About 10 years ago I went to a local music festival that was taking place in a local park. It was one of those 80s nostalgia things with lots of ‘B level’ music acts wheeled out for the sentimental carousel of a bunch of Gen X’ers.
As we entered the event, we were handed a thickly padded plastic pocket together with a coloured flyer.
The flyer explained that the post-it note sized pocket was to be used for the disposal of cigarette butts. This item was branded with the logo of the local council – who managed the park – and it was the council who had supplied these environmental butt pockets.
The flyer also explained all the harmful effects of leaving cigarette butts on the (grassy) ground. I remember something about nitrates and harm to animals.
Some further context: the pouches were handed to each and every attendee, not just to smokers. Furthermore, the park was not used to graze animals so I was unable to determine how the harmful effects of cigarette butts were going to become manifest.
Thus, the benefits were not very clear.
What staggered me at the time was that these items were presented as vital components of responsible environmentalism. The council was clearly very proud of its role in pointing out and reducing the harmful effects of ciggie butts.
Yet the pouches also had a not-insignificant negative environmental impact. Not only had the manufacture of these items used resources – and released CO2 – but they were going to end up in landfill – or hedgerows – in the very near future.
I dreaded to think how long these thickly padded items of tough plastic would take to breakdown. Decades, at least, all the while releasing micro-plastic particles into whatever vicinity they ended up in.
I wondered how the scales of Green environmentalism would balance out. Would the environmental benefits of these pockets exceed the environmental harms? How many captured cigarette butts would make the whole enterprise a net boon to the planet?
Whilst mulling over these questions, it dawned on me that the Council was very unlikely to have assessed these questions itself. The council would only have noted the benefits and ignored the costs. Even the benefits would not have been quantified. And that’s often the issue with environmentalists, if it’s something they want to do, they measure the benefits and ignore the costs. EVs and Renewable energy are examples of this phenomenon. However, if they are ideologically against sonething, then they only weigh up the costs.
In summary, someone at the council had the idea for ciggie butt envelopes and everyone at the meeting thought it would be a superb idea because not only would it be good for the land and the animals but it would show everyone how responsible the council is with regard to the environment.
‘There is only one question you need to ask to find out if someone is Left or Right Wing: do you think all people are the same? If the person answers ‘No’, they’re Right Wing. If they answer with a speech, they’re Left Wing’ – Michael Malice
In around 2021, I first started hearing – or reading – that categorising people as either ‘Left wing’ or ‘Right wing’ was no longer relevant. In the wake of the horrors of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, I learned that the new categories were now ‘Globalist’ and ‘Anti-Globalist’. Or ‘Awake’ vs ‘Sheep’. Or the ‘Anywheres’ vs ‘Somewheres’. Or ‘Open societies’ vs ‘Closed societies’. There were probably others.
Whilst I acknowledged that the positions of the Left and Right had shifted considerably over the last 50 years, I still felt that ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ were useful categories that predicated positions across a wide range of political issues.
Today’s Left wing is about supporting the expansion of the State as the provider of funds and services in the pursuit of a utopian future whereas Right Wing is increasingly hostile to the State as an inefficient, inflexible bureaucracy that continually infringes on our freedoms. Based on these metrics, isn’t ‘Globalist’ just a new term for Left Wing and Anti-Globalist just a re-branding of Right Wing?
It seemed to me that the people largely in support of the Globalist agenda are those who would previously have been called Left Wing. While those who don’t want unelected oligarchs telling us what we could and couldn’t do, would previously have been known as Right Wing.
The categories haven’t changed, just the labels. Instead of thinking of politics at a National level, we are now expected to think politically at an International level and that means, for some reason, that the old terms of Left and Right wing are no longer applicable. But they are, don’t let the Globalists tell you they are not. After all, isn’t Globalism just another layer of Government wrapped around the local and national layers we already have? Fundamentally, Leftists want ever more Government and Rightists want ever less. The Right wing is now the anti-establishment position. The Left, having wanted to replace the system with socialism have now seen that Globalism IS socialism so they support it.
So, now, I have cleared up any confusion relating to Left and Right wing, I will present a new insight that has occurred to me: The Left Wing is a political ideology that broadly aligns with female pre-occupations while the Right Wing is a political ideology that broadly aligns with male pre-occupations.
Let’s look at the evidence: the modern Left supports immigration, restrictions on speech, hyper feminism, cultural marxism (including critical race and gender theories), safety at the expense of freedom, two tier justice (where protected groups receive lenient sentences to reflect the prejudice and oppression they face), and DEI policies.
There is a very high correletion between such policies and female group characteristics.
Right wingers, on the other hand, follow traditional male proclivities: homogeneous societies, meritocracy, cultural traditions, one law for all, freedom over safety, free speech, family and self- sufficiency with minimal state intervention.
I’m not saying that all Leftists are women. I’m pointing out that the modern Leftist policies are highly correlated with female average priorities. Sure, men are part of the Leftist movement but we notice that such men are the sort that wear ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ t-shirts. It’s like they sense that Leftism is a female agenda and, as such, they feel a need to simp themselves to carry favour. Many such men probably believe being Left wing is their best chance for getting a shag.
We’re not talking ‘Alpha males’ here
And women that want men to be strong providers and protectors in order to perpetuate a system of society that has been successful for all of human history will be drawn to a political outlook that doesn’t condition them into believing that abortion is healthcare.
What does all of this mean?
