Is the fat lady ready to sing?

Three cheers for the second Egyptian uprising

Those confused by the return of the masses in Cairo have failed to learn a key lesson of history: democratic protesters are not easily placated.

By Brendan O’Neill

It isn’t only Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and the rest of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Armed Forces who threaten to get swept aside by the return of the Egyptian people to the streets. So too do the Western prejudices and paternalistic attitudes towards Egyptians, which frothed to the top of public debate when Tahrir Square Take #1 took place in February.

First there was the idea that in ousting Hosni Mubarak, their much-hated, undemocratic president, the Egyptian people had neatly executed a ‘revolution’ and should now return home, like good little girls and boys. Egyptians were patted on the back by Western officials and op-ed writers, with even Baroness Ashton, the EU oligarchy’s unelected High Representative for Foreign Affairs, saying: ‘We pay tribute to the Egyptian people for the manner in which these events have unfolded.’ That is: well done, you got shot of Mubarak, now calm down. Yet the Egyptian people are clearly aware that what took place in February was a palace coup, not a revolution; it was the reordering of the Mubarak regime by one-time Mubarakans under pressure from the Egyptian masses. The latest uprising confirms that it is the Egyptian people, not baronesses or liberal leader-writers, who will decide when a ‘revolution’ has occurred.

The second delusion shot down by the new democratic surge is the notion that the original uprising would give birth to an Islamic theocracy. No sooner had these brown people in jeans taken to the streets than observers were fretting about the emergence of ‘another Iran’. Proving they’ve never got over the shock of ’79, many worried out loud if Tahrir Square was not so much a ‘cradle of democracy’ as a ‘cradle of theocracy’, overseen by the crazies of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet the latest uprising is a massive kick in the eye to the Brotherhood, which was expecting to do well in next week’s parliamentary elections. The Brotherhood has condemned the fresh outbreak of democratic agitation, because where it wants simply to win bits of power from the military regime, the protesters are demanding the complete dismantling of the military regime before the elections. The notion that the original Tahrir Squarers were the unwitting dupes of Islamic overlords spoke to the prejudices of Western observers who freak out whenever people ‘over there’ make a stab for mass democracy. The latest uprising proves that Egyptians are as happy to piss off cautious clerics as they are powerful presidents.

And third, there was the idea that Egyptians needed the assistance, even the say-so, of the Twitterati before they dared to launch their original uprising. Back then, amongst radicals and incontinent Wikileakers, it was fashionable to claim that it was thanks to the brave revelations of public figures like Julian Assange, and to the 140-character tweets of Troubled of Tunbridge Wells, that Egyptians got both the info and the cojones they needed to take on Mubarak. As Assange said, Wikileaks helped Egypt by ‘creating an attitude towards freedom of expression’. Yet the new uprising shows that Egyptians don’t need their ‘attitudes’ carved or massaged by caring outsiders, by those London- or New York-based bearers of the White Tweeters’ Burden. Indeed, far from aping their alleged Western patrons, Egyptians are now opting to do something quite different: as Western radicals make themselves voluntarily homeless by camping in public squares, and refusing ‘on principle’ to say what their principles are, Egyptians are taking a more confrontational approach with a pretty clear aim: to get rid of the military council.

So it isn’t only Egypt’s military council which should be trembling in its boots at the reappearance of the Egyptian masses in public life. So should those Westerners who tried either to patronise the Egyptian uprising out of existence, by shouting ‘Well done! Back to normality now!’, or who sought to scaremonger it into submission by saying ‘Islamist hotheads are behind the whole thing! Let’s be careful!’ Indeed, so uncomfortable are many observers with the return of the throng in Cairo and elsewhere that they are now implicitly backing the unelected military council over the democracy-demanding protesters. A Daily Mail commentator argues that although ‘there is no doubt that Egypt’s military regime has behaved, and will continue to behave, with great brutality… as bad as the military regime may be, the most likely alternative of a Muslim Brotherhood regime would be worse’. In short, it would be better to keep the military in place rather than a) give in to the protesters’ insistence that it be swept aside, and b) allow elections in which Islamists would probably win a lot seats. For some desperate Western observers, the military council is a useful check on the Egyptian hordes’ distasteful political desires.

All these onlookers who are taken aback by Tahrir Square Take #2 – whether it’s EU officials who thought the whole thing was over with the exit of Mubarak or radical leftists who are can’t understand why Egyptians started a new uprising when the word ‘Egypt’ wasn’t even trending on Twitter – have simply failed to learn one of the key lessons of history. Which is that when groups of protesting people get a sense of their own power, of their ability to shape events and make history, they are likely to continue pushing further and harder and to try to go beyond their initially fairly limited demands. Having relatively easily elbowed aside Mubarak, a man who had ruled Egypt for so long (30 years) that many youth had never known anything different, Egyptians now fancy that they can probably get rid of a military council, too. The grovelling apologies issued by the council for the violence it visited upon the second uprising will further convince protesters that this regime is weak and can be done away with. Democratic uprisings are rarely satisfied by being offered ‘a bit of democracy’ (which is a contradiction in terms, anyway). Rather, the protesters will increasingly feel that they want the whole thing, and not next week, with parliamentary elections organised by a military council, but right now.

