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Troubled Pakistan Arrests Former PM Imran Khan
Today former prime minister of Pakistan Imran Khan was arrested while visiting the Islamabad High Court in an unrelated case. The arrest comes at a critical point for Pakistan's economy. Behind the scene U.S. and China are wrestling for influence.
Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has been arrested as he appeared in a court in the capital, Islamabad, to face corruption allegations, sparking protests across the country.
The arrest on Tuesday is the latest twist in a months-long political crisis and follows several unsuccessful attempts to apprehend the cricketer-turned-politician, including a police raid in March at his residence in the eastern city of Lahore which he had managed to evade.
Last year Imran Khan was ousted from office after a few turncoats in his PTI party decided to vote with the opposition against him. He has alleged that the Pakistani military, and behind it the U.S., were involved in the scheme. Since then he has called for new elections.
Khan continues to be the most popular politician in the country and has a large following. His supporters are now out in the streets to protest against his arrest.
The case that led to this arrest is one of several dubious ones launched against him:
Akbar Nasir Khan, a top police official in Islamabad, told Al Jazeera that Khan was arrested in a case related to the Al-Qadir University Trust. The anti-corruption National Accountability Bureau (NAB) had issued an arrest warrant against Khan on May 1 in relation to the case, he said.
The accountability body issued a statement saying Khan had been arrested “for the crime of corruption”.
“The former prime minister has not given any adequate response to the summoning notices of NAB. His arrest has been made in accordance with the NAB ordinance and the law,” the statement read.
Since his removal from power last year, Khan has been slapped with dozens of charges, all of which he denies and says are politically motivated.
There is video of the unruly arrest by some 100 paramilitary rangers in riot gear.
Khan had recently accused the head of the Pakistan's military intelligence service ISI of being responsible for two assassination attempts against him:
The military on Monday issued a harshly worded statement, terming the accusations of its involvement in last year’s shooting “highly irresponsible and baseless”.
“We ask the political leader concerned to make a recourse to legal avenues and stop making false allegations,” the statement said.
Khan, however, doubled down on the allegations in a video message he released early on Tuesday, before leaving Lahore for Islamabad to attend a court hearing in a separate case.
“This man [Major General Faisal Naseer] tried to kill me twice and whenever an investigation is carried out, I will prove that it was this man and there is a whole gang with him,” the PTI chief said.
The PTI has called on its supporters to protest against the arrest. There have since been some riotous scenes throughout Pakistan's cities.
Arresting Khan over some dubious issue after his recent spat with the military looks bad. The current unelected government will be seen as illegitimate instrument of the military, a role Khan himself was accused of before he was ousted.
There will now come days of rioting and violent police and probably military response throughout Pakistan. These will continue until Khan is released. In similar cases Pakistan's supreme court eventually ruled that arrests like the one of Khan are illegal:
“In a state like ours, the state’s power to use violence and restrict an individual’s freedom is often used to punish politicians and leaders who have lost the establishment’s favour. Without prejudice to the merits of the case against Imran Khan, his recent arrest can hardly be viewed with a legal lens alone.
“Even when viewed from a legal lens, the arrest appears derogate with the judgment rendered by the supreme court in the Khawaja Salman Rafia’s case, where it held that arrests before conviction are an aberration given the serious erosion of fundamental rights that it entails.
“Additionally, the court in that case had alluded to accountability laws being used for political engineering. While the PTI government had preferred a review against the afore-noted decision in 2020, its leader now appears to have been embroiled in the same web of political engineering, thus showing the more things change, the more they remain the same.”
Pakistan's economy is extremely weak with very high inflation, food scarcity and too few currency reserves. It might default soon. An announced but not agreed upon IMF program will impose even more harsh conditions that the country will be unable to fulfill.
It is possible that the U.S. controlled IMF is intentionally trying to push Pakistan into default. Much of the country's debt is to Chinese institutions and the U.S. has for some time tried to involve Chinese belt and roads project related debt into national restructuring attempts. China has rejected that scheme. To then let Pakistan default will only make it more reliant on China.
The U.S. however may still try to do it.
