George Monbiot: selling the 1% agenda in a Green box
Catte Black
The neoliberals of today specialise in using concepts of concern and inclusiveness as a cover for their frankly fascist agenda. Censorship is being repackaged as “anti-hate”. The destruction of the core idea of “innocent until proven guilty” is being repackaged as protecting (mostly female) victims from their persecutors. Reasonable doubt is being repackaged as “denialism.” Minority opinion is being repackaged as treachery or subversion. Facts that contradict a current state-sponsored agenda are repackaged as “fake news.”
Conformity is being encouraged, presented as a cosy and reassuring “consensus blanket”, under which we can all snuggle together, safe from confusion, doubt or the horrendous experience of having our cherished beliefs called into question. Most journos operating in the mainstream have already opted to crawl in and curl up for the long snooze into intellectual and ethical oblivion, while others, the kapos, are actively herding the remaining doubters inside.
George Monbiot is one of the latter. The last few years have outed this one time supposed anti-establishment figure as nothing more than a fully establishment goon, posturing in the sad tatters of his “dissident Green” cosplay. His performance during the Syria crisis made this too obvious. His sub-intelligent smears on those independent journalists daring to question the narrative made his real allegiances, and limitations, more than clear. His preparedness to brazenly lie and his refusal to debate the people he smeared in an open forum cemented this view.
Monbiot is revealed as the guy the establishment uses to try and lure the Left-Greens out in support of the latest agenda roll-out by the likes of Soros, Gates and the Atlantic Council. He’s booked for the same gigs as Avaaz. His brief, as ever, is to sell fascism – but this time in a Green box.
Today George is busy selling us on veganism.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Veganism is fine. It’s a human choice and it has a place. This is not an attack on veganism, or vegans.
But we need to separate what a thing is from what it’s being used for. Everything, even the best things, can be exploited. And we can’t let loyalty to the thing itself stop us from seeing when its being used for less than good ends.
Veganism is being promoted right now by the usual suspects. There has been a rash of articles in the Guardian and elsewhere about the supposed health and environmental benefits of giving up meat and dairy. Even if we happen to be vegan, we’d be insane not to wonder why. Especially when Monbiot is getting involved.
George is a poster child for the New Wave Vegan. Strange, perhaps, given he’s only a “97% vegan” himself. But let’s just ignore the 3% carnivore, since it’s only road kill. The more important point, anyway, is that George wants us all to think he’s a vegan. Because a salesman has to be seen to use the product he’s promoting. His latest article breaks no new ground on this really. He’s said most of it before, as have others. But still, given the mounting evidence for the political mobilisation of veganism, it’s a good idea to look at what he says.
He starts by offering a binary choice – between the current wasteful and insane industrial farming system and a somewhat poorly defined alternative in which everyone eats a plant-based diet, which he implies without really saying, will put an end to this insanity. He tells us not only will this choice fix the problem of worldwide food shortage (because plant-husbandry produces far more calories per hectare than animal husbandry), but it will also remove the problem of all that unused animal waste currently pouring into rivers and creating massive pollution.
George’s ideal future will also be gratifying for the processed food industry. Because vegans need ready meals!
Unless you can cook well – and many people have neither the skills nor the space – a plant-based diet can be either boring or expensive. We need better and cheaper vegan ready meals and quick and easy meat substitutes
And fake meat grown in a lab!
The big shift will come with the mass production of cultured meat.
George recognises the latter will be a tough sell, but he’s up for giving it a try. An objection to this might be that “artificial meat is disgusting”, says George, but:
If you feel this way, I invite you to look at how your sausages, burgers and chicken nuggets are currently raised, slaughtered and processed. Having worked on an intensive pig farm, I’m more aware than most of what disgusting looks like.
Mmmm…Lab-grown pseudo-meat, pink-dyed and not quite as disgusting as someting even worse! Lovely Roundup-saturated veggies processed into some approximation of the kind of protein humans can digest, and piped into microwavable sachets.
Who knew utopia would end up looking quite so much like – now? Who knew the new way would be just like the old way but with more “progressive” slogans?
George uses twisty self-contradictory arguments to claim one minute that eliminating livestock farming would “be a chance to break our complete dependence on artificial nitrogen”, while in his very next para admitting the exact opposite will in fact be the case.
the transition to plant protein is unlikely to eliminate the global system’s need for artificial fertiliser
Though he throws us a bone in the shape of
the pioneering work of vegan organic growers, using only plant-based composts and importing as little fertility as possible from elsewhere
This is blatant bait and switch. Green or green-sounding proclamations being swapped out for their very opposites with a deftness he hopes will fool us. We may, in some misty future time, not need to rely entirely on synthetic chemicals – but yes, ok, for now we will still be sucking up carcinogens with our lovely all veg diet.
Of course we could just use the animal manure to fertilise our veggies, which would entirely eliminate the need for chemical fertilisers…But let’s not think about that too much. Let’s instead soften that focus and just picture fields full of lovely cruelty-free plants waving in the even lovelier breeze…
In case you haven’t noticed, George’s entire article is hand-waving nonsense predicated on a lie, or a system of lies, and his trademark nifty footwork.
His claim that we need to produce more food is used as a blanket rationale for everything he advocates, but it’s a lie. We don’t need to produce more food. We currently produce more than enough food to feed the world. What we need and don’t have is equitable distribution. And that is because of the stranglehold of the minority interests George is carefully eliding.
His initial binary choice is a lie. We don’t need to choose between intensive animal farming and intensive cereal/veg farming. We have the option of non-intensive farming methods that treat the land, the animals and the crops with respect, and use age-old, sustainable methods to produce chemical-free and healthy food.
His dishonesty is nowhere more apparent than when he tries to elide this simple truth. Look at how he acknowledges the illogicality of unused animal waste
Today, the link between livestock and crops has mostly been broken: crops are grown with industrial chemicals while animal slurry stacks up, unused, in stinking lagoons, wipes out rivers and creates dead zones at sea.
but dodges away from the obvious solution – use the “slurry” to fertilise the land in place of synthetic chemicals – with a weak excuse:
When it is applied to the land, it threatens to accelerate antibiotic resistance.
Notice how he avoids mentioning the fact non-intensively reared animals don’t need to be pumped full of antibiotics in the first place. He even links to the source for sustainable husbandry I cite above, but does so only to dismiss it (without data) as “worse” than anything else on offer, by using, once again, the fake claim about the need to produce more food per hectare:
More damaging still is free-range meat: the environmental impacts of converting grass into flesh, the paper remarks, “are immense under any production method practised today”. This is because so much land is required to produce every grass-fed steak or chop
And adding that it’s also bad for the environment
Those who claim that “regenerative” or “holistic” ranching mimics nature deceive themselves. It relies on fencing, while in nature wild herbivores roam freely, often across vast distances. It excludes or eradicates predators, which are crucial to the healthy functioning of all living systems. It tends to eliminate tree seedlings, ensuring that the complex mosaics of woody vegetation found in many natural systems – essential to support a wide range of wildlife – are absent
You thought Monsanto, GM, monocultures and the ripping up of hedgerows was the problem? Nah. It’s fences. And herbivores eating the grass they’re designed to eat. And implicit in this nonsense of course is the greater nonsense that massive veggie monocultures drowned in pesticides and herbicides, are just teaming with wild life, tree seedlings and predators.
Just as he used frank lies to promote the Soros-backed White Helmets as unsung “heroes”, here, in the fake guise of promoting a healthy, organic, back-to-nature solution to the world’s problems, George is promoting the current power system of Big Ag and Big Food monopoly. Just as Avaaz sells us imperial regime change as grass roots activism, George is selling us industrial farming and denatured food as a return to Eden.
Don’t buy what he’s selling. Don’t surrender your sense of the real to this snake oil salesman. Go vegan if you want – that’s a fine personal choice. But not at the expense of the small producers who are already struggling to survive without the subsidies the big guys get.
Don’t vote for some future “meat tax” that will drive them out of business, and penalise the poor, just as Big Ag wants.
Don’t buy into this soft focus dreamland where our entire livestock herd disappears bloodlessly and completely from our landscape without being killed or culled, and is somehow better for it.
Don’t be whispered into campaigning for a new and self-imposed serfdom, in which 7 billion compliant vegans munch their potage or their shrink-wrapped lab-grown Soylent Green, while the 1% quietly eat grass-fed steak and snigger with duping delight.
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Superb article calling out the loathsome Monbiot.
How to get banned by the Guardian : reference Monbiots libeling of Leon Britten and his subsequent community service..
For me, it’s a legitimate question of the guys judgement.
Well, hate fake prophets like George ( calling him JihadiGeorge), but giving platform to a “meateater” that’s climbs on the “high ground” of traditional or conservative farming and looking down on all those “nutters” who broke the shackles of traditional animal killing “norm” is a bit of owngoal. And btw meat produced in the lab is not disgusting, but person who thinks: “That growing highly intelligent creatures in concrete boxes and killing them for “food” IS.
lol, the g is at it again big time this week. cholesterol deniers will cause deaths, and get your flu shot!
Now it gets even worse, he’s jumped on the anti-sugar bandwagon and basically pushing for State mandated food and menus. At this rate in 5-10 years we’ll be fully in an Orwellians totalitarian state.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/15/age-of-obesity-shaming-overweight-people
that i would agree with, anti sugar. not fat shaming.stuff is poison.
https://twitter.com/Greens4Liberty/status/1013932464539164674
Risible article in the Guardian about the Green Party Leadership Contest.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/02/greens-announce-three-sets-of-contenders-for-uk-leadership-contest
There is nothing wrong with the story, it is all true but I have to say the saddest thing about the Off Guardian is the time spent on responding to utterly worthless stories found in The Guardian. The reason why most people switched off and don’t read The Guardian and don’t have to read more lies by Monbiot. This is because the problem with giving energy and time to respond to fake people who create fake stories and peddle lies is a waste of precious time and means concentrating on the negative instead of the positive. I thought that Off Guardian would give time and space for original stories that not only investigate what is really going on, not always positive but something that needs to be done. There can also be positive stories about countries making positive changes through grassroots movements, there are quite a few, none to be… Read more »
One might say the whole point of Off-Guardian is to counter the false arguments peddled by the likes of Blairite The Guardian, Ex-Londoner. It is nice to have a place where mistruths can be replied to so counter arguments can reach the wider population through the internet. There is another example of such a magazine extant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_of_Our_Times Lies of Our Times (LOOT) was a political magazine published between January 1990 and December 1994. The magazine was published on a monthly basis.[1] Ellen Ray was both its co-founder and publisher.[2] It served not only as a general media critic, but as a watchdog of The New York Times, which the magazine referred to as “the most cited news medium in the United Slates, our paper of record.”[3] In 1995, Lies of Our Times won the Orwell Award, given out annually by the National Council of Teachers of English for outstanding contributions… Read more »
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/02/greens-announce-three-sets-of-contenders-for-uk-leadership-contest This Risible piece in the Guardian about the Green Party Leadership election sums up the Guardin, There is no opportnity to comment and it seems to be drafted from the Green Party press release. The Green Part Leadership election in 2012 , 2016 and again this time if the GP establishment gets it’s way will be very low again Less than 30% Leadership and Just above 20% turnout for Deputy leadership. Low turnouts do favour encumbents adbvantage something which helped The Social Democratic/Democratic Soiclist policy manifesto of Labour in 2017 to get traction was that a High turnout confounded the Pollsters who had factored in apathy as encouraged by all the Brenda from Bristol coverage. Anyway, How about some coverage on the GPO election 2018 here on Off Guardian. I Made this Parody Video of the Current stae of the #NotTheLeadershipCoups. Greens For Liberty 🔰 🏴 This account… Read more »
I think that’s a little pompous, to sign off like that. Perhaps you should be a little less close-minded about the channels you think progress should take, and a little less smug that people working hard to produce these publications aren’t up to your standards.
While one can always criticise, your comment is pretty self-defeating and negative – rather ironic considering your lofty tone and appeal for more ‘positive’ stories.
Offsetting propaganda with truth is by necessity led by the propagandists. It is a useful resource where people can go to help balance their viewpoint and discover alternative perspectives.
Why not make a positive suggestion that stimulates and inspires instead? No one really gives a cr*p if you chose not to post here. Its legacy is nil.
The purpose is to remind you, lest you forget what a scumbag he is. I know you may find it unpalatable. But it is undeniable. MSM today is corrupted bought and paid for.
“And fake meat grown in a lab”
I see the outer reflecting the inner.
The factory pharmed human.
The fake life devolving to a degraded and paralysed living death.
While I do not align with tyranny under fake moral rage, I do see that what we give sets the measure of our receiving – but that faking morality as targets and rules is the dead letter that would usurp the Living Word.
What we give in this living now is the measure of our receiving. Not what we ‘think’ into complex instruments of self-justification.
The Alleged Human Global Warming or Anthropological Global Warming : “AHGW / AGW as the Environmental 9/11” … The IPCC was established by the WMO & UNEP on 9 November 1988 The first session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was held in Geneva, Switzerland, from 9 to 11 November 1988. The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading body for the assessment of climate change, established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic consequences. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc11887/ The same day that King George I of Planet Earth, GHW Bush became the US President Elect. * It was the IPCC’s 4 th Climate Assessment Report ( 4AR ) published on 2 February 2007 which first proclaimed “with 90 percent certainty”… Read more »
Paranoid pseudo-Kabbalistic garbage. The IPCC has been guilty of down-playing the extent and rate of anthropogenic climate destabilisation in its Reports, released at leisurely five-yearly intervals, because of the requirement to find ‘consensus’ with denialist regimes like those of Sordid Arabia and Austfailure.
Mulga Mumblebrain : “Paranoid pseudo-Kabbalistic garbage” … Is that the best you can do Mulga Mumblebrain ? You have nothing to contribute on the subject of kabbalistic event scheduling, so you go straight to the insult phase of your claptrap, dogma. Since you, self-evidently, appear to be sufficiently aware to be able to identify what you coniser to be “pseudo-Kabbalistic…” such esoteric awareness implies that you therefore also know, what is not “pseudo-Kabbalistic …” So please, do share your insights with the world Mulga Mumblebrain … So far, your insulting, dullard, instant rejection of this subject, about which you know nothing, does not bode well for those seeking the scientific approach and reasoned, logical based arguments from you on the climate change scam… Maybe you should stick to your faux Jew baiting instead, since it seems to be what you do best … * Wikipedia : John Tyndall John Tyndall… Read more »
UNFCCC : Greenhouse Effect : Joseph Fourier Wikipedia : Joseph Fourier Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier ( 21 March 1768 – 16 May 1830 ) was a French mathematician and physicist born in Auxerre and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. The Fourier transform and Fourier’s law are also named in his honour. Fourier is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.[2] Discovery of the greenhouse effect While he ultimately suggested that interstellar radiation might be responsible for a large portion of the additional warmth, Fourier’s consideration of the possibility that the Earth’s atmosphere might act as an insulator of some kind is widely recognized as the first proposal of what is now known as the greenhouse effect,[16] although Fourier never called it that.[17][18] * The Rio Earth Summit’s UNFCCC UN Framework Convention on Climate Change… Read more »
The Fichte / Hegel Dialectic : The IPCC’s 4 th Climate Assessment Report ( 4AR ) Fichte / Hegel : Thesis, Anti-thesis, Synthesis = Problem, Reaction, Solution … Dialectics : The default modus operandi, used consistently, because it works … * Wikipedia : Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ( August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831 ) was a German philosopher Hegel has been seen in the 20th century as the originator of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad,[19] but as an explicit phrase it originated with Johann Gottlieb Fichte.[20] * From Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel died on 14 November 1831 to the landmark 4th IPCC “assessment report” ( 4AR ) : “very likely” human life on earth causes the GW problem on 2 February 2007 is : INTerval ILUAF and INClusive ISUAF = = 1665 months, 1665 weeks, 1665 days = 555 + 555 + 555 months… Read more »
As a long-time spiritual seeker, much respect for Kabbalah. Interesting to read the Bible Code etc. and very much a believer in numerical correspondences.
On a slightly connected note; astrologer Michel Gauquelin
The Gauquelin work
1. A concise history with photographs
http://www.astrology-and-science.com/g-hist2.htm
666 + 666 + 666 + …
Why should we listen to somebody who appears to be unfamiliar with the concept of multiplication?
It’s not hard to believe that numerology appeals mainly to mathematical illiterates, people who believe that numbers such as “666”, especially when repeated, have some kind of magical significance.
Even the original appearance of “666” in a seemingly-mystical context was actually perfectly materialist; “him that hath understanding” understood it to be a coded reference to the Roman emperor Nero.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_the_Beast#Nero
Anti-imperialists from two thousand years ago, such as the writer of “Revelations”, would have laughed their heads off, if they knew how their samizdat would be mystified by generations of obscurantist loons.
The apostle St. John was an anti-imperialist? Funny, but most seem to think it was a book of religious prophecy written in the style of Daniel and referred to future events http://bibleprobe.com/revelation.htm
Curiously I read yesterday that Isaac Newton devoted his latter years to investigating literal explanations for Daniel and Revelation. I’m not ‘up’ on Daniel – but my sense of Revelation is that it is based on past human experience projected and expected as a future event. This apocalyptic fear operates as catastrophic inducement to appease an overwhelming power and delay, so as to escape or be saved from a terrible fate. This also describes the human conditioning in which a personal sense of self is ‘saved’ from fear of total loss, to seek reinforcement and defence against exposures that would ‘bring down’ its defences, and so a world of lies by which we ‘save ourselves’ are framed in the belief ‘too big to fail’ – as if the whole basis for order (as we know it) depends on secrets and lies that must remain secret so as to continue supporting… Read more »
Curiously, in Islam ‘Jihad’ is either a war against others or against one self. In the 8th century there was a split within Islam between the literalist and the mystical elements of the faith, likewise within science, a split between the rational and the mystical, and Isaac Newton probably exemplified that split. From my 2011 article “Isaac Newton: First Scientist, or Last Sorcerer?” https://manfromatlan.blogspot.com/2011/06/isaac-newton-first-scientist-or-last.html “Somewhere along the history of mankind there was a split between Science and Mysticism. We are all the poorer for it.” Sir Isaac Newton FRS (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727 ) was an English physicist, mathematician, alchemist, astronomer, natural philosopher, and theologian who is considered by many scholars and members of the general public to be one of the most influential people in human history. His 1687 publication of the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (usually called the Principia) is considered to be among the… Read more »
Indeed, manfromatlan, the ‘separation’ or split is in a sense an inverted jihad and a self-deprivation in terms of the developing ‘consciousness’ of such a split.
