The Post-Partisan Emporium

  ‘Expresso Vaccines’ and Lessons from the American Chestnut Tree Why a vaccine designed in two days faced less regulatory scrutiny than a venerable nut tree that sustained life for centuries Dr. Mathew Maavak A tree that once fed multitudes now faces a decade of federal red tape before a single seed can touch wild soil, while a brand-new genetic vaccine, cooked up in 48 hours and injected into billions, sailed through approval in under a year. One restores a vanished forest, the other rewrote human cells on a planetary scale. Both are genetic modifications, yet one is treated as a potential ecological threat while the other is hailed as a modern miracle. Welcome to the “expresso lane” of modern biotechnology, where speed, risk, and scrutiny depend entirely on whose veins are on the line. Reign of the Chestnut King In the ancient forests of Appalachia, the American Chestnut (Castanea dentata) once towered as the unmatched monarch. Stretching from the southern ridges to southern Can...

  Invasion Of The Water Snatchers Texas ranchers are fighting “green” hydrogen projects. “It’s a ridiculous amount of water.” Sister Mary Grace and Sister Mary Michael, outside the  Carmelite Monastery of Our Lady of Grace , on August 15, 2024. Photo by author. Drought has hit Schleicher County hard. Lots of the stock tanks are dry. The only plants that appear to be thriving on this part of the Edwards Plateau are scrawny mesquite trees and the ever-present prickly pear cactus. As we turned onto County Road 339, the clouds of dust from the unpaved road were so thick that I slowed down to assure there was at least 100 yards between my vehicle and the tailgate of Ray and Sandra Pfeuffer’s pickup. It was the afternoon of August 15. The dashboard in our 4Runner showed the outside temperature was 103 F. The sun was relentless. There was almost no wind. A bare handful of clouds dotted the sky. The Pfeuffers, who raise goats and cattle on a 3,300-acre ranch about a dozen miles southe...

“Sustainably” Surveilling and Tokenizing Nature:  The Case of O.N.E. Amazon The architect of BlackRock’s ETFs has teamed up with a group of companies tied to US intelligence and US government debt trading to tokenize the Amazon rainforest and borgify it with a large-scale sensor network in order to create a new form of “digital gold.” by Mark Goodwin and by Whitney Webb A satellite surveillance company with links to U.S. intelligence, former Trump administration officials, U.S. government debt barons and the stablecoin Tether (USDT)  announced plans  earlier this year to build the “Internet for Forests” in the Amazon rainforest. The satellite company, called Satellogic, plans to join an initiative to rig up one of the world’s oldest and most important forests with sensors and “machine intelligence infrastructure” led by a group called O.N.E. Amazon. O.N.E. Amazon, in turn, seeks to turn the Amazon rainforest into a digital asset security to be chopped up, tokenized and so...