The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods:

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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, we look at the significant drop in bird populations.

Study Finds Hand Sanitizers Fail Against Flu

Reader DSV sent us this: Study finds hand sanitizers fail against flu, CDC completely wrong.

U.S., Canada Have Lost 3 Billion Birds Since 1970

NBC reports: U.S., Canada have lost 3 billion birds since 1970. Scientists say ‘nature is unraveling.’ A quote:

“For a study published Sep. 19 in the journal Science, Marra joined with other scientists and conservationists to analyze nearly five decades of population data on 529 species of North American birds. The results were staggering: Since 1970, the continental U.S. and Canada have lost more than 1 in 4 birds. The total bird population in the two countries has fallen by almost 3 billion, with grassland birds such as western meadowlarks and American sparrows and shorebirds such as green herons taking the biggest hits.

The population of birds at the start of breeding season in the U.S. and Canada has fallen from just over 10 billion to a little more than 7 billion in the last 50 years, the research showed.”

Social Credit Will Shift Law “From Constitution… to Analytics and Algorithm”

Penn State Prof: Social Credit Will Shift Law in the West “From Constitution… to Analytics and Algorithm”. A snippet:

“A 2018 paper written by prominent law professor Larry Backer of Penn State discussed the ways in which a social credit system could be implemented in the West. Backer writes that the shift in law with this system will “…change the focus of public law from Constitution and rule of law to analytics and algorithm…”

In the paper, titled “Next Generation Law: Data Driven Governance and Accountability Based Regulatory Systems in the West, and Social Credit Regimes in China“, Backer describes moves to social credit in the West as “fractured”, but gives guidance on how societal norms could be steadily pushed to accept this system.”

China Footage Reveals Hundreds of Blindfolded and Shackled Prisoners

Reader H.L. mentioned this at The Guardian (UK): China footage reveals hundreds of blindfolded and shackled prisoners. The article begins:

“Drone footage has emerged showing police leading hundreds of blindfolded and shackled men from a train in what is believed to be a transfer of inmates in Xinjiang.

The video, posted anonymously on YouTube last week, shows what appear to be Uighur or other minorities wearing blue and yellow uniforms, with cleanly shaven heads, their eyes covered, sitting in rows on the ground and later being led away by police. Prisoners in China are often transferred with handcuffs and masks covering their faces.

Nathan Ruser, a researcher with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s international cyber policy centre, used clues in the footage, including landmarks and the position of the sun, to verify the video, which he believes was shot at a train station west of Korla in south-east Xinjiang in August last year.

Much of the focus of international criticism of China’s far-reaching anti-terrorism campaign in Xinjiang has centred on the extrajudicial detentions of more than 1 million ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in internment and political re-education camps.”

Secret Cameras Use AI to Catch Drivers Using Mobile Phones

A hat tip to DSV for this news from Australia: These Secret Cameras Use AI To Catch Drivers Using Mobile Phones

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34 Comments

    1. Nope don’t think it’s Roundup. Pretty sure Greta Thunberg has convinced them because of Global Cooling, oops Global Warming, oops Climate Change that it’s not worth reproducing!

        1. My question is where are her parents and why have they not been arrested for child abuse? She should be in school getting a education so she isn’t so confused and scientifically uninformed.

          1. My guess would be that her parents are the biggest propagandists in her life. Just a terribly sad state of affairs. If I remember correctly, she is Swedish. I would think the government of Sweden actually approves of and even fosters this kind of severe mental child abuse.

            It’s happening here too. Mental child abuse with government approval and even applause.

    1. survivormann99 i know for a fact the cats dont really put much of a dent into the bird population. my wife and i walk thru an area with a high population of feral cats and they kill a lot of pigeons for food and do not make much of a difference in the population. sorry the study you are quoting is for one area i guess. or is wrong period. i believe what i see, not what someone tells me is the truth. now i have to agree there is a problem with the birds but its not cats more likely poison or traffic or some other problem, maybe we people are just overtaking their habitat.

  3. For several years I have noticed a decline in bird populations. We have around 30 bird houses plus numerous trees and shrubbery to provide ideal food and habitat. Not nearly the numbers or species that was here 20 years ago. I have been saying this for years…something is seriously amiss in our environment.

