It's always a pleasure to encounter someone who makes courteous and lucid comments, and it's only polite to respond in kind.

I am familiar with 'Dune', though I find the sequels far less impressive than the original. If memory serves, the God-Emperor Leto resembled a giant slug - which could also describe Trump!

The Great Famine of 1845-52, between death and flight, depopulated Ireland by around 25%. The root causes, aside from the actual blight itself, were a British Whig government advocating laissez-faire capitalism as the solution to everything, and a system of absentee landlordism in which English peers owned vast Irish estates from which they squeezed every penny of income to be spent elsewhere, and on which they never set foot. Nobody was 'on the ground' except the agents and managers, who were under instruction to collect rents and nothing else. Thus a government solution was impossible, as this would have meant interference on the private property of the peerage, which at that time was unthinkable. Ludicrous, tragic, but utterly typical of the time.