I notice ‘wrong turnings’ in history where the true was unwanted or diverted from by the appeal of that which serves (power and wealth in) self-image. I say wrong turnings in quotes because if it is part of our experience it is serving purpose if only to mark out where not to go – once uncovered as an experience of who we are Not.
So I also feel that ‘waking up’ to deceits or self-illusion is the rekindling of a core curiosity and uncovering of gifts from a ‘past’ that wait only on recognition and acceptance.
A book you may enjoy also, manfromatlan:
Our Occulted History, Do The Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens? By award-winning journalist Jim Marrs, RIP.
Was mankind created as a slave/servant race by ancient aliens?
Is this the meaning behind the earliest books of the Bible, which seems to be a rehash of Man’s oldest story, the Legend Of Gilgamesh?
Based, in part, on ancient Sumerian baked clay tablets, which predate the Bible by 2,000 to 4,000 years, with modern info that tends to point at our Moon as a spaceship, this is a hugely informative & interesting book, which I thoroughly recommend.
John Doran
Thanks, jdseanjd. I believe we were visited by people from another space/time dimension millennia ago, who created the ancient civilizations of Lemuria and Atlantis, but somewhere .. lost their way, creating the races through genetic experimentation. But they came out of idealism. My screen name, Man From Atlan is a novel I wrote in 1974 (published 1990) which is readable for free till I get around to putting up on Kindle is here: http://web.archive.org/web/20050219000822/http://www.manfromatlan.com:80/manfromatlantext.html A Search for One’s Soulmate and Destiny That Spans 14,000 Years The Man from Atlan came to Earth thousands of years ago. He and his fellow space-travellers had a mission; to teach a way of life that would form the basis of mankind’s religions. To the people of that time, they were the gods of myth and legend, but in truth they were very human. ‘Man from Atlan’ is about one such man. There was that… Read more »
Atlantis disappeared, according to Plato, who had it from Solon, about the time of the Younger Dryas cooling, 12,900 to 11,600 years ago, followed by the holocene warming a, 11,600 to 8,500 years ago. There is much debate around the cause of this sudden, steep plummeting temperature, followed by a sudden steep rise. An asteroid impact?
JD.
The discernment of the historical in the mythic, and the consequent redefining and amalgamation and association of other histories within the archetypes of meaning that shape our subjective consciousness is more than just looking in the terms we (are) set (in). For what we are looking with is part of the effect we are looking through – OF the thing we are looking for. One possibility for the end of the Younger Dryas is the forming of the Great Lakes (perhaps in minutes) by plasma discharge interactions between ‘heavenly bodies’ (The Gods were later called planets). http://saturniancosmology.org/dryas.php The ‘planes of consciousness’ of the activating and development of a subjective consciousness are of an ‘inner quality’ but the outer embodiments of our physical history were both awesome or overwhelming and catastrophic or terror-forming (pun intended). “A carbon-rich black layer, dating to 12.9 thousand years ago, has been previously identified at 50… Read more »
Thank you, I will look at this site. 🙂
Plato’s date fits well with Holocene Warming a, 11,600 to 8,500 Before Present. This sudden steep warming would have released the water locked up as ice by the Younger Dryas Cooling, very possibly, causing floods. This interesting period is discussed in Geology Prof Ian Plimer’s History Chapter & in Jim Marrs book Our Occulted History.
You may also enjoy putting Younger Dryas (or whatever) into the search box at http://www.wattsupwiththat.com
a lively climate debate site.
JD.
While the link I gave may be found wrong in its willingness to attempt to date and detail some of what its authro has gathered and studied – I have found far too much congruency in the fundamental idea of an ‘electric universe’ to persist in models that are blind to it. Along with that is my deeper sense of reintegrating the ‘inner and the outer or appreciating ‘one thing’ as many faceted – and so I do not regard the physical or ‘thing-objects’ as standalone self-existing be they patterns of energy or sentient beings. In this sense object persistence is a basis for experiencing time and space within the Idea of its unfolding. I don’t see anything in our current model that begins to hold for infinite creation excepting very very big things, very very small things, and very very long ago, but not so much instantly, or always… Read more »
The Electric Universe theory is definitely worth looking into.
The other war around is interesting: that of the making our own being alien to our sense of self.
The alien then is who we are identified with and thus defended against losing to an ‘overwhelmingly greater’ – read uncontrollable – reality. So the ‘illusion’ battles against and yet is captive to the reality that it depends upon to live the denial of.
This is similar in principle to Jesus parable of the tenant farmers and the ‘absent Master’. Or a prodigal son of a false inheritance (because the Father Lives the giving of inherence).
This is not to deny the ‘aliens’ who may be facets of unrecognised or forgotten being – just as can the grass blowing in the wind, the postman or a ladybird.
Date arithmetic or “numerology” …
an exceptionally peculiar internet phenomenon …
*
monostrovich : 666 + 666 + 666 + …
Why should we listen to somebody who appears to be unfamiliar with the concept of multiplication?
It’s not hard to believe that numerology appeals mainly to mathematical illiterates, people who believe that numbers such as “666”, especially when repeated, have some kind of magical significance.
…
Anti-imperialists from two thousand years ago, such as the writer of “Revelations”, would have laughed their heads off, if they knew how their samizdat would be mystified by generations of obscurantist loons.
*
The monostrovich fantasy : Mystical and / or “magical significance” …
Link : off-guardian.org/2018/06/07/consensus-reality-has-outlived-its-usefulness/#comment-123603
Are you a “date arithmetic denier” also monostrovich ?
MG
monostrovich
A proper “obscurantist loon” would have attempted to negate, deride, ridicule each of the 3 digit rep-digits or triplets ( 111 to 999 ) not just the “Biblical one in the middle” = 666 …
So you still have 8 triplets to do your “thing” with monostrovich …
Link : off-guardian.org/2018/06/10/ronan-tynan-kicks-off-world-cup-anti-russia-campaign-by-implying-us-war-crimes-work-of-putin/comment-page-1/#comment-123851
MG
The “Father of Eugenics” : Francis Galton : Climate : UN World Meteorological Organization Convention Ratified & WMO established on 23 March 1950 * Wikipedia : Francis Galton Sir Francis Galton, FRS ( 16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911 ) was an English Victorian era statistician, progressive, polymath, sociologist, psychologist,[1][2] anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, and psychometrician. He was knighted in 1909. He was a pioneer in eugenics, coining the term itself[3] and the phrase “nature versus nurture”.[4] * Wikipedia : World Meteorological Organization WMO The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is an intergovernmental organization with a membership of 191 Member States and Territories. It originated from the International Meteorological Organization (IMO), which was founded in 1873. Established by the ratification of the WMO Convention on 23 March 1950, WMO became the specialised agency of the United Nations for meteorology (weather and climate), operational hydrology and related… Read more »
Nazis : Reichsfuhrer-SS : Heinrich Himmler : Climate : The UNFCC Wikipedia : Heinrich Himmler Heinrich Luitpold Himmler ( 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945 ) was Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron; SS), and a leading member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) of Germany. Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and one of the people most directly responsible for the Holocaust. * Wikipedia : United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an international environmental treaty adopted on 9 May 1992 and opened for signature at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June 1992. It then entered into force on 21 March 1994, after a sufficient number of countries had ratified it. The UNFCCC objective is to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would… Read more »
So the political hopium ‘debate’ about the biogenic or abiogenic origins of oil rolls on. Bottom line: biogenic oil contains biomarkers, carbon isotopes (C-12; C-13), and trapped helium (that came from the surface) which make it conclusive that it was organic in nature; produced by sedimentation and geological conditions (depth, pressure, time). http://richardheinberg.com/richard-heinberg-on-abiotic-oil Bracketing off the question of drilling into the igneous basement rock strata; and finding sustainable oil (LOL!) …we would have to contend with the moral question: why do we want more oil? Two of the leading oil rich nations are currently engaged in genocide in Yemen. I would propose that imperialism is a function of oil. One might argue that KSA; UAE; logistically backed by USUK; are not directly motivated by oil …but they certainly would not be perpetrating genocide, in the manner that they are, without it. So, what would we do with more oil: more… Read more »
Dear me-what a most excellent contribution. I am imitating the broccoli, so envious am I.
Very well put Big B
It might be said that the substitute for “cleaner” ME oil used as a club over the rest of the world, the plentiful oil sands in North America, are greater contributors to environmental genocide. The Saudis just have to do the bidding of their imperial masters (helped along by the timely assassination of King Faisal).
“If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons
Can somebody tell Monsieur Monbiot, please ? if you happen to pass by the Guardian, coz’ particularly George, seems to be sadly absent from the Arena of Sacred Facts & Scientific Reason ..
(and I’m banned from commenting ; dat’s my excuse 🙂 )
I hear nothing has changed @Mon-bio-T’ode2narcissism ..
The lies & hypocrisy that people convince themselves of , never cease to amaze me, since 9/11 ..
Cognitive dissonance pure & simple ‘Consensus’ ,
by ‘George’ Mon-Bio-T ‘oad ..
The Guardian has another veggie burger article today.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/12/fake-meat-plant-based-burgers-vegetarians-vegans
Comments about agribusiness or the frequency of such articles are being moderated at a rate of knots.
I have posted a link to here, 5, 4, 3…
Repeated: Professor Vladilen A. Krayushkin, Chairman of the Department of Petroleum Exploration, Institute of Geological Sciences, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kiev, and leader of the project for the exploration of the northern flank of the Dnieper-Donets Basin, at the VII-th International Symposium on the Observation of the Continental Crust Through Drilling, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1994.
http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/Energy.html
This article rather seems to have put the Catte amongst the pigeons if you pardon the pun. My apologies for this.I think that the original point was that Monbiot is arguing the case for veganism at the same time as continuing support for mono culture and artificial farming methods that are not sustainable given the intense nature of the method. It would also seem that on a personal level Catte does not agree with veganism but does not condemn those who do. This does and has led to great debate and comments. Mostly these have been civil but it is a contentious issue and brave to take it on. It all comes down to an individuals own choice and free will in the end. The most important thing is that animal or vegetable. All life we take for our own needs should be respected,asked of and thanked for its sacrifice.… Read more »
[Verse 3]
Then a sentimental passion
Of a vegetable fashion
Must excite your languid spleen
An attachment a la Plato
For a bashful young potato
Or a not-too-French French bean!
Though the Philistines may jostle
You will rank as an apostle
In the high aesthetic band
If you walk down Piccadilly
With a poppy or a lily
In your medieval hand
And ev’ryone will say
As you walk your flow’ry way
“If he’s content with a vegetable love which would certainly not suit me
Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be!”
[Gilbert & Sullivan, “Patience” (a comic satire on Oscar Wilde) ]
[The hero’s character is in a romantic battle for the heroine Patience, in which his rival is an ‘earthly poet’, Grosvenor who “dines upon chops, and roly-poly pudding with avidity” ]
It’s a great article and courageous to poke the vegan dragon, even ever so gently. I object to the vegan assertion that raising ruminants for slaughter is in some way cruel or inhumane. They are designed to turn grass, which is low-nutrition but prefect for its purpose, into muscle-meat which carnivores and omnivores can eat. They are prey animals everywhere they exist, and eating them is participating in the eco-system and dare I say the purpose of God. And just to be practical rather than metaphysical, If we turned our twenty-acre farm here in West Wales entirely over to vegetables, where are the forty people we shall need to work the land going to live? And what will they eat in hungry gap? Unless we are going to fly produce up from the south, and fly ours there in our summer? I’m afraid the vegan model depends on processing and… Read more »
One might observe that very few “primitive”, indigenous societies had a vegan diet in their original, pre-capitalist state. Especially not the ones existing in relatively harsh environments, where some form of omnivorism is a pre-condition for survival.
However, contradictions such as this are usually beneath the notice of middle-class eco-moralism. As is the destruction of traditional societies by the forces of imperialism, which they are usually happy to cheer for, if given even the most transparent propaganda pretext, as in Syria and Libya.
(This is not a personal response monostrovich – but rose from reading your own in the theme of manipulative deceit). The targeting and destruction of traditional ideas is in a sense traditional… as the replacing of the father by the son, of one god-king state by another, the idea of god-king rule replaced by rights of consent, and the idea of consent replaced by the regulatory capture under deceit. The mind runs a script as a substitution for awareness of being, the movement or desire of being, the recognition or appreciation for being. I have a sense that the ‘script’ of the intent to assert, undermine, deny and usurp runs our minds and frames our experience of a world as power struggle, under threat and fear of loss. It is all the script of the self as the body – or rather limited to and confined or defined to the… Read more »
Dunka, dunka, this creep knows nothing, delivering an string of bullshit wrapped in an carpet of nonsense. Vegan, well, to me, everything is life, and I treat everything acodingly even tomato plants, I dont differentiate,and whats the borderline, where is it, Fish arent, right, etc, to sheeps. Why do we in Norway have millions of sheeps, ok, some for own food, etc to wool, but this producion of meat is way to large and leaves us with an massive over production of meat, witch is then done what with. Dumped on others, to keep the price, uh…. right for us, and we subsidice everything thru tax/tarifs and price levels. Yeah, wild life, humped with an extenicive expansion of grounds where the sheeps can be, and feed them selfs, during summer time, and this millions are kicked out into the open land, and of course, predatores arent that stupid but is… Read more »
“if you gave everybody on this globe an square mile, and dropped us all in Australia, what do you think happens”
Everybody dies, obviously.
If my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.
JD.
Alt-right poster-bo Jordan Peterson reveals he eats a diet composed exclusively of meat.
https://youtu.be/tw8Rf9h0-Sk
So this is proof that a red-meat-based diet can turn even an allegedly intelligent person into an aggressive, shouty, contemptuous short-tempered individual with utter disregard for the opinions or arguments presented by others.
A syndrome we have already noted elsewhere.
i have been “vegan” for 12 years now, its is so easy to cook and eat a plant based diet, i am same weight as when i was 18, i am in my 70s now, you are way off base in many of your comments which means you have not fully examined a plant based diet, i recommend you read the china study or some objective science regarding veganism…this is the craziest article i have read on offguardian, will make me examine the other ones with more scrutiny……
Be careful what you say here – because you will be ambushed by our resident troll, with a series of ad hom attacks on your personal credentials.
Discuss the ideas here, and don’t turn the argument towards the people or their perceived failings. That is NOT content
Fear nothing true, but be vigilant against cunning laid deceits that induce reaction to a guilt and fear sown in division, presented in forms that auto-run in unwatched minds. You cant trust the face value of anything – but that does not mean there is no basis for trust – but is starts within ourself and trusts others to be also themselves instead of setting up relationships to fail. Fantasy worlds keep us in fantasy solutions. I don’t think anyone took the bait of the plant based diet, the plant based diet, the plant based diet. Theres freedom to embrace a plant based diet and to embrace whatever you want to eat – you can eat a junk based diet and donate your life to the science of a sickness farm – and fend off the end-times for Big Food and Friends. And so the issue isn’t a plant based… Read more »
It keeps recurring: but can we please put the abiotic oil theory to bed; once, and for all? In fact, there are two versions of the theory; ‘weak’ and ‘strong’. Weak posits that oil reforms on the same geological time-frame as it originally formed …which is of no use at all. Strong means we would be drowning in oil, and we are not. There is no reason to take it from me: but Ugo Bardi is an actual Professor of Chemistry: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-10-03/abiotic-oil-science-or-politics/ As for the provable and reclaimable amount of oil left: this is an irrelevant and sophist argument. It is the quality, not just the quantity of reserves that matters (see below). Socio-economically: what counts is the Energy Returned On Investment (EROI). This states that the surplus energy (exergy) available for socio-economic needs will inevitably DECREASE over time: in ratio to the amount of energy required to recover, refine,… Read more »
Well said B. I hadn’t seen ‘abiotic oil’ save in a nostalgic way, yearning for idiocies long past, for some time. And burning a single ml more hydrocarbons that necessary during the de-carbonisation process simply adds more greenhouse gas to the atmosphere and more energy retained in the Earth system as heat. That is very bad indeed. In fact we have already caused an extra 150 zettajoules (ten to the 21st power)of heat to be sequestered in the oceans in the last 200 years. And that heat guarantees millennia of climate destabilisation and chaos, and possibly a total break-down of the global thermo-haline circulation system, oceanic de-oxygenation and the ‘Canfield Ocean’ death by hydrogen sulphide eruptions from anaerobic bacteria in the deep. Our worst enemy at the moment may be techno-optimism, the lunatic belief that we are so ‘clever’ that we’ll find a techno-fix even for the disasters caused by… Read more »
A curious observation. Many posters here show awareness of some deceits in various other arenas that those that find a target in their identification. yet they all use the same fear-guilt-danger false saviour tactic. If I was in the purpose of sowing division in forums such as this, I would make sure to attract trust for some exposures while sowing disinfo in regard to others – and come in from a range of different vectors. By all open accounting a significant budget is allocated to ‘cyber war’ under the claim of defence. I am not concerned as to whether posters are or are not genuine so much as joining with truth as I recognize it and not taking the bait of mis-communicational intent. There are so many in polarised positions that there may be enough confusion simply from triggered reaction that then trigger further reactions. There may be no need… Read more »
Abiotic oil proven in lab experiment:
http://www.viewzone.com/abioticoilx.html
John Doran
That abiotic oil is feasible is not the question. Whether it exists in appreciable quantities on Earth, and whether combusting ANY type of hydrocarbons is wise, are the real questions. The answers appear to be No and No.
jd: no it was not. You did not read the Abstract. What they produced was gaseous hydrocarbons – not oil. From this, they adduced that they might be able to produce liquid hydrocarbons …equally, they might not.
There are many scientific reasons to presuppose that this will be of no practical value (see Heinberg’s paper above.) On is that there is an “oil window” below which hydrocarbon bonds break down, reverting liquid to gas. Which your experimental friends proved. So, do we need more oil imperialism? If we can ever drill 60 miles into the crust; do we need more methane? As I suggest above, what we really need is a sustainable future …actually, just a future? Because ‘sustainable oil’ would ensure that we do not have one. Oil has cost the earth, and the future, already. Why on earth would we want more?
http://richardheinberg.com/richard-heinberg-on-abiotic-oil
The Rightwing omnicide wish is, indeed, bemusing to non-psychopaths.
Unsustainable nonsense.
The Abyssal, abiotic oil “theory” has been producing oil in many fields this past two decades: http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/Energy.html
H/T manfromatlan.
