Martin Meenagh blog

Oh, good grief.... Serbblog has links to stories today that seem to show large oil deposits, which have been apparently known about for some time, in Bosnia, Northern Albania, and Kosovo. As the oil price inexorably rises, and the quality and flow begins to fall, of course, more new 'deposits' at near-unsustainable prices will be found. It is odd, however, this way that we keep invading and dismembering places that coincidentally have reserves of the black gold so as to bring the benefits of the enlightenment in non-salon form....

Gordon Brown 2 As I have noted before, I think Britain's Prime Minister is better than the bullies turning on him right now make out. He is surrounded by awful, student-union level MPs, by a public that does not want to know about any real sacrifice, and by a climate of opinion that can fall to the level of last week's disgusting abortion 'debate' whilst obsessing over Brown's responsibility for the mortgage, debt and oil crisis that the people themselves have created by greed and reinforced by their determination not to think. That that crisis is now affecting decent, hardworking people more than those who fanned its flames is a shame. Brown is by no means perfect, and is awkward and flawed by all accounts. I think he means well, though, and is a clever and serious man. He even tried this week not to give in to craven demands to lower tax but to focus the public on what is happening with oil, even if the media do not want to listen, or understand. So I'm glad t...

The Happy Warrior There are an awful lot of armchair warriors around at the minute. However, paddling my coracle on the interweb tonight, I found the video at the bottom of the blog of JFK's charming speech to the Canadian Parliament in May, 1961. I wonder what the apostles of bombing and coalitions of the willing would make of it. It's interesting, even though Kennedy is laying it on thick almost from the beginning, to note how an America facing a massive and world-ending threat once behaved. Kennedy seeks to uphold the ideas of global development, partnership, responsibility and negotiation. He asks, in this lesser-known speech, that people of goodwill and ability do practical things to uphold human dignity. He notes a fearsome challenge; but makes no bow to go-it-alone militarism or soft bigotry. He is strong, but charming, and principled but not priggish. It is the sort of America that stretched back to the West's better traditions--he even alludes to Salamis and Marat...

A modicum of hopemongering against Apocalypticism I went to a catholic comprehensive, and before that to catholic primary schools. One of the things about the great church experiment in education, which extended in the Atlantic world over an arc of around a century and a half, was that children were issued with bibles in the desk at junior school. This was not so much a guide to all behaviour as an aide to the teachers. Catholicism, like Greek orthodoxy, Judaism, or for that matter most other great world religions, requires far less scriptural knowledge or adherence to a written word than most forms of Protestantism or many of Islam. But sometimes the teachers were a little boring, or over earnest, and went on for obvious reasons when we encountered the bible at all, about St Paul and authority. Any visiting priest who might wander in almost never used it, preferring as I remember to talk alternately about Africa, guitars, Shakespeare, or on one memorable occasion, what sort of BMW ser...

Is the net closing on Bin Laden? Matthew D'Ancona at the spectator has broken a story in Britain tonight that the Al-Arabiya TV station has. It suggests that Osama Bin Laden has been located, in the Karakoram mountain range . This is a huge range and any 'location' may be expected--or at least hoped--to be more specific. The story is as near to hearsay as one could come, but may because of the source be more solid than many of the reports of that elusive man over the past seven years. The Pakistan Daily Times had the story yesterday. Is the net closing?

Web Links Hello reader. Inter alia , I have been standing up shakily on my coracle on the interweb (which I suppose approximates to surfing the net) and have found some interesting websites. One is Question Everything , a website concerned with George Mobus' take on information systems and the future. You may also be interested in a site which, from a different perspective than mine, tries to map the consequences of peak oil and climate change. It's called future scenarios , and has a spot on the oil drum , which is proving invaluable as a source of fascinating reading material. I might also point out that both Melanie Phillips and The Exile , who are both fairly radical polemicists liable to upset some readers (consider that a warning) have been on form lately. Have a good Tuesday!

Peak Oil and Social Ownership: 12 Steps for Britain 'Big Gav' at the Oil Drum's Australia and New Zealand regional site has put up a very interesting article. In it, he notes 12 ways that the world, and especially those in the richer part of it, can cure our addiction to oil. This is important as the oil is running out, (constantly) and is of course non-renewable. The science is real and those who convinced of the idea are convinced by facts, not predisposition, credulity, or ideology. Have a look. Oil is at the heart of our models of how to use materials, how to grow and transport food, and how to use energy. It is not enough to say 'oh we have reserves', because this does not seem to be the case. Where new deposits have been found, they are only viable at ludicrously high prices, otherwise they would have been exploited earlier. There is also a huge global overhang of debt and an inflationary surplus of money in the world. The combination of these factors with in...