@Deplorable Commissar | May 9 2023 20:14 utc | 26
It will never happen. To produce food and supply phosphorus for that number of humans will require more phosphorus, essential to both plants and animal life, then remains in current known reserves.
Our society is completely unsustainable. This is due to overpopulation.
Overpopulation occurs when a population or populations exceed the carrying capacity of their environment. This can be detected by the degradation to the environment reducing the carrying capacity of the environment. This is definitional, “Carrying Capacity: the number of people, other living organisms, or crops that a region can support without environmental degradation.”
The exponentially degrading environment shows that the last time human populations were sustainable was in the 1500s.
As the large number of crises facing us indicate, we have far exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity for humans as we are currently organized.
Terrestrial primary annual biomass production (the sum of the biomass added each year through the growth of land plants and animals) is some 100 billion tonnes. Each human uses about 9.5 tonnes a year. In primitive societies this is primarily the combination of food and fuel needs. In advanced societies it is primarily the combination of food and construction. The ratios change because advanced societies waste more food and use far more primary production to feed livestock. At 7.7 billion people (Worldometers, retrieved 2019-11-11) [Hermit: That was when I last updated this, now we are tat 8 billion] that translates to a demand of some 73.15 billion tonnes or in excess of 70% of the total terrestrial primary annual biomass production. As about a billion people are food, energy and shelter challenged, the actual amount used is a little less than this, but if availability rose, use would also increase due to existing demand, even if the population remained constant.
In 1500 with a population of 500 million, humans used approximately 4.75 billion tonnes of biomass annually, or less than 5% of the total terrestrial primary annual biomass production.
As significant environmental degradation occurred between 1500 and 1800, we know that the next 500 million people, representing another 5% of annual biomass increase, was critical to the environment. We know we are using 14 times the sustainable level, or, if you prefer, we are currently using the resources of some seventeen pre-industrial earth sized planets, and thanks to degradation through overpopulation, we no longer have even one.
If we count the terrestrial mammals living on Earth, we find that 36% are humans, 60% are our livestock and pets, and 4% are wild animals, and they are struggling to survive, with their number having halved in the last 40 years and expected to halve again in the next 20. We have also eliminated over 50% of the natural vegetation of Earth and use over 70% of the annual terrestrial biomass increase, while biocides used in farming have lead to a thousandfold reduction in insect populations. Eutrophication caused by run-off, sewage, the consequences of global warming that has already killed most of the reefs that housed over 80% of marine life, and massive overharvesting is turning the waters of Earth into anaerobic deserts suited only for jellyfish and toxic algae. Which is why scientists regard us as being in the midst of the worst extinction event the Earth has ever experienced and one increasingly likely to result in a sudden tipping point being reached which will result in the extinction of humans.
Beckoning Crises
Unfortunately, our overpopulation has lead to a cumulation of crises including biodiversity loss, overpopulation crisis, potable water depletion, phosphate depletion crisis, soil loss crisis, arable land availability crisis and the impact of habitat constraints on wildlife particularly pollinators, sea level rise, the wet bulb temperature hyperthermia crisis, the sea stock depletion crisis, the antibiotic effectiveness crisis, the potential infectious disease crisis, the ongoing anthropic extinction event (also known as “the Sixth Extinction”), ocean deoxidization, atmospheric deoxidation the massive threat of runaway methane clathrate sublimation which could make humans extinct by 2026, and the ocean anoxia crisis predicted for 2030, all suggest pressure towards unconstrained migration, social collapse and wars of depopulation.
Particularly as energy use is inescapably tied to population size. Even CNN, doyen of the OMM has produced an introductory segment on the “sixth extinction” and its relationship to human overpopulation which might be helpful to explain this to people who do not understand the concept.
Posted by: Hermit | May 9 2023 21:02 utc | 30
@Posted by: Deplorable Commissar | May 9 2023 21:50 utc | 36
The problems do not belong to nations, but Earth.