🙂
JD.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhP4wrnAWFM
or put in search box:
William Engdahl – “The world isn’t running out of oil; it’s running into it: Part three
July 2013. 26 mins.
Gaseous hydrocarbons are manufactured under heat & pressure deep in the Earth & forced upwards through fissures, under pressure. Depending upon what elements, microbes, bacteria etc they encounter on the way up, they wind up as coal, oil or gas etc.
the deepest fossils ever found were at ~16,000 ft. We regularly drill for oil at 30,000 ft +.
Diamonds are carbon formed under heat & pressure then ejected toward the surface in Kimberlite pipes such as are found in South Africa.
Both fresh water H2O & Carbon Dioxide CO2, & much else are constantly manufactured & ejected by the 40,000 mile chain of undersea volcanoes along our mid-ocean ridges.
JD.
What has been unsaid – I think – is that availability of oil does not mean it is the best energy source. I also hold to the possibility that oil may serve a function in the Earth’s crust that we are not aware of – as we are not aware of so much else while we presume to subsume everything to lack based ‘getting’ agenda. The established power structure may have grown through the energy cartel – but is by no means identical. The capture and control of corporate cartel power over human institutions and therefore human thinking, is more the issue – because they have the means to set up and direct outcomes from an ‘insider’ and ‘upstream’ position to any strategy of reaction – because we are effectively hacked and in a sense ‘phished’ BY reaction to then operate in framing that they have influence over. The idea… Read more »
You blame oil for the rapacious nature of our bankster owners? Ridiculous.
Book: Pawns in the Game, William Guy Carr.
Catte is correct: we live in a web of lies advantageous to the 1%s, pushed by our fake news MSM traitors to the truth like Moonbat. Getting oil classified as “Fossil Fuel” was a con arranged by Rockefeller, 1892, to keep the price up: if it was revealed to be a product produced by natural geological processes, it would not have the finite qualities the 1%s so desire to try to limit our numbers & progress, while maximising their profits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cUg3lDgJ20 Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty: The Origin Of Fossil Fuel & Peak Oil 8 mins. Rockefeller used Maurice Strong to set up the fraud factory UN IPCC to set up the CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) con. It’s a complete crock: Dr. Tim Ball’s lovely little book: Human Caused Global Warming The Biggest Deception In History exposes the Who What Where When Why & How of this con. Maurice Strong… Read more »
More energy lies we labour under: nuclear power is both safe & clean, but is relentlessly demonised by our fake news MSM. At Fukushima, for example, there were deaths from the Tsunami & from the panicked govt’s evacuation order. There were zero radiation deaths, yet the MSM calls Fukushima A NUCLEAR DISASTER. In fact it was a demonstration of nuclear safety, even from an aged design reactor sited in the most stupid place on Earth: a region known for hundreds of years as Tsunami-prone. An insignificant amount of radiation escaped into the vast Pacific Ocean. Three Mile Island? Zero deaths, zero environmental damage, but ANOTHER NUCLEAR DISASTER. Chernobyl was operator error, to be too kind, & a very poor Soviet-era reactor. About 55 deaths among emergency crew & according to IAEA reports, perhaps 4,000 deaths long term from radiation. Coal fired power stations kill more people each & every year.… Read more »
Go on, John-tell us how good radiation is for us, and how Chernobyl is a paradise on Earth.
Robert Zubrin’s book: The Case For Mars is also good reading.
ROUTINE NUCLEAR POWER PLANT RADIOLOGICAL EMISSIONS Radiation doses are measured in units called rems, or, more often,thousandths of a rem (millirems, abbreviated mrem). While high doses of radiation delivered over short periods of time can cause radiation poisoning or cancer, there is, according to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission,”no data to establish unequivocally the occurrence of cancer following exposure to low doses & dose rates – below 10,000 rems.” (Note 36) The annual radiation doses that each American can expect to receive from both natural & artificial sources are given in Table 11.2 (note 37) Blood……………………………………………………………..20 mrem/yr Building Materials…………………………………………….35 mrem/yr Food………………………………………………………………25 mrem/yr Soil…………………………………………………………………11 mrem/yr Cosmic Rays (Sea Level)………………………………….35 mrem/yr Cosmic Rays (Denver Altitude)…………………………..70 mrem/yr Air Travel (New York to LA round trip)……………………5 mrem Medical X-Rays……………………………………………….100 mrem/yr Nuclear power plant (limit, at property line)……………..5 mrem/yr Nuclear power plants (dose to general public)…… 0.01 mrem/yr Average annual dose (general public)…………………270 mrem/yr ….we… Read more »
Doesn’t address the issue of cancer clusters around nuclear power plants
A study: childhood cancer near nuclear power stations https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2757021/
Sorry mfatlan, but I’ve seen so much fake “Pal”-reviewed literature this past few years, that I barely glanced at this anti-nuclear hitpiece: this is adequately dealt with in Chapter 11 of Zubrin’s book: Merchants of despair. I’ve seen the nonsense science of human CO2 drives climate deified since the 1988 farce of the Hansen/Wirth performance in Congress. I’ve seen the monumental fraud of the 1998 Mann/Bradley/Hughes paper which tried to wipe out the historically proven Medieval Warm Period & Little Ice Age, 1,000 years of history. The fraudstar Mann has had over $6,000,000 in govt grants. The retired climatologist drtimball.com who quipped he belongs in the State Pen (prison) rather than Penn State University has been bludgeoned into near bankruptcy by an assault expensive of court cases. Friends have saved Dr. Tim & he has won a case against another alarmist tosser Andrew Weaver. He is still pursuing the execrable… Read more »
jdseanjd : “… I’ve seen the monumental fraud of the 1998 Mann/Bradley/Hughes paper which tried to wipe out the historically proven Medieval Warm Period & Little Ice Age, 1,000 years of history.”
Wikipedia : Hockey stick controversy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
The 1998 Mann/Bradley/Hughes paper ( MBH98 ) was first published by nature.com on 23 April 1998
The 5th anniversary of the publication of the Agenda 21 document on 23 April 1993
MG
Terror symbols are necessary to the guarding of the borders – as are the foot soldiers of allegiance to the ‘protection’ of the borders. One does not have to flip to an opposite belief to question the terror symbols – or take the tempt of pride in presuming no danger – when such deceits can be worked into unconscious beliefs that we may not be aware of holding until triggered. But the capacity to pass through is part of an unwillingness to simply accept the voice for fear in the framing that it forms – but to acknowledge it and persist in the desire to know the truth here. I put it that way because from where I see, any attempt to override or attack the fear-symbol is its reinforcement. But to unified purpose it may become an unexpected ally. Wildlife is flourishing in the Chernobyl area and mutated critters… Read more »
In the ground Uranium is typically 0.7% fissionable. In a nuclear power plant the uranium is about 3% to 5% fissionable. In a nuclear bomb the uranium is about 90% fissionable & a critical mass has to be brought together to sustain the explosion. Nuclear power stations CANNOT explode: they lack both the mass & fissionable material. Chernobyl is now a wildlife refuge. Hiroshima & Nagasaki were habitable one year after the bombs. Chernobyl would have to happen every day to equal the toll on human life & health that coal-fired plants extract, worldwide. December 1952 a weather inversion over London caused 4,000 deaths immediately from coal smog, then another 8,000 deaths in subsequent weeks from respiratory disorders. Over 30,000 American coal workers have died from pneumoconiosis, black lung disease, since 1968 alone. Nuclear power stations are orders of magnitude cleaner & safer, & not much research is required to… Read more »
When a nuclear disaster occurs, however, the effects can be felt worldwide. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-01-link-nyc-cancer-cluster-chernobyl.html
Puhleeese, the radioactive output from Chernobyl 1986 wafts across Europe, the Arlantic Ocean settles over New York & causes a “cluster” of 10 cancers?
Nothing whatever to do with the thermite/nuclear weapons which caused 3 steel framed concrete floored & concrete clad buildings to turn to dust, blow away in the wind & collapse within their own footprints in 3 perfectly controlled demolitions after the impacts of 2 planes for which they had been designed to withstand?
Puhleeese.
http://www.ae911truth.org
JD.
Exposure to radiation is a world of difference to inhalation of radioactive particles.
The bod’s ability to repair and regenerate can be compromised such as to be susceptible to what otherwise would not generate functional breakdown or fatal disease.
A cancer DIAGNOSIS can kill by the way.
Indeed, binra. I do believe the world’s energy needs can best be served by nuclear power in the short term, as long as it relies on safer nuclear power plant technology, rather than unsafe US/Canadian/Russian designs. China’s Thorium reactor research is probably going to lead to cleaner power, though the US wants to supply the dangerous MOX fuel to its plants-which led to the Fukushima disaster https://newrepublic.com/article/86335/fukushima-nuclear-mox-flaws
On the other hand particles of depleted uranium likely is the cause of cancers, infant deaths, and genetic abnormalities in Iraq http://climateandcapitalism.com/2015/02/08/pentagon-pollution-5-deadly-impact-depleted-uranium/
I don’t buy the USE to which radiation is put as terror symbol – and all the police state powers that go with it. I don’t like concentrations of power that deny convivial ways of living. I have {{{ brackets}}} around issues where more clarity is needed – and I remember to NOT let the accepted currency of problem as defined be the maker of my mind. I believe the mind that fears its own denials and projections is compelled to seek and find false flag diversions – not least complex conflicts and problems that engage huge resources at expense of inner freedoms. I’m not completely sure that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in FACT destroyed by atomic weapons. But the belief they were – (regardless whether true or not) initiated nuclear terror under a ‘superpower’ as part of the post WW2 world order. The use of psychological manipulations backed by… Read more »
I’ve not seen anthropogenic climate destabilisation this paranoid and extreme since the last time I read a Murdoch title. Has Murdoch made a take-over offer?
First the scare was CAGW: Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, then it stopped warming, ~1998.
Then the scare was climate change, man-made, of course, then people realised the climate’s ALWAYS changing: “for about 4.5 BILLION years.” as Buzz Aldrin said.
Now the scare is “anthropogenic climate destabilisation” ????? When, in fact, warm times have more stable weather than cold times. http://www.realclimatescience.com
John Doran.
Surely the issue here that Catte is trying to focus on is that The Fraudian’s promotion of the vegan diet ideal plays into the ambitions of Monsanto (soon to merge with the German company Bayer) and what those ambitions might mean for the long-term future of the natural global environment. For one thing, there are rumours (for lack of a better term) on the Internet that one reason among others that Ukraine was pulled away from the Russophere by the West with promises of EU membership and its purported benefits was to prepare the country (by ruining its economy) for privatisation, including privatisation of its agricultural land for GMO exploitation. GMO soy among other plants would then be grown in Ukraine and the profits accrue to corporations like the merged Monsanto-Bayer monster. Whether we are carnivores, omnivores, vegetarians or vegans, or points in-between would make no difference: some of us… Read more »
Great article, Catte. As you say, Veganism is a fine personal choice, but for most us, moving away from large scale farming to organic and small scale farming would be the better choice. Will respond to a few points made in the comments above: -We can’t get the full range of nutrients the human body needs, fats, proteins and carbs amino acids, DHA (essential for developing infants) from plant based sources, and vegetarian/chemical alternatives are poor (and expensive) copies. I recommend Dr. Weston Price’s research and Sally Fallon’s “Nourishing Traditions-The Cookbook that challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats” as a viewpoint that counters these specious arguments. -Peak Oil’s a Western oil industry based myth. Oil isn’t fossil based, it’s Abiotic and grows from the earth’s natural processes. Stalin’s Russia, faced with Western oil sanctions, did quite well on its own. -Meat industry may once have contributed to deforestation,… Read more »
[[ -Not interested in moral arguments, sorry.]]
Your credibility is tanking on empty.
please don’t start posting content-free insult or ad hom again. You achieve nothing by it.
Try this: https://drowningwitches.com/a-case-note-23/conspiracy-theory-15-june-2007/
The soy then becomes mostly feed for livestock.
The pesticides bio-accumulate in the livestock. The problem there is monoculture farming and mass factory farming, not vegetables per se.
I question whether you are in fact not interest in moral arguments. The very fact that you went out of your way to post here information you hold to be true suggests you believe in the truth as a good. How is this not a moral preference?
Apparently it’s quite acceptable to say that you won’t accept moral arguments posted in response to your postings.
Prefer fact based arguments, sorry.
‘Abiotic oil’-fact-based???!! You are a caution.
Already stated, a preference for science and observable phenomena, not moral argument and assertion. And yes, we should move away from monoculture.
An Inconvenient Cow
https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/vegetarianism-and-plant-foods/an-inconvenient-cow/
“the production of (soy) which is a principle reason for deforestation in the Amazon. The other use for soybeans from these degrading land use practices is feed for confinement animals—beef and dairy cattle, pigs, poultry and fish—for which pastured cows continue to be blamed.”
Union of Concerned Scientists
https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/stop-deforestation/drivers-of-deforestation-2016-soybeans#.WxxUX5VzaUk
“Only about 6% of soybeans grown worldwide are turned directly into food products for human consumption. The rest either enter the food chain indirectly as animal feed, or are used to make vegetable oil or non-food products such as biodiesel. 70-75% of the world’s soy ends up as feed for chickens, pigs, cows, and farmed fish.
On top of these commercial products, soybeans have had an unfortunate by-product: tropical deforestation.”
So growing soybeans services the beef industry, and is the primary reason for deforestatsion.
FACT.
Since you love facts so much.
So stop growing soy, and feed livestock with grass. Don’t you get dizzy from all your circular arguments? Bye.
But the problem is the livestock. It makes extraordinarily inefficient use of land. The same field that produces beef to feed 10 people can feed ten times more people if not used to raise beef. This would halt deforestation at a stroke.
But I see you’ve already fled the argument with your ‘Bye’.
Again with the faulty arguments which rebutting would be an extraordinarily inefficient use of my time, sorry. Still, back at ya since I actively dislike your passive aggressive voice: https://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/80-percent-tropical-deforestation-caused-agriculture.html 80% of Tropical Deforestation Caused by Agriculture “Industrial activities are the principal driver of deforestation and degradation worldwide, but subsistence agriculture and fuelwood consumption remains an important direct driver of deforestation, especially in Africa. As you can see in the chart below, the balance of commercial v subsistence agriculture varies by region. In Latin America commercial agriculture—cattle ranching included—is far and away the largest driver of deforestation, with subsistence agriculture also contributing substantially. In Africa and Asia though the effect of commercial versus subsistence agriculture—the former taking the additional form of palm oil plantations and pulp and paper plantations—is more balanced between the two, with other factors playing a much larger role than in Latin America.” You also missed where… Read more »
Aligning in our own integrity is our core responsibility – no one else can make us choose for our good – but they may reflect the choices we are making that work against our good – to the willingness to listen. Systems of thought in identity and culture may adopt moral codes, ethical rules – but these are a currency of agreement that may be linked to a ‘gold standard’ ie something tangible, or they may be derivatives that no longer mean anything except to make of complex financial packages of concealed debt. IE: a lack of integrity will seek to act as if it had any by and every mimicry or presentation – and back up its lack of substance with appeals to ‘Authority’ or smearing with hateful unworthiness. Often, the lack of integrity accuses the other of what they are doing while believing their own spin – because… Read more »
‘Abiotic oil’-the very nadir of the ‘conspiracist’ mind-set. Do you not see the irony? I believe it was invented by the KGB. And growing soy to feed to animals is part and parcel of the process of destruction of bio-diversity.
Mulga – If you don’t agree with the theory of abiotic oil, show your reasoning and evidence, but don’t even think of dismissing it a priori with the word “conspiracist.” We expect more of our commenters than to recycle stale old CIA tropes.
Thanks, admin. Not going to bother rebutting ad hom arguments, though it’s funny how they parrot capitalist viewpoints. Still, “The eleven major and one giant oil and gas fields here described have been discovered in a region which had, forty years ago, been condemned as possessing no potential for petroleum production. The exploration for these fields was conducted entirely according to the perspective of the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of abyssal, abiotic petroleum origins. The drilling which resulted in these discoveries was extended purposely deep into the crystalline basement rock, and it is in that basement where the greatest part of the reserves exist. These reserves amount to at least 8,200M metric tons of recoverable oil and 100B cubic meters of recoverable gas, and are thereby comparable to those of the North Slope of Alaska. It is conservatively estimated that, when developed, these fields will provide approximately thirty percent of the… Read more »
Oil, like diamonds and of course so much more, is controlled scarcity – not to mention the doomsday ruse. However the oil cartels happen to be a root corruption in the rise of an international corporate hegemony – at least until the financial overlords change the rules. Pharma – and all that goes with it – plastics – and all that goes with them, and toxic effluents and exhaust. I welcome CO2 for a greener planet – but I don’t welcome toxic destruction via broad spectrum dominance. Nor the chokehold on better energy solutions. ‘Too big to fail’ means nothing is too big to sacrifice to fend of the end of our ‘world’. Including the world itself. Fear works a self fulfilling prophecy.
What is water’s molecular make up – rocket fuel?
What is the Electric Universe and why is it not openly accepted?
Too big to fail?
‘CO2 for a greener planet..’, is truly misguided. Added CO2 will lead to a browner planet due to rising temperatures, derangement of the hydrological cycle, particularly worse droughts and down-pours, and increasing mega-fires. Add CO2 WITHOUT the temperature rises and extremes, say in a laboratory green-house, and things will ‘green’, somewhat, but planet-wide it will be, indeed already is, a disaster.
I don’t buy the ‘greenhouse’ gases as a major influence on climate and have reason to believe the CO2 follows changes in temperature rather than leads. Nor do I buy cholesterol levels as significant biomarkers for heart disease – but for decades the scam run as ‘consensus science’ – which means risking your funding or career to challenge. I have no doubt that a broad spectrum of industrial and biotech toxicity is operating a progressive biocide/genocide and that the CO2 is a false flag to capture the environmental movement -and divert attention – while providing a narrative ‘moral justification, for disempowering and subjugating humanity. I hold all human institutions to be corrupted – if not all of those who work within the frameworks of belief that are taken on trust. But I don’t say that in righteous anger – but simply a recognition of that nature of fear driven self… Read more »
The ‘solutions’ are sometimes worse than the problem. Electric cars? Dependent on Lithium. Afghanistan’s sitting on vast reserves so I guess invading it makes sense. Chile is probably up next for corporate takeover, if that hasn’t happened already.
Chile suffered the ‘corporate take-over’ in 1973, remember. The current regime, of a fascistic billionaire, whose Cabinet is stuffed with Pinochetists, is a real Imperial favourite.