Stories about failed Assassins The word 'assassin', at some point along its historical trajectory, moved from meaning a drug-addled confessional killer associated with the Seljuk Turks to a phrase denoting an insane dealer in killing. One doesn't need to have read Robert J. Donovan's 1956 classic of the same name to see that. I think that the change has something to do with the tendency of the popular culture of the United States to revive old terms and then invest them with a modernised meaning. Certainly, as far as I can tell no one called the first of a modern form of schizophrenic, James Tilly Matthews , a 'wannabe' Assassin. In the popular meaning of the term, however, he was. Matthews was the man who plotted to challenge the British government on the orders, he said, of a gang operating a mysterious 'air loom' that was controlling his thoughts. Like most of his tragic fraternity, he did not actually hear voices as such; rather, he thought some tho...

Al Koran, the famous Mentalist Al Koran was a British 'Mentalist' from the middle of the twentieth century. Born in 1914, he toured England with a peculiar sort of act which went very much out of favour for a while, though the likes of Derren Brown have revived it recently. Mentalists were stage magicians, I suppose. Unlike, say, Nevil Maskelyne , the famous 'secret service magician' from world war two, mentalists were not interested in creating illusions for the sake of it. They tended to be more interested in mathematical games and logic puzzles. That said, Maskelyne did create the penny lock for public toilets, which I suppose is an achievement of almost Roman utility and longevity. With the admissions tests for law and medicine coming round again (I have delivered quite a few seminars and lectures on critical thinking and forms of logical reasoning in the past few years to declare my interest) I thought that it might be fun this Friday night to link to Al's mo...

Barack Obama and the Mullahs The presumptive Democratic nominee at the moment is Barack Obama. He is coming in for a great deal of criticism for what one website has called his determination to run for John F. Kennedy's second term . I think that there is a great deal in that observation, by the way. It is a cliche to say that, in the bloody mess of Dallas in November 1963, America lost its sense of confidence and savoir-faire and began a long engagement with a grudging and darker side which had always been present in the republic. Like most cliches, the observation has some core of truth around which a lot of rubbish has gathered. However, Kennedy's wise observation--probably in form Ted Sorensen's--that America should not negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate is a wise one for our time. Kennedy after all talked to Khruschev, just as Nixon talked to Mao. I think that the very deadly game which is being played in the Middle East right now could do with a bit of...

And while I am on the subject of the human spirit... China is a deeply civilised country whose people endure a great deal. They have sufffered greatly during the recent earthquake. Here's a picture of Peng Shuilin. He's been taking great strides since I last looked. Let him be a symbol of the human spirit and all that's great in a China that can get up despite everything that can be thrown at it, regardless of governments and ideologies. Here's Paul Robeson singing Chee-Lai, which I first heard years ago, from world war two.

Si Se Puede; the triumph of the human spirit Part 3 In these gloomy times, and on a night when Ethiopia faces famine again (a bitter forewarning of things to come across the world), my heart was lifted once again by the continuing adventures of the 'Blade Runner' Oscar Pistorius. I've mentioned him a couple of times before, alongside other heroes of the human spirit. Whatever you think of the Beijing Olympics, the news tonight that Pistorius has won his right to compete to go must surely make you feel good to be from the same species as this man. His chance was won on an appeal from the international athletics federation's decision that this double amputee was just too good and too fast because of his prosthetics. I admire Mr Pistorius, who is only 21, very much. Let's hope 'the fastest thing on no legs' meets his destiny and wins a gold!

Some are awake The news which is more than trickling in now about the coming recession is falling generally along the lines that I've been going on about for the past year or so.I take no pleasure in that. A recession is not a purely economic phenomenon. A peak oil depression will be a human disaster. When combined with demographic differences between the one-billion, ageing rich world and the five billion, young, predominantly male, and impoverished poorer world, it could lead to awful conflicts. When arcs of instability on religious and energy lines have been marked out and ignited, this prospect grows greater. When climate changes, as it naturally does, the four horsemen are approaching. Jean-Claude Trichet , the head of the ECB, seems to have, in much greater detail, a perspective that I share. I think that our present economic crisis is one in which a vast overhang of global betting is matched with oil and food pressures, and a great dependence on credit-driven consumerism. Th...

Another Weekend of the advancing storms I am spending a weekend in the yellow and blue fields of leicestershire, on the northamptonshire border. It's a good thing to get beyond London, and to see what life is like outside of the south-east in fact. In Corby, where I grew up, I'm meeting with family members I haven't seen in years at my cousin's first communion tomorrow, and eating home cooked food for once. Corby is and always has been a centre of immigration, so I noted the size of the section for communion and confirmation in the local Clinton's cards, and the number of cards in Cyrillic for the Serbs as much as the Catholic iconography. The girl at the till in a pink cowboy hat said she hoped my cousin's communion was a great day. This was a change from the atheist bigot who had a go at the Marcus Aurelius Meditations I bought as a leaving present for a Pakistani co-worker in Fulham Broadway because they were marked 'religion'. Outside, however, the ...

