In other words, inconvenient truths.

Now, while this nation used to celebrate the revelation of inconvenient truths, one of the 21st century’s biggest spreaders of inconvenient truths, Julian Assange, may be headed to prison for the rest of his life.

Extradition hearings for the WikiLeaks founder wrapped up on February 21, though a decision by British judges is not expected till mid-March. If extradition is granted, this Australian publisher and journalist will be taken to the United States, where he will stand trial on espionage charges.

How does an Australian journalist, who has scarcely spent any time on American soil, get charged under American espionage laws? How does someone, whose only criminal conviction so far has been bail-jumping, spend nearly five years in “Britain’s Guantanamo” on top of seven years in near-isolation in an embassy?

What did Julian Assange do?

Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks was designed to facilitate whistleblowing by providing an anonymous platform for whistleblowers to post material. In 2010, WikiLeaks published almost half a million documents from US intelligence analyst Bradley/Chelsea Manning. Despite the fact that most of this information was already in the public domain, then-President Obama condemned Assange as a national security threat, and Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, though the sentence was later commuted

Citizens older than 40 may remember Obama campaigning on creating the most transparent administration ever, in his desire to distance himself from the Bush administration and its War on Terror. However, Obama went on to charge more people under the Espionage Act than any other president in history.

None of this stopped Assange. Later, in 2010, WikiLeaks published about 250,000 American diplomatic cables. At the end of the year, while Assange was living in Britain, two Swedish women made sexual assault allegations against him.

Assange did not want to go to Sweden to face trial; he believed the Swedes would turn him over to the American government. So, in 2012, he sought refuge in the Ecuadoran embassy. The Ecuadorans granted him asylum after the Swedish government would not guarantee keeping him out of American custody.

Seven years later, in 2019, the Ecuadorians turned him over to the British police after complaining about his increasingly bizarre behavior and violating their conditions of hosting him.

Since Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadoran embassy rather than go to court, the British government charged him with bail-jumping and granted him the maximum sentence for this, fifty weeks. When the fifty weeks were up, the US charged him with espionage. As lawyer-turned-journalist Glenn Greenwald noted at the end of 2020, espionage charges are so complex that this guaranteed Assange would spend years in prison as British courts deliberated.

Indeed, Assange has been in Belmarsh for more than four years now, where he suffered a minor stroke in 2021, at the age of 50. Again, this is all without being convicted of any crimes more serious than bail-jumping.

How are authorities defending this?

In his data dumps, Assange revealed the names of collaborators within Iraq and Afghanistan. American lawmakers say that revealing these names, as well as the actions of American soldiers in those wars, puts American lives at risk. They believe, therefore, that Assange does not deserve any of the protections journalists would normally enjoy.

There would be a logic to this, if it could be proven true that Assange cost American lives. However, it cannot. No soldiers have ever been proven to have died as a result of Julian Assange’s actions. And as far as the welfare of our foreign collaborators, where was our concern for them when we fled from Afghanistan, handing over more than $80 billion worth of weaponry to the Taliban?

Furthermore, what about the more recent dump of classified information regarding American intervention in Ukraine?

The double standard is nauseating.

Assange’s persecution has far less to do with concern for American soldiers, or their overseas friends, than it does with the fact that Julian Assange embarrassed the Washington establishment in general, and Hillary Clinton in particular.

Documents posted on WikiLeaks showed that the 2016 Democratic primaries were rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton. Naturally, Hillary’s team did not find this flattering, and so her campaign blamed WikiLeaks in part for her 2016 loss.

Hillary does not have a reputation for letting offenses slide. In 2016, she said, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” regarding Assange After being confronted about this, like a good politician, she said she doesn’t remember saying that, but if she did, it was just a joke.

Though Trump seemed generally sympathetic toward Assange, his appointees hated him, particularly CIA director Mike Pompeo. In 2017, CIA officials were so mad about Vault 7 leaks they discussed assassinating Assange.

The Vault 7 leaks revealed vulnerabilities within different operating systems. While federal agencies were upset about the information itself being leaked, what was even worse was that no one at the agencies noticed the data was missing until WikiLeaks posted it.

In response, Mike Pompeo designated WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” Intelligence officials tried to find leaks between WikiLeaks and the Russian government, though they were never able to do so. Even a former national security official under Trump admitted that the actions taken toward Assange were out of embarrassment, not in response to any kind of tangible threat.

The real problem with Julian Assange is that he destroys narratives.

I don’t know the man personally; I don’t know if he does what he does out of a sincere, disinterested love of truth or if he simply hates the US and wants to humiliate us on the world stage. Maybe he’s just a provocateur who wants to take down the biggest guy in the room.

Either way, our political class can’t tolerate it. They believe that the narrative is more important than the truth and that without a uniting narrative, the American public will collapse.

Who remembers 1984, when Winston gets a copy of The Book? He reads about the Inner Party, about how those most fanatical about the war effort are precisely those who are most aware of how cynically war is used to keep the standard of living low.

This is a real phenomenon, and it’s how Julian Assange described the war in Afghanistan back in 2011, “. . . because the goal is not to completely subjugate Afghanistan. The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the United States, out of the tax bases of European countries, through Afghanistan, back into the hands of the transnational security elite. . . The goal is to have an endless war, not a successful war.”

Assange made this prediction ten years before our humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, and several years after the Americans could have won the war, had they not gotten distracted in Iraq. All introspection regarding Iraq and Afghanistan proves his points.

Assange continually called bullsh*t on a political elite that thinks Americans are too stupid to keep track of our own overseas interventions.

The US was never supposed to be an unaccountable political establishment.

This country was created with a system of checks and balances, precisely to keep the branches of the government restrained by each other, and the entire apparatus accountable to the people.

A free press facilitates this. Yes, it’s ugly sometimes. I had friends in Iraq. I was furious when the Abu Ghraib photos leaked. But, after years of ruminating on situations like these, I believe it is better for the American public to know what war consists of. I think the press should make it clear that our adversaries in various entanglements are not particularly humane, either. War is ugly. People do horrible things to each other. And that is why it is so important to have a diplomatic class that sees war as an option of last resort.

What happened to Assange should scare everyone who loves freedom.

Assange isn’t killing people. He just reveals information in times and places that the political class dislikes. The Washington establishment wants to push the same narrative that’s been pushed since WWII, that of the Americans being the permanent good guy, no matter what. Assange hasn’t been lying. He’s spreading malinformation, the information that is technically true but inconvenient to the prevailing narrative.

The Legacy Media loved Assange fifteen years ago when the liberal establishment was in favor of anything making George W. look bad. Today, as Assange’s revelations continue to drive the public’s general distrust of the political elite, they want him to disappear. If extradition is granted, they may get their wish.

Julian Assange is guilty of malinformation. That’s it. His decades-long harassment should concern anyone who truly believes in the First Amendment, a free press, and the United States as the Founding Fathers envisioned it.

What do you think?

Do you think that Assange has been unfairly persecuted? Do you think his leaks were important information or stuff that should’ve remained secret? Do you think he’ll be extradited to the United States? What then?

Let’s discuss it in the comments section.

This year’s climate summit was the first to extensively address food production.  There was a Food Systems Pavilion with eight thematic days, and one of those days was exclusively about how to “Advance Protein Diversification.”

In other words, how to get people to eat stuff they don’t want to.

The publishing industry is getting into this, too. You can find dozens of books that have been recently brought to market, earnestly promoting insects as food to save the planet. These are not to be outdone by books swearing that lab-grown meat will revolutionize food.

They discussed how to “push” consumers toward novel protein.

Discussions highlighted innovations in Israel, Brazil, Singapore, Denmark, and the Netherlands, all countries that have pioneered research in either insect farming or cultured meat.  The folks at the climate summit discussed “how we can push others toward the tipping point in protein diversification.”

One discussion focused on circular agrifood and biomass.  “Circular agrifood” sounds high-tech but really boils down to waste processing.  For example, a farm may be perfectly circular if livestock exclusively consumes vegetation on the farm, their poop is spread around the pastures, they get processed on-farm, and the waste materials are buried, fed to dogs, or otherwise kept on the property.  Two hundred years ago, most farms were “circular agrifood systems.”

So, are they promoting the traditional closed-loop, locally-owned, independently operated farms?

Not quite.  This discussion was chaired by an expert in waste management and a representative of an innovative food processing company, not managers of closed-loop farms.

In fact, if you live in a wealthy country, these people may see your local farmer as the problem, not the solution.  Speakers at COP28 summits blame overconsumption in wealthy countries for food instability in poorer ones.

This is a gross simplification of an incredibly complex set of problems.

Overconsumption of food isn’t just a “rich people problem.” It’s the opposite.

For starters, overconsumption of food is not necessarily related to overall wealth.  You don’t see overweight people walking around elite enclaves like Malibu or Aspen. They’re in the poorer parts of major cities, and throughout rural America.

