Martin Meenagh blog

Bill Clinton Gets it For those of you who think oil depletion and peak oil are whacky ideas, I just wanted to direct you to this link from June 2006, in which Bill Clinton (still in a pre-Hillary campaign state of grace) tried to warn people about the depletion of oil reserves. He was speaking to the 'Association of Alternative Newsweeklies' which is a serious industry body and not an automatic bunch of nuts as their title may suggest. Clinton delivered a complex, science-based lecture which stands in contrast to Al Gore's somewhat hysterical fetishisation of the global warming argument. The text is intriguing. Clinton had clearly been receiving briefings about how oil depletion in the Ghawar field and elsewhere was becoming a major problem. He seems to put a time-period of some 35-50 years on the end of what he terms 'recoverable oil'. As we learned during his presidency, however, his pronouncements are sometimes cryptic. Recoverable oil is not enough oil to sust...

Mr Hopeful It became something of a Sunday tradition on this blog for a while there to write a piece about the advancing drums. These tend to be the beat section of a band composed of stagflation, peak oil, war and the theft of society by narcissistic professional elites (so unlike my own songs of praise to the middle temple on a blog with a big picture of me on it). The drums have been here for some time, of course. However, I thought that I might continue a slight tendency to break the habit of going on about them with three things that I have recently noted. Firstly, Syria's attempt to destroy Lebanon by plunging that embattled democracy into an abyss of Hezbollah-Hamas violence oiled by Iranian money and the blood of Syria's victims, which Wahabists and Baathists could then manipulate, has clearly failed . The instability of last year's truncated Lebanon war, occasioned by the Islamist blitzing of Israel, is over, and Lebanon has made it through the semtex car seat rout...

Tagged by Bob from Brockley I've been tagged. The game is to identify an individual, and then challenge them to grasp the book nearest to them, go to page 123, take the fifth line down, and write out the next three sentences. I have four books on my cluttered desk; The Koran (M.A.S Abdel-Haleem's translation) the King James Bible, Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ , and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Marcus's book (an old 1944 translation I love and have had for years) at page 123 is concerned with a letter to his old tutor and friend, Fronto. Five lines down it reads; most delightful of men, most distinguished of consuls, sweetest of masters/ After this you are to be careful not to tell so many lies about me, particularly in the senate! Your speech made me cringe. O if only for every chapter-head I could give your own head a kiss There you are. Classic fancy schmancy Roman stuff. Imagine what he'd do with a blog...

Grangemouth The dispute over grangemouth oil refinery is a taste of things to come. Some ninety millions of pounds could be lost each day for at least six days, as it takes that long to shut down and restart the oilfield. Oil supplies, and the supplies of gas, to the North of England and Scotland, could run down dramatically. The cause of the dispute is not complex. Some years ago, British petroleum sold the forties field to an American company, ironically named Apache. No cowboys there then. The refinery and pipelines are owned by Ineos investments. Ineos is a private equity firm with around nine billion euros of debt. Its strategy, as with so many firms feeling the pinch as oil supplies run down and stagflation begins to bite, is to screw its workers by ending their pension scheme. The DNA of the Transport and General (my own union)--an old Leviathan that recently merged into a bigger Union--has passed into the workers' new representatives. They are not having it. Now, even the...

Boycotting the Olympics In the run up to the Berlin Games of 1936--the Nazi Games-- I was quite pleased to discover, a lawyer in New York of Irish Catholic descent brought a boycott movement to within a handful of votes of victory. I was quite happy to come across his story and thought that I'd provide a link to it here . Jesse Owens, who distinguished himself forever at the Berlin games and showed up the 'supermen' was opposed, arguing, perfectly reasonably, that the American South was just as bad for blacks at the time. Check it out.

Gilad Shalit Whilst defending his country and people, this young man --whose twenty first birthday was passed in chains last august--was captured by Leninist/fascists who hide behind the harder suras of the Koran. He is currently still in captivity. His capture was the public occasion of a war. He should not be forgotten, and nor should others held in the dark places of the earth. Thy children shall come again to their own border . And hopefully see sights like this... and, while I am at it, this

The Competition Commission The Competition Commission says that selling off British airports to a foreign company and allowing it to practice a state regulated monopoly was a bad idea. I agree. Heathrow is a national disgrace. The eponymous commission says that the airports should be broken up and sold off. I agree again. Britain's best performing companies these days are cooperatives and social partnerships like the John Lewis chain of shops . So, break up the airports company into units based on terminals, or whole airports in the smaller cases, and give them a constitution as a limited company. The board of directors would be hired by the partners. Every single worker, from the cleaners up, would be a partner. They would share in the outcomes and benefits, but would not hold shares that they could sell. They would also elect at least two worker representatives to the board, one man and one woman, and this would also be a condition of organisation for any domestic airline using ...

