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Survey has revealed challenges faced by pharmacists and risk of harm to patients as key drugs are unavailable

‘We’re firefighting in the background’: the pharmacists coping with record drug shortages

Drug shortages in England are now at such critical levels that patients are at risk of immediate harm and even death, pharmacists have warned.

The situation is so serious that pharmacists increasingly have to issue “owings” to patients – telling someone that only part of their prescription can be dispensed and asking them to come back for the rest of it later, once the pharmacist has sourced the remainder.

Hundreds of different drugs have become hard or impossible to obtain, according to Community Pharmacy England (CPE), which published the report. Widespread and often long-lasting shortages posed “immediate risks to patient health and wellbeing” and caused distress, it said.

“The medicine supply challenges being faced by community pharmacies and their patients are beyond critical,” said Janet Morrison, CPE’s chief executive. “Patients with a wide range of clinical and therapeutic needs are being affected on a daily basis and this is going far beyond inconvenience, leading to frustration, anxiety and affecting their health.

“For some patients not having access to the medicines they need could lead to very serious consequences, even leaving them needing to visit A&E. Medicines shortages are leading to delays in patients being able to access certain critical or potentially life-saving medicines in a timely manner.”

Recent months have seen key medicines for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, ADHD and epilepsy becoming unavailable. Last year saw shortages of HRT, adrenalines and antibiotics.

James Davies, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s director for England, said: “Medicines shortages are disrupting treatment for some patients and destabilising their health.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Video: Hiroshima-Nagasaki Dress Rehearsal. The Dangers of Nuclear War. Michel Chossudovsky with James Corbett

May 10, 2024

Video: Hiroshima-Nagasaki Dress Rehearsal. The Dangers of Nuclear War. Michel Chossudovsky with James Corbett

Today, Michel Chossudovsky of GlobalResearch.ca joins us to discuss his recent article: “The Hiroshima Nagasaki ‘Dress Rehearsal’: Oppenheimer and the U.S. War Department’s Secret September 15, 1945 ‘Doomsday Blueprint’ to ‘Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map.’”

We talk about the original, genocidal plan of the US War Department for a genocidal nuclear slaughter of the Soviets, how that plan has continued to the present day, the existential threat of nuclear holocaust and the prospects for an anti-war movement that can actually stand up to the military-industrial complex.

For more details see:

The Hiroshima Nagasaki “Dress Rehearsal”: Oppenheimer and the U.S. War Department’s Secret September 15, 1945 “Doomsday Blueprint” to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 28, 2024

Featured image is a screenshot from the video

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War”

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research!

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102

PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

You Need 2 Years of Food – Martin Armstrong

May 9, 2024

You Need 2 Years of Food – Martin Armstrong

Legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong has new data on how well the Biden economy is doing. Spoiler alert: It’s not doing well, and the financial system is about to tank. I asked Armstrong if the US government could default on its debt if countries around the world continue to stop buying it? Armstrong explained, “I think the US could default on its debt as early as 2025, but probably in 2027. We have kicked the can down the road as far as we can go. It’s not just in the United States. Europe is in the same boat. So is Japan. This is why they need war. They think by going into war, that’s the excuse to default on the debt. They simply will not pay China. If they try to sell their debt–good luck. We are not redeeming it. The same thing is happening in Europe. So, once that happens, you go into war, and that is their excuse on this whole debt thing to collapse, which wipes out pensions etc. Then they can blame Putin. This is the same thing Biden was doing before saying this was Putin’s inflation. Then, with the whole CBDC thing (central bank digital currency) . . . . the IMF has already completed its digital coin, and they want that to replace the dollar as the reserve currency for the world. . . . These people are desperately just trying to hang on to power. Nobody wants to give it up, and nobody wants to reform.”

I asked Armstrong what should the common person be doing now? Armstrong surprisingly said, “I think you need, safely, two years’ worth of food supply. . . .This is what I have. It’s not just prices will go up, but mainly because there will be shortages….

