Sometimes it takes 20+ years to learn the lesson of one moment.
“Jste zdrava?!”
“Are you quite well?!” (Lost in translation.)
It was not a friendly inquiry. So naturally, I was immediately put off. My Czech was mediocre and I was confused, I took it more literally.
Am I healthy? Why on earth is she asking me that? Why is she shouting and waving her arm?
I understand now she meant that facetiously. Like an Old Southern Belle might drawl from her wraparound porch, “You from around here, Darlin’?” Right before she pulled a shotgun from behind her skirts.
Maybe I should consider myself lucky she couldn’t possibly have a shotgun when and where she was living in Prague.
Her home looked very much like an antebellum plantation home, not so different from the one above, but only a quarter of one, and with just two pillars. With a large front and back yard, and beautiful fruit trees full of plums, which stuck out even in this neighborhood of nicer homes compared to the typical panelock housing found just a block away.
Soviet era ‘panelock’ housing
That I’d be inclined to take a photo should be logical, at least that’s how it seemed to me at the time.
Should I have told her I was perfectly healthy, 25, in my prime, one might say.
Me, always curious, at a pub in Jihlava, Moravia, current day Czech Republic, 1994
“No taking pictures here!” More hollering and waving.
Now that time I did understand without any additional effort. I put down my camera, I apologized, and I moved on to the next house, where I took more pictures unencumbered by any screaming women.
Prague in 1999 was already transformed from that of 1992, at least I could see it clearly.
Of course it’s different if you live there, even rapid change can seem incremental when one is concerned with the quotidian. Foreigners have a different perspective.
I looked like a spy to her, I get that now. It’s not that I wasn’t used to paranoia, it was permeating the place, always.
It’s just I didn’t recognize what paranoia like that would feel like until decades later, in my own country.
Yes, the United States, where we are told we are free. Of course you can take a photo of my beautiful house, I take great pride in it!
Adjusting to insanity. That’s what that woman had done. The more one is required to adjust to insanity, the more paranoid one becomes.
She saw me as a spy, not as a clueless and curious American interested in architecture.
“Are you quite well?” Was most likely a candid and covert admission that she was in possession of illegally inherited property. Or if not illegally obtained, then certainly not conforming to the current and always shifting proper codes.
Under Soviet governance no one was allowed a large house without subdividing, everywhere, not just in the large cities. There was a housing crisis. Everywhere. Even country estates and cottages had to be confiscated. Collectivized, euphemistically speaking. Then, Privatized, once again. The hand that washes the back . . .
Repatriated? Potato-Potato. Musical chairs?
You really think it’s different here now? Don’t dig too deep.
In fact, you’re not allowed to be a curious American in America either. Little did I realize. Try talking about the weather. Ask a few questions. Don’t stop when you get the first rebuff of redirection and discomfort. Press on.
You want to see how much America TODAY is like the Soviet Union?
Why is it 99 degrees in mid October in East Texas? Why hasn’t it rained for 2 months?
Climate Change is a scam? I agree.
Why are there hurricanes in the mountains of Southern Appalachia? Climate change is a scam? I agree.
Why are there so-called Northern Lights in the south?
Climate change is a scam. I know.
Where do you think this is going? What do you think they are up to? Why don’t you ask some questions? What are you so afraid of?
Press on. I dare you. Do we own our air space? Who has taken over our atmosphere? Who is complicit?
The Hate spewed in this tirade is not politically motivated, nor is it the result of biases toward any ethnic group, nor gender-oriented ideology nor philosophy, nor tribe, nor nation, nor social collective, market, herd, country, continent, school of thought or fish, sea or sea-adjacent, corporation, cooperative, nor any other type of group, at any time in past or present or future.
This will be Hate directed squarely at specific individuals, mostly for their overarching idiocy, blind obedience, gaslighting or other dainty bullshit* and general full-fledged and undeniable assholery. These would be individuals for whom my disdain and contempt has been building, decades in some instances, seconds in others.
This is not your average rant or shitposting. Therefore it will be organized in proper form, beginning with Silver level Hatred, then proceeding to Bronze level, and ending with Platinum.
In no way can my Hateful Epic Tirade be confused with a real Hate Crime, of the variety of famous (or infamous, depending on his audience), Mr. CJ Hopkins, currently awaiting his second trial in New Normal Berlin. That’s because real Hate Crimes are against groups, particularly those groups with a shitload of power.
