WORLD NEWS
Protests as Sri Lanka Runs out of Fuel, Food, Medicine
Anti-government protests have been “widespread” across Sri Lanka for the past month due to the island nation’s worsening financial crisis, which has seen Sri Lankans go without sufficient food, fuel, and medicine for weeks, India’s the Week magazine reported this week for its April 3 issue.
Protests against the administration of Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa took place on March 7 in Sri Lanka’s administrative capital of Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte. The Week sent a reporter to the city to witness the protests and interview participants of the demonstrations.
Detailing the event, the magazine wrote:
[Dilanta] Weerasekara recently went to Sri Lanka’s administrative capital, Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, to take part in a protest against the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government. “It took place on March 6 and 7. I went there both days,” he said. “It will at least show our problems to those who live in luxury bungalows.”
On March 7, people in the capital were seen holding placards saying, “Enough of corruption”, “Gotabaya go home” and “Why have you made us beggars?” Udhitha Deshapriya, a civil engineer, said Sri Lankans had been suffering for a long time. “There has to be a solution. I am here to register my protest,” he said. Rajitha Gunasekara, a banker who lost his job recently, said the incumbent government should go. “Do we actually need a government that makes us live like beggars?” he asked.
Sky News also reported on March 29 that Sri Lanka’s economic crisis “has sparked protests across the country.”
“Since the beginning of March, the Sri Lankan rupee has fallen by almost 45% against the US dollar and its foreign exchange reserves have fallen to crisis levels,” the British news outlet observed.
W.H.O. Warns Social Surveillance Must Remain Even as Global Coronavirus Cases Plunge
The number of new coronavirus cases fell globally last week including in the Western Pacific region where they had been rising since December, the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) reported Wednesday.
That unalloyed good news was tempered by a caution for governments everywhere to maintain strict social surveillance levels to thwart any possible resurgence — now and into the future.
As overall case rates fell, the U.N. agency also reported the number of people killed by the coronavirus surged by more than 40 percent over the same period, likely due to changes in how deaths were reported across the Americas and by newly adjusted figures from India.
AP reports about 10 million new coronavirus infections and more than 45,000 deaths were reported worldwide over the past week, following a 23 percent drop in fatalities the week before.
Overall, a total of 10,805,132 new cases and 45,711 deaths were reported to the global organization on March 21-27.
The decline in case incidence was reported by all the six W.H.O. global regions, particularly Eastern Mediterranean (down 32 percent), Africa (down 29 percent) and Western Pacific (down 24 percent).
In Europe, which accounts for 49 percent of all new cases registered worldwide in the past week, the case count declined by four percent.
The agency warned countries in recent weeks against dropping their comprehensive testing and other surveillance measures, saying any relaxation of social control and monitoring would cripple efforts to accurately track the spread of the virus, the AP report outlined.
“Data are becoming progressively less representative, less timely and less robust,” W.H.O. said in the weekly briefing. “This inhibits our collective ability to track where the virus is, how it is spreading and how it is evolving: information and analyses that remain critical to effectively end the acute phase of the pandemic.”
The agency warned less surveillance would particularly harm efforts to detect new COVID variants and undermine a potential response.
4 Million Refugees Have Fled Ukraine, Says United Nations Agency
The U.N. refugee agency said Wednesday more than 4 million refugees have now fled Ukraine since Russia launched its war in the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.
The new figure was posted on an UNHCR website. More than 2.3 million have arrived in Poland, but many have traveled onward to other countries or back into Ukraine.
Germany Must Ration Gas After Refusing To Pay In Rubles
In response to sanctions, Moscow has doubled down on its demands that its “hostile” European “partners” pay for its oil and gas in rubles instead of euros (which, as the bloc already demonstrated, can be easily confiscated in the name of “sanctions”). Germany has to resort to rationing fuel after refusing.
The German government is digging in its heels as the payment dispute threatens to precipitate problematic energy shortages in Europe’s largest economy. According to a report by the Financial Times. German Energy Minister Robert Habeck has activated the “early warning phase” of Germany’s gas emergency law, which was adopted to help ration supplies in the face of a severe shortage.
