90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, March 10, 2022

Visage à trois #109

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The world is heading into a global food crisis thanks to the war in Ukraine, according to the head of one major Agri organisation.

Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine is going to have a ‘catastrophic’ effect on the world’s supply of food, the head of one of the world’s leading fertiliser companies.

Both Russia and Ukraine account for a significant portion of the global grain supply, with both nations also having significant roles within the supply of fertiliser, as well as its raw materials.

However, with trade grinding to a halt as a result of the latest stage in the ongoing conflict, the head of one major fertiliser company is sounding off alarm bells.

“Half the world’s population gets food as a result of fertilisers… and if that’s removed from the field for some crops, [the yield] will drop by 50%,” Svein Tore Holsether, who heads up agri company Yara International, told the BBC.

“For me, it’s not whether we are moving into a global food crisis – it’s how large the crisis will be,” he went on to say.

Holsether emphasised that there was already significant supply difficulties before the start of the current conflict, with the BBC noting that the increased cost of gas prices was already resulting in a steep rise in the cost of fertiliser.

The Yara International boss also is reported to have pointed out that around a quarter of key nutrients used in food production come from Russia, with sanctions now looking likely to further constrain in supply.

“At the same time we’re doing whatever we can do at the moment to also find additional sources,” he emphasised. “But with such short timelines it’s limited.”

Unintended consequences: European farmers, who depend to a great extent on Ukrainian and Russian grain to feed their animals, will "suffer" as a result of war, sanctions cutting supply https://t.co/U9wyutmO7A

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) March 3, 2022

Svein Tore Holsether is not the only person putting forward a bleak picture of future food security, however.

Michael Scannell — a senior figure in the EU’s Agriculture Department — has said that the knock-on effects of the war in Ukraine will be “painful” for Europe’s Agri-Food sector, with a lot of the bloc’s fertiliser and animal feed being sourced from either Russia or Ukraine.

However, the EU bureaucrat was convinced that the European bloc would be able to get through the crisis.

“The consequences of this Russian aggression will have a major impact on our agri-food sector, and it will be painful, but, we have to suffer that pain,” Scannell said, noting that “Ukrainians are paying with their lives, not in Euros”, and so the cost did not seem so steep for the EU within that context.

Local politicians within the EU appear to have also grown increasingly concerned regarding the possibility of future shortages.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has said his country must stay out of the conflict in Ukraine, noting the country’s reliance on Russian imports, while his government’s agriculture minister has emphasised that the country’s food supply must be protected.

“We condemn the war, especially that it is here in our neighborhood; we say no to violence, we stand together with our allies, and all this is important, but the most important thing is that Hungary should stay out of this war conflict,” Orbán is reported as saying.

Ireland also appears to be on a war footing in regards to the crisis, with the country’s minister of agriculture confirming that he will be asking farmers to increase grain production in the hopes of combatting supply shortages, mirroring government policy implemented within the country during the Second World War.

However, the Irish Farmers’ Association has warned officials against taking top-down measures without consulting farmers first.

“It would be very unwise of the Government to make any decisions on this before engaging fully with...

As much as they accuse the right of suffering from a groundless list of phobias, leftist institutions are the ones promoting mental illness.

In response to Iowa’s recent legislation banning males from participating on female sports teams, a March 3 article at CNN accused Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds of using “transphobic language to justify the need for the ban.” After Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s order rightly labeling the genital mutilation of minors as “child abuse” and urging such abuse to be reported, a Feb. 26 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times described the move as a “toxic cocktail of ‘what about the children?’ hand-wringing, unregenerate transphobia and MAGA-friendly demonizing of medical expertise.”

MSNBC talking head Joy Reid brought far-left Democrats on her show on Feb. 22 to call homophobic and transphobic Florida’s bill banning public schools from teaching “sexual orientation” or “gender identity” to kindergarteners through 3rd-graders.

It’s a common tactic from those on the left: accuse their political and ideological opponents of suffering from various phobias or disorders, whether it be homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, or “Asian phobia.” It’s a clever rhetorical move: if your opponent’s opinions are not motivated by reason and argument, but irrational fear, then you don’t need to acknowledge or refute those opinions.

