Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Food Crises are Caused by Overpopulation

Nicolai Sennels’ latest essay concerns the looming agricultural crisis and the rise of world food prices. It was originally published at the New English Review, and is reposted here with the author’s permission.


Food Crises are Caused by Overpopulation
by Nicolai Sennels

Food crises are becoming larger and more frequent. Every time they strike, they result in deadly conflicts and famines around the Equator, and declining real wages everywhere, due to rising food prices. The main reason for the increasing number and severity of food crises is basically that we have become more people than Mother Earth can feed.

There is broad consensus among experts that overpopulation is the direct cause of poverty, hunger and thirst and conflicts for space, food and grazing areas in developing countries. There is also broad consensus that these things are catalysts for religious fanaticism and large streams of refugees moving into the West.

Today we are 6.9 billion people on earth, and we are approaching 10. We are about to empty the planet’s storage of raw materials, and in many places the areas for cultivation are getting too small and the reserves of clean water are disappearing. At the same time it is a fact, that man is the world’s biggest polluter. A decline of the earth’s population - or at least a halt in its growth - is therefore good for both climate and environment. A bad climate and environment has a negative effect on food production, because drought, floods and pollution destroys harvests and cultivation areas.

Here is my suggestion for a lasting solution: Pay poor people in the poor countries to have less children. In this way they do not have to have a lot of children in order to secure themselves when they get old - and they can afford to feed and educate the few children they have. We should support the families with full aid (e.g. 2 dollars pr. day) if they have no or one child, half aid if they have two children and no support if they have more than two children. An educated and well nourished population is the indispensable basis for functioning democracies and economies. In addition, it will stimulate the poor countries economy in a much healthier way than just sending food that is putting pressure on the prices and is just eaten up my ever more hungry mouths.

By empowering the individual by giving our aid to the third world as individual micro aid or micro pensions for having fewer children, we will thus hit several birds with one stone.

A theoretical experiment: The collected yearly aid to developing countries is 120 billion US dollars (in 2007). With this amount 164,383,561 families could have two US dollars every day for a whole year. Every family is - theoretically - consisting of two adults. If all families have no or one child, 328 million couples will thus be sharing the daily pension of two dollars, which is a significant amount of money in many of the world’s poor areas. Many families will surely have more kids, and thus receive one or no dollars a day. This means that developing aid can be shared by even more people (in smaller portions, though). This development policy will surely have an impact of the culture of having many children. It is therefore very possible, that having fewer children will become a trend (just like it has become a trend in other countries with successful birth rate control programmes) - when the trend of having many children is losing energy.

The Nobel Prize winning micro loan program has shown that small economic amounts are the solution. They have also shown that it is possible to control the distribution of small amounts of money to single persons in areas with bad economic and political infrastructure.

Take heed: Overpopulation is no less a problem than violent Islam.


Nicolai Sennels is a psychologist and the author of “Among Criminal Muslims: A Psychologist’s experiences with the Copenhagen Municipality”.

Previous posts by or about Nicolai Sennels:

2010 Jan 6 The Eternal Victim
  Feb 19 Youths, Crime, and Islam
  Apr 11 The Stigmatization Fallacy
  May 8 Islam Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
  Jul 28 Nicolai Sennels: An Open Letter to David Cameron
  Aug 5 Rape by Proxy
    10 Islam and Inbreeding
  Dec 17 The Connection Between Muslim Inbreeding and Terrorism
2011 Jan 10 The Dhimmification of the Red Cross
    12 Was Muhammad a Gelotophobe?

52 comments:

Anonymous said...

Quote: "We should support the families with full aid (e.g. 2 dollars pr. day) if they have no or one child, half aid if they have two children and no support if they have more than two children."

Better address the issue of polygamy as it provides the loophole which enables the demographic jihad in this scenario.

Richard said...

A lot of the raise in food prices is being caused by the increased cost of production. The high gas and diesel prices are making it more expensive to 1) grow the food and 2) transport the food to the wholesalers and 3) the retailers. When you add in the cost of shipping the food overseas you get even higher prices.

As far as the mineral resources we need to start mining the Moon, Mars, the asteroids and the moons of other planets.

Anonymous said...

Addressing polygamy is really great. But, even better, let's address the issue of forced child marriage. When a 6 year old girl is forced to "marry" a geriatric cousin, it's bad for the human gene pool AND starts the little girl's reproductive cycle a lot earlier than when a modern Western lady has her marriage and child at 30 years old.

But, aren't we all being a little naive here? Really, both polygamy and forced child marriage are morally, socially, and legally acceptable under the immutable precepts of Allah handed down by Mohammed and codified under Sharia Law.

Of course, the Muslim answer to overpopulation is to eliminate surplus non-human non-Muslims who are just taking up valuable Muslim real estate on Earth until the Madhi comes again. See there, problem solved - and who can say that they're "wrong" in this PC/MC world of ours?

Anne-Kit said...

I have enjoyed Nicolai Sennels’ writings here and elsewhere on the psychology of Muslims. But on the subject of overpopulation and food crises I must say I think he has ventured too far outside his area of expertise.

I disagree strongly with his thesis that overpopulation has caused food crises. On the contrary, the vast amount of documented evidence presented in the many books I have read on this and related matters resoundingly contradict Sennels’ opinion.

Sennels claims: “We are about to empty the planet’s storage of raw materials, and in many places the areas for cultivation are getting too small.”

Where is his evidence for this?

“ In 2005 twice as much grain was produced from the same acreage as in 1968. That intensification has spared land on a vast scale.
Consider this extraordinary statistic, calculated by the economist Indur Goklany. If the average yields of 1961 had still prevailed in 1998, then to feed 6 billion people would have required the ploughing of 7.9 billion acres, instead of the 3.7 billion acres actually ploughed in 1998; and extra area the size of South America minus Chile.

To put it another way today people farm just 38% of the land area of the earth, whereas with 1961 yields they would have to farm 82% today. Intensification has saved 44% of this planet for wilderness. There are now over two billion acres of ‘secondary’ tropical rainforest, regrowing after farmers left for the cities, and it is already almost as rich in biodiversity as primary forest.”

