Fw: [Medicalnewscommentaries] IMVA -Tightening our Belts - February 17,2008

[Guest guest]

- Mark Sircus Ac., OMD

medicalnewscommentaries

Sunday, February 17, 2008 6:27 AM

[Medicalnewscommentaries] IMVA -Tightening our Belts - February 17,2008

 

 

 

 

 

Tightening our Belts

 

 

There is nothing funny about the next essays I will be publishing on the economic crisis but today’s focus will take your breath away so prepare yourself. I asked my assistant Claudia French RN her feelings about my financial and current events writings and she said, “They are very interesting and informative and I always learn something new from these essays. But it’s probably too late to do someone like me any good, so I get disturbed by it all. It’s easy to run from this kind of information and try to bury your head in the sand and just hope for the best. It makes me feel helpless and hopeless. It's the only thing I really don't like about your essays on this. The helpless and hopeless endings, they always make me cry. But tears and fears don't go very far to changing anything or turning things around. I’m afraid no amount of writing, reporting, editorializing, you tube clips or ranting will have any effect of waking people up..”

 

To Claudia and my readers I would like to say that it is not my intent to instill helplessness or hopelessness for these feelings do hurt. I recognize the considerable strength it takes to wrap ones mind around these cataclysmic issues, and sometimes I feel drained by concentrating so intensely on such things; my wife certainly hears too much from me on it. But my commitment in life is to truth and to speak it and live it no matter what the cost.

 

In my writings I am hoping to bring awareness and understanding to my readers and it is my wish that this brings a heightened sense of both awareness and preparedness. It is sad that for most options are very limited and windows of opportunity will close more and more quickly now. But it is my bet that most of us can do something even if it’s as simple as stocking up on food, basic medicines of natural-allopathic origin like magnesium chloride and iodine and securing a pure water supply with good water filtration systems to help us with our health and survival. Certainly it is time to start thinking of banding together with others in small groups for the sake of health, sanity and survival.

 

When looking at current affairs it is very important to get perspective through looking at how trends are running parallel and how issues are merging. According to Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group, “A new crisis is emerging, a global food catastrophe that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen. The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire. The greatest challenge to the world is not US$100 oil; it's getting enough food so that the new middle class can eat the way our middle class does, and that means we've got to expand food output dramatically.” Julian Cribb, from Sydney’s University of Technology agrees saying that the oil and credit crises rattling world economies were nothing compared to the threat from emerging global food shortages.

“In an "unforeseen and unprecedented" shift, the world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are soaring to historic levels, the top food and agriculture official of the United Nations warned last month,” wrote Elisabeth Rosenthal for the International Herald Tribune. Pakistan is stockpiling wheat and using its military to guard flour mills. Indonesian consumers have taken to the streets to protest rising soy prices. Malaysia no longer lets people take sugar, flour or cooking oil out of the country.

The growing appetite of China and other fast-developing nations has combined with the expansion of bio-fuel programs in the United States and Europe to transform the global food situation. The risks of food riots and malnutrition will surge in the next year as the global supply of grain comes under more pressure than at any time in 50 years. So far, crises have been averted because states have eaten into national stocks, but this seems to be changing.

China has huge foreign exchange reserves and could buy the global food crop many times over. You can bet your bottom dollar that the competition for the world’s food supplies will become (or in recent days has already become) a shark feeding frenzy. We live in a capitalist civilization and that means that money can buy food until governments stop the flow of exports no matter what price is offered, which is already happening. But such moves limit international supplies further thus reinforcing the upward spiral in prices.

If you have not already noticed during the ever increasing heat it is becoming harder and harder to stay fully hydrated.

The harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and hundreds of millions of people eventually will not have enough water or food. Lester R. Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, who has been following this issue for decades said, “Farmers are facing a record growth in the demand for grain at a time when the backlog of technology to raise grain yields is shrinking, when underground water reserves are being depleted, and when rising temperatures threaten to shrink future harvests. Water tables are now falling and wells are going dry in countries that contain half the world’s people, including the big three grain producers—China, India, and the United States. In China, water shortages have helped lower the wheat harvest from its peak of 123 million tons in 1997 to below 100 million tons in recent years.”

