monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Democrats, the party of hate and death, don't forget fantasy. Virginia is hurting Democratic chances for 2020 more each day. This also highlights the fact Democrats do not call this hate out, giving the real impression hating Jews is permitted.
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/virginia-democrat-delegate-candidate-said-israel-is-worse-than-kkk-told-ariel-sharon-to-burn-in-hell/

It is about the Zionists'oppression of the Palestinians, not Sharia, your denials notwithstanding. Oppression is hateful.

The Zionists are oppressing the Palestinians.

Justice is the Zionists owning their responsibilities by giving the Palestinians their right of return.

My philanthropy would be a catalyst for peace in Palestine.

It's difficult to reach the moon when you're being oppressed by zealot ethnocentrists like the Zionists.

They are oppressed by their own religion. You support people taught to hate. Look, you have learned too.

Nazis are bad. Don't be a Nazi.

Denying Israel's peace offers was one of the things that killed the peace process.

The only way they can ever get that is by making peace with Israel.

If Palestinians don't like it when Israel defends themselves from their aggression, they can always stop trying to murder Israeli children.

The right of return is not compatible with a two state solution.

It's already peaceful. The Palestinians have been walled off and pounded into submission.

They can stop paying the families of those who succeed. All aid to Palestinians should stop.

Gives you an idea of where Canada is headed. E-Beth or Blatham show no concern. I can only surmise they do not care about their country but want to criticize ours. Stupid, apathetic, and uncaring.

Time to consider what they say as the garbage it is.
https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ottawa-quickly-rejects-quebecs-bill-to-impose-language-residency/

WHERE'S THE BEEF??

You Call That Meat? Not So Fast, Cattle Ranchers Say
Sales of plant-based meat substitutes, like this burger made by Impossible Foods, increased 22 percent to $1.5 billion last year.

By Nathaniel Popper
Feb. 9, 2019

SAN FRANCISCO — The cattle ranchers and farm bureaus of America are not going to give up their hold on the word meat without a fight.

In recent weeks, beef and farming industry groups have persuaded legislators in more than a dozen states to introduce laws that would make it illegal to use the word meat to describe burgers and sausages that are created from plant-based ingredients or are grown in labs. Just this week, new meat-labeling bills were introduced in Arizona and Arkansas.

These meat alternatives may look and taste and even bleed like meat, but cattle ranchers want to make sure that the new competition can’t use the meat label.

“The word meat, to me, should mean a product from a live animal,” said Jim Dinklage, a rancher and the president of the Independent Cattlemen of Nebraska, who has testified in support of meat-labeling legislation in his state.

The push for state labeling laws is a reflection of how quickly start-ups like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, which produce burgers from plant-based ingredients, have grown to challenge the traditional meat industry. Sales of plant-based meat substitutes increased 22 percent to $1.5 billion last year, according to Euromonitor International, a market research firm.

Other start-ups are getting closer to being able to create chicken nuggets and sausage from actual meat cells grown in a lab. Even though it is not yet commercially viable, traditional meat producers are worried the lab-grown meat could eventually become a low-cost alternative with little regulatory oversight.

“About a year and a half ago, this wasn’t on my radar whatsoever,” said Mark Dopp, the head of regulatory affairs at the North American Meat Association. “All of a sudden, this is getting closer. This is likely to happen in the near future, and we need to have a regulatory system in place to deal with it.”

Meat producers say they don’t want to lose control of labeling like the dairy industry, which lost its battle to keep almond and soy producers from using the word milk on their beverages. Egg and even mayonnaise producers have faced similar fights.

“Almonds don’t produce milk,” said Bill Pigott, a Republican state representative in Mississippi who wrote the legislation there. He owns a farm that has produced both dairy and beef. But his worries have gone beyond almond and soy liquid’s being labeled milk.

“The fake, lab-produced meat is a little bit more of a science fiction-type deal that concerns me more,” Mr. Pigott said.

He introduced his bill in January after the local association of cattle ranchers contacted him. It passed in the state’s House and is waiting for debate in the State Senate.

The various legislative efforts are likely to face tough challenges — and not just from vegetarians.

A bill in Virginia was voted down after lawmakers received a letter from the National Grocers Association, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Plant Based Foods Association that defended increasingly popular products. It said requiring “new and unfamiliar packaging would only confuse shoppers and frustrate retailers at a time when demand for such options is at an all-time high,” growing at 23 percent a year.

