White lies

Times Atlas 'wrong' on Greenland ice

 

Leading UK polar scientists say the Times Atlas of the World was wrong to assert that it has had to re-draw its map of Greenland due to climate change.

By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News

Publicity for the latest edition of the atlas, launched last week, said warming had turned 15% of Greenland's former ice-covered land "green and ice-free".

But scientists from the Scott Polar Research Institute say the figures are wrong; the ice has not shrunk so much.

The Atlas costs £150 ($237) and claims to be the world's "most authoritative".

The 13th edition of the "comprehensive" version of the atlas included a number of revisions made for reasons of environmental change since the previous one, published in 2007.

The break-up of some Antarctic ice shelves due to climate change, the shrinking of inland waters such as the Dead and Aral Seas, and the drying up of rivers such as the Colorado River are all documented.

But the glossy publicity sheets begin with the contention that "for the first time, the new edition of the (atlas) has had to erase 15% of Greenland's once permanent ice cover - turning an area the size of the United Kingdom and Ireland 'green' and ice-free.

"This is concrete evidence of how climate change is altering the face of the planet forever - and doing so at an alarming and accelerating rate."

The Scott Polar group, which includes director Julian Dowdeswell, says the claim of a 15% loss in just 12 years is wrong.

"Recent satellite images of Greenland make it clear that there are in fact still numerous glaciers and permanent ice cover where the new Times Atlas shows ice-free conditions and the emergence of new lands," they say in a letter that has been sent to the Times.

"We do not know why this error has occurred, but it is regrettable that the claimed drastic reduction in the extent of ice in Greenland has created headline news around the world.

"There is to our knowledge no support for this claim in the published scientific literature."

Many of the institute's staff are intimately involved in research that documents and analyses the impacts of climate change across the Arctic.

As such, they back the contention that rising temperatures are cutting ice cover across the region, including along the fringes of Greenland; but not anything like as fast as the Times Atlas claimed.

"It is... crucial to report climate change and its impact accurately and to back bold statements with concrete and correct evidence," they say.

The Times Atlas is not owned by The Times newspaper. It is published by Times Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, which is in turn owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

A spokesperson for HarperCollins said its new map was based on information provided by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

"While global warming has played a role in this reduction, it is also as a result of the much more accurate data and in-depth research that is now available," she said.

"Read as a whole, both the press release and the 13th edition of the Atlas make this clear."

The Importance of Culture

It is culture that creates economics, and not the other way around.

By ROGER SCRUTON

I first visited Greece 50 years ago, hitchhiking with a school friend from England, in search of the glorious world of Homer, Plato, and Thucydides. Of course, we didn't find that world. But we found something almost as remarkable, which was a place where the church and the priesthood dominated rural life, where villages were self-contained communities, where local saints enjoyed their festivals and where the old dances were still danced in the village squares, men in groups, and women in groups, dressed in the costumes that survived from Ottoman days, and rehearsing the old drama of the sexes with marriage as its eternal dénouement. It was a country that had yet to enter the modern world. Its rhythms were those of the village, where debts and duties were local, and where sun, sleep, and surrender managed the day. It was inconceivable to a young Anglo-Saxon visitor that such a country could be judged in the same terms as Germany or France, or that it could play a comparable role in an economy that included all three countries as equal partners.

At one point, running out of money, I joined the queue at a hospital in Athens, where you could give blood and be paid in drachmas. The presiding doctor leaped up to welcome the tall red-haired youth, and turned away the two small men who preceded me, judging their blood to be useless. The names of my unsuccessful rivals were Heracles and Dionysus. It was the only sign offered to me during that first visit that these people were descended from the Greeks to whom our civilization is owed.

