Martin Meenagh blog

2012-01-22T09:56:00.004Z

The Demolition Derby

The Republican campaign for president has become a farce. It was always likely that it would do so; serious candidates like Daniels, Petraeus, Bush, Ryan, Pence, and I suppose Powell and Rice stayed well clear, and the field was dominated by people who couldn't possibly run again in 2016, so there was never going to be much restraint. I was also surprised that the GOP establishment, judging by endorsements, thought such a deeply flawed, Wall Street candidate as Mitt Romney--one eyebrow away from a snitty explosion at any given time--could be elevated over their base. I guess I presumed that they had Perry in as insurance, and I wish I knew what had kept Sarah Palin out.

However--and some may think this appropriate given the forest of delusion into which the republicans have wandered for some time--things have now reached some form of psychic impasse. We have, in no particular order, a thrice-married (and twice badly divorced) 'Catholic', playing on racism and dog-whistle victimhood to proclaim himself a winner, with bags attached that a budget airline would never allow on board. We've got a 'pro-life' Catholic who seems to want to keep women out of politics, to bomb what he can't invade, and to put criminals to the sword, presumably on the "Caedite eos, Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius" basis. Ron Paul, for whom I have some affection, is wandering around demanding public accountability for everyone except for newsletters he sent out marked with his name; and, well, Willard is being given a pasting everywhere, for everything except his Mormonism.

This is the bit, presumably, where I am supposed to go all European and condescend to note that American evangelicals and Christians won't vote Mormon, but that's bunk really. If they'll vote Catholic, they'll vote for anyone, and besides, it's not as though Mormon candidacies were anything new. Arizona's history, as the Goldwater and Udall families showed, is as much a story of Jews and Mormons as anything, and it was the epicenter of modern conservative movements. I wish Mo Udall had won in 1976, by the way; in retrospect, he seems to my mind the only presidential candidate better than Gerry Ford. There have been dozens of Mormon politicians and very few eyebrows have been raised, though I still recall a little surprise when I found out that Eldridge Cleaver ended up one. Divorces don't matter much either, in the scheme of things; by any measure, Anthony Eden, for instance, would have graced any state, separated or not. It's just a human tragedy.

What will now happen, given Newt Gingrich's victory in South Carolina last night, is a nasty and long slog, which the candidates somehow seem to deserve. Florida is the last primary before a slew of caucuses (caucii?), which will go on until the coordinated primaries of later in the year. The move of that state forward was meant to make it a key battleground, but what has instead happened is that Florida pushed Iowa and New Hampshire too close together. Iowa came too early, and given the Paul surge, was therefore difficult to manipulate, leading GOP bosses into a botched tie between the two acceptable candidates (it makes sense if you know how to steal a caucus). New Hampshire then followed too soon, and prevented the revelation of how weak Romney was. I was amused to learn that, in the first voting at Dixville Notch, Barack Obama won. Republicans had better get used to that, because I think that an Obama victory in the electoral college beckons.

The fact that things now go into obscure caucuses, most of which are clearly not on a unit rule, means that well-organised and determined campaigns can now pick up delegates all over the place. With Newt surfing anger, Ron Paul turning those delegates into a bloc, and Romney on the negative warpath, the eventual convention may end up divided in three-and a half exclusive and irreconcilable ways, leading to an unelectable platform, or a bolt. I suppose that a brokered convention--a perennial hope of mine--is a possibility, as is an imposed candidate, but that would seal failure as surely as Mondale's last Senate candidacy did for the Democrats in Minnesota.

In the meantime, the real world unfolds. The President seems to be resisting pressure to get into what at one point may have been an American Suez. The economy is still two inches from the brink, with three wheels on the wagon, but the Cherokee haven't yet noticed. Virtually no American statistic is reliable, and Wall Street appears to be aggressively begging again whilst the MERS scandal ticks down in the background. Nothing to see here, move along please, move along....

2012-01-21T16:07:00.004Z

Cheaper to Eat Out....

It used to be a sign of American plenty that people went out for breakfast. I remember my shock the first time I did so with a family with whom I am very friendly in Baltimore, years ago, at how cheap it was to order ham and eggs, and, moreover, that you could just hold out a cup and get a coffee refill.

Late last year, Forbes magazine in the United States took notice of a curious social phenomenon. As the Great Recession rolls on--and it is such for the twenty six million or so who are either without a job, trapped in part time work, or 'discouraged' as much as for those drowning in debt--restaurants and bars are doing great business. Eating out is becoming a way to save money. This was attributed to the 6% rise per year in supermarket prices, a consequence of oil and food booms which are manifesting in odd ways around the world.

Households can't practice economies of scale, lowering spending to an average, in the way that restaurants can. Time is precious, energy is expensive and lots of people just can't be bothered cooking, especially with the cost of marginal but important things like sauces, butter and spices rising quickly. In addition, great inequality in income produces a need for what the economists call inferior goods--the sort of high-calorie-hit, cheap and cheerful things that you wouldn't eat if you had the money and inclination to, say, make a salad or grill tofu.

I saw the phenomenon in Britain at close hand when I spent time with my family over Christmas. A Harvester 'All you can eat' breakfast, in what is admittedly a much nicer setting than most kitchens, costs £3.99 for 550 calories, £5.99 for 760 with unlimited tea and toast. It's a menu made for fuel poverty really, since the cheapest loaf of bread is around 85p, and bacon alone would set you back around £2. At Wetherspoons, a cash-strapped pensioner could get a whole breakfast and a few hours' warmth for that. For the pubs, the marginal cost of opening is low--the workers aren't paid much, or are on a salary, or they're students or immigrants making a buck--and kitchens are normally open anyway to get ready for the day. It's mostly self-service, anyway. I used to eat in places like that in Oxford when I didn't fancy the JCR or Hall, but they weren't a mainstream option--you didn't see whole families or vast crowds of pensioners in Littlewoods or McDonalds of a morning. Now you do, in the equivalents.

It's not just breakfast. When I was buying a drink at the bar one evening, I looked over the menu and saw just how tailored the Sunday roasts, Christmas meals, and various 'celebratory' refreshments were to a society that just doesn't or can't cook anymore. Apparently, the food houses are packed out, regularly, and at the prices offered I can't blame anyone. What this all does, of course, is undermine real restaurants even more, which may be no bad thing if you think that British service was traditionally dodgy and that there should be simply an elite class of eateries and places which sold at minimum efficient scale goods that were good enough to attract no complaint. Le Gavroche or Harvester; the choice oddly parallels the jobs market, with a salaried, privileged experience for some, or a sort of perfectly enjoyable plastic cruise for others.

The settings are oddly communal, and I welcomed them, but what strikes me most is how odd the twentieth century was. It's an oft-quoted statistic that, for around twenty years from 1955, a manual worker could support a family of three, a new car every year, and home-cooked food every night with a roast on Sundays, plus a yearly holiday, on one wage. He could also, if his children were bright, see them given a good education at grammar school which was better than most private schools. If that didn't work, good apprenticeships were available, though the majority of secondary moderns were not places to be brought up in. The girls and women, of course, would be married off or stuck, if they couldn't escape, though only a few rebelled.

That's gone, but with each year we seem to accept more of the loss and make the most of it; now, the ability to shut your door and cook some home food is becoming a privilege or a treat, or a consequence of some enforced immobility rather than a right. In some ways, the Harvesters are better; at least I got to see my family and chat, without people worrying about cooking and cleaning afterward. You also couldn't imagine some working-class horror story like Spring and Port Wine playing out there either. Could these places actually be a sign that families, in all their modern diversity, were actually clawing out space to be together, just not in the homes they were shelling out mortgages for? Or is it that future divisions will be between those who could eat well at home, which I suppose depends upon education in cooking, and those who dined out?

We panic about obesity and illnesses associated with eating, but we never really look around us. Food is political. Large numbers of Americans are fat because Iowa caucuses get corn syrup onto the subsidy chain, and because they can't afford good food, and because they're time-poor or want to escape a bit for breakfast. Here, people who work like mad, with two parents and often a teenager working and just making ends meet, students, pensioners, and the curious are all coming together to eat food that tastes great but large doses of which are heartstoppers. The breakfast table, the pantry, and the smell of cooking to wake a person up are things to get away from, are treats, and we're becoming desensitised to what it is we are actually getting since we don't even see it raw.

Is that a bad thing, or just a precursor of what will happen when oil prices and redundancies really hit home, and all we have to comfort us are the pub chain oligopolies--and Nigella on the TV, telling us all to look for pickled things in the pantry?

2012-01-15T10:04:00.002Z

Wrong and Right

I've been in a sort of reflective New Year mood, when I have had the time to be so, and have been dwelling on three things this week. In Britain, Ed Balls has declared that Labour will have to live with coalition spending cuts, and has risked a fight with his own party over the realisation that states which are in large part foreign money users, rather than money issuers, can't live way beyond their means constantly. The effect of the banking and sovereign debt collapse, and the causes for it, have been well documented on this and other blogs--in my case, before it happened--but I wanted to record a degree of sadness that Labour not only didn't see this coming, but didn't prepare.

Three years ago, I suggested that several government departments could be scrapped, the tax regime for businesses could be flattened and made fairer, individual tax allowances should be raised, universities should go it alone, with failed ones merged into a University of Britain, and overseas aid should end. A costed programme like that could have delivered serious cuts, reduced the deficit, and maybe even begun to pay back debt, and increased tax revenues whilst lifting the burden from small businesses and individuals.

Today, I'd go further, and turn the post office into a co-op bank, with a digital bank account and card for everyone at birth, to make the high street banks really compete, and I'd also begin moves to cap or remove the likes of wonga.com and to re-establish building societies, whilst gradually winding down shadow banking. The trouble is, things are a lot trickier now, with the UK inside the borders of stagflation, and unemployment heading towards three million officially and well over that in reality.

All quite self-congratulatory. Where I would qualify what I wrote is in one of what became a 'successful' blogpost as measured by hits. I noted about four years ago that no one in a couple of thousand years had actually managed to pacify Afghanistan, and came close to arguing that the region was in a perpetual state of armed conflict and should just be abandoned. Having read a great deal about counterinsurgency there now, I'm beginning to think that I was wrong. The Taliban have been made subject to attrition; narco-traffic in Helmand seems to have declined; the Pakistanis and particularly the ISI, who instigated much of the trouble, have had the war brought home to them, and the place does not seem to have been abandoned as hopeless. Of course, that may change, but if it doesn't--if something picks up there, even at the cost of a colonial force planted in the region from the civilised world for a couple of decades--NATO and particularly the USA may have pulled off an historic feat by not being defeated in that region.

I also suggested, on the back of a reading of Operation Millennium Challenge and the reports of various retired American armed forces personnel, that an attack on Iran was impossible. Air forces would have had to deal with Syrian and Jordanian air attacks, and protect Israel, and fly into the Natanz valley with heavy laser-guided bombs to attack shielded, buried targets in at least eight locations. The silkworm and al-shabaab variant missiles China and North Korea had allowed to be placed on the Straits of Hormuz, plus small boats, could have brought down aircraft carriers, and Iran could have held back sites where it stored at least two active nuclear devices (because when a state is reportedly advanced in developing a bomb the safest thing to do is to assume that it has at least two already).

Now, I'm not so sure, and it worries me. Syria is in turmoil; Saudi Arabia would happily offer transit to Israeli planes and American stealths by looking the other way; stuxnet may have served to send a ping to Israeli and western servers to identify nuclear sites; we've learned off of Somalia how to disable small ships (with fishing nets, ironically) and American weapons systems have developed to a point where a carrier could face a salvo of a hundred cruise missiles and still have a high probability of one to no hits.

In the face of that, the Obama administration seems divided. One group are clearly into what might be called the 'Task Force 88' solution (or whatever the boys from Hereford and Fort Bragg are calling themselves now) of assassinating nuclear scientists. Another faction seems to have offered, in part because of Euro weakness and in part because of Nigerian problems, to defer sanctions until after the US elections if the Iranians talk; and others have maneuvered two aircraft carrier battle groups into the Straits of Hormuz. With force like that, we're not facing a Suez, we're facing something worse. We could be throwing away the chance to destabilise Iran by goading it into a war which would be the only thing that would unite it at the moment. Be in no doubt; a Persian war is easily a trigger for World War Three.

The Republican nomination for the US elections has become the sort of demolition derby which I predicted, and the euro is in the trouble which I noted that it ought to be in long ago, in 1992 in fact, and again in 2007. I am still wrong about peak oil, though, and despite the solar quietude, a very cold winter for the rest of the Northern Hemisphere has confirmed global cooling without being visited on this country (and I was looking forward to the snow). Consumers and businesses are also proving far more resilient to the depression than I thought that they would be.

The curiosity to me is how quiescent people are in the face of all these things. No viable third party movements; no agitation for faster, deeper change; complete ignoral of world events; and determined strain on faces, rather than anything else. Perhaps horizons retreat when people face economic crisis, or see their children doing so, or don't, but feel embarrassed in some way to admit that. Even in Turkey, I felt a little of that, as the place is a link between Iran and the west and also dependent on tourist money. This earth is a curious place. The Bar, for instance, is accelerating its self destruction and is being aided and abetted in that regard by the Ministry of Justice. This in itself is a curiosity to me, and I'll blog at length about it soon, but wincingly, since I do like the institution so.

I love blogging, but I've noticed lots of blog friends blogging less or switching to facebook and twitter. I think it's only a matter of time before these services are integrated and charged for, but until those enclosure acts, I'll be happy to be here and to be holding forth when I can--I have my own taxes and bills to pay and am nearly there with the long-term plan to collapse debts by the end of this year. I completely understand the switch to facebook though, and on the back of it twitter--it delivers a hit of knowing that what you write is not just being flung out, and offers a perfect platform for ongoing chats.

I don't want to abandon the demented on here. Both of you have been loyal readers and I appreciate it. Let's raise a cup of tea together to working out, from the sidelines, how this strange and climactic year is going to unfold. Good luck to you and your family in the turmoil--I know that I will certainly need it!

2012-01-07T09:12:00.008Z

Christmas in Istanbul

Well over a week has passed since I returned from Istanbul, and I have to say that my head is still trying to absorb the message of the beauty I saw there. You might perhaps expect me to be muttering about starlit or moonlit domes disdaining my views and all that they are, given my Yeats obsession which had so much to do with the place of Byzantium in my mind. Don’t look for it any more though. Yeats, I realised in my hotel as I spoke his lines from Byzantium and Sailing to Byzantium to myself, looking out the window one stunned night, never actually went to Constantinople. He got his images from Ravenna and Milan, rather like getting an idea of Europe from some Diego Rivera frieze on an American subway. Denis Devlin, another favourite of mine did go, but was more taken by the light and the waters than the domes. He was a diplomat in the turmoil of Ottoman collapse, after all, and winging it as a Scotsman for Ireland anyway.

What words could properly describe Hagia Sophia? The apse, the domes, the gallery tunnel oddly reminiscent of the pyramids, the Marble Door of Heaven and Hell—even the Viking graffiti on the gallery stones—are beyond description, as the faces of the slowly unfolding seraphim attest. You can almost hear the Emperor, dedicated finally and desperately to Catholic reunion, calling on the Virgin at the end, much as the distilled spirits of Thedora (I mean the co-Empress who ruled with Empress Zoe, not the original who sat in the older church), Justinian and a thousand years of Greek intrigue wafts up from what the stones absorbed below. The masterwork of Isidore and Anthemius—and I suppose I should include Sinan—defies real description.

I was there on the 25th of December, which oddly enough was its dedication day, with madgirl. As with herself, Something as beautiful as Hagia Sophia challenges preconceptions. I had expected the Cathedral museum to buttress my sense of catholic unity, and to attest to something that was a cipher and a model for the mosques which surrounded it, and in a way for every mosque. Looking on Islam as a deviation, or one of those seventh century errors which proliferated after the fall of the West, is at a certain level of the videogame life we now lead, comforting. Yet the church was ruined and rebuilt something like a dozen times, and would have fallen completely but for buttressing by the Sultans. It’s domes harked back to the Pantheon and were different from those Bruneschelli dreamed up in Florence, and the mosaics which looked down on the synodal space were clearly part of a civilisation that represented a route not taken, of an Asian rather than a western Christianity. Unity with the alien and discomfort with the identity—isn’t that what art is supposed to deliver?

Outside Hagia Sophia the square is relatively free of the comical harassment offered by carpet sellers and guides in most of the richer parts of Istanbul. In Anatolia, for instance, where they sell guns, motor engines, and homeware, and where the bookstores are eclectic and the rodeo-drive style of the New Square is surprising, not one person asked us in. In Thrace, we were accosted by leather makers, carpet weavers, porcelain producers, restaurant owners, and a whole host of others. It reminded me of the ‘charity muggers’ in Holborn, except I liked the experience of dealing with Turks on the make. Their culture has been trying and failing to get into the EU since 1962, and in conversations as at breakfast I realised what they’d kept by staying out. Not for me to hold forth on their living standards, obviously, but their food was cheaper and their own, or that of neighbours, compared to ours; their sense of themselves, standing equally in the ruins of a once great Empire, seemed sunnier; and they’d kept their traditions up. They certainly kept their Salep up, anyway, which was a revelation, a milky-vanilla and orchid drink that spoke to the sensuousness of the Ottomans as much as the maintenance of the Byzantine Cisterns, which we visited, spoke to their practicality.

We spent part of the Hagia Sophia day viewing the tombs of the Sultans, which are on the grounds but in a separate area, and again, were struck by the beauty of the domes as much as the carpets beneath our unshod feet. Turkey in December is nippy, but you realise that you’re way past England by the brightness of the light, which I can only compare to the Carolinas in its freshness. Dome interiors which would, in the north of Europe, have accumulated gloom and somehow innuminated, calling out for technology, by contrast seemed to collect and play with light and shade. The Islamic thing of not depicting living organisms until the encounter with the baroque (when the Sultans allowed fruit and trees to be shown in the panels at the Topkapi palace) enhanced this effect, I think. Walking around the covered proliferation of sultans and wives from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Ottomans were approaching a height of power, replaced thinking and rationalising with acceptance. It reinforced the tendency of the architecture and the place to overwhelm and reform, which was an odd and welcome feeling after a long year.

The Topkapi palace and the Harem, reached best early and via a walk from the Sublime Porte through a park, filled in the next exhausting day. I don’t think that the small audience chamber of the Sultan, or the Gate of Felicity, or the way the Bosphorous and the Golden Horn sneak up on one unawares to the right of the audience chamber steps as one descends into the garden sum the place up. I think that the most beautiful diamond which I have ever seen, which lit the Treasury and which was found, unannounced and mysterious in a rubbish dump, does. The 86-carat Spoonmaker’s gem held me like nothing else, even after the swarms of tourists descended, each glancing for a couple of seconds at everything and then allowing themselves to be pushed on. Yes, I know. We were travellers, but they were tourists. But I am a stubborn orange-tinted brick wall and they had to go around me, so there was some distinction to be drawn, and some basis for my elaboration. I saw the rod of Moses and the mantle of the prophet after that; but, well, my mind wasn’t all there. In fact, the long corridors and Imperial councils and schools, the Harem, the gold-and rose covered alleyways that were, all somehow flowed in after like tributaries through a hole made in a dam. I can recall sensually every moment, but find it hard to find the words of that wonderful day.

Our final day began in Suleyman’s mosque, the square outside of which challenged me again. Topkapi had set the trap; here was a huge expanse set out for an Emperor, a keeper of slaves, and yet it was relatively modest and small, but for the Sultan’s trousers and the possessions of state set within it, which I suppose bettered the British and compared to the Vatican. Yet Suleyman took a pay cut for his mosque, and paid those who built it rather well; he proclaimed what he believed to be good governance in the square, and was enlightened for his time, much more so than his contemporaries in the west. I loved having my girl with me, obviously, but for a moment I wished I could have brought Thomas Hobbes. I wanted to know what he would have thought, and whether his earnings as a Tutor and peregrinations in the continent in search of some positivistic explanation for the iterations of order more naturally rooted in the human heart had ever brought him anywhere like this. I doubt it. Leviathan would have been a lighter book if he had.

From the Mosque, having braved the Egyptian Bazaar and a small, run down and delicious kebap shop we discovered, we walked across the Galata bridge to Asia. We walked--hurdled really--past rows of fishermen seeking bluefish and more. The fish made me think of the absurdly cheap Iranian caviar in the bazaar, which we'd foregone in favour of saffron and apple tea, but which I should have bought a few tins of. The Turkish and Iranians had never been associated with fishermen in my mind before, but I suppose that it's a natural connection given the three seas and great rivers around them. Staying out of Europe has kept that for them too.

I’d encountered the professionals down at kumkapi, where we went to eat, the evening before, but my thoughts were of air, not water. Specifically, they were of an old hero of this blog, Ahmed Celebi, who launched himself on a rocket from around there, and who, I discovered, also developed a sort of hang-glider and flew six kilometres from Galata. We climbed the Venetian tower that Christian slaves rebuilt and dodged Bulgarians on its narrow viewing ledge. Up there, with night fallen, I thought of how fickle things were for Celebi. The Sultan of his day at first embraced him and then became highly suspicious of his goals. From the heights to the dump in a day, with only, I suppose, the hope of finding the odd diamond in the gutter to keep one going. Would he have done it again? Given that I did more exercise than I had in months, walking up those steep hills on which Anatolian Istanbul is built, I can see how Celebi wanted to take a lighter route. At least on his adventure, unlike Werner Von Braun, he didn’t bomb London.

Turkish room service, and Turkish Airlines, as one small coda to this piece, are great. I don’t think that I’ve had a club sandwich involving veal and chicken anywhere else, but I can recommend that which is to be found at the Prince Hotel, flight and hotel having been booked very very cheaply on E-bookers. There’s so much more to write, and I am sure that I shall because the trip we took was one of the most pleasant holidays of my life, but, well, if you’ve come this far you’ve suffered enough. Normal service will resume shortly.

A Happy new year, and Hristos se rodi where appropriate, to you all!

2011-12-31T17:12:00.003Z

A Little Northamptonshire Poetry to Help 2011 On The Way

John Clare's The Old Year's gone away;

The Old Year's gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
In either shade or sun:
The last year he'd a neighbour's face,
In this he's known as none.
All nothing everywhere:
Mists we on mornings see
Have more substance when they're here
And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
In every cot and hall -
A guest to every heart's desire,
And now he's nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
All things identified;
But times once torn away
No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year's Day
Left the Old Year lost to all.

Good luck in 2012.

2011-12-28T15:23:00.001Z

Blogging Gap

Normal blogging shall resume shortly. I had a very busy December, but have been recharged, energised, and so forth by a trip to Istanbul, which I'd recommend at this time of the year to anyone.

I'm afraid that I have to make one change to things, which is to ban anonymous messages for a time; a series of demented sales messages from what appears to be both ends of the Steppes is threatening to overwhelm my ability to filter comments, and I don't want to turn off comments completely.

In any event, I wish all the best of the season to my regular readers (both of you) and good luck in the run up to the new year!

2011-11-21T07:39:00.001Z

Corby

2011-11-17T00:22:00.003Z

Occasionally, the AOL 'Speak Yor Branes' Commments throw up a gem

This, from a piece on the Dakken field as seen by the International Space Station;

"Mystery"

This treasure trove of things, this space-born isle,
This energy turned mass, this light bespecked orb,
This would-be Eden, failing paradise;
This fortress built of Nature by her hand,
Against the dark and chilling claim of cosmic cold,
This troubled band of souls, this little place,
This precious sphere, adrift a vacuous void
Which serves in measure as a cell,
Within such shell, might form an entity more wise
Against the perils of the ‘verse unknown, to act.
This blessed plot, this place , this realm, this Earth,
This nurse, this teeming womb of living beings,
Fear'd by their breed, and infamous in their deeds .

With apologies to Richard II

2011-11-16T23:50:00.002Z

Gold Conspiracies....

The bears are back, courtesy of zerohedge.com. It's very interesting and makes me wonder if there was more to Gordon Brown selling British gold in the way that he did a decade ago. It's also interesting to hear people start talking about SDRs as claims on members' non gold exchange assets, potentially. What is going on? I feel sometimes like we're in the opening scene of '2012', when really, the only thing to suspect is what we see--an utterly corrupt farce recurring all around.

Bears are sweary as usual, so don't watch if you get offended by their chilli mouths.

2011-11-13T10:33:00.010Z

The Vatican and Monetary Unions

Earlier this month, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace produced a note on the world economy. I read it in French, because an English translation did not exist, so I may have misunderstood some of it. The main conclusion of what to an 'English speaking economist' was an economics-thin document was that there should be a world economic or monetary authority--in essence, a world public authority--to manage the world economy.

The document, in so far as it was reviewed by an economist at all, seems to have been endorsed by Leonardo Beccetti, a left-wing (if not Marxist) professor from Rome Tor Vergata. A distinctive separate voice, which dwelt upon the largely Austrian but sometimes Soviet idea of business cycles is apparent in the first section of the note. Significantly, the head of the Vatican Bank, and a central banker from elsewhere, Gotti Tedeschi, did not endorse the document. Indeed, a few days later, he appeared in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, to run it down. Tedeschi believes that the world's problems are in large part the consequence of collapsing birth rates in the developed world, and the 'grey bomb' effect of taxation and geriatric welfare on a shrinking tax base. His editorial of November 4 is worth quoting;

At this point, there are no longer many solutions.

To deflate the total debt – public, banking, business and family – and bring it back to pre-crisis levels, that is, to around 40% less, it is possible, though not advisable, to cancel a part of the debt with a type of “preventive agreement,” where creditors are paid at 60%.

It is possible, but it would be a hypothesis without a future, to invent some new bubble to compensate for debt with an increase in the value of real estate or goods.

It could be considered – but we hope it is only a temptation – to tax the wealth of families, sacrificing however, a necessary resource for development and at the same time creating an injustice.

One could also look for a way for rapid development, thanks to a growth in competition, which however in the global crisis is not easy to generate. There is no capital to invest, the banks are weak, the demographic problem penalizes demand and investments. In this context, besides, consumer debt is not even imaginable.

Western countries are expensive and to make them economical in a short period, one must intervene on the cost of labor. Protectionist interventions to sustain businesses that are not competitive however, would produce disadvantages for consumers and would reduce buying, already in decline

The single currency could be devalued, but this would lead to an increase in the price of imported goods.

Someone, to lower the debt, has also thought of inflation. But inflation does not happen if economic growth is at zero, salaries are at a standstill, the shadow of unemployment looms and even the price of raw goods is diminished.

One could say that the spiral of inflation will not occur as long as there is lack of faith in one’s currency. The problem is that today, one cannot have faith in any currency: all of them, including the euro and the dollar, are weak.

Inflation will not take off also because liquidity does not circulate, but mostly because that created by the central banks has substituted that produced by the banking system to sustain debt growth.

The first problem today, then, is not inflation but deflation. Markets, in fact, are privileging liquidity. This is because in a deflationary regime, the value of currency increases while during inflation, it decreases.

To advance the economy today without increasing public debt means correlating interest rates with the GDP. For public debt superior to 100% of GDP, it is evident that to obtain a growth of 1%, without increasing debt, means not having taxes superior to 1% and penalizing savings.

The solution is in the hands of governments and central banks who must come up with a coordinated strategic action of re-industrialization, strengthening of credit institutions and support for employment.

This will take time, a time of austerity in which the foundations of economic growth must be rebuilt.

