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News topic du jour:
https://twitter.com/evavlaar/status/1544390286184431616?s=11&t=AJwHkRBi5NFXXZkMYkU41w
Chris Martenson podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peak-prosperity-podcast/id462415188?i=1000568934553
Podcast Questions:
1. Dutch Farmer Protest [9:19]
Hi Robb and Nicki –
First I’m sure you’re wondering why I send you guys so much periodic email and don’t just join THR. It’s nothing against you guys (you’re pretty dang awesome), I’ve been a member in the past and it was lovely, but I find it’s too easy to let myself get sucked into the online communities and spend too much time with my phone in front of me. So I join for an occasional challenge or reset and then give a good Irish goodbye for a while.
Anyway, something that came across my brain this week that made me furrow my brow. Have you heard about what is going on in the Netherlands? While I’ve heard gobs about reducing carbon emissions, this is the first I’ve heard anything about reducing nitrogen emissions and the Dutch government seem keen to force plenty of people to give up their livelihoods and food security to do it: this is the article I saw https://www.politico.eu/article/police-fire-dutch-farmer-protest-nitrogen-emission-cut/ (I found myself immediately cheering on the farmers but am trying to get some more info and perspective).
Is nitrogen emission that big of a problem? Or is this just the next thing down the pike from carbon blinders? What gives? Would love your thoughts.
Thanks for the fiesty banter and witty analysis that I love you guys for. Keep on.
Cheers,
Christin
————
“The honest message … is that not all farmers can continue their business,” the government admitted in a statement last month.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/explainer-dutch-farmers-protesting-emissions-85848026
The ruling coalition wants to cut emissions of pollutants, predominantly nitrogen oxide and ammonia, by 50% nationwide by 2030. Ministers call the proposal an “unavoidable transition” that aims to improve air, land and water quality.
They warn that farmers will have to adapt or face the prospect of shuttering their businesses.
“The honest message … is that not all farmers can continue their business,” and those who do will likely have to farm differently, the government said in a statement this month as it unveiled emission reduction targets.
Livestock produce ammonia in their urine and feces. The government in the past has called on farmers to use feed for their animals that contains less protein as a way of reducing ammonia emissions. The problem is compounded in the Netherlands, which is known for its intensive farming practices, with large numbers of livestock kept on small areas of land.
Fertilizer ban decimates Sri Lankan crops as government popularity ebbs https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-decimates-sri-lankan-crops-government-popularity-ebbs-2022-03-03/
Sponsor:
The Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our electrolyte company, LMNT.
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Transcript:
Nicki: It’s time to make your health an act of rebellion. We’re tackling personalized nutrition, metabolic flexibility, resilient aging, and answering your diet and lifestyle questions. This is the only show with the bold aim to help 1 million people liberate themselves from the sick care system. You’re listening to the Healthy Rebellion Radio. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult your licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary, or fitness change. Warning, when Robb gets passionate, he’s been known to use the occasional expletive. If foul language is not your thing, if it gets your britches in a bunch, well, there’s always Disney Plus.
Robb: Welcome back, folks.
Nicki: Hello, hello. Another episode of the Healthy Rebellion Radio. This is episode 117. Good morning, everyone.
Robb: Wife, how are you?
Nicki: I’m good. I’m good. Got a lot of sun this past weekend. I did a lot of yard work. Got a lot done. Feeling pretty productive going into the week.
Robb: Well, that’s…
Nicki: Now it’s raining again.
Robb: Which is actually kind of good.
Nicki: Which is good.
Robb: We did some planting and got some stuff in the ground.
Nicki: Yeah. I found some, there’s this type of poppy that I love. They make these huge, it’s an Asian poppy or an Oriental poppy, huge, big orange flowers that are just so striking and we’ve seen them around and I haven’t seen any at any nurseries. Then this weekend I found a couple.
Robb: Poppy.
Nicki: Pretty tickled with myself.
Robb: I’ve wanted some poppies as part of my doom stay bunker backup strategy. When everything goes sideways, it’ll be penicillin and poppies.
Nicki: Yeah. I’ll let you take the lead on that, hubs.
Robb: That’s all I’m going to say for now.
Nicki: All right here. Let’s see what we have. We had a listener write into Instagram, Meredith, to share something that she thought that, I believe John, yeah, John, from our question last week, she thought her experience might help him.