Well that ‘not buying’ does not redound to your credibility. That CO2 as a major greenhouse gas, which levels in the atmosphere have been associated with other climate destabilisations in the past, is science as firmly settled as science comes. The physical basis for its role as a heat-absorbing gas is firmly established, and the paleo-climate record is also solid. Your ‘not buying’ it, is quite irrelevant. And as to the rise in CO2 following temperature increases, that occurs when glacial periods turn into inter-glacials, thanks to the Milankovitch Cycles, as at the beginning of the late, great, Holocene period, and is most unambiguously NOT the situation here, as anthropogenic emissions drive temperature rises. That difference has been pointed out innumerable times, but facts never stop denialism. The rest, sadly, is paranoid gibberish of the direst kind.
You seem afflicted by the same reading comprehension skills as the other one, or maybe simple reactiveness: where have I ever said I don’t believe CO2 levels are rising or a factor in climate change?
“CO2 fetishist” was applied to those who propose simple-minded solutions or vague shite, and I already agreed that reversing deforestation could only happen with a change in farming methods.
Man, I was replying to binra.
That CO2 as a major greenhouse gas, which levels in the atmosphere have been associated with other climate destabilisations in the past, is science as firmly settled as science comes.
That would seem to be a compelling argument against the “anthropogenic climate change” theory, but apparently we’re not supposed to notice such things.
Hello Mumble You are welcome to your view. Tit for tat assertions are pointless. There are clear comments in this page to very different interpretations of the data than making CO2 from human activity the CAUSE of Global Warming – or if it doesn’t fit the models, climate change. Perhaps for your own reasons you WANT to believe as you do – or at least invest your identity there. I am active in denying deceits to run as if true. Thanks – but no thanks. Any view that rests in truth doesn’t need to resort to smear tactics. I don’t believe this issue is about truth – but about power – and if you assign or accept human guilt for catastrophe based on an increase in carbon dioxide, you give your power to the agenda to enforce self-denial under tyranny and fanaticism. The accusation of ‘denial’ is indicative of your… Read more »
I agree: CO2 has zero effect on temperatures, in fact CO2 concentrations rise after the planet warms, as warming oceans outgas CO2.
Vostok ice core studies show this to have happened on an approx time lag of 800 years, + or – 200 years, going back 400,000 years.
Matt Ridley, science writer for the Times gives19 mins of good sense on species extinctions, economic development & CO2 from “Fossil Fuels” are greening the planet since the 1980s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-nsDaIZE&t=610s
John Doran.
If the link does not work, put in youtube search box:
Matt Ridley on how Fossil Fuels are Greening the Planet
JD.
Matt Ridley???!! Hilarious!!!
Matt Ridley is science writer for the Times, & an author. I enjoyed The Rational Optimist. His website: http://www.rationaloptimist.com
You seem to post a lot of sneers, snide & totally incompetent climate gibberish. I know who I’d rather read.
JD.
Hello Mulga Mumblebrain, you are free to believe what works for you. I find it hard to believe you believe it – but perhaps one man’s psyop is another man’s crusade. I haven’t met a love of humanity or of our planet in the ‘green fascist’ or follower. Its another version of victimism. Is Life on Earth under threat – well yes we are behaving toxically from toxic thinking as a result of being taken in by reaction to false flags that divert attention so as to persist in destruction as a means to maintain an illusion of power, not just in the shadow manipulators, but in those who buy into powerlessness at their hand and align in their framework for survival (the power of protection from terrible outcomes that in this case have already happened on computer models). Giving trust to mainstream science is no different from mainstream media.… Read more »
Equating ‘mainstream science’ to the mainstream media is bizarre. The true equivalence is between the denial of climate science, driven by the fossil fuel industry, the Right, and a weird tendency of paranoiacs on the putative ‘Left’, and the fakestream media that fosters anthropogenic climate destabilisation denialism, or simply ignore the coming Holocaust.
“No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.”
~ Alan Bullock, in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives
Admin, I was just taken by man’s previous contributions re. the ‘conspiracist’ mind-set, in regard to the discussion re. RFK’s assassination. I just found it a little, as I said, ironic. I believe abiotic oil has virtually no defenders among geologists and oil industry figures, but is rather fondly regarded by a minority of those who deny Peak Oil prognostications. ‘Conspiracist’ probably is not quite the perfect word to describe it. Perhaps ‘bizarre’ and ‘unsupported by evidence’ would be better.
And as I replied earlier, it is supported by Russian and Ukrainian geologists as well as a former BP oil engineer and president of the Royal Chemical Society (links provided then). Odd that you should only hold western industry figures as ‘evidence’.
Man, I am ‘only’ holding 99% or so of geologists and oil industry figures as evidence. Abiotic oil may be true, but the evidence so far is overwhelming that it is not. The theories are beguiling, but the evidence is scant. Oil reservoirs are still depleting, with few, if any, showing any signs of replenishment.
Science isn’t about consensus though. Every breakthrough has been a minority opinion at one time. This doesn’t mean every minority opinion is correct, of course, but the “99% of scientists agree X” argument is never valid as a response to data.
The probability that minority positions are correct, and the vast majority wrong, or engaged in a huge conspiracy to hide the truth, as with anthropogenic climate destabilisation, is very low. That probability is reduced by the advance of science, where serendipitous breakthroughs by individuals have become less likely as the edifice of science has grown. Even lower is the probability where the ‘dissenters’ are financed by gigantic moneyed interests, none more gigantic than fossil fuels.
Asserting a collection of incalculable probabilities isn’t science either. The only way to oppose data is with data. The abiotic oil question, and any other scientific question, should be addressed with competing evidence, not with a priori dismissals based on supposed reasons to disregard said data.
Probabilities are data.
Only if they are calculated. You can’t do a probability calculation on human behaviour that has any value as data. Science is about observable physical phenomena. The discussion should focus on that, and only on that.
Probabilities can be extrapolated from observable trends and predicted. but they remain guesswork even if they are informed estimates. Prophecy is more of an energy reading that takes data from an intuitive attunement. Big gov and its corps are know to use all avenues to predict and position for control of the ‘future’. They also have the ability to manipulate of invent data and astroturf adjustments to the flow of events so as to ‘make the future’. But pride’s function is to come before a Fall. Everything we give power to as a manipulative intent, is a double edged weapon. Manipulations and distortions of data make much of the scientific literature of the same nature as junk bonds and toxic debt. There is simply too much at stake for those invested in their ‘survival’ to not seek every avenue to maintain their positions of privilege – or not lose the… Read more »
@Admin & @M.M. “Science is about observable physical phenomena. The discussion should focus on that, and only on that.” Logic ! But , not all Data is observable universally and here lies the problem of withholding Datasets for Corporate self interest &&& or national intelligence or Politician’s Lobbyists interests & agenda.** In theory , both you & M.M. are correct in many ways & perceptions are many & absurdly varied. But Carbon deposits in our Biosphere from human activity are Clear and one can even see it ! like I used to be able to see the smog in London in the 60’s and white collared shirts were the direct visual evidence .. before 11 am. Fossil – Fuel Air Pollution with a cocktail of chemical ‘additives’ , is horrendous today and Collective Data Science needs to get real, real time, real fast as one constant picture of all human… Read more »
If you say so then for you it is so.
It has nothing to do with minority positions excepting that anything not supporting the established paradigm is ‘minoritised.
If you for a moment think that the energy cartels would let themselves be so behind the game you are engaging in folly. It doesn’t matter what the forms of power take as long as they are running the show. ‘They’ are not foolish in terms of protecting their investments as they see them. A token sacrifice rolls over as part of a deeper deceit. In some sense it is simply opportunism within the framework of power struggle.
The arrogance and audacity of the influence now being wielded is that of ‘making the reality’ that everyone else accepts as true by reaction OR conforms and complies to by virtue of not attracting penalty by speaking our or not showing support.
I am ‘only’ holding 99% or so of geologists and oil industry figures as evidence.
Even lower is the probability where the ‘dissenters’ are financed by gigantic moneyed interests, none more gigantic than fossil fuels.
So when gigantic moneyed interests promote the biotic origin of oil, that is inherently credible, but when they dispute anthropogenic global warming, that is inherently non-credible.
It’s always nice to see intellectual standards consistently applied like this.
You mean 99% of western geologists, not ever having studied Russian or Ukrainian scientific papers. Funny how you have such fixed opinions without studying all the evidence 🙂
And have you read these papers in Russian and Ukrainian?
Already referred to New Eastern Outlook economist, engineer and journalist F. William Engdahl, who has been writing about oil since the 70’s. http://peakoil.com/geology/how-i-came-to-realize-i-was-wrong-about-peak-oil-f-william-engdahl
Who did read them. Try not to respond with ad homs 😉
But please tell us if you personally have read this material in the original Russian and Ukrainian? SInce you keep berating others for not doing so. An honest and straight answer would be appreciated, for a welcome change.
I don’t think having read it in the original language should be an issue. If the studies have been translated into English, we must assume they’ve been done so in a way faithful to the original.
May I suggest everyone finds it in themselves to discuss the research and not each other’s shortcomings?
Engdahl is not Russian. You claimed it was essential to read the original Russian texts,. So name the authors, please, in Cyrillic, with the Russian and Ukrainian titles of these papers. I am a professional Russian-English translator and I intend to look into the content of the material you boast about.
And don’t flip me off with a “Bye” either, because your online bullying and aggression is a disgrace, and certainly doesn’t suggest someone with any kind of education in a foreign language,.
The names of the papers and their authors, in Russian, please.
Without any more rudeness.
Dear Admin
[[ You mean 99% of western geologists, not ever having studied Russian or Ukrainian scientific papers. ]]
The ManfromAtlan demands they are read in Russian. Please stop making excuses for him.
Suggesting you read Russian scientific papers obviously does NOT = suggesting you read them in Russian!
Your argumentativeness is regrettable and based largely on a failure to read or comprehend what others are writing. Since I know from experience you will continue to be disruptive and will simply ignore my request to behave sensibly I’m putting you on pre-mod until you start discussing the subject rather than trying to provoke fights
Appeals to external authority and claims of consensus reality are nothing new. There is a sense of warmth in a herd, and a sense of being unsupported, misunderstood ridiculed or walled out, penalised and denied that comes with standing in an integrity that cannot be denied without trashing yourself. I wonder if there is any cause in you that would want the story to be true or not – whether or not it is in fact true? I’m inclined not to accept corporate top-down astroturfed memes as true which means I do listen to those who sometimes risk a lot in challenging the official narrative. I am in no doubt but that information give to the many is very different from insider information. And that it isn’t just a cover story but a manipulative intent to further vested interests and private agenda. Almost everything scientists believed is found to not… Read more »
Truth is never popular and honesty can lose you your career.
If it isn’t supported by top down power, everyone will soon learn not to go there.
That in itself is not an argument FOR abiotic oil as something the Earth is constantly producing – but in response to your ‘it cant be true because it doesn’t have many (open) backers.
No one came out to back Andy wakefield. One could make a list.
And of course any particular can be ‘attacked’ and obfuscated to evade the point.
Yet, Andy Wakefield WAS exonerated in the court of public opinion.(His co-researcher’s medical license was reinstated since he was financially able to defend himself). Subsequent revelations have proven how research into the vaccine autism link was suppressed.
Indeed and well said. I suppose calling him Andy indicated that I do not regard him as a fraud nor join the demonizing that led to the term ‘Wakefielded’ in the medical profession. The film Vaxxed is not about Wakefield but about a CDC insider leaking and confessing to the hiding of a study revealing known autistic outcomes with MMR – particularly for black males.
Whistleblowing is one way to gain access and publish withheld self-incrimating insider information and another is via a court of law.
Admin, please delete. I misread the article, and apologize.
There’s literally no evidence for “Abiotic Oil” on any practical renewable timescale. Oil fields are observed to deplete. It’s the reason they’re now chasing tar sands & shale & other “tight oil” which are much lower quality resources with a lower net energy that struggle to make profit. It’s because that’s all that’s left to find. The reason Russia did Ok is because they have lots of oil!
Martin-how dare you bring facts to a nonsense-fight!
Ask him about oil, and Dr. Richard Pike has a rather sunny outlook. Oil and gas, he says confidently, will be around well into the next century.
Pike can maintain his optimism because he knows something no one else knows. He believes that a simple mathematical error – the sort made by first-year university statistics students – is causing much of our panic over a worldwide oil shortage.
It’s an error that oil companies, riding high on skyrocketing crude prices, may want you to believe.
Pike is an oil industry insider, an engineer by training. An employee of British Petroleum for 25 years, he is now the chief executive of England’s Royal Society of Chemistry”
Source: https://www.thestar.com/business/tech_news/2008/06/21/oil_oil_everywhere_well_just_maybe.html
“”This might be hard for some of your readers to take,” he warns. With oil at $132 a barrel yesterday, tensions over gas prices are at a boiling point. But listen, he says: at 1.2 trillion barrels, we have grossly underestimated the world’s proven oil reserves. If he’s right, we likely have double the amount of recoverable oil that we think we have in the ground, or perhaps even more.”
I find these massive over-estimates of remaining hydrocarbon resources unconvincing, first because they rarely, if ever, produce estimates of the EROEI, the energy return on energy invested, for these ‘resources’, which are becoming lower and lower as all the easy resources are depleted, and second because burning even a fraction of such resources would make the catastrophe of anthropogenic climate destabilsation caused by emissions of greenhouse gases even more calamitous-if there is something more dreadful than Near Term Human Extinction.
MM: I put my tuppence worth in which came out above. Oil will be around in the next century: in the ground! Quantity has to be tempered with quality, then interpreted economically with debt. I tried to develop this above. We are in the midst of a primary energy crisis NOW: when all the factors are taken into consideration. Quantity alone does not mean anything. We will likely never run out of oil. Carbon capitalism is already dead and cannot be sustained on debt forever.
Abiotic oil is bunk: I posted Ugo Bardi’s rebuttal …probably won’t make any difference though …these things have a habit of becoming a salvational sustaining hopium?
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-10-03/abiotic-oil-science-or-politics/
I read the linked ‘rebuttal’ and don’t see anything of substance.
Most of what is accepted history is bunk.
History is as controlled like oil because it is a choke and control point. And isn’t mined from the past so much as bias that is produced by conflicting underground effects of a denial and coercion.
Where there is such a concentration of power, there be secrets and lies.
Yes, to the secrets and lies of power, and interesting insight into those committed to Peak Oil. From F. William Engdahl http://peakoil.com/geology/how-i-came-to-realize-i-was-wrong-about-peak-oil-f-william-engdahl Ugo Bardi’s Association for Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), is an offshoot of Mike Ruppert’s From The Wilderness website, which came into prominence during Bush’s Iraq war. Their analysis, that the Ghawar oil field and Russian oil production had already reached their maximum output turned out to be wrong, and designed only to promote high oil prices. (A corollary is the need to develop domestic oil sources, including the shale oil fields and Alaska North Slope and Arctic Refuge fields). No one’s ever studied translations of Russian scientists abiotic oil papers so their arguments against are indeed, bunk. Conclusion: Indeed I realized that the entire foundations of Western petroleum geology was a kind of religion. Rather than accept the Divine Birth, Peak Oil “church-goers” accepted the Divine Fossil… Read more »
I find the idea that Ugo Bardi and Mike Ruppert are part of a conspiracy to drive up the price of oil ludicrous, to the extreme …and barely worthy of a rebuttal. Mike was a flawed individual, but honesty was not one of hid frailties. In fact I would describe him as terminally honest …by which I mean it was the dominant part of his makeup that killed him. When you say they got it wrong about one field, and use this as a lynchpin to discard the entire argument …we nevertheless get closer to the truth: which is political. “It turns out they were wrong” means nothing …the industry is well practiced at discovering oil on paper. Figures are like jealously guarded state secrets: and Trump’s EPA and NASA cuts prove one thing: TPTB don’t want a different interpretation, backed by science. This is a known fact among researchers:… Read more »
Of course the world IS change and those who fear the loss of their possession or position will seek to exploit the changes by subversion and control of the emerging narrative. Look at y/our own mind and see how the narrative mind operates, instead of running under its script. The mind of reframing interjects after the fact to take credit, and a personal sense of control seeks reinforcement and disregards gaps or breaks in continuity. The idea that we are in control is an idea we give sacrifice to in order to maintain it as our self. Surely appropriate to early stages of finding flow and balance of an integrated being. But otherwise a fear switch jammed on. Change is not any more or less that all the meaning we give it – and instead of being conditioned by fears of the past projecting such ‘meanings’ ontop the ‘unknown’, we… Read more »
True-your contribution above is excellent. Abiotic oil is an interesting concept, but its use by Peak Oil denialists, when the evidence for it making any contribution to hydrocarbon resources is very meagre, indeed, is very vexing.
A simple common sense pro-Peak argument against abiotic oil is: where dafuq is it? Why are we boiling keragen uneconomically when we could harvest WTI? False scarcity in extremis?
There is some outrageous stuff being ventilated merrily hereabouts, in the interests of free speech, of course. Blank rejection of the firmly established role of CO2 as a major greenhouse gas, makes me think that I’m reading one of Murdoch’s shite-rags, or watching Austfailian TV or listening to talk-back radio.
There are a large number of well-qualified scientists who question some or all aspects of the CAGW hypothesis. Let’s try to create a non-doctrinal and open spirit of discussion.
Admin (below)-there are NOT many ‘well-qualified’ scientists who question ‘all’ of the anthropogenic climate destabilisation hypothesis, but a tiny cabal of corrupt deniers on the fossil fuel payroll. They are outnumbered by thousands to one by scientists who accept the basic hypothesis because it is rooted firmly in basic science, paleo-climate research and basic observation of the rapid climate destabilisation currently being experienced. Of course many scientists do dispute certain aspects of the hypothesis-that is real science, always working to perfect a theory and make it better in describing eality. But blanket rejection of all the science is confined to ranks and the corrupt.
Like diamonds – many huge fields are left untapped. Once set up such a system of controlled scarcity can be used and extended in so many ways. I think a willingness to search a little would soon find some interesting perspectives.
Perhaps the presumption that the world works a certain way under certain expectations of accountability is the wool over our eyes that doesn’t let us see the unthinkable. HG Wells wrote of a future where humans split into two kinds. The Time Machine. Are you familiar with the relation between the two? Its vernacular is not uncommon insider talk; do you want to be predator or prey?
How does corruption creep in?