I spent much of my childhood in a low-income household.  People at the bottom of the socioeconomic food chain are not overconsuming pastured steaks and Kerrygold butter. They’re overconsuming the stuff their SNAP benefits pay for at Dollar Tree, foods like Doritos and Mountain Dew.  These foods are artificially cheap because they are made of processed corn, which is heavily subsidized by the government.

US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is aware of this. He was less militant about eliminating meat from American diets than his European counterparts.  His talks during “Food Day” emphasized less food wastage rather than eliminating meat and dairy.  However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) insists that affluent Westerners need to reduce meat and dairy consumption by 35-50% to achieve climate goals.

Climate change is being blamed for food shortages in developing countries.  However, you cannot ignore the role distribution problems play.  These might be related to war or to internal problems such as corruption. They are not necessarily affected by the actions of wealthier countries.

Solving the problem of low-income, overweight Americans would involve massive cultural changes.  It would involve fixing the subsidy system that makes junk food so cheap.  It would involve a huge push to re-introduce home economics classes, empowering people to prepare their own food.  And it would involve a change in cultural expectations. When working multiple part-time jobs is the norm, it’s really hard to find time to prepare healthy meals.

Food scarcity in developing countries isn’t because of “rich Westerners,” either.

Solving the problem of food scarcity in less developed countries is no small feat either. It would involve better infrastructure, such as roads and refrigeration facilities.  It would also require accountability at the local level in terms of ensuring corrupt officials do not keep donated goods for themselves.

All of these solutions involve increasing local control and self-empowerment for individuals to make better decisions for themselves.

So, is that what the food giants and the attendees of summits like COP28 are working toward?

These summits promote consolidation and processed foods.

No, they’re going to keep moving toward consolidating food companies and putting more highly processed junk food on the market.

The “Big Four” meatpackers (JBS, Cargill, Tyson, and National Beef Packing) control more than 80% of the market.  Of these four, JBS, Cargill, and Tyson have invested in cultured (lab-grown) meat.

They are beginning to see themselves as in the protein business rather than the meat business. Also, it doesn’t hurt that investing in alternative proteins helps companies’ ESG scores.

They are not just investing in cultured meat. Cargill and Tyson have also been investing in insect production.

In 2022, Cargill partnered with Innovafeed, an insect meal producer.  They feed livestock waste to black soldier flies, which then are in turn fed to farmed fish, chicks, and piglets.

Now Tyson’s getting in on the game.  In October, Tyson purchased a minority stake in Dutch insect farming company Protix.  They plan to build a black soldier fly facility in the US for use in pet foods and livestock feed.  Tyson says they do not plan to add insects to human food “at this time.”

Fish, chicks, and piglets do naturally consume insects.  But I still think this drive toward partnerships between giants in the traditional livestock industry and insect producers is worth our attention.

In a previous article about eating bugs, I referenced studies finding that putting the infrastructure in place for insect protein production is not as climate-neutral as it pretends to be.  Constructing the facilities required for a substantial amount of protein production would require a significant amount of space and energy.  A whole new infrastructure would need to be built, and in a more freely functioning market, investors would need to see demand before making those kinds of commitments.

As we noted in another previous article, the demand for novel proteins has not been developing organically, and a huge infrastructure for conventional meat processing already exists.  Consumers are not choosing novel proteins. They’re being pushed on us by people who seem religiously convinced that eating insects is good for the planet.

Tyson may not be planning to put insect meal into their meat products “at this time,” but they’re investing in the infrastructure that could make that happen when they think the time is right.  With all the talk about how good eating insects is for the environment, it’s reasonable to assume that companies will start looking at how to incorporate insect protein into their food products.

How to really improve the agricultural system

There are absolutely ways in which the agricultural system could improve.  But the real solutions lie in working toward fewer middlemen.  This would make locally produced food more affordable, wherever “local” is for you, and more profitable for the farmers.  Customers need more transparency to make better dietary choices, and building connections with local farmers and custom processors is a great way to achieve that.

I have eaten crickets that still look like crickets. I am not interested in processed foods with hidden ingredients.  As the food giants move toward novel proteins, it will be more important than ever to know where your meat comes from.  Unless, of course, insect nuggets sound delicious to you.

What are your thoughts, though? If you could save money, would you eat lab-grown meat or insects? Do you think this type of “food” production is good for the planet? Are you interested in trying these products?

Let’s discuss it in the comments section.

About Marie Hawthorne

A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her.

Early in November, Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny admitted in an interview with The Economist that the war is at a stalemate.  He stated frankly that Russia has three times as many men as they do, and that their technology is too similar for a huge breakthrough unless the Ukrainians are given some kind of massive technological advantage.

President Zelensky has always been insistent that Ukraine can beat off Russia, and for a long time, General Zaluzhny was, too.  After the slow counteroffensive this spring, rather than admitting any difficulties within the Ukrainian military, he was quick to blame Americans, saying we were not giving him enough advanced weaponry.

But Ukrainian men are leaving as fast as they can.

General Zaluzhny also blames the huge amount of Ukrainian men avoiding conscription.  Ever since the beginning of the Russian invasion, men between the ages of 18 and 60 have been forbidden from leaving the country.  However, many men have taken advantage of the chaos to leave anyway. The BBC estimates that 650,000 Ukrainian men within this age group have left for Europe since the fighting began.

This data came from Eurostat, which did not specify whether those 650,000 men had legal or medical exemptions.  But authorities do know that at least 20,000 eligible men have evaded conscription.

Draft dodging had been facilitated by Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt government. In August, it was announced that dozens of Ukrainian officials would face criminal charges over helping conscripted men leave Ukraine.

This firing of officials has effectively stopped recruitment.  The average age of Ukrainian soldiers is 43.  They have 60-year-old men fighting already and are now considering removing all age limits for military personnel. Ukraine already had an old and unhealthy population. The massive loss of young life in the war is leaving the population even older and sicker.  They have gotten so desperate for personnel that pregnant women are serving.

The US wants Ukraine to negotiate with Russia.

Given these dire personnel shortages, NBC reported that a group of Americans and Europeans met with Zelensky early in November to discuss what they would be willing to give up in negotiating with the Russians.  Biden administration officials are openly worried that the Ukrainians are running out of forces. All the weapons in the world won’t make a difference without people on the ground to use them.

For now, Zelensky still doesn’t want to hear it.  He insists that no one can make him negotiate.

However, Zelensky cannot fight the war alone.  In fact, he hasn’t been fighting at all. He’s been jetting around the world drumming up money.  And the man who has been managing the battlefields, as Zelensky and his wife stock up on yachts, is done.

Just this week, Ukrainian National Defense, Security, and Intelligence member Mariana Bezhula said that General Zaluzhny should resign after he refused to submit a battle plan for 2024.  Bezhula is now at risk of losing her job because she publicly complained about the general.

Redacted discussed this a little more in-depth during their November 27 episode.  Between minutes 40:00 and 57:00, they describe how, when General Zaluzhny was pressed for plans for next year, he said that he would need an extra 20,000 men per month simply to not lose ground.  He knows this won’t happen and, therefore, didn’t submit a plan.

There are demographic problems in both Russia and Ukraine.

It is worth noting that Russia and Ukraine both have serious long-term demographic problems.  In 2005, Russia’s birth rate was 1.3 births per woman, while Ukraine’s was 1.2, both of which are far below the replacement rate of 2.1.

When Putin became president, he prioritized increasing Russia’s birthrate.  The government began offering financial incentives to have children.  Who knows whether it was the financial incentives or the overall promotion of family values? Either way, during the past 15 years, Russia’s birth rate has gone up to 1.58 births per woman.  Of course, Putin is proud of this, but the fact remains that 1.58 is still below the replacement rate.  Combine this with the fact that Russia’s average age is 43, and you have an unhealthy long-term demographic situation.

Ukraine’s situation is worse.  In 2021, their total fertility rate was still 1.2, unchanged from 2005.  In 2022, it dropped to 0.9. While numbers aren’t in for 2023 yet, it’s expected to be 0.7.

The Ukrainians have almost completely stopped having children and I say that without any judgment.  I can’t imagine planning a family in their situation either.  But with an average age of 40.8, they are facing a demographic collapse.

Europe wants the conflict to end, too.

It seems to me that both sides have every reason to cut the losses of their young men, and perhaps that’s why Putin just moved the world’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, the Yars, closer to Europe.  Russia is now able to strike London in less than five minutes.  Maybe he hopes this will make the US and EU pressure President Zelensky to negotiate.

The overall desire for Ukraine to end the conflict has been increasing, with or without Doomsday missiles, with or without admission from high-level officials.

Tensions are rising across Europe over the flood of migrants, both from Ukraine as well as other parts of the world.  We saw the riots in Ireland over the stabbing of young children this weekend.  That particular incident involved an Algerian migrant, but Ireland has been overwhelmed by migrants in general the past few years.  The massive amount of Ukrainian refugees that Ireland, a small nation, has been expected to absorb has pushed the country to a snapping point.