Robb: So really quickly, this was a gentleman who, whenever he goes carnivore, gets some face rash and I had some folks ping me both in the rebellion and just peripherally. They suggested that they thought that it was a histamine response. I mean, really we don’t know, but my gut sense was a fungal die off because he didn’t describe any of the other classic histamine issues and just the localization and the way that it came out, I thought that it was fungal in origin.
Nicki: Okay. So Meredith sent us a message. Hi, Robb and Nicki. I’m listening to your most recent podcast with the person that has skin rashes after eating beef. It sounds exactly like what I was diagnosed with and have been treating on my own for years now, seborrheic dermatitis. Is it seborrheic?
Robb: Seborrheic.
Nicki: S-E-B-H-O-R-R-E-I-C dermatitis. It’s most definitely a fungal overgrowth. I struggle with yeast infections and toenail fungus also. I stumbled upon a website called Simple Skincare Science and it helped a lot. Seb derm is sensitive to certain chain length fats. I’ve noticed my diet definitely makes it flare also, specifically dairy and gluten. If you could pass this on to the person that wrote in, they could possibly find some relief.
Robb: Cool.
Nicki: Hopefully that can be of help to John.
Robb: You posted that twice.
Nicki: I did. I did. Okay. So we just had a single question this week and I see you have two news topics here. I didn’t see that second one. That.
Robb: Yeah, I added a second one here.
Nicki: You added the second one. Let’s maybe do that one and save this for when we talk about the question.
Robb: Okay. We can reorganize this however you want to.
Nicki: Okay.
Robb: This whole podcast is related to what’s going on in Sri Lanka and also…
Nicki: The Netherlands.
Robb: The Netherlands.
Nicki: Yeah.
Robb: They are related and it’s related to globalist food policy issues, the attempt to wind down animal husbandry, shift us all to crickets and…
Nicki: Pea protein.
Robb: Pea protein. So this is the theme for this episode, is looking at and addressing this stuff. I got to say, this is the shit that I was warning people about six years ago. I was pretty emphatic about the danger. I’m going to step away for a second because I have my window of my office open and rain is blowing into the office, so you can…
Nicki: That’s fine because I think I’d like to just do our sponsor ad first, before we dig into it, so that way we can just run wild with the rest of the show. So as you all know, the Healthy Rebellion Radio is sponsored by our salty AF electrolyte company, LMNT. I just had a cool story that I wanted to share. One of the fathers of one of the kids that Sagan does jujitsu with was out on a group hike with some people a couple weeks ago. One of the women started really suffering. It was a hot day here. They’re at altitude and she was drinking some sort of beverage in her water bottle, but they were going to have to turn back. They were already multiple miles in and they were thinking turn back and head to the hospital. He grabbed one of his LMNT packets, gave it to her, she drank it, and within 15 minutes she was right as rain and continued the entire hike. So hearing some cool stories really gave me goosebumps when that was shared with us.
Robb: It’s self-serving because this is our company and all that type of stuff, but we get these stories more and more often and it’s really cool because people die from hyponatremia, from heat exhaustion.
Nicki: You had another cool story of a friend of yours from high school.
Robb: Very similar. The brother of a gal that I dated in high school, he does roofing. He understands the need for hydration.
Nicki: He was an LMNT customer.
Robb: He was an LMNT customer, but he had run out. He was using a different product and he ended up in the hospital on an IV and they said, “You almost died.” So I didn’t even know that he was aware of LMNT, but I reached out to him and I was like, “Hey, man, I’ll send you some of this,” because I know he has a very physically demanding job. He lives in Redding, California and the daytime temperatures there get 115, 120 sometimes. Absolutely brutal.
Nicki: Dry heat.
Robb: He was like, “No, man, I actually had been using this stuff,” which was really cool. This is a kid that I was friends with from growing up and everything. It was already on his radar. He’s like, “I ran out. I will never run out again.” This is an ad, but I just want to throw out there again, if you don’t want to buy it, at least go to drinkLMNT.com/homebrew. We tell you how to brew your own mix and how to brew it in a way that it’s actually effective and efficacious.
Nicki: Yeah.
Robb: Makes me think of safety and efficacy here really quickly just as an aside, but for the love of God, if nothing else, mix your own brew. Do it right. It could save your life. Could save the life of somebody else. Make you feel a lot better. You’ll recover better from your exercise and training. So if you don’t want to buy it, don’t buy it. Just mix it yourself, but follow our guide.
