A book review with a twist
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If you’re a fan of The Hunger Games, this could be the book for you… Tim Grahl’s The Threshing is a novel originally aimed at young adults, but when stories are good, they cross boundaries. Personally, I think this book is one of them. It is actually Tim’s first novel, which he describes as a young adult science fiction coming of age action story. And packed full of action it is!
The Threshing has just two rules: if you win, you survive, but if you lose, you and everyone you love slowly starve to death. Jessie is a 12-year-old Rat who has never known life before the burnings, when firestorms tore through millions upon millions of sustainable farmland. With too little food for too many mouths, something had to be done. And so the world's leaders, the Reapers, created The Threshing, a do or die contest staged in the grid where only one coder can leave alive...
The grid is a virtual world where ordinary people mine credits in order to eat in the real one. Split by faction, The Threshing dictates which faction will eat well for the next four years. Jessie lives in the Americas, where society is based on a new kind of caste system, which includes the Elites, the field hands, the Numbered and the Rats. In between Threshings, in the Americas faction, you’re one of the lucky ones if you can plug into the grid everyday to earn credits.
Not content with playing by the rules, the story begins with Jessie doing what she does best: scavenging with the other Rats. Jessie hacks into the grid connections of the rich while their physical bodies are sleeping and their mental selves are busy earning a crust, to steal their credits.
It’s a delicate game fraught with danger – a danger which catches up with Jessie on the very first scavenger trip the reader joins her on. And from that moment on, this game of cat and mouse is on! There are so many times throughout this book where the worst seems to happen and you think it’s game over, only to be thrust with Jessie into a new and more dramatic drama. And every single time you can see a danger point, Jessie goes and does the exact opposite of what you are screaming in your head! And so the thrill continues.
It’s much fun watching it play out, and there are many gripping moments throughout the entire novel, which becomes particularly intense towards the end. I personally felt the ending was quite profound. It certainly makes you probe the sometimes unexpectedly delicate lines between right and wrong, black and white.
So if you are a fan of edge-of-your-seat drama and can comfortably sit within the perception of a 12-year-old girl (whose decisions have a tendency to drive you a little crazy!), it could be worth your time and energy to give it a read. The Threshing was the subject of the first three years of the Story Grid Podcast, a perennial chart topper on multiple podcast bestseller lists. You can find out more about it at https://store.storygrid.com/product/the-threshing/
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Looking for more good reads?Why not try a sample of my debut novel, The HIVE? It's a speculative science fiction thriller and my own 'what if' scenario that I hope encourages people to question the systems we trust and the stories we are told. Receive the first eight chapters for free by signing up to my newsletter, or you can read more about it on my store page. |
The twist… Are we about to see the collapse of the food system in the UK?
According to a ‘redacted’ report by the ‘UK’s spy leaders’, which has apparently been ‘sat on’ for more than a year, yes it is – potentially within five years. But is it for the reasons we are being sold?
A recent Guardian article (8 July 2026, also see https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/20/biodiversity-collapse-threatens-uk-security-intelligence-chiefs-warn), which cited this 14-page report, claims the food system collapse will happen because of the ‘collapse of ecosystems overseas… fuelled by the human-induced climate crisis and over-exploitation’. The report ‘paints a devastating picture’ of this collapse, which will result in ‘severe food shortages, price rises, migration, political destabilisation and possible war’.
While activists and farmers have been warning about the serious food shortages to come in the UK for a few years now, those warnings have largely focused on the policy decisions that have systematically taken the farming and food systems apart – by design many argue, but that is a topic for another time…
This 14-page report is arguably bigger than ‘severe food shortages’ alone, but is it really all down to over-exploitation, human expiration (breathing out) and our meat-eating habits (that is, raising so many cows for human consumption, their methane gas releases are speeding up global climate changes)? I want to explore what other reasons there might be for the changing climate, but first we must take a quick canter through what these spy leaders have said to set parliament so much on edge…
The seven threats…
The report spells out seven key judgements facing the world and the UK in particular:
The main points include crop failures, intensified natural disasters and infectious disease outbreaks happening now, which will apparently increase with degradation and intensify with collapse to 2050 and beyond.
This would highly likely result in water insecurity, severely reduced crop yields, a global reduction in arable land, fisheries collapse, changes to global weather patterns, release of trapped carbon exacerbating climate change, novel zoonotic diseases and loss of pharmaceutical resources.
According to the report, this irreversible loss of function is beyond repair.
The risk: some will be exposed sooner than others and are likely to act to secure their interests, particularly water and food security.
The main problem: the UK relies on imports for a proportion of both food and fertiliser and cannot currently produce enough food to feed its population based on current diets. Countries best placed to adapt are those that invest in ecosystem protection and restoration, and resilient and efficient food systems.
Apparently, the Amazon rainforest, Congo rainforest, boreal forests, the Himalayas and South East Asia’s coral reefs and mangroves are particularly significant for the UK.
Interestingly, there are technologies that exist and which are emerging that could help – including AI, lab grown protein and insect protein. Yum!
It also contains the usual suspects when it comes to fearmongering the public: migration, serious and organised crime, non-state actors, state threats (could it be Russia?), pandemic risk, economic insecurity, geopolitical competition, political polarisation and of course, war, otherwise known as conflict and military escalation.
Now the 'obligatories' are done, I’d like to look at what else might be contributing to earth and climate changes on a global scale.