It is going to take President Joe Biden and the United States will years to reroute their promised LNG exports (and even so, they will likely never be able to fully compensate for Russian supplies). This means Germany will need to ration gasoline if they continue to refuse to pay for Russian gas in rubles. Russia gave other options as well, however:
After demanding last week that “hostile states” pay for its gas and oil in rubles (although it hinted that gold and cryptocurrency might also be considered), Moscow said it wouldn’t share its resources “for free” after the G-7 aggressively repudiated the Russians’ request. “We will definitely not supply oil and gas for free, that’s for sure. It’s hardly possible and reasonable to engage in charity in our situation,” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier this week.
As Germany scrambles to address a looming shortfall in energy supplies, analysts are warning that the government’s refusal to meet Moscow’s request for payment in rubles could create a “substantial” risk, according to ZeroHedge.
U.S. NEWS, POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
Senators revive probe into Biden family’s money ties to Chinese government
Now that the legacy media has recognized – belatedly – that all those details about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden and their overseas business operations were not “Russian disinformation,” allegations of the family’s close money ties to Chinese interests linked to the communist military are being given another look.
The Washington Examiner reported that Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who earlier conducted reviews of financial links between Hunter Biden and China, Ukraine and more, resumed raising concerns about the issue this week in Congress.
Democrats earlier has dismissed a report from the two senators about the Biden family schemes – claiming it was part of an effort to spread Russian disinformation.
Trump wants Putin to release details of Hunter Biden’s deals with Russians
President Donald Trump has called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to release the details of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Russian billionaires.
Just the News reported the comment came in an interview with the Just the News television show on Real America’s Voice which is airing Tuesday.
He cited a 2020 Senate report that revealed Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, who then was the wife of Moscow’s mayor, delivered a $3.5 million payment to a corporation Hunter Biden cofounded, but unanswered since then has been the question why it was paid.
“She gave him $3.5 million so now I would think Putin would know the answer to that. I think he should release it,” Trump explained to Just the News. “I think we should know that answer.”
Hunter Biden has generated any number of scandals for Joe Biden, after arranging business deals with foreign entities while traveling with his father aboard Air Force Two when he was vice president for Barack Obama.
There were the payments from Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company caught up in scandal. There were the revelations about drugs and prostitutes that came from the computer Hunter Biden abandoned at a repair shop. Even recently, there was the scandal over Hunter Biden selling, to those who may want influence with the Biden administration, his amateur artwork for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
State Passes Bill That Could Jail People for 30 Days for Filming the Police
Frequent readers of the Free Thought Project know that filming the cops is not a crime. Despite this being a widely known provision — held up with multiple court precedents — cops continue to violate the First Amendment protected right of citizens to film the police. Last month, the Arizona House Appropriations Committee approved a bill that would criminalize filming cops on the job, dealing a massive blow to First Amendment rights. And this month, the Senate passed it.
It now moves to Governor Doug Ducey’s desk for signature, where it will become law.
Republican Representative John Kavanaugh, who is a former police officer, is the lead sponsor of the legislation. According to the bill, it is illegal “for a person to knowingly make a video recording of law enforcement activity, including the handling of an emotionally disturbed person, if the person does not have the permission of the law enforcement officer” and is within 8 feet of the cop.
Kavanaugh originally stipulated a 15-foot radius; however, it was later amended after multiple objections. But for many, this is still too far.
As Valera Voce, points out, the law also classifies unlawful video recording of law enforcement activity as a petty offense, unless a person fails to comply with a verbal warning of a violation or has been previously convicted of a violation in which case an offense is a class 3 misdemeanor. A class 3 misdemeanor comes with a minimum of 30 days in jail. Finally, the bill explicitly declares that it “does not establish a right, or authorize any person, to make a video recording of a law enforcement officer.”
“It’s crazy thinking about that for a second. The video that led to the criminal conviction of the police officer who killed George Floyd would itself be a criminal act. And that makes no sense whatsoever,” attorney Dan Barr told FOX 10.
“We believe that this bill stacks the deck against the public check on officer misconduct,” Timothy Sparling, a lawyer and legislative advocate for Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice, said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week. Sparling argued that the bill leaves too much up to the discretion of the officers. “When officers have such wide discretion to determine, say, what is lawful conduct or what is unlawful conduct on the ground and that is not properly defined … it’s ultimately up to whatever the officer wants it to be,” Sparling said.
Indeed, it is, and this is a dangerous notion.
CIA Officer Who Signed Hunter Biden Laptop Letter Claims Credit for Trump Loss
One of the former CIA officers who signed a letter claiming stories about a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden were disinformation says he helped swing the 2020 election away from former President Donald Trump.
