The Brussels Journal - The Voice of Conservatism in Europe

Duly Noted: The Best Ally of Guerrillas

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:35:36 -0600

George Handlery about the week that was. Vincible and invincible guerillas. The privilege of being underprivileged. About dictatorships. Pigs might be lovable but sausage is better.

1. America’s “separation” from the Iraq conflict is not unlikely. Another possible scenario is her “withdrawal” from the struggle in Afghanistan. These prospects create a background for the discussion of irregular wars, their legends and their realities.

For some time now, we are living in the age of asymmetric warfare. In these conflicts, it is typical that guerilla forces confront regular armies. Concentrating on the success-cases, a stifling myth is unfolding. It is that guerillas or to use the leftist term, partisans, cannot be defeated. This legend is probably one of the most potent weapons in the arsenal of irregular warriors. If they win, they prevail in a test of wills. That amounts to a trial of endurance and it involves a conflict that the societies that regular armies of established states serve do not consistently regard as critical for their survival. If, therefore, the price to be paid is PR-effective and the dramatized toll is prolonged, the advice of “sound and moderate minds” to “disengage” will tend to prevail. Political cultures that use automatic transmissions and ready-to-eat food demand instant success as in instant coffee. In addition, the solutions stipulated are to be fast while they are to be achieved without discomfort. Engagements that are continuous and lack heroics as much as a clear deadline for their conclusion with fanfares, do not fit these preferences.

Admittedly, guerillas can be smothered by the full deployment of the massive forces of well-organized powers. The more so when the tactical use of these means is not held back by humanistic considerations. Systems that are not only willing to cause and to accept collateral damage but also feel justified to use indiscriminate violence to their strategic benefit, enjoy an advantage. If suppression is implemented with consistent and unleashed brutality, the fear created will not mute into hatred and resistance. Much rather, the policy will cow the population whose support guerillas need. (Suppose that a tank takes fire from one of the four houses around it. One solution is to send in a squad to look for the sniper and to try to apprehend him. The other solution is to have four tanks between the houses. Each fires its cannon at one of the buildings. Starting at the bottom this is done until the structures collapse. Soon the neighboring streets will present no problem. Here an objection can be anticipated. It builds on the case of the USSR in Afghanistan. The failure confirms rather than refutes the argument. Unlike in 53 in Berlin, in 56 in Budapest, or in 68 in Prague, the Kremlin was limited by global reactions, internal conflict and the system’s crisis.)

Certain political systems will find it impossible, for reason of their political culture, to apply all their means without what they consider moral limits. On this level then, the best ally of guerillas is the democratic political system and its prejudices. At the same time, guerilla movements will quite frequently be enabled by their totalitarian ideology to commit all of their limited means to achieve maximal damage.

In using the myth of invincibility supported by selected examples so as to plead the case for withdrawal, it is convenient to ignore a salient fact behind guerilla success. Regardless of Guevara style T-Shirt romanticism, successful guerillas are hardly a crowd of barefooted guys in need of a shower and a decent hair cut. Where they prevail, guerillas have the support of foreign powers. This goes beyond the supply of weapons and includes political threats and diplomatic pressure as well as the PR work of state-run propaganda.

A conclusion: Guerillas do not defeat established states and their armies on their own. They are helped by bystanders and ultimately they are allowed to win by their exhausted or bored foes.

2. Even if they might be fighting each other, modern dictatorships are connected by a common denominator. It is their radical collectivism. The goals and ways they proclaim tend to suggests to the analytical minded that the allegedly common factors call for an awareness regarding the common elements. Any consciousness of these similarities leads one to perceive a high degree of community. It is also presumed that this perceived communality of interests can be and, for ethical reasons, should be converted into a political organization that is dedicated to pursue the welfare of all members. Regarding that welfare, it is alleged that it leads to a state of happiness. Due to its expression of a virtue, it is to take priority over the wishes and aspirations of all other – by implication inferior – group interests. The implication is that for the benefit of the select, the misfortune and subjugation of all others is not only permitted but also an expression of ethical necessity. Once this is accepted the movement’s members are called upon to legalize the elimination of those that allegedly compete with them for power and the material components of existence.

3. Those who declare themselves uninterested in responding to Iran’s nuclear armament projects tend to let you know that they do not feel exposed. The case suggests that threats are generally identified as local. In this case, “local” means that the peril is seen as directed against someone who is not too near where the elegantly unconcerned one sits. This is a perception that survives boldly against the storm of cruel facts. Such as developing rockets that will easily reach wide areas that are “behind you”. Equally overheard are threats that are made loudly and phrased carelessly so that your kind falls comfortably and unmistakably into the long list of the enemies of mankind that are to be liquidated. No matter how harsh and threatening: Political Correctness demands that there be no alerting effect. The last century’s vicissitudes came to visit upon us and murdered scores of millions. The project and the intent to carry it out has only been a surprise to the victim. Regrettably so, even if the warnings were clear and consistent. The repeated stepping into the same trap – albeit set by different violators – had been preceded by the same question of the intended victim. It sounded something like “why should they be serious about wanting to do that”? The implication was that, besides the supposed insufficiency of the means, there was no rational motive in the mind of the victims that would have justified their elimination. This is comparable to the porker of the pig-farm asking why the kind master should want to slaughter them. After all, their relationship seems to be sooo undisturbed and based upon mutual liking. The answer is not in a fault of the pigs but follows from the fact that “sausage tastes so good”.

4. Sometimes, anecdotes can reveal more of the “story” than scientific investigation and the clever reporting of the publicly available data might be able to convey. Take the case of my village’s hairdresser. The good woman runs a family-centered shop that her elders have founded. Since the parents are getting old, the lady needs help. By local standards, unemployment at 3-4% terribly high. At the same time young people who have absolved the country’s excellent trade apprentice system are, even though professionally well prepared, having problems to find jobs. So, help was hired. The new girl argued with customers and made special price cuts without asking the boss. One day then, close to closing time, the help was told that Mr. X is still due to come in for a cut. We can close once he is finished. Undaunted, the girl got dressed and left the store as Mr. X arrived. After that, she joined the unemployed. The story behind the story is that many job opportunities exist -for the right people. All too often unemployability is a reflection of the wrong attitude. You might relate that to adulthood comportment taught to once spoiled children shaped by a permissive educational system and ripened by a culture that forgives anything at anytime to anybody.

5. Immigration, or more precisely the integration of individuals of diverging backgrounds is a wide spread problem of developed societies. Those that are suspicious of immigrants and the ones that automatically defend anything that is done by persons with a “migration background” tend to suppress a crucial fact. It is a factor that is easily ignored, which is why the migrants themselves are inclined to overlook it. It is that if a person amounts to anything he must be more than the sum of the factors that amount to his ethnic background. Admittedly, realizing this and organizing ones life accordingly is difficult. Confusing signals come from progressive social policies, such as quotas and the support programs. These tend to judge individuals because of their membership in certain privileged-because-underprivileged groups. According to that condition-based judgment, support is given – or withheld. The consequence is devastating. It makes membership in the herd, and the continued practice of some of its collective bad habits that are out of tune with the conditions offered by advanced societies, to become a personal advantage.

UK State to Take Unborn Baby

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:57:57 -0600

Kerry Robertson, 17, and Mark McDougall, 25, haven’t broken any law. But they are on the run from the authorities, and from their home in Dunfermline, Scotland.

Less than eight weeks ago the couple were excitedly planning their wedding. They had booked church ceremony for the 5th of September, a Saturday. She had already chosen and bought her wedding dress. They had bought the rings, and invited 20 guests. Two days before the big day, however, social services told them that their wedding would have to be cancelled. Fife Council wrote a letter, objecting to the marriage, to Dunfermline Register Office, who consequently refused to marry the couple.

Social services claim Kerry cannot understand what marriage means, because she has learning difficulties. They are mild, it seems. She is able to read and write, and is going to college to “catch up.” Her partner Mark told the Daily Mail: “'I didn't even know she had learning difficulties until we'd been dating for two months.”

Kerry is 29 weeks pregnant – with a boy they have named Ben. “Although Ben isn't born yet,” Kerry says, “I already love my baby and know I will be a good mum. Mark and I talk to him inside me every day and tell him we love him. We've already bought him clothes and my cousin, who recently had a baby, has handed down a beautiful crib for him.”

Social services say that Kerry – a college student – isn’t intelligent enough to bring up her child with Mark. They plan to allow the couple only a few hours with Ben after he is born. Then Ben will be taken from Kerry and Mark, and placed with foster parents.

Willie Rennie is the MP (LibDems) for Dunfermline and West Fife. I’m sure he would love a polite letter or email drawing his attention to the plight of this family. He can be reached at:

Fax: country code +020 7219 2810

Email: renniew@parliament.uk

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 13: Harpo, Gekko, Barko, Sarko

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:42:54 -0600

Chapter 1: Harpo ÷ Gekko = Monkey Business x Terminal Greed

The Sprocket of History

This series has been written against the background of one of the most momentous events in history: the unraveling of the wealthiest, most powerful and most hopeful empire the world has ever known: the United States of America.

The orgy of U.S. government spending on every too-big-to-fail bankster or too-loud-to-ignore “social justice” race huckster is accelerating daily, funded by phantom dollars printed by the government or extracted otherwise from the value of its subjects’ savings. The banksters’ main column is feasting on the taxpayers’ dollars while in a maneuver worthy of Patton, the Goldman Sachs cavalry detachment has been sent to secure the perimeter of a socialist White House.

The Nobel-laureate in economics Gary Becker linked the financial travails of Argentina in the mid-1990s to government spending at more than 30% of GDP. The Swiss economist Peter Bernholz has linked hyperinflation triggers to government deficits exceeding 40% of expenditures. But government spending in Obamerica is 45% of GDP, and its deficit stands at 43.3%. Peronism has acquired a permanent perch in Washington, DC.

But there is more. In a long chain of catastrophic errors and intentional malpractice since the days of Lyndon Johnson, America’s ruling elite of both parties has run up an unpayable debt to its own retirees, to its bondholders, its foreign creditors. Having designed to turn the country into a banana republic demographically, the Club of Crooks and Loons has turned it into a banana republic fiscally too.

There is hardly anything as catastrophic to society as the giant fraud of a government stealing its subjects’ earned wealth in order to paper over the vast crater landscape of two generations’-worth of the rulers’ own corruption and incompetence. But when this comes in tandem with the government’s stealing also the social capital of its subjects via dysfunctional immigration and the coddling of hostile and criminal minorities, then the destruction is for the ages: the sack of Nineveh, of Rome, of Washington.

The strongest, most admired country in the world until just a few years ago is now a cautionary tale of the wages of sin and stupidity told to Chinese schoolchildren.

A nation that works for a living can weather perhaps even such great storms. But the jobs of the American lower class have been outsourced to imported Mexicans. The jobs of the American middle class have been exported to China and India. The jobs of the American upper-middle class have been taken from the white males who held them by merit, and given to resentful identity groups that hold them by the fiat of the government’s preferred skin colors and favored genitalia. And the jobs of the American upper class have been reprogrammed from leadership and service, to ripping off the less clever via lawyering, banksterism, and padding one’s golden CEO parachute, and then expiation via funding and leading socialist NGOs.

A freefalling dollar cannot help by increasing exports, when you have off-shored your manufacturing, and your main industries are predatory lawsuits, selling shoddy American housing to Salvadorians with faked mortgages, and marketing financial weapons of mass destruction worldwide. And a falling dollar is not a good inducement for the world to keep buying dollar-denominated U.S. debt. The cessation of that buying has such dire consequences to the United States that Chinese strategists have named them “the nuclear option.”

The American people can’t do anything about it either, except mailing tea bags to the crooks and loons who govern them. Their only electoral choice is between the party of demented progressives, and the party of progressive dementia.

And madness is everywhere. Take an example far removed from zero interest rates and collateral debt obligations: the Navy.

The Navy that just yesterday gave the free world ferocious fighting admirals like Nimitz, Halsey and Spruance now advertises itself as “A global force for good”, presumably adept at delivering food packages to shipwrecks of the global economy. It has so many pregnant sailors that commanders are complaining of a "lack of proper manning to conduct their mission" (pun not intended).

And that’s before the currently considered admission of female sailors into submarines and their “hot bunk” system. In a wholesale proactive blasphemy of crazed Body Snatchers (1) denying the natural order of the universe, the reality of the birds and the bees must win out – at a great cost to those governed by the Snatchers.

Thus, after bidding adieu to douce France, say a novena for the home of the brave and foolish. Even a European ought to shed a tear for America, for in her lay his best hope for freedom from tyranny, dhimmitude, and bloodshed on his home soil. After all, who will land in Normandy to rescue France from jihad and Afro-anarchy, when the rescuers can only send pregnant sailors under the command of an Afrocentric socialist of Muslim background relying on Muslim advisors?

Even an atheist ought to read the Bible, and the hard scientist Herodotus or Polybius, for we have been here before. This is how the Hebrew prophet, Nahum, described some 2650 years ago the terminal days of Assyria: “You increased your merchants more than the stars of the heavens. Your shepherds are asleep, your nobles slumber. Your people are scattered on the mountains with none to gather them. There is no assuaging your hurt, your wound is grievous.” (Book of Nahum, various 2:3 - 3:19)

The giant sprocket of history turns by its decennial teeth, imperceptibly to those who walk this Earth for seven and a half decades and live by hourly intervals devoted to the activities of their orifices. But he who sits still can apprehend both the direction of the toothed wheel’s revolution and the span of the arc his society is traversing. And if one does so now, survival arrangements must take precedence over everything else.

All of which is to say that the intervals between the publication dates of the successive chapters of this work have grown, by necessity, much beyond this author’s original intentions. As an American citizen, however, he has had to prepare for a predicament similar to what the citizen of Weimar Republic was facing in 1921 and that of Argentina did in 1977, just before things got much, much worse.

Harpo, or Monkey Feathers and Horse Soup

Our purpose here is not to induce all concerned proto-Europeans worldwide to fear and resignation. Rather, proper action starts from clear seeing. And guidance for proper seeing or acting cannot be found in the principles of the Swedish Democratic Youth League.

One should learn instead from exceptional people of the past, known otherwise as Dead White Men, who faced insurmountable odds that they bested. U.S. Marine General Lewis Puller, for instance, we invoked before. Surrounded with his soldiers by vastly superior Chinese forces in a frozen hellhole in Korea, “Chesty” Puller said: "All right, they're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us... they can't get away this time.”

This time, they are all around too. If they won’t get you with an Islamic takeover in Eurabia, they will get you with dissolving your net worth and outsourcing your job in Multimerica. They will get you even if you escaped to the Isle of Man, through their “Tax Equalization” blackmail of the small “tax-shelter” nations. They will get you even if you live on an Alaskan mountaintop, through their Treaty of Copenhagen.

The latter, as Christopher Monckton does not tire from pointing out, would create an unelected world government with direct power over all financial markets, and direct authority to intervene over the heads of elected governments in the economic and environmental affairs of all signatory nations. This, for the main purpose of extracting from the West 2% of its annual gross domestic product for redistribution to Third-World countries in Snatcher-warranted “reparation” for an imaginary "climate debt."

From these crushing depths of insanity, the ascent has to begin.

We left Part 12 on a note of advice: step outside the swamp and construct a new civilization. That reads like the preposterous verbal pap Body Snatchers mash together when they have a hormonal rush on account of peace, justice and equity. But these are preposterous times.

It’s not possible to understand our times, except by reading authors who lived in former inverted-reality circumstances: Solzhenitsyn, Némirovsky, Remarque, Hašek, Boccaccio, the odd Roman patrician at his diary in Gaul as the Dark Ages poured in irresistibly through the sieve of a broken civilization. That kind of clarity can also be absorbed from painters like Bosch, Goya or Grosz, and from folk tales like those of the Flemish trickster Tyl Uilenspiegel.

Then, we have the Marx Brothers. No factual analysis, no angry diatribe, could possibly convey the insanity of Western suicide-by-immigration better than Groucho as he goes about managing the occupancy of a steamliner cabin.

Spotting the lying morons who sing the praises of “Strength in Diversity,” as their cities burn and their economies crash from the Diversity Recession is easier once you have seen the mute Harpo trying to pass for Maurice Chevalier at Passport Control by lip-synching “If a nightingale could sing like you".

Seeing how the richest person in Fredonia, Mrs. Teasdale, loans money to the failing state on the condition that it be governed by “a progressive, fearless leader like Rufus T. Firefly” (Groucho Marx), helps in pegging the council of lefty billionaires ranging from George Soros to Penny Pritzker who bought the U.S. Presidency for The One. And the clueless American electorate’s supersession of the calamity of the Bush presidency with the ultimate catastrophe of the Regime Of Hope And Change is more understandable when one hears the newly appointed Leader of Fredonia announce in song and dance:

“The last man nearly ruined this place,
he didn’t know what to do with it.
If you think this country is bad off now,
just wait till I get through with it.”

Understanding the logic of Affirmative Action, of hiring not by competence but by skin color and genitalia shape is easier too, once you have seen the Leader of Fredonia hire Chicolini and Pinky to act, respectively, as his Secretary of War and aide.

It’s no longer possible to forgive and forget the 2007 subprime Alt-A mortgage scammers, the 2005 Florida condo-boom bimbo builders, when one has seen Groucho selling Florida real estate in 1929: "You can have any kind of a home you want to; you can even get stucco! Oh, how you can get stuck-oh!"

Ultimately, there is epiphany there too. For you can understand in your bones who it is that’s giving you the haircut and why, once you have seen how it’s done in “Monkey Business.”

The Monkey Business haircut consists in people like Gordon Brown (UK), Barack Obama (US) and Jens Stoltenberg (Norway), with their Body Snatcher deputies, pretending to be barbers, pretending to know what they are doing, wreaking catastrophic havoc disguised as service to their nations, employing deception to fool the customers, and demanding the customers’ praise and compliance.

Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing (2). And the monkey business barbers neither have a clue, nor let facts or wisdom ever interfere with their Body Snatcher ideology.

The Barbers of Eurabia, sing Hosannas to themselves for having blessed Western Europe with over 30 million imported Muslim taxpayers (3) and a half ton of new regulations. In reality, 70% of these “taxpayers” get more in social services than they contribute in taxes, 40% end up within one generation on the dole, and 10% become a jihadi demolition squad operating conveniently as citizens protected by the laws of the very society they aim to demolish. This treasonous farce is foisted on the European peoples because the Muslims are reliable, locked-in voters for the Socialists -- until the day when their critical mass takes Europe from Socialism to Sharia.

And the Barbers of Multiamerica pretend to govern for the benefit of the governed, while ceding to hostile minorities, subversive NGOs and unhinged banksters the power to exploit and dispossess the majority of the governed.

They give unlimited rein to the cartel of banks named Federal Reserve that has brought the country to ruin in the first place. They outsource economic policy to Goldman Sachs alumni from the industry that ruined the country in the second place. They shower taxpayers’ money and genuflect to the ACORN mob of overfed and undereducated “social justice” hustlers who have ruined the country in the third place.

We are ruled by lying clowns, forever trying to postpone the moment of truth. To the next election cycle, next government, next century. They have been destroying the West year by year for 55 years now by mismanaging government finances in order to bribe voters or to buy feel-good, do-good euphoria for their Body Snatcher vanguard. As the deficits grow, productive citizens are taxed up to double the 1/3 ratio of medieval serfs, more money printing and government borrowing is necessary, the value of money erodes and moral hazard gnaws at the foundation.

The government then cooks up “solutions” to the problems it created in the first place through its overspending, incompetence or corruption. The “solutions” camouflage the damage for a while longer and prolong the comforting illusion, just like the frantic “stimulus” to stave off a corrective deflationary depression now -- at a cost of devaluation or hyperinflation later. The “solutions” are often written up in 2000-page bills that nobody reads until their rot crawls out in litigation and 15-figure costs overruns years later.

All such “solutions” just multiply the damage and roll it forward so that the “crack-up boom” (4) boom now but crack up in the future, on somebody else’s watch.

But the future has arrived. It’s piled up all around us in heaps of diversity-enriching primitives from failed cultures bearing European and American passports, or silos full of mad mullahs and NorKor nightmare leprechauns thumbing their noses at the white castrati. It’s in the 24/7 stream of rotten mass culture that the harlots of Nineveh might envy, and in mountains of unnecessary junk purchased with nonexistent money. It’s in the giant vaults full of flimsy dollars worth 2% of their value in 1913, bloated deficits of generations of venal politicians raining borrowed currency onto client voters, and enormous industrial landscapes in China pumping out products that the now-crazed West once made at home and better.