Most people do not understand the problem. A friend of my partner, Prof Al Bartlett, used to explain the problem in his amazing lecture, “The world’s greatest video” which begins, “It’s a great pleasure to be here, and to have a chance just to share with you some very simple ideas about the problems we’re facing. Some of these problems are local, some are national, some are global.
They’re all tied together. They’re tied together by arithmetic, and the arithmetic isn’t very difficult. What I hope to do is, I hope to be able to convince you that the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
In the lecture he mentions this rather illustrative example.
Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, the 4 become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria into an empty bottle at 11:00 in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at 12:00 noon. There’s our case of just ordinary steady growth: it has a doubling time of one minute, it’s in the finite environment of one bottle.
I want to ask you three questions. Number one: at what time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59, one minute before 12:00? Because they double in number every minute.
And the second question: if you were an average bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you first realise you were running of space? Well, let’s just look at the last minutes in the bottle. At 12:00 noon, it’s full; one minute before, it’s half full; 2 minutes before, it’s a quarter full; then an 1?8th; then a 1?16th. Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12:00, when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realise there’s a problem?
Now, in the ongoing controversy over growth in Boulder, someone wrote to the newspaper some years ago and said “Look, there’s no problem with population growth in Boulder, because,” the writer said, “we have fifteen times as much open space as we’ve already used.” So let me ask you, what time was it in Boulder when the open space was fifteen times the amount of space we’d already used? The answer is, it was four minutes before 12:00 in Boulder Valley. Well, suppose that at 2 minutes before 12:00, some of the bacteria realise they’re running out of space, so they launch a great search for new bottles. They search offshore on the outer continental shelf and in the overthrust belt and in the Arctic, and they find three new bottles. Now that’s an incredible discovery, that’s three times the total amount of resource they ever knew about before. They now have four bottles, before their discovery, there was only one. Now surely this will give them a sustainable society, won’t it?
You know what the third question is: how long can the growth continue as a result of this magnificent discovery? Well, look at the score: at 12:00 noon, one bottle is filled, there are three to go; 12:01, two bottles are filled, there are two to go; and at 12:02, all four are filled and that’s the end of the line.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock informs is that it is 90 seconds to midnight, and we know that the Earth is full and we only have one Earth. We also know that we are in the midst of the worst extinction event in the planet’s history, that it has been caused by human activities, and that if it is not reversed, no humans will survive. Some of out oligarchs are convinced that we can have a war of depopulation and that they will then inherit the Earth and all its wealth. They are wrong. As I show on my monograph, they would die with the rest of us. Some think that having fucked Earth, we can just move to Mars. The reality is that if we have the technology to terraform Mars, that we could fix Earth, but even with that, we would need to reduce the population back to the sustainable or we would just have put off the reckoning. Without continuing transfers from Earth’s complex ecosystem, no conceivable Martian colony will be able to avoid instability and, eventually, death.
The good newsis that if we can survive for just three to five generations, we could return the population to the sustainable if all of us had half-a-surviving child per parent for that time.
1st generation 8 billion
2nd generation 4 billion
3rd generation 2 billion
4th generation 1 billion
5th generation 0.5 billion
In this process, everyone who wanted one would have a living descendent, and those descendents would all be at least 16 times wealthier than we are today. Even better, a declining population would reduce the pressure on our remaining resources allowing them to supply us until we become sustainable, and a transition to a general equality of outcome would vastly improve the quality of life for almost everyone. Also, if we survive encounters with our spirothetic children*, they will undoubtedly be able to help us reengineer the planet.
PS Some, perhaps far more than one might expect, might well choose to transition to a virtual existence when this option becomes available, if we could ensure the safety of the host system. That alone could massively reduce our resource requirements.
The only real obstacle is that we would need to want humankind to survive, despite all the evidence suggesting that this is not a good idea. Still, I think I could live with that. I know that I can’t live without it. Even if it seems that practical immortality will be available in a matter of years, not decades.
