The Taliban's Night Letters. Pandemics More Likely Than We Thought.

SurvivalBlog presents another edition of The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods— a collection of news bits and pieces that are relevant to the modern survivalist and prepper from “JWR”. Our goal is to educate our readers, to help them to recognize emerging threats, and to be better prepared for both disasters and negative societal trends. You can’t mitigate a risk if you haven’t first identified a risk. Today, more about pandemics.

Explosive Growth in Homeschooling

Over at Just The News: Homeschooled children increased from 13K in 1973 to 5M in 2020, report finds

Video: A Guerilla Grazer

My wife Lily echoed a blog reader, when she recommended this YouTube video: Went homeless. Done Guerrilla Grazing by choice ever since.

No-Till Farming Can Cut Herbicide Use, Control Weeds

From frequent link contributor C.B.: No-till production farmers can cut herbicide use, control weeds, protect profits. An excerpt from the PHYS.ORG article:

“Farmers using no-till production—in which soil never or rarely is plowed or disturbed—can reduce herbicide use and still maintain crop yields by implementing integrated weed-management methods, according to a new study conducted by Penn State researchers.

While no-till agriculture can conserve soil and energy, it relies primarily on herbicides for weed control and to terminate cover crops and perennial crops, noted the study’s lead author, Heather Karsten, associate professor of crop production/ecology. When farmers are no longer using tillage to disrupt weed growth, they typically use more herbicides to control weeds.

‘Farmers are particularly reliant on a few common herbicides for no-till production of corn and soybeans, such as glyphosate, which has resulted in the evolution of herbicide-resistant weeds that are now very problematic,” she said. “With more than 65% of agronomic crops under no-till production in Pennsylvania, those weeds are spreading, reducing crop yields and becoming very difficult to control.'”

California: Curtailing Solar Power & Building Natural Gas Plants

This comes to us by way of the highly recommended Your Daily G2 e-newsletter (published by Mcalvanyica.com): California: Curtailing Solar Power & Building Natural Gas Plants… Because…

The Taliban’s Night Letters

Linked over at the Whatfinger.com news aggregation site: Taliban pins terrifying ‘night letters’ on doors of those who helped the West in Afghanistan… warning them to surrender or die.

Large Pandemics are More Likely Than We Thought

And finally, C.B. sent us this, over at Medical Express: Statistics say large pandemics are more likely than we thought. Here is a quote:

“The COVID-19 pandemic may be the deadliest viral outbreak the world has seen in more than a century. But statistically, such extreme events aren’t as rare as we may think, asserts a new analysis of novel disease outbreaks over the past 400 years.

The study, appearing the week of Aug. 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used a newly assembled record of past outbreaks to estimate the intensity of those events and the yearly probability of them recurring.

It found the probability of a pandemic with similar impact to COVID-19 is about 2% in any year, meaning that someone born in the year 2000 would have about a 38% chance of experiencing one by now. And that probability is only growing, which the authors say highlights the need to adjust perceptions of pandemic risks and expectations for preparedness.”

COVID C.1.2 Could be Highly Transmissible, Evade Vaccines

From reader H.L.: New COVID C.1.2 strain could be highly transmissible, evade vaccines. JWR’s Comment: Reading the news headlines makes me want to lock the gate to our ranch and just hunker down for a few years…