Conflict Avoidance

In this game, the problem isn’t the argument, but the person, who is caricatured as bigoted, racist, or sexist. And if your interlocutor is that irredeemably evil, the solution isn’t to debate such a person, but to ridicule and silence him.

Of course, this is not arguing in good faith. It is instead one of the oldest logical fallacies in the book: the ad hominem, in which one party seeks to delegitimize the other (and his position) by attacking him. But there’s also a deep irony that this tactic is so frequently employed by leftists, for it is many left-wing policies that promote and engender various psychological maladies.

Consider for example the way our academic institutions have groomed younger generations to view themselves as so weak and vulnerable that even encountering an alternative opinion is viewed as a threat to their emotional well-being. The slogan that “words are violence” has migrated far beyond college campuses into corporate media and the way many on the left understand debate. Students at institutions of higher education from...

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), without much fanfare, announced last month that samples obtained through PCR nasal swab tests have been sent to labs for genomic sequencing.

With an unassuming Tweet, the CDC stated:

“Remember that #COVID19 nose swab test you took? What happened to the swab? If it was processed with a PCR test, there’s a 10% chance that it ended up in a lab for genomic sequencing analysis.”

What does that mean? Some individuals responded to that admission.

“Well, this is a concerning development. Was the intent provided upfront in a disclosure? I would not have agreed to releasing my DNA!” one Twitter user wrote.

Another Tweet states, “Sounds illegal to me!” while another Tweeted: “Translation… We now own your DNA Do you trust us?”

The Gateway Pundit, reporting on this admission, did note the CDC’s response was to say the genomic sequencing analysis is used to detect new strains of COVID-19 so they can perpetuate fear of the common cold. Well, maybe they didn’t admit to the fear portion, but let’s be honest.

Mac Slavo wrote: “We all knew this scamdemic was multifaceted from the beginning. The nefarious actions of the ruling class are still playing out, and it’s doubtful that this will be the worst revelation in the coming months. It also begs the question: what about the Chinese anal swabs?”

Of course, let’s not shed too many tears for those Americans subjected to the anal swabs. After all, most of them were U.S. diplomats who are part of the ruling class.

This is just one of the many, many reasons to never ever take one of these fraudulent PCR tests that have driven the casedemic. As previously reported, these tests are useless and contain poisons, and they have the potential to be used as a way to secretly “vaccinate” people.

That admission that the tests could be used to “vaccinate” came from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) which developed a micro-device called “theragrippers.”

Patrick Smith, writing for JHU, stated these “theragrippers” can be put into the human body through Q-tips.

“Inspired by a parasitic worm that digs its sharp teeth into its host’s intestines, Johns Hopkins researchers have designed tiny, star-shaped microdevices that can latch onto intestinal mucosa and release drugs into the body,” Smith wrote. “A theragripper is about the size of a speck of dust. This swab contains dozens of the tiny devices.”

The tests have been used to subjugate people and strip them of their humanity. It’s one of the many tools used over the last two years.

Evita Duffy, writing for the student-run University of Chicago publication The Chicago Thinker, detailed the subjugation occurring on college campuses.

“Since COVID-19 emerged, American colleges have subjected students to the most strict, unscientific, and unethical mandates in the country,” Duffy wrote. “Piling on top of tyrannical federal, state, and local mandates, campus rules have not only been foolish, but destructive.”

She added: “Without even controlling for comorbidities, the survival rate for Americans under 65 who have contracted COVID since February 2020 is 99.87 percent. Yet my school and virtually all other American universities have used COVID to wield frightening control over their students.”

Duffy provided the top 7 absurdities of the past two years including the removal of bodily autonomy, denial of education paid for, subjugation through masks, the inability to exercise without subjugation, the forceful mental submission, the increased surveillance state and the requirement to submit to...

Visage à trois #108

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Oil drillers say they are working to fill the recent void in the oil market but are hampered by Democrat policies.

While gas prices rose about one dollar before the run-up to the Ukrainian war and 70 cents since the invasion of Ukraine, President Biden has blamed the oil industry for not producing enough oil to shore up the oil crisis from the war. He claims American drillers are not utilizing 9,000 leases on private land.

But American shale drillers have pushed back by suggesting Biden’s supply chain woes and woke private, and public investment strategies have dramatically slowed swift production.