I have no desire to return to Greece, dreading what the tourists and the property speculators have done to it. But I know that, whatever the changes, it is inconceivable that Greece should have developed in the same way and with the same rhythm as France or Germany. Of course the country has been modernized. Roads have been built and towns expanded. The tourist trade has wiped out the gentle manners of the villagers. Sexual intercourse has begun -- somewhat later than 1963,  which is when Philip Larkin famously dated it, but nevertheless with the same devastating effect on marriage and the family. No doubt the old modes of the folk songs have been forgotten, and no doubt the multinational brands have slapped their logos on shop fronts across the land. But for sure the culture of local obligation has remained. For sure people still regard leisure as more important than work, and debts as less important, the further away the creditor lies in the network of human relations. If you don't know this from visiting Greece, you could learn it easily enough from reading Kazantzakis, Ritzos, Seferis, or any other of the writers in that great moment of literary flourishing which succeeded the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. You could even get it from Louis de Bernières and Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Anybody with his eyes open and his heart in place would know that Greece is the product of a distinctive culture, and that this culture, however it develops, will always take the country in a direction and at a speed of its own.

YET THE ARCHITECTS of the euro did not know this. If they had known it, they would have known also that the effect of imposing a single currency on Greece and Germany would be to encourage Greece to transfer its debts to Germany, on the understanding that the further away the creditor the less the obligation to repay. They would have known that if the Greek political class can use sovereign debt to pay family, friends, and dependents, and to buy the votes needed to stay in office, that that is what the political class will do. They would have recognized that laws, obligations, and sovereignty don't have quite the same meaning in the Mediterranean as they do on the Baltic, and that in a society used to kleptocratic government the fairest way out of an economic crisis is by devaluation--in other words, by stealing equally from everybody.

Why didn't the architects of the euro know those things? The answer is to be found deep within the European project. For it was a project with a secret agenda, and that agenda was to destroy, and meanwhile to deny, the reality of nationhood. And since nations are the carriers of culture, this meant denying that culture matters. Cultural facts were simply imperceivable to the Eurocrats. Allowing themselves to perceive culture would be tantamount to recognizing that their project was an impossible one. This would have mattered less if they had another project with which to replace it. But--like all radical projects--that of the European Union was conceived without a Plan B. Hence it is destined to collapse and, in the course of its collapse, to drag our continent down. An enormous pool of pretense has accumulated at the center of the project, while the political class skirmishes at the edges, in an attempt to fend off the constant assaults of reality. But this pool of pretense is a festering wound at the heart of things, and one day it will burst and swamp us all with poison.

Thus we have to pretend that the long-observed distinctions between the Protestant north of our continent and the Catholic and Orthodox south is of no economic significance. Being a cultural fact it is imperceivable, notwithstanding Weber's attempt to make it central to economic history. The difference between the culture of common law and that of the Code Napoléon, between the Roman and the Ottoman legal legacies, between countries where law is certain and judges incorruptible and places where law is only the last resort in a system of bribes--all these differences have to be put out of mind. Times and speeds of work, and the balance between work and leisure, which go to the heart of every community since they define its relation to time, are to be ignored, or else regimented by a futile edict from the center. And everything is to be brought into line by those frightening courts--the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights--whose unelected judges never pay the cost of their decisions, and whose agenda of "non-discrimination" and "ever-closer union" is designed to wipe away the traces of local loyalties, family-based morality, and rooted ways of life. Not surprisingly, when you build an empire on such massive pretenses, it very soon becomes unstable.

IT WAS MARX WHO ARGUED that the foundation of social order and the motor of social change resides in economic structures, and that culture is merely the by-product--the assemblage of institutions and ideologies--that rises from the economic foundations and keeps them in place. Hence it was to Marx that we owed that first and disastrous attempt to organize society on economic principles alone, and to assume that culture will look after itself. In fact it is culture that creates economics, and not the other way round, and if any proof of this is needed we need only look at the result of the Marxist experiment. Better still, we might look at the successful economies in the modern world--the American for instance--and note the extent to which they have depended on a respect for law, on honest accounting, and on individual responsibility, the ethic of family life, and the forms of social interaction. To analyze all the strands that have been woven together to form the American capacity for long-term economic probity you would have to trace the culture of this country back to the founding and beyond. You would have to take account of Protestantism, the common law, the tradition of private colleges, and the little platoons of a society of volunteers. You would have to understand the frontier spirit, the deep local loyalties, and the cultural miscegenation that gave rise to jazz, Hollywood, and the Broadway musical.

