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The UN Is Now Admitting That This Coronavirus Pandemic Could Spark Famines Of “Biblical Proportions”
The UN Is Now Admitting That This Coronavirus Pandemic Could Spark Famines Of “Biblical Proportions”
What the head of the UN’s World Food Program just said should be making front page headlines all over the globe. Because if what he is claiming is true, we are about to see global food shortages on a scale that is absolutely unprecedented in modern history. Even before COVID-19 arrived, armies of locusts the size of major cities were voraciously eating crops all across Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia, and UN officials were loudly warning about what that would mean for global food production. And now the coronavirus shutdowns that have been implemented all over the planet have brought global trade to a standstill, they are making it more difficult to maintain normal food production operations, and they have forced countless workers to stay home and not earn a living. All of this adds up to a recipe for a complete and utter nightmare in the months ahead.
David Beasley is the head of the UN’s World Food Program, and on Tuesday he warned that we could actually see famines of “biblical proportions” by the end of this calendar year. The following comes from ABC News…
The coronavirus pandemic could soon double hunger, causing famines of “biblical proportions” around the world by the end of the year, the head of the World Food Programme, David Beasley, told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday.
Beasley warned that analysis from the World Food Programme, the U.N.’s food-assistance branch, shows that because of the coronavirus, “an additional 130 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020. That’s a total of 265 million people.”
He described what we are facing as “a hunger pandemic”, and he insisted that urgent action must be taken in order to avoid a nightmare scenario.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Crazy long food lines across America reveal the total LACK of preparedness that now characterizes our just-in-time society
Crazy long food lines across America reveal the total LACK of preparedness that now characterizes our just-in-time society
(Natural News) As the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to spread across the United States, sickening and killing tens of thousands, other problems are just beginning, including food shortages.
As reported by The Sun, the U.S. now has more recorded COVID deaths than any other country in the world, though there are doubts even among U.S. intelligence agencies that China has been completely transparent and up-front in reporting its true number of cases and deaths.
That said, as the virus spread and governors ordered non-essential businesses closed to help contain the spread, newly out-of-work Americans, by the millions, are already beginning to suffer basic shortages of food.
The news site reports:
The shocking statistics come as the need for emergency food aid has exploded in recent weeks due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Nearly 100 per cent of food banks in the Feeding America network are serving more neighbors in need during the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet nearly 60 per cent are facing reduced inventory levels amidst rising demand,” according to a survey by Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief and food rescue organization.
Meanwhile, organizations are having difficulty replenishing their food stocks and keeping food on hand for the growing numbers of needy, many of whom line up for hours in cities like San Antonio, Texas, and elsewhere waiting for assistance.
The survey noted further that the current number of people needing food assistance has surpassed the 37 million who faced hunger in the country last year.
It added that “since establishing the COVID-19 Response Fund on March 13, Feeding America has distributed $112.4 million and over 94 million pounds to food banks throughout the network, helping provide nearly 79 million meals to neighbors facing hunger.”
If this doesn’t prove to you why aspects of “prepping” are vital, nothing will.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
COVID 19 and Our Food Supply
COVID 19 and Our Food Supply
Though food is still plentiful, with only temporary and localized shortages, the threat of the COVID 19 crisis to the food supply is considerable. There is no evidence thus far that the disease can be transmitted via food or packaging (though the virus apparently remains viable on plastic for 2 to 4 days). The real danger is that chains of supply will be undermined by both sickness and the pre-cautionary measure we take. Already we are seeing a contraction of food imports from abroad. But the danger extends to even our own local supply.
The safety of shoppers and workers at supermarkets is the first worry that public officials and the general public have expressed. But the food at market comes from somewhere; and that “somewhere” is peopled by a vast array of workers, starting with farmers and farm workers. Will we continue to have the workforce necessary to produce our food, and will they be able to do it in conditions of health and safety for themselves?
We don’t know, but there are troubling concerns. Take fresh produce, for example. Already pressed by acute labor shortages, farms large and small in places like the Central Coast of California have scrambled to provide job security to their workers. But they also depend during crucial harvest periods on temporary labor, and as the border tightened under the Trump administration the H2-A visa system has become important. Florida, Georgia, Washington, and California all depend upon a sizeable workforce from Mexico and the Caribbean under the system. But the virus has meant the closing of consulates in Mexico and elsewhere that process these visas. The labor crunch will come soon for producers of lettuce and strawberries on the Central Coast.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Fourteen Low-Tech Ways to Stay Healthy (Besides Handwashing)
Fourteen Low-Tech Ways to Stay Healthy (Besides Handwashing)
Health is not just an absence of illness. At the very least health includes a well-functioning immune system, our bodies’ first defense against pathogens that cause disease. This includes COVID-19, the coronavirus.
