The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Synthetic Chicken Will Never Fly Techno-flesh cannot replace livestock. JOHN KLAR Recent revelations at a premier lab-grown meat startup suggest techno-mystical visions of cheap, plentiful, vat-cultured meats are a fantastical pipe dream. Venture capitalists and a climate-anxious public have been lured to believe synthetic animal meat substitutes will solve environmental problems while liberating farm animals. The chief hurdles for this nascent, aspirational industry are cost and scale: The alleged misrepresentations by billion-dollar Upside Foods in Emeryville, California, reflect an industry-wide cover-up of the impossibility of achieving cost savings, large-scale production, or environmental utility with vat-flesh. The Downside of Upside Upside Foods has repeatedly touted its technology to “cultivate” flavorful, whole cuts of synthetic chicken in its  laboratory . Employee whistleblowers claim the company misled the public to believe it had developed the capacity to effic...

You Must Be In 'The Six-Figure Club' To Afford A House The latest housing data shows soaring mortgage rates, elevated prices, and limited inventory continue to worsen the affordability crisis.  New data from real estate brokerage Redfin Corp. indicates homebuyers now need a whopping $114,000 salary to afford a median-priced home of $412,000 in September - assuming a 30-year fixed mortgage rate of 7.2% with 20% down. This is a near doubling in salary needed to afford a home since Covid, and since inflation wiped out real wages for two years, more Americans than ever can no longer afford the 'American Dream' of a single-family house with a white picket fence, instead, trapped in a cycle of renting. Redfin's next report, for this month, will likely show another jump in the salary needed to afford an average home because the 30-year fixed mortgage rate has risen   80 percentage points to 8% . In 2012, the salary Americans needed to afford the average home was about $38,...

A Dog’s Breakfast By  Karen Kwiatkowski Doug Casey recently described what’s happening in the Middle East as  a dog’s breakfast . A muddle, a mess. President Biden is himself a dog’s breakfast in human form, and while Biden is never clear nor coherent, the modern pattern of US policy may be. The US government, and its military industrial complex sponsors – who own much of the media, and who, along with the rest of the media, are owned by Blackrock and Vanguard – wants mass subsidy of the US arms industry, and to sell those mostly debt-funded arms everywhere at a big mark-up. Building a border wall, whether with construction materials or security sensors, is a low margin activity, and once in place, the updating and repair contracts are not lucrative, in the way that government-subsidized weapons systems and ammunition with associated spending and endless training, and with continuous upgrades and cost overruns – this is where the real money is. Pursuant to this compelling inte...

  A Red Heifer Is the Secret to Understanding the Israel-Hamas War Written By  Zachary Emmanuel View fullsize Art by Tanzanian Wojak This is a holy war, not a geopolitical conflict. Editor’s Note: Just like everything else on this site, the purpose of this article is not to convince you of a partisan side, but to provide important and largely unreported information. The sources used in our research range from Al Jazeera to Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper to the websites of ultra-religious Messianic Jewish groups. On October 7, Hamas militants launched the most brutal attack on Israel in our lifetimes, “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm.” We’ve heard and seen the many grisly details: women and children kidnapped, families gunned down and taken hostage, bodies burned and mutilated. What has gone curiously unreported in Western media—what is strangely missing from Wikipedia entries about the conflict—is why the invasion happened when it did. The average observer either views the attacks as unp...