Yet despite recent events, one Western delusion persists: the idea, amongst more radical commentators, that the reason the original uprising didn’t go very far is because it was ruthlessly squished by Arab authoritarians and external interference. According to one Guardian columnist, the failure of the first Tahrir Square movement can be put down to ‘savage repression, foreign intervention, counter-revolution and the return of the old guard’. Sadly, things are far more complicated than such a simplistic appraisal would have us believe. One of the key – if not the key – reasons that the first uprising fizzled out is because the Egyptian protesters eschewed leadership and ideology in favour of making a public spectacle of their understandable angst. Foreshadowing the Indignados movement in Spain and the even more decrepit Occupy movement in New York and London, the first Egyptian uprising self-consciously disavowed leadership structures and any programme of ideas or demands, so that, in the words of one Egyptian writer, there was ‘a complete absence of ideological rhetoric’ in Tahrir Square in February.

This failure to lead and elucidate, the inability to put forward and pursue clear demands and ideas, needs to be seen within a new global context of an unwillingness to clarify political problems. From Egypt to Greece to New York, protesters now self-consciously refuse to engage in anything resembling a process of political clarification in favour of simply making an emotional statement – whether it’s indignation in Spain or victimhood in NYC. The tragic consequences of disavowing politics in this way can best be seen in the Arab Spring, where the old regimes, despite being rotten, unpopular and illegitimate, have been given great leeway to reorganise themselves courtesy of the failure of the protesters to make a final push for power. That is what happened in Egypt, as elsewhere in the Arab world: the uprisings put questions of power and authority on the table, but were unable to resolve them in any meaningful way. Let’s hope that the second Egyptian uprising will go some way towards clarifying the enormity of what is at stake here, and the importance of the Egyptian people moving from Tahrir Square into the heart of power itself.

Suicide is not painless

Emission Controls: The Exodus Begins

By Peter C. Glover

Rio Tinto Alcan is closing its Northumberland aluminium smelting plant in north-east England – a direct result of EU climate legislation. The closure of the decades old smelting plant is devastating for an area with already high unemployment. It is also a poignant closure for me personally.

Back in the 1950s, 60s and 70s my father owned a pioneering fibre glass business in the north-east. His firm was engaged by Alcan to replace much of the old corroding metal infrastructure, with more chemical-friendly, polypropylene piping and fibreglass-lined tanks. Between school terms, I often helped him. It was quite a learning curve standing 90 feet in the air on rickety old scaffolding being told not to step in any puddles that “may be acid”. So much for health and safety back then.

Not that the Rio Tinto Alcan plant isn’t making a profit, mind you. Even in an era of spiking energy costs generally, it is. But in 2013 the plant faces a profit-erasing rise of around £56 million to enable it to comply with a further tranche of European and UK carbon legislation. As Rio Tinto’s CEO Jacynthe Côté told the London Financial Times, “It is clear that the smelter is no longer a sustainable business because its energy costs are increasing significantly, due largely to emerging legislation.” Note the sting in the tail. Not, as politicians often like to insist, due to rising energy costs, but “emerging legislation”.

Rio Tinto’s plant closure is just one part of a plan to divest the company of $8 billion of aluminium assets. How much is due to “emerging legislation” on emission controls is impossible to say. But expect more jobs to be shed elsewhere.

Britain’s huge energy-intensive chemical industry contributes £30 million a day to the UK economy. But it is clear already that new green legislation has begun to force early closures and a business exodus to foreign parts. Steve Elliott, chief executive for the Chemical Industries Association, told BBC News in October that he feared more British job losses were imminent, with small and medium companies with narrow profit margins especially vulnerable. “There will come a moment when people say enough is enough,” said Elliot, adding, “And there will only be one direction of travel – out of the UK.” Hardly good news for a country that is consistently top of the European league when it comes to attracting inward investment.

In the English Midlands, a region famed for its pottery manufacture, Dr Laura Cohen of the British Ceramic Confederation told BBC News that high energy costs augmented by anti-carbon costs has forced factory after factory in the pottery industry to close, with one firm recently relocating its operations to China.

Not that UK companies have not done their bit to ‘go green’. Cemex UK operates the country’s largest cement plant. It has already moved away from dependence on coal alone. But Director Andy Spencer estimates incoming carbon legislation will increase his energy costs by £12 million. What concerns Spencer most of all is that he knows other countries will not impose similar taxes on their cement industries. He states that Cemex UK is already considering transferring operations to plants it runs abroad, especially Egypt. “I can see a time when it makes more sense to do that,” Spencer told the BBC, “and that time is not far away.”

Steel giant Tata which employs 21,000 people has warned the British government that its planned £1.2 billion investment program could be put at risk by “over the top” green policies. A study by the UK manufacturer’s association EEF has shown that the introduction of the Carbon Price Floor in 2013 will cost the UK manufacturing industry £250 million a year by 2020. The EEF is demanding compensation to help energy-intensive industries – yet another potential hidden cost of carbon legislation.

In August, a UK Department of Energy and Climate Change study estimated that energy-intensive industries, such as steel and paper mills, would likely have to pay 58 percent more for electricity by 2030 compared to what it would cost them in the absence of current climate policies.

Just last week, GDF Suez SA cited EU regulations as creating an unstable investment environment that was discouraging energy investment. Jean-Francois Cirelli, vice-chair and president of GDF Suez told the European Autumn Gas Conference in Paris, “Governments do not hesitate to take decisions that are not totally based on economic rationale”.