(Matt Ridley, “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves” 2010 – emphasis mine)

Anne-Kit said...

(cont'd):

More on the subject of food crises:

“Under normal conditions, output of food responds to market conditions in the same way that the output of other goods responds. As population has grown, food supplies have increased more than proportionately so that world food per capita is higher now than ever before and food prices are lower.

...] The great famines of the twentieth century were caused not by failures of supply to keep up with demand but by civil wars or appalling government policies, such as the collectivization policies carried out by Stalin in the pre-war period and China’s ‘Great Leap Forward” after World War II .

But none of the facts about the long-run decline in food prices or the way that the growth of food has consistently outstripped the growth of world population seems to make any impact on the alarmists. A recent survey of scare stories reminds us of Paul Ehrlich’s statement in the early 1970s that “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Similarly, in 1974 Ehrlich forecast a “nutritional disaster that seems likely to overtake humanity in the 1970s (or, at the latest, the 1980s) ... before 1985 mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity” (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1974).

[ ...] Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute began predicting in 1973 that population wold son outstrip food production, and he still does so every time there is a temporary increase in wheat prices. In 1994, after 21 years of being wrong, he said “After 40 years of record food production gains, output per person has reversed with unanticipated abruptness”. Two bumper harvests followed and the price of wheat fell to record lows. Yet Mr Brown’s pessimism remains as impregnable to facts as his views are popular with newspapers. [ ...]

By contrast with the continually falsified predictions of imminent worldwide food shortage the reality is that “On practically every count, humanity is now better nourished. The Green Revolution has been victorious. Production in developing countries has tripled. The calorie intake per capita has here increased by 38 percent.” (Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist, 2001). And, as Lomborg has effectively demonstrated on the basis of unimpeachable studies by the United Nations Environment Program, the oft-repeated assertion that the increase in world per capita food production during the last few decades has been obtained at the cost of massive environmental degradation, thereby storing up obstacles to future increases, is totally unfounded.


Of course there are still major pockets of hunger in some parts of the world, notably Africa. But these are far more the result of political developments [wars, tribal infighting, megalomaniac despots, Western eco-freaks opposed to GM foods, Ed.] than of any technological limitations on the potential to supply food for the inhabitants.”

(Wilfred Beckerman, “A Poverty of Reason – Sustainable Development and Economic Growth” 2003).

Anne-Kit said...

(Cont'd)

So much for the alleged problems of food production.

Now let’s tackle Sennels’ (and the ‘broad consensus’) curious insistence that the world is overpopulated and that the rate of population growth will increase and accelerate, and that therefore government interference with human reproduction is somehow necessary and even desirable:

“It is hard now to recall just how coercive were the population policies urged by experts in the mid-twentieth century. When President Lyndon Johnson’s adviser suggested that an increase in famine relief should be announced before a visit by Indira Ghandi to the US, Johnson supposedly replied that he was not going to ‘piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems.’

Garrett Hardin, in his famous essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” (remembered these days as being about collective action, but actually a long argument for coerced population control), found ‘freedom to breed intolerable’, coercion ‘a necessity’ and that ‘the only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon.’

Hardin’s view was nearly universal. [...] All right-thinking people agreed, as they so often do, that top-down government action was needed: People must be ordered or at least bribed to accept sterilisation and punished for refusing it. [...]

Yet the tragedy is that this [kind of] top-down coercion was not only counter-productive; it was unnecessary. Birth rates were already falling rapidly in the 1970s all across the continent of Asia quite voluntarily. They fell just as far and just as fast without coercion. They continue to fall today.

As soon as it felt prosperity from trade, Asia experienced precisely the same transition to lower birth rates that Europe had experienced before. [...] In 1955 Bangladesh had a birth rate of 6.8 children per woman. Today, fifty years later, that ratio has more than halved, to about 2.7 children per woman. On current trends Bangladesh’s population will soon cease growing altogether. India: from 5.9 to 2.6 children per woman. Pakistan has halved its birth rate in the last 20 years to 3.2 children per woman. Between them these three account for about a quarter of the world’s population. [ ...]

Anne-Kit said...

(Cont'd) - last instalment!

"Throughout the world, birth rates are falling. There is no country in the world that has a higher birth rate than it had in 1960, and in the less developed world as a whole the birth rate has approximately halved. [ ...]

Do these statistics surprise you? Everybody knows the population of the world is growing. But remarkably few people seem to know that the rate of increase in world population has been falling since the early 1960s and that the raw number of new people added each year has been falling since the late 1980s. [ ...]

Now that even the United Nations’ best estimate is that world population will probably start falling once it peaks at 9.2 billion in 2075, there is every prospect of feeding the world forever. “

(Matt Ridley, “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves” 2010)

Ridley goes on to explain how this trend is connected to falling child mortality, increased wealth, education, emancipation of women, among other things.

Space prevents me from elaborating more but I strongly recommend reading “The Rational Optimist”, “A Poverty of Reason” and the writings of Indur Goklany and Paul Driessen for a fuller picture.

What poor nations need – notably in Sub Saharan Africa, which is lagging the furthest behind the rest of the world, is more economic freedom, property rights properly supported by enforcible legislation, and consequently a democratic political system free of dictators and corrupt government officials and public servants.

What they definitely DON'T need is more government interference, including but not limited to bribes to have fewer children!

Richard said...

Anne-Kit I will agree with what you are saying for the long term costs, but as a Cost Accountant it is the raising fuel costs that are driving the raise in food costs.

Zenster said...

Anne-Kit: (Per Matt Ridley)“The great famines of the twentieth century were caused not by failures of supply to keep up with demand but by civil wars or appalling government policies, such as the collectivization policies carried out by Stalin in the pre-war period and China’s ‘Great Leap Forward” after World War II ."

Outstanding rebuttal, Anne-Kit! You are correct in noting that Sennels is outside his area of expertise.

Moreover, the real issue will not be about food but WATER.

My Title

Water Poverty stands a much greater chance of igniting major world conflicts and has nearly done so already in the case of India and Pakistan's dispute over dams being constructed in Kashmir.