Above all, governments must restore citizen and market trust through a governance that is adapted to the times and which, more than just being technically competent, is also a leadership model. A governance which aims for the common good.

In Vatican speak, then, Tedeschi accepted austerity and talked of problems in money as though monetarist theory, which holds that money is valuable in itself or should be, were the whole of the economic law. By contrast, the Pontifical Council note makes reference to Benedict XVI's encyclical caritas in Veritate, and implicitly to a line of papal thinking about a need for economic regulation for the common good which takes in Leo XIII's 1891 Rerum Novarum on capital and labor, Pius XI's 1931 Quadragesimo Anno, John XXIII's 1963 Pacem in Terris, Paul VI's 1967 Populorum Progressio, and John Paul II's Centesimus Annus. In this tradition, as for Erich Fromm and Karl Marx, capital is either dead or a convenient fictional cypher for time and value, whilst labour is alive and in need of real tendresse.

None of these encyclicals called for a global government. All would have or did call for global moderation and regulation, with polyarchic and multilateral structures suitable for the problems to which they were addressed.However, that is how the note is being interpreted. So I thought that I would put down, for my own diversion, what a global monetary union would have to mean.

In doing so, I'd advise readers to turn away from models like the west African CFA, or the Euro, or the Latin Monetary Union, and to look to the order which JM Keynes and most modern international structures, whether they know it or not, are directed at--the British Empire.

Keynes almost ran a ring around the Americans at Bretton Woods. He secured a pledge to a world free trade authority--always more of a British than an American idea--and to a world bank, which would swiftly come to be dominated by the ideas of British development economists like Sir Roy Harrod, and Sir Arthur Lewis. These institutions fitted alongside the largely British model of the United Nations Organisation, but critically, they were to be accompanied by a global currency which would help to regulate trade. This currency, Keynes proposed, would be known as a 'bancor'. The USA rejected this, but proposed the tie of gold to dollars as a world reserve anyway.

Doing so transferred the British way of power to the Americans, and whilst, ironically, the best demonstration of it was when the US used gold and dollars to stop the British themselves at Suez, the effect was double-edged. Britain had as a country generally maintained its empire between 1815 and 1914--the time when it was a great power--by small wars or financial diplomacy. Long wars were very difficult because the pound was tied to gold, and gold ran out. The Americans discovered this limitation in Vietnam, in 1967, when Westmoreland's surge--which conceivably could have won the war--was rejected because no more gold could be traded. It took America some time to use technology and the example of agricultural derivatives to invent a way out, in the form of the mortgage derivative that was first deployed by the federal mortgage associations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 1975. Until it died, Bretton Woods precluded long American wars from ending in victory; derivatives have allowed this at great cost.*

The Bancor would not have encouraged borrowing and deregulated near-paper currencies. Instead, an international clearing union would have established a currency on the basis of 30 leading commodities and currencies. All existing currencies would be linked to this bancor, and trade accounts of the balance of payments would be measured in it. Though states would have an overdraft, if they ran trade deficits, they would pay interest on their bancor accounts, promise to reduce the deficit, and devalue their currencies by buying bancors. When in surplus, they would reverse the process. This would avoid the sort of disastrous global imbalance found in the US-China relationship, and globally, and inside the euro.

Bretton Woods ground to a halt with Vietnam, and was finally killed off by Richard Nixon taking the dollar from gold, the oil price shocks, and the fiscal consequences of Lyndon Johnson's 'Great Society'. That cued the first serious postwar flirtation with globalised international currency, in the form of the Special Drawing Right at the IMF, which Jim Callaghan and Gerald Ford used to cluck over. An SDR is a fictional unit made up of the weights of investors (trading states) with the IMF. People have always looked to it as a possible Bancor, and in recent years the Chinese, Indian, and (unsurprisingly cynically) US governments have promoted it as a way of avoiding the euro supplanting Ole' Greenback. You'll see it on any insurance clause for luggage when you fly. There are big influences backing it.

The preponderance of economists and economic thinkers at the higher levels of the Catholic Church were always keen on Bretton Woods, and some seem to see them as eager to fix it's absence with a restoration. The Vatican, they say, thinks in centuries. If so, it doesn't seem to remember the demise of the Latin Monetary Union, which went under in large part because the papal states loaded the French Second Empire with silver which could not be redeemed at the agreed rate, leading to a massive outflow from France and arbitrage on the part of the banks in a vain attempt to resist default. It's an understudied episode, and one which the Church has always been keen to brush away since it speaks to one of the several modern periods when France and Rome ended up at each other's throats (Rome generally, but not always, won). The fiasco shows that supranational (or whatever the appropriate adjectival description is in Rome's case) interests almost never trump local ones, and that they can indeed generate a local interest in destroying the system.

Here's the problem; generally, world central banks in a fiat money system--whether the IMF for most of its career, the Bank of International Settlements at the Hague, the European Central Bank, or the Bank of England within the postwar empire--just don't work. When the BIS set reserve asset ratios for the banks in the 1990s, under the Basel agreements, it failed to preclude them from counting derivatives as assets. The Bank of England got the gold standard in 1931, the Sterling area in 1949, Bretton Woods in 1967, and the European Monetary System wrong. The ECB is currently burning down half of Europe.

In fact, the only supranational monetary authority that works is the CFA banking system in West Africa. It works there because the banks, in alliance with France and the resources of the EU, override anything approaching a sovereign government decision which breaches their spending rules.

The proper focus of the Pontifical Council's note should not have been the need for a world monetary authority, which would mark a new and useless slavery. It should have been the long tradition of distributism, labour rights, and institutional awareness of the need to trade ethically which the modern world is so much in need of.

I have a feeling that those things will be gained, if we can avoid war, by the re-localisation and regionalisation of trade in a peak oil, post-financial crisis world. I think that finance will prove almost impossible to regulate, and that therefore banks should be separated from speculation and either turned into credit unions or abolished in favour of electronic money post-office accounts in each country. That would leave joint stock companies with unlimited liability for their partners to do whatever they wish, and without the moral hazard of our tax monies having to keep them going. We might have less credit, but the same venture capital and insurance. We might have more equal resource use and wages. We might have to work harder for our bread, and to share more. We might have a better world.

The world doesn't need amoral fixes for yesterday's problems focussed on a vague bien commune--they won't work. Greed, selfishness and cocaine are better explanations of the financial crisis than any maths can produce, just as hubris, elite criminality, and arrogance explain the American and European economic debacles.

These things can only be regulated out by ethics, not system, reform, and the only system reforms that should be forced, rather than allowed to evolve, are those which allow for better ways to trammel or direct the worst of what people can be so that the best is available for all.

So--and it's the job of good Catholics to say this in the light of reason--the Pontifical Council's proposals are welcome, warm-hearted, misplaced and wrong where they are specific at all.

*As an aside, one should never forget that the American revolution began in earnest not with tea taxes, but with attempts to regulate inflationary scrip derived from currency and the expansion of business into Indian territory.

2011-11-06T10:23:00.003Z

BloggerBlock

I find it hard to deal with what the media insistently call the 'real' world anymore, and have been taking refuge in Robert Crease's wonderful history of Mathematics, 'The Great Equations'. Well, I write 'taking refuge', but I have been working like a wild man again and those moments of refuge are now few and far between. I'm also confined, more or less to that book, since my kindle is broken and Amazon--whose customer service is the best I have encountered--have entrusted delivery of a new one to the Royal Mail, which sundry incarnations of spastic overmanagement are attempting to destroy through forced incompetence.

So, well, here I am, Sunday morning, eggs and sausages finished and what do I encounter? The media, in full flow, in need of a clue wagon. Here's what they need to know;

a) The republican nomination for the presidency of the United States involves seven major candidates; Cain, Gingrich, Bachmann, Huntsman, Romney, Perry, and Paul. I don't know what happened to Gary Johnson. I'm frankly not bothered about Christie or Palin, who could still step in before the super-primaries and also run in caucuses, hoping for a brokered convention, but who have missed the first big tests now (barring a write-in). Neither Gingrich, Bachmann, Romney, Perry nor Paul could conceivably run well in 2016, and they know it, so they have every incentive to make this election a demolition derby. The Republican leadership don't want this, so Karl Rove will spread as much shit as necessary on anti-Romney people, but Mitt won't get traction and the rich men playing with that party--down to the level of school district elections--will end up cancelling each other out. An essentially fickle republican base which is demented, and out of touch with anything approaching reality, will face a demented street-occupying left full of the unemployed, and, in all likelihood, go so over the top (as in Ohio) that a pathway is cleared through the States for Barack Obama to win.

b) There has been a twenty year financial boom which has benefitted the rich. This has reduced income equality across the world to Roman Empire levels, and the volume and nature of the flow of wealth is beyond control. Many global banks are without liquidity. So are trading companies. Margin calls on these companies will be put off by washing tax dollars through the stock markets, but this trick will only last so long and has maybe run out this weekend. In addition, many derivatives are tied to mortgages where chain of title cannot be proven, and where it will not be proven. This will lead to unconstitutional, law-breaking, knot-tying duplicity on the part of the US Federal Reserve and all the European banks who sold gold in return for lines of exchange swaps over the past few weeks. People will be shafted.

c) This financial problem will be overlaid on a global imbalance between the People's Republic of China and the United States. One is running a surplus it cannot spend because, at official rates, it would flood a market the size of Germany with three trillion dollars. This would set off monumental stagflation at a time when China is past a Lewisian turning point of migration, where productivity growth from urban migration has turned not into wages but into slum growth. If it dumps the dollars abroad, it raises commodity and food prices, stiffs its own, and worsens its export markets. If it throws the money into other markets, it keeps the euro-show going, but ultimately achieves the same effect. It is trapped. The other side, the USA, is a financial basket case and will remain so as long as the laland economics prevailing in Congress and the Council of Economic Advisors continue to grip a people who refuse to wake up.

d) Within this crisis, the pundits will continue to point to Greece and Italy and Spain and Portugal as problems for Euroland. They are not. Germany is. The Euro is a single currency zone. In such a zone, surpluses in one region must be spent to reduce deficits in another. That can be achieved by tax, by government transfer, or by workers moving and sending money home. Germany has no incentive to agree to any, given a thirty to forty per cent advantage over the southern countries and a client group in the east who are cheaper than the south. The South without Germany would work. Italy is not badly run, has been saving for five years, and keeps money in homes which have not been subject to mortgage booms. It alone could sell bags, shoes, cars, watches and suits to ten per cent of the Asian middle classes and retire. It won't, because Europeans won't for some reason go out to work, probably because family breakdown, feminism and small families with many pensioned elders give no one any incentive to do so. Economies are built on the character of the men in them, and Europe has been engaging in a vast experiment to wreck honourable manhood for forty years. A eurozone without Germany would force them to step up; a eurozone with Germany will just be a Großdeutschland.

e) You cannot renogotiate the terms of EU membership, and Treaty changes will never be smooth or one-sided. Only Parliament and the British people can pass a law demanding that the courts simply throw out EU law and follow Parliament. If we did, we would be subject still to the WTO, as the EU is, and still to the British groups--the politicians, the local councillors, and the trading standards people--who act like little Hitlers behind the European shield, and we would still follow the European Convention on Human Rights. We'd still have tort lawyers, employment acts and HMRC to keep the Daily Mail in business. Futile gestures are great but they're futile in so far as no one thinks ahead. You may as well have London and then England secede from the UK, leaving it in the EU, which I suspect is what a good many English people (and I consider myself an alien in that regard) want.

f) Celebrity culture, educational theory, science 'writers' holding forth on theology, most of the modern left and right, the bulk of social science, and many economists are basically eruptions of the Satanic principle and nothing much to do with either a decent life or an escape from the eternal recurrence of our crisis.

There, that's what you need to know. On the other hand, the President of Ireland does look like Yoda, and he did beat a man who looked like Mussolini.

Now, I'm back off to my book--I'm almost onto Schrodinger. Or is his equation not there when I'm not looking?....

2011-10-16T11:38:00.002+01:00

Mr Toad and The Business of Nearly-Men

The Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States, at the time of writing, seems to be boiling down to a choice of two men most notable for their participation in business, rather than politics, Herman Cain and Mitt Romney. Neither are the caricature which campaigns project to the world, and both are being tested by a GOP which is in a particularly silly and demented funk about policy and principles. The candidates are having to attach themselves to nostrums that are, well, frankly mad.

Watching them, however, made me think of past elections which seemed winnable and in which 'outsider' candidates could have made the grade. Mo Udall, in '76, for instance, would have made a wittier and more western mormon candidate than Romney, though I think that ultimately he would have lost to Ford. Wendell Wilkie would have run a virtual pastiche of FDR's administration, before dying in 1944, leaving an empty Vice presidency (his Veep, McNary, predeceased him) which would conceivably have devolved on Arthur Vandenberg--changing nothing, except the careers of Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, J.Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson. FDR, as far as we know, didn't sleep with Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and then dump her as Wilkie did, but as president you'd like to think that he would not have had the opportunity. Then again, Anthony and Cleopatra and all that; perhaps he would have worn the rose of youth again for a strumpet who made a gap in nature....

Games like this are fun, and as a diversion, I thought that I'd list a few of the nearly men and set myself a goal of writing about them before November. The real world is disintegrating, after all, and anyone who wants to know what I think about it might as well read the blogs from four or five years ago. It'd also cheer me up, this exercise; as Chaplin said, life is a tragedy in a close-up, but a comedy in long-shot. My list of nearly-men and never-people (and women) is;

1. Robert F. Kennedy
2. Mo Udall
3. Wendell Wilkie
4. Henry Clay
5. George Clinton
6. Estes Kefauver and Harold Stassen
7. Rufus King
8. Al Smith
9. Gary Hart
10. Shirley Chisolm

and I'll also have a look at people who should, or could have been, like Thomas Marshall, Champ Clark, John McCormack, and at a troika of parliamentary alternatives to the presidency, starting with Blaine, Reed and Cannon. That'll keep me occupied.

2011-10-16T11:09:00.004+01:00

Relativity, in the Library, with a washboard?...

Apologies for the obscure Cluedo reference. There have been numerous explanations put forward for the 'superluminal' neutrinos which some claimed that they had observed a few weeks ago. I discussed a few of them, sideways, by referring to Cherenkov radiation and some poetry, but today (via wattsupwiththat) I came across a neat explanation for the CERN 'faster than light' discovery.

You can read the report for yourself. It basically rests on relativity. The team measuring the passage of neutrinos from CERN to Italy across the 730-sum miles coordinated clocks using GPS systems 20000 miles above. These satellite clocks were moving in such a fashion that the detectors seemed from them to be travelling towards the neutrinos, and at speeds where time may have been slightly dilated. The proposed discrepancy between their measurements and those on the ground is 64 nanoseconds, which is almost exactly what was seen in the results of the great experiment.

So, as James Garfield once said, God reigns and the Government lives. As a post-script, don't miss the slightly mad discussions of how the time dimension of relativity makes movement impossible for some thinkers, and how it functions as a sort of luminiferous ether for others, in the comments.

UPDATE: Science being the great thing that it is, many people are already 'debunking' this explanation and suggesting that a mistake like relying on gps when atomic clocks were being used on the ground--let alone the overall relativistic explanation--is too daft to contemplate. Some are suggesting that the point of the explanation being posted on wattsupwiththat was to show the degree of virality of anything which sounds plausible as well. In any event, I'll keep dipping in and out of the story, because it's fascinating.

2011-10-08T09:52:00.002+01:00

Wall Street Pro

Courtesy of zerohedge, here's a blast from the past--2009 in fact, when US economists were drivelling about the 'green shoots of recovery' in an unwise fashion. It's a fine demonstration of what the phrase 'An Active and Informed Citizenry' means, though very sweary, so if you have sensitivities in that regard, don't watch.

2011-10-06T08:48:00.003+01:00

iDied

I've never been an apple user, but the company's obsessive concern for design and development has spilled over into the other products that I use, and it's products are things of beauty. I have stood and just looked at them more than once in my life.

It's perhaps that which gives me the distance to reflect that the circumstances of Steve Jobs' birth suggest were he to be conceived today, that he would have been aborted by a good many of those who have built a value system around his products. His adoption seems to have been difficult too. It isn't absurd to speculate that the rage that propelled him by all accounts might have something to do with his early experiences.

I'm sure that there is some observation on synchronicity to make too, given the parallel one can draw between his origins and those of Barack Obama. There's a lot to be said for children who struggle into this world with the odds against them. For once, though, the blogosphere is not the place to declaim from, since I (and the record, for that matter) know so little of what Apple is really like.

I hope that Jobs found some solace, and may eternal light shine upon him. May he rest in peace.

2011-10-01T05:29:00.004+01:00

Glenn Beck to Launch Childrens' TV Channel

I'll avoid the obvious question of whether this actually does constitute a career change for a moment, because I've been tickled by the reaction to this news on the National Public Radio website. In the comments section, as I read it, people of a sensibility which it's fair to say is different from that of Mr Beck wrote observations involving terms such as 'crap meter' 'misinformation' 'anti semitic', 'retard', 'this guy is like herpes' and 'wack-job conspiracy theorist.'

These terms, which were not of the sort one Mr Gladstone once deployed with Queen Victoria, were then followed by a series of separate, censored statements stamped 'comments removed for not meeting NPR community discussion rules'.

What community, and which discussion, allows swearing, observations on mental health, the use of the word 'retard' in any context, and comparisons to unpleasant and transmissible sexual diseases and then gets a fit of the vapours about the rules of polite discourse?

2011-09-30T14:32:00.005+01:00

A Little Perspective On A Hot Afternoon at the End of September

"The aggregate of our joy and suffering thousands of confident religions ideologies and economic doctrines every hunter and forager every hero and coward every creator and destroyer of civilization every king and peasant every young couple in love every mother and father hopeful child inventor and explorer every teacher of morals every corrupt politician every "superstar " every "supreme leader " every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." --Carl Sagan

2011-09-26T23:48:00.009+01:00

The Speed of Light is a Universal Invariant...

in a vacuum. In other media, it can be exceeded, as Oliver Heaviside (who ought to be a hero of this blog, but who for some reason is not, and about whom I have been reading) predicted back in 1888. I've always thought that one of the examples of particles travelling faster than light in a dielectric medium, the Cherenkov radiation of advanced nuclear reactors, is just beautiful. It makes me think of Elinor Wylie's Address to My Soul, for some reason.

My soul, be not disturbed
By planetary war;
Remain securely orbed
In this contracted star.

Fear not, pathetic flame;
Your sustenance is doubt:
Glassed in translucent dream
They cannot stuff you out.

Wear water, or a mask
Of unapparent cloud;
Be brave and never ask
A more defunctive shroud.

The universal points
Are shrunk into a flower;
Between in delicate joints
Chaos keeps no power.

The pure integral form,
Austere and silver-dark,
Is balanced on the storm
In its predestined arc.

Small as a sphere of rain
It slides along the groove
Whose path is furrowed plain
Among the suns that move.

The shapes of April buds
Outlive the phantom year:
Upon the void at odds
The dewdrop falls severe.

Five-petalled flame, be cold:
Be firm, dissolving star:
Accept the stricter mould
That makes you singular

2011-09-26T23:45:00.001+01:00

Just a Little Thought, From the Book of Corinthians

1Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 2And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing. 3And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.
4Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, 5Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; 6Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; 7Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
8Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. 9For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. 10But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. 11When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 12For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 13And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

2011-09-20T08:09:00.002+01:00

Two Presidential Songs

One from Dana, and one about Derry....

2011-09-20T07:58:00.003+01:00

Courtesy of @JimSheridan on Twitter....

An observation on the Irish Presidential Race. And a message from one of the candidates.

2011-09-19T10:10:00.000+01:00

Something for the Connoisseurs Amongst You

2011-09-19T08:30:00.007+01:00

Insurgencies Everywhere...

but not reported here. In Berlin, the 'Pirate Party' opposed to the cartels who somehow manipulated the Bundestag into a copyright law has shot forward to 8.5% of the vote. It's a regional election in a city state, and I know that odd things can happen in such places, but it neatly illustrates the libertarian turn that the Depression, or pre-depression, or whatever you want to call it, is taking in some places.

Ron Paul's win in the California straw poll would be a neat counterpart, except there, the electorate was miniscule and Paul spent a huge amount of money securing it. His managers appear to be running for Congress in a presidential election. This mismatch won't do his message any good.

The last big depression saw the rise of authentic American demagogues. Talmadges, LaFollettes, Coughlins, Longs, Sinclairs and FDR himself played to the Alcibiades gallery, whilst Europe and Britain were wracked with Mosleys, Hitlers, Mussolinis, and sundry others. Even Lloyd George had a realistic chance of a return at one point. In Ireland, the remains of the Independence Parties collapsed and reformed, as Fianna Fail took power.

Today, we're seeing similar contortions as what, for want of a better word, you can call the 'system' approaches breaking point. Stripped of ethics, values, competence, nationality, faith or any sense of tradition or history, and having assaulted family and marriage for some forty years now, the West has very little moral capital to fall back upon. Transparency and open debate have deeply degraded and damaged the churches and ecclesiastical communities that ought to provide some moral leadership, because they reveal the extent to which a fallen and corrupted world dragged down the people trading under God's name.

The contrast between Ireland and England is interesting. In Ireland--a smaller country--Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander and now a Catholic socialist, is seeking some form of redemption or affirmation by running as a 'people's president'. He is ranged against an upper-class twit who clung to South-American child rapists because they were anti-American socialists, a person who appears to be campaigning for paedophile rights, a sports organiser on the make, and a country-and-western singing Catholic fundamentalist currently resident in Alabama who may or may not run. McGuinness is offering a 'new beginning'--with no apologies, and with official rhetoric which defines Ireland as Catholic, Protestant or dissenter and seems to leave out people of other faiths or none.

The odd thing is that McGuinness may win, because every 'screw you' statement that individuals who have been royally done over by banks, authority figures and the media that is now made will come with the knowledge that the way to antagonise 'them' is to vote for him. That appears to be the IRA's calculation, and they have not, to coin a phrase, been knowingly undersold for some time.

In England, little seems to be happening on the surface. A few politicians are attempting to organise a referendum to leave the EU, which will probably fail. Others are showing quiet revolts at home. For example, some remarkable journalism by Richard North, seems to suggest that at least three million people--before the depression really hits, I might point out--are engaged in some sort of tax revolt. It involves not paying the absurdly high charge for low or bullying services known as the Council tax. Banks are clearly doing much the same--the poor chap arrested the other day for 'losing' $2.3 billion appears to have been a god fearing west african whose bosses encouraged or ignored the creation of fictitious counterparties in ETF contracts based around the Swiss Franc. They were ignoring authorities for whom they had nothing but justified contempt too. This latest 'rogue' ought to get off, as people like him often do in fair judicial systems; though not always.

We've seen three bursts of rioting--over student fees, in Trafalgar Square, and the criminally-inspired 'top shop' riots of the Summer--and the police appear demoralised and alienated enough to make one suspect that others will happen too. When police are down, they light matches in tinderboxes by throwing their weight about. When times go bad, and they are constrained by a playbook written in good times (a bit like the banksters with their standard deviations) they don't know what to do. When they don't even care, as many anecdotes suggest that they do not, things get even worse.

Meanwhile, the media go on, spinning relentlessly for house prices, false recoveries and a lifestyle that vanished in 2008.

Elsewhere in Europe, people have taken to the streets. Banks are frantically recapitalising as the chairs are taken away and the music slows, the purchasing power of money is falling as more is thrown on the fire at the same time as banks raise fees and deny credit (today's version of an interest rate) and everywhere, there is a sense that something has got to give.

Those not following the mad are clearly in some form of denial--they've attached their ipods to their minds and are going about their business regardless. It's becoming a theme of mine, but we are now at the point where any contingency--a volcano in Iceland, a hard winter, a bank collapse, a death--could push the west over the edge.

Remember, when at the shops; canned tuna, crispbread and beans last some time.

2011-09-18T10:09:00.005+01:00

A Neat Graphic from the New York Times

Almost certainly, because of the shenanigans involved in the funny-money capitalisation of banks and the manipulation of East Asian and Russian funds the web of debt has got worse in the past year. However, I thought that readers might like to have a look at the graphic below as it illustrates the previous story.

There's something rather karmic about the trap that Western states have got themselves into. Having allowed Africa to be held hostage to private banks until Gordon Brown and others released indebted states from the London club and Club de Paris at the turn of the century, the Europeans are now staring at their own version of banking badness. Any debt-swap would have to suspend rights of private property, nationalise bank debt, and impose cancellation in violation of most of the precepts by which the southern continent was starved for six decades; and it would have to do so in violation of the emerging powers and the corporate syndicates that run the USA. It's no wonder that wise people note how often monetary unions end in tears....

2011-09-18T09:47:00.004+01:00

As Things Become More Desperate...

Imaginations rise to the challenge with ever more desperate solutions. Students at the Europe Business School have come up with an elegant solution to the European debt crisis, which is based upon a simulation. The simulation supposes that mutual write-offs of debt are possible, so that states and organisations could forgive one debt owed to another in return for their own forgiveness of that other's debt.

Were such an approach to be adopted, 64% of overall debt would disappear, and in some cases debt would be reduced to as near 0 as makes no difference.

The corrolary, of course, would be the destruction of the counterparty, debt-default, derivative, and interconnected global banking industries. As Tyler Durden at www.zerohedge.com notes;

this study provides a simple way to see how a fiscally-joined and central Treasury-based system 'could' come out stronger. However, the path to that 'potential' strength will be littered with the bodies of financial and non-financial equity holders, senior- & sub-debtholders, CDS traders, and FX jockeys thanks to risk-free rate re-adjustments, subordination, ringfencings, forced recapitalizations, and implicit austerity

One really has to pay some sort of credit to the madness of those propping up the euro in its current form. Their stupidity seems unstoppable. It won't be, of course, but every time reality breaks through, they double down with some new mad scheme to keep it away. Policy in the west now can only be explained with regard to psychopathology, and the emphasis, frankly, should be on the 'psycho'.

It was obvious that the euro shouldn't work from the beginning, and I remember pointing this out late one night in Balliol Library to a Swiss zealot whose response was to shout at me about 'big economic words' in 1992; the view that I formed then, and which I repeated in 2007, was that the Eiffel Tower and the Reichstag and everything else would have to be sold to shore it up, and it would still collapse.

I never thought that I'd be right though--that whole generations of book-learned social scientist political elites, a dumbed down media, and a citizenry cut off from tradition and history by debased liberal secularism would actually allow that to happen.

You live and learn. It's even more imperative now that people plan for what might come after. Good luck to the EBS plan, but what we see every day is in fact proof of Hobbes; bad and greedy people, and people who are made by them to be bad and greedy, will stand in the way of any solution at every turn, and they will be abetted by literally stupefied leaders and their taxmen and bureaucrats who know nothing else but that they should be tollkeepers for corporate welfarism.

We'd all do better stocking up on canned tuna, crispbread and beans.

2011-09-14T00:42:00.001+01:00

Let Freedom Ring in Persia--if it can

What I wrote two years ago is, sadly, still what I would say today.

