundation at first boasted of gift to foundation promoting green policies, a pass-through organization whose IRS filings reported curious payments to law firm behind litigation

Those IRS filings seem to have obscured the true purpose but Emails obtained in litigation confirm the what the millions were for

This Spring, GAO broke the story, laid out in records ordered by a court to be released in the California Public Records Act litigation Government Accountability & Oversight v. Regents, that Leonardo DiCaprio and at least one green Republican donor (and quite possibly another, influential Republican donor Andrew Sabin) had privately financed the wave of “climate nuisance” litigation brought on behalf of governmental entities by the law firm Sher Edling, LLP.

That revelation received no attention, despite reflecting a possible revolution in the legal industry. This seems about to change. Here is background on why.

Some of the DiCaprio, et al.,-funded “climate” lawsuits were dealt setbacks in court, hen judges ruled that the suits were an effort to influence federal environmental policy. This led the lawyers and plaintiffs to change tack and insist the cases are really purely local, consumer protection matters. Yet it appears that despite the lawyers’ change in rhetoric and claims to the courts, the same pass-through charity was quietly paying millions of dollars to the law firm bringing the case.

IRS filings and archived internet records appear to reveal that the same privately-financed project remained behind this litigation despite its ostensible change in focus, suggesting nothing had changed but the packaging. As defendants in the Minnesota lawsuit pointed out when removing that suit to federal court:

While purportedly brought under state law and in the name of consumer protection, this lawsuit by the State of Minnesota, acting through its attorney general (the “Attorney General”), is the culmination of a multi-year plan concocted by plaintiffs’ attorneys, climate activists, and special interests to force a political and regulatory agenda that has not otherwise materialized through the decisions of the political branches of the federal government.

While the Attorney General is entitled to disagree with particular statements about climate and energy policy, he is not entitled to use state power to suppress speech and deter free association as part of a coordinated campaign to change federal climate and energy policy.

Indeed. And remarkably, at the same time the charity behind this politically-charged spate of lawsuits was also reporting to the IRS that an extraordinary series of “charitable grants” to the law firm were for environmental causes, the law firm receiving the grants was telling courts that its cases related to consumer protection and had no bearing on federal energy or environmental policy.

The same Minnesota defendants’ pleading raised the prospect that the governmental lawsuits were actually being privately financed. What made this prospect ever more of interest to the federal taxpayer, as one law professor noted in Forbes, was the fact of politicians awarding Sher Edling massive ‘contingency fee’ agreements to file these suits on behalf of the governmental clients — i.e., on behalf of their taxpayers — such as San Francisco, Oakland, New York City, Baltimore, Annapolis and Anne Arundel County (MD), Minnesota, and numerous others.

Contingency fee agreements pay substantial portions of any verdict or settlement that might eventually be reached to compensate the government plaintiffs for their ostensible damages to lawyers. These agreements allow lawyers to collect a portion of their clients damages supposedly because of the risk the lawyers take in handling the suits with a chance of no compensation, and investing their time in ventures that may never pay off.. And the wording of the agreements and related records obtained under open records requests leave no room to doubt that that fee is the compensation for the work.

This is especially curious, because documents now suggest that these attorneys may have been receiving payment from Hollywood donors for the same work that they ultimately also sought payment for from governmental clients.

Not one but two emails released in GAO v. Regents affirmed that “Terry [Tamminen]’s group” — at the time, Tamminen was CEO of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation — and green Republican donor and benefactor of law schools assisting the climate cases (Harvard, UCLA) Dan Emmett are “strong supporters” of the Sher Edling litigation. And their colleague in several environmentalist and supporting academic enterprises, Sabin, was targeted to possibly also help fund the assault.

In one of these emails, we see a forwarded email from the “head[] of this new organization behind the lawsuits” — Sher Edling, LLP’s non-lawyer, public- and donor-relations guy Chuck Savitt — who called the funding source for the climate suits “the Collective Action Fund”.



That term was new to GAO, which now sees the phrase also used by the Hewlett Foundation in announcing a gift to a New Venture Fund “Collective Action Fund For Accountability, Resilience, And Adaptation.” That fund also claimed it was supporting such litigation, and so seemed a safe bet to be what Savitt was referring to. That Fund received, e.g., $3 million from the MacArthur Fund in 2020 for three years of work.

It seems Savitt was in fact referring to a different “collective action fund” also underwriting the campaign (read on). Either way, the dollars are really piling up to pay for lawyers millions of dollars to file “contingency fee” lawsuits!

As GAO noted when the DiCaprio revelation first emerged in this document production, one particularly noteworthy aspect is that the firm’s contingency agreements promise up to tens and tens of millions of dollars more per case in the event they prevail or settle. After all, the firms run the risk of not being paid. Or so it seems that at least some of the taxpayer-plaintiffs likely assumed when promising enormous “contingency fee” payments.

GAO pointed out that something called Resources Legacy Fund’s (RLF) IRS filings offered an odd mélange of reasons why it gave a private, for-profit tort firm millions of dollars in charitable grants, none of which reasons suggested what the emails show was the grants’ purpose: filing lawsuits (on behalf of clients who also contracted with the firm to pay tens of millions of dollars from supposed taxpayer damages if they scored big).

These reasons as the campaign was getting organized and the first few suits filed were: “land or marine conservation” (2017) ($432,129), “advancing healthy communities” (2018) ($1,319,625) then, apparently having run out of euphemisms, “land or marine conservation, promotion of education and/or healthy communities” (2019) ($1.1 million).

However, while the GAO v. Regents production, by proving a “Collective Action Fund” was privately, quietly financing the Sher Edling climate lawsuits — massive ‘contingency fee’ pacts to pay for the work, notwithstanding — there remained some ambiguity whether the millions given Sher Edling in charitable grants by RLF were in fact for the climate litigation.

The emails helpfully suggested one take a look at the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. Stashed away on the Wayback Machine we see a 2017 post confirming that this Collective Action Fund does go into RLF’s pot that is paying the tort firm for the climate nuisance suits, as discussed in the emails.




This post happens to be from the first such LDF page available on Wayback, dated September 30, 2017. It was removed sometime after May 2021. LDF has since merged with other groups into an “environmental powerhouse” called Earth Alliance.

Given this, GAO raises again obvious questions raised by the revelation that the firm is being paid millions of dollars to prosecute government litigation for which, so far as the public record suggests, it was to be paid but only be paid tens and tens of millions of dollars (per client) if it won or settled:

Did the law firm disclose to its clients, e.g., Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, that it was already being paid to conduct this litigation?

That is, did the MN Legislative Advisory Commission know this when it approved the Ellison/Sher Edling contract, in its role as a good-government watchdog? If not, possibly Professor Krauss could update his thoughts on these arrangements.

Did the Michael Bloomberg-provided attorney in Minnesota (not to mention others in e.g., DC, RI and elsewhere), know this when she waived Sher Edling, LLP attorneys in to represent the state in its case, promising compliance with Minnesota rules of professional conduct? (GAO’s attorney readers may recall Rule 1.8(f) of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, adopted in plaintiff-states like Minnesota and Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia among other jurisdictions. It would be very surprising indeed if we do not hear more on that later.)

But if the firm did make this disclosure of the private financing for Minnesota’s litigation to Ellison, then taxpayers (and the Legislative Advisory Commission) might wonder whether Ellison informed the Commission of the full financial arrangements when he sought approval for his Sher Edling contingency fee contract. Because that disclosure doesn’t appear in the materials released under Minnesota’s open records law (scroll about 70% of the way down).

Curioser and curioser.

 

[marsh]

Investors Have Now Spent $5 Billion Pursuing The "Holy Grail Of Energy" | ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Investors Have Now Spent $5 Billion Pursuing The "Holy Grail Of Energy"

SATURDAY, AUG 20, 2022 - 02:30 PM
By Alex Kimani of Oilprice.com

What do The Dark Knight Rises, Back to the Future, Oblivion, and Interstellar all have in common? They are sci-fi blockbusters that showcase a technology that scientists consider to be the Holy Grail of Energy: Nuclear fusion.
Theoretically, two lone nuclear reactors running on small pellets could power the entire planet, safely and cleanly. That’s the promise of nuclear fusion. So, why are we still relying on fossil fuels? What’s stopping us from building these reactors everywhere?

After all, scientists have been working on nuclear fusion technology since the 1950s and have always been optimistic that the final breakthrough is not far away. Yet, milestones have fallen time and again and now the running joke is that a practical nuclear fusion power plant could still be decades away.

Well, the past few years have witnessed a resurgence in the field with a handful of startups setting up shop to make nuclear fusion an everyday reality. Interestingly, the vast majority of the sector’s funding has come from the private sector rather than public investments.

