Crisis Update - Dutch Face Down Politicians

Farmers spray manure on government buildings in protest at eco diktat

Real people are withholding their labour, blocking the roads, warehouses and ports.
As faux legislators abdicate their policy-making to corporations and rich foundations.
Policy is inverted, from food to fuel, insects to electricity: killing to save the planet.

After the paywall:

Instead of politicians talking in code about Build Back Better or the New Normal, how about a bit of plain French, German, English or Dutch? For it is we Western nations that seem to be the primary target of these orchestrated shortages.

If we had open debate there would be no need for the Department of Homeland Security to set up a Disinformation Governance Board. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted the purpose of the board could have been explained more clearly. Perhaps he shouldn’t have done it in secret.

Why do billionaires like Bill Gates need to pay the media to launder their image — or pay fact checkers to assure us they are doing good?

(3,000 words or about 14 minutes’ read.)

See also Feb 9, 2022 — Crisis Update - Truckers Stand Firm
Feb 10, 2022 — Crisis Update - Truckers: Police Mass In Ottawa
Feb 18, 2022 — Crisis Update - Truckers' Leaders Arrested

Farmers bring cows to the Dutch parliament.

Jul 8, 2022

While the Dutch government tries to curtail meat and dairy farming, on the pretext of reducing emissions of nitrogen and ammonia, there is a publicity campaign to promote the eating of grubs.

Nicole Kidman is the current ambassador for arthropods: those creepy crawlies that scuttle across the floor with their segmented joints and skeleton on the outside. [1]

We go back a long way, us and the insects. Before she could walk my baby sister would hunt cockroaches in the kitchen and more than once was caught with one in hand.

My brother would sift bichus from the beach sand and swallow them. Perhaps they got it from my great grandfather in South Africa who would enjoy chocolate-covered termites.

I doubt it’s just my family. If you scrump for fruit you eat a good number without knowing it. But do they constitute a mass replacement for meat protein?

Cows must go, we are told, because of their toll on nature. And because they fart, or rather belch, methane.

Don’t insects fart? Of course they do. They have an intestine in which they break down grass and leaf matter — some of the same stuff that livestock eat — and it comes out the other end.

Cows emit methane and pee ammonia. Half of arthropods produce hydrogen and methane, the other half don’t. A 1994 scientific study didn't look for any other gas. Scientists suspect insects may emit gas through their pores, for the waste has to go somewhere. [2]

The termites that my forebears enjoyed are very farty. Their relatives, cockroaches, also fart a lot, especially on high fiber diets — note to vegans!

Scale up the growing of insects to provide equivalent calories and they may produce gas of another type. If you eat less meat protein something must replace it. The lack of meat is not good for muscle mass.

Are we just moving the expelled gas from the cow to the insect or the human? Very likely. (UPDATE: other research suggests that humans over all produce much more methane than cows.)

Unintended consequences

The Dutch rank first in the European Union and second worldwide in value of agricultural exports, behind only the United States.

A nation of 17 million people on a piece of land less than twice the area of the state of New Jersey (33 thousand square km, or 13 thousand square miles.)

Tell me that poverty is not engineered.

Farmers are protesting a “nitrogen law” that lets government expropriate their land. The family of the minister pushing this law owns online supermarket Picnic. Bill Gates invested $600 million in the company. Gates wants us to eat synthetic beef.

Then there’s the knock on effect on the countryside. In Australia they are exterminating tens of millions of bees to ward off a varroa mite plague. At least 600 hives containing 30,000 bees each have been destroyed. [3]

Ana Martin of New South Wales was forced to eliminate 40 hives. She told The Guardian: “Between the drought, fires, floods and now varroa there seems to be a bit of bad luck for beekeepers lately.”

There could be unintended consequences. As a child I remember seeing rabbits blinded by myxomatosis with which they had been deliberately infected to reduce the population.

What happened is the grass grew wild, with no nibblers to keep it short, and the impact on wild flowers and orchids was negative. My father was an amateur botanist who used to monitor the flora on military land and it suffered from the loss of rabbits.

The World Economic Forum and such like suffer from the fixed pie fallacy: less for us is more for them (or for Nature). This is zero sum thinking that afflicts the climate change movement, too.

Perhaps the insect diet is there to mislead us. It is part of the climate change, zero carbon and smart cities programmes — governments admit as much.

There is also historical precedent. Bolsheviks and Mao’s communists were both globalist projects and each starved around 60 million people in order to remove the self-sufficient element of the population, to put down their opponents and gain control of the countryside. See The War Against the Peasantry, 1927-1930, Yale University, 2005.

Fishermen and farmers

Politicians seem intent on breaking the supply chain to starve us out. We need to break it first. The latest “fringe minority with unacceptable views,” in Justin Trudeau’s words, are Dutch fishermen and farmers.

They refuse to negotiate with the government because it refuses to compromise on its goals to slash farming by sharply reducing nitrogen and ammonia use. This is typical of the European Union and the WEF Davos crowd. They don’t negotiate; they manage outcomes. To concede a point would be a victory for the other guy — more zero sum thinking.

Technocrats could consider measures to capture the chemicals — as they plan to do with carbon dioxide. The fact that they don’t, suggests the aim is to reduce food production, and put farmers out of business, either to set aside their land as fallow, or to perhaps to seize it and repurpose it.

Farmers have rumbled the politicians, who are in trouble. They're going to push harder and faster.

Protests were inflamed on Wednesday when police apparently fired shots at a 16 year-old boy on a tractor. The officer has gone into hiding. Supermarkets are running out of food as distribution centres are blocked. On Thursday, protestors began obstructing airports. Fishermen have joined in and have closed ports.

Fishermen block IJmuiden, Harlingen and other ports including Lauwerszoog (above)

In the U.S. Reuters revealed that the Biden administration has been giving part of the strategic oil reserve to China, along with Asia and Europe. He sold 5 million barrels last month, as part of a planned draw-down of 180 million barrels, one-third of the total reserve that already stands at a 40-year low.

Pump prices keep going up because Biden is not using the released oil at home, but selling it to pay for crisis spending.

Furthermore, if the White House wanted to bring prices down it could lift sanctions on Venezuela and Iran, even if it kept them on Russia.

Eighty-eight per cent of U.S. citizens polled believe the country is on the wrong track. Only 11 per cent of Americans say they are satisfied with the way things are going, according to Gallup. [4]

In Britain, trucks and tractors have jammed traffic with go slows around the nation in protest at fuel prices.

Sri Lanka may run out of petrol by the weekend, according to its energy minister. The government has banned fuel sales to citizens, as it saves it for government and emergency services. Schools are closed; hospitals struggle. Power cuts range from three to 13 hours a day.

Green policies are partly to blame. Sri Lanka has been bound to set targets under the Paris Agreement from 2016. The government tried to implement 100 per cent organic farming, and as a result yields fell by 50 per cent — something they knew in advance. The research findings are well-established. [5]

The World Food Programme says 6.2 million people in Sri Lanka are “food insecure.” That’s the new euphemism of the day.

On Jul 9 protestors will occupy a district of the capital Colombo where the prime minister lives and works. A court turned down police requests for a ban.