Cloned meat, one of several names I’ve bandied about for Lab-grown meat (mystery meat is another), is not better for the environment, it is not better for people, and it is not the future of beef in America if actual Americans have anything to say.

Or is it?

I’ve had my share of encounters with people at the grocery store who buy fake meat. I see them looking at the packages for the right one, which must be a holdover from their real meat days. They are all the same. There’s no difference—identical weight, shape, texture, everything. Other than the expiration date, I can’t imagine what might be of so much interest.

KFC launched fake chicken (vegan) nuggets two years ago and is still selling them. Of course, these are plant-based fabrications – laboratory concoctions, nonetheless, but not synthesized from base matter into something meant to look and taste like the real thing. But the impossible stuff, like the lab-grown, isn’t better for the planet. Lab-grown meat is, in fact, several orders of magnitude worse than beef on the hoof.

In the study, the scientists estimated the energy required for stages of lab-grown meat production, from the ingredients making up the growth medium and the energy required to power laboratories, and compared this with beef.

They largely focused on the quantity of growth medium components, including glucose, amino acids, vitamins, growth factors, salts, and minerals.

They found the “global warming” potential of lab-grown meat ranged from 246 to 1,508 kg of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of lab-grown meat.

The figure is four to 25 times greater than the claimed average “global warming” potential of retail beef.

But that’s not why Alabama has joined Florida in prohibiting the manufacture or sale of lab-grown meat.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF ALABAMA:
Section 1. (a) For the purposes of this section, the term “cultivated food product” means any food product produced from cultured animal cells.
(b)(1) It shall be unlawful for any person to manufacture, sell, hold or offer for sale. or distribute anv cultivated food product in this state.

SB23 was signed into law two weeks ago and takes effect October 1st of this year.

The Alabama bill, proposed by Republican state Sen. Jack Williams, vice chair of the Senate Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry Committee, and signed into law by Gov. Kay Ivey on May 7, prohibits the manufacture, sale, or distribution of food products made from cultured animal cells. State Rep. Denny Crawford also had a hand in the legislation.

Nutritionists not on-the-take have expressed concerns about “plant-based” and lab-grown meat.

[Registered dietitian Diana] Rodgers told the Post that she is concerned about a lack of publicly-available nutritional information regarding lab-grown meat. When asked whether lab-grown meat was healthy or not, Rodgers said, “We just don’t know.”

“I’d rather eat my shoe than lab-grown meat,” Rodgers told the Post. “McDonald’s is still better because the meat is a better option for vitamins,” she added later.

The plant-based variety makes claims about nutrition that are unlikely, if not themselves, fraudulent.

‘Among these products, we saw a wide variation in nutritional content and how sustainable they can be from a health perspective. In general, the estimated absorption of iron and zinc from the products was extremely low. This is because these meat substitutes contained high levels of phytates, antinutrients that inhibit the absorption of minerals in the body,’ says Cecilia Mayer Labba, the study’s lead author

To be clear, you can chew on plant-based or lab-created meat. I’m not telling you what to eat. But these are not better for the planet (consider the entire components-to-table carbon footprint of facilities, equipment, growing, prepping, synthesizing, and producing the product).

Fertilizer runoff for the plant-based product. And hey, isn’t farming bad for the planet?

But hey, the same government agency that lied about the COVID vaccines being safe and effective, completely abdicating its obligation to ensure informed consent about the risks, is responsible for ensuring fake and lab-grown meat provides accurate nutritional and ingredient details about what’s in it and the rest.

What could go wrong?

The post Another US State Has Banned Lab Grown ‘Meat’ appeared first on Granite Grok.

Would you believe me if I told you, less is more? Less government would mean more prosperity? You’d be at least 30% richer if we eliminated the bureaucratic red tape strangling our economy today. Tammy tells us about the new documentary, Flynn, we discuss the upcoming elections, shocking RTK prosecutions, and more!



The post Manch Talk: Stop Meddling! appeared first on Granite Grok.

It is a mathematical fact that gasoline in the U.S. will eventually rise to $100 for a gallon (perhaps $130 for those interested in higher octane). This is not fear-mongering but basic arithmetic and economics.  Here’s why.

The price of goods and labor is directly linked to money supply and market factors.  This is not merely “supply and demand” economics but an issue of overheating (or overleveraging) an economy by printing and/or borrowing too much money.  When a government prints more money than the underlying economy is generating in real wealth, this is essentially a form of borrowing, often called “debt monetization.”

The United States has been doing this for decades, staving off the ordinary fluctuations in the economy punctuated by innovations and growth alternating with recessions – borrowing money in times of turmoil softens the blow, but also forestalls the consequences.

