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 27th Aug. 2011. A poem by Rudyard Kipling.

Aug.2011. Nouriel Roubini: Social unrest will spread

13th Aug. 2011. London riots 2011: Lessons from France 2005.

12th Aug. 2011.Riots in citiesinEngland. What can we make of it all?

8th August 2011. Conflict in Southern Mediterranean countries and famine in East Africa. What has population change got to do with it?

27th August 2011.

A poem by Rudyard Kipling (1865 to 1936) is very relevant today.

The following poem by Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936), author of many other poems together with the Jungle Books, Kim, and the ‘Just So’ stories, at least partly explains the attitidude of many native white British people to immigration and to immigrants. This attitude or frame of mind, we think, evolved over the whole history of European peoples, and is found in other races too, and indeed in primitive human tribes. The ‘politically correct’ would have us sublimate this frame of mind. Definition of sublimate: “divert or modify  (an instinctual impulse)into culturally higher or more socially acceptable activity….” . The New Oxford Dictionary of English. However, we think this frame of mind, now probably inscribed in our DNA, is far less likely to cause conflict than the suppression of this instinct advocated by the politically correct. And far from being socially lower than the politicall correct cultural belief, it is an essential self-protecion device that will stand us in good stead in the increasingly turbulent future times. This frame of mind, is we believe, increasingly invoked by the massive immigration we in Europe have experienced in recent years. But it does not necessarily translate into violence towards, or lack of cooperation with immigrants.

THE STRANGER

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk—
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control—
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father’s belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf—
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children’s teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

24th August 2011.

“Recent popular demonstrations, from the Middle East to Israel to the UK, are all driven by the same issues and tensions”. So writes the economist Professor Nouriel Roubini, of the New York University’s School of Business, in globes [online], Israel business news, 21st August.

Roubini is writing about the demonstrations and clashes in the countries bordering the southern and eastern sides of the Mediterranean including Israel, and in China. He concludes that such events are all driven by the same issues, such as poverty and unemployment. Later he puts causes in economic terms:
“…globalization,financial intermediation run amok, and a destructive redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital”. And Roubini’s analysis is very relevant to our diagram of causes of conflicts on our Home page.

Now we are not economists, but as far as we understand his terminology, we agree with Roubini’s  list of causes, as far as it goes:  He is writing from the point of view of an economist, and he is like many or most economists, who neglect what we consider is the underlying driver of most or all problems, namely Human Population Growth. Now governments develop policies primarily from  economic and social trends and by their political affiliation. This is, we think, one reason why governments and the mainstream media have  neglected  human population growth as a  cause of problems.
Globes.

Finally, we agree with Roubini that such unrest will spread, indeed we think it will spread right across the world, as both human population growth and environmental destruction continue.

13th August 2011.

A newspaper article provides some support for our diagram on conflicts on our Home page, where we have an arrow from ‘Poor nations’ to the potential for conflict within nations. We mention ‘brain drain’ in the diagram, and this implies migration of people (the people with brains). Of course, migration from poor countries is not only brainy people, but many uneducated people as well, so perhaps we could improve our diagram. Below we put relevant information from this article. Note the “including many immigrants”.

“London Riots 2011: Lessons From France 2005.”

Palash R. Ghosh in the International Business Times (IBT), gives an opinion on the causes of the riots.

Ghosh notes that not just in London, but also across England, the disturbances have some resemblances to the disturbances in
France six years ago.

Both in England and in France “a large group of disaffected, poor youths (including many immigrants) took out their frustrations
against” what seemed to them to be “a daunting establishment structure designed to keep them in poverty”. He states that
lack of integration of immigrants, racism and “police brutality” “played key roles” in both countries.

IBT

Riots in cities in England. What can we make of it all?

 For three nights, England has witnessed some of the worst riots for decades. Starting in one small area of London following the shooting of a man by the police, things escalated, first to other parts of London then to several other cities across England.  All this was headline news in the media, and not only in the UK for it became headline news across the world.

 What can we make of it all? What were the causes of this mayhem?