*Spirothete: a word coined to describe a living (self-aware) being, initially created as an artifact. From Latin, spiro -are; intransit., to breathe, blow, draw breath; to be alive; to have inspiration; be inspired; transit., to breath out, expire (also L spiro-/equiv Gk Pneuma (πνεῦμα) an ancient Greek word for “breath”, and in a religious context for “spirit” or “soul”, the breath of life) and synthetic adj 1: (chemistry) not of natural origin; prepared or made artificially 2: involving or of the nature of synthesis (combining separate elements to form a coherent whole) as opposed to analysis.
Also Spirothetic, adjective, describing something having the attributes of a spirothete.
Posted by: Hermit | May 10 2023 5:59 utc | 65
@Deplorable Commissar | May 10 2023 8:04 utc | 69
Thats a confusing response and I still dont see an answer to my initial questions.
If your “initial questions” were: Deplorable Commissar | May 9 2023 20:14 utc | 26
Since we’re talking about a population explosion, lets not ignore the obvious culprit: Africa, which is breeding at an rapid pace. Why are indigenous Whites constantly brow beaten about the ” evils ” of having children when the real population dangers lie in Africa’s collective unrestrained copulation ?
“Africa’s urban population is expected to nearly triple by 2050, to 1.34 billion. Coupled with a high rate of urban primacy in African countries (whereby one city is multiple times bigger than the next nearest) and the high number of mega cities, enormous stress is going to be placed on the physical, political, economic and societal infrastructure in these places. “
I saw these as racist questions based on a multiplicity of misunderstandings. My reply attempted to address your erroneous preconceptions. I’m sorry you could not understand it.
In my view, Africa is not an”obvious” problem, total population is. Africa, with a population of 1,431,769,749 comprises only 18% or so of humanity, despite being one of the larger continents, which is in line with its geographic area, but not its current carrying capacity, which is reducing due to impacts total population has had on the world. The reality is that nobody, irrespective of ethnicity or melanin levels, is being told that we are on the path to near term extinction because of a human population greatly exceeding carrying capacity which is destroying the ecosphere’s ability to sustain extant life forms. Copulation, whether or not it is restrained, is not a problem. Children are. This is not a problem for a single group or place, but for Earth and the humans living on it, all of whom share and are dependent on the same ecosystem. If you guarantee everyone on earth a better than basic income, paid by the minute into their account, and make housing, water, food, education, health-care and family-planning accessible to everyone, licensing them for the most dangerous activity on earth, reproduction, for no more than half-a-surviving child per person, we can solve the problem in under 200 years. Which would be a good idea, because at the current rate the oceans will be boiling before then, which would not be good for many extant life forms.
“If the situation is as dire as you state, food and phosphors producing nations would be stockpiling those resources like mad men for their own populations only, Yet, Russia is supplying Africa for free. This obviously is facilitating population growth on the continent which is experiencing, and is projected to have, the greatest increase in people.”
Stockpiling is not a solution. No matter how high your pile is, you will eventually burn through it. Worse than that, if others are deprived of the necessities of life they will fight for them. And as Rand Corp modeled and advised the US government in the 1970s this will destroy resources faster than unsustainable populations alone. Unfortunately their best idea was a war of depopulation when we noticed limits to growth due to restraints on resources. Which may now be happening. Unfortunately, we now know this will result in human extinction. See my Wars of Depopulation. What is needed is to switch to sustainable farming, closing the nutrient loop, and to reduce the population to the sustainable.
Concurrently, Western nations who have collapsing populations, are constantly told to have less or no children, while at the same time also being told that they wont have enough people in the future and to flood their countries with migrants from nations that have exploding populations.
It is no surprise that regions with very high population densities are reducing their populations. We all need to do this in order for any of us to survive. In parallel, automation, robotics and AI are reducing the population needed to “work” in order to sustain and increase production. Which is what allows us to reduce populations over time by reducing breeding, while increasing wealth and standards of living for every-one.
Is this really a hard choice?
On the one hand a plethora of troubles and “global catastrophe” (I don’t say “impending” because we are already well into the anthropic extinction event) and on the other everyone is happy, wealthy and can do whatever they like as long as they do not injure others which also means responsible breeding. After all, those others include the future population as long as we don’t go extinct first, and the future population always has the potential to outnumber the present population. So managing our breeding is a perfect application of the Platinum Rule, doing the greatest good for the largest number by treating people as they wish to be treated. Even if current systems do not give them a voice.