Senator Joseph Biden I like the style of Joe Biden. Late of this blog, he has been characterised as 'mad Jose', and a picture of Yosemite Sam has been added to my posts, as is my wont with people I quite like. Here , however, is this great man talking about George Bush's speech to the Knesset. Biden, at least, has the Cojones (and I'm not sorry for the vulgar characterisation) to say what Democrats are thinking. I admire him tonight. Here's one of my favourite viral videos from this campaign season.

Gordon Brown is not that Bad There, I've said it. To listen to the press at the moment, Gordon Brown is the author of all misfortune in the United Kingdom. The former Iron Chancellor celebrated by the Sun and the New York Review of Books alike a year ago has become a ridiculous tribute band version of John Major, to listen to the critics. David Cameron, the empty vessel currently leading the Tory Party to a crushing possible third of the vote, is apparently some form of national saviour. There is little more unedifying than the English middle classes and the metropolitan elite blaming someone else. Buck-passing is a national forte. It's also partly Brown's own fault for presenting himself as the saviour of Real Labour and posing as super competent whilst not having laid down the tracks of success over the past ten years. British political history is laced with seams of once fabled also-rans, though. He made it. The terms on which he had to make it have damaged him, but ask...

Calum Carr and the NHS The badge which appears on the sidebar of this blog links to Calum Carr, who has been running a campaign for Mrs Carr to receive proper treatment for her disorder. They have clearly been through a very bad time and I wanted to link to them because I was very touched by Calum's blogsite, which you can access here . I found it through the interesting blog nourishing obscurity , of which more later.

How Long Before the Boris-Cameron split? I love London. Its appeal is that of a city state with a vast history bound up in such a comparatively small space. The more I am around it, though, the more convinced I am that it is at least as different from the rest of England as Scotland or Wales. Its values, rhythms and the requirements of governance here are intimately linked to the people. The people are of course in no way, shape or form representative of the United Kingdom. Fifty Seven per cent of Londoners are of 'ethnic' or immigrant background, more if you consider the London Irish. The white working class of London, almost airbrushed out of some council provisions and policies, is distinctive, and the politics of the capital spin around an odd mixture of ethnic collectivism and individual selfishness (which I suppose I represent in part) that is distinct from the rest of the country. It is therefore increasingly obvious that, even with the coming economic storms and turbule...

A slightly less mad interlude My regular reader should look away in case the following makes you even more disturbed and they have to give you the special sweets again. My fiancee has taken to issuing coded mission-impossible style numbers from her sinister undersea penthouse somewhere near the Great Lakes. I have just uncovered the latest, which I have put below. Where did you get a spindle, flax and purple silk in Chicago from honey and how much do they want for it back? 10 ALEPH. Mulierem fortem quis inveniet? Longe super gemmas pretium eius. 11 BETH. Confidit in ea cor viri sui et spoliis non indigebit. 12 GHIMEL. Reddet ei bonum et non malum omnibus diebus vitae suae. 13 DALETH. Quaesivit lanam et linum et operata est delectatione manuum suarum. 14 HE. Facta est quasi navis institoris de longe portans panem suum. 15 VAU. Et de nocte surrexit deditque praedam domesticis suis et cibaria ancillis suis. 16 ZAIN. Consideravit agrum et emit eum; de fructu manuum suarum plantavit vineam....

Science and Religion Faith and reason are often made antagonists in the schemes of oafs and shouty atheists. You could, till you were blue in the face, tell them about Georges LeMaitre , the Jesuit who invented the idea of the 'big bang', or the Vatican's work developing the spectrometer, and it would not make a blind bit of difference. Science, AMDG* is often science plus, because it tends to value wonder and the human. That said, if I needed medicine I would rather it were inserted with the sharp end of a hypodermic than a crucifix; each to its own. Anyway, the occasion for my ramble, reader, is the news that Professor Father Michael Heller has won the Templeton Prize, and picked up the appropriate envelope from Prince Philip. Here's the New Scientist link to the story. Father Heller intends to use his million dollars to create a Copernicus Centre in Krakow (I am amazed that there is not one already given Copernicus' provenance). *Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam. Quite w...

Bangladesh and Burma As my one long suffering obsessional reader will know, I am generally a fan of Bangladesh and Bangladeshis. That community (I'm conscious of the kiss of death endorsement by me normally endows) is generally resistant as a corporate body to stupid Islamist cults and has recently begun to make its way through disasters and western 'aid' organisations. So I was really pleased to see Bangladesh as the UN base of the aid effort to Burma. This is more than charitable, given the amount of food Bangladesh and Sri lanka get from Burma, but it is very welcome all the same. Bangladesh, and everyone else , now recognises how efficient its own cyclone warning system has become; and also is distinguishing itself by standing up for womens' rights in the face of Islamist hatred and violence. Three more reasons not to forget that great country. As for Burma, I pray for its people and wish its warlords and generals ill.