And that means you and I have good reason to FINALLY think of a food storage program for food prices are heading up to the stratosphere. This rising food crisis, which caused the price of food to increase nearly 40% this past year, is just starting to create international tensions and is one of the reasons governments are not going to be able to control events like they would like. An Indian government ban of rice exports has plunged neighboring Bangladesh into crisis, in a grim preview of growing global grain shortages.

The chief of the Bangladesh army, Gen Moeen U Ahmed, said that he was "very concerned" about the problem of rice supplies.

Leading rice-exporting nations such as India and Vietnam are reducing sales overseas to check domestic price rises and previously healthy buffer stocks in the world's largest rice exporter, Thailand, are shrinking. The February 7 ban by India's Ministry of Commerce and Industry intensifies a worldwide rice shortage that according to the Rome-based United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization drove up prices so dramatically this last year.[ii]

Wheat prices having been going up recently at their maximum daily allowance of 30 cents on a bushel.

Commodity markets are brushing aside fears of a US recession and are showing strong gains across the board with platinum and spring wheat recording dramatic gains this week. In Minneapolis, daily trading limits were expanded to cope with the strength of hard red spring wheat, with the March contract up 28 per cent to a record $19.88 a bushel this week. Argentina has extended limitations on wheat exports to March 17 to guarantee domestic supplies. The American Baking Association has suggested US wheat exports be curtailed to ensure enough supplies for domestic use.[iii] This is super inflation that is not inflation because the prices are not going through the roof just because of monetary expansion. “We” are facing real shortages!

Extreme weather events, a growing population, increasing affluence adding more meat to diets and diversion of grain crops for subsidized biofuels have led to depleted food reserves and soaring prices. World wheat stores declined 11 percent this year, to the lowest level since 1980. That corresponds to 12 weeks of the world's total consumption - much less than the average of 18 weeks consumption in storage during the period 2000-2005. There are only 8 weeks of corn left, down from 11 weeks in this earlier period. Prices of wheat and oilseeds are at record highs. Wheat prices have risen by $130 per ton, or 52 percent, since a year ago as of only 30 days ago.[iv] U.S. wheat futures broke $10 a bushel for the first time in January of this year but now have already soared to a record of almost 20 dollars a bushel this week, the agricultural equivalent of $200 a barrel oil. Only last month it was $100 dollar a barrel priced wheat.

"We're seeing more people hungry and at greater numbers than before," Josette Sheeran, executive director of the Rome-based World Food Program, said this week. "We're seeing many people being priced out of the food markets for the first time," said Sheeran. Some 100 million tones of cereals are being diverted to the production of biofuels each year. Nearly all of that is corn - 12 per cent of all the corn consumed around the globe.[v] We are increasingly taking food out of babies’ mouths transferring the calories to the energy sector and we are all going to pay through the nose for this.

Of course it is the billions on fixed and low incomes who are already feeling the pinch of these rising food prices and even more affluent folks are complaining and using their credit cards to buy food. This all makes me remember the time almost 25 years ago when I worked for Christopher Hills and his spirulina company. We used to sell 22 pound buckets of spirulina for survival and food storage programs.

My experience of folks today so far is that few people are going out of their way to change the basics of their lives, and as the Boston Globe reported recently, “nobody is stockpiling canned goods just yet.” Thanks to media censorship and government control we can understand why. How many of us are acutely aware of what is going on? How many of us had their fingers on the above information even though every week we feel it increasingly hitting us in the pocket book at the supermarket?

U.S. citizens are the most indoctrinated people on earth. They are also the most entertained and the least informed. Charles Sullivan

Hard Lessons

I would like to share something a martial arts teacher once said to me. “People learn from two things - impact and repetition.” Today I think it appropriate to take out a two by four and go for impact and try to break down some of the inertia we have toward insight and change.

