OffGuardian (official)

Menace on the Menu: The Financialisation of Farmland and the War on Food and Farming Between 2008 and 2022, land prices nearly doubled throughout the world and tripled in Central-Eastern Europe. In the UK, an influx of investment from pension funds and private wealth contributed to a doubling of farmland prices from 2010-2015. Land prices in the US agricultural heartlands of Iowa quadrupled between 2002 and 2020. Agricultural investment funds rose ten-fold between 2005 and 2018 and now regularly include farmland as a stand-alone asset class, with US investors having doubled their stakes in farmland since 2020. Meanwhile, agricultural commodity traders are speculating on farmland through their own private equity subsidiaries, while new financial…... Read full article ... https://off-guardian.org/2024/05/16/menace-on-the-menu-the-financialisation-of-farmland-and-the-war-on-food-and-farming/

Brent and Neil go to Manchester – Introduction Read the whole series… Part I – Part II – Part III – Part IV – Part V – Part VI – Part VII – Part VIII – Part IX Brent Lee and Neil Sanders have released their 8 part exploration of Richard D. Hall’s Book and film called Manchester The Night of the Bang. You can download Richard’s book For Free Here. If you would like to support Richard’s work you can buy his book…... Read full article ... https://off-guardian.org/2024/05/15/brent-and-neil-go-to-manchester-introduction/

OffG is looking for (proven) fake news! We’re interesting in collating all the examples of fakery in the news for an article we are planning to run later this week. That would be doctored photos, proven lies, staged video footage. For example, there was the famous “bus incident” where two reporters from CNN were pretending to be miles apart, but were actually in the same car park. Or there was the “Rape on Campus” story from Rolling Stone, an account of a sexual assault that never happened. Specifically, one of our editors recalls seeing a picture where a reporter for a television network has “faked” a…... Read full article ... https://off-guardian.org/2024/05/13/offg-is-looking-for-proven-fake-news/

OffG is looking for fake news! For a an article we are planning for later this week, we are looking for proven examples of "fake news".

Virtual Home Invasions: We’re Not Safe from Government Peeping Toms

“The privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen—a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man’s life at will.” Justice William O. Douglas

The spirit of the Constitution, drafted by men who chafed against the heavy-handed tyranny of an imperial ruler, would suggest that one’s home is a fortress, safe from almost every kind of intrusion. Unfortunately, a collective assault…... Read full article ... https://off-guardian.org/2024/05/13/virtual-home-invasions-were-not-safe-from-government-peeping-toms/

This Week in the New Normal #90 Our successor to This Week in the Guardian, This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world. 1. UK Assisted Dying Law The UK will almost certainly have legalised euthanasia by the end of the year, if not this government then it will be among the first acts of Sir Keir Starmer’s “progressive” administration after the general election. The propaganda for this has been going and going and going for years, but it’s been a particularly hot-button issue for the last few months.…... Read full article ... https://off-guardian.org/2024/05/12/this-week-in-the-new-normal-90/

Anti-War Mothers – Celebrating Mother’s Day in the US

I refuse to raise my child to grow up to kill another mother’s child. Julia Ward Howe, founder of Mother’s Day, 1870

Originally conceived as a protest to war, Mother’s Day – celebrated in the US on the second Sunday of May – has become a marketing tool to boost consumer spending to give suck to Amazon and FTD florists. Now that Rosie the Riveter, maker of fighter planes and tanks, is the face of feminism, we tend to forget that many of the early feminists were anti-war activists who had a deep respect for motherhood. Feminism has been…... Read full article ... https://off-guardian.org/2024/05/12/anti-war-mothers-celebrating-mothers-day-in-the-us/

Too Massive to Comprehend I remember a time not too long ago when you could sort of see what was happening in the world, even in your own backyard, with some degree of certainty. If you looked hard enough, got past the politics, and the greedy capitalists, and the ideological socialists, you could make some sense of it. Even then it took some work. You had to read a lot and find journalists, historians, and authors you could somewhat trust. Throw in a bit of common sense here and there, and you could pretty much lock on to a rather trustworthy sense of…... Read full article ... https://off-guardian.org/2024/05/11/too-massive-to-comprehend/

WATCH: How To Save The World! You know what the most powerful weapon in the world is, don’t you? And you know how to use that weapon to change the course of human history, right? If not, don’t fret! James is here to tell you all about it. Don’t miss this short, simple, to-the-point presentation on How To Save The World in this week’s edition of The Corbett Report podcast. Sources and download options for this video are available here, for more Corbett Report content click here.... Read full article ... https://off-guardian.org/2024/05/10/watch-how-to-save-the-world/

Wings, Prayers and Hooplas It took me a year before I finally succumbed to a phone that would accept 5G. They bugged me and bugged me by phone and email and text messages to upgrade to this new phone. I resent this all to hell. I don’t much like it—this new phone. I hate the damn thing. It makes far more noise than my old one. It seems to want an inordinate amount of my attention and I don’t know how to use it and don’t want to learn. I will never learn any of its features because I just don’t bloody care…... Read full article ... https://off-guardian.org/2024/05/10/wings-prayers-and-hooplas/