And Ireland’s not alone.  Polish truckers have blockaded the roads that go between Poland and Ukraine. Truckers in Poland are no longer letting Ukrainians cross because Ukrainian drivers have been undercutting Polish prices.  After the war started, the EU lifted all restrictions on Ukrainian carriers.  EU bureaucrats think they’re just helping the people of Ukraine, but the reality is that whenever you start messing with trade rules, there are always second- and third-order consequences.  Polish truckers are sick of the competitive advantage given to the Ukrainian truckers affecting their livelihood, and they’re making themselves heard.

For all the rhetoric coming from the political class in Europe, the average citizens seem burned out on the endless stream of refugees.  Americans are burned out as well; while politicians can’t seem to find the money to secure our own border, they have sent $110 billion to Ukraine for its border, 96% of which has already been spent.

Peace may not be a long-term solution.

Most people, at most times, want to be left alone to enjoy their families and the fruits of their labors.  And while I understand this urge to demand that politicians sit down and negotiate some kind of peace treaty, I don’t see a long-term solution.  Let me explain.

Ukraine really wants to join NATO, as we all know.  Jens Stoltenberg, the president of NATO, has repeatedly said that Ukraine can eventually join NATO and, in fact has even waived some of the normal requirements to make it easier for them.  But he says Ukraine cannot join while it is still fighting with Russia.

Putin has made it clear, for years, that he considers NATO expansion into Ukraine to be a red line.  If the Russians and Ukrainians negotiate some kind of peace agreement, for now, and then in six months Ukraine is fully accepted into NATO, what happens?  Will Russia launch another attack?  I don’t think it’s unlikely.

I don’t say any of this to discourage the people actually fighting.  But those of us not on the battlefield should at least try to understand what’s going on.  Fighting in Ukraine hasn’t stopped just because American legacy media is pushing interest in Israel right now.  It’s easy to slap a bumper sticker on your car. It’s less easy to have your community absorb waves of refugees. It’s incredibly difficult to fight in the trenches.

We need to be careful about what kind of promises we make.  I don’t see any quick solutions for Ukraine.  But I could be wrong!

What do you think? Is the fighting between Ukraine and Russia near an end? Have world governments lost interest in supporting Ukraine? Will one of the countries take desperate steps to keep the fight going? How do you see this turning out?

Let’s discuss it in the comments section.

About Marie Hawthorne

A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her.

In 2018, Finnish scientists discovered they could create plant cell cultures that were nutritious and delicious, according to taste testers.  They have produced pleasant-tasting cell culture lines that can be added to things like smoothies or jam.  They’re not at the point yet where they can produce apple slices you could toss in a baggie for a snack, but that is the end goal, and researchers around the world are convinced it’s possible.

How do they grow fruit in a lab?

Growing a fruit from cell cultures in a laboratory involves four steps:

• Step 1: Multiplication—This is where stem cells are taken from the meristem of a desired fruit plant and then multiplied.
• Step 2: Induction of flowering in multiplied stem cells—This is currently the biggest technological hurdle.
• Step 3: Induction of fruit production—This can be done using organic compounds, rather than traditional pollination.
• Step 4: Growing the fruit—This part consists of providing the growing fruit with the optimal nutrients needed for development.

These projects involve cell culturing.  Lots of foods like to call themselves “lab-grown” for the novelty factor.  Scientists tout the Cosmic Crisp apple as being “lab-grown” because the original development took place in a laboratory.  But Cosmic Crisp apples are grown on trees, outdoors, in the sunshine, just like any other apple you’d eat.

That’s not what we’re talking about here with truly cell-cultured fruit.  The technology for this is quite advanced and so far, scientists have not been able to come up with anything that actually looks like a piece of fruit.  The ultimate goal is to grow edible-parts-only pieces of fruit.  So apples without cores, citrus without peels, and so on.

Given the technical difficulty and expense in development, you may wonder, why bother?  There is a big population that has an ethical problem with killing animals for food, but the group of people with moral qualms about plucking an apple from a tree  is vanishingly small.

Additionally, livestock rearing is pretty foreign to the average urban or suburban dweller.  Growing your own fruits and veggies isn’t.  Neighborhoods all over the country are dripping with fruit at certain times of the year.  I feed lots of dinged neighborhood fruit to my pigs because homeowners literally can’t process it.

So, what’s the official excuse for these high-tech expenditures?

New Zealand’s Newsable discusses this with Ben Schon, Senior Scientist with the New Zealand Plant and Food Research.  He sees lab-grown fruit as an additional source of food as the world’s population expands, not as a replacement for traditional agriculture but a supplement to it.  Dr. Schon is a firm believer in man-made climate change and coming problems with overpopulation. He sees developing the technology to produce food in closed environments as a sort of hedge for traditional agriculture in case of climate disaster and thinks it may be more sustainable in the long run.

Lucas van der Zee, horticulture and product physiologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, sees growing only edible fruits in laboratory environments as a way to remove land from agricultural use. His Fruit of Knowledge project aims to grow only the edible portions of fruit in laboratory environments with the express purpose of allowing farmland to revert to its native state.

Proponents of this technology, in general, see it as a way to avoid food wastage.  Why have a whole apple tree with all those leaves and branches when you really just want the fruit?

(Never mind the fact that the trees are beautiful, provide shade, and smell heavenly when in bloom.  But technocrats don’t like to deal in intangibles.)

Avoiding food wastage is indeed an admirable goal, but why not pump more money into home economics classes, rather than shutting them down for ever more STEM courses that most high schoolers won’t use anyway?

Treating home economics as an important life skill and imparting the values associated with thrift and a happy, comfortable home would go a long way toward fixing many of society’s ills.  Thrifty adults waste very little food. Older people who grew up broke are often full of ideas for how to use food before it goes bad.  But the government seems to have zero interest in any solutions that involve a confident, responsible citizenry.  All solutions must be profitable for favored industries.

So, again, why?

Is lab-grown fruit just about the money?

Yeah, but it’s a LOT of money.  In President Biden’s Bold Goals for U.S. Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing report released in March, he promotes food and agriculture innovation, and as we discussed in our article here, an emphasis on lab-grown food will be part of that.  Between taking market share away from traditional farmers and the patents that will probably be involved, the favored biotech industry will see nice new revenue streams if this technology moves forward.

Cell-cultured food products could also be a convenient vector for getting mRNA into food.  We’ve discussed the efforts to grow heads of lettuce with mRNA vaccines in them.   Research is being done on vaccines that can be inhaled.

I’m sure this sounds crazier than it should, but the fact is that powerful entities, including various governments and large industries, are trying to get mRNA into absolutely everything.

You can really go down the rabbit hole trying to figure this one out, but numbers alone reveal a push in consumer behavior that cannot be ignored.  In March 2020, Moderna posted a profit of $520 million.  After peaking at nearly $23 billion in June 2022 at $10.65 billion in June 2023, they’ve still shown incredible growth in the last three and a half years.

When companies (especially companies with shareholders that include legislators and heads of state) start making huge profits, they don’t want those revenue streams slipping away just because everyone’s getting healthy on their own again.  You can see the push for mRNA vaccines in everything.  mRNA vaccines for flu, Zika, RSV, HIV, CMV, and cancer are in human trials.

There is also a push to get mRNA into livestock.  An RNA-based vaccine platform has been in use for commercial pork since 2018. While no mRNA vaccines have been used in beef production, they are being researched.

Similarly, for poultry, while no mRNA vaccines are currently in use in the U.S., French pharmaceutical companies are conducting trials for mRNA in their poultry.

Our federal government has made commitments toward promoting biotechnology and biomanufacturing, and interested parties are trying to make money by getting biotech (like medical treatments using mRNA platforms for delivery) into everything.  And, of course, this is all done in the name of public health, but if this was truly about health, they would be telling us to eat less processed food, not more.

Hiding food production from consumers facilitates all kinds of tampering with the food supply.  This is not for our benefit.

Lab-grown fruit isn’t in stores. Yet.

Fortunately, the technology to grow things that actually look like pieces of fruit is a long way off.  If you go to the store and buy an apple, you know it grew on a tree.  And even when it comes to jams or smoothies, foods in which it would be easy to add cell culture lines instead of real fruit, the cost is prohibitive right now.  Cell-cultured fruit is too expensive to sneak into other foods.

But it’s worth following this technology.  And if you’re not in the habit of cooking from scratch, there will never be a better time to start.  The less you have to rely on grabbing a bag of “whatever” to fill you up, the less you have to worry about eating something you may not be comfortable with.

What are your thoughts about lab-grown fruit? Would you knowingly eat it? What pros and cons, if any, do you see? Do you think this will make its way to grocery stores?

Sound off on this story on the Late Prepper Substack.

About Marie Hawthorne

A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her.

What are Smart Cities?

“Satellite city” just refers to a smaller city next to a larger one.   Think Fort Worth and Dallas.  It’s possible that Auntie got her words mixed up and meant to say “Smart City” instead of satellite city.  Or, she could have meant that Lahaina was supposed to be a satellite city for something bigger that was slated to be built.

