Another day, another international agreement broken by Russia.
Ukraine was pressured by the West to sign this worthless piece of paper because of the “global food crisis” – which was never anything more than another mass panic, to which Western politicians seem particularly susceptible these days.
I got fooled by this supposed crisis because – just like everyone else – I initially believed what I was being told. But one look at the above chart of the price of wheat and the penny dropped.
On January 24th, one month before the full-scale Russian invasion, wheat futures opened at $802 per 100 bushels. They peaked at $1,342 in early March, but from the middle of May there was a steady and steep decline, and on July 6th (before any hint of a “grain deal” was announced) the price dropped to $787 – back to pre-invasion levels. In other words, the markets got spooked, and have now recovered their senses.
But why aren’t the markets concerned about a crisis? Isn’t it the case that Ukraine produces a large amount of the world’s wheat? Not really. The U.S. Department of Agriculture tells us that Ukrainian wheat production is only 3% of the global total (and I don’t recall that figure being reported in the media). However, due to the geography of the country – with a lot of flat arable land and a climate well-suited to wheat production – they have big surpluses, so they export relatively more than other countries. The figure of 25% of global wheat exports (counting Russia and Ukraine) was therefore not inaccurate, but it seems to have prompted many people to conclude that we somehow had to find a huge amount of extra wheat all of a sudden.
However, in reality we don’t have to suddenly increase world production of wheat by 25% – or anything like it. The actual amount of replacement wheat production would only need to be about 10 million tons, or roughly 1% of world production. But given that the spring wheat crop was planted after the full-scale invasion, when farmers planted more than usual due to the expected demand (as seen in the wheat futures price at the time), there has already been time to adjust. Nevertheless, India has had some problems with production of the spring wheat (after a good winter wheat harvest), and parts of the EU haven’t had a good year.
Thus, the harvest this year will be watched with some interest, but the USDA betrayed no hint of panic when they summarised the situation on July 12th:
The 2022/23 global wheat outlook is for fewer supplies, reduced consumption, higher exports, and increased stocks. Supplies are reduced 1.1 million tons to 1,051.7 million as less production is partially offset by larger beginning stocks.
[…]Projected 2022/23 global trade is raised 0.9 million tons to 205.5 million as higher exports from Canada and the United States are only partially offset by lower exports from Argentina and the EU. World consumption is lowered 1.8 million tons to 784.2 million, primarily on reduced feed and residual use in the EU and Ukraine.
Essentially, there will be about 0.1% less wheat than last year, but global exports will actually increase by 0.4%. Even the BBC, while trying to sound as pessimistic as possible, can’t conclude anything worse than that there will be higher-than-usual wheat prices that might hit low-income countries.
In the Middle East and North Africa, where many countries import a lot of Ukrainian wheat, they will have to find other suppliers on the global market – which they’ve already had months to do so. But even Egypt, with the largest dependence on Russian and Ukrainian grain, was only importing 10% of their wheat from Ukraine, and it looks like they’ll still be able to import from Russia. Not to mention the fact that they claimed in February to have nine months’ supply stockpiled. And it’s not as though Ukraine has ceased its exports.
At the risk of drawing a comparison to Marie Antoinette, add to all this the fact that it’s not as though the population of Egypt – or of Bangladesh, for instance – are somehow incapable of eating anything but wheat-based products. The only real issue is the price – so perhaps we’ll see more trade in other foodstuffs, as consumer demand for wheat drops.
But none of this has stopped many, including Liz Truss and the former Supreme Allied Commander Europe James Stavridis, from calling for NATO to escort Ukrainian grain convoys in the Black Sea – creating a serious risk of a deliberate or accidental confrontation with Russian naval or air assets, which could escalate to nuclear war. On the other side, the previously-sensible Jordan Peterson has urged Ukrainian capitulation to Russia based partly on a prediction of “millions” dying from starvation.
I think it’s time for a rational re-appraisal of the facts. Let’s call off the mass-starvation panic.
