Monday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

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Warning: ‘Keys of the Food System’ Being Handed Over to Big Tech

Via The Defender

A misguided technological revolution is about to sweep through food systems, but civil society and social movements can stop it in its tracks.

Imagine a world where algorithms are used to optimize growing conditions on every fertile square meter of land. Where whole ecosystems are re-engineered. Where drones and surveillance systems manage the farm. Where farmers are forced off the land into e-commerce villages.

Imagine a world where food is treated like a strategic asset and food transit routes are militarized. Where powerful governments and their flag-bearer corporations control resources and food supplies across vast economic corridors.

Imagine a world where many foods are grown in petri dishes, vats, and bioreactors. Where people’s eating habits are invisibly nudged using reams of metadata they have unknowingly surrendered via digital wallets. Where AI assistant apps decide on people’s food intake based on genetic information, family history, mood, and data readings from inside their waste bins and digestive systems.

This may sound like science fiction. But the “4th industrial revolution” is already sweeping through food systems. For proof, we need look no further than the changing complexion of the agri-food sector, where mergers and market disruptions are occurring at a dizzying pace.

E-commerce platforms like Amazon and China’s JD.com are now among the top ten retailers globally. With agribusiness increasingly reliant on cloud, AI and data processing services, big tech firms like Amazon, Alibaba, Microsoft, Google, and Baidu are moving into food production. Meanwhile, Blackrock and 4 other asset management companies own 10 – 30% of the shares of the top agri-food firms.

With climate change, environmental breakdown and pandemics wreaking havoc on food systems over the coming years, the “silver bullet” solutions offered by the new agri-food giants may prove irresistible to panicking policymakers. This year’s UN Food Systems Summit — arising from a partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum — will be a showcase for corporate-led “solutions.”

In other words, the keys of the food system are already being handed over to data platforms, e-commerce giants and private equity firms. This could mean dismantling the diversified food webs that sustain 70% of the world’s population and provide environmental resilience. It could mean putting the food security of billions of people at the mercy of high-risk AI-controlled farming systems and opaque supply corridors.

Read the entire article HERE.

‘Godfather Of Gain Of Function’: WaPo Columnist Lays Out Fauci’s Possible Role In Wuhan Lab

Via DCNF

People do not want to acknowledge Dr. Anthony Fauci’s possible role in contributing to the outbreak of COVID-19, according to a Washington Post columnist.

“People don’t want to think about the fact that our hero of the pandemic Dr. Fauci might also have been connected to this research which might also have been connected to the outbreak” of COVID-19, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin told The Megyn Kelly Show on Wednesday.

Fauci is director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The NIH has funded “gain of function” research, which aims to predict future pandemics and create vaccines by creating novel strains of viruses. But those strains can be highly transmissible and deadly.

“The head of the entire field really is Anthony Fauci — he’s the godfather of gain-of-function research as we know it” said Rogin, adding that what he said was “too hot for TV.”

Rogin cautioned that he was not saying Fauci did anything illegal, but that the public should be more aware of this type of research.

“There’s plenty of evidence to support the still unproven theory that COVID-19 originated from an accidental leak from one of the labs in Wuhan that was doing gain of function research,” Rogin told Kelly.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology lab gathers bats for gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, supported with millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds, Rogin said. The lab is 10 miles from where COVID-19 is thought to have broken out and the lab had “very little to no oversight,” according to Rogin.

“If you were an alien and dropped down on earth” and looked at the evidence, the simplest explanation for the virus’s origin is a lab leak, he said.

Scientists fear to speak out against gain-of-function research because they receive funding from the NIH, according to Rogin. “So we can’t say anything like ‘gain of function might be dangerous or [COVID-19] may have come from a lab’ because we are going to loose our careers, we are going to lose our funding,” Rogin said many scientists have told him. Scientists whose whole life work was invested in gain-of-function research would have their careers and legacies “ruined forever.”

“More and more” scientists are feeling free to say it is worth considering if COVID-19 leaked from a lab after the former director of the Centers for Disease Control said he considers a lab leak the most likely source of COVID-19, Rogin said.

U.S. dependence on China’s supply chain has allowed China to threaten retaliation if the U.S. is critical of China’s role in COVID-19’s outbreak, Rogin wrote in his book, “Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century.”

“Privately but explicitly, Chinese diplomats threatened US State Department officials that they would cut off their exports of medical supplies to the United States if Washington wasn’t careful about the charges that it leveled against Beijing,” Rogin writes of the early days of the pandemic.

“The grim reality of the controls that China was already putting on American companies’ factories there, convinced everyone in the White House that US dependence on critical supply chains in China was a huge problem,” Rogin reports.

Read the entire article HERE.

Antifa: Docs, doxing, and the docked: The rise of Antifa in an increasingly toxic university environment

Via Campus Reform

Despite the many contributions of the academic community to developing the intellectual capital of the most prosperous nation in the world, fostering a culture of national unity, public security, and the rule of law–and educating students committed to these ideals–is not one of them. As the tumultuous decade of the 1960s came to a roaring end in the 1969-1970 school year, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called attention to this problem of radical professors propagandizing, organizing, and operationalizing college students—a problem remaining to the present with the rise of Antifa on college campuses and its activities across the country.

In 1970, the famed Director testified college campuses across the United States had witnessed “an unprecedented number of disturbances and incidents of student-centered violence,” including 1,785 demonstrations, 313 building seizures by violent students, 246 arson or attempted arson attacks, and 14 bombings (Hoover, Statement Before President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, July 1970, p.1). Issue-based grievances centering on civil rights and Vietnam War protests had putrefied in the toxic political climate of the 1960s and became revolutionary anti-Americanism as radicalized, organized, and professionalized agitators exploited opportunities and circumstances for their own benefit and for misguided visions of a better world. Communist and radical Left ideology provided the specious framework needed to channel the rage and rebellion on the strategic targets of America’s future leaders.

