The U.S. EPA is attempting to label the popular Berkey Water Filters a pesticide in order to regulate the product under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act.
Over the last year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been pursuing a case against the owner of the Berkey Water Systems which produces the popular Berkey filters. The EPA is attempting to classify the Berkey filters as pesticides because they incorporate silver in their design, a feature which the EPA claims qualifies the filters as a pesticide under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). The move has already lead to one authorized dealer of the Berkey Water Systems being forced to shut down.
On August 9, New Millennium Concepts, Ltd. (NMCL) and the James B. Shepherd Trust, the owners of the Berkey Water Systems, filed a lawsuit against EPA, suing for violations of the Administrative Procedures Act and due process for their attempts to regulate the water filters. The NMCL said the EPA is labeling the filters a pesticide because of the use of silver to prevent biological growth inside the filters, a feature shared by many water filtration systems. NMCL says the silver does not leach into the water itself and thus the filters should not be regulated as a pesticide. Silver is currently a registered pesticide with the EPA.
NMCL notes that the EPA has not utilized this new re-interpretation to stop the sale of any other outdoor water filter. They go on to state that the “real issue” is that the EPA does not like that Berkey filters have been advertised as capable of removing the COVID-19 virus from your water.
In November, the case was dismissed after the judge claimed that the company doesn’t have standing in their claims. This means that Berkey Water Systems will likely face regulation as a pesticide unless appeals are successful.
“We are now in appeal because, amazingly, the district court ruled that New Millennium had not been harmed by the EPA issuing Stop-Sale orders to its dealers, its manufacturing facility and other vendors, and therefore had no standing in that court,” they wrote in a blog response.
In October, U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz (FL-01) sent a letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan regarding the agency’s new ruling classifying the Berkey Water Systems as pesticides. Gaetz’s letter highlights the EPA’s unprecedented attempt to put Berkey out of business. Gaetz requested the EPA provide specific documents to his office showing the process the EPA used to determine its actions.
“At a time when Americans are increasingly unhealthy and their water filled with contaminants, such as endocrine disrupters, heavy metals, and ‘forever’ chemicals, such as PFAS, the EPA should be pursuing policies within its regulatory authority that incentivize increased use of water-filtration systems, not less,” the letter states.
“The EPA must end its attack on Berkey Water Systems immediately and focus on the job it was created to do – keep Americans safe – a job Berkey Water Systems has arguably done more effectively.”
Berkey Dealer Forced to Shut Down
In mid-December, BerkeyFilters.com, an official distributor of the Berkey water filter, announced that they would be going out of business as a result of the lawsuit against the EPA. BerkeyFilters.com is owned by James Enterprise Inc. (JEI). The company said they were the first Berkey dealer to receive a Stop-Sale Order from the EPA.
In a now deleted blog post on BerkeyFilters.com, the company explained their side of the story. They say the whole fiasco began in November 2022 with an “unannounced, unscheduled inspection of JEI facilities.” The blog notes that an EPA inspector also told JEI that the EPA is “cracking down” on virus claims because of COVID-19, and that “the EPA had stepped up its enforcement efforts, particularly in regard to anti-microbial devices.”
In January 2023, JEI says they removed all references and statements relating to the filters removing waterborne pathogens, or pests. The company spent “hundreds of hours” deleting content on websites, social media accounts, and packaging. However, the Stop-Sale Order has not been lifted and, according to JEI, their business has been negatively impacted. They say have been forced to fire employees, cease certain services, and pause third-party parternships.
In the end, JEI was forced to close their doors as an official dealer of the Berkey Water Systems.
The official Berkey Water Systems posted a blog making it clear that although BerkeyFilters.com is no longer an official dealer of the Berkey Filter, the company is still producing the filters and not closing down.
They acknowledge that BerkeyFilters.com was the first dealer to receive the Stop-Sale Order and that both parties attempted to work with the EPA. Berkey Filters said they worked with the EPA for eight months but could not reach a resolution.
“It became apparent that the EPA would accept nothing less than the bankruptcy of New Millennium, its dealers, and more importantly preventing you the public from being self sufficient in terms of cleaning difficult to remove contaminants from your drinking water,”Berkey Water wrote.
“Unfortunately, over the course of the past year the folks at BerkeyFilters.com have fallen victim to this overreach by the EPA. We wish them the best.”
NMCL says they are committed to “fighting the EPA’s overreach” and its attempts to “control and prevent the public from purifying their drinking water.”
While Americans are exposed to water filled with fluoride, PFAS, endocrine disrupting chemicals, and other toxins, the federal government is doing their best to destroy, or at the least weaken, a company which has been providing clean water to millions of people in America. If the EPA had done their job and kept the water supply clean, Americans would not need to seek out filters like the Berkey Water System.
Derrick Broze, a staff writer for The Last American Vagabond, is a journalist, author, public speaker, and activist. He is the co-host of Free Thinker Radio on 90.1 Houston, as well as the founder of The Conscious Resistance Network & The Houston Free Thinkers.
The EV Graveyard Reckoning, Hardly Anyone Wants to Buy a Used One
The market for used EVs is plummeting. What will car rental companies do with the used ones? Problems started in China but have spread to Europe and the US.
China’s Abandoned, Obsolete Electric Cars Are Piling Up in Cities
A subsidy-fueled boom helped build China into an electric-car giant but left weed-infested lots across the nation brimming with unwanted battery-powered vehicles.
On the outskirts of the Chinese city of Hangzhou, a small dilapidated temple overlooks a graveyard of sorts: a series of fields where hundreds upon hundreds of electric cars have been abandoned among weeds and garbage.
Similar pools of unwanted battery-powered vehicles have sprouted up in at least half a dozen cities across China, though a few have been cleaned up. In Hangzhou, some cars have been left for so long that plants are sprouting from their trunks. Others were discarded in such a hurry that fluffy toys still sit on their dashboards.
The cars were likely deserted after the ride-hailing companies that owned them failed, or because they were about to become obsolete as automakers rolled out EV after EV with better features and longer driving ranges. They’re a striking representation of the excess and waste that can happen when capital floods into a burgeoning industry, and perhaps also an odd monument to the seismic progress in electric transportation over the last few years.
Shenzhen-based photographer Wu Guoyong was one of the first people in China to document the waste that results from frenetic development, taking striking drone shots of the piles of abandoned bicycles in 2018. In 2019, he filmed aerial footage of thousands of electric cars in empty lots around Hangzhou and Nanjing, the capital of China’s eastern Jiangsu province.
“The shared bikes and EV graveyards are a result of unconstrained capitalism,” Wu said. “The waste of resources, the damage to the environment, the vanishing wealth, it’s a natural consequence.”
Hoot of the Day
“EV graveyards are a result of unconstrained capitalism.”
Mercy!
The Chinese government literally forced people to buy the damn things. Biden is attempting the same in the US.
That article is from August. Let’s flash forward to December 21 to see how things are going in Europe.
No One Wants Used EVs, Making New Ones a Tougher Sell Too
Because most new vehicles in Europe are sold via leases, automakers and dealers who finance these transactions are trying to recover losses from plummeting valuations by raising borrowing costs. That’s hitting demand in some European markets that were in the vanguard of the shift away from fossil fuel-powered propulsion. Some of the biggest buyers of new cars, including rental firms, are cutting back on EV adoption because they’re losing money on resales, with Sixt SE dropping Tesla models from its fleet.
The problems are expected to intensify next year, when many of the 1.2 million EVs sold in Europe in 2021 will come off their three-year leasing contracts and enter the secondhand market. How companies tackle this problem will be key for their bottom lines, consumer confidence and ultimately decarbonization — including the European Union’s plan to phase out sales of new fuel-burning cars by 2035.
“There isn’t used-car demand for EVs,” said Matt Harrison, Toyota Motor Corp.’s chief operating officer in Europe. “That’s really hurting the cost-of-ownership story.”
“One has to slash prices significantly just to get customers to look at EVs,” said Dirk Weddigen von Knapp, who heads a group representing VW and Audi dealers.
Biden Struggles to Convince People to Buy EVs, Only 12 Percent Seriously Considering
Last month, GM said it would push back the opening of an electric-truck factory in suburban Detroit by a year. It also scrapped an earlier goal of producing 400,000 EVs over a roughly two-year stretch, through mid-2024.
Slam Dunk Ford Project Now Unclear
Ford’s EV plan is similarly distressed. Ford pauses and then scales back proposed Michigan facility backed by government funding.
Manchin Blasts Biden’s Definition of “Foreign Entity of Concern”
Depending on the definition of “foreign entity of concern” a number of things are floating in the wind including $7,500 tax credits.
Officials worked for months to define a foreign entity of concern but failed. It is not even clear if Ford buyers are eligible for tax credits. “Licensing technology, might be permissible under the rules,” officials said.
Who wants to buy a new EV on the basis a $7,500 credit “might” be allowed?
Q&A on What’s Delaying the Definition
Q: Why the struggle on the definition of “Foreign Entity of Concern”?
A: Ford wants to use Chinese technology but GM wants to block it.
Genetically modified food has been controversial for many years. Genetically engineered salmon has been referred to as “Franken-fish”. Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration approved gene-edited pork for human consumption as well. Yikes! More recently, scientists announced that electronic soil (aka “franken-soil”) can be used to increase crop growth.
