90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, August 14, 2021

Plunging Crop Supplies Send Prices Soaring And Reignite Food Inflation Fears, WASDE Reports

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report was released Thursday afternoon and pointed to declining grain supplies that sent grain futures prices higher and will keep food inflation in focus.

The closely watched supply and demand report slashed estimates for corn yields and stockpiles. World inventories for wheat were reported near a five-year low.

Grain and oilseed futures soared to a near-decade high earlier this year but have been in a holding pattern for the last month, awaiting new reports on the outlook for upcoming U.S. harvests. A megadrought and back-to-back heat waves have plagued the corn belt and the U.S. West for much of the summer.

December corn futures were up more than 2% to $5.7150 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade, soybean futures popped on the report and are now flat at the end of the U.S. cash session, wheat futures rose more than 3%, hitting a fresh eight-year high.

The Bloomberg Grains Index closed up 1% on the report.

Bloomberg outlines the key takeaways from the August WASDE report:

DROUGHT BITES: U.S. corn and soybean yields fell below analyst expectations and the declines were largely centered in the drought-stricken northern Plains, where severe drought has withered crops.

RUSSIA: So goes Russia's harvest, so goes the wheat market. A large cut in the harvest means a lot less global wheat supplies and Russia's wheat-export throne as the world's top shipper is in doubt with the current forecast in line with exports out of the E.U.

WHEAT PEAK: Benchmark Chicago wheat prices hit the highest levels for a most-active contract since 2013. Corn and soybeans each touched multi-week highs but remain below multi-year peaks from earlier in 2021.

YOUR MOVE, FUNDS: With the USDA seeming to appease bullish traders with aggressive cuts and dry weather continuing to grip the Plains, an influx of speculative buying could bring the rally in grains, nearly a year-old at this point, to new heights.

FOOD INFLATION: Of course, with grain and soybean prices elevated for months, the higher costs should start to filter through the supply chain, pointing to higher prices for feed, seed, fertilizer, food and other goods.

This report means that adverse weather conditions are another driver of food inflation that shows no signs of stopping. We noted not too long ago, grocery store prices were expected to rise through...

In under a year, more than 500,000 post-COVID vaccine injuries have been reported to VAERS — nearly a third of all reports accumulated over the system’s entire three-decade lifespan — yet regulatory agencies remain silent.

A few months before the first COVID-19 vaccines received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in late 2020, a global vaccine safety expert cautioned the rushed circumstances made it essential to “get [safety monitoring] right” by “intensively” and “robustly” scrutinizing adverse events following the experimental rollout.

As this expert stated, “Deploying any new vaccine based on data from expedited clinical trials into a population without a functioning safety monitoring system in place is reckless and irresponsible given the tools that are available.”

Moreover, she added, any investments needed to beef up safety monitoring would be “inexpensive in comparison” to the massive funding allocated to COVID-19 vaccine development and scale-up.

In theory, the U.S. has had a national vaccine safety monitoring system in place since 1990 — the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — intended to function as an “early warning system.”

VAERS and its U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) counterpart FAERS (FDA Adverse Event Reporting System) constitute the principal data sources that regulators rely on when pulling drugs or vaccines from the market for safety reasons.

Not only has VAERS never lived up to its promise, but there can be little doubt its glaring failures are largely, and malignantly, by design.
Whistleblowers Welcome! Help Humanity – Securely Share COVID-19 Corruption

For example, when a government-commissioned study highlighted VAERS inadequacies in 2010 — estimating more than 99% of vaccine adverse reactions were going unreported and that one of every 39 doses of vaccine administered was linked to adverse events corroborated in vaccine package inserts — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) simply shut the project down.

Now, in less than a year, more than half a million reports of injuries have flooded into VAERS following experimental COVID jabs, including thousands of deaths. Yet a deafening regulatory silence has greeted this record-setting volume of adverse reactions, which accounts for...

CDC has revised Florida's COVID-19 figures after the state Department of Health accused the agency of overcounting Sunday's totals
The federal health agency reported a new record of more than 28,000 cases on Sunday
Florida's DOH accused the CDC of combining multiple days' worth of data into one and that the true figure is really 15,000, which is an overcount of 15,000
The state reported 56,000 cases from Friday to Sunday and it is believed that the CDC split the total over two days - Saturday and Sunday - rather than three days
The CDC's updated Covid numbers, reporting 19,000 on Sunday, are still higher than the figures published by the DOH
Florida no longer reports daily COVID-19 cases, instead publicly revealing weekly counts every Friday

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has quietly updated Florida's COVID-19 figures after accusations of overcounting earlier this week.