The future is here. It can no longer be rolled over but maybe for a year with respect to Iran, three years with respect to hyperinflation, fifteen years with respect to the reconquest of the West by Muhammad and Montezuma. A delay just long enough for the misruling clowns to cash in their Goldman Sachs stock options, pass veto-proof immunity laws, declare national emergencies, and build for themselves impenetrable bunkers with landing strips in Andorra or Aruba.

Gekko

Gordon Gekko is a fictitious investment banker made into a metaphor of Wall Street greed in a popular Oliver Stone movie. One year after they wrought the worst financial crash ever, a million Gekkos are pursuing with zest what they were doing before, except more boldly now because now they are “too big to fail” and have learned that the taxpayer will cover the losses of their gambling.

Just the top nine banks received $125 billion in “bailouts” from the Club of Crooks and Loons in Washington at zero interest rates. They borrow from the Federal Reserve branch of the Club at .25% short term interest, and lend it back to the U.S. Treasury branch of the Club at 3.5% long term interest. They take free money and “carry trade” it to foreign currencies and risky assets.

The Club’s open money spigot for the banksters devalues the dollar relative to foreign assets and currencies, thereby punishing everyone else. Nouriel Roubini has pointed out that the taxpayers’ money transferred to the Gekkos is not merely free (to them), but carries a 20% negative interest rate and provides a total return rate of 50-70%. For a while – until this bubble will burst too.

The Gekkos continue to securitize and trade tranches of dubious loans, coax through fraudulent but mathematically coherent algorithms derivatives out of derivatives, spin the roulette wheel by the billion with somebody else’s money at a 35x leverage, and pay themselves 8-figure annual compensation packages with taxpayers’ bailout money.

The notional value of outstanding derivatives is $1.28 quadrillion, or maybe 1.14 quadrillion, depending on the dates of the statistics used, or maybe $1.4 or $1.5 quadrillion, depending on whom you read, if the value of off-the-books derivatives be included (5). Maybe even that does not include the value of commodities- related derivatives.

But the point is, it doesn’t matter. It suffices to know that derivatives are debt bundled according to sophisticated mathematical formulas the real-world implications of which no one understands, marketed by smart and greedy people with no wisdom or conscience. What matters is that we have been catapulted into a spiraling orbit receding into cosmic insanity, hoisted on space weapons of financial mass destruction. That’s because even at $1.5 quadrillion, the derivatives’ total is more than 27 times the world’s GNP of $55 trillion (6).

Which means that if the value of the derivatives’ underlying assets slips by even 4%, the loss will exceed the gross product of the entire world. Moreover, as the trading in derivatives is typically done on a 1:20 -1:25 leverage, this is all akin to launching 25 juggling balls in the air, with the ability of catching only one, should they fall all at once.

The risk management company FRSGlobal warns that most financial institutions have a leverage ratio of 4 (i.e. 4 units of capital for each 100 unit of assets – 1:25 - versus the 30-40 leverage ratio customary in other types of business. Moreover, these crazy levels of leverage are poised on a fulcrum of fictitious capital. Nothing is the way it seems when a Gekko runs the shop.

The banksters have invented creative definitions of capital that treated subordinated debt instruments as if they were equity. They treated risk bundled into tranches of derivatives as if it were capital. Therefore, the actual ratio between capital (cash and equity) and assets has been 2%, and the banksters were really juggling 50 balls with the ability of catching at best one in case of a Black Swan event. Government regulators, hoping to move at 700% pay increase to the industry they were regulating, allowed these bloated levels of leverage to build up.

The derivatives’ juggling balls have barely begun their fall. U.S. banks alone lost $836 billion in derivatives trading in 2008, but earned $5.2 billion from this trade in the 2nd quarter of 2009. They still run this game unimpeded, secure in their knowledge that their captive government will do whatever it must to cover future losses. Greed has a short attention span; it does not concern itself with the possibility that God (call it Tao, if you wish) is a prankster, and God’s prank may trigger losses exceeding the world’s GDP several times over.

When the Club of Crooks and Loons is in charge, even arithmetic goes out the window. The financial executive Andrew Butter explains how collateral valuations were being done by lenders in Snatcherland (7):

“Someone walks into a bank and asks to borrow a trillion dollars; you say, ‘Great, have we got a deal for you! So what collateral are you offering?’ He opens up his bag and reveals that he has a miniature monkey in there, so you ask the person who does the valuations, ‘How much can I be reasonably sure to sell this miniature monkey for at some unspecified time in the future?’”

What you do, as every banker used to know, is assess the market value of the miniature monkey. But the way it works in Snatcherland, banks ignore the monkey, i.e. the underlying collateral, and instead reason:

"Oh we will check his credit rating, and we will do a multivariate regression analysis of our database to work out his ‘score’...so much if he owns a dog, a bit less if he owns a monkey, so much if he is quarter Hispanic, half White and quarter Cherokee Indian, and so much if one leg is shorter than the other, and then we will assign a standard error to each variable and run a Monte Carlo analysis and work out the probability of default, and if he passes that test we will hand over the money..." [ibid.]

It’s no wonder the IMF predicts another $1.5 trillion worth of toxic loans’ writedowns before the end of 2010, after $3.4 trillion in losses already incurred.

Greed per se is a dynamic force that can be salutary, as long as it is under a moral restraint. Milton Friedman has often praised greed. But there is a difference between greed that lays a railroad across the uncharted wilderness of America, and the Gekko type of greed.

The latter is of a kind that motivated a Rolling Stones writer Matt Taibbi to describe Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” And even that is a metaphor for a metaphor, for all the largest banks in the United States, and quite a few in Europe have engaged in these practices.

AIG, perhaps the most mismanaged enterprise in the annals of America’s folly, and the recipient of the largest bailout from the US taxpayer in history, also managed to preserve $165 million in bonuses for its corrupt, incompetent executives, after the bailout. The U.S. Senator who wrote the legislation protecting these bonuses, Christopher Dodd, is the Senate’s largest recipient of AIG donations.

President Obama was Number 2 on AIG’s largesse list. Six months after this scandal broke out, Christopher Dodd has not been impeached, and President Obama has been campaigning for his re-election.

Just as the $165 million Dodd –AIG bonuses scandal got the public agitated, it transpired that another bailed-out financial malefactor, Bank of America, had upped the ante 20 times over in this particular category of scams. When B of A was buying Merrill Lynch just before receiving $20 billion in taxpayers’ “bailout” money, it knew that Merrill Lynch had just paid out $3.6 billion in quarterly bonuses to the very executives who had steered it to a $21 billion loss for that quarter (and a $27 billion loss for the year).

“Bank of America and Merrill Lynch effectively lied to their shareholders,” said a federal who called the $3.6 billion in bonuses “effectively [a gift] from Uncle Sam”.

But there was another smelly link here. Judge Rakoff also sharply criticized the government watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that had been forced by a public outcry to investigate this case. The SEC had agreed to let Bank of America off the hook with a $33 million fine. That is 0.92% of the value of this single con, less than some at Merrill Lynch had received in 2008 bonuses, and certainly not a deterrent against future greed run amok.

Karl Denninger, the superbly informed critic of the putrid mess American-style financial capitalism has become, calls AIG “a Ponzi scheme plain and simple”, and the entire American financial system “a massive, pernicious fraud.”

This is the sort of nest of vipers where if you pull one out, all the others emerge tied head to tail. For instance, when Bush still presided over the Republican branch of the Club of Crooks and Loons, they gave a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson, the power to “save the country” by doling out (among others) $85 billion (later a total of $173 billion) of taxpayers’ money to AIG. Which enabled AIG to pay a debt of $13 billion it owed to... Goldman Sachs. Which allowed Goldman Sachs to pay 953 of its executives bonuses of at least $1 million, and 78 executives at least $5 million, each.

The unrestrained greed of financial capitalism, or what I called at the 2007 height of the boom “Kapital Kapalit” (reprint here) has been sucking the vitality of America and of much of the rest of the economic structure of the West. Simon Johnson, professor of economics at MIT and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, compares the death grip of the financial oligarchy on the United States to a Third World power structure. “Financiers,” writes Prof. Johnsons, “played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse.”

The collapse is by no means over. The Bank for International Settlements estimates the banksters’ total derivative losses at $4.1 trillion. But this is, as such things always are, just a calming nostrum for frayed nerves. In case of a Black Swan event, which such estimates never take under consideration, the $4.1 trillion figure is probably too optimistic by a good-sized fraction of a quadrillion. But what’s a quadrillion or two between friends.

People forget that Adam Smith was not an economist but a moral philosopher. Before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, he had written The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The free market is no place for cutthroats and purse snatchers. But to blame and punish the Gekkos alone would be a grave miscarriage of justice.

The biggest swindle in history could never have occurred, were in not for the active encouragement of Leviathan. It’s the U.S. Federal Reserve and successive governments in the U.S. and in Europe that have energized, refused to regulate, and bailed out the Gekkos. All this at the expense of all Americans living now and in the future, with much pain to Europeans too, catastrophically so in countries like Iceland and Estonia. Which will take us to the two models of Western misgovernance, Barko and Sarko, in Chapter 2.

Previous articles in this series can be accessed here.

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(1) The basic analogy reverts to Part 1, where we cited the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the film, alien “Body Snatchers” produce giant legume Pods that replace living people while appearing to be identical to them. From the Pods develop the new Body Snatchers who cultivate further Pods etc.

(2) These are Warren Buffet’s words.

(3) In addition to some 20 millions Muslims who live in the Balkans and in Russia.

(4) Crack-up Boom is a term coined by Ludwig von Mises, the Austrian economist, to describe the process of a deliberately inflationist policy that leads to a loss of the people’s faith in their country’s currency, a massive rush to buy things while the money still has some value, and then the ultimate crash of hyperinflation. But the term can be adopted to describe other fraudulent government policies that are inherently destructive yet not apparently so to most people for a while, because of the government‘s deceptive maneuvers.

(5) In Part 9 I quoted the derivatives’ total at $531.2 trillion. This was per up-to-date Bank of International Settlement (BIS) statistics. But since that data for December 2008 was released, economic intelligence analysts have been digging around to find a lot more than the BIS tables showed, e.g. per this.

(6) Currently quoted figures for the 2009 World GDP range from $45 to $65 trillion; we’ll average at $55 trillion.

(7) Snatcherland is my term for a society run by reality-disdaining Body Snatchers.

Leviathan Is Born: The Annexation of Europe by Brussels

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:28:41 -0600

On November 3rd 2009, at 3 pm local time, the Czech Republic ceased to exist as a sovereign state when Vaclav Klaus, its president, put his signature under the Treaty of Lisbon. The Czech Republic was the last of the 27 member states of the European Union to ratify the treaty which turns the EU into a genuine state to which it members states are subservient.

Klaus had delayed signing the document for as long as he could. The Czech Parliament approved the treaty last May. On the morning of November 3rd the Czech Constitutional Court ruled unanimously that the Lisbon Treaty did not contravene the Czech Constitution. The president accused the court of bias and publicly stated that he fundamentally disagreed with the court’s verdict, its content and justification. “With the Lisbon Treaty taking effect, the Czech Republic will cease to be a sovereign state, despite the political opinion of the Constitutional Court,” Klaus said. However, he added, as President he had to respect the verdict. Consequently, he signed his country’s independence away, barely 20 years after its liberation from the Soviet empire.

The pressure on Klaus had been tremendous. Because the treaty could not come into force until the Czech ratification, the EU authorities and the political establishment of the 26 other member states had been tightening the screws on Prague. In early October, the Czech cabinet, under pressure from Berlin and Paris, had met in an emergency session to consider how to complete ratification in the event of Klaus’s continued intransigence. They even considered impeaching the president.

Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, was very blunt on 15 October: he threatened that “a single man is not allowed to oppose the will of 500 million Europeans.” The “500 million Europeans” referred to the citizens of the 27 member states of the European Union, the “single man” to Vaclav Klaus. Kouchner’s declaration, however, was as deceptive and mendacious as the entire ratification process of the Lisbon Treaty had been throughout the EU. 500 million people had deliberately not been asked for their opinion of the treaty because the European political establishment feared they would vote it down.

Indeed, the so-called Lisbon Treaty is the second version of the European Constitution, which the electorates of France and the Netherlands forcefully rejected in referendums in May and June 2005. Refusing to take the people’s “No” for an answer, Europe’s political establishment simply repackaged the Constitution in a somewhat different order, but without changing its basic content. This Constitution.2 was called the Treaty of Lisbon, after the place where the new document was signed. It was subsequently pushed through the parliaments of the member states without allowing any more referendums. Only Ireland was obliged to put Lisbon before the people because the Irish Constitution required it. After the Irish rejected the treaty in June 2008, their “No” was also discarded. The Irish were made to vote again. Last October, they gave in, making Vaclav Klaus the last man standing in Europe.

Now, with Mr. Klaus’s signature, the game has drawn to its close and a treaty, so despised by the people that it was never put to them, has turned 500 million Europeans into citizens of a genuine supranational European State which is empowered to act as a State vis-à-vis other States and its own citizens. The EU will have its own President, Foreign Minister, diplomatic corps and Public Prosecutor. Henceforward, the only remaining sovereign power of any significance in Europe is Russia. Apart from Switzerland, Norway and Iceland, the EU leviathan has a grip on every other nation, whose national parliaments are, in accordance with the Lisbon Treaty, obliged to “contribute actively to the good functioning of the Union,” i.e. further primarily the interests of the new Union, rather than those of their own people.

The new European superstate, however, is not a democracy. It has an elected parliament, but the European Parliament has no legislative powers, nor does it control the EU’s executive bodies. The latter, who also have legislative power overriding national legislation, are made up of “commissioners.” These are appointed by the governments of the member states (although no longer with one commissioner per member state, as was the case so far, but with a total number capped at two-thirds of the number of member states). The EU is basically a cartel, consisting of the 27 governments of the member states, who have concluded that it is easier to pass laws in the secret EU meetings with their colleagues than through their own national parliaments in the glare of public criticism.

“I have always considered this treaty a step in the wrong direction,” Czech President Vaclav Klaus said last month. “It will deepen the problems the EU is facing today, it will increase its democratic deficit, worsen the standing of our country and expose it to new risks.” Klaus calls the EU doctrine “Europeism.” In a speech last August, he defined “Europeism” as “a neosocialist doctrine, which believes neither in freedom, nor in the spontaneous evolution of human society.” He said it has the following four characteristics:

“(a) economic views based on the concept of the so-called social market economy, which is the opposite of the market economy; (b) views on freedom, democracy and society based on collectivism, social partnership and corporatism, not on classical parliamentary democracy; (c) views on European integration which favor unification and supranationalism; (d) views on foreign policy and international relations based on internationalism, cosmopolitism, abstract universalism, multiculturalism and on denationalization.”

“To my great regret,” he added, “Europe is more and more dominated by this way of thinking despite the fact that it is an extremely naïve, unpractical and romantic utopism, not shared by the European silent majority, but predominantly by the European elites.”

These European elites are currently deciding whom to appoint as the Union’s first President and first High Commissioner (the EU’s common Foreign Minister). The 27 EU governments have already agreed that the former should be a Christian-Democrat and the latter a Social-Democrat. Diplomatic sources say that Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy of Belgium has the best chances of becoming President, while the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, is tipped as High Commissioner. Incidentally, Mr. Miliband, too, has a link to Belgium. His father, the Marxist ideologue Ralph Miliband, was born in Brussels and spent the first sixteen years of his life in the Belgian capital.

Although the Belgian Christian-Democrats are considered to be conservatives, they are very close to the Social-Democrats, their preferred partners in government. Both Messrs. Van Rompuy and Miliband represent the “Europeism” which Czech President Klaus so abhors.

The formal decision about who will become President and High Commissioner will be taken in late November. As the wheeling and dealing – all of it behind closed doors so that the people will not know – continues, it is not certain yet that Herman Van Rompuy will emerge as Europe’s first president. It is, however, not a coincidence that a Belgian seems the most likely candidate. Belgium is a supranational state, constructed by the European powers in 1830 and made up of two different nations, Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia. As such, Belgium, whose capital Brussels also happens to be the EU’s capital, serves as a model for the EU in its attempt to build a supranational state out of the continent’s different nations.

Like EU politics, Belgian politics is characterized by a lack of transparency, unaccountability, corporatism and a willingness to bend the democratic rules and legal procedures so as to allow the political establishment to proceed with their own project and secure the survival of a state which is unloved by its citizens but provides the livelihood of the ruling elites. What Vaclav Klaus calls “Europeism” is the application of Belgicism, the doctrine underpinning the Belgian state, on the European level.

The whole process of writing a European Constitution and changing the EU from a supranational organization into a state began with the Laken Declaration of December 2001, an initiative of the Belgian presidency of the European Council that year. The coming into power of the Lisbon Treaty marks the annexation of Europe by Brussels – the expansion of Belgium over an entire continent.

Paul Belien is the author of A Throne in Brussels -- Britain, the Saxe-Coburgs and the Belgianisation of Europe

A History of Geology and Planetary Science - Part 2

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:36:49 -0600

Since more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by seawater, detailed studies of the oceans were of great importance to science as well as to practical navigation. The first modern text devoted exclusively to marine science was Histoire physique de la mer (1725) by the Italian military man and naturalist Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658-1730), who assembled information about water temperature, salinity, currents, ocean plants and animals. The eighteenth century witnessed an acceleration of this trend as European explorers charted distant lands and the science of chemistry was rapidly maturing in Europe itself.

Ocean currents engaged the curiosity of scholars such as Benjamin Franklin who in the 1780s mapped the Gulf Stream, which originates in the Gulf of Mexico and brings vast amounts of warm water across the Atlantic Ocean to northwestern Europe, substantially contributing to the regional climate and the relatively mild winters there. Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford’s heat experiments led him to attribute ocean circulation to differences in water density, a theory which was accepted after some delay. The English geographer James Rennell (1742-1830) served in the British Royal Navy, where his numerous voyages allowed him to make accurate maps and charts of currents and tides. His final work Currents of the Atlantic Ocean was a landmark study published posthumously by his daughter in 1832.

Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806-1873) of the United States Navy in 1842 became superintendent of the U.S. Depot of Charts and Instruments in Washington D.C. From the study of old ships’ captains logs Maury assembled data on winds, currents and other information and finally published his Physical Geography of the Sea in 1855, widely considered the first extensive textbook of oceanography. The Scots-Canadian oceanographer John Murray (1841-1914) was the first person to use the term “oceanography” and along with the Norwegian marine zoologist Johan Hjort (1869-1948) in 1912 published the influential book The Depths of the Ocean. The Norwegian oceanographer Harald Sverdrup (1888-1957) developed a comprehensive theory of ocean circulation.

By the early twentieth century, several persons had suggested the existence of some form of continental drift, but it was the German meteorologist and geologist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) who had the biggest impact. He had studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Innsbruck and Berlin. From 1906 to 1908 he worked as a meteorologist to a Danish expedition to Greenland. In 1910 he had been struck, as others had been before him, of how Africa and South America seemed to “fit together.” It was known that surprisingly similar fossils and landforms could sometimes be found on opposite sides of major oceans. Based on these findings Wegener proposed his theory of continental drift in 1915 in his masterwork The Origin of Continents and Oceans (Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane). He suggested that there had once been a giant continent which he named “Pangaea” (“All-Earth”).

Scientists currently believe that Pangaea split up a little over 200 million years ago. These ideas are now widely accepted; in fact, it is believed that the major continents have drifted apart and been reunited in supercontinents several times with intervals of some hundreds of millions of years. However, it took generations for this theory to be accepted, in part because scientists lacked sufficient information about the ocean floors and in part because Wegener himself could not properly explain how continental drift happens or what drives it.

In the late nineteenth century, the invention of reasonably accurate and compact seismographs spurred the development of seismology into a quantitative discipline. In 1880 the Englishman John Milne (1850-1913), the inventor of the first modern seismograph, as a foreign advisor to the Meiji government founded the Seismological Society of Japan. Scientists in earthquake-ridden Japan soon joined the Germans and the Americans as world leaders in geophysics.

