Steve Bull's Blog, page 140
January 15, 2023
USDA Reveals US Corn-Harvested Acres At 2008 Levels Amid Megadrought
Last year was a bad year for corn — the latest US Department of Agriculture (USDA) report shows drought conditions and extreme weather wreaked havoc on croplands.
USDA unexpectedly slashed its outlook for domestic corn production amid a severe drought across the western farm belt. Farmers in Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas were forced to abandon drought-plagued fields.
The agency estimated farmers harvested 79.2 million acres, a decline of 1.6 million acres versus the previous estimate — the smallest acres harvest since 2008.
The unexpected cut to US harvested corn acres means grain supplies are a lot tighter than realized. A report Thursday showed the corn area in the world’s largest producer is at the smallest since 2008 with crops failing in states such as Texas and Nebraska. That’s due to persistent drought conditions in the western part of the country that could also hit harvests for wheat plants that are currently dormant for the winter. — Bloomberg
The crop-failed lands reduced total harvest corn acreage to levels not seen since 2008.
Less acreage tightens supply and might continue to put a bid under corn prices.
Global food prices remain at crisis levels.
Here’s the current drought situation across the farm belt.
Corn production woes from the US don’t bode well in the fight to crush food inflation. It seems as if the prices for our food will remain high well through 2023.
The Lost Forest Gardens of Europe
Contents
People of the Hazel: Europe’s indigenous cultures return after the glaciers retreat, bringing their most cherished tree with them
The Continent-Wide Orchard: Mesolithic people create Europe’s post-glacial ecosystems as vast forest gardens
A Changing Climate: millennia of drastic fluctuations in the climate lead to the creation and spread of grain-based agriculture
Strength in Diversity: early farmers innovate resilient crop mixes and companion planting to guard against climate change
Hybrid Cultures: Europe’s new creolized societies mix the best of hunter-gatherer and farmer cultures, practices, livestock, and crops to create entirely new ways to grow food
The Domesticated Forest Garden: farmers in the Mediterranean adapt their region’s hunter-gatherer forest gardens into diverse multi-story farms, creating resilient agricultural forests of domesticated crops that exist to this day
Towards a New Culture: imperialist monoculture farming systems take precedence in Europe, but the indigenous forest garden methods survive in the margins. These ancient methods are nearly forgotten, but they can provide a framework for rethinking the way we live and grow food in a changing climate.
IntroductionIn the hills above the Po river in northern Italy, there are a handful of farms that look almost the same today as they would have three thousand years ago.
There are rows of short pruned trees, with fruit-laden grape vines festooned between them. The trees are common natives in the area that produce fruit, firewood, basketmaking materials, and fodder for farm animals. The grapes are ancient cultivars that have been grown here for millennia. Between these rows of grapes and trees are diverse plots of cereals, hayfields, vegetables, and herbs. In a single field, one can find all of the staples needed to live and support the farmstead, and more to sell at a high premium…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
January 14, 2023
The Four Stages of Societal Collapse and Thiel’s Libertarian Challenge
“This is what will happen in the United States if you allow all the[se] schmucks to promise all kinds of goodies and paradise on earth which will bring the country to crisis” Yuri Bezmenov
Rewatching this video of a defector from the Soviet Union in 1985 in context of our post Covid society connected some dots. Those dots were about what Yuri describes in this video as the “Demoralization” stage of the four-stage KGB process.
Separately, Peter Thiel recently offered his view of three dystopian futures being offered by competing ideologies, and the challenge to the Libertarian right to offer a competing better vision of the future.
But first, the 4 stages of Societal collapse as Yuri Bezmenov describes above offer a nice roadmap to how we got here to begin with. The four stages of US societal collapse as the KGB prophet says are:
Demoralization: in which people are (re)educated according to your own ideology- Pressure to conformDestabilization: in which essentials like economy, foreign relations, and defense pacts/systems are disrupted- E.G. supply chains, Nato, EtcCrisis: a confluence of events on the back of the previous two steps creates existential crisis for the status quo.- Constantly threatenedNormalization: during the crisis a “force for good” will appear that promises some return to normalcy. We welcome despotic solutions to immediate problems.- Rise of authoritarianism and reduction in libertyThis reads like a playbook for the last two years, and perhaps going as far back as the GFC of 2009. The stages occur simultaneously and need reapplication like so many vaccine boosters until compliance is 100%.