According to the second global fusion industry report published by the Fusion Industry Association (FIA), private investment in fusion technology hit $4.7 billion in total, dwarfing the $117 million of public investment. Also, the current year is proving to be a watershed moment for fusion technology, with the amount of funding in 2022 more than doubling the industry's entire historic investment to the tune of $2.83 billion.

Fusion Startups
To date, Commonwealth Fusion Systems has bagged the largest amount of funding for a fusion startup. Back in December, the Massachusetts-based fusion startup snagged more than $1.8 billion in the largest private investment for nuclear fusion yet from a plethora of big-name investors including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, George Soros via his Soros Fund Management LLC, and venture capitalist John Doerr.

Commonwealth Fusion System is in good company.

On Nov. 5, Helion Energy announced that it had raised $500 million in its latest fundraising round, making it the second-largest-ever single fundraising round for a private fusion firm. Helion has a chance to surpass Commonwealth Fusion System since its latest round of funding includes an additional $1.7 billion tied to certain performance milestones. Meanwhile, Canada’s General Fusion has closed a $130 million fundraising round that was oversubscribed. General Fusion plans to launch an even bigger fundraising effort soon.

Google and Chevron participated in a $250-million funding raise for TAE Technologies, a nuclear fusion startup with an unconventional strategy, back in June. Since then, TAE has raised a total of $1.2 billion.

“It’s a sign of the industry growing up," General Fusion Chief Executive Christofer Mowry has told the Wall Street Journal.

Various fusion companies are pursuing different designs for fusion reactors, though the majority rely on fusion that takes place in plasma. Commonwealth Fusion has successfully tested the most powerful fusion magnet of its kind on Earth that would hold and compress the plasma.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is collaborating with MIT to build their fusion reactor. The team has planned a fusion experiment they have dubbed Sparc which is about 1/65th the volume of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). The experimental reactor will generate about 100MW of heat energy in pulses of about 10 seconds - bursts big enough to power a small city. The team anticipates that the output will be more than twice the power used to heat the plasma thus overcoming the biggest technical hurdle in the field: positive net energy from fusion. The Sparc team has set an ambitious target to have the reactor running in about 15 years.

But why have scientists so far failed at replicating a natural process that powers the stars in our universe?

Extreme Challenge
Turns out that the conditions necessary for nuclear fusion to take place present an extreme challenge for us earthlings.

Fusion works on the basic concept of forging lighter elements into heavier ones. When two hydrogen atoms are smashed together hard enough, they fuse to form helium. The new atom is less massive than the sum of its parts, with the balance converted to energy in the E=MC2 mass-energy equivalence.

Ok, that’s a bit simplistic since hydrogen atoms do not fuse together directly but rather in a multi-step reaction. Anyway, the long and short of it is that nuclear fusion produces net energy only at extreme temperatures - in the order of hundreds of millions of degrees celsius. That’s hotter than the sun’s core and far too hot for any known material on earth to withstand.

To get around this quagmire, scientists use powerful magnetic fields to contain the hot plasma and prevent it from coming into contact with the walls of the nuclear reactor. That consumes insane amounts of energy.

Stars have it easy in this regard thanks to their immense masses and powerful gravitational fields that hold everything together. For instance, the sun is 333,000 times the mass of the Earth with a gravity ~27.9 times that of Earth.

Unfortunately, every fusion experiment so far has been energy negative, taking in more energy than it generates thus making it useless as a form of electricity generation.

Getting the initial fusion reaction is not a problem - keeping it going is, not to mention that building nuclear reactors takes some extremely sophisticated feats of engineering.

International Megaproject
But now scientists are confident that they are close to building a nuclear reactor that will produce more energy than it consumes.

The Saint-Paul-les-Durance, France-based upcoming International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is the world’s largest fusion reaction facility that aims to develop commercially viable fusion reactors.

Funded by six nations including the US, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and India, ITER plans to build the world’s largest tokamak fusion device, a donut-shaped cage that will produce 500 ME of thermal fusion energy.

The device will cost ~$24 billion with a delivery date set at 2035. The giant machine - the biggest fusion machine ever built - will weigh in at an impressive 23,000 tonnes and will be housed in a building 60 meters high.

So, what’s different this time around?

Scientists have successfully developed a new superconducting material - essentially a steel tape coated with yttrium-barium-copper oxide, or YBCO, which allows them to build smaller and more powerful magnets. This lowers the energy required to get the fusion reaction off the ground.

According to Fusion for Energy - the EU’s joint undertaking for ITER - 18 niobium-tin superconducting magnets aka toroidal field coils will be used to contain the 150 million degrees celsius plasma. The powerful magnets will generate a powerful magnetic field equal to 11.8 tesla, or a million times stronger than the earth's magnetic field. Europe will manufacture 10 of the toroidal field coils with Japan manufacturing nine.

However, it will be another decade before a full-scale demonstration power plant will be built using lessons learned from ITER. The industrial fusion power plants will thereafter be connected to the grid.

The ITER site construction is nearly 80% complete.

With all that said… it seems nuclear fusion remains (but hopefully not forever) over a decade away.

 

[marsh]

(Canada)

Digital ID in Canada - From Conspiracy to Federal Program - Social Credit System 1:03 min

DIGITAL ID IN CANADA - FROM CONSPIRACY TO FEDERAL PROGRAM - SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM​

• WATCH

Digital Identity is in the works, but if you believed that a week ago, you'd be considered a conspiracy theorist. This is a trend the Canadian Government has been on, with a trajectory of becoming much like the Communist State of China.

or watch on

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kP-u091GU4


Report mentioned:

Canada’s Road to Beijing: The digital threat to the Charter rights and freedoms of Canadians | Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms

Canada is moving quickly toward a greater reliance on digital identification (digital ID) and digital currency technologies to form the basis of the relationship between state and citizen. Like physical ID, digital ID technologies allow users to prove their identity and to access services and...

www.jccf.ca

Canada’s Road to Beijing: The digital threat to the Charter rights and freedoms of Canadians​

POSTED ON: AUGUST 10, 2022

 

[marsh]

(Canada)

TIME TO MAN THE **** UP - SHIT IS GETTING SERIOUS NOW 2:07 min

TIME TO MAN THE **** UP - SHIT IS GETTING SERIOUS NOW​

• WATCH

WARNING - some swearing.
It really is THAT SIMPLE. Globalism has enslaved us slowly over time and now we’re facing digital IDs and the absolute loss of freedoms.
BUT don’t worry, good always prevails!
There are millions of passionate freedom-lovers who haven’t even gotten started yet!
I have complete faith in our ability to pushback against them…

 

[marsh]

Flynn/Clark - Information War, The People Are Overwhelming The [DS], We Are Taking Back Our Country 1:01:08 min (starts at 1 min)

FLYNN/CLARK - INFORMATION WAR, THE PEOPLE ARE OVERWHELMING THE [DS], WE ARE TAKING BACK OUR COUNTRY​

• WATCH

Today’s Guest: General Flynn & Clay Clark

Website: General Flynn
https://generalflynn.com
General Flynn | Linktree

Time To Free America
https://timetofreeamer…

With more than 33 years of service in the United States military and current Chairman of America’s Future, General Flynn’s military career culminated as the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and as the nation’s highest serving military intelligence officer. After retiring from the Army in 2014 and as a private citizen, General Flynn went on to serve in a variety of business, educational, and non-profit roles, to include supporting veterans’ organizations around the country, something he continues to do today. General Flynn is a National Bestselling Author, holds three master’s degrees, and is recipient of numerous military, intelligence and law enforcement awards. The conversation begins with General Flynn discussing Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan. This could start WWIII. We are in an information war and the patriots are winning. The [DS]/[WEF] are failing to bring us into the Great Reset/CBDC. The people are waking up and they are seeing the truth. We as a people need to keep pushing back, vote and overwhelm their system of cheating, we will take back America.

 

[marsh]

(Comment: There's that word again- transition)

Learning to grow tomatoes all over again​

August 17, 2022
By Kevin Hecteman

Cannon Michael and his team were staring at a steep learning curve back in 2016, when the farm they operate started growing organic processing tomatoes.

“The first couple of years, not only are you battling weather and bugs and a lot of variables, but you’re also trying new techniques,” said Michael, president of Bowles Farming Co. in Los Banos. That included using natural fertilizers that took place of conventional nitrogen products piped straight to the plants via drip irrigation.

“We’ve been fortunate to have some folks that were willing to share some information about how they were dealing with that,” Michael said. “When you’re doing it on your own ground with your own people and trying to learn it yourself, it’s just a lot.” That said, he praised his team for sticking with it and producing results.

In the early going, the farm was harvesting in the 30- to low-40-tons-per-acre range from the organic-tomato fields.