The magnetic force field that protects all life on earth is degrading
An unexpected finding came out of the work of Jesse Beltran and crew who are putting together the Nano Sapiens documentary, which I wrote about in my last newsletter. How this finding fits into the brewing ecosystem collapse and claimed use of nanotechnology in humans is shocking, and yet on some level does make some sense to me…
As part of this documentary, Dr Jack Kruse, a neurosurgeon, reveals his theory about why nanotechnology has been created and ‘covertly’ deployed in humans. His explanation, he says, answers why everyone needs to be tracked and ultimately why countries around the world ‘need’ to introduce digital ID: the magnetic force field that protects all life on earth is degrading much faster than experts thought possible, as the magnetic pole shifts rapidly east.
“The only thing that matters now is this”
“We are in a sixth extinction event. And we’re going to be the animals that get taken out first,” says Dr Kruse, who has also studied physics, light, magnetism and electricity, which ultimately led to his conclusion that modern medicine lacks a deep understanding of how humans function in relation to the natural world.
“The magnetic shield of the earth has changed in Siberia 335 nanotesla [magnetic flux density] in 20 years. That’s 320 million years of change prior to this. I didn’t think it was possible for the earth to change this fast but there is something that is happening to the things that live on top of this planet that are signalling what’s going down inside the planet.”
Two elements that our electromagnetic shield protects us from in excess are deuterium and tritium. Deuterium and tritium are isotopes of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. While all isotopes of hydrogen have one proton, deuterium also has one neutron and tritium has two.
Deuterium is common: about 1 out of every 6,500 hydrogen atoms in seawater is in the form of deuterium. This means our oceans contain many tons of this hydrogen isotope. But too much deuterium exposure in the human body can cause mitochondrial dysfunction, which can also be a hallmark of many chronic diseases.
Tritium is not common. It is a radioactive isotope that is rare in nature and decays relatively quickly, with a 12-year half-life. At present, evidence for its true health effects on humans appear to be scant, but studies have explored its potential to increase cancer, the cerebral nervous system and the effects of the element in the environment and food chain exposure. Interestingly, a scientific study was published in July/August of 2025, titled: Escalating tritium in global precipitation (1955–2021): Geoscientific insights into risks to human and ecosystem health. Unfortunately, I can’t even access the abstract online, but the title alone would suggest that tritium exposure in the environment is increasing…
According to Dr Kruse, when you get deuterated or tritiated, you are more EMF sensitive. During the interview clip this conversation was taken from, Dr Kruse says this exposure caused by a rapidly depleting electromagnetic force field will cause more autism, more infertility and more neurodegeneration. It will also cause more cancers, particularly childhood cancers.
The nanotechnology and digital ID connection
The track and trace microchipping and digital ID connection is needed by those in power, says Dr Kruse, because people who have been exposed to deuterium and tritium, either by inhaling it from the atmosphere, or consuming contaminated food or water, will be burning from the inside out. They will suffer from all manner of diseases, illnesses or conditions and so they will not be allowed in the safe zones of Earth, where the magnetic flux is still strong enough to shield people from these elements.
According to Jesse, who was speaking on The Shawn Johnson Podcast promoting the Nano Sapiens documentary earlier this year, the bottom line is this: “The earth’s magnetic shield, which protects us from radiation, is depleting. And there are only going to be a few safe zones on this planet. When [Dr Kruse] talks about the digital ID, those safe zones are the green zones. We’re going to be doing a global triage. There won’t be no yellow and red anymore. It’s only going to be black and green. Green is the walking, the ones who are going to be saved. Everything else is going to be black.”
He adds: “Safe zones will still have high-density magnetic flux that can still protect you from radiation. The people that are in those spots are the only ones that are going to live. That’s one of the rare places that food is going to be ok to eat. Everything else around the globe is going to be radiated to a point where people are going to be dying very rapidly.”
The point, according to the filmmakers, is that the governments of the world want to keep out of the safe zones those who are radiated and sick. They also want to keep this news quiet because they don’t want those areas to be flooded by ordinary people en masse seeking refuge, who would consume the much-needed resources all too quickly.
Data verification
Jesse and his team have reviewed the data Dr Kruse is using to make such a bold claim, and they say it’s true. “When I saw the data and saw that it’s happening much more rapidly, if we were to graph it over 300 million years [we’d have a graph with horizontal data plotted on it.] The graph is something like this now [a graph with vertical plotted data]. It’s a vertical line,” says Jesse. The data is apparently publicly accessible through NOAA. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is a US agency responsible for forecasting weather, monitoring oceanic and atmospheric conditions, charting the seas, conducting deep-sea exploration, and managing fishing and protection of marine mammals and endangered species in the US exclusive economic zone.)
According to Ed Szall, documentary producer, the event could happen anywhere within the next 25 to 50 years. Earlier in the conversation, Jesse said between five and 30 years, but it’s apparently impossible to say accurately because the decrease in energy is now happening exponentially, at a rate faster than anyone thought possible.
“The take away from this,” says Dr Kruse, “is to learn about your local magnetic field. Understand this vortex is tied to this magnetic field, but it’s also tied to the sun.”
As host Shawn Johnson said by the end of this promotional interview: “I’m curious and interested and scared all at the same time. But I’m very intrigued. And I think the audience listening to this is definitely intrigued.”
This podcast was very interesting and contained many more points than can be captured here. I think we will need to catch the full documentary to draw formal conclusions, but what do you make of it? And if the world’s ecosystems are collapsing, is this a more plausible explanation for that collapse than the human-induced climate change scenario given by climate experts and governments across the world? I’ll leave that one for you to decide.
Until next time!
Carina x
PS: In mid-July, a spokesperson revealed that new (unelected) PM Andy Burnham ‘has dropped’ plans for a digital ID system in the UK. However, there are many countries that are still planning to implement this type of ID system, and others that have already introduced it. For an overview see: https://regulaforensics.com/blog/worldwide-digital-id-overview/ It remains to be seen whether our new PM will do any back-pedalling...
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