“I take special pride in personally swinging the election away from Trump,” John Sipher, who served for decades as a senior operations officer at the CIA, wrote in a recent post on Twitter. “I lost the election for Trump? Well then I [feel] pretty good about my influence.”
Sipher and 50 other former U.S. intelligence officials signed the letter on Oct. 19, 2020, alleging that the effort to distribute its contents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” despite not knowing whether the laptop was legitimate.
The letter was at the core of a story from Politico that claimed the New York Post story about the laptop was “Russian disinformation.”
The Post was the first to report about emails on the laptop, which was dropped off at a computer repair store and never picked up by then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, according to the store’s owner.
While the FBI picked up the computer and a hard drive from the store’s owner, the bureau’s apparent inaction in probing the matter prompted him to pass on a copy of the hard drive to an attorney representing former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who, in turn, passed it to the Post.
The Oct. 14, 2020, story about the emails came as some voters were still deciding whether to vote for Biden or Trump. The story was widely questioned by legacy media outlets, suppressed by social media platforms, and claimed to be part of a Russian effort, despite top officials such as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe saying there was no evidence that was the case.
Sipher is one of the few former officials who signed the letter to respond to fresh questions about the laptop’s contents, after more legacy media outlets, including Politico, said they’ve confirmed that it’s legitimate.
Election Watchdog Finds 137,500 Ballots Unlawfully Trafficked in Wisconsin
At least 137,500 absentee ballots were cast through unlawful vote trafficking throughout several of Wisconsin’s largest cities in the 2020 election, according to research presented last week to the state Assembly’s Committee on Campaigns and Elections by the public interest organization True the Vote (TTV).
Ballot trafficking is an activity in which absentee ballots and votes are solicited, sometimes in exchange for money or other valuables. They are then collected through a process called “harvesting” and delivered to drop boxes by intermediaries (someone other than the voter), who are often paid a per-ballot fee by partisan actors.
“An organized crime against Americans” is how TTV cyber expert Gregg Phillips described to the committee what happened in Wisconsin and elsewhere during the 2020 election.
FBI: Election Officials in Nine States Targeted by Cyberattacks
The FBI warned Tuesday that election officials in nine states have been targeted in recent cyberattacks, including phishing emails containing malicious links.
“If successful, this activity may provide cyber actors with sustained, undetected access to a victim’s systems,” the FBI said in a report (pdf). “These emails shared similar attachment files, used compromised email addresses, and were sent close in time, suggesting a concerted effort to target U.S. election officials.”
Such cyberattacks have occurred since October 2021, the bureau said, adding that such incidents will likely increase or continue “in the lead-up to the 2022 U.S. midterm elections” in November.
On Oct. 5, 2021, unidentified hackers targeted certain election officials in nine states while also targeting representatives of the National Association of Secretaries of State, the FBI said.
“These emails originated from at least two email addresses with the same attachment titled, ‘INVOICE INQUIRY.PDF,’” the report said, adding that the email redirected users to a website that harvests logins and passwords.
“One of the email addresses sending the phishing emails was a compromised U.S. government official’s email account,” the agency continued, adding that both “emails contained Microsoft Word document attachments regarding invoices, which redirected users to unidentified online credential harvesting websites.”
The FBI did not say whether the alleged cybercriminals had ties to another country or group. Previously, U.S. intelligence officials have blamed Chinese, Russian, and Iranian state actors for coordinated cyberattacks against U.S. officials.
“Proactive monitoring of election infrastructure [including official email accounts] and communication between FBI and its state, local, territorial, and tribal partners about this type of activity will provide opportunities to mitigate instances of credential harvesting and compromise, identify potential targets and information sought by threat actors, and identify threat actors,” the FBI also wrote.
As a result, the FBI recommended that elections officials and other government workers should take precautions to stop phishing attacks.
The Exodus From US Cities Is Gaining Speed, New Census Data Show
America’s largest metro areas saw massive declines in population, new US Census Bureau data show.
Three of the top five metros that saw sharp declines between July 1, 2020, and July 1, 2021 were in California. Leading the way was the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area, which lost 176,000 residents, a 1.3 percent drop. Next was the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley metro, which saw a decline of 116,000 residents (2.5 percent decline), followed by San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, which shed some 43,000 residents (2.2 percent drop).