LINKÖPING, Sweden — Scientists have developed an innovative “electronic soil” that significantly boosts crop growth, with barley seedlings growing 50 percent more when their roots receive electrical stimulation through this “eSoil” layer. This breakthrough, spearheaded by researchers from Linköping University in Sweden, focuses on soilless cultivation, commonly known as hydroponics.
Eleni Stavrinidou, associate professor, and supervisor of the study and Alexandra Sandéhn, PhD student, one of the lead authors, connect the eSoil to a low power source for stimulating plant growth. (Credit: Thor Balkhed)
“The world population is increasing, and we also have climate change. So it’s clear that we won’t be able to cover the food demands of the planet with only the already existing agricultural methods,” says Professor Eleni Stavrinidou, leader of the Electronic Plants group at the university, in a media release. “But with hydroponics, we can grow food also in urban environments in very controlled settings.”
Her team has developed a specialized electrically conductive cultivation substrate, termed eSoil, designed for hydroponic cultivation. Their research demonstrates that barley seedlings grown in this conductive medium and electrically stimulated at the roots exhibited up to a 50-percent increase in growth over 15 days.
Hydroponic cultivation allows plants to grow without soil, relying only on water, nutrients, and a substrate for root attachment. This closed system facilitates water recycling and precise nutrient delivery, requiring minimal water and keeping all nutrients within the system, a feat not achievable in traditional farming.
A barley seedling grows within the eSoil, an artificial electronic soil that makes seedlings grow faster. (Credit: Thor Balkhed)
The team highlights that hydroponics also supports vertical farming in large towers, optimizing space use. While currently used for crops like lettuce, herbs, and some vegetables, grains have not been commonly grown hydroponically, except as fodder.
In their study, the researchers successfully cultivated barley seedlings hydroponically, enhanced by electrical stimulation.
“In this way, we can get seedlings to grow faster with less resources. We don’t yet know how it actually works, which biological mechanisms that are involved,” Prof. Stavrinidou notes. “What we have found is that seedlings process nitrogen more effectively, but it’s not clear yet how the electrical stimulation impacts this process.”
Typically, hydroponics employs mineral wool as a substrate, a non-biodegradable material produced through energy-intensive processes. However, the team’s eSoil is a blend of cellulose and a conductive polymer called PEDOT, marking its first use in plant cultivation and creating a plant interface in this way.
Unlike previous research that used high voltage for root stimulation, this new “soil” has the advantage of low energy consumption and no high voltage risks.
“We can’t say that hydroponics will solve the problem of food security. But it can definitely help particularly in areas with little arable land and with harsh environmental conditions.” Prof. Stavrinidou concludes.
Mass mental illness is running amok across the world, and German scientist Dr. Michael Nehls offers some interesting insights as to why.Author of “The Indoctrinated Brain,” Dr. Nehls appeared with Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, on an episode of the “Health Ranger Report” to discuss the matter further.
In the following video, Dr. Nehls unpacks what he has learned over the past several decades in his studies on the human brain and how the globalist “elite” are exploiting it.
“I was seeing the attack on the human brain indirectly by the health policy of the last decades,” Dr. Nehls explained.
“But what we have observed in 2020 and even worse with the mRNA injection program in 2021 when it started, it became totally clear that this is a real major attack on the human mental immune system.”
Be sure to watch the full video below to see the entire interview:
(Related: One major way the globalists have taken control of people’s minds and bodies in recent years involves COVID “vaccines,” which are causing recipients to develop major personality changes – are COVID jabs genetically modifying human DNA, turning people into walking, talking GMOs?)
Humans no longer able to think due to attack on human mental immune system
While the attack on the human brain has been an ongoing operation for many years, it really ramped up with the onset of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) “pandemic.”
For the first time in recent history, people everywhere bought the lie that a scary “virus” was circulating that required them to stay at home in fear, cut off their friends and family members, and take chemical injection after chemical injection to stay “safe.”
COVID and the Operation Warp Speed “vaccine” campaign that accompanied it successfully disengaged most people’s brains, causing them to let down their guard and just believe whatever the “authorities” told them.
In order to survive as a species, humans must engage their mental immune system in a healthy and constructive way, which is many ways is no longer possible since humanity is under attack by an increasingly evil global governance system that disrespects human autonomy and strips people of the fruits of their labor.
It has become a situation where it no longer makes sense to even try, at least not to the degree that natural instinct would dictate, because doing so becomes an exercise in futility.
At the start of our lives, the human brain is filled with wonder and possibility about the future. The brain’s immune system coordinates with the rest of the body’s immune system to facilitate cooperation between the gut and brain.
That cooperative arrangement is under attack by all sorts of things, including not just COVID jabs and other childhood “vaccines” but also 5G and other related wireless technology, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the food supply, brain-damaging media programming, and rampant corruption both in the public and private sectors that keeps humanity enslaved in a matrix of braindead existence from which there is no apparent escape.
Add to the mix the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and the replacement of the human brain with computers and robots and the situation becomes even more dire. Are humans still relevant, so to speak, or have the globalists rendered all their peasants redundant and obsolete?
Dr. Nehls believes that there are solutions that have the ability to “unblock” neurogenesis in the brain, allowing people to once again utilize their full brain power. Have a watch above to learn more about his ideas.
You will also find the latest news about the mass brainwashing of the global population into forced acceptance of global totalitarianism at Propaganda.news.
Oklahoma Governor Signs Executive Order Effectively Banning DEI In All State Institutions
Following the meltdown on Capitol Hill by “Ivy League” Presidents from Harvard, MIT and Penn, on Wednesday of this week Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signed Executive Order 2023-31, effectively banning diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies in state institutions.
Standing in front of a podium which read “DEFUNDING DISCRIMINATION”, Stitt announced: “In Oklahoma, we’re going to encourage equal opportunity, rather than promising equal outcomes.”
“Encouraging our workforce, economy, and education systems to flourish means shifting focus away from exclusivity and discrimination, and toward opportunity and merit. We’re taking politics out of education and focusing on preparing students for the workforce,” he said at a press conference.
According to the Governor’s office, the order says that state agencies and institutions for higher education shall not utilize state funds, property, or resources to:
Grant or support diversity, equity, and inclusion positions, departments, activities, procedures, or programs to the extent they grant preferential treatment based on one person’s particular race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin over another’s;
mandate any person to participate in, listen to, or receive any education, training, activities, procedures, or programming to the extent such education, training, activity, or procedure grants preferences based on one person’s particular race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin over another’s;
mandate any person swear, certify, or agree to any loyalty oath that favors or prefers one particular race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin over another;
mandate any person to certify or declare agreement with, recognition of, or adherence to, any particular political, philosophical, religious, or other ideological viewpoint;
mandate any applicant for employment provide a diversity, equity, and inclusion statement or give any applicant for employment preferential consideration based on the provision of such a diversity, equity, and inclusion statement; or
mandate any person to disclose their pronouns.
Patrice Onwuka, director of Independent Women’s Forum’s Center for Economic Opportunity, commented: “As a nation, we strive for equality of opportunity to give every young person a chance at achieving their American Dream. Race, ethnicity, gender, and heritage should not be used to discriminate against any person. Yet, discriminatory DEI programming has done damage on college campuses—fomenting division between students, eroding free speech rights, threatening academic freedom, and bloating school bureaucracies, which in turn drives up tuition costs.”
Onwuka continued: “Furthermore, these efforts do not prepare young women and men for the diverse workforce that values aptitude, grit, and skill, not a sense of entitlement driven by victimhood. We applaud Governor Stitt and the state for taking leadership on removing discriminatory and divisive race-based programming and staffing from Oklahoma colleges and universities. Every student deserves a campus free from discrimination. Thankfully, legal protections already outlaw race-and sex-based discrimination, but this executive order guards against efforts to bypass those protections.”
David Safavian, general counsel for the American Conservative Union, commented: “For years, universities and government agencies, even those in red states, have become increasingly beholden to a coercive liberal agenda, often framed under the banner of DEI.”
He continued: “The transformation of these institutions has been exposed following the response by major universities in the aftermath of the October 7th terror attack by Hamas. Especially with that in mind, CPAC applauds Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt for acting through executive order today to take down DEI in all of Oklahoma’s government. Abolishing DEI bureaucracies and ending mandatory ‘diversity’ training and DEI hiring statements will ensure Oklahoma’s institutions can focus on the diversity of ideas, rather than shame-based political activism. Oklahomans can take pride in knowing that the content of their character will matter more than the color of their skin.”
Following the release, public universities reacted accordingly:
Executive Order 2023-31 can be read in full here. To rewatch the press conference, click here.
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WVLT) – Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed a lawsuit against BlackRock Inc. Monday, claiming the investment company misled Tennessee customers about how it’s fighting climate change, violating consumer protection laws.
BlackRock joined the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative in 2021 and Climate Action 100+ in 2020. As part of joining those groups, the state said, BlackRock made promises aimed at fighting climate change and did not make that clear to customers.
Skrmetti said that BlackRock presents itself to customers as strictly profit-driven, but has also made promises to invest in fighting climate change through its memberships with the climate initiatives. This misled customers because BlackRock made business decisions based on fighting climate change, not making customers money, according to the attorney general.
