The United States Surgeon General used twitter to tell the public to NOT use face masks to protect against the coronavirus because they don’t work, they only work for health care workers. Now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering a recommendation that people wear masks when in public.
We all remember this – when Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweet said it all “Stop Buying Masks!”:
Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk! https://t.co/UxZRwxxKL9
“There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.
“There also is the issue that we have a massive global shortage,” Ryan said about masks and other medical supplies.
“Right now the people most at risk from this virus are frontline health workers who are exposed to the virus every second of every day. The thought of them not having masks is horrific.”
We were told that face masks weren’t effective at preventing a coronavirus infection unless we are a healthcare worker, but now the CDC is saying otherwise.
There’s still no consensus (meaning someone from the government hasn’t made a decision yet) on whether widespread use of facial coverings would make a significant difference, and some infectious disease experts worry that masks could lull people into a false sense of security and make them less disciplined about social distancing, according to a report by The Washington Post.
But studies done by doctors in the medical field have shown properly fitting N95 face masks to be about 80% effective.
They are certainly better than nothing and could be used to get people back in public and the economy on a roll again. It’s an “ongoing discussion” however, and nothing has been finalized. The official, who asked to remain anonymous, said the new guidance would make clear that the general public should not use medical masks – including surgical and N95 masks – that are in desperately short supply and needed by health-care workers. So once again, the guidelines would be to “cover your face” not use a respirator that could actually stand a chance at protecting you.
Nassim Taleb had strong feelings about the bullshit…
This is the strongest statistical association I’ve seen w/ respect to the virus. Wear a mask, mandate others to wear masks, & remember that @WHO is criminally incompetent. To repeat:@WHO is criminally incompetent.
At the daily White House briefing Monday, President Trump was asked if everyone should wear nonmedical fabric masks.
“That’s certainly something we could discuss,” Trump said, adding, “it could be something like that for a limited period of time.”
It seems like the government can’t make up their mind on just about anything. But the one thing they have been doing is expanding their power and getting the docile population in a constant state of fear.
From an opinion Friday by Judge John D. Bates (D.D.C.) in Sandvig v. Barr:
Plaintiffs are academic researchers who intend to test whether employment websites discriminate based on race and gender. In order to do so, they plan to provide false information to target websites, in violation of these websites’ terms of service. Plaintiffs bring a pre-enforcement challenge, alleging that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as applied to their intended conduct of violating websites’ terms of service, chills their First Amendment right to free speech.
Without reaching this constitutional question, the Court concludes that the CFAA does not criminalize mere terms-of-service violations on consumer websites and, thus, that plaintiffs’ proposed research plans are not criminal under the CFAA….
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There is much to be said about Adrian Vermeule‘s provocative new essay, “Beyond Originalism.” In some ways, it taps into some real movements on the right. It envisions a world in which President Donald Trump has helped remake American politics that opens the way for a reformulated and revitalized conservative politics. It appeals to the desire of some on the religious right to use politics to reaffirm and reestablish an older social order. It hearkens back to an era before the election of Ronald Reagan when there were many different conservative camps “imagining a constitutional restoration” and originalism was not conservative orthodoxy. It embraces big-government conservatism and rejects any vestigial influence of small-government libertarianism.
The conservative movement and the Republican Party have sometimes been useful vehicles for marginally advancing, or at least preserving, classical liberal principles, but Vermeule’s version of post-Trump conservatism and GOP would put an end to that.
But for the moment, I just want to note Vermeule’s interesting opening to the essay. He says, originalism
served legal conservatives well in the hostile environment in which originalism was first developed, and for some time afterward.
But originalism has now outlived its utility, and has become an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.
Vermeule was never an originalist, and so it is no surprise that he would be happy to see it displaced. It is not obvious that he ever thought originalism served any useful purposes for his own particular political and jurisprudential commitments. He is not dropping the mask on originalism or even the conservative legal movement. He is hoping to reconstitute the conservative legal movement on entirely different principles, and he hopes that political coalitions and the intellectual landscape are shifting enough to make that possible.
But what’s interesting is how he evaluates an approach to constitutional law. A constitutional philosophy has “utility” to the extent that it advances his policy objectives, and does not to the extent that it gets in the way of constructing the ideal policy regime.