Nicki: There you go. I do have to share some sad, sad, sad news. Grapefruit salt is officially sold out and I know that’s… I know, I know. Until next year. It’ll come around again, but for all of your other favorite LMNT flavors, whether that be orange salt or watermelon, citrus, raspberry, lemon, habanero, making chili, or chocolate salt, you can go to drinkLMNT.com/robb. That’s drink L-M-N-T .com/ R-O-B-B.
Robb: Okay. So do you want do the question first and then we’ll just circle back into like the…
Nicki: The newsy stuff? It all ties together.
Robb: Well, the news topic really ties into this, so why don’t we… I know it’s throwing you off because we’re not following the scripted…
Nicki: It’s not throwing me off. I can be adaptable and resilient.
Robb: Oh, man. So intelligent.
Nicki: All the things so resilient. Okay. This question is from Kristen and she wrote in regarding the Dutch farmer protest. So she says, “Hi, Robb and Nicki. First, I’m sure you’re wondering why I send you guys so much periodic email and just don’t join the Healthy Rebellion. It’s nothing against you guys. You’re pretty dang awesome. I’ve been a member in the past and it was lovely, but I find it’s too easy to let myself get sucked into the online communities and spend too much time with my phone in front of me. So I join for an occasional challenge or reset and then give a good Irish goodbye for a while.” It’s okay. We appreciate you when you’re in there, Kristin.
Robb: We strongly endorse it.
Nicki: Yes. Anyway, something that came across my brain this week that made me furrow my brow, have you heard about what is going on in the Netherlands? While I’ve heard gobs about reducing carbon emissions, this is the first I’ve heard anything about reducing nitrogen emissions and the Dutch government seemed keen to force plenty of people to give up their livelihoods in food security to do it. This is the article I saw. She linked to an article on Politico. I found myself immediately cheering on the farmers, but I’m trying to get some more info and perspective. Is nitrogen emission that big of a problem or is this just the next thing down the pike from carbon blinders? What gives? Would love your thoughts. Thanks for the feisty banter and witty analysis that I love you guys for. Keep on.
Robb: You want to read the…
Nicki: Well, I added this.
Robb: Okay.
Nicki: So I don’t know where you want to go.
Robb: Maybe we’ll go back.
Nicki: Okay.
Robb: Yeah, I mean, the carbon emission stuff has clearly been on many people’s radars for quite some time. The problem of nitrogen runoff and the challenges of nitrogen effluent is a huge deal in the United States. It causes a giant dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico every year and there’s two main inputs for this, animal husbandry, and then also the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer that is produced via the Haber BOSH method. Man, where to go with this. Well, let me read this piece from Twitter. The Dutch minister who pushed the nitrogen law that grants the government the power to appropriate our farmers’ land has a brother who owns online supermarket at Picnic. Guess who invested 600 million in that company, Bill fake meat Gates. This is what corruption looks like. Then it has a quote from Bill. “Do I think the rich…”
Nicki: I do think.
Robb: I do think that rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef. Eventually that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the behavior people or use regulation to totally shift the demand. Again, I just have to flash back to the news piece where Bill Gates, with just the warmest grin you could imagine was talking. A man who was already shockingly wealthy from software commented that the greatest investment that he had ever made to that point in his career was in vaccines and this was a couple of years before COVID. Now he is…
Nicki: The largest farmland owner in the United States.
Robb: In the United States. Very outspoken about wanting to shift away from animal husbandry and towards synthetic meat. This has all been green washed up the wazoo. It’s worth mentioning, I forget if it’s Impossible Foods or Beyond Burger, but one of those, or possibly both of them, but at least one of them is being investigated by the securities and exchange commission because they make claims about sustainability, but yet they have zero data to support their claims. They just basically said…
Nicki: Their claim is that it’s not meat, so therefore it’s sustainable.
Robb: Yeah, it’s this weird circular argument.
Nicki: Makes no sense.
Robb: Yeah. It’s just because…
Nicki: If you just a hundred percent accept that meat is bad and anything that’s not meat is more sustainable than meat, then you can get there.
Robb: Funny enough, in the real world, we oftentimes should do risk reward analyses and comparisons. Comparing things is interesting, which not to devolve this into a COVID discussion, but that’s part of the reason why we really seem to see this push to get everybody and their cat vaccinated, because then we have no control group, but that’s just a side deal. So this other piece…
Nicki: Well, hang on. So are you done with… Go back to our…
Robb: Sorry?