The Japanese geophysicist Motonori Matuyama (1884-1958) was the son of a Zen abbot. After studies at the Imperial University in Kyoto, he worked in Chicago with the American geologist Thomas Chamberlin (1843-1928). Matuyama proposed that long periods had existed in the geological past in which the polarity of the magnetic poles was the opposite of what it is now. A geomagnetic reversal is a change in the orientation of Earth’s magnetic field where magnetic north and south become interchanged. In the past 4 million years there have been nine reversals, which leave magnetic imprints in certain rock samples.

The English geologist Arthur Holmes was a proponent of Wegener’s continental drift. His pioneering work on radioactive heat and geological time had led him to a profound understanding of processes in our planet’s interior. He proposed that very slow-moving convection currents in the Earth’s mantle cause continental breakup, seafloor formation and continental drift. The Dutch geophysicist Felix Andries Vening Meinesz (1887-1966) measured gravity anomalies above the ocean floors. Before the 1940s, most geologists had assumed that the sea floor represented the most ancient crust. When samples where finally obtained from the ocean beds it turned out that they were far younger than expected and that the youngest samples were found next to the volcanically active mid-ocean ridges.

The existence of a “mountain range” in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean had been suspected since the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858, but the global system of mid-ocean ridges was mapped only after 1950. Both the United States and the Soviet Union, the latter with less financial resources at their disposal than the former, needed to known more about the ocean environment to navigate with their nuclear submarines. The seas constituted an important frontline in their Cold War superpower rivalry. Research coupled with electronic computers greatly increased the understanding of oceanography and atmospheric physics and facilitated the integration of these various fields into the umbrella discipline of Earth science.

Studies of paleomagnetism (changes in the Earth’s magnetic field “fossilized” in samples of magnetic minerals) and distribution of fossils triggered a mental revolution in geology and the emerging Earth sciences. The American geologist Harry Hammond Hess (1906-1969) while working as an officer in the US Navy during WWII conducted his own research of the ocean floors using the transport’s sounding gear. In 1960 at Princeton University, Hess put the pieces together and advanced the theory that the Earth’s crust moves laterally from volcanically active oceanic ridges. “Sea-floor spreading” helped to establish the concept of continental drift as scientifically respectable. The Canadian geophysicist John Tuzo Wilson (1908-1993) soon after created the new synthesis we know as plate tectonics.

According to scholars Philip Rehbock and Gary Weir,

“Wegener proposed that the present configuration of the continents, and other phenomena from stratigraphy, paleontology, and biogeography, could be accounted for by assuming the gradual movement of the continents horizontally over the face of the globe. The theory gained few adherents until the 1960s, by which time new lines of evidence helped bring about the plate-tectonics revolution. Evidence came from studies of paleomagnetism and polar wandering carried out by P. M. S. Blackett, S. Keith Runcorn, and their colleagues in Britain; heat flow from mid-ocean ridges, by British geophysicist Edward Bullard; seismological activity along mid-ocean ridges, by Americans Maurice Ewing and Bruce Heezen; and gravity anomalies, by the Dutch geophysicist Felix Andries Vening-Meinesz and the American Harry H. Hess. In 1960, Hess proposed the hypothesis, subsequently known as sea-floor spreading, that would explain all of these phenomena. In the mid-1960s, the British geophysicists Frederick Vine and Drummond Matthews confirmed the hypothesis by analyzing patterns of magnetic anomalies around mid-ocean ridges, and the Glomar Challenger drilled directly into the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. J. Tuzo Wilson’s 1965 concept that the earth’s surface consists of several rigid but mobile plates put the finishing touch on plate tectonics.”

If two of these enormous plates are moving away from each other, an ocean ridge or continental ridge will form. If they collide, one may be pushed under the other in a process called subduction. If neither plate can subduct under the other they push up mountain ranges. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is straddled by volcanically active Iceland, has churned out magma (fluid molten rock) and expanded the Atlantic for millions of years. The Eurasian plate collides with the African plate in the Mediterranean region, which is why the eastern Mediterranean in particular is a volcanically and seismologically active area with volcanoes Mount Etna on Sicily and Mount Vesuvius east of Naples. In the Aegean Sea, the massive Thera eruption at the island of Santorini around 1600 BC weakened the Minoan civilization.

Whereas the Alps in Central Europe were born through the collision between the African and European plates the Himalayas in Asia, the planet’s highest mountain range, were created by a collision between the Eurasian Plate and the Indo-Australian Plate. The so-called Pacific Ring of Fire is a region plagued by frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The western Pacific Ocean contains the deepest trench on the Earth’s crust, the Mariana Trench, which lies at the subduction boundary between two tectonic plates.

While most of the volcanic activity on our planet can be explained by plate tectonics there are nevertheless some exceptions. A hot spot is an area of persistent volcanic activity which originates at unusually hot areas of the mantle-core boundary in the Earth’s interior. Examples of such hot spots would be Galápagos, the unique Yellowstone area in the USA and Hawaii. The Hawaiian Islands are actually peaks of a great undersea mountain range created by the slow movement of a tectonic plate across a hotspot. Whereas the famous Mount Everest in the Himalayas stretches 8,848 meters above sea level, Mauna Kea in Hawaii would be over 10,000 meters if measured from the base of the mountain at the bottom of the ocean.

The theory of plate tectonics triggered a revolution in the Earth sciences in the late twentieth century. There are those who view it as a paradigm shift like the ones described by the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) in his influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions from 1962. Kuhn broke with several key positivist doctrines held by philosophers of science such as Karl Popper and was responsible for popularizing the term “paradigm.” According to him, science enjoys periods of stable progress punctuated by revolutions when one conceptual world view is replaced by another. Kuhn received some criticism for these views by scholars who claimed that it is more appropriate to describe the development of social and cultural ideas than the history of science; some postmodern thinkers have used or misused his ideas to claim that there is no such thing as objective truth.

While the theory of plate tectonics is now almost universally accepted we still don’t know how this process started. Scientists believe that it began at least 2.5 billion, possibly as much as 4 billion years ago. The very young Earth was probably too hot for the crust to solidify completely and the lightest minerals would have floated to the surface. Geologist Vicki Hansen of the University of Minnesota in a controversial hypothesis from 2007 suggested that the impact of a massive asteroid or comet might have kick-started plate tectonics on Earth.

Stones falling from the sky were often viewed by ancient peoples as signs from the gods. In Enlightenment Europe, stories about such events were usually dismissed by scholars as common superstition. The German scholar Ernst Chladni (1756-1827), who is often regarded as the founder of meteoritics, in 1794 published a paper suggesting the extraterrestrial origin of meteorites, asserting that masses of iron and rock enter the atmosphere from above and produce fireballs when heated by friction with the air. He concluded that they must be cosmic objects. This view was defended by the German astronomer Heinrich Olbers (1758-1840), but ridiculed by those who believed meteorites were of volcanic origin and created on Earth.

Eyewitness accounts of fireballs were initially dismissed, yet fresh and seemingly reliable reports of stones falling from the sky appeared at the turn of the nineteenth century. The young English chemist Charles Howard (1774-1816) read Chladni’s work and decided to analyze the chemical composition of these rocks. Working with the French mineralogist Jacques-Louis de Bournon he made the first thorough scientific analysis of meteorites. Here is a quote from the book Cosmic Horizons, edited by Neil De Grasse Tyson and Steven Soter:

“The two scientists found that the stones had a dark shiny crust and contained tiny ‘globules’ (now called chondrules) unlike anything seen in terrestrial rocks. All the iron masses contained several percent nickel, as did the grains of iron in the fallen stones. Nothing like this had ever been found in iron from the Earth. Here was compelling evidence that the irons and rocks were of extraterrestrial origin. Howard published these results in 1802. Meanwhile, the first asteroid, Ceres, was discovered in 1801, and many more followed. The existence of these enormous rocks in the solar system suggested a plausible source for the meteorites. Space wasn’t empty after all. Finally, in 1803, villagers in Normandy witnessed a fireball followed by thunderous reverberations and a spectacular shower of several thousand stones. The French government sent the young physicist Jean-Baptist Biot to investigate. Based on extensive interviews with witnesses, Biot established the trajectory of the fireball. He also mapped the area where the stones had landed: it was an ellipse measuring 10 by 4 kilometers, with the long axis parallel to the fireball’s trajectory. Biot’s report persuaded most scientists that rocks from the sky were both real and extraterrestrial.”

The French physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774-1862) also did work on the polarization of light and contributed to electromagnetic theory. He accompanied the great chemist Joseph Gay-Lussac in 1804 on the first balloon flight undertaken for scientific purposes, reaching a height of several thousand meters while doing research on magnetism and the atmosphere. The Montgolfier brothers had performed the first recorded manned balloon flight in France in 1783. The French meteorologist Léon Teisserenc de Bort (1855-1913) later discovered the stratosphere, the layer of the Earth’s atmosphere above the troposphere which contains most of the clouds and weather systems, by using unmanned, instrumented hydrogen balloons. The French physicist Charles Fabry (1867-1945) discovered the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere in 1913. Ozone (O3) is tri-atomic oxygen that exists in the stratosphere as a gas and protects us from most of the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.

Unmanned gas balloons are still used for meteorological, scientific and even military purposes. Without a pressurized cabin, manned ballooning becomes dangerous in the upper reaches of the atmosphere due to the cold, the low pressure and particularly the lack of oxygen. The Swiss inventor Auguste Piccard (1884-1962), who served as a professor of physics in Brussels, created balloons equipped with pressurized cabins and set a number of flight records during the 1930s, reaching an altitude of 23,000 meters.

His son Jacques Piccard (1922-2008), a Brussels-born Swiss oceanographer, explored the deepest reaches of the oceans when he and the American Don Walsh (born 1931) in 1960 used the bathyscaphe Trieste to travel 10,900 metres down to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. The pressure exerted by ten meters depth of water roughly equals one atmosphere. At the bottom of the Challenger Deep the pressure is consequently well over one thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level, yet amazingly Piccard and Walsh spotted fishes living even under these extreme conditions.

The French naval officer, explorer, ecologist, author and prizewinning filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910-1997) invented the aqualung together with the engineer Émile Gagnan (1900-1979) in 1943. Cousteau was a pioneer in the development of underwater cameras as well. He possessed the rare gift of being able to communicate his love of the natural world to a mainstream audience and did a great deal to popularize knowledge of underwater biology.

The Austrian physicist Victor Francis Hess (1883-1964), educated at the Universities of Graz and Vienna, in a series of balloon ascents in 1911-13 established that radiation increases with altitude. Early explorers of radioactivity studied its intensity from church steeples and tall buildings. Hess found that radiation declined during the first 1,000 m of ascent but then began to rise again, reaching double that at surface level at 5,000 m. By flying his balloon at night and during a solar eclipse he demonstrated that this radiation comes from outer space but not from the Sun. This high-energy ionizing radiation is now called cosmic rays.

The troposphere contains about 80% of the total mass of the atmosphere with most of the rest concentrated in the next layer, the stratosphere. The air temperature in the troposphere drops with altitude. The depth of this layer varies from about 8 to 16 kilometers from the polar regions to the warm tropics. Commercial airliners typically cruise at altitudes of above 10 km to optimize jet engine fuel burn and stay above most of the turbulent weather found below.

From an altitude of 11 to 50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface we find the stratosphere. The lower portion of this layer is influenced by the polar jet stream and subtropical jet stream, fast uniform winds concentrated in a narrow band. The stratosphere defines a layer in which temperatures rises with increasing altitude. This is caused by the absorption of ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the Sun by the ozone layer. Weather balloons filled with lighter-than-air gases such as hydrogen or helium may reach the stratosphere but cannot explore the layers above it as the decreasing pressure causes the balloons to expand until they disintegrate.

The mesosphere stretches from 50 km to 80 km. Temperatures here drop with increasing altitude to almost -100°C, making this the coldest atmospheric layer. The ionosphere can be found at an altitude of around 80 km, at the border to the thermosphere. Solar radiation here generates very high temperatures but the air is extremely thin. There is no specific height at which the atmosphere begins or ends; it gradually merges into space. Nevertheless, the Kármán line, named after the Hungarian American physicist Theodore von Kármán (1881-1963), at 100 km above sea level is sometimes used to mark the beginning of space. The International Space Station (ISS), a research laboratory in a microgravity environment and probably the most expensive man-made object ever created, is currently found in a Low Earth Orbit roughly 340 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Artificial satellites are usually not put into orbit at altitudes of less than 300 km as this is considered impractical.

Space is full or rocks, ranging from asteroids to specimen the size of a fist. A meteoroid is too small to be called an asteroid or a comet. Even smaller particles are called cosmic dust grains. If meteoroids enter our atmosphere they become meteors. Most meteors burn up by the friction before they reach the ground, typically in the mesosphere where they create fireballs we see as shooting stars. Those who survive this fiery entry become known as meteorites. Many meteorite specimens are believed to be remnants of the Solar System as it was during its formation, most of them probably fragments of asteroids. Based on their chemical composition, a few known meteorites are believed to come from the Moon or the planet Mars.

The French geochemist and mining engineer Gabriel Daubrée (1814-1896) developed a classification system for meteorites and their composition. In 1866 he presented his theory that the Earth has a nickel-iron core, similar to the nickel-iron alloys we can find in certain iron meteorites. In early, hot planetary bodies iron-rich metal and other heavy elements may have separated from the molten bodies to form dense cores inside shells of silicate material.

As we have seen, the nebular hypothesis was presented in the eighteenth century by Emanuel Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant and Pierre-Simon Laplace. The planets and asteroids all revolve around the Sun in the same direction and roughly the same plane, which strongly indicates that they were created during the same process. In 1905 the geologist Thomas Chamberlin and astronomer Forest Ray Moulton (1872-1952) in the USA developed a theory that smaller objects, planetesimals, orbited the Sun during the formation of the Solar System and collided to build the larger planets. Some elements of their theory remain in use today.

We currently believe that about 4.6 billion years ago the solar nebula, a cloud of interstellar dust and gas, was slowly spinning in a flat rotating disk. Many objects in the Oort cloud and the Kuiper belt may be rocky chunks known as planetesimals left over from this period. Small chunks of matter collided to form kilometer-sized planetesimals, some of which collided further to form a few hundred planetary embryos and moons. It is possible that one of these protoplanets slammed into the very young Earth and thereby created our Moon; the Solar System certainly was a much more turbulent place back then than it is today. Well over 99 % of the material in the solar nebula gathered to form a protostar, until the temperature and pressure at the core was high enough to start hydrogen fusion and give birth to our Sun.

The Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi (1746-1826) studied at Milan, Turin and Rome, taught philosophy for a time at Genoa and mathematics at the University of Malta. Well-connected in Italy and within the European scientific community he managed to establish a decent observatory at Palermo, Sicily. In 1801 Piazzi discovered Ceres, the first known asteroid. He correctly believed it to lie in the orbital region between Mars and Jupiter but soon fell ill and lost track of the object. Based on the very limited number of observations the brilliant young German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss successfully calculated its orbit.

Ceres is by far the most massive body in the asteroid belt. Its size is sufficient to give it a spherical shape and it is therefore considered a “dwarf planet.” It contains a significant quantity of water ice and probably preserves a record of what the Solar System was like when it was first condensing from cosmic dust into planetesimals and larger protoplanets. Many astronomers believe that it was the gravitational influence of the neighboring gas giant Jupiter that prevented the plantesimals of the asteroid belt for form into a regular planet.

Soon after Piazzi’s discovery the German physician and astronomer Heinrich Olbers found two more asteroids, Pallas and Vesta. Next to his medical practice in Bremen, Olbers conducted astronomical observations and discovered several comets. He is also famous for popularizing Olbers’ Paradox, a question which scholars had found surprisingly difficult to answer: Why is the sky dark at night? If the universe is eternal and contains an infinite number of stars then presumably it should be much lighter than it is. The preferred answer to this, at least within the framework of the current Big Bang cosmological model, is that the universe is not infinitely old (less than 14 billion years old) and that it is expanding. Partial credit for providing the correct answer to this riddle has been given to the American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) as well as to the great British physicist Lord Kelvin.

After the introduction of photography, the German astronomer and astrophotographer Max Wolf (1863-1932) from the University of Heidelberg invented a technique for revealing asteroids by the streaks they left on photographic plates, thus discovering hundreds of new ones. Astronomers then discovered the asteroid belt between the planets Mars and Jupiter and by extension found an explanation for many impact craters on various planetary bodies.

The discipline of Earth science was invented in the 1960s and 70s when it replaced geology as the major discipline for studying our planet, just as geology had once replaced mineralogy. Geophysicists, geologists, oceanographers and meteorologists began working on related problems using similar techniques and implements. At the same time the first space probes were being sent to investigate other bodies in our Solar System, which meant that geologists could extend the scope of their investigations to the domain formerly dominated by astronomers. This led to the creation of planetary science and branches such as astrobiology.

The American geologist and astronomer Eugene Shoemaker (1928-1997) was one of the pioneers of planetary science and arguably founded astrogeology. In much of his asteroid and comet work he collaborated with his wife Carolyn Shoemaker (born 1929), who currently holds the record for most comet discoveries by any one individual with 32. They were co-discoverers of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, whose spectacular collision with Jupiter in 1994 was followed closely by scientists. Eugene Shoemaker did much to bring attention to the significance of possible impacts from comets and asteroids during the Earth’s history.

We know from the fossil record that there have been several mass extinctions of life on our planet previously, but the causes of them remain disputed. Many people believe that the extinction which ended the age of the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago was at least partly caused by the impact of a large asteroid or comet. The American experimental physicist and Nobel laureate Luis W. Alvarez (1911-1988) from the University of California, Berkeley together with his son Walter Alvarez (born 1940) suggested this theory in 1980.

One of the key pieces of evidence was a clay layer (the K-T boundary) from this period which contains an unusually high concentration of the platinum metal iridium. Iridium is very rare in the Earth’s crust because it is dense and therefore presumably sank into the core during the Earth’s childhood. It is much more abundant in meteorites and by extension probably in asteroids and comets. Since then, a huge impact crater from this geological period has been identified outside of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, although doubts have been raised by some scholars as to whether this impact was the sole cause of the mass extinction in question.

Icelanders Do Not Trust the EU

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:57:01 -0600

The majority of Icelanders has very little trust for the European Union according to a new opinion poll published on Saturday by Capacent. Only about 26% trust the EU with 44% who do not trust it. The rest, or 30%, are undecided. The Icelandic government is, however, proceeding with the EU accession process.

Last Friday, a former Foreign Minister of Iceland, Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson, said at a meeting held at the University of Reykjavík that he thought the Icelandic people would probably reject membership of the European Union in a referendum. This he contributed among other things to a poor political leadership by which he was obviously referring to the current government in Iceland. Hannibalsson’s remarks are seen as quite interesting since he has for years been one of the most outspoken supporters of Iceland joining the EU. The former Foreign Minister is, however, far from being the only leading supporter of EU membership in Iceland who has recently aired pessimism that Iceland will actually join the EU at the end of the ongoing accession process.

Steingrímur J. Sigfússon, Iceland’s Minister of Finance and chairman of the junior coalition partner the Left Green Movement, said last Tuesday at the Nordic Council’s 61st Session in Stockholm that although his government had applied to join the European Union the Icelandic people do not want to become members. Sigfússon was responding to a question directed to him about the situation of Iceland’s EU application.

Nevertheless, last week, the Icelandic government delivered its answers to a total of 2,500 questions about Iceland, its economy, politics and society in general to the European Union. The answers are a part of the Iceland’s accession process. The government denied a popular demand in Iceland that the questions and the answers to them would be translated into Icelandic so all Icelanders could examine them. The questions and answers were in a kind of a Brussels-bureaucratic version of English.

The government had previously promised that the whole accession process would be transparent and the Icelandic people would be kept informed about every step of it. This is not seen by critics as a good start. It might be mentioned that among those who called for an Icelandic translation of the questions and the answers were organisations of both those in favour of EU membership and those who reject it.

The Cold War Never Ended

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:12:53 -0600

It is now almost twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. But did it really end, and did we win it? Look at the situation in Europe today, where many of the former Communist countries in the eastern half of Europe are freer and safer than many of those in the western half of Europe. Instead of an Iron Curtain we now have an Iron Veil of Multiculturalism, and Western Europe is on the wrong side of it this time around. Did we trade the USSR for the EUSSR? If we really "beat" Marxism, how come Marxists and Leftists of all stripes virtually control Western media and academia a generation later, and why does the USA have a Marxist-inspired President Obama?