In an editorial, the Urdu-language newspaper Roznama Khabrain accused India of using water as a weapon, proclaiming: "In order to establish its hegemony over the region [of South Asia], India is even using water as a weapon."(48) Sheikh Rasheed Ahmad, a senior Pakistani politician and former Minister of Railways, has warned that Pakistan and India may go to war on the issue of water…

The warning of nuclear war between the two neighbors has been reiterated by multiple sources, including veteran Pakistani editor Majeed Nizami.(52) Even former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, a center-right politician who was responsible for conducting the 1998 nuclear tests, warned in May 2009 that "the issues of water and Kashmir must be resolved as early as possible so that the clouds of war between Pakistan and India can be eliminated forever.
[emphasis added]

This tinderbox is nothing when compared to the MME (Muslim Middle East). Water poverty is extreme plus Muslim technological incompetence and rejection of modernization are seeing what little resources there are being inexcusably wasted.

Given how orthodox Islamic groups like al Qaeda view proserity as bad for jihad, expectations that solutions for water poverty will be given any priority may well be unfounded. Quite the opposite may pertain.

As an example, the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region is the world's fastest growing importer of wheat. Iran recently eclipsed Japan at the largest wheat importing nation.

To irrigate the amount of wheat impoted by the MENA region would require the annual flow of THE RIVER NILE.

Buying wheat is merely a way of importing water.

The world's largest exporters of wheat are largely mismanaging their own water supplies as it is. Furthermore these countries, the USA, Canada and Australia, are all targets for Islamic terrorism and hatred.

Should just these three nations decide to embargo all wheat exports to the MME, the onset of mass starvation would begin in about THREE WEEKS.

In its typical insanity, Islam continues to stab at its largest food suppliers and doing this knowingly even as some Arab countries are beginning to recognize their dependency upon food imports as a threat to national security.

Zenster said...

Link to Water Poverty information.

Richard said...

Anne-Kit I would have put this on the earlier post but my headache made me forget. The massive fires in Russia this summer destroyed most of their wheat crop, that means they are buying more then normal and that along with the price of fuel is driving up the food costs. Granted the lack of freedom and education is hurting the Third World and causes them to buy more food rather then purchasing it. The reason so many nations pay people not to plant is to keep the price of the food so the farmers can earn more money. If the US put all of our farm land in production most farmers would go bankrupt because of the drop in selling price.

Anne-Kit said...

Zenster, I agree with you that the real remaining challenge is water.

However, the issue here is not the QUANTITY of water available (there is more than enough!) but of (MIS)MANAGEMENT of water as a resource. The example you mention of India using water as a weapon underpins the argument that poverty and starvaton (including water starvation) is an issue of politics, power and management, not of scarcity.

Fully 70% of the world's water usage is for crop irrigation. The loss to evaporation of spray irrigation is huge but other forms of irrigation like drip irrigation, already used extensively by Israel, Jordan and Cyprus, are fast catching on.

The wastefulness of water is a product of its low price. Once it is properly priced by the markets, water will not only be used more frugally, but its very abundance increases through incentives to capture and store it.

Human ingenuity is almost boundless: We were endowed by our Creator with amazing imagination and (a pale reflection of His) enormous creativity.

We truly are, to use a phrase famously coined by the late, great economist Julian Simon, "the ultimate resource".

Already people are envisaging farming as a multi-storey enterprise, with hydroponic drip irrigation and artificial lighting producing food 24/7, 365 days a year on derelict urban sites.

The future is bright and full of possibility, but then I've always been a "glass half full" kinda person!

If we have to worry, let's focus our efforts on the REAL threats to humanity: Creeping Islamization and the suicide of Western civilization, aided and abetted by the deliberate dumbing-down of education, moral and cultural relativism, the hegemony of minority "rights", feminism on steroids and the resulting emasculation of entire generations of men.

Have I left anything out? :-)

Professor L said...

If I can just add in a little extra note - we also have the options of biofuel, which uses otherwise fine food crops to develop a less CO2 polluting version of car fuel (personally, I reckon Hydrogen is better. Just catch the bloody rain!). That saw a spike in the food prices about 2008, so there is some added demand coming through, just not from feeding hungry mouths.

Also, for those still uncertain, these three videos are for you.

Freyja's cats said...

Friends,

WE NEED TO DIRECT OUR WEALTH TOWARDS HELPING OUR OWN EUROPID WOMEN HAVE BABIES.

Our Western "wealth" is, to a great extent, accounting poofery and bookkeeping slight-of-hand.

Our national debts are through the roof. We have no actual real wealth that we can afford to give away to Other Peoples as bribes and largess.

Euros, pounds, dollars, etc., are mostly paper and electrons. They do not represent gold and silver and precious metals and actual goods and materials that can be used by our men and women to produce more life.

Forget about the neo-liberal penchant shoveling out money to NGO's to shower it down upon the Third World.

Stuff the imperialist and colonialist impulse to "keep the masses down" by distributing largess and bribes.

Let the Saudis and the other oil-rich Muslims feed their own people -- instead of funding mosque complexes in the WEst.

We need to direct our resources to our own core populations.

We, the descendants of the indigenous nations of Europe must use our wealth to reverse our falling birthrates, so that we can grow our population sufficiently to apply outward pressure on the populations that are pressing down on us.

WE NEED TO DIRECT OUR WEALTH TOWARD OUR OWN WOMEN so that our own women can be relieved of outside-the-home employment and have Europoid babies.

HAVE BABIES, WHITE WOMAN!

That's what needs to be done!

Women: Get your priorities straight.

It is more important that you European women have babies, and help your fellow European women have babies, than for you to "break glass ceilings" or have lots of shiny baubles and the latest gadgets.

Stop listening to liberals and leftists infected with the Marxist-Leninist Maoist Third Worldist ideological disease spouted by commie Third Worldist "feminists" like this suicidal leftist robot.

Stop falling for the suicidal propaganda of these 1960's commie operatives.

Hop into bed, and make babies. Enjoy yourself, while you're at it. Award yourself a Doctorate of Motherhood for each beautiful European baby you bear and raise. Motherhood is the most precious and noble occupation of all!

