Monday, January 31, 2022

Mysterious Claw Marks & Odor Encountered by Zimbabwean Witness







Exactly one climax predator is properly associated with the smell of dead meat and that is the Giant Sloth.  This creature also has a global distribution while adept at not been observed visually.

This one is in Africa, but also contained by two plantation walls.  The creature was chanelled in front of the witness.  Pretty dramatic.  Claw marks also conform to expectations.

Of course they are about. fotunately they maintain hunting ranges and are thus well spaced.  Home ground observation is rare and this is no exception.


Mysterious Claw Marks & Odor Encountered by Zimbabwean Witness

Friday, January 28, 2022


https://www.phantomsandmonsters.com/2022/01/mysterious-claw-marks-odor-encountered.html?

A Zimbabwean woman encounters a terrible odor while walking her dogs in a forestry plantation. She observed deep claw marks in a tree, unlike what is seen from the local wildlife.

I recently came across the following account:

“I was born in the country of Zimbabwe, in Africa. I left to live in the UK when I was 28. I'm now 49 and I’m still in the UK, where I feel much safer, as Africa is not a very kind place to live. The country I lived in is land-locked and has a big forestry industry which is used for export and trade. I lived most of my life on various forestry plantations way out in isolated and remote places where very few other people live.

The forestry industry plants their pine trees in large blocks with each tree being on a grid pattern, since its pine nothing grows beneath them due to the soil becoming acidic, so there is no ground cover or any brush or shrub. Like most remote places, the roads are really just dust without any covering which means mud, rain, and hard baked earth from the sun.




I would take my three small terrier dogs walking each day, leaving the house after lunch and I would usually be out for just over an hour. I walked the same route each time, up along a dirt road between two blocks of almost mature pine trees. At this point on the route the road then curved around one block of trees and came back to meet the road from the house, forming a loop. It's a breathtaking walk with trees on both sides of you. However, the trees fall away on the right of the road half way up and it gives a stunning view of the hills covered in shrubs and bush grass.

I went walking one afternoon as normal and I heard a growl in the bush grass just up from the house. My three dogs fled in terror and whatever was in the bush chased them. I later found out it was a leopard with a cub, so I waited a week then went walking again. Thankfully there was no sign of momma cat and I was careful to avoid her cub zone as I had the dogs and they are a delicacy for leopards.

About half way into the walk, just as the trees on the right cleared away and the view opened up, I started to smell something I have never had before. It had a strong ammonia scent, like cat urine, but it was shocking how powerful the stench seemed to be out in the open like that. The dogs reacted in a strange way, they ran to me and cowered between my ankles whimpering. I know a leopard would have spooked them into running home so I was confused about it being urine.

I stood my ground with the dogs between my legs, you learn early on never to run with wild animals, and I was also armed with a handgun being female and out alone. The smell got stronger and stronger, then it seemed to mix with the smell of wet dog fur. By this time I was terrified, but I did not know why. All I knew was I felt surrounded by something that was making the hair stand up on my body, yet I couldn't see anything. I wanted to run back the way I had come just to get away from whatever was happening there, but I knew if I ran and it turned out to be a big cat I was going to be attacked. So I did something that almost made me mess myself in fright.

I went forward and kept moving very slowly, one step at a time along the road into the smell. Have you ever been so frightened that you can hear blood roaring in your ears? I remember my teeth were literally chattering and the dogs were milling about between my legs with their tails against their bellies. That is not a good sign. The further along the track I got the more I looked around me and saw nothing. It's impossible, but there was nothing to see at all. How could I not see anything in a block of trees planted in straight rows with nothing growing beneath them when I could see straight to the other side of the block along the tree row?


I noticed an old gnarled tree standing alone on the right side of the road where the beautiful view was and although the tree had been there as long as I could remember, I stopped to look it over. About 8 feet up the trunk were fresh rips into the bark, but they were so deep they went into the wood below the bark. Each one looked around 15cm long and were fresh enough to have liquid sap leaking from them. I thought at that point it was probably a big cat and it had stretched up along the trunk to sharpen its nails. But it occurred to me that cats pull downwards and these cuts were at an odd angle.

There were two marks on the left and three on the right of the trunk, at about 30 degree angles. It looked like a person with long nails had reached up and started near the middle of the tree trunk then gouged outwards and down at the same time.

The smell was the strongest by that tree. I kept turning and looking in all directions as I moved forward then finally the smell just stopped. I was a long distance from the tree by then. The dogs were back to running between myself and whatever they were currently examining, everything was just normal again. I got home safe with all three dogs, but I was too frightened to go walking again.


I was 24 at the time. I have not had the courage to tell even my own family about this and only one other person knows the story. He is a skeptic and said it's probably just a wild cat.

A lot of strange things have happened in my life, both in Africa and the UK. Most of them are to do with me seeing lights in the sky at night, especially here in the UK. One other thing that happened on the same African tree plantation was that a UFO was seen the same week as the one that landed in Ruwa where the children at the school spoke to the occupants of an unidentified craft. I am still very confused over that one as we lost track of time when we were travelling to the fire lookout tower to see if we could see it. When we arrived, the lookout at the tower said it was gone and we chatted to the other fire towers along the mountain ridge who were still watching it as it moved south along the country. At least we got an eyewitness account from the man who saw it which was really interesting.

I just don't know what to think about that smell. It was so strong it burned my nose enough to make me want a tissue.

Do you have any thoughts on what it could have been? Have you heard of something like the smell before?” P

NOTE: Since the witness grew up in Zimbabwe, and that they were unfamiliar with the evidence, It's hard for me to offer an identification. I was also thinking big cat, but not sure what to think. Lon

If you wish to comment on this Phantoms & Monsters post, please go to Phantoms & Monsters Post Comments

Never-Before-Seen Rubbery Clots



Now we start to see the consequences of the Vaccine kill shot.  That fibre may werll be graphene. It is not obviously organic..

Again we are not confirming this cause of death yet.

I do remain hopeful that only a small fraction got the kill shot, yet so far this is awful and hte real numbers are rising while been suppressed.