Of course, this is an extremely familiar way of thinking about constitutional jurisprudence. It has been the dominant way that the political left has thought about constitutional jurisprudence for decades. It has had adherents on political right as well, but originalism as a philosophy of constitutional jurisprudence resisted those kinds of constitutional projects on both the left and the right and resisted that approach to justifying the exercise of judicial review.
Originalists would urge legal conservatives not to evaluate their approach to constitutional law by the standard of how well it facilitates their getting the policy outcomes that they want. As Vermeule recognizes, originalism is not the friend of results-oriented jurisprudence. Originalists made limited headway in trying to persuade those on the left that results-oriented jurisprudence was not the best path the country should be pursuing. Originalists might have to spend more time trying to persuade conservatives on that point as well.
Winter is coming.
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Airbnb Bails Out Highly Leveraged Superhosts As Travel Industry Crashes
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky wrote a letter to all hosts informing them that the company is committed to a $250 million bailout to cover some of the cost of COVID-19 cancellations. The canceled check-ins are for March 14 through May 31, Airbnb will pay hosts 25% of what they would’ve received via their cancellation policies, and the “payments will begin to be issued in April.”
Chesky said a separate $10 million Superhost Relief Fund would be designed for “Superhosts who rent out their own home and need help paying their rent or mortgage, plus long-tenured Experience hosts trying to make ends meet. Our employees started this fund with $1 million in donations out of their own pockets, and Joe, Nate and I are personally contributing the remaining $9 million. Starting in April, hosts can apply for grants for up to $5,000 that don’t need to be paid back.”
And here’s where the story gets interesting…
Of the four million Airbnb hosts across the world, 10% are considered “Superhosts,” and many have taken out mortgages to accumulate properties to build rental portfolios.
With the travel industry crashed, many of these Superhosts have seen their rental incomes plunge in March and risk missing mortgage payments in the months ahead. Chesky was forced to bailout Superhosts because some of these folks have overextended their leveraged in building an Airbnb portfolio and risk imminent deleveraging.
Highly leveraged Superhosts could be the first domino to fall that triggers a housing bust this year. Superhosts can have one property and or have an extensive portfolio, usually built with leverage. So when rental income goes to zero, that is when some have to make the difficult decision of missing a mortgage payment or having it deferred or liquidate the property to raise cash. These decessions are all happening all at once for tens of thousands of people not just across the world but all over the US and could trigger forced selling of properties into illiquid housing markets in the months ahead.
Some of the horror stories are already playing out on Twitter:
It is hard to feel sympathy for AirBnb superhosts with multiple properties. In the UK at least, house prices are hugely inflated out of the reach of regular incomes and are due a correction.
And just like in 2008, when the rent payments stopped, landlords also felt the crunch and went belly up. What’s happening with highly leveraged Airbnb Superhosts is no different than what happened a decade ago. Again, no one has learned their lesson. And we might have discovered the next big seller that could ruin the real estate market: Airbnb Superhosts that need to get liquid.
If you’re an @Airbnb Superhost and pay a mortgage on that property, you’re about to take the financial hit of a lifetime.
We’ve all seen the jokes on social media about how nine months from now a new generation will be born that will eventually be dubbed “Coronials” – and once they come of age, “quaranteens.”
After all, if we’re stuck working from home or self-isolating along with our partner or significant other, it’s only natural and healthy for us to seek solace through sexual activity – and the increase in baby-making activities can naturally result in a miniature “baby boom.”
But as it turns out, the joke may have some basis after all – especially because a global shortage of condoms could deprive couples staying at home from one of the more popular birth control methods.
Reutersreports that Malaysia’s Karex Bhd, a company that is responsible for producing one out of every five condoms globally, spent over a week without producing a single condom at its three factories after the government imposed a lockdown to halt the spread of the coronavirus.
This has resulted in a shortfall of 100 million condoms which normally would be marketed worldwide under such brands as Durex, distributed through aid programs like the United Nations Population Fund, and the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS).
On Friday, the company was granted permission to resume production under a special exemption for critical industries but with only half of its workforce.
Chief Executive Goh Miah Kiat said:
“It will take time to jumpstart factories and we will struggle to keep up with demand at half capacity.
We are going to see a global shortage of condoms everywhere, which is going to be scary.