Smart Cities are a different matter entirely. (People often use “smart city” and “digital city” interchangeably.)  TWI, a multinational engineering and consulting firm, defines a smart city as one that “uses information and communication technology (ICT) to improve operational efficiency, share information with the public and provide a better quality of government service and citizen welfare”

Engineering firms like this believe that increased data collection through the use of cameras and sensors in cities can improve citizens’ quality of life by streamlining traffic and relieving congestion.  There are projects already in place to turn places like Tokyo, Singapore, New York City, and Reykjavic into smart cities.

Smart cities aren’t a “conspiracy theory.” They’re engineering projects that have been underway for quite some time already.

Maui was actually home to an early smart city project, called JUMPSmart Maui.  American and Japanese researchers installed electric vehicle charging stations throughout the island and worked with Nissan Leaf owners to collect data about how well the charging stations actually worked.  This project explains why Maui residents have smart cities on their radar.

It’s important to note that we’re told not all smart city concepts consist of individualized data collection.  While some smart cities, like those in China, certainly can use facial recognition tech to track individuals, companies trying to sell their services in Western countries insist that data collection can be done anonymously and only be used for traffic relief.

But we must remember that this can change depending on political winds.  Our cell phone data was supposed to be anonymous, too, and yet the CDC bought the data from phone companies to evaluate compliance during lockdowns.  I see no reason to assume data about movement within cities would remain permanently anonymous and inviolate, either.

Look at the Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) in London.  Mayor Sadiq Khan installed thousands of cameras across London to determine whether or not vehicles in the city comply with emissions standards, which most older vehicles do not.  Many small business owners cannot afford to simply buy new vans, but noncompliant vehicles are fined £12.50 per day.  In response, gangs of Londoners have vandalized huge numbers of traffic cameras.

Despite the promises of politicians and city planners, these cameras are not popular.

Then there are 15 minute cities

A “15 minute city” refers to a city in which a person’s home and everything they need can be reached within a 15-minute walk or bike ride.

This, also, is getting a trial run in the U.K.  Oxford has divided the city into six zones, and private cars will need permits to go into different zones, or they could face fines. While Oxford legitimately has traffic problems, residents are concerned that it will kill business in the city center because it will be so much more difficult for people to reach, and also simply push the traffic issues to surrounding areas as people are forced to change their driving routes.

British city planners claim the goal is to get more people to use public transportation.  That can work, theoretically, if you live in an area where public transportation has not become dangerous, but that is increasingly rare.

I’ve lived in cities where you didn’t need to own a car.  Depending on your phase of life, it can work out quite nicely.  But I can’t imagine it working as a parent of 2+ teenagers with disparate interests.  Being stuck in a 15-minute radius would severely curtail my children’s opportunities to learn, socialize, and develop as human beings.  And it’s a killer for small businesses.

Yet the 15-minute city concept has been heavily promoted by the C40 Climate Leadership Group, a global network of nearly 100 mayors of major cities.

Again, this is not a conspiracy theory.  C40 is a real group of mayors of real cities.  Do you live in Houston or Miami?  You live in a city run by a mayor who has made a commitment to work toward a 15-minute city.

There is a push to retrofit existing cities to a 15-minute model.  But there are entirely new communities being planned, too.

These communities ARE coming

We’ve written before about the Dutch farmer protests.  The Dutch government has been forcibly purchasing farms to meet the EU’s nitrogen reduction standards, but the Dutch know that this has less to do with the environment and more to do with Tristate City.

The proposed Tristate City will be able to house 45 million people.  Supporters include property developers, pension funds, and Utrecht’s economic board.  They believe that Dutch cities are currently too small to compete with Asian megalopolises, and they believe this will be the wave of the future.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., a group called Flannery Associates has spent about $800 million purchasing approximately 52,000 acres northeast of San Francisco, right next to Travis Air Force Base.  For years, this organization had been shrouded in mystery.  Yet, within the past two weeks, this group has come forward with a website launch for their proposed utopia.

California Forever, the parent group behind Flannery Associates, promises a vibrant town powered by solar energy, full of walkable neighborhoods, and high-paying jobs.

But Flannery did not endear itself to the community with its years of secrecy and then its aggressive buying tactics.  Their assumption that they can build a brand new city, taking as much as water as they want, has not gone over well.  Local landowners, as well as Congressmen Mike Thompson and John Garamandi, have been intensely frustrated with the project owners and do not want the utopian city to go through.

And yet the members of California Forever are powerful billionaires.  The group includes Stripe co-founders John and Patrick Collison, venture capitalist Michael Moritz, Marc Andreessen and his venture capital fund, LinkedIn founder (and Epstein associate) Reid Hoffman, venture capitalists Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and the philanthropist/widow of Steve Jobs, Laurene Jobs.  The project is spearheaded by former Goldman Sachs investor Jan Sramek.

Sramek may be a 36 year old investing prodigy, but he has been incredibly vague on details regarding blueprints and environmental permitting, as well as financing for the people who may actually want to live there.

In a perfect world, jumping through the legal hurdles needed for a project like this would be impossible.  The area is zoned for agriculture, and the existing communities of Solano County don’t want to change it.

Incidentally, a lot of Smart Cities are in wildfire-prone areas

And Solano County is prone to wildfires.  The LNU Lightning Complex fires, California’s 6th most destructive wildfires, torched part of Solano County in 2020.  Locals say that the fire protection in Solano County is already underfunded.  Putting a new city, planned to include massive solar farms (which are a fire risk on their own) will be putting additional stress on an infrastructure that’s already not up to code.

And you know, it’s kind of funny how people seem to keep putting up Smart Cities in fire-prone areas.  You’d think that if you were going to dump tons of money into an area to improve the technology, they’d prioritize fire safety.

Just look at Kelowna, up in British Columbia.  It was devastated by wildfires in 2003.  Experts made recommendations, at the time, to avoid such destructive wildfires in the future but longtime local residents complain that no real changes were ever made.  It’s like no one cared that much about whether or not Kelowna burned.

It’s not like Kelowna is some poverty-stricken area, either.  In fact, it has the distinction of being Canada’s first “real-world 5G smart city.”   The government was willing to dump money into fancy new cameras and a 5G network. You’d think they want to keep the area from burning down.

You might be wondering why this matters

It matters because there is a method to the madness.  Smart Cities, cities where constant surveillance is the norm, are coming.  The move into them is not organic. It’s being driven.

Climate change is being used as an excuse for us to pack into heavily surveilled cities to reduce our carbon footprint, and the mainstream media has been pointing to this year’s wildfires as an example of climate catastrophe.  The head of the UN announced this summer that we had entered an era of “global boiling.”

Global boiling has supposedly led to both the Maui fires as well as the Canadian fires. This is supposed to scare us so much that we’re ready to make drastic lifestyle changes.

Except there are a few problems with this scenario.

First of all, 2023 has had heat records broken in some areas, but other parts of the world have had unusually cool summers.  There has been a great deal of hullaballoo about the “hottest summer on record,” but averages have only barely made it past those of the 1930s.  (source)

Second, these fires have been anything but natural.  Recent evidence has come forth that Hawaii Electric turned the power off 6 hours before the string of deadly fires that destroyed Lahaina.  Whether it was a Directed Energy Weapon or good old-fashioned gasoline we won’t know for some time, and personally, I’m not sure how much it matters.   I hope as the lawsuit between Maui County and Hawaii Electric proceeds, solid facts will emerge.  For now, all we know is that there was nothing “natural” about this supposed wildfire.

Up in Canada, you can find all kinds of videos and accusations being made online about who’s responsible for the fires.  Some of them might be overblown but we know for a fact people have been arrested for arson.  Arson and climate change are not the same thing!

If you think the talk about smart cities is hyperbolic, look at the talk about climate change.  Reading the UN’s website, they treat an impending man-made climate cataclysm as a fact despite public debate from climate scientists worldwide.

Or listen to King Charles talk about how this is humanity’s “last chance” to save the planet despite the fact that the climate change predictions made in the 90s and early 2000s about what the 2020s are being proven seriously wrong.

The climate doom rhetoric is utterly ridiculous, yet we’re supposed to take everything King Charles says as gospel and dismiss Auntie?  No, sorry, not buying it.

I don’t know whether or not King Charles believes his own rhetoric.  I kind of suspect he doesn’t, considering how much beachfront property he owns.  But it is clear: the powerful groups he is part of have a vision for the future that includes more surveillance for the rest of us.

We need to be paying attention

This website is about preparedness.  An awareness of the political class’s goals will help us to see what’s coming and think about what we personally can do to keep our families happy and healthy.

What are your thoughts about Smart Cities? Are they real or just another conspiracy theory? Do you think there will be a push to move us all into them or will they just be available for those who choose to live there? What do you see as the pros and cons? Do you believe plans for Smart Cities are behind some of the horrific disasters that have been occurring? What about the massive land purchases?

Let’s discuss at our Late Prepper Substack.

About Marie Hawthorne

A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her. Article cross-posted from The Organic Prepper.

When people see current systems failing, they are more likely to be open to bigger changes.  As Daisy noted, when FedNow was announced in March, it came on the heels of multiple large bank failures.

