The predominant system of agriculture I am working in now has been intentionally set up against me and current and future farming generations. Today’s corporate controlled system is bad for farmers, bad for consumers, bad for rural and urban communities and economies, bad for our environment and our climate, and bad for democracy.
We are in this position because the rules (laws, policies and regulations) have been written, and lobbied and paid for by corporate special interests. We are in this position because of corporate-written, bad Farm Bills and bad trade agreements (the main drivers of our farm and food system).
We are here because many of our elected “representatives” don’t really represent us, their constituents or the vast majority of Americans. We’re here because we have a democratic process controlled by that “elephant in the room”–billion dollar multinational corporations.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on The Elephant in the room Is Destroying Family Farms, Rural Communities and Our Democracy
Expanded use of ethanol — enabled by President Biden’s lifting a summertime ban on fuels with a 15 percent blend — is a poor answer to high gasoline prices and a refusal to recognize the failures of the corn-based fuel additive. Reuters described the president’s action a win for the corn lobby, but all others appear to be losers.
Shortcomings of ethanol as an alternative to gasoline have been reported continually since at least 2007 when the U.S. government expanded its requirement that distributors blend ethanol with fuels to reduce dependence on foreign oil. The additive also has been touted as a way to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.
“There is a great danger for the right to food by the development of biofuels,” U.N. human rights advocate Jean Ziegler said at the time. “It (the price) will be paid perhaps by hundreds of thousands of people who will die from hunger,” A year later he called the diversion of food crops to fuel production a “crime against humanity.”
Nina Burleigh of Business Insider who is best known to the world for having “Offered Oral Sex to Bill Clinton to Keep Abortion Legal” found a new mission in life. This time it was focused away from presidential candle sticks to presidential stickers. Specifically, the highly popular “I Did That!” Joe Biden stickers that have appeared pointing at rising prices of gasoline on station pumps during the past year.
…
Her meme hunt for the heinous creator was inspired by Burleigh’s extreme rage at many for blaming poor Joe Biden for the rise in gasoline prices in particular and for inflation in general.
Perhaps she will have a stroke and die. That would be … appropriate.
A homeschool portfolio is a visual record chronicling a child’s entire homeschool year. There are basically two types of portfolios. The first, an academic-focused portfolio, serves as part of an annual assessment per your state homeschool law, and its primary purpose is to show that academic progress has been achieved. The second is meant to be a personal keepsake.
There are several benefits to creating homeschool portfolios. They can be powerful motivators and self-esteem boosters for your child. The simple act of seeing how far he or she has come in a single year can encourage your child to persevere, work harder, or consider setting more challenging goals next year. Invite your kids to join you in the assembly process and have fun reminiscing together as you look back over the school year.
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Thank you, Bill Clinton. (And George H.W. Bush, who fumbled the ball so badly.)
Up until 1993, the federal government merely guaranteed/backed student loans that private lenders gave. This meant that only in the case of someone defaulting on their loan would the government be on the hook, stepping in and paying the college what’s owed.
This amendment completely overhauled that system, making it so that for the vast majority of student loans, the federal government directly made the loans to students. More specifically, the federal government pays the universities/colleges up front, and the student then owes the government that money.
This represented a large shift in the alignment of incentives. When the loans come from the federal gov, there’s much less pressure on schools to compete on price. This is especially true since “increasing max student loan size => making college more accessible to everyone” is a political argument that both major parties benefit from in terms of optics.
Researchers have crystallized the enzyme that makes the natural product stevia taste 200 times as sweet as sugar. The enzyme is a uridine diphosphate–dependent glucosyltransferase, UGT76G1, and it catalyzes the addition of branched glucosides to compounds in stevia.
I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
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Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization – St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers – dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they’re more stylish.
This is the setup for my all-time favorite conspiracy theory, Tartaria. Its true believers say we are those savages. We live in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, Art Deco skyscrapers, etc. But our buildings look like this:
The headquarters of Google, one of the richest corporations in the world. A third-rate 1500s merchant would be ashamed to live anywhere as bare.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Whither Tartaria?
Kyle Rittenhouse confirmed in an interview that he is readying to file lawsuits in a bid to “make the media pay”—months after he was acquitted on several murder charges in connection to the August 2020 shooting during a Wisconsin Black Lives Matter protest and riot.
“We’re going to make the media pay for what they did to me,” Rittenhouse told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on Monday. “They made it hard for me to live a normal life. … I don’t think I’ll ever be able to work or get a job because I’m afraid an employer may not hire me.”
