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Sep 9, 2022Liked by William Hunter Duncan

I read two very incredible books 1) "Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat: Why Well-Raised Meat is Good for You and Good for the Planet" by Diana Rodgers and Robb Wolf; and "The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability" by Lierre Keith. Turns out beef is the most intensely nutritious food a human can eat--ounce for ounce. Cows, bison, elk, deer and antelope are one integral part of the ecology that was when Indians shepherded the land. There are many regenerative farmers and ranchers already up and going here in Colorado. Cows get to live a natural cow's life until that one bummer day when they go to the slaughterhouse. The best part of all of this, besides that we humans get great nutrition, is that soil is brought back to life, and then does its job of sequestering carbon from the air.

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That is one of the maddening things about the globalist demonization of meat - like covid madness, it is cherry picking "science" to get the outcome you want, amounting to anti-science. The American prairie was never as lush as when 100 million buffalo roamed freely on it. I have friends who rotationally graze their 70 head of grass fed dairy cows, their fields are lush and the soil flourishing, compared to the industrial CAFO dairies and the fields they plant for feed, the soil like concrete, while little grows without massive inputs. The move toward replacing meat with insects is ideology, anti-nature and anti-human.

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Sep 9, 2022Liked by William Hunter Duncan

Exactly. I've seen reports that there were 600 million bison roaming Central U.S., along with hundreds of millions of deer, elk and antelopes--so don't give me that b.s. burping methane argument for global warming. There are videos galore on YouTube about regenerative farming. Implements for planting and harvesting have already been developed so as to break the soil as little as possible. As for eating bugs, my friend quotes Claus Schwab--a bilious billionaire, who says, "You will have nothing (and eat bugs) and be happy." Gwyneth Paltrow is the empty-headed vegetarian Hollywoodite promoting eating insects--[eyes rolling]

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Sep 11, 2022Liked by William Hunter Duncan

I'm not concerned about the insect-eating craze (though I am concerned about the pollinators). My reasoning is very simple -- the people pushing the need to eat insects and the fools who are excited to "do their part" by eating insects are the same idiots who are always part of the "current thing." They have an attention span of a gnat (maybe they'll eat those too). This will go the same way as alternative meats, which was a big fad a few years ago, but sales have really slumped now. The same thing will happen with insects. Some people will continue to eat insects even when it is no longer the current thing, but most will happily go back to their former diets.

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You are probably right at the personal level. I suspect too they are also going to build their market regardless, and the future steak one eats probably will not be advertised as insect-fed. I saw a picture on Tess Lena's site of the ingredients of some processed grain snack that had cricket flour in it, so I imagine we will see a lot more of that. If people object to "cricket flour" they will probably just give it a new name like "alternative protein."

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Sep 11, 2022Liked by William Hunter Duncan

Aren't windmills killing metric shit-loads of flying insects? I would have to imagine a significant portion are pollinators. I am very concerned about this. This characterization of these troubling trends that are doubtless products of managerial class malfeasance (pesticides killing pollinators, mRNA vaccines killing young healthy people, forest fires caused worsened by poor management, water issues in the SW associated with preferential rates for agriculture etc) as consequences of climate change is... aggravating. What can we do to help out the pollinators? Is there legislation that would be beneficial? Perhaps banning the types of pesticides that are neurotoxic to pollinators?

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Also, yes the windmills are not ecologic.

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There seems to be a move to cut down on nitrogen use, which is good for the water but not for the current human population or pollinators. I think the idea is, we eat insects and return much of the land to the wild, but that would mean a lot less humans too. I think we can probably feed everybody and pollinators without a trans woke digital currency social credit system.

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by William Hunter Duncan

I am fortunate... our neck of the world seems to still have our pollinators. At my current house, we have a large mimosa which bees and hummingbirds seem to love. At the homestead-to-be, we had a volunteer thistle last year. I saved seeds, just in case it didn't reseed itself. (But it did, many times over.) It was a bee magnet... honey bees, bumble bees, little itty-bitty ones I didn't recognize. And they didn't mind being on the same flower at the same time.

Regarding edible insects, nope. Not me. I'm not even a fan of sea-faring arthropods.

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I am glad to hear any story about pollinators. Thank you.

I'm sure you are the first I've heard who saved thistle seed. I saved some bee balm from my garden for the 80.

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Here, look at these fancy bugs and what we can do with them (but don't pay attention to the bugs your life actually depends upon...)

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