Well, it explains why women are increasingly drawn to the modern Left. The Left has become a mirror of female values. It hasn’t always been so, of course. Once upon a time, the 2 main interests of Leftist political parties were nationalism and improving the living and working conditions of the working class.
Over time, however, the Left has slowly migrated towards the adoption of an internationalist, academic outlook. This has appealed to women. As more women have become Left wing, so the Leftist parties have taken on ever more female concerns which has appealed to more women and so on and so forth.
Single women, particularly, favour Left wing parties whilst married women are more supportive of the Right. This has led to the observation that married women look to their husbands for protection whilst single women look to the State for protection.
Similarly, the agenda of the Right is increasingly dictated by the needs of men as men seek shelter on the Right from the anti-male rhetoric coming from the Left.
Thus, while political ideology was once based upon class, it is now increasingly based upon gender.
I came across this video on Substack. I have no idea who this guy is but he summed up the ‘Trust the experts’ mantra so well that I transcribed his words into this Blog:
‘We’re all playing the adult version of ‘Simon Says’ but it’s called ‘Science Says’ which is one of the biggest sleight of hand tricks of modern civilisation.
Science is just a method but it’s being pushed as authority and most people don’t even realise the difference. People hear ‘Science Says’ and then immediately surrender their own thinking. That’s because science is being framed as an institution instead of just being a process and institutions eat sovereignty for breakfast.
The problem here isn’t science which is just expressed curiosity through disciplined observation. Real science is a relationship with reality that’s pretty humble. It’s testable, falsifiable and is always asking questions to disprove itself. However, what we’re all witnessing isn’t actually ‘science’, it’s ‘scientism’ which is a religion built around the appearance of science. And what happens when we all defer to ‘Science Says’ is that science becomes a form of priesthood whereby most people don’t read the studies, they just read the headline ‘this study shows…’ and blindly trust a journalist summarising a press release that was written by a PR team funded by a corporation.
And the entire chain is hearsay dressed up as truth and in that way authority replaces intelligence. And instead of thinking, people reference something that’s been said instead of something that’s been observed. ‘Trust the experts’ then becomes code for ‘Outsource your perception’.
Now funding becomes truth because if you can control the funding you can control the research and if you control the research you can control messaging and if you can control messaging you can engineer belief and belief drives behaviour and behaviour drives markets and in that living knowledge is erased, knowledge that was accumulated through ancestral lineage, passed through word of mouth for tens of thousands of years, something I care a lot about, which is dismissed as ‘unscientific’ because there’s not institutions controlling it.
And then the language becomes a trap because now people are defending things they don’t understand. Words like ‘misinformation’, ‘peer reviewed’ and ‘consensus’ are used like shields which is always a red flag for me because I’m not actually hearing an argunent here, I’m hearing obedience signals.
It’s very easy to cling to Scientism because it gives us a way out of responsibility: that lab coat said it so I don’t have to think. If that study says so then I don’t have to trust my own lived experience. If the consensus exists, I don’t have to take a stand. It’s all just permission to feel comfortable in someone else’s narrative.’
Did you know that new childhood vaccines are NEVER tested during formal approval processes against an inert neutral solution (placebo)?
Each and every one of the vaccines on the US CDC-recommended childhood schedule has been tested in clinical trials against another vaccine (or vaccine-like compound) that has a similar scope of side effects. Not a single one was tested against a true placebo.
As David L Streiner confirmed in the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences: ‘There are serious ethical concerns about placing patients on a placebo when effective treatments exist. Further, if a new agent is tested only against a placebo, there is no guarantee that it is more effective, or even as effective, as an existing agent. For these and other reasons, ethicists and regulatory bodies have said that, under these circumstances, new drugs should be tested against an active agent.’
The clinical trials’ designers use this technique to cover up the high rate of adverse events expected with each new vaccine. Thus, the new vaccine can be declared “safe” and its side effects proclaimed “normal”, as the recorded side effects do not substantially exceed those of the ‘control’ vaccine.
For example, in one of the DTaP [diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis] vaccine trials, the rate of hospital admissions in the Trial Group was almost 1 in every 22 subjects. The researchers did not consider this alarming, however, because in the Control Groups that received different DTP vaccines, the hospitalisation rate was similar.
In the case of Rotarix, there was no existing vaccine for Rotavirus. Instead, the new vaccine without its antigenic component was used on the Control Group. (The antigen is the active ingredient that provokes an Antibody reaction in the body).
However…the vaccine-sans-antigen is still a potentially potent compound whose side effects are likely to be quite similar to those of the vaccine being tested.
In the Rotarix trial, about 1 in 30 control group subjects experienced a ‘severe’ medical event (a rate which was even slightly higher than the trial group), and a similar proportion of patients were hospitalised. In addition, 16 infants suffered intussusception and 43 died.
However, Rotarix was approved. The Rotarix package insert states: ‘No increased risk of intussusception was observed in this clinical trial following administration of Rotarix when compared with placebo’.
Big Pharma uses the word ‘placebo, in a knowingly deceptive way: they rely on the fact that lay-people interpret ‘placebo’ to be a medically inert substance.
In future trials of next-generation Rotavirus vaccines, GSK will be able to give their Control Groups the standard ‘placebo’ – the current-generation vaccine – whose safety ‘was already proven’
The use of this intentionally flawed trial methodology means that every vaccine on the US childhood schedule received FDA approval without a true measurement of the actual magnitude of its adverse events against the background rate.
In 2022, the Rockefeller Foundation put out one of those Food reports that read like ‘How can we save the planet by taking away all pleasure in food and stripping all food consumption down to fundamental metrics relating to health and sustainability’.
I’m drawn to these ‘Future of Food’ type reports. Firstly, there are a lot of them which reminds me how important control of the food supply is and, secondly, the reports are always surprisingly candid about the dystopian future that the Global Stakeholders have in store for us.
I’m going to include the summary at the start of this piece for those that just want the quick take. Those with more time or interest can choose to read the rest of my takes on the report’s proposals.
Summary of Rockefeller’s ‘True Cost of Food report: The report says that we need to take account of all of the associated costs of the US Food System (such as health issues and environmental impact) as knowing the ‘True Cost of Food’ (TCOF) will enable better policies to be devised. The report then qualifies and quantifies all of the hidden costs which it concludes equal double what is currently spent on food. The report is quite vague about what policies are required to reduce the hidden costs but it comes down to more govt interference and private investment. There are repeated references to covid, climate change and the burdens borne by people of color. We are told that we must remake the incentive structures of the food system away from volume, safety and affordability and instead create incentives based around health and the environment. The report wants everyone to eat better but is quite vague about how to achieve that, other than through govt food programs, policies to limit portion sizes, taxes on sugary drinks and more education (as if people don’t know what food is unhealthy). There are references to involving private investment and how such investment can improve returns but only if we know the TCOF. Towards the end of the document, the report makes an oblique reference to tokenisation of natural assets to solve climate change caused by food production. The report also refers to how corporate behaviours can be adjusted by the finance world which is obviously a reference to ‘ESG’ by penalising those actors that aren’t reducing their carbon footprint. Food security is not mentioned once but reducing the resources dedicated to food are heavily inferred.
Now let’s get into the detail:
The Detail:
This report from the Rockefeller Foundation is less precise, more vague than related documents I have reported on – here and here – nevertheless, the desire for centralised control still comes shining through.
After all, as the saying goes…’Whosoever controls the food supply, controls the people.’
The name of the Rockefeller report is ‘True Cost of Food: Measuring What Matters to Transform the US Food System’. Spoiler Alert: what matters is not ‘taste’ as this word appears only once in the entire report.
No, the entire theme of the report is that the US food system has ‘hidden costs’ which fall on everyone and, thereby, make it ‘unsustainable’. Also, the report states that our ‘food system is failing us’. We are not told how it is failing. However, the answer, we are told, is to account for the True Cost of Food (TCOF):
Page 1: ‘That’s why accounting for the true cost of the food we eat is the first necessary step towards remaking the incentive structure that drives our food system today.’
Remaking the incentive structure? That should send shivers through you. Such an objective suggests an entirely new system is being designed to replace a system that has evolved over hundreds of years to be fit-for-purpose. The probability is extremely high that a designed system will be much worse, in many ways, than the system it replaces. As explained on page 5, the current incentives in the US Food System are volume, safety from disease (ie quality) and affordability. Those seem like the correct incentives for a food system: providing enough quality food for everyone.
So let’s see if we can work out why knowing the TCOF will make the food system more resilient during the next pandemic and how the incentive structure will be remade. The foreword starts as follows:
Page 1: ‘Covid-19 exposed longstanding fault lines in our foodsystem. As lockdowns took hold, hunger and insecurityskyrocketed, and cars stretched for miles outside foodpantries across the country. Producers faced surplusgoods, while grocery store shelves sat empty, revealinga supply chain vulnerable to crisis and disruption…’
So the government disrupted the supply chains in the most extreme way (by making everyone stay at home) and were surprised when the supply chains struggled. Right. So now the Rockefeller Foundation have rocked up to tell us how to ensure supply chains continue to function the next time the govt places everyone under house-arrest. Except, oddly, at no point in this dull, wordy report do the authors explain how their recommendations will provide supply chain stability. We never see the term ‘supply chains’ again.
We are told that Americans spent $1.1 trillion on food in 2019 but that cost did not include:
i) healthcare costs for those suffering from diet-related diseases ($1.145 trillion)
ii) costs of the food system’s harms to the environment ($350billion)
iii) costs of reduced biodiversity ($455billion)
iv) costs of livlihood effects ($134billion)
v) costs to economy ($21 billion)
Thus, the true cost of food is actually $3.2trillion.
Also, the true cost of food ‘disproportionately burdens people of color, who are more likely to suffer from diet- related diseases, have less access to water and sanitation, and often work in food production jobs for less than a living wage.‘
So, the TCOF report will show us how to reduce these hidden costs.
Page 2: ‘We must accurately calculate the full cost we pay for food today to successfully shape economic and regulatory incentives tomorrow.’
Another reference to changing the incentives of the food system. I suspect the long arm of the State will make an appearance within the solutions.
Page 5: ‘Poor nutrition is now the leading cause of poor health.’ This is because… ‘For too long the food system has optimized for production volume, safety from food-borne infectious illnesses, and inexpensive calories’.
Volume; safety and inexpensive food – these are the incentives that page 1 warned us are in need of ‘remaking’.
Page 5: ‘We need holistic and transformational change to build a food system that provides healthy and affordable food for all consumers; fair, livable wages, and safe working conditions for workers; viable farming options for rural communities; and efficient and sustainable use of our natural resources, to name a few. We need a system that protects the environment and human health, while delivering fair returns to a broad set of stakeholders— from workers to consumers to producers.’
What are viable farming options? This is never explained. Safe working conditions are covered by existing legislation. Clearly it is not possible to hit all of those objectives as many will come with large costs of their own which will break the ‘affordable’ objective. But look at the terminology – references to fairness, safety and health. Politicians want to be associated with these terms. And that is the point: the report is a tool with which to lobby politicians.
Page 6: ‘We believe there is significant opportunity to both address overall costs of the food system and increase the benefits or “total return” from the food system if innovations, products, and policies are designed with a more comprehensive view of system costs and benefits’.
Ok, so we are going to see increased benefits. I wonder what those benefits will be. Saving the planet would be my guess. Let’s keep an eye out for the ‘innovations, products and policies’.
Page 6: ‘while it is critical to quantify the “true cost” of food to effectively address the impacts of the current food system, the sole solution for change cannot and should not be increasing consumer prices.’
Ok, so consumer prices need to go up but this won’t be the only solution. Let me guess, we also need more regulation? More centralisation?
Page 6: ‘…there is neither a clear line of sight into such costs, nor incentives to reduce these true costs and optimize for the true benefit of food through public spending and private investments.’
The report reads like the Rockefeller Foundation are the first people to realise that unhealthy diets impose a costly toll on the nation’s health. Yet there has been a constant campaign to instill the importance of healthy eating for 40 years. That campaign has failed because unhealthy food tastes nice so people like eating it. It will be interesting to see how the Rockefeller Foundation thinks it can do better.
Note also the references to public spending and private investments. This is a ‘spend money to save money’ pitch. I’m wary of such a strategy as I suspect that, as usually happens, the costs will be borne by the public purse and the benefits – ie profits – will accrue to the private firms.
Page 6: ‘We believe that there is a myriad of options to reduce true cost: from redesigning public nutrition programs, to dietary shifts, to adopting more resource-efficient business practices, to technological innovations to improve the nutritional value of products, to policy changes.’
Ok. I’m surprised that nutrition programs don’t already reflect what we know about healthy eating. Let’s keep an eye out for those ‘technological innovations’ and ‘dietary shifts’ and ‘resource-efficient business practices’.
Page 6: Because the TCOF unfairly burdens marginalised communities…‘we should look for ways to meaningfully address the “true cost of food” without necessarily raising consumer prices or adopting changes that exacerbate existing inequities in the food system.’. The logic for how TCOF unfairly burdens the marginalised is looked at on page 24.
I have no idea how they’re gonna walk this tightrope. One moment we are told to expect higher prices then we are told that prices shouldn’t ‘necessarily’ be raised.
Page 7 is shown below. The diagram shows the 5 shifts that are required to transform the US food system. We can see that ‘True Cost Accounting’ is only 1 of the 5 shifts. Presumably, each shift will come with a report of its own.
The next few pages was filler about the methodology for calculating TCOF.
Page 17: ‘While nutrition programs and benefits—both public and private—have often been viewed as expensive, looking at them through a true cost lens reveals that they are in fact wise investments for strengthening our country’s economy ‘
More public spending is needed to reduce costs. The eternal cry of indebted governments everywhere: ‘No, we’re not spending too much. In fact, we’re not spending enough’.
Page 20 explains the breakdown of environmental and biodiversity costs associated with the US food system. In short, it’s the packaging and use of land, water use, soil erosion and nitrogen pollution (from fertilisers, I assume, but the report does not confirm this).
I’d be happy to have less packaging but food production requires land and water. That is kind of how it works. Soil erosion? I thought that was understood 100 years ago and it no longer occurs (or is there a new definition of ‘soil erosion’?). As for fertiliser, these were designed to boost yields so that there would be enough food for everyone. The report seems to imply that having enough food is now a negotiable concern.
Page 22 breaks down the livlihood and economy costs under TCOF. Livelihood refers to poor employment regulation. Economy refers to agricultural subsidies.
Page 24 explains – again – that people of color carry the heaviest burden of TCOF. This is because they are more likely to be obese and suffer from diabetes. The report also lists other metrics relating to people of melanin that seem to be more about general poverty levels than about food. For example: ‘Air pollution exposure is 25% higher for Black Americans compared to the national average.’ But isn’t that to be expected considering that blacks are more likely to live in cities which is where the air is polluted? The report is inferring that the food system is causing the air pollution.
Page 25 informs us that of TCOF livlihood costs…
‘a disproportionate amount is borne by the ~11 million producers and workers in the food system, the majority of whom are Black and Indigenous people of color’. Further down the page the report states:
‘Median hourly wage for persons of color is 22% lower than for White Americans.’
However, this statistic is nothing to do with the food industry. This relates to all salaries across the whole of the US. Therefore, it is somewhat misleading in this document.
Page 26: ‘[Meat] processing plants that continued to operate became transmission sites for the disease. Reports show approximately 300,000 excess cases of Covid-19 due to proximity to a livestock plant and approximately 5,000 deaths happened among workers in meat processing facilities – primarily immigrants, refugees, people of color, and those who lack other employment opportunities.’
Such stats are completely bogus. This is a continuation of the narrative that aims to create a negative association with meat. These food reports always demonise meat-eating. Plus, this information does not explicitly feed into any of the report’s recommendations so what is the point of including it?
Page 28: ‘By approaching food and the food system as an investment, and understanding its downstream returns, we have the potential to not only lower our true cost of food bill, but also transform the food system in a way that reduces costs and increases returns across the different systems and domains with which it intersects.’
The report mentions how investment can reduce our TCOF bill like it is now self-evident to the reader. But, of course, the report has not shown this connection in any way. As for reducing costs, lots of costs have been presented but no case has been presented as to what costs should be reduced and by how much. And what would be the benefit? And to whom would that benefit accrue? The consumer or the investor?
