From The Fields

In 1798 Thomas Malthus predicted that the relative prosperity the human race was enjoying at the time would end in sorrow. He predicted that food production would increase arithmetically while the population would increase geometrically leading to shortages of food. It seems he has been wrong for 225 years now. Just in my 76 year lifetime, the yield of dryland corn has increased from about 30 bushels per acre to a nationwide average of 177 bushels per acre. 200-300 bushel yields under good growing conditions is common. So corn production has increased nearly 6-fold. Meanwhile the population is up by only about 2.5 times. Looks like Malthus got it backwards. Population has risen arithmetically while food production has increased geometrically.

Lesson learned, right. The population doomsters are laughably wrong and should be safely ignored. Except they keep popping up and spreading the same message of fear and need for massive government regulation. In 1968 Paul and Anne Erlich wrote "The Population Bomb" which said, The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

Well, it seems we survived the 70s. In fact in 1980 economist Julian Simon made a $10,000 bet with Erlich that 5 commodities of Erlich's choice would go down in inflation adjusted price by 1990. Erlich chose copper, tin, nickel, tungsten and chromium. He lost the bet.

When Al Gore became Vice President, he was given authority of the President's newly established President's Council on Sustainable Development. Gore's first priority was to make sure everyone in a position of authority in the Clinton Administration hewed religiously to the narrative of human caused global warming. Indeed, when the Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy testified before Congress that the scientific data did not support the hypothesis of global warming. he was summarily fired. Administrative state bureaucrats have toed the line ever since. Gore went on to produce the movie, An Inconvenient Truth which predicted apocalyptic dying polar bears, inundated coastal cities, spreading diseases, hurricanes and tornadoes wiping out cities, and food supplies exterminated by droughts. None of these dire predictions came to pass but Al Gore's net worth increased from $2 million to $399 million.

What's the point of all these scary stories other than Halloween was just a few days ago? It's that in politics, fear sells. If a politician is telling you to be afraid of something, best to hold your wallet in a very safe place.

Richard Fields reporting from Helsinki, Finland, the newest member of North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Finland, a country that maintained neutrality since the end of WW II applied and was accepted for NATO membership within weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In the last three weeks I have traveled to Krakow, Poland and seen Oscar Schindler's factory and Auschwitz and Birkenau, the concentration camps where millions of Jews were killed by the Nazis. I saw the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. And the KGB "Headquarters" in Vilnius, Lithuania where thousands of Lithuanian patriots were imprisoned, brutally interrogated and shipped off to near certain starvation in Siberian labor camps. Or shot in the convenient KGB on-site execution chamber. Same story different details in Latvia and Estonia. The Finns fought a brutal winter war against the Soviets. They lost territory but were able to avoid becoming a vassal state of the Soviet Union.

The Baltic State citizens who rode railroad cattle cars to Siberian labor camps were replaced by Russians. Many of their descendants are still there. Same story in Ukraine. One of Putin's talking points for his invasion of Ukraine is the protection of those Russian speaking Ukrainians.

The fear that they will be next on Russia's invasion list is palpable among Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Finns. Understandably. There is also an almost childlike faith that NATO will defend them. To their credit, these countries are all spending the 2% on GNP on defense that is a condition of NATO membership. Many of the NATO members of western and southern Europe are not.

But the elephant in the NATO room is the United States. To say that the U.S. is militarily overextended is an understatement. We have formal or implied commitments to defend Israel, Taiwan, and many other countries in addition to Ukraine. Our financial warfare against Russia, Iran and other countries is eroding our dollar as the world's reserve currency. Contrary to what the White House and the lapdog U.S. media are saying, Ukraine is not winning against Russia. It's a stalemate at best.

The CIA support during the Obama Administration given to the 2014 coup in Ukraine that overthrew a regime sympathetic to Russia is coming back to bite us.

Let's hope that that the bite does not lead to the escalation of war to the nuclear level.

Reporting from the Fields, I'm Richard Fields. See you next week.

Richard Fields here, reporting from Northern Europe. For the last three weeks I have been traveling in Poland and the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. I am now in Helsinki, Finland.

The recorded history and architecture of these countries goes back over 800 years. All of these countries have been independent nations only for a portion of that period. In the16th and 17th Centuries the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were ruled by one monarch and made up the largest and most populous Kingdom in Europe. Finland was part of the Swedish Kingdom for a few hundred years.

