Guest's Blog
There is a long-term disaster far worse than the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic will end in a few years; however, the world will lose many millions more to sickness, hunger, poverty and catastrophic weather events because of the unprecedented climate emergency.
The world reached a record of 417.2 parts per million of carbon dioxide (ppm CO2) in the atmosphere in May 2020 – the most in over 3 million years.
A study published in May 2019 shows that if we don’t succeed in radically reducing emissions, civilization could collapse by 2050. As reported by the New York Post, the authors of the report say:
“This scenario provides a glimpse into a world of ‘outright chaos’ on a path to the end of human civilization and modern society as we have known it, in which the challenges to global security are simply overwhelming and political panic becomes the norm.”
The good news is that we can turn this around by scaling up regenerative agriculture.
No grievance regarding vaccines is more serious than vaccine-injury. A mere possibility of vaccine-injury is insidious: what is meant to be a prophylactic life-saving procedure performed on a healthy recipient may end in his or her serious injury or death.
As pediatrician Dr. Robert Sears discussed in a public talk, the very idea of vaccine-injury is a hard one for doctors and public health specialists to accept, therefore, out of a need to protect their collective ego identity, the default position of the medical profession is denial of vaccine-injury.
It’s easy for medicine and public health to remain silent about or minimize the perception of vaccine injury. War metaphors in public health lead to the implicit acceptance of vaccine-injury as acceptable collateral in dealing in the war against infectious disease.
The metaphor of war has long been a part of public health. In responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, the world’s public health agencies mobilized and shut down entire parts of society under the utilitarian goal of stopping the spread of COVID-19.
In America, entire states were locked-down, public schools were dismissed, government public services halted and businesses closed while grim pictures of death were painted, pictures of sick and dying on ventilators were broadcast and vivid dialogue of apparently overwhelmed hospital capacity were plastered on mainstream media. Journals and media outlets played along, streaming out content about the dangers of COVID-19 and the need for continued lock-down. Dissenting views on social media were censored by social media tech companies.
New research is adding worrisome evidence to concerns that the widely used weedkilling chemical glyphosate may have the potential to interfere with human hormones.
In a paper published in the journal Chemosphere titled Glyphosate and the key characteristics of an endocrine disruptor: A review, a trio of scientists concluded that glyphosate appears to have eight out of ten key characteristics associated with endocrine disrupting chemicals . The authors cautioned, however, that prospective cohort studies are still needed to more clearly understand the impacts of glyphosate on the human endocrine system.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, scientists have searched for clues about what led to the emergence of its causative agent, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Uncovering the source of SARS-CoV-2 could be crucial for preventing future outbreaks.
A series of four high profile studies published earlier this year provided scientific credence to the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 originated in bats and then jumped to humans through a type of anteater called a pangolin —among the world’s most trafficked wild animals. While that specific theory involving pangolins has been largely discounted, the four studies known as the “pangolin papers” continue to provide support for the notion that coronaviruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 circulate in the wild, meaning the SARS-CoV-2 that caused COVID-19 probably comes from a wild animal source.
I got an article this week. It appeared in Civil Eats, and it had quotations from Linley Dixon, Kathleen Merrigan, and others about COVID, farm scale, and feeding people. It raised very important questions.
This past weekend, Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) board chair Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. sent a message to the people around the world who realize they are watching their freedoms be taken away one after the other. Spoken in solidarity with citizens who participated in rallies in at least 15 countries to protest the global movement towards totalitarianism, Kennedy not only provided hope to freedom advocates, but also asked some critical questions relevant to the COVID crisis.
Chief among those questions is: What are the origins of COVID? This very basic question on something that has taken lives around the globe — including deaths from despair — and destroyed countless businesses is not being asked of government officials in any country on the planet. This is why Kennedy and CHD President Lyn Redwood have asked leaders in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to launch a thorough investigation of COVID’s origins.
Chlorpyrifos insecticides were introduced by Dow Chemical in 1965 and have been used widely in agricultural settings. Commonly known as the active ingredient in the brand names Dursban and Lorsban, chlorpyrifos is an organophosphate insecticide, acaricide and miticide used primarily to control foliage and soil-borne insect pests on a variety of food and feed crops. Products come in liquid form as well as granules, powders, and water-soluble packets, and may be applied by either ground or aerial equipment.
Chlorpyrifos is used on a wide variety of crops including apples, oranges, strawberries, corn, wheat, citrus and other foods families and their children eat daily. USDA’s Pesticide Data Program found chlorpyrifos residue on citrus and melons even after being washed and peeled. By volume, chlorpyrifos is most used on corn and soybeans, with over a million pounds applied annually to each crop. The chemical is not allowed on organic crops.
The palm civet is a small omnivorous mammal of Indonesia and other parts of tropical Asia. Emerging from its forest home onto coffee plantations, it’s able to sense the finest coffee fruits of perfect ripeness. Eating them, it digests the pulp and excretes the beans, adding a musky scent to them from its anal glands.
In the 1990s, Indonesian kopi luwak – civet coffee, made from coffee beans that had passed through a civet’s digestive tract – became a new luxury commodity among wealthy coffee-lovers. Market dynamics being what they are, local producers cashed in on the demand by capturing and caging wild civets, force-feeding them coffee beans and selling the produce as cut-price kopi luwak. Though cheaper, the resulting coffee lacked the quality of the original conferred by the civet’s discerning nose, and came at the expense of ecological and animal welfare.
In September 2017 I was in Mexico for a four-day meeting of the Regeneration International network at the Vía Orgánica ranch, a research and training center near San Miguel de Allende linked with the Organic Consumers Association.
It is a beautiful setting: We convened under high, airy tents from where we could gaze out at fields full of cosmos—a flower native to Mexico—in all shades of pink, and follow the dips and turns of bees and butterflies. There were more than a hundred of us from around the globe; I was among colleagues and friends. Yet I was restless, my attention drifting as I sat in the sessions.
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