Mr. Hopkins deserves his prosecution for so hatefully opposing many such VIP groups. Too many to count surely, but most certainly he is an enemy of the totalitarian State by any measure. He made a grave mistake of criticizing it repeatedly on various public forums and a great many suffered for his actions, so there must be strict punishment.
Besides, any satirist worth his salt should spend time in prison, it’s like a rite of passage. It will ultimately improve his work, so I hope he understands it will be worth it. That is, if he lives long enough to get out. And even if not, great satirists often get even funnier after they’re dead. It’s mystical or something.
But I do not like the idea of spending heaps of sums (which I don’t have) on attorneys, or the threat of a ruined career (too late) and jail time (been there too) by being hateful to any group, powerful or otherwise.
Therefore I’m focusing my Hate directly on the individuals who engendered that hatred by their own actions, or lack thereof.
Before proceeding I’d also like to clarify that my hatred does not extend to violence, nor to the threat of violence. I want to make it perfectly clear that while, yes, I am indeed armed, I am not dangerous.
Furthermore, I’m a terrible shot and get frightfully nervous and shaky when alarmed, and I probably couldn’t manage to shoot a pair of balls at close range, eyeballs or otherwise.
So, to get on with it!
The Silver Level Hatred is awarded to my neighbor, Herr Blackheart. His crime is being a belligerent idiot. Idiocy is one thing, we all have to tolerate it regularly, this is part of the invisible social contract no one signed.
Belligerent idiocy is common as well, but it’s far more dangerous. Herr Blackheart is bullying and condescending and adolescent and has the social graces of a shanked hog.
And he has the infuriating gall to go on and on about the pristine air quality of our skies!
I can only assume he means in comparison to the slums of New Delhi in winter. Otherwise he might have earned a Bronze or even a Platinum award for the level of Hatred he was able to inspire in me.
A man so willfully blind he laughs out loud as he yells about his army of friends in the aviation industry, who all (shockingly) tow the company lines: Chemtrails are a conspiracy theory! Geoengineering is not real! You are a crazy lady! Stop bothering us!
And furthermore, weather modification is awesome, so there!
Some day we will control the weather and he who controls the weather will control the world!
YEEHAW!
Moving on.
The Bronze Level Hatred is awarded to my former dentist in Arizona, a total Jackass of epic proportion, who is really lucky I can’t remember his name.
Jackass was forced on me by my insurance plan and I had to suffer his arrogant used car salesman tactics for a year before I could switch. He employed all the well-worn tricks to get me to purchase every product and procedure available at his Uber High-Tech office with an unusally large staff of all young and beautiful female assitants. My teeth aren’t white enough, straight enough, clean enough, my gums are receding, I need a root canal, and maybe another.
I’m super surprised he never tried to send me to his 2nd cousin in Albequerque for a boob job.
And, I’d bet the farm he was on drugs, amphetamines of some sort. He would hit nerves I didn’t even know I had, and then claim I was being too sensitive.
Too sensitive, eh? Perhaps I didn’t have the same degree of drugged blood necessary as to render me as insensitive as being in his presence required. (Perhaps because he and his staff were sniffing off the top a little too much?)
Too bad I can’t invite him to sit in my magic chair of torture and drill into his brain, just a little. With an entourage of uniformed pretty boys gazing on.
Don’t let the bland eyes and penciled-in eyebrows fool you, this is one mean career Tyrant standing here!
The Platinum level Hate goes to Frau Ines Karl, the Hate-Crime Commissar of New Normal Berlin.
This is my personal gift, since I can’t afford a financial donation, on behalf of the Hate Crimes trials of Mr. CJ Hopkins. I know, that’s mighty white of me, as the saying goes. I will avoid taking a bow for humility’s sake.
I just think he needs some solidarity at the moment and even though he has been terribly Hateful to many VIP groups, he has been far too kind to the garden variety Tyrants he’s been exposed to on a daily basis for quite some time.
I know he’s a very courageous individual, but he’s hardly in a position to put any Hate down on any one person, especially if said person has the power to put him in prison for three years. Or more. Or less. Her whim, I suppose.
Not that he doesn’t deserve to be in prison, that’s been established in the previous paragraph: All good satirists deserve to go to prison. It enriches their work. Really, she’d be doing him, as well as his international audience, a great service.
But since I know that’s not her motivation, she gets the full reward of my individualized Hate.
I know some of you are probably thinking she doesn’t deserve that, from me certainly, who has never even met her, or heard her name spoken before this day. Hate, well-tended, does tend to come on suddenly, and be transferable. It’s mystical or something.
While you may be right about that, it’s beside the point. I stand with Mr. Hopkins. He is not able to Hate on her, maybe he doesn’t even hate her at all, so clearly, it’s up to me.