Rising Food Prices As you know, my one reader, I have been going on about peak oil and rising food prices, amongst other things, for months now. I wasn't particularly unperturbed to note this monday's Wall Street Journal. One would expect it to come out with the normal guff about free trade in agriculture and how some sort of mythical Ricardian global market would deliver food for everyone, rather than Malawi-style disasters everywhere. However, columnists in the Wall Street Journal , that well know mixture of left wing panic and survivalism, are now recommending that readers start stockpiling food. I agree. Dig your garden, plant potatoes, carrots, strawberries, rhubarb--all those things working men used to have rather than patios. Don't tell me you have no time. My grandfather used to work a full shift at the steelworks and then came home to the garden like half the others who weren't out on the taxis. My other, beloved, Grandad from Donegal used to tap out his life ...

Underground Bases One of the curious things about the cold war, and I suppose about the development of aerial bombing and missile technology anyway, was that bunkers did not stop with Hitler. Huge amounts of money have been spent over the past half century on developing very deep facilities underground, some of which are still active. True to form, the British cold war bases , dotted across this island but not, as far as I can tell, in the other islands of the archipelago, have mostly been closed down on health and safety grounds. In other countries the military would make an exhibition of them, along the lines of the Churchill Museum or the old cabinet war rooms. Some have been sold off with that in mind ; others, like this base in Wiltshire , which I suppose I was near today, would make a lovely exhibition. It even had an underground lake reservoir for drinking. In Russia and America, however, the idea of the under-mountain or underground base is still going strong. Dick Cheney's...

The Democratic Presidential ticket : Obama-Clinton? At the start of the American republic, the President and Vice-President were not running mates, but the people with the top two blocs of votes in the electoral college. This led to trouble, not under Washington but under the much-underrated and 'unflashy' John Adams, who had to put up with Thomas Jefferson behaving badly at every opportunity with quite a degree of glee. Adams was a one term President, and as soon as Jefferson, who tended to operate under cover of revolutionary-sounding populism, got the chance, he changed the system and appointed a stooge. That has been the default position of the Vice-President ever since. As John McCain once rather memorably put it, the idea was to hang around, go to funerals, support the President and stay quiet. The founders didn't elaborate on the office; they didn't even say whether the Vice-President should actually be President if a President were incapacitated. That came when ...

Public and Social Ownership I believe in Public and Social ownership, which is why I helped found the Campaign for Public Ownership. That doesn't mean centralised, bureaucratic or state control, and doesn't necessarily inflate useless local councillors and bureaucrats. I think people should have a stake in their services and surroundings and not be at the mercy of capital and monopolies. That's why I was fascinated by this excellent piece by Freeborn John , courtesy of Bob from Brockley . Check it out!

Any Pennsylvania readers? Here's a well sourced, copper plated story of the Clintons' pardon for members of the weather underground who participated in bombings and bank robberies that left a security guard dead. I only post it given that Barack Obama's associations with anti-poverty campaigners have come up time and again just recently, as has the rest of Hillary's kitchen sink. Meanwhile, cheers to Andrew Sullivan for the following video on how Hillary can win.

What world are we in? Since the end of the cold war, the west, and a good part of the rest of the world, has been getting used to the redrawing of political categories. Old identities, which seemed immutable, have faded, and despite all attempts to create some grand new overarching schemes, old forms of analysis, grounded in class, or natural law, or the reification of reason, have refused to go away. It sometimes seems to me that people who think of themselves as major political philosophers, in common with those who just think about politics, are like teenagers, repeating versions of their signature over and over until they acquire the identity that will carry them through the futures of which they dream. So, in the past months in blogland, we have had west vs anti west, liberal universalist vs communitarian, Burke vs Paine, individualist vs fascist, and a million other permutations. Surely though, to understand ideas it is necessary to understand the context in which they arise? For...

Fuhrerinbefehl My Fiancee has issued sinister orders from her hidden underground penthouse that I post the following song. So, I thought I would anyway. It's very beautiful and reminds me of her, though I note the implied threat in the last lines in which the singer's lover goes home to meet his wife. She's Italian, so if I am found shot, count your way down the queue of suspects and pick her out.

Michael Steven Gorbey You may remember the story of a man arrested in January in Washington DC, Michael Gorbey. He was found dressed in a flak jacket with a samurai sword, a loaded shotgun, various knives and accoutrements. He claimed to be on his way to meet Chief Justice John Roberts, who is also a Master of my own dear Middle Temple, albeit a junior one. Three weeks later, police looked in Gorbey's van and found a massive bomb. Gorbey plans to defend himself , and the trial is scheduled to start today. He hails from Rapidan, West Virginia, and no connection whatsoever has been mooted with terrorism. The trial, all the more because it is really the trial of something that did not happen, offers to provide a picture of how Washington DC is policed, and also a slice of American criminal procedure . It used to be said that a person who defended themselves had a fool for a client. Despite that received wisdom, many people have followed the lead of Helen Steel and David Morris (who...