Nicki: So I don’t know where you’re going with this part.
Robb: You know what, I get it. I get it. Let’s ditch that one. Let’s ditch that one.
Nicki: Okay.
Robb: Okay. Let’s ditch that one for a later date.
Nicki: Yeah, I wasn’t sure if there was some theme that was tying…
Robb: Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
Nicki: Okay.
Robb: Sorry, folks. We’re…
Nicki: We’re on shaky ground today.
Robb: We’ve got flies, Tony.
Nicki: I don’t know if people will remember that, but that…
Robb: We should stick that one into the show notes.
Nicki: Stick that one back in. That was a funny video.
Robb: Okay. So where are we with this?
Nicki: So is nitrogen emissions that big of a problem?
Robb: You know what I meant to post was this one.
Nicki: Okay.
Robb: This Sri Lanka one.
Nicki: This makes more sense.
Robb: Okay. Now I get it.
Nicki: He had inserted a link to a COVID related article and I was really struggling.
Robb: Yeah, no, no, I get it.
Nicki: I hadn’t seen it until we just started recording and so I was struggling how it tied into…
Robb: Well, and I was super surprised that one was there.
Nicki: Okay.
Robb: There’s a Reuters piece, Fertilizer Ban Decimate Sri Lankan Crops as Government Popularity Ebbs. A couple of years ago, the Sri Lankan government, and it’s worth mentioning Sri Lanka, so much of the world was and is a developing nation. It was just crushed with abject poverty, the green revolution hit and over the last 50 years, Sri Lanka had moved into what was basically a middle income country. It had quite a lot of tourism, has amazing natural resources. It is an island. So it’s got a shitload of coastline. So for people that want a vacation there and whatnot, Arthur C. Clark made his final residence in Sri Lanka. He absolutely loved that country. They had made really remarkable progress, but the government, for whatever reason, and maybe related to some of these world economic forum, young global…
Nicki: Leaders.
Robb: Leaders, and what is the term, the environmental social… ES?
Nicki: ESG, environmental social…
Robb: I forget what the last part is, but it’s basically where, we’ve talked about this stuff, where all of this, and I don’t know how to say it any other way, I don’t mean for it to be inflammatory, but this woke ideology where social justice topics, environmental topics, and…
Nicki: Environmental, social, and corporate governance.
Robb: Corporate governance.
Nicki: That’s ESG. Yeah.
Robb: So corporate governance, because of course we want a corporation to govern over us, which is part of what this thing is driving at. Why have elected leaders who can be bought and sold by the corporation? Let’s just have the corporation own everything outright, including our governance directly. So Sri Lanka was using a mix of what we would consider to be modern industrial farming. The population was largely middle income, growing out of poverty, and the government, just by dictate, by decree said, “We’re not going to use synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and a host of other items.” Basically implemented this overnight. They wanted the country to shift to a hundred percent organic food production.
Robb: Now, at the end of the day, I think that a shift towards largely “organic food production” is a reasonable thing, but you need to phase this in stages and it will be different in one place versus another. Even though I think that the application of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is problematic from the perspective of topsoil maintenance and things like that. There will still be situations where that will make sense for the people living there, because ironically, for ages, we’ve had all this discussion around, we can’t feed the world, we can’t feed the world, go vegetarian, go vegan, but then actually we produce 50% more calories than what we need. It’s not really about calories. It’s about nutritious food. So now it’s all about climate change and CO2 emissions and now the nitrogen piece is becoming this issue because nitrogen outflow does damage waterways, both in the ocean and fresh water systems.
Nicki: I have a question, and I’m sorry to interrupt you, but clearly I don’t know enough about this, but is there a way to harness that? If it’s going into the water, can it be collected and then shift around?
Robb: Abso-fucking-lutely.
Nicki: Because feel that we have a fertilizer shortage from Ukraine and all of the stuff that’s going on over there.
Robb: So we talked about this a little bit a couple of months ago where I mentioned somewhat offhandedly that people had bought manure futures basically.
Nicki: It seems like the Netherlands is a gold mine. If they’ve got all of, I mean, the nitrogen and ammonia, is the other one that they’re claiming is in excess.