“Getting lenders to choke off money to fossil fuel companies is the next needed move for the industry to address the material risks that the coal, oil and gas industry faces,” Leslie Samuelrich, president at investment advisory firm Green Century Capital Management, said back April about industry’s future lending decisions.

Samuelrich’s analysis has come true, which is greatly reducing the feasibility of new oil projects on the reported 9,000 private land leases.

“Ten years ago, the ‘cost of capital’ for developing oil and gas as compared to renewable projects was pretty much the same, falling consistently between 8% and 10%. But not anymore,” Bloomberg reported in November. Now the cost of capital is reportedly 20 percent for long-cycle developments.

Biden’s attack on private financing is only one angle of assault. In August, a Biden changed global bank financing rules that make it more difficult for drillers to find investors. The policy is intended to accelerate renewable energy investment rather than fossil fuel investment, thereby greatly defunding oil production.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that oil drillers believe the “flight of capital from the fossil-fuel industry in recent years has left U.S. oil patches without enough fracking equipment to bring a ton of new wells online, and that a resurgence of go-go drilling would deplete companies’ most valuable drilling locations”:

Lenders—who have become more wary of funding oil-related ventures as environmental, social and governance ideas catch on in financial circles—are still unwilling to give money to most of the nation’s crop of oil-field service companies, or to smaller oil producers that want to expand their operations, executives and analysts said. That has left small but instrumental players short of the financing they need to repair fracking equipment sidelined during the start of the pandemic, or invest in building drill bits, drilling rigs and blowout preventers.

Data suggests the drillers are correct. American oil production is down drastically from 2019 before the pandemic. In 2022, oil production is 12 million barrels or 8 percent less than in 2019.

“They’ve already got all of their available equipment out there already,” Richard Spears, vice president at energy consulting firm Spears & Associates Inc., told the Journal. “The constraint on growth is going to be, where do you get another [fracking] truck?”

Biden also has a third approach to damaging the American oil industry. Biden has nominated Sarah Bloom Raskin to the Fed. It is well known Raskin expressed interest in driving up financing costs for fossil fuels. In a New York Times op-ed from 2020, Raskin dubbed the oil industry as “dying” and suggested the Fed should not support the oil drilling.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) told Breitbart News that Raskin is “trying to kill an essential industry to the world economy by nominating people for the Federal Reserve that will use fiduciary rules to unemploy 12.5 percent of the state, and give Russia more leverage over the...

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #283

The Likely Return of the Disastrous Nuclear Deal with Iran

Will a desperate Biden make even more concessions?

President Joe Biden is on the verge of making another colossal foreign policy blunder. He wants to restore the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that the Obama-Biden administration had concluded in 2015, along with Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China. Some of the same Obama-Biden administration players involved in the original negotiations, who strongly denounced former President Donald Trump’s wise decision to withdraw from their fatally flawed handiwork, are determined to bring it back to life.

President Biden appears ready to make major concessions to Iran. For example, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, “Iran’s 'breakout time'—the duration needed to amass enough nuclear fuel [f]or a bomb—could be as little as six months,” under a restored deal as opposed to the JCPOA’s original twelve-month breakout time. As of mid-February, Iran had already amassed 33.2 kilograms of uranium material enriched to the 60 percent level, nearly double the amount it had in early November of last year.

“Iran would need around 40 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium to produce enough weapons-grade nuclear fuel for a weapon,” the Wall Street Journal reported. This means that Iran already has about three-quarters of what it would require to advance quickly to weapon-grade 90% fuel for a nuclear bomb.

Iran has put itself in the driver’s seat by plowing ahead to reach an incredibly short breakout time, enabling the regime to extort more concessions from the Biden administration. The war in Ukraine, which is destabilizing the global energy market, also provides the Iranian regime with a stronger bargaining position to achieve the maximum lifting of sanctions and unfreezing of Iran’s assets. The regime is counting on the West’s need for Iranian oil to make up for shortfalls from other oil producing countries.

President Biden finally announced the cut-off of U.S. oil and gas imports from Russia on March 8th. But instead of reversing his war on fossil fuels policies that have stymied more drilling and production of oil in the energy-rich United States, the Biden administration already has its hand out to Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for their oil to make up for the resulting shortfall. And the Biden administration has its eyes on Iran.

