Martin Meenagh blog

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 reall...

The Jazz Accordion Now, there is a dissonant idea, rather on a par with the morphing of Calvin and Weber's Protestant work ethic into the chance to win high school qualifications via McDonalds . Anyway, viewer, I thought that I would sign in and leave a short instructional video for you. It comes from the Lawrence Welk Show, which was a staple of post-war America. I thought of it today when I read the sublime headline on Salon.com, 'McCain Wins Florida Primary; Conservative Heads Explode' . Really, Salon's blogs from the campaign trail in the states have been almost as completely wrong as mine from the supreme vantage point of a small box flat in Putney, but probably much better written. We now face a moment when America's federal state cannot really afford to pay its bills without the far east agreeing to the bond issues. It's a moment when every terrorist in the world wants to take a pop, and multiple governments have much the same approach, and where the two ...

Sunday Musings One of the things about walking back from mass on a pleasant Sunday is how much time one has to just muse about things. I found myself quite absently thinking about Barack Obama's pleasant victory last night, and also about the Thames, and about art, in a very convoluted but quite fun way. Obama's victory was smashing. He's increasingly reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson, a segregationist 'progressive' Democrat in 1912(though Wilson of course was never subject to primaries). Wilson was picked as an unbending and incorruptible university professor who had been born in the South, raised in the North and who served briefly as a sea-green but successful Governor of New jersey. In 1912, he swept past Democrat stalwarts and front-runners like Champ Clark, partly because of his campaign manager, William McCombs, who was a political organizer of genius. McCombs, born poor in Harlem, powered the man who brought the idea of world government to Europe in the Peace of...

The Burning of Sudan The picture is of the saint I was named for by my parents (my confirmation name, which was different, was Bernard, after the great medieval saint and the dog). I am thinking of him tonight, though he lived hundreds of years ago in South America, and rather shamefully the connection in my mind with the events in Darfur that I am dwelling on is the colour of his skin and what it would mean there. This is usually a timewasting, and often light-hearted blog. I try to keep a balance for you. This site , however, contains a movie about what is going on in Sudan. It details how the government of that country in alliance with Islamists are systematically murdering black Christians. You should watch it, if you have the time. North Africa is the source of a huge amount of Europe's energy supplies, it is the holding ground for millions who seek to escape Africa and it could so easily catch fire from this inferno in its south. Things are being done today, the eve of the Ho...

Hillary Clinton and New Hampshire A while ago, I pointed out the discrepancies in the voting in the New Hampshire primary, and how Hillary Clinton's total seemed artificial in areas with electronic voting machines. Denis Kucinich, the Ohio Congressman and former presidential candidate, paid for a recount because of many people suspecting that there was unaccountable error in the machines, manufactured by the Diebold corporation, or their software. A partial recount now has been held, and, though all candidates bar Richardson in a third of the electoral districts were probably overcounted, no substantial fraud seems to have occurred. So, I was wrong (until a full recount proves otherwise) to suspect anything more than a small variation in votes, and I am rather glad of it. However, since blogs seem to last forever, I just wanted to correct my error. Here's the machinist at Salon.com with a full report on the shenanigans. I'm enjoying the reportage in Carl Bernstein's at...

It's Australia Day As though I needed an excuse to play my favourite youtube of 'Advance Australia Fair'. However, since I have only one reader and they are a little troubled, were I to believe the letters that arrive wrapped in tinfoil, I thought that I would hold off from doing that. Here, for your pleasure, is instead the Australian Cultural Attache to the Court of St James, Sir Leslie Patterson, holding forth in a segment from the Parkinson show many moons ago. If you do not like swearing, sexist imagery, smoking, drinking to excess, obesity, vulgarity or are possessed of a cast of mind somewhat distanced from the bien-pensant, look away now.

The Green Children An awful lot of people just talk. Here's a website for the Green Children, who raise money and promote microcredit on the Grameen Bank model in Bangladesh, Kenya and elsewhere. They are also a music group, and are made up of the stunningly beautiful Mille Sunde and the admirable Tom Bevan. This link is to their socially aware website; their actual green children site, which you can reach through it, is very well designed and you can some of their music on it too. If you do want to waste some time, have a look! If you buy their music, (and you should only do so if you like it, but it is good in the way of that sort of thing), they will use some of the money to help the world. The picture on this post is of course of Sunde and Bevan with Mohammed Yunus, and I hat-tip 'the Third World View' for it. You can reach it through the list of blogs on the left of this site. The name Green Children, of course, is taken from the famous mystery of the Green children o...

