Notes from the edge of civilization: November 9, 2025
Hunger games; even hungrier games, if you don't eat the swine; and the collective amnesia brought to you by your friendly, three-letter agencies.
Maybe Trump really is a genius.
Refuse to fund SNAP so the poor can’t afford to eat, then make weight-loss drugs cheaper so they don’t want to eat. Budget balanced. Problem solved. This is a perfect feedback loop of austerity and appetite suppression — fiscal discipline meets body discipline.
It’s hard not to admire the efficiency. The government just found a way to curb hunger and health spending in one shot: starve the population while giving them cheaper access to pharmaceutical pablum with extensive, deleterious side effects (treatable, of course, through more pharmaceutical magic).
The only glitch in this masterful merger of public cruelty and corporate profit came when a Big Pharma rep literally collapsed at the drug price announcement. There’s no explanation from the White House about his condition, other than he was light-headed but now he’s feeling fine. The ‘Died Suddenly’ crowd have their suspicions, but maybe it’s just that a body can’t take that much hypocrisy all at once.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
If cloned meat was something that made the food supply safer, cheaper, or more ethical, wouldn’t our overlords want to parade the “innovation” through every news outlet, hold a press conference with lab coats and smiling farmers, and throw a ticker tape parade in every town in North America?
Makes you wonder why the Canadians decided this news wasn’t so newsworthy: Health Canada has lifted long-standing restrictions on foods derived from cloned cattle and swine, removing them from the country’s “novel foods” list.
The new designation removes cloned beef and pork from a category that would require pre-market safety reviews and public disclosure. That means Canadian consumers now have no way of knowing if they are eating cloned-animal products.
Why would Health Canada choose this approach? Probably because they know any other approach would appear dystopian and people would object. They know a full-blown public consultation with unbiased media coverage would go sideways faster than water freezes in a Winnipeg winter. So why bother with the formalities? Frame it as a routine regulatory update — not a fundamental rewrite of what “food” actually is.
Collapse Life brings you news of these stealthy, underhanded, inhumane changes to things as important and life-sustaining as food precisely so you can look out for yourself and your families. Because, in the age of “trust the science,” the only thing they don’t trust is what you’ll do if you actually know what’s on your plate.
On Thursday, the United Nations Security Council voted to lift sanctions against General Aladeen Ahmed al-Sharaa — the Syrian leader formerly known as Mohammed al-Jolani.
It’s a remarkable comeback for a man once synonymous with the region’s darkest chapters. Al-Sharaa was once a top gun in Al Qaeda in Iraq and helped found al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate. Until recently, the US had a $10 million bounty on his head. Now he’s being invited to the White House and has been rebranded as a “stabilizing force” for Syria.
You have to hand it to the global PR machine and their three-letter agency clients: there’s no sin that can’t be scrubbed clean with a new LinkedIn title and a handshake photo-op. What Sacha Baron Cohen once mercilessly mocked in The Dictator as cartoonish propaganda — strongmen reinvented as progressive reformers while oil pipelines and geopolitical interests hum in the background — has now become actual policy.
We used to laugh at the absurdity. Now we call it foreign policy. Predictive programming?