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If I’m honest, I find it hard to relive any part of the covid madness, be it ina book, seeing video footage of the time, or pretty much anything that takes me back to it.
It makes me angry and anxious and it.makes.me also despair of the human race, which I don’t want to do.
Me too. Chatting to an acquaintance just now that I haven’t seen for years, and some of her friends. They were full of complaints about how lockdowns were over the top, terrible that people died alone etc, one is vaccinated 3 times but just got covid. But absolutely no connection to why and how it happened, how it could have been done differently, who is to blame, how to stop it happening again. It just happened to them, like a rain shower, and they’ve moved on. Utterly baffling.
I think that many people have not moved on to the extent that they appear to. It’s cognitive dissonance at play in many cases. If they are to start realising that their Government and the other PTB lied to them and do not have their best interests at heart, then it opens a whole can of worms they are just not ready for. Will they ever be, is the question!
I bounce between not wanting to relive the experience and becoming obsessed by it and reliving every detail. Either way, it’s not healthy.
Probably a combination of things – some are pretty dozy people, others don’t want to face the horrible truth, or a combination of both.
I don’t relive it, and I am trying to enjoy my life, but neither do I intend to “forgive and forget”. I suppose I am mildly obsessed by it because I now realise it’s part of an ongoing drift that is the destruction of our civilisation, which I want to try and understand so I can try to slow it down.
It seems to me that one big problem is people have disconnected themselves from criticising what was done to them because they have realised that whatever they do it is unlikely to change any future experiences they have imposed on them by the idiots in charge.
I’m a natural fully paid-up member of the awkward squad, but even I struggle some days when I see the massive deluge of liquid excrement that is being poured on us day in, day out. In the case of UK water companies this is the literal truth too.
I have held up so far because I have always had pretty much the same mindset from childhood on. But it’s wearing.
There certainly seem to be few grounds for optimism but I love life too much to be miserable and I don’t want to give our enemies any satisfaction
“Idiots in charge”
I don’t understand how in mid 2023 it is possible for people to still buy the “cockup” explanation.
I know of many who have had to move on, for one reason only.. Their sanity
I guess we’re all different. I can’t “unsee” what I’ve seen and “un-understand” what I’ve understood. I just have to live with it, which is OK. That’s life.
Never forgive. Never forget. It’s burned into my memory. I couldn’t delete what happened if I wanted to!!
I sure have it all burned into my memory. I tracked every bit of madness going on around the world aas it was happening. Pretty obsessively in fact, and was constantly making sense of it and eventually trying to anticipate how things would unfold next.
I would struggle to read or see something that I haven’t already encountered or thought of regarding covid.
I coukd probably write a very thoroigh account of the covid terror if i had to and no doubt plenty of others on here could too. So this sort of book just isn’t for me. I’m sure it’s useful for those who lived through it in a hypnotised, zombie like state and are still coming around.
Same here. I’m going to have to force myself to do it regularly. We’ve lived through a dress rehearsal for the world the elitists want us to inhabit in the next 30 years.
The recent warning that in London , the MMR vaccination rate has fallen below the level above which measles outbreaks are prevented contrasts with the response of Jo public to the Covid vaccine . MMR prevents disease developing and yet people are suspicious . MRNA vaccine seems to promote infection and yet people still talk about it as a preventative . What is wrong with the logical thinking at work here ?
I assume MMR vaccination rates have fallen because many people have seen the harms and ineffectiveness of the mRNA injections and no longer trust medical advice pertaining to other vaccines.
Unfortunately the deaths and injuries have far from stopped.
I think that a lot of it is to do with the sleight of hand after the revised definition of what a “vaccine” is. Historically, the common understanding of their functionality would be that they can prevent infection by whatever. Not so now, for some of them, and the current C-19 in particular. In an honest, logical world a new name should have been coined to separate the two – but then, developing brand new drugs, getting them approved, and sold to the general public may be uneconomic. After all, the issue of emergency use authorisation (EUA) was like a red rag to a bull; money talks.
