The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Brutal Crushing of the Lower 50% towards a genuine democratic capitalism ELIZABETH NICKSON Last week the WEFers held their summer camp in China. More to come, they warned us. More pandemics, more catastrophic global warming, more inflation, hell on wheels, they promise us, Armageddon is coming. Be very afraid. The following was a particularly lovely event: “How to Stay Within Planetary Boundaries -  Carrot or Stick ?” which focused on whether to incentivize or force compliance with “climate goals”. It was hosted by some joker who edits a magazine called  Nature Energy,  no doubt funded by the WEF and read by exactly nobody. And some very  po-faced  morons of various colors, paid in the six figures, cited a bunch of falsified statistics ending with these pretty little paragraphs: “We are - broadly speaking - agreed that we need to get on track towards a net-zero, climate-safe and nature-positive future, but we know this will not be easy. And we’re goin...

  The irony of protein corporations As I’ve noted many times before, including in  Soy 101 , grass-fed/pasture based grass finished cattle doesn’t eat much if any soy, and grass-fed/feed lot grain-finished cattle eats very little soy (largely husks in the form of pellets). This recent paper,  The Rise   of Meat Substitute Consumption and its Impact on the U.S. Soybean Industry , from Purdue University reaffirms this second point about conventional US beef production. As noted in this paper:  “…The total amount of feed excluding harvested forages fed to beef cattle equals approximately 64.5 million tons in 2019 in the U.S. Roughly 57% of this amount came from corn and only roughly 4% was soy-related ingredients…” The researcher’s analysis, based on certain assumptions, goes on to note that plant based and especially cell-Ag proteins increase the markets for soybean since soy isolates are used in many of the plant based products and soy hydrolysate is the most ava...

  The Two Causes of the Coming Great Depression But the status quo has much to unlearn, and it seems the only pathway to a new understanding is a Great Depression. There are two approaches to analyzing a situation: 1. Choose the desired outcome--generally the one that doesn't require any major changes, sacrifices or downward mobility 2. Identify the initial conditions and systemic dynamics and then follow these to a conclusion back-tested by comparisons with historical outcomes. Our default setting as humans is 1: select the outcome we want and then find whatever bits and pieces supports that conclusion.  Cherry-pick data, draw false analogies--the field is wide open. This is why we get so upset when our "analysis" is challenged:  we're forced to ask what happens to us if our desired outcome doesn't transpire, and since the answer might be something less than optimal, we violently reject any data or analogies that conflict with our carefully curated "analysis...