Michael Meyer, the author of The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall, is exercised by the onerous Cold War “myths” that we all cling to, yet he never engages or identifies those who supposedly propagate them. He rightly denounces the America-centric view of Cold War history but barely mentions the pivotal role played by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in reunification. France’s Francois Mitterand, Great Britain’s Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II are similarly absent from the narrative. (As Polish dissident writer Adam Michnik later observed, “It will be a long time before anyone fully comprehends the ramifications of [the Pope’s] nine-day visit” to occupied Poland in 1979.)

In place of the old myths, Meyer erects new ones: “For all the problems they faced…most East Germans had no desire to leave their country,” he insists, “contrary to the impression fostered in the West. Many if not most were perfectly comfortable with the socialist system that guaranteed them work, low-cost housing and free lifelong health care and schooling.” There is no source for this fantastical claim. That a certain measure of nostalgia for the East German dictatorship exists from a distance of 20 years is undeniable, but an opinion poll taken in 1990 showed that 91 percent of East Germans favored unification and, by definition, the dissolution of the “worker’s state.”

Reagan, of course, had his flaws, as voluminously documented by scholars, enemies, and sympathizers alike. But Gorbachev, Time’s “Man of the Decade” for the 1980s (unlike Reagan) and a Nobel Peace Prize winner (unlike Reagan), often escapes similar scrutiny. Meyer is more interested in score settling, pointing out that many hard-liners in the Reagan and Bush administrations, several of whom later joined George W. Bush’s administration, misjudged Gorbachev’s seriousness.

Gorbachev’s economic reforms were vague and ad hoc, and they wound up being tremendous failures. His chief foreign policy aide, Anatoly Chernyaev, grumbled during glasnost that Gorbachev “has no concept of where we are going. His declaration about socialist values, the ideals of October, as he begins to tick them off, sound like irony to the cognoscenti. Behind them—emptiness.” As historian Robert Service has observed, Gorbachev intended glasnost as “a renaissance of Leninist ideals,” while his books “still equivocated on Stalin.” He avoided repeats of 1956 and 1968, when the Soviet military ruthlessly cracked down on its restive satellites, but did send troops to murder residents of Vilnius, Tblisi, and Baku.

Both Mann and Meyer are correct that without Gorbachev, the end of the Cold War wouldn’t have arrived so quickly. And Vaclav Havel is surely right when he argues that Gorbachev’s “historical achievement is enormous: communism would have collapsed without him anyway, but it might have happened 10 years later, and in God knows how wild and bloody a fashion.” But Mann’s case is convincing that the man of the decade, the great peace laureate, destroyed the Soviet Union “unintentionally,” not as an expression of any democratic desires.

It is difficult to accept heroic portrayals of those who were complicit in the mass enslavement and murder of their unwilling subjects. The Soviet Union’s leaders, out of at least partial desperation, opened the door to democracy a crack, and their restless captives barged right through. On the other side they found VHS players, compact discs, supermarkets overflowing with fresh produce, press freedom, the hurly-burly of markets, multiparty democracy—and an army of fallible historians, journalists, politicians, and pundits, all desperate to prove that they had been right all along

Duly Noted: Swiss Hostages Disappear in Libya

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 06:05:28 -0500

George Handlery about the week that was. The dictator’s tantrum: a chronic obsession. Making and not keeping agreements. Strange bedfellows and odd mutations. Language laws and their insanity. When aid fuels dictatorship.

1. Months ago, the writer began to pen episodes that were presented as “The Dictator’s Tantrum.” Originally, the topic was a vehicle to share something funny and bizarre with the reader. Recently the laugh stopped and the matter got serious. With that the conflict turned into a lesson about dealing with dictatorships and their “Leaders-in-need-of-treatment.” As it unfolds, the story is also a warning to potential hostages about going to work in dictatorships or visiting there.

Long ago, Geneva’s police arrested Gaddafi’s son Hannibal in a luxury hotel for beating his imported personal servants. Once Hannibal returned home Dad Gaddafi had two Swiss working in Libya arrested for violations of immigration rules.

In August, the acting President of Switzerland went to Tripoli to settle the matter. There he gave the Gaddafi family the factually unwarranted apology they demanded in their tantrum. He did so even though, “Mr. Son” has been handled according to the laws of the realm. Naïve Mr. Merz returned without the hostages but with promises. He guessed that the Libyans did not want a high publicity welcome for the returned hostages. A government plane and the head of state would have had that effect. The idea was that the hero’s welcome, such as the one given to the Lockerbie bomber by with which Libya’s violated its promise to Britain, had to be avoided. He did, however, have the commitment of the ranting dictator that by the end of September the case would be closed in exchange for an “independent” investigation of the arrest in Geneva. Therefore, a government plane was sent to bring the hostages back quietly. After three days, the plain was ordered to return empty. Following some complication, the deadline passed and the hostages stayed. Supposedly, the Leader was insulted because a local paper published a picture showing Hannibal while under arrest. The Libyans now claimed that all that they had promised was to take some action regarding the detainees. That promise was fulfilled by referring the issue to the Ministry of Justice. “Justice” and the “independent judiciary” did not see it fit to ignore the alleged overstaying of visas.

Now the matter gets more serious. The two Swiss who resided in the Embassy were asked to come to a hospital for a pre-exit check-up. Was it the facility in which the “Bulgarian nurses,” that were sentenced to death for infecting children with Aids, used to be working? The insinuation was that this examination is to prove that the detainees were in good health prior to their release. Well, the presumably healthy hostages never returned from their check up. For weeks now, they are being held in an unknown place. Violating several rules, they are not allowed to have contact to either their consulate or to their family.

Late developments. Libya protests the Swiss foreign minister’s recent use of the term “hostage.” We learn that the two non-hostages are free. However, they are kept in a safe place where no one can harm them. (Be sure you are seated as you digest the absurdity that follows!) The secrecy is needed to prevent Swiss commandoes from kidnapping them Entebbe style. Again, the Swiss, presumably having been invited to do so, sent a plane to Tripoli with foreign office staff to resolve the matter diplomatically. The would-be “negotiators” returned empty handed.

Typically, the humiliated Swiss are confused. Should they apply retaliatory sanctions? Those would anger Gaddafi. Whatever they do, the international community will not help them because Libya has oil money. Furthermore, no one wishes to irritate dictators unless they are directly involved. Who cares, unless he has to, about Lockerbie, the “nurses case” or bozo’s recent stand up comic show at the UNO? That being the case, a criminal regime is again “getting away with it.” That eggs on other similar systems to emulate the example. Just think of Iranian and North Korean promises and their ignored, consequence-free disregard that is followed by new demands and delays. The comportment jeopardizes everybody and signifies a crisis of the international order. The global order is being undermined by discrediting, through their misuse, the proven procedures that sustain it. The pattern that emerges promises to lead to more and more substantial violations. For those transgressions the now silent potential victim states and the “international community” (what a misnomer!) is responsible.

2. Elsewhere, too, the tactic of “on again, off again”, but never delivering on the promises made, proves to be an effective approach. This is a profitable recipe for negotiations that amount to warfare by diplomacy. The trick that aims to make political capital out of the credulousness and good will of “the other side” should not function more than once. Nevertheless, as Pyongyang’s and Tehran’s ongoing cases prove, it works even if it is part of a repeated ritual. All one needs to do is to apply the ploy brazenly. Well-intentioned negotiators that are not swayed by negative evidence in their attempt to find a “solution “no “matter what” guarantee a good return.

3. Politics’ real or imagined necessities produce more than only strange bedfellows. A fall-out of the pairing can be classed under “odd mutations.” Some of the virtual prostitutions – see above – actually reflect an inner inclination that is in need of a public saving justification. The view has little merit that “realism” should keep one from setting moral norms when negotiating with eccentrics. Those supportive of that proposition also hold that, one sidedly, we need to be content with the politics of the possible. Therefore, we are to accept the truncated success that is a consequence of self-limiting principles.

4. Slovakia’s new language law imposes a maximal fine of €5,000 ($7,500) for violating the primacy of Slovak. The matter has now been raised in the rather reluctant-to-hear-it European Parliament. Members of state organs (administration, police, hospitals) are now under orders that they may only speak Slovak when on duty. If therefore, in a Hungarian-speaking region one addresses a police officer in Magyar then, even if the cop is also a native speaker of it, he may only respond in Slovak. Even if the client does not understand, what he is told. One wonders whether the regulation also applies to English and German. (No. It is possible that in a Magyar speaking town the railroad station’s signs are in Slovak, German, English but not the idiom of the residents.) There has been an extended period during which “Europe” tried to ignore the situation in the pious hope that the problem will resolve itself. The consistent jacking up of the issues having a background in bizarre practices such as described above, forces reluctantly extended international attention to arise. Even the US’ Bratislava representatives are reported to have claimed they have taken notice of Europe’s minority commissar’s, Kurt Vollebaek’s concerns.

5. The following gem further illustrates the general insanity that can be the consequence of running a state whose theory makes it want to be unitary while in reality it is multi-ethnic. This wish tries to ignore reality created by the disturbing, centuries or millennia-old presence of minorities that are local majorities. When this happens, the result is what would be a joke if the implication would not be serious. Take a village. It has 1,500 inhabitants. Five of these are natives to the official and protected language of the state. The village elder has always made announcements on the public address system in the majority’s language. He is now accused of violating Slovakia’s language law. Comparable is the case of a local paper that appears in Hungarian/Magyar. Absurdly, it is now asked to publish the ads it carries in Slovak.

6. A problem arises with the expanding size and the resulting ethnic complexity of state territories. Unless a federal system able to accommodate local peculiarities is accepted, the central power will tend to secure the land by extending its purvey. This authority claimed by the center of power creates a political context in which dictatorship flourishes. First, it functions in the name of the majority over the allegedly separatist minority. Ultimately, it subjugates the originally consenting but shortsighted majority, too.

A Conservative Obligation: Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony in C-Minor, “Resurrection”

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:36:31 -0500

Readers of The Brussels Journal might approach the following essay as though it were an extended footnote to “Fjordman’s” magisterial multi-part treatment of Western music-history. My essay is also, in its way, a follow-up to my own earlier Brussels Journal statements about Johann Sebastian Bach and Joseph Haydn. This year (2009) is the bicentenary of Haydn’s death. The year 2011 will be the centenary of Gustav Mahler’s death. As in the cases of Bach and Haydn, I consider Mahler (1860-1911) – and specifically his Second Symphony (1894) – to be what I call “a conservative obligation,” an essential and poignant manifestation of the Western spirit, close familiarity with which Westerners ought to cultivate. Not all “conservative obligations” are musical. I hope, in future, to dedicate some words to the Hudson Valley School of American landscape painting and to the aesthetics of steam locomotion, European and American. I have reason to believe that once, during his sojourn in New York State and on his way to Niagara Falls with his wife, Mahler passed through the small town on Lake Ontario where – in my exile from my native California – I have lived since the fall of the fateful year 2001. A fair number of Mahler acquaintances made their way to California in the 1930s. His influence may be heard in certain landmark film-scores, like those of Eric Korngold. For me, Mahler is a presence, immediate and personal.

I. We hear in the music of Gustav Mahler – in his symphonies and songs, for those were alone his genres – the whispering spirit of cultural finality. It is as though in Mahler’s ideas of developmental scale and infinitely nuanced instrumental color, and in his extended (also fragmented) melodies and dense often-grotesque counterpoint, Western music had reached the ultimate stage in the logic of its maturity, from which it could grow no further. Mahler’s context – Vienna at the end of the Nineteenth Century, Austria-Hungary before the fatal calamity of war, sugary, colorful, melancholy and delirious all at once, and in three-quarter time – itself imparts a flavor of fleeting ripeness to his scores. One cannot listen to Mahler’s music without hearing, or rather without the experience of being haunted by, one’s knowledge, inescapable, of the artist’s tribulations and suffering. Mahler’s premature death came at the age of fifty, from heart disease exacerbated by a streptococcal infection and by the emotional upheavals of his tenure with the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. The infidelity of his wife, Alma, which he discovered at this time, did nothing to help the situation. The concluding Abschied of Das Lied von der Erde (1909) and the counterpart Adagio of the Ninth Symphony (also 1909) have long since become iconic of this aspect of Mahler’s oeuvre, representative of that fading-away of existence and bitter-sweet leave-taking from all that one loves, with which posterity has come to associate the man. The attitude about Mahler was not always so sympathetic.

Writing in the journal Scrutiny in 1940, during the twelve years when Nazi hegemony in Europe prohibited the performance of Mahler’s scores on the continent and at a time when English and American critics had not yet come to terms with Mahler’s esthetic, Wilfrid Mellers (1914-2008), always perceptive in his judgments, boldly argued for that composer as an artistic “key-figure.” In his essay, “Mahler as Key-Figure,” Mellers quotes some of the standing dismissals of Mahler at that time: “For instance, we are told that Mahler is an ‘old wind-bag’ who talked so much about his own tragic feelings that he did not even know what his feelings were; or, more politely, that though Mahler the tragic sufferer was genuine enough in his emotional outpourings he was essentially the romantic egoist and we (being so much more mature and sophisticated) are not interested in that sort of thing any longer.” In addition, Mellers writes, although the ascription conflicts with those that castigate him as avant-garde and a provocateur, “we have the theory that Mahler is the bourgeois composer par excellence, whose aim and function is to ‘move masses.’” In the last of these charges, we see emerging the modernist anti-communicative snobbism that would soon, beginning in the 1950s, make a habit of condemning all music for which a viable audience of non-specialists existed – the music of composers like Edward Elgar and Jean Sibelius, to name but two in addition to Mahler.

These complaints, as recorded by Mellers, echo prejudices against Mahler that first appeared in music-journalism at the turn of the century and that persisted for a long time. Nicolas Slonimsky collects a number of these in his Lexicon of Musical Invective (Revised Edition, 1965). Thus, for the reviewer of the New York Musical Courier, writing in November 1904, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony sounded like so much “drooling… emasculated simplicity.” Critic Rudolf Louis of Die Deutsche Musik der Gegenwart, writing in 1909, bluntly declared Mahler’s music “repulsive” on the grounds, as he so charmingly put it, that it “acts Jewish.” Reviewer R. D. Darrell, writing of the Eighth Symphony for the American journal Downbeat as late as 1952, heard only “fatuous mysticism and screaming hysteria.” Mellers must have been aware of criticisms such as these, much harsher than those that he actually quotes; yet surprisingly, of the pronounced skepticism concerning Mahler’s symphonic achievement, and even presumably of the hostility to it, Mellers can write that, “there is an element of truth in all these accounts.” The fact that Louis was apparently an anti-Semite does not mean that recognizably Jewish elements play no part in Mahler’s symphonic sound world. They do, importantly, as we shall see. For Mellers, Mahler “is the typical romantic figure”: “as a Jew… conscious of a sense of isolation” and as an heir of such musical precursors as Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, and Richard Wagner, acutely aware of prior compositional achievements colossal enough to humble even the most ambitious creative spirit.

Like all authentic creators, Mahler, as Mellers puts it, was both an original genius and a synthesizer, seeking to reconcile innovation with tradition, the Christian with the Jewish, and the romantic-subjective with the objectivity of Eighteenth Century music – whence in all likelihood, and exemplarily, his frequent attempts to fuse sonata form or scherzo or rondo with fugue. “If we concentrate,” writes Mellers, “on that aspect of Mahler’s romanticism which we can locate in [purely] musical terms we see that technically it is associated, as the cult of the personal usually is, with the chromatic (‘Wagnerian’) nature of his harmony, and the exotic (or colouristic) aspects of his orchestral technique.” It should be added, however, that Mahler often builds the drama in his symphonic structures on the contest between the chromatic and the diatonic, the expressionistic and the songlike, a pattern that the Second Symphony well illustrates. In its chromatic character, Mahler’s music, according to Mellers, “marks the end of a cultural epoch,” as “the sunset of his voluptuous harmony and rich orchestration wavers into the twilight of… Berg, Schönberg and Webern.” At the same time, Mahler’s music looks backwards to the rich ethos of Austrian and Central European folksong, especially to the triple pulse of the Ländler, also beloved of Schubert, whose quest for a lost innocence Mahler recapitulates at a new degree of urgency.

Finally, in connection with Mahler’s interest in baroque procedure, his Catholicism becomes incorporated in his music. Mahler became a convert in 1897. In this, Mellers finds another clue why the reception of Mahler’s music corresponded to irritation for decades after his death: “The incomprehension of his music so arrogantly displayed during this period is due as much to the traditionally religious aspect of his art as to the notoriously unpopular element of personality.” For Mellers, “the polyphonic aspect of Mahler’s work is associated with… the musical past,” which Mahler wishes to preserve on the grounds that it represents a spiritual achievement contact with which becomes increasingly necessary in the burgeoning industrial-materialistic society. The composer, whose childhood occurred in the provincial countryside, struggles to find his place in this society, without compromising his integrity as a person; he offers his own struggle as a model to others.

This intention, to hold the culture back from the abyss of nihilism, explains the presence in Mahler’s scores, supremely irritating to his detractors, of Kitsch-genres: the Klezmer tunes, parade-ground marches, and snippets of cabaret-song. These decadent late-versions of authentic folk music represent a last, rapidly diminishing remembrance, by modern persons, of an earlier, spiritually charged life – the one lived by grandparental generations, now dead.

II. The death-shadowed Second Symphony in C-Minor, which nevertheless struggles towards faith, began as a stand-alone, single-movement tone poem on the model of Liszt and Richard Strauss. In concept, Liszt’s Héroïde Funèbre (Symphonic Poem No. 8 [1854]) seems a relevant precedent, especially considering the descriptive title that Mahler first appended to his manuscript-partitur – Totenfeier or “Funeral Rite.” Mahler explained that the musical graveside elegy of the score referred to the entombment of the “hero” of his First Symphony (1888), whose subtitle “The Titan” the composer borrowed from a novel, one of his favorites, by Jean-Paul Richter. In a romantic context the Titan refers to Prometheus, the pagan proto-Christ, divine tutor of humanity, redeemer of the people through his tuition, and sufferer of dictatorial retribution for his generous deeds. Liszt, too, had written a Prometheus, his Symphonic Poem No. 5 (1855), in which the mythic figure becomes allegorically the artist-as-martyr whose vision remains unappreciated until his death, whereupon posterity, reversing its judgment, celebrates him tardily and guiltily. Perhaps also the Totenfeier reflects Wagner’s Siegfried, whose funeral march forms a powerful interlude in Die Götterdämmerung, the final opera of The Ring. Yet Mahler’s obsequies for his hero sound nothing like Wagner’s for the assassinated Volsung, nor really like Liszt’s lugubrious perorations.

Marked in the score – Allegro Maestoso: With Serious and Solemn Expression Throughout and Wild – the first bars of the Totenfeier, after a short tremolo in the violins and violas, require the double basses, with bows biting into the strings, to launch what Mellers, in The Sonata Principle (1962), describes as “a strifeful Mannheim skyrocket, straining to break the bands of the harmony’s processional rhythm.”

Deryck Cooke and Michael Kennedy see a precedent for these otherwise unprecedented symphonic gestures only in the opening bars of Mahler’s first large-scale work, his cantata Das Klagende Lied (1878). Cooke writes of the Totenfeier that, “the funeral march rides ruthlessly over everything” in the movement; Cooke thus seconds Harold Truscott, who describes the cortege as “rumbling throughout much of the movement… sensed even when it is not played.” The march-theme spins off motifs that Mahler exploits as subsidiary themes. If this were grief, it would be grief inflamed by anger and troubled by anxiety. Not too far into the movement, Mahler deploys his second subject: a quieter, more transparently scored, rising theme in the violins – colored by flutes, horns, and muted trumpets – that tries to solace the grim mood. Not only does the recurrent tread of the procession resist such solace, however, but the appearance of the plainsong Dies Irae, associated with the Last Judgment, also contributes to maintaining the movement’s dark mood. Toward the end of the developmental section, we hear, once, a motif that will return as a central, generative element in the elaborate Finale – a foretaste of the “Resurrection” theme. Mahler foreshortens the recapitulation; he ends, not at all with a great crash, as one might expect, but with a sudden descent into silence.