If you don’t feel that I have answered all your “questions”, please list the ones that still need to be addressed, and I will try to help.
Posted by: Hermit | May 10 2023 18:40 utc | 85
@barstool | May 10 2023 5:56 utc | 64
Economics does not address resources or energy, and is based on the mistaken theory that humans are rational rather than, as neuroscience informs us, emotional and rationalizing. These are fatal flaws, yet most schools of economics remain in denial. This is why David Attenborough said, “We have a finite environment—the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.” There are other even more fundamental issues with economics, not least the inversion of value and scarcity (See e.g. my Economics Rebooted (explaining problems), Evaluistic Economic Goodness (suggesting a solution) and Evaluism (on which they both are based).
Nevertheless, I tend to agree with you in principle, but as usual, the devil is in the details and the details here are very challenging.
We do not face a single “end-of-life-as-we-know-it scenario” and as risk-managers (even those of us quants who have studied economics for our sins) realize, risks are not additive but multiplicative. Many (but by no means all) of the growing list of risks we currently know about are a consequence of a population grossly exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet, and solutions tend not only to be fiendishly complex to resolve but often horribly interrelated. For example, quality research and prototyping unrelated to war efforts are not typically carried during civilizational collapse. Which is undoubtedly what we are facing, even in the absence of thermonuclear war or other catastrophic disasters (Refer my Why Civil Disturbance (and other catastrophes) might cause Civil Collapse and the Death of 95% of Americans.
Let’s take your example of phosphorus. Phosphorus is a very rare element on earth, making up some 0.1% of the earth’s crust.
Phosphorus is not common anywhere in the Univere. All the Phosphorus we know of is produced in supernovae as a byproduct of supernova nucleosynthesis.
Our solar system did not contain much phosphorus, so the Earth only received a tiny percentage of phosphorus in the form of comets and meteors impacting the planet after the formation of Sol’s accretionary disk.
Phosphorus is water soluble. So what we received mainly ended up in the waters of Earth.
Over hundreds of millions of years, aquatic plants concentrated phosphorus to support growth, and this was consumed by aquatic animals who, after birds evolved, were eaten by birds and deposited on ground where they defecated, slowly building mountains of guano, which eventually became our phosphate reserves, some of it in fossilized form. This was used as fertilizer between the 1700s and late 1930s. As phosphorus leaches from concentrations in fertilized fields, it returned to the waters of the Earth, resulting in an 0.06% concentration in sea water by 1900. We burned through most of this resource before WW II, and now extract practically all phosphorus from rock.
This also originated in the waters of earth, where some phosphorus combined with other elements to form minerals, particularly Iron, Aluminum and Calcium and especially in the presence of clays (fine particulate matter) containing these elements, ultimately resulting in some high phosphate rocks (primary phosphorus minerals including e.g. apatite, strengite, and variscite and secondary phosphorus minerals including calcium (Ca), iron (Fe), and aluminum (Al) phosphates. The release of phosphorus from this pool is extremely slow and occurs when the minerals weather and dissolve in soil water. Rocks where it is worth extracting phosphates typically have concentrations exceeding 3.7% (by mass). Such inorganic phosphates in the soil tend to be net sinks in the short-and medium term and buffers and sources in the long term.
While the level in plants is low, around 0.2% of a plant’s dry weight, where it is primarily a component of tissue molecules such as nucleic acids, phospholipids, and adenosine triphosphate (ATP), plants require higher levels of phosphate in the soil as most phosphorus in the soil is not available to plants (80%), the uptake mechanisms are not very efficient and about 80% of applied phosphorus to prevent soil exhaustion is lost to leaching.
