The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has approved $1,075,660 in grant funding since 2016 to develop and test the effectiveness of a Japanese role-playing game-inspired web app in reducing binge drinking among sexual and gender minority youth, according to a federal grant database. The grant claims LGBTQ youth are “at greater risk for alcohol-related morbidity and mortality across the life-course.”

The NIH pledged to pay $343,340 for the game’s development between April 2016 and May 2019 and $732,320 for studying its effectiveness in binge drinking mitigation between July 2023 and June 2028, according to federal spending records. The agency awarded both grants to the University of Pittsburgh.

The grant defines sexual and gender minority youth as people under 18 who identify as transgender, nonbinary, gay, bisexual or lesbian, among other identities.

The game involves turn-based battles, interacting with non-player characters, exploration and reading journal entries about the harmful effects of bullying, according to a 2019 research paper associated with one of the grants. Gay youths playing the game take on the role of a “superhuman individual” who faces discrimination at school “because of their uniqueness,” according to NIH-funded researchers.

During character creation, the game prompts players to choose six different pronouns.

Researchers claim that children will be encouraged to employ “productive coping strategies” and engage in “help-seeking behaviors” after playing the game.

Another 2021 study associated with the grants tested the efficacy of the game in improving outcomes for sexual and gender minority youth across a broad range of areas and found few significant results. Researchers found little evidence that the game improved help-seeking behaviors, fomented productive coping skills or improved mental health.

The study did, however, find that playing the game was associated with “significantly reduced binge drinking frequency” and reduced “cyberbullying victimization.” Those relationships disappeared after a two-month follow-up period, however.

Authors of the study told readers to be cautious when interpreting their results, saying that their work was “a feasibility study” and that they “were not powered to find significant effects for secondary and tertiary outcomes.”

The research funded by the most recent NIH grant hypothesizes that playing the game will be associated with reduced binge drinking after three, six and 12 months.

Other grants related to queer youth paid out by the Biden administration include over $200,000 from the NIH to fund a LGBTQ mentoring program in June 2023, nearly $700,000 from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) intended to prevent transgender boys from getting pregnant in September 2023 and an up to $1.7 million from HHS for LGTTQ youth counseling in July 2023, among other programs.

The NIH did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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The audit examined costs incurred in 2018 by Fermi Research Alliance LLC, the contractor that operates the Fermi National Accelerator Lab near Batavia, Illinois. The Energy Department owns the lab, which receives millions in funding from the federal government. The lab also received $260 million from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

The inspector general’s audit found that costs claimed by the contractor were not always allowable or reasonable. The inspector general questioned $160 million in indirect costs as unsupported, $15 million in subcontract costs as unresolved (pending an audit), and $2.5 million as unsupported, unallowable, or unreasonable.

Specifically, the inspector general had many concerning findings. They include Fermi Research Alliance’s loss of over $2.4 million in vendor invoices, unreasonable subsistence reimbursements to visiting scientists and researchers in excess of $30,000, and excessive holiday pay exceeding $50,000. He also found that Fermi Research Alliance was not in compliance with federal cost-accounting standards.

The Energy Department’s inspector general concluded: “These issues could result in the department reimbursing [Fermi Research Alliance] for costs that were unallowable, not allocable, or unreasonable.”

This mismanagement directly impairs the Energy Department’s mission, the audit found, since these questionable expenditures could have gone toward further research efforts at the lab by purchasing more equipment or hiring more researchers.

The waste was completely preventable by enforcing accounting standards and frequently auditing to ensure they are met, the audit found, but instead lax oversight meant these issues went undiscovered for five years.

The Associated Press reported Oregon was “awash in treatment funds after decriminalizing drugs,” adding the state has allocated $265 million to recovery centers. The funding came from taxes levied on the sale of marijuana. Sadly, the rollout of these funds has been slow, with only $184 million distributed as of May 26.

Despite this massive funding, The Economist reported that “…help seems hard to come by.” The overdose death rate in Oregon almost doubled since 2019, twice the national average.

The New York Times has reported on the horrid conditions on the streets of Portland, including needles and humans feces littering the streets, drug addicts using drugs at all times of the day, and violent addicts in tents beating other homeless people with baseball bats.