Right here you can see he’s being far too kind to this career Tyrant.
“I don’t want to impugn her competence as a Senior Public Hate-Crime Prosecutor or in any way suggest that the “lengthy review process” of her understanding of the law (including the concept of “the rule of law” in non-totalitarian societies) conducted by the Judges’ Election Committee and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution prior to turning her loose on the public following the collapse of the GDR was … well, anything less than adequate, but, if Germany is going to continue to claim that it has any respect for basic democratic principles — not to mention its own constitution — someone might want to take Ines Karl aside and explain that political dissent is not a crime.
Or, on second thought, maybe it is now. In which case, it would helpful if the German authorities would drop the “Germany is a democratic state under the rule of law” crap and just go openly totalitarian. It would certainly be less confusing.”
Tyrants, please have mercy on Mr. Hopkins, just look how sad and confused he is!
You see, he’s confused. I get it! I just want to help.
This Tyrant has made a long and successful career out of prosecuting Haters, so being a Hater myself, I feel justified to a bit of long-distance revenge.
“Senior Public Hate-Crime Prosecutor Ines Karl began her distinguished prosecutorial career back in the GDR, i.e., the German Democratic Republic, the judiciary of which convicted roughly 200,000 people of political crimes during its 40-year existence.”
I’ve reserved a special Hate-On Voodoo Supreme Package I learned deep in the swamps of Plaquemines Parish before the arrival of the Great Hurricane Katrina of the Raytheon Empire. This ritual can only be performed on the Sabbath of the 56th year of the Holy Birth of the Phantom Shelle.
And it just so happens that’s coming up at the end of this month!
Prepare for a Major Hate Flow coming your way Frau Karl of New Normal Berlin!
*Dainty bullshit, is the popular expression attributed to shitposting professional, Decker, of the esteemed blog: Dispatches from the Asylum.
So many stories not told. They don’t fit the mold.
While the same stories are repeated over and over. The approved stories, with the approved arcs and twists, capturing audiences beyond time and space.
Hero or Villain? Victim or Culprit?
The ordinary stories of ordinary folks are bypassed. Not sexy enough. Not dramatic enough. Too slow-paced. Not Catchy. Or spicy. Or click-baity.
Not nearly sticky enough.
Stories must be sending the right message. Clicking the right boxes in the right moments in the accepted paradigm according to the right models.
Triumph over adversity are ultimately the only stories allowed. Even the stories of failed heroes are spun in such a light, otherwise they are considered ‘dystopian’. And even then we see tragic heroes ‘set free’ by their surrender to the ‘greater force’ or ‘liberated’ by a merciful death.
How the stories are told indicate what the audience will perceive. Here I provide some examples.
These are all still ‘my stories’, just spun to be acceptable, or not. My goal here is to get folks to question WHY certain stories sell. Is it a matter of authentic taste? Of expectation? Of social programming?
Is it the audience who choose, or someone else, perhaps more subtly who chooses for you?
Here are some stories never told, true (ish) stories from my own life. You be the judge/critic/pretend publisher and let me know.
***
While in NOLA, a hurricane. The story that would sell: Young teacher moves to New Orleans for her new position at a prestigious Southern university one week before the most devastating hurricane in its history. She evacuates to a remote part of the Louisiana bayou and learns about Creole and Cajun history and music and cuisine and finally settles in the region of the native Caddo tribe to study Pre-Colombian cultures of the Deep South.
The story that won’t sell: Young teacher moves to New Orleans for her new position at a prestigious Southern university one week before the most devastating hurricane in its history. She evacuates to a remote part of the Louisiana bayou and learns about weather modification and clandestine military operations pertaining to centralized, unelected power structures controlling the U.S. government.
***
While in Galveston, a hurricane. The story that would sell: Couple not long ago evacuated from New Orleans experiences second 100-year hurricane evacuation after just three years. After being forced to split up in order to continue working, they blow through a decade of savings, suffer marital issues and nearly divorce, but are called by God to settle in the remote hills of East Texas to build a homestead.
The story that won’t sell: Couple not long ago evacuated from New Orleans experiences second 100-year hurricane evacuation after just three years. Wife begins seriously researching ‘chemtrails’ and learns about the 70+ years of weather modification that leads her to the ongoing Geoengineering projects—that is the global ‘climate remediation’ experimentation, much of it covert operations of global public-private partnerships with zero accountability or known oversight.