In other words political ideology and sheer wishful-thinking in the war on fossil fuels means that many of those making the political decisions still aren’t “getting it”. Britain’s energy and climate minister Chris Huhne exemplifies the ‘disconnect’ by persistently deeming climate policies sacrosanct while insisting high energy costs alone are to blame. “We’ve had a 27 percent increase in the gas price on world markets over the year to August,” says Huhne. “Now with the best will in the world, I can’t do anything about that.” Huhne is clearly not listening to industry bosses who cite the profit-destroying effect of climate policies, especially the EU-imposed extra green costs currently being factored into budgets from 2013.

The EU Climate Commissar is Connie Hedegaard. She was voted in by nobody yet this unelected official is behind the new EU directive on fuel quality. This measure sets minimum standards for a range of fuels. It is this directive which threatens to label Canada’s oil sands as “dirty” and threaten the future of Europe-wide shale gas development.

Hedegaard says, “With this measure, we are sending a clear signal to fossil fuel suppliers. As fossil fuels will be a reality in the foreseeable future, it’s important to give them the right value.” De-coding Euro-speak, Hedegaard wants fossil fuels made as expensive as renewables.

A plague of profit-busting climate policies is indeed sending a “clear signal” to energy-intensive industries: divest yourself of assets, shed jobs – or just plain ship out. Cocooned in ideological green protectionism, however, don’t expect Hedegaard and Huhne to “get” it. 

Science vs Green Theology

Understanding E = mc2 

Prof. Albert Einstein delivers the 11th Josiah Willard Gibbs lecture at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the auditorium of the Carnegie Institue of Technology Little Theater at Pittsburgh, Pa., on Dec. 28, 1934. 

By William Tucker 

When I was in college, I took a course in the great political philosophers. We studied them in order – Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx.

In my mind, I had placed them with the historical eras they had influenced – Hobbes and the 18th century monarchs, Locke and the American Revolution, Rousseau and 19th century Romanticism, Kant and the 19th century nation-states, Marx and 20th century Communism.

Then one day I saw a time-line illustrating when they had all lived and died. To my astonishment, each had lived a hundred years before I had placed them in history. The implicated seemed clear. “It takes about a hundred years for a new idea to enter history.”

Almost exactly 100 years ago, Albert Einstein posited the equation E = mc2 in his “Special Theory of Relativity.” The equation suggested a new way of describing the origins of chemical energy and suggested another source of energy that at that point was unknown in history – nuclear energy. Nuclear power made its unfortunate debut in history 40 years later in the form of an atomic bomb. But 100 years later, Americans have not quite yet absorbed the larger implications of Einstein’s equation – a new form of energy that can provide almost unlimited amounts of power with a vanishingly small impact on the environment.

E = mc2. Who has not heard of it? Even Mariah Carey named her last album after it. “E” stands for energy, “m” for mass, and “c” is the speed of light – that’s easy enough. But what does it really mean? (The answer is not “relativity.”)

What E = mc2 says is that matter and energy are interchangeable. There is a continuum between the two. Energy can transform into matter and matter can transform into energy. They are different aspects of the same thing.

This principal of the equivalence of energy and matter was a completely unexpected departure from anything that had gone before. In the 18th century, Antoine Lavoisier, the great French chemist, established the Conservation of Matter. Performing very careful experiments, such as burning a piece of wood, he found that the weight of the resulting gases and ashes were always exactly equal to the weight of the original material. Matter is never created nor destroyed, it only changes form.

Then in the 19th century a series of brilliant scientists – Count Rumford, Sadi Carnot, Rudolf Clausius, Ludwig Boltzman – established the same principal for energy. Energy can take many forms – heat, light, motion, potential energy - but the quantity always remains the same. Energy is never created nor destroyed either.

Now at the dawn of the 20th century, Albert Einstein posited a third principal that united the other two in a totally unexpected way. Einstein stated a Law of Conservation betweenmatter and energy. Nothing like this had ever been imagined before. Yet the important thing is that co-efficient – the speed of light squared. That is a very, very large number, on the order of one quadrillion.

We really don’t have a reference point for a factor of one quadrillion. We know what a trillion is – that’s the federal budget deficit. But a quadrillion is still a bit beyond our ken. What it means, though, is that a very, very large amount of energy transforms into a very, very small amount of matter and a very, very small amount of matter can transform into a very, very large amount of energy.

Perhaps the way to understand the significance of Einstein’s equation is to compare it to another equation, the formula for kinetic energy:

Kinetic energy is the energy of moving objects, “E” once again standing for energy, “m” indicating mass and “v” representing the velocity of the moving object. If you throw a baseball across a room, for example, its energy is calculated by multiplying the mass of the ball times the square of its velocity – perhaps 50 miles per hour.

The two formulas are essentially identical. When brought into juxtaposition, two things emerge:

1.   For any given amount of energy, mass and velocity are inversely related. For an identical amount of energy, the higher velocity goes, the less mass is required and vice versa.

2.   When compared to the velocities of moving objects in nature – wind and water, for instance – the co-efficient in Einstein’s equation is fifteen orders of magnitude larger – the same factor of one quadrillion.

How is this manifested in everyday life? Most of what we are calling “renewable energy” is actually the kinetic flows of matter in nature. Wind and water are matter in motion that we harness to produce energy. Therefore they are measured by the formula for kinetic energy.