“We’ve been able to, at least last year, get over 50 (tons per acre), and I’m optimistic, cautiously optimistic, that this year we can get over 50 on our organic tomatoes again,” Michael said, calling this “really encouraging when you look at the differential between the conventional and organic price. If you can make a yield, it actually works out pretty well.”

California farmers grew nearly 669,000 tons of organic processing tomatoes in 2021, according to California Tomato Growers Association figures. That represents 6.22% of the 2021 crop, which weighed in at nearly 10.8 million tons. The 2021 organic harvest is up slightly from 526,085 tons in 2020, or 4.65% of the 11.3 million tons harvested.

The organic share of the processing-tomato crop has been trending upward over the past decade. Organic represented 2.4% of the 12.1 million tons of tomatoes harvested in 2013 and still represents a small slice of the market.

As of May, processors reported intentions to buy 11.7 million tons of processing tomatoes, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Mike Montna, president and chief executive of the California Tomato Growers Association, noted the USDA report does not break out organic numbers.

“The organic crop’s going to be a little bit off,” Montna said, explaining that overall production could be down 10% to 15%.

Some of the decline is blamed on a crop disease, curly top virus, and the leafhopper bug that carries it.

Curly top was a persistent issue this season for Huron tomato grower Chris Coelho.

“Personally, I had a rough organic year this season on the processing tomatoes,” said Coelho, who manages tomato and garlic crops for his Fresno County employer.

“We had multiple flights of leafhopper,” said Coelho, who applied organic “knockdown-type materials” to fend them off. “You go through and spray, and if the wind’s still blowing the next day, it just blows in fresh leafhoppers,” forcing Coelho to send out the sprayers again.

“After several weeks of this,” Coelho said, “it gets to be a little expensive.”
Besides battling curly top virus, keeping unwanted vegetation in check is another challenge for organic growers, because most herbicides are off limits for organics.

Michael of Bowles Farming noted that while some conventional insecticides are targeted to specific pests, their organic equivalents are less precise and can wipe out the pests as well as lacewings and ladybugs, two insects he’d like to see more of.

“We are frustrated at times, because we really are always trying to work to keep that balance of beneficial insects and use the beneficial insects to our advantage,” Michael said. His farm may soon begin experimenting with hedgerows designed to attract beneficial insects and to lure pests away from the crops.

Growing organically also means relying on natural fertilizers such as chicken manure, said Derek Azevedo, Bowles Farming’s executive vice president.
“Every year you apply those, you’re applying almost three years’ worth of fertility,” Azevedo said, adding that this works out to a third available this year; a third next year; and a third the year after. “It takes time to build up that residual fertility as you’re transitioning into organic, and then building up your residual fertility to give your crops the opportunity to be supplied to their fullest.”

The first year, “it’s like the plants are in a cabinet full of canned food with no can opener,” Azevedo said. “You’ve got to allow the microbes to break that down over time.”

Converting a field from conventional to organic takes three years, during which the farmer is abiding by organic standards but has to sell the crop as conventional until certification is achieved.

Michael said another block of land is in transition, and he expects 10% of the farm’s acreage to be organic by next year. But he and Azevedo don’t want to push their luck.

“We’ve been cautious about how quickly we transition land into organic, just to make sure that we’re not getting out ahead of supply and creating a situation where we don’t have rotations to go into,” Azevedo said.

Michael said his farm rotates organic tomatoes with organic cotton.

Coelho said water supply challenges will affect organic tomatoes, along with everything else. With California already curtailing surface water deliveries, growers relying on groundwater may be further limited in pumping under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.

But Coelho sees no changes in how much he will plant for 2023 so far due to limited water. He said, “We’re going to actually hold our organic acreage steady, regardless of rainfall.”

He said he is planning for “a zero allocation” of surface water supplies. However, he said, “if it appears wetter than normal, then maybe we will plant more. But we would just operate assuming the worst.”

Those who can bring an organic-tomato crop to market will receive $165 per ton this year, compared to $105 per ton for conventional, Michael said.
“There’s much more risk on the organic side,” he said. “If you can manage it correctly, and if you can get a good yield and all those kind of things line up, the opportunity is there for good returns.”

But, he added, “You’ve got to be very, very, very precise.”

 

[marsh]

(Germany)

Crisis Government; Excess Deaths in England; Christina Berndt’s Eleven Ideas

To reduce energy consumption in the face of the looming German gas crisis, Economics Minister Robert Habeck has proposed a bizarre set of indoor temperature ordinances that continue the pattern of direct state interventions in everyday life first established by mass containment

www.eugyppius.com

Crisis Government; Excess Deaths in England; Christina Berndt’s Eleven Ideas

eugyppius

To reduce energy consumption in the face of the looming German gas crisis, Economics Minister Robert Habeck has proposed a bizarre set of indoor temperature ordinances that continue the pattern of direct state interventions in everyday life first established by mass containment.

Workspaces where hard physical labour is performed are not to be heated above 12 C, under the new rules. Those involving moderate labour while standing will have their temperatures capped at 16 C, and moderate labour while sitting at 17 C. Places where light labour is performed standing, will be permitted temperatures as high as 18 C, while white-collar office spaces where everybody sits and types will be permitted nothing warmer than 19 C. The heating of hallways and other common spaces will be outlawed, as will certain kinds of restroom water heaters. There will be a general ban on using electricity or gas to heat private pools, and shops will be ordered to keep external doors closed at all times. Political pressure is growing for similar ordinances limiting gas consumption in residences.

While some doubt that these rules can be enforced, German police have already proven effective at enforcing pandemic-era contact limits in private homes. And even if indoor temperatures are never systematically checked by authorities, I’m pretty sure that the simple prospect of unannounced inspections and fines will be enough for most employers to declare a third season of home office, with the added prospect of offloading higher gas prices onto their employees.

It is most curious, how this totally new catastrophe should call forth some of very same measures demanded by the Corona pandemic. Not only will home office return, but municipal pools will close again and cities will be kept dark at night, a de facto limitation on evening mobility that might well encourage some places to reimpose the curfews last seen in the winter of 2020/21.
Meanwhile, some of the very same spaces recently commandeered for excess hospital capacity and mass vaccination will be repurposed as heated shelters for the old, the sick and the poor.

Not any unified plan, but rather a long series of contingencies, have caused the German gas crisis. Yet the steadfast refusal of the Scholz government to consider any course of action that might ameliorate the shortage, always with a new excuse, grows every day more unsettling.

There’s the obvious explanation, that the Greens in government are merely taking advantage of this opportunity to achieve their higher goal of restricting fossil fuel consumption, as they’ve always wished. But I think there might be another, deeper way to understand this too. I suggest that we’re seeing here the emergence of a new political style, which you might call Crisis Governance—or, as a friend put it, “the continuation of Corona policy by other means.”

One of my core themes here has been the deepening demobilisation of western states, as power is diffused downwards from the political apex into the bureaucratic institutions, the press and major corporate enterprises. The great advantage of this power-sharing is a near-total uniformity of political views that it has inspired across the socio-cultural elite, but it comes at the cost of initiative, coordination and strategy. Crises seem to be one of the only ways our new, demobilised states can overcome their paralysis and act to further any kind of positive political programme.

I want to cut against the grain a bit, and suggest that that Telegraph article blaming excess UK mortality on lockdowns is more than just an attempt to exonerate the vaccines. Of course the vaccinators will blame lockdowns for their own failures, if it comes to that, but their duplicity shouldn’t distract us from the profound disarray lockdowns have inflicted upon all levels of society, and healthcare in particular.

Even before Corona, the NHS faced serious administrative problems and an inability to meet demand in many areas. Two years of near-exclusive focus on a solitary viral pathogen have cast the entire system into new depths of chaos:

The hospital waiting list in England alone includes 6.5 million names, and various regions have seen dying patients waiting hours in ambulances before they can be treated by hospital staff. The great irony is that lockdowns were sold as a means of keeping our healthcare systems from melting down, whereas in fact they simply brought about the very healthcare shortages and delays they were supposed to prevent. This will be a slow burn now, for it will take years to clear the treatment backlog, if they ever manage it.

That said: Mortality trends are complex and multi-causal, and there’s clearly a role for the vaccines here too. Note in particular the mid-2021 timing of the mortality increase:



My own crude, spot comparison of the age-stratified data suggests that excess deaths have risen proportionally across all age brackets above 15.

Last week, horrifying schoolmarm and villain-of-the-blog Christina Berndt co-authored a very strange item in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, under the headline Getting Through the Pandemic Pragmatically: Eleven Ideas That Could Prepare Germany For the Coming Corona Waves.