  5. Birds dying off? Is this just another in a long list of stories trying to scare us? Coming ice age, population bomb, ozone hole, acid rain, killer bees just to name a few in my lifetime. All based on poorly done science or in some cases just made up. Watch George Carlin saving the planet. He does a great job covering this.

  6. Social credit rating already exists as bank credit rating. It has been taken up by auto insurance companies as part of their rate determiner, etc. People already think of it as a social credit system.

  7. Humanity vs Nature: Birds consume insects, seeds and grains. Humans genetically modify plants and insects (mosquitoes) after inundating nature with pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides,
    Bee colonies collapse, birds disappear, meanwhile, humans have the arrogance to think we will control nature and “save” the planet? Meanwhile, bacteria and viruses become resistant to the “miracle” antibiotics and the human arrogance continues with vain attempts to control its’ own destiny. God created the heavens and the earth. God created man and woman. God has the solution to our man-made issues and problems and nature will find a way…….in spite of human intelligence and intellect.

  10. I think the bird drop is due to less area being farmed as farmland, therefore less food and habitat
    Over the last 100 years, big AG has focused completely on high yields on less acres tilled. Resulting in a large drop in areas being farmed, and less variety of crops being planted

  11. Re: Birds

    The raw data from the studies would be interesting to view, especially on a time scale.

    In my work I attend marine mammal training every year. The biologist who gives it says the Orcas are dying off. When they put the population graphs of the Orcas up for display, it shows a relatively flat line for 60 or 70 years with slight blips along the way.

    I have seen the same thing with all kinds of data in all kinds of situations. Financial data. Health data. All kinds of data. Not just ecological. Executive summaries often exaggerate real issues or often as not do not match the data at all.

    I would also like to see where the bird surveys were done. There is significant population growth on the coasts in our country and in specific urban areas. In many areas farmland is reverting back to forest. I have seen this in Idaho and Michigan and elsewhere. If your surveys are all on the fringes of population growth areas, like the area the man spoke of in Connecticut I have no doubt population are falling. But in some of the areas of Michigan I have seen reverting to forest, I wonder if the birds there are even being counted.

    1. If cats kill 1/3 of the birds in North America every year, birds should have gone extinct decades ago.

      There has been so much anti-cat propaganda that in some areas, especially liberal, middle class areas, there are almost no feral cats left at all.

      I had a very sweet outdoor cat as a pet. One day she disappeared. I found her at the local vet’s office, in a cage, spayed. Without my knowledge or permission, and I had to pay for her medical expenses to get her back. She was perfectly healthy.

      Spay-neuter nazi’s should not take other people’s cats. A sleek, shiny, healthy, well fed outdoor cat obviously belongs to someone.

      1. Any loose cat is feral, and in Wyoming they can be shot on sight! I see feral cats hunting birds every day in my neighborhood. They are a nuisance critter! If you love your cat you would keep it indoors 24/7! Coyotes love to dine on cat and so do mountain lions!! Cars run loose cats over all the time! Cats like to defecate in your beautiful garden that you work so hard to make fruitful. I blast cats with a high-power water hose when I catch them in my yard, as they like to kill my hummingbirds!!!!!!!!!!!

        1. That is too bad. Cats will also kill hundreds of rodents that eat your garden produce and defecate on your lettuce, not to mention carrying deadly hantavirus in their urine, which they will happily distribute on every surface they walk over.

          I was having a morning cup of coffee a couple of weeks ago when one of my cats jumped up on the chair next to me with a present. A dead rattlesnake she had just killed. Or what was left of it.

          Snakes are terrified of cats, with good reason. Cats on the other hand just love snakes. Such fun! It is similar to a duel between a muzzle loading rifle and a machine gun. The snake has to rewind to strike. The cat does not. If the snake misses the first strike, it’s all over.

