Food is the body's news

 

During the last lunch at the restaurant, while you read the Times, your body was reading the potatoes: was there rain ? too many chemicals ? enough sun ? ...

December 12th 2022

Written by: Sayer Ji, GreenMedInfo

Eating Dates Produces Powerful Health Benefits, Religion and Science Agree

 

Since biblical times, dates were to believed to possess profound healing properties, but only now is science catching up to confirm our distant ancestors knew exactly what they were talking about.

 

If you go by the Nutrition Facts panel of an ordinary package of dates, they look more like sugar bombs than a healthy snack. But are they really as nutritionally vapid as these label claims make them seem ?

Not by a long shot.

 

When we apply the complementary lenses of modern scientific investigation and ancient wisdom, dates begin to look like both a holy- and a super-food of immense value.

Here's a neat example.

 

From the Koran to Clinical Trials: Dates for Better Birthing

 

In the Koran, the central holy book of Islam, Allah instructs the Virgin Mary to consume dates when she gives birth to Jesus.[1] And so, not surprisingly, dates are commonly referred to within the Islamic tradition as beneficial to pregnant women. We might chalk this up as "pre-scientific" magical thinking without basis in medical fact, were it not for a remarkable human clinical study that confirmed their value in pregnancy...

 

Published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 2011 and titled, "The effect of late pregnancy consumption of date fruit on labour and delivery", researchers set out to investigate the effect of date fruit consumption on labor parameters and birth outcomes. Over the course of 11 months at Jordan University of Science and Technology, two groups of women were enrolled in a prospective study where 69 women consumed six date fruits per day for 4 weeks prior to their estimated date of delivery, versus 45 women who consumed none. These women were matched so there was no significant difference in gestational age, age and parity (the number of times a woman has brought a pregnancy to viable gestational age) between the two groups.

 

The results of the date intervention were reported as follows:

Improved Cervical Dilation: "The women who consumed date fruit had significantly higher mean cervical dilatation upon admission compared with the non-date fruit consumers (3.52 cm vs 2.02 cm, p < 0.0005)."

Less Damage to Membranes: "[The intervention group had] a significantly higher proportion of intact membranes (83% vs 60%, p = 0.007)."

More Natural (Spontaneous) Labor: "Spontaneous labour occurred in 96% of those who consumed dates, compared with 79% women in the non-date fruit consumers (p = 0.024)."

Less Drugs Required: "Use of prostin/oxytocin was significantly lower in women who consumed dates (28%), compared with the non-date fruit consumers (47%) (p = 0.036)."

Shorter Labor: "The mean latent phase of the first stage of labour was shorter in women who consumed date fruit compared with the non-date fruit consumers (510 min vs 906 min, p = 0.044)."

 

The researchers concluded:

"It is concluded that the consumption of date fruit in the last 4 weeks before labour significantly reduced the need for induction and augmentation of labour, and produced a more favourable, but non-significant, delivery outcome. The results warrant a randomised controlled trial."[2]

Thanks to research like this we can see how the mythological and scientific ways of understanding now converge and confirm one another. I believe that rather than contradict and/or negate one another, the mythos and logos are beginning to assume a far more productive complementary relationship as we move into a new era of understanding where the profane and sacred are perceived as intimately entwined in our direct experience. The field of nutrition, as you can see, is no exception.

 

Dates Contain Nourishing Information

Dates, of course, are in the palm tree family, and along with coconut and red palm, are some of the oldest cultivated plants known in the historical record; in fact, they are so old we don't know where they first originated. They have provided life-sustaining nutrition in regions that are often sparse in edible resources, and are increasingly being researched as a powerful medicinal food that could reduce much suffering in malnourished and disease prone populations, especially in underdeveloped countries.

 

Even while scientific analysis of dates are beginning to reveal that they are actually densely packed with a wide range of minerals, vitamins, amino acids and fatty acids, it should be emphasized that they are not just sources of energy and material building blocks for our body. We must acknowledge that they are also sources of biologically valuable (perhaps indispensably so) information. We can not analytically decompose a food into the minerals, vitamins, and macronutrients (e.g. lipids, fats, and protein), that we believe are responsible for its nourishing and life-sustaining properties, without losing quite a lot in the process. Foods contains hundreds, if not thousands, of physiologically important biomolecules, together which modulate the expression of thousands of genes in our body, as well as affecting our microbiome. In fact, our microbiome works on the foods we ingest, and together produce an intermediary layer of biomolecules known as the metabolome, many of which may be indispensable to our health.