The piece is festooned with bizarre garbage graphics …

… and presents an incoherent gaggle of suggestions that speak volumes about where Camp Containment finds itself at this late hour.

Berndt and co. want better wastewater surveillance, they want more group therapy options, they want school attendance exemptions for at-risk children and for children with at-risk parents, they want more educational videos for all those kids stuck at home, they want more Paxlovid, they want more flu vaccines especially for children, they want more home office, they want more antigen testing, and they want “masks for all.” Oh yes, and in the midst of this bewildering nonsense, they remember to ask Santa for more nursing staff.

I was going to write a longer piece on this laughable potpourri of demands that lead nowhere, but honestly, who cares. It’s so boring I can’t even bring myself to translate the stupidest bits. This is the picture of a political and social movement in advanced decay, whose members no longer aspire to eradicate SARS-2 or realise a post-virus utopia, but now hope merely for more faecal virus surveys, more pharmaceutical snake oil, and more hiding alone at home, all amid a growing awareness of their own mental illness. It’s merely interesting to see what staying power the anxiety over children as a vector of disease and contamination has had among this set. School closures and other measures targeting youth have been the achilles heel of mass containment, the seed of its political demise, and yet the most ardent supporters of masking, testing and closing forever simply can’t give it up. In a very big way that I still don’t fully understand, lockdowns were a measure directed, sometimes even with malice, specifically at the young.

 

[marsh]

World Economic Forum Pushing For Digital ID Systems Around The World

World Economic Forum is pushing for digital identity systems around the world.

www.newsbusters.org

World Economic Forum Pushing For Digital ID Systems Around The World​

Autumn Johnson
August 20th, 2022 8:03 PM

World Economic Forum is pushing for digital identity systems around the world.

In a blog published Wednesday, World Economic Forum (WEF) called for “digital ecosystems” around the globe–starting with digital ID.

WEF said digital ID would be the first step to building “digital trust.”

“Building digital trust into our global digital economy can unleash trillions of dollars of opportunities,” the blog reads. “But if we don’t know for certain who we are interacting with online, we cannot have trust. Digital identity must therefore be the foundational element to our digital economy and here is why.”

WEF claims “digital trust” would increase economic growth for all.

“Given the current global economic challenges – with the possibility of current economies to contract and the cost of living to continue to increase – a glimpse of what digital trust has the potential to deliver is enough to demonstrate why digital identity must be front and centre for the world economy,” the blog says.

Last week, NewsBusters reported that Canada is plotting the creation of a digital ID system with WEF.

“The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for government services to be accessible and flexible in the digital age,” the country’s plan reads. "The next step in making services more convenient to access is a federal Digital Identity Program, integrated with pre-existing provincial platforms."

Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the CensorTrack contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

 

[marsh]

Why digital trust is key to building thriving economies

Digital trust can benefit economies by driving growth in GDP but first we need to tackle the 'trust gap', with digital identity a key element of doing so.

www.weforum.org

Digital trust: How to unleash the trillion-dollar opportunity for our global economy

Aug 17, 2022
Digital trust is key to growing economies.

Zia Hayat
Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Callsign

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The Digital Economy
Building digital trust into the world's digital economy could unleash trillions of dollars of opportunities, according to The Digital Trust Index.

But a 'digital trust gap' is emerging that threatens to undermine the full potential and benefits of a thriving global digital economy.

Digital identity is vital element of building trust both online and in our wider economies – to everyone's benefit.

Building digital trust into our global digital economy can unleash trillions of dollars of opportunities. But if we don’t know for certain who we are interacting with online, we cannot have trust. Digital identity must therefore be the foundational element to our digital economy and here is why.

Technological advancements have brought a wealth of opportunities within touching distance. From artificial intelligence to big data, cryptocurrency to blockchain, we’re constantly facing imminent technological revolutions, game-changers, and paradigm shifts.

Digital trust key to reaping rewards of new technologies
However, to reap the rewards of any of these technologies, we must first establish one universal value – trust.

Recently the prevalence of cybercrime has taken a toll on trust levels and, as a result, our economies. So, with the current economic headwinds, it is vital we address the issue of digital trust now.

As economies moved online there was an assumption that the inherent trust which exists in the physical world – because we can see and know who we are interacting with – would be replicated in the digital world. This is not the case, and we now find ourselves needing to build digital trust.

Digital trust is the belief we have that we are interacting online with genuine people, rather than bots, or someone pretending to be someone they aren’t.

It is also the faith we have that the systems we rely upon are secure, reliable and privacy preserving. It’s about ethics, fairness and inclusivity.

When we use digital products and services, we are confirming that we trust them and the whole ecosystem that surrounds them.

Trust fundamental to building digital ecosystems
While trust is an abstract idea, it is fundamental to building a better digital ecosystem. If we don’t know for certain who we are interacting with online, that the technologies and processes involved are secure and ethical, we will stop interacting online.

And if enough of us lose trust in online services, large parts of the global economy and therefore society will start to break down.

The World Bank estimates that the digital economy contributes to more than 15% of global gross domestic product (GDP), and in the past decade it has been growing at two and a half times faster than physical world GDP.

But, if we can’t carry out trade or civic duties online because we don’t have trust, we take a step backwards – physical localities and size become economic advantages again where digital had lowered barriers to entry, levelled the playing field and driven inclusion of populations previously excluded.

This got us thinking about the positive impact that building digital trust could have on our lives. So, we worked with economists at the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) to look at the value that building digital trust could bring to society and economies around the world.

The Digital Trust Index: the value of digital trust report has quantified the missed opportunity caused by a lack of digital trust. We found that a 5% point increase in digital trust results in an average increase in GDP per capita of $3,000.

From a GDP per capita perspective, this means we can significantly impact the global economy. For example, a five percentage point increase in digital trust in the US would grow GDP per capita from $62,500 to $65,000.



Table showing how digital trust can boost economies. Image: Callsign
Meanwhile, the UK would grow GDP per capita from $46,000 to $49,000, and Singapore would grow GDP per capita from $97,000 to $100,000.

A relatively modest increase in digital trust can have a significant positive impact on the global digital economy.

‘Digital trust gap’ differs across world
A ‘digital trust gap’ is emerging. Non-Western markets have a positive trust gap indicating consumer attitudes to digital trust exceed societal trust levels.

Conversely, Western markets have a negative trust gap where societal trust is higher than trust in digital services.



How digital trust varies between markets. Image: Callsign
The factors driving the trust gaps include personal experience of fraud, reading about people’s experiences of falling victim to fraud, and not understanding what information can be trusted online.

But what is the impact of scarce digital trust? We calculated the digital economy was valued at $14.5 trillion in 2021, but the estimated global cost of cybercrime was $6 trillion – or 41% of the digital economy.

What is more concerning is that by 2025, we calculated that the digital economy will be worth $20.8 trillion, but cybercrime will be worth $10.5 trillion.

So despite growing the value of the digital economy, cybercrime will grow more and account for 50% of the size of the digital economy in 2025.

Identity key to building digital trust
This means we cannot leave our digital world to chance. In a conversation with Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak, I asked him if he would do anything differently with regards to the creation of the internet.

His response was that if we had known what we know now, we would have built in security and identity right from the start.

Which brings me to my final point, that identity must be the foundational element to building digital trust, and therefore our global digital economy.

Video on website 48:23 min

If you don’t know for sure that you are interacting with your bank, not a fraudster, or a real person not a fake social media account, how do you trust in a digital world?

Almost half of all consumers we surveyed expect governments to create a more secure digital world. To achieve this, 68% of respondents stated an interest in the creation of a digital identity system, overseen by an independent body.

Consumers also told us they would trust banks and financial services firms the most to create and maintain an identity system.

How digital trust can boost our economies
Our GDP numbers are not a forecast or a prediction, but a reflection of the application of the average factor of building digital trust into our economies across all countries in our survey.

Given the current global economic challenges – with the possibility of current economies to contract and the cost of living to continue to increase – a glimpse of what digital trust has the potential to deliver is enough to demonstrate why digital identity must be front and centre for the world economy.

Higher incomes generally mean better outcomes, not only for private citizens earning potential, but it means governments have a greater capacity to provide public services such as education, health care and other social assistance programmes.

 

[marsh]

'Nitrogen Agenda' Used by Globalists to Take Land: Farmer Faces Having to Cull 95 Percent of His Cows | Facts Matter

‘Nitrogen Agenda’ Used by Globalists to Take Land: Farmer Faces Having to Cull 95 Percent of His Cows | Facts Matter​

FACTS MATTER Roman Balmakov

This video is brought to you by Sekur: Video is 24:21 min

---

Dutch farmers in the Netherlands have been protesting, blocking roads, and using their tractors to shut down major city centers, airports, bridges, as well as food distribution plants across the entire country for several months now.
They are rising up against a government proposal that would put a severe limit on nitrogen emissions—and in the process, put about a third of the farmers out of work.