My concern is that for a lot of humanitarian programs deep down in Africa, the shortage will not just be two weeks or a month. That shortage can run into months.”
The news comes as condoms rank among toilet paper and hand sanitizer as one of the most sought-after items during the CoViD-19 crisis, reportsHighsnobiety.
Earlier this month, sex product retailer Promescent’s CEO Jeff Abraham confirmed that the company saw surging condom sales all month.
“In fact, we’ve seen a 54 percent increase in our online sales since the beginning of the pandemic.
With the tremendous effort put forth by so many government and local organizations, we want to do our part to ensure people are continuing to practice safe sex and have adequate access to birth control in a time of social distancing and self-isolation.”
In times of uncertainty and isolation, it’s natural to seek physical and emotional intimacy https://t.co/ybAyWkzgF6
Condom factories in China, India, and Thailand have also faced disruptions in their operations. Similar problems have also been faced by regional manufacturers of critical protective gear like medical gloves in Malaysia.
A Durex spokesman reassured Reuters that operations would continue as normal, and no supply shortages are anticipated. They added:
“For our consumers, many of whom will be unable to access shops, our Durex online stores remain open for business.”
Goh added that while condom production may face interruptions, the demand for the contraceptive remains stronger than ever. He said:
“The good thing is that the demand for condoms is still very strong because like it or not, it’s still an essential to have.
Given that at this point in time people are probably not planning to have children. It’s not the time, with so much uncertainty.”
“Sailors Don’t Need To Die”: Captain Of Nuclear Carrier With Over 100 COVID-19 Cases Pleads For Help
In an astounding plea for help, the captain of the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt has urged top command of the US Navy to take drastic action after more than 100 sailors aboard the ship have been infected with the coronavirus.
More than a week ago it started with a handful of COVID-19 cases, which by the end of the week spiked to 36, causing the West Pacific-deployed carrier to dock at a naval station at Guam, ordering infected crew members out of the some 5,000 total into makeshift quarantine facilities, including a basketball gym hastily transformed for that purpose. The San Francisco Chronicle has obtained and published excerpts of an unprecedented plea for help written by the USS Roosevelt’s Captain Brett Crozier to Pentagon leadership:
“This will require a political solution but it is the right thing to do,” wrote Capt. Brett Crozier, a Santa Rosa native, from Guam where his 1,092-foot carrier Theodore Roosevelt docked following a COVID-19 outbreak. “We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our Sailors.”
USS Theodore Roosevelt, via US Navy photo
In the letter Capt. Crozier warned that“Due to a warship’s inherent limitations of space… the spread of the diseast is ongoing and accelerating.” The SF Chronicle described that the letter was issued Monday as the captain fears there will be possible deaths among crew under his command if more resources aren’t immediately allocated.
It is unclear as yet how many of the crew have been quarantined on land at Guam, and how many still remain aboard the docked carrier. But it appears the ongoing attempts at quarantine and containment are not going fast enough, with less than necessary resources employed. Previously General John Hyten, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said testing of the entire crew is expected to take a week minimum.
Crozier further urgently requested “compliant quarantine rooms” on shore in Guam for his entire crew “as soon as possible”. He added, “Removing the majority of personnel from a deployed US nuclear carrier and isolating them for two weeks may seem like an extraordinary measure… this is a necessary risk.”
He outlined specific dangers of large amounts of the crew remaining on board the ship as follows, according to the SF Chronicle:
The tight quarters on the carrier are “most conducive to spread,” he wrote, including large amounts of sailors in a confined space, shared sleeping quarters, restrooms, workspaces and computers, a common mess hall, meals cooked by exposed personnel, and movement constraints requiring communal contact with ladders and hatches.
The criticisms are aimed at the current strategy of merely moving the numbers of infected and immediate exposures off the ship, while increasing social distancing and disinfecting measures for the majority still on the ship, which he called “ineffective”.
I’ve never seen anything like this.
Captain of Theodore Roosevelt pens a four-page letter pleading for resources, says the situation is rapidly spinning out of control as nearly 200 sailors test positive: https://t.co/OZuJwAQi46
And in perhaps the most unexpected and stunning section of the letter, the captain takes the unprecedented step of pointing out to top brass that focus on battle-readiness in this case will actually lead to potential significant loss of life:
If the Navy focuses on being battle ready, it will lead to “losses to the virus,” Crozier said. The second option, the captain recommended: “Achieve a COVID-free TR.” Methodically clean the ship, while isolating the crew in port with a massive amount of individualized lodging equipment.