“We allege that BlackRock’s inconsistent statements about its investment strategies deprived consumers of the ability to make an informed choice,” Skrmetti said in a statement. “Some public statements show a company that focuses exclusively on return on investment, others show a company that gives special consideration to environmental factors. Ultimately, I want to make certain that corporations, no matter their size, treat Tennessee consumers fairly and honestly.”
BlackRock directly contested Skrmetti’s claims in a statement given to WVLT News, instead saying that it does disclose its practices to customers.
We reject the Attorney General’s claims and will vigorously contest any accusations that BlackRock violated Tennessee’s consumer protection laws. Contrary to the Attorney General’s claims, BlackRock fully and accurately discloses our investment practices and our approach to proxy voting.
On behalf of our clients, BlackRock has invested approximately $40 billion in Tennessee, and we are helping more than 600,000 hard-working Tennesseans retire with dignity. We are proud of our contribution and committed to the future in Tennessee.
BlackRock
It’s worth noting that BlackRock’s participation in both groups was announced publicly by either the groups or the company itself when they signed two and three years ago.
In BlackRock’s Jan. 6, 2020 statement on joining Climate Action 100+, the investment agency said it would, among other things, work with companies it invests in to make sure they are disclosing the environmental impacts of their practices. In that statement, BlackRock also acknowledged that its primary duty is to shareholders and customers, saying “BlackRock owes fiduciary and contractual duties to its clients.”
Related video: TN’s Attorney General files lawsuit against Wall Street giant BlackRock (WTVF Nashville, TN)
And Tennessee is the first state in the country taking
A similar statement on BlackRock joining the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative is also publicly available.
However, the state has claimed that BlackRock’s customer disclosures don’t mention the climate goals, saying “BlackRock has told consumers elsewhere that the only consideration driving its investment decisions is return on investment.”
In the lawsuit, the state summarizes by saying BlackRock is inconsistent in how it presents itself to customers; on one hand, claiming to be only profit-driven, but on the other, making promises to help fight climate change. The state is asking for injunctive relief, civil penalties and recoupment of the state’s costs.
Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy criticized Republicans for supporting the global warming hoax and the carbon capture scheme that is being used to conduct eminent domain to seize land to build underground pipelines. He said that the US is subservient to the religion of climate and that “crony Republicans” are complicit in offering carbon capture subsidies in order to pass eminent domain laws that allow the seizure of farm land. People are affected every day by the climate cult.
Alex Jones reported that the Biden administration is spending $451 billion per year to pay for illegal alien and asylum seeker benefits to attract more people and then the benefits are cut off after a few months. Ramaswamy revealed that there is a federal law 287(g) that allows local law enforcement officers to serve warrants for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to help them remove illegal aliens in this country.
Synthetic dairy products, including milk made from genetically engineered yeast, are being touted as environmentally friendly health foods that should replace real milk from cows and other animals
Along with missing important micronutrients that are abundant in real milk, fake milk contains compounds that have never before existed in the human diet
Ninety-two mysterious, unknown compounds were detected in the fake milk that don’t exist in real milk
None of these compounds have been tested for safety by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
Tech oligarchs and venture capitalists are funding most fake food technologies, which gives globalists unprecedented power and control over human health
Synthetic dairy products, including milk made from genetically engineered yeast, are being touted as environmentally friendly health foods that should replace real milk from cows and other animals. But this deceptive greenwashing is putting human health at risk, according to Dr. John Fagan, a molecular biologist who worked with the U.S. National Institutes of Health for 8.5 years.
Fagan is cofounder and chief scientist at the Health Research Institute (HRI). He spoke with Errol Schweizer for an episode of his podcast, “The Checkout,” detailing concerning new findings about “animal-free” dairy. Along with missing important micronutrients that are abundant in real milk, fake milk — which Fagan and others refer to as a “synbio milk-like product” — contains compounds that have never before existed in the human diet.
“It’s really strikingly different. It just shows that this is not like milk. You can’t say that this is nutritionally like milk in any way,” Fagan says.1
Full-Spectrum Analysis Reveals Unknown Compounds in Fake Milk
At Fagan’s HRI, they use “cutting-edge mass spectrometric and molecular genetic approaches to make the invisible visible.”2 This full-spectrum analysis is capable of revealing so-called “nutritional dark matter,” even in foods as mundane as wheat. The fact is, an estimated 85% of the nutritional components in common foods remain unquantified. The health implications of most compounds also remain largely unknown. New Scientist notes:3
“This is also true of individual micronutrients. ‘Consider beta-carotene,’ says [Albert-László Barabási at Harvard Medical School, who coined the term nutritional dark matter] … ‘It tends to be positively associated with heart disease, according to epidemiological studies, but studies adding beta-carotene to the diet do not show health benefits.
One potential reason is that beta-carotene never comes alone in plants; about 400 molecules are always present with it. So epidemiology may be detecting the health implications of some other molecule.’ Another probable cause is the effect of the microbiome on dark nutrients, says [FooDB founder David] Wishart. ‘Most dark nutrients are chemically transformed by your gut bacteria.
That’s probably why studies on the benefits of different foods give relatively ambiguous results. We don’t properly control for the variation in gut microflora, or our innate metabolism, which means different people get different doses of metabolites from their food.’”
We know even less about the constituents of processed foods and synthetic foods that ignorantly claim to be “equivalents” to whole foods, such as “animal-free meats” or “animal-free milk.”
At HRI, Fagan and colleagues are using their full-spectrum analysis for a new category in the food industry — synbio milk-like product. For a bit of backstory, in 1994 Fagan returned close to $614,000 in grant money — and withdrew a request for an additional $1.25 million — to protest genetic engineering and the release of GMOs into the environment.
At the time, he said, “The benefits of genetic engineering have been oversold, and the dangers have been underrepresented.”4 His efforts to advocate for food purity and safety, nutrition and food security have continued via HRI.
FDA Hasn’t Tested the 92 Unknown Compounds in Fake Milk for Safety
As Fagan explains to Schweizer, one form of synthetic biology involves bacteria, yeast or fungus cells genetically engineered to produce another compound, in this case cow milk proteins. The idea is once you have milk proteins, you can make something from that that supposedly is milk, he says. But Fagan and colleagues used a mass spectrometer to chart the differences in composition between synbio milk-like products, biodynamic milk and organic milk.
While important micronutrients exist in organic and biodynamic milk, they’re missing, or very low in, synbio milk. Further, mysterious, unknown compounds were detected in the fake milk that don’t exist in real milk. Fagan says:5
“These are small compounds, and they include things like … fungicide and other really weird compounds … These are huge amounts of these compounds that are present in synbio milk and not present in real milk. Literally, I counted and there are 92 different compounds.
Most of them are so uncommon that we don’t even have names for them. And so we can say with good confidence that these compounds have never been part of the human food supply before, and yet they are the predominant small molecules in synbio milk.”
None of these compounds have been tested for safety by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.6 “This product has been put on the market without any safety testing, and your FDA — the FDA that you are paying taxes to watch and make sure your food is safe — looked the other way,” Fagan says.7
The proteins in synbio milk are also different from proteins in real milk. “Most of the protein that they’re putting into this synbio milk-like product is not milk proteins from cows, but it’s fungus and yeast proteins … we don’t know which, because that’s one of their trade secrets.”8
In recent years, the idea that we can replace whole foods with synthetic, genetically engineered or lab-grown alternatives that are wholly equivalent to the original food has taken root. In reality, that’s simply impossible.
How can scientists create equivalence when they don’t even know what 85% or more of the whole food they’re trying to replicate consists of? Common sense will tell you they can’t. It might look, smell and even taste similar, but the micronutrient composition will be entirely different and, as a result, the health effects will be incomparable as well.
Selling Precision Fermentation as ‘Natural’
Fake food companies want you to believe their products are natural because they’re made with components of plants, yeast or fungus, even though nothing like them exists in nature. Be on the lookout for their industry buzzwords like precision fermentation, a term the biotech industry is using to piggyback off the popularity of truly health-promoting natural fermentation.
Precision fermentation, however, is nothing like its natural counterpart. It’s a form of synthetic biology that’s been around for at least 20 years. It uses genetically engineered microorganisms, such as yeast and bacteria, that are fermented in brewery-style tanks under high-tech, pharmaceutical grade sterile conditions. This is because these cultures are highly susceptible to contamination that could ruin the entire batch.
And, contamination can happen easily, so billions of dollars have been poured into this technology, which is using biological pathways that have never before existed in nature. Biotech firms have obliterated the precautionary principle, as the long-term outcomes are completely unknown, to produce fake meats, fake fats and fake milk.
But it’s all serving the underlying agenda, which is total control and world domination. There’s no easier way to achieve this than by taking control of the food supply. These fake, ultraprocessed foods give the globalists unprecedented power and control over human health, and they’re using stealthy marketing techniques. As Schweizer wrote in Forbes:9
“The biggest set of questions here revolves around ownership, governance and social equity considerations. Just about all of this new food technology is heavily funded by tech oligarchs, venture capitalists, or the occasional celebrity. Bill Gates is just one such example. He made his fortune by enclosing, privatizing and scaling what had previously been mostly an open-sourced, common-pool resource: software.