 

This is why when we say food is medicine, we are not simply using a metaphor. We now know that food is capable, on a molecular level, of positively modulating a wide range of biological pathways simultaneously, in a manner that drugs simply can not replicate. In fact, I believe food contains an immense, if not infinite, amount of information which our bodies draw from to realize optimal gene expression, especially in times of stress or imbalance. Looking at it granularly, I believe food contains discrete units or packets of gene-regulatory energy and information. This can be inferred by the way curcumin, for instance, which is only one of hundreds of biomolecules found in the spice turmeric, is capable of modulating over 2,000 genes simultaneously within a cancer cell line, with a positive end result. Both the specificity and broadness through which these food compounds are capable of correcting imbalances is simply astounding and speaks to an intelligence within certain plants of particular food and medicinal purpose that can not be exhaustively explained through terms and methods of the reductionistic sciences that still form the backbone of our understanding of conventional nutrition.

 

 

 

So if my theory holds true, and dates, which are a food type (namely, fruit) we co-evolved with for quite some time, are more than just a package of mainly simple carbohydrate (half fructose/half glucose) and mineral quantities of alphabetic vitamins and minerals, but also possess gene-regulatory energy and information, shouldn't it perform a number of therapeutic effects? Indeed, the research now bears testimony to exactly this fact.

I took the liberty of doing a cursory meta-analysis of the extant research on dates available through the National Library of Medicine's biomedical database MEDLINE, accessible of course through the google-like search engine pubmed.gov. And to my pleasant surprise the research on dates as a whole (including the fruit, pollen and seed extract) reveals approximately 19 specific beneficial modes of action, and a preventive and/or therapeutic role in about 40 different health conditions.

 

Consider for a moment that most of the blockbuster drugs on the marketplace only have one therapeutic mode of action and one condition they are approved to treat. Additionally, there are on average 75 adverse health effects for each drug. The fact that it is classified and sold as a food and not a drug should not delude us into thinking it is not as powerful as a pharmaceutical. In fact, it should be clear that foods are actually far more powerful in affecting root cause resolution of health conditions by nourishing us deeply, nutritionally, and again, informationally (literally: to put form into).

FOOD AS INFORMATION: Living Water, Epigenetic Pathways, and the Wisdom of the Ancestral Diet

The Power of Peppermint: 15 Health Benefits Revealed

... Just read !

CONSUMER ALERT: The Deadly Reason Tylenol (paracetamol) Should Be Banned Immediately

THE MAN WHO STOLE THE EARTH

 

"Kissinger remained at Harvard as a member of the faculty in the Department of Government where he served as the director of the Harvard International Seminar between 1951 - he was 28 - and 1971

From 1956 to 1958, Kissinger worked for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund as director of its Special Studies Project. He served as the director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program between 1958 and 1971. 

In 1958, he also co-founded the Center for International Affairs with Robert R. Bowie where he served as its associate director. Outside of academia, he served as a consultant to several government agencies and think tanks, including the Operations Research Office, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Department of State, and the RAND Corporation.

Henry Kissinger received his BA degree summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa in political science from Harvard College in 1950, where he lived in Adams House and studied under William Yandell Elliott.

His senior undergraduate thesis, titled The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant, was over 400 pages long, and was the origin of the current limit on length (35,000 words).

 He received his MA and PhD degrees at Harvard University in 1951 and 1954, respectively. In 1952, while still a graduate student at Harvard, he served as a consultant to the director of the Psychological Strategy Board,[34] and founded a magazine, Confluence.[35] At that time, he sought to work as a spy for the FBI.

His doctoral dissertation was titled Peace, Legitimacy, and the Equilibrium (A Study of the Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich). 

In his PhD dissertation, Kissinger first introduced the concept of "legitimacy", which he defined as: "Legitimacy as used here should not be confused with justice. 

It means no more than an international agreement about the nature of workable arrangements and about the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy". An international order accepted by all of the major powers is "legitimate" whereas an international order not accepted by one or more of the great powers is "revolutionary" and hence dangerous.

 

Kissinger: It's Time for Negotiated Peace in Ukraine to Avoid World War

THIS IS Henry Kissinger KCMG, National Security Adviser 1969–1975, U.S. Secretary of State 1973–1977, first chair of the 9/11 Commission Nov.–Dec. 2002, author of NSS Memo 200, Bilderberg attendee, subject of The Trials of Henry Kissinger,

mentor of Klaus Schwab,

Atlantic Council board.",

99 years old, ... the 'Third Party' ...