What the Egyptians are about to do to Hamas As you can tell from this blog's posters and badges, I am no fan of the HAMAS movement. The political capture of Islam by the forces of hate, exclusion and anger has been an ongoing process since the humiliation of the Arab world in the face of Israel's embattled and determined armies in 1967, if not since the Egyptian tortures of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1953. I am also not best convinced of a case often bruited about on the left that Israel is at the root of many of the Middle East's problems. Israel, after all, has a right to exist and a sovereignty to defend. A traumatised country of 3% of its region with a relatively free press and elections that responds in the way Israel does to hatred and the physical threat of more bombs than the London blitz raining down from rockets on its cities and villages isn't the craziest or most unrestrained of places. 'Militants' even use google earth to target Jews. China bans you...

Social Engineering in New Orleans The individual in the picture was due to retire from the American House of Representatives next week to join a managed funds association. His name is Richard Baker, and his district is centred on Baton Rouge in Louisiana. These past few years, American politics have been far more than usually dishonest. They may have of course been working simply to a peak of a Romney-Clinton contest, which would just simply be a festival of lies on the woodstock scale. However, during this particular cycle, Mr Baker had a moment of honesty for which he will probably be remembered. In 2005, he noted that God, through Katrina, had done what he and his colleagues had been wanting to do for years, and destroyed the working class areas of New Orleans . Mr Baker, a former developer, then sponsored a bill to bail out mortgage companies by paying off working-class mortgages, taking the land in response, and offering it to development corporations to attract different sorts of...

Martin Misses the Point of The Glass Bead Game Again I am a devotee of Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game , and am currently re-reading it after an eight-year hiatus. The book is a strange, 23rd century memoir within a novel of the sort Germans call a bidungsroman. It concerns a mysterious order of quasi-Catholic monks who play the unifying game of a post-modern yet suspiciously contemporary world that integrates all knowledge. Herman Hesse also tried to use the book to depict the development of a sensitive soul into a tough and masterful administrator of the pointless world order, and the things that happened to him along the way. Knecht, the central character, eventually experiences a spiritual crisis that drives him out of the position he has sought and into an attempt to serve a harsh and unforgiving world that ends predictably badly. Hesse seems to have wanted to dwell on the theme of reincarnation and spiritual growth too, but thankfully kept that sort of thing to a minimum. If y...

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...

Long, Long Ago I remember summer nights at home and winter days walking miles to school, convincing myself my mind was there to be disciplined by repeating over in the theatre of my head lines and lines of Yeats. The pompous, vaulting prose of the early man and the washed out fatalism of the later old goat soared in me, lifted me up. It's funny how tonight I remember how clever the perception of a cold and rook delighting heaven made me feel, and how for some reason I remember waving leicestershire corn and a big red sun all at once when I do. That, I suppose, is the cultural language in which a person raised on travel programmes in the nineteen seventies sometimes thinks. I'm feeling a little melancholy reader. There was a hole in my shoe down chancery lane, and I've been writing and lecturing all day for what, thanks to her majesty's revenue and customs, seems very little reward, and I'm really very tired. And now my mind has turned to another comment on Yeats, th...

More than Slouching towards a Crisis Things are picking up pace now. For the past year, I've been sounding (I know) like some 'moaning weirdo' about the very real issues that the West faces. I can of course do nothing about them, I am, like the vast majority of the inhabitants of the world impotent in the face of things. I have eyes to see, though, and at least this odd combination of commonplace book and diary that a blog is can put that down for you, should you wish to plough on. The present collapse of our souffle economy is just a preliminary to an absolutely inevitable adjustment. We have had eight years of deficits, spending growth, and the mortgaging of the British and American states to over indebted economies. The banks, if one looks at the rates of interest they impose upon loans to each other, and to their attempt to retract their own exposure to the global economy, have seen it coming for some time. Sovereign funds in the east are not a sign of the east's gr...