Robb: Well, the ammonia is really the backbone of what is used in the synthetic chemical fertilizer application. Yeah, absolutely. It’s a little more expensive. It’s a little more unwieldy. A bag of ammonia, the amount of nitrogen you get out of that is huge. It’s dry. It’s stable. You can move it around, do all this stuff. A manure pond is more difficult to manage, but it absolutely should be used, but the ironic thing is that the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is so fucking cheap to make that it makes it cost prohibitive…
Nicki: To ship the actual waste. Got you.
Robb: To use the natural stuff.
Nicki: Got you.
Robb: Yeah. It’s a little bit like plastic bags. People freak out about plastic bags and plastic bags are horrible. Plastic containers are horrible, but if you are singularly focused, what Diana Rogers and I forget who coined this term, but carbon tunnel vision. If your goal is the use of less, say, petroleum products, ironically, you get less petroleum products used using plastic and plastic bags and whatnot versus glass because glass is so god damn heavy that it costs an enormous amount of energy to move things around.
Robb: Now, this is where, as a society, we could though pump the brakes and say, “Well, okay, maybe it’s worthwhile to use more petroleum products, moving things around the planet so long as we use glass, which is much more recyclable. Even if it just ends up in the environment at some point, it basically turns back into sand.” That’s what the stuff is versus microplastics being in the environment, but this is one of these interesting cost benefit stories where the world has called for and economics have driven this, use less energy.
Robb: Okay, the way that we use less energy is we have a plastic bag sitting on my desk and you would need to use something like 20,000 uses of a woven cotton bag to offset the efficiency of producing these shitty, plastic, disposable bags. I don’t 100% have the answer on that, but this is the stuff that we need to have a conversation around. What are our values? What do we want to do with this stuff? A shift towards more “organic farming,” organic agriculture, and ranching, and whatnot will likely increase food costs at least to some degree, but then there’s going to be all these other externalities.
Robb: One of the things that we’re not really accounting for in, let’s just say, the United States is we do produce this massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, where there’s no seafood, and there’s all the environmental damage, and the water sucks, and people can’t swim, and there’s red tide, on and on and on. So maybe meat and other food production is a little bit more expensive if we shift into this more organic farming story, but we get much healthier fisheries and waterways and all these other things, but in general, this stuff is all decoupled and separated, and we’re trying to optimize in different directions. Oftentimes they’re working at loggerheads to each other.
Robb: So the long and short of this though is, in Sri Lanka, the populace was forced into an overnight change and immediately they saw a cratering in food production. The government walked back their policy briefly and then for reasons that nobody understands, it’s completely oblique, I haven’t been able to find any reasoning on the part of the government, they saw that it was cratering food production, that there was going to be all kinds of collateral damage to this. They reinstated this nitrogen ban and now Sri Lanka is becoming a failed state and people are starving, and dying, and there’s huge disruption. The funny thing is that failed states are a massive fucking ecological catastrophe. Even during 2008, during the economic crisis that occurred in Greece, there was a massive uptick in people burning coal in old coal burning stoves. They cut down forests. So it had…
Nicki: You’re desperate and you’re doing anything you possibly can to keep your family alive.
Robb: Exactly.
Nicki: So people don’t give two shits about what the rules are if they’re starving and freezing to death. They do what they need to do.
Robb: Yes, and this is one of these ironic features of the efficiencies that have come out of using fossil fuels. I’m a big fan of nuclear energy, and I just can’t believe that more people aren’t fans of it. We’ve talked about that a little bit in the past, but again, these externalities, if you really are excited about the environment, you have to think about how people will fuel their lifestyles, fuel their lives, and that means energy. You have to think about what that energy source is, what the ramifications are, but you can’t just act like people can shift from a massive energy consumption to a massively curtailed energy consumption and expect anything other than fucking collapse. You are an idiot to assume otherwise.
Nicki: Chris Martinson, the Peak Prosperity Podcast, actually had a great episode and it was fairly short because I think it was a talk that he gave in person. So the first 20 minutes of it, he shared on his podcast and I’m going to find the episode because it’s actually great and it’s about energy and where is it?
Robb: We can pull it up in the show notes.
Nicki: I’ll pull it up and put it in the show notes.
Robb: It is outstanding.
Nicki: Yeah. Yeah.