Likewise, many people now recognize that the worldwide response to Covid was a total fiasco.  The WHO is trying to use this as an excuse to centralize control. The causes behind both the bank failures and the events surrounding Covid are still highly debatable.  People worldwide have been discussing these issues for years.

Europeans may lose their ability to even complain about current events.

Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) is coming online this August.  The DSA aims to curtail illegal online activity and restrict targeted advertising. The largest companies, those with over 45 million European users, will face fines of up to 6% of their annual turnover if they fail to comply with the new rules.  They will have to be transparent about how they moderate content, advertise, and use algorithmic processes. Hosting services and domain registrars are now responsible for reporting criminal offenses to authorities and cooperating with national law enforcement.

Like many other laws, much of the Digital Services Act seems reasonable on the face.  I don’t like targeted ads.  I think it would be nice for people that have been de-platformed from social media to understand why.

However, the DSA also contains provisions for combating disinformation, which means that it can be used to police online speech.

Is this the first we’ve heard of something like this?

No, this isn’t much of a stretch. France has already threatened to kick out Twitter. A voluntary agreement had been put into place between Big Tech and the European Commission to help the largest tech companies comply with the Digital Services Act’s new obligations. Twitter had been on board at first, then backed out due to Elon Musk’s concerns regarding free speech.

Upon Twitter’s withdrawal, France’s Digital Minister Jean-Noël Barrot publicly stated, “Twitter, if it repeatedly doesn’t follow our rules, will be banned from the EU.”  He also posted on Twitter, “Fighting disinformation will be legal obligation under #DSA.”

In general, the DSA grants companies like Twitter a fair amount of leeway in what constitutes disinformation.  However, it does contain a crisis mechanism that will grant the European Commission much more power to restrict speech in times of crisis.  In the law, “crisis” has been given the broad definition of extraordinary circumstances that can lead to a “serious threat to public security or public health.” This is a pretty broad definition, and its lack of specificity has already drawn the ire of civil rights groups.

And it doesn’t help that the EU has already shut down large media outlets without so much as a court order.  After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the European Commission passed a series of measures aimed at curtailing the spread of Russia Times and Sputnik, both media outlets paid to propagandize for the Russian government.  Cable, satellite, IP-TV, internet service providers, and internet video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and TikTok all removed content within a short time period.

I don’t think Russia is totally innocent here, but that’s beside the point.  My point is simply that the EU has already shown itself willing to shut down huge media outlets.  In the same way that FedNow is putting in a framework for CBDCs, in the same way that the WHO is setting up a framework for worldwide health programs, the Digital Services Act is putting in a framework for widespread internet control within Europe.

And once it’s up and running there, who says this framework can’t spread?

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed at the size and breadth of freedom-restricting frameworks being put into place.  Megalomaniacs have always dreamt of world domination; the only difference now is that our technology and global interconnectedness have made one-world government a real possibility.

The desire to centralize power has been around longer than the World Economic Forum.  Read Carroll Quigley’s The Anglo-American Establishment, which you can download for free here, and you’ll see, in letters written between British aristocrats a century ago, that this is not a new impulse.

And it is not just a desire for raw power but a belief in their own righteousness that makes globalists so dangerous.  Watch some of the videos of the WEF; read some of the letters re-printed in The Anglo-American Establishment.  There has been a group of very wealthy, very powerful people absolutely convinced that they have a moral duty to manage the rest of us for a long time now.

Personally, I think this kind of arrogance is insane.

But thinking that isn’t enough.  The only way to counter the frameworks of control currently being put in place is to come up with our own frameworks for resistance.

In a recent interview with Redacted, former British Parliamentary candidate Jim Ferguson had some interesting thoughts on how to think of ourselves in facing down this power-mad behemoth of wannabe world governors.  He said that resistance could take place at three levels: strategic, tactical, and operational.

The strategic level would be international, consisting of people getting together in agreement to work toward national sovereignty for individual countries around the globe.  This is what Ferguson does himself. This would be the role of politicians that truly had their countries’ best interests at heart.

The tactical level would be regional, addressing specific issues.  This would consist of groups like the various Freedom Convoys or the Dutch Farmers’ Defense Force.

And finally, at the operational level, we have the people that just keep things running.  This would be those of us engaged in the day-to-day work of growing food, keeping the lights on, and raising the next generation of children.  It’s easy to see many of these tasks as insignificant in the face of powerful global movements, but they aren’t.

Join the parallel economy.

If you are stuck in a job that you feel is meaningless, think about what kind of productive hobby you could pursue, something that would give you a spot in a parallel economy.  This could be something you and your family do together.  If you need direction, look at what the World Economic Forum wants us to do, and then run the opposite way.

Henry Kissinger said a long time ago, “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”

If you want to take back some control in your life, perhaps you should start with your food supply.

We talk about food production a lot on this website and for good reason.  Most people can produce at least something, and producing one thing often leads to the development of many other skills.  For many people, some productive tomato plants in their suburban backyards lead to learning how to can, which leads them to buy in bulk from farmers’ markets, which leads them to meet like-minded people, and it just keeps going on.

Once you start doing something truly productive, other pursuits will eventually follow.  Can you always plan this all out?  Of course not.  The important thing is to start and to be willing to see where your journey toward increasing independence takes you.

The best way to resist these frameworks for control currently being put into place is to develop our own set of frameworks for resistance.  I think Ferguson’s way of thinking about strategic, tactical, and operational levels is a good place to start.

It may be hard to think of yourself as part of something meaningful when you spend your day engaged in menial tasks.  However, if you can begin to see yourself as part of a parallel economy – part of an active resistance – you will gain enough strength and confidence to oppose these forces that want to see us all in their rigid little frameworks.

Owning nothing and happy about it.

What’s your take?

Do you think the Digital Services Act is going to be used to gain global control? Do you think this is going to be implemented in the United States? Do you have any suggestions on some things we can do to gain independence from a situation like this?

Let’s discuss it in the comments section.

About Marie Hawthorne

A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her. Article cross-posted from The Organic Prepper.

The movie starts off with the kidnapping of a brother and sister from Honduras by a young woman posing as a talent agent.  You then see the American Homeland Security agent, Tim Ballard, recover the little boy.  After the little boy’s rescue, he asks Tim if he can find his sister, too, and most of the movie involves Tim trying to find out what happened to the little girl.

It’s an action story of a man trying to put a family back together; it’s also a story of Tim Ballard’s personal journey in leaving the security of a government job to do what he believes is right.

Here’s some background.

I watched Jordan Peterson’s interview with both Tim Ballard and Jim Caviezel, who plays Tim in the movie, and I recommend it because it adds a bit of depth to what was going through Tim’s mind.  Tim’s wife is only a very minor character in the movie, but in his interview with Jordan Peterson, Tim tells Jordan that she was actually one of the major drivers behind his actions.

Tim is a devout Mormon and had six children of his own at the time he was trying to track down the little girl from Honduras.  When it became clear that trying to find her would mean leaving his government job, he tells Jordan he almost wanted his wife to tell him to just come home.  Instead, she asked what he’d do if one of their children was missing, and told him, “I’m not going to allow you to jeopardize my salvation by not doing this.”  Tim’s wife said she was willing to live in a tent if that was what it took for them to live with clean consciences.

Here are some key takeaways from Sound of Freedom.

This movie provided so much food for thought it’s hard to know where to start.

The movie, combined with the Jordan Peterson interview, struck me in that it really shows what a strong marriage between two people firm in their beliefs can accomplish in society.  I’ve been divorced for a long time, though, so maybe that’s made me more impressed by the couples who do get it right.

More than this, the movie shows how easy it is for little children to be dragged around, unnoticed, through seedy harbors and party towns and sometimes into the background of American living.  The little boy is rescued at a checkpoint between the U.S.-Mexican border when it was more secure.  Tim Ballard says in multiple interviews that this is how it actually happened; they had a photo of the little boy and his sex-offending “guardian,” and so were able to throw the offender in jail and reunite the little boy with his dad.

But this event took place ten years ago. Our borders are a sieve now, and things have changed.

In an interview with Redacted,  Tim Ballard talks about how our border policies under Biden have made the problem of child exploitation so much worse.  Because the border has been so much more open, more people are willing to take risks in heading toward the border.

Many smugglers work with “sponsors” in the U.S.  They write down a name or phone number and pin it to a child’s shirt.  When they arrive in the U.S., government employees turn the children over to these “sponsors,” who will put the children to all kinds of work.

Tim Ballard is not the only person making these claims. Tara Lee Rodas, who worked at an intake site in California, came forward and testified to Congress that this was happening.

We think that we’re being nice by letting everyone into the States, but we aren’t.  There is absolute chaos at our southern border.  And chaos engenders atrocities.

The thriving business of human trafficking

Human traffickers have been making more than $14 million per day smuggling people through the Mexican-American border. Human trafficking is the fastest-growing international crime trade, generating about $16 trillion per year worldwide.

Some places are trying to tackle this.  A great deal of prostitution-related crime occurs in hotels. In 2019, Florida required hotels to watch out for trafficking schemes, and in 2023, they cut the time for hotels to get into compliance in half before issuing fines.