(at your service 24/24, SBF is child play, WW2 was a bad trick)

China: The World's First Technate – Part 2

Mad Max-Style Images of Chinese COVID Hell

China’s Military is Built with US Technology

The Slow Strangulation of the World Economy

(...)

"Faucian Economics

I’ve never been one for conspiracy theory but one would have to be stupid not to see that there is something of a plan here. They are attacking cities, enterprise, economic growth, and even procreation too. How? In every conceivable way.

I’ve given up trust, all trust, in these people, their plans, and even their products. They are dangerous. Their vision of the world is even more so.

We used to say that socialism cannot work. What does that mean? It means that it will only make people poorer and more miserable. But what if you have an ideology that is actually intended to do that? Can Faucian economics work? Yes, if you mean to reduce the population, spread misery, end progress, abolish all comforts, empty the cities, cause people to freeze to death, and only allow what’s left of the population to live off bugs."

We need to get real. These people are truly up to no good. They have gotten their way. What’s more, the gang that did this is not subject to the voters, so elections might not make a bit of difference, even if they turn out well."

The Age Of Drones

Ben Bartee via Industrial Society and Its Future:

 

"In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. 

A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. 

Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individual has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision. 

What usually happens in practice is that decisions are made by public officials or corporation executives, or by technical specialists, but even when the public votes on a decision the number of voters ordinarily is too large for the vote of any one individual to be significant. 

Thus most individuals are unable to influence measurably the major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. 

The system tries to “solve” this problem by using propaganda to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if this “solution” were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning."

 

The WEF is the technocratic answer to a question no real person asked. It has circumvented national sovereignty – and with it the right to self-determination – by penetrating the cabinets of industrialized governments worldwide. It offers global solutions to local problems, whether the local populations believe them to be actual problems or not. 

With no claim to a democratic right to govern, it issues decrees such as "you will own nothing and be happy" and "you will eat zhe bugs," applicable worldwide and subject to no popular dispute.

2022, ‘en vrac’...

 

Refugees ?

We are the refugees, we who live in the concrete jungle, we are the manpower of the leeches who drink our blood daily, parked like cattle, exiled from nature, killers of the earth & ourselves.

We are exiled from fresh light, the sun - & vit D, from fresh water, fresh food, fresh everything. We are canned alive !!

Who is able today to ride eight hours straight under the rain, sleep on the sideway on the frozen ground ? That, man was able to do a mere 200 years ago.

We have become shadows of men, caricatures of living beings. We are sitting ducks waiting to be taken down by created wars, illnesses, misery, crime, bribes, whatever the rulers see fit to profit their grip.

Stomp on the flags !!!

The war flags, the market flags, the money flags, the national flags, the religious flags, the political flags …

Remember who you are, a piece of love between God and us and between ourselves.

The Y chromosome is going to disappear, scientists say

Dictatorship of the proletariat

A high trust society

ARTIFICIAL WOMBS

Nuclear Fusion Incinerates Climate Crazies

Unleashing Clean Fusion Power is America's Best Defense Against Tyranny

The Other Lab in Wuhan: The German-Chinese “Laboratory for Virus Research”

Anything Mao Can Do I Can Do Better: Xi Jinping (Clear enough ?)

BREAKING - 12/21/2022

Entire Battalion of German Puma Tanks Fail to Pass Latest Drill inEmbarrassing Blow to its Military Capabilities

+ ... Scientists Develop Gelatinous Robots to Crawl Through Human Body to Deliver Medical Payloads, Diagnose Illnesses

'Lies My Government Told Me, and the Better Future Coming'

 

G20 Signs Declaration for International Vaccine Passport

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola, December 04, 2022

 

Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA and DNA vaccine core platform technology (the

original platform, not the current mRNA COVID shots), has published a new book, “Lies

My Government Told Me: And the Better Future Coming,” in which he analyzes the tyranny

we currently face, and how to get out from under it

 

The first part of the book reviews the reality of censorship of medical and scientific truth

during the COVID pandemic, and the emergence of global totalitarianism

 

The second part tries to answer the question, “Who or what is behind it all?” Malone

believes it’s a combination of bad actors with nefarious intent, and opportunism

 

The last part of the book is focused on how to create a better future. A major part of the

answer lies in creating decentralized, local intentional communities, and to create the

potential for networking between them on a national and international level, while

remaining independent and self-governed

 

A good way to avoid groupthink that results in policy fiascos is to establish completely

separate problem-solving groups that do not interact with each other. Only after each

group has independently come up with their own ideas do they come together to share,

analyze and find common ground

(...)