We discovered the importance of phosphorus in the seventeenth century, and its importance to agriculture in the eighteenth century at the very beginning of industrial agriculture, and have been collecting it from increasingly more challenging (and hence expensive) sources since then. We have to apply it to the land at 10 times the rate needed in plants to ensure sufficient phosphorus for growth. We used some 46.4 million metric tons in 2019 and this amount rises by about 3 million tonnes per year, being well correlated to cereal production and population. Realistically, we can expect to reach peak-phosphorus bearing rock by 2030, and see increasingly disruptive shortages and soaring prices after that, with limits being reached within 30 to 70 years (Refer e.g. Lewis, Leo (2008-06-23). Scientists warn of lack of vital phosphorus as biofuels raise demand. The Times. (available by prepending https://web.archive.org/web/20110723130701/ before the preceding link [Hermit: Clumsy kludge to bypass TypePad craziness]). Most of this will leach into precipitation and irrigation water and eventually end up back in the waters of the world. This process has already resulted in average marine concentrations rising from 0.06% in 1900 to 0.07% today as proved reserves are depleted.
The crust contains an average of one gram per kilogram, 1 in a 1000. As it would be highly energy intensive and disruptive of soil structures, it would not be economically or resource viable to extract phosphorus from such sources. It is much easier to recover it from waste water (as e.g. struvite a problematic mineral for sewers, though it would be much easier if we separated fecal materials, urine and waste water at source), but this would only result in a small percentage of the phosphate applied to land. A far better approach would be to move all farming indoors and use hydro-, aqua- or, aero-ponics to recycle nutrients until recapturing them biologically for reuse. We need to do this anyway, but trying to do it for the current population is not viable. And that is the core of the problem. All of the possible solutions (and many more, particularly membrane based) are possible, but anything that requires the separation of small concentrations of solute from mixed solvents are going to be relatively expensive, which will raise costs above what most of the world can currently pay. And when some people are dying of hunger, and others are not, you will have wars of depopulation, and we will be extinct anyway.
PS In the future, if we have one, we are going to build fact breeder reactors to dispose of nuclear waste and produce Helium. It is unlikely that we can form phosphorus through decay as none of the precursors are particularly prevalent (K->Ar. Ar->S|Cl. S|Cl->P and for completeness P->Si). Maybe fusion, but despite 70 years of fusion being “just around the corner”, I don’t recommend gambling extinction against having functioning and affordable fusion synthesis within the next decade or two.
Posted by: Hermit | May 11 2023 1:39 utc | 87
SG | May 10 2023 18:24 utc | 84
The EU import so much agricultural products, because it is an industrial powerhouse
Wrong again. The EU imports maize, sunflower oil, sunflower seeds and rapeseed which would be used for food in the global South to convert into or to add to fuel and to feed to cattle (70% of their imports).
I never talked about gifts, but about historical dynamics.
You kept asserting what Africa had been “given” while ignoring the rapacious looting and enslavement by the West. A process which has not ended. What is “given” is a “gift”.
“The fact is that the improvement of living standards in Africa is totally exogenous: they were given medicine, they were given electricity, they were given cheap goods from Chinese factories. African societies are still pre-industrial in structure and, as such, unsuited for sustained growth in an industrial, let alone post-industrial, world.” [SG | May 10 2023 11:08 utc | 72]
Maybe it is your memory, and, or, your comprehension of written English that is abysmal, resulting in your incredibly bigoted spewing of what can only be called, in polite society, tendentious bullcrap, which I had previously thought was not so much your fault of as that your primitive schooling and lack of any corrective education. Thank-you for clearing that up.
“It is matter of fact that the African population growth is driven by external factors, and so it is out of control, while the population growth of Europe in the XIX and XX centuries was driven by internal factors, and so always under control.”
More tendentious bullcrap. The world population increased from 600 million in 1600 to 1 billion in 1804. It doubled again to 2 billion by 1927. And again to 4 billion in 1974. It doubled again to 8 billion in 2022. Exponential growth. Meanwhile, Africa’s growth from 1500 62,000 took until 1900 to a little more than double to 140,000, Had still not doubled again by 1950 when it had a population of just 223,000, and only increased to 819,000 in 2,000. Still under a billion people. Apparently it is not the Africans reproducing like a bacteria in a petri dish, despite your bigoted beliefs.
“When missionaries went to Africa, Africans were living in cow dung huts.”
