Opus 2022-265: Hunger and Hacks

Reading history can help us deal with our present fears.  I am currently reading a book called The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 by Canon John O’Rourke.  It is available by downlead from Project Gutenberg.  I have found that many people know about the great potato famine that drove waves of Irish emigration.  It is the events around it that I find reassuring because they reflect on the panic that so many are trying to create around the world.

The cause of the famine was not a potato blight.  That is what the books tell us and there was a problem with the potato crop.  It failed.  That failure put many people in the path of starvation but not because there was no food.  It is restated several times by the time I am a fourth way through the book but here is one,

"That the people of Ireland, in their bitter hours of misfortune, have the strongest right to impeach the criminality of the ministers of the crown, inasmuch as it has pleased a merciful Providence to favour Ireland in the present season with a most abundant crop of oats. Yet, whilst the Irish harbours are closed against the importation of foreign food, they are left open for the exportation of Irish grain, an exportation which has already amounted in the present season to a quantity nearly adequate to feed the entire people of Ireland, and to avert the now certain famine; thus inflicting upon the Irish people the abject misery of having their own provisions carried away to feed others, whilst they themselves are left contemptuously to starve.” Kindle location 1293-1298

The potato failed but there was a bumper crop of other foods.  The problem was not a lack of food but a surplus of political shenanigans.  England controlled Ireland and made it illegal for the Irish to import food that did not first get unloaded in an English port and then loaded again.  They also looked at crops like oats as a cash crop and were not about to leave them for the Irish to eat.

The government in London knew the problem and did a lot of talking but at the point I am in the book they were doing nothing but talk.  I am assuming since the famine was so bad that they kept talking and taking their tea breaks.

There were other political causes of hunger around the world.  This is just one example.

Then you have what we like to call “climate change.”  It is a common occurrence in the history of the world.  Ireland got there share.

"’In the beginning of November, 1739, the weather,’ says O'Halloran, ‘was very cold, the wind blowing from the north east, and this was succeeded by the severest frost known in the memory of man, which entirely destroyed the potatoes, the chief support of the poor.’[17] It is known to tradition as the ‘great frost,’ the ‘hard frost,’ the ‘black frost,’ etc.”  Kindle Location 445-448

Then we have another familiar story.

“To add to the miseries of the people there was a great drought all the winter and spring.”  Kindle Location 471-472

And then they went through torrential rains that rotted the potatoes in addition to the blight.

Does any of this sound familiar?  It should.  It is very similar to what we are going through.  There is nothing we can do about the weather except accept that it is part of the natural cycle of the earth.  The politics also seem like we are being run into the ground.  Do what you can on that.  If nothing else, wake up to people you have voted for that are backing the current politics of the Progressives.

I think it fits into Solomon’s statement,

(Ecc 1:9 KJV)  The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

homo unius libri