Well the first thing to say is we should be very careful about drawing definite conclusions about causes, because the situation was complex. That might sound like an excuse, but it is the reality. Consider these questions:. Was the rioting only by people of one race, of one level in the social hierarchy, of one degree of education or wealth, of one political persuasion? The answer is all cases is no.

 But we do have some key information. Most of the rioters were young people, and most were men. Probably most came from poor rundown areas, and many, perhaps most were uneducated and unemployed. So were most rioters just simply very resentful at the big wealth gap between the governing classes and themselves, between the poor with no say in the world and the well off who seemed to control things as if the poor did not even exist?

 People have had these concerns for a long time, but the murder of a man by the police was the final tipping point.  On the other hand , it was clear that many or most of the rioters were primarily motivated not by some social or political cause, but sheer greed, like the people who arrived after stores had been broken into and filled shopping trolleys high with goods and wheeled them away.….

 From the political point of view, on the left the riots were seen as the understandable reaction of poor, deprived and disenfranchised people who came from rundown districts. From the right, the rioters were simply criminals and undisciplined hooligans.

 Perhaps surprisingly, the left leaning Guardian Newspaper did not plump for a simple left wing argument. Under the headline “Who are the rioters? Young people from poor areas, but that’s not the whole story”. The subsidiary headline was “The crowds on the streets are drawn from a complex mix of social backgrounds”.

And the Leader article was quite clear about the proper reaction to the situation. These riots “have become the defining contest between disorder and order”. It went on to say that “there is only one right side to be on”. The attacks must be stopped and the law enforced. But it waned against draconian measures being adopted.

 Jonathan Freedland looked a t the riots in the context of other events – phone hacking and the world financial crisis. All these things made, as the title for his piece says “The year when we realised our leaders cannot protect us”. And he ends by noting the irony of the situation where as the nations of the Arab spring were demanding “the tools of democracy”, “we are finding them rusting and blunt in our hands”.

 The Daily Mail, which some regard as right wing, has three articles of an analytical nature. In the Comment section it notes that the Left-wing blamed social deprivation, racism and Government cuts for riots. It argues “David Cameron’s judgment has been called into question”. The metropolitan Police had been “shorn” of effective leadership because Cameron had in effect forced the two most senior men, who were tough and very experienced, to resign.

 The second article was by James Slack, who also drew attention to the removal of the two most senior men. He notes that officers facing the rioters were unsure just how much force they could use. And things were made much worse by the fact that they had been “burdened by decades of political correctness”. He identifies the labelling of the Police force as “institutionally racist in the McPherson enquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence as the beginning (we think political correctness was there long before this). It left police with their “hands tied behind their backs”, especially, as in the case of the riots being discussed where large numbers of the protesters were black teenagers. If police stop and search for drugs or weapons, they are called ‘racist’. If they use slightly stronger force “they will be hammered for alleged brutality”.

 With these opinions of Slack we agree.

 But the most serious and penetrating opinion piece was by Max Hastings, military historian and veteran war reporter who marched in to Port Stanley with the troops that were taking the surrender at the end of theFalklands war.

 He starts by referring to the 1967 race riots in theUS city ofDetroit, in which 43 people died. A black reporter had shown Hastings round after the riots and told him not to believe people there who said they were sorry for what had happened. “When they talk to each other, they say “It was a great fire man!”.Hastings commented he was sure many of the rioters in our riots thought the same.

 This made a sort of headline for what Hastingswas going on to say… For the rioters, what they did made life interesting, it made people notice them; it showed the police and the rich that they could do what they liked.

 ForHastings the rioters hade no moral compass, no conscience, so they felt neither guilt nor shame. “They are essentially wild beasts”. They respond only, like animals, by instinctive impulses – to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy…”. They were unemployed, they had no good family role models, living in homes where any way the father had often left. “They are illiterate and innumerate. They lack “the discipline that might make them employable…”. They are a layer in society with “no skills, education, values or aspirations”.

 And Hastings asserts that to conclude as some do that rioters behaviour simply “reflects deprived circumstances or police persecution”, is quite wrong.