You illustrate one vector:
Oh we cant allow anything to get official acceptance if a rival or threat to our institutional identity can use it as ammunition against us.
War, not honouring the true, as a defence against and attempt to undermine anything that upsets the Notional Security of a fear of losing face, wealth, and the power to keep it and grow it.
One doughty chap finds a ‘…simple mathematical error..’, that all the other oil industry experts did not? Bizarre. Or are those nassty industry fellows just lying? And burning hydrocarbons into the next century is NOT a ‘…sunny outlook’. It is a recipe for gigantic climate destabilisation and Near Term Human Extinction.
Engineered or not, panic over (support and supply of sustenance) oil running out is another issue than a directed addiction to it, and in my view a suppression or withholding of new technologies that would undermine the existing power structure perhaps because of not being so ‘controllable’ patentable or even profitable. What if water can be used as fuel? Sources of electricity from the atmospheric capacitance or even from the innately electrical process of nature? The other side of the coin is responsible relation with energy and its consequences. I believe until we accept this as our self-responsibility for consciousness, we will not find alignment in the outer world of law, finance, politics and culture. I see magical solutions as the redistribution of psychic energy by cooking the books or moving the furniture around without a real change. Adapting to self-denial under a ‘moral crusade’ to self-deny is nothing but… Read more »
I do believe alternative sources of energy are available, once you get past the CO2 fetishists 🙂
‘..the CO2 fetishists..’-a ray of sunlight onto your true motivations, I would say. Thank-you for the candour.
Sorry, my comment was unclear. I’m totally against oil sands and fracking, and it com applied mostly to those wedded to the carbon economy they discount alternative sources.
I also dislike simple ‘solutions’ to climate change like taxing fuel, cap and trade, and vegetarianism.
Human ingenuity CAN find solutions to climate change if we can shift priorities and avoid divisiveness. Cold Fusion research, geothermal, hydro?
I see. Yes, we might, possibly, just sneak through if we act as a whole, with a mega-Manhattan Project effort, which would have to include humane population reduction, massive decreases in consumption, planetary ecological repair, and some method, or methods to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Oh, and a restoration of global albedo lost in the Arctic and elsewhere as ice melts. But even then, (and the rulers of mankind won’t allow it, of course)the question of the heat sequestered in the oceans (150 zettajoules in the last 200 years)seems intractable, to my mind at least.
“Humane population reduction” and yr earlier crack about “free speech” really hints at the fascistic impulses of extremism.
What is ‘fascistic’ about the word humane? What is utterly fascistic is to work to make an ecological collapse Holocaust inevitable, with the consequent entirely INHUMANE destruction of billions of human lives-possibly all of them.
The West’s ‘humane’ methods of population reduction include vaccines laced with sterilizing hormones in Africa and the Philippines https://healthimpactnews.com/2015/polio-vaccines-laced-with-sterilizing-hormone-discovered-in-kenya-who-is-controlling-population/ and vaccine shill Bill Gates musing on how vaccines could reduce world populations. Smacks of Hitler, China, or India’s Indira Gandhi. Fascist is as fascist does.
Man, my idea of ‘humanely’ is the ‘demographic transition’ to lower family sizes that you almost inevitably get when poverty is reduced and women educated and empowered. That a theocracy like Iran can go from an average of six children per woman, to around two, in two generations shows what is possible when the world’s stolen wealth is removed from the kleptocrats and returned to the people who created it. What you cite, with examples like Bill Gates and sterilising vaccines, is most definitely NOT my preference, or the best way to proceed.
But how could we ever confer that much power on any government and hope for a good outcome? Governments are by their nature inclined to be amoral, self-serving and power hungry. Giving them the remit to “reduce the population”, but only by “humane means” is asking for abuse and exploitation on a massive scale, surely?
So, Admin, what do we do then? Allow human populations to grow until they INEVITABLY cause an ecological Holocaust, whereupon you will get population reduction, alright-possibly to zero if it leads to thermo-nuclear war. Humane population reduction is possible. It is happening in Japan and much of Western Europe simply by voluntary reductions in family size, a move that could be encouraged by tax policies, but more crucially, by poverty reduction and female education and empowerment. I really fail to see how one can argue with that, given the alternative that is already assailing the planet.
This attitude proceeds from an error. Who is the ‘we’ in your assertion? Why would growing population cause an ‘ecological burnt sacrifice” or do you simply reach for that term for the most emotional leverage in dramatic effect? But lets just say catastrophe. Is population in itself the core issue here? or is it really about our (lack of) relationship with nature – that reflects that of our own nature – our intra personal and interpersonal conflicts. Might the attempt through the Millennia to use coercion and deceit to eradicate ‘problems’ assigned to symptoms be the false drive and structuring of our thought such as to develop and multiply a corrupted sense of power or control? That logically results in the Financially and Corporately captured State of the regulatory protection of its own interests as the primary despoiler? Not just in poisoning air, water, land and food, but in the… Read more »
And Mulga, it isn’t ’empowering women’ that reduces the population, that is already happening in Western society thanks to its economic system making that choice necessary; and assault on Mother Nature with attendant chemicalization making you er, infertile. Which is a good thing for the planet perhaps since one Westerner has ten times (I guess) the impact on the environment than ten Africans. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jul/29/infertility-crisis-sperm-counts-halved
Good point about giving government the remit, Admin. I was thinking of the communist Chinese and Indira Gandhi experiment in forcible population control then http://thefederalist.com/2018/04/24/china-indias-population-control-atrocities-sown-gale-force-wind/
After wading through binra’s maunderings, I find myself in agreement with much of the kernels of truth buried therein.Of course we must find a new economic model that does not reward destruction of Life on Earth, and reduces everything to a sordid materialistic calculus. And of course the current system produces results utterly antithetical to real human welfare. But even if we had such a more beneficial and sustainable economic and social system, that prioritised Life values rather than greed and profit, we would still need to reduce the human burden on the planet, unless it is envisaged that the bulk of humanity must live at the lowest standard of living enforceable. As for man’s appeal to the ‘authority’ of the arch-Rightist ‘Federalist’ to abuse China and India’s population control efforts, well I remain firmly, as I’ve reiterated but the ecological Holocaust denialists seem keen to continue to ignore, in… Read more »
Sigh. Whenever a person invokes Godwin’s Law in an interminable argument you know you’re wasting your time. And The Federalist is a conservative magazine, not an ‘arch-Rightist’ magazine. Argue with the facts, not the source. ‘China and India’s population control efforts’ were coercive and abusive, as any number of sources can tell you. Forcible abortions, sterilizations and fines were the rule, not exception.
And people who invoke the Holocaust to gain some sort of moral supremacy over those who disagree with their position-a reductio ad Hitlerum hyperbole because they have no argument. Bye.
A book I’m sure you’d enjoy mfatlan: The Ultimate Resource 2, by Julian L. Simon. An economist who first thought that wars & overpopulation were mankind’s largest problems, he studied the data & found that greater population numbers caused greater prosperity, always, throughout human history. The mechanism he deduced is, roughly, more people, greater specialisation, better productivity, more inventors, more entrepreneurs, more prosperity, which would make it easier to clean up our industrial messes, if the “money out of thin air” parasites were not so busy hoovering it all up, aiming to reduce us all to serfdom. Simon got fed up with all the doomster sh1te being pushed out since the 60s. He challenged arch-doomsters & depopulation fanatics Paul Ehrlich & John Holdren to a bet. They were predicting commodity shortages & price rises as well as food shortages & huge famines. Ehrlich & Holdren were aided & abetted by… Read more »
The 1972 Limits to growth nonsense included oil to run by 1992, aluminium by 2003, copper 1993, gold 1981, tin 1987, Manganese 2018. It was alarmist hysterics, sanctified by use of a computer, exactly like the computer climate models of today. Economist Julian Simon issued a public challenge: “This is a public offer to stake $10,000, in separate transactions of $1,000 or $100 each, on my belief that mineral resources (or food, or other commodities) will not rise in price. If you are prepared to pay me now the current market price for $1,000 or $100 of any mineral you name (or other raw material including grain & fossil fuels) that is not govt controlled, I will agree to pay you the market price of the same amount of that raw material on any future date you now specify. Will the doomsayers, who now say that minerals and other raw… Read more »
Of course. Everything is in some sense energy in motion. Responsibility of conductivity and balance are all part of energy – as is joy and depression. I sense that these ‘inner’ qualities are not unrelated to what seems as if a denial and suppression of new sources.
This five-year-old girl puts many of the posters below to shame.
I wonder who would down-thumb a video of a five-year-old girl? It says a lot about the circle of users posting on this page, really.
George is now part of the “flexitarian” movement, which is basically the food industry co-opting laziness so you still crave meat and milk sometimes. Going cold turkey is reduces cravings significantly more as your gut bacteria adapts to a plant based diet, which then communicates with your brain to demand plant foods. I’m of the Gregor NutritionFacts plant-based diet persuasion, where 90% of our deaths could be prevented and people could be less inflamed by the chronic consumption of meat. Our animal protein consumption leads to dementia, diabetes and heart disease to name a few. I’d highly recommend having a look as again this is someone independent working outside the mainstream to wage information warfare to the genuine betterment of society. He’s only selling books which beats big-pharma and other that parasitically sit on all of us. We will never ever see george pointing to this resource directly, instead he… Read more »
Well said.
I also recommend The Merchants of Doubt, which demonstrates the tactics used by big industry to instil enough doubt in the population at large to inhibit them from making that change. The subject of this excellent documentary is doubt around global warming, but at the beginning of the film there is reference made to nutrition as one of the many areas subject to the tactics discussed. And this is one of Gregor’s main points: the disinformation is huge and pervasive. But in the end, the truth will out…
And then there’s The Game Changers. Coming to a cinema near you, soon.
Great article.
An interesting article looking at the arguments about methane emissions and meat production:
http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/grass-fed-guilt-free
Response to the article: https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/articles/grazed-and-confused-an-initial-response-from-the-sustainable-food-trust/ Summary Although the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) agrees with a number of specific points in the report (see below), we fundamentally disagree with its conclusions and we challenge some of the scientific evidence used and some of the authors’ analysis. The report focuses exclusively on greenhouse gas emissions and while it does accept that grassland can sequester carbon, it fails to understand the vital necessity of returning degraded cropland to rotations that include grass and grazing animals, in order to rebuild carbon and organic matter levels, and the potential of integrating grazing livestock production with crop production in genuine mixed farming systems, to address a wide range of the food system problems currently faced. The only practical way to produce human-edible food from grassland without releasing large amounts of carbon to the atmosphere is to graze it with ruminants, and with the increasing global population… Read more »
you cant support the current world population without artificial fertilizer, end of story. doesnt matter if people go vegan or not.
there is nothing harmful about such fertlisers, they are just the chemicals the plants need.
The risks with fertilisers relate to soil fertility and access to oil.
Garbage. The use of chemical fertilisers has deranged the nitrogen cycle leading to huge and spreading dead-zones, in rivers, lakes, coastal waters and, increasingly, to open oceans.
Of course you can live as if this is true and be comfortable in your opinion. But you are merely ‘telling everyone’ because you are right. Freedom of information exchange is distorted by trillion dollar interests. and social engineering is so confident now as to proclaim a post truth era. We are framed and nudged in what to think by the ongoing hacking of the human mind. I don’t share your stated view but nor do I take it as truly yours or you would at least back up what you say rather than run the script as if it is true because you have been told it is so. Plunder for profit and control of markets and minds is ‘business as usual’ Pr resorts to fear manipulation such as ‘only we can feed the world’. Or to greed; “grow more quicker” without saying ‘and become dependent and depleted by… Read more »
Chinese farmers fed millions for thousands of years using only human waste.
And there’s plenty of nitrogen fixing plants to go round as well.
And Permaculture. Heard of that?
Veganism is a better option for poor people. Economically and medically.
Permaculture usually involves rotational grazing of livestock
Plants can be engineered/bred to fix nitrogen fertiliser direct from the air.
& before loons start screaming GMOs at me, we have bred dogs from wolves & all our domesticated animal breeds have been bred from wild species.
There is nothing whatever wrong with improving a species, be it plant or animal, fish or fowl.
John Doran.
Manual management of living complexes of relational being will inevitably introduce and ‘harvest’ a different outcome, not all of which will be as desired or expected. A key quality in my view is where we are coming from – or what for? Feeding the plant and bypassing the soil is a living metaphor for an egocentric deceit by which to harvest depletion, fear, conflict, and the drive to dominate or overcome ‘nature’. IE Destructive outcomes that inevitably follow a false sense of self-inflation. Of course one can do both. But recognising that what is first comes first is maintaining a connected relationship with that which supports all else – instead of creating bubble realities of a sense of self-power that no longer roots in anything true but refers only to itself. So to your ‘nothing wrong with improving a species’ – I feel to say according to whose ‘plan’? The… Read more »
I meant more along the lines of practical improvements for mankind: I’m no fan of Big Anything: Banking, Oil, Pharma, Ag, whatever. “Too Big To Fail” killed capitalism IMHO, in the West. We now live under the Fascist system of govts subservient to Banking & other corporations. Re farming, I remember reading about pineapple fields dying in Hawaii, through an iron deficiency, though the soil is volcanic, practically solid iron. They figured out that the iron in the soil was of a type the plants could not use. They had to buy car junkyards, dissolve the cars in acid & spray the fields with this solution for the plants to recover health. Thereafter, the fields were treated as a bank: whatever minerals etc the plants took out at each harvest was sprayed back on. They started treating farming as a science. I see no problems with this. Similarly, at some… Read more »
Be fruitful and multiply also fits with ‘by the fruits you shall know’. So of course there are ways to educate ourselves and learn to work within nature rather than against – but I hold that whatever ideas we accept as true – shall go forth and multiply – and their fruits shall be like unto their seeding thought. Thus seemingly good ideas and good intentions can mask our own conflicted nature – and effectively embody conflicted and destructive outcomes under the aegis of power and protection. One of the way this works is to set up or make use of a terror symbol or catastrophe scenario and set up a crusade against it. The tricks are hardly subtle – yet they continue to work because few are educated to develop an awareness of their own personal identity structure, but operate from it or within the framework of its ‘reality’… Read more »
website: http://www.hendersonlefthook.wordpress.com
You are a wordy/windy boy ain’t ya?
JD.
Its fascinating to me that so many commenters are a priori accepting the very binary argument Monbiot tries to sell us and which my entire article is trying to show is bogus.
We don’t need to choose between Vegan Big Ag or Carnivore Big Ag, people. That’s the whole point.
Even vegans need animal husbandry of some kind if they are to have organic veg. And the planet as a whole would be better off if, instead of being sidetracked by Monbiot’s agenda, we united to oppose industrial farming and promote small sustainable local production.
I don’t think your point about vegans needing animal husbandry is correct. There are vegan permaculture farmers out there demonstrating this as we speak.
My preference is to ignore shills like Monbiot, never feed that beast, and concentrate on the science.
The whole point is that we have a duty of care to all life because we have the power to abuse and destroy all life. As we evolve we learn new things. Sometimes these new things require a radical overhaul of what we thought we knew. We are face to face with a huge paradigm shift, probably unparalleled in our history. Diet is on the table – pardon the pun – as fundamentally as everything else, up to and including the nature of reality.
Rotational grazing is generally considered a vital part of permaculture. The problem is that at some point the question of ethical consumption runs up against the irrefutable though ethically uncomfortable truth that all living things need to consume other living things in order to survive. It’s a strange situation when you stop and think about it, but it’s a limitation we can’t break away from. Everything we decide about the ethics of food consumption is predicated on this truth. We need to consume life in order to sustain life. That is the only absolute here. And the only debate is about what forms of life we consider it ethical to consume. A debate about where you put the bar. For some, battery and broiler chickens are no problem, for others harvesting honey from small organic hives is too much exploitation. Some say organic “happy meat” is fine, others think only… Read more »
Rotational grazing is generally considered a vital part of permaculture. I know, but as I stated there are those proving otherwise. I don’t find it ethically uncomfortable or strange at all that survival requires consumption and death. The debate underway about where we put the bar is fuelled by a lot of ignorance about other animals, as well as a lot of species snobbery that emerges from Enlightenment thinking re. human exceptionalism. That said, I agree with you that some manifestations of the vegan position are overly sentimental, but that is not a reflection of the arguments in veganism per se, more a reflection of our modern, sheltered lives. Even many carnists are squeamish around dead flesh, not to mention living flesh. We modern humans have a very out-of-whack relationship with the rest of nature, imo. There are those who truly believe that plants feel pain. My response to this… Read more »
I agree with your comment. I also think it is impotent to give thanks and appreciation for our food whatever our personal choice of diet. There is a lot to be said for the vibrancy of fresh food and a connection to it and where it comes from. Permaculture is an amazing way of being and is supportive of all life. Of course not having access to fresh food is all part of the enforced disconnect.
Kathy: I presume that’s a typo? I read “important” not “impotent” and totally agree!
Yes sorry important is what I meant to write. I thought I had been thorough in making sure no mistakes, but didn’t notice that one. Thank you for pointing it out and your reply.
Wasn’t “proven otherwise”. A counter argument: https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/articles/grazed-and-confused-an-initial-response-from-the-sustainable-food-trust/ Summary Although the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) agrees with a number of specific points in the report (see below), we fundamentally disagree with its conclusions and we challenge some of the scientific evidence used and some of the authors’ analysis. The report focuses exclusively on greenhouse gas emissions and while it does accept that grassland can sequester carbon, it fails to understand the vital necessity of returning degraded cropland to rotations that include grass and grazing animals, in order to rebuild carbon and organic matter levels, and the potential of integrating grazing livestock production with crop production in genuine mixed farming systems, to address a wide range of the food system problems currently faced. The only practical way to produce human-edible food from grassland without releasing large amounts of carbon to the atmosphere is to graze it with ruminants, and with the increasing… Read more »
Catte, if we discover we should not kill and eat plants, we must become fruitarian, and disperse the seeds.
What would it be to live without ‘should’? Would it wake from the unconscious habits to bring a full attention present in our lives? Does unconscious fear dictate a full attention to a past that is not here – excepting its reenactment as the blind defence that brings confirmation in a like response? Is there a way of living that is not coercive upon life in self or other, to be uncovered beneath the layers and looping of entanglement in a mind of guilt, fear and reactions that reinforces its premise? Would this necessarily require uncovering the reactive patterns of fears and guilts that are hidden as if to escape them – including ‘hiding’ them in scapegoats, pharmakoi, and models of reality that distantiate and dissociate from psychic emotional conflict. And so does this not mean we look upon our own thought and feeling and reaction in the desire for… Read more »
Some light reading Catte:
http://www.eatlikeyoucarebook.com/
The thing that strikes me as most revealing in Monbiot’s article is his claim that he is a vegan, whilst admitting that he is in fact an omnivore. This blatant misuse of language (particularly nouns) lies at the heart of the propagandist’s practice.