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Indonesia’s Toba Volcano Changed Human Evolution

May 5, 2024

How Indonesia’s Toba Volcano Changed Human Evolution

The massive supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago has been blamed for nearly killing off our species. The emerging truth is much more interesting.

THEY NEVER SAW IT COMING. For the small bands of hunter-gatherers across Africa and Eurasia, the day was like any other. Some tracked great herds of migrating animals across expansive grasslands; others moved through dense rainforests, or along the banks of turgid rivers and ephemeral streambeds. Survival—finding food and water, avoiding predators, strengthening the small group’s social bonds—was the order of the day.

Thousands of miles away, an extraordinary event was about to take place: a cataclysm that would make the entire planet shudder. It would also change the story of our species. The question is, how?

About 74,000 years ago on Sumatra, the Toba supervolcano erupted on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. It was the most powerful eruption of the last 2.5 million years; by volume, it was more than 215 times larger than the 20th century’s biggest boom, the Novarupta event in Alaska, and more than 11,000 times the size of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. It dwarfed even the three largest known eruptions of the Yellowstone supervolcano.

In the late 20th century, researchers began trying to reconstruct what happened after Toba blew. According to those early models, inches-thick blankets of ash smothered much of the Indian subcontinent and choked the seas from the Arabian to Chinese coasts. Global air currents swept a haze of sulfur and ash particles across oceans and continents, wreaking climate havoc…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Politics of Food | Chris Smaje

May 3, 2024

Lab-grown food vs small farms

What’s the future of food?

Last year, two of my former podcast guests had a long and very public disagreement about the politics of food, locking horns over the utility of farming in a densely-populated world. Activist and writer George Monbiot has written extensively about lab-grown food and the need to revolutionise our food systems with technology so that we can better feed everyone. Farmer and academic Chris Smaje has argued that farming is a critical component of community autonomy, and wrote a book in response to George’s own, Regenesis, criticising the vision as “eco-modernist”. George hit back that Chris’ proposal is a “cruel fantasy”.

I watched this unfold online, worried to see two experts disagree so deeply on something fundamental to how we organise society, and invited Chris back to talk about this second book, Saying No To A Farm-Free Future. Chris explains how our food production systems are emblematic of our crisis of relationship to the earth. He argues that de-materialising our food supply plays into the colonial history of uprooting people from the land and denigrating agriculture. This leads us to discuss land, language, and culture, decentralising power, and the political binaries that could be dissolved by grounding our thinking in the land.

Correction: The previous version of this interview stated that the debate between George Monbiot and Chris Smaje was around lab grown meat instead of lab grown food.

…click on the above link to listen to the interview…

The Worst Time to Be Alive

April 30, 2024

The Worst Time to Be Alive

The world has ended before.

Sure, the entire world has never ended before. Not all at once. Depending on how you define words like “world” and “end.”

But…

There have been plenty of times in history where it sure tasted like the world was ending, where the future didn’t look so bright, where everything might as well have ended for lots and lots of people.

According to historians, the absolute worst time to be alive was 536-550 AD, when three different volcanic eruptions blotted out the sun across most of the planet. During the first one, the sky went dark for 18 months. It snowed in the summer. An ash sky lit a cycle of droughts and floods that upended agriculture. Crops failed all over the world, and then starvation began.

Societies collapsed.

Records from Rome to Japan reference the events. Archaeologists have found a layer of ash virtually everywhere. They’ve also discovered abnormalities in tree rings around the world during that period.

Nobody was spared.

Some historians argue that the years of winter changed the entire course of human history. It sent humanity into a downward spiral that would take a century to recover from. Wouldn’t you know, the first bubonic plague struck right in the middle of that cold, dark, awful era. In fact, historians believe the cooler temperatures brought about by the volcanic eruptions were precisely what facilitated the spread of the plague bacteria.

Historian David Keys was one of the first to connect the volcanic eruptions to pivotal shifts in history. According to his book Catastrophe, these disasters dissolved the ancient world and planted the seeds of medieval civilizations and religions. His claims faced skepticism at first, but more and more evidence has supported his arguments. Now they’re not so controversial. The year 536 basically changed everything.