Worldwide Exclusive: Embalmers Find Veins and Arteries Filled with Never-Before-Seen Rubbery Clots




Dr Jane Ruby has her own show now on Stew Peters' Rumble channel and on Wednesday, she was joined by board-certified embalmer and funeral director, Richard Hirschman.




As part of the embalming process, the veins of the deceased are first drained of all blood. In the middle of 2021, Hirschman says he began to discover these "unnatural blood clot combinations with strange fibrous materials" completely filling the vascular system, having totally clogged all of the arteries and veins of the deceased.




"I don't know how someone could live with something like this inside of them," he says.




The cause of death for most was heart attack and stroke but he says doctors making these assessments can't see what he's seeing – and he has never seen anything like this in over 20 years of practice.




These are not simple blood clots. They're compounded with long, stringy, white, elastic structures, that he can rinse under water.




These cases began appearing about 6 months after the vaxxine rollout, which makes sense to him, as "I can't imagine something like that happening overnight."




Over time, he's gone from seeing 50% of his embalmed cases with these types of blockages rise to almost 80% and many colleagues tell him they're seeing the same thing.




"I'm very concerned for the future," he says.




"My fear is this: If this is caused by the vaccine, which my gut is telling me it is – I can't prove that – but if this is caused by the vaccine, imagine the amount of people that will be dying in the future. Because, people can't live with this kind of substance floating around in their vessels and it's amazing how many people are dying of heart attacks and stroke, lately.




"If one of these small fibrous tissues gets up into the brain, they're going to have a stroke. If it gets into your heart, it's going to lead you to a heart attack...I don't want to be the bearer of bad news but at the same time, people need to know this.




"If it is the vaxxine that's causing this, we need to stop it. Whatever this stuff is, if we can figure out what it is, then maybe we can figure out a way to dissolve these things to help save peoples' lives."

Asia's coffee revolution: From Indonesia to Vietnam, homegrown beans are back



It is an evolutionary process that has been happening now for less than thirty years.  Recall one the go to home coffees used to be some brand of instant coffee before 1980.

Long term it is very promising considering that SE asia has hardly begun growing coffee vrietals.  The bigger reason is that its primary competator is tea or mate whose ability to be flavor adjusted and package is far less than that of coffee.  We do not sell a lot of instant tea either.  Tea has at least recovered enough to get on the board with Chais in particular.  It still cannot match the versatility of coffee.

Of course coffee provides twice the caffein hit so there is that as well.  Thirty years is a bare beginning for hte advent of premium coffee.  Expect steady market share growth.



A barista serves coffee in one of Seoul's many trendy cafes, the demand for which is growing throughout Asia due to the emergence of a new breed of pandemic era coffee connoisseurs. (Photo by Jean Chung)


Asia's coffee revolution: From Indonesia to Vietnam, homegrown beans are back

More disposable income and TikTok trends push coffee ahead of tea

NANA SHIBATA, CK TAN, ERWIDA MAULIA, LIEN HOANG and KIM JAEWON, Nikkei staff writersJANUARY 26, 2022 06:00 JST


TOKYO/SHANGHAI/JAKARTA/HO CHI MINH CITY/SEOUL -- Not a day goes by without a cup of coffee for Leo Hao, a native of Shanxi Province in China now working in Shanghai. The branding executive used to drink tea but switched to coffee in 2013 under the influence of his then-girlfriend, who is now his wife.

"I got hooked by the fact that coffee could be both cheap and tasty," recollected Hao, 32, who brews his own but also consumes coffee from the growing number of coffee outlets across China's cities.

Hao is part of the reason why Asia's coffee consumption has grown by 1.5% in the past five years, compared to 0.5% growth in Europe and 1.2% in the U.S, according to the International Coffee Organization, turning the region into the coffee world's soon-to-be center of gravity. Traditionally a tea-drinking region, Asia's growing coffee consumption is largely driven by the rise of a middle class that is keen to try anything trendy.

But coffee is about more than disposable incomes and caffeine addictions. It is a cultural phenomenon as well -- wrapped up in a long legacy of colonialism and imported Western influence, from Meiji Japan to colonial Vietnam to Dutch coffee plantations in Sumatra.

In China, for example, coffee is now a barometer of Western influence, brought back home mainly by people who studied abroad. Hao's wife acquired a taste for coffee in the Netherlands before returning to China.


Leo Hao is one of many Chinese who have switched to drinking coffee from tea. He was influenced by his wife, who has lived abroad. (Photo by Yu Jun)

"In many parts of Asia, coffee farming and exporting, as well as local coffee drinking cultures, are deeply rooted in countries' colonial past, as we see in the case of Vietnam with France, and Indonesia with the Netherlands," Nobuko Kobayashi, a partner at EY Japan, told Nikkei Asia. She added that westernized lifestyles, coupled with urbanization, have fueled consumers' demand for quick coffee, such as instant brews and takeout options.

However, spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian coffee drinkers' appetite for a more locally-produced caffeine hit has been growing in recent years. Domestic coffee producers own more of the value chain and indigenous coffee cultures are starting to rival Western imports like Starbucks and Costa. Currently, Asia produces 29% of the world's coffee beans, but the region (including Oceania) consumes only 22% of them.

Iman Kusumaputra, co-founder of Kopikalyan, an Indonesian coffee shop chain, is one of many coffee proprietors in Asia who see a massive business opportunity in balancing these numbers out. "Our vision is to become the first [international] coffee chain from a coffee-producing nation," he told Nikkei.


Iman Kusumaputra, left, hopes his Kopikalyan coffee chain makes homegrown beans more mainstream in his native Indonesia. (Photo by Dimas Ardian)

Kusumaputra noted that none of the big names such as Starbucks of the U.S, Costa Coffee of the U.K, Gloria Jeans Coffee of Australia or Arabica of Japan originate from coffee-producing countries such as Brazil, Vietnam or Indonesia. Kopikalyan is part of an Asiawide movement to break this trend, as home-brewers and coffee shop owners alike aim to reclaim coffee for the region that grows it.