“We are in this new demographic era for California of very slow or maybe even negative growth,” Hans Johnson, a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California, told the Los Angeles Times. “And it does have implications for everything in our state — from how we live our lives to which schools are getting closed down to how much capacity we might need for transportation networks, and eventually to housing.”
California metros had company, however.
The New York-Newark-New Jersey metropolitan area saw a decline of 328,000 residents, the highest in the nation in raw numbers. The Chicago area, meanwhile, saw a decline of some 92,000 residents.
ECONOMY & BUSINESS
Video: Putin sets deadline for dropping the dollar: It begins this Friday
Beginning this Friday, Russia will only accept rubles, gold or bitcoin as payment for energy exports to “unfriendly” countries. No dollars or euros will be accepted. And why should Putin accept dollars or euros anyway, given that the western financial system has told Putin he can no longer use dollars or euros to purchase anything.
As a result, Putin is demanding rubles, gold or bitcoin. And that means the Russian ruble is now backed by commodities exports, making it a currency backed by something real. If you buy rubles, in other words, you can trade those rubles for natural gas or oil.
Rubles have a future; the dollar does not. At least not with current economic policies in place.
Texas Oil Can ‘Lead the Way’—But Will It Be Allowed To?
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Railroad Commission chairman Wayne Christian asked President Joe Biden to “get out of the way” and “give the green light” respectively, so Texas oil can lead the way.
“Texas can drill enough oil and natural gas to keep prices low here in America and in Europe if Biden would get out of the way,” Abbott tweeted on Feb. 24 as the war in Ukraine ramped up, and Russian oil slowly became a target for sanctions by the United States and its Western allies.
Christian concurred three weeks later in a post on the commission’s website on March 18, 10 days after Biden banned the import of Russian oil, liquefied natural gas, and coal to the United States, and suspected war crimes in Ukraine were coming into focus.
“The Lone Star State is ready to meet U.S. energy needs,” he wrote, “and help our European allies meet theirs. Mr. President, please just give Texas the green light.”
Texas is the third-largest producer of oil in the world.
Of the top five largest oil fields on the globe, Texas is home to two of them; the Permian Basin and the Eagle Ford Shale.
Rising Cost of Ammunition Hits Firearms Owners in the Wallet
Competitive target shooter Dan Sutton, of Glendale, Arizona, has seen the price of everything go up over the past year. But it’s the rising price of ammunition that really hits close to home.
“It started a year ago,” said Sutton, one of a dozen contestants in a long-range shooting competition at the Ben Avery Shooting Facility in Phoenix on March 26.
“I don’t know about [hurting firearms] ownership—it’s like the price of gas. Some people have quit shooting because of the price of bullets. You can’t find some of the components a lot of times. Especially primers. Bullets. Gun barrels. They went up in price, and it’s hard to get a new barrel.”
Sutton told The Epoch Times that two weeks ago, nearly 100 target shooters attended a similar event. He said turnout would have been higher if not for the skyrocketing price of gasoline.
“We would have had well over 100, but some of them said they couldn’t afford six dollars for [a gallon of] gas to drive all the way from New York out here,” said Sutton, who’s been target shooting since he was 13. He’s now retired, living on a fixed income.
“We buy reloads, so we need to find the components—the primers, the powder. It’s been going up [in price] for over a year. It’s pathetic what’s happening in this country.
“Demand keeps going up and they can’t get enough [supply]. They can’t get the raw materials. Or nobody wants to work anymore to fill the jobs.”
On Dec. 21, 2021, U.S. ammunition supplier Vista Outdoor announced price increases on many of its products because of rising material costs.
“As we continue to see supply chain constraints and increases in our raw materials, we are increasing our pricing to help offset those rising costs,” Jason Vanderbrink, the company’s president of ammunition, said in a statement.
Beginning April 1, the cost of Vista’s primers and powder will go up 5 percent. Likewise, it will cost 2 to 8 percent more for handgun ammo and 3 to 8 percent more for rifle cartridges. Customers will see a 3 to 12 percent price increase on shotgun shells.
Ohio Restaurant Group’s Endorsement of Gov. DeWine Sparks Outrage
Many restaurant and bar owners across the state are expressing outrage after the Ohio Restaurant Association (ORA) announced that it’s endorsing Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted for reelection.