The captain’s recommendation is to instead keep only 10% of the crew on board at any given time in order to initiate deep sanitization procedures and crucially to operate the reactor plant, according to the letter.
No doubt the captain’s letter was not meant to go public, especially given America’s enemies and rivals are surely watching very closely. After all it took an ‘invisible enemy’ in the form of a virus infecting over 100 sailors to essentially knock out of commission an entire nuclear aircraft carrier.
The depth of the financial and economic impact of the Coronavirus is impossible to predict since we don’t know how far the virus will spread or how long the economic shutdown will last. But we do know that pension shortfalls will jump, borrowing will increase and the state budget hole will widen dramatically. Unfortunately, it will take months before all those numbers are reported and summed up.
In the meantime, one number Illinoisans can keep an eye on is the state’s unpaid bill backlog, which currently stands at just over $7.5 billion. The state has been notorious for not paying its bills on time since 2005 and its backlog jumped to $17 billion in 2017.
As the Coronavirus crisis deepens, don’t be surprised if unpaid bills begin rising again.
Keep in mind that the unpaid bill number can be manipulated in many ways – we’ve covered that in detail – so the state can make the backlog look better than it really is. However, the backlog can serve as a limited gauge, in conjunction with other numbers, for how the state’s finances are holding up under the shutdown.
Illinois pols have constantly overpromised pension benefits, passed unbalanced budgets and hiked spending, all of which have left the state with a chronic bill backlog.
There’s a real human cost to that backlog, which has long been an indicator of Illinois’ deadbeat status. Those billions should have already been paid to thousands of contractors across the state, many of them small businesses and social service providers which are among the hardest hit by the shutdown.
The pressures on the state are going to be intense as sales and income taxes and a host of other revenues shrink along with the economic freeze. The Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability expects revenue losses of over $8 billion for the state over the next few years. Unless the government reduces its operating costs in line with the shutdown – which it showsno signs of doing – expect the backlog to jump.
Unpaid bills reached a high of over $16 billion in 2007, but the state government borrowed $6 billion via long-term bonds to bring the backlog down to just over $9 billion in November of 2017. This time around, unless the federal government steps in, borrowing money will be much more difficult. Barring some type of bailout, it’s easy to see the bill backlog rising again.
For sure, other numbers will eventually reveal the true depth of just how unprepared Illinois was for this crisis. But in the meantime, just follow the unpaid bills.
Read more about the impact of the Coronavirus on Illinois:
Is This What’s Behind Italy’s Outrageous 10% Mortality Rate From COVID-19?
Italy’s 10% mortality rate has been one of the most disturbing mysteries of the global pandemic. Italy’s mortality rate is roughly 20x Germany’s (a relatively benign 0.4%), and many multiples of China’s (roughly 2.5%) rate.
As scientists puzzle over the reason, researchers have proposed a theory that’s being vetted by peers: Italy’s mild flu season left a larger victim pool for COVID-19. This would suggest that the US, which has struggled with more lethal flu seasons, won’t have as large a pool of potential high-risk victims, especially as testing suggests the virus is more widespread than many had expected.
A report by the Italian Ministry of Health found that elderly people and those with chronic diseases who were spared death by the flu from November through January are “outsize” targets for the more lethal novel coronavirus in March.
But thanks to the fact that there were fewer flu deaths , this “led to an increase in the pool of the most vulnerable,” according to the report, which analyzed data from 19 Italian cities through March 21. In other words, when taken alongside flu season deaths, the bump in deaths would be much beyond what would normally be expected for a developed country struggling with a COVID-19 outbreak.
COVID-19 has been spreading in some parts of Italy since early February. In the northern cities that have borne the brunt of Italy’s more than 12,000 deaths, flu mortality among people age 65 and over was 6% below a baseline from previous years. In the cities of central and southern Italy, flu deaths were 3% off the baseline.
Could this account for enough deaths? It’s possible that it could account for at least some of the discrepancy.
A chart shows how deaths among the 65-plus population during the coronavirus outbreak through March 21 has already reached the levels of the previous two flu seasons, and were still below the total flu season deaths from three seasons ago (the 2016-2017 season).