Vietnam: The "crimson cherry" renaissance

Vietnam has been a coffee colossus in its own right, ever since French colonizers first harvested the crimson cherries (a fond nickname for the fruit of the coffee tree) in the 19th century. So deep-seated is coffee in Vietnamese culture that the crop has been integrated into the local lexicon: Bribes are "coffee money," and to socialize is to go ca phe ca phao. There is also the cultural export, ca phe sua da: thick robusta coffee made with teeth-rotting condensed milk, historically enjoyed by the French who lacked refrigerators to store fresh milk. Today, that legacy has helped Vietnam to become both the world's top robusta exporter and a cafe society.


Vietnam, the world's second largest exporter of coffee beans, has been known for producing the "crimson cherries" ever since its days as a French colony in the 1800s. (Photo by Ken Kobayashi)

Vietnam's coffee culture is as old as the trees, but it is evolving. Just look at the UCC Coffee Roastery in Ho Chi Minh City. Outside, street carts charge $1 for drip-filtered robusta that has been a cardinal feature of the country for more than a century. Inside, baristas specialize in siphon brewing, an entertaining task that makes the cafe look like a tiny science lab.

To demonstrate, a barista fires up a Bunsen-like burner that glows under a carafe of bubbling water. The pressure pushes the water through a siphon and into a beaker on top of the carafe, where the coffee steeps. The cafe is helping to push Vietnam past its robusta roots into an era of diverse, TikTok-fueled tastes, catering to two groups in particular: those who want something fun to try, like a frappe, and hobbyists busy with all the minutiae of terroir and roasting.

"Information is open, it's easier for people to research coffee origins and reviews now," UCC manager Phan Thi Kieu Nga told Nikkei over a cup of Kenyan arabica, fanning the steam to coax out its maple-syrup scent. "So people's knowledge of coffee quality is growing." Customers often ask Nga about flavor profiles or sourcing at her Ho Chi Minh City shop, which is populated with beans from three continents, an industrial roaster and kit like hand grinders for sale.

The pandemic planted a whole new batch of home-brewers, she said, who spent lockdown refining their pour-overs, mimicking Instagram influencers and acquiring a nose for single-origin grounds.


At UCC Coffee Roastery in Ho Chi Minh City, baristas specialize in siphon brewing, attracting coffee hobbyists looking for the latest trend. (Photo by Lien Hoang)

"Before, the focus was mostly on exporting," said Rolan Colieng, a fourth-generation farmer whose company, K'Ho Coffee, is named after her ethnic minority in the central highlands.

Over a crackling phone line from the jungle, she said Vietnamese now take a more active role in building up the quality and reputation of local coffee beyond the cheap robusta planted by French colonizers.

"Domestic consumers love [specialty] coffee ... creating very high value for farmers," she said. Now, farmers "also save the best coffee for themselves to drink."

Nguyen Duy, a 21-year-old sporting bleached hair and Nike sneakers, loves both coffee types: trickling from an aluminum filter, or gushing out of an espresso machine. He exemplifies the changing tastes of Vietnam's coffee consumers now that foreign chains that weren't present a decade ago, like Starbucks, are spreading the consumption of espresso-based drinks, such as macchiatos.

"It starts from my personality, I want to explore more, I like to discover new coffee," Duy told Nikkei in an airconditioned cafe on a hot afternoon. He learns about each country he visits by trying its coffee; while studying in Australia, he got into the habit of drinking americano, a brew that his parents hate. They hooked him on strong, bitter Vietnamese coffee as a child.

As a result of such diametrically varied palates, each city block today is a bricolage of cafes. Chains selling cappuccinos worth half a day's wage coexist next to sidewalk vendors with folding chairs and hand-scrawled cardboard menus. Caffeine fiends dispense their own coffee from machines at GS25, a minimart, or order a moka pot at Vietnam Coffee Republic, a trendy cafe.

Duy, who finds cafe trends on TikTok, says the draw of coffee shops, as opposed to home-brewing, is the fact that "people can sit on the street and enjoy the coffee. They like to have coffee and talk with friends and family."

Coffee houses also stand out as one of the last redoubts of street life, now that ever-wealthier Vietnamese are retreating behind malls and gated communities. Only at sidewalk cafes and restaurants do locals pull up in Porsches and quaff lattes, while street children and veterans stop by to hawk lottery tickets.

Indonesia: Homegrown hype

In Indonesia, Asia's second biggest coffee-producing nation, the cafe industry is also gaining momentum.

Iman Kusumaputra started Indonesia's answer to Starbucks as an afterthought six years ago when, returning from Melbourne, Australia, with a finance degree, he decided to set up a property company. "And then we thought, 'if we have a property office, surely it should have a small coffee shop,'" the 35-year-old told Nikkei in an airy and sleek Kopikalyan outlet in a bustling commercial area in South Jakarta.

"We -- my co-founders and I -- used to live in Melbourne, a mecca of coffee shops, so we'd really gotten used to drinking coffee. In the end, our coffee shop business kept running, but the property one did not."

Kopikalyan currently runs three coffee houses around Jakarta, and set up its first, and currently the only, overseas outlet in Tokyo in December 2020.



Kopikalyan currently runs three coffee houses in Jakarta and has big plans for overseas expansion. (Photo by Dimas Ardian)

Its coffee is made only of arabica beans sourced fully from Indonesian coffee plantations. As well as Western coffee shop standbys like espresso and cappuccino, Kopikalyan also sells locally popular blends like Es Kopi Susu (iced coffee with milk and palm sugar). It recently launched what it calls the Kopi Atlas project, which offers eight select single-origin coffees from different regions in Indonesia, from Aceh in the west to Papua in the east.

"Indonesia is interesting because, being the world's largest archipelago [nation], we're separated by a lot of seas, so flavors of coffees from one region to another can be very different," Kusumaputra said. "Indonesia has the largest number of single-origin varieties -- even one island can be home to several different single-origins."

Kopikalyan, which opened its first coffee outlet in 2016, is ambitious with its expansion plans. There have been plans to open outlets in some other major cities in Indonesia, as well as in Japan, the United Arab Emirates and Australia, but the COVID-19 pandemic and mobility restrictions have forced the company to put these goals on the back burner.

