This post belongs to an effort going back over a year. First and second part here.
I got many new subscribers in the last 2 days, there is a clarification needed. My focus is complexity, the overall system, unconnected dots, and unexplored paths. You can expect a mixture of everything. The pandemic is about to end and our real problems begin. For the unjabbed I mean.
This post is a continuation of over 1 year of work tracking both diseases, which I still consider major global problems as you will understand pretty soon, in this post. Recommend you to read both And then came the plague and Global Protein Insecurity and scroll down the linked Twitter thread. When you do this type of complex analysis, mixed with forecasting, it's easier and better to just build up, so I can have a track record and be corrected at any point.
As I have been mentioning for close to two months here, over a year in my Twitter feed, both plagues continue to spread, the overfocus on SARS-CoV-2, and it’s useless contrived mitigation policies would come to bite us in the ass, and they are starting too.
The avian flu, which up to18 months ago couldn’t kill anyone, or even infect, has been slowly but surely adapting to animal-to-human transmission, and we have very few deaths, but we have fatalities. After a few months, it was clear governments lacked the speed, decisiveness, and will to properly deal with such an event. Reassessment of priorities is a must.
And as you can see in the Twitter thread in my And then came the plague post, I warned many many many many times this would reach Europe, would travel the sea and jump to North America, and one possible explanation is inside the Twitter thread. At this point, given the challenges of the current administration, they should really focus on dealing with protein security and not pumping up Pfizer's stock price.
And last, something to tie every single post not related to the virus together. High energy prices. Inflation. Food scarcity and historic high food prices = civil unrest and massive political turmoil.
Now I guess why it makes sense, at least for the reader who is here for a few weeks now, why China bought half of the world’s grain, and drove protein prices, globally, to historical levels (granted corruption and greed played a good 30% part on it too). Why both Russia and China squeezed the entire planet out of different types of fertilizer. Lysine (important to grow animals).
From a Hybrid Warfare perspective, some players have been dictating the rules, setting the board and the pieces, and the tone, while others have been virtue signaling and fueling dementia with ice cream.
Buckle up. We may live in many Springs…
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What is ‘Bird Flu’? Do I Need to Worry About It?
Several cases of “bird flu” have been detected in North Carolina and other eastern states. But what exactly is bird flu? Why is it important? Does it affect humans? What can we do about it?
Bird flu continues to spread in North America, Europe
Florida reported its first cases of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza of the season last week.
The first case of H5N1 in North America this season was detected in Newfoundland and Labrador in late December. Since then, the virus has spread to other locations in Canada and the US.
Last week, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) confirmed the presence of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), subtype H5N1, in two flocks in Nova Scotia. One outbreak was in a backyard flock, while the other outbreak was in a commercial flock. According to CBC, 12,000 turkeys were euthanized at the commercial barn during the second outbreak.
Meanwhile, in the US, the first cases of the virus were detected in South Carolina in mid-January before the virus spread to North Carolina and Virginia in recent weeks, with Florida reporting its first cases last week.
Avian influenza forces 12,000 turkeys to be killed at western N.S. barn
Hundreds of dead birds washed up on Solway Coast amid avian flu
A conservationist has described how "distressing" it was to see hundreds of birds washed up on the Solway Coast, thought to have died from avian flu.
The biggest impact has been spotted in Barnacle geese populations, where up to 16,000 birds have died in the UK since the first was reported in November.
Experts say risk of catching bird flu low despite first bird to human infection
"This case demonstrates the increased risk posed by this kind of close contact but does not change the overall assessment that the risk to the general public from avian influenza virus remains very low."
Pig product warning for southern Cape as African swine fever detected
AFS was also detected in KwaNonqaba, outside Mossel Bay, earlier this month.
The quarantine notice urges community members and pig farmers not to remove any pigs or pig products from the area to prevent further spreading of the disease.
Bulgaria: Bird flu outbreak in Haskovo district, African Swine Fever in Blagoevgrad district
The Bulgarian Food Safety Agency (BFSA) said on February 1 that it had confirmed an outbreak of Avian Influenza in the Haskovo region.
On January 31, the food safety agency said that it had confirmed an outbreak of African Swine Fever on a private farm in the village of Kavrakirovo, Petrich municipality, Blagoevgrad district.
Beef producers not sure Biden meat packing program will help
The Biden Administration announced in early January it is setting aside $1 billion of American Rescue Plan Act funds to help foster a “fairer, more competitive, and more resilient meat and poultry supply chain.”
But local ranchers and industry insiders in Wyoming are concerned that the money will be no more than a Band-Aid fix for a complex problem.
Food Prices Approach Record Highs, Threatening the World’s Poorest
The I.M.F.’s data shows that average food inflation across the world reached 6.85 percent on an annualized basis in December, the highest level since their series started in 2014. Between April 2020 and December 2021, the price of soybeans soared 52 percent, and corn and wheat both grew 80 percent, the fund’s data showed, while the price of coffee rose 70 percent, due largely to droughts and frost in Brazil.
From another article with the same title.
Maurice Obstfeld, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who was formerly chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, said that food price increases would strain incomes in poorer countries, especially in some parts of Latin America and Africa, where some people may spend up to 50 or 60 percent of their income on food.
He said that it wasn’t “much of an exaggeration” to say the world was approaching a global food crisis, and that slower growth, high unemployment and stressed budgets from governments that have spent heavily to combat the pandemic had created “a perfect storm of adverse circumstances.”
“There’s a lot of cause for worry about social unrest on a widespread scale,” he added.
Even before the pandemic, global food prices had been trending upward as disease wiped out much of China’s pig herd and the U.S.-China trade war resulted in Chinese tariffs on American agricultural goods.
Posthaste: Warning from Kazakhstan — energy and food inflation could ignite global political unrest this year
High energy and food prices often serve as a leading indicator for outbreaks of civil unrest
Are the protests in Kazakhstan over high energy prices a taste of things to come?
The protests were sparked after the Central Asia state’s authoritarian government decided to remove price caps on liquefied petroleum gas at the start of January, expecting higher production to rein in prices.
High energy prices, along with supply-chain issues and COVID-19 related labour and manufacturing shortages, have lit a fire under inflation across the world.
“Europe, in particular, is on the front line of a spike in global gas prices, and governments across the continent are scrambling to manage a looming cost of living crisis,” Brennan noted. “A failure to deal with the energy price crunch effectively this winter risks driving anti-government protests and political populism across the region in 2022.”
Global Protein Insecurity Part II
Can you clarify your comment that things will get bad only for the unvaxxed? Great article by the way.
Great article. I always enjoy how you piece things together. I also tend to see the big picture and I have been eyeing Russia for years But China. They are playing Long ball and the two sidled up together is very bad. I figure one way for our dear leaders to save face after two years of disastrous mandates and lockdowns is to distract the masses with a good ole fashioned war. Putin wants to reconstitute the Russian Bear and he is great at playing with the sense of National pride and love of it's history.