Of course, I share the belief of many American conservatives that this culture is being lost, and indeed that America has taken fatal steps in the European direction. But this change has itself been initiated at the cultural level. Left to itself the American economy would not have incurred the truly fantastic debts that have been heaped on it by the maladministration of Bush and Obama. In each case cultural factors have driven the leadership to hold the country hostage to ideological goals. And the same is true of Europe. It was not economics but culture that engendered the euro--a culture of a ruling class at war with the people of Europe, wishing to establish trans-national government at all costs, and hoping to wipe away yet another trace of nationhood. By destroying those ancient currencies through which the people of Europe had expressed and managed their apartness, the European elite hoped to make a decisive move toward the goal of Union. Instead they have burdened the continent with new debts, new resentments, and a looming disaster that was not foreseen only because it had been ruled out as impossible. 

Driving in the wrong direction

Erdogan Has Good Reason To Be Crazy

by David P. Goldman 

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan brings to mind the story about the housewife who calls her husband during rush hour. “Be careful driving home on the Beltway, dear,” she advises. “The news says that there’s a maniac driving in the wrong direction.” “What do you mean, ‘a maniac’?,” he replies. “Everybody’s driving in the wrong direction!”

Now that Turkey has threatened Europe with a “freeze in relations” if Cyprus (as planned) assumes the presidency of the European Union in 2012, it must seem to Erdogan that everyone is driving in the wrong direction. Earlier this month Turkey declared “null and void” the United Nations’ Palmer Commission report, which supported Israel’s right to enforce a blockade against Gaza. That was a minor gaffe, because United Nations dicta have the authority of revelation to the liberal media, except, of course, when they support Israel. It’s one thing for Turkey to freeze relations with Israel — we take it for granted these days that everybody hates Israel — but the Europeans? Everybody likes the Europeans, who have replaced their defense ministries with an answering machine that says, “We surrender.” And over Cyprus? Even Russia, Turkey’s key trading partner and the host for millions of Turkish guest workers, is aghast at Erdogan’s tantrum. Russia has strong ties to Cyprus.

The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman blames Israel for not apologizing to the Turks. But one doesn’t want to apologize to Erdogan. You don’t want to talk to him. Don’t make eye contact. We New Yorkers learn that on the subway. It seems mad to take on Washington, Brussels, Moscow, as well as Jerusalem, all in the same week. What is driving the Turkish prime minister round the twist?

The Arab world is in free fall. Leave aside Syria, whose regime continues to massacre its own people, and miserable Yemen, and post-civil war Libya. Egypt is dying. Erdogan’s “triumphal” appearance in Egypt served as a welcome distraction to Egyptians — welcome, because what they think about most of the time is disheartening. What’s on the mind of the Egyptian people these days? According to the Arab-language local media, it’s finding enough calories to get through the day.

Egypt imports half its caloric consumption, the price of its staple wheat remains at an all-time high, and most Egyptians can’t afford to buy it. The government subsidizes bread, but according to the Egyptian news site Youm7 (“The Seventh Day”), the country now faces “an escalating crisis in subsidized flour.” Packages of subsidized flour are not reaching the intended recipients, in part because the Solidarity Ministry hasn’t provided the promised shipments to stores, and in part because subsidized flour and bread are diverted to the black market. A small loaf of government-issue bread costs 5 piasters, or less than one U.S. cent, but it can’t be found in many areas, as the Solidarity Ministry, provincial government, and bakers trade accusations of responsibility for supply problems. Poor Egyptians get ration cards, but flour often is not available to card-holders. Rice, a substitute for wheat, also is in short supply, and the price has risen recently to 5.5 Egyptian pounds per kilo from 3.75 pounds.

Most Egyptians barely eat enough to keep body and soul together, and many are hungry. That is about to get much, much worse: The country is short about $20 billion a year. The central bank reports that the country’s current account deficit in the fiscal year ended July 1 swung from a $3.4 billion surplus in the fiscal year ended July 2010 to a deficit of $9.2 billion in the fiscal year ended July 2011. Almost all of the shift into red ink occurred since February, suggesting an annualized deficit of around $20 billion. Egypt’s reserves fell about $11 billion since the uprising began in February. Who’s going to cough up that kind of money? Not Turkey, whose own balance-of-payment deficit stands at 11% of GDP and whose currency is collapsing, as shown in the chart below:

Not the U.S. Congress, for that matter, nor the hard-pressed Europeans, who have their own problems, nor the Saudis, who can be counted on for a few billion here and there, but not $20 billion a year. I reiterate: Egypt will make Somalia look like a picnic.