Kenny Tjahyadi, director of Kopikalyan Tokyo, told Nikkei: "Indonesian people are now starting to realize that their coffee is something that they should be proud of." Previously, arabica coffee and high-grade coffee were not consumed domestically, and most beans were exported, but since the cafe boom began in Indonesia, high-grade beans are being distributed, and people are starting to understand the potential of Indonesian coffee, Tjahyadi added.

While that is more of a long-term vision, Kopikalyan has reasons to be confident, at least with its home market, where appreciation for local origin coffee has been growing noticeably in recent years. Local coffee is the new hype, replacing beans imported by the likes of Starbucks, which began the coffee house culture in Indonesia in 2002 and keeps expanding, and the Vietnamese drip coffee trend that hit Jakarta several years back.



Customers socialize over cups of coffee at a Kopikalyan outlet in Jakarta. (Photo by Dimas Ardian)

"In 2016 when we started out, only a few people would ask the cashier, 'How's the taste of the coffee? How is it brewed?' We would call them coffee warriors," Kusumaputra said. "But now, Indonesians, in general, are more curious about where their coffee comes from, who the farmers are. ... And also there are a lot of home-brewers these days, so it's easier for us to sell our coffee beans. Overall we think the coffee trend in Indonesia is becoming much stronger."

To support sales during the pandemic, Kopikalyan has developed different packaging for its coffee, including aluminum cans and drip bags, and partners with ride-hailing companies Gojek and Grab for deliveries, as well as local online marketplaces like Tokopedia to reach out to more customers. Tjahyadi mentioned that domestic brands are benefiting as more consumers become keen to support local products rather than consume foreign brands, a trend triggered by COVID-19 concerns.

Despite being the world's fourth largest exporter of the commodity, coffee in Indonesia - where tea is the traditional drink of choice - has only enjoyed a popularity boost in recent years, along with the pre-pandemic rise of the middle class and their disposable incomes, as well as the growing popularity of cafe culture among young urban populations. Tjahyadi also made the point that 90% of Indonesians are Muslim, so people are looking for a social drink that is not alcohol.



"New age" players like grab-and-go coffee chains Kopi Kenangan, Janji Jiwa and Fore Coffee are joining the ride, filling in the need for affordable fresh coffee options and attracting global investors enough to make one of them, Kopi Kenangan, Indonesia's latest startup unicorn, DealStreetAsia reported in December.

Andita, a 23-year-old fresh architecture graduate in Jakarta, said she began frequenting coffee houses in her college days to work on class assignments. She now visits them to do work projects.

"I need coffee because I often work overnight," Andita said. "And since I started working in Jakarta a year ago, due to the work from home policy I often work in a cafe during the daylight, choosing ones with a nice ambiance."

On weekends, Andita meets friends at coffee shops like Kopikalyan. When she's at home, she often brews her own coffee using a French press.

Meralda Abida, an 18-year-old university student, said she started drinking coffee in high school to help her study for exams. Back then, her choices were limited to coffee sachets sold at convenience stores. Now, with classes at her campus still fully online due to COVID-19 restrictions, she often works on class assignments alone or with classmates at coffee shops.

"I have several favorite cafes near my house in South Jakarta that I visit once or twice a week," she said. "They have a nice atmosphere, areas to do work, and they sell food as well."

Meralda added that she also often orders grab-and-go coffee via Gojek or Grab.

China: A nation of coffee-drinking youngsters

China is experiencing a similar trend. The arrival of foreign chains including Starbucks and Costa Coffee in the late 1990s stamped a mark across Chinese cities and attracted young consumers. But the emergence of local chains and roadside kiosks in recent years is now driving China's own coffee drinking culture.

According to a March 2021 report by financial news outlet Yicai, Shanghai now has the highest number of stand-alone coffee shops in the world, with 6,913 outlets. This is more than the 3,826 in Tokyo, 3,233 in London and 1,591 in New York.

As the Yicai study shows, coffee outlets in China are highly concentrated in affluent, urban areas, targeting the young.


"[Young people] have the purchasing power and money to spend and they want to try new things," observed Min Chun, a project leader at Daxue Consulting in Shanghai. "If there is a new trend and products that are attractive, they are willing to try."

Initially, these young coffee aficionados with overseas experience were driving the market in China, another traditionally tea-drinking society. Then came local brands such as Manner Coffee and Luckin Coffee that set the trend with takeout service, gaining traction with on-the-go urbanites with prices ranging from 10 yuan ($1.50) to 25 yuan.

"The younger generation doesn't have time to sit down in a coffee outlet," said Chun, who advises businesses on China's coffee market. "They just grab and go." Drinking coffee from outlets that typically bear a distinctive foreign name also reflects the growing urbanization and purchasing power of the population.

"Some don't really like coffee or know what a good coffee drink is," Chun said, "but holding one and walking around with it makes them [think they] look fancy."

"China's efficient delivery service really makes drinking coffee cheap and easy," said Wang Xiaoyi, who works at a trade services startup in Shanghai. Like many other urbanites, Wang uses mobile apps to satisfy her coffee cravings without leaving the office or house.

To strike a different note, specialty chains such as Seesaw Coffee and Mellower Coffee offer innovative drink menus of alcohol-mixed coffees targeted at urbanites. Seesaw has also linked up with Finnish designer Marimekko in co-branding, while at Manner, customers who bring their own cup get 5 yuan off the bill.

China's iiMedia Research in November projected the country's coffee market will maintain a 27% annual growth rate to reach 1 trillion yuan in 2025, up from 381.7 billion in 2021.

Investors seem to be paying attention to such ambitious forecasts. Manner, reportedly planning to float its shares, drew several rounds of funding in the past year from investors that included Singapore's Temasek, Meituan and ByteDance.

Seesaw, which runs fewer than a hundred stores, attracted hundreds of millions of yuan from Chinese milk tea operator Heytea in July and Costone Capital in December, pushing up its valuation to 1.6 billion yuan, according to Chinese data provider Itjuzi.com.

To Chinese coffee drinkers, these local operators with their localization bids reflect the guochao, or patriotic, trend that has swept consumer markets from apparel to cosmetics since trade tension with the U.S. began. Chun, the marketing consultant, told Nikkei that, unlike foreign players in China with their imported coffee beans, Chinese chain operators go for local beans out of cost considerations and customer preferences for local flavors.