Men: Treat your woman like the beautiful, fecund queen she is. Hop in the sack. Enjoy yourself immensely. Make sure that she enjoys every minute of it, too. Take excellent care of all of them.

Be proud to be a European dad, of a beautiful, strong and courageous tribe of your own.

HAVE BABIES, PEOPLES OF INDIGENOUS EUROPE!

Anonymous said...

Anne-Kit, regardless of whether you're right about the details, can you also supply the reason why the first world net exporters of food should support the others? They don't like us and tend to immigrate and cause problems.

You're probably right that technology can support lots more people. But you haven't said what's in it for us.

As for water being priced too low, that's your opinion. I pay $15 per month for water in Northern California, an area with a lot of water. Should I volunteer to pay more so I'll be forced to use it more efficiently? Sure, I could skip baths and save gray water for my plants, but why? So I can have even more noisy African neighbors?

That's the part fans of statistics always leave out. Quality of life for the people who actually have to live with the results.

Zenster said...

Anne-Kit: The wastefulness of water is a product of its low price.

Absolutely. Water pricing should be tripled to factories that use "once through" systems instead of recycling loops.

Once it is properly priced by the markets, water will not only be used more frugally, but its very abundance increases through incentives to capture and store it.

Ain't Capitalism the schiz?

I'd start with water trading for its weight in oil.

Wheat? That would be 11,000 gallons (26 barrels @ $90 per bbl. = $2,340) of oil per ton of wheat ($345.39), thankyouverymuch.

LET THEM DRINK OIL AND EAT SAND.

Anne-Kit said...

Latte Island, I responded above to a specific post with a specific message. It did not deal with "who supports whom and why".

Yes, technology can and will support more people but my response also deals with the prediction that population growth is slowing - did you read it all?

You may well be paying too much for your water in California, given that California has one of the most deluded governments of all the US States. It is likely to have more to do with "green" subsidies and "sustainability measures" and thus artificially inflated prices, than reflecting the real market value, if it's true you have more than enough of it. I.e. government intervention, not the real price signal set by the market.

Your view point is too narrow in this context. I'm talking about world trends above.

Sennels' post did not touch on the issues of immigration and culture. Nor did my response.

Anonymous said...

Anne-Kit, then we differ in our approach to reading and commenting. I always feel free to comment on what interests me. I don't feel I have to restrict myself to exactly what the previous commenter intended.

I asked you a larger question about values. For instance, if the article had been on the general subject of bombs, and one commenter seemed to know a lot about bombs, but not be concerned about the consequences of allowing anyone to have bombs, I might ask them about their values with respect to bombs.

I'm very used to these discussions, where anecdotal evidence is dismissed, because it's too folksy or "narrow." I think you are gaslighting me. There is nothing wrong with my asking you why it's okay with you to just let it all happen, third world people are having fewer children of their own free will, nothing to see here. This is exactly the type of response one would get from a U.N. bureaucrat with an agenda.

The problem with leaving everything to the market is that leftists use the market to advance their agenda of feeding more and more people to import to the first world, in order to destroy it. Capitalism and technology aren't neutral forces at all, in our world. Even if your comment was not related to that, would you be willing to think about it now and offer an opinion here?

You don't have to, of course. But I find it odd that you would object to my asking.

Findalis said...

Here is an easier and cheaper solution:

How about we in the West refuse to send free food. Force the governments to feed their starving people. Force the governments to provide clean water, food and medicine. Why should I or any person in the West pay for the people of Africa? They are not our responsibility.

Anonymous said...

People who blame modern problems on "feminism" make me aggravated - especially when you stop to think that modern feminism is what enables women to determine the course of their own lives and vote about both their politicians - and who and when to marry and bear children. Given FREE CHOICE, girls want to grow into educated and experienced women BEFORE having families with an unrelated age-appropriate mate and producing a reasonable number of BOTH girl and boy babies.

One can only hope that Islam would experience "feminism on steroids" in order to completely ELIMINATE the following female problems:

1) girlhood clitorectomies
2) forced child marriages
3) forced participation in polygamy
4) forced temporary marriages
5) forced cousin marriages
6) honor beatings and killings
7) inability to prosecute girl and boy child molestation and rape
8) forced veiling of girls and women
9) inability to pursue education, 10) inability to pursue legitimate paid employment
11) inability to leave the house without a male escort
12) inability to drive
13) inability to vote
14) inability to choose family planning instead of unlimited births
15) inability to divorce abusive mates
16) inability to receive child custody in divorce cases
17) inability to save girl children sacrificed to make room for boy children, etc.

Indeed, the PRIMARY effect of radical forced birth control policies like those of China is that GIRL babies are murdered (or at best cruelly abandoned) in favor of BOY babies - creating a highly unnatural imbalance in the ratio of boys to girls - and eventually men to women.

In the case of China, Hillary Clinton was dead wrong. It does NOT take a village to raise a child. Rather, it takes a village to coerce a woman to kill her GIRL child as a baby.

In Islamic countries, extreme (self-inflicted) poverty also has the PRIMARY effect to discriminate horribly against girl babies who are either aborted or allowed to grow into little girls who are physically and financially exploited as forced child prostitutes in Allah-Mohammed-Sharia Law sanctioned temporary marriages arranged by devout imams between rich and poor Muslim men trading the rape of little girls for money.

A large dose of modern feminism would only increase the standard of living for all of the exploited and abused girls and women in the world. Countries without modern feminism treat their women terribly.

Anonymous said...

Malthus is back again. He will return over and over.

Anne-Kit said...

Nice rant, Egghead! You misunderstand what I refer to by "feminism on steroids".

I am certainly not against the emancipation of women, equal rights, equal pay etc. I am a woman; how could I be? And as far as the atrocities you list, of course we must fight to stop that.

No, in my opinion we have taken feminism too far IN THE WEST. Honestly, we no longer need affirmative action to get "more women into management positions" - we are quite capable of competing on our own terms, thank you very much! Men are disadvantaged in a multitude of spheres - not least the Family Courts, and boys and men are left unsure of their identities and roles in society. What do women really want? The feminist 'narrative' says one thing but ordinary women's actions often say the opposite.