The Second Symphony had the longest gestation of any Mahler symphony. To the composer himself the Totenfeier loomed, if not quite as a fragment, then as a portent that pointed beyond itself. Just where the portent might lead, Mahler at first remained unsure, composing the next three movements as intermezzi that would stand in contrast, mood-wise, to the Allegro Maestoso and to whatever would follow them by way of a Finale. What would ultimately become the third movement, or Scherzo, and the fourth movement, with a sung text, Mahler drew from his existing settings of the folk-poems in the Clemens Brentano collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn; while what would become the second movement, the Andante Moderato, he composed from scratch. This Andante plays deceptively with classical conventions. On its surface, it offers a sweet visage strongly at variance with the first movement’s grimness: in its initial phrases it sounds for all the world like mock-Schubert, with lilting reminiscences of the cake-like Rosamunde music. Swiftly, chromatic intrusions becloud the simple harmonies, with the glowering temperament of the previous movement returning to subvert the assertion of innocence. The “spiritual quest” reaches an impasse conspicuously not resolved by a recapitulation of the opening bars, whose transparency the listener now apprehends as entirely faux naïf.

For the Scherzo, Mahler adapted his Wunderhorn song about Saint Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fishes, dispensing with the vocal part, massively expanding the structure, and re-orchestrating thoroughly. A moto perpetuo in three-quarter time, the “Fischpredigt” Scherzo offers no relief from the prevailing despair; on the contrary, its obsessive rhythms and weird instrumental effects suggest precipitation into madness. In the text of the original song, Saint Anthony, finding the parish church abandoned, decides to preach to the fishes. The fish rise to attend as though a miracle were in the offing, but, as the text says: “Die Predigt geendet, / Ein jeder sich wendet, / Die Hechte blieben Diebe, / Die Aale viel lieben. / Die Predigt hat g’fallen, / Sie blieben wie allen.” [“The sermon once over, / Each darted for cover. / Every pike stayed a rover, / Every eel a lover. / The sermon they cherished / But their vices ne’er perished.”] In a darkly comedic way the folk-verses comment on the vanity of actions and words – even those of a saint, who might be as deluded as a sinner.

Musically, an ascending theme in the brass signifies the effort to transcend delusion, but the tripping rhythm drags down the attempt, leaving us in the world of empty chapels and lunatic homilists. The rute (a kind of musical brush) and col legno effects in the strings suggest that the Scherzo is, in fact, a Totentanz, appropriate again under the morbid dominion of the first movement.

Next comes the symphony’s shortest section, which, however, introduces the human voice for the first time. Urlicht, or “Primal Light,” also began as a Wunderhorn song. To darkly colored brass-band accompaniment, at slow tempo, the contralto sings of the “Röschen rot,” the “Rosebud red,” that symbolizes the Christian redeemer. Yet if the flower and the light were Christian symbols, they would also have strong Behmenist or mystical connotations, as does the expressed longing of the poem for a return from this world – this wandering path of exile – to God. To add to the ecumenic mélange of impulses, Mahler chooses to accompany the repetition of the song in the second half of the movement with a violin solo the minor key warbling of which sounds like nothing else but a Jewish lullaby. If it occurred as an interlude in Fiddler on the Roof, no one would think it out of place. The words of Urlicht, writes Davies, “leave no room for doubt that the entire [symphony] is a prolonged meditation on the reason for life, on the need to accept a teleological view of existence.”

III. The three middle movements of the musical scheme at last taking form in his mind, Mahler could begin to contemplate the Second Symphony’s Finale, which he understood would need to match the first movement in scale and ambition – and effect transfiguration for the Totenfeier’s mood of adamant hopelessness. Mahler wrote to friends about his certainty that the Finale would require “the word” – that is, vocal, probably choral, forces, and a text, as had the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth – and about the difficulty of finding suitable verses. The death of Mahler’s elder colleague the conductor Hans von Bülow occurred at this time. In March 1894 Mahler attended Bülow’s memorial service in Vienna, at which he heard a choir sing Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s hymn “Die Auferstehung” or “The Resurrection.” Mahler appropriated Klopstock’s first stanza, altering it slightly, omitted the others, but wrote supplementary verses of his own. In a later suppressed program note, Mahler described his Finale this way: “We again confront all the dreadful questions and the mood of the end of the [first] movement. – The voice of the caller is heard: the end of all living things is at hand, the last judgment is announced, and [all] the horror of that day of days has set in. – The earth trembles, graves burst open; the dead arise and step forth in [long] endless files. The great and the small of this earth, kings and beggars, the just and the ungodly – all are making that pilgrimage.” The apocalypse unfolds until, “an almighty feeling of love illumines us with blessed knowing and being.”

Like the anonymous medieval author of the Dies Irae, or Dante, or Albrecht Dürer, or Jerome Bosch, or the many composers like Wolfgang Mozart and Hector Berlioz who had set the Requiem Mass – Mahler was attracted by the imagery of the Apocalypse; but he also found nourishment in the more consoling Pauline vision of Last Judgment. One should be skeptical of the view, sometimes encountered, that Mahler was an intellectual naïf. On the contrary, as such of his biographers as Egon Gartenberg, Kurt Blaukopf, and Henri Louis de la Grange have shown, Mahler read methodically in a variety of subjects, including religion and theology, throughout his adolescence and adulthood. Blaukopf, for example, while noting that earlier Mahler-biographers had tended to neglect the composer’s intellectual life outside the musical domain, characterizes his subject as “well-read, conversant with classical poetry and with the novel and drama of his day, as well as with the works of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky.” According to Blaukopf, Mahler had “an extensive interest in philosophy” but was also “drawn to Christianity”; moreover, “his Christianity was deeply felt,” despite the fact that, “it never attained to the state of dogmatic manifestation.”

The Second Symphony, summed up in its Finale, is not only musically but also philosophically and religiously coherent. Musically, as Kennedy writes, “Mahler weaves his fabric from a skein of thematic cross-references, anticipations and cross-fertilizations. Offstage horn calls and what can only be called fanfare-fantasias prepare for the violent percussive outburst that precedes a wild popular march.” The Finale begins “im Tempo des Scherzos” – with an outburst of anguish involving the full orchestra. As this subsides into quietude, the horns (Rehearsal Division No. 3) call to one another mysteriously from remote locations in the auditorium, their interweaving, increasingly complex figurations introducing a calculated spatial element into the score, as does also the offstage brass ensemble, when later it comes into play.

Out of the initial horn-episode, Mahler develops a vast march, with ever-thickening textures, on the Dies Irae (11-20), already heard in the Totenfeier; this gathering tumult comes to a great and calamitous climax, as though to reiterate the cry of anguish with which the movement had begun. Now is the moment, after a brief silence, for the “fanfare-fantasias” that Kennedy remarks to come into their own (22-28). After that – the “Nightingale” episode, combined with a reprise of the distant horn calls, which leads to Klopstock’s hymn (30): “Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n wirst du / Mein Staub, nach kurzer Ruh!” [“Rise again, yes rise again thou wilt / My dust, but a short sleep hence!”] Mahler’s own verses, however, are the ones that articulate the idea behind the music. The kernel of it is this: “Was entstanden ist / Das muss vergehen! / Was vergangen, auferstehen! / Hör’ auf zu beben! / Bereite dich zu leben!” [What rises to be / It must pass away! / What passes away it rises anew! / Leave off thy fright! / Rise again to light!”] Mahler’s words parallel Paul’s in First Corinthians 15:42 and following: “So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.” And later (15:52): “For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised… For this perishable body must put on imperishability.” As Eric Voegelin has noted, Paul’s text, in its original Greek, echoes themes that appear in Plato and Aristotle, especially in the former.

In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates describes poetry – or art – as an activity by which men transcend their mortality to create metaphysical values that constitute the real, although intangible, bases of orderly existence. For Paul, belief is an art, which he strives to perfect. For Mahler, art is belief; it articulates the conviction, as Blaukopf puts it, that “all the toil of earthly life is meaningful” and that “death does not extinguish life, for resurrection is certain.” What does “death” mean in the context of Mahler’s ”Resurrection” Symphony? “Death” stands as metaphor for all those compromises with humanity that we associate with the purely economically driven, routine-based, bureaucratized society and that have as their consequences the alienation of the individual from himself and from the communal and moral sources of his integrity. Artistic achievement serves to remind the individual of that integrity, whether he sustains it or has let it lapse. According to Blaukopf, Mahler “was obsessed by the idea that his compositions were in the truest sense indestructible.” Mahler builds his symphonic structures, in part, from already-existing materials – the Dies Irae melody, a Jewish lullaby, the sound of night birds trilling, and Klopstock’s hymn – that he himself resurrects in a new context. “Resurrection” implies for Mahler not only what Blaukopf calls “a concept of workmanship, ensuring creative continuity” but also the openness of existence.

The harmonic scheme of the symphony illustrates such openness, moving from the grim C-minor of the Totenfeier to the brilliant, uplifting E-flat major of the Finale.

IV. The first full performance of the Second Symphony occurred in 1897, with Mahler himself conducting. Later performances in Mahler’s lifetime involved the cooperation of some of the key figures of the Mahler performing tradition as it emerged in the Twentieth Century – Oskar Fried, Otto Klemperer, Hermann Scherchen, and Bruno Walter. Mahler’s acceptance in the latter half of the Twentieth Century has often been ascribed to the supposed pioneering evangelism of Leonard Bernstein. While Bernstein certainly widened the modern audience for the Mahler oeuvre, especially in the United States, the idea of his solitary crusade on behalf of an unknown composer is a pure (some might say self-serving and idolatrous) myth. In fact, Mahler had early tenacious advocates in Walter, who began as his assistant in Hamburg and moved with him to Vienna, in the Dutch director of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, Willem Mengelberg, and in others. Walter gave important premiere performances of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde. Mengelberg, who had known Mahler and who had invited Mahler to conduct his orchestra, organized a Mahler Festival in 1920, at which all the symphonies and Das Lied were performed.

Mahler performances in the 1920s and 30s, while not legion, but were hardly unknown. Fried, Klemperer, Scherchen, and Walter all steadily advocated from the podium; so did Arthur Rodzinski and Carl Schuricht. Klemperer and Walter carried on their advocacy in America, to which the Nazis forced both in exile.

The “Resurrection” Symphony has been recorded dozens of times. The discography below adheres to selectivity; its sections follow a chronological principle, with “Historical Recordings” listed first, followed by “Early Stereo Recordings,” and followed again by “Recent Digital Recordings in Various Media.” The criteria are personal and eccentric if not altogether arbitrary.

Historical Recordings: (1) Oskar Fried conducts the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, the Berlin Cathedral Chorus, and soloists Gertrud Bindernagel (soprano) and Emmi Leisner (contralto); recorded 1924. (Naxos 8.11052-3) Fried’s is an acoustic recording, whose audacity, given the technical limitations under which the engineers achieved it, is hard to overestimate. Fried’s recording should not be anyone’s initial exposure to the Second Symphony, but those who gradually invest in the work will eventually want to hear it. Despite the swish of the shellac surfaces and the narrow dynamic range of the sound, the drama and conviction of the interpretation manage to tell.

(2) Eugene Ormandy conducts the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Twin Cities Symphonic Chorus, and soloists Corinne Frank (soprano) and Ann O’Malley Gallogly (contralto); recorded 1935. (Biddulph WHL 032) Ormandy’s is only the second recording of the Second Symphony, ten years after Fried, and using the electrical recording process. Ormandy’s later, stereo “take” of the work is routine, but this commercially daring recording has real fire and, for its vintage, excellent fidelity.

(3) Otto Klemperer conducts the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Akademie Kammerchor, the Singverein der Musikfreunde, and soloists Ilona Steingruber (soprano) and Hilde Rössl-Majdan (contralto); recorded 1951. (Vox CDX2 5521) The “Resurrection” Symphony was a signature-item for Klemperer throughout his career. His interpretations varied, from the manically swift to the glacially slow in tempo. His postwar Vienna account for Vox is reminiscent of Fried’s but with much better sound – although not yet in stereo.

(4) Bruno Walter (I) conducts the Vienna Philharmonic, choral forces, and soloists Maria Cebotari (soprano) and Rosette Anday (contralto); recorded in concert 16 September 1948. (Archipel ARPCD 0082) Klemperer once said that Walter was a “moralist” and that he was an “immoralist.” Where Klemperer’s interpretation is craggy and modernistic, Walter’s, especially in this “air-check” of a broadcast concert, softens the edges, with a certain gain in the sweetness that is, after all, an element of the score.

Early Stereo Recordings: (1) Hermann Scherchen conducts the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, the Vienna State Academy Chamber Choir, and soloists Mimi Cortese (soprano) and Lucretia West (contralto); recorded 1958. (High Definition Tape Transfers HDTT 137) Scherchen, who, like Leopold Stokowski, took great interest in recording, was the first out of the gate with a stereophonic “Resurrection.” Using multiple microphones, the Westminster engineers bring the listener into the midst of the orchestra, revealing a richness of “inner detail.” Scherchen led his forces through one of the most powerful Finales ever.

(2) Bruno Walter (Bis) conducts the New York Philharmonic, the Westminster Choir, and soloists Emilia Cundari (soprano) and Maureen Forrester (contralto); recorded 1958. (Sony SM2K 64 447) Like Scherchen’s “Resurrection,” Walter’s belies its more than fifty years, the stereo soundstage being extraordinarily spacious and deep. The Columbia engineers crafted a more blended sound, however, than their Westminster counterparts. As in his 1948 Vienna performance, Walter emphasizes the lyrical side of the score. His choral entry is magical.

(3) Otto Klemperer (Bis) conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus and soloists Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (soprano) and Hilde Rössl-Majdan (contralto); recorded 1963. (EMI CDM 7 696622) By 1963, Klemperer had slowed considerably, so that this landmark EMI recording clocks in at 79 minutes compared with 75 in 1951. In 1963, however, Klemperer takes the Scherzo slightly faster than he had in 1951, with an increase in the grotesque mania of the movement. Klemperer’s “Last Judgment” is here as frightening as in Scherchen’s recording.

(4) Maurice Abravanel conducts the Utah Symphony, the University of Utah Civic Chorale, and soloists Beverly Sills (soprano) and Florence Kopleff (contralto); recorded 1967. (Silverline Classics Audio DVD 288244 – 9) Maurice who? The Utah Symphony? Abravanel, a Greek-born Sephardic Jew, studied music in Berlin, and came to the United States in 1936. He led and formed the Utah Symphony from 1946 to 1979, creating a first-rate ensemble in the Great Salt Desert. The Vanguard engineers recorded Abravanel’s Mahler in a warm, resonant acoustic that perfectly matches the conductor’s optimistic understanding of the score. – At least equal to Klemperer and Walter.

Recent Digital Recordings in Various Media: (1) Claudio Abbado conducts the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, the Orfeón Donostiara, and soloists Eteri Gvazava (soprano) and Anna Larsson (contralto); recorded in concert 2 August 2003. (EuroArts DVD 2053268) The visual element rarely adds much to an orchestral performance. Because of Mahler’s fantastically variegated orchestration, however, and because of the spatial element in the “Resurrection” Symphony, the image can help listeners understand the subtleties of the score. This is especially so when the performance is as beautiful and carefully judged as Abbado’s. An additional attraction is the multi-channel layer of the disc, which spreads the sonic platform to four speakers.

(2) Michael Tilson Thomas conducts the San Francisco Symphony, the SFS Chorus, and soloists Isabel Bayradakian (soprano) and Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson (mezzo-soprano); recorded in concert 23 – 26 June 2004. (SFS SACD 821936-0006-2) Thomas began as a protégé of Bernstein, but has honed a personal style with Mahler that is less histrionic but more deeply probing than his mentor’s. Like Abbado’s performance, Thomas’ is stunningly beautiful and superbly recorded, with a transparency that reveals extraordinary detail in the dense polyphony of the Finale.

(3) Bernard Haitink conducts the Berlin Philharmonic, the Ernst-Senff Chor, and soloists Sylvia McNair (soprano) and Jard van Nes (contralto); recorded in concert January 1993. (Philips DVD 074 3131) Haitink succeeded Eduard van Beinum at the Concertgebouw Orchestra; van Beinum had succeeded Mengelberg. Haitink sustained the orchestra’s commitment to Mahler and recorded a complete cycle of the symphonies for Philips in the 1960s and early 1970s. He has re-recorded the cycle several times. Haitink’s 1993 account with the Berlin Philharmonic illustrates his “non-interventionist” style of interpretation, heeding strictly Mahler’s tempo directions and expressive indications. As in the case of Abbado, the intelligently directed visual aspect of the recording helps in “explaining” the complex goings-on in the score.

When in Europe Watch What You Say – EU Attempts to Restrict Free Speech. Media Missing in Action

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:03:09 -0500

If all goes as planned, the 27 member states of the European Union will soon have a common hate crime legislation, which will turn disapproval for Islamic practices or homosexual lifestyles into crimes. Europe’s Christian churches are trying to stop the plan of the European political establishment, but it is unclear whether they will be successful. The media are silent on the topic.

Last April, the European Parliament approved the European Union’s Equal Treatment Directive. A directive is the name given to an EU law. As directives overrule national legislation, they need the approval of the European Council of Ministers before coming into effect. Next month, the Council will decide on the directive, which places the 27 EU member states under a common anti-discrimination legislation. The directive’s definition of discriminatory harassment is so broad that every objection to Muslim or homosexual practices will be considered unlawful.

On April 2, the European Parliament passed the “directive on implementing the principle of equal treatment between persons irrespective of religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation,” 363 votes to 226. The directive applies to social protection and health care, social benefits, education and access to goods and services, including housing. American citizens and companies doing business in Europe are also required to adhere to it.

Originally intended to serve as an equal treatment directive for the disabled by prohibiting discrimination when accessing “goods and services, including housing,” activist European politicians and governments had the directive’s scope expanded to include discrimination on the basis of religion, age and sexual orientation.

Under the directive, harassment – defined as conduct “with the purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a person and of creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment” – is deemed a form of discrimination.

Harassment, as vaguely defined in the directive, allows an individual to accuse someone of discrimination merely for expressing something the individual allegedly perceives as creating an “offensive environment.” The definition is so broad that anyone who feels intimidated or offended can easily bring legal action against those whom he feels are responsible. Moreover, the directive shifts the burden of proof onto the accused, who has to prove the negative, i.e. demonstrate that he or she did not create an environment which intimidated or offended the complainant. If the accused fails to do so, he or she can be sentenced to paying an unlimited amount of compensation for “harassment.”

The European press has mostly remained silent on the topic so far, but Christian congregations are extremely worried. Last August, Mgr. Andrew Summersgill issued a statement on behalf of the Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland, rejecting the directive because it would require people and organizations to act against their beliefs. “Homosexual groups campaigning for same-sex marriage may declare themselves to be offended by the presentation of the Catholic Church’s moral teaching on marriage, an atheist may be offended by religious pictures in an art gallery, or a Muslim may be offended by any picture representing the human form,” said Mgr. Summersgill.

“When providing a service (such as a hotel room) or selling goods (such as books) in the EU, businesses and their employees will have to provide them or risk being sued, irrespective of whether they find themselves facilitating sexual ethics contrary to their religious beliefs or helping promote another religion,” say the legal experts of the British organizations Christian Concern for Our Nation (CCFON) and Christian Legal Centre. Organizers of a Christian conference, for instance, will be legally obliged to make double rooms available to homosexual and unmarried couples as well as to normally married couples.

The directive is currently being amended by Sweden, the president of the European Council in the second half of 2009, with a view to the final vote which will be taken by the Council next month. Activist politicians are attempting to extend discrimination and harassment in the directive to cover assumptions as well. Countries where the Catholic Church still has a large influence, such as Malta and Poland, however, are raising objections to these attempts. As the directive needs a unanimous approval by all 27 EU member states, it is not yet certain how far-reaching the final version of the directive is going to be.

Nevertheless, the almost complete silence of the European media and of public opinion on the important issues which are at stake, is worrying. Europe risks losing important fundamental freedoms, such as the freedom of speech and the freedom of opinion, but does not seem prepared to fight and preserve these freedoms. Perhaps the lack of interest of the inhabitants of Europe for legislation concocted at a supranational level explains the lack of interest in this matter.