Chinese chain Manner Coffee is popular among on-the-go city dwellers due to its takeout service. (Photo by Yu Jun)

"If [Chinese players] can prove that local coffee beans are as good, as sophisticated and tasty, I think [this tactic] will work. They are not targeting the foreigners but local young generations who are sensitive to this type of marketing," he added.

Coffee fan Hao's comments echoed this. "We don't necessarily like to drink Starbucks or Costa," he said when describing the cohort of consumers like himself. "When we come across outlets run by a self-proprietor, we are willing to try, just like how we like Manner for its environmentally friendly policy. We feel closer to the international society."

Danny Li, founder of Goffee-Coffee in Myanmar, has noticed a similar trend among his customers.

After graduating from a university in Taiwan, Li, who is of Chinese Burmese descent, opened his coffee shop in Mandalay in 2016 when there were almost no cafes, apart from restaurants, that offered coffee. "When I was studying [in Taiwan I] decided to bring back [coffee culture] to my home country," he said. Still, many of his customers are tech people, young engineers and expats, rather than locals.

To spread coffee culture, Li offers workshops in his cafe. Milk tea has been a staple drink on the streets of Myanmar, a former British colony, but the tide is turning as people start drinking coffee. "We tell people about coffee and how to distinguish good coffee."

Japan: Tea no longer reigns supreme

Another nation with a long history of tea-drinking, Japan has been experiencing a rise in coffee consumption in recent years. Japan's coffee market is the biggest in Asia, with coffee sales worth $34.45 billion in 2020, according to Mersol & Luo.

"Tea consumption has been the mainstream in Asia so far, but I think that the number of people who drink coffee will increase, as we have seen in Japan," Masahiro Kanno, president of the Specialty Coffee Association of Japan told Nikkei. "Since Japan originally has a culture of drinking tea, we already have a custom of boiling water. I think it is easy to establish a culture of drinking sophisticated coffee, such as brewing pour-over coffee."



Starbucks opened its first cafe in Japan in 1996. Here, a barista prepares coffee in Tokyo's Roppongi branch, located inside Tsutaya book store. (Photo by Ken Kobayashi)

While coffee has become one of the most consumed hot drinks in Japan, tea consumption is decreasing. According to the Japanese Association of Tea Production, the domestic consumption of tea fell to 108,454 tons in 2019, down 30% from 2004, the most recent peak.

Herbert Yum, a research manager at Euromonitor International, admitted that "it is true that young consumers might be losing interest in tea in some markets like Japan and South Korea, in which coffee is the dominant hot drink thanks to the long-standing development of coffee culture."

Like many industries in Japan, it is not surprising that tea and coffee purveyors are facing issues brought on by the country's declining population. But in contrast to the tea market, Japan's coffee consumption has been rising, reaching 452,903 tons in 2019, up 5.8% from 2004 according to the All Japan Coffee Association.


Even before the arrival of Starbucks in 1995, Japan's coffee drinking habit had been emerging since the Meiji period in the 1800s, with consumers' yearning for Western culture. But the entrance of the Seattle chain and its no-smoking policy helped increase the number of female coffee drinkers, many of whom had been put off by the smoky atmosphere of Japan's traditional kissaten coffee shops. Around 2010, the boom of brewed-to-order coffee at convenience stores contributed to the market expansion.

Although the pandemic hit cafes and convenience stores alike in 2020, the industry now sees an opportunity as consumers are spending more on specialty beans and equipment to use at home. "It's not true that people in their 20s and 30s don't have money, they have a consumption style that pays for whatever [they think is] valuable," Kanno said. "In Japan, due to the pandemic, the number of people who are particular about coffee equipment and beans has increased."

South Korea: Asia's coffee culture hub

In South Korea, home to Asia's second largest coffee market until it was overtaken by China in 2020, cafes have become an integral part of the social ecosystem.

Seo Young-woong, 37, goes to a Lusso Lab coffee house in downtown Seoul twice a week as the two-storey cafe built with red bricks offers him a shelter from the bustle of the city.

"I like it here because I can enjoy my own time and space," said Seo, who works for a senior welfare center. "Its seats are cozy and the venue is clean."


A barista prepares coffee at Lusso Lab coffee house in downtown Seoul. The cafe not only provides refreshments but also a space to socialize and study. (Photo by Jean Chung)

The cafe, run by CK Corporations, a local coffee chain, was filled with other customers as well when Nikkei visited on a December afternoon. The space caters to coffee consumers of all ages and backgrounds: A senior journalist was interviewing a source on the second floor, while three ladies in their 20s were chatting with each other over americanos and cake. A teenage classical music student also dropped by for an iced latte with a violin on his shoulder.

While Lusso Lab offers a shelter downtown, a Cafe Comma outlet in western Seoul, run by Munhakdongne Publishing Group, is a book cafe where people can sip coffee, read books and study. Thousands of titles fill bookshelves that stand tall in the five-story building.

A young couple was studying mathematics together on the second floor with a tablet PC, while a lady in her 30s was working with a laptop in a seat beside the window. It looked more like a library than a typical coffee house.

South Korea's coffee market has risen fast the past few years despite the pandemic, thanks to customers who adopted cafes as their second home, office or library. The country's imports of coffee reached $916 million last year, up from $738 million in 2020 and $662 million in 2019, according to customs authorities' data. Hyundai Research Institute, a Seoul-based private think tank, said in a 2019 report that the country's coffee market is expected to grow to 9 trillion won ($7.5 billion) by 2023.



A Cafe Comma outlet in western Seoul doubles as a library and studying space for a diverse range of customers. (Photo by Jean Chung)

Although this market expansion is in part a side effect of Asia's overall economic expansion and rising disposable incomes, Euromonitor's Yum told Nikkei that "the growth of the [coffee] category in the Asia Pacific is supported by the continuous development of coffee culture in the region."

Yum predicts that coffee will become even more ingrained in Asian societies as the years go on. "Asian consumers are pursuing something more for their lifestyle, including drinking quality coffee. These consumers typically have a middle-class background and they have been exposed to the lifestyles in Western countries, such as meeting with friends at cafes via social media," he told Nikkei. "Once they have adequate financial power, they just start realizing their lifestyle goals, including increasing their coffee consumption."