One program that has been particularly costly and unsuccessful is the treatment hotline. Meant to be a resource for addicts to call for help after receiving a citation for using drugs, The Economist found that in its first two years of existence, fewer than 200 people called the hotline, and fewer than 40 callers were interested in treatment. That put its cost to taxpayers at $7,000 per call.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

• Donated clothing enters a stream of garments, many of which are shipped to poor countries where they are sorted and sold or dumped in landfills creating small mountains of waste along beaches
• Fast fashion, or cheap copies of high fashion garments sold at affordable prices, is a large contributor to the fashion industry’s dirty secret that only 1% of all clothing is recycled and most textiles ultimately end up in landfills
• The fashion industry’s goal is to make people unhappy with their clothing and feed an addiction to purchasing new clothes as often as possible. Although several companies are exploring the idea of renting clothing, this fundamentally means the clothing must be well-made and durable
• You can lower the impact of fast fashion by taking several steps, including purchasing high-quality, sustainably made clothing, repairing and reusing your clothes, swapping and exchanging clothes with friends and family and donating to local charities that keep the clothing in your community

Studies conducted during the on-again, off-again lockdowns of COVID-19 revealed how damaging social isolation was to most people. A reporter from The Conversation¹ did an informal review of 33 published studies that included nearly 132,000 people from around the world and found that social restrictions increase your risk of depression over 4.5 times and the odds you would experience loneliness nearly doubled.

During this time, many people turned to what has been called “retail therapy,” or shopping for clothing, much of which occurred online during the lockdowns. While some suggest that buying new clothes could make you feel better, most people agree those positive feelings seldom last long.

What does last is the impact fast fashion has on your pocketbook and the environment. Underneath all the glamor in the store windows and beautiful photos online are dirty secrets the fashion industry doesn’t want you to know or understand. If you’re like many people, you haven’t considered what happens to your clothes after you donate them.²

You might feel like you’re doing your part by donating unwanted clothes to charity or dropping them off at a take-back bin. But the sad reality is that a large portion of these discarded clothes simply ends up in a landfill somewhere.³ The overabundance of donated clothing is the result of the push for cheap clothing by manufacturers whose sole goal is to create demand and boost their income. These actions have made them a major contributor to environmental pollution.⁴

In 2014, Americans bought 500% more clothing than in the 1980s⁵ and Canadians bought 400% more clothing.⁶ Although the problem is significant, there are potentially effective options from which to choose. Before discussing these ideas, let’s discover why it’s crucial we make changes to the way we buy, use, and discard clothing.

What Happens to Donated Clothing?

Stacy Dooley is a BBC investigative reporter whose 2018 documentary, “Fashion’s Dirty Secrets,”⁷ shone a light on the damage retail therapy is doing in developing countries. You might be surprised to learn that fashion is second only to oil as the top five most polluting industries in the world.

As shops can quickly produce copies of high fashion items at affordable prices, people are tempted to update their look. This feeds their insatiable appetite, increasing the potential that retail therapy becomes even more addictive. Unfortunately, of the massive amount of fast fashion that reaches take-back bins and charity shops, less than 1% will eventually get recycled into new garments.

Much of the cast-offs ends up along the coast of Ghana, which Bloomberg reports is one of the largest importers of used clothing.⁸ As clothing gets cheaper and more disposable, the fashion industry produces more than 100 billion items each year. Bloomberg reports this is approximately 14 pieces of clothing for every person walking the Earth. Shockingly, this is more than twice the number produced just a little over 20 years ago in 2000.

Once the clothing arrives, it undergoes sorting by brokers and processors whose business is to export the clothing to developing countries where it will be purchased and worn. Once clothing has entered the deluge of garments transported to Ghana and India, there is no way to track what happens to it.

Mark Burrows Smith, chief executive officer of Textile Recycling International, spoke with a reporter from Bloomberg, noting that in his experience with a company that processes 400 million garments annually in the U.K. and Ireland,⁹ “I think it needs to be understood that all textiles, whether new or recycled, will ultimately end up in landfill. The key is to keep the garment in use as long as possible.”

The cast-offs that arrive by the bale from industrialized nations are known in Ghana as obroni wawu, or dead white people’s clothes. It’s almost incomprehensible to the people of Ghana that so much clothing could be thrown away.

Accra is the capital of Ghana and just south is Chorkor Beach along the Gulf of Guinea. There you’ll find a wall of clothing more than 6 feet high. The rags have been packed down through exposure to the weather and are degrading in a putrid pile. It is here that people have built a small town on a foundation of rags.

Solomon Noi is the city’s head of Waste Management and he believes that 40% of all the used clothing that moves through the port of Accra is not worn or repurposed. Although the country doesn’t have the infrastructure to take care of the waste, banning the imports would shut down a trade that supports many people’s livelihoods.

Recycled Clothing Is a Myth Perpetuated by Retailers

Old clothing rarely gets recycled into new garments because the technology does not exist to handle the waste produced at scale. Additionally, different fibers require different chemicals to break down the product for recycling. Many garments are made with two or three types of fiber, making recycling nearly impossible.¹⁰

Instead, clothing enters a supply chain supported by workers in third-world countries to prolong the life of the material before it eventually ends up in a landfill or piled high along the beach. The recycling myth was created and perpetuated by companies that want people to continue to purchase clothing without feeling guilty about what happened to the clothes they discard.