It doesn’t occur to liberals that there are problems for which solutions might not exist; the notion that cultures and countries may suffer from tragic flaws does not enter into consideration, because if that were true, there would be no need for liberals. That is why Friedman, the bellwether of liberal opinion, sounds stupider than anyone else when he describes Israel as “alone and adrift at sea.” If only Netanyahu had offered his own peace plan, complains Friedman…to Hamas? A news analysis in the Times meanwhile reports the Obama administration’s consternation that every pillar of its foreign policy is crumbling at once.

If the Obama administration and the New York Times are pulling their hair out over the disintegration of Arab society, consider how Tayyip Erdogan must feel. His economic boom is about to come to a crashing end, and his country is doomed demographically to split up when Kurds outnumber Turks not long from now, as I argued here recently. And his ambitions for Turkish hegemony in the Muslim world have run directly into an existential crisis that is long past solution. That would make anyone crazy. Don’t think of the Turkish leader as an outpatient who lost his meds. In the spirit of political correctness, we might call him “existentially challenged. ”

It would be easy to overestimate just how dangerous Erdogan might become. The estimable David Warren calls him “the man who could trigger a world war.” That seems alarmist. Whom is Erdogan going to fight? Any military provocation would lead to a further collapse of the Turkish currency, and a deep setback for the Turkish economy.

Homeopathy in action

EU integration is the last thing we need

No matter how crisis-ridden and corrupt the EU becomes, the elites’ solution is always: ‘More EU!’

by Jason Walsh

Announcing plans for greater European political integration, German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy promised late last month that they would defend the Euro. Their plans include appointing a Eurozone president to oversee financial governance for the entire Eurozone group; all 17 member states writing guarantees of ‘balanced budgets’ into their constitutions; and introducing a tax on financial transactions.

The announcement came hot on the heels of just another ordinary week in the Eurozone: markets in turmoil, bank shares plummeting and demands for ever-greater austerity. In August, the share price of French bank Société Générale, stuffed full of delicious Greek debt, took a precipitous 15 per cent tumble, very nearly taking much of the rest of France’s banking system down with it, while the EU was forced to gobble up €22 billion worth of Italian and Spanish government bonds – a bizarre spectacle that saw Italy, the eighth-largest economy in the world, in danger of joining the bailout club.

There’s no doubt about it: the EU is in panic mode. While the urgency of the crisis is rather new, the fact remains that the whole European project lost its sheen quite some time ago. This fact is borne out by the message sent by voters to the EU on the few occasions they have been allowed to express an opinion in a meaningful poll.

The past few years haven’t exactly been kind to those who seek closer European integration. On top of the markets’ lack of faith in the EU, there have been clear signs that the various European publics have had enough of the EU project. First there was the rejection of the European constitution by the French and Dutch electorates. Then came the Irish people’s rejection, followed by grudging acceptance, of the Lisbon Treaty. Vast amounts of money were later sunk into propping up the Greek, Irish and Portuguese economies (and, ultimately, French and German banks) and then there have been a couple of years of on-and-off rioting in Greece.

And yet, every time the crisis deepens, two things happen: the EU and its defenders tighten the austerity screw into people’s heads and make blustering calls for ‘more Europe’.

A good example was a recent piece in the Guardian by Nicholas Berggruen, the founder of a private investment company, and Nouriel Roubini, an economist and member of the Council on the Future of Europe think tank. They bluntly stated: ‘More European integration, not less, is the only solution.’ According to this pair, nationalist demons stalk the continent. In fairness, they also admit that there is a ‘democratic deficit’ at the heart of the EU, but their idea that the European Parliament needs to be ‘empowered’ is misguided. This may make the EU, as a bloc, more democratic, but at the price of weakening national parliaments. The authors, like many others, fall into the trap of seeing the EU’s problems as a mere technical matter that can be magicked away by, you guessed it, more Europe.