Trumps height.

 


I personally went through cadet service in the same time period as Trump.  I was 5 11 and a half.  That put me in the top third of any company i was in which today would just as certainly would possibly drop me to bottom third.


What this means he was in parade boots which add about an inch and a half in the heel.  Thus with fully juiced up joints and parade boots he likely came in at 6 3.  Thin shoe soles and aged joints would then have him back at less than 6 1.


This is also the only place any of this matters.  More to the point he and I are then about an inch and one haf in height difference excdpt i also had way more meat in my thighs.  This makes us an excellent comparable for weight.   My worst was around 260 as moderately obese at least.  I thus suspect he peaks around 260 but also drops back by twenty.

I personally lost over seventy of those pounds and he needs to do the same.




Sandy Campbell

Combatting fraud with modern technology1y

Is Donald Trump really 6’3” and 243 pounds?

Estimates of Trump’s true height have been argued to death, including using this ‘family photo’ from the 2018 G7 Summit in Quebec as a scale. Nevertheless, I decided to dive a little deeper, comparing actual heights with official heights. (Scale added to show true heights vs official heights; Leah Millis photo, Reuters)



My baseline was Justin Trudeau, who is officially 6 foot 2 inches tall. This could be off, but when I created a 1-inch grid in Adobe Illustrator, the official heights of the other leaders in the photo are almost dead on.


Theresa May matches her official height of 5 feet 8 inches, though she might be less than that because she’s wearing modest heels. Angela Merkel, wearing flats, is arguably one half inch taller than her official height of 5 feet 5 inches, and Emanuel Macron looks to be about one half inch shorter than his official height of 5 feet 10 inches.


Oddly, Shinzo Abe appears to be 1.5 inches taller than his official height of 5 feet 9 inches! His hair is very poofy, so an accurate height is guesswork, and maybe he’s wearing lifts in his shoes, but those factors wouldn’t add 1.5 inches to his height.


As for Trump, even sucking in his gut won't make him any taller than he actually is, which is clearly not 6 feet 3 inches tall, or even 6 feet 1 inch. I would bet he’s no more than 6 feet 1/2 inch tall, but I’ll give him an extra 1/4 inch.


As for Trump’s weight, I’m 5′8″ and used to weigh 288 pounds. Based on the many unflattering pictures of Trump playing golf, and his physique being similar to what mine used to be, I’d guess he weighs well over 300 pounds. Nancy Pelosi is not exaggerating when she describes Trump as being morbidly obese (which is an actual medical term).

Saturday, January 29, 2022

By de-cloaking, the demons running the global depopulation campaign just telegraphed their exact plans for 2022 – 2024



This is a worst case scenario.  Yet the counter revolution is out there and working.  Yet they do have to try.

Again listen to the silence.

I just wish it was all over.  I know we will win but only because the future tells me as much and yes, one other thing.  I do think that upon victory that Yesua  will also emerge as part of our continuum.  That is a real end games.



By de-cloaking, the demons running the global depopulation campaign just telegraphed their exact plans for 2022 – 2024

Thursday, January 27, 2022 by: Mike Adams


This article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author



(Natural News) As the truth about the anti-human demonic entities running our world today is revealed in the present, it provides us the opportunity to reevaluate the past and gain new understanding from our own first person witnessing of history as it unfolded.

For example, we now know that the globalists are, factually speaking, child-trafficking pedophiles. We know they run a global organ harvesting and transplant black market operation. We know they routinely plot to maximize corporate profits by killing any number of human beings in the process (covid vaccines, pharmaceuticals, etc.), and we know they plot false flag operations in order to run psychological terrorism campaigns against the people of the world.

With that realization, looking back at events like 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing and even World War II suddenly brings new clarity: We realize the history of the world is actually a history of globalist terrorism against the people of the world. Nearly every crisis we’ve all lived through was engineered on purpose and unleashed to achieve a globalist goal of profit, power or depopulation.

There are almost no acts of actual terrorism committed by individuals or groups that weren’t directly run by governments or funded by globalist operators.

Once we fully understand the past and the present, we can then see the future with much greater clarity. We know, for example, that:

Any time humans are on the verge of a mass awakening or “freedom” wave, globalists unleash another horrific terrorism campaign to keep people enslaved in fear.

A key weapon of the globalists is to force the people into isolation so they cannot talk to each other. Covid lockdowns were part of this, but the far more effective strategy is to shut down the power grid so that people can’t even communicate electronically.


Globalists telegraph their moves ahead of time because they need to set up the appropriate narratives in advance of their next wave of attacks. For example, while they plan to take down the power grid themselves, they are putting out warnings that claim “extremist” groups want to target the power grid. The real “extremist” group in the USA is the FBI, of course, and there’s nothing more extreme than a fraudulent regime that stole power by rigging elections and staging a hoax “insurrection” to demonize their political opponents.




Knowing this with absolute certainty — and having a firsthand experience now of how globalist governments are actively targeting humanity for total extermination — we can accurately anticipate their next escalation attack.


The next play will be the FINAL play against humanity… there won’t even be any attempt to hide their real motivations

It now appears they are ready to play the “end game” card against humanity and go for a total civilization takedown. This means disrupting or destroying the food supply chain, the power grid, telecommunications, monetary systems and the rule of law. The goal is absolute chaos resulting in mass death on a global scale, and the more chaos they can unleash in this manner, the more easily they cover up the truth about vaccine deaths.

All this confirms what we’ve suspected for quite some time now. The next attack vector will be one or more of the following:

A staged cyber attack on the financial infrastructure to take down the transactional infrastructure and plunge cities into chaos. This will be the opening round of the “great reset” script.

A deliberate takedown of the power grid to achieve a similar outcome.

A subsequent telecom “kill switch,” if needed, to ensure the complete collapse of internet functionality so that people can no longer connect online.

A deliberate release of a highly aggressive pathogen with a very high kill rate (Marburg / Ebola, etc.) or a toxic nanoparticle that simulates a pathogen. The panic from this will be used to drive additional “vaccine” campaigns which are of course simply death shot injections.

