Ethiopia again:
In Africa there is a humanitarian emergency unfolding that has largely escaped the world’s attention. It is a prodigious drought and it holds much of the continent in an unforgiving grip. Here in Ethiopia it is reckoned to be the worst for 50 years. The culprit is long-term climate change coinciding with a hot and unwelcome blast of El Nino. The result? Successive rains have failed. And when the rains fail, so do the harvests. In a nation where three quarters of the population relies on farming, that’s a disaster. And so a great hunger has arrived which will render as many as 15 million people in need of urgent aid.
The ruling party in Ethiopia is the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. The name says a lot. Wikipedia details concisely their ideology.
The front views liberal democracy and free market capitalism as decadent, and has a “romantic attachment” to the beliefs of Vladimir Lenin…
That would be the kind of decadence that lets us feed ourselves when the weather is bad.
The Wikipedia article cites an article in the Addis Ababa university paper.
Not forgetting ‘revolutionary democracy’ as a pervasive and effective yet out-dated alternative to the ‘‘ill-fit and unsustainable liberal democracy’’, it is undeniable that EPRDF’s economic results owe their little success to the liberal economic reforms pushed into results by a powerful state.
They fucking know what they have done, and what they should do to fix it.
Exactly, it’s not about the drought. But of course, Obama being a good christian…
😉
…will prostrate himself (and us) with plenty of mia culpas and a plethora of self immolation. I’ll come back to the global warming crap in moment.
First I would like to mention the “evils” of free markets.
It’s that evil profit motive that motivates speculators to store (or invest in storing) when there is plenty and prices are low, and to sell when items are scarce and prices are high.
Oh, how fucking evil, making money off of people’s needs!!!!
BUT of course, the “unintended consequences” of this profiteering is that speculating not only stabilizes markets, it aids people EXACTLY when they need it the most. It takes up the slack when there is a surplus and diminishes scarcity when times are hard.
Of course, much more can be said about the benevolent effects of free markets, even “price gouging”, which helps people have availability to things they urgently need more than others. Price gouging keeps reactionary idiots from hording “affordable” items desperately needed by others in a common crisis.
Now, back to climate change.
Consider,
This is the FORMAL LOGICAL FALLACY known as denying the antecedent.
NO DEGREE OF RATIONALIZING AND FACT GATHERING CAN MAKE THE ABOVE STATEMENT A NON-FALLACY.
No amount of lefty arm-waving can change this.
And it is the fundamental basis of all “global warming” measures implemented or suggested by POLITICAL forces.
“Climate change” as a reactionary political theory, is pseudo-scientific mysticism.
Another idiot trying to deny that the globe is warming. Australia just had its’ hottest April day ever recorded. Climate change is real!!!
We can react in different ways, of course. That some people use it for their own purposes shouldn’t stop us from acknowledging it.
As for aid, we should just parachute it all over the countries concerned, since government distribution agencies in Africa are selective about who gets the food. We should also give them something to read, such as ‘Atlas Shrugged’, or the writings of Adam Smith, and John Locke.
I imagine in about 12 months you’re going to see a lot of Ethiopian restaurants and grocery stores opening in the UK.
I was watching TV news with the Sage of Kettering when they announced that the EPRDF had come to power, replacing the Soviet backed Dergue régime with a different bunch of Marxists, perhaps a bit worse than the Bern replacing you-know-who but essentially no change at all, as the Sage remarked of the Front ‘There’s a name that inspires confidence‘.
In the 1984 famine, the media gave the incumbent Communists a pass on causation, the collectivisation of agriculture leading to famine as night follows day, as the Wiki page points out.
All these Third World crapholes need poltical reform, and to root out the Leftists that ruin them, sadly there’s no prospect of that happening at all.
During the last seven years of Elisabeth the First’s reign there was a severe drought across the north of England resulting in famine.
Yet another “hottest day ever”.
If I had a £20 note for every time that lie has been peddled I would be a very wealthy man.
In Ethiopia the farmers do not even own the land – the government does.
So the farmers have no incentive to engage in long term investment.
And if ordinary people prepared for hard times – the government would, most likely, confiscate their “hoarding”.
As for the idea that lack of rain is a recent problem in the country……
Well such an idea is an error.
Nicholas said,
You should sharpen your reading skills before tossing invectives, Nich. I said “climate change” as a reactionary political theory, i.e. the doomsday scenario that climate change is necessarily man made and WILL lead to “global disaster” rather than the increased greening of our planet and largess of food crops… which the latter is far more likely and is already happening.
UH…that’s weather, not climate, my genius friend.
Yes, there is climate change, which is why it’s called CLIMATE.
“Climate deniers” is a lefty invective that hardly applies to anyone. The question is, is it primarily caused by man and will the effects be devastating. The leftist hyperbole regarding the latter two questions and the illogical foundation of their nonsense and the force and fraud they use to bully and intimidate speaks for itself.
Thailover,
I would hazard a guess, a wild stab at that, that Nicholas had a picomole of sarcasm in his comment.
Quick someone send food before Band Aid gets re-recorded. I am not sure the world can take another group of self congratulatory celebs being photographed outside sarm studios high on adderrall lecturing ordinary folk on a set of topics they are ill informed about themselves
Mr. Ed said,
“…that Nicholas had a picomole of sarcasm in his comment.”
I would certainly hope so, but it went on for several sentences, so I assumed the worst, lol.
Phil said,
LOL, or we can just watch the Oscars, where the WILDLY pay-differentiated 1%-er capitalists who win Oscars for “best ACTRESS” and who own 4 mansions and fly lear jets can lecture us about global warming, sexism, elitism, the wonderful nature of (marxist) social equality and the evils of the wealth gap.
Thailover, when you called it all ‘global warming crap’, you gave your game away. If you are not denying it happens, what did you mean by that phrase?