  13. interesting to me is that this is roughly 1/3 of the Birds in North America. 1/3 seems to be the significant number of Revelations Chapter 8. i’m wondering if all the recent fires in the Brazilian Amazon has reached the value of 1/3…

  14. The main problem here in central FL are chem trails on a relentless basis. Read what are in the trails! You maybe surprised at the contents. This is especially wild during the winter season when the northerners are prolific here. People coming at the tune of 900 per DAY moving to FL (this is people in general, not just visitors) What is a better way to decrease the older population than flying planes very high and few people do not know they are being poisioned. Your friendly secret government at work! FYI: These are not contrails all the time
    Everything is being poisoned.

  16. Birds are doing fine at my place they are about to eat me out of house and home buying black oil sunflower seed and they are having pool parties in our bird baths by the flocks they have to wait in line to get in the water. In addition the squirrels and rabbits are having a party too. I’m researching for a good pellet air rifle. The squash bugs are doing well also. The bird survey counters are looking in the wrong places again.

  17. Bird mortality is mostly due to new green technologies. Wind turbines and solar generators mess up their migratory patterns. Near Primm, NV this facility destroys millions of bird each year (and more are being built):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility

    Eagles in Alaska are running out of fish to eat and are dining on blue herrons. Homeless in Los Angeles are roasting pigeons and sparrows nightly. The growing coyote population is starving and climbing trees in search of nests.

    The only solution is to ban bird hunting and fund new bird loss studies.

  19. Mother Nature is perfect in my estimation. For millions of years we have had climate changes that occur on our planet, whether it be cooling or heating, these changes occur over hundreds or thousands of years, different species mutate and adapt, become born or extinct. I think God did a wonderful job in making Mother Nature the controller of all of this glory we see around us. People who deny climate change now I believe are idiots. People, in there lust for power, money and control, have disregarded and taken advantage of our planet and have made something that occurs naturally over thousands of years speed up out of our control now. We are seeing changes in every aspect of nature around us. Humans are so over populated now and we are still hell bent on using our precious resources even faster and faster, and want to deny what most can see for themselves. In the past if we have had a large deer population in one area, what happens?? We see a die off for the next several years…..that’s just Mother Nature fixing the balance. On the large scale now the Big thing wrong with our planet is US, (humans ), and I fully believe Mother Nature will take care of that problem SOON!

    1. TXnurse,

      I don’t deny that climate change is happening. I do deny that humanity as a whole is the cause. The largest driver of climate on this planet isn’t on this planet. Tomorrow, about noon, go outside, face south, look up. What you see is our sun. The biggest driver of climate for planet earth. Now sit down at your computer. Do a web search on the number of active volcanos in some state of eruption right now, there well over 30. The biggest atmospheric polluter on the planet is volcanos. One good column of ash from a volcano, shooting 15, 20, 30 even 40,000 feet in the air puts out more pollution than all of humanity combined can put over decades and decades. There have been dozens of such plumes just this year alone. Oh and the number of active volcanos going off in any given year appears to be tied directly to solar cycles.

      Climate change doesn’t necessarily happen over thousands of years, it’s cyclical. The cycles are on the order of decades, other cycles can be over centuries, like the Maunder Minimum, or even over millennia. But is humanity the biggest driver of climate change? The answer is a resounding NO. It’s the human caused climate change fanatics who are the true science deniers.

      There are some very bad actors who have no honor and no sense of morals, who routinely cause local pollution. They pollute the ground water, they pollute the very air you are forced to breathe. Your government, the corrupt politicians and the corrupt bureaucrats, do nothing to rectify the problems. They even facilitate and legitimize these polluters by making them “legally” immune from criminal prosecution for their willful criminal acts, nor are they being forced to financially pay for the consequences of their actions and the real tangible harm they do. These are the very same politicians and bureaucrats who promote the fantasy of human cause global climate change.

      As an obvious example, look at Monsanto and all the harm, I would say criminal harm, they have done with glyphosate. They are just now, maybe, paying a financial price for the harm they have done. In the end, they may still get off completely exonerated, yet the harm they have caused is very real and provable. Thank you FDA, thank you USDA, thank you CDC for your corruption.

      As a previous commenter noted there might just be a connection between the insects, the bees in particular, and glyphosate.

      Don’t blame all of humanity for the crimes of a very few. Blame the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats and those who bribe them.

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