***
While in Elkhart, a tornado. The story that would sell: Couple experiences third weather disaster and nearly loses home and wife talks of ‘meeting death’. She finds God, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Enlightenment and starts a fundamentalist cult which then gets attacked Waco-style by the government and all cultists die in flames.
The story that won’t sell: Couple experiences third weather disaster and nearly loses home and wife talks of ‘meeting death’. She turns to herbalism and organic gardening and a life of quiet reflection about the nature of evil and tyranny and the statist system broken beyond repair and the inadequacies of every group-think solution to this issue, including the anarchy renamed voluntarism and the so-called ‘mystery schools’ and the exhausting rehashing of ‘Prophecy’ and is just generally permanently dissatisfied with all the solutions and proposals she’s ever heard, and she’s heard a fucking ton of them by now.
She discovers a mass effort at brainwashing against the ‘victim’ —some kind of crazy signaling effort of victims to rally other victims, and wonders who does this attitude really serve? So, we ‘victims’ are now considered by the establishment as of a ‘dark triad’ type (witches?) if we don’t spin our circumstances to always be whistling while we work, in whatever chaotic wind they care to bare down on us. Or so it would seem.
“Victim signaling, defined as ‘public and intentional expressions of one’s disadvantages, suffering, oppression, or personal limitations’ is strongly correlated (r = .52) with Dark Triad personality traits”.
“In the days since Hamas attacked Israel, that response has translated into contributions of millions of dollars, loads of military gear and mountains of clothing, food and household supplies from Jewish communities across the United States. Items have ranged from granola bars to boots and bulletproof vests. The outpouring has come from the smallest neighborhood synagogues to the wealthiest corners of the Jewish business community – and everything in between. Some 5.8 million Jews live in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center. While there is no sign that Israel is short on basic supplies like granola bars, the donations underscore the concern and connection Jews in the United States feel toward Israel.”
$100 million in one year, and that’s in 1957 dollars!
Life Magazine August 12, 1957 “The Jews Of America and the State of Israel”
“Aid from U.S. to Israel. U.J.A.’s $100 million supports refugees. Generosity to the less fortunate has been an article of Jewish faith since the time of Moses. In the eyes of American Jews, this now means helping the swarms of persecuted Jewish refugees from Europe and the Arab world, for many of whom the one glowing hope is to get to Israel. America’s vessel of generosity is a phenomenal private philanthropy called the United Jewish Appeal, which this year will raise $100 million to help Jewish refugees.”
In the same issue “How U.S. Jews View Jewish State” by George Steiner “We do not, admittedly, have enough information on American electoral trends and voting habits to give a definitive answer. But certain generalization can safely be made. In New York State professional politicians regard a measure of pro-Zionism as a law of survival. In close presidential and congressional elections New York and other urban centers in which Jews are concentrated may determine the margin of victory.”
“It should not be overlooked that the American Jewish community makes itself heard not only at the polls. There are a great many Jewish writers, impresarios and performers—men skilled in presenting ideas and summoning emotions. Whenever Israel is threatened, the voice of Jewish feeling is heard eloquently in the full-page advertisements of leading newspapers and over the loudspeakers at well-attended rallies in New York’s huge Madison Square Garden. This flair for public relations must be taken into account when one tries to say just how much pressure, political and indirect, American Jews can bring to bear on Washington officials in defense of Israel.”
“Adjusting to a new life, Omessi, who had always been an office worker, still wears a city man’s clothes as he awkwardly half-squats in the broiling desert sun to try to prune a grapevine. Of three alternatives in Israel all offering little but hard work and risk, Omessi deliberately chose to join a farm settlement, or moshaw, where he would at least have a home and seven acres of his own and receive about $9 a day for his labors in the vineyard and other projects.” 😂 😂
I wonder how long Omessi lasted as a farm laborer in his new home?!
Do mere words, forever shifting on the barnyard wall, mold our collective behavior?
If a lie lands in the narrative, and no one knows it’s a lie, does it pass for the truth?
Enter, the Scapegoat:
“No, everything seems conditional now, contingent on proof of cognitive compliance. Their cancellation of me has been cemented into their own identities. The people who were once closest to me now exist in direct opposition to the person they imagine I’ve become. There is no way to dissuade them, to show them that I really am me, the same me I’ve always been. I realize the framing they’ve embraced since the lockdowns cannot shift without destabilizing the shaky narrative they’ve chosen to inhabit. I am the problem. I have to be the problem in order for their reality to remain steady.” Alison McDowell
Oh how I know this role so very well! I was born into it—by chance, divine intervention, twist of fate—I have no idea.