Other places just won’t admit it’s a real problem.  California is one of the largest sites for human trafficking in the United States, and yet California Democrats just killed a bill that would make human trafficking a felony.

Human trafficking is big business, and it goes to the top of society.  Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell are probably the most famous, and they were known for hobnobbing with the likes of Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew.

And maybe that’s why the MSM hates this movie.

Which probably explains why this movie ran into so many problems.  It took five years to be released.  The script was actually written back in 2015, and they finished filming in 2018.  After the movie was filmed, the producers made a distribution deal with 20th Century Fox.  However, in 2019 Disney purchased 20th Century Fox, and they sat on the movie.  In 2023, Angel Studios obtained distribution rights, which is why we can see it in the theaters now.

Now that it has been released, audiences love it. Sound of Freedom has a 100% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.  It even has a 77% critic score, which is somewhat surprising given all the negative press attention it’s received.

CNN claimed the movie fed into QAnon conspiracy theories despite the fact that human trafficking is a well-documented problem.

Oh, wait, CNN fired high-level employees Chris Cuomo, John Griffin, and Rick Saleeby after they were all arrested for crimes involving children.  Maybe it’s not so surprising that the network is trashing a movie that portrays child molesters as the bad guys, after all.

It makes me wonder what Rolling Stone has to hide. They called Sound of Freedom a “superhero movie for dads with brainworms.”

 We are at a strange time in American history.

When I was young, being in a homosexual relationship was scandalous.  You could lose your job over that.  When same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide, most people didn’t have a problem with it. I think a lot of us knew gay people that had some legitimate complaints surrounding health insurance and power of attorney for their partners, and it didn’t seem unreasonable to allow them access to the same kinds of benefits heterosexual couples enjoyed.

The trans movement’s been weirder.  There’s not a specific set of legal privileges they want access to. Instead, they want other people to recognize their ideas about gender identity and play into their fantasies.  The destruction of women’s spaces by letting biological men into women’s bathrooms and women’s sports leagues has turned the issue from ideological to physical.

And it’s still not stopping.  It hasn’t been enough to destroy sexual norms and women’s sports.  Have you seen the drag marchers chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children”?   They’re not joking.  People with a wide variety of sexual preferences have always been around, but for a long time, behaviors were limited by cultural and religious norms.  Those have been destroyed.

As I child, I had limited experience with some people that just assumed, “Well, kids that age don’t really understand anyway.”  There are more perverts out there than most people want to admit.  The majority of the population is not particularly violent or perverted, but they will just look away when confronted with ugly things.

Sound of Freedom begs people not to look away.

In case you were concerned, there are no scenes whatsoever of violence against children in the movie.  They just do a really good job of having Jim Caviezel look upset at the right times, and the child actors also do a good job of looking scared at the right moments so that you can tell what’s going on without actually seeing it.

At one point in the movie, when Tim Ballard is trying to convince some wealthy individuals to help him, he tells them that child sex trafficking is the highest growing international crime syndicate, already passing up weapons dealing and soon to pass the drug cartels.  He also tells them that, if it is not stopped, the pain of these children will spread until it reaches everything until it touches even the people that think they cannot be touched.

You really should see it, though you might want to buy your tickets early.  I went during the middle of the week, thinking I didn’t need to worry about finding a seat, but the theater was packed.  If you get inspired to take some kind of action or support Tim Ballard’s charity, that’s great.

If not, it’s still a really good action movie.

Have you seen Sound of Freedom?

Have you seen the movie? What did you think of it? If not, do you plan to do so? Why or why not? Do you have any thoughts on why the MSM is so adamantly opposed to the movie?

Let’s discuss it in the comments section.

About the Author

A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her. Article cross-posted from The Organic Prepper.

We wrote a few months ago about how consumers have not expressed interest in novel proteins.  People around the world just want meat.  However, this push to change our diet doesn’t seem like it’s going away, so let’s first look at what this product actually is and why we’re being told we should eat it.

What is “lab-grown meat?”

Lab-grown meat, which will be labeled in stores as “cell-cultivated,” is a highly processed product that mimics the taste and texture of real meat.  Proponents claim it will save the environment and end animal cruelty   The truth, however, is a little more complicated.

Scientists begin by taking cell samples, either from live animals or from stored cellular lines, and place them in a soup of amino acids, sugars, salts, and other compounds needed by the animal tissue to replicate.  In about three weeks, sheets of muscle tissue will be present in the fermentation tanks, and these are used to create dishes that look like they contain meat.

So, first of all, these are not vegan products.  Scientists are taking actual animal cells and forcing them to replicate.  Additionally, fetal bovine serum is one of the ingredients used in making these products.  Ever heard of fetal bovine serum?  It’s made with blood from calf fetuses. FBS is obtained by killing pregnant cows along with their calf fetuses, which means that not only is cell-cultivated meat not acceptable for vegans, but it’s also not acceptable for people that insist on humane animal husbandry.

And let’s think about what else is in the soup that feeds the growing animal cells.  As explained by Alan Lewis in the Environmental Health Symposium last year, the soup in which the animal cells are cultured contains sugars and amino acids, which largely come from corn and soy.  These crops are almost exclusively grown in huge monocultures with all their attendant health and environmental concerns.

And then we have the energy and industrial facilities required to produce this product.  Even proponents of cell-cultivated meat admit that, as our energy grid currently stands, cell-cultivated meat has a far larger carbon footprint than any kind of livestock system.

They say this “meat” is ethical, but it’s not.

Trying to pretend that these food products are the ethical equivalent of a pastured, custom-processed chicken from the farm outside your metro area is incredibly misleading.

This strikes me in particular because, for years, I had a small side business producing truly pastured, custom-processed chickens.  I still produce them for my own household.

Claiming industrially produced meat-like products are somehow more ethical than the chickens raised outside my back door, on feed produced two hours away and then processed behind my shed, is not only insulting but absurdly wrong.  The carbon footprint going into my birds is minuscule compared to the carbon footprint involved in these energy-intensive industrial facilities.

And I’m willing to bet that my chickens taste a lot better, too.

So, why is lab-grown meat being pushed so hard?

Why the push for this stuff, especially when, as noted before, people don’t really want it?

We’ve already discussed the way in which driving conventional farmers and ranchers out of business will consolidate the food supply into the hands of a few very powerful players. And while I think those points are as valid as ever, there are a few other things I’d like to consider here.

This push away from animal husbandry, this drive to demonize conventional farmers and ranchers, has been taking its cues from the climate movement.  And climate activists talk like scientists but think like religious zealots.  A high percentage of the world’s population that considers itself educated has very little real connection with nature and its systems; they idealize nature while at the same time avoiding getting their hands dirty.  This disconnection from living, breathing, eating, copulating, and killing nature makes them easy prey for whatever scheme the folks looking to capitalize on climate alarmism come up with.

Promoters of lab-grown meat are part of this.  They have an emotional reaction to much of what goes into conventional meat production, and when you confront them about the use of a product like FBS, they just insist that they’re working on it, the usage is temporary, and a more ethical solution is just around the technological corner.

Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.  There are so many trade secrets involved in these high-tech formulations that it’s actually pretty hard to find out what, precisely, goes into these highly bioengineered food products.  What we do know is that these facilities are astoundingly expensive and complicated, and to produce cell-cultivated chicken at a scale even close to the current demand for chicken is completely unrealistic.  But, to the true believer, that’s all beside the point because they operate on faith.

It’s also worth thinking about this approval of cell-cultivated chicken within the framework of kamikaze marketing, as Daisy’s previously discussed.  In America, as most of us over-40s understood it, companies exist to make money, and so when products flop, one would expect the folks at corporate headquarters to shift gears.  This doubling down by corporations on unwanted products does not make sense.

However, thanks to massive amounts of investor money tied to ESG scores flowing into companies, consumer preferences and the power to boycott don’t have as much political clout as they used to.  This is as true with food products as it is with tuck-friendly bathing suits.

It’s all part of an agenda.

Finally, 2030 is rapidly approaching, and I think this drive toward engineered food is merely one more marker on the path to a society where we own nothing and are all happy about it.  Elites have all kinds of opinions about how the regular people around the world should be living, and this approval of cell-cultivated meat should serve a reminder that much of what happens in the corporate world is about their plans rather than true consumer preference.

The World Economic Forum has stated it wants to nudge meat off the menu. We’ve talked about nudging before on this website, and this is something the White House intends to get in on, too.  Just last September, the White House hosted a conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health.  Moving forward, there will be a huge public-private partnership aimed at changing the way Americans eat.

Those who are connected with nature won’t want lab-grown “meat.”

I can’t imagine cell-cultivated chicken sounding appealing to anyone who has actually raised chickens or enjoyed home-raised meat.  Selling cell-cultivated meats would only work on a population completely separated from actual farms, a population stuck in 15-minute cities, whose images of “farms” consist only of huge monocultures and animals crowded into chutes, getting ready for slaughter.