'The Lies My Government Told Me'

As explained by Malone, the basic structure of "The Lies My Government Told Me" is like that of a physician's approach to a new patient.

"When the patient first comes to you, you want to understand their main problem, their chief complaint, and take a history and do a physical. Then you go through a process of determining a diagnosis. What's really wrong with them? What's causing them to have that complaint? Then you come up with a treatment plan.

That was the basic idea of the structure of the book. The first third of it is personal anecdotes from people — myself, Meryl Nass, Paul Marik, Pierre Kory and many others who have experienced directly the censorship, the deplatforming, loss of license, all these things, so that people can have a sense of what it's really been like at the forefront; what people have been experiencing …

 

The second part is an excursion, trying to get to sense-making, which really started with Bret Weinstein's Dark Horse podcast, when he posed the question to me and to Steve Kirsch, 'What's really behind this? Is there a grand conspiracy, a single conspiracy, or is this an emergent phenomenon?'

I think in the end, having spent months and months running down all these little warrens, these rabbit holes of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the central banks, Tony Fauci, the DOD and all of that stuff, I've come to the conclusion that it is really multifactorial, and that it is a situation where, I'm sure, there were some nefarious bad actors behind this.

 

But in addition, there was a lot of opportunism and people taking advantage of a system in a situation in ways that they had kind of planned before, that when something like this came up they would take advantage of it.

Folks like Ed Dowd … [have made it] quite clear that there were major financial liquidity problems going into this, and that that opportunity was exploited to inject massive amounts of capital and restructure the economy in ways that we're still just beginning to appreciate as we're encountering inflation and the stagflation cycle we're in. So, the middle part is about making sense [of the situation]."

 

Creating a Better Future Through Decentralization

The last part of the book is focused on the subhead of the book's title, which is about creating a better, more humane, future. As noted by Malone, after everything we've been through during these past three years, it can be difficult to envision a future that doesn't involve a totalitarian One World Government, replete with forced eugenics protocols, as envisioned by WEF founder Karl Schwab and his transhumanist philosophy guru Yuval Noah Harari.

 

But there is a way. The answer is basically the converse of the problem. Since the problem, the driver toward totalitarianism, is centralization and top-down governance, the answer lies in the creation of self-sustainable decentralized systems and self-governance.

"How do you envision a better future when you come to grips with the dark mutterings of Harari and Schwab, talking about transhumanism and the Fourth Industrial revolution, the fusion of man and machine, the excess surplus labor, the need for guaranteed basic income, the logic behind 'You will own nothing and be happy.'

Which actually has a business model behind it — when you come to terms with the willingness of our government to suspend the Bill of Rights and fundamental ways, and the willingness of our government to disregard the norms of bioethics that have been established for generations? …

How do you imagine a better future when you're confronted by what is clearly a thrust towards totalitarian control? … How do you envision a future where there's such a massive force driving towards a centralized-command economy totalitarianism, based on the concepts of Marxist utilitarianism?

 

The answer is best captured in one of the final chapters from a group in Italy … IppocrateOrg. They, like the World Council for Health under Tess Lori have been very committed to a vision of decentralization and intentional communities. They give some great examples of what they've done, which I think are a fantastic opportunity for the world to learn through their experience.

The physicians in Italy were censored at least as bad as the docs here in the states. Hundreds have lost their license, ability to practice, for the sin of providing early treatment and saving lives.

They've come together and formed this organization, and they're now starting their own medical school, Ippocrate, and they've done very novel things, like assembled local community groups in cities and towns throughout Italy that are engaging in training. This includes setting up training programs for physicians to despecialize.

So, doctors that had been hospitalists, that had been focused in very narrow specialties, are learning and have set up mentorship with primary care physicians to learn the tools of the trade to allow them to go back to old-school medicine, to treating patients, which is where so much of the joy comes from.

 

All of the things that they've been subjected to, just like many of the docs here in the United States, have led them to conclude that corporate medicine is just not the place they want to be …

I hope that what we can do is find our souls and move towards a future where we respect the importance of human dignity and commit ourselves to acting in integrity, with transparency. These are the things that we've lost.

I think what the book really brings to the fore is that all throughout the system of governance … we've lost integrity. People are willing to lie and misrepresent and hide behind their conflicts of interest and not disclose them. Somehow, we have to get back to a space where that's not acceptable."