Thousands of restaurants and bars have closed amid DeWine’s COVID-19 shutdowns and restrictions.
“They have betrayed the very businesses they claim to represent,” said Aaron Crater, a professional bartender who founded an advocacy group for the hospitality industry known as Ohio Barhop in the summer of 2020.
“Gov. DeWine destroyed our industry, shutting it down without any regard to actual data and science.”
As of March 2022, more than 3,000 Ohio restaurants—or about 10 percent—have closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the ORA.
Big Ask for Housing in Biden Budget
President Joe Biden requested historic funding for housing supply in his federal budget proposal for the fiscal year that begins October 1, 2022. The proposal was released Monday.
A requested 34% increase over last year for the Department of Housing and Urban Development includes $50 billion in grants and loans to increase the supply of affordable housing. This amount includes $32 billion for the Housing Choice Voucher Program and nearly $2 billion in funding for the HOME Investment Partnership to create more affordable homeownership opportunities.
“This unprecedented investment demonstrates how seriously the White House views the supply crisis,” says Shannon McGahn, NAR’s chief advocacy officer. “We worked with the administration and Congress over the past year on comprehensive policy proposals, and now a consensus is growing across Washington that decisive action is needed.”
In 2021, NAR commissioned a landmark report on housing supply, which confirmed a shortage of nearly 6 million residential housing units nationwide. “NAR’s report became the center of conversation on housing supply, and our policy recommendations are showing up in proposed legislation in Washington and around the country,” McGahn says.
To close the supply gap, NAR supports new funding for affordable housing construction, preserving and expanding tax incentives to renovate distressed properties, converting unused commercial space to residential, and encouraging and incentivizing zoning reform.
The proposal now moves to Congress.
“A president’s budget is a wish list of policy goals and ambitions,” McGahn explains. “Many changes will be made to this plan, but it is good news that the White House sees this issue for what it is—a crisis—and many in Congress on both sides of the aisle agree. The next step is that Congress will hold hearings on this budget proposal. We will continue to work with lawmakers and encourage an all-hands approach to the supply shortage so that the American dream is achievable for all Americans.”
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Vaxxed By Machines, Tracked By Machines: Humanity To Be Augmented One Cell At A Time
Moderna’s co-founder created a quantum dot tattoo to track the vaxxed. The company is now using AI to generate endless mRNA jabs. Welcome to Transhumanism, Inc.
We’re living out a sci-fi thriller where unaccountable corporations openly force advanced tech into our bodies. Capitalizing on the current germaphobic frenzy, Moderna’s co-founder, Dr. Robert Langer, saw his experimental mRNA vaccines pushed on the American public. Riding that dark wave of corporate and government mandates, Langer became an instant billionaire. But this isn’t the only fanged rabbit in his magic top hat.
In 2018, the MIT scientist had developed a quantum dot tattoo—an under-skin nanoparticle QR code, to be scanned by smartphones—in order to track the vaccinated masses and ensure compliance. Like many undignified experiments, this was to begin in the Third World—cuz social justice.
This vaxx & track technology drew the intense personal interest of Bill Gates. That interest naturally translated into millions of dollars in funding. This is in addition to $20 million given to Moderna by the Gates Foundation back in 2016 to develop a new type of vaccine—where bits of injected genetic code would hijack the cell’s machinery to produce reams of pathogenic proteins.
Three technologies drive the plot of this horrific story—mRNA gene therapy, quantum dot tattoos, and artificial intelligence. Advanced machine learning, used to predict the effects of mRNA mutations in silico, allows for lightning fast vaccine development—including regulatory approval. Additionally, embedded subdermal tracking systems can ensure that every person on planet Earth is up-to-date on their shots.
Taken together, these innovations are rapidly converging on a long sought after goal—an inescapable surveillance state, controlled by corporations, in which the global population is subject to continual medical experimentation.
This is not a new story. Many argue it was first written down by St. John on the island of Patmos, some two thousand years ago. In recent decades, sci-fi pulp novels and paranoid tracts on the subject have piled up to the ceiling. The Internet is flooded with cartoonish depictions of evil, chip-implanting globalists—many of which are remarkably accurate.
Today, in the wake of what appears to be a leaked bioweapon, a subsequent global pandemic, the cynical declaration of a Great Reset, a laughable disinformation campaign by every major media outlet, and the imposition of total digitalization—in which even the human body requires regular genetic software updates to remain viable—we now behold a pale horse. That sick beast is poised to trample every liberty we once enjoyed.