Let’s start with hydroelectricity. Water falling off a high dam reaches a speed of about 60 miles per hour or 80 feet per second. Raising the height of the dam by 80 or more feet cannot increase the velocity by more than 20 miles per hour. The only way to increase the energy output is to increase the mass, meaning we must use more water.

The largest dams – Hoover and Glen Canyon on the Colorado River –stand 800 feet tall and back up a reservoir of 250 square miles. This produces 1000 megawatts, the standard candle for an electrical generating station. (Lake Powell, behind Glen Canyon, has silted up somewhat and now produces only 800 MW.)

Environmentalists began objecting to hydroelectric dams in the 1960s precisely because they occupied such vast amounts of land, drowning whole scenic valleys and historic canyons. They have not stopped objecting. The Sierra Club, which opposed construction of the Hetch-Hetchy Dam in Yosemite in 1921, is still trying to tear it down, even though it provides drinking water and 400 megawatts of electricity to San Francisco. Each year more dams are now torn down than are constructed as a result of this campaign.

Wind is less dense than water so the land requirements are even greater. Contemporary 50-story windmills generate 1-½ MW apiece, so it takes 660 windmills to get 1000 MW. They must be spaced about half a mile apart so a 1000-MW wind farm occupies 125 square miles. Unfortunately the best windmills generate electricity only 30 percent of the time, so 1000 MW really means covering 375 square miles at widely dispersed locations.

Tidal power, often suggested as another renewable resource, suffers the same problems. Water is denser than wind but the tides only move at about 5 mph. At the best locations in the world you would need 20 miles of coastline to generate 1000 MW.

What about solar energy? Solar radiation is the result of an E = mc2 transformation as the sun transforms hydrogen to helium. Unfortunately, the reaction takes place 90 million miles away. Radiation dissipates with the square of the distance, so by the time solar energy reaches the earth it is diluted by almost the same factor, 10-15. Thus, the amount of solar radiation falling on a one square meter is 400 watts, enough to power four 100-watt light bulbs. “Thermal solar” – large arrays of mirrors heating a fluid – can convert 30 percent of this to electricity. Photovoltaic cells are slightly less efficient, converting only about 25 percent. As a result, the amount of electricity we can draw from the sun is enough to power one 100-watt light bulb per card table.

This is not an insignificant amount of electricity. If we covered every rooftop in the county with solar collectors, we could probably power our indoor lighting plus some basic household appliances – during the daytime. Solar’s great advantage is that it peaks exactly when it is needed, during hot summer afternoons when air conditioning pushes electrical consumption to its annual peaks. Meeting these peaks is a perennial problem for utilities and solar electricity can play a significant role in meeting the demand. The problem arises when solar enthusiasts try to claim solar power can provide base load power for an industrial society. There is no technology for storing commercial quantities of electricity. Until something is developed – which seems unlikely – wind and solar can serve only as intermittent, unpredictable resources.

There is only so much energy we can draw from renewable sources. They are limited, either by the velocities attained, or by the distance that solar energy must travel to reach the earth. So is there any place in nature where we can take advantage of that “c2” co-efficient and tap transformations of matter into energy? There is one that we have used through history. It is called “chemistry.”

Chemical energy is commonly described in terms of “valences.” A sodium atom has a valence of +1, meaning it is missing an electron in its outer shell. Meanwhile, a chlorine atom has a valence of –1, meaning it has an extra electron. Together they “mate” to form sodium chloride (table salt). All chemical reactions are either “endothermic” or “exothermic,” meaning energy is either absorbed or released in the process. The Bunsen burner in chemistry class is a way of adding energy to a reaction. The other thing that can happen occasionally in chemistry lab is a sudden release of energy called an “explosion.”

The great achievement of 20th century quantum physics has been to describe chemical reactions in terms of E = mc2.

When we burn a gallon of gasoline, one-billionth of the mass of the gasoline is completely transformed into energy. This transformation occurs in the electron shells. The amount is so small that nobody has ever been able to measure it. Yet the energy release is large enough to propel a 2000-pound automobile for 30 miles – a remarkable feat when you think of it.

Still, electrons make up only 0.01 percent of the mass of an atom. The other 99.99 percent is in the nucleus of the atom. And so the question arose, would it be possible to tap the much greater amount of energy stored in the nucleus the way we tap the energy in the electrons through chemistry?

For a long time many scientists doubted it could be done. Einstein himself was skeptical, saying that splitting an atom would be like “trying to hunt birds at night in a country where there aren’t many birds.” But other pioneering scientists – Enrico Fermi, George Gamov, Lise Meitner and Leo Szilard – discovered it could be done. By the late 1930s it had become clear that energy in unprecedented quantity could be obtained by splitting the unstable uranium atom.

Unfortunately, World War II pre-empted the introduction of nuclear power. This is a historical tragedy. The atom bomb stands in the same relation to nuclear energy as gunpowder stands to fire. While gunpowder has played an important role in history, fire’s role has been far more essential. Would we want to give up fire just because it led to guns? Yet the atom bomb continues to cast a shadow over the equally important discovery of nuclear energy.

The release of energy from splitting a uranium atom turns out to be 2 million times greater than breaking the carbon-hydrogen bond in coal, oil or wood. Compared to all the forms of energy ever employed by humanity, nuclear power is off the scale. Wind has less than 1/10th the energy density of wood, wood half the density of coal and coal half the density of octane. Altogether they differ by a factor of about 50. Nuclear has 2 million times the energy density of gasoline. It is hard to fathom this in light of our previous experience. Yet our energy future largely depends on grasping the significance of this differential.