Let me please ask you the reader what if anything you felt and thought reading about this gathering food crisis? Did you feel upset, insecure at the prospect of living in a world of ever increasing shortages and higher prices on foods? Did you connect to the reality that million of people are going to starve? When it comes to food both empathy and fear are appropriate. Empathy drives us to reach out and help others and fear can motivate us to take care of our families and ourselves.

No one is going to like reading what I am going to share next but what I am going to communicate takes us back to one of the nobler souls (Russian) that has walked the earth and one of the deepest questions we can ever be asked. The point to the below is to increase ones awareness and caring by seeing and feeling how deep the rabbit hole goes, how far we have come from the basic attributes of the heart, which is after all the center of the vulnerability of our beings.

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature…and to found that edifice on its un-avenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Read Dostoyevsky’s words again before reading what Arthur Silber writes, “There is one final point to be made about all this -- and that has to do with the supreme value of a single human life. In our desensitized, dehumanized age, most people have almost no appreciation for what I'm talking about, and our political establishment and media only make this grievous failing worse. Each of us is unique; not one of us can be replaced. Each of us has a family, loved ones, friends and a life that is a web of caring, interdependence, and joy. When even one of us is killed or horribly injured for no justifiable reason, the damage affects countless people in addition to the primary victim. Sometimes, the survivors are irreparably damaged as well. Even the survivors' wounds can last a lifetime.”

So how do we Americans stack up in this regard? Pervasive torture, the humiliation, dehumanization and sexual degradation of prisoners, the gratuitous beatings, the rapes, the outright murders, dozens of them, which took place at U.S. prisons in Iraq didn’t faze the Pentagon or the White House or the American public very much did it?[vi]

The media in the United States refuses to allow Americans to be made aware of these critical crisis issues facing all of humanity.

Rape is one of the worst torments a person can experience but it is one of the least reported crimes within the UK and the USA. In the States alone every hour 78 woman are raped. That’s 1,872 per day, 13,000 a week, 52,000 a month, 629,000 a year. Let’s face it; we are not that sensitive to the sufferings of others, and when it comes to child sexual abuse or rape we hardly are aware that a large percentage of women around us have suffered quietly through it - and are still suffering through it for it is a kind of suffering that happens on a deep level and most often lasts for a life time. Many men also suffer the same abuses, the same hurts but our media finds not the time or space to report any of this.

Everywhere around us the pattern has been set to reduce our awareness and feelings to the sufferings of others. People can be sexually attacked, tortured, drugged by the pharmaceutical industry, poisoned by the chemical industry, injected with mercury, given lethal combination drugs for legal execution and on and on. Today’s news in this regard was that the lives of 22,000 patients could have been saved if U.S. regulators had been quicker to remove a Bayer AG drug used to stem bleeding during open heart surgery, according to a medical researcher interviewed by CBS Television's 60 Minutes program.[vii]

What Sibler has written and published on this is enough to chill anyone’s soul. “If you have ever wondered how a serial murderer -- a murderer who is sane and fully aware of the acts he has committed -- can remain steadfastly convinced of his own moral superiority and show not even the slightest glimmer of remorse, you should not wonder any longer. The United States government is such a murderer. It conducts its murders in full view of the entire world. It even boasts of them. Our government, and all our leading commentators, still maintain that the end justifies the means -- and that even the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents is of no moral consequence, provided a sufficient number of people can delude themselves into believing the final result is a success." Silber is thinking of what some people estimate are a million deaths in Iraq since the American led invasion but when writing the above he was thinking about only one particular five-year-old Iraqi girl who was killed by a bomb.

Sibler continues saying, “We are a nation that has voluntarily renounced all its most crucial values, and all its founding principles. We can appeal all we want to "American exceptionalism," but any "exceptionalism" that remains ours is that of a mass murderer without a soul, and without a conscience. It is useless to appeal to any "American" sense of morality: we have none. It does not matter how immense the pile of corpses grows: we will not surrender or even question our delusion that we are right, and that nothing we do can be profoundly, unforgivably wrong.”

