When Powerful Meat Producers Muscle Puny Plant-Based Meat Producers

Business, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics

“The beef industry in America has been urging legislatures to restrict the use of the word ‘meat’ to that which comes from an animal carcass,” reports the Economist.

When big business, nay massive, begins to muscle small business (with a tiny share of the food market), you ask critical questions—that is if you are a fair-minded thinker, as conservative and libertarian-minded people ought to be.

The latter must certainly reject restrictions on speech in advertising.

Which is why it is clear on whose side a fair-minded person will be in the case of the meat producers vs. the makers and marketers of plant-based meat.

Remember, the word “meat” is NOT A TRADEMARK, it’s a noun in the English language.

So longs as plant-based meat producers are clearly listing the ingredients on the packaging of their products and are not defrauding the consumer—I know on whose side I am. But then I’m fair-minded, not partisan.

FROM “Plant-based meat could create a radically different food chain”:

..At least nine American states—including Arkansas, Missouri and Mississippi—have now agreed. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is also asking the Food and Drug Administration, the federal regulator, to outlaw what it sees as misleading labelling of plant-based meat. In April the European Parliament’s agriculture committee recommended the introduction of a ban on plant-based meat producers using such terms as “burgers” and “sausages”, although the proposal has not yet been debated or voted upon by the full parliament. The European Court of Justice ruled that many plant-based alternatives could not be labelled “milk” in 2017, but this did not noticeably affect demand.
The fight over labels is a sign that meat producers are on the defensive, says Mr Friedrich of the GFI. “The meat industry attempting to define meat as something that comes from a slaughtered animal is every bit as absurd as trying to say that your phone is not a phone because it doesn’t plug into a wall any more,” he claims.
When plant-based meat becomes common, language will no doubt adapt. The word “meat” may one day simply evoke the sensory experience that comes from eating a particular blend of fats, amino acids, minerals and water.
Whether that is made by slaughtering animals or by some other means depends on the ingenuity of the new meat makers. …

* Image courtesy of The Economist.

UPDATED IV (11/10/020): NEW COLUMN: Multiculturalism Elbows Anglo-Americans Out

Conservatism, Culture, Founding Fathers, History, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Multiculturalism

NEW COLUMN is “Multiculturalism Elbows Anglo-Americans Out.” It’s on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

An excerpt:

America is “a society that is and always has been multiethnic and polyglot,” burbled David Frum, in a 2016 exposition. It’s a refrain repeated by centrists like Frum and French (also David), by all lefties and by well-trained faux rightists.

Such dissembling about America having always been multicultural are no more than post hoc justifications for turning the country into a veritable Tower of Babel.

Early America’s colonies were founded by Englishmen in periwigs, speaking different English dialects. They were joined by Irish, Scottish, French, Dutch, German and Swedish Christians, who quickly adopted English as lingua franca.

Not even the woke Wikipedia denies that, “Nearly all colonies and, later, states in the United States, were settled by migration from” one colony to another, with “foreign immigration” generally playing “a minor role after the first initial settlements.”

In other words, population growth was organic, a result of the settlers themselves multiplying and being fruitful, not of a flood of immigrants.

This so-called “multiethnic” dispensation saw early Americans publicly debate and come to a broad agreement on some highly complex, abstract matters of political philosophy, an impossibility today. The colonial community had to be pretty tight to arrive at the Articles of Confederation, followed by the Constitution.

Try as he might, not even the sainted Barack Obama got away with claiming, as he did, that, “Islam had been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding.”

Beyond their heavy involvement in the slave trade and in the Barbary wars—and contrary to Obama’s modern myth-making—Muslims were most certainly not enmeshed in America from its inception.

Moreover, and almost to a man, the learned Founding Father, as chronicled by Laura Rubenfeld of PJ Media, held a dismal view of Islam and its vampiric prophet. 

