Martin Meenagh blog

Proscription and Prescribers I once lost a hundred pounds in weight. I had become stressed by graduate life at Oxford, which was isolating and pretentious in inverse proportion to the experience for a working-class Irish-British Catholic of being an undergraduate. Anyway, I responded by exploring cigars, wine, and really good food, which in those days was more than possible on a student budget with British academy funding and lots of teaching on the side. I like the finer things in life. Anyway, when I finally got too heavy, I booked myself into a gym and did a modified Atkins diet (white meats and fish, no cream, no dairy and no carbs except the odd vegetable) and the weight fell off. I rode a bike, often with no helmet and no stupid lycra as now seems to be the norm. The weight fell off. I was, of course, acting in complete defiance of the frauds who were outraged by the Atkins (largely, it seemed, because they absolutely needed the validation of their overcomplicated scientised diet...

The Year of counterfactual Miracles What if history wasn't on some fatal merry minuet-style course to a crunch, but actually took a sensible turn? What would that involve? Thirty years ago, men dreamt of going to the moon, curing cancer, ending poverty--and even took political action to try and make it so. I refuse to believe that this was only a PR campaign in the face of the challenge of 'scientific socialism' and its potential appeal to the western working classes. So I came to think--what would be on my prescription for a worthwhile future? Things have been so gloomy of late. Here's a top ten, in no particular order; 1) The world learns of the potential of helium-3, found on the moon, at the same time as practical controlled nuclear fusion becomes possible. This kicks off the game that stopped in 1972--to use space for human purposes and break the bonds of oil and energy wars, and to redeploy the billions we spend on rockets with bombs on onto rockets with people an...

What if the oil is running out ? A general agreement seems to be emerging that the 'Hubbert Peak Oil' moment was at some point around December 2006. That means that the world is, if the analysts are correct, now running out of oil, and that by 2012-25 our present lifestyles will have become unsustainable. The prophets of doom may become historians, or four things may intervene to save us--and I do mean us, because individuals no matter how rich will not be able to retreat to some Rousseauian wilderness. Our society is going to take a Hobbesian mickey-fit unless; 1) the theorists of peak oil are wrong, and the increase in oil prices merely means more efficient transport, and a return to trains, zeppelins and teleconferencing 2) oil is not a fossil fuel 3) we build a half tonne of nuclear power plants and supplement them with the hydrogen (and accompanying platinum technology, which is expensive) and ethanol machines. 4) we discover some new source of energy and way of living The...

What MPs think of their constituents 2006 from http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/westcountry/2006/02/334012.html To a constituent opposed to ID cards > Thank you for your e-mail of 22nd January 2006. I think we can summarise the debate as you are against ID cards, I am for them for the reasons described in my previous correspondence. > ID cards formed part of the Labour Party Manifesto upon which both Tony Blair and I were elected. I see no point in continuing this correspondence if you refuse to accept my explanations. > With best wishes, etc, etc Anne Snelgrove MP South Swindon

What Members of Parliament thought of their voters 1734 (from Denis Healey's Secret Planet ) 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

The Sound of Drums Between 1885 and 1912, European Great Powers launched two great schemes. One was an orgy of 'globalization' under cover of Imperialism. It left unlikely states like Belgium in charge of an eighth of the world's resources, subsumed vast areas of Africa, Asia and the tropics, and saw South America bullied by a combination of militarism and financial pressure into informal Empire. An ineluctable tension, a tide that would one day come in, was built into the affairs of states. One does not have to be an admirer of the psychopath Lenin to understand that he had a point in his views of Imperialism as an inevitably destructive process. The later KGB were often right for the wrong reasons; look at how they predicted that US agrarian/industrial interests would 'elect the peanut magnate Carter over the legislative functionary Ford' in their comical but correct analysis from 1976. States would inevitably have read into the cycles and energies of their compet...

Why is so much sociology American? One of the delights of teaching in London is that one is forced to be on one's toes by bright students. One of the things I have been doing lately is reading on development policy, sociology and American intellectual history. The most striking thing to me is how sociological it all is. From the Harrod-Domar growth model that was imposed on third world countries as they decolonised, through the 'Rostow' analysis of the 1960s, to the fukayama theses of the 90s, Americans of the right and left embraced sociological studies. In family studies too, it was Americans--often, but not always Catholic--from the right and centre who applied the sociological analysis--George Peter Murdock, Talcott Parsons, Dan Pat Moynihan and Charles Murray, for instance. What happened? Here, sociology became a lazy refuge for people who didn't apply themselves or worked through essentially Marxist, or at the most, Gramscian takes on things without actually linki...

Chief Justice Cornelius; the greatest Judge of the past century? It's odd the things that attract you to a country of which, really, you know little but with which you can draw analogies. I should, for instance, be a much greater sympathiser with India than I am. India is a vibrant, stable democracy with a safe tradition of law and by far a better 'bet' for people who think themselves realists and don't know much else than that India, and its constitution (Mrs Gandhi's emergency rule aside) has generally functioned without revolution. It contains places like Kerala, which has something of outsider status in India, a democratic-communist tradition (if such a thing can exist) and strange but very human family structures amongst groups like the Nayar which would fix the eye of anyone with an interest in how people are. But it's Pakistan that I am really fascinated by in that part of the world. It is such a country of contrasts--tourist gibberish usually, but true i...

1962 There are times, I suppose, when from the vantage point of now, the past seems attractive. We live in the past in a sense, since time slips by so quickly and our memory brings such constructions to bear on what we knew or what we think we know about a place or time. I do wish, however, that I could step back to the summer of 1962. (It's that sort of crazy musing that a blog is for, I might point out, and yes I can't sleep and no I am sober). I think it the most interesting year of the past 50, if silly calculations about interest were to be made. The great Chief Justice Cornelius was coming to the attention of the world in pakistan. A Catholic, he held one of the foremost Muslim seats of law at a time when Pakistan--still linked to Bangladesh-to-be--was roiled by its three-way split between army, elite and peasantry but not yet broken. In those Vatican II days, he even wondered if some blend of shariah, then an abstraction, and common law could practically be found. In Isr...

Curioser and Curioser W hat exactly happened in Syria on September 6? The British Spectator is carrying a story backed by heavy breathed briefing from British and American sources about something 'very big' having happened when the Israelis struck at a Syrian facility. The name 'orchard' seems to be associated. Time reveals all things. Like the now long past tale of the USS Liberty, however, perhaps we will need to wait a very long time for this one to be explained. Is our new doctrine a sort of 'Suez-lite' in which through proxies enemies are hit and intelligence gathered before anything big happens? Or is the silence of the Arab and Iranian governments revealing?

The Iranian Game Sorry for my absence for a while; I have been in North Carolina with the Middle Temple, filling in the gap in that state whose more interesting citizens refer to it as 'a valley of humility between two vast mountains of arrogant pride' in Virginia and South Carolina. The South is at least honest, mostly, about what it is about. I even saw the American flag sung to the background in a native pow-wow. the haunting song of a vanished people chilled me as I watched on a hot carolina day. And so I'm back. Since I've been away, the US military and intelligence community seem to have been blogging through reliable mouthpieces in an increasingly manic game of bluff and counter-bluff with Iran. That isn't sensible with the people who invented checkmate, of course. Look at the evidence, though. Reliable sources note that the United States Central Command in Florida has been planning nuclear bunker-busting attacks on Iran since April. This has been co-ordinate...