One elementary source of comparison is to consider what it takes to refuel a coal plant as opposed to a nuclear reactor. A 1000-MW coal plant – our standard candle - is fed by a 110-car “unit train” arriving at the plant every 30 hours – 300 times a year. Each individual coal car weighs 100 tons and produces 20 minutes of electricity. We are currently straining the capacity of the railroad system moving all this coal around the country. (In China, it has completely broken down.)

A nuclear reactor, on the other hand, refuels when a fleet of six tractor-trailers arrives at the plant with a load of fuel rods once every eighteen months. The fuel rods are only mildly radioactive and can be handled with gloves. They will sit in the reactor for five years. After those five years, about six ounces of matter will be completely transformed into energy. Yet because of the power of E = mc2, the metamorphosis of six ounces of matter will be enough to power the city of San Francisco for five years.

This is what people finds hard to grasp. It is almost beyond our comprehension. How can we run an entire city for five years on six ounces of matter with almost no environmental impact? It all seems so incomprehensible that we make up problems in order to make things seem normal again. A reactor is a bomb waiting to go off. The waste lasts forever, what will we ever do with it? There is something sinister about drawing power from the nucleus of the atom. The technology is beyond human capabilities.

But the technology is not beyond human capabilities. Nor is there anything sinister about nuclear power. It is just beyond anything we ever imagined before the beginning of the 20th century. In the opening years of the 21st century, it is time to start imagining it.

The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

The Real First Thanksgiving

by Richard J. Maybury

Each year at this time school children all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating.

It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving’s real meaning.

The official story has the pilgrims boarding the Mayflower, coming to America and establishing the Plymouth colony in the winter of 1620-21. This first winter is hard, and half the colonists die. But the survivors are hard working and tenacious, and they learn new farming techniques from the Indians. The harvest of 1621 is bountiful. The Pilgrims hold a celebration, and give thanks to God. They are grateful for the wonderful new abundant land He has given them.

The official story then has the Pilgrims living more or less happily ever after, each year repeating the first Thanksgiving. Other early colonies also have hard times at first, but they soon prosper and adopt the annual tradition of giving thanks for this prosperous new land called America.

The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.

In his History of Plymouth Plantation, the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years, because they refused to work in the fields. They preferred instead to steal food. He says the colony was riddled with “corruption,” and with “confusion and discontent.” The crops were small because “much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable.”

In the harvest feasts of 1621 and 1622, “all had their hungry bellies filled,” but only briefly. The prevailing condition during those years was not the abundance the official story claims, it was famine and death. The first “Thanksgiving” was not so much a celebration as it was the last meal of condemned men.

But in subsequent years something changes. The harvest of 1623 was different. Suddenly, “instead of famine now God gave them plenty,” Bradford wrote, “and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God.” Thereafter, he wrote, “any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day.” In fact, in 1624, so much food was produced that the colonists were able to begin exporting corn.

What happened?

After the poor harvest of 1622, writes Bradford, “they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop.” They began to question their form of economic organization.

This had required that “all profits & benefits that are got by trade, working, fishing, or any other means” were to be placed in the common stock of the colony, and that, “all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock.” A person was to put into the common stock all he could, and take out only what he needed.

This “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” was an early form of socialism, and it is why the Pilgrims were starving. Bradford writes that “young men that are most able and fit for labor and service” complained about being forced to “spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children.” Also, “the strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak.” So the young and strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was never adequate.

To rectify this situation, in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines.

Many early groups of colonists set up socialist states, all with the same terrible results. At Jamestown, established in 1607, out of every shipload of settlers that arrived, less than half would survive their first twelve months in America. Most of the work was being done by only one-fifth of the men, the other four-fifths choosing to be parasites. In the winter of 1609-10, called “The Starving Time,” the population fell from five-hundred to sixty.

Then the Jamestown colony was converted to a free market, and the results were every bit as dramatic as those at Plymouth. In 1614, Colony Secretary Ralph Hamor wrote that after the switch there was “plenty of food, which every man by his own industry may easily and doth procure.” He said that when the socialist system had prevailed, “we reaped not so much corn from the labors of thirty men as three men have done for themselves now.”

Before these free markets were established, the colonists had nothing for which to be thankful. They were in the same situation as Ethiopians are today, and for the same reasons. But after free markets were established, the resulting abundance was so dramatic that the annual Thanksgiving celebrations became common throughout the colonies, and in 1863, Thanksgiving became a national holiday.

Thus the real reason for Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them.