It gives me great pleasure to break it to my anti-Semitic readers and to Ilhan Omar, the representative from Mogadishu in Minnesota: Jews were around. Early American Jews were of, mostly, Sephardic origins, having hailed from Spain and Portugal. That Jewry has always been more refined and reactionary than their radical, East-European brethren, who arrived much later.

And so we find Jews fighting or financing the War of Independence. Francis Salvador and Haym Solomon come to mind. “The highest ranking Jewish officer of the Colonial forces was Colonel Mordecai Sheftall.” Why, Jews even produced proud Confederate soldiers, the likes of Col. Abraham Charles Myers.

It was to the peaceful Jews of America that George Washington saw fit to promise peace and goodwill in a 1790 address to a synagogue congregation in Newport, Rhode Island.

Descendants of the original inhabitants of the United States of America are certainly not up to dealing with the political aggression brought to the country’s politics by recent immigrants. Come to speak of it, neither are the First Nations, the American Indians, who’re also politically more passive, when compared to the barbarians who’ve joined the Empire, since 1965.

To tether the character of Rep. Ilhan Omar to America’s immigration preferences is perfectly proper. Likewise Rashida Tlaib. The representative from Michigan is a second-generation Palestinian-American, and is every bit as tribal, politically aggressive and reliably leftist as Omar.

By virtue of its main source countries, America’s mass immigration policy privileges individuals like Omar: angry, anti-white, and highly receptive to theories that blacken the West and porcelainize the undeveloped world (a pedagogic poison that is, by the way, hothoused in the U.S.—K to 12 and beyond). …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN is “Multiculturalism Elbows Anglo-Americans Out.” It’s on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

UPDATE I (11/8/019):

Joe writes: “Don’t forget Judah P. Benjamin [featured above], Secretary of State for the Confederacy. Southern Jews fought with great valor against Lincoln’s einsatzgruppen.”

Others would have preferred that Benjamin be more of a loser.

UPDATE II:  The Economist, a left-liberal publication, comments on, “The rising clout of Indian-Americans,” and alludes to the passivity of the Ameri-Indians, by comparison, as I did in the column. “There may well be an Indian-American president before there is an American Indian one,” they write.

UPDATED III (12/10/019):

Important column by @michellemalkin emphasizing the attempt to regain states’ rights lost. Did you know that “communities” lacked “… explicit…rights to stem the lucrative tide of #refugees coming largely from Third World countries”?

UPDATE IV (11/10/020): Judah Benjamin.

UPDATED III (4/11/020): DRUDGE Clearly Cares Deeply About Animals, All Animals

Conservatism, Culture, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Media, Morality

To his great credit, DRUDGE Report alerts almost daily to stories of abuse of wild and companion animals.

Drudge is also clearly trying to raise consciousness about the destruction of animal habitat at the hands of humans, that is if thematically consistent headlines on the site are any indication.

And DRUDGE does not appear to be one of those ethically challenged individuals who’ll tell you, “I’m a dog person; fuck the lions who’re being culled in canned hunts.”

My impression from following this news aggregator’s headlines for years is that DRUDGE cares deeply about animals and their fate.

Today, the item on Drudge raised awareness about “the complex relationship between humans and animals.”

Yesterday, Drudge linked to a story of a starving elephant made to carry tourists until she dropped dead.  Disgusting culture that would allow this.

I will keep you updated with a daily Drudge on animals.

UPDATE I (12/26/019):

Via DRUDGE: “Elephants in Thailand ‘broken’ for lucrative animal tourism…

UPDATE II (1/14/020): Parrots are innately kind.