Abortion activists firebombed a pro-life pregnancy center outside Buffalo, N.Y., the latest in a series of attacks on pro-life offices and churches since the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.
The pro-life organization CompassCare reported that early Tuesday morning, activists smashed windows and set fires in the group’s Amherst, N.Y., medical office. The assailants graffitied the phrase “Jane Was Here” on the building, a tagline associated with a group called Jane’s Revenge that has claimed responsibility for attacks on pro-life institutions across the country.
If the DHS is worried about ‘domestic terrorism’, this would be a prime candidate. They’ll ignore it, of course.
At any dinner party conversation, the refrain is practically the same.
“It’s the immigrants,” someone will say.
“It’s the refugees.”
“There are too many.”
“Too many.”
“They are trying to change our culture.”
“This is my country – my beautiful country. They don’t belong here.”
They sound like the dialogues you’d hear among white supremacists in America or Marine Le Pen supporters at the best restaurants of Paris. But they are among Turkey’s liberal, secular intelligentsia, unapologetically concerned about a growing Islamization of their country.
“If this makes me racist, then I’m a racist,” one woman told me.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Secular Turks Fear Immigrant-Fueled Islamist Wave
Imagine you are an advisor to a politician facing a difficult re-election campaign in the fall and you are tasked with planning a campaign strategy. If you are a rational person, you would first start with the polling. What are the big issues on the minds of the voters and how do they rank your guy on those items. The best way to get back in good standing with the voters is to show them you care about their issues and most important, you agree with them on those issues.
Now, this is easier said than done. If the top issue with voters is energy prices and your guy has spent his career talking about the need to ratchet up energy costs in order to please Gaia, then you have a problem. The voters are stupid, but there are limits and your guy is a true believer. In fact, you worship Gaia as well, so the idea of speaking against the climate cult is a bridge too far. Still, you have to figure out a way to convince people that Gaia cares about gas prices too.
This is the problem with impractical politics. When public policy is about putting two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot, politicians are free to acknowledge error and change gears to chase the voters. In happier times, politicians were the guys chasing the parade, hoping to get to the front so they could pretend to be the parade leaders come election time. That can only work when the only thing you believe in is being on the good side of the voters.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Friends and Enemies
As we’ve been told over and over by the important people, you need to stop driving your own car and take public transportation to fight Climate Change. On the other hand, the important people feel entitled to promote policies and manias that help make taking the bus a nightmare.
Many have read that there’s a food crisis looming and there are significant concerns about grain shortages. The main reason for this possible crisis is the Ukraine invasion. However, this is not the full picture.
Many countries around the world have a large deficit in cereal production, which is essential to feed livestock. The main culprit is rising government intervention that has made costs soar even in periods of low energy prices, and an unsustainable level of restrictions that have made it impossible for farmers to continue planting and producing grain.
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A small NYC-led cancer trial has achieved a result reportedly never before seen – the total remission of cancer in all of its patients.
To be sure, the trial — led by doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering and backed by drug maker GlaxoSmithKline — has only completed treatment of 12 patients, with a specific cancer in its early stages and with a rare mutation as well.
But the results, reported Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine and the New York Times, were still striking enough to prompt multiple physicians to tell the paper they were believed to be unprecedented.
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The top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, introduced a measure that would withdraw the United States from the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO), claiming the bodies have been soft on China.
Rogers, R-Ala., told Fox News that the U.N. has “repeatedly proven itself to be an utterly useless organization.”
Got that right.
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The front page of Monday’s New York Times acknowledged the obvious: The crime issue is hurting Democrats badly on the ground: “Debate on Crime Splits San Francisco Democrats.” The report from Tim Arango and Thomas Fuller spotlighted San Francisco’s controversial District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who may prove too far left for…San Francisco?
Boudin’s has impeccable leftist family ties. His parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were Weather Underground members, convicted of murder for driving the getaway car in the Brink’s armed car robbery in 1981 in which two police officers and a security guard were killed. He was then raised by Weather Underground member and future Obama comrade Bill Ayers.
Forget about the faux Biden ´Don´t Come´ talking point intended to keep undocumented migrants from crossing into the United States. Now, according to the Latino network newscasts, a record-breaking, 15,000 migrant strong caravan is making its way through Mexico to send “a message” to the leaders gathered at the Summit of the Americas currently underway in California.
Watch as Telemundo shifts from the ´stay away´ threat to report on the longest and biggest caravan that correspondent Pedro Ultreras has “had to cover in recent years”; now, the motivation for the onslaught is to “send a message to Latin American leaders that the immigration problem is still very big and that they need them to help”.