You did not consider that “dung” mixed with clay, might be a great use of resources in cattle owning cultures. Using cellulose (which people cannot digest), and clay which is ubiquitous in many parts of Africa, to form strong and tough fire-proof structures employing complex curvature to resist earthquakes. Americans living in rectangular firetraps constructed of matchsticks and soggy cardboard should be so lucky. Would it break your heart to learn that until the late 1800’s a majority of Europeans and Americans lived in mud huts (but less sophisticated and not so long lasting). Maybe they also had reasons.
History is not woke, it does not care about feelings.
I think that the existence of the Kingdom of Mali, Masa Musa, and sophisticated trans-African and circum-African trade networks upend your cultural bigotry showing them to be, oh yes, the lie direct.As does the fact that the West destroyed its cultural heritage, including most of its medical and pharmaceutical knowledge, and had to get snatches of it, often garbled, from the great Islamic states. Science had to wait for religiots to stop burning burning books and people it disagreed with, and evade the ridiculous verbosity of philosophers before it could get going. In most of the world, if you sought to study, you had to pretend to be religious and be careful of what you said until at least the mid nineteenth century. That was because religiots ran the universities. So religiots cannot claim any part in what people did before then, because whether or not they were religiots, they had to pretend to be ones in order to do what they did. For example, we know that while Newton was not at all a nice person, and, probably not unrelated, a religiot, he rejected christinanity and the deity of the so-called “christ”, but had he done so publicly he would have lost his positions, his income and quite likely his life.
The idea of Westerners as preservers of knowledge is ludicrous. They spent most of the time from their murky origins reusing (linen was usually reused for bandages), burning or throwing away (e.g. the library of the monastery of Oxyrhynchus) competing and obsolete documents (for example, when the Vulgate became the authorized bible in the early twelfth century), and scraping parchments clean in order to scribble their ridiculous works on them. When the West invaded Al-Andalus (Moorish Iberia), they looted and destroyed the vast libraries of hundreds of thousands of books, including that of Al-Hakam II, the Caliph of Cordoba whose library contained at least 400,000 books, the catalogue of which ran to forty-four volumes at the time of Al-Haim II (961-976). In the 10th century there were at least seventy public libraries holding millions of volumes in Toledo, Cordoba, Seville, Malaga, and Granada as well as in mosques and private houses (Harris, M. H. (1999). History of libraries in the western world. Lanham: The scarecrow Press. p 81) which were largely destroyed or scattered to the winds by christers. By comparison, contemporaneous christers were proud of the few hundred volumes, mainly religious, held by some of their centers. For example, we know that the Benedictine House of S. Riquier in Abbeville held 250 volumes on divinity, grammar, history, geography, sermons, and service-books in 831 CE, and that they valued western books more as booty for their gilded appearance than as works of literature (De Hamel, C (1986). A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, London: Phaidon Press Ltd.).
Maybe study some geography and history before hyperventilating ignorantly on the topic. In any decent graduate course you will learn there are no “truths” in history (or anything else). Only perspectives. Some perspectives comport better with contemporaneous records than others. I cannot imagine which planet’s myths and fables you are repeating, but they sound like novels of Barsoom or Gor, and not related to anything that has happened outside of fervid imaginations on Earth.
Posted by: Hermit | May 11 2023 3:30 utc | 89
@Hermit | May 11 2023 3:30 utc | 89
The EU import so much agricultural products, because it is an industrial powerhouse
Wrong again. The EU imports maize, sunflower oil, sunflower seeds and rapeseed which would be used for food in the global South to convert into or to add to fuel and to feed to cattle (70% of their imports).