In a way, the world really did end.

A new one began.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Major cities in Mexico running out of water as extreme heat continues

April 30, 2024

Major cities in Mexico running out of water as extreme heat continues

The Dark Origins of the Davos’ Great Reset

April 29, 2024

The Dark Origins of the Davos’ Great Reset

Important to understand is that there is not one single new or original idea in Klaus Schwab’s so-called Great Reset agenda for the world. Nor is his Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda his or his claim to having invented the notion of Stakeholder Capitalism a product of Schwab.

Klaus Schwab is little more than a slick PR agent for a global technocratic agenda, a corporatist unity of corporate power with government, including the UN, an agenda whose origins go back to the beginning of the 1970s, and even earlier. The Davos Great reset is merely an updated blueprint for a global dystopian dictatorship under UN control that has been decades in development. The key actors were David Rockefeller and his protégé, Maurice Strong.

In the beginning of the 1970s, there was arguably no one person more influential in world politics than the late David Rockefeller, then largely known as chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.

Creating the new paradigm

At the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, the international circles directly tied to David Rockefeller launched a dazzling array of elite organizations and think tanks. These included

The Club of Rome;

the 1001: A Nature Trust, tied to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF);

the Stockholm United Nations Earth Day conference;

the MIT-authored study, Limits to Growth;

and David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission.

Club of Rome

In 1968 David Rockefeller founded a neo-Malthusian think tank, The Club of Rome, along with Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King. Aurelio Peccei, was a senior manager of the Fiat car company, owned by the powerful Italian Agnelli family…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Final Destiny: Catastrophe or Rebirth?

April 29, 2024

Our Final Destiny: Catastrophe or Rebirth?

Millenialism or renewalism?

The “Base Case” scenario of the first version of “The Limits to Growth” study, published in 1972. Note the shape of the curves: a slow growth is followed by a rapid decline, the typical “Seneca Shape.” Note also that the calculation shows a single cycle. Collapse, as seen in this scenario, is final and irreversible. Is it a “millenaristic” view of the future? Maybe, but we cannot exclude that the system will rebound in a farther future.

For decades after it was published, in 1972, the “Limits to Growth” was criticized with the accusation of being a “wrong prediction.” Remarkably, these accusations started immediately after the study was published, way before the main result of the calculations, the impending societal collapse, could be verified. It was a good example of the human attitude of thinking that what you don’t like cannot be true.

Today, more than 50 years later, the tide seems to be turning, and the study is being re-appraised; see, for instance, the book Limits and Beyond. Yet, we may be making the opposite mistake: turning a scenario into a prophecy and seeing collapse in the light of an unavoidable apocalypse for humankind.

It is not surprising. The history of human thought sees two attitudes going in parallel: “millenarism,” the idea that the world will go through a single cycle and then die, and the opposite one, which I might call “renewalism.” It sees death followed by rebirth in an infinite series of cycles, or at least a very long one.

The term “millenarism” is often attributed to Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), who said that Roma would last one thousand years. It is typical of the Jewish tradition as expressed, for instance, in the Book of Daniel in the Bible…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Threat of a Solar Superstorm Is Growing—And We’re Not Ready

April 29, 2024

The Threat of a Solar Superstorm Is Growing—And We’re Not Ready

Someday an unlucky outburst from our sun could strike Earth and fry most of our electronics—and we’ve already had some too-close-for-comfort near misses

A solar flare, as seen by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory — Powerful outbursts from the sun—like this bright, flashing solar flare and the adjacent eruption of hot glowing gas—can wreak havoc with Earth’s power grids, computers and telecommunications

The sun is ramping up for a big year.

In one sense it already had a big year, thanks to the April 8 solar eclipse. But that was a terrestrial phenomenon. What we’re gearing up for is a decidedly solar one—our star is nearing the peak of its magnetic activity cycle, which means more sunspots, more storms and, potentially, more danger to Earth.