Mild temperatures were credited with the drop in flu deaths.
Understanding the history of Italy’s flu outbreaks could hold the key to explaining its outlandish mortality rate from COVID-19. Italy has reported more than 105,000 confirmed cases, along with 12,428 deaths.
There is much to be said about Adrian Vermeule‘s provocative new essay, “Beyond Originalism.” In some ways, it taps into some real movements on the right. It envisions a world in which President Donald Trump has helped remake American politics that opens the way for a reformulated and revitalized conservative politics. It appeals to the desire of some on the religious right to use politics to reaffirm and reestablish an older social order. It hearkens back to an era before the election of Ronald Reagan when there were many different conservative camps “imagining a constitutional restoration” and originalism was not conservative orthodoxy. It embraces big-government conservatism and rejects any vestigial influence of small-government libertarianism.
The conservative movement and the Republican Party have sometimes been useful vehicles for marginally advancing, or at least preserving, classical liberal principles, but Vermeule’s version of post-Trump conservatism and GOP would put an end to that.
But for the moment, I just want to note Vermeule’s interesting opening to the essay. He says, originalism
served legal conservatives well in the hostile environment in which originalism was first developed, and for some time afterward.
But originalism has now outlived its utility, and has become an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.
Vermeule was never an originalist, and so it is no surprise that he would be happy to see it displaced. It is not obvious that he ever thought originalism served any useful purposes for his own particular political and jurisprudential commitments. He is not dropping the mask on originalism or even the conservative legal movement. He is hoping to reconstitute the conservative legal movement on entirely different principles, and he hopes that political coalitions and the intellectual landscape are shifting enough to make that possible.
But what’s interesting is how he evaluates an approach to constitutional law. A constitutional philosophy has “utility” to the extent that it advances his policy objectives, and does not to the extent that it gets in the way of constructing the ideal policy regime.
Of course, this is an extremely familiar way of thinking about constitutional jurisprudence. It has been the dominant way that the political left has thought about constitutional jurisprudence for decades. It has had adherents on political right as well, but originalism as a philosophy of constitutional jurisprudence resisted those kinds of constitutional projects on both the left and the right and resisted that approach to justifying the exercise of judicial review.
Originalists would urge legal conservatives not to evaluate their approach to constitutional law by the standard of how well it facilitates their getting the policy outcomes that they want. As Vermeule recognizes, originalism is not the friend of results-oriented jurisprudence. Originalists made limited headway in trying to persuade those on the left that results-oriented jurisprudence was not the best path the country should be pursuing. Originalists might have to spend more time trying to persuade conservatives on that point as well.
Winter is coming.
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All across America, store shelves are emptying and people are becoming increasingly frustrated because they can’t get their hands on needed supplies.
Most Americans are blaming “hoarders” for the current mess, but it is actually much more complicated than that. Normally, Americans get a lot of their food from restaurants. In fact, during normal times 36 percent of all Americans eat at a fast food restaurant on any given day. But now that approximately 75 percent of the U.S. is under some sort of a “shelter-in-place” order and most of our restaurants have shut down, things have completely changed. Suddenly our grocery stores are being flooded with unexpected traffic, and many people are buying far more than usual in anticipation of a long pandemic. Unfortunately, our food distribution systems were not designed to handle this sort of a surge, and things are really starting to get crazy out there.
I would like to share with you an excerpt from an email that I was sent recently. It describes the chaos that grocery stores in Utah and Idaho have been experiencing…
When this virus became a problem that we as a nation could see as an imminent threat, Utah, because of its culture of food storage and preparing for disaster events seemed to “get the memo” first. The week of March 8th grocery sales more than doubled in Utah, up 218%. Many states stayed the same with increases in some. Idaho seemed to “get the memo” about four days later. We were out of water and TP four days after Utah. Then we were out of food staples about four days later. Next was produce following a pattern set by Utah four days earlier.