Throughout the era, Hoover and other security experts identified not only off-campus agitators, and foreign operatives as key actors creating the unrest, but also university professors, who directly and indirectly condoned and excused campus violence, disregarding their responsibility to ethically educate the student community. These university “Docs” and college administrators had worked aggressively to demoralize, degrade, and darken and entire generation, many of whom are now nested comfortably in the academic community where they hatch another generation of radicals, this time largely shorn of long hair and headbands, psychedelic clothing, and peace signs and often clad in simple black and calling themselves Antifa.

Piled in the same historical closets with these relics of “the love generation,” are the simple force configurations of radicals–loosely associated academics, professional organizers, disillusioned students, and “hippies” openly displayed in a public orgy of political violence on campuses—a visible, largely external force. Now, Antifa operates deeply inside colleges where radical socialism has metastasized into the vital organs of departments, institutions, administrations, and wider systems. Emerging in this toxicity of ideas are the malign opportunities, cultures, and networks such as the Campus Antifascist Network (CAN), whose very name belies its own propaganda message asserting Antifa is a movement and not an organization.

While Antifa emerged from the putrefied political ideology of the 1960s, its tactics (organizational, operational, and support) are more a product of decades of fermentation through the suffocation of failure and legal prosecution, which created a potent cocktail of tactical strength mixed with inebriated feelings of invincibility among its members, who imbibe Anarchist propaganda through websites like CrimethIinc–and many others. CrimethInc not only advocates the most proven subversive and violent tactics of anarchists, but also the psychological, sociological, managerial, legal, and procedural components necessary for lethality and operational success—no doubt the contrivances of expert subversives and not amateurs.

Read the entire article HERE.

BLM Co-Founders’ Million Dollar Housing Binge Underscores The Marxist Movement’s Hypocritical Power Grab

Via The Federalist

The receipts are in, but censorious big tech corporations don’t want you to see them. As reported by The New York Post last week, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors purchased four homes in predominantly white neighborhoods for an estimated $3.2 million. Cullors, who claimed in 2015 she and her BLM colleagues are “trained Marxists,” is evidently no practicing Marxist herself.

Although Cullors and the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation hide behind both a veil of Marxism and “social justice” in qualifying efforts to encourage rioting and looting for months at the expense of national security, and the American taxpayer, Cullors’s decisions are representative of a capitalist.

Cullors employs doublespeak, relying on capitalism’s tenets to advance herself and her business model. Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels’s conception of revolt against the central banking system, among other institutions, is mirrored by the BLM mob, but not the insiders raking in the benefits. The very “bourgeois,” or property-owning class that the mob claims is a product of white supremacy, must only be a farce if the its black leaders are part of it.

The 37-year-old co-founder has amassed considerable wealth for someone in favor of communism. Having earned an undergraduate degree from the prestigious University of California, Los Angeles, Cullors then went on to receive a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Southern California.

As of today, these two programs combined will cost someone in-state an estimated $96,064. Only in America today can someone pay almost $100,000 for a degree, publish an institutionally award-winning thesis featuring “[e]lements of performance, live music, sculpture and improvisation,” and still skate by calling themselves a Marxist. These achievements are not only indicative of someone with high status, but also someone seeking an individualism Marx would say leads to “misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, [and] mental degradation.”

Do not be fooled, though. This development remains part of a trend among the hypocritical BLM foundation working to undermine this republic through deceptive rationale. The mob rioting and looting may seem to be inspired by Marxism, but the corporate heads running the show are woke capitalists.

The BLM Global Network Foundation financial disclosures from February show $90 million in donations. But according to several chapters across the nation in a letter penned last November, they “have received little to no financial resources from the BLM movement since its launch in 2013,” as noted by Daily Mail.

From July 2017 to June 2019, BLM only spent 6 percent of its millions of dollars in funding on grants to outside organizations, including its own chapters. Cullors’s group spent $1.6 million on consulting fees, $2.1 million on personnel costs, and $899,000 on travel — which is 83.3 percent of its three-year spending, as reported by the Daily Caller News Foundation last summer.

BLM’s foundation is not tax-exempt. It is funded by many anonymous sources, and notably financially assisted by left-wing 501(c)(3) charity Thousand Events. Therefore, Thousand Events maintains all donations, allowing virtue-signaling celebrities, politicians, and corporations who provide BLM money to perform write-offs come tax season, according to the Internal Revenue Service.

Read the entire article HERE.

Minneapolis City Council To Offer Looting Passports

Via The Babylon Bee

MINNEAPOLIS, MN—The Minneapolis City Council has voted unanimously for the equitable distribution of looting passports to peaceful protestors.

“It can be confusing for citizens to know if a crime is acceptable or not based on the ebb and flow of the City Council’s agenda,” said Councilperson Maria Saliva. “With looting passports, protestors can know when it’s OK to loot stores and destroy businesses in the name of social justice.”

Looting passports could not come at a better time, as eight months have passed since looting was in vogue, and many peaceful protestors are in dire need of updated name-brand clothing and bigger TVs.

When asked whether he believed looting passports could be seen as unfairly punishing honest business owners, President Biden replied, “Well, you can’t swat a cow gator without priming the barrel bark, which gobbles up the huffles for good ol’ spazamaturble. You know?”

At press time, the City Council was discussing the logistics of distributing the passports based on a citizen’s melanin levels.

“Obviously, fighting the oppression of white supremacy and ushering in a utopia of equity for all begins with looting,” stated a council member for Minneapolis from his suburban mansion surrounded by police.

Check out all of the Bee’s takes on a world gone mad HERE.

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