The same phenomenon, a lack of interest on the part of European and also American public opinion, is apparent with regard to the semi-legal initiatives taken at the level of the United Nations. On October 2, the UN Human Rights Council approved a free speech resolution, co-sponsored by the US and Egypt, which criticizes “negative racial and religious stereotyping.” American diplomats said the decision to co-sponsor the resolution was part of America’s effort to “reach out to Muslim countries.” The resolution passed unanimously, with the support of all Western nations. Though the resolution has no immediate effect in law, it provides Muslim extremists with moral ammunition the next time they feel that central tenets of Islam are being treated disrespectfully through the creation of what they perceive to be an ‘offensive environment.’

Paul Belien is an Adjunct Fellow of the Hudson Institute. This article was first published at the Hudson NY website

A History of Geology and Planetary Science - Part 1

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:58:04 -0600

People have studied stones for practical or decorative usages since prehistoric times. The ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus in his work On Stones described many minerals. There are those who claim that the history of geology begins in the eleventh century AD with the Persian polymath Avicenna, a view which is not convincing. In China, the polymath Shen Kuo upon noticing that there were seashells embedded in a sandstone cliff far above sea level inferred that the sandstone must have derived from an ancient beach that had somehow been compressed and elevated. While this insight was correct, it remained an isolated observation and was not followed up by other Chinese or Asian scholars. Geology, like modern science in general, was therefore born in Europe after the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.

There were important mines in the mountainous regions of Germany and Eastern Europe. After the introduction of gunpowder from China during the Mongol conquests in the 1200s and the independent development of large cannon in Europe, the growing demand for copper for the manufacture of bronze cannon in the fifteenth century was a stimulus for advances such as the “liquation” process, used in ores containing silver to separate it from copper.

The German scholar Georgius Agricola (1494-1555) was a pioneer in mineralogy. He got a degree from the University of Leipzig and studied medicine in Italy. On his return to Saxony in 1526 he developed a life-long interest in mining and spent some time in Bohemia, the richest metal mining district in Europe. His work De Re Metallica, published posthumously in 1556, was a comprehensive summary of all aspects of mining and metal production then known. His work was highly regarded by contemporaries and has stood the test of time well.

Nicolas Steno, or Niels Stensen (1638-1686) from Copenhagen, Denmark, studied medicine and moved to Italy in 1665. In 1666, two fishermen caught a huge shark which Steno dissected. While examining its teeth he was struck by their resemblance to stony objects that were found in certain rocks. He argued that these objects had come from once-living sharks and come to be buried in mud or sand that was now dry land. His English contemporaries Robert Hooke and John Ray, too, argued that fossils were the geologically preserved remains of once-living organisms. Steno is also famous for his law of superposition. In 1669 he concluded that layers of rock (strata) are arranged in a time sequence with the oldest on the bottom and the youngest on the top, unless later processes have disturbed this arrangement.

The French naturalist Jean-Étienne Guettard (1715-1786) was the first person to recognize the volcanic nature of the Auvergne region in central France. In addition, he prepared early geological maps and identified heat as the causative factor of change in the Earth’s landforms. Nicolas Desmarest (1725-1815) in the 1760s studied the Auvergne region and found large basalt deposits and traces of flows of lava (magma, molten rock) from nearby now-extinct volcanoes. The German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt carried our major studies of volcanoes in the first part of the nineteenth century.

The word “geology” as a term for the study of the Earth was popularized in the late eighteenth century by the Swiss (Genevan) naturalists Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1799), the aristocrat and scholar who is famous for his voyages in the Alps and often considered the founder of alpinism, and Jean-André Deluc (1727-1817). Deluc was the son of a clockmaker and spent years climbing the Alps with his brother. He made accurate instruments to measure the height of mountains and in 1773 sought a place in England. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in London on the strength of his barometry and instrumentation skills.

The German scholar Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749-1817) studied law at the University of Leipzig and later got a teaching appointment at the Mining Academy of Freiberg in Saxony, where he stayed for many years. As a talented mineralogist he worked up simple descriptive standards of classification and discovered eight new minerals, but mineralogy gradually diminished from the overarching category for the study of the Earth to a mere subdiscipline. While sometimes wrong, Werner was an influential geologist and the first to work out a comprehensive theory for the history of the Earth’s formation. He believed that all rock was once sediment or precipitate in a universal ocean, a view which became known as Neptunism.

James Hutton (1726-1797) was the leading representative of the rival Plutonist theory. He was born and educated in Edinburgh, Scotland, during what has become known as the Scottish Enlightenment. He was a Newtonian in natural philosophy and counted among his friends the chemist Joseph Black, the economist Adam Smith and the inventor James Watt. Hutton proposed the uniformitarian view of geological history where all strata could be accounted for in terms of geological forces operating over very long periods of time, such as the slow erosion of rocks. His ideas were popularized by John Playfair (1748-1819) of the University of Edinburgh and picked up by the young Scottish geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875).

Charles Lyell became fascinated with geology and took several field trips to Continental Europe. Sicily with the active stratovolcano Mount Etna in particular impressed him. As a member of the Geological Society he took part in lively debates and supported the uniformitarian theory. Contrary to catastrophism it indicated the past to have been an uninterrupted period of erosion, sediment deposition, volcanic action, earthquakes etc. These gradual processes, still going on today, could account for great changes when given enough time, which meant that the Earth had to be many millions of years old. Lyell’s Principles of Geology, first published in 1830, was very successful and accessible to a wider audience, something which Hutton’s work never had been. It went through many editions and brought the author a considerable income, which he used to travel and expand his ideas. Lyell greatly influenced a number of men of science, including the young Charles Darwin. Modern geology can be said to have been born with Charles Lyell’s extension of James Hutton’s theories.

The principles of stratigraphy, the study of the Earth’s strata or layers of sedimentary rock, had been created by Nicolas Steno in the seventeenth century and were rapidly extended between 1810 and 1840. Over the next century, geologists filled in the details of the stratigraphic column with ever-greater precision. By the turn of the nineteenth century, it was generally accepted among Western European scholars that fossils could be used to identify and correlate strata. The great naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), widely considered the founder of paleontology, together with fellow French scholar Alexandre Brongniart (1770-1847) produced a pioneering geological map of the Paris region in 1812. Brongniart had studied chemistry under the brilliant chemist Antoine Lavoisier. The fruitful collaboration between these two men established a scientific approach to stratigraphy and demonstrated that particular geological strata could be recognized by the fossils found within them.

The English surveyor, canal engineer and geologist William Smith (1769-1839) came from a family of small farmers. He received little formal education, but from an early age took an interest in exploring fossils. Based on stratigraphic investigations from canals and quarries he produced a complete geologic map of England and Wales in 1815, the first nationwide geological map. Partly due to his humble origins and limited education his great contributions were overlooked at first by the scientific community, and Smith suffered from severe financial difficulties. Not until the later part of his life was his careful work fully appreciated.

Although the marriage between geology and mining took a long time to yield practical results, the frequent claims that dynamic Britain during the Industrial Revolution was exhausting its coal supplies turned out to be false alarms. State-sponsored geological surveys were undertaken throughout Europe and North America after the mid-nineteenth century. This research would greatly benefit the mining industry as well as the emerging petroleum industry. Many geologists in the twentieth century found work in the oil industry, which joined geological surveys and mining as the main sources of non-academic employment.

Roderick Murchison (1792-1871) was born into a wealthy Scottish Highland family. He spent years in the army and became a very active member of the Geological Society of London, collaborating with Charles Lyell and the Englishman Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873). Murchison’s great work The Silurian System in 1839 established the Silurian geological time period of the Paleozoic Era, followed a year later by the Devonian while collaborating with Sedgwick. Murchison’s travels through Russia and Scandinavia after 1840 resulted in the establishment of the Permian period, which ended 250 million years ago with the greatest mass extinction of life on Earth, which wiped out perhaps 90% of all then-existing species.

Adam Sedgwick taught geology at the University of Cambridge, where Charles Darwin was one of his students. He proposed the Cambrian period, the first part of the Paleozoic, lasting from roughly 540 million to 490 million years ago. Judging from the fossil record this was an age of rapid development of complex life-forms which is called the Cambrian explosion.

Gideon Mantell (1790-1852) was an influential English paleontologist. In 1822 his wife noticed an object which he recognized as a fossil tooth but was unable to match to any known creature. The respected scholar Georges Cuvier in Paris in an uncharacteristic error suggested that the remains were from a rhinoceros. In London, Mantell was shown the skeleton of an iguana with teeth almost identical to the ancient teeth that he had just found, though much smaller. Mantell realized that he had discovered the remains of an extinct giant reptile which he called Iguanodon, making it one of the first dinosaurs to be formally named. Also in England, Mary Anning (1799-1847) was an early fossil collector who produced many remarkable finds. Perhaps the most important one was her discovery of the first plesiosaur.

The English paleontologist Richard Owen (1804-1892) coined the term “dinosaur” in 1842. The name means “terrible lizard” and is not very scientifically accurate, but it stuck. Owen was a quarrelsome man who claimed the discovery of the Iguanodon for himself when it had been done by Gideon Mantell, yet according to Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything, he also contributed to the development of modern museums: “Owen’s plan was to welcome everyone, even to the point of encouraging working men to visit in the evening, and to devote most of the museum’s space to public displays. He even proposed, very radically, to put informative labels on each display so that people could appreciate what they were viewing. In this, somewhat unexpectedly, he was opposed by T. H. Huxley, who believed that museums should be primarily research institutions. By making the Natural History Museum an institution for everyone, Owen transformed our expectations of what museums are for.”

The Scottish geologist James Hall (1761-1832), a friend of James Hutton, founded experimental geology by artificially producing various rock types in the laboratory. He carried out dangerous experiments with limestone heated under pressure and lived to report that it did indeed consolidate under sufficient pressure. In the twentieth century Pentti Eskola (1883-1964), a professor of geology and mineralogy in Helsinki, Finland, applied chemical methods to the study of minerals and metamorphic facies (groups of mineral compositions in metamorphic rocks), thereby laying the foundations of studies in metamorphic petrology.

There are three main rock types: Igneous rocks are formed from the solidification of molten rock (magma). Intrusive igneous rocks such as diorite, gabbro and granite solidify below the Earth’s surface while extrusive igneous rocks such as basalt, obsidian and pumice solidify on or above the surface. Sedimentary rocks are formed by the accumulation of sediments. Some such as conglomerate and sandstone are formed from mechanical weathering debris. Organic sedimentary rocks such as coal form from the accumulation of plant or animal debris. Metamorphic rocks have been modified by heat, pressure and chemical processes, usually while buried deep below Earth’s surface. This has altered the mineralogy, texture and chemical composition of the rocks. Examples of this would be marble produced from the metamorphism of limestone or quartzite from the metamorphism of sandstone with quartz.

The nebular hypothesis was first proposed in 1734 by the Swedish philosopher and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), who was born in Stockholm and studied at Uppsala University. He wrote on mathematics, chemistry, physics, mineralogy and astronomy and made a sketch of a glider-type aircraft. The German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant developed this theory further in 1755, and the French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace also advanced a nebular hypothesis in 1796. Laplace suggested that our Solar System was created from the cooling and condensation of a large and hot rotating “nebula,” a gassy cloud of particles and dust. This idea strongly influenced scientists in the nineteenth century, and central elements of it have survived to this day. For a long time, geologists preferred the hypothesis that the Earth had cooled and contracted. The work on rates of cooling made by the brilliant French mathematical physicist Joseph Fourier seemed to support this model.

In 1831 the French geologist Élie de Beaumont (1798-1874) suggested that the Earth had cooled from a molten body and that the crust at intervals had buckled under the strain, throwing up mountain ranges. Variants of this contraction theory flourished, culminating in the four-volume Face of the Earth (1883-1904) by Eduard Suess (1831-1914), a professor of geology at the University of Vienna. Throughout the twentieth century, geologists amassed a mass of new data from all corners of the planet and, crucially, from the bottom of the oceans.

Geologists knew that there was evidence of past upheavals, but many still believed these had been caused by the Biblical flood of Noah. There were a few individuals who believed that glaciation had been much more extensive in the past than it is today, for instance because of the presence of huge boulders dumped far away from the strata where they belonged. They included the Norwegian geologist Jens Esmark (1763-1839) writing in the 1820s and the German-Swiss mining engineer and naturalist Jean de Charpentier (1786-1855). In Norway and the Alps there are surviving glaciers, and much of the landscape was shaped by previous glaciers. The Norwegian fjords are valleys carved by glacial activity and now filled with seawater. The ideas of Charpentier and others in Switzerland were taken up and developed further by the Swiss paleontologist, geologist and glaciologist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873).

Louis Agassiz studied medicine at Zürich and Heidelberg before moving to Paris, where he was influenced by the ideas of Georges Cuvier. Agassiz was already interested in palaeontology and soon became a leading expert of fossil fishes. Despite initial skepticism, after personal studies he became an enthusiastic supporter of the glacial model. In 1840 Agassiz published a work in two volumes entitled Etudes sur les glaciers (Study on Glaciers), which can be considered the first mature scientific work on the existence of a previous Ice Age when glaciers had covered much larger land areas than they do now. Later scholars discovered evidence for several distinct ice ages, not just one. Last Glacial Maximum was about 20,000 years ago. Still, this left the unresolved issue of what could cause such ice ages.

The French mathematician Joseph Adhemar (1797-1862) suggested that ice ages were caused by astronomical forces. His theory was modified by the Scottish scientist James Croll (1821-1890) and above all by the gifted Serbian civil engineer and mathematician Milutin Milankovitch (1879-1958). Milankovitch studied at the Institute of Technology in Vienna in Austria-Hungary and later taught mechanics, theoretical physics and astronomy at the University of Belgrade in Serbia. During the turmoil in the Balkans following the collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires he served in the Serbian army during World War I. He picked up an obsession with climate and a determination to set up a detailed mathematical explanation of how temperatures change as a result of changes in the eccentricity, axial tilt and precession of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. His complex work on what has now became known as Milankovitch cycles took him many years and was carried out only with brain power. It was published in a 1920 book that met with widespread acclaim.

The reasons for the periodic ice ages we know of from the geological record are not fully understood, but are believed to be at least partly related to cyclic changes in the Earth’s orbit and tilt. Other factors such as the composition of the atmosphere, the changing position of the continents, eruptions of supervolcanoes or cometary impacts may contribute as well.

We currently know a lot more about the surface of other planets such as Mars than about the interior of our own planet, but what little we think we know to a large extent derives from the study of seismic waves. The Dutch mathematician Willebrord Snell in the seventeenth century in what has become known as Snell’s Law described the bending of light, or refraction, which takes place when light travels from one medium to a medium with a different composition and density, for instance from air to water. This effect can be seen by anybody in a small boat who puts an oar into the water and observes how it appears to be “bent.” This phenomenon is caused by the change in velocity that occurs when light waves pass from one medium to another. The same principle applies to other waves, too, for example seismic waves, the shock waves generated by earthquakes or explosions that travel through the Earth’s interior.

The Irish geophysicist Richard Dixon Oldham (1858-1936) discovered that seismic waves travel through the interior of the Earth in different directions and at different speeds. This insight was used by the Croatian seismologist Andrija Mohorovicic (1857-1936), who had studied physics in Prague and taught geophysics at the University of Zagreb. By analyzing the data from a 1909 earthquake, Mohorovicic realized that the velocity of a seismic wave is related to the density of the material that it is moving through. He interpreted the acceleration of seismic waves observed within Earth's outer shell as a compositional change within the Earth itself. This Mohorovicic Discontinuity, or “Moho” for short, is believed to constitute the boundary between the Earth’s crust and mantle. It can be found at an average depth of 8 kilometers beneath the ocean basin and as much as 32 kilometers beneath the continents.

The Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann (1888-1993) studied at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and later worked on cataloging seismograms from Denmark and the Danish-ruled island of Greenland. In 1929 a large earthquake occurred near New Zealand. Lehmann studied the recorded shock waves, and in a 1936 paper she theorized that the Earth’s center consists of two parts: a solid inner core surrounded by a liquid outer core. The outer core boundary lies below the mantle almost 2,900 km beneath the Earth’s surface. The inner core begins about 5150 kilometers beneath the Earth’s surface where the temperature is estimated to be close to 6000 °C, similar to the temperature at the Sun’s surface. In total, the Earth’s core is about 7,000 kilometers in diameter, making it roughly comparable in size to the planet Mars.

Beno Gutenberg (1889-1960) was a German-born seismologist educated at the University of Göttingen. In 1930 Gutenberg became a professor of geophysics at the California Institute of Technology in the USA. His colleague there was the American seismologist Charles Francis Richter (1900-1985). They collaborated on the development of various scales using seismic waves so that observers could assign magnitudes to earthquakes. In 1935 this work resulted in the creation of a logarithmic magnitude scale that came to be named after Richter alone. Earthquakes below 2.5 on the Richter scale are too weak to be noticed by humans. Earthquakes with an intensity of 10.0 or more have so far never been measured, the strongest being one of 9.5 in Chile in 1960. The Great Lisbon Earthquake which destroyed the Portuguese capital city in 1755 happened more than a century before modern seismographs had been invented, but based on descriptions it may have approached a magnitude of 9.0.

The age of the Earth was a subject of great interest to both theologians and naturalists. The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in the 1770s made one of the first scientific attempts to establish the age of the Earth. He assumed that it had gradually cooled from a much hotter state in its early history. Based on experiments with heating balls of iron, Comte de Buffon estimated that the Earth was at least 75,000 years old. While this is far too young it was nevertheless a lot older than a literal reading of the Bible would indicate.

In 1859 Charles Darwin published an estimate of 300 million years for a piece of rock. Lord Kelvin calculated that it would take the Earth about 100 million years to cool from an assumed primordial molten condition to its present state. These calculations changed soon after the realization that radioactive elements constantly emit heat. The birth of geophysics as distinct from geology depended upon the discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel and Pierre and Marie Curie in France in the late 1890s. This provided a source of heat that could prevent the interior of the Earth from cooling into a solid, inert lump over long timescales. The physicist Ernest Rutherford suggested that the decay of radioactive elements could be used to measure the age of various rocks. This idea was followed up by Arthur Holmes (1890-1965) in Britain and Clair Cameron Patterson (1922-1995) in the United States.

According to The Oxford Guide to the History of Physics and Astronomy, “Robert John Strutt and his student, the geologist Arthur Holmes, pursued Rutherford’s idea. By 1911, Holmes had used uranium/lead ratios to estimate the ages of several rocks from the ancient Precambrian period. One appeared to be 1,600 million years old. Many geologists were initially skeptical, but by 1930, largely as a result of the work of Holmes, most accepted radioactive dating as the only reliable means to determine the ages of rocks and of the earth itself. The discovery of isotopes in 1913, and the development of the modern mass spectrometer in the 1930s, greatly facilitated radioactive dating. By the late 1940s, the method produced an estimate of between 4,000 and 5,000 million years for the age of the earth. In 1956, the American geochemist Clair Cameron Patterson compared the isotopes of the earth’s crust with those of five meteorites. On this basis, he decided that the earth and its meteorites had an age of about 4,550 million years. All subsequent estimates of the age of the earth have tended to confirm Patterson’s conclusion.”

Duly Noted: Justice Served the UN Way

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 04:12:19 -0500

George Handlery about the week that was. “What goes around…” The UN’s biased rendition of reality. Unwelcome refugees. Noble ends and terror. Third Worlders, socialism and failing societies. Tyranny and guided economies. Strange bedfellows and odd mutations.

1. A small news item calls attention to the issue hidden behind it. The report of October 18 tells that a terrorist attack cost the lives of several Iranian revolutionary guards. Even some bosses were among the victims. We might be inclined to file away the news under the heading “well deserved,” or “ultimately we all have to swallow our own medicine,” or perhaps the reaction is “who cares, we are used to this”. While the terms might fit, the event has a significance hiding under its surface. It points to something that transcends the event itself.

Iran is a state run by a force disguised behind the façade of a normal government. Domestically, its exponents exercise and protect their access to power by the use of terror against their real enemies and all suspected opponents. The same system – the formal government and power structure is only a part of it – supports terrorist organizations abroad against persons, groups, parties and states it opposes. It will hardly present a challenge to the reader to identify, besides Iran, several other states and movements that fit the generalization. The conclusion that emerges is that wide spread application of terrorist tactics as part of an international strategy has become prevalent. This should not surprise anyone. Terrorism pays. It pays because the timidity of its past, present and future victims have make it through into a profitable enterprise. Through this toleration – extended in the hope of escaping attacks – a number of goals seem to be achievable that would not be realistic if normal means would be applied. The upshot is that the system, which regulates and civilizes the way international disputes are carried out, is tottering. Diplomacy as an instrument of solution and as a device to avoid armed conflicts is limited in its use to a shrinking number of states. They happen to be the ones that would, due to their internal order, not be likely to resort to violence as a preferred instrument to solve problems. In addition, these entities have not too many serious issues burdening their relationships.