Out of sheer desperation, the Biden administration appears ready to turn to Iran to add its own oil to the global oil supply. This means agreeing to a nuclear deal on Iran’s terms. It is a quick fix to show the American people that the Biden administration is taking action to reduce the price of gasoline that they are paying at the pump. Anything to avoid offending the climate change activists at home, which would happen if the administration were to do the sensible thing and remove barriers it has imposed against more domestic production of oil and gas.

While trying to isolate Russia economically and diplomatically for its invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration is negotiating alongside Russia (and China) to restore the JCPOA. Even worse, since Iran has refused to negotiate face-to-face with U.S. representatives, the Biden administration has outsourced the principal intermediary role to Russia.

“Russia has been instrumental in shaping a compromise,” Reuters has reported, based on information from diplomats.

If there is a deal, Iran will most likely ship its excess uranium over the agreed upon cap to none other than Russia as it did the last time around. Only this time, Iran would be doing so in concert with a country that has just brought the world perilously close to...

Have mRNA jabs ruined our chance at herd immunity?

New figures from Britain raise bright red flags about the direction of Covid in wealthy countries that used mRNA and DNA shots to attempt to defeat the coronavirus last year.

Hospitalizations and deaths remain stubbornly high and overwhelmingly occur in vaccinated people. In February, 90 percent of the 1,000 Britons who died each week of Covid were vaccinated.

New infections are not only far higher than they were before the Omicron variant emerged, they are rising again after a brief fall in February. And even boosters appear to offer no protection against hospitalizations in younger people.

British data are crucial both because Britain vaccinated and boosted early and because its datasets are far more complete and less politicized than those in the United States.

Day by day, week by week, the figures are becoming more worrisome. They hint that mRNA and DNA shots may have slowed if not completely halted the natural progression to herd immunity that occurred in earlier respiratory virus epidemics.

In fact, Britain now reports 99 percent of adults have antibodies to Covid, mostly as the result of vaccination. That level is far higher than epidemiologists believed would be necessary to support herd immunity. Yet Covid infections, hospitalizations, and deaths continue unabated. Almost 12,000 Britons are now hospitalized with Covid, more than at this time last year.

The most stunning chart is this one. Each week the British government releases a “surveillance report” which includes Covid deaths by vaccine status.

SOURCE

In the four weeks ending February 27, 397 unvaccinated Britons died of Covid, compared to 3,512 who were vaccinated. Using a broader definition, which may include more incidental deaths unrelated to Covid infections, the numbers are even worse, with 5,871 vaccinated people dying compared to 570 unvaccinated. (The United States does not publicly provide this data; it is not even clear American public health authorities collect it comprehensively.)

The report also shows for the first time that adults under 50 are now just as likely to be hospitalized for Covid whether they are boosted or unvaccinated. The report does not provide a similar hospitalization estimate for people who were vaccinated but unboosted, but based on the raw numbers it does provide, those rates are the highest of all.

Meanwhile, new Covid infections have nearly doubled in Britain in the last two weeks, and now top 60,000 a day. British media outlets have connected the rise to Britain’s “freedom day” on Feb. 24, which marked the legal end of Covid restrictions.

But Britain had already been moving toward normality throughout February, and cases were falling sharply. It is not clear that the legal end to restrictions made much difference behaviorally.

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Britain is not alone.

Though elite media outlets have sharply deemphasized reporting on Covid, the epidemic continues unabated in advanced countries. In Europe and the United States, overall death and hospitalization rates remain high as the epidemic enters its third spring. Meanwhile, in South Korea and Japan, which largely avoided serious problems before mRNA vaccinations and the Omicron variant, infections are soaring and deaths following.

In contrast, many poorer countries that used older “inactivated virus” vaccines, or have low overall vaccination rates, have seen their coronavirus epidemics progress in a more traditional pattern.

Infections have risen and then fallen rapidly in distinct seasonal waves. Omicron has not caused off-the-charts spikes in new infections - probably because previous immunity from natural infection is far broader and more valuable against Omicron than vaccine-generated protection.

Here’s India, for example: