Martin Meenagh blog

Airship News I was just about to go out, but before I do I wanted to return to a perennial theme of mine --airships. Ecogeek , which is an excellent site, put up a post last December completely independently of mine and all the others I learned from, which limned the future of these beautiful aircraft. You can be absolutely sure that ecogeek was independent of me, by the way, since his or her head would probably explode if they read some of my pieces on global cooling, carbon dioxide skepticism, or plastic bags. I recommend ecogeek as a site strongly to you. It isn't the case that I agree with everything on it so much, simply that it is stimulating and seems decent. People of goodwill and, more importantly, reason, may come to the same conclusion from different angles. It may be that you think that our present use of oil and its derived products is wasteful and silly. It may be that you are becoming increasingly convinced by the peak oil theory. It may be that you think that we sh...

Global Helium Stocks Last year, and earlier in this one, I sadly put away my infatuation with airships because of coherent and well-informed comments on the blog and elsewhere relating to the world shortage of helium. This shortage, expressed in the diminishing stocks of helium held near Amarillo, Texas, was a consequence of American policies through the past decade led by Congress and the present Administration, and in part associated with peak oil. One of the joys of the web, however, is the ability to go and look for other, well-informed viewpoints that it provides. On the basis of a thin skein of hope from Phil Kornbluth which I have located in this blog post, I am putting up another link to the truly beautiful Aeroscraft . Kornbluth, as he declares, obviously has an economic interest which may colour your view of what he says. I claim no special scientific knowledge and it seems to me believable. If you can refute him, or wish to comment, please feel free to do so. A testing devi...

The Defense Industry Daily I've been idling away some moments before a law class and have discovered this little gem from the American Defense Industry Daily. It's a news sheet for the various pentagon contractors and planners. Anyway, the reader of this blog, whoever he or she is, will know of my taste for airships. They are elegant, effective, renewable and almost harmless. Except in the hands of armies, obviously. You could do somebody damage with an army. The US Department of Defense had a programme called 'Walrus' to replace ageing expensive aeroplanes with heavy-lift hybrid airships that could have moved troops or equipment anywhere in the world within seven days. They would have needed very little fuel, have flown at 8000 feet, and travelled at 174 miles per hour. The late and unlamented Republican Congress killed the policy stone dead, the heavy implication being that Pentagon contractors who wanted a highly expensive refit of existing planes weren't happy....

Airships, Sailing Ships and Stars My regular reader, whoever you are (and provided you haven't thrown yourself out the window after that last blog) will be aware of how much I love the idea of modern airships . They are clean, safe, elegant and timely vessels whose presence can only grow in our skies this century, if we keep our heads and use our advanced science to replace oil-based metal and plastic things with technology that is clever and practical. I am currently now happier than a Yeti in a Bureaucrat's heart, having discovered this site. It is dedicated to low-tech hi-tech, and contains articles on modern carbon-fibre ships that use sails to take freight across the Atlantic, amongst other things. Today saw the maiden passenger voyage (for journalists) of the MS Beluga Skysails , which uses a kite controlled by computers to massively cut fuel bills. Given that 90 per cent of world trade is still carried by ships (leading to the pollution of the sea lanes) this is a fanta...

A Reader Writes I am becoming more and more convinced of the Peak Oil idea by the day. It has been playing around my head for some years, but we do seem to be entering a period when it's predictive validity is being tested. The theory, which holds that we have used more oil at viable prices than is left, is still largely unknown. This is a pity, since the impact of predicted future oil shocks and of sustained high trend prices for oil will affect all of us. Arguably, the theory is better founded than some of that associated with global warming. Anyway, a reader who wrote in on the comments section after my post about airships has put things better than I did. I wanted to share the comment, from damifino, with you; As we enter this age of limits, the most difficult aspect of 'looking forward projections', airships or otherwise, is coming to grips with our interdependency with oil. It is near impossible to comprehend just how ingrained it is in all we do and produce, and how...

Just Beautiful My long term demented readers (who are, I am sadly informed, now only allowed to tap out my address on a keyboard with a soft stick held in their teeth, as their arms are being restrained, just like Mrs Mary Honeyball MEP's assistants) will know of my love for airships. I am especially attracted to the aeros craft , though I was informed last year by a regular reader that a world shortage of helium made it highly improbable that commercial aeroscraft would ever fly. Anyway, the designer Massaud has won awards with the picture on this post, and I just wanted to put it up here. It is beautiful, and makes me feel like I'm lost in some crisp wood on a winter morning stunned by the whale in the sky. And no, I don't need the nurses round. My girlfriend's back soon, and she can be a very angry woman when she gets the wrong idea....

Mary Honeyball v A Green Lobby I suppose that I qualify as a long-time antagonist of Mrs Mary Honeyball. She doesn't like religion, and I am a happy Catholic. She is committed to a sort of statist feminist orthodoxy I am not keen on. She is a London Member of the European Parliament, and was appointed to that body from a list in accordance with the electoral system, and I don't agree with it. One thing about her which I have noticed, however, is that she is honest--honourable, even, though that term is hackneyed. She does slog away at the European Parliament's somewhat pointless rituals, does attend the hearings at a ludicrous body that meets in Strasbourg and Brussels and very occasionally Luxembourg, and does seem to declare all her expenses. These are very few; they mostly consist of a use of continental transport and the occasional use of a car park when taking a flight from the London City Airport. A 'green organisation' is currently having a go at her . They h...