The investor model here is very Silicon Valley: identify a particular market sector or category and its sales potential, fund the company to offset large losses as it scales, and compete aggressively with the goal of cornering this market as a monopoly or a duopoly. Think: Uber, Doordash, Instacart, Amazon. The investors throwing billions of dollars at such enterprises are not altruists …”
Bill Gates’ startup company BIOMILQ, announced in June 2020, is one such example. It’s using biotechnology to create synthetic lab-made human milk for babies. Using mammary epithelial cells placed in flasks with cell culture media, the cells grow and are placed in a bioreactor that the company says “recreates conditions similar to in the breast.”10
Aside from Gates, BIOMILQ investors include Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Masayoshi Son, Jack Ma, Michael Bloomberg and Marc Benioff.11
Metabolic engineering is another major subset of precision fermentation, which involves methods such as next-generation sequencing, high-throughput library screening, molecular cloning and multiomics “to optimize microbial strains, metabolic pathways, product yields, and bioprocess scale-up.”12 Sounds just like something down on the farm, doesn’t it?
Whether it’s called precision fermentation, gene editing, GMO or something else, don’t fall for the hype that it’s good for you, for society or for the planet.
Is Synbio Milk Better for the Environment?
The idea that animal-free milk is “carbon neutral” and environmentally friendly is another marketing tool being used to promote this inferior product. In Forbes, Schweizer raises a host of important questions that consumers should be asking to get to the bottom of fake foods’ true environmental impacts. Among them:13
Is the nutrient bath derived from corn or soy, typically genetically modified to withstand high dosages of herbicides?
What is the caloric conversion and nutrient uptake efficiency of the microbes compared to animal livestock?
How much farmland acreage would be impacted?
How much waste material is produced by such microorganisms relative to sellable product?
What kind of testing has been done to understand the potential environmental impact for if and/or when the microbes escape the confines of a fermentation plant, particularly as the technology scales?
When these types of inputs are factored in, fake foods are far from sustainable. Fagan explains:14
“The reality is that many of the carbon footprint calculations have been done starting with the fermentation process and going forward, but where did the high fructose corn syrup come from that is the primary energy component that goes into these fermentations?
… And you look at that industrial agriculture and you add that carbon footprint on to what they have been using in their calculations and suddenly it goes way in the wrong direction. And so we can’t even use the sustainability arguments to justify what’s being done. It just doesn’t work.”
Real Food Is Best
Just as was the case with GMOs, raising awareness about the dangers of fake foods, including synbio animal-free milk, is important, especially in this early and aggressively expanding phase. Tell your social circle that to save the planet and support human health, it’s necessary to skip all the fake food alternatives and opt for real food instead.
When you shop for food, know your farmer and look for regenerative, biodynamic and/or grass fed farming methods, which are what we need to support a healthy, autonomous population. As Fagan puts it:15
“The biggest thing to keep in mind … we need to trust Mother Nature and go with what she has developed. Her R&D stretches back billions of years. So, there’s a lot of deep knowledge there that’s optimized for life. We should be putting our attention on maximizing that and creating an environment that supports that. So, purity of food and simplicity, all of these things are really important.”
The gross malfeasance observed throughout COVID-19 has opened many people’s eyes to the immense corruption within our government
This corruption has been gradually growing over decades, and at this point numerous well-established mechanisms exist for the pharmaceutical industry to buy out federal employees, guideline committees, and regulatory agencies
Much of that corruption has been directly orchestrated by Anthony Fauci, a man who is directly responsible for making the American government no longer serve its people — while being paid handsomely for doing so
Addressing the root causes of this corruption is vital for the future of our nation and necessary to prevent something even worse than what we witnessed throughout COVID-19 from being enacted in the future
For a society to function, it requires a collective trust in the society’s institutions. One of the most challenging things for many to come to terms with throughout COVID-19 has been how each institution we trusted to protect us instead pushed a variety of unjustifiable policies and then refused to stop pushing them even as public protest broke out against the harm those policies were creating. I would argue what we saw throughout the pandemic was ultimately a consequence of two things:
Medicine is one of the United State’s most lucrative industries (the amount we spend on it has steadily increased each year).
The practice of medicine is controlled by regulatory bodies who grant monopolies to any party which can complete the arduous tasks needed to earn their seal of approval.
Because of this, an immense incentive exists to buy out the regulators, so unscrupulously spending large amounts of money to earn a coveted spot in the medical marketplace has become a routine business practice for the pharmaceutical industry.
In turn, as time has moved forward, and the medical industry has continued to grow (e.g., in 2021, 4.3 trillion dollars went to healthcare, amounting to 18.3% of all spending in the USA), the corruption that sustains it has proliferated throughout our institutions.
Because of the wanton disregard for the science we saw throughout COVID-19, much of the public now believes our institutions are throughly corrupt. However, what is much less understood is the anatomy of that corruption and how deeply it has entwined itself within the Federal government.
Tightening the Thumbscrews
A common pattern I repeatedly witness is a new institution being created by strongly investing in creating the idealized version of it, then once that ideal version has earned the public’s trust and everyone becomes invested in its new way of doing things (to the point they can’t return to how things were before), the screws are gradually tightened on the institution. Once this happens, those who work within the institution often become willing to compromise on their values and ethics.
For example, a college education was originally considered a specialized path for those genuinely interested in scholarly pursuits. However, after it became a way for individuals to dodge being drafted into the Vietnam War, many more began pursuing it, which made the Federal Government’s willingness to provide unconditional loans to anyone wishing to pursue a college education give birth to an enormous industry which rapidly inflated the costs of a college tuition.
This, in turn, increasingly incentivized colleges to prioritize growth and to retain their failing students so those students would continue paying tuition.
In parallel to this, the job of a college professor radically changed; previously they were in short supply now a glut of them exists in the marketplace, especially since the growth-focused mentality of higher education has eliminated the previous stipulation that professors needed to be selected on the basis of their academic merit.
Because of this, there are many professors (often with PhD’s) who have a low enough salary they need food stamps to make their ends meet and hence cannot do anything which challenges their employers.
For example, I’ve talked to numerous professors who have stated that they have been forced by their administration to disregard cheating from their students (so they would continue to pay tuition) and a cottage industry now exists for professors to make money on the side by writing papers (e.g., a thesis) for students seeking a degree.
Note: One of the best compilations I saw of the increasing corruption within the educational sector came from a blog by an anonymous college professor. A few years ago he passed away from a grossly mismanaged testicular cancer, so the final posts on it focus on medicine rather than education.
As you might imagine, this issue has also seeped into the medical field as medical schools make a lot of money. In turn, as the years have gone by, colleagues have shared increasingly concerning instances of cheating being swept under the rug or them being pressured by the administration to find ways to pass students who should have otherwise failed.
One of the most overt examples we saw of this came from the recent discovery that immediately after the leak occurred at the Wuhan lab (which Fauci had funded), he panicked and then contacted a group of respected virologists to request they produce a paper to prove COVID-19 could not have come from a lab. The virologists, in turn, did just that, and Fauci repeatedly used their paper to debunk the lab leak hypothesis.
Shortly after, the lead author had a 9.8 million dollar research grant from the NIH approved (which Fauci held the final say on) — which that author lied to Congress about, and later leaked chat messages emerged showing the paper’s authors also lied to the world as they themselves believed the virus had come from a lab.
Note: This paper also formed the basis for Big Tech aggressively censoring anyone who suggested a lab leak had occurred. Had the lab leak hypothesis have been allowed to enter the public discourse, Fauci likely would not have been allowed to direct the response to the pandemic he himself was responsible for creating (especially given that in response to public outcry over previous leaks of dangerous pathogens, Obama had effectively banned Fauci’s research).
Another noteworthy example occurred after the vaccines had hit the market and many recipients began developing complex neurological illnesses from them. Some of those individuals (e.g., the clinical trial participants) contacted the NIH for help and were enrolled in a study to evaluate and treat their concerning disorders.
According to one participant (Brianne Dressen), the NIH was initially very interested in helping them (and learned from the FDA that it was aware of other clinical trial participants who had been injured), but once it became clear neurological injuries were a frequent complication of the vaccine, the NIH appears to have decided its best move was to try and bury everything and hence ghost the people it was evaluating for the neurological illnesses.
Thus the NIH publicly denied there was any evidence neurological vaccine injuries were occurring and repeatedly pushed back the date they’d promised Dressen and others to publish the study evaluating them. Had that study been published on time, it would have greatly helped many of the patients suffering neurological injuries that “couldn’t exist” because there was no peer-reviewed literature substantiating those injuries or more importantly guidelines on how to treat them.
In short, I’d argue that the debasement of our educational system has rippled out into the entire society as we depend on its graduates to turn the gears of everything (e.g., by appropriately conducting scientific research), and if we have incompetent or dishonest personnel occupy these positions, the institutions they staff decay as well.
One of the primary ways the thumbscrews have been tightened throughout the society has been by gradually impoverishing everyone except the working class (most recently, from 2020 to 2021, billionaires went from owning slightly over 2% of the global household wealth to 3.5% of it.). Because of this, almost every institution we depend upon is underfunded and thus willing to consider unethical sources of funding.
For instance, industry often “donates” large amounts of money to schools in return for favorable research being pursued there, and then may threaten to withhold those donations unless an unrelated professor within the college stops performing research that is critical of the industry.