Domestic terrorism false flag operations that involve nuclear or radiological terrorism. (Could also be the mass aerosolized spraying of populations using drones or chemtrail sprayers.)

Provoking war with Russia or China and destroying the remaining US military in the process, making America deliberately vulnerable to foreign invasion.

The suspension of fair and free elections, the invocation of medical martial law, mass gun confiscation, domestic checkpoints, covid death camps and similar operations.

The timeline for this is obviously approaching very quickly because globalists are being forced to act. Here’s why:

The awakening is accelerating. The covid narratives are collapsing. Humanity is beginning to rise up against tyranny, and the censorship efforts have failed to stop it.

The 2022 mid-term elections are coming and cannot be allowed to take place, or Democrats will be thrown out of power.

Vaccine deaths are already accelerating and can’t be hidden for much longer. The body bags are stacking up in the morgues and can’t be ignored forever.

Thus, the almost certain window of opportunity for globalists to unleash their next wave of attacks on humanity is between today and early November.

That means we have fewer than 300 days remaining for the semi-reliable functioning of society as we know it.

What will you do with these few hundred remaining days?

Today’s Situation Update podcast helps provide some analysis and answers: (note: My voice is still recovering, so apologies for the low-energy delivery…)

Anti-aging vaccine clears out dysfunctional cells that cause disease





This strategy may actually work out for us in the short term while we wait for med beds that reverse us for thirty years.

Recall that a thirty year reversal is only good for one repeat which only adds up to an added sixties years.

Thus a cellular cleanse can extend our life spans past one hundred allowing an age reversal of even up to seventy years. Twice that is 140 years plus the base 100 years for a typical lifespan of around 250 years.

This is pretty good.

Anti-aging vaccine clears out dysfunctional cells that cause disease


January 26, 2022

Researchers have developed a new anti-aging vaccine that clears out dysfunctional cells to improve lifespan and healthspan in mice tests
VIEW 2 IMAGES



Many of the all-too-familiar symptoms of aging can be attributed to a build-up of senescent cells, those which have stopped dividing. In a new study, researchers in Japan have identified a protein specific to these cells and developed a vaccine that can clear them away, with tests on mice reducing the effects of aging.


Cells cannot keep dividing forever – eventually they accumulate too much DNA damage through environmental stress, so the body shuts them down and flags them to be cleared out by the immune system. This seems to be an evolutionary defense mechanism against cells turning cancerous.



However, even immune cells aren’t immune from this process, and as they become senescent themselves the immune system gradually loses the ability to clear out senescent cells. As these inactive cells accumulate in the body, they contribute to symptoms of aging and the diseases that come with it.

In recent years scientists have been experimenting with a new class of drugs called senolytics that clear away these defunct cells, which have shown promise in slowing down the effects of aging and increasing lifespan and healthspan, the proportion of our lives we spend in good health.


For the new study, researchers in Japan set out to find a way to target senescent cells more directly while leaving healthy cells alone. By examining gene expression in senescent cells, the team first identified a protein called GPNMB, which is expressed in high levels by these defunct cells. This protein was also detected in high levels in patients with atherosclerosis, which is linked to senescence.

Next, the researchers tested what happened when GPNMB is removed. The team fed mice a high fat diet to speed up senescence, then genetically eliminated cells that expressed GPNMB. Sure enough, treated mice had fewer metabolic abnormalities and other molecular markers of aging, as well as less severe symptoms of atherosclerosis, than control mice.




A diagram describing how the new anti-aging vaccine works to improve the health and lifespan of mice
Juntendo University


While this experiment showed that targeting GPNMB can fight senescence and aging, genetic elimination of those cells isn’t something that can be easily done in humans. So the team developed a peptide-based vaccine that could target the protein and induce the immune system to destroy cells that expressed it. This was then tested in three groups: young mice on a high fat diet, middle-aged mice, and mice with an accelerated aging disease known as progeria.

Improvements were seen in all three groups. The high-fat-diet mice had better metabolic function than mice on the same diet that didn’t receive the vaccine. Middle-aged mice that were vaccinated at 50 weeks of age remained more active and had faster movements by 70 weeks than control mice. And vaccinated mice with progeria had a significantly longer median lifespan than unvaccinated animals, with the effect more pronounced in male mice.

Of course, there’s still plenty more work to be done before this exciting work could be translated into humans. The team says that GPNMB likely isn’t the only potential target either.

“Our study has demonstrated the possibility of a new anti-senescence strategy,” said Professor Tohru Minamino, corresponding author of the study. “We speculate that there are many more seno-antigens that are produced by other kinds of senescent cells. With more research we will be able to provide individualized anti-senescence therapy for patients depending on the prevalence of different types of senescent cells in their body.”

The research was published in the journal Nature Aging.

Nuclear fusion milestone creates "burning plasma" for the first time




This milestone actually matters.  A burning plasma means plenty of energy production and now we can really scale up with condidence and generate sustainable energy production.

hopefully we can do a lot better than heat water, though we will catch plenty of that.

We actually have way too few methods of producing eneergy but no one ever mentions that.



Nuclear fusion milestone creates "burning plasma" for the first time


January 26, 2022



A key goal in nuclear fusion research is to achieve self-heating plasma, and scientists at the National Ignition Facility claim to have done just that in newly published research




For the prospect of limitless, clean energy produced through nuclear fusion to become a reality, scientists need the reactions at the heart of the technology to become self-sustaining, and newly published research has edged them closer to that goal. Scientists using a high-powered laser at the National Ignition Facility in the US have achieved "burning plasma" for the first time, demonstrating for a fleeting moment how the fuel can provide much of the heat needed to keep the reactions going.


Scientists have been pursuing nuclear fusion technology at the National Ignition Facility since it came online in 2009, using 192 lasers housed inside a 10-story building to deliver 1.9 megajoules of ultraviolet energy onto a fuel capsule roughly the size of a ball bearing. This creates tremendous pressure and temperature that causes separate atoms to fuse into helium, a reaction that releases vast amount of energy.