2011-09-13T07:47:00.006+01:00

Mystic Marty Speaks

I hate myself for writing this when I promised not to, but I want to record what seems to be happening in the American presidential race for myself if for nothing else. As I thought would happen, the pre-primary race has become a sort of demolition derby. Ms Bachmann, with no route to 2016, absolutely has to tear down Mr Perry with allegations of crony capitalism, health scares about cancer injections for little girls, and whatever else comes to hand. She started to do so last Monday night. Perry is vulnerable because he looks, talks and walks like a cowboy but is actually a sort of centre-statist in Texas terms with fairly big vulnerabilities in terms of immigration and education. People forget that Texas is a country in itself, and swaggering and right wing as it may seem, it contains large blocs of liberal and hispanic voters, and people who think that gummint should work for them, as well as huge numbers of federal employees. One cannot win that state as a domestic candidate without being a little bit LBJ somewhere. I mean that last point 'politically', as it were; I don't mean that Perry should aspire to be a war criminal who steals elections, rips millions off the feds and has people murdered, though the way things are going, he might well win several states if he touted such a manifesto.

No one's told the Tea Party what real Texan government is though, and Bachmann has a need to. The Teepees are generally not Southern and they tend to fall for the Bonanza schtick--once, but God help you when they're scorned.

Bachmann, in turn, is a mad tax lawyer with no human sympathy who'll be taken apart herself for tax-farming orphans and her attachment to some loony heretical belief or other after serving the establishment, but she'll give as good as she gets because she's smart and disciplined.

Mr Romney, who can't go through to 2016, has to adjust his strategy of being above the fray so much, that he'll reinforce his reputation as a trimmer. He won't win over the big money and serious operators in the GOP, and he'll get into the same trouble Tim Pawlenty (who endorsed him yesterday) got into when he was in the race. Romney can't be counted out but may be severely wounded soon. The most consistent and popular candidate--Ron Paul--won't get anywhere near the nomination and if he does some method will be found to remove him, possibly involving some of his own demented supporters. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum can't win, and Jon Huntsman is clearly running for 2016, which is good for him since 2012 isn't his year. Herman Cain is entertainment, except when he isn't.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama is morphing into 'give 'em hell Barry Truman' and has realised that he ought to be a one-term president but economic populism, a tax drive against elites and corporations, and a Japanese-style infrastructure programme (accompanied by a republican split) could give him a close-to-comfortable pathway through the electoral college and into a second term. Just the suggestion that he may win, allied to the catnip of foreign policy success, a tax-and-spend programme, and the heated emotions of the Republican race, is going to drive the ordinary Americans in the Tea Party who are already very angry round the bend.

I think that 'Barry' is well aware that the country could collapse around him but is much savvier than Jimmy Carter ever was and much more determined, in a Chicago kind of a way, just to survive. I may be wrong in that; there are persistent stories of Michelle wanting him out of the race, but I can't see any Hillary candidacy being different. The main thing to remember is that likely but still contingent events--another economic collapse, more environmental trouble, trouble in the middle east--could as easily strengthen the presidency as weaken it. Carter beat Kennedy in part because of the Iranian hostage crisis, people should remember, not despite it.

Which leaves a candidate of superb political instincts when in the fray, but nothing much else, who read out a great populist speech of the sort that would split the Republicans down the middle the other day, with a space.

That politician could easily raise hundreds of millions online, run a third party or party-within-a-party effort, and would be much more formidable than anyone would give credit for, even if she does have a tendency to do stupid things that get other people shot. If either she or Ron Paul are disrespected much more by the GOP establishment, I'd say a third-party republican split was on the cards, if an insurgent takeover from stage right failed (which it probably would).

And for sundry reasons (cf passim) I am not mentioning her name.

2011-09-11T12:06:00.003+01:00

Let's Free The Banks of England

This country clearly has a problem, which is both domestic and global. There are multiple causes, which have been laid out on this and better blogs many, many times since 2006. We have an unbalanced world in which the dollar and the euro are failing to reflect value, because people who do not produce the dollar are accumulating and using it, and because states in the euro are locked into unrealistic exchange rates.

Money is beginning to replicate the Cuban Peso, having different values in different places, and electronic cash is undermining a system that emerged in the quaint days after world war one. A succession of reforms to global bank and tax regimes have resulted in twenty years of madness to 2008, and might now lead to thirty years of drawn-out collapse.

In addition, an energy and food crisis is competing with a growing population and culture imbalance to threaten everyone.

So it's time again for modest proposals. Here's one. British retail banks talk constantly of their need to make money for their shareholders, and occasionally use their oligopoly capacity to offer free ATMs and clearing as a threat.

So let's remove the government guarantee for deposits from retail banks, and let them offer whatever package they want for customers.

Investment banks want to live in an unregulated world of derivatives and credit default swaps and other such products of highly intelligent minds, and in every case where the law of the jungle is substituted for regulation, they find ways to use the regulations to leech from taxpayers.

So let's separate the investment banks from the retail banks and let them stand or fall by their own hand. Let's enforce separation between them and the banks.

Let's also give the retail banks some competition; let's allow building societies and mutual funds back, on a coral network of local organisations.

Ah, you might say, but what about the social activities of the banks?

Well, we have a Post Office that is a)making no money and b)socially vital. Let's give every citizen a digital account with the post office, into which wages can be paid, and from which bills can be paid; let's let the post office use cash machines free as a condition of their existence, and regardless of other charges; let's give it co-operative status so that the dead hand of the state is replaced by the efficiency of a partnership; and let's let it make loans. In addition, let's have both national insurance and private pension payments made to accounts in the Post Office and not used as assets by business.

With the money saved, let's introduce a flat tax regime, cut the size of government by a third, balance the budget and pay off debt, and remove loopholes for big business, accountants and lawyers whilst making small business easy.

What's that you say? The Post Office plan would be illegal under EU law? Right then, let's have a referendum on our continued membership of the EU. Then let's get on with governing ourselves as a free people and redeveloping our economy towards our new free trade partners in Europe, Asia, and North America.

I love Sundays.

2011-09-08T08:58:00.005+01:00

I promise, I absolutely do, not to write anything at all about this....

Given the row last time when she started getting people shot, it's all for the best anyway. From Pauline Bonaparte to Jeanne D'Arc, with my infatuation in between; what a career.

2011-09-06T11:18:00.002+01:00

The History of Truth, for the Markets and Experts

In that ago when being was believing
Truth was the most of many credibles
More first, more always, than a bat-winged lion,
A fish-tailed dog or eagle-headed fish,
The least like mortals, doubted by their deaths.

Truth was their model as they strove to build
A world of lasting objects to believe in,
Without believing earthenware and legend,
Archway and song, were truthful or untruthful:
The Truth was there already to be true.

This while when, practical like paper dishes,
Truth is convertible to kilo-watts,
Our last to do by is an anti-model,
Some untruth anyone can give the lie to,
A nothing no one need believe is there

2011-09-05T08:33:00.009+01:00

Mosler Bonds; a Call to Patriots or a Prudency Vampire?

There has been a great deal of speculation, amongst those inclined to agree with the financier and businessman Warren Mosler, that 'there is no problem so great that tax cuts or spending rises cannot solve it.' This speculation centres on the possibility that so-called 'Mosler bonds' could help solve the sovereign debt crisis.

The idea of such bonds is that citizens or legal persons with taxable business in a state would buy the bonds at above-savings and inflation interest rates (currently that would be around 7-8%, on a long-term basis). These bonds could be sold to other citizens or legal persons, or leveraged. Their distinctive quality would be that, in the event that the State defaulted on the bonds, the value of the bond could be set against tax liabilities. This would be such a constraint on states that the bonds, in theory, would be stable, and they would stabilise investment and confidence.

I think that this sort of thing, and the enthusiasm for it, comes very close to my earlier prediction that, as we started sinking, iterations of crisis management that happened before, in Italy and Japan, would start appearing with us. In itself, this is one of the key reasons that gold is climbing (cf. earlier posts). Gold is now functioning as an alternative international currency. This is because currencies themselves are starting to go haywire, and are surrounded by mad professors who want to make things worse. It is very difficult, however, to screw people who hold real gold unless you take over all the places they could possibly trade it in.

Yet there are more and more of these calls essentially to take peoples' assets. I can see why a company in the short term might buy Mosler bills, but given inflation, and the tendency of states to demand 'sacrifice' of their own people, why on earth would any individual saver transfer their savings into such vehicles?

Populations need a better understanding of fascism, I think, because we're down a liberal-language version of that rabbit hole right now. Mussolini it was, famously, who privatised profit and nationalised debt. What people forget is that he did this before the depression, requiring as part of his late twenties deflation that people sacrifice their bonds 'on the altar of the fatherland', where a grateful nation ceremonially burnt them.

One of the defining features of being a citizen of the West is that one is at the behest of the gangs of thieves and worse who run it like the fourth crusade--and Mosler Bills seem to forget that people know this. The idea requires of government that it do things on trust to 'rebuild' and economy when trust is long gone. What's to stop government defaulting, or inflating, and then inventing a non tax 'fee' or charge to offset Mosler liability offsets?

In the long run, what we are facing is a collapse of Keynesianism on the national scale. There is nothing much to replace it yet because I think (and I hold out no special insights myself) that people do not understand what the combination of digital monies of all sorts and globalisation have done to the world economy in general and to the West in particular.

Hoping to nationalise assets directly, with consent, as much as trusting in mad budgets or stimuli, is literally morbid, in that it reflects the mental illness consequent upon a refusal to accept the mortality of previous policy responses. At the same time, nationalising indirectly--by using taxes to subsidise and purchase banks--is doing very little other than keeping the cadaver alive.

So what gives? What, in a world where trust has broken, where governments are in denial, and where international banks and domestic policymakers are desperately filling their boots before the next great crash reifies the unemployment and desperation many already feel, are we to do? I can't help but feel when I read about magic solutions to our troubles that another undersea cliff-edge is approaching, and it worries me because I wouldn't want what I suspect is coming visited upon the people and the places I care about.

FASCISTS GREAT SACRIFICE

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UPDATE: *smacks head*. You fool Meenagh! If a state issues paper which can be transferred between citizens, and which can be accepted as payment for taxes, that state has found a way to issue....money. To reinvent its own parallel currency to the euro. And that state can then arrange default swaps with other states, on an arbitrage basis. Why not decorate the bonds with, say, national figures, and issue them in small denominations of 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50? We could call them, oh, I don't know, punts or drachmas or pesetas.

Of course, all we'd be doing is resetting a debt-based ponzi scheme, buying time desperately, and encouraging citizens to move their assets to the state in the absence of a real money gold outlet...but time might be all the near-bankrupt states need.

I like this idea now. It takes me some time to get there, sometimes, but I do in the end.

2011-09-04T15:43:00.007+01:00

Gold Fingers China

I've thought for some time that it makes sense for China to develop a long-term plan to float the renminbi yuan. China would benefit from the development of reserve status and interior investment, and could address it's deficit with dollar-denominated ASEAN commodities as well as escape from the parasitic political interdependence which it has developed with the United States.

Floating a currency is no easy matter, however. If China simply allowed people to trade in it's cash, the RMB would simply rocket, the dollar would be undermined, and China's export and lending advantages with the US would become millstones. Equally, developing an internal market with foreign money might put China on the course to even higher inflation and to the dependence on foreign markets and metastasizing derivatives which it loathes.

So there are, logically, four things that China ought to have been doing for the past three years. I've detailed suspicions about them here, but I'm pleased to see wikileaks now confirming what I had suspected. Well, I write pleased. Pleased in the way that you realise that you were right about the spider in the cupboard, which is to say, not pleased at all.

Firstly, if I were the Chinese government, I'd be setting up a smokescreen which also functioned as a plan-B by encouraging talk of the use of the International Monetary Fund's Special Drawing Right as a global currency. There would be an appeal to this, in that western smart-alecs could latch on to it as a way to drag out talks and because the SDR doesn't depend upon bonds.

The SDR is a weighted unit, now used (if you look at your aircraft ticket clauses) in insurance assessments and as a sort of exchange-denominating credit by the IMF. SDRs have been going since 1969, after the Vietnam war sunk the dollar but before Richard Nixon acknowledged the fact. I think that I am right in writing that Jim Callaghan claimed credit for them in his memoirs, but Jim didn't really understand economics any more than Gerald Ford understood the mortgage derivatives invented by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in his time. The real creators remain obscure.

Anyway, the weighting of the SDR unit depends on investment in the IMF, which functions a little like a company. So China publicly hinting that it wants to go for the SDR is really a statement that China wants to play nice, knows its bond market is too small, and will invest its dollar and euro surpluses back in the managing company of the west.

Some of our strategic genii can be expected to fall for this. After all, it makes sense. All good smokescreens do.

However, China has also been up to other things. It's been purchasing commodities as though there is no tomorrow. Western pension funds have been slow on the uptake here, diverting money through false equity rallies to the stock market and Treasury bonds, and to gold certificates. Yet gold mines near China which are not controlled by Russians, physical gold, and copper and coal stocks in the Pacific rim countries have all gone up.

This accumulation of resources is a way of hollowing out the ground beneath the US. The dollar is still merrily being used as an international reserve currency, but increasingly, the dollar is Cuban; which is to say, there is an international dollar which holds up as China accumulates real assets, and which others use as a faith-based currency, and a digital domestic dollar, mostly found in ATMS which is diminishing in purchasing power and in circulation (a paradox until one considers the American credit market) at the same time. That second dollar is attached to a failing economy which is still capable of feeding and powering itself, just, and so which does not understand, which is not told by it's stupid manipulated media, what is happening.

So the second thing China is doing is building up assets and avoiding direct confrontation with the dollar. It's interesting to me to see wikileaks confirming that this week.

China is also, on a third track, acclimatising the world to the RMB in the long run by issuing bonds through the Hong Kong Markets and allowing them to be traded. Looking back through the figures, these bond issues are usually preceded by high activity in the gold markets about a month before, which I take to be a manifestation of the Chinese developing a hedging fund.

Fourthly, the overall impact of this strategy is being disguised because the Chinese are washing profits through the eurozone bond markets, which offer excellent opportunities for political and economic arbitrage, and through around 60 banks to which European governments are now beholden.

I'm tempted to say that it is fairly obvious that this is happening, but we live in lalaland at the moment, and perhaps others can perceive other patterns beneath the smoke. Like many satisfactory suspicions, however, it makes sense and is confirmed by most new releases of data. The glimpse of things which wikileaks has provided strikes me as an obvious point to pray in evidence.

Looking over it all, cultures don't change, do they? As Sun Tzu argued centuries ago,

"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win"

Our lads need more than luck.

2011-09-01T10:37:00.013+01:00

Abortion Ought to be a Secular Issue....

For most of history, what is now the Catholic position on abortion (which has continued to be that of the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox, uniate and old Catholic Churches in schism, and some heretical organisations) has been that life should not be loosely disposed of.

The religious position is not really confused. With a lawyer's eye, it is possible to find some gaps in the Christian addendum in which to insert pro-choice arguments, but the process is a shaky one to say the least. Tertullian, for instance, based his arguments on Moses' extension of the Lex Talionis to anyone who attacks a pregnant woman and causes her to give birth prematurely. Even we punish this, however, and the passage referred to has to be extrapolated several times before we get to the woman actually procuring a premature birth. It actually refers to a mutable liability for assault.

Moving on, both the book of Psalms (51:5) and James place emphasis on the soul, which is apparently in place at birth, but St Thomas Aquinas questions when this happens (without knowledge of the difference between a cell, blastocyst, zygote or foetus). Aquinas would, however, still provide an argument for a very strict regulation of abortion to a few days after conception, read liberally (which I am sure was not what Nancy Pelosi was talking about when she sought to rest on Thomas for comfort--a point further confirmed when she referred to Thomas as 'Augustine'). The Council of Ancyra condemned abortion--but it also mandated the election of Bishops by worshippers, the witholding of communion from murderers, and the equivalence of leprosy with bestiality. Subsequent condemnations of abortion depend upon the letters of Popes.

None of this--and it is impressive in parts-- is evidence upon which, to say the least, one could find support when placing it before the court of skeptical opinion.

There's a greater problem with religious objections to abortion based upon tradition or scripture in general, and it is that both change and at best, both require interpretation. As a Roman Catholic, I can follow the changes and have faith in them; others might not. The lesson of history is that I should not force my religious views on other civilised peoples. Religious logic is also circular; a just war is possible, so the just despatch of an innocent from suffering may be, since war invariably kills innocents; yet how could one bear witness to the cross and believe such a thing?

Logic essentially becomes sick when faith is applied to reality like that, unless people are trained in the traps--and most will not be. However, by a strange coincidence, religious objections to abortion ought to be barely relevant anyway, in the sense that religious objections to letting people cut their own hands off are not primary. Secular arguments are actually better.

Abortion, for a society, ought to be a matter of reason and practicality. Reason is an easy one; Human Beings are ends in themselves. Any worthwhile person will accept this argument, because slavery and the use of people as a means to an end is implicitly wrong. It's wrong because meaning, dignity, and personhood are removed from the individual if they are not a person in themselves.

If people are ends in themselves, then they should not be killed for the purposes of another, with the exception of clear grounds of sacrifice in self-defence or the defence of others as a society. A foetus can be a person. Therefore a foetus should not be killed.

It follows that personhood conveys great meaning--in fact, an infinite meaning, since it is an absolute. It must surely therefore be that a process which will, without interruption, and with no interference, create a person is practically indistinguishable from the process of personal growth. The time before personhood is therefore just as much a part of the person as that after, when a child comes into its faculties. If we would not kill a child, we must perforce not kill that which, left alone, will become one. That doesn't apply to eggs and spermatozoa, and certainly does to the viable foetus, but it leaves room in between the two for a skeptic.

All fine so far. Nothing so magnificent as the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me, as Kant wrote. I happen to believe in natural law, but I don't need it.

But then what happens if someone comes along and says, 'all this moral law stuff is very reasoned and high minded, but the real world is messy and indistinct. That can't be the basis for policy'.

I don't see why not, but let's take this argument. We fall back onto a choice of arguments that is clearly persuasive to most liberals, the utilitarian one. The basic practical argument is that hospitals cannot save babies who are clearly independent beings at 18 weeks, and kill them at 24, because the destruction of one weak being as policy will mean the destruction of other classes later.

One basis of policy should be that, when the baby becomes a person, that person should not be killed. That would mean that abortion, which has psychological consequences for those left behind as well, should at least be very heavily restricted.

Another basis should be the effect upon the parents of an abortion. Parents in this society have a variety of options available, from adoption to benefits and tax credits. They at least should be counselled before any drastic step by people who have no financial or ideological interest in procuring the abortion. A society which promotes abortion as some sort of positive solution in a sinister way will not want this; and given that ours does not want it, it is not a tautology to suspect that there is something sinister about that reticence.

There's a further argument. A society that, like the UK since 1967, subverts the letter of its own clear law to create abortion on demand that prevented 7 million lives is one engaged in a great experiment, and not just with the rule of law.

This experiment is already failing. Desperate to put women into the job market, it neglects the children who live whilst defending them as a collective hysterically; it promotes selfishness; it demands immigration that displaces its own workers inevitably, because of a collapse in the critical mass of native talent that keeps a society viable; and it ends up promoting procedures that turn abortion, which is and ought to be a traumatic process, into an industry full of specious defences. That industry then expands to the old, the uncared for, and the hospitalised weak, and leads to the obscenity of 'death paths' in places of medical treatment. This is not conjecture. This is happening. Why should anyone want to defend such a society, of any religion or of none?

This industry is then transferred to other places, which abort on grounds of sex, appearance, or disability, and, hey presto--you have millions of Chinese and Indian men, in nationalist societies armed to the teeth, with no hope of marriage or family in a world where resources are imbalanced. People in easy-abortion countries plunge into credit-fuelled hedonism because they have little to live for; and minorties and working people find themselves blamed for crime, and their own dwindling numbers lauded for its reduction. What are we proferred to justify this? Tablet computers which can play Sex and the City, but no population of balanced, happy or critical minds.

When you think of all of this, why on earth would anyone think that the appropriate language for this most fundamental of issues is that of rights or property? We have suffered, in recent decades, in that secularism has become liberal secularism--a matter of contract, property, legitimacy, representatives and rights. Liberalism is an ideology, however. In my experience, they are of questionable use in interpreting existence.

The real world, ideologies aside, can be judged by how happy people are, how reasonable societies are, how capable of self-protection, propagation, and the avoidance of self-destruction societies are. The New Left, Liberals, and the New Right--all species of liberals--fail on this ground. Their legacy is our suicide as a society. Abortion, as theory, fails; it fails as a policy; and absolute defence of it is not possible.

So a non-liberal secularist could be reasonably expected to deplore abortion, to want to restrict it, or even to abolish it. I think that understanding that is an important part of understanding why arguments about abortion shouldn't be on a faith versus liberalism playing field. No one can win that one.

Given that, why would anyone react so fiercely against the Dorries-Field bill currently before Parliament? The explanation of that mix of muddle, institutionalised liberal badness, and corruption should surely be for someone far smarter than I to explain.

A part of me wants to argue (and knows) that this sort of thing cannot go on; another fears deeply that it will. One adapts Jefferson easily; I tremble for the west when I reflect that karma happens.

2011-08-27T10:58:00.002+01:00

A Little Late Summer Sun

Right, let's shake the bars a little. It's my first weekend off in a while, the Sun is shining pleasantly on a cool late August Day, and after a nice tortilla breakfast, (well, I say tortilla, but Huevos rancheros is possible too), I thought that I'd have a look at alternatives to the doom and gloom with which the largely accurate and illiberal pronouncements of this blog are usually associated. I'd like to be uplifting for a while anyway; if I can impose upon readers, my mother would welcome your prayers again and so would I. She's at the foot of another peak, which she will scale, but there are times when you wish you were either on top or in the valley with a beer.

Let's look at the gloomy, and realistic scenario, first. In a parody of Medieval microcosmic analogies, the financial system is riddled with imbalance. Globally, states with trade surpluses are accumulating dollars which are depreciating in the United States at a different level to the reserve dollar in the markets, because inflation and purchasing power are different. One thing that such states are being forced to do, to keep their own economies going, is to lend a large portion of their earnings to the states with deficits, and in particular to the USA.

This is a sort of Jevons paradox of the crack world; the more likely it is that a thing will run out, the more people who shouldn't have it and who are wasting it want it, and the more frantically pushers will need to provide it.

Ultimately, trouble awaits. China's surplus is inflationary and destabilising and mediated through strange branches of the Communist Party that westerners have named 'banks', given the political similarity to their own oligopolistic and fiasco-ridden institutions.

Abortion has also delivered Asia a vast surplus of young men with no hope of a wife, house, proper job, or any fall in food and energy prices. The usual outcome of this sort of thing is war, which is why the build-up of large forces going on in the China seas ought to worry us all, as ought the wilful destruction by the west of the idea of the rule of law and sovereignty in the past ten years.

Moving down a scale to what we might call the mid-cosm, Europe and the United States are also being racked by imbalances of dollars and euros, as major parts of their single markets are locked into debt either by politics or currency, and others are forced to pay for them. California could do better by bringing in a peso, and Greece a drachma--but neither is going to happen, and so the bonds of the states and cities are going to be a burden for all. In reaction, Germany and Texas are going to bring forth an half-tonne of self justifying rhetoric which, when the history is written, will have strangely overlooked the influence upon the governments or opinion formers of those zones of their own banks and financial interests.

Meanwhile, a connection between sunspots and climate having been established, a series of cold winters amounting a maunder minimum allied to rising oil prices are going to make food very expensive. This in turn will produce great tension in an American working class whose living standards have been falling since 1973 and whose calorific intake has been maintained by corn subsidies, industrial meat production, and cheap oil.

At the microcosmic level, people are drowning in student, mortgage, credit card and bank debt, inflation is eating at incomes, stagnation is powering a descent through part-time work to unemployment, and that cold winter is going to mean a choice between heat and food for many. Riots don't begin to cover what could come.

So, how to pivot? How to think of a way out of this awful story? The fevered fantasies of left and right, which never really got over eugenics, would have us believe that a war or environmental collapse 'should' happen, and that those alive today must acknowledge that they are well past the point of diminishing returns for growth. Austerity, cutbacks, and a drop in global wages accompanied by debt destruction in a very slow way are the order of the day. There is no alternative.

Really?

What about railways to restore global demand and rebalance the world economy? Russia this month committed $65 billion dollars to a Bering Strait tunnel. They've been using their accumulated capital not on exterior purchases (whatever the number of truck-like gold-ridden cars I come across in west London on a daily basis) but, for once, on the only way that anyone ever has ever thought Russia would succeed--the exploitation of Siberia. Railway lines now run north and west, and south. The Ukraine and Russia are again in harmony on gas pipes and wheat production. Imagine what would happen if a railway were to link Canadian and Siberian resources, reining in a China which is already dependent on Asean, lifting Canada, and reducing to a question of economies of scale the issue of getting pipelines and water to the western American states?

A series of Hoover-dam style projects, based around a global railroad going down the Americas and across Eurasia could soak up derivative debt by rolling it forward into new project insurance, encourage the development of an Indo-Asean energy grid, stabilise the Indo-Pak relationship and unlock coal, uranium, and metals well into the next century. It could provide money and settlement in empty areas for Asia's male surplus, and provide the west, which has an engineering lead, with a boost.

We could manage the decline of peak oil, and put the surplus monies into the exploration of the thorium option for cheap, safe reactors, and that in itself would lead us to a world that could support nine billion comfortably, with energy, and which could spread out and take the resources of the moon. The new engineering boom could inspire other engineering booms; ceramic scramjets, space elevators, and airships. We could live without war, by our wits...we could do so much.

By force of finance and growth, Europe could come out of the fortress radical, impoverished Islam will probably put us into for fifty years, global imbalances could be addressed through the development of parallel currencies once people started believing in political possibilities, faiths could spread, and a Christian Russia and Christianising China could lead to a thousand years of civiisation. The abortion-ridden, fearful, consumerist liberal secular virus and their radical jihadi counterparts would have been contained, having done their worst, and proper families would slumber on a kind and properly exploited earth.

Sigh.

No.

That's not going to happen.

I realised as I wrote that where things were going. Into the realms of nutty happenstance and lalaland is where they were going. It's all very well wishing consummations devoutly hither and anon, but the truth is probably more that the flaws in us will radically imbalance the potential. I wish it were not so, and wish that more could find in faith the chance to be bigger and better than their own mind.

Still, it's nice to dream, isn't it? I hope that you have the dry and canned foods in, and enough of a winter plan to keep you going reader. From here on in, it's continued descent.

2011-08-27T09:42:00.006+01:00

What if, 2012?

The circus of the Republican nomination process aside--six strange people competing to be a schizophrenic footstool--there are some interesting questions arising from the current American scene that I think it would be diverting, on a Saturday morning, to explore.

One is that Obama should not win. I don't mean that from any partisan point of view, since I rather like his calm intelligence and demeanour, which I presume he picked up in Asia. No winning candidate in 2008 should really have expected to win in 2012, because for an increasing number of Americans, regardless of rigged unemployment and inflation figures, an income squeeze is turning ineluctably into a depression. Vast scandals that were tolerated during the long boom have mired that country in mortgage fraud, overleveraged banks, and a sort of financial dementia which an alienated political and media class can only contribute to. Anyone in charge would be in trouble.

From a more prosaic point of view, if Obama ran against one reasonably strong generic Republican candidate, he would have a difficult path to victory in the electoral college that has decided the presidency for most of it's existence. Across the republic, Obama 2012 would run into problems, if present trends continue, which might not be offset by his strengths.

In Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin, the GOP has shown great strength that is belied by opinion polls; Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina are probably territories of serious difficulty for the president; and Texas may well be a toss-up. In a very good year for any Democrat, 2008, Obama pulled 365 electoral votes, 95 over those he needed, and won all the states which I have identified bar Texas. The States that I have just identified, if combined, are worth 159 in combination, and 121 without Texas.