Within the federal government, this impoverishment comes through budgets being slashed and agencies inevitably looking to the private sector for funding. In turn, something similar to what is observed in the educational sector happens, although the scale of it is often far worse.
For example, in 1983, Congress authorized the CDC to accept gifts “made unconditionally…for the benefit of the [Public Health] Service or for the carrying out of any of its functions.” Then in 1992, Congress established The National Foundation for the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention so that CDC could obtain additional funding for its work, or put differently, created a third party for passing tainted money to the CDC.
•Being paid by a pesticide industry firm to conduct a study to prove the safety of two pesticides.
•During the years 2010-15, Coca-Cola contributed more than 1 million dollars to the CDC Foundation. In return, the CDC offered numerous services including collaborative meetings and advice from a top CDC staffer on how to lobby the World Health Organization to curtail the WHO’s initiative to reduce global consumption of added sugars — which is really something given that the CDC has been tasked with fighting obesity.
•Taking money from Roche to push Tamiflu (which the CDC continues to do to this day), an ineffective and harmful flu treatment which was approved off of data that was kept secret from the public.
Note: As of 2019, the CDC also owned 57 vaccine patents and recently spent $4.9 of its $12.0 billion-dollar annual budget buying and distributing vaccines. This may help to explain why the CDC always recommends every vaccine regardless of the evidence arguing against of doing so or how much opposition they receive from the public (and sometimes even their advisors).
The pernicious influence of industry cash can also be seen at the FDA. On October 29, 1992, in response to public concerns that no AIDS treatments were getting to market (which was a result of Fauci deliberately blocking all of them to clear the way for the deadly and ineffective AZT), Congress and then George Bush Sr. signed into law the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which authorized the FDA to take money from the drug makers it approved drugs for.
As a result of this act, drug approval times were shortened (going from 29 months in 1987 to 10 months in 2018), and the percentage of drugs that were approved the first time an approval was requested dramatically increased. Conversely, prior to the act, 21% of medications were removed from the market or had new black box warnings added to them.
For example shortly after the backdoor approval of a controversial Alzheimer’s drug, Califf was a keynote speaker at the annual pharmaceutical industry conference which emphasized the incredible investment opportunities offered by the new Alzheimer’s and obesity drugs (which the agency was also pushing through).
Furthermore in addition to being overtly compensated by the industry for supporting its interests (e.g., Califf had taken a lot of money from Big Pharma), a revolving door also exists to pay them off after the fact. Consider for instance that the second official appointed by Trump to head the FDA, Scott Gottleib is now on Pfizer’s board.
Likewise, Stephan Hahn the commissioner who was in charge of the FDA for the entirety of Operation Warp Speed (and as Peter Navarro showed, against the president’s orders, actively sabotaged affordable and effective treatments for COVID-19) Hahn is now an executive for the venture capital firm that launched Moderna (and thus owns a significant portion of it).
Note: This issue exists beyond the healthcare sector — for instance Lloyd Austin was first a four-star general under Obama, then left to become a board member for Raytheon, and then left that position to become Biden’s Secretary of Defense. Since becoming in charge of our military, one of the worst wars in modern history has broken out, which coincidently required a massive amount of weaponry to be purchased from defense contractors like Raytheon.
All of this has effectively created a “pay-to-play” situation, where it’s almost impossible to get a drug approved unless you have a lot of money and as a result, therapies that put people before profits have a very difficult time getting through.
This was best shown throughout COVID-19 where numerous teams were unable to receive an EUA (or sometimes even permission to conduct American trials) for safe therapies that had strong evidence they were effective in treating COVID-19, while awful but highly lucrative therapies (e.g., Remdesivir, Paxlovid and Molnupiravir) sailed through the approval process.
Given that the Prescription Drug User Fee Act was originally created during the AIDS crisis to help expedite emergency therapies being approved to treat novel diseases, its noteworthy the exact opposite ultimately happened.
Note: I was heavily involved with one team which attempted to secure an EUA, and it was depressing how high a standard we were held to compared to Pfizer.
One of the classic tactics propagandists and marketers use to manipulate the public is to have an “independent” party (especially a trustable one) endorse the sponsor’s position. Because of this, you frequently find that a variety of nice sounding third parties (e.g., many of those which advocate for helping patients with specific medical conditions) are taking money from corporate sponsors and ultimately advance positions that to serve their sponsor’s interests.
A common way this technique is utilized is by delegating important policy decisions to impartial committees of qualified experts. That way, the conclusions they come to are perceived to be objective truth, rather than the work of a corrupt bureaucrat — even though in reality the corrupt bureaucrat calls the shots by deciding who ends up on the committee.
For example, in COVID-19, much of the death that happened was the result of no effective treatments existing for COVID-19, and instead only dangerous ones like remdesivir being permitted — which seems odd given that the evidence for remdesivir was appalling, whereas the evidence for many of the other treatments was phenomenal.
Let’s in turn consider the evidence and cost of each approved treatment for COVID-19 (the EUA list can be found here, the NIH treatment guidelines here).
Note: A few newer (and expensive) currently approved treatments for COVID-19 are not included in the above list. Many of the discontinued therapies were the monoclonal antibodies (which effectively treated COVID-19). The FDA discontinued them because they no longer matched the circulating variants of COVID-19 — yet simultaneously this decision was not applied to the vaccines.
I feel this decision was a shame since numerous people reported those monoclonals (which matched the vaccine spike protein) often were very helpful in treating vaccine injuries, but after the EUA was withdrawn, the entire supply was disposed of (minus a bit like what my colleague intercepted when this happened).
From looking at this list, it seems clear the primary determinant of if a treatment ended up in the guidelines was if it did not treat the infection (instead only providing symptomatic management — which was often dangerous) or if it was a lucrative product someone was making money off of. In short, our regulators appeared to be focused on protecting the market rather than the American people.
Interestingly, when the NIH committee which created the COVID-19 treatment guidelines was looked into, it was discovered that most of them had taken money from Gilead (remdesivir’s manufacturer). Furthermore, example this article discusses how Fauci chose to appoint one of his longtime associates (pictured below) to chair that committee.
Likewise, the official Fauci appointed to chair the committee which monitored the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines while they were being tested was a board member of Gilead and numerous members of the FDA committee which horrendously voted to approve the vaccine for children had previously worked for Pfizer.
Note: The best argument I have seen in defense of the government hiring experts who are taking money from the company whose drug they are evaluating is that so many experts are being paid off now it’s extremely challenging to find academically qualified individuals for these committees who do not also have significant conflicts of interest.
This is one illustration of how the pervasive corruption in academia (which increases as funds become in short supply) has rippled out into the broader society.
Sadly, COVID was not the first time a corrupt committee’s guidelines have had massive consequences for the world. Consider this example from chapter 7 of Doctoring Data:
“The National Cholesterol Education Programme (NCEP) has been tasked by the NIH to develop guidelines [everyone uses] for treating cholesterol levels. Excluding the chair (who was by law prohibited from having financial conflicts of interest), the other 8 members on average were on the payroll of 6 statin manufacturers.
In 2004, NCEP reviewed 5 large statin trials and recommended: “Aggressive LDL lowering for high-risk patients [primary prevention] with lifestyle changes and statins.”
In 2005 a Canadian division of the Cochrane Collaboration [who were not paid off] reviewed 5 large statin trials (3 were the same as NCEP’s, while the other 2 had also reached a positive conclusion for statin therapy). That assessment instead concluded: “Statins have not been shown to provide an overall health benefit in primary prevention trials.””
When deciding on approving a new drug, the FDA seeks the advice of an outside advisory panel about half of the time (typically for more controversial or less understood drugs).
In those cases, the FDA is more likely than not to agree with that panel — one study evaluating 416 decisions made between 1997 and 2012 found the FDA followed the advice of its panel 84% of the time, and when the FDA overruled its panel, 61% of those decisions were to have a drug rejected by the committee nonetheless be approved. Some of the more noteworthy recent over-rulings included:
•Approving an extremely expensive Alzheimer’s drug which did not work but did frequently cause brain bleeding and swelling (which could be fatal). That drug was unanimously rejected by the advisory committee, and when the FDA still chose to approve it, three members of that panel permanently resigned from their advisory capacity.
•A CDC advisory panel voted in favor of giving the booster six months after the second shot to those over 65, and for those with health factors that put them at risk for a severe COVID-19 infection, but against recommending it to workers who were more likely to come in contact with COVID.
The CDC overruled that final decision and advised it for everyone (which in turn resulted in it being mandated for much of the American population since many use the CDC’s “voluntary” guidelines to craft their policies).
In 1980, the Bayh–Dole Act was passed, which gave researchers (whose research was funded by taxpayer money) and their universities the patent and royalty rights to any drug they developed. The act was intended to help facilitate discoveries making it to the marketplace (which was a valid point since things moved very slowly when the Federal Government retained control of those patents), but at the time many worried it would corrupt the national research apparatus.
Not long after, as detailed within Chapter 7 of The Real Anthony Fauci, Fauci entered the scene and began transforming our national research apparatus into a pharmaceutical production pipeline. For example to quote a 2021 interview with RFK Jr:
“Between 2009 and 2016, there were hundreds of drugs approved by FDA. Virtually all of them came out of [Fauci’s NIH pharmaceutical production pipeline].”
