What is a Boondoggle?

by Not Sure

30 April 2023

PLANT-BASED MEAT

The Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger are products of Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, respectively. Things in common include that they are marketed as plant-based beef substitutes, the companies are headquartered in California and Bill Gates made large investments in both. Gates, Jeff Bezos and Al Gore also invested $158 million in Chicago-based Nature’s Fynd which makes breakfast patties and “cream cheese” from fungus.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a process that Impossible Foods uses to make its “meat” bleed. For vegetarians it’s a bit too realistic. There is a conspiracy theory lifted from Soylent Green that claims both burgers contain human meat and that’s why they taste so convincingly like real beef. (I assumed human meat tasted like chicken.) Remember back in 2019 when Magnus Soderlund of the Stockholm School of Economics advocated that people eating meat derived from dead humans could help save the planet if only conservative people could overcome their taboos against cannibalism?

ClearLabs food testing company released a study that revealed their findings testing 258 burgers, meat and veggie. Two veggie burgers contained meat, three meat burgers contained rat DNA and one burger contained human DNA, so the human meat conspiracy theory isn’t surprising. The study said it was likely hair, skin or fingernail mixed in during manufacturing and went on to state, “…some amounts of human and rat DNA may fall within an acceptable regulatory range.” As if we don’t have enough to worry about.

AP News Fact Check assures us that Bill Gates is not America’s biggest owner of farmland. At just under 270,000 acres with a total of nearly 900 million acres of total farmable land, he is not even in the top thirty. (By the way, Ted Turner of the Good Club – you know, the billionaires including Oprah Winfrey, George Soros and Bill Gates who want depopulation – owns about two million acres of ranch and farmland, making him one of the largest individual landholders in the U.S.) But still…as Alan Watt says in this Redux, Bill Gates is way above the Bond villain, Blofeld.

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On May 24, 2020, Alan Watt’s talk was entitled “Pilgrim’s Process.” Skip to the end of this piece to read the poem that accompanied the talk. Gates’ name appeared thirty-six times in the transcript. Alan loathed Bill Gates. He could barely stomach watching the man speak. If there is a Hell, Alan has assigned an especially hot place there for the Dead-Eyed-Hand-Waiving-Psychopath-Demon “launched and presented as some kind of superstar.”

CLEAN ENERGY

In 2015, SPECTRE, oops! I mean George Soros, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Jack Ma, Richard Branson, Michael Bloomberg and Mark Zuckerberg started Breakthrough Energy spearheaded by Blofeld, er, Bill Gates. According to Wikipedia, “At the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in November 2015, Gates announced that a coalition of 28 high net-worth investors from ten countries had committed to the Breakthrough Energy initiative. In December 2016, a group of investors collectively worth US$170 billion announced more personal commitment to funding the efforts of a US$1 billion fund "focused on fighting climate change by investing in clean energy innovation." The fund is named Breakthrough Energy Ventures.”

Their website is full of catchy little phrases like “Getting to Zero” and “How We Plug In” but one that grabbed me was “The Green Premium.” Here is the sad tale:

The Green Premium is the additional cost of choosing a clean technology over one that emits more greenhouse gases. Oh! Boo hoo!

According to this pathetic lie, “clean solutions are usually more expensive than high-emissions ones, in part because we don’t factor the true economic and environmental costs of existing options like fossil fuels into the price we pay for them.”

Last week, I happened to be able to hear someone from a local energy cooperative speak. He avoided politics and deftly dodged angry questions such as “They want us on electric cars by 2030, but where’s the electricity going to come from?” But what he did reveal was quite illuminating to me. Energy companies are required to purchase their power from either wind or solar, if those options are available on any given day. Evidently, this was enacted by the Biden administration. (More on that later.) There is no legislation which exists (yet) to eliminate the building of other types of power plants, but there is a huge financial disincentive if energy suppliers are obligated to purchase wind or solar if it’s available.

There really isn’t a Green Premium, but rather the reverse. If you have a company, or a service or a product and you’re not stamped GREEN by SPECTRE, you will not be able to play on the new GREEN field.

Those with strong stomachs, watch the video on the Breakthrough Energy website where Bill Gates waves his hands for two minutes and shares his excitement about all the innovations that are going to come from this boondoggle, I mean, exciting venture.

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What is a boondoggle? Let’s go back to Wikipedia. “A boondoggle is a project that is considered a waste of both time and money yet is often continued due to extraneous policy or political motivations. The term "boondoggle" may refer to protracted government or corporate projects involving large numbers of people and usually heavy expenditure, where at some point, the key operators, having realized that the project will never work, are still reluctant to bring this to the attention of their superiors. Generally, there is an aspect of "going through the motions"—for example, continuing research and development—as long as funds are available to keep paying the researchers' and executives' salaries.”