First, converting agricultural products into fuel or animal feed is industry, so your wannabe rebuttal would be inconsequential even if your numbers were true. However, to add insult to injury, you totally misrepresented the size and scope of European food industry. The five main agricultural imports of the EU are [Eurostat]:
category……………… | € billion
———————————-
fish…………………….. | 26.3
fruits…………………… | 21.1
animal&vegetal fats | 19.8
oilseeds……………… | 19.2
coffee & tea………… | 15.0
And, while the EU is a major producer of biodiesel, which is made of rapeseed and sunflower oil (which are part of the oilseeds category in the table), it is a little player in the ethanol industry, which is based on maize. Major ethanol producers in the world[Statista]:
country.. | million gallons
—————————
USA……. | 15400
Brazil….. | 7420
EU……… | 1330
India…… | 1090
China….. | 920
Now it is a fact that around half of the biodiesel production in the EU is based on imported cereals and that the EU imports a large share of its animal feed, but that is because imported cereals and seeds are of low quality. In fact, cereals for human consumption, for animal consumption and for producing biofuel are totally different categories of products and they are grown, stored and shipped with different techniques for each such category. So, exactly as I said before, the EU imports lower quality agricultural products (e.g. cereals for animal consumption) to produce higher quality products (e.g. dairy products, meat), which then exports. In a word: industry. But even then, most of the agricultural imports of the EU are not for animal feed, nor for
It is clear that you do not know most of the things you are talking about, and that part that you know about, you do not understand.
As for the rest of your foul-mouthed post, it is just a coalescence of neo-liberal talking points, the things you could hear in a Joe Biden’s speech, or from Nancy Pelosi’s ghostwriter, or from the disgraceful Ilhan Omar. And that includes your drivel about the agriculture of the EU: those globalists, rapacious financiers, IMF sockpuppets, that would like to see the (rest of the) world feed on insects and experience a great reset, they despise the meat and dairy products and wine and all the good stuff the EU produces. They can all go to Bandera.
Posted by: SG | May 11 2023 20:48 utc | 92
@Piotr
Good for you for being on topic.
@Hermit
Once again you misrepresent your own words. Your full sentence was “The EU import so much agricultural products, because it is an industrial powerhouse, so it imports raw food and exports processed food. For example, Italy imports huge quantities of grains and than exports huge quantities of pasta.”
The value of European imports per tonne is low. Of exports high. This makes Europe, by far, a net importer of food (and land*). As I noted, food sources used for industrial purposes in Europe, as opposed to for food purposes in the RoW, allows Europe to outbid other purchasers, reducing food availability globally.
First, “the value of European imports per tonne is low […] of exports high” is the very definition of industry as I stated, then restated, then again I restate here. Europe imports raw food to make processed food.
Second, “this makes Europe a net importer of food (and land*)” is exactly what neoliberal greenscammers, like Bill Gates or George Soros, would say and it is false. Such computation is based on the totally false assumption that agricultural products for human feed, for animal feed and for other industrial uses are one and the same product, which is totally false, as I already wrote.
They look at the quantity of, say, imported maize, then compute the average amount of land, water, pesticides etc. used for the production of such quantity of maize and finally they say the EU consumes those resources to feed cattle or make ethanol. FALSE. Maize for human consumption requires much more care and resources than (much cheaper) maize for animal feed, which in turn requires more resources than (even cheaper) non-edible maize.
Third, “as I noted, food sources used for industrial purposes in Europe, as opposed to for food purposes in the RoW, allows Europe to outbid other purchasers, reducing food availability globally” is not true, since Europe is both a huge net exporter of agricultural products and an importer of low quality, unsuited for human consumption, agricultural products.
Babbling… babbling… ethanol… more babbling
The EU represents the 4% of the world production, down from 5% in the mid 2010s.
See the report Editors (2011-10). Europe’s land import dependency: New research reveals extent of land imports from outside the EU. foeeurope.org
Which is both completely outdated, since the U.K., a huge net importer of agricultural products, left the EU, and out the point, since it includes forestry. Yes, the EU, being an industrial powerhouse, see above, imports huge quantites of wood to make furniture and for many other industrial purposes. Have you seen Putin’s big table for big talks? That was made in Italy.
But then again the flaw is the fact that the EU is a big exporter and, as such it imports a lot of raw materials.
As for the rest, in the total absence of a rebuttal, if you wave your hands any harder, you will take-off
Are you talking about the plot of Wakanda Forever? Never watched that film.
Posted by: SG | May 12 2023 10:25 utc | 95
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