2. Would you have guessed it? Tehran accuses the US ands the Jews – it is amazing that the “realists” there still discern some difference – to be responsible for the attack through “guided suicide bombers”. Originally, the writer intended to add in irony that next the USA will be declared responsible for bad weather, too much rain and too little precipitation. Then it downed on him that America is already made responsible for the “weather” – at least when it is not optimal and therefore it does not deserve credit.

3. Notably discouraging. The Gaza clash of Israel’s army with the Hamas terrorists has been the subject of the Goldstone Report. Whatever one might think of the result, that investigation found the IDF and Hamas equally responsible in what it alleged were human rights violations. By some standards that made the Report “impartial”. After all, while improving on reality, it condemned both parties equally for unequal deeds. Then the UN’s Human Rights Commission acted on the Report. After a split vote, it sent the resulting recommendation to the GA. Again, all this happened in the interest of twisted impartiality, conforming to the way that the concept might be understood, let us say in Tehran. Israel’s misdeeds, as in the original report were mentioned. The words wasted on the skewed Goldstone report on the Hamas’ actions were de-emphasized. It all adds up to a biased rendition of reality that then was filtered through prejudice. That made the product conform to the views those that were intent on proving not only shared guilt but also the exclusiveness of the crime of one of the parties.

4. Canadian problems. To some outsiders these terms, if connected, might appear to be a non-sequitur. Canada – but also Sweden and Switzerland – try to avoid “problems” by ducking well before the “shoe is made to fly”. The writer is convinced that such demeanor that makes a virtue of forgiving prior to the injury encourages violations. That seems to be the case with the refugee status of immigrants from some safe countries who seek asylum because, so they claim, they are being persecuted at home.

Euphemistically these souls to be saved are citizens of assorted countries even though, unofficially, they are identified as gypsies. The newest wave to reach Canada is from Hungary. Realistically gypsies, while generally not liked, are not persecuted in Hungary or in the rest of east central Europe. Evidently, however, in a poor country welfare payments will be a reflection of the gross domestic product. Given the limited means, it is also likely that access to parsimonious allocations will be subjected to more hard-nosed scrutiny than in wealthy communities. There it is easy to stuff complaining mouths by generous handouts. To be officially poor in a rich country beats being middle-class in a poor one. Regarding the Czech Republic, Canada has imposed visas. Ottawa has warned that, if the chance that is offered for immigration under a false pretext continues to be misused, similar restrictions will also be imposed on all Hungarian citizens. Anything else would be rated as discrimination.

5. The advocates and practitioners of terror have a remarkable argument justifying their deeds. Not unlike radical revolutionaries in the Western experience, they claim that the purpose of politics by violence, and persuasion through terror, have a noble purpose. It is to bring peace and virtue to those that are to be liberated from their skewed prejudices by these policies.

6. Not all revolutions fit the above observation. It can be said that some revolutions have been carried out to civilize power. For example, the Glorious Revolution as well as the American had comparable aims. Their claimed goal was the taming of government and the imposition of an order that limited and exposed to review the record of those that were given a mandate to exercise power.

7. Third worlders and classical socialists have shared roots. Both lack an understanding for the origins of the wealth of nations. Both assume – this follows from the aforementioned ignorance- that wealth is created by theft. If that would hold water then a possible implication would be that, in the interest of equality, we are all condemned to poverty. The theory fails to answer the inquiry regarding the origins of that wealth that is alleged to have been robbed. It also ignores the prosperity of communities such as that of the defeated Japanese and Germans, or of weak peoples ones such as the Swedes and the Swiss that were not in a position to extort anyone. Alas, such irrational explanations, once they are built into economic policy, guarantee failure and poverty as the reward for misguided efforts.

8. Government directed and politically inspired planning and democracy do not mix well. Those condemned by government pressure or their self-inflicted errors to drink the mixture of political power and economic dominance are likely to choke while ingesting it. The foul taste comes about because the plan will be misguided and because its correction will prove to be more than difficult. That will be because concentrated political and economic power will lack the checks and balances that the ability to correct errors presumes. Political power will be devoid of checks and balances because the difficulties of the economy to deliver its promises will create a resistance that will have to be suppressed. Furthermore, the separation of economic and political power is a precondition of lived liberty. Once this separation of powers is undermined, the resulting centralized power will become openly tyrannical. That will happen because dictatorship will be possible and, due to various deficiencies, most necessary.

A History of Algebra

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:50:48 -0500

Diophantus of Alexandria is sometimes called “the father of algebra,” although the title is disputed. He worked in Roman Egypt in the third century of our era, but while he is usually assumed to have been a Greek, very little is known about his life. His collection of books known as the Arithmetica, a landmark work in the history of algebra and number theory with the so-called Diophantine equations, is believed to have been completed around AD 250. Dirk J. Struik explains in A Concise History of Mathematics, Fourth Revised Edition:

“Their skillful treatment of indeterminate equations shows that the ancient algebra of Babylon or perhaps India not only survived under the veneer of Greek civilization but also was improved by a few active men. How and when it was done is not known, just as we do not know who Diophantus was – he may have been a Hellenized Babylonian….In Diophantus we find the first systematic use of algebraic symbols. He has a special sign for the unknown, for the minus, for reciprocals. The signs are still of the nature of abbreviations rather than algebraic symbols in our sense (they form the so-called ‘syncopated’ algebra); for each power of the unknown there exists a special symbol. There is no doubt that we have here not only, as in Babylon, arithmetical questions of a definite algebraic nature, but also a well-developed algebraic notation which was greatly conducive to the solution of problems of greater complexity than were ever taken up before.”

Basic algebra was known to the ancient Egyptians, to the Babylonians in Mesopotamia in the second millennium BC, to the Chinese, the Indians and other cultures. Yet with the exception of the work Diophantus and some contributions by scholars in medieval East Asia, India and the Middle East, the history of algebra seemingly made surprisingly little progress for several thousand years until Renaissance Europe, after which modern algebra was born. The solutions to linear and quadratic equations were known to the ancient Babylonians, but the solution to the general cubic equation did not come until Renaissance Italy.

According to the book Mathematics Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Mathematics, “Throughout these 3000 years, the Greeks, Indians, Chinese, Muslims, Hebrews and Christians seem to have done no more than present their own versions of solutions to linear and quadratic equations, which were well known to the Babylonians. Diophantus, Bhaskara, Jia Xian, al-Khwarizmi, Levi ben Gerson and Leonardo of Pisa, all provide examples of this. However, the history of algebra is subtler than that, with small changes accumulating slowly. There were many concepts which needed to mature before the breakthrough in algebra was ready to occur. Independence from geometry, a comfortable symbolic notation, a library of polynomial identities, and the tool of proof by induction, were all stepping stones in the history of algebra.”

Bhaskara (1114-1185), also known as Bhaskara II or Bhaskaracharya, was a prominent mathematician and astronomer in medieval India. Jia Xian (ca. AD 1010-ca. 1070) in China in the mid-eleventh century invented what has become known as Pascal's triangle, which was discovered independently by Blaise Pascal in France centuries later. It was also used by other prominent Chinese mathematicians such as Zhu Shijie (ca. 1260-1320). The knowledge of Pascal's triangle is one example of how the Chinese originated, but did not follow up, inventions and discoveries that later became key elements of Western science and technology.

Levi ben Gerson, or Gersonides (1288-1344) was a Jewish rabbi, philosopher and astronomer who lived all his life in the south of France and was highly regarded in the Christian majority community. His surveying device called Jacob’s Staff, which was popular with sailors who used it for navigational purposes, was similar to a device which had been employed for several centuries in China. It is not currently known whether the idea was carried along trade routes from East Asia or whether it was an independent invention in Europe.

Arguably the most important mathematician who ever lived in the Islamic world was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (ca. 780-850). He, or perhaps his ancestors, came from Khwarizm, the region south of the Aral Sea now part of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. He probably wasn’t an ethnic Arab and may have been born in Central Asia, yet he spent much of his life working as a scholar in Baghdad, synthesizing Babylonian with Greek methods. According to author David C. Lindberg, al-Khwarizmi’s Algebra “contains no equations or algebraic symbols, but only geometrical figures and Arabic prose, and it would not be recognized as algebra by a mathematics student of the twenty-first century. Its achievement was to deploy Euclidean geometry for the purpose of solving problems that we would now state in algebraic terms (including quadratic equations).” This book circulated in Western Europe and contributed in the long run to the development of a true symbolic algebra there.

Next to al-Khwarizmi, perhaps the most gifted mathematician of the medieval Middle East was the Persian scholar and poet Omar Khayyam (1048-1131). Ibn Warraq in the book Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out calls him the “Poet of Doubt.” Khayyam was definitely not an orthodox Muslim and he loved wine. He compiled astronomical tables and contributed to reform of the Persian calendar by introducing ideas from the Hindu one. The result was superior to the Julian calendar and comparable in accuracy with the Gregorian one. Khayyam was the first to solve some cubic equations and the first to see the equivalence between algebra and geometry, although further progress here did not take place in the Islamic world.

Our numeral system dates back to India during the early post-Roman era. It came to Europe via the medieval Middle East, which is why these numbers are called “Arabic” numbers in European languages, yet even Muslims admit that they imported them from India. Labeling them “Arabic” numerals is this therefore deeply misleading. Calling them “Hindu-Arabic” number system could be accepted, but the preferred term should be “Indian numerals.”

The Maya in Mesoamerica developed a place-value number system with the zero at least as early as Indians did in Eurasia, but this great innovation sadly did not influence people elsewhere. According to Michael P. Closs in Mathematics Across Cultures, “There is reason to credit the Maya with the first invention of a zero symbol. It is absent in the surviving epi-Olmec texts but is very common in the Maya inscriptions. Zeros are found in many chronological counts in the Dresden Codex where they occur in positional contexts just as other numerals. Most Maya glyphs come in several variants and the same is true of the zero sign. The zeros in the codices are identifiable as shells and are always painted red. In most cases, the zero shells are stylized and simplified. In the inscriptions, the most common form of the zero is shaped somewhat like a three quarter portion of a Maltese cross.”

The Aztecs who were politically dominant in Central Mexico from the 1300s on used hand, heart and arrow symbols to represent fractional distances when calculating areas of land. Mesoamerican and especially Mayan mathematics is the one pre-Columbian scientific achievement that compares most favorably to developments in the Old World, but the mainstream development of mathematics happened in the major Eurasian civilizations and the Maya seem to have concentrated their efforts largely in the field of planetary astronomy.

The zero can be used as an empty place indicator, to show that 2106 is different from 216. The ancient Babylonians had a place-value number system with this feature, but base 60. The second use of zero is as a number itself in the form we use it now. Some historians believe that the Indian use of zero evolved from earlier innovations by Greek astronomers. Symbols for the first nine numbers of our number system have their origins in the Brahmi system of writing in India, which dates back to at least the mid-third century BC. More important than the form of the symbols is the notion of place value, and here the evidence is weaker.

The Chinese had a multiplicative system with the base 10, probably derived from the Chinese counting board, a checker board with rows and columns. Numbers were represented by little rods made from bamboo or ivory. The abacus was introduced in China around the fourteenth century. Somewhere around or before 600 AD (the place and date remains uncertain) Indians dropped symbols for numbers higher than 9 and began to use symbols for 1 through 9 in our familiar place-value arrangement. The question remains why Indians dropped their own multiplicative system and introduced the place-value system, including a symbol for zero. We currently don’t know for sure. Historian of mathematics Victor J. Katz elaborates in his excellent book A History of Mathematics, Second Edition:

“It has been suggested, however, that the true origins of the system in India may be found in the Chinese counting board. Counting boards were portable. Certainly, Chinese traders who visited India brought them along. In fact, since southeast Asia is the border between Hindu culture and Chinese influence, it may well have been the area in which the interchange took place. Perhaps what happened was that the Indians were impressed with the idea of using only nine symbols, but they took for their symbols the ones they had already been using. They then improved the Chinese system of counting rods by using exactly the same symbols for each place value rather than alternating two types of symbols in the various places. And because they needed to be able to write numbers in some form, rather than just have them on the counting board, they were forced to use a symbol, the dot and later the circle, to represent the blank column of the counting board. If this theory is correct, it is somewhat ironic that Indian scientists then returned the favor and brought this new system back to China early in the eighth century.”

A decimal place-value system for integers definitely existed in India by the eighth century AD, possibly earlier. Although decimal fractions were used in China, in India there is no early evidence of their use. It was the Muslims who “completed the Indian written decimal place-value system by introducing these decimal fractions.”

There is evidence of the transmission of pre-Ptolemaic Greek astronomical knowledge to India, possibly along the Roman trade routes. The earliest known Indian work containing trigonometry dates from the fifth century AD. The Gupta period from the fourth to seventh centuries was a golden age for Indian civilization, with a flourishing of art and literature. Astronomers produced a series of textbooks (siddhanta or “solutions”) covering the basics of astronomy and planetary movements using Greek planetary theory. The Aryabhatiya of the prominent Indian mathematical astronomer Aryabhata (476-550) from 499 was an important work which summarized Hindu mathematics up to that point in time, covering arithmetic, algebra, plane trigonometry and spherical trigonometry. Next to Aryabhata, Brahmagupta (598-ca. 665) was the most accomplished Indian astronomer and mathematician of this age, making advances in algorithms for square roots and the solution of quadratic equations.

As Katz writes, “in 773 an Indian scholar visited the court of al-Mansur in Baghdad, bringing with him a copy of an Indian astronomical text, quite possibly Brahmagupta’s Brahmasphutasiddhanta. The caliph ordered this work translated into Arabic….The earliest available arithmetic text that deals with Hindu numbers is the Kitab al-jam’wal tafriq bi hisab al-Hind (Book on Addition and Subtraction after the Method of the Indians) by Muhammad ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi (ca. 780-850), an early member of the House of Wisdom. Unfortunately, there is no extant Arabic manuscript of this work, only several different Latin versions made in Europe in the twelfth century. In his text al-Khwarizmi introduced nine characters to designate the first nine numbers and, as the Latin version tells us, a circle to designate zero. He demonstrated how to write any number using these characters in our familiar place-value notation. He then described the algorithms of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, halving, doubling, and determining square roots, and gave examples of their use.”

One Latin manuscript begins with the words “Dixit Algorismi,” or “al-Khwarizmi says.” The word “algorismi” through some misunderstandings became a term referring to arithmetic operations and the source of the word algorithm. Some Sanskrit works and terms were introduced to Europe via Arabic translations. “Zero” derives from sifr, Latinized into “zephirum.” The word sifr itself was an Arabic translation of Sanskrit sunya, or “empty.”

Rabbi Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra, or Abenezra (ca. 1090-1167), a Spanish-Jewish philosopher, poet and Biblical commentator, left Spain before 1140 to escape persecution of Jews and Christians by the regime of the Muslim Almohads. He wrote three treatises which helped to bring the Indian symbols to the attention of some learned people in Europe, but it took more time for Indian numerals to become fully adopted on this continent.

Leonardo of Pisa (ca. 1170-1240), often known as Fibonacci (son of Bonaccio), was an Italian and the first great Western mathematician after the decline of ancient Greek science. The son of a merchant from the city of Pisa with contacts in North Africa, Leonardo himself travelled much in the region. He is most famous for his masterpiece the Liber abbaci or Book of Calculation. The word abbaci (from abacus) does not refer to a computing device but to calculation in general. The first edition appeared in 1202, and a revised one was published in 1228. This work enjoyed a wide European readership and contained rules for computing with the new Indian numerals. The examples were often inspired by examples from Arabic-language treatises, but filtered through Leonardo’s own considerable creative genius. Indian numerals faced powerful opposition for generations but were gradually adopted during the Renaissance period, especially by merchants. Their practical advantages compared to the more cumbersome Roman numerals were simply too great to ignore, although Roman numerals are still used for certain limited purposes in the West in the twenty-first century.

Victor J. Katz sums up the state of global mathematics around the year 1300, with a special emphasis on the major Eurasian civilizations, Europe, India, China and the Middle East:

“European algebra of this time period, like its Islamic counterpart, did not consider negative numbers at all. India and China, however, were very fluent in the use of negative quantities in calculation, even if they were still hesitant about using them as answers to mathematical problems. The one mathematical subject present in Europe in this time period which was apparently not considered in the other areas was the complex of ideas surrounding motion. It was apparently only in Europe that mathematicians considered the mathematical question of the meaning of instantaneous velocity and therefore were able to develop the mean speed rule. Thus the seed was planted which ultimately grew into one branch of the subject of calculus nearly three centuries later. It appears that the level of mathematics in these four areas of the world was comparable at the turn of the fourteenth century. Although there were specific techniques available in each culture that were not available in others, there were many mathematical ideas and methods common to two or more.”

If the level of knowledge was comparable across the major regions of Eurasia by the early fourteenth century, why was modern mathematics developed in Europe? In the Islamic world, mathematical sciences and natural philosophy tended to be classified as “foreign sciences” and treated with some suspicion, not integrated into the core curriculum at places of learning. In Europe there was a growing body of universities where natural sciences were viewed more favorably and where students enjoyed much more free inquiry and legal protection. The Islamic world did not develop calculus, analytic geometry or heliocentric astronomy.

In China, the education system was a part of the imperial bureaucracy, which did not encourage studies in science or mathematics but memorization of ancient literary classics. Those who did mathematical work usually did so in isolation, independent of each other and often unknown to each other, and their work was in many cases not followed up. This does not mean that Chinese mathematicians did not make valuable contributions, but like in the Islamic world this often happened more in spite of than because of the education system.

The practical handbook Jiuzhang Suanshu (Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art) is the longest surviving Chinese mathematical work, and prominent Chinese mathematicians, among them Liu Hui in 263 AD, published commentaries on it. Zu Chongzhi (ca. 429-500 AD) calculated π to seven decimals, the most accurate known estimate in the world until the Persian Jamshid al-Kashi (ca. 1380-1429) surpassed this. The Chinese were proficient in solving many kinds of algebraic problems. One of the most dynamic periods of mathematics in China was the late thirteenth century, with men such as Qin Jiushao (ca. 1202-1261).

Katz states that “Chinese scholars were primarily interested in solving problems of importance to the Chinese bureaucracy. Although some development of better techniques evidently occurred over the centuries, to a large extent ‘progress’ was stifled by the general Chinese reverence for the past. Hence even incorrect methods from such works as the Jiuzhang suanshu were repeated through the centuries. Although the thirteenth-century mathematicians exploited the counting board to the fullest, its very use imposed limits. Equations remained numerical, so the Chinese were unable to develop a theory of equations comparable to the one developed several centuries later in the West….Finally, in the late sixteenth century, with the arrival of the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), Western mathematics entered China and the indigenous tradition began to disappear.”

Madhava of Sangamagramma (ca.1350-ca.1425) was an innovative mathematician and founder of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics in South India, which did some interesting work from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, but there is today little proof of transfer of knowledge to other regions. According to author John North, “Indian religious tradition was a powerful controlling force, not only of content, but also of form and of the ways of learning by rote. As a result, a typical work of eighteenth-century astronomy can be easily mistaken for one of the previous millennium. We are reminded of the situation in China, markedly different from that in the West.” There was never any strong drive in India to link astronomy with other systems of knowledge, for instance physics, as happened in Europe.

The most important Asian mathematician of the early modern era was arguably Seki Kowa or Seki Takakazu (ca. 1642-1708) in Japan, a rough contemporary of Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton who anticipated some European advances. Born into a samurai family, he was a leading figure in the wasan (“Japanese calculation”) movement. He was the first person to study determinants and independently discovered Bernoulli numbers at the same time as or slightly before the brilliant Jacob Bernoulli (1654-1705) in Switzerland. While you can find a handful of Asian exceptions here and there, Victor J. Katz concludes that “Nevertheless, the locus of the history of mathematics after the fourteenth century was primarily in Europe.” If I concentrate on Europe in the reminder of this story it is because almost all global advances in mathematics between the fourteenth and the mid-twentieth century happened there.