In whose interests does the EU actually work? One needn’t descend to the level of the fevered conspiratorial fantasies or banal complaints about the EU being a ‘club for bosses’ to have some doubts about its composition and mission.

Since its foundation, the EU has been decried by Eurosceptics as a vehicle for the creation of a single European superstate, but aside from a few kite-flyers no one has seriously suggested a United States of Europe. Yes, the EU constantly pushes for greater integration, but this is also coupled with denial that it is in fact doing so. Even the father of the EU, Jean Monnet, eventually accepted that his dream of a united Europe was an unlikely one. The powers that the EU has are, as often as not, granted to it by national parliaments willingly ceding them in a desperate bid to dodge political responsibility.

The EU has a remarkable propensity for funding propaganda programmes and awarding study grants to those who seek to write complimentary things about it. What it does not do is openly argue that a single European political entity would be beneficial for the people of Europe.

The EU’s subterranean drive for integration has come to a head since the European Central Bank (ECB) decided to engage in a series of bailouts to Greece (whose exit from the Euro now looks inevitable), as well as to Ireland and Portugal. Ostensibly designed to stop the ‘contagion’ spreading to larger countries, the bailouts are in fact fund transfers to France and Germany. They take money out of the bruised economies in the hope, ultimately, of propping-up the larger ones that lent to them.

Now, ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet has called for the creation of a single Eurozone finance ministry. The implications of any such move would be staggering: a vast chunk of national sovereignty would be gone in one fell swoop, with countries’ forced to implement EU diktat, not only in general terms as is the case now, but actually in minute detail.

Bailout countries already have the parameters of their budgets defined by the so-called troika of the EU, ECB and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Few have stopped to notice that the IMF, long the bogeyman of transnational organisations, is asking for significantly less in the way of pain than the supposedly cuddly, we’re-all-in-it-together EU. It is also striking that there hasn’t been any serious attempt in any of the bailout countries to implement policies that would lead to growth. Investment is out; higher taxes and swingeing cuts are in. This inevitably leads to further depression in consumer demand and, ultimately, deepening of the recession.

Plans now being mooted would further centralise economic and fiscal policy in the hands of the EU elite, away from the national parliaments and, ultimately, electorates. It is hard to interpret the Franco-German plans for a common corporate-taxation rate as anything other than a precursor for full tax-harmonisation within the Eurozone. Such moves, and the imposition of direct EU taxes, would diminish the right of national governments to set fiscal policy and it would further strengthen the EU as a political entity.

Other ideas rejected - so far - by Merkel and Sarkozy are no less interfering. For example, the proposed beefing-up of the bailout scheme, currently known as the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), into a full-blown European Monetary Fund (EMF) is contingent on handing Brussels direct oversight of national budgets. Even the more popular idea of ECB-issued Eurobonds (proposed by Italy’s finance minister Giulio Tremonti and supported by none other than billionaire financier George Soros) to replace the current ad-hoc system is only workable if the EU’s largest economy, Germany, is willing to swallow it. That will only be possible if Germany gets to set fiscal policy in other countries via EU proxy.

When it comes to the Eurozone crisis, the proposed cure is at least as bad as the disease. But in demanding more power the EU is appealing to a trend for removing control of national bodies from politicians and, ultimately, national electorates. Last month, Ireland created the Fiscal Advisory Council, an EU-mandated ‘independent body’ that will oversee Ireland’s budget-making process. Soon after it came to power, Britain’s Lib-Con coalition handed fiscal power over to the unelected Office for Budget Responsibility without the need for diktat from the EU.

Of course, magical solutions to the Eurozone crisis don’t exist. Living in Ireland, I don’t much relish the collapse of, or an Irish exit from, the Euro. It’s one thing to argue we should never have joined; it’s entirely another thing to say we should walk away now. As the experience of Iceland shows, with the massive devaluation akin to that of its currency after the banking crisis, the consequences would be to drive up the cost of imports and drive down living standards.

A currency worth slightly more than a handful of gravel may encourage tourism and, eventually, exports (bearing in mind that manufacturing plants are not built overnight). But, rather more immediately, it would also render purchasing anything other than life’s most basic necessities – not to mention repaying Euro-denominated personal loans and mortgages – a Sisyphean task.