Feminist political correctness
paints men to be either incompetent fools or drooling rapists, and "wimmin" can do no wrong, according to prominent feminists like Germaine Greer et al.

THAT'S "feminism on steroids"!

But that's really a subject for discussion on other blogs - and I've run out of time ...

Sagunto said...

I agree that Sennels should stick to his field of expertise and keep writing insightful articles about the (male) Muslim psyche.

It is bad enough that even in some of those articles his "solutions" belie his progressivist mentality, but in the above piece he really shows a leftist penchant for international social engineering. This is but a boring echo of old school Club of Rome propaganda.

Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.

Zenster said...

Findalis: How about we in the West refuse to send free food. Force the governments to feed their starving people. Force the governments to provide clean water, food and medicine. Why should I or any person in the West pay for the people of Africa?

Permit me to suggest a superb article by expert Kenyan economist, James Shikwati:

"For God's Sake, Please Stop the Aid!".

Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

Freyja's cats said...

In my comment, I put "feminism" in quotes because the "feminist" in this video is not really a "feminist" in the sense that a lot of people think that word "feminism" means.

The woman in that video is not espousing the "emancipation" or the "liberation" of European women.

She is espousing the "emancipation" and "liberation" of the planet from the "oppressive White race."

That woman is an anti-Germanic Maoist Third Worldist Marxist-Leninist operative.

She, and other Maoist Third Worldist Marxist-Leninist operatives like her, are working for the destruction of Germanic women (and men).

Unless, of course, you view "death" as "emancipation" and "liberation from "life."

There is nothing "emancipating" or "liberating" about being manipulated to forgo child bearing so as to increase the "White World's" GDP and force the Euro-descended woman to become an unfecund minority in her own homeland, with the goal of eventually snuffing her kind out altogether.

The goal is to destroy European and Western families, as a way to conquer Europe and the other countries of the West.

Gloria Steinem was no friend of women, as much as she went around touting "women's liberation from patriarchal oppression." Steinem was (and is) a secular Jewish Maoist Marxist-Leninist communist, just like Fred Klonsky, Bob Avakian and Weather Underground Organization terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Steinem's goal wasn't to help women. Her goal was a totalitarian communist world where she and her fellow Jewish communists would be able to enslave and ultimately destroy the oppressive White race -- especially the Germanic peoples that that generation of "Red diaper babies" hated so much because of Nazis and other "anti-Semitic" peoples of Europe.

The real purpose of this "feminist revolution" was to fool Western women into demanding the very tools and "rights" via which to commit societal suicide. It is a "silent genocide" that is self-inflicted by whites, so that the Marxist-Leninist "feminist" operatives could walk away from the battlefield without the blood of a "counter-holocaust" on their hands.

Watch this video, which gives the testimony of a witness to a communist meeting where such tactics were discussed.

As Mao Tse-Tung said,

“Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.”

A suggestion that the West bribe Third World women not to have children, is a punishment against Western women, who would have to work extra hours to pay the taxes that the government would have to raise in order to fund this Third-World tinkering. The result would be a further reduction of a Western woman's fertility.

Sagunto said...

On a further note, about Sennels' demented Club of Rome reasoning, it seems he really must think we still live in the seventies or something. Proposing ridiculous plans about "paying" others not to breed, as if the dollar isn't on the brink of total collapse (thanks to the FED-cats) and the euro following the trail of the dodo. That is apart from the fact that if there were a problem with overpopulation, the only way to reduce numbers is make people wealthy. How can "we" do that? We can't, but free markets can. Problem is, Sennels doesn't understand free market economy, because, as a progressivist, he is bound to the dogmas of expert interventionism.

As a sidenote, I think he'd better worry about declining native populations in the West, but I reckon that problem is unlikely to appear on his PC MC radar.

What I also find more than a little disturbing is the way Sennels talks about a "broad consensus" that overpopulation is a catalyst for "religious fanaticism".

Ever since Al Gore launched his "consensus" ploy, I'm a bit suspicious whenever I stumble upon it.
And what about the "religious fanaticism"? Sennels probably wasn't thinking about Catholic nuns working zealously for their fellow human beings in Africa when he wrote those words, was he? So when he's actually referring to Islam, why not say so openly? Why hide it under the PC MC misnomer "religious fanaticism"?

Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.

Anonymous said...

Sagunto, it remains to be seen if free markets can make Africans wealthy. Just because capitalism works for some people in the west, it doesn't mean it will work for people with an average IQ 30 point lower. Africa may well need to be either managed by smart people from another culture, or ignored and left to starve, without rescue from the west.

As for those Catholic nuns working for their fellow human beings...yes, the Church has done so much for Africa. Preaching against condoms, enabling the spread of AIDS and out of control population growth, some of which ends up in the west.

It's not just the Catholic nuns, it's everyone. Every religion on the planet is in Africa, doing things for their fellow human beings and exporting the results to the west. Even the agnostics are in on it.

I don't care if Sennels isn't an expert in this field, or if he's a leftist or what. He's right. So if we can't pay people not to have children, then let's stop paying them to have children, as we do now. That's what all food and medical aid is.

The government of Singapore pays losers to not have children, and it pays smart, productive people to have more children. Social engineering, eugenics, or whatever anyone wants to call it, it works.

Sagunto said...

Hi latté island,

Of course as a progressivist you believe in eugenics through state interventionism and of course you engage in thuggish propaganda against the Church, that's just part of the package.
With childlike simplicity, you frame the issue of African prosperity in the predictable "either-or" scheme. Africans are either "rescued" by the West ("managed" in your words), or they are ignored and left to starve. You seem to miss the point that free market economy is about freedom first and foremost. Freedom from state interventionism, from central banking, from artificial setting of interest rates, from FED induced monetary inflation, from governments that through taxes are fully engaged in the looting business.
We had some degree of free markets once, we don't have that any more. Whatever system has been in place throughout the West for say, the past century (and there are many different roads to serfdom), it certainly hasn't been based on free market civilization.