Alison, having experienced life primarily as the golden child, here feeling it now so poignantly, perhaps for the first time, navigating as an outsider, has put words on my reality as I never could. Such poignant, touching, true words.
There is something about venturing into new territory and trying to map the landscape for yourself that highlights what is most special and unique about a particular place from a particular perspective. It’s a kind of magic I think. What has become invisible to the native through habituation has new meaning through new eyes and in turn brings new insights to the observers’ previous perspectives simultaneously.
It’s why I wanted to be a travel writer, why I thought I could be good at it, because if I could recognize that level of magic, surely I could learn to apply it myself.
But now I deal in inner worlds, instead of outer ones. So many of us find ourselves here in these times that we can hardly consider ourselves outsiders anymore. Can we?
“The Herculean effort to struggle to come to an understanding of something alone, without mature guidance and the fellowship of other stumbling souls is more than most can bear. This is what angers me about the glib soundbites in praise of the ‘freedom’ for individuals to simply learn alone via internet study.” Christine Jones
But, in ways that don’t seem to matter to me much these days.
That we are each middle aged women who have been cast off—by our own or divine, or others’ design—how delightful, still, to find sister castaways.
What I’ve come to learn lately navigating the inner worlds at the expense of the outer ones is that words matter much less. Labels hardly at all. That works out pretty well since language has forgone nuance words have become superfluous. (Spellcheck just tried to correct me from ‘become’ to ‘Beyoncé’, how apropos)
The inner world narrative is not man’s narrative. Words hardly fit. Words hardly fathom. The words sound ever-more more political the further in you journey. Falsity reigns and duplicity rains and you find that words only rein in reality. They don’t invent it, they don’t even represent it, not really. The map is not the territory.
In fact, it becomes more difficult to navigate the inner worlds the more you rely on the words.
What are thoughts but words yet expressed? What am I to rely on once words begin to lose their meaning to me? Me, who spent four decades devoted to the study of words. Who considered language to be the cornerstone of civilization and all that made it function.
What a shift, now to think in fact it is not words that craft the spells that create our cultures, but rather enclose them, like walled gardens or mazes, constructs that sometimes illuminate and sometimes obstruct. Sometimes nurture and sometimes confound.
Once upon a time “devious” and “clever” were not synonymous. To understand how they’ve become so confounded one must explore the inner world, beyond the words and into the being. There the answer lies.
Lies?
Perhaps the lies inherent in the words, inherited with the words, are driving us collectively mad? Everywhere I hear about the ‘clever’ machinations of the great powers. Clever?
Perhaps if we shake hard enough, like a soaked dog after his bath, the words will be cast off like water droplets, leaving the cleansed being behind.
One thing I never liked about teaching was being the center of attention. I was told I’d get used to it, but in 20+ years, that never happened.
It’s not that I’m a shy wall-flower, far from it. It’s also not that I didn’t appreciate that stage-ease in other teachers when I was a student. In fact, I rather liked it.
Still, I always felt like, if I could design my own classes they would never be lectures, never large groups. Even though some of my large lecture experiences as a student were very positive.
But, that’s because getting lost in the crowd is so easy.
Far more challenging is small group, low structure. It’s a very unique dynamic and my personal preference. It’s not necessarily conducive to many teaching tasks, but it does work very well for other things. Especially if your goals are real community ties over speculative market drivers.
After all, when you consider what motivates most teachers, money rarely tops the list. Small group, low structure is the least beneficial monetarily speaking, for obvious reasons. That’s probably why it’s so rare.
Seven ladies in my tiny kitchen, oh my. BTW, that’s Kombucha we’re imbibing, not beer!
Many hands make light work. I think that means not just a lighter work load. It’s also ‘light work’ as in, bringing the joy of community into our work and into our homes. Incorporating the unique contribution of each individual toward a common goal. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s pretty much the opposite of what incorporation has come to mean in modern parlance—which is more like automatons performing tasks to perfection at the command of a central authority.
“Um, excuse me, but your Shankleesh balls are not uniform!”
We are witnessing in our ‘Institutional Affairs’ that not only are we being conditioned to not discuss religion or politics, but it is becoming a requirement for receiving public funding.
While personally I’m ambivalent to these policies, because on the one hand I appreciate a separation between Church and State. Still, on the other hand I perceive what’s actually happening is an enmeshment of Globalist agendas with local affairs. An infiltration which began long ago that lately has been picking up pace.