Nevertheless, if we accept that it was the basic divergence of Eurozone economies that laid the foundation for the Euro crisis, why on Earth would we assume that the answer is to do anything and everything we can to keep the Euro together? Tying together fiscal policy across the Eurozone would come at a huge political cost and does not guarantee an end to the slump.

Bizarre radicalism

Allotments: a plot against modern society?

 The fad for growing your own food is not radical – it’s a retreat from the attempt to change the world.

by Rob Lyons

About nine years ago, my partner applied for a plot at our local allotments in south-east London. Given the fact that demand for local-authority allotments seems to be greatly outstripping supply, she was told she might have to wait three years. Instead, she got a call just a few months later. There had been a crackdown on untended plots by the allotment committee and a half-sized plot had become free.

So, one damp Sunday in February 2003, the two of us plus two friends went down to have a bash at turning the soil over. First, the soil was very obviously soaking wet and therefore heavy. Secondly, it seemed to be about 90 per cent clay. We would have had more joy taking up pottery with that soil than growing food. After a couple of hours of backbreaking toil, we’d managed to roughly turn over about a quarter of it. Clearly, this grow-your-own malarkey was hard work, especially when you’re completely clueless about what you’re doing.

Eventually, thanks to the generosity of our fellow allotment holders, we had a couple of rows of spuds in and a couple of rows of broad beans. Progress was slow, but the weather improved, as did the soil thanks to digging a lot of manure and compost into it.

Then the council had to repair some water pipes at the cemetery next door, which also supplied water to the allotments. They just forgot to switch on the water to the allotments afterwards, so we had three weeks with next-to-no water and blazing sunshine. While my working hours were pretty flexible, which meant I could get up to the allotments most days to water the plants, my partner’s job meant she couldn’t take her turn very often.

So I was spending a chunk of my time every day watering plants on an allotment that I didn’t ask for, then spending more time at the weekends (when we weren’t away) digging up more clay and watching black fly eat the green beans despite our best efforts.

All this effort produced about a pound and a half of small potatoes and some bean-shaped food for flies. Admittedly, they were really very nice potatoes, because there is something unique about eating something that’s just been ripped from the ground. Sadly, or maybe not so sadly, that was it for allotments and me as we then moved out of London for a while and had to give the plot up.

In those few months when I worked that allotment I learned a few things.

Firstly, I learned that growing your own food is a lot harder than buying it from a supermarket. I feel very confident that even if we had stuck with it and developed the skills and experience to make the plot more productive, it would be far less time-consuming to work extra hours at the job I knew well and pay for my food from the supermarket than to spend it with a fork in my hand on that plot. There’s only one situation in which growing your own makes economic sense in the UK, as far as I can see, and that’s when you’re retired or unemployed and you don’t or can’t get a wage for your labour. Then growing your own might make more sense, though you’d still need to fork out (as it were) for tools, seeds, compost and so on.

Secondly, eating your own produce is very satisfying. You’ve managed to master nature, to bend it to your will or at least exploit its workings in a creative fashion, after which you can delude yourself that you’ve obtained a ‘free’ dinner.

Thirdly, the allotment was a pretty decent community, with people willing to help each other out, especially the newbies like us. I really hadn’t thought about allotments very much before I had one, but there are clearly an awful lot of people who enjoy gardening and growing their own food.

Fourthly, the social anthropology of the allotment was fascinating. There seemed to be basically two tribes. On the one hand, there were the Arthur Fowlers (after the old EastEnders character), the middle-aged working-class people who’d been there for a long time. The Arthur Fowlers were by no means all male or white, but they did it as a hobby, as a way of relaxing and getting out of the house. Running an allotment for them wasn’t remotely political.

On the other hand, there were the Greenies, who were mostly female and were growing their own as part of an ethical, eco-friendly lifestyle. They’d be composting every scrap of kitchen waste they had and they would kick up merry hell if anyone else tried to use a chemical weedkiller on the site or use a rotavator to dig up the soil (even though, with that clay soil, we really, really could have done with someone doing that for us).

As a result, there were a few tensions between the Arthur Fowlers and the Greenies about how things should be done.