Literal Religions One of the curiosities of life is how fiercely people believe things that to an outsider make no sense. I've been thinking about that in different ways since reading an introduction by Richard Tuck to Hobbes's works last week, when I was on the train to Bath. Tuck argued that one of the points about the seventeenth century, which I'm fascinated by, is that its thinkers tried time and again to grapple with what we'd know as relativism. After 1525, and in truth for a hundred years before that since the crushing of the Cathars, the Islamic invasions and the discovery of America, the minds of Europe had been unsettled and in crisis. With Catholic certainty dethroned, men had to come to terms with the possibility that no one could ever know anything for real. This led, in a century of devastating war, to the possibility not that everyone was wrong but that anyone could be right. Some, like Grotius and, after him, Hobbes, attempted to scale the impossible ...

Finally we meet Mr Bond.... Here is a certain Gordon Brown a few years ago, arguing that a scheme to issue 3 billion in bonds to finance public investment in a criminally underfunded London underground system at the height of a bond market was 'unsafe' and 'questionable'. It would have cost every family in London £1000 he said. Here is Prime Minister Gordon Brown when the market is heading seriously downhill proposing through a glove puppet to issue at least 24 billion in bonds to prop up a failed bank nearly doubling the size of the government budget deficit, all things remaining equal. Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure . As they used to say in Rome, just as this sort of thing was happening. Just before the fall.

Mr Appalled. It's Christian Unity Sunday. Things are about to get very, very nasty, partly because Mitt Romney is hated by Huckabee and McCain--perhaps held in contempt is better term--for attacking them and everyone else and saying anything to get elected. Giuliani knows he has to get nasty with Romney. Romney attracts support from Republicans who hate McCain and fear Huckabee and Paul. Hillary has to tear Obama down. Edwards has nothing to lose and may wish to tear Hillary down. The eventual nominees will then have to attack each other negatively. So I thought I'd get mine in first. Let's start with two people who lied to me, and anyone else who respected them. The Clintons have been working as a team for over forty years. During the course of those years, Hillary Clinton and her husband have repeatedly sought to raise the hopes of those in the shaky coalition that is the American Democratic Party, and around the world, in a sort of baby-boomer soixante-huitard approach t...

'We want to offer Shariah Law to Britain'. One thing I know is that a piece on Sharaiah law should never start with or contain the phrase '...on the one hand...'. I simply wanted to reply to this story and not to extrapolate any points so that they might be directed at a community I respect. I know many hard working, decent, funny Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Muslim people generally. However, an offer has been made of 'Shariah law for Britain'. A request has been made that the hadith, the siri, and the Qu-aran be given legal authority. The request includes an example. It is the example of the practice of recognising the particular Muslim legal ethic during the British Raj in India. Those employing the example want it to be revived here. No. I have a copy of the Abdel-Haleem Qu-aran on my desk next to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius , the King James Bible and Thomas A Kempis's Imitation of Christ . I respect your tradition. But, No. You call for harsh puni...

The American Elections The Flag on this blog, with vertical and not horizontal stripes and a colour scheme different from that to which you may be used, is a product of some demented libertarian re-imagining of US history in the early twenty first century. Some writers, for reasons probably connected to distaste for the Federal government, decided to create the idea of a creeping militarised conspiracy to replace the US 'peacetime' flag after the civil war with one associated with the war department. To that end, they invented a history, claimed the US customs flag and variations upon it as their own, and set about rewriting history. Their claims are refuted extensively here , but a libertarian project to re-write the long ago in order to criticise a somewhat leaden and centralised present has a certain quirky twinkle about it, I suppose, until it comes to seem sinister. The sad truth is that the United States has never really been a peacetime republic and I write that as someo...

Lynda Carter in Her Glory I posted this picture just because I could. Beautiful women are beautiful at any age and beauty isn't really found in outward appearance. However, Lynda Carter in this picture is just stunning . I've been lucky to have women in my life. However, the rational, twentieth-century part of me wants to think that the sweet egotistical thought of female attention never turned my head. I would, of course, be a liar on presidential political proportions if I convinced myself of that. Fallen as my view of humanity is, you would have to be totally stupid if you fell for it too. My girlfriend used to meet Carter in the Rockies when she was skiing, and it turns out that she is a nice person too. No wonder when she became interested in politics, President Clinton's staff made darn sure he was never, ever, allowed to be alone with her. What god hath wrought.