It may be that Obama can rely on strength with hispanic groups to bring him back into play in the West, but that means that he must win all the Mexican cession bar the Indian reservations and the Lone Star State. Frankly, I think that it can't be done, especially given how to work, Obama would have to stoke a virtual civil war by coralling hispanics to vote against some very antagonised armed and legal citizens in the south-west. Arizona for O?

So the first prediction for the 2012 election is that, if Obama does not lose, he may well face a very very close election. He may improve his chances if the Vice-President were to choose to retire and, for instance, Mrs Clinton or Mrs Napolitano to run with him, but not much. I don't see the utility of going for another Democratic man, and Andrew Cuomo wouldn't deliver hispanics, or New Englanders, in any unique way. He could potentially bring Wisconsin and Pennsylvania back, though, which would change the odds, but Joe Biden's abilities amongst white working class voters (the group of whom we must dare not speak in the Atlantic economy) should not be underestimated. I can't see much of an alternative to Joe, but then, well, I like Joe.

I suppose that I should also place another prejudice of mine on the table, which is that, as I get older, the president whom I most admire is Gerald Ford. I said this once to an aspirant American politician when discussing Malcolm X in Oxford (and I liked him too, at the end) and noticed that it isn't the sort of thing one is meant to say. Jerry was intelligent, understood the rule of law, and most of all understood the value sometimes of doing nothing in a way that others, including Reagan, did not. He was amiable and not super-clever, which is a combination that I deeply admire in a presidential leader. He should have won in '76, and if he had not ballsed up his Vice-presidential choice, or had won in the debates, he could well have. The eighties would have been different. It's an odd and logically unmerited comparison I know, but Barry could do himself no real harm by swapping the Marlboros he gets past Michelle for a pipe and a more reassuring air.

Much of the above analysis depends upon Obama running against a 'generic republican' candidate. There was a time when Jerry was generic, but there are few Fords or Lincolns in the Republican car yard at the moment, and plenty of junkyard dogs.

The Republican 'A-team'--people like David Petraeus and Jeb Bush--are staying well clear of the nominating process. That does not mean that they may fail a fleeting appearance hereafter. US politics is very much due a 'brokered convention' of the sort narrowly avoided in 1976 where no candidate has won before nomination day. Romney is highly organised and has deep pockets; Governor Perry has real support amongst the Republican base; and, whilst they probably cannot win, Bachmann, Huntsman, and Ron Paul have the capacity to remove the margin of victory from other players and to win a state or two themselves. If Sarah Palin entered the race, she would poll low but deny victory to others on a random basis.

Therefore, to win the nomination, and avoid a call from Tampa to some A-list kidnap team, Republicans are going to have to run against significant sections of their own party and in personal ways against each other. One interesting feature of all of this is that most of them are not going to go through to 2016, so there is an incentive to recklessness as well. Perry steals Paul and Bachmann's clothes; Paul's supporters and Bachmann herself attack Perry; Romney slithers and is attacked by everyone; and Huntsman declares everyone else mad. The outcome of that, it would seem to me, is a flawed Perry or Romney coronation, followed by a third party bid by either Palin or Paul. This one could easily turn into A Clockwork Orange.

Perry himself was a weak candidate in Texas, and ran behind his party. Ron Paul is a popular Texan congressman, so it is not hard to make the link and suggest that Paul (whom I admire as a man) could easily split the Texas GOP vote and hand the state to Obama if he ran as a spoiler having lost the Republican nomination. Of all the possible independent candidates, Ron Paul is the one with traction, and with the least reason to stay within the Republican Party. The Ron Paul campaign have already officially denied that their candidate--who ran as a libertarian once and endorsed a libertarian in 2000--could actually leave, so we have at least one indication that it is a real political possibility (on the old basis that you never believe anything political until it is denied).

He could gain money both from the internet and Ross Perot, who has not gone away, and could easily displace a comedy independent like Donald Trump or Sarah Palin. Since the political-media establishment is scared witless of him, I predict that if he even gets close to bolting, the major republican donors will start encouraging a Palin or Trump third-party candidacy, and Rick Perry will discover a longstanding hatred of the Federal reserve--just as the municpal bond crisis hits the states and they start calling effectively for Qe.

If you were a Republican, wouldn't you stay out? The GOP is probably going to win the engine room of Congress anyway, the Supreme Court will probably declare Obamacare unconstitutional after the election, and Obama himself, if you care about things, is an excellent foreign policy president--so why not keep him in and make his life worse?

There's an enigma here, or rather what is probably a silly end of summer question. What if Barack Obama, persuaded by a wife who clearly hates the Washington limelight and an analysis similar to mine, simply doesn't run? Perhaps he does not want to take Joe Biden down to defeat, or face four grinding years, or be locked up in those exotic mechanical coffins the Secret Service favours for much longer. What then?

Well, then the nomination and the election are Hillary Clinton's to lose, and this time she won't. Hillary will hang on for dear life until 2020, and then make darn sure that Andrew Cuomo is in until 2028. Followed by Chelsea.

I think that the Republican Party get that point too, and amongst their major strategists--the rich and relatively clearheaded men who give the chumps and grunts their orders--a close Obama victory, followed by four years of hanging, drawing and quartering of the entire Democratic brand, might seem like something appealing. All that I would suggest, were I ever to be listened to or read, is that people should be careful what they wish for, because, well, those verdammt contingencies have a way of messing plans up.

2011-08-21T10:50:00.005+01:00

Lyndon, What Did You Do?

Johnson, by the way, is shouting to a helicopter pilot in that picture, on the campaign trail; he isn't aggressively attacking a heckler, and Kennedy isn't holding him back so much as steadying him--but it's really a matter of what you want to read in, isn't it?

Who'd be a serious political leader? I don't mean the untested and managerial leaders of present days, but those who aspire to Empire. There's a huge amount of evidence in the American presidency of the psychological requirements and costs of leadership, for example. Every single president since Eisenhower, until Obama, has been weird, with one exception. Kennedy was priapic; Johnson psychotic; Nixon neurotic; Carter strange; Reagan a delusional liar; Clinton not far off that, and, well, the Bushes. If Ford escapes my list, it's because Leslie Lynch King (his first and therefore 'real name') wasn't elected to any office and was acutely aware of it. To me, he didn't do that bad a job when faced with what he faced, and should frankly have won in '76.

There's a script which I am tempted to associate with Theodore White, but which I know I should not, about these presidents. The drama begins with some disastrous late night meeting, followed by a Hamlet-like contemplation alone in the oval office; then a whisky-soaked rise by lamp or firelight to an intense contemplation of Abraham Lincoln's portrait, followed by a quiet collapse into a chair. LBJ did it during Vietnam, taking odd comfort as a Southern Democrat from Lincoln's fortitude in the fiery trial; I'd like to imagine Kennedy doing it after recording his haunted tape on the worst night of the Cuban crisis.

Actually, though, Lincoln was tormented and lucky not to have been either overthrown or removed from a collapsed nation. Like Johnson, history books record his sleeplessness and guilt, though unlike LBJ, he at least could acknowledge the cause of his troubles, the Civil War. Johnson--who should have slept easy, having pushed through Civil Rights, medicare and medicaid, the 'Great Society' and one of the biggest wins in history--actually seems to have been gripped both by the disaster in Vietnam, and the chaos in the streets consequent upon it, and by all accounts, by something much more intimate (given that sending American servicemen to a mincer and killing lots of Asians isn't, at the top, an intimate affair).

LBJ was, let's face it, mad. He bullied neurotically, pursued political office relentlessly, and combined cowardice with duplicity and bizarre, byzantine schemes in a way that somehow managed to embody Hermann Goering and Susan B Anthony. Perhaps he just simply wasn't suited to the presidency, and had grown up warped; perhaps he was, like many political leaders, too fixed on eclipsing his already-eclipsed hero, FDR, to build anything new.

There seems, however, to have been more than a smidgeon of guilt in Lyndon Johnson's mind over what had happened to John Kennedy in Lyndon's native Texas in 1963. At the very least, on 22 November of that year, Johnson had been facing almost certain resignation from the Vice-presidency, and possible criminal prosecution in the Bobby Baker affair. He could be credibly connected to a web of Texas corruption which had already killed, and could be connected to 'Mac' Wallace, who appears to have been some sort of unstable Texas hitman quite easily. Later on, after his death in 1984, Johnson would be named in purported pre-indictment material as a co-conspirator in the murder of several people on the basis of his association with Wallace. Including Johnson's sister.

Even if President Kennedy had pardoned Johnson, JFK seems to have been determined, according to his secretary, Mrs Lincoln, to have dropped Johnson in 1964, and to have run with Terry Sanford of North Carolina. His original choice, named in early press releases in 1960, had not been Johnson anyway, but Stuart Symington of California, and Kennedy's brother hated LBJ. Friendless, threatened, and politically alone, Johnson had spent most of the fall of 1963 at his ranch, making frantic telephone calls and lazing, until, in November, the calls appear to have stopped and Lyndon seems to have calmed down.

By 2011, a growing body of opinion not associated with the early investigators, obsessives and ghouls of the Kennedy assassination movement, seems to have cohered around the probability that Lyndon knew something about one or all of the assassination attempts that dogged Kennedy in 1963. People forget that the President is almost always a hunted person; in 1963, Kennedy motorcades were cancelled in Tampa, potential gunmen were restrained in Chicago, and, according to Secret Servicemen of the time, other attempts and rumours of potential attempts on Kennedy's life were suppressed. There may even have been teams of people following those who were clearly out to kill the president, ready to kill them if they acted.

We know this because the exhaustive works concentrated on the assassination, including the Warren Commission, the Congressional Hearings of the Seventies, the Church Committee, and the Assassination Records Review body have all revealed it, as have people like Abraham Bolden. Bolden was the first black Secret Serviceman, personally hired by JFK, who tried to expose the culture of hard-drinking and racism rife amongst the service and who was drummed out under Johnson, before apparently being set up and jailed in trials which the lawyer in me doesn't like to think about at all.

There is very little forensic evidence in the Kennedy assassination. That which exists is perfectly consistent with Lee Oswald firing his rifle with his bullets, at John Kennedy from the Texas School Book Depository, then escaping to kill JD Tippett before being apprehended and shot by Jack Ruby. What there is is a mountain of lost evidence, damaged or corrupted evidence, circumstantial data, and multiple conspiracy which is overlaid.

It's perfectly possible, for instance, that LBJ was told that Oswald had a Cuban connection (it's possible he had, as a low-level intelligence agent) and that Oswald was being set up as a 'Castro sympathiser' to justify a war on Cuba before the event, leading to LBJ coming down hard to make him a lone gunman afterward. There's plenty of evidence of that. It's possible that the Mafia wanted to claim the credit for the killing, and that they had deniable contracts out anyway, so put two and two together and, as in Vegas, made five.

It's possible the Kennedy family wanted as little physical information out as possible. It's possible the FBI and the Secret Service wanted one, lone gunman who could not have been stopped as an excuse. It's possible Oswald was an intelligence asset... it's possible, it's possible. Odd that Kennedy's age when nothing seemed impossible should end in that way. It's possible the Kennedys even thought Johnson knew or had a hand in the killing; Robert may well have done, and there have been intriguing stories in recent days that Jacqueline, to whom 'Bobby' was very close after the murder, may well have thought so too. People try to rationalise senselessness.

Any yet, cui bono? I've been bemused, this past year, by the number of books more than prepared to blame LBJ for what happened. A palm print was found, for instance, matching in 13 points that of Mac Wallace, at the sniper's nest and no explanation for it other than that 13 points isn't certainty, has ever been given.

Lyndon's last row with Kennedy, on the morning of the killing, involved Johnson pleading that his political enemy, Yarborough, sit with Kennedy in the car, and that Johnson's friend and Governor of Texas, John Connally, not do so. Johnson spent a good deal of time ducking down in the car following Kennedy, rather than sitting up straight, before any shooting started.

Connally it was who pretended to event organisers that the route had been secured and approved, and who altered it to the strange, indefensible one which took Kennedy's heavy car slowly up and down a dog-leg turn. Johnson's friends owned the Book Depository in which Oswald worked; they provided money for many in the shady milieu in which he seems to have operated. Johnson lied and lied to be sworn in on Air Force One, where he was found by aides in the toilets muttering 'they are going to kill us all', and by Jackie Kennedy lounged across what had been her bed.

He directly disposed of the car in which Kennedy died almost immediately, sending a helicopter escort to have it cleaned, fixed, and altered, and he warned everyone on his commission to head off a real investigation that they could 'start a nuclear war' to the point of reducing Earl Warren to tears. Yet he never once put the White House on nuclear alert. Johnson pathologically deleted everything of Kennedy's within 24 hours from the Oval Office, and then, two years later, in a moment of breakdown, mumbled to an aide through whisky that he had 'had to do it--they were going to ruin me and end my career. I had to do it'.

LBJ's condition of paranoid depression and nightmares in fact got so bad that there were real concerns about whether he would make it to 1968, though once there a hard core of his supporters were probably correct in believing that he could have fought against Richard Nixon and won had he ran, and had his 'bombing halts' worked.

The evidence against Johnson appears to come to this; that he was a phenomenally ruthless and ambitious man; that a strange murder that eliminated his boss happened in his native state; that people claiming to be his mistress, and others, implicate him in at least foreknowledge; and that he definitely covered things up, before experiencing nightmares and paranoia at the thought of a second Kennedy coming at him 'for revenge' in 1968.

That's more or less it, and it's not unpersuasive, though we can't know. As I wrote above, there were plenty of people talking about eliminating Kennedy in 1963, and Johnson may have known of some. The Kennedys made great enemies. There was such a thing as a military-industrial national security state, and it did include the CIA, the mafia, the army and Air Force, the national security staff, and a host of very rich and well connected people as well as grass-roots (perhaps grassy knoll?) organisations. The Kennedys played all sides; they certainly played the anti-Castro people, just as they were secretly writing to Khruschev, associating with Indonesian nationalists, contemplating the swap of West Berlin for parts of East Germany, and revelling with foreign prostitutes.

All this is a matter of record; the amazing thing is that they thought that both sides would not find out. It's perhaps here that the moral failings of the Kennedys as a clan operated analogically, or cosmologically. If their wives, pimps and bootlegging associates could be played with little comeback, in that intimate domestic sphere, why not the more restrained men of the system?

I would think it wrong for James Douglass, in a lovely book called JFK and the Unspeakable, to try to win John Kennedy back for the simple Manichean forces of light. Douglass, a Catholic peace activist and an intellectual historian, would probably argue with me. To contrast Kennedy with 'the unspeakable'--the evil of this world, which is all antichrist, and all within us, in the proper Catholic sense--might seem to make the president the opposite, but the contrast is false. What Douglass reminds us about Kennedy is that he did not respect the limits of the Cold War, and that he had a grip on office without a personal investment in any particular system. He could well have reached out to the third world; might well have avoided Vietnam; may well have avoided deficit-financing war, the destruction of the American gold standard, and the moral messiness of detente. He may have delivered a world where there was an accomodation with Castro and no American trauma, and, who knows, he may have got this past the entrenched forces of American society.

But would he? We won't know. Kennedy was a complex man. He'd technically died several times, and come just the right side of war heroism to get a medal rather than a jail term. Because of his father's money, he hadn't had to constrain himself and warp his adolescent personality to political compromise and success, and because of daily pain he had an unusual sense of the moment. It's no wonder people--women and men--flocked to him. As an historian, however, one has to go back to 1963 and remember that Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan were really doing very well and would continue to do so, and that the Kennedy legacy could, on exposure of the Baker scandal (which inevitably would have tainted the whole administration) have been very very limited indeed. Kennedy ran ahead of the public and lied about it; not a good tactic in the face of the unspeakable.

Barring some document (it's too late for the guns to be smoking) or some strange, amazing combination of electronics and photography of the sort that Thomas Wilson once promised, we'll now never know what happened in Dallas. We can't even be sure, after all, what happened to Kennedy's body, his brain, or his reinternment in 1967. The court he ran (and it was a court) was more renaissance than Imperial, more Borgia than the burghers who followed. What a ride it is to stop wondering who was on the sixth floor or the knoll (either one) or what the impossible details were, and to ask, quite simply--Lyndon, what did you really do?

2011-08-19T11:17:00.005+01:00

Those London 'Riots'

Now that the dust has settled, so to speak, on the latest of the London civil disturbances, I thought that I would try to record what I thought. I think that, in the heat of the event, it is difficult for people not to fall to type and to project. Some people have been unable to resist seeing the riots as the rise of a disenfranchised class; others have condemned 'sheer criminality'; some have reached for race or ethno-cultural explanations'; others have found fault in the police. I think that the weakest explanations have placed the blame on 'the cuts' (which have really not happened yet, and which overall may not) and my own favourite, the corruption and isolation of the political and media classes. That latter point reflects my own prejudices, rather than any truth, I think--very few of those involved in riots must say to themselves 'well, the Prime Minister is a former gang member and cokehead and his deputy is an arsonist' before 'bricking' some chanel-for-chavs place in Clapham. Those sorts of rationalisations are made by middle-class anti-GMO or CND types, in my experience, and very few others.

It's clear that the riots were a complex and complicated phenomenon. There were at least three sorts of protest. One emerged out of agitation at the fringes of a peaceful protest in response to the killing of some form of gang condotierri in Tottenham. The details of that killing, which are still sketchy, have been absent from much of the debate. A second 'protest' was clearly organised criminality, revealed in flashes such as the attempt to reach wimbledon on the Croydon line by groups of people who were involved in some form of conspiracy with each other, or the organised attacks on stores in wandsworth. Thirdly, a sort of social explosion of looting and hysteria, partly occasioned by police tactics but mostly by youths of all classes and races, seems to have engulfed the two other efforts.

The riots were not London-wide; four out of thirty two boroughs saw major difficulties, and the 'copy cat' assaults on civic order in other cities seem to have been on a similar proportionate scale. Very few died, and high-value stores and areas were heavily protected; Detroit this was not.

Yet so many people seem determined to fight the last war. David Starkey called the riots a clash of cultures, but what he failed to understand, I think, is that London is now largely a separate country from England, and that there are not two cultures but dozens, merging and separating at different points. There is not the comfort of industrially-organised categories, whether of race or of class; instead, the picture is more some Medieval tableau in which different identities and feudal ties mix colonially with each other.

The people most desperate to fit in somewhere were the ones most caught out; middle-class whites and members of the welfare classes who had no religion, family honour or proper critical education to hold them back. Those who were part of a group--who didn't need to fit in, and who hadn't been produced by devastated family structures, like the Sikhs, Turks, Poles, and older-middle-classes in places like Putney and Kensington-- escaped, or even had a chew of the 'finest hour' cigar as they defended their areas.

In such circumstances, an organisation as clumsy and confused as the Metropolitan Police faces real difficulty. It was too slow for many of the gangs, though it performed well once alerted; simultaneously too heavy, and too restrained for street battles; and too aware that it either negotiated or occupied, but did not control, large parts of what was nominally the capital of the country. It's troops could turn up Roman style in, say, Croydon, without riot control equipment of the first order, and could charge and so on, but were conditioned not to hit out with truncheons or hand-to-hand, which may have disciplined some of those children out on the street. They became a sort of Roman kabuki, too distant and too full of people afraid of a career-ending lawsuit. They defended the gates well; but the bridges and walls were what burned.

The politicians have, as usual, been a disgrace. That's not surprising, and I won't dwell on the many and manifest faults they demonstrated. All I would note is that, when Boris Johnson (Bullingdon firestarted and Darius Guppy's thugmaster) talks of 'people with a sense of entitlement', and when David Cameron flails, and when Nick Clegg (arsonist) condemns, and when Michael Gove and Caroline Spellman (looters of the public purse)stamp their feet and shout, I really have to ask, 'what gives?'. Theresa May and Vince Cable seem to have been the only people with any moral authority who kept their heads, but like others they largely bit their tongues. The silence from the Bishops and Royals spoke volumes. Were they scared of revealing their lack of authority, or of bearing witness to the monsters beneath the ice?

I think that there are better models than the twentieth century ones to look to in order to explain what happened. New York's Irish riots (which were largely continuous from 1844 through the nineteenth century) were once part of my academic stomping ground, and I saw a lot of Butcher Bill, the gangs, and the Bowery last week, in my parallax view. On the wind, I even heard the silence of Dagger John. Those riots, as these, were neither of the Catholic nor the Protestant nor the urban nor the rural Irish solely, nor only of that ethnic group; and that ethnic group was also divided on class lines, and sat within a period of rapidly changing incomes and rapidly depreciating economic humanity. They're a much better model for what went on, with all their socialisation of violence and hopelessness than the riots of people in industrial societies in the 60s and 70s ever were. Of course, we shouldn't forget how violent London and England always were anyway; that old saw that the oddity was the period of Empire and War from around 1900 to 1960 that drilled repression into people of all classes and hues here shouldn't be forgotten. In one very real sense, we are back to the past, but those who think that they know things have forgotten everything. Those who haven't are ignored.

Ultimately, and with a pompous trill, the owl of Minerva sings only at dusk. We live in a society of consumerist trilogies and sequels, conditioned by movies and stories in our childhoods long ago. Episode one of London's troubles seems to have been the tentative, clumsy reworking of public protest that culminated in the students' demonstrations last year. None of them were used to the fight; none had brought implements or floorbrushes (great urban pikes, and not a weapon, except to horses and thin lines) or tactical intelligence to prevent the relatively straightforward kettling tactics of the police.

Now, the gangs and the discontented have got a bit bolder, and the police are under pressure. I worry what the third episode, when everyone is seasoned and when the middle classes and those who will be hit in the coming winter, of all ages, sexes and conditions, by economic, energy, food and pensions crises as well as unemployment and financial desperation, will bring. Napoleon fell at Waterloo not when he surrendered, but when the Imperial Guard turned around and walked back under Wellington's fire. There may well come a point when the police--because they have families and debts and sense too--will retreat, next time, and then we'll really see trouble. I hope that I never see it.

What else? We've discovered again that the media do not understand sentencing, and that some magistrates--many magistrates--do not either; that the governing classes of this country hanker for a bloody code; that we're at 1905, really, rather than 1917, and that left-wing attempts to make every uprising a sort of abortionists' pilgrimage of grace are now completely bankrupt.

Get your seats, as far away on the high tier, with pre-bought food, now; you ain't seen nothing yet.

2011-07-31T19:29:00.002+01:00

Another useful graph

with thanks to www.zerohedge.com

2011-07-17T08:54:00.002+01:00

Shocking Hacking and Stolen Information

Three years ago, following on a linked but separate German operation, Her Majesty's government acquired cds and other electronic data. This information detailed the names associated with private bank accounts in Liechtenstein. Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs now allows for 'disclosure', even on funds from elsewhere, created after the discovery, at tax-amnesty rates.

I for one am shocked at this hacking and use of stolen data. Wherever could they have got the idea from?

2011-07-14T11:27:00.024+01:00

Obama's Ship Money; The Fourteenth Amendment 'Solution' and the crisis of 1869-76

David Goldfield has a new and interesting book out, which in the best sense of the word starts from the sort of premise that a bright twenty something who wanted to re-write the field and attract attention would embrace. It is that the American Civil War was essentially a consequence of evangelical protestantism, and of the moral zeal, intolerance of compromise, and dissolving effect of that movement upon politics and society in the decades before the War of 1861-5.

By recasting the war as one that was avoidable, and the product of religion, Goldfield (who teaches in North Carolina) breathes life into a modernised 'blundering generation' hypothesis that may appeal to an almost monoculturally fideophobic American intellectual class whilst allowing people to escape the simplistic iterations of slavery guilt that some of the sixty-eighters have traded on for years.

However, the thesis does not hold up. A catalyst is something that changes the world around it without in whilst only being destroyed by secondary reactions, rather than the thing which it primarily works upon. Playing the game of finding the cause of the Civil War that was not slavery is a fool's errand. The mass immigration of the Roman Catholic Irish, for instance, destabilised Northern cities, broke the Whig Party, and caused a nativist reaction which allowed non-nativist conscience radicals to set up viable anti-slavery parties. It also allowed for the vast augmentation of the Northern workforce and, provided the imperative for the North to flank the south with railways and canals connecting grain-producing areas, isolating and undermining the hitherto primacy of future confederate agriculture. The settling of the West was allowed for by German immigration, which was forgotten after 1914 and is something that still helps explain a good deal about the mid-West.

Similarly, one can't blame racism or the rise of democratic Jacksonian theories; these were in fact as strong or stronger in the slave-free North as in the South. But one could try to single them out, along with neo-confederate 'original conceptions' of the constitution which look at the North as a new and dangerously centralised body. The 'causes' of the war, and of the settlement that followed, metastasize once one abandons slavery as the prime aetiological referent; technology (telegrams, steam railways, and print); 'big money' (the post-1837 Northern bank push for monetary expansion; 'protectionism' (the tariff-supporting, federally lucrative bloc linking expensive Pennsylvania steel and manufacture to Midwestern wheat and meat)....I could go on.

Slavery caused the war. There really shouldn't be any doubt in any mind, except that the academy and intelligent debate sometimes thrive on creating such.

One thing that Goldfield does get right, however, is the extraordinarily vituperative and fissaparous nature of the Republican Coalition. The Party which ended slavery emerged in 1857 as a confluence of groups. Anti-slavery (not pro-negro) politics was what held it together, as people realised at the time, but an emphasis on wider policies and backpedalling to the electorate was what got it elected in 1860--that and a Democratic split. Republicans were a hard-money, anticatholic inflationist, western-settling, New England native and Pennsylvania steel coalition which co-opted the moral zeal of evangelicals but which also embraced Whigs, spiritualists, and those thrown askance by the Mormon wars of the 1840s. When Abraham Lincoln (who was not most Republicans' first choice for president, who was dumped in 1864 and who ran with a Democrat Vice-president as a consequence) did strike at slavery, he did so piecemeal and messily. He himself seems to have spent some time wishing black people would emigrate somewhere before being driven by blood to a higher conception of humanity.

All of this is important because, once slavery finished, the Republicans had nothing to unite around. They flailed. They impeached Lincoln's successor, President Johnson. They 'reconstructed' the South in a mad way. They embraced Gladstonian liberalism, split with it, took bribes, condemned them, fell out, tried to promote black citizens then undermined them disgracefully, and generally pushed and pulled like some strange circus creature. And they re-wrote the constitution of the United States in ways that matter very much today.

The Fourteenth Amendment

It is worth recalling the amendment in full, (written by Republicans in 1866) if only because few Americans ever treat the sections as an integrated whole, and because the world economy, and any understanding of modern America, depend upon it. From the start it was political. Via a parliamentary manoeuvre, Congressional leaders sought to draw President Johnson into denying the Joint Committee which wrote it funding, and thus to lay the groundwork for his impeachment. The amendment is not neutral law. (By the way, I've adopted the near-universal (and sane) numeration of the amendment as 'XIV', though readers on the 'ghost amendment' fringe, and I mean no unnecessary disrespect, may view it as only the fourteenth accepted amendment).

Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.