The problem for us in Idaho was this. The stores in Utah were emptied out then refilled twice by the warehouses before it hit Idaho. Many of these Utah stores have trucks delivering daily. So when it did hit Idaho the warehouses had been severely taxed. We had a hard time filling our store back up even one time. We missed three scheduled trucks that week alone. Then orders finally came they were first 50% of the order and have dropped to 20%. In normal circumstances we receive 98% of our orders and no canceled trucks. Now three weeks later, the warehouses in the Western United States have all been taxed. In turn, those warehouses have been taxing the food manufacturers. These food companies have emptied their facilities to fill the warehouses of the Western United States. The East Coast hasn’t seemed to “get the memo” yet. When they do what food will be left to fill their warehouses and grocery stores?
Food distribution and resources for the Eastern United States will be at great peril even if no hoarding there takes place. But of course it will.
Additionally the food culture of the East Coast and other urban areas is such that people keep very little food on hand. They often shop several times weekly for items if they cook at home. They don’t have big freezers full of meat, home canned vegetables in their storage rooms, gardens, or beans, wheat, and rice in buckets in the their basements.
With most of the country locked down, normal economic activity has come to a standstill, and it is going to become increasingly difficult for our warehouses to meet the demand that grocery stores are putting on them.
Meanwhile, our farmers are facing severe problems of their own. The following comes from CNBC…
The U.S.-China trade war sent scores of farmers out of business. Record flooding inundated farmland and destroyed harvests. And a blistering heat wave stunted crop growth in the Midwest.
Now, the coronavirus pandemic has dealt another blow to a vulnerable farm economy, sending crop and livestock prices tumbling and raising concerns about sudden labor shortages.
The chaos in the financial markets is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, and it is going to remain difficult for farm laborers to move around as long as “shelter-in-place” orders remain in effect on the state level.
Iowa farmer Robb Ewoldt told reporter Emma Newburger that “we’ve stopped saying it can’t get worse”, and he says that this coronavirus pandemic looks like it could be “the straw that broke the camel’s back”…
“We were already under extreme financial pressure. With the virus sending the prices down — it’s getting to be the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Iowa farmer Robb Ewoldt.
“We were hoping for something good this year, but this virus has stopped all our markets,” he said.
Of course this comes at a time when millions of Americans are losing their jobs and unemployment is shooting up to unthinkable levels. Without any money coming in, many people are already turning to alternative sources of help in order to feed themselves and their families.
On Monday, hundreds of cars were lined up to get food from a food bank in Duquesne, Pennsylvania. To many, this was eerily reminiscent of the “bread lines” during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Kazakhstan, for instance, according to a report from Bloomberg, has banned exports of wheat flour, of which it is one of the world’s biggest sources, as well as restrictions on buckwheat and vegetables including onions, carrots and potatoes. Vietnam, the world’s third biggest rice exporter, has temporarily suspended rice export contracts. Russia, the world’s biggest wheat exporter, may also threaten to restrict exports, as it has done before, and the position of the US is in doubt given Donald Trump’s eagerness for a trade war in other commodities.
If this pandemic stretches on for an extended period of time, food supplies are inevitably going to get even tighter.
So what can you do?
Well, perhaps you can start a garden this year if you don’t normally grow one. Apparently this pandemic has sparked a tremendous amount of interest in gardening programs around the country…
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, more people are showing an interest in starting home gardens. Oregon State University‘s (OSU) Master Gardener program took notice of the growing interest.
To help citizens who want to grow their own food, the university kindly made their online vegetable gardening course free until the end of April. OSU’s post on Facebook has been shared over 21,000 times.
Food is only going to get more expensive from here on out, and growing your own food is a way to become more independent of the system.
“It’s the largest volume of orders we have seen,” said Jere Gettle of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds in Mansfield, Missouri. Peak seed-buying season for home gardeners is January to March, but the normal end-of-season decline in orders isn’t happening.
Customers are gravitating to vegetables high in nutrients, such as kale, spinach and other quick-to-grow leafy greens. “Spinach is off the charts,” said Jo-Anne van den Berg-Ohms of Kitchen Garden Seeds in Bantam, Connecticut.
For years, I have been warning people to get prepared for “the perfect storm” that was coming, but of course most people didn’t listen.
But now it is upon us.
Desperate people have been running out to the grocery stores to stock up on toilet paper only to find that they are limited to one or two packages if it is even available.
And now that “panic buying” of seeds has begun, it is probably only a matter of time before many stores start running out.
We have reached a major turning point in our history, and things are only going to get crazier.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans still have absolutely no idea what is ahead of us…