We are all constantly exposed to bacteria, viruses, and parasites even if we wash our hands twenty times a day. If our immune system is working well, it creates a barrier that stops the antigens from entering the body altogether. This is the first line of defense. If this fails, the second line is for the immune system to produce white blood cells, chemicals and proteins that find, attack and destroy the antigens before they can reproduce. If that fails, the immune system destroys the antigens as they multiply. If the antigens are able to multiply a lot you will feel lousy as your body fights the disease in earnest. You will have unpleasant symptoms. A large part of your energy will go towards your immune system’s battle. You will be sick.
I don’t know about you, but I want to stay at defense levels one and two. And this is more than possible, even with the coronavirus. Don’t get me wrong—handwashing and not touching your face does reduce the amount of pathogens that make it to your immunity barrier, but it doesn’t eliminate them entirely unless you live in a special isolation bubble. To be healthy, you also need your immune system functioning robustly. The following suggestions (to do before you become sick) may strike you as common sense, but, to paraphrase Voltaire, in the middle of a pandemic common sense is sometimes not so common.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Shocking New Study Concludes That The “Best Case Scenario” For A COVID-19 Pandemic Is 15 Million Dead
Shocking New Study Concludes That The “Best Case Scenario” For A COVID-19 Pandemic Is 15 Million Dead
Over the past week, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 outside of China more than tripled once again. Hopefully it is extremely unlikely that such a rapid growth rate will continue, because if it does, there will be more than a million confirmed cases outside of China just a month from now. I don’t even want to imagine the level of fear that would cause, and needless to say that would be absolutely devastating for the entire global economy. Of course if we do get to a million confirmed cases, there won’t be any way to keep it from spreading everywhere on the entire globe, and the ultimate death toll could be unimaginable.
According to the WHO, the current death rate for this outbreak is 3.4 percent, and many experts believe that it will continue to go higher.
That means that a whole lot of people will die if this virus cannot be contained somehow.
Researchers at a major university in Australia modeled seven different scenarios for how a COVID-19 pandemic might go, and in the “best-case scenario” the death toll was 15 million…
New modeling from The Australian National University looks at seven scenarios of how the COVID-19 outbreak might affect the world’s wealth, ranging from low severity to high severity.
Four of the seven scenarios in the paper examine the impact of COVID-19 spreading outside China, ranging from low to high severity. A seventh scenario examines a global impact in which a mild pandemic occurs each year indefinitely.
But even in the low-severity model — or best-case scenario of the seven, which the paper acknowledged were not definitive — ANU researchers estimate a global GDP loss of $2.4 trillion, with an estimated death toll of 15 million.
A pandemic that kills 15 million people would change everything.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How The Cold Can Be Bad For Your Health, & What You Can Do About It
How The Cold Can Be Bad For Your Health, & What You Can Do About It
Winter comes with some extremely cold temperatures for parts of the country, and as such, brings the potential for health problems too. There are a few things to look out for, and ways to prepare yourself if you have to be outside when temperatures begin to dip in the negative numbers.
Winter comes with some extremely cold temperatures for parts of the country, and as such, brings the potential for health problems too. There are a few things to look out for, and ways to prepare yourself if you have to be outside when temperatures begin to dip in the negative numbers.
Obviously, if you can stay inside when it starts to get extremely cold, you’ll be doing yourself a favor. Having some kind of a backup source of heat for your home will also help keep you comfortable if the power ever goes out and that’s our first suggestion for anyone living with this potential. A woodburning stove is an excellent option While not cheap, the benefits for some will certainly outweigh the costs.
10 Awesome Tips You Never Knew About Using Wood Stoves That May Change Your Life
What To Look Out For If Exposed To The Cold:
- Hypothermia. This condition occurs when your body temperature drops below 95˚F (35˚C). This results from your body losing more heat than it can make, such as when you are exposed to cold or water. Hypothermia can show up as shivering, clumsiness, confusion, tiredness, or urinating more than usual. If not treated quickly, hypothermia can cause severe health problems, including death.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
We evolved to exercise and need high levels of physical activity to be healthy
We evolved to exercise and need high levels of physical activity to be healthy
Preface. This is my summary of Herman Pontzer’s 2019 “Evolved to exercise. Unlike our ape cousins, humans require high levels of physical activity to be healthy” in Scientific America. As fossils decline, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll use more muscle power, so get in shape now…
Also, your personality as measured by the Big Five Personality traits will be better if you exercise. Couch potatoes are less conscientious, open, agreeable, and extroverted. The link with exercise was relatively strong. Physical activity predicted personality better than disease burden did (Stephan 2018).