Section 3.
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4.
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5.
The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Three modern debates arise from the amendment, though others exist too. Immigration to the United States was given a relatively unique quality, in that those born there automatically became citizens of the federal entity. The previous procedure was that, as in the European Union until recently, only citizens of States could become US citizens. Since States had their own constitutions and methods of assimilation, the first section of the amendment transfers sovereignty and constitutionalises rights. This proposition meant that, immigration, border matters, and nativism were effectively moved up and neutralised as issues. It's something that Republicans, in the border southwest and port cities, have recently begun to organise against, and was never that popular in those Western states and Alaska where resident citizens effectively become shareholders in state resources.

Federalising rights led to their legalisation. More than any other country, until a recent decline in tort and judicial activism generally, Americans have argued for rights, and the resolution of political problems, in the federal court system (State Judges being often elected should be judged part of a different process). When the Supreme Court decided, for instance, that segregation and 'separate but equal' provisions met with the requirements of the amendment in Plessey v Ferguson, some black lawyers saw it as an advance; others agitated to change conditions, beginning a legal strategy which shaped organisations like the NAACP and, indeed, the shape of politics in the mid-twentieth century. Oddly, as money flows into political parties, in 2011, street organisation and the parliamentary resolution of problems through elections and lawmaking has become important again. Perhaps that is to be expected of an executive headed by a former community organiser in which legal recourse is expensive and where agitated parties both lash out at 'judicial activism'.

For our purposes, however, the third most significant thing of the amendment is the phrase buried in section four;

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

Madly, there are some in the presidential camp who think that, should Congress fail to authorise an increase in the debt ceiling on August 2nd of this year, then the president should simply order the Treasury Secretary either to forgive and destroy bonds owed by the Government to itself, or to issue new ones on the strength of the amendment.

There are many reasons why this would open the door to a new level of madness; but one of the most appealing is rooted in the seventeenth-century revolt against the Stuarts from which much of the American radical and common-law tradition emerged.

Ship Money

By 1629, in an England of a few million, riven with ideological schisms based around religion, the emerging new economy, and foreign entanglements, Charles I found it impossible to deal with Parliament. The traditional picture of him, and of his Stuart heirs, has been until recently constrained by what he did next. He simply went around the parliamentary process of revenue generation, and raised his own money constitutionally. By claiming that citizens had a duty to grant him both a loan for their own defence, and to pay for a Navy to defend them, he employed the prerogative to fund his administration for the next ten years, and actually did quite well in doing so. Quite well from a practical point of view, that is. From the perspective of, say, Darnel and the Five Knights who ended up on the wrong side of the Crown when they complained, it was tyrannical. Even the Judges who convicted them implicitly agreed, pretending that the forced loans were not taxes or levies and really that they were only emergency actions.

They weren't intended as such, of course. The reaction against the forced loan and ship money led directly to the petition of right, the English Civil War, and, ultimately, the 1688 proposition that the Crown and its prerogatives must lie in the assembly elected by those who would pay the taxes. That principle made it's way into the American colonies, and it was embedded in the Constitution as firmly as the Stuarts were pickled in the somewhat addled aspic of the radical imagination.

The vituperative Republican Party of 1866, however, roiling at the loss of the slavery issue, unable to stir up enough willingness to take on the emergent nightriders of the KKK, and realising that impeachment would only hold them together so long, placed a loaded gun in the hands of future presidents. At the time, they were confident such presidents would be republicans, given the rate at which they were adding states and 'reconstructing' the South. They were right about that; between 1876 and 1932, only four Democrats- Tilden, Cleveland, Wilson and Roosevelt--were elected president, and Tilden was denied the office in a constitutional stitch up in 1877. By Wilson's time, the gun-the duty of the president and courts to uphold the fourteenth amendment even if Congress disagreed--was set in abeyance by the creation of the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax. Cleveland hadn't even thought of it, because the debt debate in his tim was turned into a debate on whether greenbacks should be gold or silver-backed. Ironically both had a tendency to prevent default, and, anyway, the United States government at the time did not need much.

It does now. By August 2nd of this year, the USA may well be faced with a debt beyond fifteen trillion dollars. Since the Liberty Bond issue of 1917, Congress has insisted on its exclusive control of this debt. Some are suggesting that the President should a simply overreach this rule, as an emergency measure which does not permanently undermine Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution. The basis of this point would be that, by not raising the debt ceiling, Congress was in fact acting unconstitutionally and allowing the debt of the USA to be challenged, and that the President could not allow this as Chief Executive. Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Scalia, Alito, and Sotomayor may support him in this; Justice Thomas would almost certainly oppose it.

The first group are supporters of executive power and Thomas is as near as the Tea Party gets to a representative. The future of a world economy predicated upon a currency imbalance that emerged from a debt created by Lyndon Johnson and worsened by Ronald Reagan and George W Bush beyond repair will then depend upon a new Five Knights case. Will, as their predecessors did, Brayer, Kennedy, Alito and Kagan allow an illegal, Stuart-era dodge revived by the poisonous GOP of 1866 to impose future taxes and inflation on citizens, rather than global economic collapse--or will justice be done though the Heavens fall? The list of successful presidential overreach is not a comforting one--Truman and the Steel Mills, Nixon and executive Privilege, Bush and torture and anyone with War since 1964. But the answer to the question may well decide the way in which our dissolving economy finally collapses.

2011-07-13T13:19:00.002+01:00

"Democracy is Government by Explanation"--David Cameron

I thought that I would replicate a facebook note that I wrote here, as this scandal about the media-political class and their bubble is becoming more interesting.

Sicut Erat, et Nunc, et Semper--Until Judgment

Tom Watson MP, who knows lots about the hacking scandal, has just asked about elements of the intelligence services working with News International, who in themselves were working with criminal elements. Significantly, the head of the Legal department at NI has just quietly resigned. Big and bad things are moving.

This may seem a silly bubble scandal, while the real economy here freezes and the west's economy burns. It is becoming something else. We're getting a glimpse beneath the murk of the political-media class and the financial monsters who live in the deep.

Watergate was important not because of Nixon, and Dallas only partly because of JFK--they both exposed the connections that really run a great many things, and the existence of a nexus of money, power and war that has nothing to do with democracy but which convinces itself that it owns the free world. It emerges out of the darker parts of human society, or the soul, or whatever you wish to call it. In America, as in London--the centre of a globalised market--that nexus takes different forms; yet it emerges inevitably where you have elites and complex society, and it always has. It's the same sort of thing that, say, sold out Bengal to the East India Company, and then to slavery under the British Empire. Greed, selfishness, power worship and secrecy.

That was why exposure was fought tooth and nail. We might get a glimpse behind the curtain here soon, and it won't be pleasant.

2011-07-12T00:14:00.005+01:00

The Times They Are A-Changing

Well,they're about to. I'd adapt Toynbee (Arnold, not Polly, and originally about civilisations, not limited companies);

Corporations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet'

The media-political class is finding its world alternately freezing with the home economy and burning with the one abroad, and I suppose the cracks are showing. For the record, I used to enjoy the Sun and the News of the World whilst knowing the feeling was wrong, but that's neither a new nor an alien thing for a Catholic. The sociopathic side of me also has a certain healthy respect for that old Monster Murdoch--a sort of Joe Kennedy style predator whom most of his detractors deserved to be eaten by. You have to admire the Tiger, especially when it's about to get shot and is still defiant. It needs to fall in battle, so long as it's ultimately stuffed or splayed on the floor.

Can one live in hope? I'll enjoy seeing the Times, and News International, buried even more. Every pompous, self-and-elite serving, warmongering-and-appeasing, establishment-swerving echo of that paper needs to be trapped in the concrete leg of the bridge over Time, if only to keep it's multiple trolls warm in the rain.

Most of all, though, I'm stunned at Billy Bragg coming up with what Tom Lehrer would have called a tune you can hum--the first of this Depression's folk songs?

BILLY BRAGG - NEVER BUY THE SUN from Billy Bragg on Vimeo.

We're dealing with three or four things at once, and it might make sense to reflect on Gramsci's highly adaptable observation from The Prison Notebooks that 'the old is old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.'

The media-political class, and the public, are directly ignoring the energy crisis, the global unwinding, and the incipient stagflation--but with the money and control of the agenda gone, what's left is the lynching of the shills for the economic world that is passing by those who are suffering. The self-styled Masters won't be able to cope.

We're also dealing with the forty-year loss of the counsel and institutional memory that seasoned backbenchers with a personal hinterland, representative political parties, proper historians and academics in Oxbridge and the media, and the better parts of the Lords and the Bar used to provide. The husk of the culture hollowed out and not defended since the sixties is a real force multiplier for the mob when the oil runs out.

Finally, the educators--from the out-of-a-textbook social science bullshitters at university, to the teachers who failed to equip people with the sense and independence to resist (because business and the left carved the curriculum up between them)--are directly culpable here.

If only where we were going socially and economically were not bound to be so painful. Drowning men clutch at straws, those in debt at ever more stacked gambles and lotteries. Perhaps, like those around Augustine at the Fall of Rome, I'm just grabbing at attempts to make sense of such a surreal, lunatic exposure of the Satanic principle at the heart of the neoliberal world.

Still, isn't Milliband E doing well? His initial streak of shameless ruthlessness with a wounded foe, even if it was his brother, seems to be precisely what the Opposition needs. The times, they are a-changing.

2011-07-06T10:11:00.004+01:00

From the Blogs

I found the following on The Trader website, via Zero Hedge. It is by one Gordon T Long, and I wanted to put it here as an aide-memoire--but I thought that some of my regulars would like it too. I like diagrams.

2011-07-01T12:26:00.003+01:00

DSK: Scurrilous, ill advised or thought provoking?

I noticed, around the 3-5 of June, that the following comments were appearing on various websites. At the time, I thought, as I still think, that no one can understand what goes on in a trial without the benefit of reading a very thorough report or being there--and even then, having sat in on several dozen trials, the instincts and conclusions of juries are often very difficult to fathom.

Anyone holding forth as an authority on any case is immediately suspect; I have about thirty thousand JFK assassination documents on cd, or on my shelves (including a copy of the Warren Commission report, for instance, which I have read). I've accumulated them over twenty years. You know what? I haven't a clue what happened on 22 November 1963, beyond four people being shot and the Beatles releasing an album.

People read the wrong focus into things often; silly little crimes become great affairs of state, and great conspiracies become one-off 'black swan' events in the eyes of those who wish to see what they wish to see.

However, as a sort of aide-memoire, I thought that I would place a copy of the comment which I cut and pasted from the Daily Telegraph's letters site, by an anonymous commenter, here. Please don't read anything more than that into it!

"A new report prepared for Prime Minister Putin by the Federal Security Service (FSB) says that former International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was charged and jailed in the US for sex crimes on May 14th after his discovery that all of the gold held in the United States Bullion Depository located at Fort Knox was ‘missing and/or unaccounted’ for.

According to this FSB secret report, Strauss-Kahn had become “increasingly concerned” earlier this month after the United States began “stalling” its pledged delivery to the IMF of 191.3 tons of gold agreed to under the Second Amendment of the Articles of Agreement signed by the Executive Board in April 1978 that were to be sold to fund what are called Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) as an alternative to what are called reserve currencies.

This FSB report further states that upon Strauss-Kahn raising his concerns with American government officials close to President Obama he was ‘contacted’ by ‘rogue elements’ within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who provided him ‘firm evidence’ that all of the gold reported to be held by the US ‘was gone’.

Upon Strauss-Kahn receiving the CIA evidence, this report continues, he made immediate arrangements to leave the US for Paris, but when contacted by agents working for France’s General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) that American authorities were seeking his capture he fled to New York City’s JFK airport following these agents directive not to take his cell-phone because US police could track his exact location.

Once Strauss-Kahn was safely boarded on an Air France flight to Paris, however, this FSB report says he made a ‘fatal mistake’ by calling the hotel from a phone on the plane and asking them to forwarded the cell-phone he had been told to leave behind to his French residence, after which US agents were able to track and apprehend him.

Within the past fortnight, this report continues, Strauss-Kahn reached out to his close friend and top Egyptian banker Mahmoud Abdel Salam Omar to retrieve from the US the evidence given to him by the CIA. Omar, however, and exactly like Strauss-Kahn before him, was charged yesterday by the US with a sex crime against a luxury hotel maid, a charge the FSB labels as ‘beyond belief’ due to Omar being 74-years-old and a devout Muslim.

In an astounding move puzzling many in Moscow, Putin after reading this secret FSB report today ordered posted to the Kremlin’s official website a defense of Strauss-Khan becoming the first world leader to state that the former IMF chief was a victim of a US conspiracy. Putin further stated, “It’s hard for me to evaluate the hidden political motives but I cannot believe that it looks the way it was initially introduced. It doesn’t sit right in my head.”

Interesting to note about all of these events is that one of the United States top Congressman, and 2012 Presidential candidate, Ron Paul [photo bottom left] has long stated his belief that the US government has lied about its gold reserves held at Fort Knox. So concerned had Congressman Paul become about the US government and the Federal Reserve hiding the truth about American gold reserves he put forward a bill in late 2010 to force an audit of them, but which was subsequently defeated by Obama regime forces.

When directly asked by reporters if he believed there was no gold in Fort Knox or the Federal Reserve, Congressman Paul gave the incredible reply, “I think it is a possibility.”

Also interesting to note is that barely 3 days after the arrest of Strauss-Kahn, Congressman Paul made a new call for the US to sell its gold reserves by stating, “Given the high price it is now, and the tremendous debt problem we now have, by all means, sell at the peak.”

Bizarre reports emanating from the US for years, however, suggest there is no gold to sell, and as we can read as posted in 2009 on the ViewZone.Com news site:

“In October of 2009 the Chinese received a shipment of gold bars. Gold is regularly exchanges between countries to pay debts and to settle the so-called balance of trade. Most gold is exchanged and stored in vaults under the supervision of a special organization based in London, the London Bullion Market Association (or LBMA). When the shipment was received, the Chinese government asked that special tests be performed to guarantee the purity and weight of the gold bars. In this test, four small holed are drilled into the gold bars and the metal is then analyzed.

Officials were shocked to learn that the bars were fake. They contained cores of tungsten with only a outer coating of real gold. What’s more, these gold bars, containing serial numbers for tracking, originated in the US and had been stored in Fort Knox for years. There were reportedly between 5,600 to 5,700 bars, weighing 400 oz. each, in the shipment!”

To the final fate of Strauss-Kahn it is not in our knowing, but new reports coming from the United States show his determination not to go down without a fight as he has hired what is described as a ‘crack team’ of former CIA spies, private investigators and media advisers to defend him.

To the practical effects on the global economy should it be proved that the US, indeed, has been lying about its gold reserves, Russia’s Central Bank yesterday ordered the interest rate raised from 0.25 to 3.5 percent and Putin ordered the export ban on wheat and grain crops lifted by July 1st in a move designed to fill the Motherlands coffers with money that normally would have flowed to the US.

The American peoples ability to know the truth of these things, and as always, has been shouted out by their propaganda media organs leaving them in danger of not being prepared for the horrific economic collapse of their nation now believed will much sooner than later."

As it happens, Mr Salom Omar did plead guilty to groping a maid; and the United States routinely does not audit gold and has not done so since 1961. So, well, nothing to see here. Move along....

2011-06-24T17:19:00.002+01:00

An Oldie But Goldie

Along with 2007's warnings about global recession and the digital money/derivative crisis, 2009's global cooling outlook, 2011's questioning of the Libya War and 2008's suspicion of the Iran agenda--and anything else which you read on here that has turned out to be true--I thought that I would give this post, from January 31 2008, another little outing. We are preparing to scuttle in Afghanistan, and the consequence will be comparably disgaceful to the Belgians in Congo in '60-62, or to what happened in Indochina after '72. God help those whose minds and lives awoke only to face the Taliban's whip and bullet, or the boot of some loony savage with a gun fighting a war that began either thirty seven or three thousand years ago depending on your point of view.

These stupid wars of choice must stop. We must adopt a new grand strategy in the arcs of instability, against terror, militant Islam, peak oil, and peak food. Barack Obama seems lately to have begun that effort, but the real story of what is now happening can obviously not yet be written. I just wish our leaders weren't so venal and so silly....

A Little List
Here is a list of all those major powers who have invaded Afghanistan at one time or another. I do not pretend that it is authoritatively exhaustive, but believe that it may be, and if you want to comment further I'd be happy to hear from you.

Alexander the Great
Arab Islam
Mahmud of Ghazni and the Ghaznavids
Genghis Khan
Tamerlaine
The Turks
The Moghuls
The British Empire
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 1979-1989
NATO

Here is a list of those who managed to hold the place without any major massacres, corruption, devastation, or the ultimate collapse of their hold from exhaustion, bankruptcy or foreign invasion so far.

0.

Here is a list of those who ended up being accused of overstrech, brutality, the collapse of self confidence, and folie de grandeur (and that was those of the group not remembered by a species prone to psychosis as monsters).

All of them.

Young men and women (some of whom I know and all of whom I respect) are out there at the moment, and really, given that they are in the middle of a civil war that began after the deposition of Mohammad Daud Khan it is sensible to ask 'why?'.

Have a think about that question. Invading Afghanistan, however strategically important people think the act, has a tendency to lead to horror and exhaustion. It may be that the oil is slipping away, and that the security of the lines of trade and energy upon which we shall desperately spend ourselves in the coming years is worth it; I doubt it. It may be that the West will succeed in its aims. I'm not sure of that either. But what is obvious is that the Afghan War is not won, and whatever the strength of the weltvolksgemeinschaft it won't be.

2011-06-11T12:32:00.000+01:00

A Little Summer Video

2011-06-11T12:14:00.003+01:00

Mark Shea on Politics

I'm in conductor mood at the minute--buses, not orchestras--and would direct you to a seat near the great Mark Shea, who is a Catholic person. So are a billion others, of course (including myself), but Mr Shea points out in the American context how hard it is to be Catholic and political. No one can excommunicate themself, of course, and everyone is to a certain extent a bad catholic--but what gives when the choice is between narcissists and randroids with anger issues like Santorum or Gingrich, as representatives of the 'torture' side, or sundry abortionists and God-hating pagans and Satanists on the other?

The debate plays out here between liberals who think they are Tories and liberals who think that they are socialists when, in fact, they both seem like nothing so much as a crusade against decency, commonsense and the Western tradition. Give me fifty-eighters like Habermas and the Pope over soixante-huitards anyday, frankly. I'm sick to the back teeth of the cisatlantic social science class and their wannabes.

Anyway--the Shea quote that got me going;

But rejecting the evils which the Thing that Used to Be Conservatism is coming to embrace does not mean embracing the evils that the Thing that Used to Be Liberalism has been championing for decades. It means returning to the Tradition and rejecting twaddle and sin as best one can, whoever is pushing it, while trying to preserve, as best one can, the fragments of Catholic teaching that still remain in both debased political movements in the hope that someday, people will wise up, reject the garbage our demented system offers us and save, like Robinson Crusoe, those fragments of Catholic teaching still honored in both parties from the shipwreck our political culture has made of itself

My one cavil is that I would specifically like to place the blame in a nexus of commerce, the professional academy, and the media-political class, rather than just 'political culture' but I'm off out so I can't be bothered. Happy Saturday everyone!

2011-06-11T01:28:00.003+01:00

Ron Paul Returns--Sans Airship

The late great Ron Paul (along with Marcus Aurelius Biden) has returned to us and is once again running for chief shoveller in Mr Bullet's debt factory. In pursuit of this aim, he's been quoting the bible, and in particular the cost-conscious armchair republicanism of Yahweh in 1 Samuel 8 (God eventually rolls over, unusually). I do like this passage, and thought that I would put it up;

So Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who asked him for a king. 11 And he said, “This will be the behavior of the king who will reign over you: He will take your sons and appoint them for his own chariots and to be his horsemen, and some will run before his chariots. 12 He will appoint captains over his thousands and captains over his fifties, will set some to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and some to make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, and bakers. 14 And he will take the best of your fields, your vineyards, and your olive groves, and give them to his servants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and your vintage, and give it to his officers and servants. 16 And he will take your male servants, your female servants, your finest young men,[a] and your donkeys, and put them to his work. 17 He will take a tenth of your sheep. And you will be his servants. 18 And you will cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, and the LORD will not hear you in that day.”
19 Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, “No, but we will have a king over us, 20 that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles. And Samuel heard all the words of the people, and he repeated them in the hearing of the LORD. 22 So the LORD said to Samuel, “Heed their voice, and make them a king.”
And Samuel said to the men of Israel, “Every man go to his city.”

and presumably, 'prepare to abandon self-government'.

2011-06-07T23:40:00.001+01:00

The Gaiety of Nations

"Lady Thatcher will not be seeing Sarah Palin. That would be belittling for Margaret. Palin is nuts"--Thatcher aide. Parse this statement.

2011-06-06T06:44:00.002+01:00

Album number 990

Over on facebook, I have been counting down the '1001 albums' to expand my tastes and give myself a bit of a daily rest. Today's was Miles Davis' 1957 'Birth of the Cool', which is just about perfect. Of all the tracks on a wet Putney morning, to the birdsong of which I awoke at four thirty from a nightmare, this is beautiful, outstanding, the best; Moon Dreams

Enjoy.

2011-06-06T06:25:00.003+01:00

Football Fans

I have no knowledge of football. This is, as far as I can tell, no bar to having an opinion on it, and anyway, this is my blog. Why is it that football fans have neither a share nor a say in their clubs? If they had, could they federate to elect the FA, cap salaries, and make soccer work for them and not Rupert Murdoch? And, if not, why don't football companies stop pretending that they have any local connections, follow the example of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and take themselves off somewhere with either a lot of space or a contempt for planning laws. Asia perhaps? Shanghai United has a nice sound to it.

Then I could get a nice flat in Chelsea, and Fulham Broadway would stop being the Constantinople Coliseum on a bad day every other week.

2011-06-06T04:46:00.004+01:00

Referism: A Dream of New England

Discontent with the virtual representation present in Her Britannic Majesty's Parliament is not new. Here's Anthony Henry MP to his constituents in 1734, responding to comments about his vote on taxes (I found it in Denis Healey's great old book, My Secret Planet, and have referred to it many times before);

Gentlemen,
I have received your letter about the excise and I am surprised at your insolence and writing to me at all.

You know, as I know that I bought this constituency. You know, and I know, that I am now determined to sell it, and you know, what you think I don't know, that you are looking out for another buyer, and I know what you certainly don't know, that I have found another constituency to buy.

About what you said about the excise: may God's curse light upon you all, and may it make your homes as open and as free to the excise officers as your wives and daughters have always been to me while I have represented your rascally constituency.

Yours sincerely,

Anthony Henry MP

That was, of course, before facebook. I've been a personal witness to how social technology can change indifference to pretended, and possibly worthwhile concern these past weeks when watching the 'Corby Lights Campaign' from afar. This was a cross-party effort to demand that East Northamptonshire County Council stop turning off and sawing down fifty per cent of Corby streetlights 'to save money'. Corby's Tory MP, elected because the constituency boundaries emasculate the immigrant, working-town enclave, was initially indifferent. Louise Bagshawe, after all, is rarely seen in the town, seems to share with it a mutual hatred, and has a sleb career to be getting on with. For her, the lights going off were an 'environmental matter' which a load of Labour types and unison organisers were blowing up out of proportion. She told a radio microphone so from a distance.

We've no recall, obviously--don't be silly, they're in charge--but a few short weeks later, and a vociferous grass-roots facebook campaign with more members than are in her majority, and she is on board, against the Tory Council, and 'consulting' on concerns.

There's the core of a Californian-style referendum culture here, I think, equally to be found in the bottom-up No Cuts for Kids as much as on the venerable EU Referendum page. It probably also touches on the Economic democracy concerns of things like the Co-Op movement and the Campaign for Public Ownership, and it's about connecting people with politics as though they had a sense of common good which is not communicated to or by their representatives.

Such a culture is often derided as populist and prone to contradiction. Let's leave that to one side--California's budget problems are as much to do with it's state legislature's spending rules and byzantine representative morass as its tax propositions--and concentrate on a fresh attempt to encapsulate what people want--Dr Richard North's 'referism'.

I should declare that I have a good deal of time for Dr North, and for his partner in crime, Christopher Booker, and I think well of their core schemes of sunlight in the family courts and a referendum on EU membership. For the past few weeks, North has been promoting an idea which links a robust, informed citizenry outside of the press in the blogosphere with the new Chartist idea of yearly referenda on the national and local budget. Others on the right, some of whom now claim to be 'radical' rather than Whig or Tory, have enthusiastically taken up the cause.

The idea is a good one. I find myself comparing the referist cause, however, with the fully-fledged child of the Radical tradition, the New England Town Meeting. Vermont, Maine, Connecticut and Massachusetts have, from colonial times, been holding local meetings. Average attendance is 20% of a township according to recent studies, but rises where referenda and the most serious issues are involved. At the town meetings, local ratepayers decide whether to raise debt, employ policemen, clean streets, fund libraries, or embrace the projects of selectmen who have to make their case. The system sounds idyllic, to me.

We know, however, that it doesn't work in big cities. A succession of neighbourhood council initiatives from Lyndon Johnson on have crashed and burned on the rocks of community politics and identity debates of the sort that are just not had when the local community, as is often the case in cities, can't trust on an individual or group basis. Big city populations are prone to games of selfish advancement and wedge-issue grifting, and they always will be so long as everyone has a voice and we don't have Athenian slavery. Democracy is very difficult to work when class interests clash. As Frank Gallagher once rhymed out in shameless,

Tickets this way for the Chatsworth Express.
Come and watch pikeys making a mess of the lives they were given by him upstairs. And kids they’re convinced aren’t actually theirs.

What sound on earth could ever replace kids needing money and wives in your face? 'Cos this, people reckon, and me included, Is why pubs and drugs were kindly invented

To calm us all down, stop us going mental. These are Chatsworth Estate’s basic essentials We are worth every penny, for grinding your axes You shit on our head, but you pay the taxes.

Imagine a Britain without Chatsworth buccaneers Who’ll cum on your face for the price of a beer. Make poverty history! cheaper drugs now! Make poverty history! cheaper drugs now!

There are exceptions. I think that the scheme in Brixton to create 'Brixton pounds' in a local exchange trading system sits as democratically as, say, the monetary decisions of your average canton. It makes sense in terms of an emerging new medievalism, however, not a monetary democracy because the effect of local currency is necessarily deflationary and conservative. Maybe it will look better after the hyperinflation.

I can't help thinking that class matters a lot when considering direct democracy. People who have known the genuine badness of poverty might fear, for instance, that there is a dark side to referism's radical inheritance. This would take the shape of the Yellow Peril, or Enoch's dockers, but I think these nativist movements bogeymen. The real spectre would be the Poor Law Guardians. These local worthies, almost forgotten now, were all elected locally and regularly in elections that were effectively referenda on whether local taxes should be used for the poor, or whether local rules should be deployed against the indigent. The Guardians, sitting above the working man in common with aldermen and magistrates, survived until the Welfare state abolished them. Workhouses are not things most people are now proud of, and they attract as far as I can tell no heritage tours.

Fear, though, leads to mistakes; if local referenda, when tried, have led to a refusal to pay higher taxes, it may be that the wise crowd does not wish to fund nonsense jobs and expenses. Without clear referenda, the councils and government are guaranteed to hit the poor and the popular for cliquey or administrative concerns and call it austerity. With it, they might be stopped.

We're seeing in the latter days a beginning of the breakdown of western order. As I write, there are between fifty thousand and half a million people in the central square in Athens whose weight is straining the euro senseless. There are a fifth of Americans unemployed, if one reads the figures with the right squint. There is rampant hidden inflation in every shopping basket as incomes lose value in a weird combination of economic stagnation and price distortion.