Today's Important Election No, not the election of a rich robotic and disingenuous Romney in Nevada, nor the victory of Hillary Clinton's increasingly underhand campaign, nor the success of Ron Paul, nor the South Carolina projections that may bring comfort to Mike Huckabee. No, something more important than that. The Jesuits have just elected a new worldwide Superior-General in Rome. He's the former President of the East Asia section, Adolfo Nicolas. Father General Nicolas has extensive experience in Japan, the Phillippines and East Asia, whilst hailing from Spain. He stands as the 29th successor to Saint Ignatius Loyola and now leads the biggest Catholic Order of priests. The Jesuit Father-general is often referred to as the 'Black Pope', as opposed to the 'White Pope' in the Vatican. The 'Red Pope' is the Cardinal Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, now called the Congregation for the Evangelization of the Peoples. The election signals that the Orde...

Northern Rock Madness The British government is currently considering propping up what appears to be an otherwise failed bank with securitised loans currently running at between twenty four and fifty billions according to some reports . The people chosen to float the new idea and see what happens are Tony Blair's new employers. The Government is highly reluctant to nationalise the bank. As I understand it, the government is either going to get someone else to buy the bank at knock-down prices, with 70% of its mortgage assets secure and held by another company based abroad, or to turn the bank's debts into bonds which it will then owe and pay out upon with cash that can ultimately be traced to the taxpayer. Either way, this means a vast injection of capital into the system. As a rule of thumb, 1 billion pounds of a bond issue will mean over 3 billion injected in, because the bonds will be paid back at interest and will have a multiplier attached. Since at least 24 billions are ...

Her Brittanic Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Over the course of previous posts, readers of this blog may have developed the impression that I have taken some sort of petty umbrage with the Foreign Secretary. Posts such as 'Milliband; which glove puppet are you?', the repetition of the great Robert Marshall-Andrews QC MP's description of the Secretary as 'a pillock on a gap year', and jib-jab videos in which the Foreign Secretary's head was placed on the body of a woman terrorist in a floral dress before being removed by supersonic metal, may have given rise to the idea that I have some sort of demented contempt for Mr Milliband. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have, I might point out, been faithfully following Mr Milliband's pronouncements. His recent phillipic in Baghdad, for instance, that what Iraq needed was a 'Dad's Army' of part time anti-Jihadis, in my mind rests alongside the inv...

Human Endurance 2; Si se Puede It is all too easy in blogland to be depressed by tales of overindulgence in negativity, by the pettiness of disputes and by the necessary parochialism of our lives. Only Christ ever lived for the whole world, after all, and a bleeding heart such as that of the saviour is not so much a matter of spiritual development as a cue for an angioplasty. However, after a day spent lecturing on the seventeenth century's long political crisis, and its dislocation, its revolt against relativism and fundamentalism, its Muslim invasions and the way they gave a fillip to imperial powers who wished to hold allies in line, and the radical loneliness that Thomas Hobbes wanted to overcome, I feel like I want to just admire another human being. And there are so many to admire. This world is full of people who get up in the morning against the odds and go to work in the dark and live out their precious lives and it is rare that anyone says anything about them. No one is g...

Oscar Pistorius and the Triumph of the Human Spirit Oscar Pistorius , for those of you who do not know, lost his fibulae to a rare disease when he was eleven months old. He runs on metal strips, which have gained him international fame as the 'Blade Runner' from South Africa. In fact, so great is the melding of his will and the machines on his legs that he has been excluded from the Summer Olympics because of the advantage he is perceived to have. I know next to nothing about sports. Playing truant from them and going down to the pub with my dad, or learning elementary Russian, or just chatting with reprobates who like me didn't bring kit to games at school did me no harm whatsoever. They were activities of great benefit. But I am very moved by tales that occasionally turn up of the human condition. Rocky seems as real to me as any philosopher. Pistorius, voted Sports Personality of the Year by BBC viewers in 2007, is a breathtaking example of a man who just won't quit,...

The Spirit of '61 Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But He Beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended: At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. One of the funnier comments when Werner Von Braun, germany and then America's rocket-obsessive, wrote an autobiography after the moon programme at NASA called 'I aim for the Stars' came from NASA engineers. They, practical men all, obviously, added a sub-heading; 'but sometimes I hit London'. I ca...