The sun’s magnetic field is generated in its interior, where conditions are so hot that electrons are stripped from their host atoms, forming an ionized gas. A basic law of physics states that moving electric charges generate a magnetic field, and it’s this ionized-gas-induced magnetism that so profoundly affects the sun’s behavior.

Unlike Earth, which has a fairly strong and well-organized magnetic field similar to that of a single gigantic bar magnet, the sun is dominated by countless locally generated fields. Each one shapes its own parcel of the solar interior. The actual dynamics of this magnetism are fiercely complex, but to simplify, you can think of our star’s overall magnetic field strength as waxing and waning over a period of about 11 years—what we call the solar magnetic cycle.

Hot material inside the sun rises to the surface and, once cooled, sinks again in a process called thermal convection, in a very similar way to water in a boiling teakettle…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Scientists Are Preparing for Apophis’s Unnervingly Close Brush With Earth

April 27, 2024

How Scientists Are Preparing for Apophis’s Unnervingly Close Brush With Earth

The potentially hazardous asteroid is on its way for an uncomfortably close flyby of Earth in 2029.

This is radar image of a near-Earth asteroid similar to Apophis. We actually know very little about what Apophis looks like, but its pending flyby in 2029 will provide scientists with an unprecedented look.

In about five years’ time, a potentially hazardous asteroid will swing by Earth at an eerily close distance of less than 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers). During this rare encounter, Apophis will be ten times closer to Earth than the Moon and scientists want to take full advantage of its visit.

Apophis is a on trajectory towards an Earth flyby on April 13, 2029. When it was first discovered in 2004, the 1,100-foot-wide (335 meters) near-Earth object was designated as a hazardous asteroid that could impact our planet. Later observations, however, reassured scientists that there’s no need to panic just yet, and that the asteroid has no chance of crashing into Earth for at least another century.

That’s very good news given the size of this object and the serious damage it would inflict should it some day strike our planet. Hopefully that’ll never happen, but objects of this size tend to hit Earth about once every 80,000 years, unleashing catastrophic damage and global-scale impact winters.

Images of Apophis captured by radio antennas at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex in California and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia when the asteroid was 10.6 million miles (17 million kilometers) away.

During its upcoming flyby, scientists want to explore the asteroid to determine whether Earth’s gravitational field will have an impact on Apophis’ orientation, composition, and spin…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable

April 27, 2024

The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable

This is an article (or in science speak a paper) review. My method is to start with a copy pasted into the Medium editor unread and boil it down to key bits [and add comments in brackets as I read/assess/vet the offering, which may or may not be of value, especially to anyone who knows or knows of Bill Rees and his work, in which case they should just click this hypertext and red his paper, which is about a 34 minute read as Medium recons time].

Abstract

Homo sapiens has evolved to reproduce exponentially [to recover from depopulation events, e.g. plague, disaster], expand geographically [as K-strategists by competitive displacement, not by aggressive conquest], and consume all available resources [within environmental productivity limits, i.e. carrying capacity]. For most of humanity’s evolutionary history [over the last 50k to 75k years], such expansionist tendencies have been countered by negative feedback [e.g. overshoot and collapse]. However, the scientific revolution and the use of fossil fuels reduced many forms of negative feedback [e.g. starvation, scarcity induced conflict], enabling us to realize our full potential for exponential growth [in the abscence of adaptive and evolvable K-strategist behaviors]. This natural capacity [e.g. of a somatic cell to become cancerous is natural, not uncommon, and not selected for, a condition of being non-evolvable, non-viable long term] is being reinforced by growth-oriented neoliberal economics — nurture complements nature. Problem: the human enterprise is a ‘dissipative structure’ [a complex, adaptive, dissipative but non-evolvable system or structure as are supercells or whirlwinds] and sub-system of the ecosphere — it can grow and maintain itself only by consuming and dissipating available energy and resources extracted from its host system [in the absence of K-strategist behavioral limits], the ecosphere, and discharging waste back into its host…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US fertility rate dropped to lowest in a century as births dipped in 2023

April 27, 2024

US fertility rate dropped to lowest in a century as births dipped in 2023

The teen birth rate reached another record low in the US in 2023, while women ages 30 to 34 had the highest birth rate, according to provisional data from the CDC.

hxyume/E+/Getty Images

The fertility rate in the United States has been trending down for decades, and a new report shows that another drop in births in 2023 brought the rate down to the lowest it’s been in more than a century.