Note:RFK Jr. recently estimated that Fauci’s agency owns 2,200 drug patents, many of which have been lucratively licensed to pharmaceutical manufacturers. Similar conflicts of interest also exist for the NIH and CDC (which may help to explain why the CDC always recommends every vaccine).
This transformation was greatly accelerated by Fauci’s maneuvers during the AIDS crisis (creating a hysteria about the disease, blocking all effective treatments for it from coming to market and making the deadly AZT be approved and then become the standard of care) which allowed him to get his agency, the NIAID, a massive discretionary budget, a global influence over scientific research and international health policy, and a large influence over the FDA and CDC.
In effect, Fauci gained control over the national research apparatus (which amongst other things was why he was able to destroy the careers of scientists like Peter Duesberg who challenged him as he could cut off their access to the grants every career scientist depends upon and make many reluctant to hire those who had crossed him). To create his pipeline Fauci did the following:
He assembled a network of clinical investigators (PIs) around the country who would test these drugs, often in a highly unethical manner.
He concealed the financial conflicts of interest from the trial participants (who likely would not have consented if they’d known they were guinea pigs for an investment).
He worked diligently to conceal the money everyone was making from the royalties on those drugs.
He used the money this pipeline brought in from the pharmaceutical industry to gradually buy out our regulators so they would push along his dangerous and unproven drugs.
Note: Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady is the nation’s chief bioethicist. Throughout her tenure, she has used her position to successfully lobby for Fauci’s policies (e.g., all of horrendous ones we saw throughout COVID-19) to be deemed “ethical.”
In short, Fauci made the Bayh–Dole Act become something far worse than its harshest critics had imagined. To quote Vera Sharav, a Holocaust survivor who has runs a non-profit directed at investigating unethical human experimentation and spent years investigating the NIAID’s conduct:
“Beginning around 1990, clinical trials became the profit center for the medical community. The insurance industry and HMOs were squeezing doctors so that it became hard to make big money practicing medicine. The most ambitious doctors left patient care and gravitated toward clinical trials.
Everybody involved was making money except the subjects of the human experiments. At the center of everything was NIH and NIAID. While people were not paying attention, the agency quietly became the partner of the industry.”
RFK Jr. aptly summarizes the immense scope of Fauci’s enterprise:
Between 2010 and 2016, every single drug that won approval from the FDA — 210 different pharmaceuticals — originated, at least in part, from research funded by the NIH.
At the time all of this happened, the pharmaceutical industry had far less control over the media as it was only in 1997 that directly advertising pharmaceutical products became legal in the United States.
This resulted in an ever increasing amount of advertising dollars coming from the pharmaceutical industry which in turn allowed the industry to be able to leverage media companies into never airing content critical of the industry — best illustrated by the fact in 1976, a far less dangerous (but still dangerous) experimental vaccine was recklessly deployed on America and after a significant number of people were injured, candid admissions of this were seen on mainstream news networks, something which is not allowed in today’s much more corrupt media climate.
Note: Outside of the United States, direct pharmaceutical advertising remains illegal in most countries (New Zealand is the only other country that fully allows it — while Canada partially allows it).
As a result, in the past, the press was much more willing to criticize Fauci’s conduct. For example, this is what the BBC’s investigator from it’s 2004 “Guinea Pig Kids” documentary shared about one of Fauci’s experiments which forced many of the participants to take the medications against their consent:
“I found the mass grave at Gate of Heaven cemetery in Hawthorne, New York, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a very large pit with AstroTurf thrown over it, which you could actually lift up. Under it one could see dozens of plain wooden coffins, haphazardly stacked. There may have been 100 of them. I learned there was more than one child’s body in each.
Around the pit was a semi-circle of several large tombstones on which upward of one thousand children’s names had been engraved. I wrote down every name. I’m still wondering who the rest of those kids were. As far as I know, nobody has ever asked Dr. Fauci that haunting question.
I remember the teddy bears and hearts in piles around the pit and I recall the flies buzzing around. The job of recording all those names took all day. NIAID, New York, and all the hospital PIs were stonewalling us.
We couldn’t get any accurate estimate of the number of children who died in the NIAID experiments, or who they were. I went to check the gravestone names against death certificates at the NYC Department of Health, which you could still do at that time.
BBC wanted to match these coffins to the names of children who were known to have been at ICC. It was a very slow, byzantine project with tremendous institutional resistance, but we did turn up a few names.
This story ran in the NY Post, believe it or not. But one after the other, every media outlet that touched this story got cold feet. Even then, the medical cartel had this power to kill this kind of story. Dr. Fauci has built his career on that attitude. Nobody even asks him a follow- up question.
NIAID’s narrative, at that time, was that these children were among the doomed as they ‘had AIDS,’ so supposedly they were all going to die anyway. When people died, in large numbers, gruesome deaths, NIAID’s medical researchers called it ‘lessons learned.’”
Note: Another lucrative HIV drug, Nevirapine was pushed through by Fauci and his AIDS branch DAIDS. When it was unethically tested in Africa on mothers and their children to prevent HIV transmission, thousands of adverse events occurred (including dozens of deaths), which Fauci hid from the FDA.
Later when similar injuries occurred within the United States, Jonathan Fishbein, MD (who in 2003 was hired to oversee DAIDS’s research) tried to bring attention to these serious research violations. This resulted in Fauci firing Fishbein from DAIDS, and after a lengthy whistleblower investigation was conducted by Congress, it instituted an annual cap of 150,000 dollars on the royalties each government scientist could receive each year for the drugs they helped developed.
In addition to the BBC, other media companies were also willing to criticize Fauci. For example:
“According to a 2005 exposé by the Associated Press, “In all, 916 current and former NIH researchers are receiving royalty payments for drugs and other inventions they developed while working for the government.” That investigation concluded that scientists and administrators at the National Institutes of Health flagrantly disregard ethical and legal requirements of financial disclosure.
Five years ago Donna Shalala, then Secretary of the Health and Human Services, issued federal requirements (2000) of financial disclosure requiring NIH scientists to disclose their financial interest in experimental treatments on informed consent documents reviewed by patients being recruited as test subjects.
According to the Associated Press, NIH administrators did not even consider implementing the 5 year old federal requirement until AP filed a Freedom of Information request last week.”
Note: Between 1997 to 2005, Fauci and his deputy H. Clifford Lane (another of the chairs of the COVID-19 treatment committee) had each received $45,072.82 in royalties for an experimental AIDS treatment they invented and spent a lot of tax payer money testing (e.g., $36 million on one experiment), often in an unethical fashion (e.g., they repeatedly failed to disclose their conflicts of interest to trial participants).
Sadly, by the time COVID happened, the pharmaceutical production pipeline was so well established that dissenting narratives simply could not see the light of day. Because of this, Fauci continually received fawning admiration throughout the (pharmaceutically sponsored) media — the most depressing of which was probably this segment:
More importantly, Fauci was never called out on his lies, his responsibility for creating COVID-19 or the innumerable ways he contradicted himself throughout the pandemic. Rather, he was allowed to direct the pandemic response through non-sensical proclamations that only benefitted his sponsors.
Because of the embarrassment that was created through the 2005 AP investigation, the NIH pledged to become more transparent with royalty payments and disclose financial conflicts of interest for patients recruited into their trials. In 2021, almost twenty years later, the watchdog organization Open the Books (with the help of Judicial Watch) attempted to replicate the AP’s FOIA investigation.
They found not surprisingly, the NIH had failed to uphold its commitment and instead had become much more secretive about its activity since 2005 (e.g., in addition to not voluntarily disclosing the pharmaceutical payments, it refused to honor legally required FOIA requests). Although much was concealed they eventually found:
1.Over 56,000 royalty payments (from third parties) totaling over 325 million dollars were paid to 2400 NIH scientists.
2.Many of these payments came from foreign companies (e.g., a questionable Russian company and a Chinese company that worked closely with the Wuhan lab) or vaccine companies (e.g., for the disastrous HPV vaccine).
4.Many of the parties paying the royalty payments had also received much larger grants from the NIH (for context the NIH gave out 30 billion dollars in grants in 2022).
5.The most prominent figures in the NIH (who decided where those grants were directed) also received a disproportionately higher number of royalty payments. For example:
Fauci received 37 payments between 2010-2021
Francis Collins (the NIH director between 2009-2021) received 21 payments between 2010-2021
Fauci’s deputy Clifford Lane received 8 payments
Douglas Lowy who has occupied various leadership roles at the National Cancer Institute (e.g., he’s been the acting director since 2015) received 192 payments since 2009
Unfortunately, the NIH has still refused to disclose exactly how much each of their employees has received from the royalty payments.
Fortunately, with the help of Congress, Adam Andrzejewski was eventually able to obtain Fauci’s financial disclosures and discover how much he and his wife made during the pandemic response (which Fauci’s recently released calendar shows he was directing behind the scenes with all the key players long before COVID-19 was officially acknowledged):
Note: Fauci is the highest paid federal employee, while is wife is one of the highest (she makes more than the vice president). He is also presently slated to receive a retirement pension of over $350,000.00 a year — which is also the largest federal pension in history.
Sadly, this excellent journalism resulted in Andrzejewski (who had previously earned the position of a senior policy contributor) being fired by Forbes — which again shows how much influence the pharmaceutical industry has over the media.