Perhaps it is unfair that Christian-affiliated groups are getting squeezed out of public affairs. I can certainly empathize with their predicament and growing resentment. And yet, far more important to me is that I have encountered first-hand and through others’ stories that part of the means to this end is being achieved by categorically excluding crucial topics from public dialogue.
The de-platform and shadow banning and cancel culture that’s being most hyped online often excludes what’s been happening locally in folks’ churches, State-run organizations like the Master Gardeners, and State and church-affiliated out-reach programs and charities, not to mention in the schools.
This in particular makes small gatherings an essential part of a healthy public and community life. Feeling threatened by group-think and ostracized for a differing opinion occurs far less often.
Particularly, when we are gathered around wholesome work, like learning skills together, getting necessary things done, or just sitting on the porch—shooting the shit, so to speak—group identity is replaced by an individual-level camaraderie, where the label is not the first thing on everyone’s radar and money takes the back seat to true care. Christian, Buddhist, Atheist, Republican, Anarchist, whatever—these are the social constructs as much as gender identity or which church or which school or which job one has, if any at all.
Differences can be appreciated in a friendly and comforting surrounding rather than creating strict and professional-level hierarchies. Sure, it’s still great to have like-minds around, but they don’t have to be like-minds set in stone or the whole edifice risks collapsing.
When the goal is a better life, actually living it, politics is naturally relegated to the background, not because it’s a forbidden or contentious topic, but because in the manner of human relations it belongs in the background.
Or, even better, six feet underground!
Lunch al fresco with lots of ferments to sample, yum!
And for these reasons, I feel charmed and grateful for the, so far, two ‘Fermenting Workshops’ I’ve hosted here on the wee homestead, with a lotta help from my friends.
Thanks and well done, Ladies! What lovely and wonderfully productive days—I look forward to many more!
All in a day’s work—West African Sweet Potato Ferment, Lemon-Dill Kraut and Shankleesh to take home for you and your family’s enjoyment !
A very special thanks to Nicole Faith, our supreme community organizer and A+ homesteading student, who also provided these photos, along with her exuberant enthusiasm and gracious courage. 😘
I grew up on fast food, TV dinners, mac & cheese, like most middle class Americans. And I liked it, like most middle class Americans. Because, I didn’t know any better. Like most middle class Americans.
We had a constant supply of chips, cookies, candy, coke, and all things convenience. Our cupboards and fridge were never empty. I never worried I would go hungry.
And yet, I know now, decades later, I was malnourished. I know this in retrospect, like I know now I was also vaccine injured. It is not until you know what real nourishment feels like, what real health feels like, that you can recognize its opposite.
I feel like I was one of the lucky ones. I saw it in time. I traveled, so I saw how different my normal actually was, in the wider context. No other culture ate like we did. Every other culture was healthier than we were. It has since changed in the last decades, as more cultures adapt to Western, particularly the modern American, faux-food diet.
But this realization is far from new or unique. As James Corbett so well documents, and I’m elaborating on now with personal anecdote, food as a weapon is not new or unique.
When was food weaponized? Well, let’s just say, it’s been a minute.
My food upbringing was normalized and enhanced— baby formula replacing breast feeding, a dozen vaccines added per decade, cooking from scratch becoming obsolete, supplements becoming de rigeur, pharmaceuticals coming to rule the world of health where food once reigned.
And the conquering continues.
Corbett: “The answer is simple. We are witnessing a controlled demolition of the food supply chain, one that is intended to result in the destruction of the current industrial farming system as we know it. But this changeover is not intended to return us to truly sustainable farming practices, with local, organic farmers producing crops in accordance with age-old agricultural wisdom. Far from it. As it turns out, the “solution” to this food crisis being proffered by the billionaires of the corporate-pharmaceutical-medical-industrial-philanthrocapital-military complex is being engineered in laboratories and sold to the public via a bought-and-paid-for mainstream media. One thing is for certain: the future of food will look very different from anything that we have seen in human history.
Scientists are bioengineering spores that can be inserted into crops and livestock, allowing companies to identify and track food products all the way through the food system, from farm to factory to fork. DARPA is doling out multi-million-dollar contracts for researchers to find ways “to turn military plastic waste into protein powder” for human consumption. A company called Amai Proteins is using genetically engineered microbes to create peptides that taste like sugar but are digested like proteins. And the best (read: worst) part is that, “[a]lthough these microbes are technically genetically engineered, the desired products can be purified and legally sold as non-GMO”!”
Just as my home cupboards were full, todays grocery stores are full. As we suffer mass malnutrition.
Yes, some claim shortages because they can no longer find cheap cat food. Whatever.