Bloomberg reports¹¹ that in 2013, H&M began a used clothing collection program across 40 countries to tap into growing environmental awareness. The H&M’s blog once claimed: “H&M will recycle them and create new textile fiber, and in return you get vouchers to use at H&M.”¹²

Today, H&M acknowledges that only 1% of garments collected are recycled each year and most end up in landfills,¹³ but the damage has already been done. Other fashion chains began their own recycling campaigns and none acknowledged that the capability of recycling at that scale did not exist. In 1950, New York department store tycoon, Earl Puckett said:¹⁴

“It’s our job to make women unhappy with what they have in the way of apparel. Basic utility cannot be the foundation of a prosperous apparel industry. We must accelerate obsolescence.”

In 1974, Norman Wechsler, president of Saks Fifth Avenue, said obsolescence in women’s fashion was “the name of the game.”¹⁵ By the 1980s, the Spanish clothing company Zara had pioneered a model that allowed them to roll out thousands of designs each year.

Rancid Piles Fed by Fast Fashion Pleasure-Inducing Compulsion

The new production model changed the shopping habits of Zara consumers as they began visiting the store four times the usual number each year. A 2007 study¹⁶ found that the company had inadvertently tapped into strategies that support addictive behavior.

The researchers found that the decision to purchase a product was related to how much the individual anticipated they would gain and lose. A consumer purchase could be predicted by looking at specific patterns of brain activation that showed they weighed a combination of preference for the item and price considerations. In other words, your brain likes to find a bargain.

Bloomberg reports¹⁷ that in the past 20 years, the average number of times a person wears their clothes before getting rid of them has dropped by 36%. In America, that equates to wearing clothing less than 50 times on average. In China, the average number of times an individual wore their clothes dropped from over 200 to just 62 times.

With a greater eye on the environmental impact, several companies have explored the idea of renting your wardrobe. The business model is described by researchers as “providing consumers with the ability to focus on using their products instead of ownership.”¹⁸ One research team surveyed 362 adults¹⁹ born between 1997 and 2002 and found the attitude of the Gen Z consumer helped mediate the intention to use a rental service.

However, while this may help feed the consumer’s desire for new clothing and keep a particular garment in circulation longer, the fundamental idea of rental clothing means the garment must be well-made and durable.

The fashion industry used to have four seasons but today collections are updated on a nearly weekly basis. In a 2018 CBC Marketplace report,²⁰ journalist Charlsie Agro investigated the claims made by retail take-back programs and took a Canadian family behind the scenes to show them the journey clothes donated at their local charity take on the way to Africa or India.

Claudia Marsales, senior manager of waste and environmental management for Markham, Ontario, believes the take-back programs are a losing proposition and nothing more than a form of greenwashing. It does nothing to address “the broken business model of fast fashion,”²¹ and is really just circumventing rather than addressing the real problems.

In short, the industry business model is the root issue, and recycling programs are a simple way to make the industry appear more responsible without actually altering the way they do business.

Help Lower the Impact of Fast Fashion

In addition to being chemically dependent and conventionally produced, cotton also needs water — lots of water. Chemicals and toxic dyes are released from these textiles, adding to our global water pollution problem. At the end of the day, the answer to lowering global waste lies with every individual doing their part to reduce total consumption.

The solution requires consumers to purchase high-quality, sustainably made clothing that is cared for and worn much longer than fast fashion. When you purchase clothes, seek fabrics that are made with organic cotton, hemp, silk, wool and bamboo. Consider exchanging clothing with your family and friends, especially when you have clothes hanging in your closet that have not been worn for more than 6 months.

Find ways to repair and reuse your clothing and consider selling or swapping online. Keep in mind that most donated clothing ends up in landfills, so consider seeking out reputable charities that serve the needs of your local community, such as your local church.

In the past I didn’t give much thought to my clothing, but I’ve since dedicated myself to wearing sustainably produced organic clothing and supporting the “Care What You Wear” movement through Regeneration International.²² I added a line of organic clothing grown and sewn in the USA to my webstore, and we support the SITO brand — a GOTS-certified organic clothing brand by the biodynamic certification agency Demeter.

The Mercola-RESET Biodynamic Organic Project is also helping 55 certified organic farmers in India convert to biodynamic production of cotton on 110 acres of land. Biodynamic farming is organic by nature, but it goes even further, operating on the premise that the farm is regenerative and entirely self-sustaining.

Biodynamic farming brings animals and plants together to form a living web of life, a self-sustaining ecosystem that benefits the surrounding community. RESET (Regenerate, Environment, Society, Economy, Textiles) will pay all organic biodynamic farmers in our project a 25% premium over conventional cotton prices, which will be paid directly to the farmers.