The most restrictive proposal, in Washington State, would make it a crime to sell lab-grown meat and would bar state funds from being used for research in the area because some lawmakers say not enough is known about it to consider it safe. The bill has not yet come up for a vote.

Surprising coalitions are forming around the future of lab-grown meat. The North American Meat Association has said it wants lab-grown meat to be referred to as meat to ensure that new products are not able to shirk any of the regulations applied to traditional meat. And most large meat companies have stayed out of the debate. Some of them, including Tyson and Cargill, have made investments in lab-grown-meat start-ups.

In Nebraska, a meat-labeling bill was written by Carol Blood, a Democratic state senator from suburban Omaha. Despite her last name, Ms. Blood has been a vegan for years.

She said she had decided to pursue her bill after overhearing two women in her local Fresh Thyme supermarket expressing confusion about whether a package of Beyond Meat burgers contained animal flesh.

“I don’t care that it says burger — I care that it says it’s meat,” Ms. Blood said. “I have this thing that sticks in my craw when people are trying to be deceitful.”

Beyond Meat is not, in fact, produced with any meat. It gets its trademark bloody look from beet juice.

“We provide the consumer with meat made from plants, and believe that it is reasonable for the consumer and for us to refer to our products as plant-based meats,” the chief executive of Beyond Meat, Ethan Brown, said in an email.

Last year, Missouri passed the first law that barred companies from “misrepresenting a product as meat that is not derived from harvested production livestock or poultry.”

That law has been challenged in court by the company Tofurky, which specializes in tofu and other soy-based foods, as well as the local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups.

Sarah Sorscher, who works on regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said there was little evidence that consumers were confused by the labeling of alternative meat companies.

“We think the issue of whether they use a term like meat is a proxy for this bigger issue, which is that the meat industry is concerned about competition from these products,” Ms. Sorscher said. “The bills don’t seem to be directed at solving a problem in the marketplace. It is about fighting off competition.”

Beyond Meat has received assurances from the authorities in Missouri that its labels make it clear that the product is not meat and will not run afoul of the new law.

The Good Food Institute, which represents both plant-based meat companies and cell-based-meat start-ups, has scrambled to get employees and lobbyists to state capitals where laws are being considered.

Jessica Almy, who is the policy director for the organization, said she believed that most of the state laws and proposals would be rendered moot if and when the Agriculture Department weighed in on labeling for lab-grown meat, which it promised to do last year. Still, she argues that the state-mandated labels could create more confusion for consumers.

“There is no truthful way to refer to it without using meat terms,” Ms. Almy said.

Mr. Dinklage, the Nebraska rancher, said he was also interested in providing clarity to consumers. He also wants to protect a livelihood that is growing harder all the time.

“Just think what it actually costs eventually in a lab as compared to running a ranching operation,” he said. “It would be a lot cheaper and that puts me out of business.”

DT Socks it to Turdeau and Canada:



https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-strengthening-buy-american-preferences-infrastructure-projects/

http://www.al-rassooli.com/tiny-israel.html

make-believe nation, make-believe people....

Tastes like chicken

The truth about lab-grown meat
Producers say they’ll roll-out ‘clean meat’ products soon, but would you eat it?
PASSANT RABIE • JANUARY 16, 2019

An open field where plump, well-fed livestock waddle their way through the grass under the eye of honest, local farmers — that’s how people like to envision where their meat comes from.

The reality, however, is that most of the beef consumed in the U.S. comes by way of an industrialized system that confines cows to small pens in vast feedlots, where they are fattened with hormone-laced grains before being shipped away for slaughter in what are essentially meat factories.

The industrial system makes meat products more affordable, but not particularly humane — and that’s beside the environmental costs and health concerns about meat-centric diets. Agriculture contributes to about 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, destroys natural habitats and pollutes water worldwide.

Yet people are reluctant to give up their steaks and chickens. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, beef and poultry consumption hit record highs in 2018, with the average American eating over 200 pounds of meat. But soon, meat lovers will have a new option for satisfying their cravings — one that involves neither open fields nor industrial slaughterhouses: laboratory-produced meat.

Until recently, the idea of lab-grown meat was constrained to a distant, futuristic realm, but by the end of 2018, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration announced a joint agreement to oversee the production of cell-cultured meat. And if manufacturers succeed in driving down current sky-high production costs, you may soon see lab-grown meat not just in fancy restaurants, but on grocery store shelves, too.

