Martin Meenagh blog

Eid Saeed too! I have far less of a clue about Eid, but I noticed some of my students in traditional dress today and I read that Ramadan has finished, so I hope that you enjoy your meal and your family, if you're of the Muslim persuasion. Good will to you.

Happy New Year to Any Jewish Readers L'shanah tovah tikatevi v'taihatemi

The End of Postmodernity There is a whole underwater mountain range somewhere in the Atlantic which, one day, may fall into its surrounding waters, so displacing them that devastating waves will criss-cross the Atlantic. Everyone knows it is there. The mechanism by which, one day, it will fall, is well elaborated and clear , though some believe it to suffer from hyperbole and panic. With some strange irony, a precursor of the effect upon which it could rely was suffered in 1929 . At least no-one has yet built an entire economic system to reward the super-rich upon it, and then pretended that the saps who construct intellectual arguments around its solidity should be employed or honoured in their folly. For a brief while, but with pernicious effects in what passes for intellectual life in the west, many thought that history had been deconstructed, relativised, subjectivised and vanished like some mentalist card-trick. According to the various critiques, the nineteenth century, and the ...

Reach for your inappropriate Simile of choice The defeat of the seven-hundred billion tax grab yesterday is a) The equivalent of the rejection of the Versailles Treaty as un-American by the Senate (one for the bankers) b) The equivalent of the rejection of the Kyoto Treaty as silly by the Congress (one for the left) c) The equivalent of the abdication of responsibility by the Congress and its delegation to the courts over the abortion issue, or civil rights (one for process driven people) d) The equivalent of the parlement de Paris rejecting some ludicrous royal demand or other (one for the smart alecks) Insert the appropriate simile in your article of choice and pass the acquired patina of insight off as your own--in no time, you'll be remembered for your prose. On the dole queue.

The Great Republic is fighting back I awoke this morning with a song in my head of which I must have been dreaming. It was one of those by Irish singers which my mother had played in the car when I was young, and she was driving around Northamptonshire thinking of Donegal. In retrospect, many of those songs were radical American protest songs, and quite a few were by Woodie Guthrie--but when replayed and resung in Irish accents, they took on a republican tinge I have always admired. The song of which I was thinking was one I couldn't quite place--Guthrie's 'Banks are Made of Marble', which I can't find on youtube. The chorus runs Let's break out the banks of marble With the Guard on every door And share out the gold and silver That the workers sweated for . After that, I went down the Cromwell Road and gave a sort of lecture-cum-seminar on European politics. A bright American asked me at the end what I thought of the reformed Paulson plan, and I, trying to be re...

LIBOR and TED and the rebirth of the Mixed Economy When banks lend money, they borrow from the interbank market. This is because even banks that issue their own notes, like the Scottish ones, actually can't break government rules about the issue of cash. So a good indicator of how bad the banks think things are, or indeed of how bad they really are, is the interest rate at which banks lend to banks. Today, the rates of interest on interbank loans are growing rapidly. The banks do not think each other a safe bet. It is also the case that demand for money to pay off debts owed on the markets is growing from investment arms of banks. This means that the price of money for loans is going right up. It also means, as this blog has been going on about for over a year, that even if banks are given a tonne of money by governments, they will simply absorb it or pay off their own debts with it. This is now especially true since there is an element of risk creeping into a traditional practice ...

Should Doctors Kill.... The way in which legal logic works itself out of the boxes in which it has been set is intriguing to me. These past days, occasioned by a horrible story of a child murdered at the hands of her mother for being disabled, I found myself asking about the way in which the power to kill had devolved upon doctors. Doctors tend to be default arbiters in this country. That is to say, when the abortion legislation was put through the commons and lords in 1967, it didn't convey a right to abortion. Instead, it formalised a longstanding defence to a charge of illegal abortion, which was that such a thing was available at the discretion of a doctor on the terms normal to the medical community. That's still the case, and only one doctor has ever been prosecuted for performing an abortion on demand (R v Smith [John] in 1973). In 1992, the law of England and Wales went a little further. The result of Airedale v Bland was that doctors were allowed the option of switchin...

Why is a full Brigade of troops being permanently stationed on American soil for the first time since 1878, and why is the American left worried about it? Glenn Greenwald and others have drawn attention to this Army Times story. The National Defense Authorization Act presupposes a permanent base for the active brigade within the USA. This rescinds the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act . President Bush, in a 'signing statement' (America is, apparently, back to Rex est Lex Loquens )has said that he will deploy the soldiers wherever he likes. The President did not need this authority. In time of civil unrest, as in Detroit in 1966, or emergency, as after Katrina, or in time of insurrection, the president always had authority to deploy troops or federalise the National Guard or, in certain cases, to draft people. So why the anticipation of civil unrest? I'm no conspiracy nut, I hope. But we have a long-predicted banking collapse, a 700 billion dollar power grab, a Brigade of troops on...