Driving around the Netherlands, I suddenly realized why such a small country became the world’s No. 6 exporter of food. There are farms quite literally everywhere. No matter where you drive, you can see cows, horses, sheep, goats, and a lot of crops.

In fact, small farmers own approximately 60 percent of the land within the country, which might be part of the reason that the government is pushing them away.

 

[marsh]

Study: 20% of electric vehicle owners couldn't charge their EVs at public charging stations

As the Biden administration pushes electric vehicles, thousands of EV owners report that they couldn't charge their electric cars at public charging stations, according to a new poll. JD Power – a consumer research, data, and analytics firm – released its second annual U.S. Electric Vehicle...

www.theblaze.com

Study: 20% of electric vehicle owners couldn't charge their EVs at public charging stations

PAUL SACCAAugust 20, 2022

As the Biden administration pushes electric vehicles, thousands of EV owners report that they couldn't charge their electric cars at public charging stations, according to a new poll.

JD Power – a consumer research, data, and analytics firm – released its second annual U.S. Electric Vehicle Experience Public Charging Study on Wednesday. The survey interviewed 11,554 electric vehicle and plug-in hybrid vehicle owners from January through June 2022.

The study found that 20% of electric vehicle owners couldn't charge their EVs at public charging stations.

"The study finds that one out of every five respondents ended up not charging their vehicle during their visit," JD Power reported. "Of those who didn’t charge, 72% indicated that it was due to the station malfunctioning or being out of service."

Brent Gruber – executive director of global automotive at JD Power – said in a statement, "Not only is the availability of public charging still an obstacle, but EV owners continue to be faced with charging station equipment that is inoperable."

This week, the New York Times published an article titled: "A Frustrating Hassle Holding Electric Cars Back: Broken Chargers."

"Owners of battery-powered cars sometimes struggle to refuel on longer trips because public chargers don’t work or malfunction while cars are plugged in," the Times article read.

There are an estimated 41,000 public EV charging stations in the United States.

President Joe Biden authorized spending $7.5 billion to expand the EV charging infrastructure and hit a target of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations by 2030.

Gruber points out that "just adding stations isn't the answer."

"The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program […] will lead to sizable growth in the availability of EV charging stations, but just adding stations isn’t the answer," Gruber said. "Stations need to be added to areas where there are currently gaps in heavily traveled routes and in high-density areas for people who don’t have access to residential charging, but most importantly, designed with things for users to do while charging – regardless of the use case."

Despite supply chain issues, electric vehicle sales (including plug-in hybrids) spiked 41% in the first half of 2022 compared to the same timeframe last year, according to Urban Science. EVs represented 6.2% of all new U.S. car sales in the first six months of 2022, versus 3.6% in 2021.

The JD Power study did not reveal the exact reason as to why the remaining 28% of the EV owners couldn't charge their cars.

A possible reason why EV owners may not have charged their cars at a public charging station could be lengthy wait times.

In March, a woman posted a video of a long line of Tesla owners waiting to charge their vehicles in Louisiana.

The woman who took the video spoke to one of the EV owners, and he said that it normally takes 30 minutes to charge, but the demand was so high that it took over an hour to charge one car.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1504445775509704705

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1504445775509704705
.23 min

In November 2019, a video of a massive line of Tesla automobiles in line went viral.

View: https://youtu.be/a1uFudf37JU
1:21 min

 

[marsh]

Selection Code Movie 1:01:18 min

Selection Code Movie
Right Side Broadcasting Network Published August 20, 2022

Was 2020 stolen? It’s deeper than that.

You’ve heard it said “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.”

What about those who code the vote?

What if our leaders aren’t actually being elected by us, but instead… selected?

ELECTION CODE follows the story of Tina Peters the County Clerk in Mesa Colorado, who made a backup of her counties Dominion Voting System server, only to stumble across evidence of manipulation in a recent local city council election…. and also the 2020 general election. Tina’s discovery ignites a chain reaction upending her life. And upending the world.

You will not be able to unsee what you see.

We stand at an apex in human history. Are we handing too much power to technology – and those that program it?

ELECTION CODE is a political thriller uncovering a secret so critical to the survival of America it transcends political parties. It is not about correcting the past. It’s about correcting the future.

Once you see ELECTION CODE you’ll never again let a machine near your vote.

 

[marsh]

(Twitter grab bag)

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1559084663007756289

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1559084663007756289
1:24 min

(Netherlands)

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1560996888685342721

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1560996888685342721
.20 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1560970175700164610

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1560970175700164610
1:24 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1561123859944075265

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1561123859944075265
2:20 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1561102391914758156

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1561102391914758156
.29 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1561019885903298562

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1561019885903298562
2:05 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1561160648578449408

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1561160648578449408
.37 min





(Europe)


(Africa)

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1561020328276631552

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1561020328276631552
.35 min

(Neil Oliver)

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1561097654754545665

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1561097654754545665
9:58 min

(Climate Change)

 

[marsh]

Breads Made of Powdered Crickets May Be Loaded with Bacterial Spores

A new study from Italy finds that breads made with powdered crickets may be loaded with potentially dangerous bacterial spores.

www.livescience.com

Breads Made of Powdered Crickets May Be Loaded with Bacterial Spores​

By Charles Q. Choi published June 21, 2018

Three breads produced with different blends of wheat four and, from left to right, 30 percent, 10 percent and zero percent cricket powder. The more cricket powder was used, the darker the color.

Three breads produced with different blends of wheat four and, from left to right, 30 percent, 10 percent and zero percent cricket powder. The more cricket powder was used, the darker the color. (Image credit: A. Osimani et al.)
If bread made from powdered crickets isn't gross enough for you, this article won't help: A new study from Italy finds that breads made with powdered crickets may be loaded with potentially dangerous bacterial spores.

That's a setback for what is otherwise a highly nutritious bread, according to the researchers. [7 Insects You'll Be Eating in the Future]

For decades, scientists have known that edible insects can be highly nutritious. What's more, switching from eating livestock to eating insects is good for the environment, as it takes much less space and other resources to farm insects. (Previous research, for example, has found that livestock currently use about 70 percent of all available farmland worldwide.)

But it goes without saying that convincing non-insect-eating people to eat insects can be difficult. So, to make insects more appealing to potential diners, researchers have experimented with making food that contains insect-based ingredients but doesn't obviously appear to do so. (Think of it like tricking your kids into eating veggies by throwing them in a smoothie.)

To see what breads made with insects might be like, scientists in Italy baked experimental loaves using different blends of wheat flour, plus a special ingredient: a commercially available powder made from crickets.

"The main goal of the study was to mask the presence of insects in everyday foods by using powders instead of whole insects," said study senior author Lucia Aquilanti, a food microbiologist at Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy.

But masking the insects, even in powder form, was easier said than done. The researchers found that the more cricket powder there was in the experimental bread loaves, the less the dough rose and the more firm the bread was. This was likely because the more cricket powder there was in a loaf, the less wheat flour there was, thus reducing the amount of gluten that helps bread rise and makes bread chewy, they noted.

And, perhaps more important, the more cricket powder there was in a loaf, the less tasty people judged it. "The taste was not too pleasant — it seemed a bit like cat food," Aquilanti told Live Science.

There was another downside, too: the presence of bacterial spores — a dormant state of some types of bacteria — in the cricket-based breads. These spores raised potential safety concerns, the researchers said, as such germs might potentially spoil the breads, or even make people sick.

This doesn't mean we've reached the end of the road for breads made with cricket powders, though. There are a number of techniques, such as gamma irradiation, that may rid cricket and other insect powders of the potentially dangerous spores, Aquilanti said. (Gamma irradiation exposes items to gamma rays to sterilize them.)

Aquilanti also noted that the researchers have experimented with other insect powders in breads and found "the final flavor is extremely dependent on the species." For instance, bread made from mealworm powder "has a very nice nutty flavor," she said.

Still, it wasn't all bad news for the cricket breads. The scientists found that the breads with cricket powder were more nutritious than the wheat-based breads. In particular, they contained more protein and essential amino acids, as well as fatty acids that help add calories and keep bread from going stale, than the purely wheat-based loaves.

The scientists detailed their findings in the August issue of the journal Innovative Food Science and Emerging Technologies.

If bread made from powdered crickets isn't gross enough for you, this article won't help: A new study from Italy finds that breads made with powdered crickets may be loaded with potentially dangerous bacterial spores.