It seems we have the answer to Fyodor Dostoyevsky question.

From the point of the pure heart, that is not separate from itself and what it feels, we can see almost all of human life as manifesting different degrees of uncaring, rejection, and denial of feelings. At one end of the spectrum we have the pure heart that cares totally and at the other, the sociopath and psychopaths who have clearly lost all capacity to feel, all capacity for empathy. And the rest of us are somewhere in-between. My writings are for beings that care and are able to deal with the painful realities of life without slipping onto the dark side of denial.

The dark night that seems to be headed our way might indeed be necessary for it does seem that most of our lessons need to come the hard way. Such is the nature of the collective ego of humankind. The individual cannot completely escape collective events and the collective is the sum total of all individual components. Though we can build illusions about the supremacy of our individualities, and the individualities of others, there is a level of reality that cannot be divided. This is the true and ancient meaning of individuality, “that which cannot be divided.”

Epilogue

When you think of the shadow government of assassins, arms dealers, drug smugglers, former CIA operatives and top US military personnel who have been running foreign policy unaccountable to the public these past few decades, and the secret plans to use FEMA to institute martial law and ultimately suspend the Constitution we should shiver. There is going to be no shortage of reasons in the near future to declare martial law. It’s a nightmare just waiting to happen.

Stopped for speeding in Vermont and as I usually do I objected in jest to the charge. No big deal just friendly talk. Or so I thought until the officer put his hand on his gun and asked if I was calling him a liar.

It is just at times like these that bring out the worst in people and it’s the worst people who come to power. We see that even with the police. “My husband and I were once pulled over while in NYC's Midtown Tunnel. We obviously drove until we were out of the tunnel and then stopped. While in the tunnel, the officer sped up to our car and drove right next to us, lights ablaze, his window open, holding up a PA and shouting like a madman for us to pull over! I looked at him in disbelief from my car window and signaled with my hand to lower his voice and calm down. "OK, OK, don't have a heart attack!" I could not figure out what the problem was. When he stormed up to our car, once we stopped, he was screaming uncontrollably, his face bright red, and he was frothing at the mouth (I swear!). He was carrying on like a rageaholic! What could we have possibly done that was so terrible, I asked? Why, we switched lanes when funneling into the tunnel. Oh, the horror. We are such a menace! We deserve to be locked up, of course!”

Yes she deserved to be treated this way and everyone who lights up a joint should be put in jail. This is the insanity of our times. As the worst things are happening to people all around the globe society is ready to stomp not only on minor misdeeds and traffic violations but on deeds (like smoking pot) that are not misdeeds at all but a possible treatment for cancer and many other serious medical problems.

We have to be strong just to read this kind of material forget about living in a civilization that made it all so. It might be good to get up and run around and curse, healthy anger could be good at a moment like this but in the end we can only be angry also with ourselves if we are honest. I don’t know anyone including myself who has not been duped into the system to one degree or another. Thus anger in the end is fruitless so a better idea is to pray. There is after all a force, a spirit that can and does comfort our souls even at the worst of times if we tune into it.

Mark Sircus Ac., OMDDirector International Medical Veritas Association http://www.imva.infohttp://www.magnesiumforlife.comhttp://www.winningcancer.com/

http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=213343

[ii] http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JB14Df02.html

[iii] http://news./s/ft/20080215/bs_ft/fto021520081519438557;_ylt=AliZY1r.X4E9hCEeWuQTYE2s0NUE

[iv] http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=10167

[v] http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5iQmUgGiQfpFaqjSnHIOQlTJJKmNA

[vi] http://www.internationalist.org/iraqtorture0504.html

[vii] http://news./s/nm/20080215/us_nm/bayer_deaths_dc;_ylt=ArcWykV7P3mJuTayWSW6x_as0NUE

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