By the fourteenth century a commercial revolution had begun in Western Europe where the “new capitalists” could remain at home and hire others to travel to various ports as their agents. This led to the creation of international trading companies centered in major cities, and these companies needed more sophisticated mathematics than their predecessors did because they had to deal with letters of credit, bills of exchange, promissory notes and interest calculations. Double-entry bookkeeping began as a way of keeping track of these various transactions. A new class of “professional” mathematicians grew up in response to these growing needs, the maestri d’abbaco or abacists. Italian abacists and merchants were instrumental in teaching Europeans the Hindu-Arabic decimal place-value system.

Luca Pacioli (ca. 1445-1517) was one of the last of the abacists. He was ordained a Franciscan friar and taught mathematics at various places in Italy. He gathered materials for some 20 years and in 1494 completed the most comprehensive mathematics text in Europe of the time, Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita. This summary lacked originality, but its comprehensiveness and the fact that it was printed caused it to be widely circulated. Pacioli was well-connected. His friends included the architect Leon Battista Alberti and above all the polymath Leonardo da Vinci, who had a passionate interest for mathematics which was reflected in his art and his studies of proportions and perspective.

Niccolò Tartaglia (1499-1557) was largely self-taught in mathematics and got the nickname Tartaglia (“Stammerer”) from an injury he suffered at the hands of a French soldier. He settled in Venice in 1534 as a teacher of mathematics, wrote on the application of mathematics to artillery fire and was thus a pioneer in the science of ballistics. By 1535 he had discovered a general method for solving cubic equations. Gerolamo Cardano or Cardan (1501-1576), who was trained as a physician and was a lecturer of mathematics in Milan, in 1539 contacted Tartaglia to publish his solution. Tartaglia refused at first but eventually confided in him. He extracted an oath from Cardano that he would never publish Tartaglia’s mathematical discoveries as he planned to publish them himself at a later date.

Cardano began working with the problem of cubic equations, assisted by his gifted student Lodovico Ferrari (1522-1565). Over the next years he worked out the solutions and their justifications to all the various cases of the cubic. Ferrari solved the fourth degree (quartic) equation as well. Tartaglia still hadn’t published anything and Cardano was eager that the solutions should be made available. In 1545 he published his great work Ars Magna, Sive de Regulis Algebraicis (The Great Art, or On the Rules of Algebra), devoted to the solution of cubic and quartic equations. Tartaglia was furious, even though Cardano did mention him as one of the discoverers of the method. Cardano’s masterpiece contained much else of interest, including a solid understanding of the use of negative numbers. Cardano’s Ars Magna was extremely influential in Europe and has been dubbed the first book of modern mathematics.

The Italian mathematician Rafael Bombelli (1526-1572) was educated as an engineer and spent much of his adult life working on engineering projects. He made free use of negative numbers and was the first person to write down the rules for addition, subtraction and multiplication of complex numbers. He had studied Cardano’s popular work. Algebraic notation was gradually replacing the strictly verbal accounts of the Muslims, and Bombelli contributed to this change. According to Katz, “Although only the first three of the five parts were published in his lifetime, and although in the questions concerning multiple roots of cubic equations Bombelli did not achieve as much as Cardano, nevertheless Bombelli’s Algebra marks the high point of the Italian algebra of the Renaissance.”

The Italian humanist Federico Commandino (1509-1575) had studied Latin and Greek. He spent years of his life publishing improved Latin translations with commentaries of Greek texts by Archimedes, Ptolemy, Euclid, Aristarchus, Pappus, Apollonius and Hero of Alexandria. He contributed greatly to the survival of these works, which were eagerly studied by leading figures in Europe. Some medieval translations made before the printing press were linguistically flawed and had not been done by skilled mathematicians, as Commandino was.

Pappus of Alexandria (ca. 290-ca 350 AD) was the last of the notable Greek geometers. He worked in Roman Egypt, probably as a teacher. His compendium of mathematics, the Synagoge (“Collection”), was not terribly original but valuable to us because it preserved some Greek mathematical texts that would otherwise have been lost. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, “Pappus’s Synagoge first became widely known among European mathematicians after 1588, when a posthumous Latin translation by Federico Commandino was printed in Italy. For more than a century afterward, Pappus’s accounts of geometric principles and methods stimulated new mathematical research.” His influence is conspicuous in the work of René Descartes, Pierre de Fermat and Isaac Newton, among many others.

As these examples demonstrate, Italy during the Renaissance period was the leading nation in Europe in science and mathematics, but the northern peoples were making advances, too. Robert Recorde (1510-1558), a Welsh physician and mathematician and graduate from the University of Oxford in England, was the first author of mathematical works in Britain during the Renaissance. His work The Whetstone of Witte from 1557 introduced the equals sign =.

The Flemish mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin (1548-1620) made substantial contributions to a change in mathematical thinking with his well-though-out notation for decimal fractions and his role in erasing the Aristotelian distinction between number and magnitude. Decimals had been used by the Chinese and Muslims before, but not by Europeans. Stevin introduced this in 1585 with De Thiende (The Art of Tenths). The Scottish scholar John Napier and others took up his notation and developed it into that used today. Stevin also published L'arithmétique in French, a work containing arithmetic and algebra.

Born in the city of Bruges in Flanders, Stevin became a bookkeeper with a firm in Antwerp and traveled in Poland, Prussia, Norway and other parts of northern Europe in the 1570s. He left the southern Netherlands, then under Spanish rule, and in 1583 entered the University of Leiden. He became an advisor to Prince Maurice of Nassau (1567-1625) and was responsible for meeting the growing need of the Dutch nation for trained engineers, merchants and navigators. He wrote textbooks in Dutch rather than the traditional Latin. Inspired by Archimedes, Stevin wrote works on mechanics and arguably founded the science of hydrostatics. In 1586, before Galileo did the same, he reported that different weights fall a given distance in the same time after experiments conducted from a church tower in Delft.

Algebra in the Islamic world had been entirely rhetorical, with no symbols for the unknown. Everything was written out in words. In fifteenth century Italy some of the abacists began to use abbreviations for unknowns. Innovations spread faster after the introduction of printing.

The brilliant French algebraist François Viète (1540-1603), Latinized as Franciscus Vieta, was a lawyer by profession. He developed the first systematic use of algebraic symbols. In their online biography, J. J. O'Connor and E F Robertson state that “François Viète was a French amateur mathematician and astronomer who introduced the first systematic algebraic notation in his book In artem analyticam isagoge. He was also involved in deciphering codes.” He demonstrated the value of symbols to represent quantities. “While Viète had come only part way toward modern symbolism, the crucial step of allowing letters to stand for numerical constants enabled him to break away from the style of examples and verbal algorithms of his predecessors. He could now treat general examples rather than specific ones and give formulas rather than rules.” He was not the first person ever to employ letters of the alphabet to denote numerals, but after 1590 he popularized this concept.

Omar Khayyam had seen a relationship between geometry and algebra, but the decisive breakthrough came with Descartes and Fermat in France. Just like Viète, Pierre de Fermat in Toulouse was a busy lawyer. His mathematical work was communicated to friends by means of letters, often with little in the way of formal proof. He was fluent in several languages, among them Italian, Greek and Latin, and made major contributions to geometric optics, modern number theory, probability theory and analytic geometry. According to Victor J. Katz, “Descartes, along with Thomas Harriot and Albert Girard, reworked some of Viète’s algebraic ideas into a theory of equations….Fermat also was responsible for the first new work in number theory since Leonardo of Pisa, while Pascal, along with Girard Desargues, made some of the earliest contributions to the subject of projective geometry.”

In the margin of a Latin translation of the Arithmetica by Diophantus, Fermat claimed to have found a beautiful theorem which became famous and known as Fermat’s Last Theorem. Mathematicians struggled with it for centuries until finally in 1995 the English mathematician Andrew Wiles (born 1953) appeared to have solved it. There are some historians of mathematics who question whether Fermat ever had the proof that he claimed to have.

The French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650) was one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution. Descartes had studied at a Jesuit college in Anjou, classical subjects, Aristotle and mathematics as well as acting, poetry, riding and fencing. He enlisted in a military school and in the 1620s travelled through Europe, ending up in the Netherlands to enjoy the liberty of s society where he could be an original thinker without fear of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. He later went for brief visits back to France. Descartes contributed substantially to optics and meteorology and devised a universal method of deductive reasoning based on mathematics, his most famous statement being Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am).

Viète had used vowels for the unknowns and consonants for known quantities. Descartes introduced the convention we use today of employing letters at the beginning of the alphabet (a, b, c etc.) to represent known quantities, and letters at the end of the alphabet to represent unknown ones (x, y, z). He created the Cartesian coordinate system with axes labeled x, y and z respectively, which made it possible to express positions in two or three dimensions. This was later extended to include negative numbers. Algebra could now be linked with geometry, a development which had repercussions right down to Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Some ideas of coordinate geometry had been anticipated by the Frenchman Nicole Oresme (1323-1382), but his work did not link algebra and geometry. Coordinates had been used by ancients Greeks such as Hipparchus and Ptolemy in astronomy and geography, but historians give René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat shared credit for the invention of analytic geometry. Traditionally, algebra had been treated as completely separate from geometry. This tradition began breaking down with the work of François Viète in the late sixteenth century. Both Fermat and Descartes built on Viète’s ideas. Author Marvin Jay Greenberg writes:

“Descartes was the first to publish in 1637, as an appendix (La Géométrie, in three parts) to his very influential Discourse on Method, his philosophical method for finding and recognizing correct knowledge. Fermat never did publish his work; instead, he communicated his results in private letters to a few colleagues, and his work was made public only in 1679, fourteen years after he died. Curiously, although both these men were outstanding mathematicians, mathematics was not their profession. Fermat was a jurist who did mathematics as a hobby. He is best known for his work in number theory….Fermat also discovered the basic idea of the differential calculus before Newton and Leibniz. Descartes contributed to other sciences besides mathematics, but he was primarily a philosopher whose writings had a great impact on the way educated people viewed the world. Both men initially introduced their algebraic methods in order to solve problems from classical Greek geometry, recognizing that the new methods had great potential to solve other problems. Their successors over many decades realized that potential. Descartes’ stated goal was to provide general methods, using algebra, to ‘solve any problem in geometry.’”

The French natural and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a very influential mathematician who contributed to many areas of mathematics. Descartes visited Pascal and the two argued about the existence of a vacuum, which Descartes did not believe in. Using the newly invented barometer, Pascal in 1648 observed that the pressure of the atmosphere decreases with height and deduced that a vacuum existed above the atmosphere. In mathematics he is especially famous as the co-founder of probability theory, a branch of mathematics which is of vital importance to modern physics and economics. He corresponded with Fermat in 1654 about problems related to a game of dice. Blaise Pascal soon underwent a profound religious experience and pledged his life to Christianity. He argued his case for the rational belief in God by stating that if God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing.

The Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) learnt of the work on probability carried out by Pascal and Fermat and in 1657 wrote a small work De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae on the calculus of probabilities, which was the first printed text on the subject.

Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754) was born in the Champagne region, but as a Protestant he left Catholic France for England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. He became a member of the Royal Society in London and friendly with Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton. His major work was The Doctrine of Chances, published in 1718 with expanded editions in 1738 and 1756. This text was much more detailed than the work on probability by Huygens, partly because of the rapid general advances in European mathematics since then. De Moivre gives not only general rules but also detailed applications of these rules.

According to author Charles Murray, “The discovery that uncertainty could be calibrated fundamentally changed human capacity to acquire and manage knowledge. In science, it led not only to the edifice of statistical analysis that is indispensable in all the hard sciences, the social sciences, engineering, and industrial processes of all sorts, but to the unraveling of mysteries that could be understood only in terms of probabilities - quantum theory is one example. In economics, the ability to analyze reality not just in terms of yes or no, but as precise numbers in between, enabled the management of risk that in turn makes possible modern economies.”

The Dangerous Return of Utopian Socialism

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:41:37 -0500

Jeffrey Sachs is senior economist at the UN and author of the bestseller "Common Wealth" and the controversial Time essay "The Case for Bigger Government". In a recent interview in the Brussels newspaper De Tijd Jeffrey Sachs blames “unbridled American market capitalism” for the financial crisis and pleads in favor of the Swedish social model as an alternative. His ideological argument is revealing for the dominant utopian-socialist mind at the top of the UN.

The Swedish social model, which Sachs would like to introduce, has not the only the largest Size of Government of Western World, but also the weakest economic performance of the OECD. In 1970, Sweden still was the fourth wealthiest nation in the world. Thirty years later, Sweden had fallen to rank 17 with catastrophic social consequences. In the meantime the U.S. consistently managed to remain the second or third for more than half a century. So there is not much socio-economic wisdom to be learned from the Swedish Social Model.

Sachs also argues that "unbridled capitalism" is the cause of the current crisis. The reality is that during the last twenty years central planning progressively intruded Western economies who now bear the burden of governments spending 40% to 55% of GDP. Entrepreneurs face ever more crippling restrictions, licensing schemes, quotas and price and quality controls. Businessmen endure tens of thousands of pages of new rules and regulations each year, all written in a lawyers slangy that totally undermines the legal certainty of the free market and which transformed business into a gamble on the next political caprice and on judicial interpretations of the legal jargon. Size of government, computerized control and dirigisme has now reached a level plan economists of the Soviet Union could only dream of. Not the capitalistic system failed, but excessive dirigisme is to blame for the crisis.

Monetary Policy
Sachs also fails to mention the role of monetary policy in the financial crisis. Still it was money printing that undermined our purchasing power, and heavily forged our means of exchange and saving, with massive distortions as a result. The reason why interest rate manipulation causes so much distortion is that the interest rates are the key factor in all spending and investment decisions. Not only in the choice between saving and consumption, but also in the investment calculus between capital intensive and labor-intensive production processes. Years of low interest rates lead to overinvestment in futuristic automation and nonsensical expulsion of low-skilled labor from production processes. The colossal waste of low skilled labor tumbles overall productivity resulting in lasting stagflation and heavily suboptimal living standards.

Way too easy access to cheap credit also lead to the banks’ under-capitalization and extreme leverage ratios, and to a massive competitive disadvantage of labor-intensive SMEs in favor of big business. System Threatening concentration and monopolies are the result. Industrial overproduction and huge inefficiencies due to shortages of service providers are just a couple of the actual symptoms.

New Monetary system
Technological and commercial progress result in yearly productivity gains of 2 to 3%. Prices should therefore fall by 2 to 3% and not rise as we now witness for as long as one remembers. The positive inflation targets adopted by Central Banks worldwide seize all the benefits of progress in favor of the bankers, and systematically confiscate 4 to 6% of Joe Sixpack’s and Sally Housewife’s added value. Such inflation leads to severe distortions and is fundamentally unjust. The collective achievement of progress belongs to the whole of society, and in the first place to those who most contribute to it. Worse still is the fact that inflation devalues worker’s savings so much that the real purchasing power is often only one third when they reach retirement.
We do not need a Swedish social model as Sachs argues, but an just monetary system. Such system can only be equitable and achieve efficient allocation of resources when monetary growth is zero or at the most limited to the growth of the real economy. A return to the gold standard may be the best guarantee thereto.

Kyoto and Emission rights
Sachs also belongs to the side of the climate fixers who take the controversy over the global warming trend for a "global consensus" and continue to believe that human action caused the trend and may even reverse it. According to Sachs Southern Europe will soon dry out and cause a massive flow of refugees to the north. The bombastic climate alarmism in the run up to the Copenhagen Climate Conference next month must be understood as an ultimate attempt to convince conference goers to step into the global emissions bureaucracy.

CO2 Emission rights are a totally fictitious but legally indispensable commodity for most production processes. Politics will determine its degree of scarcity and the regional allocation, thereby disconnecting production costs from market reality and cause massive distortions. The global ETS scheme is not only fraud sensitive. Scarcity and allocation being the result of political decisions, inside knowledge are likely turn the ETS scheme into one big swindle with grave counter-productive effects. The Soviet debacle learned to what systemic waste the falsification of competition and the elimination of market forces can lead. High subsidies for extremely low productive windmills and solar panels in the Western World for example are causing awfully suboptimal use of scarce resources worldwide. Under free market conditions much more productive use would be found in developing countries.

Market oriented Alternative
Before attacking hypothetical problems, let us first solve the real problems that threaten humanity. One single water pump at an equivalent cost of a couple of solar panels can indeed spare hundreds of Sahel women the daily journey to the spring and spare many infections and lives.

Fundamentally, Kyoto emission rights are nothing less than a World Tax on existential human needs and are therefore incompatible with the human right to development. The scheme will cost the Belgian taxpayers 3 to 5 billion Euro annually in the first phase, or the equivalent waste of a "Long Wapper" each year. And such type of taxes tend to increase over time.

If indeed CO2 reductions ever proved to be effective in the “climate management”, national governments can just as well raise existing taxes on fossil fuels without the extravagance of the global emissions bureaucracy. As consumers will only substantially save energy when energy becomes expensive, it is the only effective and market-oriented way to reduce emissions without the distorting political interference. The administrative cost of such an increase is zero whereas a shift of the tax burden from income to consumption can only boost the economy rather than destroying it as would be the case with emission rights.

The emission rights scheme and the World Climate Organization which Sachs calls for are dangerous steps towards a "New World Order" that bring closer the specter of a World Government under UN tyranny.

Sachs calls it frightening that the fate of the world depends on what (democratically elected national) senators think about global warming. Even more frightening is to entrust our way of life and our living standard to the utopian socialist ideals of a few UN despots who escape democratic control. Even Marx saw in the Bourgeois idealism of utopian socialists the biggest threat of all to mankind.

This article was written by philosopher Martin De Vlieghere and businessman Paul Vreymans

Statistical Breakdown Threatens Telecom Reforms

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:03:33 -0500

An article by Johnny Munkhammar

One cause of the impressive economic development in the Nordic countries during the last two decades has been their early deregulations of the telecom market. A symbol for this has been the healthy competition between Nokia and Ericsson. We have not just seen an explosion in the supply within telecom but also 75 per cent in price cuts. The industry as a whole has been able to increase its productivity and the consumers have gained more in freedom and choice.

Last summer, the European Parliament rejected the so called telecom package, and now during the fall – lead by the Swedish presidency – comes a so called reconciliation process. Its purpose is to reach a decision through different compromises. The main part of the telecom package is – to a substantial degree – about doing for the rest of Europe what has already been done in the Nordic countries. The European telecom market will be characterized by more competition and freedom of choice for the consumer.

But in order to make decisions about such a package, there has to be an established need for further decisions about liberalizations. Then one needs to know what reality looks like. On that point, the OECD usually supplies the western world with the most reliable and well-founded information. If one wants to compare growth, employment, pricing and other factors between the 30 OECD member countries, this source is the obvious choice.

Some weeks ago, the OECD presented a study of, among other things, the telecom markets and the price levels in the OECD-countries (OECD Communications Outlook 2009). Their conclusion was that the lowest costs for mobile phone calls were to be found in Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden. So far this seems highly probable. But then they claim that the highest prices were situated in Canada, Spain – and the United States.

In case the United States should have one of the highest prices it would mean that either their market is not particularly free or that a free market does not lead to low prices. In particular the last interpretation, that undoubtedly certain actors would want to make their own, would speak against liberalizations like the telecom package. The truth is, however, that the OECD has made a big mistake, one that renders their data in this case completely useless.

In the United States, according to several studies, by among others Merrill Lynch, the cost per minute for a mobile phone call is on the contrary the lowest compared with all the 30 OECD-countries. How could the OECD have come up with the opposite? The OECD has gathered what they regard as typical amount of phone calls and compared this. But as a matter of fact the average consumer in the United States calls more than three times more than the OECD definition of “high usage”. They have compared apples and pears.

On page 275 the OECD has a small reservation that their ”typical” cases may not necessarily be correct for all countries. But if such a choice of method leads to that an entirely incorrect conclusion, should they not instead have remade the typical cases so that it in fact they are typical for the countries that are compared?

In one of our most important welfare questions, which is a hot topic throughout Europe, the OECD has contributed with false information about reality. The management should take care of the OECD’s good reputation and withdraw the study. Facts remain; Europe needs a freer telecom market, also in order for the consumers to get lower prices. And the United States provides a good example of that.

Johnny Munkhammar is Research Director of the European Enterprise Institute.