So, going forward, give some serious thought to cleaning up and “greening” your wardrobe. Your choices as a consumer will help guide the fashion industry toward more humane and environmentally sane manufacturing processes, and not just stopping short at a façade of sustainability through take-back recycling programs that do very little to curtail our global textile waste and environmental pollution problems.

• ¹ The Conversation, April 11th, 2022
• ^{2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17} Bloomberg, November 2, 2022
• ³ CBC, January 19, 2018
• ⁴ UN Environment Program, November 12, 2018
• ⁵ The Atlantic, July 18, 2014
• ⁶ YouTube, January 19, 2018 Min 3:54
• ⁷ BBC, October 9, 2018
• ¹³ H&M, Let’s Close the Loop
• ¹⁶ Neuron, 2007; 53(1)
• ¹⁸ Sustainability, 2021;13(15)
• ¹⁹ Study Finds, August 12, 2021
• ²⁰ CBC News January 19, 2019
• ²¹ YouTube, January 19, 2018 min 9:40
• ²² Regeneration International

The pandemic has been nicknamed “plandemic” and “scamdemic” for several legitimate reasons. Beyond the obvious coerced vaccination agenda and cheating at the polls with falsified mail-in ballots, small businesses have been bankrupted, the supply chain is falling apart, and inflation is skyrocketing. This is not all happenstance or coincidence. Not at all. Meanwhile, millions of consumers still have yet to become careful with their spending, savings, or even “survival” funds that they have left, if any.

Many people are suffering what they think is “long COVID,” even though it’s really health decimation caused by the clot shots. These folks are fighting depression, anxiety and central nervous system disorders, and they’re rushing to therapists in hopes that will “fix it.” Others are so paranoid about catching or dying from Fauci Flu that they won’t leave their homes, so they order in food for almost every meal, wasting money on delivery costs and tips for the delivery drivers.

Then, there are plenty of pet lovers out there who spend a fortune, unnecessarily, on their pets, even during tough financial times. The cost of everything has skyrocketed, including pet treats, pet toys, veterinary care and pet funerals. Yes, people still buy tombstones and even caskets for their pets. Poor little “Sparky” and “Boots.”

Cabin fever (pandemic lockdowns and social interaction paranoia) brews wasted spending

While on lockdown, self-quarantine, or just plain paranoia of catching the Wuhan virus, millions of people have wasted lots of time and money just sitting on their couch watching the ‘boob tube.’ Streaming television services can cost a bundle, especially if viewers subscribe to all of them, like many do, including Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Showtime, ESPN+, HBO, Disney, Pay-Per-View and more.

Consumers are buying movies, renting movies and binge-watching series that cost extra money for on-demand services that are streamed right to their living room or bedroom televisions. Meanwhile, these same consumers are eating junk food and wrecking their health, while missing work, sitting around unemployed, or just collecting free money from Resident Biden’s scamdemic administration.

Add to that financial implosion the addiction of ordering products, especially unnecessary, useless or scams from Amazon.com, where everything is delivered to their front door within days, like every day is Christmas, until these folks are broke, sick and starving.

Lockdowns and social distancing has now led to people over-indulging in entertainment that costs an arm and a leg

Just try to go bowling or to a comedy club and see how much money you spend. Things have changed for the worse, and drastically. Most entertainment has tripled or even quadrupled in price, but people are so desperate to get out of the house and be around other people, they pay for it anyway. Others have no clue that an economic and financial tsunami is on the way and underway right now.

Another housing bubble, like 2008 or worse, is about to burst. People buying homes, boats, pools, jet skis, hot tubs and other big ticket items that most likely will lose major value in the next few years may decimate their financial situation in ways that can’t be “repaired.” It’s not hard to remember how many Americans were “under water” with mortgages on their own homes, second homes and investment properties after the 2008 housing crash. Have no doubt, another one is beginning now.

Top 8 ways people are wasting money and then suffering buyer’s remorse later

1. Therapy overload (therapists, counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, virtual therapy)
2. Dining out and ordering take out/delivery
3. Pet treats, vaccines, funerals
4. Too many subscriptions for streaming services
5. Ordering unnecessary items from Amazon (convenience & scams)
6. Entertainment
7. Homes, boats, and other “big ticket” items
8. Unnecessary lawsuits – domestic disputes and low tolerance for disagreements

All in all, people should be buying storable, nutritious food and ammunition, instead of wasting money on everything else. When the SHTF big time, they will surely wish they had. Tune your food news frequency to FoodSupply.news and get updates important supplies you should be purchasing while you still have money and they’re still available.

Sources for this article include:

• NaturalNews.com
• MoneyManagement.org
• NATURAL NEWS