A cowardly part of my mind tries to rationalise the evil of the last three years out of existence. ‘Nah! It was a bad dream!’ Memory fades and trauma tries to bury itself. Being a freelancer and a long term ‘libertarian wing of small ‘c’ conservatism’ man, I’m scarred for life by what happened. I had the virus at the end of 2019. There was no need for the lockdowns. I actually consider what happened to be a physical and psychological manifestation of Evil. What we experienced was on the spectrum of Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and others.
Just because we didn’t get as far as people being put in camps in the UK, didn’t mean we weren’t hearing about what happened in Australia or Canada. Everywhere, people were snitching on each other and talking up horrifying plans such as detainment camps for people refusing the jabs. I remain terrified of what the state in the internet age has shown itself capable of. I would read the news and think ‘Can’t you see what you’re advocating? Can’t you see the parallels?’
‘Anger’ doesn’t come close to how I feel: it’s elevated to a sense of repugnance and agonised sadness. People I’ve broken bread with have advocated imprisoning people like me, because they ceased to think of the individual. If we needed evidence of how a loon like Hitler can easily seduce a country, we had it in spades from 2020. I worked out and built myself up in 2020, because I honestly thought the public would break and there would be civil conflict. I was preparing myself for potential civil war and I had poorly elderly parents to look after. Instead, to my eternal disgust, the public rolled over and exposed their yellow bellies!
I haven’t changed my mind that I don’t want to live in the UK anymore: the UK I hoped for post Brexit was strangled at birth when the lockdown was declared. I now have a UK passport that I despise. Our EU rivals behaved obscenely, but authoritarianism has long been part and parcel of Europe and its Roman-Napoleonic Law. At least they were consistently authoritarian. Britain’s totalitarianism was on account of there being no laws: politicians and the police made them up as they went along.
The oncoming storm of a Labour Government terrifies me, because that evil cabal of communists and Satanists will lock us up again in a heartbeat, will look to Sturgeon, Morrison and Trudeau for inspiration on authoritarianism and use wealth and property taxes to fund another lockdown. I don’t know where to go that wouldn’t force this behaviour on its citizens another time, though.
I’m angry and I’ll bloody well stay angry. I want to live to be old and angry enough to hobble on a zimmer frame to Matt Hancock’s grave and urinate on it, then drink a lot of water so I can urinate on Boris Johnson’s grave too. They don’t deserve to live to an old age, but they almost certainly will. I intend to live longer and freer!
I might well buy the book. It will be tough to read. But after the lockdowns, The Gulag Archipelago is something you read in a completely different light too.
It is important not to forget. I will get the book. I regret not keeping a diary and my comments on Disqus threads,which could have be an alternative, are not retrievable as far as I know.
I was one of those who kept my diary on a blog, and it’s a small comfort to be able to look back (and for anyone else to look back should they desire) and see I was not wrong about most of what I perceived.
It was a massive eye opener for me. I’d always assumed incompetent but relatively benign leadership. 2020 blew away those thoughts entirely. Watching the global picture rather than just UK frightened me more, seeing the EU, Turdeau and St Jacinda being utterly evil.
I was fairly wrecked during this and for sometime quite emotional. I’m mending now, helped by a few months off work.
I’m not willing to forgive or forget, but I also can’t maintain the same level of anger indefinitely.
Yes, I was the same. Part of me had always assumed a certain level of good intentions offsetting a not-too-dark level of evil in Western governments. Instead, I was confronted with a pit of evil and the realisation that this lot had the potential to be as bad as any 20th century mass-murdering regime. As a result of the lockdowns, things I suspected and feared were proven devastatingly true. Atlas Shrugged got blended with Nineteen Eighty-Four and became real! I frequently couldn’t believe what I was seeing on TV and reading in the paper. It was literally word for word from those books. The Atlas Society ‘accidentally’ got blacklisted on Microsoft’s Edge browser at one point. Even stakeholder capitalism turns up in Atlas Shrugged.