You make one valuable point though, which is about not intervening with food and medical aid. And all other types of interventions that are part and parcel of the foreign aid industry's arsenal, I might add. Foreign aid programs don't work for basically the same reasons domestic programs, i.e. govt. interventions don't work.

Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.

In Hoc Signo Vinces† said...

In hoc signo vinces


"I’m thinking of the immigration cap, which is still a source of concern for companies and institutions, like universities, that need to bring international talent into the UK.

Sir Richard Lambert final major speech as CBI Director-General.

Conservative free market thinking is based on the free movement of peoples across international borders, he is actually saying there can be no free market without mass "laissez-faire" immigration this was the motivator for the "laissez-faire" mass immigration of the Thatcher epoch - the Waziristan waiter paradox of laissez-faire free market conservative thinking which is now being revisited on the UK and the indigenous workforce by the present Conservative Government.

Anonymous said...

Sagunto, that's not fair to accuse me of thuggish propaganda against the church. I was careful to include everyone, because that's the truth. And the Catholic Church in particular has a lot to answer for, because of its anti-birth control and anti-condom policy, which it now is partly easing up on. Too little too late.

I'm not an economist, but I can't help but notice that capitalism and progressivism have been strange bedfellows lately. If something can be done more cheaply somewhere else, that's where the jobs go. Never mind that American taxpayers, workers and consumers have helped build the companies that screw us over. And foreign aid is part of the package, because it's enabled the development of our foreign competition.

I'm fairly detached from most ideologies, I just want to see things change for the better. And if you or any religious person was offended by my point about the church, I apologize, because I didn't intend to use offensive language against any religion, but OTOH, all organised religions have made their own foreign policy, and it has ruined my own community, and I'm not going to keep quiet about it, just because some of my friends and allies here are believers.

We are never going to see completely free markets, ever. It's always going to be corrupted by special interests. That's why I'm a pragmatist and I like quick fixes that will help in the short run, rather than insist on pure capitalism, which we will never have.

I won't take a position on which system is best, because I have no idea. But to dismiss the article, and hold out for only free market solutions, isn't flexible enough. Anything that will keep some peasants out of my country is something I'm willing to consider.

Van Grungy said...

I love gatesofvienna. Always lots to learn.

But this piece is utter crap.

There is a reason I go to wattsupwiththat.com for news about climate and other science. It's well covered there.

Btw. "Climate reparations" IS global Jizya.

Stick to fighting the jihad, this tripe needs to get the heave ho.

gsw said...

The problem was first highlighted by Thomas Malthus, a British economist in 1798.
Malthus said that human population grows at an exponential rate,whereas food supplies, at best, only increase at an arithmetic rate.

ZPE/declining population is opposed by:
a) those peddling religion (popes, imams, shamans etc) the more they suffer the more they can be made to grovel and submit. Fear is also power.
b) politicians who have based their governmental systems on pyramid schemes that would collapse without an increasing base. (Someone should inform them that an ignorant, starved and jobless base causes its own problems!)

Please note: The population of this planet has trebled in my lifetime.

Baron Bodissey said...

Van Grungy --

Please don't refer to Dr. Sennels' piece as "crap". That is a rude, unkind, and uninformative form of criticism.

If you don't have anything to add to Anne-Kit's thorough (and civil) debunking of the piece, then you may refrain from commenting rather than insult the author.

As it happens, I don't agree with the basic premise of Dr. Sennels' argument, either. But he is young, and still just getting his sea legs in the English-speaking blog world, and I like to try to help him out. When he ventures outside his field of expertise, he will soon enough discover his mistakes -- the distributed intelligence of our readers will see to that.

In the meantime, if you please, criticize his work on the merits (or lack thereof), whilst remaining civil to the author.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of water? Anyone familiar with the "Great Lakes water theft"? If true it is very frightening.

Van Grungy said...

Please excuse me if I bring the common man's lexicon to the table.

..But I stand by my assessment
Someone had to say it.

It's not personal.. Just honest

Baron Bodissey said...

Van Grungy --

Unfortunately, what you said was not an assessment. It was an insult. It's a sign of how degraded our common discourse has become that people think calling something "crap" is an assessment.

An assessment would read something like this:

"I completely disagree with Dr. Sennels. His conclusions are totally in error, and here's why..."

Following which you might have advanced factual reasons for your disagreement, or referred to Anne-Kit's ample evidence.

Instead, what you said added nothing whatsoever to the discussion, except to reduce it to the level of invective. You neither provided additional facts, nor advanced any arguments based on facts. You did not even state your own opinion -- you merely characterized Dr. Sennels' piece using an offensive word.

If he is wrong, he deserves to be refuted, not insulted.

Freyja's cats said...

Baron,

It's a sign of how degraded our common discourse has become that people think calling something "crap" is an assessment.

Sorry...but I had to chuckle a little bit when I read this.

O, do I long for those halcyon days when the degradation of our common discourse was symbolized by the use of words denoting certain bodily functions.

These days, when a person draws a satirical political cartoon of Mohammed, flaming and deadly protests break out worldwide; death threats are made and carried out; targets of threats must secure 24-hour security and build "panic rooms" in their homes; and, axe-wielding Soldiers of Allah hack their way into cartoonists' homes, in order to behead the infidel enemies of Allah.

O, for those halcyon days!

bewick said...

No no no. Another administrative hotchpotch. The QUICKEST and most natural way to adjust population (will still take 20+ years) is to stop ALL food aid - except during disasters - and allow the Rule of Nature to rule as it has for billions of years.
Inhumane? Yes. Sensible. Totally.
Religion has no place when hunger takes over. Allah will be cursed as people die. Sad? yes. Sensible? yes. Inhumane? Yes but when needs must.
At least the Chinese are trying to address the problem harsh as it may be.

Profitsbeard said...

In essence: no aid to any Muslim country.

Since they mean us no good, they deserve from us no food. (Et al.)

Zenster said...

Sagunto: … Sennels doesn't understand free market economy, because, as a progressivist, he is bound to the dogmas of expert interventionism.

An unfortunate but solid assessment, I fear. Much as Sennels is able to navigate the twists and turns of contorted Muslim psychology, evidently, he does it from a Socialist pilot's seat.