The Coming Global Adjustment Markets around the world, and economies, are having to adjust to gathering tectonic forces. One is that there is a much higher demand for oil to fuel the awakened giants of Asia. This process is having a happy consequence of moving money to South America and Africa after decades of debt imprisonment. Just last week African leaders asserted themselves in the face of a silly European attempt to patronise them without offering concrete reforms like, say, a monetary stabilisation fund or a Mediterranean community. A second reality is that the huge credit imbalances in the UK and USA, and the deficits, excess money supply, and balance of payments deficits across the west are combining with demographic decline across Europe. This is forcing states to think about the long-term survival of their cultures, welfare states and their view of immigration. The confusion on this issue is profound. This is particularly since the west has focused not on the surplus labour a...

Rocket Men In retrospect, the daring, wasteful, silly moonshot of the mid-twentieth century becomes stranger and stranger. It did not result in many major innovations, and cost around $35 billions. It protected some of the most murderous German slave masters and enemies of humanity of the 1940s, and was funded and conceived out of a military effort to lob bombs in a faster way. 'I dream of the Stars' Wernher Von Braun wrote of himself...'but sometimes you hit London', his NASA colleagues added. And yet, and yet..it has a romance about it. The dreams of travel and development around the solar system of the twentieth century were almost realised before economic disenchantment and spending on preparation for war took over again. I've been reading Gerard DeGroot's Dark Side of the Moon, which is a scales-from-the-eyes history of the moon programme which I prefer to Andrew Smith's Moondust. The latter is different in degree, but not kind. DeGroot's book is fu...

Sensible Social Ownership. I am no mad fan of nationalisation for its own sake. There are some things government has proved bad at, like education in England, or the provision of medical care rather than the funding for it. However, it is time to ask why we don't have some sort of social control of utilities, transport, and energy. It is also time to ask why we have the private sector providing police services, collecting information about the public, and getting hugely rich off of what appear to be rubbish contracts to manage the affairs of the people electronically. Even Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs is now legally lowering its own liabilities by outsourcing to a companies like Mapperley, Cap Gemini and Capita. The standard justification in England is that the way the UK outsources some of the core businesses of government to the 'private finance initiative' meets several requirements. It is meant to lower public borrowing, and therefore interest rates. It is mean...

Christmas present ideas One : The Tale of the Next Great War One of the more contemporary aspects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the prevalence of invasion and disaster literature as a public pastime. WH Smith made sure that railway newsstands were full of tales of the next great war, and they make fascinating reading, from stories of airships delivering biological attacks on China to worries about inflation, terrorism or alien invasion. H.G.Wells was in on the act, of course, with 'The War of the Worlds', but so was A.A.Milne, with 'The Tale of the Army Aeroplane', and Jack London, with 'The Unparalleled Invasion'. For those interested, I can recommend I.F. Clarke's Tale of the Next Great War , which as a collection of these things is a cracking read. It's just the thing for a comfy chair as you digest Christmas dinner (although I am aware in my present near-exhausted state how many of my posts involve comfy chairs and horrible ...

If The Air Ban Goes On.... Then the future of airlines is as clear as the sky. I love Airships! If you happen to be one of BA's useless management, here's where you can buy one .

Global Warming Heretics Since the demise of the threat of the Cold War, it has proved difficult for those who wish to be spurred and benefitted in their secular righteousness to find a cause. Many causes are simply small and uninspiring beer, and the networks within which middle-class people move are not particularly tolerant of anything that really challenges their views. So, if you happen to be from a belief system that actually is possessed of a logic, history and eschatology worth thinking about, or if as a citizen you question some of the parts of the nineteen sixties settlement that might seem to you destructive, you will find it very difficult to do so. You may as well spend your days looking at pictures of the gorgeous Linda Lusardi, of the sort that I've posted beside this article. In this milieu, the 'global warming controversies' have developed. There is, amongst lobbyists and true believers, a consensus that man-made carbon dioxide emissions create global warmin...

The Skylon Spaceplane One of the minor disappointments played out on this blog and precious few other places in the past two years was the failure of the airship industry to take off, as it were. I know that in this I'm past parody--I have a whole 'holiday village' somewhere beyond the satire hills of cyberspace--but I was really taken with the aeroscraft project, which has recently gone all military. Like Victor Chernomyrdin, I hoped for the best and everything turned out as usual. Various readers sent in details of a world helium shortage. This shortage was one that probably could never be resolved. This meant that airships, and the safe, clean, no hassle and low-security fantasy of the future which I entertained, fell slightly from my mind. However, hope springs eternal. British engineering has from time to time, and in the face of ridiculous odds, come up at various points over the past few centuries with stunning ideas. One of them that I recall, also with an aerial ...

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 dif...