The Media’s Role in Demoralization
The MSM has been revealed beyond the pale to be a water-carrier for elites (a Trump dividend BTW) and in return for their subservience the media gets to manipulate and monetize our emotions.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
We Must Have The Truth
In an understatement of the century, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky recently summed up her agency’s role in promoting distrust in science by stating that they did not “reliably meet expectations.”
I am always happy to welcome new content from The Brownstone Institute, one of the last few beacons of common sense left in the world of actual journalism.
This week they published a new piece on Covid and our response to it, called We Must Have The Truth. I reached out to the publication last year and requested permission to share their content when I enjoy it, in full, with my readers, which they kindly granted. If you’re interested in the topic – or simply just having a grasp on the objective truth – I believe it is a “must read”.
The article is written by Pat Fidopiastis, who is a Professor of Microbiology at California Polytechnic State University.
On April 2, 2020, a paddle boarder was chased by authorities and taken into custody. This event should have caused unanimous outrage over the absurdity of what happened – law enforcement arrested a lone paddle boarder on Santa Monica Bay for the crime of “flouting coronavirus closures.”
Traditional voices that could have questioned unscientific authoritarian policy instead provided cover. The Los Angeles Times justified law enforcement’s ridiculous response by quoting a scientist who made the claim (presumably with a straight face): “..[SARS-CoV-2] could enter coastal waters and transfer back into the air.” Setting aside the absurdity of this and every other justification for closing beaches, hiking trails, and parks, think of the narrative it perpetuated — the virus is so insidious that even those who dared to paddle board alone on the ocean might somehow spread it to the rest of us.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Siberia Records Minus-80 Degrees As Talk Of Polar Vortex Grows
Several weeks after the Christmas Arctic blast, much of the US and Europe have enjoyed record warmth. Recall on Dec. 27, we noted the cold air mass from Siberia that spread across the continental US would dissipate into the new year. So far, this is correct, as three weeks of above-average weather has staved off an energy crisis in the Northern Hemisphere. But just north, in Siberia, temperatures are sinking to near-record lows. And it could only be a matter of time before the giant cold air mass swirling in the North Pole becomes unstable, breaks down, and begins pouring into the US and Europe.
Global warming alarmists who called for an imminent climate disaster last summer are scratching their heads as the rural northern Siberian town of Zhilinda just recorded temperatures of minus-79.8 degrees, according to climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks extreme temperatures across the globe.
Herrera told The Washington Post that Zhilinda was just a few degrees off from breaking its record low of minus-82.3 degrees. The all-time low for the Northern Hemisphere was set in Russia in 1933 at minus-89.9 degrees.
Earlier this week, Arcfield Weather’s Paul Dorian said winter isn’t over and called for a significant change in North American weather “in about ten days or so.” Like anything, nothing is ever constant, and the warm spell could give way to colder temps later this month or early February.
“Sometimes, exceptionally cold air that builds over Siberia spills into the eastern United States,” WaPo explained, adding:
“Although the eastern United States has had very mild weather since that late December cold blast, there is the potential for a significant pattern change toward the end of January.”
…click on the above link to read the rest…
These Are North America’s Biggest Sources Of Electricity By State And Province
On a national scale, the United States and Canada rely on a very different makeup of sources to generate their electricity.
The U.S. primarily uses natural gas, coal, and nuclear power, while Canada relies on both hydro and nuclear. That said, when zooming in on the province or state level, individual primary electricity sources can differ greatly.
In the infographic below, Visual Capitalist’s Selin Oğuz takes a look at the electricity generation in the states and provinces of these two countries using data from the Nuclear Energy Institute (2021) and the Canada Energy Regulator (2019).
Natural Gas
Natural gas is widely used for electricity generation in the United States. Known as a “cleaner” fossil fuel, its abundance, coupled with an established national distribution network and relatively low cost, makes it the leading electricity source in the country.
In 2021, 38% of the 4120 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity generated in the U.S. came from natural gas. Not surprisingly, more than 40% of American states have natural gas as their biggest electricity source.
Here are some states that have the largest shares of natural gas-sourced electricity.
In Canada, natural gas is only the third-biggest electricity source (behind hydro and nuclear), accounting for 11% of the 632 TWh of electricity produced in 2019. Alberta is the only province with natural gas as its main source of electricity.
Nuclear
Nuclear power is a carbon-free energy source that makes up a considerable share of the energy generated in both the U.S. and Canada.