Page 28: For example, by expanding access to healthy food for all Americans, through infrastructure investment‘food is medicine’ interventions integrated into healthcare delivery, business incentives, greater consumereducation, strengthened federal nutrition assistanceprograms, and more active regulatory and labeling policy,we could reduce diet-related disease relatively quickly,improve individual and population health, and eliminate many of the health-related costs‘.
Surely Americans have access to healthy food? Perhaps they just don’t want it. Is more consumer education really required? Will more labelling stop people buying Doritos? I think we can assume that everyone knows that unhealthy food is bad for you. This messaging smacks of liberals thinking that the only reason people aren’t doing what liberals want them to do is that liberals haven’t told them enough times what they want them to do.
Page 28: ‘If diet-related disease prevalence rates were reduced to be comparable to countries such as Canada, health care costs could be reduced by close to $250 billion per year…’
If, if, if! How are you going to make such changes? By handing out leaflets? Recipe cards for healthy meals? It’s just a wishlist. Governments have been publishing healthy eating advice for years yet people keep getting fatter.
‘… Similarly, if the U.S. can reduce agriculture-specific emissions to comply with the 1.5°C pathway, then close to $100 billion could be reduced in additional environmental costs…’
Doesn’t hitting the 1.5°C target require the whole world to comply with emissions targets? That’s not going to happen so this is a pipe-dream. Plus, the idea that a slight increase in temperature since the end of the Little Ice Age is going to cost the US $100 billion in costs is laughable. Has anyone stopped to think that there might be benefits from a warmer climate?
Pages 29 and 30 describe 7 shifts that are required across the food system. These shifts are about ‘rewiring the food system in fundamental ways’.
Here are the 7 shifts:
• ‘Significant appetite to expand and modernize nutrition safety nets and better align government food procurement with a true cost approach.’
Ok, so the government will only procure healthy and sustainable food and that will reduce the costs associated with health and the environment. There is no mention of what proportion of all food provision is provided by the government. There is no mention of the private sector. There is no mention of the processed food that is made by the private sector.
• ‘Movement by governments to support marginalized communities, especially Blackand Indigenous peopleof color and small producers. This includes work toreverse the costs of years of discrimination through newlocal purchasing incentives and producer debt relief,and increased worker wages, and expanded health benefits.’
More affirmative action for black people. The Liberal mindset exposed. Also, more government intervention which will be paid for by the taxpayer. This doesn’t appear to reduce ‘hidden costs of food production’, merely re-allocate those costs.
• ‘Greater interest by governments to create incentives to address the human health impacts of the food system. Efforts include policies to limit portion sizes of unhealthy foods and beverages; adding nutrition labels; and considering additional taxes on sugary drinks or other foods.’
Ok, more regulation and more taxes to force us to eat healthily thereby raising prices. Whatever the problem, more government is the answer!
• ‘The private sector, including health care companies, are working to address the root causes of healthcare expenditures. This includes investments in medically tailored meals, produce prescriptions, and ‘food farmacies’ that leverage healthcare dollars to support positive diet-related outcomes.’
I don’t know what any of this means and I suspect that is the intention of the authors. However, the private sector will only be involved if they can make money out of it.
• ‘Acceleration in the development of new tools to reduce GHGs. This includes new financial markets related to natural capital including carbon, water, soil nitrogen and biodiversity. Policy makers are introducing new subsidies or incentives for farmers and agriculture producers to encourage the adoption of regenerative practices including conservation tillage methods and planting cover crops to build carbon in the soil and prevent runoffs.’
Financial markets can save us from greenhouse gases! I suppose this refers to tokenising all natural assets which will mean introducing carbon credits to manage usage of carbon. If you’ve used all your credits for the month, no more meat for you (unless you’re rich, in which you can buy more credits). Also, policy makers interfering in farming matters by setting (new) incentives, ie not the incentives of sufficient, affordable, disease-free food that we read about on page 5. These incentives will be about using less farmland and less fertilisers and having less cows (methane) so that we eat less meat.
This reminds me of Stalin’s 5 year plans. Also, there is a reference to more subsidies but on page 22 we were told that agricultural subsidies were part of the ‘hidden costs of food’ that the report wabts to reduce?!
• ‘Financial investors are rewarding and incentivizing environmental stewardship of corporations. Driven by their fiduciary responsibility and armed with a greater understanding of climate-related investmentrisks, they are also penalizing actors that are not makingmeaningful progress on reducing their environmentalfootprint.’
Ah, yes, ESG in other words: the social credit score for companies. To ensure that companies toe the line of the Global Stakeholders. Less GHG in farming will mean less food. The report has not presented any technical innovations that will avoid this.
• ‘Consumers are making different food choices, based on new information. Today, consumer purchase decisions are not just influenced by taste, price and convenience but also by factors such as health and welliness technologies, environmental sustainability, and personal values.’
More behavioural nudging from the Liberals: Enlightened people like us are doing the right thing and now we are going to force everyone else to do the right thing.
Liberals have the deluded mindset that if they point out to people the error of their ways – i.e. eating unhealthily – those people will thank the Liberals kindly and immediately adjust their behaviour.
Page 33: ‘If left unaddressed, the true cost of food will continue to rise and negatively contribute to climate change, the prevalence of diet-related diseases, and growing inequity…’
Growing food is contributing to climate change therefore, we need to grow less food. I don’t think that will end well. Also, ‘growing inequity’? It’s policies implemented by Global Stakeholders that are responsible for growing inequity between the super-rich and everyone else.