Robb: Chris Martinson has this thing called the Crash Course, which I would strongly recommend people check out, and he talks about energy, the economy, and the environment. This is very similar in my mind to my perspective of evolution, economics, and thermodynamics. It’s just different terminology and honestly his terminology is probably more elegant and on point, but when you look at the problems that we are facing, particularly around energy, and these notions that we’re just going to pivot on a dime into all wind, all solar, no synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, on and on and on.
Nicki: He makes that point. It is impossible to do that and you also need fossil fuels to make all of those other things.
Robb: Right.
Nicki: So there is no solar and wind without fossil fuels.
Robb: Fossil fuel inputs. Yeah. What’s our point to this? I think things are getting to a point where you all individually and your families and your communities, you need to beachhead what you have going on. You need to make, in my opinion, relationships with local farmers, with local ranchers, support those folks, have a network, understand that these food insecurity issues globally, the US will probably be protected from the vast majority of it, but not entirely. The decentralization that we still can benefit from could save us a lot of suffering. This is a real deal and stuff I’ve been warning about where the COVID, social justice, climate change stuff wrapped together as if they are one in the same, it’s being used as a truncheon and it’s going to kill people en mass in ways that are absolutely stunning.
Robb: It’s all going to be couched as for the better good and it is evil. I’ve kept my head down on I guess my real feelings on this stuff. Some of it is fear of reprisal and blow back and some of it is just feeling like what the fuck am I going to do? I’ve got a small platform. I don’t really reach all that many people anymore, but we’re at the point where anybody who understands this stuff is critically important in forestalling the worsening of this situation or picking up the pieces once all this stuff breaks. So we’ll stay in the fight as best we can. To a degree, it makes sense, but I would encourage folks to really dig into this and to understand that a future of regenerative agriculture is a beautiful thing and it’s an amazing thing and it’s not going to be exactly Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farms. There’s going to be some industrial hybrid inputs here and there.
Nicki: Hybrids.
Robb: Some hybridization and over time, people will figure out what works the best. A lot of what we need to figure out is what do we fucking value? What do we want? Do you want plastic bags because it’s cheap and effective or are you okay with things costing a little bit more money because we ship it around the world in glass? Manufacturers will respond to that. If you’re like, “No more fucking plastic. I want glass and it’s going to cost a little bit more. We’re okay with that,” then that is the way that we will drive things, but these economics follow to some degree the value systems, but the value systems have to actually align with reality. When we change things, particularly food systems, you got to do them incrementally, you need a plan. It might not be a bad idea to have four or five different experiments going on so that you can…
Nicki: So that if one fails epically, it doesn’t have massive knock-on effects?
Robb: Develop some best practices? Yeah, maybe only 10% of that sectors gets shifted over, and even that shift is in an incremental fashion. Just shutting this stuff down, alienating people, bringing Dutch farmers to the point where they’re weaponizing their tractors because this kid got shot by the police because he was trying to run a barricade and stuff like that.
Nicki: I saw the Netherlands actually is a huge exporter of meat.
Robb: Yeah.
Nicki: Some they call them the tiniest largest meat producer or something like that. So it’s not just the Netherlands that will suffer from this. It’s all of the people that import their beef or their animal products.
Robb: We mentioned in previous shows, Ireland is being coerced to cull 30% of its ruminant population.
Nicki: I just have to read a quote that was quoted by the government of the Netherlands. It said, “The honest message is that not all farmers can continue their business.” It went on to say, but it wasn’t a direct quote, something to the effect of those that do continue will have to make some changes, which, okay, changes, but what does that actually look like? Then there’s talk of the country of the Netherlands purchasing farmland for the farmers that are unable to make ends meet due to these new restrictions. So then you have the government owning a lot of the farmland, which is what we, Bill Gates is not the government, but we have a very wealthy individual in our country who owns the most farmland in America.
Nicki: I found this quote by Henry Kissinger, which just ties it all together. “Control oil and you control nations. Control food and you control the people.” I know that makes it sound a little more sinister and conspiracy theory esque, but it doesn’t take a big leap to see who is wanting the land? Who is controlling the land? What happened in the Russian revolution when they killed all the farmers? There was no food. People starved, right?
Robb: Not to divert this. Maybe this will end up being the last episode that we do. We’ll see, but yeah, the Bolshevik Revolution, lots of people died. The farmers continued farming and they made comparatively a fair amount of money because the world was going to shit and one of the only things that was stable was food production. Then the people in power took the bulk of the people that knew how to farm, killed them outright, or sent them to go gulags. This is where the Gulag Archipelago and the, what’s the other one, the life of…
Nicki: A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?