Sometimes the right of higher level predator animals ie humanity to enslave exploit eat and generally use for our own pleasure, wants and needs, seems very similar to the rationale behind the higher level humans exploiting the lower level humans. The doctrine of might is right from the dominant group has little regard of the relative sentience of its ‘property’.
Monbiot is right and wrong, going on Catte’s excellent article and the comments (I refuse to read the article). Many of the issues raised have been touched on: but the most important, I feel, has not. If we continue to rely on our current industrial and intensive farming methods, the so called ‘Green Revolution’: billions will die as a result – vegan, vegetraian, or not. The main issue is embedded fossil fuel calories in our food calories. According to Michael Pollan, each food calorie contains ten fossil fuel calories. This makes ‘cheap’ food reliant on fossil fuel prices, which, post peak oil, is not a good thing to be totally reliant on. This is just to grow the food: further fossil fuel calories are added in packaging, processing and distribution (all those vegan ready meals that process the nutrients out of the food; and package it in single use black… Read more »
Exactly. My dream future is a move towards permaculture practices. It’s still a young science, but its founding assumptions are based on partnership with nature, not domination, which makes it good in my book. It has achieved amazing results already. It would of course be a far more labour-intensive system, but in a good way, a meaningful way. Pursuing it would thus mean radical change across the board, but we need that anyway.
Toby: peak oil will make the entire parasitic superstructure ecologically untenable. The entire economic (and class) role-diversity is also bio-energetically untenable. There is not enough energy – not in the future – but now. Charles Hall has calculated the EROI values that sustain a diverse culture such as ours. 14:1 is a minimum (depending on which study, we are on the cusp of this now): below that we need to cut schools, or art, or hospitals, or the military. No one will advocate that politically, so what will happen is that the developed nations will increasingly suck dry the less developed nations to maintain our standard of living. Otherwise, it’s pitchforks at dawn! Our “night at the opera” freebie for an elite couple is a years food for an indigenous family who will now go hungry. No one outside a few disparate forums thinks like this. The political world is… Read more »
Exactly. I came across that sobering data a while back on a website call The Oil Drum. Really opened my eyes. I gave up my job on the back of that (and other data), aged 44 or something. God, my idealism! I’m still recovering from that decision today…
The figure I have read consistently over twenty five years is that fossil fuel driven food production consumes about ten calories per calory of food produced.
Of note is that Monbiot has tried to rubish the significance of the peak oil argument.
Which explains the massive hate campaign, preparatory to war, against China and Russia. The Western elites might lie about climate destabilisation, peak oil, fracking etc, in order to get elected, but they are well advised as to the reality-Trump seems an exception, of course. They know that their blood-sucking parasitism can only continue if Russia is looted, and China’s rise ended, and the country made a vivisected string of stooge regimes, and if global population is massively reduced. Hence the drive to war, and the huge efforts, world-wide, in bio-warfare research, particularly into genetically engineered pathogens, and genetically specific bio-weapons.
I agree with you. He’s a gatekeeper as he never ever mentions the health aspect of veganism:
https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=from%3AGeorgeMonbiot%20plant-based&src=typd
All he would have to do is tweet and stickey http://nutritionfacts.org and start taking about how everyone going vegan could extend lifespan massively, especially we if shift to better veganic farming on the local level, with 20 hour work weeks, animal sanctuaries, smaller scale farming and food soveignty which means lower staple food prices on the global level as there is less animal waste. Instead, he carefully tows industry led talking points to be a fifth columnist indirect murderer through his inaction.
Always “be careful being vegan get ur b12” never any excitement about being vegan.
Aurochs and lynx, more like. I don’t think lions were endemic to the British Isles at any time during the Holocene. Excellent comment.
Telegraaf sez:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/5077393/Super-sized-lions-roamed-UK-in-ice-age.html
https://chinadailymail.com/2016/10/21/china-acquires-syngenta-for-us43-billion-chinas-biopolitics/
China’s securing Syngenta’s advanced biochemical patents appears to be more a business investment and possible future use for its own agriculture market, given that
Define ‘traditional’? Low-tech (or appropriate tech); low-impact; organic (with elements of permaculture); or highly industrialised, mechanised, highly reliant on petrochemical fertilisers and pesticides – aka the “green revolution”? Because this ‘tradition’ is only about half a century old, and is destroying the planet …with or without GMO.
Don’t see how the Green Revolution count as ‘tradition’, not that I used the term or presented such a Hobson’s choice.
Monbiot is and has always been a despicable excuse for a human being. An absolute fraud.
Actually you can rear pigs naturally in forests to produce 30 month old animals for slaughter. The Spanish traditionally fattened up their pork in oak forests, eating copious voumes of acorns the autumn before slaughter. They did it on steep hillsides where only trees would bind topsoil sufficiently to prevent erosion. You can rear chickens on ground you are preparing to grow crops on, feeding them on food waste, letting them eat all weeds and remaining grass and fertilising soil as they go. You can rear cows in public parks where they feed as much off hedgerows as grass. In many places, hardy beasts live out all winter, removing need for silage, hay and barns. The traditional PTB fascism is to offer two alternatives, one of which you paint as appalling. It is like saying you can have big breasted black woman or small petite white woman and aren’t big… Read more »
I was disgusted by Monbiot!’s Syria comments. However, I see nothing objectional in this Guardian article. He may not be right, but if tnat is the case, his argume ts can be properly and calmly crtiqued. This OffGuardian criticism is merely a pile of gratuitous insults. It is unworthy of the general high standard of this site.
Wilfred Whattam – No, actually this OffGuardian article is not “a pile of gratuitous insults,” but rather a factual rebuttal of yet another of Monbiot’s nonsense positions. If you read the article you should be aware of that. Since you disagree with the author perhaps you could point out those – “gratuitous insults” – and offer some information that might counter them, rather than posting such a non-fact based critique.
Obviously a disgruntled vegan.
The issue in Catte’s post that even if we adopted veganism, that in itself will not solve the problem of environmental degradation and long-term health issues arising from what we eat. The problem is that most farming around the world has become industrialised, farms have become indistinct from factories, and decisions about what to grow and how agricultural land is used are made by a small number of companies and individuals who do not have our health and the planet’s health uppermost in their priorities.
It’s not so much what George Monbiot says, as what he omits to say, that Catte is pointing to. Is this omission deliberate or an accidental oversight?
If we’re to become truly vegan, we must do so with eyes and ears open, so that our decisions don’t result in worse problems than if we stayed omnivorous.
“It’s not so much what George Monbiot says, as what he omits to say,…” Precisely, Jen. That’s one of the ways these manipulators work. You can see it widely evident in ‘healthy’ retail food promotion generally. I have learnt over time not to believe the ‘banners’ but to look closely at the ingredients listings. Food items sold as ‘low fat’ are packed with refined sugars to compensate, and – to my mind worst of all – items sold as ‘no added sugar’ are packed with chemical sugar substitutes. I avoid them rather than have to worry about the true impact they may be having on my health. When was the last time any food items were advertised with the focus on all the added colourings? Colourings which can include additives classified as ‘natural’ such as aluminium, silver, iron and titanium oxide, not to mention synthetically produced dyes which studies have… Read more »
I’ve never bought food tampering and promoting this that and the other from day one. I simply cannot understand why people bought the “low fat” and artificial sweetener nonsense. Even now they get it wrong with sugar. There’s a vast difference between processed sugar and naturally-occurring sugar.
Not to forget, GMO’s.
‘Supposed health benefits’ ?
Do some research folks: https://www.plantbasednews.org/post/10-mind-blowing-vegan-transformations?utm_source=Plant+Based+News+Subscribers+Combined&utm_campaign=9742faab54-Weekly+News+Updates&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5651a57357-9742faab54-192765605
https://www.plantbasednews.org/post/world-milk-day-dairy-industry-lies?utm_source=Plant+Based+News+Subscribers+Combined&utm_campaign=9742faab54-Weekly+News+Updates&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5651a57357-9742faab54-192765605
I have no credentials I would suggest that, when it comes to nutrition, there is only one dumb species. Experimental evidence demonstrates that animals given free choice choose their food not by what the food is, but rather by the soil fertility the food is growing in. Experimental evidence demonstrates that as plant yields are going up per acre, the total nutritional value per acre is going down. Experimental evidence demonstrates that animals increase the protein content of the food they consume by eating the germ of the grain while eating as little as possible of the endosperm. Experimental evidence demonstrates that the amount of insect damage to crops is related to the soil fertility the crop is growing in. Experimental evidence in a fifty year experiment comparing a six crop rotation with growing each of the six crops on the same soil year after year demonstrates the soil fertility… Read more »
Gary, …and observational evidence demonstrates that a large proportion of the world’s population don’t give two hoots about nutritional value!
Seriously, you make valuable points which go further to demonstrate that it’s all about increasing what is already a healthy financial profit for the food, farming and pharmaceutical industries, even if it’s to everyone’s physiological detriment.
The degradation of human ‘stock’ is by design of a broad spectrum dominance. Whatever ‘most people’ may or may not be or do’ we each are making choices and living the consequence of our choices. Many of these are experienced as no choice at all or operate completely unmindfully. If you have enough free awareness to move and question the mind as it presents your reality to be, you can learn to pause and disregard what does not really belong to you – and generate positive outcomes from negative experience. You wont be able to wake the dead or ‘save’ anyone who isn’t already waking to their true self-responsibility. Regardless our differences and seeming conflicts, a true willingness to embrace and align with life on earth is shared purpose that reintegrates and unifies to joy in life – which is the natural song of inner freedom of being. If fear… Read more »
To quote Ice T (from Body Count’s cover of “Institutionalized”) re: veganism; “I could give a fk if you wanna eat sawdust! Just step away from my muthafkn [ham] sandwich!”
Sums up the argument for the beef industry perfectly.
That George Monbiot actually suggests that wild herbivores move freely across grasslands is itself reason to doubt that he knows his topic as well as he thinks he does. Wild animals, even without human interference, migrate in more or less regular patterns that can be predicted. These depend on seasonal weather and rainfall patterns affecting food supply, among other things. Why else do wildebeest, zebras and other herbivores migrate annually in parts of Africa? Why do some bird species undertake annual journeys of thousands of kilometres across oceans? These journeys are not “free-ranging”. What is Monbiot’s agenda here?
Scratch an ‘ecologist’ and there is a very good chance that you will discover a Darwinian fundamentalist-which is to say a disciple of TH Huxley- underneath.
Monbiot is in the long tradition of anti-social thought exemplified by Hobbes and Malthus both of whom insisted on the innate violence of man.
In fact both Darwin and his contemporary and colleague Wallace denied the idea that natural selection was characterised by ruthless violence: Wallace put it this way
what “the struggle for existence…really brings about is the maximum of life and the enjoyment of life with the minimum of suffering and pain…it is difficult even to imagine a system by which a greater ballance of happiness could have been secured. “
“Farmers and governments have been comprehensively conned by the global pesticide industry. Shareholder value comes first…it will count for nothing when we have lost the living system on which our survival depends”. This is George Monbiot writing last October about the disastrous decline in pollinating insects caused by over-promotion and overuse of pesticides and herbicides in crop production and related industries, all eager to make a fast buck at the expense of the future of mankind. I certainly don’t disagree with the concerns he voiced then but what I find strange is that in all his latest advocation of veganism there is no mention of the fact that, unless something is done quickly to discourage the farming industry from continually using pesticides etc in the name of obtaining maximum achievable yield, they will have to face the problem of NO yield in years to come. Perhaps he doesn’t mention this… Read more »
The chemical blitzkrieg against insect life is the latest, and one of the most profound, examples of capitalist omnicide. Any industry predicated on destroying the basis of Life on Earth, the bedrock of food-chains and plant pollination, in the drive for profit maximisation is not just innately EVIL, but lunatic. That no political regime dares simply ban this aspect of the capitalist war on Life and arrest and prosecute those responsible, and take emergency measures to reverse this horror, just yet again illustrates that under market capitalism societies are run by dead souls, Evil psychopaths dedicated to destruction.
So much in the Guardian these days reads like something from a parody of the Guardian written by some wag at Private Eye. It’s as if the average Guardian journalist has desire to live in a society that resembles a Jane Austin novel and they are the clever and witty characters, not the farm workers or the servants of course! Poor, deluded, ignorant, babies. Modern journalism is very moralistic and the ‘liberal’ journalists role is similar to the religious police in Iran or Saudi Arabia. The Guardian’s journalists are moral guardians, continually telling people what they are supposed to think and think properly, morally. We really do seem to have returned to a kind of New Victorian Age where ideas, language and images are increasingly under intense scrutiny in relation to how ‘morally pure’ they are, or, politically correct. Language and texts have become a veritable minefield. Take their bizarre… Read more »
I don’t know what you’re talking about. One of today’s leaders is about the crisis surrounding the lack of qualified nannies. I mean, we need to know this stuff!
Yes, they are manning barricades in Crouch End and Muswell Hill. Apparently someone might take away their au pairs! What next, eh? Ration cards for buffala mozzarella in HIghgate?
The Fraudian presstitutes are ‘moralising’, not ‘moral’, and generally in the service of extreme immorality, even outright Evil, as in their frenetic lying and misrepresentation to support the takfiri butchers attacking Syria.
Satan either pays very well or he has some overly-enthusiastic volunteers that love doing his work. Does Georgie boy know about the herbicide, pesticide and fungicide runoff from all those veggies he loves to eat that is turning rivers, creeks and lakes into dead zones???
I’ve heard good things about this new type of food Carkill is testing called “Soylent Green!”
There is more pesticide in animal products as they eat grain and the pesticide builds up.
Grass fed free range animals don’t eat grain
True, but their flesh represents a tiny proportion of that consumed by humans. Only the rich can afford grass-fed animal flesh.
Right, so let’s try to make organic, sustainable farming the norm. Arguing that we don’t know what “natural” is anymore simply isn’t helpful. A grass-fed free range animal treated with respect is clealry living a more natural life than one locked in a concrete pen and fed hormones to speed its growth. And the meat it produces is healthier and more natural too. Muddying that simple pragmatic fact is only helping Big Ag.
And no one here is opposing veganism.
Stating that veganism is unnatural is a kind of opposition, don’t you think? An animal is not treated with respect when it is property. Apply that logic to human beings, also animals. Would we be treating humans with respect by raising them ‘naturally’ to kill them when their flesh is just right for our taste preferences? There is also the problem of the amount of land we would need to feed 7 billion humans and growing if all animals for our consumption were produced this way on a western style diet. It’s a question of need. If a whole-food plant-based diet is perfectly healthy, then we don’t need to treat animals as produce. If it is not perfectly healthy, then we do, if we don’t want to return to the jungle. As for organic, I’m all for it. The more the better. My preferred solution is permaculture, which I mentioned… Read more »
Veganism is “unnatural” in that it requires synthetic vitamins and synthetically denatured proteins in order to be sustainable. How can simply saying a thing is what it is be considered opposition? The corollary of your position is that we should lie in defence of the things we support. That is Guardian-thinking.
How can simply saying a thing is what it is be considered opposition?
Because in this case the natural-unnatural dichotomy is at least misleading; I see it as false. It is therefore a form of opposition that falsely speaks against veganism in the same way that it would falsely speak against civilisation generally.
I disagree that my position requires that you lie to defend the Guardian. Lie about what? Veganism does not require synthetic proteins, far from it. Modern life requires supplementation of dietary components like b12 and vitamin d, but not protein. Not at all.
[[ And no one here is opposing veganism.]]
Oh really?
Yes, really. None of us want to wipe out vegans. That’s a promise. But facts are sacred, even when they apparently upset some people.
‘Facts’ = what *you* think?
Your claims about vitamin supplements and food additives are fact free.
Here we go again. There is nothing to oppose about veganism as a choice as to what to eat or not eat. But veganism as a trojan force is a deceit – not a diet. Veganism used as a form of victimism by which to claim moral unchallengability is worship of death pain and power for what can be gotten to mask one’s own hatreds. Ironic to see humans managed, pharmed and fed by the manipulation of identity. The grass root movement is a valid alignment in response to all number of unresolved conflicts as a current choice lived. The astro turfing of a corporate mind-capture is the intent and attempt to subvert and use the movement for a power agenda – be that weaponising to attack and undermine, or market or mind-capture or strengthening the multifaceted trap of a global technocratic replacement for the human spirit, freedom of will… Read more »
Hi Catte: My point of view it that there are two kinds of food you can eat. One is “conventional” food which I call malnutrition with poison. The other is “organic” food which I call malnutrition without poison (if the organic farmer isn’t cheating). Soil fertility is the ability of the soil to produce protein. When you grow food and harvest it, the proteins in the food have removed some of the minerals in the soil needed to create the protein, thereby lowering the soil fertility slowly over time. I have always wanted someone to explain to me what is sustainable farming. Organic farming rules concern what you can’t use to grow food. Whether or not there is poison in your food does not determine the nutritional value of the food. What makes food malnutrition, with or without poison, are deficiencies in the food caused by deficiencies in the soil.… Read more »
The very basis of organic food production is building soil health and vitality. Organic food is not truly organic when the soil is degraded.
If the very basis of organic food production is building soil health and vitality why isn’t it in the regulations for being certified organic?
Would you agree or disagree with this statement, “We fail to recognize the fact that the soil fertility is the basic force under all creation.”, William A. Albrecht, PhD.?
How does one build soil health and vitality?
You know, Gary-crop rotation, compost, nitrogen-fixing crops, green manure, animal excrements etc. It takes time. Avoid all agri-chemicals, don’t till too vigorously, encourage beneficial insects, birds etc. I do agree with Albrecht.
Excellent point Mulga.
The same principle holds true in all arenas of life.
Look after the soil and all that grows will be of its nature.
Getting from life or others without honouring life is not a true receipt so much as a hollow victory – though it may take a decent into wretchedness to finally register as a futility to abandon.
Satan either pays very well or he has some overly-enthusiastic volunteers that love doing his work. Does Georgie boy know about the herbicide, pesticide and fungicide runoff from all those veggies he loves to eat that is turning rivers, creeks and lakes into dead zones?
I’ve heard good things about this new type of food Carkill is testing called “Soylent Green!”