 

How to Win on an Uneven Playing Field

Like Malone, I believe we can win by creating new decentralized systems to replace, on our own terms, the systems that are now falling apart. A surefire way to lose our freedoms and everything else is to do nothing and simply wait for the eugenics-centered cabal to replace them for us. Because they will.

They're decades ahead of us in terms of planning and they already have new top-down centralized systems ready to go. Programmable central bank digital currencies, digital identity and an international vaccine passport are just a few examples that will be implemented very soon.

 

The playing field is by no means even. But we can still overcome their plans, for the simple reason that "average people" outnumber the globalist cabal by millions to one. They need our cooperation, or their new enslavement system won't work. We saw this with vaccine mandates.

No one, at least not in the U.S., was ever held down and injected at gun point. They used every conceivable and inconceivable method of coercion, yes, but they couldn't use physical force.

 

One reason for that is because there's too many of us. They need us to enter their system by choice, even if it's a coerced choice. So, our greatest weapon is simply refusal, to say no, even if it costs us in the short-term, and to instead enter into and support emerging parallel alternative systems.

 

One example of this is the emergence of alternative free-speech social media platforms and online payment systems to replace Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, GoFundMe or EventBrite.

 

No one actually "has to" use any of those platforms anymore, because there are alternatives that won't mine and sell your personal data, censor your viewpoints, fine you for wrongthink or dictate who you can and cannot send money to. So, make the switch sooner rather than later. Support the alternatives that are cropping up rather than feeding a beast intent on swallowing you whole.

 

Our Immediate Challenges

Granted, some of our immediate challenges will indeed be challenging and will require our participation. Coming right up is the planned implementation of an international vaccine passport. The World Health Organization is also seeking to attain the sole authority to dictate the global response to declared pandemics. Can a decentralized model be successful in the face of the global cabal continuing their efforts to eliminate our freedoms? Malone responds:

 

"I'm being hit with multiple requests for press commentary about this new position that the G20 has taken in favor of personal ID health certificates to restrict global travel. I fear that things have progressed to such a point that we may not be able to overcome the momentum that confronts us.

 

The modification of the international health regulations is proposed to be backed by the World Trade Organization as the enforcement arm for the World Health Organization, so that they'll be able to impose sanctions on noncompliant countries.

Had we had a major red wave [in the midterm] elections, I would've been more optimistic. But I fear that this will get pushed through under this administration this summer … I'm of the opinion that to a significant extent, they will have their way with us. So, what do you do in the face of that? What do you do in the face of this profound evil? …

I've just come back from a three-day meeting in Mexico City with a group of very intelligent folks that are very active in business and investment, and many of them are establishing their own local intentional communities. My sense is that there is a reasonable chance that we will see these local consortium collections of intentional communities pop up all over the world.

 

The opportunity is to create some way for them to come together and form their own network, their own matrix. My concern is that right now we're so dependent on an internet that is subject to arbitrary and capricious modification from the ICANN [the Internet governance] committee or others. There are some fundamental problems we have to solve, but I think there are ways that we can approach this.

 

The solution cannot be imposed or created by any one person or even a small group of people, because then we'll end up falling into exactly the same trap. I think that it has to emerge organically, from many different groups from all over the world, interacting with each other.

 

But I think what we can do is envision a process to enable it. I think that process starts by defining what the need is. What it is that we as a community of independent thinkers and networks need?

I think we can envision a process where key people come together, representing their communities, and define what it is that we want to see in a decentralized world, and what the problems are in getting there. Once we define what those are, then we can start working on coming up with solutions to that problem set."

 

How to Avoid Groupthink Traps

Malone suggests we learn the lessons presented in Irving Janis' book "Victims of Groupthink," in which he points out that the most effective way to avoid the kinds of policy fiascos the U.S. government finds itself in on a regular basis is to create completely separate problem-solving groups that do not interact with each other.

 

Each group is given a common set of problems (which is why our problems need to be defined), and each group then comes up with their own solutions. Only then are the groups brought together to share their ideas.

"That way you have independent solutions coming from a diverse array of different people from different cultures and nation states," he says. "Then, [we] come together and see if we can find common ground among those. I think that's a process that could work. But I'm very wary of anybody who thinks they have the answer right now.

I think I might be able to help facilitate [such] a process, so, what I'm trying to focus on is, how could we get there? Not saying, 'Oh, I know the answer, we need to do this or do that.'

 

There are a lot of classic traps that the medical freedom movement is starting to find itself in, and one of those is the trap of cults of personality. It's easy to get caught up in the fame and adulation, but I think we really have to fight that and come together in a way that does not set up any one person to be the leader, but rather enables all of us to be leaders."

 

An Invisible Prison Has Been Built Just for You

Henry George vs Recreation.gov

 

What a delight to see that Henry George's spirit hangs around ...

Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks ?

BY TYLER DURDEN. FRIDAY, DEC 02, 2022

Authored by Matt Stoller via BIG,

 

Two of the classic works of late 19th century American political literature, representing precisely opposite views of how commerce in an industrialized democracy ought to work, are Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, and the speeches of George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall.

George was one of the great political economists of his day, and he ran and lost for mayor of New York City on an anti-monopoly and land reform ticket. George was interested in why we experienced tremendous inequality in the midst of great wealth, and traced it to the exploitation of land.

 

George was an international superstar, influencing both Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, as well as environmentalists and the modern libertarian movement. (There’s an iconic statue of the greatest mayor in Cleveland history, Tom Johnson, with Johnson holding a copy of Progress and Poverty.) The modern academic profession of economics arose in part as a reaction to the popular success of George’s work. The game Monopoly comes directly from George, and in many ways, the national parks, as well as everything from spectrum allocation to offshore oil drilling, must wrestle with Georgeist thinking.

But by land, he meant far more than just the plots upon which we live. “The term land,” George wrote, “necessarily includes, not merely the surface of the earth as distinguished from the water and the air, but the whole material universe outside of man himself, for it is only by having access to land, from which his very body is drawn, that man can come in contact with or use nature.” Unlike Marx, who saw the exploitation of capital over labor, George thought that the root of social disorder was a result of the power of the landowner over both capital and labor.

 

By land, he meant all value drawn purely from nature or from collective human existence. He would, for instance, consider ‘network effects’ a form of land, and likely seek regulation or national control of search engines. George had his first run-in with monopoly in San Francisco, where a telegraph monopolist destroyed his newspaper by denying him wire service. But his key work, in 1879, was written before the rise of the giant trusts, just as railroads, which were really land kingdoms, were becoming dominant.

 

A much more cynical set of works are the speeches of Plunkitt. Plunkitt was a political boss in New York City, a proud machine politician in office at the same time in the same political arena as George. Both men were interested in modern industry and wealth, and in both cases, the key fulcrum around which power flowed was not capital, but land. But while George sought a better world, Plunkitt just wanted to get rich, and saw in the purchase of land one of the key ways to do that.

Plunkitt’s key moral guidepost was the practical wielding of political power to enrich oneself. He posited something called “Honest Graft,” which he distinguished from crime in a formulation that every important corporate lobbyist, knowingly or not, has since used. To Plunkitt, stealing would be taking something that doesn’t belong to you. But if you happened to know that the city would need a piece of land, and you got there first, well, that was simply smart. As Plunkitt put it:

"I could get nothin' at a bargain but a big piece of swamp, but I took it fast enough and held on to it. What turned out was just what I counted on. They couldn't make the park complete without Plunkitt's swamp, and they had to pay a good price for it. Anything dishonest in that?"

 

George was part of the land reform anti-monopoly school of Anglo-American thought, from Frederick Douglass to Thaddeus Stevens. Plunkitt was a machine politician, and proud of it. The battle between these two elements of America, the desire to conserve the public weal versus the desire to cynically plunder it, is still fierce today. It will probably never end.

And that brings me to the political conflict over our national parks, and the strange situation whereby a large government contractor, Booz Allen, somehow found itself in a position to rent us back our own land.

 

 

Red Rock Canyon in Nevada.

Every day, visitors to Vermilion Cliffs National Monument in Northern Arizona hike into an area named Coyote Buttes North to see one of the “most visually striking geologic sandstone formations in the world,” which is known as The Wave. On an ancient layer of sandstone, millions of years of water and wind erosion crafted 3,000-foot cliffs, weird red canyons that look like you are on the planet Mars, and giant formations that look like crashing waves made of rock. There are old carvings known as ‘petroglyphs’ on cliff walls, and even “dinosaur tracks embedded in the sediment.”

 

The Wave is unlike anywhere else on Earth. It is also part of a U.S. national park, and thus technically, it’s open to anyone. Yet, to preserve its natural beauty, the Bureau of Land Management lets just 64 people daily visit the area. Snagging one of these slots is an accomplishment, a ticket into The Wave is known as “The Hardest Permit to Get in the USA” by Outside and Backpacker Magazines.

To apply requires going to Recreation.gov, the site set up to manage national parks, public cultural landmarks, and public lands, and paying $9 for a “Lottery Application Fee.” If you win, you get a permit, and pay a recreation fee of $7. The success rate for the lottery is between 4-10%, and some people spend upwards of $500 before securing an actual permit.

 

But while the recreation fee of $7 goes to maintaining the park - which is what Henry George would appreciate - the money for the “Lottery Application Fee” is pure Plunkitt. That money goes to the giant D.C. consulting firm, Booz Allen and Company. In fact, since 2017, more and more of America’s public lands - over 4,200 facilities and 113,000 individual sites across the country at last count - have been added to the Recreation.gov database and website run by Booz Allen, which in turn captures various fees that Americans pay to visit their national heritage.

You can do a lot at Recreation.gov. You can sign up for a pass to cut down a Christmas tree on the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests, get permits to fly-fishing, rifle hunting or target practice at thousands of sites, or even secure a tour at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. There are dozens of lotteries to enter for different parks and lands that are hard to access. And all of them come with service fees attached, fees that go directly to Booz Allen, which built Recreation.gov. The deeper you go, the more interesting the gatekeeping. As one angry writer found out after waiting on hold and being transferred multiple times, the answer is that Booz Allen “actually sets the Recreation.gov fees for themselves.”

 

Lately, hundreds of sites have begun requiring the use of the site. A typical example is Red Rock Canyon, which added "timed entry permit" in the past two years. Such parks, before adding these new processes, usually do a "trial" period followed by a public comment period, and then the fees are approved by a Resource Advisory Council, objects of derision composed of people appointed by the government bureaus. As one person involved in the process told me, these councils are sort of ridiculous. “Agencies fill it with people beholden to them,” he said. “so the council playing committee rubber stamps whatever they send their way, often even if it makes no sense.”

 

The entry permit almost always become permanent. This includes heavily visited lands like Acadia National Park (4 million annual visitors), Arches National Park (1.5 million), Glacier National Park (3 million), Rocky Mountain National Park (4.4 million), and Yosemite (3.3 million). There’s nothing wrong with charging a fee for the use of a national park, as long as that fee is necessary for the upkeep and is used to maintain the public resource.

 

That was in fact the point of the law passed in 2004 - the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act - to give permanent authority to government agencies to charge fees for the use of public lands. But what Booz Allen is doing is different. The incentives are creating the same dynamics for public lands that we see with junk fees across the economy. Just as airlines are charging for carry-on bags and hotels are forcing people to pay ‘resort fees,’ some national parks are now requiring reservations with fees attached. And as scalpers automatically grabbed Taylor Swift tickets from Ticketmaster using high-speed automated programs, there are now bots booking campsites.

None of this is criminal, though the fee structure may not be lawful, but it is very George Washington Plunkitt. “I Seen My Opportunities,” he said, “and I Took ’Em.”

 

Honest Graft

The entry point for Booz Allen can be traced back to the Obama administration, and a giant failed IT project. In 2010, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, pledging that by 2014, the government would have a website up in which uninsured Americans could buy health insurance with various subsidies. In perhaps one of the most embarrassing moments of the Obama administration, Healthcare.gov failed to launch the day the new health law came into force, and millions couldn’t sign up to take advantage of it.

It’s hard to overstate the shame of that moment. The government had spent $400 million over four years - more time than it took the U.S. to enter and win World War II - and yet, the dozens of contractors couldn’t set up a website to take sign-ups. The whole thing was an embarrassing disaster, a festival of incompetence and greed. (Despite the failure, the main IT contractor’s CEO became a billionaire. Honest graft indeed.)

 

President Obama hired Google’s Mike Dickerson to come in and fix the Healthcare.gov website, which Dickerson and his team did. This wasn’t some miracle, it’s not like websites were new technology. The government itself created the internet and most of the underpinnings of digital technology, and it had many functional and important systems. But the Google name at that point was magic, and so the U.S. Digital Service, designed to help the government use technology, was born. After Dickerson, the new head was Google’s Matt Cutts, and then health care monopolist Optum’s Mina Hsiang. The U.S. Digital Service, far from being particularly competent, is a branding exercise. It is full of people from Amazon and Google, and tends to push the government to outsource its technology to third party contractors.