***
Apes are a lot like us, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos share over 97% of our DNA. But the differences are interesting. Our bodies changed dramatically over the past two million years with a larger brain, invented tools, language, hunted and gathered, and our survival depended on lots of physical activity.
We couldn’t just sit around like chimpanzees and eat fruit all morning, nap, groom, then gorge on figs, hang out with friends, group, another nap, and more fruit and some leaves. Likewise, oranguatans and gorillas are also idle and sedentary, spending 8 to 10 hours resting and then 9 or 10 sleeping, walk about 1.8 miles a day and climb about 330 feet, equal to another mile of walking.
Humans who try to slack off this much risk serious health problems. Without at least 10,000 steps a day, the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and metabolic disease increases. Sitting at a desk or in front of a TV for long times ias also associated with an increased risk of illness and a shorter life span. Basically, physical inactivity is on par with smoking as a health risk.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Fake Food, Fake Meat: Big Food’s Desperate Attempt to Further the Industrialisation of Food
Fake Food, Fake Meat: Big Food’s Desperate Attempt to Further the Industrialisation of Food
Photograph Source: Mattes – CC BY-SA
The ontology and ecology of food
Food is not a commodity, it is not “stuff” put together mechanically and artificially in labs and factories. Food is life. Food holds the contributions of all beings that make the food web, and it holds the potential of maintaining and regenerating the web of life. Food also holds the potential for health and disease, depending on how it was grown and processed. Food is therefore the living currency of the web of life.
As an ancient Upanishad reminds us “Everything is food, everything is something else’s food. “
Good Food and Real Food are the basis of health .
Bad food, industrial food, fake food is the basis of disease.
Hippocrates said “Let food be thy medicine”. In Ayurveda, India’s ancient science of life, food is called “sarvausadha” the medicine that cures all disease.
Industrial food systems have reduced food to a commodity, to “stuff” that can then be constituted in the lab. In the process both the planet’s health and our health has been nearly destroyed.
75% of the planetary destruction of soil, water, biodiversity, and 50% of greenhouse gas emissions come from industrial agriculture, which also contributes to 75% of food related chronic diseases. It contributes 50% of the GHG’s driving Climate Change. Chemical agriculture does not return organic matter and fertility to the soil. Instead it is contributing to desertification and land degradation. It also demands more water since it destroys the soil’s natural water-holding capacity. Industrial food systems have destroyed the biodiversity of the planet both through the spread of monocultures, and through the use of toxics and poisons which are killing bees, butterflies, insects, birds, leading to the sixth mass extinction.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Fitness without the Long, Grueling Workout
Fitness without the Long, Grueling Workout
Pondering what Nature selected as advantageous in our long existence as hunter-gatherers helps us understand why walking and occasional short bursts of intensive exercise together yield the vast majority of the benefits of exercise/fitness.
What if there was a way to get rich by merely investing a modest amount of money weekly? Who wouldn’t want to join the program? Our health is our only real wealth, and fitness is like the modest investment that yields multiples of the investment made.
Since our culture is based on commerce and marketing, extreme sports are front and center: professional athletes, daredevils performing insanely dangerous stunts, oldsters running marathons, and so on.
The subtext of this media coverage implies that athletics and fitness are unattainable by us average people who have neither the time nor inclination to pursue extreme training.
This media glorification leaves a lot of decidedly unglorious reality out of the picture. Extreme training often leads to extreme injuries–but you won’t see any injuries except in carefully edited stories in which an extreme athlete recovers from a horrendous accident by sheer willpower and arduous training.
Left out are those who don’t recover despite their willpower and arduous training.
Scientific research is giving us a much more realistic, practical and attainable understanding of increasing and maintaining a level of fitness that yields tremendous health benefits with relatively modest effort.
As discussed in a previous blog post (The “Miracle Cure”: Walking), we’re selected/engineered to walk, and so the simple inclusion of walking in our lives yields enormous benefits in everything from mental health, lowering our risk of dementia, strenghening our immune response and so on.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
ANOTHER “Bomb Cyclone” Will Bring More Flooding To Parts Of The Midwest That Were Hit By A “1,000 Year Flood” Last Month
ANOTHER “Bomb Cyclone” Will Bring More Flooding To Parts Of The Midwest That Were Hit By A “1,000 Year Flood” Last Month
Less than a month after a “bomb cyclone” caused a “1,000 year flood” in the middle portion of the country, another “bomb cyclone” of similar strength is going to bring even more flooding to the High Plains and Upper Midwest. According to meteorologists, it is being projected that this new “bomb cyclone” will be “similar in intensity and in snowfall” to the last one, and the latest forecast is calling for “more than 30 inches in some areas”. The floods that we witnessed last month absolutely devastated communities throughout the region, and now it is going to happen again. The middle part of our nation has literally never seen anything like this happen ever before, and this is easily the worst natural disaster to hit the United States since Hurricane Katrina.
