Pick Your Apocalypse

Pestilence, courtesy of Red Barry's Food & Drug Administration....:

Forbes magazine Editor in Chief Steve Forbes warns that the Food and Drug Administration’s foot-dragging on approving new antibiotics is leading to the “potential catastrophe” of a “bacterial apocalypse.”

The FDA has been making the approval of new drugs increasingly burdensome in recent years, Forbes — who was a Republican candidate for president in 1996 and 2000 — writes in a Forbes magazine editorial.

“The FDA’s behavior is no surprise to the organization’s watchers,” he says. “Approve a medication that has an unintended side effect and congressional headline-seekers will be giving officials the third degree. Better to let people die by depriving them of new medicines.”

As a result of the FDA’s foot-dragging, the pipeline for new antibiotics is drying up, according to Forbes.

Antibiotics have saved tens of millions of lives since the 1940s, but bacteria can become drug-resistant and new drugs are constantly needed to keep pace with new killer germs. But the flow of new antibiotics “has slowed to a trickle,” Forbes observes in the editorial headlined “How the FDA May Kill Millions of Us.”

One reason is that research is becoming more expensive, discouraging pharmaceutical companies from risking money on developing new medications that may not ultimately gain FDA approval.

“But the chief villain is the FDA,” Forbes declares.

He quotes David Shlaes, author of the book Antibiotics: The Perfect Storm. Shlaes writes: “Regulatory agencies like the FDA are contributing to the problem with a constant barrage of clinical trial requirements that make it harder, slower and more costly to develop antibiotics.”

Forbes also might have pointed to a new study by oncologist David Stewart and his colleagues at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. The study notes that the time from drug discovery to marketing increased from eight years in 1960 to twelve to fifteen years now, Reason magazine reported.

The researchers calculate that five years of this increase is the result of ever tighter regulations boosting the costs and lengths of clinical trials.

Forbes declares: “Thus today we are faced with potential catastrophe. Lethal bacteria now threaten to colonize U.S. hospitals. If nothing is done, we will be facing a bacterial apocalypse. The horrors that we thought were banished seventy years ago are coming back.”

The FDA should be overhauled to remove its capricious hurdles, Forbes says, calling on the new Congress to “hold hearings on the FDA’s increasingly deadly and bizarre behavior.”

....Starvation, courtesy of Red Barry's greenstremist "renewable energy" zealotry....:

While rising food prices have been a factor in recent riots in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere, the United States is continuing to increase its use of corn to make ethanol, pushing up grain and meat prices worldwide.

“The global economy is getting back on its feet, but so too is an old enemy: food inflation,” The Wall Street Journal states in an editorial, noting that the United Nations benchmark index for food reached a record high in December, “raising fears of shortages and higher prices.”

In 2001, only 7% of America’s corn crop, about 707 million bushels, was used to make ethanol fuel for vehicles. By 2010, nearly 40% of American corn went for ethanol — almost 5 billion bushels out of total U.S. production of 12.4 billion bushels.

American farmers account for about 39% of global corn production, and about 16% of the crop is exported, so America’s ethanol production can influence world prices.

March futures for corn recently hit a thirty-month high of $6.67 a bushel, up from $4 a bushel a year ago.

Also, since 40% of U.S. corn production is used as animal feed, rising corn prices push up the cost of beef, poultry and other items as well.

“This trend is the deliberate result of policies designed to subsidize ethanol,” and it “coincides with a growing consensus that ethanol achieves none of its alleged policy goals,” The Journal observes.

Ethanol supporters claim it reduces American dependence on foreign oil, but a Cornell University scientist calculated that even if the entire American crop was used for ethanol, it would satisfy just 4% of our oil consumption.

And the Environmental Protection Agency has downplayed assertions that ethanol provides a cleaner source of energy than gasoline, saying it “has a minimal to negative impact on the environment,” according to The Journal.

The American Thinker on Monday observed: “Today there is a global food shortage and sky-rocketing prices. This has become the underlying factor in the riots in Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt, where up to 56% of a person's income is dedicated to the acquisition of food. These riots are now leading to the upheaval of governments and the very real possibility of the ascendancy of the radical elements into control.”

A significant factor “in the overall global food situation is the American decision to, in essence, burn food in its cars, a policy championed by the environmentalists since the 1990s,” American Thinker also noted.

“There is no quicker way to foment riots and revolution than to deprive the populace of food, particularly when so much daily income goes into feeding oneself and one's family. The pictures we have seen in North Africa may well be repeated elsewhere throughout the world.”

Noting that Congress recently voted to extend the $5 billion tax credit for blending ethanol into gasoline, the Journal concludes: “At a time when the world will need more corn and grains, it makes no sense to devote scarce farmland to make a fuel that exists only because of taxpayer subsidies and mandates.

“If food supplies tighten and prices keep rising, such a policy will soon become immoral.”

 ....or U.S. economic collapse from Red Barry's runaway debt:

The national debt rose by $569.4 billion in the first four months of fiscal 2011, putting this year on pace to become the second-ranking year in U.S. history for accumulating new federal debt.

The federal debt increased by $105.8 billion in January, pushing the total debt to $14.13 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

Fiscal 2009 set the record for increasing the debt, raising it by $1.89 trillion. In that year, Congress passed the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program that President George W. Bush signed in October 2008, and the $787 billion stimulus bill that President Barack Obama signed in February 2009.

Fiscal 2010 is currently the second-ranking year — the debt rose by $1.65 trillion that year.

But the “federal government’s accumulation of new debt in fiscal 2011 is currently on a pace to outstrip the new debt accumulated in fiscal 2010,” CNS News reported.

“If the government continues accumulating debt in the final two-thirds of the year as quickly as it did in the first third [October through January], then the total new debt accumulated for fiscal 2011 would reach $1.7 trillion,” ahead of 2010 but behind 2009.

Also at that current rate, the federal government would end up borrowing an additional $5,532 for each man, woman and child in the country. And the total debt of $14.13 trilling equals $45,769 per person.

The punchline?  False Messiah is delivering all three to us at the same time.  Why?  Because he needs more crises to exploit in order to complete his communistic transformation of America and the world into the New Dark Ages - if, that is, his friends the Islamists, Russians, and ChiComms don't simply kill us all first. 

"Change you can believe in" - from the grave.