I have to agree with the Arthur Fowlers: I don’t think there’s anything radical about growing your own food. It might be fun, if you like that kind of thing, but I think that to the extent that there has been a turn towards growing your own, it’s a conservative trend. For all its many failings, capitalist society has created a vast division of labour that has made producing many things, including food, very much more efficient than it was in the past. That has freed up millions of people to do other kinds of work while giving us cheaper food with greater security of supply. In the 1930s, people in the UK spent about 30 per cent of their income on food; now it’s about 10 per cent, while food shortages are pretty much unheard of. Why would we want to go back to subsistence farming?

As it happens, growing your own is no more than a gesture. The reality is that people who grow their own are still dependent on the market for much, if not most, of what they eat. It also feels like a retreat, a response to the apparent impossibility of political change and a sense that the world is going pear-shaped. To grow your own is to hunker down in a manner that says I don’t need the rest of you. I’ll grow my own food, make my own clothes, and so on. There may have been a TV comedy, The Good Life, inspired by self-sufficiency, but it seems more like a fantasy, a piece of shit-shovelling role play rather than a serious alternative way of life.

More positively, and perhaps in slight contradiction to what I’ve just said, growing your own also becomes a way of being part of a community. In that, it is not alone. Many people are rightly dissatisfied when the only basis on which they interact with other people is through work, a quick hello to the neighbours and chatting at the school gate if you’ve got kids. Hence the rise of all sorts of weird and wonderful social clubs, from knitting circles to book clubs. The things that would have created a sense of community in the past, like the church, the Women’s Institute, the trade union or the local Labour or Conservative club, are nothing like the force they used to be in society.

Tending an allotment can be an enjoyable pastime, a creative challenge. But pretending that it represents some kind of basis for radical political change or that there is something particularly rewarding about communing with nature seems bizarre.

The strange slow death of Euro

"Orderly default" in Greece? Good luck.

By Nin-Hai Tseng

The opportunity for debt-troubled Europe to avoid a disaster is shrinking. Fast. Over the weekend, Greek leaders struggled to agree to a set of radical budget cuts as the country approaches an October deadline to qualify for $11 billion in aid without which it will certainly default on its growing debt.

As the bailout of Greece spirals into a costly mess, officials have raised the idea of an "orderly default." Germany's economy minister Philipp Roesler publicly introduced the concept and, needless to say, the mere mention of bankruptcy was anything but calming for global investors.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel stepped in, telling BBC News that the euro zone must stick together and that there aren't any procedures underway to ease Greece into a default that promises a softer landing. Merkel may have been trying to allay investors' fears, but most now see it for what it is: Greece is already preparing for what it hopes will be an orderly default, even though the country has not yet technically declared bankruptcy.

An orderly default is equivalent to restructuring debt -- whereby creditors accept a loss while debtors agree to pay most of its debts. In July, European Union leaders agreed to a rescue plan for Greece worth more than $150 billion, which would help it cover its financing needs for the next several years. One of the key elements of the plan, which is awaiting final approval, is a bond swap deal in which Greece's debt burden is reduced, while the country's private-sector creditors agree to accept new bonds worth less than their original holdings.

In the past, other nations have pulled off orderly defaults successfully. Could Greece, Ireland, Italy and other troubled nations in the euro zone do the same? Judging by the general surge in bond yields of the peripheral countries, it looks less likely.

What happens after a Greek default

Developing nations have completed orderly defaults before. For instance, the Brady bonds in the late 1980s and early 1990s arose from an effort to reduce debt held by mostly Latin American countries that were frequently defaulting on loans.

The Ukraine and Pakistan have also defaulted in orderly fashion. So did Uruguay in 2003. The country successfully did a voluntary bond swap in which the government offered to exchange bonds coming due in a few years for similar ones that matured later. The move was enough to convince investors that its problems were temporary and that with time, Uruguay would be better off since its growth prospects were strong.

But for Greece, economists believe austerity measures attached to its rescue package will slow economic growth and weaken the country's competitiveness for years to come. What's more, orderly defaults in industrialized nations are essentially unprecedented, which partly explains why investors are so spooked by what's happening in the euro zone.