A phenomenon of a protracted puberty

Ludwig von Mises on the First 'Occupy Wall Street'

By Robert Wenzel

In his book Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises discussed the German youth movement that occurred in Germany the decade before the First World War. The similarity with OWS is quite remarkable: 

In the decade preceding the First World War Germany, the country most advanced on the path toward bureaucratic regimentation, witnessed the appearance of a phenomenon hitherto unheard of: the youth movement. Turbulent gangs of untidy boys and girls roamed the country, making much noise and shirking their school lessons. In bombastic words they announced the gospel of a golden age. All preceding generations, they emphasized, were simply idiotic; their incapacity has converted the earth into a hell. But the rising generation is no longer willing to endure gerontocracy, the supremacy of impotent and imbecile senility. Henceforth the brilliant youths will rule. They will destroy everything that is old and useless, they will reject all that was dear to their parents, they will substitute new real and substantial values and ideologies for the antiquated and false ones of capitalist and bourgeois civilization, and they will build a new society of giants and supermen.
The inflated verbiage of these adolescents was only a poor disguise for their lack of any ideas and of any definite program. They had nothing to say but this: We are young and therefore chosen; we are ingenious because we are young; we are the carriers of the future; we are the deadly foes of the rotten bourgeois and Philistines. And if somebody was not afraid to ask them what their plans were, they knew only one answer: Our leaders will solve all problems.
It has always been the task of the new generation to provoke changes. But the characteristic feature of the youth movement was that they had neither new ideas nor plans. They called their action the youth movement precisely because they lacked any program which they could use to give a name to their endeavors. In fact they espoused entirely the program of their parents. They did not oppose the trend toward government omnipotence and bureaucratization. Their revolutionary radicalism was nothing but the impudence of the years between boyhood and manhood; it was a phenomenon of a protracted puberty. It was void of any ideological content.

Math 101

Sarkozy: Europe's "Liquidity Run" Has Begun Because There Is An Unsolvable $30 Trillion Problem

by Tyler Durden

No, not that Sarkozy. His half-brother - the one who actually can use a calculator. In an interview on CNBC, the Carlyle group head had the temerity to tell the truth, the whole truth, and use math - that long-forgotten concept which one has to scour various backwater blogs to rediscover - to explain nothing but the truth which is that Europe needs many more trillions than either the EFSF or the ECB can afford to give. Actually, we take that back. The ECB can inject the needed €3-5 trillion, but after that concerns about localized episodes of (hyper)inflation, especially now that Kocherlakota has confirmed that the transmission mechanism between bank reserves and inflation may be broken, will be all too justified. In the meantime, Sarkozy on Europe math fail:

"The math i'm working with is very simple. In the US banking sector, we had 3 trillion of wholesale funding that needed to be stabilized, got stabilized by the implementation of TARP which saw the US treasury buy $212 billion worth of preferred in the banking sector to stabilize that $3 trillion, give our banks the time to work through their problem assets.

In Europe, that $3 trillion is $30 trillion. So if you multiply the $212 by 10, you get the $2.12 trillion. In my view, the issues on the European banks are bigger than the issues on the books of the US Banks. So if you want to stabilize that $30 trillion and in my view it's not that you want to, it's that you have to, you do not have a choice, you're going to have to be at least at 2.1 trillion and i suspect it may need to be more." 

Q.E.D. - there, the math wasn't that difficult, was it?”

We should mind our own business

Imagine

By Walter E. Williams

After Moammar Gadhafi's downfall as Libya's tyrannical ruler, politicians and "experts" in the U.S. and elsewhere, including French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, are saying that his death marked the end of 42 years of tyranny and the beginning of democracy in Libya. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said Gadhafi's death represented an opportunity for Libya to make a peaceful and responsible transition to democracy. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, "Now it is time for Libya's Transitional National Council to show the world that it will respect the rights of all Libyans (and) guide the nation to democracy." German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that "Libya must now quickly make further determined steps in the direction of democracy." It's good to see the removal of a tyrant, but if we're going to be realistic, there's little hope for the emergence of what we in the West call a democracy. Let's look at it.

Throughout most of mankind's history, personal liberty, private property rights and rule of law have always won a hostile reception. There's little older in most of human history than: the notion that a few people are to give orders while others obey those orders; the political leadership classes are exempt from laws that the masses are obliged to heed; and the rights of individuals are only secondary to the rights of the state. The exception to this vision feebly emerged in the West, mainly in England, in 1215 with the Magna Carta, a charter that limited the power of the king and required him to proclaim and recognize the liberties of English subjects.

The Magna Carta served as inspiration for other instruments of personal liberty, such as habeas corpus and bills of rights, and five centuries later served as inspiration for the U.S. Constitution. The ideas of liberty and limited government were cultivated by great British philosophers -- such as Francis Bacon, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and David Hume -- and on the Continent by the likes of Baron de Montesquieu, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Through the works of Western philosophers and the politicians influenced by them, including the founders of our nation, the idea emerged that political leaders couldn't run roughshod over the common man.

The key point to recognize is that Western transition from barbarism to civility didn't take place overnight; it took centuries. More importantly, for the most part Western civility and its institutions were not transplanted; they emerged from within Western civilization. Where they were successfully transplanted, it was done through Western colonialism, such as in the cases of the U.S., Canada and Australia.

In Libya and most other countries in the Arab world, what we know as personal liberty is nonexistent. According to Freedom House's 2011 "Freedom in the World" survey, as well as Amnesty International's annual report for 2011, most North African and Middle Eastern countries are ranked either "repressive" or "not free." Moreover, I believe that there's little prospect for Arabs ever being free and that Western encouragement and hopes for democracy are doomed to failure and disappointment. Most nations in the Middle East do not share the philosophical foundations of the West. It's not likely liberty-oriented values will ever emerge in cultures that have disdain for the rule of law and private property rights and that sanction barbaric practices such as the stoning of women for adultery, the severing of hands or beheading as a form of punishment, and imprisonment for criticizing or speaking ill of the government.