 He goes on in effect to briefly picture the school days of such people. From a young age they have not experienced “effective sanctions”. They have learnt that they are unlikely to experience rebuke,  and far less likely to experience real retribution, if they do things like bullying fellow pupils, or throwing litter out of a car window, play  car radios at a deafening volume, or commit “casual assaults”. If anyone dares to rebuke them they are likely to utter a stream of obscenities, or actually respond with physical violence.

 Hastings goes on to mention what we might call, features of the politically correct environment in which they exist – promoting single motherhood as a desirable state, claiming that family life as the proper model is no longer valid. And Parliament, he alleges has refused to agree that children do better if they have two parents rather than one.

 The judiciary has also played a negative role, ‘colluding’ with lawyers who stress the rights of criminals more than the rights of citizens, especially when dealing with young offenders. So as one commentator Hastings mentions says, the law seem to be there to project the rights of the perpetrator, rather than the rights of the victim!

 The BBC does not escapeHastings’s criticism either. How can you expect young people to be persuaded to stop using bad language when that is what they hear on the BBC? And some role models come in for criticism. Hastings mentions the footballer Wayne Rooney who lacks even “the most meagre human graces”.

 Hastings ends his article by concluding that until the people running Britain have in place incentives for good behaviour and penalties “for bestiality”, there will always be people around like the recent rioters.

 While we do not know if all the specific claims Hastings makes are correct (e.g. the claim about Parliament), we entirely agree with the thrust of his assessment of the situation and his conclusion about incentives and penalties.

Our further comments.

 We would like to make three further comments.

 1), “Instinctive animal impulses”.  We cannot help comparing the riots here with the other clashes in counties round the southern Mediterranean. We know that in both areas unemployment is high, and in both areas the poor are very concerned about the wide gap in earnings and standards of living between themselves and the ruling classes. If a person from outer space approached the earth and observed  what was happening with the two sets of clashes, he would notice that the majority of the rioters were young men.

As we wrote in our comment of 8thAugust:

“Now the evolution and development of the human species has taken place through competition and conflict between different groups of people, with young men being the agents. And these young men have been ‘fired up’ for conflict by high levels of the sex hormone testosterone

 Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden in their book “Sex and War”, which we also referred to in our comment of the 8^th, note that the level testosterone circulating in adults is  20 times higher in men than in women. And having noted that it is testosterone that gives a man greater muscular strength, his deep voice, his beard and his sex drive, they write “Testosterone also provides much of the male drive for status and aggression, and accounts for our poor impulse control”.  In primitive man this testosterone enhanced conflict was perhaps a contributory factor keeping population levels low.

 2). The initial clashes, which broke out so suddenly and violently after the death of a man, occurred in Tottenham, one of the most racially diverse areas in the whole of Europe. So the question arises, was this lack of comparative ethnic homogeneity a factor in the sudden conflict development?

 3). In Max Hastings article, at one point where he is defining the character of the rioters, he has a short paragraph that says “they know nothing ofBritain’s past, they care nothing for its present”.

 We think this point about the past is important. Until after the Second World War we had something called patriotism (a dirty word now in the eyes of the politically correct) and one fundamental pillar for this was a sense of our history and out great achievements. Ordinary people were not historians with a detailed knowledge of our history. But the reading of story books, and the radio had informed them about key people and key events with which they were associated. And history was one of the principal subjects in school. All this gave them confidence, But at the same time, the discipline they had heard about in the armed forces, the still strong religious prohibition of violence, and the fact that most people lived in families with two parents, usually kept society peaceful, or if there were any disturbances, protected them from causing  violence. Of course there are a few notable exceptions to this..

 No doubt the causes of the riots will be discussed for a long time to come, and it will be very interesting to find out what future generations of historians have to say.

Conflict in Southern Mediterranean Countries and Famine in East Africa. What has Population Change got to do with it?

 Media News recently has been very depressing. Daily we have headlines on the deepening financial crisis in Europeand the USA. But there are two other causes of depressing headlines, the conflicts in countries bordering the southern and eastern Mediterraneanand the severe malnutrition and famine in East Africa. And we ask the question, what have population changes got to do with these crises?  We deal first with conflict in Mediterranean countries.

The desire for freedom from despotic and corrupt leaders seems to be the chief reason for conflict. But there are other reasons too – the high price of food, and high unemployment, and these developments have been exacerbated by continued human population growth and changes in the age composition of countries.