There were about 3.6 million babies born in 2023, or 54.4 live births for every 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to provisional data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.

After a steep plunge in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fertility rate has fluctuated. But the 3% drop between 2022 and 2023 brought the rate just below the previous low from 2020, which was 56 births for every 1,000 women of reproductive age.

“We’ve certainly had larger declines in the past. But decline fits the general pattern,” said Dr. Brady Hamilton, a statistician with the National Center for Health Statistics and lead author of the new report.

The birth rate fell among most age groups between 2022 and 2023, the new report shows.

The teen birth rate reached another record low of 13.2 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19, which is 79% lower than it was at the most recent peak from 1991. However, the rate of decline was slower than it’s been for the past decade and a half.

“The highest rates have, over time, been shifting towards women in their 30s whereas before it used to be with women in their 20s,” Hamilton said. “One factor, of course, is the option to wait…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

From One Ignorance to the Next

April 27, 2024

From One Ignorance to the Next

Is humanity a herd of animals, doomed to follow its rulers to slaughter?

There is a tendency to view history as if it were a personified being, as if it has a mind of its own and is trying to accomplish predetermined goals for humanity. One version of this view is that history moves toward liberating man from oppressive regimes. Marx claimed that history moved determinately through stages according to prevailing modes of production, roughly going from slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism, to communism, and ultimately to socialism. Modern neoliberals or neoconservatives might say that history is a process of “the people” being given more of a voice in their government—a view that conveniently means the current system that provides the elite with power and job security is the ultimate end of history.

Personally, I view history as ultimately a product of Providence. However, God works in mysterious ways, and allows us to be the agents of change within whatever His ultimate plan for history is. Thus the question for what causes change from one period of history to the next is not as simple as saying it is whatever God wills. Even embracing Providence, we can still ask whether any patterns emerge in how human beings ambulate from one period of history to the next.

Thus, it occurs to me that a case can be made for viewing the progression between historical periods as the product of a series of “veils of ignorance” being removed from people’s minds, only to be replaced with new ones under which they can still be ruled but under new systems of government.

person covering the eyes of woman on dark room — Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why societies grow more fragile and vulnerable to collapse as time passes

April 26, 2024

Why societies grow more fragile and vulnerable to collapse as time passes

Getty Images

Do societies become more fragile over time? (Credit: Getty Images)

An analysis of hundreds of pre-modern states suggests that civilisations tend to have a ‘shelf-life’ – a pattern that holds lessons for today’s ageing global powers.

The rise and fall of great powers is a cliche of history. The idea that civilisations, states, or societies grow and decline is a common one. But is it true?

As a group of archaeologists, historians and complexity scientists, we decided to put this idea to the test. We undertook the largest study to date to see if societal ageing can be seen in the historical record. Our results, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that states do age, becoming gradually more likely to terminate over time. Could there be lessons here for the present day?

Comment & Analysis

Luke Kemp is a research associate with the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, and a research affiliate with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.

The mortality of states

Defining civilisations or societies is tricky, and the former often carries unsavoury baggage. We instead restricted our analysis to pre-modern “states”: centralised organisations that enforce rules over a given territory and population (much like the nation-states of the US and China today).

We took a statistical approach across two different databases. We created our own “mortality of states” dataset (Moros, named after the Greek God of Doom) which contains 324 states over 3,000 years (from 2000BC to AD1800). This was compiled from numerous other databases, an encyclopaedia on empires, and multiple other sources. We also drew on the Sehat databank, the world’s largest online depository of historical information curated by archaeologists and historians, which had 291 polities.

Getty Images

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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