It is only with the greatest reluctance that I reach the conclusion that the modern theory of multivalued logic is illogical, in that it is elliptical and superfluous to restate in confusing jargon what Medieval Schoolmen stated clearly, and in Latin.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Aristotle in a Non Aristotelian Age
I find it difficult to find anyone who uses more than Excel and eighth grade level mathematics (=arithmetic, and a little bit of algebra, statistics and programming). In the summer of 2007 I taught an advanced geometry course and had two students in the class who had been engineers and one who had been an actuary. They claimed never to have used anything beyond Excel and eighth grade level mathematics; never a trig function or even a log or exponential function! There is in fact a deskilling going on in our economy, where even the ability to make change is about to disappear as an important skill.
The word reentered the national consciousness Monday when New York Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attempted to boost the word, and accused people of starting drama over it.
In a video posted on her Instagram, Ocasio-Cortez said “”I want to have a note on gender inclusivity in Spanish language. People sometimes like to make a lot of drama over the term Latinx.”
“Gender is fluid, language is fluid,” she said before concluding, “Don’t have to make drama.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ocasio-Cortez is not just wildly out of step with the American people, but Latinos as well.
source of a marine compound that had long shown promise as an anti-cancer drug — but wasn’t able to be found in enough quantities in nature or synthesized in a lab.
The source of the compound, called eleutherobin, has been vexing drug discoverers for a quarter century, until it was found in common soft corals off the Florida coast — a mile from the researcher’s brother’s apartment.
The researchers were able to take the first steps towards recreating how the soft corals produce eleutherobin, opening the door to potentially synthesizing the compound in large amounts in the future, once they figure out the rest of the “recipe.”
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Many parts of the U.S. government, including its leading scientific agencies, are being blamed for the country’s chaotic and disorganized response to COVID-19. The CDC’s muddled and mistaken messaging about masks, testing, and the mechanism of viral spread sowed public confusion. The FDA’s extreme caution about approving boosters may have slowed the deployment of those vital measures. But a nation’s ability to weather a pandemic also depends upon its underlying ability to make major scientific discoveries, even—or especially—during moments of crisis. Success is not just a matter of luck; historically, the United States has made a series of strategic decisions that put researchers in a position to make timely breakthroughs. Yet amid the biggest health crisis in 100 years, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the $42-billion-a-year engine of our nation’s biomedical-research infrastructure, has been strangely quiet.
BENI, Democratic Republic of Congo—Suspected ISIS terrorist affiliates killed at least 18 people in a village raid in eastern Congo on Sunday night, local sources said, while fighting resumed with the M23 rebel group in a neighbouring province.
Terrorists believed to be from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) killed residents and burned down houses in the village of Otomabere, in Irumu territory, Ituri Province, said a witness, a local chief and a local human rights group.
Congolese army spokesman Jules Ngongo confirmed the ADF attack without giving a death toll, and said Congolese forces were in pursuit of the assailants.
The ADF is an Ugandan ISIS affiliate that moved to eastern Congo in the 1990s.
Just a little reminder that Muslim terrorists are still out there and still killing innocent people.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Suspected ISIS Affiliates Kill at Least 18 in East Congo Attack
President Joe Biden has written an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal detailing his plan to fight inflation.
Well, perhaps the word “detailing” is too generous. The preponderance of the column features Biden taking credit for economic growth that can be attributed to the reopening of the economy that was shuttered by the governing class during COVID-19. Biden, of course, not only championed those closings but was critical of Republican governors who opened their states before he deemed it appropriate.
But with midterms approaching, there’s been a concerted effort underway to exonerate the president, and thus Democrats, of any culpability for rising prices. Biden sycophant “Morning Joe,” for example, contends that anyone who blames the president for more than a “passing impact” on inflation is a “lying hack or an ignorant rube.”
One wonders if that group includes former Obama adviser Steve Rattner, who argues that inflation has been driven by government putting “too much money in people’s pockets”? Or Obama’s onetime Director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers, who had been warning for more than a year that cash infusions would exacerbate inflation? Or Jeff Bezos, who correctly pointed out that the “administration tried hard to inject even more stimulus into an already over-heated, inflationary economy”?
You probably missed the New York Times column last week exploring the upside of inflation. Understanding what Democrats and their supporters need to hear right now, the Times delivered Annaliese Griffin’s op-ed column “You Want to Buy Meat? In This Economy?”
Like a bad cold contracted by a cigarette smoker, inflation presents a good opportunity to lose a bad habit. Griffin observes: “Meat, poultry, fish and eggs now cost 14.3 percent more than they did a year ago.”