Indeed, where is all of this baksheesh supposed to come from?

latté island: Africa may well need to be either managed by smart people from another culture, or ignored and left to starve, without rescue from the west.

This, curiously enough, has led to calls that Africa should be “re-colonized” in order to halt the general mayhem that is fobbed off as civilization on the rest of our world.

After all, we are talking about a continent where officials still must beg the natives not to remove railroad spikes and joining plates (to make spear points and implements), as it allows the tracks to separate and causes derailments.

In a separate comment I will delineate my own rather gloomy assessment of Africa and outline one of the only programs I foresee as being of any use.

latté island: … I can't help but notice that capitalism and progressivism have been strange bedfellows lately. If something can be done more cheaply somewhere else, that's where the jobs go.

Please don’t conflate the current crop of oligarchic elitists with Capitalists. Utilizing the antithesis of a free market, like China, in order to bolster one’s personal wealth or corporate stock value, has nothing to do with Capitalism and everything to do with GREED.

Real Capitalism isn’t about “cheap”. It’s about quality products, honest competition, creation of wealth and a relative degree of transparency. Nothing of the sort applies to this modern batch of disloyal transnational corporate thieves.

gsw: The problem was first highlighted by Thomas Malthus, a British economist in 1798. Malthus said that human population grows at an exponential rate, whereas food supplies, at best, only increase at an arithmetic rate.

Thank you for putting Malthus in perspective. The uproar his work, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), caused when first published overshadowed the acclaim it received from fellow economists of his time.

ZPE/declining population is opposed by:
a) those peddling religion (popes, imams, shamans etc) the more they suffer the more they can be made to grovel and submit. Fear is also power.
b) politicians who have based their governmental systems on pyramid schemes that would collapse without an increasing base.


This is a cynical but largely true assessment regarding much of the power based politico-religious structures of today. Islam and, sadly, Catholicism too, have much to answer for in this department. The ongoing administrative level Ponzi schemes are simply criminal enterprises masquerading as government and they should be prosecuted as such.

Freyja's cats: Oh, for those halcyon days!

It appears as though you are confusing the late period when those who promoted civil discourse tolerated occasionally less articulate interjections as opposed to these modern and Politically Correct times where, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, people mince their words rather finely because it makes them so much easier to eat afterwards.

A while back, people may have endured infrequent invective but it was never accepted as the final word in polite conversation. Satire, criticism, farce and spoofs were all accepted means of demonstrating contempt for opposing viewpoints but not abuse.

There is a world of difference between the ancient and respectable use of body part-related metaphors that gave legs to one’s meaning and the guttural modern tendency to analogize concepts with body functions.

Van Grungy said...

ok...

"Take heed: Overpopulation is no less a problem than violent Islam. "

Really? I can't call this as I see it? Comon..

Even you must have read this, without ANY supporting evidence, and realized that this statement has no clean end to pick it up with...

I'll be back later to drain the pool and clean it Carl Spackler style..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PmMFaVzbzc
====

Van Grungy said...

Here's a rebuttal in video form..

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/food-theres-lots-it
Since overpopulation isn't the cause of hunger, "fixing" overpopulation won't fix these problems. In fact, the obsession with overpopulation often leads to precious aid money being spent on population control rather than real aid. "Family planning" programs miss the real point, especially in places like Africa--which is that the people need legitimate, concrete aid.

====

With the access to information comes a responsibility..

Baron, you have a blog of record.. I would think you would take this responsibility seriously and refrain from posting articles that veer off into the throughly charted reality that many people have woken up to.. It's called alarmism.. while you have a legitimate blog about the threat of islam, this sort of non-researched off topic report doesn't add real knowledge about the real problems we have in this world, such as islam..
I don't think there is anything wrong with summing up this piece as I did originally with that one word..
I think it's a bit sad that you have posted this just because of a certain track record.. It's like you gave Nicolai Sennels a pass just because of previous work..
or, maybe you posted this to give Nicolai an education...

Jeeze.. even the 'pay to not procreate' idea smacks of a suggestion to just give Jizya willingly in the hopes that 'overpopulators' (muslims) will stop being muslim..

It's just so much awful in such few words, it's overwhelming how much has to be said to crush this piece...

I'm sorry to see you have decided to post disinformation just because you personally like the author..

Personally I think you took personal offense to my one word description of your post of your buddy's disinformation...

That's why you rebuked me so..

Baron Bodissey said...

Van Grungy --

Personally I think you took personal offense to my one word description of your post of your buddy's disinformation...

Not at all. I took offense for precisely the reason I stated. You violated rule #1, as posted at the top of the comment window.

Your comment was gratuitously insulting, and contained no information or argument whatsoever. Just an insult.

If you are unable distinguish the difference between saying "I think you are totally mistaken" and "That's crap", then I am afraid I cannot help you.

What was accomplished by your message? Were you be likely to have changed anyone's mind with it? Did you impart new knowledge? Add to the the larger picture?

If it accomplished none of the above, then why bother saying something offensive?

I grant that you may have felt better for having said it, but that's hardly an adequate justification in my book.

If I were inclined to take offense simply because of your disagreement, I would also have objected to what Anne-Kit said. But I don't; in fact, I agree with her.

I helped Dr. Sennels out because he's young and new at this game. He asked me to post this for him, and I did. I knew that our commenters would drop in and fill in the background for him. That's they way things should work in an online discussion.

The author needs to learn from the give-and-take of a blog comment thread. I hope he's been following along.

Professor L said...

People do seem to enjoy a good rag on tha Catholic Church, so I shall go to its defence once again (I might as well rename my blog the Catholic Defence Paper).

The Catholic Church states that abstinence is the best way of preventing the spread of AIDS. Not only is it 100% effective at preventing transmission (unlike condoms, which can break, thus leaving them around 85% effectiveness), it is also considered the most holy way of doing so.

The Pope's recent remarks on the use of condoms was not a case of "It's OK", but rather, he stated that it was a better option than unprotected sex in the prevention of transmission, a first step, the final goal of which is abstinence.