Farm life consists of far more than that.  I used to do survey work and have traveled extensively through small towns throughout the Midwest, the Gulf Coast, and the Western Slope of the Rockies. Watching cattle graze at dawn is beautiful.  Watching chickens chase bugs (or occasionally mice) is pretty funny.   If you’ve ever seen someone working a team of Clydesdales, you know that the humans and animals involved add to the beauty of the landscape, not detract from it.

Promoters of cell-cultivated meat like to dismiss these kinds of farms as artisanal and impractical for most of the world’s population.  And it’s true that many people can’t afford artisanal food, but more people can produce at least some of their own food than they probably realize.  The recent approval of cell-cultured chicken should serve to remind us that, if you’re a meat eater, finding independent food suppliers has never been more important.  Better yet, learn to raise some of your own meat yourself.

I was raised by die-hard suburbanites, but I was able to learn how to produce much of my own food as an adult.  There is a big push to end conventional animal husbandry, but if you look around, there is a lot of good advice available for those who want to become more self-sufficient.  If you feel at all inspired to become more involved in your food supply, now is the time to start learning.

What do you think about lab-grown “meat?”

What do you think about the push toward lab-grown “meat?” Would you eat it? Would you choose it over real meat? Do you think there’s an agenda at play here or is it just an effort to feed the world?

Let’s discuss it in the comments section.

About the Author

A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her.

Article cross-posted from The Organic Prepper.

The OP has suffered a lot from deplatforming, as Daisy has documented. This has been very difficult financially, but we’re far from alone. One of the biggest public figures regularly getting shut down is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an official presidential candidate. RFK is constantly getting banned and smeared as an “anti-vaxxer.” But is he really that crazy?

Some background on RFK Jr.

RFK Jr. was born famous and privileged, except, of course, for his father and uncle getting assassinated in his childhood. For a long time, RFK Jr. was best known as an environmental lawyer. He became involved in cleaning up the Hudson River in the 1980s as part of court-mandated community service from a heroin arrest. His community service inspired him to work with multiple groups dedicated to cleaning up the Hudson, and he eventually founded Waterkeeper Alliance in 1999.

His environmental hero status didn’t last, however. In 2005, he entered the vaccine debate after being contacted by parents of vaccine-injured children. Since then, it has been hard to find an article about RFK Jr. that doesn’t begin by describing him as an “anti-vaxxer.”

For about fifteen years, most people (myself included) were content to dismiss him and the anti-vaccine movement in general as cranks. I raised my children with all their shots, trusting the medical profession to keep us healthy.

Until Covid.

As the “two weeks to flatten the curve” turned into months and sometimes years, many people began to realize there was something deeply wrong with many of our formerly-trusted institutions. We saw businesses get shut down and livelihoods ruined. Decisions were not being made in the best interests of normal Americans, those who ran small businesses and relied on institutions like the public schools.

When the jabs came along, things got weirder. Natural immunity was totally ignored and the nation was expected to submit itself as guinea pigs for this treatment that had never been tested for long-term effects. When vaccine mandates began to be implemented, RFK Jr.’s advocacy for parental choice regarding medical treatments started to sound a lot more reasonable.

It became obvious that there was a lot of lying and manipulation going on. I became increasingly suspicious of “official” voices and more willing to listen to figures like RFK Jr. I bought his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, almost as soon as it was available.

I read the whole thing. All 492 pages detailing one scam after another. You may not agree with RFK Jr. on every issue, but no one can deny that he knows his material. And no one has sued him for libel or slander, which makes me think the book is mostly accurate.

The Real Anthony Fauci sold over a million copies and has more than 23,000 reviews culminating in 4.8 stars, yet garnered no book reviews from legacy media.

So, why are the Democrats so afraid of him?

On pages 142-142, RFK Jr. recounts going from a sought-after guest speaker whose articles were regularly featured in legacy media to a total outcast. His status changed abruptly once he turned from cleaning up waterways to pharmaceutical companies. However, he has deep pockets, he’s got the Kennedy name, and he hasn’t gone away.

As the public, in general, became more and more distrustful of the Covid response, people became more willing to listen to non-mainstream voices like RFK Jr. His non-profit, Children’s Health Defense, saw its profits double in 2020.

His “Defeat the Mandates” rally in January 2022 was attended by over 30,000 people.

After The Real Anthony Fauci was published, Tucker Carlson hosted RFK Jr. more regularly. The two men had an interview on April 19, the day RFK Jr. announced his plan to run as a Democratic presidential candidate. On April 24, five days later, Fox fired Tucker, leading to speculation that Tucker’s willingness to give RFK Jr. a large platform was part of the reason for his dismissal.

RFK Jr. has been interviewed by the likes of Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson. Despite being endlessly labeled “crazy” and “extremist,” after watching him interact with a variety of hosts, he comes across as anything but.

After immense social pressure, Instagram had to reinstate his original account as well as his campaign account once he announced his presidential bid. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has endorsed RFK, much to the outcry of the MSM. He’s proven difficult to silence.

He would be very impressive in a presidential debate.

Rather than name-calling, if RFK Jr. is so dead-wrong about vaccines and children’s health, why doesn’t anyone actually engage him?

People refuse to engage in arguments with RFK Jr. because they can’t. He’s a long-time trial lawyer, so he’s good at arguing, and he’s also very, very intelligent. He’s comfortable reading scientific material and understands much of the debates around childhood health and vaccines in a way that many people, even many college-educated people, just don’t.

For example, in The Real Anthony Fauci, on pages 285-286, he discusses the debate between Louis Pasteur and Antoine Bechamp back in the 19th century. To simplify: Pasteur is the guy who realized that germs spread diseases. He posited that, by keeping environments germ-free, we could avoid infections. Obviously, there is a lot of truth in this. It is the model Western healthcare runs on.

Bechamp, however, who lived at about the same time as Pasteur, argued that it wasn’t so simple. He thought we could never kill every imaginable germ, nor should we try to. Instead, Bechamp thought our time would be better spent focusing on optimal nutrition and basic sanitation so that our bodies would be best able to fight off whatever harmful germs came along. We know, at this point, that there is truth in this as well, and RFK Jr. uses Bechamp’s line of thinking to posit that maybe we should focus more on higher-quality food and a healthier environment for children rather than more pharmaceutical products.

There is nothing crazy about this, and in fact, the more we uncover about the importance of the microbiome in our intestines, the more it makes sense. In David Quammen’s book The Tangled Tree, featuring the lifetime work of microbiologist Carl Woese, he puts forth the recent research indicating that we understand the microscopic world far less than we think we do. Simply lumping microscopic life forms into “good” and “bad” categories, and then trying to kill off all the “bad” ones, cannot work when the lines between the species are fairly blurry.

Many scientifically-literate individuals understand this to varying degrees, and this is part of the reason that PhDs displayed the most persistent suspicion around the Covid vaccines. Time has proved them correct, as we find that the jabs were, at best, fairly ineffective and, at worst dangerous for certain groups.

Controversial or not, he gets the word out.

And this all goes to prove that RFK Jr. understands issues at a level that most public figures just don’t. His stances are definitely debatable, but they are not unhinged and they don’t come out of nowhere. However, because understanding his point of view well enough to engage in serious argument requires an understanding of both science and history, most pundits find it far simpler to just call him crazy and refuse to let him speak.

But RFK Jr. gets his message out anyway, finding alternative outlets, doing his best to expose the inner workings between Big Government and Big Business.

And this is probably why RFK Jr. is such a thorn in the side of the Democratic establishment. He doesn’t play along with most of the big donors he’s supposed to play along with. He has watched the Democratic Party go from being anti-war, anti-corporate, and pro-free speech to being the party of lockstep conformity. No other family represents the old Democratic Party the way the Kennedy clan does; he is in a unique position to point out the ways in which the Democratic Party has morphed into something completely different than it was even twenty years ago.

RFK Jr. also has a pulse on using media in a way that most establishment figures don’t. During his recent interview with Jordan Peterson, he referenced the first televised presidential debate back in 1960, when young, handsome John F. Kennedy mopped the floor with Richard Nixon.

The way in which his uncle used the newest form of media to his advantage sixty years ago obviously made an impression on RFK Jr. He said that Trump won the 2016 election, in part, because he used Twitter to his advantage, even though legacy media treated his campaign as a joke. RFK Jr. believes that the 2024 race will be hugely influenced by podcasts, and he has a real advantage here because, unlike so many other candidates, he is ready and willing to sit down and debate for two or three hours at a time.

He’s an interesting candidate.

I should make it clear, again, that I disagree with RFK Jr. on plenty of issues. I used to work in oil and gas, and I think his characterization of “clean” wind and solar is way off. I could argue with him on that.

But I’m happy he’s out there, throwing rocks at establishment windows and forcing powerful figures to either explain themselves or prove by their silence that they have something to hide.

What are your thoughts? Is RFK Jr. a viable candidate? What do you think of him, pros and cons? Do you think he has any chance in his presidential run?

Let’s discuss him, the media response, and his candidacy in the comments section.

About Marie Hawthorne

A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her.