19% of America’s and 15% of Canada’s electricity comes from nuclear power. While the percentages are close to one another, it’s good to note that the United States generates 6 to 7 times more electricity than Canada each year, yielding a lot more nuclear power than Canada in terms of gigawatt hours (GWh) per year.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Western Journalists Are Cowardly, Approval-Seeking Losers
Research conducted by New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”
Which is to say that all the years of hysterical shrieking about Russian trolls interfering in US democracy and corrupting the fragile little minds of Americans — a narrative that has been used to drum up support for internet censorship and ever-increasing US government involvement in the regulation of online speech — was false.
And to be clear, this isn’t actually news. It was established years ago that the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency could not possibly have had any meaningful impact on the 2016 election, because the scope of its operations was quite small, its posts were mostly unrelated to the election and many were posted after the election occurred, and its funding was dwarfed by orders of magnitude by domestic campaigns to influence the election outcome.
What’s different this time around, six years after Trump’s inauguration, is that this time the mass media are reporting on these findings.
The Washington Post has an article out with the brazenly misleading headline “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters“. Anyone who reads the article itself will find its author Tim Starks acknowledges that “Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior,” but the insertion of the word “little” means anyone who just reads the headline (the overwhelming majority of people encountering the article) will come away with the impression that Russian trolls still had some influence on 2016 voters.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
What is the US “Gas Stove Ban” REALLY about?What sounds like overeach in itself, is actually a cover for something potentially far, far worse.
The Biden administration is apparently looking to ban gas stoves, calling them a “hidden danger”. But while that sounds bad enough, a deeper dive shows – as usual – it’s not really about what they say it’s about.
Talk of banning gas stoves and “unregulated indoor air quality” could be a Trojan horse designed to get even more “smart” monitoring technology into your home.
Let’s jump in.
ARE GAS STOVES DANGEROUS?Well, according to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the New Scientist and million other outlets and pundits who started talking about it in the last two days, yes.
Earlier this week near-identical articles from the National Review, Bloomberg and CNN detail how the US Consumer Product Safety Commission will be opening “public comment on the dangers of gas stoves sometime this winter”.
The articles claim:
The emissions have been linked to illness, cardiovascular problems, cancer, and other health conditions. More than 12 percent of current childhood asthma cases are linked to gas stove use, according to peer-reviewed research published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health last month.
Now would be a good time to talk about the phrase “linked to”. It’s always a good one to look out for in any mainstream publication. Journalists love it because it implies causation without stating it.
Consider, one hundred per cent of serial killers have been linked to the ingestion of water and the wearing of shoes.
If this manipulative use of language were not evidence enough of an agenda, the rather premature deployment of the race card proves it:
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Twitter Files Expose How Dems/Media Defied Twitter ‘Facts’ To Spread ‘Russian Bot’ Hoax
What’s this? Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and staff repeatedly pushed Twitter to remove perfectly legal content that they found offensive, according to Friday’s installment of “The Twitter Files.”
When Twitter pushed back, Schiff staffer Jeff Lowenstein pulled out the ‘slippery slope’ argument.
Twitter also refused requests to ban content about Schiff and his staff, telling the congressman’s office that this would not be “conceivable.”
Hilariously though, Schiff’s office was concerned that if tweets were “deamplified” that law enforcement may have a harder time tracking the offending users.
But there’s much, much more…
As Mimi Nguyen Ly and Tom Ozimek noted earlier via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The latest Twitter Files release shows how prominent Democrats knowingly pushed a false Russiagate-related narrative about “Russian bots” promoting a key House Intelligence Committee memo that detailed efforts to spy on the Trump campaign, despite the lawmakers being told by Twitter executives that it wasn’t true.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) delivers remarks during a hearing in Washington, on Oct. 13, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)The 14th instalment of the Twitter Files was released on Jan. 12 by journalist Matt Taibbi, who explained in a series of posts that, at a key moment in the Trump-Russia investigation, Democrats alleged that “Russian bots” were spreading an explosive report from then-Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).
“At a crucial moment in a years-long furor,” Taibbi explained in one of the posts, “Democrats denounced a report about flaws in the Trump-Russia investigation, saying it was boosted by Russian ‘bots’ and ‘trolls.’”
“Twitter officials were aghast, finding no evidence of Russian influence,” Taibbi continued.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