 

Following the U.S. Digital Service’s playbook is what led the government to bid out and allow the creation of Recreation.gov, with its weird and corrupt fee structure. In 2017, Booz Allen got a 10-year $182 million contract to consolidate all booking for public lands and waters, with 13 separate agencies participating, from the Bureau of Land Management to the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration to the National Park Service to the Smithsonian Institution to the Tennessee Valley Authority to the US Forest Service.

 

The funding structure of the site is exactly what George Washington Plunkitt would design. Though there’s a ten year contract with significant financial outlays, Booz Allen says the project was built “at no cost to the federal government.” In the contractor’s words, “the unique contractual agreement is a transaction-based fee model that lets the government and Booz Allen share in risk, reward, results, and impact.” In other words, Booz Allen gets to keep the fees charged to users who want access to national parks. Part of the deal was that Booz Allen would get the right to negotiate fees to third party sites that want access to data on Federal lands.

 

It’s a bit hard to tell how much Booz Allen was paid to set up the site. Documents suggest the firm received a lot of money to do so, but it’s also possible that total amount was the anticipated financial return. I wrote to Recreation.gov team leader Julie McPherson at Booz Allen to find out what they were paid to build the site, and I haven’t heard back. Regardless, there’s a lot of money involved. For instance, as one camper noted, in just one lottery to hike Mount Whitney, more than 16,000 people applied, and only a third got in. Yet everyone paid the $6 registration fee, which means the gross income for that single location is over $100,000. There’s nothing criminal about this scheme, but it is a form of Honest Graft, or of handing a Ticketmaster-like firm control of our national parks.

 

Judgment Day

In 2020, an avid hiker named Thomas Kotab sued the Bureau of Land Management over the $2 “processing fee it charges to access the mandatory online reservation system to visit the Red Rock Canyon Conservation Area.” He claimed, among other things, that the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act mandated that this fee was unlawful, because it had not gone through the notice-and-comment period required by the act. Kotab, an electrical engineer by training, is one of those ass-kickers in America, who just goes after a grift because, well, it’s just wrong.

 

A few years later, a judge named Jennifer A. Dorsey, appointed by Obama in 2013, agreed with him. She looked at the statute and found that Congress authorized the charging of recreation fees for the purpose of taking care and using Federal lands, not administrative fees that compensated third parties. As such, Booz Allen’s ability to set its own prices was inconsistent with the law mandating the public’s right to comment on what we are charged for using our own land.

 

The BLM sought to appeal, but then dropped it in July. Rather than a bitter procedural argument about classifying fees, the government and Booz Allen have decided they’ll just go through the annoying process of having the public comment on Booz Allen’s compensation, and then ignore us using their phony advisory council process. Here, for instance, is the Mojave-Southern Great Basin Resource Advisory Council Meeting in August simply proposing to substitute new standard amenity fees “equal to the associated Recreation.gov reservation service fee.”

One notable part of this saga is that technically, the BLM and Booz Allen owe refunds to everyone who went through Red Rock Canyon’s timed entry system from 2020-2022, but they’ll probably ignore that and steal the money. That verges into actual graft from the ‘honest’ type, but I suspect Plunkitt did that as well from time to time.

 

And yet, it’s not over. The Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act authorization runs out in October of 2023, which means that Congress has to renew it. Hopefully, an interested member of Congress who loves Federal lands could actually tighten the definitions here, and find a way to stop Booz Allen and these 13 government agencies from engaging in this minor theft via junk fees. It wouldn’t be hard, and it would be fun to force a bunch of government agencies to actually do their job and either take over the site themselves or pay Booz Allen a fee for its service. (Another path would be Joe Biden, through his anti-junk fee initiative, simply asserting through the White House Competition Council to the 13 different agencies that they end Booz Allen’s practice of charging these kinds of fees.)

 

It’s easy enough to see scams everywhere, and here is certainly one of them. But let’s not lose sight of the broader point. Henry George, at least in this fight, has won. Yes, Booz Allen gets to steal some pennies, but we have a remarkable system of public lands and waters that are broadly available for all of us to use on a relatively equal basis. And we can still see the power of George-ism in the advocacy of hikers and in the intense view that members of Congress had when they passed the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act in 2004, which strictly regulated fees that Americans would have to pay to access our Federal lands. Indeed, the anger and revulsion I felt at the fees Booz Allen puts forward comes from George, even if I didn’t necessarily trace it there at first.

 

We are in a moment of institutional corruption, but these moments are transitory as institutions change. George Washington Plunkitt, and his political descendants at Booz Allen, might have gotten rich, but Henry George imparted instincts to Americans that are far more permanent.