Gordon Brown is not that Bad 4 The individual on the right is her Britannic Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. He has been memorably described as 'a pillock on his gap year'. Is this what the Downing Street strategy now constitutes--standing next to people so ridiculous, even if the Media-political class wants them in power, that you look like Socrates? Who's next? Kim Il Jung? Mugabe? Rod Hull and Emu? I mean, two of those are dead.

Have a Poem When I first went to Balliol, all fresh and robust from my steel town and my saturday job at Texas homecare, I was, frankly, terrified. Trying not to show it, I looked for ways to stay calm. In my room above the JCR, I clove books to myself. Despite the confidence I tried to show outside--and if you can sell a Texas kitchen to Corby people you have it made--I desperately needed some home comforts. I found it in the most strange place. It wasn't just the cold bacon and sausage rolls in the Junior Common Room--too many of those, eventually!--or in the odd glass of wine here and there. Nor was it in the eyes and laughter of the women who became my closest friends, because I hadn't met them in my first term. It wasn't in the histories of America, or the letters I sent to friends, or the memory of my Grandad's smoky old terrace. Nor was it in the paintings and line drawings I've done at those times in my life when I've been stressed or pressured, though I...

A Revolt against an Indian CEO--or a horrible murder? Something akin to Germinal's mob scene seems to have happened in India yesterday. I take no pleasure in it. A very large group of workers were laid off from a factory three months ago. They responded to the destruction of their livelihoods-- in a country with no appreciable safety net--by invading it and murdering the Chief Executive Officer of the Italian, outsourced, firm. I'm reading Michael Burleigh's Sacred Causes at the minute. It confirms me in my belief that the French Revolution deserves a very high place in Europe's disasters, given what it spawned--alongside racial slavery and Imperialism. Is what happened in India a herald of a global disaster on the same lines? If global capital and the model most of the west has got materially rich from--the economic model which allowed me to buy this computer, and have the life I do--continues to treat workers who didn't get anything but baubles the way it has b...

The State of the Sun NASA have held their press conference on the state of the Sun. Apparently we are now seeing the lowest minimum in a cycle since accurate records began. Indeed, solar cycle 24 seems almost quiescent. This means that cosmic winds which could be important in affecting cloud cover on earth , and which also play a role in diverting cosmic rays, are extremely low. All of this in the past seems to have coincided with extreme moments of global cooling. So it seems that we could be heading back to the nineteen seventies at least. Soon, a scientific 'consensus', no doubt backed by politicians, premillenarians, and the media, will be pushing the 'next ice age' line fairly loudly. What if the carbon, methane and sulphur in the atmosphere are eventually shown to keep us warmer than we should be? Are we going to be hoping for global warming in the coming winters?

The Dodd Plan to avoid Paulson's Tax-grab Chris Dodd has just published a brilliant plan to counter the republic-threatening Paulson plan. Here is the link; what's inspired is that bad mortgages are destroyed, the poor get new reissued ones predicated on a 15% reduced house price, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation--the nationalised non private guarantor of the banks--gets the income. The republic is fighting back. These are tactics from people who seem to sense where we need to go if we can avert disaster in the long term. I thought that Dodd was a senate boob; I was wrong, on this evidence, and very badly so. We should gradually untie and dissect the banks, the hedge funds, and the vast global malefactors. Then we should tie value, credit and worth to production and land, and prevent the creation of a vast and exploitative planetary aristocracy of wealth. I am coming to the conclusion that such a disinflation is in fact a kind of public moral enterprise, and that ...

Continuous War As the problems of resource depletion, instability, and social collapse begin to bite within the west, the Pentagon has published its 2008 modernization strategy. It calls for a fiscal and national commitment to war for the next four decades. The Irish Times --with Le Monde and the FT , one of the best newspapers in the world--has a clear analysis here . I also note the safe return of Irish soldiers from peacekeeping in Chad. The Irish Army has been at the forefront of peacekeeping efforts for decades, and its soldiers are a credit to the Irish. Well done to you, should these words fall under your eye. Have western states, decent places like the Federal Republic of Germany or places that can save themselves still, like America, got what it takes to see the obvious antidote and vaccine to the illness of continuous war? Reinstitute the draft. Citizens now play video game wars with the social extremes of their society and immigrant-aspirant soldiers. That makes them less...