What should the West do about the gross violations of human rights so prevalent in North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere? My short answer is to mind our own business. The only case in which we should interfere with Middle Eastern affairs is when our national defense or economic interests are directly threatened. That is, for example, if Iran were to meddle with Middle Eastern oil shipments or if we discovered good evidence of its building nuclear weapons, then we should militarily intervene. What they want to do to one another is none of our business.

Moral Hazard in Action

As Expected, Ireland Is First To Demand Debt Relief In Greek Bailout Aftermath

by Tyler Durden 

When we commented on the October 26 European "EFSF Bailout" which has since been long forgotten, the one take home message from the embedded 50% cut in Greece debt is that "this means that Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy will promptly commence sabotaging their economies (just like Greece) simply to get the same debt Blue Light special as Greece." This was followed up by a post  that half confirmed or thesis: "Bloomberg notes that Ireland has not even waited for the ink to be dry before sending out feelers on just what the possible "rewards" may be: 

"Greece’s failure to cut spending and boost revenue by enough to meet targets set by the European Union and International Monetary Fund prompted bondholders to accept a 50 percent loss on its debt. While Ireland won’t seek debt discounts, the government might pursue other relief given to Greece, including cheaper interest payments on aid and longer to repay it, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be identified as no final decision has been taken." 

There is one very important addition here: "While Ireland won't seek debt discounts" yet." A month later, the "yet" is "now."

A forgotten giant

The Opium of the Intellectuals

By Roger Kimball

How many people still remember The Opium of the Intellectuals, the French philosopher Raymond Aron’s masterpiece? First published in France in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, L’Opium des intellectuels was an immediate sensation. It caused something of a sensation in the United States, too, when an English translation was published in 1957. Writing inThe New York Times, the historian Crane Brinton spoke for many when he said that the book was “a kind of running commentary on the Western world today.”

Unaccountably the book was been out of print for many years. It was therefore welcome news indeed that Transaction Publishers brought out a new edition of Opium in 2001. The deformations that Aron analyzed are still very much with us, even if the figures that represent them have changed.

Aron’s subject is the bewitchment — the moral and intellectual disordering — that comes with adherence to certain ideologies. Why is it, he wondered, that certain intellectuals are “merciless toward the failings of the democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of the proper doctrines”?

Aron’s title is an inversion of Marx’s contemptuous remark that religion is “the opium of the people.” He quotes the French writer Simone Weil’s sly reversal of Marx: “Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. . . . [I]t has been continually used . . . as an opiate for the people.”

In fact, Weil got it only partly right.

Marxism and kindred forms of thought never really became the people’s narcotic. But they certainly became — and in essentials they still are — the drug of choice for the group that Aron anatomized: the intellectuals. The Opium of the Intellectuals is a seminal book of the twentieth century, an indispensable contribution to the literature of intellectual disabusement.

Aron, who died in 1983 in his late seventies, is a half-forgotten colossus of twentieth-century intellectual life. Part philosopher, part sociologist, part journalist, he was above all a spokesman for that rarest form of idealism, the idealism of common sense. Aron was, Allan Bloom wrote shortly after the philosopher’s death, “the man who for fifty years . . . had been right about the political alternatives actually available to us. . . . [H]e was right about Hitler, right about Stalin, and right that our Western regimes, with all their flaws, are the best and only hope of mankind.”

From the 1950s through the early 1970s, Aron was regularly calumniated by the radical Left — by his erstwhile friends Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for starters, but also by their many epigoni and intellectual heirs. In 1963, for example, Susan Sontag dismissed Aron as “a man deranged by German philosophy belatedly converting to Anglo-Saxon empiricism and common sense under the name of `Mediterranean’ virtue.”

In fact, it would be difficult to find anyone at once more knowledgeable about and less “deranged” by German philosophy than Raymond Aron. His was a sober and penetrating intelligence, sufficiently curious to take on Hegel, sufficiently robust to escape uncorrupted by the encounter. The fact that Aron was hated by the Left does not mean that he was a partisan of the Right. On the contrary, he always to some extent considered himself a man of the Left, but (in later years anyway) it was the pre-Marxist Left of high liberalism.

As the sociologist Edward Shils noted in an affectionate memoir of his friend, Aron moved from being a declared socialist in his youth to becoming “the most persistent, the most severe, and the most learned critic of Marxism and of the socialist — or more precisely Communist — order of society” in the twentieth century. Shils spoke of Aron’s “discriminating devotion to the ideals of the Enlightenment.”

The ideals in question prominently featured faith in the power of reason. Aron’s discrimination showed itself in his recognition that reason’s power is always limited. That is to say, if Aron was a faithful child of the Enlightenment — its secularism, its humanism, its opposition of reason to superstition — he also in many respects remained a faithful grandchild of the traditional society that many Enlightenment thinkers professed to despise.

Enlightened thinking tends to be superficial thinking because its critical armory is deployed against every faith except its faith in the power of reason. Aron avoided the besetting liability of the Enlightenment by subjecting its ideals to the same scrutiny it reserved for its adversaries. “In defending the freedom of religious teaching,” he wrote, “the unbeliever defends his own freedom.”

Aron’s generosity of spirit was a coefficient of his recognition that reality was complex, knowledge limited, and action essential. The leitmotif of Aron’s career was responsibility. He understood that political wisdom rests in the ability to choose the better course of action even when the best course is unavailable — which is always.