"One of the founding pillars is this concept that the debt of industrialized countries is risk free," says Jacob Funk Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "Markets are asking if it turns out there's risk in Greece maybe there are other countries in the industrialized world that face the same issues."

Hope for a soft landing

One of the big hopes, if the euro zone's debt crisis worsens, is that it would force a larger rescue fund, such as dramatic expansion of the European Financial Stability Facility. Italy is one of the euroz one's biggest debtors and its heavy debts have raised questions about the health of European banks, which have bought bundles of Italian bonds. The problem is that Europe's emergency bailout resources are far from enough to support anything more than smaller countries such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland.

One of the glaring weaknesses that the debt crisis has exposed is the lack of a common treasury in the construction of the euro, financier and businessman George Soros has said. While the EFSF is tasked with providing a safety net for the eurozone as a whole, the fund merely has the ability to raise money, leaving governments of member countries with authority over how to spend it.

"This renders the EFSF useless in responding to a crisis; it has to await instruction from the member countries," Soros wrote earlier this month in The New York Review of Books.

To be sure, euro zone leaders did widen the EFSF some but refused other bigger expansions during a summit in July. Committing much more money would likely have helped convince global markets that the fund is big enough to can handle just about anything -- even Italy. Several key governments, including France and Berlin, oppose strengthening the fund. And understandably so, since agreeing to pledging ever-growing sums of money to weak European states could strain the finances of some governments while causing political havoc for those dealing with disgruntled voters.

Nevertheless, the International Monetary Fund has urged euro zone leaders that a much bigger fund is needed. It remains to be seen how much influence the global lender has, but perhaps the possibility that the organization might share some of the financial burden in resolving the crisis could bring more support for a much grander EFSF.

A default -- however orderly or disorderly -- hasn't been able to calm markets. Spooked investors might likely find calm in an expanded EFSF

Advocating liberty

Democracy Versus Liberty

By W. Williams

It is truly disgusting for me to hear politicians, national and international talking heads and pseudo-academics praising the Middle East stirrings as democracy movements. We also hear democracy as the description of our own political system. Like the founders of our nation, I find democracy and majority rule a contemptible form of government.

You say, "Whoa, Williams, you really have to explain yourself this time!"

I'll begin by quoting our founders on democracy. James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 10, said that in a pure democracy, "there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual." At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Virginia Gov. Edmund Randolph said, "... that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy." John Adams said, "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." Alexander Hamilton said, "We are now forming a Republican form of government. Real Liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship."

The word "democracy" appears nowhere in the two most fundamental documents of our nation — the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Our Constitution's Article IV, Section 4, guarantees "to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." If you don't want to bother reading our founding documents, just ask yourself: Does our pledge of allegiance to the flag say to "the democracy for which it stands," or to "the Republic for which it stands"? Or, did Julia Ward Howe make a mistake in titling her Civil War song "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"? Should she have titled it "The Battle Hymn of the Democracy"?

What's the difference between republican and democratic forms of government? John Adams captured the essence when he said, "You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe." That means Congress does not grant us rights; their job is to protect our natural or God-given rights.

For example, the Constitution's First Amendment doesn't say Congress shall grant us freedom of speech, the press and religion. It says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..."

Contrast the framers' vision of a republic with that of a democracy. Webster defines a democracy as "government by the people; especially: rule of the majority." In a democracy, the majority rules either directly or through its elected representatives. As in a monarchy, the law is whatever the government determines it to be. Laws do not represent reason. They represent force. The restraint is upon the individual instead of government. Unlike that envisioned under a republican form of government, rights are seen as privileges and permissions that are granted by government and can be rescinded by government.

To highlight the offensiveness to liberty that democracy and majority rule is, just ask yourself how many decisions in your life would you like to be made democratically. How about what car you drive, where you live, whom you marry, whether you have turkey or ham for Thanksgiving dinner? If those decisions were made through a democratic process, the average person would see it as tyranny and not personal liberty. Is it no less tyranny for the democratic process to determine whether you purchase health insurance or set aside money for retirement? Both for ourselves, and our fellow man around the globe, we should be advocating liberty, not the democracy that we've become where a roguish Congress does anything upon which they can muster a majority vote.