Obama-Palin I just want to record this point clearly. If Barack Obama and John McCain tie in the electoral college, with 269 votes each--and I think a glance at Real Clear Politics' electoral college map suggests that they will unless one makes unrealistic assumptions at this time --then there are three steps to the presidency. (I disagree with the allocation of states there--when you look at the map, go to the one where you can allocate the toss-up states yourself, and you'll see 269 is a likely Obama figure, not 273). Firstly, the electors could be encouraged to drop their allegiance and to vote for the winner of the popular vote. Candidates would have a month to do this. Second, if that does not work, the House of Representatives, state delegations acting as a bloc--so California has as many votes as Delaware--elects the president. I think that this would be Obama. Some others who have thought of this before me agree. Third, the Senate in such circumstances elects the Vice-P...

Public Ownership Watch The Libertarians are consistent and are pursuing an intellectually defensible logic. They're also as funny and insightful as the exile in polemical mode can be. I wouldn't fit with their view, partly because of my communitarianism and partly because of my Catholicism. Still, I'd like to recommend the Devil's Kitchen site to you. One reason for that is that they keep turning up and exposing ludicrous waste. Such waste is now built into nepotistic, public-private 'partnerships' that link the third rate political hacks that run us with the grade-D 'consultants' who give them jobs after we kick them out in return for our money. In recent weeks, I've read how the Downing Street website was fleeced for a hundred thousand pounds by designers. Maybe some of the civil servants recruited by rigorous tests and then set to stupid regulations and power games could have been diverted to save us that money. Equally, I've read about the b...

Creationism People are free to believe whatever they like. Any decent approach would attempt to persuade, either by example or words, but recognise that people can make up their own mind. If their faith is strong enough, then God or the universe can deal with those who don't believe, frankly. I've just come back from mass and was, as usual, surprised to find on the web a certain amount of ignorance about faith, some of it spread by the faithful. Surely it should now be obvious, to people--after all, you've had nearly two thousand years--that the Catholic Church (tm and (c)) which I love has a passing acquaintance with the literal word of the bible (choose your version and translation), but also with the holy spirit's guidance of a church defined by a logic which depends only upon its premises. Catholics are in fact enjoined to believe so that they may understand -- credo ut intelligam --set out by the pope amongst others. It is very possible to see this as a duty to b...

The Invasion of Cuba that Kennedy forestalled In the early nineteen sixties, elements within the United States defence establishment came to believe that Cuba was a menace to the United States. The rhetoric of the ham-actor tyrant running that island encouraged them. They drew up plans to remove him. I was very struck by the details of some of these plans whilst reading about them yesterday, and by the reason leadership at the presidential level and an independent media is important. For instance, General Lemnitzer , Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered this document to Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962 . It details a plan to destabilise Cuba , and to lay the groundwork for an invasion. Among the plans it details are attacks on US assets and foreign embassies in places like Guantanamo, Haiti, and Nicaragua which would have been blamed on the enemy. Attacks on civilian airliners would be provoked, and, chillingly, a terror campaign would be launched in Miami and other cities...

The power of finance in the anglosphere I wrote the other day of the importance of insurance to the American 'tort model' of rights which now characterises the political behaviour and outlook of many American citizens. So I understand the importance of AIG to the American economy, and society. As one of the co-founders of the campaign for public ownership here, I understand that sometimes governments have to act, and would argue that sometimes society is protected by collective economic action. I am stunned by what has happened this week, however, and by the blase contempt of those who have done it. The only possible justification for it all is that it has held off another Depression. But we all know that the goal is to remove the risk that the super-rich and financial institutions always said justified their wealth, even if that required straining the chains of the media-political class they own and exposing who runs things to the citizens. Many of those involved couldn'...

NASA schedules a press conference on the state of the sun Global cooling cycles linked to a slight diminution in the activities of the sun have been explanations of periods of cold in the past for some time. Indeed, the New Scientist last week carried an interesting story which wondered if stone age men caused a slight global warming that helped stave off an ice age. The solar cycle has been linked to agriculture, and to the rise and fall of civilisations. I am coming to the belief that, if the history of the hysterical last gasp of premillenarianism in our societies ever gets written, man-made global warming will be seen as a colossal diversion from the study of the sun's influence on our climate. But, hey, carbon-credits have become a business, and environmentalism proves one's credentials with the western middle classes as an autonomous yet engaged individual. So that's alright then--or at least it will be until the carbon traders go down with their ship . Something i...

Barack Obama on Religion and Abortion I was very struck to read this thoughtful, careful speech from Senator Obama on what should be allowed to the secular sphere of reason and what it was that we could not share of faith. He has a very subtle mind, and I like him for it. Many thanks to the great Bob from Brockley for posting the link.