We are now at the end of the report and it’s still not clear how true cost accounting of food will make America a better place. However, they don’t want to make it too clear because people won’t like the medicine they are prescribing. As usual with documents like this, this report is just a sales brochure for the benefit of the government. Its entire purpose is to sell the product – the centralisation of food production or the tokenisation of assets or the carbon credit system, whatever are the hidden solutions in this report – in a way that will appeal to Liberal sensibilities about social justice, health and the environnent. All the while, the real benefits of the policies will accrue to the Rockefellers and their peers.
As for making the food system more resilient to future lockdowns, nothing in the document solved that conundrum.
If you genuinely believe that humans are responsible for destroying the planet via Climate Change then Game Theory would propose that the only rational solution would be to drastically reduce the human population. Such an outcome is what AI would determine.
Unsurprisingly, many Global Stakeholders who push the Climate Change and Environmentalist narratives have expressed their Malthusian desires to reduce the human population
Eugenics has been a popular philosophy of the upper classes since at least the Victorian era before becoming an unacceptable topic after WW2. However, as the quotes below prove, the idea of eugenics remains central to the ideology of what are now called the ‘Global Stakeholders’.
‘The population problem must be recognised by government as a principal element in long-range planning.’
Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood):
‘All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class.’ And… ‘The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.’
Ted Turner:
‘A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.’
Boris Johnson (Baby-maker extraordinaire):
‘The primary challenge facing our species is the reproduction of our species itself … It is time we had a grown-up discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this country and on this planet’
Dave Foreman, Earth First Co-Founder:
‘My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with its full complement of species, returning throughout the world.’
Paul Ehrlich, member of ‘Club of Rome’, a former science adviser to President George W. Bush and the author of ‘The Population Bomb’:
‘Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism … of sexism … of religious intolerance … of war … of gross economic inequality. But if you don’t solve the population problem, you’re not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you’re interested in, you’re not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem.’
Maurice Strong (First executive director of the UN Environment Programme; Foundation director of WEF; member of World Business Council for Sustainable Development):
‘Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?’
Professor Philip Cafaro (Colorado State University) in a paper entitled ‘Climate Ethics and Population Policy’:
‘Ending human population growth is almost certainly a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for preventing catastrophic global climate change. Indeed, significantly reducing current human numbers may be necessary in order to do so.’
Jacques Costeau:
‘In order to stabilise world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it.’
Finnish environmentalist Pentti Linkola:
‘If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions of people would die.’
Prince Philip (Co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund):
‘In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.’
Bill Gates (doctor and farmer): ‘The problem is that the population is growing the fastest where people are less able to deal with it. So it’s in the very poorest places that you’re going to have a tripling in population by 2050. (…) And we’ve got to make sure that we help out with the tools now so that they don’t have an impossible situation later’
And let’s not forget Guide #1 on the Georgia Guidestones, organised under conditions of high secrecy but since destroyed, which stated ‘maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.’
Eugenics and population control has been a constant pre-occupation of the intelligentsia since the Victorian era.
When humanity is a variable and the environment is a constraint, the optimization function can solve for fewer humans.
Many women, especially leftist women, just don’t know how they are supposed to behave these days. Feminists tell them that they mustn’t behave like their mothers or grandmothers because those women weren’t good feminists. Instead, they supported the Patriarchy by being Tradwives. Young women are under pressure not to perpetuate the system by acting the same way.
So, what are women to do to prove their Feminist credentials?
Well, to start with, women – particularly leftist women – are increasingly selecting male partners that they can dominate. To destroy the Patriarchy, they have to become the Matriarchy. Thus, women are choosing weak men.
The problem is that deep down, at a biological level, women do not want to dominate the men in their lives. As unfashionable as it is, women want to be with strong minded men who can fill in for the anxiety and neuroses that women are susceptible to. But strong minded men are increasingly right wing and that is not acceptable in the social justice era. Society has sharply split into Left and Right wing political factions with women overwhelmingly choosing the Left wing side.
The result is that strong liberal women are going out with weak liberal men. Or they are engaging in hook-up culture which brings us to the other way women are trying to be good feminists…
Young women are now trying to ape male behaviour. And, why not? They are told that men have all the power and that gender is just a social construct so why not behave like men. Perhaps that is the secret to having all the power? So women try to copy male behaviour by being more strident, less apologetic, putting their jobs first and engaging in hook-up culture. But it’s a very misguided and confused version of how men behave because they’re just pretending and, in reality, they’re a bit lost because they are no longer allowed to act like women. And huge numbers of them were raised by their mothers without the constant presence of a father in their lives. As such, they only have a vague and distorted idea of what men are like. So they’re pretending to be something that they don’t understand. Women are torn. On the one hand they have hormones and biological needs that demand monogamy and maternity but on the other hand they are constantly subject to behavioural nudging that instruct them not to follow their natural instincts: not to get married or, if they do, not to have children; concentrate on their careers; not to allow men to have any control over them. They are repeatedly told that men are the enemy.
The irony is that casual sex benefits men much more than it benefits women which means that women are playing into the hands of the Patriarchy by giving men commitment-free sex.
All of this is making women unhappy:
‘Using data across countries and over time we show that women are unhappier than men in unhappiness and negative affect equations, irrespective of the measure used – anxiety, depression, fearfulness, sadness, loneliness, anger – and they have more days with bad mental health and more restless sleep.’