Islam, with no such centralised authority and the institutionalisation of polygamy, has no such proscriptions. Muslims are called to have sex as much for pleasure as procreation (maybe even more so). In the Catholic Church, intercourse is a holy act, and if done solely for pleasure, is defiled.

I resent any comparison of the two, as both an honest man and a Catholic. I understand widespread misconceptions, but I remember my sex ed pretty damn well, and encouraging people to take a risk even with condoms is stupid and irresponsible, and leads only to more troubles when the eventual stuff-up occurs (something that is naturally impossible with a concept so simple as abstinence).

Van Grungy said...

hmm.. well then..

"Ain't Capitalism the schiz?" - Zenster

I guess you have double standards.

Don't complain about getting stung if you decide to poke a hornet's nest..

Nice avoid on my point about responsibility.. I don't think it's responsible of you to be posting what you know to be untruths without a disclaimer of some sort..

I hope you can admit you erred on your part as well..

At least I'm not disingenuous

Baron Bodissey said...

Van --

I didn't find Zenster's comment insulting. Maybe I missed the point.

I don't think it's responsible of you to be posting what you know to be untruths without a disclaimer of some sort.

What specific "untruths"?

I saw opinions -- some of which I disagreed with -- and policy prescriptions, which I found wrong-headed, impractical, and potentially harmful. But I saw nothing that was specifically contrafactual.

Did I miss something? If I did, please point it out, and I will retract, and issue a disclaimer.

Zenster said...

Van Grungy: I guess you have double standards.

Which you are curiously unable to elucidate. Much in the same way you continue to comment in this thread without much in the way of substantiation.

Please feel free to name just ONE other socio-economic system that works better than honest free-market Capitalism. I'm confident that more people than just myself await your answer to this very simple question.

PS: If the Baron's admonitions do not make any sense to you, then feel free not to reply at all.

Sagunto said...

As it may be that the author is following along, I wish to say that I'm always pleased to read his insightful articles about the brittle egos of Muslims living among us. I was delighted to recently find out that one of these articles had been translated into Dutch, as part of a bundle about Islam ("kritische essays over een politieke religie").

However.. in the light of the above acticle, I'd like to complement my critique with a few short cuts, in the form of reading tips, towards a better understanding of true free market philosophy versus progressivism/socialism.

One good book to start with, when pressed for time (as we all are), would be:
"Economics in one Lesson", by Henry Hazlitt.
A very entertaining read that will give you a good first grasp of the ideas of Frédéric Bastiat and those of the Austrian School of Economics (about the only ones to predict the housing bubble and the current economic meltdown), like Ludwig von Mises.

When you got the taste for more, get hold of a work by the latter, Ludwig von Mises. I'd prefer his seminal work, first published in 1922, called "Socialism".

For some useful antidote to his outdated Club of Rome views on population growth and the global food supply, I'd like to point the author to a work of his fellow compatriate, Björn Lomborg, called "The Skeptical Environmentalist".
I especially recommend reading CH.5 on Food and Hunger, starting with "Malthus and Everlasting Hunger". A telling quote with some bearings on the above discussion:
"Malthus' theory is so simple and attractive that many reputable scientists have fallen for it. But the evidence does not seem to support the theory. The population rarely grows exponentially [..] likewise, the quantity of food seldom grows linearly. [..] Basically, we now have more food per person than we used to, even though the population has doubled since 1961."

Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.

Van Grungy said...

"Ain't Capitalism the schiz?" - Zenster

Just pointing out to Baron that you get to use 'crap', but I don't..

I agree with you, I wasn't speaking to you.. Just pointing out Baron's hypocrisy..
=======

"I saw opinions -- some of which I disagreed with -- and policy prescriptions, which I found wrong-headed, impractical, and potentially harmful. But I saw nothing that was specifically contrafactual."

Oh no, nothing specific, just the whole thing that you presented as fact...

"Nicolai Sennels’ latest essay concerns the looming agricultural crisis and the rise of world food prices."

I see no warning that Gates of Vienna does not endorse this piece or mention that commenters are invited to correct Sennels obviously ignorant assertions..
======


Look, if you don't like to be criticized, I understand.. But when you post 'crap' be prepared to be called on it...


Is this now the 'Gates of Vienna' blog where wrong-headed, impractical, and potentially harmful articles are now posted on occasion, just to get a rise out of commenters?

You can run your blog any way you like.. Obviously your ego is so large that when you are wrong and someone points it out you become understandably defensive..

I guess you don't understand the difference between calling something crap and actually posting crap...

You insult your readers by posting tangential deliberate provocations

If you don't like to be called on it, don't post it...

=========

Sagunto said...

As another important sidenote to the author, I'd like to point to some real-life and disastrous effects of progressivist policies and the danger of acting on non-problems. Because some problems with the food supply really are man made, in contrast with the progressivist scheme of "man made" global warming.

And I quote Lord Monckton, in an open letter to Australia's PM, Kevin Rudd:

"Millions are already dying of starvation in the world’s poorest nations because world food prices have doubled in two years" [..]
"That abrupt, vicious doubling was caused by a sharp drop in world food production, caused in turn by suddenly taking millions of acres of land out of growing food for people who need it, so as to grow biofuels for clunkers that don’t. The scientifically-illiterate, economically-innumerate policies that you advocate – however fashionable you may conceive them to be – are killing people by the million."


See the vicious cycle? Progressivist interventionism, based on fraudulent "consensus science" (note the oxymoron here), creating problems that in turn are being analysed by means of ill conceived and outdated theories, turned into yet more progressivist policy recommendations (in this case, bureaucratic attempts at manipulating population growth).

Obviously well intended, no doubt, the road to hell (and serfdom) is paved with "good intentions".

Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.

Anne-Kit said...

Sagunto, you and I think alike on may issues - including "climate change". Allow me to point you to one of the other excellent blogs I follow and have contributed to (although lately I hang out here more than there ...): www.joannenova.com.au

Jo Nova lives in Perth, Western Australia, like me and we have become friends. I translated her excellent "Skeptics Handbook" to Danish - it's available to download on her site - please let your contacts know about it!

Sagunto said...

Hi Anne-Kit,

Many thanks for the tip, I will take a look and follow-up on it.

Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.