UPDATE II (2/14/020):

“Meet the Wildlife Police: An unsung group of conservation heroes often stands between human predators and species on the edge of extinction”:

One of these critter cops is Andy McWilliam, a veteran English police officer who joined the NWCU at its inception in 2006. Mr. McWilliam has tracked down taxidermists and collectors of rare birds and mammals; prosecuted real-estate developers who destroyed the habitats of protected water voles and brown long-eared bats; and helped lead a national campaign to arrest egg collectors, a fraternity of largely middle-aged men who raid nests in England, Scotland and Wales, threatening protected species from kingfishers to golden eagles.
Even within their own departments, wildlife police sometimes struggle for respect. Mr. McWilliam recalls being taunted by colleagues in Liverpool after he returned to the station house with an egg collector in custody. “Put him before the beak,” they joked, using a slang term for a magistrate. …

… In 2017, Mr. McWilliam gathered intelligence in England for his American counterparts that led to the arrest, conviction and jailing of a Connecticut taxidermist who had stuffed and smuggled dozens of rare, protected birds, in violation of both the U.S. Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Endangered Species Act.

The NWCU has inspired other wildlife-crime units. Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia and the Netherlands all established or strengthened environmental-crime divisions in recent years. Operation Blizzard, a 2019 investigation overseen by Interpol and Europol, mobilized wildlife agencies from 22 countries against the illegal global trade of reptiles. The operation, according to Interpol, “resulted in the seizure of 2,703 turtles and tortoises, 1,059 snakes, 512 lizards and geckos, and 20 crocodiles and alligators.”
More in Ideas

The case of Jeffrey Lendrum, a notorious bird thief and smuggler who trafficked live peregrine eggs to wealthy falconers in the Persian Gulf, brought the NWCU its greatest encomiums—and showcased the increased cooperation of wildlife cops across international borders. In 2010, Mr. McWilliam led the investigation against Mr. Lendrum in Birmingham, England, for peregrine smuggling that sent him to prison for a year. In October 2015, Mr. Lendrum flew to Patagonia on another egg-thieving mission. A hotel clerk who’d read about the Birmingham arrest six years earlier tipped off Chile’s wildlife police, but Mr. Lendrum had already departed for Brazil. The Chileans alerted their Brazilian counterparts, who nabbed him in São Paulo’s airport as he was about to board a flight to Dubai. Wildlife agents seized four rare, white-breasted peregrine eggs stolen from Patagonia’s cliffs. …

UPDATE III (4/11/020): Corona and Zoonotic transmission

As this blog post suggests, DRUDGE is attempting to lead the ethical way via his hyperlinks.

Via Drudge, a news aggregator, comes the news link concerning Jane Goodall warning that the manner in which animals, wild and domestic, are raised, harvested and treated creates conditions and opportunity for viruses to jump from animals across the species barrier to humans.

She is not without sympathy and solutions for the poor, but she knows of what she speaks regarding the zoonotic source of the coronavirus pandemic.

Surprise, Surprise: Ramaphosa Can’t Fight The ANC’s Pro-Corruption, Pro-Crime Lobby

Business, Crime, Government, Labor, South-Africa

In South Africa, reports The Economist, “Economic life is dominated by big business, big labour and big government.”

only an elite few ever have a place at the table. … Firms face too little competition, cushy labour laws lock the jobless out of work and the public sector provides woeful services. Many well-paid teachers barely teach. Many bureaucrats do little but slow-walk paperwork and embezzle. Most are never held accountable. A quarter of South Africans enjoy a middle- or upper-class life, while the rest struggle to get by. When a country has an insider-outsider problem, you cannot let the insiders dictate terms.

The problem, really, is that African National Congress bosses will have Ramaphosa’s head if he does anything to threaten their hold on “big business, big labour and big government.”

Ramaphosa is near-powerless before “the pro-corruption lobby within the ruling African National Congress (ANC).”

MORE:The need for speed: Cyril Ramaphosa is running out of time to reform South Africa.”

But let’s not beat about the bush: Ramaphosa has failed to recognize—and aggressively move against—systemic crime against his white, productive minority. In fact, Ramaphosa categorically denies the ethnic cleansing of South Africa’s white farmers.

Comments Off on Surprise, Surprise: Ramaphosa Can’t Fight The ANC’s Pro-Corruption, Pro-Crime Lobby