Courtroom Fun A funny thing happened on the way to the courts....

The Ghost of Reggie Maudling Amongst maligned British political figures of the past hundred years, one has always stood affectionately out for me. Happily for someone who likes contrarians, my praising him managed to send the head of the government legal service into a bit of a spin at a Middle temple do last year, even though the man of whom I speak has been dead for nearly three decades, and was nothing of a contrarian except by the reaction he invoked in the humourless. I mean, of course, Sir Reginald Maudling. 'Reggie', as he was known to one and all, was the propagator, if not the inventor of what he called the 'well balanced lunch'--something generous accompanied by a bottle of red and a bottle of white, with a friend. He knew his cigars like the back of his hand, and was of the political generation that was myopically condemned for managing the decline of empire instead of making Keynesianism work in a traumatised post-war economy. Reggie Maudling was also profou...

More Peak Oil news Russia's oil production has peaked and is stagnating, according to one of the Russian Federation's most respected oil executives, the energy minister, and the Financial Times . The Association for the Study of Peak Oil has the story and the technical explanations here . Meanwhile, Kuwait's Bhagrum oilfield has peaked. The world's second largest oilfield is exhausted. You can read the story here . Saudi Arabian sources have taken to saying that they have 'miraculously' bucked the idea of peak oil in the Ghawar field . When pressed, however, they point constantly to productive capacity--the number of rigs--and not to production--the amount of oil. Meanwhile, OPEC has blamed speculators and issued a doublespeak press release in which prices are 'volatile' but the market is 'stable'. They contradict the first part with price data on their own website. There is also substantial evidence that world production figures are being massag...

The London Mayoral Debate You may have found this debate--run by the BBC--yourself. If not, the example of aggressive interviewing and a policy-based bearpit is one that contrasts very well with American debates held just recently. All politics is either a blood sport or a version thereof, and sometimes very disconnected from policy and principle. However, getting out in front of the people, or the other side's supporters, and not being scripted is something all political candidates should do because it tests them to the full. People are not idiots but the default tendency of an insulated political and media class is to suspect that they are. This is what happens when they find out that they aren't. Have a look! The picture at the top of this post is of course of Dicken's Eatanswill election by Phiz.

Women Leaders The pictures above are of two of Marvel Comics' key women. Spider-woman was infected by a mad political conspiracy. She then rebelled against male bosses, and tried to fight crime. However, she kept running into the egos of her boyfriends and the obsessions of weirdo costumed stalkers. She would frequently have to do for them all with a venom blast and eventually stopped prancing about in a costume, deciding instead to get a proper job. She-Hulk was ignored by most men, or patronised, until she went green. Unlike her male counterpart, she retained her brains, did not smash everything, and qualified as a feminist lawyer. Happy models both for some of my friends. I go down to the Thames Magistrates quite regularly. Sometimes I take students, sometimes, I go for a spot of legal observation which I suppose could be characterised as rubbernecking. Serious stories are of course told in every court, and what happens even at the most ridiculous level affects everyone. I usual...

Catiline Zimbabwe I have always had a very ambivalent relationship with the idea of Rome. It began before my visit as a young person. I knew about Rome, and dimly suspected the influence of the republic and empire on politics and law in the west even though people did their best at my school to keep Roman history away from me. At Balliol as an undergraduate, I mangled Latin and bathed in beautiful women from whose lips Latin could tumble quite easily whilst restraining myself from my own cheery humiliation in attempting to read or speak it. It is also the case that Rome, in both republic and Empire, was a deeply vicious place. Death, torture, slavery, and corruption still play around the pile of ruins turned to profit because they could not be cannibalised by Rome's successors in that hot and dusty city. I am a Catholic. I am meant to contemplate the cross, after all. Yet yesterday's sad anniversary, and in truth the reaction to Barack Obama's debate performance earlier in ...

Russia and the Mediterranean Rim Western leaders have always been prone to miss bigger pictures. In the space race, for instance, which seems to have resulted in western success at huge cost with little return, amazing things were achieved to little purpose. In a far darker way, World War One, the struggle for Empire, and the Cold War, were all predicated on the idea of a defined task the achievement of which resulted in 'victory'. What the West has not been culturally good at is the integration of the bigger picture and the greater game with this capacity for determined focus. We tend to move from the histrionic to the practical with no connexion in between. That was OK when rivals were self-defeating because of the grand sweep of their designs. We could pat ourselves on the back and assert that versions of liberal materialism added to technological leads could get us anywhere. What happens, though, when ineluctable forces, and cold, calculated, patient planning of a sort that...