During World War II Poland, Finland and the Baltic States were the battlefield between Germany and the Soviet Union. Finland lost a lot of its Eastern territory to the Soviets. After the war, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were annexed into the Soviet Union. Anti-Soviet citizens of those Baltic countries were shipped into slavery and starvation in Siberia. They were replaced by ethnic Russians. Many of them and their descendants live there till this day. Poland became a satellite state to the Soviets. During the wartime occupation by Germany, upwards of 90% of the Jewish population in these countries was murdered. Over 6 million in total. I visited Auschwitz, one of the death camps where Jews were gassed to death by the millions.

I also visited the KGB "Headquarters" in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The entire basement was a prison for anyone or the family of anyone who opposed the Soviet occupation. Those lucky enough to survive the prison were sent to labor camps in Siberia on the shores of the Arctic Ocean where they were forced to build their own shelters out of driftwood and dirt and to fish in the freezing arctic waters to provide fish for Soviet soldiers. If they survived they did so by "stealing" some of the fish they caught. Many of those imprisoned in the KGB Headquarters were taken to an execution chamber in the building and shot to death. I talked to one of the survivors of the Siberian labor camps. He was 35 before he had a meal large enough to feel full. The number of people killed by Stalin through executions and starvation is estimated to be between 9 million and 60 million.

Visiting this part of the world and learning its history is a stark reminder of how evil humans can be to each other if they are convinced that those they are killing or enslaving are less than human "others". Nazis killed Jews, the Roma and the disabled. The Soviets killed anyone considered not a true-believer in the Socialist/Communist narrative of the government.

Mark Twain and others are reported to have quipped that history does not repeat but it rhymes. There's a lot of rhyming going on right now. The Hamas ruled Arabs in Gaza killing Jews. On the anniversary of the Yom Kipper war, no less. The Israeli response is to level Gaza and kill anyone who gets in the way. When there is no real viable option to get out of the way.

Russia invaded Ukraine. To protect the interest of the Russian speaking people in Eastern Ukraine. Never mind that the Russian speakers in Ukraine are descendants of the Russians that were sent to Ukraine to replace 100,000 or more Ukrainians who were sent to Siberia during the Stalin era.

China would like to regain control of Taiwan. Because.

Voters in the United States are supporting politicians who would love to please their defense industry patrons by getting us involved by proxy in all these global conflicts. Voters are forgetting that the "other" in Russia and China is a nuclear power. And the ally in Israel is also well equipped with nuclear weaponry. And wars have a way of escalating.

Reporting from the Fields, I'm Richard Fields. See you next week.

Fear of COVID and climate change fuel the admistrative state

An 11 year old boy was killed, allegedly in a road rage incident in Albuquerque, NM. That death was seized upon by the Governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham, to decree a 30 day ban on concealed and open gun carry rights in Bernalillo County where Albuquerque is located.

Any violent death is tragic. However, as a pretext for a ban on constitutional rights it is not justified. Particularly when it will, by the Governor's own admission, not work. Criminals will not obey the ban. The Sheriff of Bernalillo County has publicly refused to enforce the ban due to it being unconstitutional. U.S. District Court Judge David Urias, a Biden appointee, has blocked the ban. Multiple gun groups are suing to overthrow the ban. Governor Lujan Grisham knew most of this would happen before she issued the ban. Clearly she is attempting to appeal to the fears of those afraid of guns on an emotional level.

The larger issue, though, is that she has boldly and explicitly asserted that constitutional rights are not absolute. And that she, under her ability to declare a public health emergency, has the authority to cancel them at her whim.

The most obvious precedent for this sort of thinking are the numerous public health emergency decrees issued to deal with COVID. Mandatory masks in public. Mandatory vaccinations if you want to keep your job. Mandatory social distancing in public. Mandatory lockdowns of businesses and schools. All of them are constitutionally questionable. Is not being prevented from doing business a violation of Fifth Amendment property rights? Are not social distancing and lockdown orders violations of First Amendment rights of association?

In New Mexico, bans on carrying guns are blatant violations of Second Amendment rights. The Governor obviously does not think the Constitution means what it says but instead means what five Supreme Court Justices can be persuaded to say it says.

Hopefully the courts and law enforcement officers on the ground will continue to enforce what the Constitution actually says.