The high price of food has several causes. But one cause has been the continued rapid growth of the world population, forcing continued efforts to raise food production, resulting in continued use of intensive methods of farming that result in severe environmental damage, including the quality of food growing soils.

Then we need to note that these Mediterranean countries are going through what is called the first demographic transition. By this we mean the transition from an agricultural economy with high birth and death rates, to an industrialised economy with low birth and death rates. Countries at the beginning of this transition are relatively very young, the majority of the population being children and teenagers. Gradually as the transition takes place with birth rates falling, the very young people are entering the working age population.

This would be a very good thing if there were plenty of job opportunities, because the working age population, the largest element of the total population, would be able to support both young and old in the population, if, and it is a big if, there were plenty of job opportunities. And that has been the case with East Asian countries.  And we note that one of several reasons why there have been adequate employment opportunities has been that these countries have adopted measure to limit population growth, with China as the extreme example.

If unemployment is high, this middle part of the demographic transition is very worrying for the leaders of the countries concerned, especially when the governments are, or are thought to be by the people,  corrupt. The result has been clashes between the public and government law enforcing bodies, the military and the police.

But there is another factor to be taken into account here.  If you think back to the television coverage of the riots in these countries, you will recall that the protesters were predominantly young men.  Now the evolution and development of the human species  has taken place through competition and conflict between different groups of people, with young men being the agents. And these young men have been ‘ fired up’ for conflict by high levels of the sex hormone testosterone. A very important and interesting book about this is the 2008 book “Sex and War” by M. Potts and T. Hayden, Benbella books.

So in the countries we are here considering we have the situation where  large numbers of young men, fired up with testosterone, have been easily provoked into fighting for freedom and a higher standard of living. 

So  we can conclude that continued human population growth and change in age composition are important causes of the conflicts in the countries around the southern and eastern rim of theMediterranean.

Now News Bulletins in the UK (and we suspect elsewhere in the developed world), in dealing with the causes of the awful situation, have stressed the importance of  a desire for freedom and perhaps to a lesser extent high food prices and high unemployment. But they have said little, often nothing, about two important underlying causes, namely human population growth and changing age composition

Now we look at  malnutrition and famine in east Africa. We wrote something about this in our July the 30^th news item “Malnutrition and starvation in East Africa, but human population growth is not usually mentioned as a cause”. We now add more detail.

The climate of Djibouti, NE Ethiopia, Somalia and NE Kenya is dry to very dry, with periodic droughts in the less dry western parts of the area; and the soils have poor water retention capacities. So the population of people that can be supported sustainably is at best rather sparse.

Population growth has been massive. We get an idea of the scale of this growth from figures for the whole of Ethiopia and Somalia given in the following table (population in thousands). Djibouti, Eritrea and Kenya have also exhibited high growth rates. And while fertility rates have decreased in this region since 1950 (although the decrease has been very small for Somalia), they are still high.

Small farmers in this region have traditionally incorporated fallow periods on their land, allowing regeneration of the soil and vegetation, and cow dung supplied fertility to the ground.

But with the gradual loss of woody vegetation for building wood and cooking fires, and the use of cow dung for fires rather than as fertilizer, the vegetation has suffered badly and the soil become increasingly infertile.

Now we comment on this situation in much the same way as we did with the conflict in Mediterranean countries.

News bulletins have focused on the human tragedy. We have seen endless photographs of severely malnourished and dying children, the long walks that many people have taken out of war torn areas of Somalia, the conditions in refugee camps and areas around them, and landscapes with almost no living vegetation and  scattered dead cows.

We do not dispute the real significance of these photos and the commentaries that have gone with them. But ask yourself the question: how often have we been told about underlying causes of the situation? Conflict has been stressed. But very little or nothing said about human population growth. And when experts have told us what needs to be done to remedy the situation, usually nothing is said about the need to bring down then stop population growth. Likewise the appeals for aid usually neglect to mention rapid population growth.

Finally, the neglect of human population growth as a cause of problems in the two situations we have dealt with, is typical of what happens in dealing with most of mankind’s problems that are investigated.