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There are a few thoughts that have been on my mind lately that I’ve been wanting to share but none of them are worth dedicating an entire article to so I figured I’d give them each a few paragraphs and throw them all out at once. Let me know if this is a format you’d like me to use in the future.
The Solution to the Bird Flu Outbreaks
Over the past few months egg prices have been quite high here in the United States because of a bird flu outbreak killing off a bunch of chickens. This isn’t the first time this has happened in recent memory, although I can’t remember if it was last winter or the one before when we had this issue, but that isn’t important I have a feeling that we’re going to see bird flu outbreaks killing off hens for the next several winters as well unless a change is made in the egg farming industry.
The change needed is a very simple one, it comes from a Joel Salatin quote I saw on a meme while scrolling the internet. (Since it came from a meme I can’t give an exact quote or a direct source to it but I’m confident it wasn’t a fake quote.) Salatin’s suggestion for fixing our bird flu problems is to take the chickens who survive outbreaks and use them for breeding so the next generation of chickens is more resistant to the bird flu.
We breed farm animals selecting for all sorts of traits: size, growth speed, egg/milk production, and things like that. Animal breeders should also be selecting for disease resistance, and if they are at all worried about food security disease resistance should probably be their highest priority in selecting which animals are bred. I think breeding the chickens who are resistant to the bird flu would have a positive impact on the egg industry and would prevent us from having such large spikes in egg prices next winter.
Nature isn’t entirely to blame for the egg shortages, a lack of understanding and application of simple science is a huge thing contributing to the problem.
Another Note on Eggs and Chickens
That was all I had on that topic but it reminded me of another chicken related Joel Salatinism. This one probably comes from a chapter of Everything I Want to Do is Illegal but it has been quite a while since I have read it so I’m not a hundred percent sure on that. Salatin claims that if every household kept a few chickens whatever food crisis we’re in would be solved. Garbage collectors would also have smaller loads.
Backyard chickens would provide families with a daily source of fresh healthy eggs along with a food waste disposal system that takes a lot less effort than composting does. Of course the eggs wouldn’t be completely free as chickens still need to be fed but in many parts of the country there are enough bugs crawling around to feed a decent amount of chickens. Also if you’re cooking your own food, as one should be, you’ll have plenty of scraps as you are chopping meat and vegetables. I’ve also been wanting to take up coyote hunting and figured that if I did the meat could be fed to some chickens if I were to harvest the furs.
Unfortunately not every neighborhood is friendly towards chickens. Many cities and HOAs will ban backyard chickens out of fear of noise complaints. That annoys me because my neighbor has a dog that is way noisier than any chicken could be and there are no prohibitions on little dogs that bark nonstop when someone on the other side of the fence is outside. I’m a supporter of Tim Pool’s proposed 28th Amendment.
Vaccines Cause Peanut Allergies
There are a lot more people with allergies now than there were fifty or a hundred years ago and there are a lot of theories out there on why we have much higher rates of allergies than we had in the past. There was a while when I subscribed to the theory that allergies were really just sensitivities to the pesticides and herbicides used on modern crops that are more present on some foods than others but this argument doesn’t make perfect sense when it comes to the most common allergy because peanuts grow in a shell in the ground so nothing could be directly sprayed on the part of the plant we eat. Now that I think of it, the fact that almost nobody is allergic to strawberries disproves that theory because strawberries have thin skins that would absorb all the stuff sprayed on the plant. But we’re here to talk about peanuts today.
Vaccines are another thing people have lots of theories on. The most famous of these is that they cause autism. I don’t fully subscribe to this theory since there exist plenty of unvaccinated kids who have autism so if there was a singular cause to the disorder vaccines aren’t it, I think it is more likely that poor diet plays a bigger role in the autism equation since I’ve never seen an autistic person with a good diet.