The GAO Investigation
One of the more honest departments within the Federal Government is the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an agency that serves as Congress’s watchdog and frequently uncovers other branches of the government deliberately concealing their misdeeds (e.g., this occurred when the GAO was assigned to investigate the military’s disastrous experimental anthrax vaccination program).
As part of the COVID-19 relief bills, the GAO was assigned to investigate the four agencies directly responsible for crafting the COVID-19 response (the FDA, CDC, NIH and ASPR) and attempted to answer a relatively simple question. Did political interference prevent employees within those departments from following policies in accordance with the existing scientific evidence?
After conducting interviews with employees in each agency, the GAO found many had observed this happen and a few at the CDC and FDA went further to state that: “they felt that the potential political interference they observed resulted in the alteration or suppression of scientific findings.”
When the GAO asked why the federal employees failed to report these actions, they cited the following reasons:
They feared retaliation.
They thought their leadership was already aware of those issues.
They were unsure how to report issues as no existing policies or procedures existed for making those reports.
Note: Not having procedures in place to report misconduct is unusual as most large organizations have them and they are often required by the government to (e.g., medicare requires all hospitals receiving its payments to have a way for employees to report fraud).
When the GAO asked the leadership of those agencies why these necessary policies and procedures were not in place, the only explanation they received was that no reports of political interference had been made so there was no need to have a formalized reporting system for it.
In turn, I would argue this line of reasoning is not that different from the agencies habitually refusing to honor their promises to be transparent with the bribes they are receiving from the pharmaceutical industry.
Once I learned this I was relatively sure the vaccine would be approved by the FDA regardless of the red flags that emerged — and despite all the issues that have come to light since that time (along with the fact the vaccine barely works now) those agencies are still trying to push booster after booster for it onto the market.
In my eyes, one of the most important takeaways from the GAO’s investigation is that there are a lot of good people in these agencies who want to do the right thing, but they are often prevented from doing so because corrupt officials have been appointed to lead these agencies — something which RFK Jr. has also repeatedly found to be the case in his years of litigating against the federal government and the sentiment echoed by many of the personnel in these agencies (e.g., the previously mentioned CDC employees).
Conclusion
One of the most common strategies power hungry individuals use to control the masses is to rigidly establish pyramidal hierarchies within the society and then take control of the very top of each of those institutions.
For example, the premier medical journals have been established as the arbiters of “scientific truth,” and as the years have gone by, they’ve marched more and more in lockstep with Big Pharma — so as you might guess both the journals themselves and their editors receive a lot of money from the pharmaceutical industry.
This helps to explain why all of them (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) refused to publish anything critical of the COVID vaccines or remdesivir. Likewise, as Pierre Kory details within the War on Ivermectin, they refused to publish all the data showing affordable off-patent drugs worked much better than any of the lucrative products being rushed out for the COVID boondoggle.
In this article, I’ve attempted to show how there has been an increasing tide of corruption within the agencies we have long trusted to look out for our health. This corruption has now metastasized to the point we saw entire government march in lockstep throughout the pandemic in support of the irrational, unscientific and disastrous policies that were implemented throughout COVID-19. In many ways, I feel like we are well on the path to this scene from the iconic movie Idiocracy:
As much as I’d like to blame the government for the disaster we are witnessing, I think much of it is also a reflection of the culture. For example, Big Pharma and the medical device industry spends a lot of money grooming doctors (now about 20 billion a year) — including over 2500 doctors who’ve received more than half a million dollars from the industry and 700 who’ve received over a million. Remember, that money is only spent because it works.
All of this I believe is representative of a cycle societies throughout history have been observed to follow:
Many factors in turn account for the cyclical nature of things; for example, as the times change, the society’s institutions are no longer suited to meet the needs of current era.
Likewise, when everything works well, citizens often take that for granted and lose the motivation to actively participate in making the society work, which allows the rot in the society’s institutions to fester, whereas once things become bad enough, they become motivated to become active participants in turning things around.
One of the major factors that goes hand in hand with this cycle is the level of corruption, as once it passes a certain point, the institutions society depends upon prioritize serving whoever is bribing them rather than the society — which rapidly leads to things falling apart. As I have tried to illustrate in this article, we are presently in a period of institutional breakdown which has gone hand in hand with the ever-growing corruption throughout our society.
At this point, there are now more and more indications the egregiousness of that corruption (especially given how far things went throughout COVID-19), has now begun to open the public’s eyes to the pervasive corruption within our society and that it’s reached the point it is now threatening the stability of the United States.
In turn, my hope is that this recognition will create the political will to halt the institutional decline our nation is facing — because if it doesn’t, the decline will continue worsen (history has countless examples of the innumerable atrocious things which occur during major institutional declines) and we will likely experience an even greater shock than what was seen during the pandemic.
Why a Global Government Is the Ultimate Goal of Billionaires
October 06, 2023
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
The European Union’s “Energy Performance of Buildings Directive” — the legislative instrument that dictates the energy performance standards for buildings within the EU — will be used to achieve a massive wealth transfer scheme
By 2030, the EU must meet a minimum 55% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. By 2050, they want every building — commercial, public and residential — in the EU to meet zero-emission standards. To achieve that, they will impose a slew of new renewal energy requirements on homeowners
For example, heating systems that use fossil fuels are to be completely phased out of existence by 2035. Homeowners will be required to install new “green,” presumably electric, heating systems — and pay for it out of pocket. The cost for these new energy requirements are estimated to be around 100,000 euros for a residential house
The goal is to force people out of their homes. If you cannot afford the required upgrades, you’ll be forced to sell your home. Asset management companies will then buy them and turn them into rentals
September 20, 2023, the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) president approved a declaration on pandemic prevention, which assigns pandemic authority to the WHO, without a full assembly vote and over the objections of 11 member states. The objections should have prevented a consensus adoption the declaration, but the U.N. is skirting the rules by having the UNGA president, rather than the General Assembly, approve the declaration
In the video above, Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen, a best-selling Norwegian novelist, explains how the European Union’s “Energy Performance of Buildings Directive” — the legislative instrument that dictates the energy performance standards for buildings within the EU — will be used to achieve a massive wealth transfer scheme.
In March 2023, the EU Parliament voted to revise this directive as part of a “Fit for 55” package, which aims to meet a minimum 55% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
By 2050, the EU intends to achieve a “zero-emission and fully decarbonized building stock.”1 In short, by 2050, they want every building — commercial, public and residential — in the EU to meet zero-emission standards. To achieve that, they will impose a slew of new requirements on homeowners.
For example, heating systems that use fossil fuels are to be completely phased out of existence by 2035,2 if the European Parliament gets its way, and that means homeowners will be required to install new “green,” presumably electric, heating systems — and pay for it out of pocket. According to Bull-Hansen, the cost for these new energy requirements is estimated to be around 100,000 euros for a residential house.
The Goal Really Is for You to Own Nothing
The goal, Bull-Hansen, explains, is to force people out of their homes. If you cannot afford the required upgrades, you’ll be forced to sell your home, and asset management companies like BlackRock and Vanguard will stand at the ready to snatch these properties up.
And that’s if you’ll be allowed to sell a house that isn’t up to standards; the government might just deem it unsellable and seize it, or you may have to pay a fine of some sort.
In the U.S., BlackRock and Vanguard started bulk-buying residential homes in earnest in early 2021, which they then rent out rather than resell, thereby eroding middle class homeownership. They also artificially drove up home prices by paying above-asking price, thereby pushing homeownership further out of reach.
Of course, the price of rent has also skyrocketed, and renters will have to pay even more after these energy upgrades. So, not only is homeownership something many young people can no longer achieve, many can’t even afford to rent, and are forced to live with their parents or multiple roommates. We can eventually expect the number of homeless to skyrocket as well.
As noted by Bull-Hansen, the elimination of personal property ownership is all part of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Great Reset agenda, Agenda 2030 and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. These are just different names for the same overarching plan.
The WEF’s “8 Predictions for the World in 2030” video,3 in which they cheerfully declared that by 2030 “you will own nothing,” spelled out many of the aspects of this global plan, including the goal to eliminate personal ownership rights. “All products will become services,” the WEF explains on its website.4 That’s what “you’ll own nothing” refers to.
Gone will be the days when you buy something once and can use it indefinitely because you own it. Instead, the new system they’re pushing us into will require you to rent everything — your home, transportation, furniture, pots and pans and all the rest. You’ve probably noticed this creep already.
For example, you used to be able to buy a piece of software, which came on a disc. You could install and reinstall that program on any computer you wanted, because you had the CD.
Today, most software programs are cloud-based subscriptions, and you have to pay a monthly or annual fee for as long as you’re using it. And, while the fee may be low, once you add it up over a lifetime of use, you’ll end up paying many times more than what you did when you were able to buy it outright.
Homeownership Has Always Been a Wealth-Building Strategy
As noted by Bull-Hansen, homeownership defines the middle class. More importantly, it’s been a way to build and secure generational wealth for ages. Remove the ability for people to buy their own home, and you effectively eliminate the middle class, leaving just the very rich, and the very poor.