What has gone wrong? Griffin does not want to know how we got here. Rather, Griffin presents the opportunity food inflation presents for you, the reader, to reform your diet in the interest of Gaia.
Save the planet! Eat bugs! Live in caves! Huddle in the dark!
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Upside of Inflation
Politics in a democracy not only devolve into theater, but they select for the sorts of people attracted to the theatrical. The reason for this is democracy is about winning the crowd, which rewards those best at winning the crowd. Inevitably, elite interests will invest in those who show the ability to stand in front the mobs and win them over without making too many promises. After all, if you need to bribe the crowd then why bother investing in a guy trying to win the crowd?
Of course, the best stage performers are the people who are extraordinarily high in extraversion and very low in agreeableness. This person loves being the center of attention and likes meeting new people. A good actor can light up a room full of strangers and come away energized by it. He will also be very low in empathy and see others as either competitors of victims to be exploited. Great performers tend to be horrible people when away from the stage.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Quitting the Circus
A cancer trial has reportedly become the first in the world to completely remove the disease in every patient, according to a study published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The study, titled “PD-1 Blockade in Mismatch Repair—Deficient, Locally Advanced Rectal Cancer” was conducted among 12 rectal cancer patients, all of which had a “clinical complete response,” according to the authors, led by Dr. Andrea Cercek of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York City.
Doctors have been unable to see any evidence of tumors among the patients when using magnetic resonance imaging, fludeoxyglucose F 18 injections, physical examinations, or via endoscopic evaluations, according to researchers.
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Woodrow Wilson can’t seem to catch a break. Since Princeton University’s 2020 decision to remove the name of the former president (both of the United States and the university) from its school of Public and International Affairs for his “racist thinking and policies,” other academic institutions have followed suit. An elementary school in Trenton, New Jersey, decided in May to drop his name because of Wilson’s “racist values.” Another school in San Leandro, California, made the same decision, as has a high school in our nation’s capital.
There’s more than a little irony here. Wilson, racist though he was, was also a leading champion of the progressive, globalist worldview shared by our technocratic elites. He pursued a policy of “Moral Diplomacy,” encouraging democratic reforms and American-assisted “self determination.” Our nation’s high-schoolers learn of his famous assertion in a 1917 speech to Congress that “the world must be made safe for democracy.”
Less well known is his role in the progressive project to refashion government into an administrative behemoth governed by unelected experts. In 1891, he wrote that “the functions of government are in a very real sense independent of legislation, and even constitutions.” In an even earlier 1886 essay, he declared, “The field of administration is a field of business. It is removed from the hurry and strife of politics; it at most points stands apart even from the debatable ground of constitutional study.” In other words, the very same diversity, inclusion, and equity technocrats that decry Wilson owe their esteemed status to him.
Arguably the most evil (with respect to effects; not the worst, Biden has a lock on that) President in U.S. history. In other words, the Platonic Ideal of a Democrat.
Sometime in the next couple days I’m going to formalize a new regular feature, Power Line’s Political Lexicon, which we’ll update regularly (especially with reader help). For now, I’ll offer the newest entry:
Expert (noun): People who are wrong about everything. Usually collaborators in Groupthink, and employed by government agencies or a university.
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Despite each killing at least three, none of these mass shootings would make the Mother Jones magazine list of Real Mass Shootings. They leave out all felony-related massacres, all ones vaguely attributable to “gangs” (i.e., black lowlifes who are peeved at each other), and ones that haven’t been cleared by the cops.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Another Saturday Night of Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings
For the past decade, America’s urban centres have been increasingly run by ‘progressive’ activists. Yet today, as US cities reel from collapsed economies, rising crime and pervasive corruption, there’s something of a revolt brewing, the success of which may well determine the role and trajectory of our great urban centres.
This emerging conflict is coming to a head next week in Los Angeles, the US’s second-largest city, in the Democratic primaries for LA mayor. Next week’s vote is likely to lead to a head-to-head between moderate billionaire developer Rick Caruso and progressive congressperson Karen Bass, once considered a potential vice-president for Joe Biden. On the same day, ultra-liberal San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin faces a potential recall amid rising crime rates.
The possible shift towards the centre reflects a move back to more traditional urban policies, particularly on crime and homelessness. It’s not Republicans leading the charge against ultra-progressive policies, either. It is African American, Democratic mayors like Houston’s Sylvester Turner and New York’s Eric Adams.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on America’s Great Cities Are Gripped by Decline and Disorder