A food supply abundant with non-nourishing food is worse than empty store shelves. Exponentially worse. We are a population lulled into the illusion of abundance for the last six decades plus.
If you think that’s not a deliberate and highly effective conquering strategy, you are a fool.
My first deep dive down the conspiracy theory trail was not Geoengineering/Weather Modification, though that’s where I find myself most often these days. Rather, it was food, and health.
I was already well down that particular trail for years before attending a very large conference in Washington, DC where one of the hot topics was GMOs.
One of the speakers was an African woman who had some official title in some African country. All the details about her escape me now, except for one thing she said. She was speaking to us ‘anti-GMO’ types in the audience, and there were a lot of us. She was referring to our privilege to be able to take such a stance as Americans when there were people starving all around the globe.
Of course, that wasn’t the first time I’d heard such a claim. But something about her—a very large, dark-skinned woman donned in her traditional dress with quite a commanding presence—made me waffle, for just a moment. In that moment I looked around the room and realized her statement was having a similar effect on others. As she went on in that line of lecturing, they began to nod and look a bit sheepish after having just feverishly applauded the opposing stance.
It was, after all, a mostly Progressive crowd of over-40s who were clearly well-to-do, judging by the cost of the conference and the topics discussed. She was shaming us, and it was working.
Later on, when I was considering her words while not among the approving crowd, I thought, I wonder how many anti-GMO activists she just converted. She was effective, no doubt. But she wasn’t saying anything new, it was the same diplomatic version of—if you don’t feed Africa with GMO crops we will starve, so save your do-goody, anti-science rhetoric for those who can afford to hear it.
What I hear her saying is actually this: We want a quick fix, a short-term solution for a long-term problem. Then when that solution fails, come in with another one. And then another. If you keep selling those solutions, we’ll keep buying them.
“On the Corruption of GM Science,” John stated, “There is no balance in the GM research field or in the peer-review process or in the publication process. For this we have to thank corporate ownership of science, or at least this brand of it . . . Scientific integrity is one loser, and the public interest is another.” Dr. Brian John to GM Science Review, 2003
2003! It’s almost 20 years and it’s only gotten worse. (I’ve been writing about it since 2009 if you’d like to see some of those old posts with some very telling comments still attached: Starting From Scratch – Kensho Homestead)
Why do we continue to allow our own Food Gratitude to poison the world with Food Idiocracy?
I’m very grateful my better half contributes whole-heartedly in our efforts to maintain food wisdom on the wee homestead and in cyber-discussions on the topic. Here’s a bit of recent data he’s compiled.
Have you heard the latest? Well, line up folks, the Food Pyramid is back, new and improved!
Welcome to the ‘Food Compass’!*
What will you find in this 200+ page document crafted by top university scientists?
Egg substitutes scored high than real eggs! Over seventy processed breakfast cereals scored higher than a boiled egg. Even one called “Malt-O-Meal Marshmallow Mateys”, cause if its got marshmallows its gotta be good for you. 🤮
Some interesting rankings (the higher the score the ‘better’): Almond milk, unsweetened, chocolate 91 Soy milk, light 75 Chocolate milk, made from no sugar added dry mix with non‐dairy milk (Nesquik) 73 Hot chocolate / Cocoa, made with no sugar added dry mix and non‐dairy milk 70 Whole milk 46
Frosted Mini-wheats is ranked as healthier than ground beef, Lucky Charms as healthier than chicken…
TVP (Textured Vegetable Protein)** gets a perfect score of 100 Higher than any red meat, poultry, or seafood except Halibut or Tuna The best poultry: Braised Chicken Liver 71 Boiled goat head and Cooked beaver 43 The best red meat: Raw Ground Beef 38 Braised Beef steak 23
They also list IMITATION cheese as healthier than 40+ of the “real” cheeses listed. (For example cheddar, Monteray, colby, gouda, feta, etc…..).
*”Food Compass is a nutrient profiling system which ranks foods based on their healthfulness using characteristics that impact health in positive or negative ways. It was developed by the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.”
** “For TVP, first you extract oil from the soybeans using hexane (which leaves about 20 ppm hexane behind in TVP), followed by a sequence of other similarly appetizing processes to degum, bleach, deodorize, and neutralize the taste of the oil. The solids left over are defatted soy flour. That is cooked and extruded through a nozzle into various shapes and sizes, exiting the nozzle while still hot and expanding as it does so. Sometimes some higher-protein concentrate or isolate is also used. The defatted thermoplastic proteins are heated to 300–390 °F, which denatures them into a fibrous, insoluble, porous network that can soak up as much as three times its weight in liquids. As the pressurized molten protein mixture exits the extruder, the sudden drop in pressure causes rapid expansion into a puffy solid that is then dried (it’s basically “shot from guns” like Cocoa Puffs). As much as 50% protein when dry, it is approximately 16%, similar to meat, when rehydrated, and various artificial colors and synthetic flavors can be added during the process to make it imitate different kinds of meat.”