This is seen not just in the reckless Biden-Harris spending extravaganza masked by upside-down monikers such as “Build Back Better” or the “Inflation Reduction Act,” but across party lines and even centuries.

Notably, the largely forgotten S & L Crisis of the 1980s under the Reagan administration was never paid off: the proverbial can was simply kicked down the economic road (subject to compound interest, of course).  The S & L debacle is estimated to have cost U.S. taxpayers some $132 billion, chump change by today’s debt measures. But that “crisis” caused the collapse of more than 1,000 U.S. banks and the insolvency of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation.

That $132 billion in 1980s dollars has not yet been paid off – it was simply rolled into the national deficit, followed by decades of mostly deficit spending by both parties.  The 2007-2008 financial crisis is estimated to have cost taxpayers some $498 billion, though President Obama famously lied to taxpayers in 2012, claiming the government recouped “every dime” used to rescue the banks he bailed out.  Whatever the actual sum, it remains subsumed in the accumulated national federal deficit of about $35 trillion.

Imagine running a household on infinite credit card debt, and you understand the federal government’s profligacy.  But it is much worse than that.  When unfunded entitlement obligations such as Medicaid and Social Security are counted, the current total estimated debt of the U.S. government exceeds $100 trillion, and the federal debt-to-GDP ratio is above 122%.  Currency and credit derivatives approximated $90 trillion in 2000, when U.S. Treasury dollars were $3,546,531,560, according to usdebtclock.org; they now exceed $1,576,612,150,000 – 444 times as much printed money in 25 years, far outstripping real GDP growth.

A 2024 Ford F-150 now sells for $36,770 ($73,735 for the Platinum model).  Has the truck’s “value” increased, or has the relative value of the dollar simply deteriorated?  The answer is a tad of both – these 2024 trucks have more gadgets and extras (the Platinum is a hybrid) than a 1986 Ford F-150, which retailed for $8,373 ($19,587.47 in today’s dollars).  But that difference between $8,373 and $19,587 is all inflation, which is accelerating dangerously despite Biden administration deceptions.

The moral hazard is that rewarding one’s pet projects and crony donors by printing money and disbursing it favorably is hard to trace.  The impact of this practice always falls on the poorest wage earners and fixed-income recipients in the form of higher prices and shrunken real incomes, but it is virtually impossible to link back to root causes, thus the temptation to do so because there is no accountability.

In his monetary policy study titled “Money Mischief,” economist Milton Friedman traces this conundrum, emphasizing that overprinting money is always what causes inflation:

According to Milton Friedman (1963)—and also the Deutsche Bundesbank (1999)—inflation is “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” and thus the responsibility of central banks. This conclusion builds on the so-called quantity equation (M * V = P * Y), which establishes a relationship between the quantity of money controlled by central banks (M), the price level (P), the quantity of all goods and services produced (Y) and the velocity of money in circulation (V). If the velocity of money in circulation is constant, then the price level rises if the money supply grows faster than the quantity of all goods and services produced.

Friedman also warned that all fiat currencies eventually collapse because they are not backed by actual physical assets.  This means that just like that F-150, the price of a gallon of gas will eventually climb to $100/gallon and that wages will never keep pace – without regard to oil supply shortages or interruptions in distribution (such as could be inflicted by an Iranian attack on numerous oil-shipping choke points).

A glimpse of what is inevitably coming to American shores is found in the example of Zimbabwe, which also shows that math, and money-printing, are not racist but color blind – they don’t care what skin color, social justice cause, or Utopian fantasy is employed to violate their fundamental logic.  Robert Mugabe tried to harness the Zimbabwean economy for social spending (“social justice”), with devastating effects on that nation’s currency and people.  Inflation rates reached nearly 250,000,000 % in 2008, though they have subsided to “merely” 57.5 % currently.  A $10 trillion Zimbabwean note can be purchased for about $10 U.S.

The U.S. dollar is not immune to such abuses, and America is on the precipice of a monetary disaster (to be “rescued” by an all-controlling digital currency).  As one commentator observed in October 2022 of Biden-seeded inflation:

….the M2 money supply is up 41.6% over the past three years.  So while not all inflations are caused by rapid money growth, this one is.  Indeed velocity has actually slowed during this period, which means that more than 100% of the inflation comes from monetary policy as defined by Friedman.  Thus, at least this time around: It’s the money supply, stupid.

The United States Congress created a bipartisan commission to tackle rising debt, but in an election year there is bipartisan hesitancy to take this mighty monetary bull by its inflationary horns:

More than six months later, the proposal appears all but dead, extinguished by vocal opposition from both the right and the left.