This mimics the reactions that take place inside the Sun, but the trouble is creating them here on Earth requires huge amounts of energy to initiate the process. The overarching objective in this field is to have the fusion reactions become the primary source of heat instead, creating a self-sustaining form of nuclear fusion and ongoing energy production.

The results of experiments undertaken at the National Ignition Facility in November 2020 and February 2021 confirm small but critical steps toward this aim. The scientists made a few tweaks to the setup that included scaling up the amount of laser energy focused on the fuel, while changing the geometry of the target and the way energy is transferred between the laser beams. The result of this was a novel way to control the implosion process that compresses and heats the fuel, enabling the creation of self-heating plasma.


“In these experiments we achieved, for the first time in any fusion research facility, a burning plasma state where more fusion energy is emitted from the fuel than was required to initiate the fusion reactions, or the amount of work done on the fuel,” said lead author Annie Kritcher.

Though the lifetime of the plasma was measured in just nanoseconds, the achievement of burning plasma is a step toward nuclear ignition, where the process continues to fuel itself to produce energy. That reality is likely still decades away, but the scientists see these short-lived snippets of self-heating plasma as an important proof-of-concept.

“Fusion experiments over decades have produced fusion reactions using large amounts of ‘external’ heating to get the plasma hot," said lead author Alex Zylstra. "Now, for the first time, we have a system where the fusion itself is providing most of the heating. This is a key milestone on the way to even higher levels of fusion performance.”


The research was published in the journal Nature.

Bizarre radio signal repeating every 18 minutes discovered in Milky Way




We now have something that defies the usual handwaving theoretical approach.  Better yet it is a powerful signal sporting a cyclical nature that also vshuts down for a few years as well.  This may even be a signalling device screaming out in radio space.  We noticed did we not?

It is also close to us.  A mere 4000 lightyears.  Are there others in this Galazy?  Imagine a grid build for hte purpose of been lighthouses.  This accomadates galactic navigation.  You use a woormhole for a blind jump and then triangulate your location precisely using these lighthouses.

\May not be true, but we need to scan the sky out to 10,000 lightyears to discover if we are dealing with common sense.

Bizarre radio signal repeating every 18 minutes discovered in Milky Way

January 26, 2022


https://newatlas.com/space/radio-signal-repeat-18-minutes-magnetar/

The location of the new repeating radio source in the Milky Way
Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker (ICRAR/Curtin)
VIEW 3 IMAGES



Astronomers have discovered a bizarre radio signal coming from somewhere in our galaxy that can’t be explained by any known object. When it’s active the source gives off energetic radio bursts lasting up to a minute, every 20 minutes – which should be impossible based on what we know about it.


The object was discovered by a team using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in Western Australia, which scans large areas of the sky in radio waves. Curtin University Honors student Tyrone O’Doherty was searching for transient objects within the plane of the Milky Way, comparing pairs of images taken 24 hours apart to find things that change in brightness in that time.


MORE STORIES

And sure enough, one signal stood out with a huge spike of radio waves. When the team searched older data from the same region, they discovered more pulses with stunning regularity. Whatever it was, the object gave off bursts every 18.18 minutes like clockwork, with each pulse lasting between 30 and 60 seconds.

“This object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations,” said Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker, lead researcher on the study. “That was completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that. And it’s really quite close to us – about 4,000 light-years away. It’s in our galactic backyard.”


Deepening the mystery, the object doesn’t just do this constantly – it went through an active period in January 2018, took most of February off, then turned back on for most of March. During each of those 30-day active periods it stuck to its strict schedule, but it didn’t appear in the data in the five years prior or the four years since.
A section of the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia, which discovered the new signal
Pete Wheeler/ICRAR

So what is it? A suspiciously repeating radio signal from deep space will always raise the question of aliens, but the researchers say that’s unlikely. The signal covers a very wide range of frequencies, which points to a natural origin. And some of its other characteristics provide clues as to what it might be.


Analysis shows that the light coming from the object is 90 percent polarized, indicating that it has very strong, highly ordered magnetic fields. And its repetition means that it’s most likely rotating. These are features of pulsars and magnetars, and the new object is probably one of these – albeit a very unusual one.

Both objects are types of neutron stars, compact cores left behind after a massive star dies. Pulsars emit beams of radiation that sweep across the sky like a lighthouse, making it look like the light is flashing on and off. Magnetars meanwhile have extremely strong magnetic fields. On rare occasions, it’s possible for a neutron star to be both a pulsar and a magnetar, and since this new object has characteristics of both, that’s a possibility.

But there’s one major problem – it spins way too slowly. Pulsars spin on the order of milliseconds to a few seconds, while magnetars can rotate as slowly as once every 10 seconds. This new signal’s 18-minute rotation is far too long to neatly fit into the box.

“The thing is, if you do all of the mathematics you find that they shouldn’t have enough power to produce these kind of radio waves every 20 minutes,” said Hurley-Walker. “It just shouldn’t be possible, they should be quiet. So what we think is that the magnetic field lines are somehow twisted. The neutron star has undergone some kind of outburst or activity that is causing a temporary production of radio waves, that makes it strong enough to produce something every 20 minutes.”
An artist's impression of a magnetar, which is the leading candidate for the strange new radio signals
ICRAR

The team suggests that the object is an “ultra-long-period magnetar,” a slow-spinning variation that’s been hypothesized but never detected.


“Nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be so bright,” said Hurley-Walker. “Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.”

Interestingly, magnetars are also a leading candidate for another cosmic mystery, fast radio bursts (FRBs). These signals are short-lived pulses of radio waves that can either be one-off events or repeat either regularly or randomly. While no source of these signals has yet to be confirmed, magnetars have all the right ingredients, and one in our galaxy was recently spotted giving off suspiciously FRB-like signals.

There’s a chance, the team says, that ultra-long-period magnetars could be responsible for FRBs as well, but we’ve missed them because astronomers haven’t been watching them on the time scales that they repeat over.

As is always the case, the mystery will only be solved with more observations. The team is planning to use MWA to keep an eye on the new object in case it turns back on, as well as scanning the Galactic Plane for signs of any others lurking out there. Searches of other archival data could also reveal similar signals.

The research was published in the journal Nature. The team describes the work in the video below.