For further reading:
Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation by F. William Engdahl 2007
Altered Genes, Twisted Truth: How the Venture to Genetically Engineer Our Food Has Subverted Science, Corrupted Government, and Systematically Deceived the Public by Steven M. Druker 2015
Foodopoly: The Battle Over The Future Of Food And Farming in America by Wenonah Hauter 2012
Just what are the Globalists and their minions taking from us, really?
They are stealing our wealth, that much is very clear. In that move they are accumulating enormous power, those two go hand in hand. They are creating a monoculture—their ideal “One World”—which on the surface to a great many around the world sounds like a nice thing.
These folks, mostly the young and those of ‘aspiring’ economies, expect to see more opportunities, a more equal distribution of resources, better access to education, a higher standard of living.
I want those things for them too.
This doesn’t sell as well in the U.S. and other Western countries. Our standard of living is already quite high, relatively speaking. So the promotion angle of their scheme is different with us. We get verbally spanked for being too successful.
We get optimal inflation and free training in resilience and a taste of tyranny and are expected to be grateful for it.
Whether you buy into the Globalist socio-economic vision or expect to benefit from it is the crux of most folks’ concern—either for or against—if they are concerned at all.
But what’s really being stolen, the root of the issue, as I see it, is much more serious than material gains or losses, or more convenient global commerce. Or mass immigration. Or even a totalitarian takeover.
Both Hubby and I were avid travelers when we met, and continued in that vein for many years afterwards. Most of this was before widespread use of the internet, when traveling alone was really traveling alone. If you got homesick you waited two weeks for a letter, or stood in line at the pay phone, or just suffered through it.
Mark Twain has supposedly said, “Traveling makes you humble.” I believe he meant the real kind of travel, not the group tours through Europe hitting ten capitals in ten days brand of modern tourism. No military base or corporate job or trust fund to cling to either. Those types are real traveling about as much as glamping resembles real camping.
To be a stranger in a strange land is a consciousness altering and life changing experience. When I saw McDonalds and signs in English and waves of expats, I got my fill of nostalgia quickly, and moved on. I experienced lots of loneliness. LOTS. I was scared sometimes. I put myself in some compromising positions, which I then had to navigate without the safety nets of language, cultural familiarity, kinship, or commraderie. “Travails” —that is the deepest purpose of travel and what separates a traveler from a tourist, or an occupier.
When I see signs in this country in Spanish or Chinese I feel sorry for those travelers, or immigrants. They are missing something essential through our obsession with making everyone feel safe and welcomed.
They are missing the life-changing opportunity to become ingratiated to another, in testing their own metal, in developing their own personal resilience and emotional fortitude. And ultimately, their ability to adapt to an environment, and to transform themselves.
We are not doing them any favors by denying them these opportunities and calling it welcoming and inclusive.
What we are actually doing is fostering weakness and projecting our own sheltered materialism onto all those who come here in order to experience cultural strength and conscious, courageous individuality—in us—and in themselves.
Russell would put it forth most succinctly in his “The Scientific Outlook” (1931):
“The scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researchers of psycho-analysis, behaviorism and biochemistry will be brought into play… all the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called “cooperative” i.e.: to do exactly what every body else is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished will be scientifically trained out of them.”
“In 1953, Russell would update this creepy piece of work and make it even creepier, writing:
“It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment… This subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship. Anaxagoras maintained that snow is black, but no one believed him. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.”
In his “The Managerial Revolution,” Burnham echoes the Fabian Society methodology and Russell’s “The Scientific Outlook,” writing:
“Nevertheless, it may still turn out that the new form of economy will be called ‘socialist.’ In those nations – Russia and Germany – which have advanced furthest toward the new [managerial] economy, ‘socialism’ or ‘national socialism’ is the term ordinarily used. The motivation for this terminology is not, naturally, the wish for scientific clarity but just the opposite. The word ‘socialism’ is used for ideological purposes in order to manipulate the favourable mass emotions attached to the historic socialist ideal of a free, classless, and international society and to hide the fact that the managerial economy is in actuality the basis for a new kind of exploiting, class society.”