Out of this peak oil/high food/monetary/future wave pressure will come a tremendous need for people to go back to political basics, once the explosion and its after effects are gone. You can see the divisions forming amongst people of relative goodwill, just as the fascists and stalinists elsewhere are reformulating their case.

The graduate liberals and philistine secularists 'educated' in the west will cling to what they think is distributive justice, a fear of populism, and economic ordoliberalism, and in doing so will parody Habermas by treating the fifty-eighter as a soixante-huitard. Others will scrap over the Atlantic radical tradition, as Maurice Glasman and Phillip Blond are doing. Some, like me, will try to square the circles of economic democracy, the common good, and property-owning distributism in a frankly non-liberal way. But I hope that most will choose democracy under law as a starting point, and if they do, I can't see how an humane referism can go wrong. Maybe we should all get the chairs out for another New England-as long as we refrain from hitting people with them.

2011-05-26T23:32:00.003+01:00

1,001 Songs

I have a new project, which friends have tasked me with. It is to listen to the songs on 1001 albums, spanning a period from 1955 to 2008, which are regarded as classic and have been published as such in a book called '1001 albums to hear before you die.' I intend to do one a day, to post it here (youtube permitting) and, occasionally, to add a post or a picture that goes with it. I'll also post to facebook. The first of the songs, rather appropriately given his importance in the modern canon, goes to Frank Sinatra-- In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning. This is from February 1955, and, well, take it away Francis....

UPDATE: I think that this project is much more suited to facebook, so have moved it over there. Amongst the delights of the past seven days @martinleemeenagh have been Keely Smith, Fats Domino and Vladimir Putin singing 'Blueberry Hill'. I have a feelin that the facebook medium is less permamnent than here but, then, in ten years time--will I really want jokey references to Vlad hanging around in easily accessible form?

2011-05-25T13:08:00.003+01:00

Bibi Addresses Employees

I used to admire Yitzhak Rabin, really very much. I like people who reach out to beyond what they can be in the service of something great. But, then, Bibi went and created an atmosphere that got Rabin killed. That was before the latest set of allegations about Bibi, businessmen and some penny-ante byzantine tale of graft; after the lawsuit alleging that his wife was some sort of boss from Hell when it came to servants whom she treated as untermenschen. It's not completely fair to blame everything on him--Sara and Bibi have a complex relationship. Maybe there is some collective term for all the Bibi-shite that seems to swarm around the man.

No fan of Benjamin Netanyahu am I. I would refer to him as a sort of 'Jewish Nixon' except, of course (as my one demented reader will know) I have some time for the 37th president. My interest has been piqued, however, by a question which the CEO of a good many congressional donations implicitly raised yesterday, when he said that 'Israel would not return to the indefensible borders of 1967'. Which stunning act of indefensibility, exactly, was illustrated by the performance of the Armies of Eretz Yisrael in that year?

Israel feels itself to be in real trouble right now, as far as I can tell, partly because Bibi was allowed his Ulster Unionist naysaying fifteen years ago. But at its best, Israel has responded to traps by springing them. What mileage is there in the antic delusions of selfish fear?

Was there ever such a disaster for the Jewish state, or anything so predictable once zionism changed and Israel was sucked into the cold war by the likes of Scoop Jackson, as Likud? People lose hope and think situations are dire because no one has the resources or the courage or the social support to imagine anything different, which is admittedly a modern condition outside of Israel too. We've lost the heritage of religion and western humanism that used to make people strong. However, things seem really dire in Israel. So dire that even Rabin's son feels he has to lend some sort of support to Netanyahu. Maybe it has something to do with all those Iranian missiles and Syrian 'insurgents' coming over the borders.

As each day goes on, I feel more and more for the Palestinian Christians. I know a few of them, just as I have known Jewish and Muslim people from those lands. Three peoples, one state was the dream, now effectively poisoned by Hamas and regional powerplays and a whole load of demographic blow-ins. Can we really not do better as a species?

Tell me--does this video remind you of a wal-mart or coca-cola management meeting, or of a whole load of people refusing to be bigger than themselves? Neither's good. I really hope Obama has something up his sleeve.

2011-05-19T09:02:00.002+01:00

Of Cabbages and Kings: the New Old World Order

One of the interesting things about history is how much times--any times really--conspire to surprise. I've often thought that mediaeval or semi-modern models of association and organisation were more viable than they were given credit for, for example, but that they were long gone. Each passing day of our new medievalism makes me think of how viable Hanseatic Leagues, and Holy Roman Empires would now still be, and of what they could teach us.

Two instant things have made me think of this. The first is located about a thousand miles east of where I am. When Eastern and Central Europe broke away from the Soviet empire, it seemed logical to me--and, yes, I know that I can be demented--that their Visegrad group should arrange an area of preferential trade and defence for themselves. In the long run, this would have been a better way for Poland, the Czechs and Slovaks, the Hungarians, and the Ukrainians, as well as the Balkan states, to grow. The EU, which might have been counted on at one time to normalise states was too ready to assimmilate and transform, and in the transformation was the trap of the Euro, which I have never been convinced of. Like the Association of South East Asian Nations, the states were a better fit with near neighbours if they wanted to keep their soul, and anyway, the Council of Europe might maintain the new standards of human rights.

Well, it didn't happen. Instead, the EU and emigration became vehicles for neolibral transformation, and time appeared to move on. I put things down to my semi-thought out nostalgia for things like the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires and left it at that. The East did join NATO, and the EU (but not the euro) and no one could fault them for it.

But--lo--what light through yonder flatscreen breaks? Visegrad as a group is not only alive, but it has developed a defence capacity, which is independent of NATO,and gives every appearance of being a viable structure for when NATO and the EU fall apart. The Hapsburg lands are now, as they always were, in the grip of various competing sodalities and realms, but this new addition is intriguing.

The liberal world order is fraying in odd ways. My second surprise of the past few weeks was how a 'League of Princes' was emerging in the Middle East and North Africa, reaching out to those threatened by republicanism. Calculating that they can no longer rely on western allies, given the Arab Spring and their own gimlet-eyed assessment of western wealth, the Gulf Co-Ordination Committee has been extending links to Jordan, Tunisia and Morocco as possible partipants in their own organisation, which shelved its own single currency temporarily last year.

ASEAN, the GCC, and Visegrad--third, overlooked forces are emerging everywhere. You might almost call it a New-Old World Order. They're all locked into bigger units, which overlap, and draw their legitimacy from multiple places. If you want a common pattern, however, they all seem to have worked out what a lot of trouble the West is in. How many more people have worked out, our basically silly media aside, that we're on the edge of the abyss of debt, collapse and permanent disruption, and are laying their plans accordingly?

2011-05-10T10:18:00.006+01:00

In the Spirit of Twitter

I have received a comment from a 'David2' concerning one of the blogs that I drop by on from time to time. I thought that I would avoid the politics of petty personal destruction and put it up, as a courtesy to David. In the spirit of Mr Justice Eady (who is a good sport at Middle Temple Revels, or was the last time they let me past the door), I do like a robust and informed debate.

Ummm, you do know the comment on David Lindsay's **** that you ***** was ******, don't you? Lindsay is a ******** ***** at Durham and was totally ****************************. It got ************. Even **** ***** ran away. So Lindsay has to **** **** ******* on his blog. We got him sacked from The Telegraph blogs because ************ and had ***** *** *********** "Martin Miller" and "Stephen Alexander". Poor Lindsay gets ******* every time he ********. He wrote about ********** last week. He made ****** to ***************** for ************* and they respond with even more *****. ** ***** ***** ***** phone him up to congratulate him on his blog. He's an ***** ****** *******among Durham students.

2011-05-02T13:55:00.002+01:00

Ephesian 6:12, Job 14, Matthew 26:52

For those unlettered amongst you, the specific passages are;

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore, take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down; he fleeth, also as a shadow, and continueth not. And doth thou open thine eyes upon such a one, and bringest me into judgment with thee?

Then said Jesus unto him, Put up thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

I can understand vengeance. Should any of those I love be touched, I know that I would want revenge, and there is a moral calculus in the decision that is as old as time. Equally, states that embody their citizens, which I suppose the proper description of a Hobbesian republic such as the US can sometimes be under the sovereignty of the Law, can take on those wishes for revenge and divert them into justice. I also understand that some are warriors, that they are necessary for the defence of a free people, and that there are very dark things in the world, both within us and outside, that any civilisation has to struggle with.

I'm really not keen on assassinations though. They tend to blow back. One by definition has to have a capacity to commit them, which is deployable and which can be denied or finessed. They work in a secret world in which chains of command and scrutiny must be the loosest and most obscure things, they usually, in the sweep of history, unleash as many as, or more problems than, they solve, and they mean that free societies must especially be on their guard because we are most vulnerable to them.

That said, wars happen. Osama Bin Laden, with all his great wealth, took up a sword against the most successful and freest civilisation in history when it was writhing with power (even if I spend a good time observing how much of that is weakening and being mismanaged). He took decisions and financed operations that killed a great many people in that civilisation and elsewhere, and then he fled to a corrupt rogue state whose intelligence service or military--and, chillingly, it is more likely to be the hitherto reliable Pakistani military given that what happened was near Islamabad and not Rawalpindi--protected him. It appears that he lived until yesterday, when justice was visited upon him by soldiers and sailors who did not know, given what seems to have happened to their helicopter, whether they would make it alive out of their engagement zone. These were men braver than those who attacked the twin towers or the USS Cole, even if they were made of the same stuff. We still do brave, too.

He's not the only one to blame for our predicament. When he launched his attacks, the West was in surplus, the banks were barely two years into throwing our money into the abyss, and though the arcs of instability were full of tinder, major wars were not in place. Now, in part thanks to him, war and debt and a sort of political, partisan madness grip large parts of North America, Europe and Australia. I can't weep for him and I understand the crowds who are happy at what they see as justice. I won't 'celebrate death' because, well, he may have repented and anyway, judgment is God's. I worry what the blowback for this act will be, and I would rather have seen him on trial.

But Osama made war on the people of all sorts in the Praries and on the Plains and under the Canadian Shield; on the fields of France and the cliffs of England and the steppe, on the Alps and the Rockies, on the Australian desert and on the Atlantic main. He messed with Texans and Turks. He raged against free people and took our flabbiness for utter weakness, our spiritual corruption for a complete collapse of morals, and our narcissism and distraction for total idiocy, and he tried to murder other people's children and other people's parents, regardless of whether they were at war with him or not.

He seems to have paid the price of that--I'll wait for the DNA match to be made available to be sure--and if, I suppose, such a person, who chose to do awful things, has been sent to his Judgement, then today I am--what? glad? Content?

With Adolf, and Benny, and Tojo, and Boney, and the Kaiser, and the Caliph, and Genghis, and every single other one of our pretended conquerors, 'the Great King of Terror' has gone to the dust. I wonder if we can now stop being afraid, and if we can dismantle the terrors and the darkness within.

2011-04-24T13:23:00.003+01:00

Blogging on Blogging

Natalie Cecire, who works on modernism and the literature of science at Berkeley, as far as I can tell, has written a nice piece about blogging that is making me think. I thought that I would put it up here as part of the very occasional references I have made to smart, intriguing academic commnentary--something rare in the liberal tenure-track race, where jargon and a set of fliptop head attitudes are usually more important. There are still things I only dimly understand (I think), as in the quote 'eschewing anonymity is gendered not neutral' by which I think that she means that proper men ought to put their names to things and say things to people's faces. I always have done, anyway, whereas some of the anonymous cowards you meet on the web wouldn't dare in a month of Sundays.

I am assuming that no one else has paired Natalie with our fellow Doctor, Christopher North, but, then, why not? Dr North has a very consistent point that the main stream media and most of the borg world are not only misinformed but far more so than bloggers, as his general reporting on defence, or his latest coverage of the Bristol riots attest. I haven't bought a paper in years and wouldn't, now I know which monomaniacs with high standards to read on the web. By the way, Dr North is distinct from the other North, a eugenicst who writes for the liberal middle classes and their bloodlust.

Finally, in a different iteration of blogging, which seems somehow very English in its depth but limited scope, my blog-friend Martin has revamped his family history site. It's none of anyone's business, which of course is what makes it fascinating.

Happy Easter.

2011-04-20T08:48:00.003+01:00

Quagmire Days

For some time now, the culture of the West has been one of what Christopher Lasch would no doubt have called delusional narcissism. This has been created in part by our technology, which has liberated us from the limiting struggles that used to characterise everyday life for the majority, and in part by a welcome relief from the oppression of industrial society, in which people were bullied and coralled as much as they lived their lives. We've now raised two generations of children to adulthood in English speaking countries on the false prospect of liberation and self-realisation through debt, and we have torn up both the humanist and the Christian inheritance.

The consequences are all around us. They manifest not just as a lack of ethics, but as a lack of understanding about why people need to be ethical, and as an angry response rather than a wise or patient one to anything challenging.

So it comes down to this. We stumble around, unable to work out what is good or bad, being willingly lied to by media whilst we let the poor bear the burden of the rich. We allow the middle classes everywhere to become debt slaves whilst systematically undermining working people and branding their reaction to various schemes to 'skill' rather than educate, or to exterminate, rather than celebrate, or to exploit rather than employ, as beyond the pale. Bankrupt, we rain million pound bombs on someone else's civil war and create a quagmire, which we will no doubt abandon in time, if we have any sense. And a large part of our educated classes bow before fascism, whether in the form of the undutied rich or the Islamist poor. These are the wages of liberal societies, paid out grudgingly to people who work hard, try to raise families, and want to be good, in debased coin.

People are beginning to sense this. Across the West, the anger of working people is connecting with the economic condition of the middle classes in a way that is puzzling the media and political classes, whose obsessions and concerns are meeting with indifference. As we wait for the economic shoes to drop—and they will—those who want something different should start thinking about what sort of different world they would want after the crisis. I have been making this point for three or four years now, depending on when you separate my calliope rambles about the crash that I and others saw coming from the post-crash fantasies of what to do next. My list of practical things would be quite simple--

1) A flat tax on income, services, goods and profit with no loopholes and no allowances, and the rest to be kept by individuals
2) universal credit rather than welfare, and more prisons.
3) Small local banks and credit unions federated by guarantee, and investment banks that are separate which can do whatever they want
4) A national, distributed, multi-campus University system, and a privatised Russell Group
5) Social ownership of utilities and an end to the grossly wasteful private finance initiative
6) Referendums on the European Union and NATO, the independence of Scotland and Northern Ireland, and legislative devolution for London ; the elimination of two thirds of local council representatives
7) A draft rather than a professional army; more houses than bombs.
8) Parliamentary recall, primaries, and a second ballot or alternative vote
9) A voucher system for schools, or free academies, or grammar schools, and professional teachers rather than brainwashed and industrialised facilitators
10) The extension of the Human Rights act to large corporations

All of this is all very well, of course. It will get nowhere, however, unless we remoralise. I don't mean some 'whitebread' personal priggishness—we're all flawed and all human and all capable of sins of one sort or another, of which hypocrisy is the most civilised vice. I mean that we should stop lying in business and to each other as public men and women about politics and the state. Peak oil, and peak food, need just be challenges, not fatal. Abjure war; stare the economy and the society in the eye, and believe in ourselves and in God again. That's the only way out of this mess, which will otherwise continue in descent.

Think we'll take the opportunity? I live in hope....

2011-04-09T21:21:00.000+01:00

One Way to think of War and Churchill

2011-04-09T10:58:00.005+01:00

A Wilful Refusal To Learn

Jared Diamond once wrote that the West had achieved it's extraordinary success because it was never fully unified after Rome. Other multinational areas may have created vast Empires and zones of peace--I think that Iran and Russia have the most countries on their borders of all the countries of the earth, and the Chinese, the Moghuls and the Mauryans were almost cosmopolitan--but Europe cultivated disunity. I can understand this point. I mean by this not to convey any inflated respect for the Medieval, as is common amongst Catholics like myself. After all, we all imagine ourselves in history inside the palaces, whereas the bulk of people would have been living in ordure and dying of what are now, thanks to science, easily treatable conditions at an obscenely early age (unless they were women, in which case the likelihood is that the majority would be die of childbirth).

What I mean is that the West has, historically, had an incentive to be disputatious, expansionary and forgetful. Forgetting is one of our core strengths. Start a fight, win it, forget it. The Chinese may remember the Opium Wars, and the Middle East the Crusades, but most European peoples have barely a clue. The mechanisms which normally inculcate memory--traceable genealogy, tribalism, historical subordination, or the oral tradition of national history--are more or less lost on most of us. Truly democratic and excellent systems of education have never been the norm here. Though the Church remembers things, it has historically been in the interests of Rome to recast herself from time to time, and--from the Council of Trent to the Second Vatican Conference of the 1960s--to massage history a little, and let other things rest in the Secret Archives or the Holy Office. These are necessary things if you wish to survive, which is a core duty of the Holy See, after all.

So we forget. In the past thirty years, however, that process seems to have accelerated into something between mass stupidity and delusion on such a scale that the observer ends up wondering if some rich elite actually wanted this to happen. From top to bottom, we refuse now to remember and to think. Afghanistan is celebrating 'impossible' concerts, for instance, and 'unthinkable' gains; just like it was a couple of years ago, and a couple of years before that. Financial sages are studying a train crash, and celebrating the party in the latter carriages since only the front of the engine has gone over the cliff. Whatever excuse was given for the Libyan war last week differed from this week and will differ from the next. We stare at Japan and forget, or perhaps cannot comprehend, the hundreds and thousands of lives that are ruined. We debase science everytime someone mentions global warming.

In Britain, we ignore the insistent questions; what sort of a country is it that takes something as useful and efficient as the NHS and wants to sell it to foreigners; where members of parliament make small business almost impossible with tax regulations from which they exempt themselves; where public figures cannot tell the difference between debts and deficits, where everyone in power lies about Europe, about the voting system, about how welfare reforms will put the taxman in every bank account; where stagflation has a grip, the central bank is attempting to inflate away a vast debt, and where everyone is waiting for the economic shoe to drop?

It's a country with its head in its hands, and pods in its ears. Personally, I wonder if the education system should not just be rebooted; abolish GCSEs, reintroduce grammar schools run by the Russell Group, the Open University taking over the bottom fifty 'unis' and making them a distributed university--that sort of thing. We need to do something. People need to think more, and to rest on their own talents more. Lower, flatter taxes, more coal, more nuclear power, more mutual banks, fewer 'professionals' and more people on real jobs. Children need to be taught calculus and Latin not sex and truculent narcissism.

And we all need to wake up to the understanding that there is no money left. What there was was invented. Indeed, a good case can be made that the only liquid cash in the global boom of 1984-2005 was either skimmed from trade deficits or procured by the drug cartels, then washed through banks. We have, throughout the West, elevated a rich elite who refuse to pay taxes, and whose client media can drum up angry serfs at the drop of a hat, and then clothed them in forgetting whatever they do, whether it be stealing assets or destroying presidencies.

This has all got to stop. I am not convinced that it will, and it is almost as ferociously depressing to me that it happens as the realisation that I will either be pigeonholed as a cynic, a depressive, or a crank for pointing it all out. The image that these posts convey is not the one which I would wish. After all, I have enjoyed myself at the end of this particular Rome, I have good jobs which I love, and I have enough to be happy on, including the love of a passionate woman. I'm more than capable of standing on a station platform in the bright sun and enjoying everything, including the mixture of concrete acid and hot tarmac cinnamon that emerges from the heated stones. I just can't fail to note that no one else seems to 'get' how much later it is than they think.

Perhaps the fault is in myself; perhaps, in a lesson of the West, it is in their wilful forgetting that others will survive. There are necessary and unavoidable lessons heading this way, however, and people who hold themselves out as men and women of understanding would do well to get ready to learn.

POST SCRIPT: I do like Gerald Celente, and Max Keyser, though I know why people react as they do. On the other hand, someone certainly seems to have poked Grandpa with a stick here;

2011-03-31T22:51:00.000+01:00

War Songs
No reason.

2011-03-27T11:58:00.002+01:00

The Half a Million March

I happened to be at St Pancras yesterday, beneath its beautiful roof, heading out as the trains carrying protestors moved in. It is my favourite railway station in this hemisphere, as I like Grand Central and Union station more, and the Gare du Nord and Venezia only slightly less. The atmosphere was far less angry than people had a right to be, given how comprehensively shafted the country is; I saw families, fathers and children, and people of all ages, heading towards central London.

I suppose that this is the point where one normally slips some mealy-mouthed condemnation of anarchists and troublemakers and the mob into the mix. This I find curious. On the one hand, people who think of themselves as radicals and democrats seem to believe that any movement at any time which resulted in change in the common law countries was peaceful and nothing to do with the 'thugs'. On the other, those who eagerly embrace police violence and who have fevered fantasies of shooting union members, blacks, homosexuals, or public servants at the first sign of trouble, never seem to want to be exchanged in that coin.

The truth is that most forms of secular freedom have been won through violence or war, in contrast to the gains when people sacrifice themselves for law, or when Christ gave himself up to secular power for our spiritual salvation. Governments routinely ignore people who cannot blow things up, smash things, break things, or run up police overtime bills, unless they ask for things that do not matter.

The vote was won on the back of martyrs, the right to strike in bitter labour disputes, and independence from Empires on the back of directed violence. I admire Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but without Jinnah, Nehru, the threat of Chandra Bose or Malcolm X and Bull Connor, the argument for tea and sympathy and bugger all else would have been overwhelming.

I wish that things were different. They are not, however. The interesting thing to me is how very few people seem to be connecting with what must surely be the main elements of the present situation. Bankers set up ephemeral products backed by real money, academic prostitution and greed. The media then instructed politicians to drive a frightened and malleable populace, drunk on credit and the illusion of housing, into the condemnation of anyone who dissented on the left or right. The firm places upon which people could stand--social trust, faith, and proper education--were liquidated. Mutualism was undermined.

We are now saddled with states which are machines for war, the privatisation of profit and the socialisation of debt and regular, peculiar iterations of satanism, aided and abetted by people who have more or less sold themselves at every level.

Neuroses arise when people avoid something which causes them trauma, but fixate on something that reminds them of it. That's why immigration, and the exaggerated fear of Islamism, and the EU seem to gain an edge--not that those things don't have real consequences in themselves, they do. However, if you fear that you and your country is no longer sovereign, that you cannot connect to others, and that those elsewhere who are more disciplined and patient than you are doing better, what are you to do but fixate? I'd prefer that notion to the idea that peoples' moods have something to do with sunspots.

Britain at the moment, and the West in general, gives out every signal of being in a stage of dissolution which could be epic in its consequences. We have abandoned ethics, proper parenting, reason and faith in very large part, and particularly amongst those who consider themselves clever, or who have property and therefore social position, or those who run the place. The new Middle Ages--a sort of bastard medievalism in which overlapping powers and organisations knock people from side to side and demean their moral integrity as persons--have hit this place particularly hard.

When I heard those groups coming into London yesterday, I thought more of the start of the dark ages than the end. It wasn't them it was the situation, though of course I am from time to time the sort of Irish Catholic who can't be doing with all this 'limited protest' stuff anyway. All or nothing really.

Yet there are more sensible ways out, and they are not so subtle or so obscure as to be invisible--far from it. Nor do they require much in the way of lower living standards than we are going to get. We need a new mutualism, which recognises that credit unions and building societies are better than big banks. We need housing for people, and not investments. We need lots of coal and nuclear power. We need lower, flatter taxes and far less intrusive and ambitious governments. We need regular, practised democracy, with a break-up of the political and media classes. We need proper education. We need multi-speed supranational institutions. We need to systematically reform intelligence agencies and the arms industry. We probably need realistic health insurance rather than state provision, and private or local universities and schools that offer vocational or academic places but not both. We need cooperatives in the place of oligopolies. We need family-friendly and person-centred politics. We need to stop using machines to kill people so easily whilst preening on the death--whether because of abortion, euthanasia or war. But above all, we need ethics and faith, in ourselves and in whatever you want to call God.

The question is becoming simpler and simpler. If we do not change, in the face of peak oil, the elite rule of supranationalism as it is constituted, and food crisis, then we will be trapped in a sort of hellish recurrence. The same things happen over and over again while the world for our fellow citizens spirals down and down.

Practically, we have been living in a fool's paradise for a long time, and now, people cannot pay the bills, cannot afford their transport, cannot afford to eat in many cases, and are constantly made to fear things that add to their real fears. We are lied to because we lie to ourselves, and we embrace corruption at the drop of a hat. Yesterday, united under the banner of an alternative no one articulated, we saw a little of the shape of things to come.

I think that we as a people, as humanity, have a longer way down before we wake up. I wish that we would just face up to what we really have to do and do it. When is too late?

2011-03-22T19:49:00.002Z

For My Aunt

Patrick Mulvey has this up on his site, and I loved it, so, with a hat tip to him (and a cheeky change to the other Paddy Reilly) here's Come home Paddy Reilly to Ballyjamesduff. Lovely tune, that.

2011-03-22T17:17:00.002Z

Chilean Readers Get Their Papers Quicker

Though Goodness knows how. Courtesy of Martin in the Margins on Facebook, here is a bicycle race 'with a difference' from Chile which I have been cheered up on a long day by.

VCA 2010 RACE RUN from changoman on Vimeo.

2011-03-21T23:16:00.005Z

So I held to the Cross, after all....

I despise war. I think that, in a fallen world, people must sadly prepare for it, but only to keep out. Like many, I wish that people of reason and strength would not embrace it, but human beings are flawed and some want the badness and some want to fight it. Indeed, there are times when men must fight. Just not for the sake of it, or all at once.

Many of my instinctive rejections of what is going on in Libya right now are, probably, illegitimate. The bombs which we are using cost a great deal, and the aeroplanes we are using to drop them on the sons of others cost more. A raid with stormshadows using three laden aeroplanes yesterday, as far as I can gauge, cost as much as a small hospital. But it is no objection to war to point to the cost of murdering others as the reason not to do it. Money is very rarely the measure of anything, and certainly not the reason to allow those brave rebels their death.

Human history is a tale of badness. To embrace the darkness because it is there is, well, to sail by a very chilling star and to go the way things always went. Romans, Persians, people from Empires of which you and I have never heard, all made order by throwing stones or stones on arrows or stones on chemicals or stones on fire on people. This will go on and on until people stop. To buy some people a few more years, and to further our own interests, that is what we are doing now.

This war as constituted is also not illegal, at least in the United Nations. The last best hope of man, riddled with our hypocrisies and contradictions, demands a world of law, but law was built on lawgivers. Liberals say, 'Either we have a kind of international state, minimal as it may be, or we have anarchy and worse'. In a real way, they are right. Chapter 7 of the UN Charter is a high aspiration. It allows for the international community to uphold law, and to pursue the proud whilst sparing the humble. In this, it is true to its Imperial British origins. Those people long ago thought of their sundry emendments to their rapine peace like that, and in truth, to spare the humble is to take on the proud. Pride is a very sinful thing.

I also know that the argument that this is an Arab civil war and an Arab fight is a dubious one; but no more than that which holds that the Vietnamese Civil War or the Irish or the American one was theirs to win and intervention would have lost their futures now passed. Things are complicated. We are humans, after all. We breathe and live, and Gibran and Kennedy went into the dust that makes democrats of us all, together, poet and King. Not to take sides is in itself, as others have pointed out, a positive act.

