[American Thinker] There’s a Yiddish expression -- Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik! It means "don’t bang on my teakettle." Apparently when you went to see someone and they were in the field, workshop or barn, you banged on their teakettle to summon them. So the expression means, don’t bother me.
Each day when I check my emails, there are at least 20 messages with the header "disturbing" or some like word designed to get me agitated enough to contribute something to the sender.
Honestly, I’m disturbed enough about the state of the world that I don’t need more things to get disturbed about. For starters, there’s rising inflation with no discernible end in sight. There’s a horrible war in Ukraine with enormous destruction and loss of life. People are starving in Sri Lanka as a result of idiotic "green" agriculture mandates which are undoing there and soon elsewhere the marvels of Borlaug’s Green Revolution where the use of manufactured fertilizers and crops bred to be disease-resistant were making national famines a thing of the past.
Perhaps because of the seven years he spent living in America during the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mr. Rajapaksa was in thrall to green nostrums. He campaigned for president in 2019 on a platform that promised a form of technocratic utopia, including the commitment to turn Sri Lankan agriculture completely organic in a decade. He was particularly attentive to Vandana Shiva, a rabid Indian opponent of modern scientific agriculture. She considers Borlaug the enemy.
Covid hit Sri Lanka particularly hard, wiping out tourism, its economic mainstay. Heedless of this calamity, and of the wider impoverishment caused by lockdowns, Mr. Rajapaksa took a step that poleaxed Sri Lanka. On April 27, 2021 -- with no warning, and with no attempt to teach farmers how to cope with the change -- he announced a ban on all synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Henceforth, he decreed, Sri Lankan agriculture would be 100% organic. Agronomists and other scientists warned loudly of the catastrophe that would ensue, but they were ignored. This Sri Lankan Nero listened to no one. [snip]
Lost in all the ideological ululation was another likely explanation for Mr. Rajapaksa’s action: So debt-ridden was Sri Lanka -- to China, in particular -- that he may have decided to forgo imported fertilizer and pesticide as a money-saving measure.
What happened next? Rice production fell by 20% in the first 180 days of the ban on synthetic fertilizer. Tea, Sri Lanka’s main cash crop, has been hit hard, with exports at their lowest level in nearly a quarter-century. Whether from indignation over the new laws or an inability to go organic, farmers left a third of all farmland fallow. Food prices soared as a result of scarcity and Sri Lanka’s people, their pockets already hit by the pandemic, began to go hungry. To add to the stench of failure, a shipload of manure from China had to be turned back after samples revealed dangerous levels of bacteria. The farmers had no synthetic fertilizer, and hardly any of the organic kind.
The people of Sri Lanka learned a sad lesson -- mandated "organic farming" proved a horrible disaster. The people of Ghana also face starvation and national collapse as a result of green policies (and government corruption). Farmers in the Netherlands are striking in protest of equally unworkable green mandates on agriculture.
Just as absurd is the notion of zero carbon emissions. Germany is rationing conventional fuels and distributing wood and urging householders to burn it. I anticipate that will be insufficient to keep Germans warm this winter. I suppose the nitwits who shut down the country’s nuclear and coal plants will blame climate change for the deaths and misery, but I bet that won’t long work for them.
To prove the stupidity of this blinkered objective, China is fast constructing more coal plants, plants likely (given Communist countries’ penchant for production over environmental concerns) to be emitting not just carbon but the unhealthy emissions which had already been scrubbed from U.S. and western European coal plants.
Not disturbing enough for you? There’s a doddering head of state here and removing him would leave an equally feckless vice president in charge. A man who armed the Taliban in an ill-planned pullout of our troops in Afghanistan. A man who has ignored U.S. immigration law and common sense to leave our Southern border wide open, a man who opened the floodgates on our diminished treasury which only fired-up inflation. A man who selected as his Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, a dimwit who promises to spend our money fighting "racist" highways while doing nothing to ease the supply chain shortages. The President leaves in place the head of the FDA who with one stroke could lift the restrictions on baby formula from Canada and Europe to ease the shortage the agency itself foolishly caused by shutting down our major production facility for no good reason. |
If after nearly two years, my observations are correct, any "Doddering" or feckless leadership must be ascribed as a cover for the agendas of Rice and Klain. They are the shadow government, the ones who are actually in charge. The first black President has been closely followed by the first black female President. You can say it isn't so, but the cloaking of both Rice and Klain by the media provides a telling confirmation.