Before I get into the details of the latest weather forecast, let’s review what we have witnessed so far. “At least 1 million acres of U.S. farmland” were under water for at least 7 days last month, according to Agriculture Secretary Sunny Purdue “as many as a million calves” were lost in the flooding in the state of Nebraska alone, and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crops were destroyed. Thousands upon thousands of farmers were financially ruined, and thousands of farmers will not be able to plant any crops at all this year.
If you can point out a worse agricultural disaster in the last 50 years in the United States, please feel free to do so. To my knowledge, there isn’t one.
And now a second “bomb cyclone” is on the way this week. According to CBS News, it looks like this “bomb cyclone” will produce “a blizzard of epic proportions”…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
100s Of Millions Of Dollars In Crops Destroyed By Flooding, And Farmers Are Being Told “There’s Nothing The U.S. Government Can Do To Help”
100s Of Millions Of Dollars In Crops Destroyed By Flooding, And Farmers Are Being Told “There’s Nothing The U.S. Government Can Do To Help”
This is the worst economic disaster for U.S. farmers in modern American history. Our ongoing trade war with China had greatly depressed prices for wheat, corn and soybeans, and so farmers were storing more crops on their farms than ever before in early 2019. And then the floods came. The water moved so fast that the vast majority of the farmers in the affected areas could not have moved what they had stored even if they wanted to, and the scale of the losses that these farmers have suffered is starting to become clearer. According to UPI, “hundreds of millions of dollars in crops” that were destroyed by the flooding were not covered by insurance…
Hundreds of millions of dollars in crops destroyed in Midwestern floods this month were not insured, farmers say. And the losses could leave many without sufficient income to continue farming.
“This uninsured grain issue is really starting to affect people,” said Jeff Jorgenson, a western Iowa corn and soy grower whose farm flooded when the Missouri River spilled over its banks March 12.
Without an extraordinary amount of assistance, there are thousands of farmers that will never be able to come back from this.
One fifth-generation farmer that was interviewed by Fox News said that about 7 million dollars worth of grain was destroyed in his county alone…
Dustin Sheldon, a fifth-generation grain and soybean farmer, watched in horror as the floods that devastated the Midwest began to recede and he could assess the damage to his crops.
He said the record-breaking floods caused about $1 million in losses for his family farm.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
5 Simple Pieces of LIFESAVING Medical Knowledge
5 Simple Pieces of LIFESAVING Medical Knowledge
There is almost a preparedness fixation with gunshot wounds and having sachets of quick-clot in your first aid kit. But in terms of bang for your buck, there other things which are frequently overlooked and very under-rated that much more likely to be life-saving than your hemostatic agent.
Use soap and water to wash your hands.
This to me something that seems so incredibly simple and but it seems lost completely on some. Can you honestly say you have never forgotten to wash your hands after going for a poo?
It is almost unanimously accepted that the understanding of microorganisms spreading infectious disease and the connection that hand washing substantially reduces transmission of disease has been the single most important advance in medicine ever.
Simply forgetting once to wash your hands can result in transferring bacteria from your hands to food, your mouth, or into others’ wounds (if you are caring for them) and exposing them or you to a potentially fatal infection.
While the use of soap is important – the action that is most important is the friction of the rubbing of the hands combined with the water washing the bacteria away. So even in the absence of soap, there is still real value to hand washing (and drying – removing the bacteria containing water).
Drink clean water.
This goes hand in hand with (1) – germ theory explains why you need to be extremely important with your drinking water.
No matter how thirsty you are, taking the time to ensure the purity of water is vital – regardless if it is filtration, chemical sterilization, or boiling, it is time worth taking. While you may get away with it 9/10 or 49/50 the risk isn’t worth it, especially in a grid down situation where a serious gastrointestinal infection can be fatal.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
New Warnings on Plastic’s Health Risks as Fracking Industry Promotes New ‘Plastics Belt’ Build-Out
New Warnings on Plastic’s Health Risks as Fracking Industry Promotes New ‘Plastics Belt’ Build-Out
A new report traces the life cycle of plastic from the moment an oil and gas well is drilled to the time plastic trash breaks down in the environment, finding “distinct risks to human health” at every stage.