But.

I can't do it. I can't embrace the idea of a Blitz to keep our concentration camps of refugees and our oil safe, our arms contracts secure. I cannot embrace massive direct interference in the fight of other men to be free even though I know that they are, otherwise, hopelessly outgunned, without making a mockery of the living God whose love and person and life gives me meaning.

I'm a member of the Bar and I spent a great deal of time in a seat of learning too. I know about bullshit. But here is the thing. I mean all that when I embrace the cross. I can believe in the brotherhood and sisterhood of man, and the melding of love and reason and the bona fides of the good liberals and conservatives and others who are friends of mine who embrace what is going on in Libya in good conscience.

My God was nailed to a tree by power seeking order and by all the base things that go on in a human heart and a calculating mind and the only blood price he asked was my own and that of any other real believer. I fall, I get angry, I have hit out in my life. But Christ's blood washes and saves me. I have very little anger anymore.

That said, you can take this war and shove it, because I am going to cling to the cross and the resurrection and salvation and passion that are bound up in it and which it represents. Those bombs in the desert will one day be a memory. Your soul and mine will not, and in the winds now blowing we all just have to hang on to the timeless things that make us not afraid, of ourselves or the reactions of others or of bad men.

I
hate
pointless
war.

2011-03-17T13:37:00.006Z

A Nephew on St Patrick's Day
My lovely little sister has gone to the hospital to have a baby on St Patrick's Day. Good luck in there Katie. Here's a song from Grandad, who is no doubt watchingxxx

2011-03-09T13:16:00.004Z

Since I have been away....

The government here has been trying to involve itself in an Arab civil war without the troops, or weapons, or means, and armchair generals have touted a 'no-fly' zone without quite understanding what that means about preliminary strikes on air defences and over 500 Libyan aircraft; a weird 'common law' rebellion against Magistrates' Courts has got going in the North West; a New Jersey politician has beaten a supercomputer (I wonder how George Cayley would have done); a new form of social security which will necessitate taxmen in everyone's bank account has been brought in; an Irish businessman has decided that democracy as it has been conceived is dead (and Eamon Gilmore has thrown away the chance to lead a genuine Irish opposition, which means that Fianna Fail will come back, insh'allah); and Egyptians have started behaving like Romans. It is funny how Americans since Dallas, or Ike, have been Praetorian, but Muslims across Asia and the Maghreb have behaved like the children of the Dominate.

Oh, and the Chinese have worked out that the West is Christendom and Christendom is the West; the short cultural suicide (and aborticide) since the sixties will at least not end without that revelation. Peak oil is back (and mainstream), speculators are partying like it's 2008 (which in some ways it is) and Her Majesty's constabulary are feeling bullied.

Almost by the day, some new staggering lack of awareness emanates from the political class, away there in fairyland, and from their fellow travellers in minor universities and the more mediocre of the legal profession. Today's plan is to destroy small business owners who want to sell me the occasional lucky strike or packet of American Spirit.

The ride down is going to be madder than I had anticipated. Hope you are all well. I've been extraordinarily busy lately, but have been missing blogging and wanted to return properly at some point. Such is the way of the world, though, I want remaining debts as low as possible and the cupboard as full of necessities as I can make it before the real volatility starts. I'll be back properly soon, but am all over facebook and twitter if anyone fancies a chat.

2011-02-13T23:49:00.004Z

Two Songs for Valentine's Day

The first, for reasons of my own, is a song which reminds me very much of the first time I landed in Baltimore, and the second of nightshifts in a Corby warehouse just after I finished my undergraduate exams at Oxford. I was living with my grandfather and earning money on Sainsbury's one-hand-distant agency shilling. In those days, the feeling when I got home just before sunrise and took those steel capped boots off was unbelievably sensual. Mad, that.

The video of the second, by the way, is capable of being bizarrely poignant--a song dedicated to a dead army comrade through a demonstration of ice skating set to music of a different sort of love. Petrenko really deserves credit for doing it. Words fail me, but he does dance well.

I love being human. I hope that you are in love, wherever you are. Blogging will be light again, this week, as I am off out to a very fine but homely French place tomorrow and working my socks off for the rest of the week.

Oh, ps, for any young men reading-If you, as I was, are forgetful and a little clumsy, may I perhaps recommend that you steal the Rosetti poem below and present it on being asked for the date upon which you first met the current or forever love of your life. I remember situations, clothes, looks of those women I have known exactly, but almost never dates and times and the sort of things that constitute proof. Whilst I am at it, Yeat's embroidered cloths of heaven, which I used to deploy romantically, is a bit hackneyed for a man of my jaded age, though if you are younger I strongly suggest that you memorise it and learn where Vega and the Pleiades are. Point them out. Any women like that. I remember once, and it is too long a story to say why, ending up sitting on a mobile veterinary van in a tough part of North Carolina sinking bourbons with a lesbian trucker film director and her lawyer girlfriend, and picking out stars whilst chatting about the world at midnight; it was a real bonding moment, and I got to share their couch with a very friendly pit bull until I got a nicer place elsewhere. I got called civilised too. This, too, could happen to you.

Really, the rewards of impressing women, sometimes by pretending not to care, are well worth the effort, even if your love lasts days. There is a reason Liberty, Peace and wisdom are all usually depicted as women. Get loved. Sex is fun, and absurd, and will make a fool of anyone, but love is better and the secret of the universe. Its the best advice anyone could possibly give.

I wish I could remember that first day,
First hour, first moment of your meeting me,
If bright or dim the season, it might be
Summer or Winter for aught that I can say;
So unrecorded did it slip away,
So blind was I to see and to foresee,
So dull to mark the budding of my tree
That would not blossom yet for many a May.
If only I could recollect it, such
A day of days! I let it come and go
As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow;
It seemed to mean so little, meant so much;
If only now I could recall that touch,
First touch of hand in hand.--Did one but know!

2011-02-13T22:38:00.004Z

Astounding News

I am shocked--shocked--that wikileaks cables are suggesting that Saudi Arabia has overstated its oil supplies and may be in or near peak oil. That sort of mixture of hearsay and delusion belongs on the more obscure fringes of the blogosphere. I would give all the references to myself, but as Voltaire said, to be a bore is to explain everything in detail.

That's my story and I am sticking to it. At least the Sudans, Iraq, North Africa and central asia, as well as Siberia and Alaska are about to increase their production in some last desperate drive. That's what I hear, anyway.

It must have been news like this that gave Mr Mubarak the 'stroke' everyone is talking about, but at least it has for now kept him off his exploding aeroplane.

Here is a selection of other people in similar states of choqueitude

2011-02-12T07:37:00.006Z

Two Pictures from Space

Aren't those Sputnik things great? I mean, here are two nebular mysteries, onto which those projecting the future have drawn star signs and from which they have pronounced all sorts of predictions. They're so strange. We have nothing like them on planet West, except in Serbia, Luton and Whitehall and places like that.

Tahrir Square in Egypt, and Azadi Square in Iran, looked to me like two different locations in more than the geographical sense on February 11 2010. It's amazing how many people from all sides of the political spectrum will tell you that these images in fact show multiply similar things, although whether you believe that Iran leads to Egypt or Egypt leads to Iran seems to depend on where in the US your mind lives. At the moment.

2011-02-09T00:31:00.003Z

Plenty Tough People

Sitting here at night, on pinot noir and flu pills after a long day, I found myself watching the news conference which State Premier Anna Bligh and Prime Minister Julia Gillard gave in Australia during Queensland's latest tribulation. I was struck by the steel efficiency of it all, and the calm voice of a great strong people. I get very sentimental about Australia, for no good reason at all.

Anyway, I am not going to inflict my usual Sydney Olympics 'Advance Australia Fair' version. Here is a different one, by a classically trained pianist who ended up in a pop group. Condi Rice, I suppose, could have too, but well, you take a wrong turn here and there in life, and there is no going back.

Anyway, decent tough working people with hearts of gold. That's my Australian prejudice tonight, and here is the requisite aspirational film, which I found genuinely moving. It is odd what these pills will do....

2011-02-07T08:03:00.007Z

Cuba, Egypt, and Men with Beards

The United States Media, who are in a sort of push-me pull-you relationship with that country's establishment (others might compare it to those strange friendships found in prisons or amongst Spartans) have been agitating for the world power to 'do something' about the revolt in Egypt for some time now. Sage heads have nodded, and last night, a reasonably large force of Marines seems to have been despatched, complemented by the carrier group led by the Enterprise. The President has said serious things about full and fair elections, and the intelligence chief has been touted as the inescapable man just as the Egyptian Army have moved to secure pipelines and quietly arrest agitators.

This is a far cry from 1989, of course. I look at what is happening, or rather, that is all I can do, unlike some of my former students, who are in the thick of things, and I think 'I hope that this does not turn into another Cuba'.

Cuba as a cipher for the modern American state's nightmares seems apt. Remember, Fidel Castro (a former baseball hopeful) first appeared on TV in America in 1957; he went so far as to tour the States, and employed a major public relations firm there in 1959 and 1960. Though he displaced a client dictator out of whom many in America did well, he at first was concerned to reach out to the Eisenhower administration and American public opinion in general. In part he succeeded with the public, and was popular at first, but was loathed in the executive and legislative branches.

His assurances may have been the workings of a duplicitous mind, given his subsequent behaviour, or genuine. In any event, the overtures were met with several concurrent plans for his assassination, begun by Richard Nixon, Frank Wister, Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell and Richard Helms. These were and carried on by the Kennedys upon arrival in office fifty years ago.

They all failed. That which many liberal Americans claimed to want--a Cuba that actually represented its people--brought the world to the brink of atomic war, and became communist, in very short order. At the back of those strategic minds who remember must be the concern that, well, maybe Castro could have been captured for the West, had America not been so anticommunist from the outset. I think that sort of addled thinking may well be leading people to wonder if they cannot bring in the Muslim Brotherhood to any new Egypt--an inclusion about as useful as bringing Hitler into the Weimar cabinet, to any other mind.

Perhaps the spectre of another fifty year crisis concentrates minds. Certainly, the Cuban imbroglio led directly, as far as I can tell, to the strengthening of the forces which ended the most hopeful presidency of the twentieth century.

Perhaps other worries are present. In 2005, Al-Qaeda's long term strategy documents came to light. There is some sense in calling them strategic plans, though I suppose in truth they had something more of the chancer's eye for a route through difficulty about them. They had been written, apparently, by an Egyptian, now believed by many to be hiding in Iran following a tour of duty in Afghanistan and a career which began in the murder of Anwar Sadat. The documents purported to chart a course for the Base that would stretch into 2020. In 2010-12, as the fourth phase of a seven-part plan, they had pencilled in 'cyber terrorism, assaults on oil supplies, and the destruction of Arab governments, particularly in North Africa'. Little else of their plan--the third phase destabilisation of Syria, for instance, or their pre-surge hopes for an Iraqi collapse, seem to have come about, but, well, coincidences in international politics are interesting.

Egypt is full of ghosts, not the least of which is Al-Libi, I suppose. He was the Libyan who, under torture in Egypt, (under the practiced eye of Omar Suleiman) confessed to the American authorities his knowledge of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Later, he sought to recant. He died in a Libyan prison, apparently of multiple explanations.

Like Batista, Mubarak knows a lot about what the United States has suffered to be done. Like America, he is probably haunted by his ghosts too. I hope that they keep him awake at night. The suspicion must arise that they, and the memory of numerous other last times, are more likely to keep the old man in power this time than not; no more Batistas, or Shahs, if the CIA can help it.

2011-02-04T10:10:00.002Z

To Lost Commentators

I've had an email or two about my absence--I'm just working very hard--but also, about the criticism policy on this blog and in my head. Let me make it clear (best Richard Nixon voice); people whom I like can say exactly what they like, and I really don't mind criticism. I have an Irish mother and love her dearly, and a Korean girlfriend, whom I love, and I am scared of both of them appropriately. These facts more or less demonstrate that if I was precious I'd be six feet under.

Secondly, if you do have a go, I'll have a go back but I love you all really and will do so with a smile--God loves opinions, after all, since he made so many of them!

Thirdly, if I really didn't like you, you wouldn't be on here. I am not a liberal person.

Normal service resumes shortly.

2011-01-30T17:20:00.008Z

Blair; Wannabe or Lookalikey?

I know that her Britannic Majesty's Former First Lord of the Treasury is, shall we say, a little non grata around these parts at the minute. He's seen in this country rarely enough for some to call into question his resident tax status, and even then there's usually a Judge and a couple of my learned friends in front of him. Such, Marcus Aurelius would sigh into his ear, is the life of an ex-Emperor.

But, well, really--what is he doing impersonating the Majority Leader of the Pennsylvania House, under the name of Mike Turzai (pictured)? Having regretted that Britain is 'too small' for his ambitions, has he really dropped us for Harrisburg? For Harrisburg?

2011-01-28T22:30:00.009Z

For Brave People Standing and Dying Like Men for Freedom Tonight

Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate;
va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli,
ove olezzano tepide e molli
l'aure dolci del suolo natal!

Del Giordano le rive saluta,
di Sionne le torri atterrate...
Oh mia patria sì bella e perduta!
Oh membranza sì cara e fatal!

Arpa d'or dei fatidici vati,
perché muta dal salice pendi?
Le memorie nel petto raccendi,
ci favella del tempo che fu!

O simile di Sòlima ai fati
traggi un suono di crudo lamento,
o t'ispiri il Signore un concento
che ne infonda al patire virtù.

Odd things are happening in the partner countries of NATO's Mediterranean Dialogue tonight as they have been for some days past. I can't get the man in Cairo who told the BBC on the telephone that he was prepared to die like a man for his boy and his freedom out of my mind. I thought of the best of Ireland, of my grandfather, and of various songs. Such are my middlebrow references, I couldn't help but think of Nana Mouskouri, sing Je Chante Avec Toi Liberte to Verdi's Nabucco, and a mad seventies' childhood's Fernando, and of the Freedom song.

Verdi, in particular, produced the song of the fleeing slaves at a time of deep personal devastation and in memory of those who have, over the centuries, fled Egypt in the hope that they could live. What would happen, I always wondered, if people did not run? We all die, I suppose.

It's an almost funny thought, but not really when you think of the obvious associations, that that song of the running slaves was the only encore the New York Met would ever allow, according to cliche and legend. You know, New York City, Cairo, heartstrings, all that....

All self indulgence, of course, but I'd defy any heart to read of people guarding each other's churches and mosques and walking into the fire to be free, and not be moved. I'm very conscious that I spent the day, after a sleepless night, in much different circumstances and can think the way I do because I wasn't spending my time facing down some hired thug who was out to earn his bread by bashing my brains in. I did see a bike go under a car as I walked home, though--I and another man checked to see if things were alright, and they were, and then slipped away as someone mentioned the word 'witness'.

There was no fear of any Imperial entanglements, as Obi Wan would have said anyway. I saw two vans of the Metropolitan Commissioner's finest (kitted out in full riot shielding) look the other way as they drove past, almost certainly accidentally. It was a cold night and then end of a shift, and most things are best done without interference from the law.

All worked itself out, but how quick are the seconds in which lives can be changed, or lost! It sharpens the senses to see people almost die near where you live. I wonder if that thought occurred to people as prayers finished today and they moved their leg towards the crowd and their voice towards the leap that might free them earlier today.

Anyway, when all this drives up oil prices, starts an Arab Civil War, and gives mad Islamists an entry whilst drawing together badness at our lifelines in the oil and gas of the Maghreb, I may not sing quite the same tune.

As it is, I have to admire those young people at the Egyptian State's door tonight. Egypt's repression of its Muslim men was the ground zero of Islamism; an act of vicious inhumanity that sowed the wind, more than half a century ago. How odd it is that a place where Moses walked and Napoleon played and Joseph and Mary wept should return such a reward.

I just hope that now, here, its people are showing what real liberty, frightening and beautiful in its aspect, can mean.

So what, then? Victor Laszlo at Rick's Bar would be overblown, even by my histrionic standards. But the bloody song of the Free French? I suppose that it is worth a punt tonight. I have some good old young students in Cairo, whom I used to teach. These must be amongst the highest days that they have ever lived.

2011-01-23T11:52:00.007Z

Told You So

I was having a snarfle through old posts this morning, and this one from June 23 2008 sprang out. I know that this blog has about five readers, and that two of them may be in a coma of one sort or another, but, well, don't say that the writing wasn't on the wall;

Join the Dots

Many thanks to the oil drum for doing what the mainstream media are not, and keeping an eye on Saudi oil promises.

On August 11 2004, Saudi Arabia promised to increase oil production to 9.3 million barrels per day, for the foreseeable future, and then to increase production further.

On April 26, 2005, the Saudi government promised to increase oil production to 12.5 million barrels per day.

On July 31, 2007, they were back, promising an increase again--but this time, to only 10.8 million barrels per day, which they should have reached anyway.

And today's great promise of an increase? to 9.2 million barrels per day.

How much oil does anyone realistically think they have left at viable prices?

Two years ago, the writing was on the wall. It was written by a combination of food and oil price increases because of peak oil, combined with a falling off in money markets, and a vast global overhang of capital. It said that these things would lead to stagflation and monetary crisis.

Very few people read and learned outside of the blogosphere.

One year ago, it was very clear that the combination of Islamism and demographic instability in the world could be intelligently and systematically combatted. The effort would involve attempts to spark Islamic reformation, promote thinkers like Father Koerner and Gulen in Turkey, and to withdraw from vast wastes of time, energy and blood in middle eastern wars whilst using intelligence agencies, military power, and trade wisely.

Nobody in power listened. Even George Bush's former man in the Sudan has published a piece in Foreign affairs this month crying out for someone to learn.

Today, it is fairly obvious that global warming as a consequence of man-made carbon is fairly unstable, unsure science, and that new, decentralised energy production, distributed systems of local food production, and the emergence of a new argument for social ownership, the limitation of profit, and much more limited, democratic, even libertarian government is vital.

These simple facts will challenge almost all of our self-styled 'political', 'left-wing', 'green' and 'compassionate' politicians and commentators. So most of them are not listening.

It is also fairly obvious that, although our technology may be able to save us from what is coming, it won't save us from a global slump. It will not save us from a war of choice in Iran. It will not save us from the break-up of the euro.

Nor will we be saved by the inevitable increases in pathological, useless, security measures as states become more fearful, and central banks more dependent upon the diminishing mirage of their own control of interest rates.

We will not be saved from the collapse of bee populations. That may seem a silly point, but without them there is no agriculture that can feed us properly. Here's a link on that latter note to the celcias site, some of which I disagree with but which you might take a look at.

We will only be saved by our reason, and by whatever it is that makes us love.

The age of oil is in descent. The sounds you are going to hear over the next few years are no longer the drums of avoidable, beatable armies of difficulty over the horizon. The armies are here. The sounds you will hear are and will be the sounds of empires falling.

Respect for community institutions and proper religions must be refounded and the west must begin to adjust to a new phase of accelerating decline which will not only return the world to Asia, where its wealth was before imperialism, but also will require great ingenuity and determination from us all just to survive.

How many people do you think are listening to that?

In 2011, controversy is raging in the oil world about whether Saudi production is 8.5 or 8.6 million bpd.

and no, awareness does not extend to the spelling....

2011-01-15T12:18:00.002Z

Because There's Still Hope....

I love Merle Haggard songs, and have previously put up the Seashores of Old Mexico. This one occurred to me today though. When you contemplate how deep the real recession still is for workers and the middle classes on both sides of the Atlantic--who have suffered the worst decline in purchasing power and wages since the Great Depression--it might be easy to just give in.

Equally, rising oil and food prices, the flood of QE into paper derivative markets, and the takeover of the western Treasuries by the banks and corporate world, disguised as a sovereign debt crisis, might make one despair. There are wars and plagues all over the place and the sky is dark with Damoclean swords.

But then again, all one needs in moments like that is a bike ride and a spot of Merle, and all is resolved. Things will get worse before they get better, but there is no need to wallow in despair; you and me, reader, will ride between the blades and raindrops. Good luck!

2011-01-13T13:19:00.004Z

The Sort of New Orleans Gospel Song one does not often hear.....

I found this yesterday whilst looking for a theme tune for La Palin's 'blood libel/sippenhaft' gabble. Arty Semite likes it, Generation x Yiddishe Mamme says that evil has never sounded so good (though the Horst Wessel Song's obscene corruption of My God, How Great Thou Art is memorable), Crimes Against Music lists it and Hound Blog has a recording. I wish I could see the reactions of people when they see this blog sometimes. Take it away, Sister Albertha Lewis Harris.*

*A Protestant lady, for the avoidance of doubt.

2011-01-10T13:20:00.011Z

Six Terrorists Inspired By Glenn Beck and Fox News

This link to business net further illustrates yesterday's conversation. The people named killed Six Americans and injured seven more and directly cited Fox and Beck as explanations for their motivation. Words have consequences.

UPDATE: 'Gobsmacked'.

Apparently, only Muslims in imaginary mosques in New York, and Islam in general, create a climate of fear and division in which people may be encouraged to identify enemies where others see human beings* (alternatively, if you are on the left, 'sexist' speech is really a form of rape). It's beginning to look, as I suggested it might the other day, that this isn't directly true of what happened in Arizona the other day; rather, a fatal combination of drug use, guns and schizophrenia may well be to blame. Chalk another massacre up to marijuana, the cuddly brain surgery of choice for bourgeois youth.

However, if you are the Junior High school bully and patented 'mean girl' of politics, anyone questioning the demented violence of your language and your determination to divide, whilst being ignorant, is guilty of a 'blood libel'. Apparently.

So, well, whew, Sorry for the old antisemitism there in criticising a Republican more than a Democrat. I wouldn't be the first Irish Catholic to have to apologise for it, after all.

I hope Gabrielle Giffords is recovering, and I'm sorry for the other victims, and I hope that people in her synagogue are not too offended by the former Governor of Alaska. See, if a Christian person rather than one of her neocon boosters had written that no-responsibility statement (since I assume that someone other than the Great She did), I'm sure that La Palin would have been traducing the cross to which bad liberals were doubtless trying to affix her rather than raising Medieval terms best left buried--yea, even in the medium of song.

Perhaps we should all just stop stoning Sarah and just move on like good little burning Buddhists. I mean, Holy Cow, lets give Christian tolerance the Big Mo.

*Apparently, Muslim religious profiling at airports and transportation hubs is alright, presumably because some constitutional amendments and rights matter much more than others. Glad that one has been cleared up!

2011-01-09T12:08:00.003Z

Gabrielle Giffords on Violent Political Rhetoric

Words have consequences, as Ms Giffords reminded Ms Palin last year.

2011-01-08T23:07:00.014Z

Because American Politics is Not Just A Game

There are, and always have been, very dark energies swirling around the politics of the republic. Those who seek to lead it, and who have deserved to, have in the past understood that. The narcissistic culture of the past forty years, though marked by sentimental emotionalism about the sundry and disastrous assassinations for which it was responsible, has never really got the point. I think that the boomers understand the darkness, but that they get off on it. From Oswald to Oklahoma, the other side was always to blame, and badness was in some way, way cool.

Many people are dropping the Giffords shooting at Sarah Palin's door tonight. Fox News understands this, which is presumably why they were going around suggesting that the gunman, Jared Loughner, may have been an illegal immigrant before anyone knew anything. They are now suggesting that, like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber, he is some kind of deluded libertarian in terms which suggest that he is actually the form of antifederalist whom they and the GOP in general have been courting for some time. Move along folks, nothing to see here but the pigeonhole. I almost feel sorry for the mob, since, well, many of their concerns are legitimate. The danger of taking on 'Washington' though is that they and their fellow travellers notice, set you up, corrupt you, or blame you when it is convenient, especially if you idealise the simple rustic stupidity of your ideal. This is what happens in empires.

On the left, an attempted massacre including someone whom the American media care about, as well as five others, perpetrated by an anti-Washington person, may seem like Oklahoma come early. Some are rather shamefully already behaving as though the ferociously destructive terrorist attack which rebooted Bill Clinton and hobbled Newt Gingrich has come round again. The more shameless of the right have to be hoping that he was high, or that Janet Napolitano released him from some federal programme, or that a teacher was to blame.

Both sides will misbehave, feeling no shame in doing so, in the coming days. Some already are doing so. It's not surprising. The left and right understand the blame game which is coming. After all, both understand that the conveniently named-and-isolated Tea Party are Jacksonians, though conservative Democrats and a good part of the GOP fear that people will understand that they usually pretend to be as well. Life was cheap for General Jackson when those living it disagreed with him.

I would make one point; there is absolutely no real evidence for the motivations of the maniac with the automatic weapon who opened fire in Arizona; there is as yet no clear news story detailing the facts; names and backgrounds have not been made clear; and there has been no trial.

In those circumstances, people should refrain from attempting to shove the picture accompanying this post down Sarah Palin's throat, and remember that the only way the west proceeds in the economic crisis which we are in is for people of goodwill to push aside those of badwill, in order to get through the vast cultural and economic challenge which is opening up over us, every day, wider and wider.

If evidence does emerge that Palin's posters, rhetoric, campaign style, or shallow high school sub-fireeater politics of division had anything to do with what happened, that sarahpac image at the top of this post should be plastered over every single Palin 2012 site until people move on into tomorrow.

Until then, I suggest that everyone just pray for the victims of this tragedy and their loved ones.

UPDATE: A reminder of just where rhetoric was going-beyond Palin and beyond the Pale--here. Some Americans are armed at the minute, many are under severe economic and personal stress, and the human being at the centre of politics is in many cases being forced to acknowledge the mismatch between the promise of American life and their circumstances. In such situations, people should not be stirring snake oil and threats into the body politic.

UPDATE TWO: There are some very interesting comments over at salon, including this one from the New York Times via 'Betzee';

What’s different about this moment is the emergence of a political culture — on blogs and Twitter and cable television — that so loudly and readily reinforces the dark visions of political extremists, often for profit or political gain. It wasn’t clear Saturday whether the alleged shooter in Tucson was motivated by any real political philosophy or by voices in his head, or perhaps by both. But it’s hard not to think he was at least partly influenced by a debate that often seems to conflate philosophical disagreement with some kind of political Armageddon.

The problem here doesn’t lie with the activists like most of those who populate the Tea Parties, ordinary citizens who are doing what citizens are supposed to do — engaging in a conversation about the direction of the country. Rather, the problem would seem to rest with the political leaders who pander to the margins of the margins, employing whatever words seem likely to win them contributions or TV time, with little regard for the consequences.

Consider the comments of Sharron Angle, the Tea Party favorite who unsuccessfully ran against Harry Reid for the Senate in Nevada last year. She talked about “domestic enemies” in the Congress and said, “I hope we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies.” Then there’s Rick Barber, a Republican who lost his primary in a Congressional race in Alabama, but not before airing an ad in which someone dressed as George Washington listened to an attack on the Obama agenda and gravely proclaimed, “Gather your armies.”

I'm in two minds about the wider point, or, rather, I can see emotionally that most republics worth the name are ones in which the governors are more afraid of the governed than vice versa. Rationally, however--and in the face of what has happened in Arizona, as an example--I am not impressed with that tradition at all. What criteria should be applied to politics before violence can be sanctioned, if it ever can? As I write, of course, thousands of people in the Sudan diaspora, and many more in Sudan, are attempting to solve a brutal civil war with a referendum.....

2011-01-08T00:20:00.001Z

Well, I like it.

