Zimbabwe's Coming Famine

Organizations that follow African agricultural situation are alarmed by Zimbabwe's rising food prices. 

Seasonal livelihood strategies continue to be constrained mainly as a result of poor 2018/19 harvests, worsening economic challenges, and decreasing water availability and access, especially in arid areas, limiting household incomes. Agricultural and non-agricultural casual labor opportunities are very limited as better-off households have no or limited resources to pay for the labor. In-country and international remittances mainly from South Africa are below average.  As cash shortages continue, the use of mobile money has increased in both rural and urban areas is eroding disposable incomes owing to high service charges or rates.

The world is taking for granted that African nations will periodically suffer food supply crisis and need help to feed themselves. But Zimbabwe is a farmer's paradise and its inability to grow food is not "normal". A generation ago it was exporting food in quantities. Who destroyed Zimbabwe? I for one remember and know. It was the British left wing anticolonial movement of the eighties. They were (and are!) so sanctimonious and high-minded. They attacked the farmers under the illusion that they were expropriating what Nature was giving, not working hard in the middle of dangerous and unhealthy Africa. They were totally disconnected from reality. Thinking about the intellectuals general disdain for reality, I realize that Mao's policy of sending millions of students and academic workers to the countryside  to learn how and by whom their food was being produced, was justified. Mao was no peasant but had a clear idea of reality and may have been shocked by the emergence of the new class of Communist intelligentsia. May be the English Left needed to spend a few years in Africa to connect with its reality. That would have avoided the coming famine in Zimbabwe. 

Proud Ghost Dad

I ghostwrite my little daughter's seminar papers. I got a 95 and am proud of it. For sake of truthfulness, most of the writing is hers, my contribution is at best marginal, but let me feel good. I am surviving a fiery, cursed August. And it is not over yet.

She'll start teaching at a newly organized tichon (high school) in a half empty new town. They are a collective of young, idealist, leftist teachers, and families are moving to Harish to get their children registered in this elite democratic/communist outfit. 

Black August

This summer is hot and difficult for me in Israel. I can hardly focus and work. Yesterday I spent three hours in a meeting in the Ministry in Ramla, while my subject was not even touched. I sat and learned about Listeria and food factory planning. I am having a bad bad day. This morning I had an important meeting and I forgot it.

The bourse is falling all over the world, Trump's trade war is upsetting the world's monetary system, which anyway was unsustainable. America was being bled white, the industry was moving to China. It is a financial storm and I feel powerless even to try to understand it.

New Cuban Missile Crisis,This time in Romania

I am old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Russia positioned nuclear missiles in the Island of Cuba, close range from Washington. Kennedy received a nervous fit and forced Hrushchov to take them back. Fifty years after, America is positioning short range nuclear missiles on the Soviet border, creating a mortal threat to Moscow and tightening an already tense situation. Craig, an anti-Semitic politician, describes the new situation and blames … Romania.

"After falsely accusing Russia of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), Washington unilaterally repudiated the treaty. Thus did the US military/security complex rid itself of the landmark agreement achieved by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that defused the Cold War... resurrecting the specter of nuclear war by the deployment of US missiles on the borders with Russia."

Farewell to illusions

Clark's book The Farewell to Alms shows that the population of England underwent selection in the last thousand years, as the upper middle class replaced the lumpen that died off. Clark bases his conclusions on the systematic study of family names, a method that seems rather unreliable to me. Ashkenazi Jews had no family names, for example. But the English are different.

Now I am reading that Iceland was settled a thousand years ago by a 50% Norwegian and 50% Irish population. However, the current genetic composition is 75% Norwegian and 25% Irish. There was differential selection, just like Clark discovered.

These results are applicable to every group of humans. Extract your own conclusions. Keep it quiet. 

The tongue is the best

A small cave in Gibraltar called El Sidron was the hiding place of the last surviving family of Neanderthal humans. The bones of the twelve show that they had been surprised by cannibals, cut into pieces, their skulls broken to extract the brain, and their mandibles scratched with flint knives by someone intent in devouring their tongues. Neanderthals had red hair and were heavy, up to 200 kg. We know the identities of the cannibals: they were you and me. Africans are innocent, their alibi is that they were at that time far away in Africa. 

The Persistance of Lead Contamination

My interest in lead contamination started with the "National Emergency" of Flint, Mich. some year ago. The more I learn about the issue, it appears more and more dramatic. Lead persists in the environment forever, and it not only reduces IQ but also fertility. Surprisingly, it is a Catholic religious blog has an excellent article on the subject, while the professional water media almost never deals with it. I always considered Catholicism as the most intellectually satisfying religion, more than Judaism (I am a Jew but not because the intellectual worth of the Talmud but because my ancestors were all Jews and so shall I die too) and incomparably more rational than the Islam.  Why are Catholic padres worried about lead instead of counting the angels dancing on a pin?

Lead pollution provides an entire suite of family planning services—everything from puberty delay to male and female fertility reduction to chemical abortion. Indeed, colonial-era commentators recommended lead as an abortifacient. In Flint, Michigan, lead pollution has increased fetal death by perhaps as much as 50 percent and reduced overall fertility by more than 10 percent. A study of a temporary lead spike in Washington, D.C. showed similar results: huge increases in fetal death rates and substantial declines in birth rates. But most people probably assume that, despite a few crises in a few places, their childbearing plans are safe from lead-related problems.

Most people are wrong. Recently, a working paper titled “Toxic Truth: Lead and Fertility,” published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, used air-pollution data from the 1970s and 1980s to demonstrate that the presence of lead molecules in the air altered local fertility rates in those decades. Later, the reductions in lead emissions brought about by environmental regulations raised the national birth rate by about 6 percent. 

The comments section is worth reading too. 

Did the Romans' exposure to lead, not only in the water supply, but in pewter drinking vessels, cosmetics and even from wine sweetened with lead acetate affect fertility levels?

There are probably too many variables to say, but it is certainly true that the birth-rate was a matter of concern to Augustus and the other Julian Emperors, as witness the Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus and the Lex Papia Poppaeia, which restricted or extinguished the inheritance rights of unmarried (coelebs) or childless (orbi) people and transferring them to the heirs or legatees with children. Again, it is remarkable how, of the 311 Patrician houses mentioned by Livy, only nine survived into the Augustan age.

That there was a fall in population is certain.

Pic.: Spices and herbs and ceremonial powders and alternative medicine remedies imported from South East Asia have very high - dangerous levels of lead. You have been warned.