The subject of politics, Aristotle noted, is “the good life for man.” What constitutes the good life? Aron cannily reminds us that the more extravagant answers to this question are often the most malevolent. They promise everything. They tend to deliver misery and impoverishment.

Hence Aron’s rejection of Communism: “Communism is a degraded version of the Western message. It retains its ambition to conquer nature, to improve the lot of the humble, but it sacrifices what was and must remain the heart and soul of the unending human adventure: freedom of enquiry, freedom of controversy, freedom of criticism, and the vote.”

Such freedoms may seem pedestrian in comparison with the prospect of a classless society in which liberty reigns and inequality has been vanquished once and for all. But such an idea, he noted, is “no more than an illustration in a children’s picture book.”

For Aron, the issue was “not radical choice, but ambiguous compromise.” He continually came back to man as he is, not as he might be imagined: “At the risk of being accused of cynicism, I refuse to believe that any social order can be based on the virtue and disinterestedness of citizens.”

In his foreword to The Opium of the Intellectuals, Aron noted that he directed his argument “not so much against the Communists as against the communisants,” against those fellow travelers for whom the West is always wrong and who believe that people can “be divided into two camps, one the incarnation of good and the other of evil.”

The primary target of Aron’s polemic was fanaticism. But he also recognized that the defeat of fanaticism often leads to a contrary spiritual sickness, indifference. Both are expressions of the ultimate enemy, nihilism. Skepticism, Aron wrote, is useful or harmful depending on which is more to be feared at the moment: fanaticism or apathy. The intervening faculty that orients us appropriately is practical wisdom, prudence, “the god” (Aron quotes Burke) “of this lower world.”

Aron’s indictment of intellectual intoxication is not the same thing as an indictment of intellectuals. He was not anti-intellectual or contemptuous of ideas. This was not simply because he was an intellectual himself. He clearly discerned the immense power, for good or ill, that ideas can have. “Intellectuals suffer from their inability to alter the course of events,” he noted. “But they underestimate their influence. In a long term sense, politicians are the disciples of scholars or writers.”

In the ugly world of reality there are consequences to suffer.

Alice in Liberal Land

By T. Sowell

Alice in Wonderland was written by a professor who also wrote a book on symbolic logic. So it is not surprising that Alice encountered not only strange behavior in Wonderland, but also strange and illogical reasoning — of a sort too often found in the real world, and which a logician would be very much aware of.

If Alice could visit the world of liberal rhetoric and assumptions today, she might find similarly illogical and bizarre thinking. But people suffering in the current economy might not find it nearly as entertaining as Alice in Wonderland.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the world envisioned by today’s liberals is that it is a world where other people just passively accept whatever “change” liberals impose. In the world of Liberal Land, you can just take for granted all the benefits of the existing society, and then simply tack on your new, wonderful ideas that will make things better.

For example, if the economy is going along well and you happen to take a notion that there ought to be more home ownership, especially among the poor and minorities, then you simply have the government decree that lenders have to lend to more low-income people and minorities who want mortgages, ending finicky mortgage standards about down payments, income, and credit histories.

That sounds like a fine idea in the world of Liberal Land. Unfortunately, in the ugly world of reality, it turned out to be a financial disaster, from which the economy has still not yet recovered. Nor have the poor and minorities.

Apparently you cannot just tack on your pet notions to whatever already exists, without repercussions spreading throughout the whole economy. That’s what happens in the ugly world of reality, as distinguished from the beautiful world of Liberal Land.

The strange and bizarre characters found in Alice in Wonderland have counterparts in the political vision of Liberal Land today. Among the most interesting of these characters are those elites who are convinced that they are so much smarter than the rest of us that they feel both a right and a duty to take all sorts of decisions out of our incompetent hands — for our own good.

In San Francisco, which is Liberal Land personified, there have been attempts to ban the circumcision of newborn baby boys. Fortunately, that was nipped in the bud. But it shows how widely the self-anointed saviors of Liberal Land feel entitled to take decisions out of the hands of mere ordinary citizens.

Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner says, “We’re facing a very consequential debate about some fundamental choices as a country.” People talk that way in Liberal Land. Moreover, such statements pass muster with those who simply take in the words, decide whether they sound nice to them, and then move on.

But, if you take words seriously, the more fundamental question is whether individuals are to remain free to make their own choices, as distinguished from having collectivized choices, “as a country” — which is to say, having choices made by government officials and imposed on the rest of us.

The history of the 20th century is a painful lesson on what happens when collective choices replace individual choices. Even leaving aside the chilling history of totalitarianism in the 20th century, the history of economic central planning shows it to have been such a widely recognized disaster that even communist and socialist governments were abandoning it as the century ended.

Making choices “as a country” cannot be avoided in some cases, such as elections or referenda. But that is very different from saying that decisions in general should be made “as a country” — which boils down to having people like Timothy Geithner taking more and more decisions out of our own hands and imposing their will on the rest of us. That way lies madness exceeding anything done by the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.

That way lie unfunded mandates, nanny-state interventions in people’s lives, such as banning circumcision — and the ultimate nanny-state monstrosity, Obamacare.

The world of reality has its problems, so it is understandable that some people want to escape to a different world, where you can talk lofty talk and forget about ugly realities like costs and repercussions. The world of reality is not nearly as lovely as the world of Liberal Land. No wonder so many people want to go there.