That's a setback for what is otherwise a highly nutritious bread, according to the researchers. [7 Insects You'll Be Eating in the Future]

For decades, scientists have known that edible insects can be highly nutritious. What's more, switching from eating livestock to eating insects is good for the environment, as it takes much less space and other resources to farm insects. (Previous research, for example, has found that livestock currently use about 70 percent of all available farmland worldwide.)

But it goes without saying that convincing non-insect-eating people to eat insects can be difficult. So, to make insects more appealing to potential diners, researchers have experimented with making food that contains insect-based ingredients but doesn't obviously appear to do so. (Think of it like tricking your kids into eating veggies by throwing them in a smoothie.)

To see what breads made with insects might be like, scientists in Italy baked experimental loaves using different blends of wheat flour, plus a special ingredient: a commercially available powder made from crickets.

"The main goal of the study was to mask the presence of insects in everyday foods by using powders instead of whole insects," said study senior author Lucia Aquilanti, a food microbiologist at Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy.

But masking the insects, even in powder form, was easier said than done. The researchers found that the more cricket powder there was in the experimental bread loaves, the less the dough rose and the more firm the bread was. This was likely because the more cricket powder there was in a loaf, the less wheat flour there was, thus reducing the amount of gluten that helps bread rise and makes bread chewy, they noted.

And, perhaps more important, the more cricket powder there was in a loaf, the less tasty people judged it. "The taste was not too pleasant — it seemed a bit like cat food," Aquilanti told Live Science.

There was another downside, too: the presence of bacterial spores — a dormant state of some types of bacteria — in the cricket-based breads. These spores raised potential safety concerns, the researchers said, as such germs might potentially spoil the breads, or even make people sick.

This doesn't mean we've reached the end of the road for breads made with cricket powders, though. There are a number of techniques, such as gamma irradiation, that may rid cricket and other insect powders of the potentially dangerous spores, Aquilanti said. (Gamma irradiation exposes items to gamma rays to sterilize them.)

Aquilanti also noted that the researchers have experimented with other insect powders in breads and found "the final flavor is extremely dependent on the species." For instance, bread made from mealworm powder "has a very nice nutty flavor," she said.

Still, it wasn't all bad news for the cricket breads. The scientists found that the breads with cricket powder were more nutritious than the wheat-based breads. In particular, they contained more protein and essential amino acids, as well as fatty acids that help add calories and keep bread from going stale, than the purely wheat-based loaves.

The scientists detailed their findings in the August issue of the journal Innovative Food Science and Emerging Technologies.
Originally published on Live Science.

 

[pauldingbabe]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

How The US Made Inflation Worse

FRIDAY, AUG 19, 2022 - 11:40 AM
Via Global Macro Monitor,

Not a bad primer video from CNBC on the Fed’s policy mistakes, which we all are now, literally, paying for.

View: https://youtu.be/f60Z4epksOk
12:19 min

I would add that monetary policy is a black box, mainly because we can’t define the money supply, much less measure it. Using your brokerage account to write checks to pay for gas and groceries, for example, shouldn’t it be counted as part of the money supply? Ditto for crypto, among others

Money Quotes:
The two following money quotes from the video above could have been lifted straight from the Global Macro Monitor.

“If we were actually measuring inflation in a consistent manner, the peaks in the seventies and eighties are actually much more similar to the peak today than we would have initially thought.”
See our post, Today’s Inflation Rate And Nolan Ryan’s Fastball

“So I think at this point the Fed has to stick to its guns, even if that means taking speculators down. And that really is what has scared the Fed in the past. The Federal Reserve is supposed to make monetary policy in the whole of the public interest, not just that of investors. And this going to be a test of which they have not really had to take since 1981.”
We have written many posts on this issue, but see this one, in particular, The New “Supply-Side Economics” Fueling Asset Bubbles

Exogenous vs. Endogenous Money Supply
No distinction either between exogenous money (created by the Fed) and endogenous money created by the private sector. The Fed tries, and we stress, tries to control the endogenous money supply by interest rates and the exogenous money supply by its balance sheet.

Endogenous money is primarily created by leverage and is most likely easier to bring inflation down as assets deflate and credit slows.

The current inflation we are experiencing was mainly driven by exogenous money – Fed printing- and is much harder to break until quantitative tightening really begins to bite. Think middle of 2023.

So, realize, folks, if asset prices are increasing, such as stocks, with a 10 percent inflation rate, it is inflationary.

The Fed has a tiger by the tail, mainly of its own doing, by allowing monetary policy to be, in the words of my good friend, Professor Constantin Gurdgiev, “hijacked by Goldman Sachs and Black Rock.” Let’s throw in Jim Cramer just for fun.

The body politic gets it is unfair, and we see the political angst played out in today’s society.

View: https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg
2:44 min

Even a monkey will revolt against unfairness and inequality.

That Ted Talk video was hilarious!

 

[marsh]

<i>In Vivo</i> Toxicity Study of Freeze-Dried Skimmed Powder of Zophobas atratus Larvae (frpfdZAL), a Novel Food Source

Sun Young Kim, Kyu-Won Kwak, Gun Kang, Yun-Shik Oh, Hyung Joo Yoon, Yong-Soon Kim, Kwanho Park, Eunsun Kim, and Sun-Don Kim. Journal of the Korean Society of Food Science and Nutrition 2021;50:437-44. https://doi.org/10.3746/jkfn.2021.50.5.437

www.e-jkfn.org

Journal of the Korean Society of Food Science and Nutrition 2021; 50(5): 437-444

Published online May 31, 2021 Journal of the Korean Society of Food Science and Nutrition

Copyright © The Korean Society of Food Science and Nutrition.

In Vivo Toxicity Study of Freeze-Dried Skimmed Powder of Zophobas atratus Larvae (frpfdZAL), a Novel Food Source

Sun Young Kim1 , Kyu-Won Kwak1 , Gun Kang2, Yun-Shik Oh2, Hyung Joo Yoon1, Yong-Soon Kim1, Kwanho Park1, Eunsun Kim1, and Sun-Don Kim2

1Industrial Insect Division, Department of Agricultural Biology, National Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Rural Development Administration
2Safety Pharmacology Center, Nonclinical Research Institute, Chemon Inc.

Correspondence to:Sun-Don Kim, Safety Pharmacology Center, Nonclinical Research Institute, Chemon Inc., 240, Nampyeong-ro, Yangji-myeon, Cheoin-gu, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi 17162, Korea, E-mail: sunkim@chemon.co.kr
*These authors contributed equally to this work.

Received: February 9, 2021; Accepted: March 12, 2021
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License
(Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International — CC BY-NC 4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Zophobas atratus (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae), the giant mealworm beetle, has been recognized as an edible insect with a high protein content for new human food source and animal feed. On the other hand, the potential toxicity and food safety of Z. atratus is not well understood. Therefore, this study evaluated the toxicity of freeze-dried skimmed powder of Z. atratus larvae (frpfdZAL), known as the super mealworm, using different model approaches, including acute oral toxicity studies in SD rats and Beagle dogs and skin sensitization in Hartley guinea pigs (Buehler’s method) in accordance with the OECD guidelines and the principles of Good Laboratory Practice. No toxicological changes were observed in the clinical signs, body weights, and gross findings in acute single-dose administration in SD rats and Beagle dogs.

In addition, skin sensitization rate was 0%, and its sensitization potential was classified as grade I (very weak) using Buehler’s method. In conclusion, frpfdZAL is safe with no adverse effects and can be applied as an edible ingredient for animal feed or used for other biological purposes.

Keywords: edible insect, Zophobas atratus, food safety, acute oral toxicity, skin sensitization

 

[marsh]

TOXICOLOGICAL STUDY ON THE EDIBLE LARVA OF CIRINA FORDA (WESTWOOD) | Semantic Scholar

Preliminary investigation showed that the raw extract of Cirina forda (Westwood) was toxic to mice, showing sign of irritability and muscular tremor, and the neurotoxic nature of the raw Extract needs further investigation. Toxicity of the aqueous extracts of raw and processed larva of Cirina...

www.semanticscholar.org

[*]Corpus ID: 86294184

TOXICOLOGICAL STUDY ON THE EDIBLE LARVA OF CIRINA FORDA (WESTWOOD)​

Veterinary Physiology
Published 2002
Biology

Toxicity of the aqueous extracts of raw and processed larva of Cirina forda (Westwood) administered orally were studied in white albino mice and albino rats. Preliminary investigation showed that the raw extract was toxic to mice, showing sign of irritability and muscular tremor. An LD50 value of 7,000mg/kg body weight was obtained for the raw extract using mice. The effects of sub lethal dose of the extract on hematological and serum biochemical parameters were also studied in rats for 14 days…

Weight changes and organ pathology in rats given edible larvae of Cirina Forda (Westwood)
O. Akinnawo, V. Taiwo, A. Ketiku, J. Ogunbiyi
Biology
2006

The effects of oral administration of extracts of raw and processed larvae of Cirina forda (Westwood) on morphometry and histo pathology were studied in albino rats. Weights of rats in the control…

In vitro biomonitoring of the genotoxic and oxidative potentials of two commonly eaten insects in southwestern Nigeria
Eray Memiş, H. Türkez, Ü. Incekara, A. Banjo, B. Fasunwon, B. Toğar
Biology
Toxicology and industrial health
2013

It was concluded that the studied insects can be consumed safely, but it is necessary to consider the cellular damages that are likely to appear depending on the oxidative stress, and this in vitro approach for oxidative and genotoxicity assessments may be useful to compare the potential health risks of edible insects.