A Google billionaire’s fingerprints are all over Biden’s science office
Eric Schmidt has long sought influence over U.S. science policy. Under Biden’s former science chief, Eric Lander, Schmidt’s foundation helped cover officials’ salaries, even as the office’s general counsel raised ethical flags.
As President Joe Biden granted his science office unprecedented access and power, one outside adviser to that office has attained what staffers describe as an unusual level of influence.
A foundation controlled by Eric Schmidt, the multi-billionaire former CEO of Google, has played an extraordinary, albeit private, role in shaping the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy over the past year.
More than a dozen officials in the 140-person White House office have been associates of Schmidt’s, including some current and former Schmidt employees, according to interviews with current and former staff members and internal emails obtained by POLITICO.
Schmidt maintained a close relationship with the president’s former science adviser, Eric Lander, and other Biden appointees. And his charity arm, Schmidt Futures, indirectly paid the salaries of two science-office employees, including, for six weeks, that of the current chief of staff, Marc Aidinoff, who is now one of the most senior officials in the office following Lander’s resignation in February. The chief innovation officer at Schmidt Futures, OSTP alum Tom Kalil, also remained on Schmidt’s payroll while working as an unpaid consultant at the science office for four months last year until he left the post following ethics complaints.
Schmidt has long sought to influence federal science policy, dating back to his close ties to the Obama administration. While his spokespeople presented his efforts to help Biden as part of Schmidt Futures’ mission to “focus and mobilize these networks of talent to solve specific problems in science and society,” his foundation’s involvement in funding positions for specific figures raised repeated red flags from internal White House watchdogs.
WAYMO to Send Driverless Cars Through San Fran
The company is also expanding its service area in PhoenixWaymo plans to start offering rides in its fully autonomous vehicles — without human safety drivers behind the wheel — in San Francisco. The Google spinoff says its driverless vehicles are now only available to employees but will soon grow to include members of the company’s “Trusted Tester” program.
Waymo is also making big moves in Arizona. The company’s service area is finally growing to include downtown Phoenix after operating exclusively in the exurban towns of Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, and Tempe for nearly five years.
Waymo has been running fully driverless rides without a safety driver in those towns outside of Phoenix for more than a year now. The company is one of a handful trying to launch a wide-scale commercial service built around autonomous vehicles, like Argo AI (which is backed by Ford and Volkswagen) and Cruise (which is backed by General Motors).
Waymo has been testing AVs in San Francisco for a decade, dating back to when it was still just a quirky project inside Google’s X division. In 2017, the company launched a limited ride-hail service outside of Phoenix, which eventually grew to include over 300 vehicles.
HEALTH
Spirituality can help heart failure patients improve their quality of life, study says
Spirituality may be the best medicine for people with heart problems, a new study finds. Researchers at Duke University say it can improve the quality of life for heart failure patients.
Numerous studies have shown that spirituality can help improve quality of life for people with chronic diseases such as cancer. The new study concludes that spirituality should become a “potential target” for palliative (pain-relieving) interventions.
“Patients who have heart failure experience a poorer quality of life compared to their peers, with high levels of depression, anxiety and spiritual distress,” says study lead author Dr. Rachel Tobin in a media release.
“Contributing to diminished quality of life is the fact that heart failure, unlike many other chronic diseases, is very unpredictable and can lead to hopelessness, isolation and altered self-image.”
Eating Avocados Reduces Heart Disease Risk By 21 Percent: Study
Avocado toast has become the favored breakfast of the healthy and fit, and now new research suggests their choice may protect their hearts.
People who ate half an avocado twice a week had a 16% lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 21% lower risk of heart disease, compared with people who never or rarely ate the fruit, researchers found.
“This study provides further evidence that the intake of plant-sourced unsaturated fats can improve diet quality and is an important component in cardiovascular disease prevention in the general population,” said lead researcher Lorena Pacheco, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
“Our results are timely, since the nationwide consumption of avocado has risen steeply in the U.S. in the last 20 years,” she noted.
This type of observational study cannot prove definitively that eating avocados lowered the risk for cardiovascular disease, only that there might be a connection, Pacheco cautioned. Funding for the study came from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
Avocados are rich in dietary fiber, unsaturated fats like monounsaturated fat (healthy fats) and other components that have been linked with good cardiovascular health.