Robb: Yeah. Yeah. This is straight out of all that stuff, but they were portrayed as profiteering from the people and they were capitalists. So out with them. The real carnage happened when they took idiots who had no fucking idea how to produce food and put them onto these farms and a hundred million people died of starvation. There are pictures. It’s so fresh. There are pictures out of the post Bolshevik Revolution where there’s an old woman with a table with the head and body parts of children that she’s selling for food. This is where the shit went. Now, I’m not suggesting that this is where we end up. History doesn’t fortunately perfectly repeat, but god damn if it doesn’t rhyme, and this is the idiocy that these people are operating with. There’s all kinds of good intention. I am a “environmentalist” through and through, but I just happen to also understand enough physics and other stuff to realize that it’s not just a switch that you turn on and off at the drop of a hat. There are…
Nicki: There’s huge lag time. There’s huge time before things get up and running. You can’t just…
Robb: It’s not the same god damn thing everywhere. In Peru and Paraguay, it’s going to be a different solution than what it is in the plains of the United States. California is going through this come to Jesus moment where it’s amazing to grow food there so long as you have water, but guess what? They’re running out of water and maybe the Southeastern United States becomes the fruit and vegetable basket of North America and not California, because it’s much better suited for that, and on and on and on, but I guess I’m just throwing this out there.
Robb: We had some questions about this, I guess because of the work we’ve done with Sacred Cow, and we’ve talked about all this, but my worst fears on all of this are being realized. I didn’t think it would happen this fast. I didn’t think it would be this brazen. I didn’t think it would be this dumb. These movements by Sri Lanka and the governments in Europe, it is dumb. It is preposterous. It is destroying food sovereignty. It’s destroying food security. It’s consolidating power, consolidating resources into these ivory towers. It is the most antithetical thing to freedom and resiliency that you could possibly imagine. It is just on steroids right now.
Robb: So I mean where and when you can fight this stuff legally, we need to organize to do that. Where and when you can find resilience within your own life, and maybe that’s getting a patch of dirt and growing your food and raising some grazing animals. It seems like the people who can raise grazing animals should raise it. It like the people joke about vegetarians and vegans. I’ll eat double the meat to make up for the one that you’re not eating.
Robb: We need to do that with cow and sheep production. If you’ve got a couple acres of fallow land, you need some animals on it and we need to figure out how to distribute that around. It sounds crazy, but again, I started warning about stuff like this at least six years ago, and it’s worse and faster than I would’ve ever dreamt it could be. I think that a lot of that was accelerated and facilitated by the COVID experience, but this is where we are.
Nicki: That, my friends, is another cheery episode of the Healthy Rebellion Radio. Anything else?
Robb: Make your life an act of rebellion. Make your health an act of rebellion. It’s here. Now it’s starting to affect people’s lives in a way that people are dying and they’re dying from rioting. They’re dying from food insecurity. This next winter is going to be a fascinating ride because some of the Martinson stuff that he talks about, fuel shortages, heating, all this, people go on and on and on about the challenges of climate change and a warmer planet. There are, without a doubt, challenges that we need to face there, but if we go into a winter with inadequate heating options, god damn if there’s not going to be a lot of people that just freeze to death and or are miserable. We’ve got this new subvarient of COVID that is more infectious, more transmissible than measles. It appears to disproportionately affect the vaccinated and now almost everybody is vaccinated and on and on and on. Yeah.
Nicki: That’s a rosy picture.
Robb: It is.
Nicki: All right, folks, enjoy your weekend. Hopefully it’s sunny where you are and you can work on your Vitamin D.
Robb: Stock up your Vitamin D. Yeah.
Nicki: You’ll need that going into winter for sure. Be sure to check out our show sponsor, LMNT, at drinkLMNT.com/Robb. We’ll see you next week.
Robb: Bye everybody.
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Janet W McNally says
Great Podcast! As to ‘why nitrogen’ being regulated in Holland, I have been aware of the Dutch regulating nitrogen on some level for decades. I suspect that because they already had a process in place to measure it, and farmers were already accustomed to being regulated, that they thought they could just tighten the screws in the name of climate change, rather than come up with some other process to measure GHG.