Here's a video about Mr Tickle He used to tickle people. It's good for your mental health to have a break with cartoons like this, especially from all the doom and gloom on this blog. And besides, Mr Tickle is a lawyer's fantasy. Once m'learned friends at the criminal bar had finished with him, he's be sued to the point of several christmas dinners and a bottle of lafitte. God almighty, he's hanging around schools as well.

Stuff I'm enduring an odd, September-grey hangover near an open window. The fresh breeze is just chilled enough. A mix of Glen Campbell Wichita Lineman and Buddy Holly, whom my father loved when he was alive on the earth, is playing on Radio 2 as I write. How odd these moments of clarity are. The United States is nationalising a large portion of the financial system, centred today upon a loan to AIG, the insurance giant. This goes to the heart of one of the institutions which are at the core of the republic of lawyers that was reformulated in the twentieth century. It's all very well to talk of tort lawyers running America, for instance, or of a culture of rights. I have , though I hope not yet past the point of tedium. That model of a politicised legal system to which people turned and congress deferred or passed the buck, intimately depends upon the insurance industry. America, unlike England and Wales, is regulated through the courts, which allow contingency fees for lawyer...

Perfect

Lynda Carter's Opinions of Sarah Palin Lynda Carter, who is, was, and always will be a smart, beautiful Christian woman has given her opinion of Sarah Palin . The former Wonder Woman does not approve of the present one. Here is a picture to illustrate my comments. It should be familiar to my reader. It is of Ms Carter in her glory which I thought I would take this opportunity to re-post. Again. Frankly, if we start a war with Iran, I'm just going to make it a screensaver-size portrait and we can all kiss our non-glowing modernity goodbye before we meet baby Jesus.

Income versus Life Expectancy Here is a link to a graph detailing income against life expectancy across the world. A student of mine just sent it to me. It seems vaguely obscene that we should have been living like this at a time of plenty in 2006. However, as I have been suggesting for years now, food, oil, demographic pressure and war are about to bring those who are not super rich much nearer equity, and not in a pleasant way. Happy Monday!

Jack Alderman Today was a day in which the normal liturgical cycle was interrupted at mass. Catholics in England were exhorted to contemplate the cross, and the awful dark power of Rome that employed this agonising form of capital punishment. Sometimes, Catholics forget that alongside opposition to abortion, the logic of the faith involves an opposition to capital punishment too. I have argued for a very long time that there are secular arguments to be made against these two policies and that that is what catholics and all citizens and subjects who want to live under a rule of law should do. I want to break my rule about religious arguments in case any reader may be swayed. I know honourable people on both issues who disagree with my position, and those of my church. I would just ask of any readers who claim to be catholic that they read about the case of Jack Alderman . Alderman is on death row in the United States. He has been since 1975 . On what is reported as the evidence of a sc...

A Cooler Winter This is interesting. The excellent Watts Up With That? site has noted a volcanic explosion last month which has spewed sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere. The global cooling trend which some have identified recently may soon be enhanced. I note that solar cycle 24 is still practically sunspot-free . Sunspots cycles have been credibly linked to global temperatures , with sunspots releasing energies that affect cloud cover on earth. Looks like those Russian gas and oil pipelines are going to be even more important than usual in a few months time....

Gordon Brown is not that bad Part 3 There are many things to blame Gordon Brown for. I need to take a few paragraphs to list them. He sold off gold at too cheap a price. He failed to see the perfectly predictable end of an unsustainable housing boom and to lay precautions against it. He failed to fix and safeguard the national insurance fund (instead, he plundered it), to neuter and then roll back the private finance initiative, or to create a sustainable pensions system. He actually deepened the culture of mortgaging government business and public goods to the medium term to get short-term fixes. He undermined his own government, and encouraged a very heavy form of statism and class consciousness in education, whilst encouraging inefficient public-private monopolies elsewhere. Yet he did some good. His Millennium bonds initiative , and bilateral write off of debt helped eliminate a modern scourge, even if it was quickly replaced by others which began in Africa. I know that 'Br...

Why do we even bother to pretend that a 'Left' exists anymore? I ask in all seriousness. The predictive and evaluative usefulness of things like historical materialism aren't confined to Marxists. One is not either a neoliberal or of the left when it comes to economics. Secular atheism, feminism, and the various agendas to emerge out of 1968 are profoundly reactionary and depend not upon free thought but upon enforced groupthink. Abortionism and blind scientism are not compassionate things, and the Green movement, which is often touted as part of the 'radical left' has as much in common with the mid-twentieth century radical right. There are some, too, who are honest about their conception of what being left is, and they locate it in the French Revolution. That revolution involved the physical destruction of enemies as a class, the bloody desecration and attempted destruction of the church, and an orgy of anarchy that devolved quickly into nationalist militarism and...