Satan (to me) represents love of form at expense or disregard of content. So as to enact a fantasy gratification upon the forms or bodies of living tools. Whereas fantasies are perfect (until life interrupts), relationship is messy, onerous and to be replaced with the mere forms of communication. Form or fantasy object based reality is a fruit of the fool or indeed the fall. Satan pays in lies at cost of lives. For what does it profit a man to gain the world if he loses Soul awareness? As for your other point – have you heard of ‘organically grown veggies’? If you like horror stories look up so called ‘organic’ biosolids. There is a whistleblower on Mercola. If the world hasn’t broken your heart yet – there’s a lot more down the line. As for glyphosate … is it an embodiment of Luciferian hate? Lucifer (to me) represents… Read more »
Some people claim to thrive on vegan diets, but I notice how many of them appear in the obituary columns in their 50s or thereabouts. As far as I can see, after a lot of careful study, human beings evolved to eat mostly meat with a side dish of salads. The Agricultural Revolution of c. 10,000 BC has been described (by Jared Diamond) as possibly the biggest disaster in human history (and prehistory). Average heights plummeted by about six inches, and the bones of early farmers show signs of everything from infectious diseases like tuberculosis to sheer malnutrition. As many others have observed, Nature has furnished the world with huge grasslands which are ideal for grazing. Other, different, lands are suitable for growing vegetables and cereals. Cattle automatically fertilize the grasslands, pigs and chickens love to root around in forest areas and orchards, and it has been shown that an… Read more »
Billion, dammit, billion! Sorry people, I’m an idiot.
I do quite a bit of my translation work for the Russian Academy of Sciences. Quite a bit of the workload for the last 2-3 years has revolved around study of mass graves in Russia from the 1230s – the period of the massed onslaughts of Mongolian warlord Batu Khan and his Tatar vassal armies. Regardless of the political background to these now, the unusual circumstance they created was that – according to the well-honed Mongolian plan of assault – a surprise attack would be made at dawn on an unsuspecting Russian town, in which all the inhabitants were slaughtered in a single day. No survivors were left, not even to bury the death. The result is that anthropologists get a ‘snapshot’ picture of how life had been in an entire community on one particular day in 1238. The mass graves (which we presume were made many months later, by… Read more »
“And if you will forgive the gruesome aside, the most common cause of death in our sample was a Mongolian sword or club to the skull (as skeletal evidence clearly shows).”
Which puts the comparable longevities of peasant villagers two centuries later
“We can compare their community to bodies from graveyards (from 200 years later) in poor rural communities. Their results show almost no meat or fish in the diet at all. Yet the average longevities are the same – people weren’t living longer due to eating meat (or fish)” into a fairly stark perspective.
These folks must be wrong then:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study
About one in ten thousand people jack as enzyme which means it’s dangerous for them to be vegan, but everyone else will do fine on it as long as they make sure they get vitamin B12, iodine, and vitamin D and they will do well on it. The health benefits are enormous.
I should have added EPA and DHA omega 3 to that list, but you can get plant based versions. Vegans should not rely on flax seed.
And the science behind veganism is very good now explaining why the diet is so healthy. Vegans should subscribe to Dr Gregger’s site to get the latest scientific facts.
https://nutritionfacts.org/
“So what you are saying is”…Veganism is not a naturally feasible option to take. It requires boosters and processing and supply chains to sustain it. If a person were to live traditionally off their land then they would not last very long.
I’m all for people choosing to become vegans in our modern society but there’s far too many Millennial zombies foaming at the mouth screaming their corporate vegan indoctrination at everyone else.
Personally, no thanks, I’ll eat my eggs, cheese and a little meat, pulses, lots of nice vegetables and salads and some fruit, ie, a fairly balanced diet.
No, veganism is “naturally feasible”. Vitamin D (which is not a vitamin but a hormone) comes from sunlight on the skin, but only when the sun is 50 degrees or higher in the sky and when 50% or more of your skin is exposed. You need about 20 minutes a day in those conditions. Modern life therefore makes supplementation important to almost all humans. For example, in London the sun attains 50 degrees and higher starting in late April I think, and this high-enough zenith ends mid August or so. It attains this height range for about 10 minutes on the first day of this summer stretch, and on 21 June it’s 50 degrees or above for about 3 hours (if memory serves). B12 is problematic for all humans in civilisation due to the hygienic ways we live and how sanitised our food is, generally speaking. For example, if you… Read more »
You can get Vitamin D from mushrooms. Place them in the sunlight, and they produce their own, which you can then consume. How long exposure is required in your hyperborean climes, I do not know, but here in the ‘sunny, all too sunny, South’ it doesn’t take long.
But small amounts – and a tip for storing vit D. Persistent small amounts may fend off rickets so I don’t feel to negate your statement – but in the months and climes where sunlight makes vit D even a small exposure is vastly more. The Innuit got their vit D from animal fats. Many animals get it by licking their hair/fur. Pharma downplays and neuters vitamin and nutritional health wherever it can. My positive assertion is for informed choice rather than regulated mechanism. The mind of a ‘moral guilt’ leverage operates to kill choice, deny freedom of speech and undermine the very foundational structures by denying and blocking light under the guise of fighting darkness – so it must be ‘right’. The long grass of arguing into the details of this or that ideology (because that what diet becomes as a leverage of social and political manipulation), is obscuring… Read more »
‘Freedom’ cannot be absolute. You do not possess the ‘freedom’ to limit the freedom of others. There are positive freedoms, that respect those of others, and the negative freedoms of the capitalist parasites who feel free to do anything to limit the freedoms of others, in pursuit of gain. The ‘freedom’ of junk-food peddlers to poison humanity by brainwashing their victims, starting with the very young, through relentless advertising mental and psychological manipulation and molestation is the very apotheosis of negative freedom.
Would you like to be just a little bit free so as to suffer at the hands of hated evil other or hated evil past that you can then claim rights to reaction in a like ‘power’? Go right ahead Freedom to imagine has no limits but those who accept for yourself. Freedom to experience your imagination is within the freedom to know your own existence. What you accept true for yourself does set the measure of your own experience and of your presumption of others. For the self you see in them is of course your own judgement – excepting you know them without such limit. Packaged and framed life in terms of the human conditioning is like a ‘narrative dictate’ and not Fact. yet the freedom to ‘survive’ and operate in such terms is the freedom to make your chosen ‘facts’ sacred as the basis to disregard and… Read more »
You said it – no one else can limit your freedom but you.
[[ Personally, no thanks, I ]]
Great. you’re welcome. please carry on. That roughly sums up your theory – “It’s what I want, so there”
You kill animals and eat their dead bodies?
You trade for the body fluids of enslaved mammals and eat that?
You eat embryos and call all that a “fairly balanced diet”.
Frankly speaking, that’s horrible.
But only a cultural acceptance makes it ridiculous to say that about eating veg. As Catte said, what happens if one day we find they too feel pain, fear and stress?
I answered that question already, but have another point to make. It’s a fairly disingenuous line of argument: What happens if X turns out to be false/true at some unknowable future point? This can be asked of almost anything. What about rape? What happens if we find out human women want to be raped without realising it? What about racism? What happens if we discover there is a superior ethnicity? Slavery? What happens if we discover humans with an IQ below 80 are best used as slaves, for their own good? Almost nothing to do with subjective responses rooted in consciousness or qualitative subject matter can be asserted to be 100% one way or the other. There’s always room for doubt. How do we come to decisions? With the best data we currently have. The best data we currently have supports whole-food plant-based diets as perfectly healthy for humans, and… Read more »
They may not operate a subjective imagination within a modelling of a life in death – but there are proofs of bio-electrical reaction to intended threat. Our model of the world is the human world. We can open communication with life if we open from the filtering that rules in or out what is ‘accepted reality’ by having that ‘channel open’. Everything is a state of communication with everything else – at once – but out mind model is of objects that reflect a subjective continuity. While we live this we do well to live well within its premise, for what we give out sets the measure of our receiving. Disconnected thought is a ‘killer’ but those in communion take only what they need and give thanks in receiving. Sure this can be romanticized and then used to justify disconnect as ‘real’ – but at some point we see that… Read more »
Great comment , binra 🙂
with you all the way & you helped clarify and give context to so many of my own thoughts & belief sets, all of which I could probably never have expressed so eloquently , like you just did, here & now ..
Many thanks, I’m gonna’ re-read your words, extra slow .. with some slow food, for even slower digestion 😉
Thankyou for your synchronicity balkydj I trust you recognize the insight is your own recognition regardless that it seems to come from someone else. My own trust is that meanings communicate. Meanings that are in a sense ‘deep’ and often dense – for there’s a lot in there and yet but not so much ‘thought-out’ or for ‘thinking about’ as to truly feel or intuit and abide in. For part of uncovering a clearer perspective is a willingness to abide with new information without force-translating it into old frameworks, and abiding with it as the willingness to let it ‘become in us’ – and so find expression through us without the censoring and filtering that subvert a true insight into an extension of the old system rather than the conscious unfolding of a fresh appreciation. To follow a leading edge may simply seem un-understandable to others – because people skim… Read more »
This argument does not include a consideration of unnecessary harm. Drawing on its logic, any action, as a form of communication, is morally equivalent to any other action, be it torture, rape, war, murder, whatever. These things do happen. Why? Because we think too much? Perhaps, but that would only be one part of a fuller answer. The argument is also a misrepresentation of my position, which is awe- and humility-based. In short, I agree with your reasoning poetically, and to some degree philosophically, but stress choice as a fundamental part of existence, as well as learning/evolution. In terms of choice and how to live in an optimally respectful way, one that deeply respects all Others and in consideration of the data at hand, consuming animals is anyway consuming the plants the animals consumed to grow. And due to energy conversion rates, this would mean consuming ever more plants as… Read more »
Speaking of plant pain
“Plants can see, hear, smell and respond”
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170109-plants-can-see-hear-and-smell-and-respond
“The hearing is not the only sense that plants share with humans. Indeed, it seems that they may have all of the senses we have, plus some others that we don’t share with them”
https://www.lifeadvancer.com/plants-feel-pain-research-emotions
Oh dear. Looks like it’s the lab-grown “meat” or nothing then. 🙂
This line of argument rests on the belief that matter gives rise to consciousness. This is very far from proven. Consciousness is not called The Hard Problem for nothing. For example, computers can see, touch, hear and interact, but cannot feel or experience in the way conscious animals can. While there are grey areas between what we call plant and what we call animal, what applies to the autonomic responses of computers applies, albeit organically rather than mechanically, to plants. So while it is perfectly valid to talk of senses that enable interactions with the environment in the case of plants, and indeed of plant senses not shared by animals, it is a non sequitur to then assert that plants experience consciously what they sense autonomically. Awareness/consciousness ‘requires’ a different biological architecture, as it were. Consciousness-first explanations of the nature of reality do a better job of explaining all phenomena… Read more »
The claim in the articles (which you seem not to have read) is that plants actually may be aware and even able to read minds.
You are right, I did not, but now I have, and anyway I have read others like them. None of the information is new to me, which is why I am a keen follower of permaculture. From the BBC article: So while it is useful to describe plants in anthropomorphic terms to communicate ideas, there are limits. The danger is that we end up viewing plants as inferior versions of animals, which completely misses the point. I am as amazed by plants as I am by all life. And when we add ecology into the mix, and Gaia theory, at least as a pool of provocative ideas, it’s really mind-blowing stuff. Information like this deeply informs my anti-exploitation stance. Which is why I do what I can to minimise the exploitation I fund and engage in. From the Life Advancer article: The conclusions from such experiments, we should note, are… Read more »
@Toby: Hi there, you said:- “It’s not my position that plants are not alive, just that they are not conscious.” I have often watched huge fields of Sunflowers shy progressively away from mass exposure to intense sunlight & the rising heat , under very high temperatures, (with a high level of fascination that most would find “bonkers” I knowww), lol, 🙂 : but because of having an eye and ear for detail and the individual , as well as their configuration in any given collective, including herding & the swarming of Birds & especially Bees , I have come to the conclusion that the ‘Plant Kingdom’ does have some form of SELF conscious reaction & mechanism, even when growing within or ‘en masse’ 😉 , the sunflower individual is aware of what the others are thinking & reacting, & precisely how they are beginning to respond, be they the taller… Read more »
Hi Balky, There is something compelling about that position, and what I respect most about it is that it proceeds from respect for all life, a position I share with you. To get to the bottom of what we are discussing, however, would require a veeerrrry long and ultimately inconclusive examination of the nature of reality. My position is based on information physics fused with consciousness-first principles. But whatever either of us may state in support of our own understandings will be conjecture. I love this sort of discussion, but admit it is hardly science. It can be soon I hope, but not yet. On the will to survive: Here we have semantic difficulties revolving around the terms “awareness”, “consciousness” and “will” that are very blurry and, I suggest, impossible to keep distinct. Because I am a consciousness-first advocate, I see “will” as rooted in consciousness rather than in DNA,… Read more »
While anything may seem real, only truth is true. Subjective ‘reality is by definition a generated or constructed experience yet the idea that Reality is truly an objective cause of a ‘virtual but perhaps compelling’ experience is to assert that you do not exist – and this view is indeed an anti-life or destructive belief-system. The transcendence of the subject object split is not in some other moment or condition. so much as the reintegration of the polarised sense of exclusion and opposition. The will to survive is not other that the embodied purpose of any life form – there is little subjective awareness of death in animals – and yet the subjective human consciousness – that becomes our measuring stick of presumed consciousness – is predicated upon awareness of death – not at first as a conceptualized thought – but the sense of a self-possession that can be dispossessed.… Read more »
The idea of private minds with secret thoughts is a human construct that has echoes of ‘covering a sense of lack with fig leaves so as not to be seen. One aspect of such a sense of lack is a loss of the universal ‘communication’ which unlike codified signs and symbols representing something ‘real’ is the nature of reality itself. And so our framing of a response in plant bio-electrics or indeed water structure to apparently ‘private thought’ is to presume another ‘private mind’ – that we presume to be the ‘meaning of consciousness’ – is ‘telepathic. But underneath is simply a vibrational attunement or resonance that is a communication of both being in a similar vibrational state rather than of any signal crossing ‘space’ between separate ‘minds’. I am not seeking to take away our experience of a narrative reality but to open to a reintegration with true presence… Read more »
I see you in your choice to project your intent and meaning into the minds of others. So life as lived on Earth disgusts you. Is there another way of looking at this? Or do you want to believe it and be-live your experience? You have presumably chosen not to eat animals but yet you still focus in their dead bodies and enslavement as the diet of your thought that you then share out. I do not argue with your experience. It is your freedom to feel and know according to where you give focus of attention along the purpose you follow. Dead thought enslaves and sacrifices the living. But ‘let the dead bury the dead’ because I feel the call to attend the Living. There are many horrors that can guilt is to subjection, impotence and rage – so beware of fascination in what robs you of life even… Read more »
I think this is a reply to one of my comments, but can’t quite tell which. Life does not disgust me, it amazes and delights me. Exploitation saddens me. My thought is not focussed on dead bodies, no. This is just a focus here in this discussion these last couple of days. You read me wrongly in this case, Binra. It is life and health I argue for, as constrained by current circumstances, one of which is factory farming, another is planetary carrying capacity, the required profit-oriented ‘efficiency’ of slaughter houses, etc. We all comment at this site in defence of something, for something. If nothing matters and all things just happen and it’s not really our business anyway and we don’t get the right to control the outcomes, why are we here arguing for what we believe in? You are passionate too, Binra. You are, for example, offended by… Read more »
[[ Have you seriously considered that my arguments here might be right? ]]
He’s already said that he has no plans to listen to arguments. How odd that a Meat Industry spokesman might actually be a ‘plant’.
let’s steer away from personal attacks, please. Keep your arguments “to the facts” and not “to the man”.
Thankyou for a kind response. I share purpose with you in a awakening true relation instead of a dissociated insanity. I addressed your comment upon eating dead bodies as disgusting – though I haven’t the exact phrases to hand. It’s use invokes a self-righteousness that then denies any other view – and even to demand an ‘argument’ for justifying the eating of animals is framed in your own belief that we have to have a rational argument to justify our self or by our own frame of judgement we are invalidated – and in this case dismissed as ‘killers’. I have no desire seek to dissuade anyone from adopting an exclusively animal, dairy and egg free diet if that is what they choose – but I would caution against ‘vegan’ processed food – and also denatured or pesticide sprayed food (and GM but in UK that is not such an… Read more »
But the mere fact we need to take synthetic processed vitamins in order to maintain a vegan diet means we are not physically designed for it. We can survive on it sure, and people who make the ethical choice to do so should be respected, but we don’t thrive on it naturally. Therefore there are unlikely to be any “health benefits” that wouldn’t be even better for eating a more natural array of foods that we can process without the need for supplementations.
You are wrong on this point. Please look into this more closely at e.g. nutritionfacts.org and also please consider what you mean by “natural”. Is farming “natural”? How about mass factory farming? How about the ‘unnatural’ sanitation technologies for cities that were festering pools of disease back in the day? Are you asserting that humans should not have left their jungle habitats? Humans thrive on whole-food plant-based diets. The evidence supporting this is massive. You just need to look. Nutritionfacts is a good place to start.
Toby: I was vegan for two years (and vegetarian for over thirty) …I nearly died. Long story short, I have a liver condition. At 6’5” I was 11.5 stone: not healthy. I now eat a mainly vegetable and pulse wholefood diet; with small amounts of chicken (free range) and fish (locally caught off Hastings). Veganism is not healthy for everyone: so it can’t be the diet for the future. If it is, goodbye, and thanks for the conversation! 🙂 As I see it; the problem is overconsumption and inequatable distribution (as outlined above). Catte’s point is that to advocate veganism so that the 1% can have a sustainable rapine future is fucked up. The entire system has to change: as we have already touched on …with common ownership, invested stakeholder responsiblity, food, energy, and personal sovereignty, etc, etc. Our entire industrial farming and distribution network is posited on cheap oil.… Read more »
Your case supports my position, BigB. If you need to eat animals to survive, then you should eat animals, and go about it as humanely as you can. (Without knowing what the liver condition is, I’m not sure if there is no plant-based solution. What was it? Vitamin A? A cholesterol issue?)
I see the ethics of veganism as a very effective gateway into the future we want: respect based, free of exploitation, partnership with the rest of nature not dominion over it. No, it alone is not the solution, but that hardly singles it out. There are no silver bullets. We need a radical overhaul of everything as far as I can tell.