Women would rather be allowed to be women than be inferior men but they are shamed for doing so. Right wing women are sneered at. Behold the latest shaming device…
Women are even being made to be ashamed of having a boyfriend. Like the whole idea of even liking a man makes a woman a bad feminist. Vogue published this article about how straight (white) women are downplaying their boyfriends in their social media so as not to appear ‘culturally loser-ish’. This is Vogue behavioural nudging their readers: you should be embarrassed to have a boyfriend. To have a heterosexual relationship is patriarchial endorsement by the back door. You should be hooking up with 3 dudes per week or you should be a lesbian. Having a heterosexual relationship makes you very suspect.
So what is the result of such nudging? Well, as it is ‘culturally loser-ish’ to look to a man to look after you, women are now looking to the State to look after them.
Single women are increasingly voting for leftist – ie ‘Big State’ – political parties to provide that safety net for them.
Women are bearing the brunt of social conditioning that aims to encourage women to shun all those aspects of their personalities that make them women. The ones who are swayed by such conditioning are very unhappy but they don’t know why and they are locked into patterns of behaviour that they cannot escape from. I feel sorry for them.
In a future post, I will describe the social conditioning of men.
Cultures come into being, evolve, mature and then decline. So wrote Oswald Spengler in his book ‘The Decline of the West’, pub. 1918.
Spengler explained that the final form of a culture is its ‘Civilisation Phase’, representing the high point of the culture. From this point the culture starts its decline.
Each culture is independent of other cultures. For this reason, there can be no universal history of mankind only the individual histories of self-contained organic high cultures that grow along observable and predictable patterns that come into being age, inevitably decline and die. Each individual high culture has a totally unique form of expression.
“There has never existed a human culture in general, but only independent cultures of individual form, consequently also at all times, separate developments.” – Oswald Spengler
Spengler called the Western culture ‘Faustian’ after the story of the man who sells his soul to the devil in return for forbidden knowledge. This is because the West expresses itself through an insatiable desire for growth and knowledge.
Spengler said of Western civilisation that it had already passed its cultural peak – or ‘Summer’ – and was now slowly declining into its ‘Winter’ an era of vulgar barbarianism and chaos.
Spengler argued that the French Revolution was the transitional event in Western culture that marked the move from an age of traditional spiritual aristocratic form and the beginning of decline into an age of materialism, cultural bankruptcy and imperialism. The former age was the ‘Culture phase’ while the latter is the ‘Civilisation phase’. Civilisation is the final stage of a culture. It is in effect where a culture goes to die.
Thus, for Spengler, the French revolution and the rise of Napoleon were the beginning of the end for the West, the beginning of the West’s civilisation phase.
Spengler wrote: “Civilisation is the ultimate destiny of the Culture…Civilisations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion…Petrifying world-city following mother earth and the spiritual childhood.”
Our Faustian culture was born around 900 AD. The culture phase is the ‘becoming’ while a culture works out its place in the world while the decline is synonymous with the ‘become’ marking the end of creative possibilities.
Art in the culture period is pure creation with a religious intensity, the thing-becoming as the culture finds its way in the world. However, once the potential is fully actualised, grand art is essentially completed. After this art in general declines into mutable styles and fashions that have no grand meaning. Arts and sciences of past seasons are perfected and expanded, but nothing fundamentally new is created.
Art is no longer a well defined thing with shared characteristics because art as a cultural language of expression has nothing left to accomplish. According to Spengler, the ‘becoming’ of Western art was completed some time in the early 19th century. After this point, art declined. Art now can only look backwards. There is no remaining originality to be tapped.
‘You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove to you that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains—I can prove to you that those were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient States—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome.’ Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
According to Spengler, imperialism is the only course left for a civilization once other potentialities have been realised. Energy that was once directed inwards to the mind and the spirit is now directed outward to politics and economics. Spiritual possibilities are now completely exhausted. The civilisation phase replaces the Culture’s spiritual creation with mecchanistic construction. Tradition cannot survive rational materialistic logic. This is why in every civilization’s modernity period a form of democracy appears, characterised by bourgeois statesmen with economic powers rather than kings with divine right. Rationality overcomes instinct and it becomes cancerous. The civilisation turns on itself.
This is when the moral and political ideology begins to assert itself: ‘-isms’ (socialism, individualism, transgenderism etc) serve as replacements to religion for a people that no longer have a spiritual need for religion.
The rootless masses find life in the great cities but have little drive. They can’t be bothered to settle down and produce children so they turn to hedonism and other time wasting activities. They distract themselves from the unfulfilled boredom of modern living.
Spengler predicted the main societal divide would exist between city folk and provincials – those still connected to the soil (from which all cultures begin).
In time, democracies become the political weapons of money. They inevitably give way to bureaucracies and technocracies, further alienating the masses. Money replaces blood and tradition as the source of power in the civilisation phase.
‘In place of a true-type people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman…’ Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
Imperialism increases in scale and intensity until the international system becomes so irreparably damaged that only a few nations remain strong enough to conduct foreign policy.
The civilisation decays into a strange state of civilised barbarism and will remain in this state for the rest of its existence.
Into this directionless void, strongmen will emerge that Spengler referred to as ‘Caesars’.
Spengler predicted that the period of Caesarism in the West would emerge between 2000 and 2200. The masses gravitate towards the strongmen – Caesars – who promise to destroy the democratic system that has been made ineffectual and weak through the influence of money and interest groups. Caesarism, however, can never restart a culture in a profound way.