For my career, the media shut down early, so I nearly lost my business, then went berserk catching up last year, which helped rebuild it, and has been dead this year, so work is thin on the ground. I saved plenty of money last year and am still living back with my parents, and thus have time to recover a bit at last this year. I moved back from London in mid-2019, planning to spend a few months at my childhood home before renting my own place. As things have transpired, that won’t happen now.
My work is all from home now, so I’m going to have to look at going out more, because I’ve been a recluse for three and a half years! I didn’t have time to make any new friends before lockdown. I went to the opticians for the first time since January 2020 today, because I really need some new glasses. Something so anodyne now seems ‘special’!
I’ve had a big garden to tend to, I’ve delved into music I’d liked but not really explored – Tangerine Dream, Mylène Farmer, Enigma, Röyksopp, a lot of classical – I’ve read about 40 Stephen King novels, including the giant ones like It and The Stand, over 60 novels from the publisher Hard Case Crime, a load of science fiction, and rediscovered my love of Japanese horror films and film noir. So there have been positives.
My vengeance on the Government, in part, will be to live as ‘normal’ a life as I can – I’m unjabbed and I never bought into the COVID-19 hysteria, so I’m a 2019 person who has been imprisoned for three years. Unfortunately, my Dad, now in his late 80s, lost the sight in one eye due to there being no eye operations during lockdown – by the time he had the operation, it was too late – and my mother is now very poorly due to her heart being seriously damaged by the third Pfizer jab (she’s on a pile of different drugs and is having a defibrillator-pacemaker fitted next week, being serious enough to be pushed to the front of an 18 month waiting list) I have a lot on my plate now!
I’ll stay angry in the right way, but won’t let it eat me up. It’s always there if I think about it – if I see Matt Hancock turns up on TV, I have a habit of screaming ‘C**t!!’ at the television, with my Dad joining in, until my Mum turns it off! – and it taps a dark well of anger, but I keep myself occupied.
I hope you steadily feel better. At least we all had this site. Without this site, Allison Pearson’s columns and Peter Hitchens and Mike Graham’s Monday chats, I might have thought I was alone in being against the lockdowns. I suspect the panicked disinformation legislation is in part because the governments of the world know they’ve lost control of the ‘narrative’ and we’ve all turned to alternative media.
Thanks for sharing your own experience. We all, each of us, found it tough, but differently so. A million+ injustices still being processed.
I’m calmer but very wary and quite cynical, a very big change in my personality and world view since 2019. I probably won’t be the old me again.
But Lockdown Skeptics (I still call it this) did me a huge service simply by existing. Cheers Toby.
I’m not so sure that we should have it in the rearview mirror. It:
What should one do with the Hallett Inquiry. One view is that one should have nothing to do with it as it is only a white wash and a means to justify more lockdowns etc. in the future; the alternative that it is better to at least take every opportunity to air ones views and not let them be completely ignored by default. So I have already done a criticism of the Terms of Reference, and even though it will be quite some work am thinking of contributing my experiences, which will be my reaction to the suspension of civil liberties and the attempts to coerce one into having the jabs, as part of the inquiries Every Story Matters
https://www.technocracy.news/bis-blueprint-for-unified-ledger-global-control-of-all-assets-information-people/
Or as Iain Davies refers to this:
“The Theft of the Commons.”
This is the ultimate endpoint of “you’ll own nothing and be very unhappy.”
Nice to see one of Bob Moran’s wonderful – bang on target – cartoons.
We are exhorted to remember the killing fields of WW1: “Lest we forget.” “At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.”
We are continually reminded of the Holocaust and how important it is that future generations learn about it and the victims are remembered.
Similarly, we must not forget the EVIL of the Covid Scamdemic. It was the worst tyranny of my lifetime. I will never forget; and I will never forgive. There are no acceptable excuses for the destruction they deliberately wrought on us.
Well said.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/wQHst6gskaMh/