I’ve been carefully studying the meat aisle at the sole local market.

The best bang for the buck is chickens, whole or legs or backs, for about two dollars a pound.

But of course these are factory-farmed birds with no suggestion of quality, no words like organic or free-range in evidence anywhere. Yesterday I found, for four times that price, packages of ground hamburger that had a lot of good words. Grass-fed. Certified Humane.

Of course these things mean next to nothing under the American regulatory regime:

Various sources estimate anything from 40% to over 70% of beef claimed as “Grass-fed” and sold to consumers in the US is not authentic Grass-fed. —source

Essentially, all American meat producers have to do to sell their products as “grass-fed” is to sign a paper that says they are. There is no governmental oversight or inspection. There doesn’t even seem to be an agreed definition of what it means, which has led to the invention of terms like “grass-finished”, meaning that cows allegedly fed on grass for 97% of their lives are NOT stuffed full of cheap grain right before slaughter to increase their weight–which is pretty standard practice.

Tongue in cheek, I might proclaim that it’s Anarchy out there. It’s not. It’s capitalism and it is chaos full of lies, but contrary to popular opinion that’s not the same thing.

So another word on the packaging of my eight-dollar hamburger was: Wagyu.

I had a very vague sense that this meant it was somehow Japanese and higher quality. I went and learned.

Is “Wagyu” ground beef a scam?

Answer: Not in Japan. But here, yes. A buzzword on the label at best, a scam at worst.

But I bought it anyway, with fingers crossed for hope.

On Nora’s advice, I tried to find a way to buy ranch-direct around here. There are possibilities, but generally you have to buy a whole cow at a time, and a big freezer to go with it, and cow or beef is the only option. Nope.

In terms of the good stuff, I am definitely at least 80 miles out into in a meat desert.

In the medium term I’ll need to get myself back on a ButcherBox subscription. It’s not cheap, but it is good. They can’t say ‘organic’ if it’s anything less–that one still means something real. And there are various independent certifying organizations that offer the possibility of trustworthiness, regarding things like the relative Humanity of the product.

***

There’s a story beginning to break about what really happened around the time Russia crossed the line into Ukraine. I learned about it here on The Duran, and it’s a big complex beast of a story, but I did some digging, and the basics are here:

Just one month after the start of the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators had come very close to an agreement for a ceasefire and to an outline for a comprehensive peace solution to the conflict.

In contrast to today, President Zelensky and his government had made great efforts to negotiate peace with Russia and bring the war to a quick end.

Contrary to Western interpretations, Ukraine and Russia agreed at the time that the planned NATO expansion was the reason for the war. They therefore focused their peace negotiations on Ukraine’s neutrality and its renunciation of NATO membership. In return, Ukraine would have retained its territorial integrity, except for Crimea.

There is little doubt that these peace negotiations failed due to resistance from NATO, and in particular from the USA and the UK. The reason is that such a peace agreement would have been tantamount to a defeat for NATO, an end to NATO’s eastward expansion, and thus an end to the dream of a unipolar world dominated by the USA*.

The failure of the peace negotiations in March 2022 led to a dangerous intensification of the war that has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people …

*It’s ending anyway. All the mass death just put it off for a while, and that’s all.

I heard so many good smart people, heavily motivated by the Russiagate lie and by Trump Derangement Syndrome, screaming for blood, demanding Putin’s head on a plate, and proclaiming Zelensky a lion and a hero as the Reds intervened in the civil war already in progress for years in the Donbass.

If I had to boil down my message to them, I would want them to remember two things.

The Establishment and the Rulers lie to you habitually and manipulatively, and most of what you routinely believe is hypnotic bullshit and distraction.

And, regardless of who says what at the start of any war that’s happened in our lifetimes, the people who are steadfastly against ramping up that war from the start will always be right in the end.

Blessed are the peacemakers, and damned be the hawks.

I’m going to hold my tongue as long as I can at Thanksgiving, lest it too devolve into some kind of civil or uncivil internecine war.

You know what I think. Please don’t put me in the position of needing to proclaim it once more from the rooftops, over the turkey and stuffing. I’ll be as good as I can be, as good as you let me be.