So, now you know why everything is becoming worse. Western culture was always destined to collapse, like every other culture before it. This is what it looks like. It cannot be restored.
Let’s document the egregious acts imposed by the UK labour govt since their election win in July 2024:
Pre-election pledge to abolish student fees – abandoned.
Pre-election pledge freeze council tax for 1 year. Broken.
Pre-election pledge to reduce energy prices – the opposite has happened.
Made Winter fuel allowance for pensioners means tested despite pledging before the election not to do so.
Closed the migrant barge.
Stopped Rwanda programme.
Promised before election that ‘pensioners would be better off under labour’.
Gave his donor, Lord Ali a Free Pass for Downing Street.
Undeclared freebies.
Made family farms eligible for inheritance tax despite pledges from Starmer to protect farmers.
£500 million given to foreign farmers.
22.3% pay rise for doctors.
15% pay rise for train drivers
Bridget Phillipson (Education Secretary) will face legal action over her decision to pause new free speech laws designed to protect academics from cancel culture…Legislation designed to protect academics from cancel culture paused just days before it was due to come into force in August.
Southport protests: Starmer branded all those who were angry about the murder of 3 little girls ‘far right’.
Thousands of prisoners had their sentences reduced so they could be released to free up spaces in prisons. On October 22nd, 1,100 prisoners were released after completing only 40% of their sentence to “ease overcrowding”. These include those convicted of kidnapping, grievous bodily harm, and torturing a child on Snapchat. This followed September 10, when 1,700 inmates were also released — including 37 freed by mistake, who have since been returned behind bars.
Gave Ukraine permission to fire UK supplied missiles into Russian territory. (This meant UK soldiers would be firing these missiles).
Starmer’s Chief of Staff is at the helm of Britain’s interference in US elections.
Gave £millions more to Ukraine.
Gave £50 million to Syrian militants.
Labour Party broke US electoral law by advising Kamala Harris’s campaign.
Lied about a financial black hole in order to raise taxes.
Promised to ‘smash the gangs’ driving illegal immigration. Instead numbers have risen.
Promised to build 1.5 million new homes during their term. Instead, housebuilding has fallen.
Refused to commission a national inquiry into grooming gangs before yielding to public pressure. Since then, the government has done everything it could do to undermine the scope of the inquiry, leading to all victims disassociating themselves. A chairperson still has not been appointed despite 6 months having passed.
Signed the UK up to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme where carbon costs were much higher than the UK. Carbon costs have risen 37.7% from £19.84/MWh in January of this year.
Rolling out facial recognition software throughout the UK.
Attempting to bring anti-semitism laws
Attempting to bring in islamophobia laws
Introducing Digital ID
Stuffing the Lords with his cronies and ex-advisers.
Aligned the UK with the EU Emissions Trading Scheme thereby driving up energy prices.
Planning to perform medical experiments using puberty blockers on 13 year olds.
Paid £570m to the EU to re-join the Erasmus scheme which allows free movement of students with the EU.
Spends £72m refurbishing HMS Bulwark then sells it to Brazil for £20m
Introduced ‘banter ban’ whereby employers are held responsible if their employees oveehear anything at work that offends them.
This government is quite remarkable in its hostility to the native population and its determination to enact unpopular legislation. We wake up each morning wondering what the government is going to do that day to make our lives poorer and more miserable.
I will continue to add to this list.
‘Keir Starmer isn’t dishonest in the traditional sense. That would imply intent, memory, and a fixed relationship with reality.
What he practises instead is something far more modern narrative laundering.
Statements go in firm, clear and solemn, and come out later unrecognisable, cleansed of meaning, date stamped “misinterpreted” and quietly reissued as if nothing ever happened.
The Telegraph’s catalogue of his untruths doesn’t read like scandal. It reads like a job description. This is a Prime Minister who treats promises as provisional drafts, manifestos as mood boards, and voters as an inconvenient audience who keep quoting the script back to him.
Starmer didn’t break pledges, you see. He merely outgrew them. He didn’t raise taxes. He simply discovered new definitions of “raise” and “tax” after the election.
He didn’t mislead the public about the state of the economy. He just waited until he had the keys to Number 10 before admitting the house was already on fire, then blamed the smoke on those who noticed earlier.
The most impressive thing about Starmer is not the scale of the contradictions, but the calm with which he delivers them.
No bluster. No drama. Just the serene confidence of a man who knows that if he says something slowly enough, with enough lawyerly precision, most people will assume it must be true or at least too exhausting to challenge.
This is governance by semantic exhaustion. Every claim is wrapped in so many caveats, footnotes and retrospective clarifications that accountability simply gives up and goes home.
Ask him what he promised, and he’ll tell you what he meant. Ask him what he meant, and he’ll tell you what you should have understood.
Even the famous fiscal “black hole” follows the same pattern. It didn’t exist before the election because acknowledging it would have been politically inconvenient.
It existed immediately afterwards because it became fiscally essential.
This wasn’t deception, apparently. It was statesmanship. Schrödinger’s budget both balanced and broken, depending entirely on whether votes were still required.
He doesn’t inspire confidence because confidence requires belief. He inspires compliance.
Don’t question too closely. Don’t remember too clearly. Don’t compare the before and after too directly. Just accept that whatever was said then has been superseded by what must be said now
In the end, Keir Starmer will never steady the ship insisting he never promised calm seas, never denied the storm, and never said the compass was pointing north in the first place.
And if you remember it differently, that’s not his problem. That’s yours.
Atticus Fox 