Advocates tout lab-grown meat (they prefer to call it “clean meat,” for marketing reasons) as a much more sustainable alternative to the current industrial system. Still, consumers remain skeptical. In a 2017 study published in Public Library of Science, nearly two-thirds of people surveyed were willing to try clean meat, but only one in three was willing to eat it regularly as a replacement for conventional meat. Some were skeptical of the taste and appeal of lab-grown meat while others cited safety or health concerns.

The survey also found many people had little or no understanding of what clean meat actually is. To clear up some of those misconceptions, here are some basics about lab-grown meat.

How is clean meat made?

The idea of growing cells outside of a living body has been around since the 19th century and used in everything from tissue preservation and vaccine production to chemical safety testing and much more. But it wasn’t until 2013 that the first lab-grown burger was unveiled to the world by Mark Post, a vascular physiology professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

Start-ups have since raced to perfect the technology. Companies including JUST, Memphis Meat, and Mosa Meat each use a slightly different technique but the basic concept is the same: begin with a stem cell from a live animal.

“All meat starts with cells,” explains Parendi Birdie, a research associate and member of the cell development team at JUST. “And for these cells to grow, they require nurture in order to naturally grow as they would in a cow, chicken or pig.”

Developers feed the extracted cell salts, sugars and amino acids so it can grow and multiply via hundreds of cell divisions. The cells created can be of different lineages — muscle cells, fat cells or tissues — allowing producers to create different types of meat such as steak or chopped burger.

So is it really meat?

Well, sort of. Clean meat is made from stem cells extracted from real, live animals. There are all sorts of ways to extract them, including a conventional surgical biopsy. They can even be extracted from the feather of a bird, according to Isaac Emery, a senior environmental scientist at The Good Food Institute, a non-profit organization that helps companies develop clean meat products.

However, not everyone agrees that the product should be labeled as meat. Food safety expert Catherine Hutt, a former assistant administrator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, advocates a cautious approach with clear labelling. “It’s about transparency for the consumer,” she says, “in order to make sure that the consumer knows [whether] they’re choosing this cell-based meat-like product, or an actual meat product.”

But Birdie argues that all that matters is the taste, and that, in her experience, clean meat tastes just like the real thing. At tastings with potential investors and consumers, she says, “when they actually eat it, it tastes exactly like meat.”

Is it better for the environment?

That’s a definite yes. A 2011 study found that clean meat produces 78 to 96 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions, uses 99 percent less land and between 82 and 92 percent less water. Research at the Good Food Institute has concluded that a cell culture the size of one chicken egg can produce a million times more meat than a chicken barn stacked with 20,000 chickens, according to Emery. Energy costs, too, are much lower — and no animal parts are wasted, he adds.

“We won’t be growing the bones and the skin and the intestines that take up resources,” Emery says. “We’ll be vastly more efficient in the land we use.”

How much will it cost?

Experts say cost is the main obstacle standing between consumers and clean meat products.

In 2013, the first clean burger cost $325,000. While the price has decreased dramatically since then, current estimates range from $363 to $2,400 per pound, making it much more expensive than regular meat. (A pound of conventionally produced lean ground beef costs less than $6. Organically raised beef typically costs about a dollar more.)

JUST’s Birdie says the company is pushing hard to drive down production costs. “How do we make these products in order to compete with the price of a Big Mac?” she asks.

The biggest expense, she says, is protein used to feed the cells as they grow. In an effort to improve cost efficiency, JUST has developed a robotic platform capable of screening thousands of proteins to find the best at spurring growth, she says.

How soon can I try some?

Depending on where you live and your willingness to pay a very expensive restaurant tab, you may be able to try some clean meat in 2019. While JUST promises a product in the coming months, it’s a ‘limited-edition release,’ and likely available only at select restaurants.

Through his work with various producers, Emery says he expects that clean meat will be in the supermarket within two to five years, and could be as inexpensive as conventional meat in a decade.

Former USDA official Hutt, however, is less optimistic. She argues that the process behind food regulation takes a long time, and expects the debate behind labeling clean meat to drag on.

“The federal regulatory system moves slowly, deliberately,” she says. “It’s a process that takes time… the federal government is doing what it needs to do to protect the consumer.”

Emery is confident that once clean meat is available in stores, consumers will be blind to the difference. “People are driven by the same factors when we buy food, and that’s price, taste and convenience,” he says. “Once clean meat is being produced, and it’s in the restaurants and grocery stores we usually go to, there will be a lot less concern about what it’s called and where it came from.”