Dozens of times I’ve heard the claim that vaccines cause peanut allergies but until recently when I learned the reasoning for it I was skeptical, but now that it has been explained to me I’m convinced. There are a lot of things injected into a person when the receive a vaccine. Of course there are the actual vaccine molecules that mimic a virus for your white blood cells to learn to fight. But then there is some portion of heavy metals (usually aluminum) to encourage an immune response. There is probably a few more things in a vaccine too but all that stuff has to be mixed into some sort of liquid so that it can be injected. In almost all cases that liquid is peanut oil.
I don’t know where other allergies are coming from but based on that information I’m pretty confident that peanut allergies come from vaccines. We shouldn’t need to conduct a randomized controlled trial to conclude that injecting peanut oil with a bunch of things mixed into it designed to provoke an immune reaction is going to cause a subset of the population to develop a sensitivity towards peanuts. It’s a no-braine, and a risk I think people should be aware of.
Do Not Comply by Will Witt
The last book I finished reading was Do Not Comply: Taking Power Back from America’s Corrupt Elite by Will Witt. It was a good read, but I don’t think it was noteworthy enough to write a long review for like I have with other books, but I’ll write a short one here.
In the introduction Witt writes, “This idea of America is dead, and we have killed her. The remnants of her great past live on in history books and nostalgic conversation, but the soul of America lies in a casket, buried beneath the steps of Washington D.C. We as a people have allowed out country to be taken over by traitors and tyrants, weak and lazy men, and godless liars and false idols.” (page 2) This sets the tone for how Witt feels about the state of the country today.
In the next chapter he quotes Fredrick Douglas who wrote, “I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.” (page 16) Witt then spends the book explaining to us how things like modern politics, big tech, big media, big pharma and even the lack of good new art have pushed us into a state of thoughtlessness. Big ideas aren’t allowed in politics, big tech sells us a false reality through social media, only certain voices are allowed on both mainstream and alternative media, big pharma doesn’t encourage questioning, and dull architecture and uninspiring new movies leave us nothing to be inspired by.
If the typical Joel Salatin book can be classified as a collection of boomer rants then this one is a bunch of zoomer rants through the eyes of someone who isn’t afraid to see the world as it is. The book is full of some great quotes and insight on various topics and it does a good job at convincing the reader that the core message and title Do Not Comply are good words to live by in the context of modern American life. It was a refreshing read although I can’t say I learned a whole lot from it since a lot of the topics covered were stuff I’m already familiar with. I also didn’t come away from the book with any new practical advice on how to unplug myself from the matrix, but Witt isn’t more than two years older than I am so I’m not sure if he is in the best condition to be giving that advice to begin with.
Is Do Not Comply a bad book? No. Are there better books out there? Yes. Is there anything wrong with reading this book? No. It’s a quick read, it only took me a few days and it is a nice choice if you’ve been reading heavier books and need a little break from that, although it is fairly America focused so you probably won’t enjoy it as much if you aren’t American.
Avocado Oil is a Scam
Over the years I’ve promoted animal fats over plant-based oils but have said that if you are to use a plant-based oil it should be either coconut, olive or avocado oil. Coconut and olive oils have been easy things to recommend because they have been used in different cultures for thousands of years but I’ve been skeptical of avocado oil because it is a relatively new invention, sure it isn’t a seed oil but I still felt a bit strange promoting it but never took the time to dig deep into it. Well a part of a podcast I was listening to while driving home just justified my suspicions.
Olive oil and avocado oil are both made in the same way, you take the flesh of the respective fruits and press the oil out, very simple, very healthy. But olives and avocados are very different, nobody really ever buys olives but avocados can often sell for three dollars a fruit.
A good three dollar avocado is not going to produce three dollars worth of oil so the healthy avocados are not the ones that the oil is pressed out of, avocado oil comes almost exclusively from rotten fruit that would never sell in a grocery store.
It has also been speculated that most brands mix canola oil into the avocado oil they are selling. So avocado oil is a health scam, it is made from rotten fruit and is rarely sold pure.