Virtually all plastic — 99 percent of it, according to the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) report — comes from fossil fuels. And a growing slice comes from fracked oil and gas wells and the natural gas liquids (NGLs) they produce.
The report concluded that plastics bring toxic or carcinogenic health risks to people at every stage.
“Until we confront the impacts of the full plastic lifecycle, the current piecemeal approach to addressing the plastic pollution crisis will not succeed,” the report concludes. “At every stage of its life cycle, plastic poses distinct risks to human health, arising from both exposure to plastic particles themselves and associated chemicals.”
People can be sickened not only when plastics are produced, in other words, but also while plastic is actively used by consumers and then again after it’s thrown out, where plastic trash often breaks down into smaller and smaller bits that can contaminate the food chain and make its way into people’s bodies.
The scope of the risks requires an international response, the center said.
“Both the supply chains and the impacts of plastic cross and re-cross borders, continents, and oceans,” said David Azoulay, the center’s Director of Environmental Health. “No country can effectively protect its citizens from those impacts on its own, and no global instrument exists today to fully address the toxic life cycle of plastics.”
In the U.S., however, a major push is underway — and attracting hundreds of billions in investment, both foreign and domestic — to move in the opposite direction and produce more plastics and other petrochemicals.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Survival Guide For 2019
A Survival Guide For 2019
How to safely navigate the ‘Year Of Instability’
As the first month of the year concludes, it’s becoming clear that 2019 will be a very different kind of year.
The near-decade of ‘recovery’ following the Great Financial Crisis enjoyed a stability and tranquility that suddenly evaporated at the end of 2018.
Here in 2019, instability reigns.
The world’s central banks are absolutely panicking. After last year’s bursting of the Everything Bubble, their coordinated plans for Quantitative Tightening have been summarily thrown out the window. Suddenly, no chairman can prove himself too dovish.
Jerome Powell, the supposed hardliner among them, completely capitulated in the wake of the recent -15% tantrum in stocks, which, as Sven Henrich colorfully quipped, proved what we suspected all along:
The global tsunami of liquidity (i.e. thin-air money printing) released by the central banking cartel has been the defining trend of the past decade. It has driven, directly or indirectly, more world events than any other factor.
And one of its more notorious legacies is the massive disparity and wealth and income resulting from its favoring of the top 0.1% over everyone else. The mega-rich have seen their assets skyrocket in value, while the masses have been mercilessly squeezed between similarly rising costs of living and stagnant wages.
How have the tone-deaf politicians responded? With tax breaks for their Establishment masters and new taxes imposed on the public. As a result, populist ire is catching fire in an accelerating number of countries, which the authorities are anxious to suppress by all means to prevent it from conflagrating further — most visibly demonstrated right now by the French government’s increasingly jack-booted attempts to quash the Yellow Vest protests:
Meanwhile, two other principal drivers of the past decade’s ‘prosperity’ are also suddenly in jeopardy.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Climate Collapse: Wind Chill Temperatures Will Hit -60 In The Midwest This Week As Global Weather Patterns Shift
Climate Collapse: Wind Chill Temperatures Will Hit -60 In The Midwest This Week As Global Weather Patterns Shift
The experts are telling us that the Midwest could experience the coldest weather that it has ever seen this week. Wind chill temperatures of -40 and -50 degrees will be common throughout the region, and it is being projected that some spots will actually get hit by wind chill temperatures of up to -60 degrees. A shift in the polar vortex is being blamed for this life-threatening weather, and we are being told to expect the coldest temperatures to arrive on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. But all-time records are already being set. For example, according to Accuweather the temperature in the city of International Falls, Minnesota hit 45 below zero on Monday morning…
The coldest weather in years will put millions of people and animals throughout the midwestern United States at risk for hypothermia and frostbite to occur in minutes during the final days of January.
The deep freeze continued across the Upper Midwest on Sunday with temperatures plummeting well below zero in the morning. The low of 45 below zero F in International Falls, Minnesota, shattered the day’s record of 36 below zero F from 1966.
Please keep in mind that was not a wind chill temperature.
That was the actual temperature outside.
As the week progresses, bitterly cold temperatures will be accompanied by heavy snow and strong winds across the Midwest. The polar jet stream has weakened, and as a result the polar vortex will “dip into parts of North America”…
The wintry onslaught will be driven by the Northern Hemisphere’s polar vortex, the pocket of cold air sitting atop the North Pole. When temperatures rise in the Arctic, the polar jet stream — the torrent of westerly winds that hold the polar vortex in place — can weaken and dip into parts of North America.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