I will make some refinements on the definition as it applies to Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and indeed, all the many thousands of ‘protracted government or corporate projects.’ In the boondoggle called SUSTAINABILITY aka GREEN, the key operators KNEW from THE BEGINNING the PROJECTS WOULD NEVER WORK. To quote Alan Watt, “The climate is always changing. It’s called weather.” Trillions of dollars float about, before sinking into the piranha tank of Bond’s Blofeld. The “boondoggle” is just one of the games evil rich men like to play. Boondoggles are also a bit like the shell game con or sleight-of-hand.

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PLANT-BASED MEAT

When the product is GREEN, the vendor is self-righteous, avoids scrutiny and falls back on “the big vision” and baseless claims. The problem with Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, according to The New York Times, is that “neither discloses the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions across all of its operations, supply chains or consumer waste. They also do not disclose the effects across all of their operations on forests or how much water they use. But on its website Beyond Meat claims that consumers who switch from animal to plant-based protein can “positively affect the planet, the environment, the climate and even ourselves.” Baseless claims. Impossible Foods says that switching to plant-based meats “can be better than getting solar panels, driving an electric car or avoiding plastic straws” when it comes to reducing your environmental footprint.” The big vision. “The dominant narrative from the plant-based industry and the venture capitalists supporting it is that these companies are better for the environment, they’re better for health, they’re better for this and better for that,” said Ricardo San Martin, the research director of the alternative meats program at the University of California, Berkeley. “But it is really a black box. So much of what is in these products is undisclosed. Everybody has a supply chain, and there is a carbon footprint behind that chain.”

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CLEAN ENERGY

When trying to understand what a corporation or fund is up to, I look for numbers. Corporate reports, real investment amounts, etc. Other than the initial round of publicity at the announcement of Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, I found very little. I stumbled on a service called PitchBook which promised to help me “unlock private markets right from my browser.” I could request a free trial, but there was no way they were going to tell me how much the product cost. Finally, I did a general search “How much does PitchBook cost?” $13,500 for one “seat.” (I guess a “seat” is a “user.”) $25,000 for three seats. Getting into the financial bowels of Breakthrough Energy is not possible for me. I cannot afford a seat at that table.

Moving on to another of Bill Gates’ boondoggles mentioned in that Wiki article. Mission Innovation is a “global initiative to accelerate public and private clean energy innovation to address climate change, make clean energy affordable to consumers, and create green jobs and commercial opportunities.” This is about countries throwing more money into CLEAN ENERGY RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT. A boondoggle. (If I could find the paper/lobby/grift trail that ended with the Biden administration’s demand that energy suppliers first purchase wind or solar, would that trail start with Bill Gates and Mission Innovation?)

I found an eighty plus page PDF on their website entitled “Country Highlights” from 2021. Interesting this. I learn that Germany is throwing piles of money into Hydrogen and GREEN HYDROGEN research and development. Just last week, I read that Germany closed its last three nuclear power plants, making good on their promise to move away from nuclear energy and toward renewables. In fact, this move makes them more reliant on coal, and environmentalists have criticized this move away from a carbon-free power source.

According to “Country Highlights,” in June 2020 Germany launched its National Hydrogen Strategy. “The National stimulus package for the COVID-recovery provides 7 billion euros for the implementation of the National Hydrogen Strategy domestically, and another 2 billion euros for fostering international cooperation in the field of hydrogen.” It would be hard to understand what a National Hydrogen Strategy had to do with COVID-recovery, unless you’ve kept up with essential reading like the World Health Organization’s 2020 publication, WHO Manifesto for a Healthy Recovery from Covid-19: Prescriptions and Actionables for a Healthy and Green Recovery. This has almost nothing to do with Covid-19, pandemics or world health and everything to do with SUSTAINABILITY.

Hydrogen does not occur naturally on Earth in large quantities and needs a primary energy source to produce it such as methane or the electrolysis of water. The methane method releases carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide into the atmosphere (greenhouse gases) which ostensibly contribute to climate change. GREEN HYDROGEN is obtained by electrolysis via electricity from renewable sources, but this is very expensive. Of course, it is. That’s why Bill Gates’ Mission Innovation is helping countries spend billions of dollars, so that they can Research and Develop and Research and Develop, less expensive and GREEN ways to produce it.

Mission Innovation’s Country Highlights 2021 states that “Canada has successfully met and exceeded the MI doubling pledge” (bureaucratese is not my native tongue but I think this means that Canada has succeeded in getting private business to match and then double government pledges) “remains committed through the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change to keep pace with the global economy in moving towards a greener future. Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) continues work towards increasing the creation and adoption of clean technology in energy, mining, and forestry, the three key Canadian economic sectors.” Okay, I get that bureaucratese, but should I live to a hundred years, I will never understand this sentence:

“In 2020-21, NRCan continued to award funding through its existing programs, while also supporting proponents through COVID-19 by exercising maximum flexibilities within programming parameters to provide real-time support through increased funding allocations and timeline extensions.”

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In the excerpts from this talk, Alan read (admiringly) about Italian politician Sara Cunial calling for the arrest of Bill Gates for crimes against humanity. Would that anyone listened.