Normal blogging will be resumed soon, but in the meantime, here is a video of the Lion Pope to keep you amused.

2011-01-06T09:24:00.002Z

Quite Endearing, Really....

2011-01-05T21:48:00.004Z

McAlpine's Fusiliers

For every emigrant who ever had to go somewhere else and build stuff for money...and because I am avoiding doing the pile of work in front of me. You could never have said that of a 'Navvy', which for American readers is a British industrial word for the sort of good tough madmen who in other places became US Marines.

2011-01-05T21:20:00.011Z

Bird Deaths, Earthquakes and a Mischievous Spot of Totally unreferenceable stirring....

I have absolutely no evidence for the correlation which you may choose to identify between the map of apparently random mass animal deaths (this January's 'silly season' story) and the map of earthquake fault zones.

In the depths of the last Depression, when 'prosperity was just around the corner' and the economy had of course, according to every whitebeard, 'rebounded', the Loch Ness Monster was invented, completely coincidentally by the Daily Mail. Quite a few people made a lot of money out of that. I've seen how much money can be made out of rubbish like global warming too.

So, if you fancy sending me some money so that I can study the link between these two maps in, for example, different colours, or with a wider variety of statistical programmes than are at the moment available to me, feel free! Of course, if this all becomes in the slightest way predictive, don't be worrying about that credit card debt. It isn't likely to, though. I mean, it isn't like there is any serious scientific correlation here of the sort that, oh, say, an obscure, university-network-backed organisation which I just found on the internet would come up with....

The second map was found at this site. It is incomplete, as deaths have been reported on the Chile faultline too, along with very powerful earthquakes.

UPDATE: If you send me money, I will also connect the Large Hadron Collider, the recent Weather (which all went bad when it was turned on) and the 'Aflockalypse' to it...except, rats, the Daily Mail has beaten me to it again. Curse you Daily Mail! Mrs Mary Honeyball MEP was never this resourceful an opponent.....

2011-01-04T09:15:00.003Z

Mad Cow Disease Causes Global Warming

According to Shub Niggurath's cheerfully named 'total distortion of the facts' climate site. I did like that.

It's still true, and has been for the past three years, that both hemispheres have been registering cooling, that global warming ideas do not pass a null hypothesis, that no reliable mechanism for global warming can be found, that cyclical cooling linked to the sun has proven robust in terms of predictive validity, and that anyone now going on about global warming as a reality must be by definition either malign or silly. It's also clear that a bunch of middle class types high on themselves and their own thanatic busyboots drama--and desperate for research grants and camera time--have been making up figures to appeal to ex-hippies and wannabe Dylanites in the political class right life and centre.

People should get back to conservation and the challenge of dealing with peak oil--by building up nuclear and coal supplies--quickly. I do not hold my breath that the political-media class will get the point.

h/t EU Referendum

2011-01-04T08:15:00.003Z

A Conscious and Determined Resurrection

At its height, the East India Company dominated half of recorded world trade, owned its own army, and was the single most important reason for the expansion of the British Empire. The company's flag (which I have put at the top of this post) is not coincidentally related to the American and Malaysian ones, as a consequence.

The Company had a very proud career (and I am fully aware that pride is a sin) before its final over-reaching. It effectively ran India, below the princely states, but its corporate policies went so awry that it caused, more or less, the abortive War of Independence of 1857, known to the British as the Mutiny. The Company was effectively nationalised in 1858, but re-emerged as a tea-trading enterprise, which was formally dissolved in 1874. One hundred years later, it was resurrected for a second time, by a group of post-Imperial 'Britain backers', and again, it fell prey to the trade winds--this time in the form of seventies stagnation and global sclerosis.

A former student of mine sent me a link yesterday to a story about the Company's new return. In a determined (and fully informed) historical act, Sanjiv Mehta has purchased the name and identity of the EIC and intends to run it as an Indian-owned, London-based luxury business selling in Britain. I'd imagine that the EIC was a fairly safe bet. Good luck to Mr Mehta!

It is interesting to me how, if one waits long enough, things go full circle, or fully tidal, depending on your metaphor.

h/t Miriam Grinberg on facebook

2011-01-03T12:04:00.006Z

That 'Sovereignty' Bill

I'm bored and avoiding work, so let's have a look at this week's 'EU no surrender bill'.

There is a longstanding clash between what the British political classes tell themselves and reality, when it comes to European Union matters. The European Union has believed since 1962 that it is engaged in the construction of a New Legal Order (Van Gend en Loos) capable of overriding local constitutions (Costa v ENEL, Simmenthal, and Factortame) and which must be read into all state laws if possible (Von Colson, Marleasing and Thoburn v Sunderland). The European Court of Justice simply views membership of the club as denoting obedience to the rules regardless of any special pleading.

British politicians appear to have convinced themselves that their rubber-stamp parliament, the sensible part of which admits that it cannot control the EU, is still in some sense sovereign. Like some raddled Hollywood star of the fifties, the place keeps asserting its sovereignty whilst texting its agreement to ever more desperate appearances to its sleazy agent. Her capacity to define terms is gone, and whilst she still might--might--get a folding chair with her name on it, it'll be nowhere near the Director and the Chinese will need it for their six o'clock shoot.

Well, OK, I'm exaggerating. No texting is involved. Most MPs, after all, need their right hand free.

Anyway, the latest attempt to delude parliament into thinking that it is sovereign is in the traps, in the form of the Sovereignty Bill 2010, due to embarrass our unshameable excuse for a Prime Minister later this week.

Clause one seems fair enough; the sovereignty of the UK Parliament is affirmed. What does that mean, though? Properly speaking, the authority enjoyed by the House of Commons stems legally from the Crown-in-Parliament, and politically from the people. No Judge is ever going to take a vague term like that and dare to read an expansive discretion to do whatever parliament wants into it; in fact, it is more likely that a phrase like that will strengthen judicial review, since a sovereign parliament will have tasked Judges implicitly with controlling the executive outside of it by reading into its laws whatever the Judges think fit. That's a bollocks clause which will warm many legal firesides for some time.

Where does it leave the monarch, and those wielding the monarch's powers, too? Up till now, the courts have left the Royal Prerogative more or less alone. That's the power which Ministers wield over immigration and the army and political appointments and so forth. What if Parliament's intentions, as expressed in human rights or freedom of information laws, was ever indirectly but implicitly challenged by ministers? Wouldn't the sovereignty bill strengthen the Judges against the Crown?

Clause Two, then.

No Minister of the Crown shall sign, ratify or implement any treaty or law, whether by virtue of the prerogative powers of the Crown or under any statutory authority, which—

(a)
is inconsistent with this Act; or

(b)
increases the functions of the European Union affecting the United Kingdom without requiring it to be approved in a referendum of the electorate in the United Kingdom.

Any Treaty or Law? NATO? The WTO?

Firstly, there is no need to sign any new Treaty increasing the functions of the EU; passarelles (devices to unanimously and legally extend power), Article 122 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, and the allowed extension of Qualified Majority Voting in the Council can do that. The text of this sovereignty bill will not preclude any of it. Things like defence and the police are largely outside of the Treaty at the minute, but they--as the Anglo-French aircraft carrier programme shows--do not require any treaties or laws to be integrated anyway.

Secondly, if a minister exercises sovereignty on behalf of the crown and signs a treaty which is then subject to debate in the commons, and in the understanding that the commons could refuse to agree to it if it changes primary law, how is the minister being inconsistent with parliamentary sovereignty?

A Treaty that changes law must be subject to a vote already. A Treaty that does not must be subject to a debate within three weeks. So, I ask again, how could signing a treaty that extends power in the knowledge that this will be put to parliament anyway compromise the sovereignty of parliament?

These are deep waters. Parliament, in theory, can do anything it wants, except bind a future parliament. Nevertheless, 'super conventions' arise practically, which preclude change--no one would ever think of taking the vote away from women, for instance, or returning to 1831 constituencies. What is so special about the EU's effect on sovereignty that a whole bill is needed when, even if a treaty purports to limit parliament, it cannot?

The EU is not an international body. It is more of a sort of mixture of coral and foam. If in it, states must accept that they are subject to a super-rule that they won't, when their arguments are exhausted via the proper procedures, refuse to implement its laws. If they cannot promise this, they should leave. What on earth is the point of saying 'well, we will obey the rules but we reserve the pointless non-right not to without leaving?'. Not only is that discourteous, it is stupid.

An alternative, of course, would be to take the Bill as applying to any treaty, and then ask if any extension to NATO membership, or WTO rules, or the UN Treaty should be subject to a referendum. Let's see how much time that wastes with a well-funded trade union or newspaper campaign behind it.

The thing is a dog's breakfast. More legal money before the Judges ultimately back down and throw the whole thing back to parliament. Next?

This Act shall have effect and shall be construed as having effect and deemed at all times to have had effect by the courts of the United Kingdom notwithstanding—

(a)
the European Communities Act 1972;

(b)
any exercise of, or rule of prerogative, or rule of international law; and

(c)
any Act of Parliament, whenever enacted, unless in that Act it is expressly stated that, subject to a referendum under section 4, it is to have effect without regard to the United Kingdom Parliamentary Sovereignty Act 2010.

The EC Act 1972 expressly states that all future EU law is to be treated as UK law with the force of parliament and implicitly affirms parliamentary sovereignty. In cases where Parliament has contradicted itself, as in Thoburn ('The Metric Martyrs'), the courts have followed the EC Act 1972 and EU law. If the Sovereignty Bill became an Act, I find it hard to see how the situation would change for the better. Parliament in 1972 (and therefore now, since legal time does not exist) would say 'follow the Europeans in what we have agreed to, which is almost everything' and Parliament in 2011 would say ' don't follow the Europeans in what we have not agreed to anyway but try and work out which existing process is something that we must have forgotten to disagree with'. It'll be like ordering lunch, then dessert, then saying that you won't pay for the peas which you did not have as an appetizer.

It is not clear from the Bill, as far as I can see, that there is any one authority which could decide if sovereignty was threatened, and I wonder about the mechanism by which a government which refused to pass a referendum could be brought to account. For instance, let's say a minister signs a treaty, which is then subject to a vote in the 'sovereign parliament' and passes, and which extends an EC power in language which does not suggest that anything new is happening-- a 'consolidating treaty', for instance. Who decides that sovereignty is compromised? Parliament itself will have already spoken. Whom does one name in the judicial review? Who are the authorities one can quote from?

You don't think that lawyers will waste time with this? I have one word for you. Pringles.

Silly, silly, silly. This bill--which will force parliament into the limitation of itself by a written constitution if anyone takes it seriously--and climate change, and cuts built into an expanding budget which prints money and shovels it at Banksters, is what UK Government is all about in 2011.

I hope AV Dicey is rolling in his grave.

2011-01-03T11:05:00.004Z

January....

And like the vast majority of people on this fetid island, I am fantasising about emigrating. Probably never would, though, for long-- I like my rainy days and cups of tea and London too much for that, but of course if I were ever forced to contemplate living outside London, in England or somewhere, I'd have to find a working airport pronto.

So, here I am, watching Canadian, Australian and Hong Kong videos and even humming 'the sidewalks of New York' to myself; but of course, in this mood, you can't beat The Leaving of Liverpool. What a great song.

2011-01-02T14:01:00.005Z

Science Corner

Before modernity entered into the arc that is now played out, St Anselm suggested an interior proof of God's existence. Not only did God exist, he stated; because he could imagine God, God must exist. If one could imagine the greatest thing in the universe, in all universes, then it must exist because otherwise, there would be no greatest thing and nothing would exist at the end of things; since nothing was less than something, something had to be there.

There's a neatness to Anselm, but also an insecurity, which one can find in St Thomas too. Both men were products of a Western tradition which required proof for things, but which believed that proof could emerge from intimation and faith, rather than the other way around.

Some forms of modernity are like that. Modernity was, above all, about a particular sort of objectification. It held that all things were measurable, and that things existed outside of our immediate intuition or knowledge but which could be accessed by reason. No one has ever seen a particle, for instance, or been on the surface of Pluto, and until very recently, pictures and sounds and data had never been sent from other planets. Now, of course, one can click a link and listen to the winds of Titan.

In the midst of all this passion for the actually existing, people still hope. They read into 'facts' different premises. So, for instance, economists create measures that create trust in their measures--until something comes along, a 'three sigma event', for instance, that undermines their sigils. Then they fall back on faith.

Somewhere in modernity, the faith that there are other worlds, as real as Hy-Brasil off Donegal, or St Brendan's Land, exists in the most robust of heads. I find it intriguing that the 2000s was the decade when alien belief went, if not mainstream, then without the mocking laughter of the fearful.

Let's count the ways in which the modern, objective minds of scientists and engineers and military men started to play openly with life elsewhere and else life here, in the past ten years. Alien interference with missile bases, reported in the mainstream press? Check. The potential for life on Ganymede, Europa, Titan, Mars and Asteroids? Check. Vatican conferences on exobiology, attended by leading scientists? Check. UN contact policies? Check. Abortive US announcements of extraterrestrial life? Check. Peviously serious defence ministers from NATO countries talking of aliens? Check. I could go on.

Of course, one thing is different from another. It is one thing to find potentially contaminated rocks from Mars and declare them to possibly bear fossilised life, or to note the chemical and thermic organisation of tidal moons. It's fine--indeed essential--for scientists to speculate.

It's wholly another to leap to the idea of intelligent life in the universe. Why are people with reputations to preserve now not scared of doing so, and why are so many coming forward? Is it our new medievalism in which ideas and data overlap with wish and imposed pattern as much as states, sovereignties and identities are now confused?

Scientists in a media savvy age do need funding, and you can't all ride global warming, of course, but we should also remember that the most serious of people could be prone to the maddest of ideas. The CIA's stargate programme, for instance, springs to mind, as does the Soviet 'psychic research' that produced nothing but disinformation and lunacy in the west.

One can't help but notice, however, that the idea of extraterrestrial life is now more or less normal, and not without scientific support. It seems to have leapt away from the newspaper silly season and the crustier parts of public libraries, and out of the closets at the back of scientists' minds. I wonder if that is not one of the most significant developments of the past ten years, in terms of understanding how the late West thinks about itself. Frankly, a part of me also wonders if the normalisation is some vast emergent property of disinformation campaigns, or a symptom of the breakdown of modernity--or if someone knows something that they can't directly tell?

2010-12-28T18:30:00.008Z

Corelli and the Christmas Concerto

The image is of Monet's Thaw at Vetheuil, 1880/1. He's not normally someone I'm keen on, but the cold is hiding momentarily here and I thought it appropriate. Vetheuil is where the Seine ice-blocks for Paris used to come from, but Monet painted them because the mini-icebergs crashed and rolled eerily when a thaw set in. That was back in a previous period of global cooling, of course

I'm a great believer in the idea that Christmastide is what we should be celebrating, and that it does not properly finish until the 6th of January. Having had a wonderful time at home with my family, experiencing the generosity and Christmas spirit of my relatives, I thought at mid-point that a little Baroque was in order, and this sprang to mind as I travelled back down to London today. I wish that I could have trusted the camera on my blackberry to put a picture up for you of how the snow was melting in a mist, deceiving itself that it was evaporating when in reality it was returning to earth in a messier way. Perhaps it is all a metaphor for something. Who knows? In the meantime, a continuing Merry Christmas to you.

The picture with which the last two movements of the concerto are illustrated is Matthias Grunewald's nativity scene from 1515, containing an angel which I've always thought looks suspiciously like St John. There is a nice riff on it over on Chibiseimi.com.

2010-12-26T18:25:00.006Z

What We Should Do in an Ideal World, (and what we may be pushed into anyway)

Once more, and with feeling....

1) Institute one, flat rate of tax at 15% on profits, consumption, income, and land values--with no loopholes, no complications, and a £12000 earnings allowance

2) Abolish Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs and instead require individuals and companies to electronically declare pay through a bank, whilst receiving income credit through banks and post offices

3) Abolish one third of all local government, starting with any seat in which electoral turnout is under 25%

4) Privatise the Russell Group, and allow remaining universities to merge into a National University of Britain run on Open University lines

5) Abolish the Departments of Business, Culture, Media and Sport, Children and Families, and International Development

6) Withdraw all subsidy from rail transport and allow the collapsed companies into social ownership

7) Provide for a referendum on membership of the European Union and NATO

8) Withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, and consider an airborne British deterrent; inistitute an inquiry into the merger of the Armed Forces into a Defence Force; consider a draft and a referendum before future major deployments

9) Allow major banks to go bust and prepare to reset the system on the basis of local building societies, credit unions, and regulated oligopoly banking

10) Abolish the Crown Prosecution Service, the Acts underlying the Family Law System, and Climate Change legislation; consider the creation of local Sheriffs; allow supermarkets to run one-stop law firms; build large numbers of prisons.

11) Institute Primary elections and the Alternative Vote, with Parliamentary seats limited to those aged 35 and over.

12) End Quantitative Easing and aim to balance the budget whilst switching to a new, non-oil based energy economy via nuclear and coal power within a decade.

Of course, we won't, anymore than we did when this obscure blog suggested these things every year for the past three years. I have a feeling that the worst of the economic crisis that is approaching, however, will force a National Governent into doing these things in time. In the meantime, pray.

2010-12-26T16:36:00.004Z

Palin, Obama, and stuff....

I've often taken a much more sympathetic view of Sarah Palin's skills and talents than many in the blogosphere, at least on this side of the Atlantic. A while ago, I found it impossible to sustain any sort of respect for the Honourable representative for Moonie Ponds, however; her peevish attempts to isolate journalists and to play upon her children's illnesses, her wilful ignorance, and her narcissism struck me as an attempt to embed the worst aspects of Richard Nixon into some shopping channel Harpy, and I just started ignoring her.

The Republican party's establishment seems to have had much the same idea. With increasing force in recent days, the Bushes, Krauthammers, Coulters, and Roves have all fired their arrows into Hughie Long's lost, confused high school bully of a daughter.

People forget how conservative the Republicans actually are, partly because of their tendency to dress up in cowboy boots whilst pretending to be stupid. Since 1952, 12 out of 14 presidential tickets have contained someone called Bush, Nixon, or Dole, and the two which did not--Goldwater-Miller in 1964 and McCain-Palin in 2008--went down to disastrous defeat. The GOP likes its nexi and nodes. What it lacks these days is a candidate with Paul Ryan's sense or Mitch Daniel's competence allied to old money and party gravitas, given that Jeb Bush is damaged goods and there are no Lodges or Rockefellers worth the candle anymore.

And so, for now, the face of the Right in America is, variously, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor,and Sarah Palin. None of the formal office holders have Palin's appeal. No one, as far as I can tell, trusts Mitt Romney (rightly), and neophytes like Scott Brown have not proven able to gain any media traction.

I also find it hard to believe that the Tea Party has gone away. All of which provides an interesting conundrum for the GOP. Do they continue to try to waterboard Palin whilst pretending to just be raising sensible questions, and encourage her to bolt? Will they be blamed for the stagnation side of stagflation, whilst the Obama Administration claims credit for mortgage write-offs, anti-debt inflation, and the export via the creation of an unsustainable Sino-surplus of inflation to China?

I think the Democrat, whoever that may be in 2012, is still the safe bet for election to the White House. Barring a trip to Dallas, as it were, serious money should still be on Obama (or Hillary Clinton, in the unfortunate event) despite the vast expansion of the monetary base with no commensurate expansion of work, or jobs, or resources, and no serious reduction of the deficit and debt. I'm also open to the idea of a Tea Party split undermining the Republicans.

All this whilst Obama deserves genuine plaudits for his foreign policy, and for playing a very weak hand very well. At any other point in American history, Obama would have been a guaranteed one-termer- David Dinkins in a Carter mask. Foreign policy normally does not matter, and, famously the economy does. The American economy, the real economy rather than that of the pundits and massaged figures, is at the moment still in a dire state. This ought to be very bad for the Administration.

But our times are not normal, and the President is actually doing rather well. If he carries on in this vein, Joan Walsh may well be justified in her lukewarm attempt to brand him a liberal Reagan, without the lies and criminality, obviously.

It's a funny old world, isn't it?

2010-12-19T13:57:00.006Z

Tyranny and Corruption in the Late West

If tyranny is to come in North America, it will come cozily and on cat's feet. It will come with the denial of the rights of the unborn and of the aged, the denial of the rights of the mentally retarded, the insane, and the economically less-privileged. In fact, it will come with the denial of rights to all those who cannot defend themselves. It will come in the name of the cost-benefit analysis of human life

Actually, George Grant's magnificent Red Tory discomfort with the modern liberal version of the 'rights agenda' is an interesting one, given that it is now about four years older than myself. I've always thought that it went further than North America, as he referred to Canada, too. People often think of 'Human Rights' as a given, sprung forth like Venus from a clamshell out of the mind of the enlightenment, and some have built a career on that sort of misunderstanding--but what, actually do they mean?

I can't point you legally to any one statement, not that a statement matters much to something which is in some ways a bundle of principles of varying importance plus the evolved procedures of law-based states. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is essentially a constraint on governments, for instance; the inter-American convention, and the European Convention, let alone the African declaration, all differ slightly, and case-law contains a margin of appreciation for the interpretation of rights which in some states turns into a chasm.

It suits the left and right to claim that rights are a monolith, usually associated with sociopathic narcissism and those aspects of libertarianism which the rich want someone else to take the blame for.

Really, though, are there not two streams of rights? One has a religious heritage. It is rooted in the idea of a compassionate society, in which all are linked one to the other, and in which life, reason, and being are all shielded by due process from the predations of companies, individuals and governments. That stream is invariably connected with some notion of property-based independence and active citizenry, but also with an objective notion that rights emerge spontaneously or inalienably from our common humanity and the fierce lesson that tyranny and selfishness does not pay.

The other stream has been essentially generated by lawyers as a kind of replacement for the Devlin style 'man on the bus' universalism that religious heritage used to give rise to. I also think that, because it has been expressed as a constraint on governments, that it has to go into all sorts of calculated torsions and delusions to become incumbent upon individuals. I am not sure that it works, or indeed that this stream does much of anything at all.

The difference between the two is important to me, in that economic questions increasingly come down to questions of value. Do we value each other, and is the value which we accord to money that of the base of work and resources that lies beneath it, or do we say things have value and good just because society ascribes those things to them?

Economics and politics are not so far apart, if one rides the first stream. I notice a bizarre confluence of catholic social thought, which is basically communitarian but which emphasises property based independence, and the Austrians. If money had value as land, or work, or resources, then the mad quantitative inflation which we are stoking would be seen for the lunacy which it is; and if we valued each other, and took an essentially local view of our surroundings in which each human being was a full person, not defined by one legal right or another, perhaps we would treat each other a little better.

If we treated each other better, we could save and not seek solace in credit and spending; we could invest in science and capital, and not in the consumer industries that divert us from our isolation. If we recognised how fallen we are, but that we could get up, we wouldn't as a society be plunging quite so steeply into obvious decline. People would use their minds to improve their societies rather than clinging to some false climate god that is now making monkeys of bien pensants everywhere.

The stagflationary crisis which I have amongst others have expected for some time is almost upon us, midwived into the world by peak oil and contingencies like the weather and war. People need to think about what they are going to stand for afterwards, and what we are going to do after the wave; because it is increasingly obvious that no one is going to do anything to stop it before the event.

2010-12-16T07:35:00.003Z

Made it... so far

I've been snarfling around the internet looking for appropriate Christmas carols and am feeling a little alienated by the Americanisation of lots of hymns. By that, I mean the breathy, tremble-voiced and somewhat creative attempts of people to sing with a face that suggests something somewhere between ecstasy and hard calculation of the price of a parquet floor. It's even worse when English people do it in the hope that they sound like they're from Ohio.

So, anyway, here's 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing', which has a lovely if dodgy bit of near-Arian theology in transition of the second verse ('veiled in flesh the Godhead see' and 'late in Time behold him come'). Oddly enough, three of the people most responsible for the first American Great Awakening of the early eighteenth century, which shook up the religious and social structures of the Western colonies, had a hand in this; George Whitefield, John Wesley and his brother Charles. By the way, the original lyrics of the hymn for Christmas Day talked charmingly of how the angels sang around the Welkin; why don't people use words like that much anymore?

The tune is Mendelssohn's, adapted via the Temple Church in the 1850s--a lovely part of the Victorian reign that--by William H. Cummings, though the Anglo-Irish version sets the words to Handel's music instead. The late Anglican faith's great adaptability probably shines through the graft.

Happy Advent, and mind the roads.

2010-12-12T00:05:00.003Z

De profundis clamavi

J'implore ta pitié, Toi, l'unique que j'aime,
Du fond du gouffre obscur où mon coeur est tombé.
C'est un univers morne à l'horizon plombé,
Où nagent dans la nuit l'horreur et le blasphème;
Un soleil sans chaleur plane au-dessus six mois,
Et les six autres mois la nuit couvre la terre;
C'est un pays plus nu que la terre polaire
— Ni bêtes, ni ruisseaux, ni verdure, ni bois!
Or il n'est pas d'horreur au monde qui surpasse
La froide cruauté de ce soleil de glace
Et cette immense nuit semblable au vieux Chaos;
Je jalouse le sort des plus vils animaux
Qui peuvent se plonger dans un sommeil stupide,
Tant l'écheveau du temps lentement se dévide!
— Charles Baudelaire

I remember the Fleurs du Mal as an old friend, since I spent some of my first scared days in Balliol, fresh up from Corby in my third floor room, translating them to keep calm, along with the odd prayer. I'm dead tired and in the depths of a huge amount of work right now, as I always seem to be at this time of year; but I thought that I'd post Charles' poem as a reminder of a younger self. Onward and upward.

2010-12-07T07:56:00.001Z

The Endless Wars for Peace
An appropriate Australian commentary on it all, for friends abroad.

2010-12-03T11:50:00.004Z

A Walrus Exercising

Right. Iceland told the Bankers to get stuffed and is rebounding, albeit on top of a volcano. Global warming is clearly not happening, and the carbon mechanism does not work; as Richard Feynman noted the great test of science is proof and there is no evidence for the folly at which our leaders are throwing money. Wikileaks has revealed a brutal world in which the US ruthlessly pursues its own interest--no surprise to those of us who knew of the jungle, but no-one seems interested or shocked. The US has responded by shutting down wikileaks servers, concocting a rape case, and calling for Julian 'Fox Mulder' Assange to be assassinated, 'cept he won't be because he has placed an insurance package on multiple sites on the internet and the key will be released if anything happens to him.

Elsewhere in Gotham city, stagflation is taking a grip on the western heart and the Koreas are at daggers drawn, and we're all thinking here about a failed kleptocratic soccer competition award in 2018. Oh, and the British 'cuts'--which are actually part of an overall rise and which have not happened yet--mean that we can keep 90 000 more wasters in office. Just to top it all off, NASA is hinting at parallel evolution on earth or alien life as though it were normal. Not a peep from most of the media. I sense no awareness of the disturbance in the force.

One can neither satirise nor comment properly on a world in which the Romans are gripped by St Vitus' dance as the tribes are wiped off ice fields and the lights go out in Rome. So here is a video of a Walrus exercising. It is oddly reassuring and it puts me to shame. I should be down the gym, preparing my body for the collapse so that I can loot the food and wine shelves before running to my stolen, diesel-powered car.

2010-11-28T12:35:00.005Z

An attempt to make a video

I am bored, so I have made a video. Please be gentle with it. Anyone can do it on xtranormal.com and it is a reasonable waste of time, which was one of the original points about this blog.