Peak Oil Denial The media-political class seems fixed on avoiding what will become the driving engine of our histories ; oil supplies at prices that make our economies viable are running down or out. The Sunday Times in the UK carried two essentially silly articles characterising what is happening as a) a 'super-spike' or b) not happening at all today, and seems to be censoring comments. We only need the perfectly sensible, non-loony argument for peak oil to be characterised as a 'conspiracy theory' by people who actually believe in carbon-linked global warming to know something is really up. In the midst of all this, I've discovered this peak oil website. It is, along with the oil drum and the peak oil association's website, amongst the best in the field and I thoroughly recommend it to you. Wake up!

The Slow realignment of the Left Between the French Revolution and the later stages of the Cold War, there were many who associated under the banner of the Left. This Left represented a congeries of traditions. Those who took their cue from the France of 1792 were prepared to make their compromises with terror and violence, and embraced revolution as an idea of social detonation. Others came from what should probably have been opposed Christian sources, and upheld Christ's gospel message of equality as fiercely as some remembered his treatment of the rich and the money-changers. A part of the left overlapped with market liberalism, and after 1968, upheld the narcissism of modern identity politics, replacing class with lifestyle and 'community' identity. No one ever synthesised an 'essence of Left' however. It was easier to define the Left against the Right. This Left is now clearly not so much dead as part of the hammer horror undead. It has kicked the bucket, passe...

Shakespeare Moments I have had the very good fortune this week to have been given the run of a set of BBC Shakespeare plays from the 1970s and 1980s. As summer steals in mixed with Spring in the evenings, I have returned to my flat in the usual exhausted state and stuck one on in the evenings, and I can't recommend the recordings enough. This week has been great fun because of the films. Henry IV part 2 , with Anthony Quayle making Falstaff human, poignant and almost tragic, was just brilliant; Julius Caesar , was enough to send me happy to bed. Charles Gray, who in his career will probably be remembered as Blofeld in Diamonds are Forever (or, at a pop, Mycroft Holmes) was superb. There aren't enough superlatives. But the real discovery of the set was a great performance of The Life and Death of King John , with Leonard Rossiter, Gordon Kaye and John Thaw. British readers will know how surprising it is to hear those three presented as Shakespearean actors. The latter tends to ...

This is what you get for hope these days.... 1) up to one hundred thousand people possibly dead in Burma , with the food resources of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Burma contained in the Irrawaddy Delta rice fields flooded and Burma's disgusting military leadership keeping help out 2)rubbish about how the solution to peak oil is to ignore it and the solution to global food problems is hare-brained globalism 3)Syria stepping back from Lebanon so Iranian militants can hand Hezbollah another $100 million to screw that country with riots and jew-hatred. 4)Mysterious Chinese diseases flaring in Asia 5)Pagan environmentalist idiocy whilst the world catches fire from ' a pillock on a gap year' . Actually, I'm being unfair on David Miliband as usual. Someone has written something sensible into his speech about the 'resource crunch' but it gets lost in the windborne mental fog. To despair is a sin. I have a great deal of confidence in the people whom the media-political cla...

Southall Black Sisters The following organisations are on the roll of honour for funding the SBS: The Bromley Trust John Lyon’s Charity Department of Health Section 64 Funding The Sigrid Rausing Trust City Parochial Foundation Bridge House Trust Comic Relief London Borough of Ealing Network for Social Change Princess Diana Memorial Fund Oak Foundation Wates Foundation Henry Smith Charity London Rape Crisis Centre Atlantic Philanthropies However, the sisters, who provide vital help to beaten and intimidated minority women suffering domestic violence, still seem to be under threat from their local authority. So, resourceful as ever, they are launching a fund to pay for themselves from donations and public support. This is the address. Whilst I do not expect anyone from SBS to agree with anything on this blog, these people save lives and if you are looking for a charitable cause, I would suggest that you consider them.

Science and Doubt There are an awful lot of people currently puffing themselves up as experts on science. That is to say, there are those, usually atheists from the social sciences, who will brook no dissent whatsoever about things like global warming, abortion for social reasons, HIV-AIDS, or the MMR vaccine and its putative links to autism. I think that an intelligent person could make up his or her mind on the basis of the preponderance of doubt, and the provable falisifiability of evidence. That reads as quite a pompous thing to write. What I mean is that it should not be beyond citizens in a free country, whether in Europe, South Africa, or the USA, to raise valid questions about the orthodoxies of the day. It should of course also not be above people, once their mind is made up, to say 'I am right until I'm proved wrong'. On the balance of doubts, and in the face of clear evidence, it should also be possible to say to contrarians sometimes, 'you are wrong, step as...