EFFECTS POTENTIALS OF COMMERCIAL EDIBLE HETEROMETRUS SPINIFER IN VITRO
K. Koc, Eray Memiş, H. Polat, H. Turkez
Biology
2012

It was concluded that the studied scorpion can be consumed safely, but it is necessary to consider the cellular damages which are likely to appear depending on oxidative stress at higher concentrations, as well as the potential health risks of edible scorpion.

Bio-Active Compounds Composition in Edible Stinkbugs Consumed in South-Eastern Districts of Zimbabwe
R. Musundire
Chemistry
2014

Encosternum delegorguei Spinola (Hemiptera: Tessaratomidae) are consumed as relish and with traditional claims of having medicinal roles in the South-Eastern districts of Zimbabwe. However, very…

Biomonitoring of the genotoxic potentials of two edible insects species in vitro.
H. Turkez, Ü. Incekara, O. Erman
Biology
2010

In this study, it is concluded that this in vitro approach for biomonitoring genotoxicity assessment may be useful to compare the potential health risks of edible insects.

Isolation of filamentous fungi associated with two common edible aquatic insects, Hydrophilus piceus and Dytiscus marginalis
Murat Ozdal, Ü. Incekara, Ahmet Polat, Özlem Gür, E. B. Kurbanoğlu, G. Taşar
Environmental Science, Biology
2012

In the present study, microfungal flora of internal and external surface of Hydrophilus piceus and Dytiscus marginalis collected from their natural habitats in Erzurum (Turkey) are evaluated and species that were recognized as pathogenic or toxigenic, and ones having biotechnological importance were found.

 

[marsh]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0956713519300428

Risks related to the presence of Salmonella sp. during rearing of mealworms (Tenebrio molitor) for food or feed: Survival in the substrate and transmission to the larvae​

Author links open overlay panelE.WynantsaL.FrooninckxbS.Van MiertbA.GeeraerdcJ.ClaesaL.Van Campenhouta

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodcont.2019.01.026Get rights and content

Highlights​

•Food pathogens may be present in substrates for insects reared for feed and food.
•Survival of Salmonella in wheat bran and transmission to mealworms was studied.
•Salmonella survived for at least seven days in the bran when larvae were absent.
•When larvae were present, Salmonella was reduced in both bran and larvae by day 7
.•Salmonella presence in larvae at day 7 depended on initial numbers in the bran.

Abstract​

During rearing of insects for food and feed, their microbial safety is of utmost importance, but little is known on the transmission of food pathogens from the substrate to the insects. The aim of this study was to investigate whether transmission of Salmonella sp. to mealworms (Tenebrio molitor) can occur, in case mealworms are fed with contaminated wheat bran as substrate. Three consecutive contamination levels of a mixed culture of three Salmonella enterica strains in wheat bran were studied, being 7, 4, and 2 log cfu/g. At each of these contamination levels, Salmonella sp. remained present in the bran during the experimental period of seven days when larvae were absent.

This indicates that Salmonella sp. can survive for at least seven days when wheat bran is stored, as is done in industrial rearing facilities. When larvae were present, however, the survival of Salmonella sp. in larvae and bran depended on the contamination level. When bran was contaminated with 7 log cfu/g Salmonella sp., the bacterium was still present after seven days in both larvae and bran, with average numbers of 3.7–4.1 log cfu/g, respectively.

At a contamination level of the bran of 4 log cfu/g, Salmonella sp. counts decreased until <1.5 log cfu/g and <1.0 log cfu/g on average in bran and larvae, respectively. However, the pathogen was still detected in most larvae and bran samples after seven days, as was shown using presence/absence testing. At a contamination level of 2 log cfu/g, presence/absence testing revealed Salmonella sp. to remain present in some bran samples after seven days, but surprisingly was not detected in the larval samples. Apparently, when present at a low level in the substrate, Salmonella sp. is not retained by the larvae during the seven day period, likely either because of competitive exclusion by the endogenous larval microbiota and/or because of antibacterial activity of the larvae.

 

[marsh]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168160522003324

Occurrence of selected bacterial pathogens in insect-based food products and in-depth characterisation of detected Bacillus cereus group isolates​

Author links open overlay panelHendrikFrentzelYlannaKelner-BurgosJennieFischerJanineHeiseAndréGöhlerHeidiWichmann-Schauer

Highlights

•B. cereus (s.l.) was detected in 42 and C. perfringens in twelve out of 73 samples.•Six samples contained B. cereus (s.l.) counts higher than 103 cfu/g.•B. cytotoxicus and capBCADE gene-positive isolates were identified.•One sample (crickets) contained Salmonella (S. Wandsworth and S. Stanley).
STEC/EPEC and Clostridioides difficile were not detected.

Abstract​

Insects are increasingly used as alternative protein sources and ingredients of foodstuffs produced in industrial scale. Previous studies on the microbial status of insect-based foods revealed that classical foodborne pathogens such as Salmonella spp., Campylobacter spp., Listeria monocytogenes or pathogenic Escherichia coli are rarely detected, whereas particularly spore-forming bacteria with pathogenic potential such as species of the Bacillus cereus group or Clostridium species may pose a food safety risk. However, detailed descriptions of the encountered pathogenic bacteria in insect foods are scarce.
We investigated a variety of 73 food products with insect or other arthropod ingredients on the occurrence of potential bacterial pathogens. These included B. cereus (sensu lato (s.l.)), Clostridium perfringens and Clostridioides difficile as representatives of spore-formers and Salmonella spp. and Shiga toxin producing and enteropathogenic E. coli (STEC/EPEC) as representatives of non-spore-forming Enterobacteriaceae.

Most of the investigated food products complied with food safety standards regarding the presence of pathogens considered. However, one cricket product contained two Salmonella enterica subspecies enterica serovars (S. Wandsworth and S. Stanley). B. cereus (s.l.) was found in 42 samples (58 %), of which six contained B. cereus (s.l.) at levels higher than 103 cfu/g. The highest B. cereus (s.l.) counts of 3.8 × 105 cfu/g were found in a product with boiled and dried scorpions. Clostridium perfringens was detected in twelve samples (16 %), whereas Clostridioides difficile and STEC/EPEC were not detected in any of the samples.

Remarkably, five samples contained the B. cereus (s.l.) species B. cytotoxicus. Moreover, strikingly high numbers of B. cereus (s.l.) isolates carried the capsule syntheses genes capBCADE, which were presumably located on the B. cereus pBFI_2 plasmid. Whole genome sequencing-based phylogenetic analysis suggested a high relatedness for only very few of the B. cytotoxicus and cap-positive isolates, respectively.

 

[marsh]

Potential role of chitinase 3-like-1 in inflammation-associated carcinogenic changes of epithelial cells - PubMed

The family of mammalian chitinases includes members both with and without glycohydrolase enzymatic activity against chitin, a polymer of N-acetylglucosamine. Chitin is the structural component of fungi, crustaceans, insects and parasitic nematodes, but is completely absent in mammals. Exposure...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Review World J Gastroenterol
. 2009 Nov 14;15(42):5249-59. doi: 10.3748/wjg.15.5249.
Potential role of chitinase 3-like-1 in inflammation-associated carcinogenic changes of epithelial cells

Katrin Eurich, Mayuko Segawa, Satoko Toei-Shimizu, Emiko Mizoguchi
PMID: 19908331 PMCID: PMC2776850 DOI: 10.3748/wjg.15.5249

Abstract
The family of mammalian chitinases includes members both with and without glycohydrolase enzymatic activity against chitin, a polymer of N-acetylglucosamine. Chitin is the structural component of fungi, crustaceans, insects and parasitic nematodes, but is completely absent in mammals.