“It doesn’t matter if you believe this will be good for the environment or not,” Bull-Hansen says. “This is about controlling you. This is about owning you … This is a wealth transfer that we’re looking at, and we can’t accept that. Ownership is important. It’s a very, very essential concept …
If you take ownership away, what you’re left with is feudalism. Someone’s going to own the stuff that you need, and they will be the so-called ‘elites’ … So we must put our foot down and refuse to accept this.”
Disobedience Is Our Only Way Out
OK, so what do we do about it? I second Bull-Hansen’s call for peaceful disobedience. “We MUST be disobedient now,” he says. The alternative is to accept serfdom.
And again, the coming slave system is not merely about removing human rights and eliminating the freedoms we’ve enjoyed our whole lives — even simple things, such as having the freedom to travel wherever you choose, whenever you want — it’s also about stripping us of our wealth and eliminating the possibility of building wealth in the future.
They’re not just trying to take away your ability to own a home and build generational wealth that way. With a central bank digital currency (CBDC), you won’t make interest on your money, and they’ll take taxes out automatically. They’ll also have the ability to dictate where and what you can spend your money on, and put expiration dates on your funds so that you can never save up for a rainy day.
The globalist cabal behind this entire agenda intends to create a permanent slave class that has no rights, no freedoms and no way out.
If you go along with these “green” proposals — which is what they’re using to justify this particular wealth transfer scheme — then you are actively choosing poverty and slavery for yourself, your children and all descendants thereafter, because dismantling this global system of control will be unimaginably difficult once it’s in place.
How are you going to rebel when the government can seize your bank accounts at will, lock you out of grocery stores, send you to an infectious control internment camp to “protect public health” even though you’re not sick, program your electric vehicle such that it only runs within a specific designated area, and punish everyone you know in the same way, simply because they know you?
All of that, and much more, will be possible once the AI-run digital surveillance and control grid is fully implemented and linked to your digital identity, a programmable CBDC and the unified ledger system.
As noted by Bull-Hansen, there will be ramifications for disobedience and refusal to go along with the globalist “green” agenda, but if we agree to pay the price now, and refuse en masse, this globalist power grab will absolutely fail. They cannot do it without mass obedience.
Who’s Looking to Rule the World?
If this topic is new to you, you might be wondering who these “globalists” are that are trying to effect this global coup. I’m not going to name names here, although it’s getting easier by the day to identify the individuals who are part of the club by examining their public statements and stances, their business endeavors and affiliations.
The reason for this is because most are no longer even trying to hide their involvement, and the organizations erected to drive the agenda forward are becoming more and more open about their goals.
For example, June 5, 2023, the United Nations published a document spelling out its commitment to make the World Health Organization the central global governance body.
The following excerpt is from page 9 of the Zero Draft of the “Political Declaration of the United Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response” document drafted in advance of the September 20, 2023, General Assembly meeting.5
The final text6 of this document was published September 1, 2023, and in that version, all of the headings have been removed, but the overall intent to make the WHO a de facto governing body for the world remains unchanged.
While the document focuses on the WHO’s authority to dictate pandemic prevention and response worldwide, as I’ve detailed in several previous articles, the WHO will not only be in charge of pandemics. That’s just the justification they use to get its foot in the door.
Next, the WHO will move into general health care by advancing the acceptance of a universal health care system. This will be promoted under the banner of enhancing pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, as detailed on page 11 under OP33 in the Zero Draft,7 and under article 22 in the final text.8
Then, through the global One Health program, which expands “public health” to include everything from agriculture and pollution to travel and climate change, the WHO — or some spinoff thereof — will take over all government functions.
The final text of the UN’s “Political Declaration” even declares that health is an indicator of “sustainable development,” thereby directly linking the WHO’s pandemic authority to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030.
Lawlessness Reigns
Making matters all the more dire for the people of the world is the fact that governments and global organizations involved in this power grab are increasingly flouting rules, guidelines, laws and treaties that previously have ensured at least some semblance of democracy and rule of law.
One of the latest examples of this is the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) president’s approval of the declaration on pandemic prevention (the document discussed above) without a full assembly vote and over the objections of 11 member states (Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Eritrea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Nicaragua, the Russian Federation, the Syrian Arab Republic, Venezuela and Zimbabwe).
According to Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a bioweapons expert and professor of international law at the University of Illinois who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the objections by 11 nations should “prevent this declaration being adopted by consensus and thus arguably becoming part of customary international law, which is what those behind the declaration intend.”
“They could not get it through the UNGA as a Consensus Resolution because of the 11 objecting states,” Boyle told The Defender.9“They are trying to spin it and misrepresent it by having the UNGA president — not the UNGA — approve the declaration.”
UN Declaration Calls for Universal Vaccinations and More
The fact that the UN General Assembly president is creating loopholes where there are none is particularly disturbing in light of the fact that the declaration makes the COVID-19 power grabs permanent and calls for universal vaccination, increased surveillance, vaccine passports, social media censorship, and an “integrated One Health approach,” which I just explained is the primary way by which the WHO will end up governing all aspects of human life.
So, we can see that even when countries disagree and push back, U.N. leadership simply skirts the rules and follows the Deep State plan anyway, and that’s precisely the kind of behavior we can expect from a “One World Government.” They’ll have rules for themselves, which they’ll conveniently ignore when it suits them, and fixed rules with harsh penalties for the rest of the plebs. As reported by The Defender, September 20, 2023:10
“Critics called the declaration, which seeks to create a global pandemic authority with the power to enforce lockdowns, universal vaccination and censorship of ‘misinformation,’ ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘unhinged.’ The approval came as part of a high-level meeting on PPPR [Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response] …
In a statement, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, ‘If COVID-19 taught us nothing else, it’s that when health is at risk, everything is at risk.’ He linked the PPPR to the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), saying world leaders should ‘show they have learned the painful lessons of the pandemic’ …
Writing for the Brownstone Institute, Dr. David Bell, a public health physician, biotech consultant and former director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund, said ‘the main aim’ of the declaration ‘is to back’ the ‘pandemic treaty’ and IHR amendments currently under negotiation by WHO member states.
Bell said a ‘silence procedure’ is in place, ‘meaning that States not responding will be deemed supporters of the text.’ He said the text is ‘clearly contradictory, sometimes fallacious, and often quite meaningless,’ and intended to centralize the WHO’s power.
Bell told The Defender, ‘The declaration was not written with serious intent, but is essentially empty rhetoric promoting a continued centralization of control that the U.N. and WHO are openly seeking, at the expense of democracy, human rights and equality.’
Francis Boyle … agreed … ‘This is a full-court press to have the entirety of the United Nations Organization, its specialized agencies and its affiliated organizations, back up and support their proposed globalist WHO worldwide totalitarian medical and scientific police state,’ he said.”
Why Does the Deep State Reveal Its Plans?
In recent years, the last three in particular, the Deep State global mafia has gotten more and more open about its plans. That said, even decades ago, the plan for a “New World Order,” a “One World Government,” was there for anyone to see. They discussed it in published white papers and reports, they hinted at it in movies and entertainment, they divulged it in tabletop exercises.
Why do they always reveal their plan? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to keep it a secret so that people don’t know what’s coming and therefore won’t put up a fight?
As it turns out, there’s a method to the apparent madness, and the video above, “Revealing the Method: Esoteric Symbolism as Mind Control,” explains it. In summary, the agenda for a global governance system uses mass mind control to condition people to loss of personal power by promoting and getting us used to three types of loss:
Loss of memory (amnesia)
Loss of will or initiative (abulia)
Loss of interest in that which is vital to one’s health and well-being (apathy)
These three psychological conditions are required for the global cabal to successfully implement a global government. Mind control methods used by the cabal to promote these conditions include the subversion of sacred symbolism and archetypes.
With the use of occult and esoteric symbols, they appeal to mankind’s lower instincts, animalistic appetites, compulsive urges and “inharmonious drives that conflict with an individual’s higher conscious nature.” The goal is to arrest the spiritual development of individuals and stifle the evolution of spirit within society.
Putting their “mark” on everything they do may also be an ego-driven facet of the cabal’s megalomania. It proclaims their dominance to each other and, subconsciously, to the masses, while simultaneously mocking those they view as inferior.
One particularly interesting aspect of the cabal’s use of symbolism is that the symbol typically means the exact opposite of the mainstream consensus view of its meaning. For example, the hammer and sickle symbol, found on the flag of the former Soviet Union, is commonly thought to represent the tools of the working class — industry and agriculture. The idea is that of a “working class utopia.”
The occult meaning, however, which predates the Soviet Union, is that of Saturn, a demi-urge who used a sickle to sever the unity of earth and heaven. Having separated earth from the divine, Saturn became the architect of the material world. In emulation of Saturn, the cabal is also engrossed with matters of the material world: owning it, shaping it, controlling it.
The hammer, meanwhile, represents the obliteration of matter — “The final act of chaotic destruction to usher in their new order.” It’s the instrument that shatters the last remnants of divine will within mankind “in a process in which man devolves and descends further into a post-human world.”
The hammer and sickle, then, seen from an occult perspective, denotes the tyrannical rule of an elite class intent on separating mankind from the divine and, ultimately, destroying it. Its occult meaning is that of a divided dystopia — the opposite of a unified utopia.
I recommend viewing the video, which goes into much greater detail than this short summary. If nothing else, it’s food for thought.