Goodbye, Signor Verza Annalisa Verza is a talented, beautiful friend of my heart, and a person I admire very much. I wanted to say in a small way how warm and kind her father seemed to me when I met him on those occasions in Rovigo. Last Tuesday, he joined Anna's lovely mother, whom I met in Oxford but whom I will always associate with Venice. My prayers of course, are with my friend. A good man has passed on, and every time I dip a piece of bread in wine I will think of his kindness and intelligence. He learned to do that when he was young, in the countryside of Italy. We had such strange conversations early in the morning, he not speaking English and me not speaking Italian, to my shame. Signor Verza and his family have taught me, though they do not know it, a great deal about the dignity and decency of the ordinary Italy that people like me almost never see. There is a calm and an honesty about many of Italy's long suffering decent citizens that is often lost on English spea...

The Worries of the World Two converging storm fronts seem to have hit Bangladesh's pressurised environment last week. One is clearly occasioned by rising food prices . Another is composed of Islamist and democratic protest around a new law empowering women . The environment in Bangladesh is already highly pressurised because of the political problems there, and an 'anti-corruption drive' inspired by multilateral organisations that cannot get rich states to adhere to the standards they are imposing. This latter problem is largely due to the effect anti-corruption laws would have on the defence industry. Protests have emerged over both issues that have begun to tear at civil society and order on the streets. If you add in a potential climate change because of farming practices and water problems, Bangladesh is evidence, if it be needed, of some of the darker potentials of the world, as the good ladies and gentlemen at Shariah Finance Watch have recently pointed out. It w...

Why Public Ownership Makes Sense The case for social ownership of resources, accountable to the people, is one that is not often made in Britain these days. It is almost never made in the rest of the English-speaking world. This is a shame. The historic reason is the way that centralised, under resourced public utilities and organisations were undermined by government control and cost cutting after 1945. Despite this, public services, publicly run and socially accountable, are a success story in many countries. Spain has, for instance, developed a very high-tech railway system lately that is less polluting than airlines, less expensive in the long run, and less dependent on oil and gas. This latter point is critical as oil and gas begin to run down and, fluctuations aside, begin to rise inexorably in price. Equally, Germany--a republic I admire deeply--is a very good example of how a decent culture can be created and maintained in which the effort of the public is not put to inevitabl...

The Constitution of Ireland Well done to Brian Cowen on his elevation as Leader of Fianna Fail, and soon the Premiership of Ireland. Ireland has enjoyed a boom of late. The past twenty years have reversed some one hundred and sixty, economically. Nevertheless, the celtic tiger economy has resulted in some moments of selfishness and lunacy; not least the proposal to concrete over Tara , which some are opposing . Economic growth of a kind similar to that in England and Spain has also threatened to corrupt the culture of a free people as surely as globalist materialism did elsewhere. This latter fact may be of critical importance in the years that are to come, in which economic pressures and energy depletion must be met with community, localism, and agrarian populism of the sort that Ireland became Mistress of to survive. It might be time for democrats truly interested in the survival of people to think about Article 45 of the Irish Constitution. It seeks to set out the directive principl...

A cloudy ray of hope Sometimes, things can go right. The confrontation of two Chinas across the Taiwan straits is one of the more unstable of the world's relationships. Recently however, in elections and in investment structures behind the scenes sponsored by the European Union, The People's Republic and Taiwan have engaged in a rapprochement. This is important for three reasons. Firstly, China is under far more economic strain than most people would believe to read the press. There are vast differences between the urban and rural areas of that country, and vast disparities in income and in rates of inflation. There is no private banking sector and few other mechanisms which can bridge the gap. China could be booming and starving at the same time. Secondly, China is resource dependant. It always has been. Outside of Manchuria, it has very little in the way of raw materials and goods, and requires earnings from its surplus with the west to pay for its deficits with Asia. This we...

Ron Paul Now that the caravan has moved on, I thought that it would be interesting to have a look at one of the more interesting candidates on the Republican side this year. Ron Paul was not a favourite of the media. He had a deeply anti-modern message. That message was that government really should be restricted, that foreign policy should be predicated on the national interest and not some sort of 7-11 convenience store Imperialism, and that understanding the world meant understanding some of America's faults. He even had an airship. I think his candidacy, and that of Mike Huckabee, showed up something about the politics of the US as the world enters into a period of resource depletion, recession, and accelerated war (I write accelerated because war never really went away after 1945, it shifted to the third world, and then came back via the arcs of instability that I have gone on about before). The conventional wisdom , which in the American media is debased, self interested an...