Exposure to antigens containing chitin- or chitin-like structures sometimes induces strong T helper type-I responses in mammals, which may be associated with the induction of mammalian chitinases. Chitinase 3-like-1 (CHI3L1), a member of the mammalian chitinase family, is induced specifically during the course of inflammation in such disorders as inflammatory bowel disease, hepatitis and asthma. In addition, CHI3L1 is expressed and secreted by several types of solid tumors including glioblastoma, colon cancer, breast cancer and malignant melanoma. Although the exact function of CHI3L1 in inflammation and cancer is still largely unknown, CHI3L1 plays a pivotal role in exacerbating the inflammatory processes and in promoting angiogenesis and remodeling of the extracellular matrix. CHI3L1 may be highly involved in the chronic engagement of inflammation which potentiates development of epithelial tumorigenesis presumably by activating the mitogen-activated protein kinase and the protein kinase B signaling pathways. Anti-CHI3L1 antibodies or pan-chitinase inhibitors may have the potential to suppress CHI3L1-mediated chronic inflammation and the subsequent carcinogenic change in epithelial cells.

 

[marsh]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1561288474011074560

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1561288474011074560
2:10 min Russell Brand

 

[Oreally]

Jesus....

 

[marsh]

Census Bureau Admits Overcounting 7 Blue States, Just 1 Red State | ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Census Bureau Admits Overcounting 7 Blue States, Just 1 Red State

SUNDAY, AUG 21, 2022 - 02:30 PM
Authored by Hans Von Spakovsky via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

In a shocking report, the U.S. Census Bureau recently admitted that it overcounted the populations of eight states and undercounted the populations of six states in the 2020 census.

All but one of the states overcounted is a blue state, and all but one of the undercounted states is red.

Those costly errors will distort congressional representation and the Electoral College. It means that when the Census Bureau reapportioned the House of Representatives, Florida was cheated out of two additional seats it should have gotten; Texas missed out on another seat; Minnesota and Rhode Island each kept a representative they shouldn’t have; and Colorado was awarded a new member of the House it didn’t deserve.

These harmful errors also mean billions in federal funds will be misallocated. Funding for many federal programs is distributed to the states based on population. Overcounted states will now receive a larger share of federal funds than they are entitled to, at the expense of the undercounted states.

The Census Bureau has not explained how it got the 2020 census so wrong. This is particularly troublesome because the bureau reported an error rate of 0.01 percent in the 2010 census—an overcount of only 36,000 people, a statistically insignificant mistake.

The 2020 errors were discovered through the “2020 Post-Enumeration Survey.”

After each census, the bureau interviews a large number of households across the country and then compares the interview answers with the original census responses. The 2020 survey showed that the bureau overcounted the population in Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Utah. The largest mistake was in President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware, which was overcounted by 5.45 percent.

The states whose populations were undercounted were Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. The largest error in the undercount was in Arkansas, where the population count was off by 5.04 percent.

The original census reported that Florida needed only 171,500 more residents to gain another congressional seat. Yet the survey shows that Florida was undercounted by over three-quarters of a million people. The bureau also said that Texas needed only 189,000 more people to gain another congressional seat. The survey shows that Texas was undercounted by 560,319 residents.

Minnesota, according to the original census report, would have lost a congressional seat during reapportionment if it had 26 fewer residents; the survey shows the state was overcounted by 216,971 individuals. Similarly, Rhode Island would have lost a seat if the Census Bureau had counted 19,000 fewer residents. It turns out that the state was overcounted by more than 55,000 individuals.

The Associated Press quoted John Marion of Common Cause in Rhode Island admitting that the state would benefit from this mistake, including “more representation in Congress.”

Unfortunately, the federal statutes governing the census and apportionment provide no remedy to correct this problem. And it would be very difficult to devise an acceptable remedy this far after the fact.

The census is geared to providing a count of the population on one specific date, in this case April 1, 2020. A remedy that involved ordering the Census Bureau to conduct another actual recount in the 14 affected states—a complex, expensive undertaking—would provide numbers on a different date than the original census, whose population totals would still be in effect for the rest of the states. This would raise fundamental fairness issues, given the high mobility of our population.

The concept of conducting a new census of the entire nation also seems impractical.

One thing, however, must be done. Congress needs to use its oversight authority to investigate and determine why these errors happened, particularly since they didn’t occur in the 2010 census. Lawmakers should then make the changes necessary to ensure this does not happen again.

Originally published by The Washington Times. Reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or Zero Hedge.

 

[marsh]

Inflation Is Quietly Stripping Us Of Our Private Property Rights | ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Inflation Is Quietly Stripping Us Of Our Private Property Rights​

SUNDAY, AUG 21, 2022 - 12:30 PM
Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

I used to scoff at the mention of ‘The Great Reset”, or the idea that a handful of elites are running the global show behind the scenes. Needless to say, on the other side of the pandemic, I have warmed up to the idea in a big way. I can’t help but feel as though some often talked about conspiracy theories are in the process of unfolding right before our very eyes, whether via premeditated means or just from plain old dumbass incompetence from global politicians and Central Banks.

As anybody who is harshly critical of the idea of a “Great Reset” will tell you, one of the key tenets of a post-apocalyptic, Klaus Schwab-run world is the idea that we will no longer have private property rights. This comes from a statement that Schwab made, predicting what life would be like in the year 2030:

“You’ll own nothing” — And “you’ll be happy about it.”​

And while today’s lesson is rather elementary, it’s worth noting that this conspiracy theory not only isn’t too far from the truth, it could very well be in the midst of taking place right before our eyes.

I had to look no further than my own personal circle to find recent examples of grown adults who were having difficulty making ends meet due to rising prices. These people had some money saved up, but still could not keep up with the price of rent and housing, and ultimately wound up giving up on having their own place and moving back home with their parents.

When I was discussing this example on my most recent podcast, I had the revelation that, as is true with anything economic, this same situation was playing out millions of times over, with millions of other Americans, every day. In other words everyone is having the same problem: they simply can’t afford things anymore and, with inflation at between 8% and 9%, the value of their savings is collapsing.

In just 3 years, things cost between 15% and 20% more than they did when many savers were putting away a majority of their money - before the pandemic. The purchasing power of the dollar is down by about 20% over the same time.


USD Purchasing Power (5 Years) via TradingEconomics.com

Those who are still working on a wage that isn’t 20% higher than it was just 3 years ago are losing significant ground. Those who have stopped working and are either on a fixed income or are living off savings have been hit even worse (especially if you’re living off a pension managed by some of the absolute worst managers to ever step foot in front of a Bloomberg terminal, like this one and this one.

This financial pressure is widely talked about when it comes to people paring back their discretionary spending. We hear the news talk about a slowdown in spending all the time when economic times get tougher - it’s one of the dynamics that creates recession and de-leveraging cycles. But what happens when it’s the cost of shelter (i.e. rent and housing) and real estate that are also getting too expensive for everyday buyers. This is talked about far less, so let’s quickly think about what it could mean for the future.

In Klaus Schwab’s future, borrowing the words of Judge Smails, “you’ll get nothing and like it!”

We are all Spaulding
It’ll be this way because everything will be communal and shared. The focus will be taken away from private property and private property rights.

Inflation helps this narrative greatly. If you have less purchasing power to buy discretionary items then, by proxy, you have less private property.

The scary thing is when this dynamic starts to extrapolate itself over people’s real estate and land ownership. In other words, a future where nobody can afford a second set of golf clubs doesn’t seem that post-apocalyptic, but a future where fewer and fewer people own land and house, and where the geographical distribution of the world’s livable area starts to fall into the hands of the richest few and state backed entities - well, this seems extremely post-apocalyptic.

While I admit this is a bit “fringe” at the moment (hey, it’s what I do), I now can’t help but think of inflation as a way to help strip away people’s individual private property rights. When you take away a person’s private property, private property rights don’t hold the same meaning to them. Do people that don’t want to own guns care about the right to own guns?

Probably not as much as those who are avid sportsman or want to own guns for personal protection.

If you haven’t yet, I would encourage you to listen to my most recent podcast with Andy Schectman, where he lays out the de-dollarization path we could be on and how the global economic landscape is shifting before our eyes. In his estimation, everything that needs to be happening for ‘The Great Reset” to take place on or ahead of schedule is already happening. [Stocks, Bonds, Real Estate & The Dollar Are About To Get "Vaporized" ]

And as I said to him, while I may have laughed at the idea a couple of years ago, I found myself with my jaw agape by the end of the interview – because as much as I didn’t want him to, his post-apocalyptic scenario was making a whole lot of sense.

I know this is somewhat of a basic lesson in economics, but the next time you hear the Biden administration refer to inflation at 0% sequentially, despite the fact that it was up more than 8% from the year prior, take it personally.

Remember that every positive CPI print we see represents the percentage of things you can buy less of with the same money you had a year prior.

If you could afford 8% more “stuff” last year with the same dollar, what type of mental gymnastics do you need to perform to convince yourself that your rights to private property aren’t being whittled away and taken out from underneath you?