TOKYO -- Shortages of rice have recently been seen across Japan, and the price of the staple food is soaring. But close to 100% of Japan's rice is domestically produced and the yield of crops appears normal, so why is this happening?

The Mainichi Shimbun spoke with Kazuhito Yamashita, a former bureaucrat at Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries and a research director at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, about the background to the rice commotion, shedding light on the reality of rice policies that have disregarded consumers. Questions and answers from the interview follow:

No poor harvest

Question: Why is there a shortage of rice and why are prices high?

The Vigilant Fox 🦊

@VigilantFox

WHOOPSIE: RFK Jr. reveals that if the Democrats hadn't resorted to mafia tactics and just left him alone, “they probably would win this election.”

Kennedy's internal polling showed that he took far more votes away from Trump than Harris.

Instead, the DNC hired a woman named Liz Smith and other operatives to "collect dirt" by interviewing anyone Bobby knew for the past 70 years.

Kennedy told Tucker, “I got calls from, for example, a guy that I met at an AA meeting 40 years ago, and he received a call. Most of my family members received calls, contacts, either text or telephone calls from people who said, 'I'm doing intelligence for the DNC, and we'd like to talk to you about Robert Kennedy.'"

“They didn't want me running ... It was not smart because I was actually helping the Democrats. And if they just let me stay in and they didn't run this campaign against me, they probably would win this election.”

Michael Yon: Callsign BIG HONEY 6

@Michael_Yon

Trashy Degenerates such as Black “ku klux klan” General CQ Brown.  Openly detests and hates and white people and is top General in U.S. military — which military openly helps invade USA while engaging in child trafficking.  CQ Brown is a useful idiot, another condom for globalists.  Brown’s masters will discard him the moment he’s of no use.  Same masters will do same with drug and jab pushers like
@ScottAdamsSays
, who in his faux-brilliance realized only too late he had taken the poison and there is no seat for him on the globalist “ark.”  
@joerogan
and others will also be discarded as quickly as third-worlders discard their hamburger wrappers while polluting our roadways with litter from the cars they steal.

There is no border crisis.  There is no border.  You are at war.

See this article from
@DougAMacgregor

Monday, Aug 26, 2024 - 07:15 PM

Macgregor: America's Reckoning With Reality

The Republican and Democratic National Conventions, always heavy on glamor and light on substance, are over. It’s time to move beyond sloganeering and address reality.

In the United States, the price of food is up 21 percent in three years. Thirty-year mortgage rates were 3.7 percent; they are now 7 percent. Rents are skyrocketing, car loan delinquencies are rising and, last year, there were at least 150,000 reports of American children going missing in what is becoming a child-trafficking emergency.

Millions of Americans think that our society is experiencing a moral collapse. Divorce is widespread, single parents struggle to raise children, drug abuse is rampant, suicide rates are high, and the rule of law is collapsing across the country.

Is it really a surprise that Americans doubt their institutions, their courts, even the leadership of their own armed forces? Americans feel disconnected from their collective, national identity. Shamed into isolation and self-hatred under the oppressive weight of mass-media, pop-culture, and official deceit, Americans feel helpless to stop their freefall into nihilism—the belief in nothing, not justice or beauty, no divine influence, just nothing.  

Americans feel like their homeland is being transformed into a wasteland. More and more Americans think that taxation without representation is the norm in all 50 states, not just in DC. Voting for one or another of the major parties, Democrats or Republicans, does little to arrest the nation’s descent into chaos.

What does Washington’s ruling political class of so-called Democrats and Republicans, hereafter referred to as the Uniparty, think?

Frankly, the Uniparty does not care.

While American wages declined, and jobs dried up Washington’s ruling political class grew rich from insider deals and cronyism. Since January 2021, America’s 750 billionaires have increased their wealth by $1.5 trillion. Like the political figures the billionaires pick to run the government, including 5,000 political appointees, they have no “skin in the game.”

The Uniparty celebrates trashy, degenerate events like the opening ceremony for the Olympics in Paris. Americans who object to the degradation of Christianity and Western values and beliefs are dismissed as bigots, extremists, or White Christian Nationalists.

Americans want to know what is happening to their country. Americans want to know why they are living in a world where the ugly pretend to be beautiful and the beautiful are being brainwashed to think that they are ugly.

Part of the answer is that the politics of identity are no longer just a campaign strategy. They are now a reality, a permanent feature of America’s political landscape.

Why else would General C.Q. Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, complain that the U.S. Armed Forces have too many white pilots? Anyone who thinks that the federal programs for diversity, inclusion, and equity are sincere and mean anything other than hatred for our country and the generations of Americans that fought and died for it is extremely naive. It’s like suggesting the Ku Klux Klan was pro-civil rights in the 1960s.

Thanks to open borders, a system of “one ballot, one vote” is replacing “one citizen, one vote.” Thanks to this system of institutionalized fraud, Americans can expect the Uniparty’s new crop of illegal foreign “voters,” a mix of future dependents, lawbreakers, low-skilled workers, to show up on November 5 and vote to decide America’s future. These are also the masses of foreigners, with no ties to our society, that the ruling class wants to staff our armed forces.

Why would the Uniparty inflict this damage on the American People?

The Uniparty knows that, without common identity or kinship, democracy is replaced with tribal anarchy, a societal condition that leads to nihilism, drug abuse, criminality, and worse.  

The goal is painfully obvious. It is the denationalization of the United States, the fundamental destruction of national identity and the social cohesion that supports it. The process involves the conversion of Americans into an amorphous mass of sedated consumers. The transformation of the U. S. Armed Forces into mercenary military formations staffed by illegal migrants is an enormously important step in the direction of denationalization.

After all, before Americans won their independence, their national identity rested on the shoulders of the Continental Army. If General Washington could hold the Continental Army together despite fearful odds, our country and its governing body—congress—existed.  The Continental Army was, and today’s Armed Forces still are, the repository of American national Identity.

The Uniparty rejects these charges. Instead, the Uniparty tells us how fortunate we are to welcome tens of millions of foreigners into our country where they will enhance our culture, society and way of life. Really, how many “Rs” are there in “fat chance?”

Meanwhile, the Uniparty promotes the sexualization of children in our public school systems. Naturally, the Uniparty pretends to care for the workingman or woman, and it promises everything to everyone for nothing in perpetuity—tuition-free college, free health care, free housing, free everything. The Uniparty is giving non-paying, illegal immigrants access to our healthcare system.

How the Uniparty will pay for these things is a question no one answers. Servicing the national debt on an annual basis already involves a sum larger than the defense budget. Are the presidential candidates aware? Do they care? For the Uniparty, none of these concerns matters. The daily life of the Uniparty is about self-enrichment, sensual pleasure, and social prestige. The Uniparty motto is “When in doubt, print more money.”

Equally troubling is the Uniparty’s enthusiasm for war. In fact, the Uniparty sees enormous benefit to war, even to the point of turning over control of the U.S. Armed Forces to the direction of a foreign power for use in a major war that will escalate to involve other nuclear-armed powers.

But Americans are not stupid.

Americans know that open borders are not a net benefit, and they know that modern war is not a game or an event that occurs only on foreign soil. The new, emerging constellation of potential adversaries in Eastern Europe and the Middle East is no longer a loose collection of hapless opponents without armies, air forces, navies, air defenses, or persistent surveillance from seabed to space.  

President Abraham Lincoln was right: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

The time for Americans to halt the destruction is upon us.

The question is whether Americans will remain bystanders or intervene to save the Republic.