I’ve always thought, without knowing exactly what the numbers might be, that diversity would produce humans who need animal flesh to survive. My guess is that their number is a low proportion of the total, someone in this discussion suggested 1 in 10,000. Who knows? My idea is that we would not need to farm animals in that case, but perhaps hunt wild versions in sanctuaries of some kind. Make the sanctuaries as ecologically diverse as possible and have trained hunters ‘farm’ whichever animals live there. That sounds just to me.
Of course there are great difficulties with this sort of solution, such as establishing who needs to eat animal flesh, but perhaps, considering the difficulties/impossibility of feeding 7 billion plus humans on naturally-raised animals in the nutritional proportions currently enjoyed in the west, it is not an entirely far-fetched idea.
It was/is a calorific thing: my liver condition is supposed to be benign. It’s called Gilbert’s Syndrome; and affects how I break down bilirubin. What I did not know until the advent of the internet is that is not benign at all! My body is incredibly susceptible to stress (including fasting), hence the budddhist thing! To give you some idea, I am now around 16.5 stone, and not overly fat! I simply could not eat enough and the stress on my body was risking organ failure, or so I was told. And yes, I do know about food combinations etc (I was also a macrobiotic for a number of years). After a year of emaciation and ME-like symptoms I was saved by a naturopath. My story is anecdotal in as much as the medical world did not know what was wrong with me: and I self-diagnosed. So this is what… Read more »
Nice pun there at the end! I actually guffawed.
Gosh, I hadn’t heard of that either, but am happy to hear you are now a strapping young man again.
[[ we need to take synthetic processed vitamins ]]
Link or retraction, please.
The vegans on this thread have acknowledged what is simple fact – people on a vegan diet need to take B12, iodine and other manufactured vitamins because a vegan diet doesn’t provide them.
Vegetables can provide b12 if not cleaned of the soil that holds the bacteria we would then have in our biome that produces b12. Or if we were to drink pond water. Neither pond water nor soil microbes are animal products. Iodine is present in sea salt and sea vegetables. Much b12 in animal flesh comes from additives to their feed anyway. As for ‘vitamin’ D, sunlight does that, which is also not an animal product.
You are misrepresenting the facts.
I didn’t mention vit D. But zinc, iron and calcium are other nutrients hard to get naturally on a vegan diet. Do you not take these supplements?
Legumes such as brown and green lentils, and soybeans; grains, including brown rice, quinoa, and others; pumpkin seeds, cashews, and pine-nuts; prune juice; dried apricots and peaches, and prunes… are all natural sources of iron.
There is no need for ‘supplements’. None..
edited by admin to remove ad hom
Science vs assertion: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23356638 How prevalent is vitamin B(12) deficiency among vegetarians? “Vegetarians are at risk for vitamin B(12) (B12) deficiency due to suboptimal intake. The goal of the present literature review was to assess the rate of B12 depletion and deficiency among vegetarians and vegans. Using a PubMed search to identify relevant publications, 18 articles were found that reported B12 deficiency rates from studies that identified deficiency by measuring methylmalonic acid, holo-transcobalamin II, or both. The deficiency rates reported for specific populations were as follows: 62% among pregnant women, between 25% and almost 86% among children, 21-41% among adolescents, and 11-90% among the elderly. Higher rates of deficiency were reported among vegans compared with vegetarians and among individuals who had adhered to a vegetarian diet since birth compared with those who had adopted such a diet later in life.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14988640 Dietary iron intake and iron status of German female… Read more »
That’s not true. There are some issues with absorption as the body adjusts, in my case after over 4 decades on an omnivorous diet, but it then settles down and absorption rates return – this is for zinc and iron. Getting enough though, more than enough, is easy. I use https://www.cronometer.com to track my diet. My iron and zinc values, like all the values of all micronutrients, including all amino acids, are easy to get over 100%, iron is always over 200% and hard to keep lower. My blood tests, my wife’s and daughter’s have all been fine on every occasion. I take no supplements other than b12 (some vegans don’t by the way, and publish their blood results showing perfect b12 scores) and d. Our various doctors – doctors are notoriously poorly trained in nutrition – are always surprised, knowing we are vegan. Now that we have the internet,… Read more »
I should also add that my family and I have been in excellent health these last 6 years, and feel great too. I know all this is anecdotal and I could be lying, but for all my faults I am an honest man. I went into veganism sceptically, asking all the questions on display here, and others besides. The data I found answered every question I had.
The reason for my passion here is that there are victims involved in this discussion who cannot speak for themselves, are born into slavery/property and bred to be monstrous versions of their former selves for human pleasure. It is a horrible situation, just as the holocaust was. There is a vegan holocaust survivor who sees it this way, too: https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/vegan-holocaust-survivor-says-the-reason-he-survived-was-to-end-the-oppression-of-animals-a3543956.html
Every single one of the Fattest People In America (and there are some true hippos in that category) is an avid consumer of meat. Their risk of cancer is greatly raised by the lack of dietary fibre intake.
But I think I’ve blown the cover of our abusive friend here. Which online source continuously mentions how meat contains “significant sources of essential nutrients such as iron, zinc, selenium, B vitamins and vitamin D” ??
Oddly enough it’s the Meat Advisory Council – which is a made-up body existing at the address of the PR Company paid by the meat industry. So it’s a complete fake. in fact.
It’s kind of a mess, right? I include myself in this, but people get very emotional when it comes to diet. It’s experienced, viscerally, as a right. We should have the free right to choose what we put into our bodies!! I think this ‘instinct’ makes discussion of this topic very fraught, that and the speciesism that sees consumable animals as products, property, somehow underserving of our affection. The result of all this is that these discussions sprawl all over the place like a battle of drunken octopuses slipping this way and that.
I hope some sense can be made from the tangle this important thread has become. My heavens it’s tiring…
I asked for a link. Your failure to provide one is very indicative.
Here, there are many scientific papers that prove the point https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318135128_The_impact_of_vegan_diet_on_health_and_growth_of_children_and_adolescents_-_Literature_review
The paper you link to is a review of other literature that examines vitamin deficiencies in vegans in terms of percentages and risk. The abstract draws strong conclusions in my view, i.e.: Vegans are at a high risk for cobalamin and calcium deficiency and an increased risk for inadequate levels vitamin D and iodine, unless proper food planning including supplements and/or fortified foods are utilized. First, ‘vitamin’ d (it’s a hormone) deficiency is widespread. Sunlight on the skin produces the hormone, not consumption of animal products (except through supplementation in milk). In other words, this is a general, civilisational problem, not a vegan problem. Second, adequate calcium intake and absorption are possible from plant sources. I’m not going to cite a paper, just look up almond milk and spinach as two examples of rich vegetable sources of calcium. Iodine is richly present in sea vegetables. And to repeat, b12 is… Read more »
[[ it looks to me like the deficiencies observed in the literature may have been due to poor nutritional knowledge ]]
Or deliberate lying from the Meat Lobby and its omnipresent mouthpieces.
Well one can simply do what you want and accept the consequences and find out if in your case it serves you well. There is a man who lived with the Innuit and shared an almost totally carnivorous diet and thrived. When he returned he undertook to persist a 100% meat diet while under constant medical supervision and study. He thrived. This is not an intent to gainsay or promote any particular life choice. But to release polarised action and reaction of ‘identity’ politic that is so open to being used by anything that seems to support or strengthen it. Of course people react with doubts and cautions to different cultural choices that challenge their comfort zones. Is that necessarily a persecution, oppression of cause for resentment of hurt feelings? When we find something that we feel alive in, we can be disappointed when others are not open, interested or… Read more »
I’ve thrived on a vegan diet since 1968, without vitamins or supplements. No major illness, just a few crashes. (Maybe being vegan makes you clumsy.)
Exactly so. But you will get pilloried by the beef industry, Monsanto, and the vitamin pills industry if you ever dare to say so 🙁
I get my Omega-3 from organic Siberian flax-seed oil, A 500ml bottle costs 85 roubles in Moscow – about a quid in British money. There are easily-available vegan sources of B12, too.
When MSM publishes a sort-of-sensible-sounding article like the one by George Monbiot, then that’s the time to become even more vigilant and do independent research so as to figure out who is benefitting from the views advocated in the said piece, and who will be suffering/losing out.
We must start demanding that the media is taken out of Jewish hands. The media is at war with the public on every front.
And who is going to do that? You should go back to writing your university rag mag.
I see little evidence that the media is in Jewish hands and none that, if it were it would make any difference.
The problem with the media is that it is owned, controlled and committed to the interests of the capitalists, for most of whom religious beliefs are of little importance compared with the compulsions of their system, which compels them to break every one of the ethical rules underpinning religions, not least Judaism.
Out of ZIONIST hands. They are the enemies of their own people, as well as the rest of us.
Apparently, there isn’t enough land to graze cattle to feed everyone now. That’s sad, so I hope more people go vegan as factory farming is incredibly cruel.
I agree with Catte about Monbiot, though. I worked with a JW colleague for many years who believed man was irredeemable and only God could save us. As he didn’t believe any person was good enough he always warned me about George Monbiot who he absolutely hated saying he was a hypocrite. I couldn’t understand why he hated him so much so I always argued with him but it turns out my colleague was right.
The article links to a source that claims there is ample food to feed everyone with current land use
There’s a lot spare lands in the world, but do we want to turn over all the countryside for grazing use. Hopefully veganism will spread, especially when the health benefits are realised.
No, you don’t understand – we currently ALREADY produce enough food to feed everyone in the world. There is no food shortage. There is a distribution problem.
This is partially true. However, we are overusing planetary ‘resources’ and the so-called developing worlds want in on western dietary habits. That’s unsustainable. The way the west conducts itself is the problem, not the solution. From the data I have seen, the most sustainable diet, and the healthiest, is a whole-food plant-based diet.
Exactly, the same with wealth.
The major systems are rigged to ensure the majority remain in grinding poverty, struggling to survive or as better off indoctrinated slaves propping up the minority who profit from the global misery and destruction they create.
I don’t read the Guardian or Monbiot now but this article is a great take down and pointer to an agenda hidden in plain sight on the back of the ‘green’ movement, which in my opinion has been subverted.
I used to struggle to get Monbiot’s name right for some time after I first came across him, he was Monibot to me… now it seems most appropriate.
Deforestation’s primary cause is the beef industry. Not crop-growing, but meat.
That’s the main reason I’ve been a vegetarian for the past 35 years. Veganism is great, but not compulsory. If we all ate lower down the food chain, there would be more land to round, and we would not need to fell forests to produce cattle.
Because a whole-food plant-based diet is perfectly healthy, veganism becomes an ethical decision, not a choice. IF there were no flesh-and-blood victims, then it would be about choice. More simply, we have no right to kill or abuse living creatures in their billions unless we must do so for survival/health reasons. And that’s before we look at the sustainability of factory farming. So why veganism rather than vegetarianism? Because the dairy industry treats some non-human animals (cows) as property, which is as wrong as treating human animals as property. And because, to be profitable, the dairy industry must mistreat and abuse those non-human animals, including abduction of all and murder of male babies, yearly. The mothers suffer badly from this, and survive only about a third of their natural lifespans due to the exhausting exploitation of them as resources. I’ve been vegan for close to six years. About half way… Read more »
This is not a matter which I regard as of any particular urgency, but it does give rise to the question of why we assume that it is more moral to eat plants than animals.
Perhaps the answer would be to eat each other rather than impose ourselves on other species.
You first, Bev! With a nice chianti!
Veganism is not anti death, that would be stupid. Death is a necessary part of nature. Veganism is against exploitation, one part of which is subjecting fellow earthlings to unnecessary harm. Humans can and do thrive on plant-based diets but not on nothing; we must eat something. Plants do not have central nervous systems, and do not have brains. It seems beyond reasonable doubt based on those facts that they suffer far less than animals, if at all.
The rest of Life on Earth, whatever remains after our auto-genocide, won’t miss us.
The life of a factory dairy cow is far worse than that of a factory beef cow, mothers raped and constantly pregnant, nipples tortured, newborns separated just after birth, males locked up in tiny cells for a few weeks then slaughtered and marketed as “veal”. Full disclosure: I’m not vegan, but no mammals for two decades and no dairy in about five years except for an occasional weakness for cheese. So I’m admitting I’m still a hypcrite, but my point is how there’s a huge difference between vegetarian vs vegan and it’s in keeping that in mind that I’m usually successful in avoiding the temptation.
We’ve always coexisted with animals and eaten their naturally dead carcasses or hunted wild ones.
Vegetarianism with a bit of meat thrown in is probably the best, but vegan is an extremist political or moral standpoint and now being rapidly promoted by either or both of corporatists and neo-Marxist/ Trotskyist types…unholy alliance or same puppet master behind the scenes?
The assertion that veganism is extreme is not correct and the rest of what you say here is fallacious.
Extremism is extremism in all cases. There can be extremist capitalists, market fundamentalists, Christians, atheists, etc. Veganism is no exception, but is itself not extreme.
On “always”: we’ve also always raped women. Does that make it morally defensible? “Always” is not a good argument.
Also, vegetarianism is not vegetarianism with meat included.
“vegetarianism is not vegetarianism with meat included”. On a less serious note this reminds me of a visit to a pizza chain with a group of friends many, many years ago when one of our group ordered in all seriousness “the vegetarian pizza with an added topping of mince beef”. Not a glimmer of realisation of the incongruity.
That’s a very illustrative story, a clear example of how we have stopped thinking about where our food comes from, and what is involved in getting it onto out plates. People commenting here against veganism refer repeatedly its apparent ‘unnaturalness’. But this merely reflects a need to cling to habits of eating that are fostered and sustained by very ‘unnatural’ systems of processing and advertising, the former being concealed, the latter all pervasive.
Considering that this site is about exposing deliberately hidden truths, it is sad to see such a reluctance to apply the forensic attitude to establishment dogma typically and rightly on display here also to nutrition, big-ag factory farming, dairy and meat production.
Citing the fact two things are unnatural does not mitigate the unnaturalness of either. If you haven’t picked up my opposition to agribusiness, intensive farming and aggressively, chemically de-natured food, you have not read as carefully as you might.
I put ‘unnatural’ in quotes for a reason. It’s a word I try to use only to argue it is meaningless. There is only nature, nothing else. There is unsustainable and unhealthy, but not unnatural. Both unhealthy and unsustainable situations are natural, part of nature. The need to cast parts of the human domain as ‘unnatural’ is, in my view, a logical extension of the humanist or human-centric thinking that sees nature as an out-there pool of resources that mechanically-minded humans can tinker with until they get it right. In other words, part of the problem.
I know it’s customary to throw these words around, where ‘natural’ = good and ‘unnatural’ = bad, and I know general usage is a kind of defence here. But I do find it weak in important discussions such as this one, and deserving or critique.
Looks that argument here is Vegans/Meat eaters……
We can argue as much as we want and as long as we can.
If we do not stop multiplying soon, it will not matter what we eat.
I tend to agree with you , Nicola: imho, many of us already exist in a dog eat dog or human being society, delivered to us deliberately premeditated with ‘Malice Aforethought’ & now being amplified by the Masters of Zion & their Directorship, & orchestrations of engineering via control & censorship of our daily diet of mainstream media news: that omits to mention all serious Science or obviates it completely, in the interests of promoting the Elite 1% and their Corporate goals & also their goals to reduce numbers of us humanoids radically, in the most immoral, unprincipled & unethical of manners: which includes , in their various nefarious strategies, Apartheid and divisions and rifts in all societies, in order to maintain their arrogant beliefs of actually believing they know best, after having stolen / misappropriated all the intellectual property of others, beginning in recent times with Tesla, Einstein, Turing… Read more »
Don’t worry, Big food, Big Pharma, Vax, toxic exposures and the military industrial complex and enforced austerity/poverty have everything lined up to address the ‘problem’ – oh and The Duke of Edinburgh is reincarnating as a deadly virus to bring the population down. Where would we be without our leaders?
Where would we be without our leaders? huh..? (considering-errrr..)
Logic: Leaderless, in a true heavenly state of Anarchy on Earth , firmly grounded by all things electric @432 Hz with mind, heart & Soul in tact & in tack with the true wild nature of “Tings & Times” & Linton Kwesi Johnson’s pure poetry in motion .. ? !
(most respectfully, your starter for 10 .. 😉 )
Kind regards,
Balky 😉
Hi Balky – taking an initiative because you see and feel it worthy and are moved to act is a leadership role. But roles are not who we are. Recognizing a worthy initiative and choosing to support it is a following or supporting role – but the role is not who we are. A whole is who we are and bringing a wholeness of being to our relationships is to sometimes find we are leading and sometimes following – but we don’t lose our belonging in each other as our wholeness. Ok we find that we lose the true Signal in identity attachments to roles and endeavour that we take our identity from and defend against change. There is a quality in being that supports and guides for health and wholeness and there is an identity conflict that blocks its own channel. We like to blame parents and authority figures… Read more »
As always the focus goes to quantity with no addressing of quality. In a sense HG Wells in the Time Machine spelt it out, there are the eaters and the eaten. The eaten may actually not have their flesh consumed so much as being pharmed and managed in whatever way serves the eaters – and so pharming for sickness – while there is profit and power incentive – as part of a longer term culling by stealth. You can project fear from a past conditioning into the imagined future and thereby react emotionally as if it is happening now. This is a way to lose your life without actually dying but runs as a self-protective sense of survival. The attempt to change the future without truly opening and reading the present, is the reenacting of the past. I see humanity has gone forth and multiplied debt and division and so… Read more »
I first began smelling a rat, a great big propaganda rat, when Monbiot peddled the Srebrenica ‘genocide’ lies, and, despite being comprehensively mauled by the redoubtable Edward S Herman regarding that propaganda invention, resorted to slander and abuse of his betters. It’s just gotten worse, steadily, ever since, mirroring the Fraudian’s decline and decay. It has reached a really grisly climax with his mendacious and abusive defence of the child-crucifying jihadist vermin, the so-called White Helmets scum. He can’t sink much deeper than that.
Re: The “Srebrenica masscare” …
Bosnian War : Srebrenica massacre : Barbara Bush
https://forum.davidicke.com/showpost.php?s=a71039300f11f5f71486e4a53eeb6e9c&p=1062735674&postcount=203
MG
I think you’ve nailed the bugger in one.
Monbiot recently advocated repopulating the British countryside with lions and aurochs. He stands in no need of nailing, as he does the job magnificently on his own.
Yep. Them aurochs make a right dent in your motor on the M1. Lousy road-kill by all prehistoric accounts.