On Monday, the Florida Department of Health (DOH) accused the CDC of misreporting the state's weekend COVID-19 numbers.

The federal health agency had posted that 28,317 new Covid cases were recorded in The Sunshine State on Sunday, a record-high that was reported by multiple media outlets.

However, the DOH stated that is true total was 15,319 cases, indicating an overcount of more than 13,000.

On Wednesday, the CDC updated Florida's new cases to 23,958 for Friday, 21,487 on Saturday and 19,584 on Sunday - quietly admitting that the state DOH was right - but did not offer an explanation as to why.

Interestingly, the revised CDC numbers are still higher than totals the DOH published to its Twitter account on Monday.

CDC revised Florida's COVID-19 figures after the state Department of Health accused the agency of overcounting Sunday's totals with updated figures showing 19,584 new cases (left). CDC previously reported an inaccurate new record of more than 28,000 cases (right)

Florida's DOH said the true number of cases on Sunday is 15,000, making the CDC's original number an overreport of 13,000 cases and not a record-high

The DOH official Twitter account took aim at local news outlets who published stories about the state setting a new record of daily COVID-19 cases on Monday, citing the CDC data.

'This is not accurate,' the agency tweeted on Monday evening, in response to...

CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen greeted Joe Biden’s vacation with a harsh but factual assessment of the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan: It is Biden’s fault.

A group of religious warriors, riding on captured American military vehicles, vanquish a US-trained military, which relinquishes much of its power without a fight.

Sound familiar?

That’s what happened in Iraq after the US withdrawal of troops from the country at the end of 2011. Within three years, an army of ISIS fighters was only a few miles from the gates of Baghdad and had taken many of the significant cities in Iraq.

It was then-Vice President Joe Biden who had negotiated the Obama administration’s drawdown from Iraq.

Anyone who has watched Joe Biden’s career could and should have seen this coming. For all his and his supporters’ claims that he is some foreign policy expert, Joe Biden has been expert at getting foreign policy questions wrong. He wanted to pay Iran cash right after 9-11, just because he wanted to. His own staff killed that notion. He’s still trying to pay Iran in cash, just as the Obama administration did while Biden was vice president. One could surmise that Joe Biden really wants to hand Iran, which backs terrorism against Israel and has declared itself an enemy of the United States since the 1979 revolution, large piles of American cash. One could also surmise that Biden is on course to exceed even Jimmy Carter’s disastrous Middle East foreign policy — a foreign policy that helped beget revolutionary Iran in the first place.

Biden wanted to carve up Iraq along sectarian lines as some kind of solution to the violence that plagued the country following the U.S. invasion. Iran was fomenting much of that violence through proxies with the express intent of hurting the United States, destabilizing Iraq, and extending its influence. Any armchair analyst could see that from the comfort of home in the U.S. I saw it first-hand in Baghdad in 2007 and was given a classified briefing on the situation in detail by American Army officers who had been fighting that war for years. But Biden evidently never saw it and still doesn’t.

When it came time to deal with Afghanistan from the Oval Office, Biden once again failed to see the facts on the ground and plan for anything. He even set the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, engineered from Afghan soil by al Qaeda under the aegis of the Taliban, as the date certain for U.S. withdrawal, believing that to be some kind of PR gain. That might be the mother of all head-scratchers unless the intent was to give the Taliban, not the United States, a PR boost.

Now he’s moved that date up to August 31, while also sending more troops in to protect the U.S. embassy in Kabul and at the same time begging the Taliban not to attack that embassy. It’s all as irresponsible as it is incoherent. And it’s all vintage Joe Biden.

CNN’s Bergen likens Biden’s effort to one of history’s most notorious moments of rank cowardice.

(U.S. Ambassador Zalmay) Khalilzad agreed to pressure the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners, several of whom simply rejoined their old comrades on the battlefield once they were released. It’s hard to recall a more failed and counterproductive diplomatic effort. Maybe British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to reach a lasting peace agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938 in Munich on the cusp of World War II?

Bergen notes that the fall of Afghanistan will be seen as a significant jihadist victory just as the Obama withdrawal from Iraq was. That withdrawal set the stage for ISIS to arise there and in Syria. Holy warriors poured in and the world saw them perpetrate horror after horror.

Afghanistan is unlikely to be any different. It could be worse, actually, with as many as 20 jihadist groups and tens of thousands of warriors-in-training moving in and setting up shop sure in the knowledge that the Americans will not...