GARDENING, FARMIN, & HOMESTEADING
What Did People Feed Their Chickens Before Commercial Chicken Feed?
Chickens are a common first step for people looking to take control of their food supply and get into homesteading. They can be a great source of entertainment for children, as well as a worthwhile lesson in raising your own food. However, they are also an added responsibility, and between supply chain issues and severe inflation, you may be wondering how to feed them this upcoming year. How did people feed chickens before commercial chicken feed?
Personally, I try to keep at least a month’s food on hand for all livestock. That gives me time in the event of a SHTF situation to answer two questions: Do I need to process animals? Or can I wait till things settle down?
However, it’s good to be aware of chickens’ nutritional needs in the event of longer-term SHTF events if you are unwilling to process. Or if you have too many birds and lack the storage space for processed birds.
People got by without commercially mixed chicken feeds for a long time, but that doesn’t mean you can feed chickens whatever and still expect them to grow and lay well. You can be flexible, but there must still be structure.
Chickens are graminivorous.
They prefer to eat mostly grains and seeds, and many breeds will get fat if you let them. A common practice in the days of backyard flocks, where the birds went into a house at night but ran all over the place during the day, was to toss them a handful of “scratch grains” (usually a mixture of corn, wheat, barley, oats, or whatever was available) in the morning, then turn them loose. During the summertime, chickens will get protein from insects, and if they have healthy pastures to graze upon, they can get many nutrients from green, growing grass.
During the wintertime, people would toss them meat once a week or so to provide the needed protein.
Unless you grow grain yourself, you will have to buy grain for your birds.
But organic whole grain (wheat, oats, barley) chicken scratch currently costs $715 per ton. The organic layer ration is $910; the grower ration is $995. Scratch plus whatever was lying around the homestead was what most birds subsisted on for a long time.
So, what’s lying around your homestead? If you have a variety of homesteading projects, you may be able to switch to cheaper scratch without ill effect.
Think about what you have available.
If you buy your meat directly from the farmer (which you really, really should be researching if you aren’t already), ask the butcher to throw in the organ meats. If you don’t want to eat them, you can add them to scratch grains occasionally for your birds because they contain so many minerals. The birds would need ordinary cuts of meat more regularly for the protein, but a combination of ordinary cuts as well as organs provides a great deal of protein and minerals.
If you have your own milk cow (or goat), chickens thrive on milk. And raw milk that has started to sour a little bit can be given to chickens. They actually love it. In the Herbal Handbook referenced above, Levy writes that the French, known for pampering their laying hens, would regularly give them curds. When you let raw milk sit, it separates into curds (chunky stuff) and whey (watery stuff).
Chickens love both.
If you garden, you can toss your chickens any extra odds and ends. For example, if a few tomatoes get worms, you can toss them to the chickens, and they’ll love the worms along with the tomatoes. Occasionally, we’ll get a bunch of hornworms in our garden. We just pick them off and give them to the birds. Vegetable ends that you might otherwise toss in the compost can go to chickens.
Your birds will need leafy green material.
If your birds free range on healthy pastures, they will figure out what they need on their own. If you have to keep your birds confined, tossing in a bale of alfalfa once in a while is probably easiest for most of us.
Another option would be to grow the green material yourself. Comfrey, nettles, and dandelion are all known for being high in minerals and trace nutrients.
Though a warning if you plan to go yanking all the dandelions out of your neighbor’s lawns for your chickens: The deep roots that make these plants so nutritious are the same deep roots that will absorb all sorts of pollutants. If you plan to scavenge food for your birds, find out whether or not it’s been sprayed. It’s probably best to talk to neighbors and friends that don’t spray.
And this can turn into a bartering exchange.
Organic Prepper has written about this before, and I believe we’ll only see more of it as inflation and supply chain issues persist. If you have a neighbor who owns land with nettles (harvest those with gloves!) or dandelions, offer eggs occasionally. If you’re an urban or suburban flock owner, you have limited options for growing your own animal feed, so you’ll need to look to expand your relationships.
COVID RELATED NEWS
Heart Attack Rates Are Skyrocketing, And The Media Is Blaming Everything Other Than COVID Vaccines
The establishment is running into serious problems trying to explain away the skyrocketing rates of cardiovascular events that are occurring ever since Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) “vaccines” were unleashed on the world.