Facing the reality that any fiscal commission would almost certainly suggest that Americans pay more or get less from their government, lawmakers have time and again done what they do so well: punt the problem to the next Congress. And they seem poised to do so again.

This means that even without interruptions of foreign oil supplies or Biden policies shrinking U.S. energy production and oil drilling, reckless U.S. monetary policy promises to drive the price at the pump for gasoline far above a paltry $100/gallon.  In the future, American fathers and mothers will not nostalgically say, “I remember when gas was 17 cents a gallon.”  They will tell their children, “I remember when gasoline was only $100 a gallon.”

The post When Gasoline is $100 per Gallon appeared first on Granite Grok.

There are many ways to look at Biden’s comments when he goes off teleprompter. First, it shows his mental acuity is gone, which most logical observers have been saying for a few years. Two, it shows his little respect for anyone across the aisle, and this is from the man who promised to be the great unifier. It makes us salivate at the thought of this feeble old man debating Trump.

At one of his campaign stops over the weekend, Biden was working hard to scare his listeners, and they were just a few, by telling them what kind of Judge Trump would appoint to the Supreme Court if he got a chance. He qualified his thought, saying, “Does he even know how to nominate a judge with a brain?” Are you kidding me? Can this man be any less respectful? I don’t think so. How do the three Supreme Court justices he appointed – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett feel about the current President, who cannot string two sentences together, questioning their intelligence intelligence? That is rich, very rich!

Sometimes, Biden doesn’t even have to speak to show his ignorance. We all remember the flag-draped remains of the thirteen service people returning to America at Dover Air Force Base. Pictures don’t lie, but Biden and his surrogates do. Biden has denied it, and Jenn Psaki, Biden’s Press Secretary, wrote in her recent book that Biden did not glance at his watch during the dignified transfer.

Just a week ago, Biden showed his lack of respect for the former President, “That other guy, that loser. I think he’s having trouble,” Biden said, without referring to Trump by name. The insult was met with laughter in the ballroom for an event honoring Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. “That other guy, that loser. I think he’s having trouble,” Biden said, without referring to Trump by name. The insult was met with laughter in the ballroom for an event honoring Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. To be fair, Trump shows no respect for the current President.

Speaking to the NAACP this weekend in Detroit, he referenced his tenure as Vice President during the Pandemic when Barack Obama sent him to Detroit to help fix it. What is he talking about? He was VP from 2009 to 2017, and the Pandemic did not hit until 2020! Somebody, please fact-check this old man.

In April, President Biden made the sign of the cross, a gesture Catholics often make before and after prayer, while listening to pro-abortion comments by a fellow Democrat in Florida. “Biden’s decision to make the sign of the cross in support of abortion extremism is a despicable charade that attempts to co-opt a sacred practice in support of his new abortion religion,” added CatholicVote President Brian Burch. “His gesture openly mocks the Christian belief in the sanctity of life.”

“There is no divine support for destroying the lives of innocent children, and he should know better,” Burch added. “Biden’s gesture suggests he is either terribly naive, or senile, or callously indifferent to the foundational beliefs of millions of Christians in America.”

The last sentence in Burch’s statement sums up Joe Biden perfectly. “He is either terribly naive, or senile, or callously indifferent to the foundational beliefs of millions of Christians in America.” It is not just Christians but anyone on the Right side of the aisle. For a man who was to unify, he widened the aisle to a four-lane highway with Do Not Cross signs at the entire length. No President, not even Jimmy Carter, has done as much in one term to bring down Americans and America.

The post Did Joe Biden Really Say That appeared first on Granite Grok.

To recap from Part 1: “It needs to be done by someone so why NOT us?”. Yeah, that’s a great summarization of this 3-Part interview with Ken Eyring and Tom Murray

GIP – the Government Integrity Project – was founded by Ken and Tom a number of years ago. Its  mission, with their relentless (and sometimes, ruthless – heh!) is in being vigilant in finding out where Government is not playing with a straight deck with what it is supposed to do – cut . And like with Windham, NH, finding out locals here in NH where such tomfoolery (and faux foppery in trying to do the “cover up waltz” to throw people off their scents). “Good ole’ boys” networks, self-centered politicians, and unelected, unaccountable, and unassailable bureaucrats should be looking over their shoulders.

The strains from the TV show should be bouncing in your head right about now “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do?”. Yup, GIP knows what to do.

And, both have their own individual stories to tell – and they did!

Part 2:

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Parting Quote from their time on the Windham School Board:

“You don’t have to spend more money to get better results”

when it comes to school budgets (heh! Music to Grokster Ian’s ears!)

The post “Why Do You Do This Stuff?” – With Ken Eyring and Tom Murray Part 2/3 appeared first on Granite Grok.