Article cross-posted from The Organic Prepper.

I encourage you to read Daisy’s FedNow article.  It will give you a good idea of how digital payments will be initially billed as a convenience, then something we can’t do business without.  Read the article, and then imagine digital currency on a global scale.

This is in the works, too.

Worldwide digital currency

On April 10, the Digital Currency Monetary Authority (DCMA) launched its international central bank digital currency.  Proponents claim that this Universal Monetary Unit (UMU, Ü) will be used exactly like any other form of digital money.

Side note: DCMA has also been referring to the Universal Money Units as Unicoin.  However, since there is a separate cryptocurrency also going by the name “Unicoin,” we’ll refer to this as UMU. (source)

You may be wondering, what is the DCMA?  What countries is it affiliated with?  Is it part of the  United Nations?

As explained in this Redacted video, DCMA is run by bankers and unnamed government officials from around the world.

The DCMA is described as “a world leader in the advocacy of digital currency and monetary policy innovations for governments and central banks.  Membership within the DCMA consists of sovereign states, central banks, commercial and retail banks, and other financial institutions.”

On its website, the DCMA states that its mission “is to enable trade globalization through the monetary integration of international payments and settlements while strengthening national economies [sic] monetary sovereignty.  The first wave of cryptographic cash was designed for public untrusted networks.  The DMCA reimagines the next wave of cryptographic innovations engineered for adoption by central banks, retail and commercial banks, Fintech, governments, and cryptocurrency exchanges.”

Here’s what makes UMU Unicoin different

UMU’s big advantage, what makes this different from individual countries’ proposed CBDCs, is that it can be used for cross-border transfers of money.  Offering UMU users discounted foreign exchange rates is part of the plan to encourage adoption.  International Monetary Fund (IMF) representatives claim that right now, exchanging currencies between different nations slows down transactions and increases the cost of doing business; they claim that UMU will dramatically speed things up.  Like FedNow, they are using the convenience of instant payments, coupled with the promise of the best foreign exchange rates, as a method of promoting this new payment framework.

As of January, 114 countries, representing over 95% of the world’s economy, are exploring CBDCs, and a few have already rolled them out.  However, as BeInCrypto noted, the rollouts haven’t gone particularly smoothly, which makes this rollout of a global crypto framework linked to the international banking system somewhat surprising.

Here’s what happened when the Nigerian government tried to force the issue.

China’s use of the digital yuan to enforce its rigid social credit system is well known.  However, we can also look to Nigeria to see what can happen when governments attempt to impose CBDCs on the population.

In 2021, Nigeria became the first African country to implement a CBDC, the eNaira.  Nigeria struggles a great deal with terrorism and counterfeiting operations; CBDC cheerleaders claimed that switching to digital currency would address some of these problems.  Since 35% of Nigerians use cryptocurrencies, government officials assumed that Nigerians would hop right into a CBDC system.

They were wrong.

35% of Nigerians may be comfortable with crypto, but less than 0.5% signed up for the government-issued eNaira.  The ones that did download it gave it lousy ratings.  No one really wanted it; many vendors wouldn’t accept it.

So, the Nigerian government tried forcing everyone to use it.  They restricted cash withdrawals to about US $44 a day or no more than about US $217 a week.

Authorities hoped that this would force people onto the CBDC. Instead, it resulted in chaos.  A tremendous cash shortage ensued, and some governors claimed their territories were “on the verge of anarchy.”

Since then, the Nigerian government has slowed down its rush to become a cashless society.  They had originally planned to be totally cashless by January. This did not work, and people will be able to use their bank notes until the end of 2023. (source)

No one would call this an inspiring success.  But no one seems to want to change courses, either.

Sweden is NOT actually a cashless society.

Mainstream media continually holds Sweden up as an example of a wealthy, functional cashless society, but this is disingenuous.  Sweden’s not actually cashless.  Yes, most Swedes choose not to use cash, but the government has actually passed laws saying that it has to be available.  Why?  Because the Swedish government, quite sensibly, admits that digital money is vulnerable to disruption, whether through natural disasters that disrupt the grid or something like an EMP.  They know that they need backup currency in case of emergency. (source)

Sweden is investigating CBDCs, just like everyone else.  We’ll see where they land.  Interestingly enough, their mostly-cashless society is being sold on digital currency for the same reason the Africans are: the ease of cross-border payments.  The Swedes have been functioning mostly without cash but also without a CBDC.  So why would they want an e-krona?  To make international trade easier, and that brings us right back to the UMU.

Things are not going well in the financial world.

Patterns are emerging.  Failures abound.  Fox just fired its most popular host.  Anheuser-Busch slapped its working-class customer base in the face with its hiring of TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney as a promoter.  It’s cost the company at least $5 billion.

And then the bank failures!  Three out of the four biggest bank failures in American history have occurred in the last two months.  Daisy wrote about First Republic failing on Monday. Signature Bank and Silicon Valley Bank both failed in March.  As of Tuesday, several other regional banks started to collapse, as reported by ZeroHedge.

When small businesses go under, bigger establishments win.  J.P. Morgan Chase is now the biggest bank in the U.S.  As there are fewer and fewer banks to negotiate, implementing new rules (like CBDC) becomes easier because fewer entities need to agree.

The bank bailouts of the past 15 years have been rewarding poor investment decisions and destabilizing the financial system, as explained by Peter Schiff.

We’re at the beginning of another round of crashes, but what is the financial sector doing?  As of May 1, the Biden administration will be slapping those with high credit scores with additional mortgage fees to subsidize home loans for people with poor credit.  We had a collapse in 2008; it looks like we’re at the beginning of another crash.

And yet we insist on incentivizing poor lending behavior.

Businesses are making poor decisions left and right, seemingly heedless of consequences.  Those trying just to make money are being hampered by ESG and CEI scores.  It’s like there’s a conscious effort to destroy business as usual.

The more time goes by, the more I suspect that’s the point.  As Daisy noted in the FedNow article, widespread bank failures will make people desperate, and desperate people become willing to sign on for “solutions” like CBDCs that they otherwise may not have.

Is this the road to global governance?

Once CBDCs are common among nations, UMU will follow.  And UMU will greatly facilitate global governance.

This probably sounds crazier than it should, but we’ve been sleepwalking toward global governance lately.  Look at the WHO’s most recent treaty.  If this gets ratified, which is very likely, all signers will have given sweeping powers to a huge, unelected group of global bureaucrats.  Global currency is just another nail in the global governance coffin.

I don’t think this will happen overnight.  I agree with Rebel Capitalist’s recent assessment that this will be a process. Getting everyone onboard with a CBDC will take time, particularly if governments want to avoid social disruption.  Nigerians were stripping their clothes off and smashing bank machinery in protest when they couldn’t get cash. I imagine American bank owners would prefer to avoid that.

Adding a global layer of infrastructure is that much more work.  But just because it’s five years down the road doesn’t mean we should ignore what’s going on right now.  Frameworks are being put in place that, in a perfect world, could conceivably lead to streamlined international business.  But we don’t live in a perfect world.

Between Covid, and the Afghanistan debacle, and the widespread dysfunction within the business community, I don’t think it’s far-fetched for anyone to harbor serious concerns about the competence and motives of those in power.

CBDCs are a danger to freedom.

The frameworks being constructed will enable a level of surveillance and control that past dictators could only dream about.  We need to call it what it is and do what we can to delay implementation.  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Senator Ted Cruz are both calling for CBDC bans. I don’t live in Texas or Florida, but I applaud those politicians for speaking out about it

Most of us probably need to educate friends and relatives about CBDC, too.  I’ve been shocked at how many people have no idea that this is in the works.  Advertisements for instant payments are all over the place; if most people had better spending habits, this wouldn’t be anywhere near as appealing.  If you have teenagers and young adults in your house, talk about finances with them.  Solid budgeting skills make instant payments unnecessary.  Make the youngsters in your life aware of the costs of constantly doing whatever is most convenient.

Unfortunately, I agree with Daisy in that this is probably going to happen regardless of what we do.  However, we can still do our best to starve the beast by minimizing our digital footprints and doing as much as we can on our own or within a trusted network of friends.  We don’t have to stumble into the New World Order blindly.  We can be difficult.

Two years ago, there was a widespread push to mandate certain medical treatments across the workforce.  People stalled, argued, and filed lawsuits.  Mandates started going away, and just this month, the U.S. is finally ending its vaccine requirement for foreign travelers.

Do I think this is a permanent reprieve?  Oh no.  I think medical passports will come back in some other form, for some other disease.  My point is simply that dragging our collective feet might buy us a little time.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant for government policies as well as laundry.  By spreading awareness about the CBDC and UMU frameworks being put in place, hopefully, we can slow the adoption of these massive surveillance tools.

What are your thoughts?

Do you think UniCoin or Universal Monetary Unit is part of the plan to institute one global currency? Do you think this will move the world further toward digital currencies and cashless societies? What potential problems do you see with that, if any?

Let’s talk about it in the comments.

About Marie Hawthorne

A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her. Article cross-posted from The Organic Prepper.