Corporate-controlled media outlets, including some “conservative” ones, are blaming everything from fluctuating weather patterns and daylight savings time to watching too much television and even having too much sex.
Suddenly, all the normal things that people have been doing forever are magically causing otherwise healthy (or so they seem) people to suffer a heart attack or stroke, even though this never happened prior to Operation Warp Speed.
“The ‘experts/priests’ who worship and respect the Science©, and interpret it like Nostradamus reading tea leaves, want to assure the peasants that the unprecedented increase in heart attacks, even in young people who historically don’t suffer from them has nothing to do with the ‘vaccines’ produced by the same pharmaceutical entities that coincidentally fund their research work,” the Daily Bell reported.
“Obviously, no conflict of interest affects the Science© overlords’ judgment because they exist in a moral class above the petty fallible humans they oversee.”
American Heart Association admits that COVID vaccines cause heart inflammation
On its website, the American Heart Association (AHA) reveals the following, which the lying propaganda press refuses to even acknowledge let alone report on: “We conclude that the mRNA vaccines dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis, cardiomyopathy, and other vascular events following vaccination.”
This seems pretty self-explanatory, but the establishment does not approve. In fact, it is going out of its way to try to deflect from the truth by blaming exercise and skipping breakfast for the massive uptick in heart events that we are now seeing.
“The principle at play here is akin to a legal concept called ‘plausible deniability,’” the Bell‘s Ben Bartee wrote.
“Most often, plausible deniability refers to members of high-ranking governments or similarly large, complex entities creating, through various machinations, a mirage of ignorance to protect themselves from liability for criminal or unethical behavior that they actually sanctioned.”
The corporate-controlled media is doing the exact same thing by presenting an array of ridiculous and highly unlikely scenarios to try to explain away all of the COVID jab injuries and deaths that are spreading like a virus among the “fully vaccinated.”
“If the corporate media can offer an array of alternative explanations for the precipitous spike in heart attacks, cancers, etc., then determining for certain that an individual owes their debilitating health condition to the ‘vaccines’ becomes virtually impossible – it could’ve been almost literally anything else!” Bartee added.
The Pandemic Treaty Is a Spreading Plague
The globalist cabal wants to monopolize health systems worldwide, and a stealth attack is already underway in the form of an international pandemic treaty, proposed by the World Health Organization
The treaty is a direct threat to a nation’s sovereignty to make decisions for itself and its citizens, and would erode democracy everywhere. Not only would the treaty empower the WHO to mandate COVID jabs and vaccine passports globally, it could potentially also expand the WHO’s power to dictate all health care policy worldwide
The treaty would also give the WHO the power to censor health information worldwide. This would be disastrous, as the WHO has a long history of corruption and health policy failures that are intrinsically linked to conflicts of interest
When people are harmed by the WHO’s health policies, there’s no accountability because the WHO has diplomatic immunity
Bill Gates, the second largest funder of the WHO, has also been funding pandemic exercises, including Event 201 and the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s exercise on international response to deliberate biological events. This scenario involved a deliberate release of a genetically engineered bioweapon — a pneumonic plague — for which there is no available treatment. Both exercises were held in 2019
Fauci: Americans Should Be ‘Prepared for Possibility’ of COVID-19 Restrictions
White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci warned about the potential for the reinstatement of COVID-19 restrictions in the United States.
Americans, he told the BBC on Sunday, “need to be prepared for the possibility” of an uptick in COVID-19 cases, which may lead to further restrictions.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘lockdowns.’ That has a charged element to it. But, I believe that we must keep our eye on the pattern of what we’re seeing with infections,” he told the outlet.
Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from the virus have dropped significantly in the United States since the winter’s COVID-19 surge.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that currently, the BA.2 Omicron subvariant that is spreading makes up for about 54.9 percent of cases. Meanwhile, data from the CDC revealed that just over 9,600 new cases were reported Sunday.
“Having said that, we need to be prepared for the possibility that we would have another variant that would come along,” Fauci said. “And then, if things change and we do get a variant that does give us an uptick in cases and hospitalization, we should be prepared and flexible enough to pivot toward going back–at least temporarily–to a more rigid type of restrictions, such as requiring masks indoor.”
But several days ago, Fauci told another news outlet that he does not expect another significant COVID-19 surge.
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