One of the most powerful forms of censorship is censorship by omission. There has been a lot of that going on lately. If the public never hears news reports about massive crop failures in America the very thought of a famine in the U.S will always be absurd. And almost no one will prepared when a famine happens. We are supposed to think that crop failures and widespread famines only occur in nations that are not red-blooded American-style democracies chock full of Capitalism and bubbling over with Free Enterprise. Like Russia, China, and every evil third-world country that--unlike us--God didn't like best. But we've had our famines too, starting with the Jamestown Colony. And that wasn't the only one. We had famine in 1816, during the Year Without A Summer, and another major famine during the Dust Bowl. It's hard to get much information because the facts about famines in America have been very thoroughly scrubbed from the public record. But we can all learn a lot from Jamestown, and we need to learn it now There is a Perfect Storm of Starvation looming on the Western horizon. And it's moving our way fast. There is an unprecedented drought taking place in the Western States. It is being exacerbated by plagues of locusts large enough to be tracked by radar. Literally trillions of locusts, stripping the ground bare of anything green. Farmers have culled their herds of cattle because they can't afford to feed them. Ditto for pigs and chickens. Milk, cheese, and egg production has dropped like a stone. Every crop from wheat to corn, rice, and soybeans has been impacted. That includes vegetables like potatoes, onions, and carrots, as well as fruits such as citrus, and nuts. Basically every kind of produce that you would see in a supermarket is moving into major shortage mode, especially if it comes from west of the Mississippi. And food prices are already going up about 10% per month. In studying the Jamestown Famine, it is easy to see the mistakes the Colonists made. They arrived with inadequate food supplies, and they were not able to immediately start producing food on a large scale. They also relied on supply ships--which never came. And when starvation became a fact, they did what people always do in a famine: They traded whatever they had for whatever food they could get. Then they ate everything they could get their hands on that had the slightest trace of food value. And then they ate each other. Cannibalism is an ugly thing, but it always occurs during a severe famine. Hunger physically rewires the human brain--and the previously unthinkable becomes an infinite necessity. A famine does not have to be nation-wide, or even regional. It just has to happen in an area where people cannot get away. A famine does not have to kill everybody. All it has to do is, for example, kill the poor that can't pay the higher prices for limited food supplies. The deaths usually start with the poor, old, sick, disabled, and very young. After that it's just a matter of what percentage of the population dies. The fattest guy in the famine will be the last man standing--if a skinny guy doesn't eat him. A famine in "just" New York City would become desperate in three days, appalling in five, and apocalyptic in two weeks. In a month, the loss of life would be in the millions. The best place to be in a famine is somewhere else. But it's not easy finding a safe BOL. Most people just don't have the resources to Bug Out and Hunker Down. And every safe BOL will sooner or later become an unsafe BOL because if you can find it, so can five thousand other very hungry people. All a person can do is the most they can do. The time to do that is now. The worst thing they can possibly do is nothing. How The Worst Famine In The US History Killed 3 Out Of 4 People – Is A Horror Story From The Distant Past, But It Also Contains A Lot Of Lessons For Preppers Note: Ignore "The Lost Ways" hustlers that are piggybacked on the above link. They're a buncha schmucks. (Recommend: See rense.com for a lot of news that never makes the MSM.)
The main lesson that Jamestown should teach us is that COMMUNISM DOES NOT WORK. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank chides Dick Armey today for having said that socialism caused starvation at Jamestown. “Who knew they had socialists in 1607?” Milbank asks. Actually, lots of people know this. As I wrote three years ago: Four hundred years ago today 105 men and boys disembarked from three ships and established the first permanent English settlement in North America. They built a fort along what they called the James River, in honor of their king. The land was lush and fertile, yet within three years most of the colonists died during what came to be known as “the starving time.” Only the establishment of private property saved the Jamestown colony. What went wrong? There were the usual hardships of pioneers far from home, such as unfamiliar diseases. There were mixed relations with the Indians already living in Virginia. Sometimes the Indians and settlers traded, other times armed conflicts broke out. But according to a governor of the colony, George Percy, most of the colonists died of famine, despite the “good and fruitful” soil, the abundant deer and turkey, and the “strawberries, raspberries and fruits unknown” growing wild. The problem was the lack of private property. As Tom Bethell writes in his book The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages, “The colonists were indolent because most of them were indentured servants, expected to toil for seven years and contribute the fruits of their labor to the common store.” Understandably, men who don’t benefit from their hard work tend not to work very hard. But a new governor arrived and instituted a system of private property. And then, the Virginia historian Matthew Page Andrews wrote, “As soon as the settlers were thrown upon their own resources, and each freeman had acquired the right of owning property, the colonists quickly developed what became the distinguishing characteristic of Americans – an aptitude for all kinds of craftsmanship coupled with an innate genius for experimentation and invention.” John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, said that once private property was instituted, men could engage in “gathering and reaping the fruits of their labors with much joy and comfort.” I gotta go with Milbank, not Armey, though, on another point of contention: Alexander Hamilton was a big‐government man. At least by the standards of 1787; no doubt he’d be appalled at the size, scope, and power of today’s federal government, though he might approve the imperial trappings and authority of modern presidents.
Any society that allows a subset of parasites to consume the fruits of other peoples industry will fail one way or another. Jamestown it was starvation, this Republic it will probably end in violence.
Yep--socialism was a (if not the) key element in the Jamestown Famine. Survival is like rocketry. Even the slightest degree of inefficiency can be enough to wreck the whole project.
Also, many of the original Jamestown colonist weren't interested in tilling the soil, as they were gentleman adventurers in search of GOLD!...which they expected to find laying on top of the ground. I have yet to read of a colony that brought enough food with them, be they English, French, Spanish, etc.. The early colonial forays always expected that #1-GOD would provide manna from heaven, #2- The Indians would be willing to trade for food, and #3- Supply ships were due any day. Is it any wonder that the colonists starved or were killed by the Indians.
Every story I read about the trappers in the 1800s included starvation, game scarcity, eating their horses, it was a fact of life they could not carry enough and had to hunt. The Indians staved frequently, agriculture was developed to stop this. We are doing our best to build towns on the best land for growing so what a big surprise when we are out of food.
FIRSTHAND REPORT "I don't have pics, but we just left northern NV, and drove through southeast OR on our way to southwest WA to escape the high temps. There were Morman Grasshoppers crawling everywhere. In the evening our campsite was so overrun with hundreds of grasshoppers, that we were forced to go inside in order to get away from them and shut them out of the RV. The highways we're so thick with the dead bugs that it left two reddish-brown stains all along the road and the fishy smell they left behind was enough to make you gag."
Water mismanagement has hugely exacerbated agricultural drought issues. California runs water into ocean FFS. Just like the forests are mismanaged with dire fire seasons every year. As I write this I'm on my porch by the creek inundated in wildfire smoke under a yellow sky. If I wasn't so dug in I'd move to a less combustible area.
The Pilgrims/ Puritans in New England also tried communal agriculture....it didn't work any better for them. Too many men complained of ailments that prevented them from working in the fields, and of course their lady wives and children couldn't be expected to do manual labor, either! After the colony divided the land into family farms, they ALL worked from can to can't. Amazing how the knowledge that the food you eat will come from your own land and by the sweat of your own brow will motivate you!
