Martin Meenagh blog

The Burning World 1 We are, as a culture, a parochial one though we consider our values and ideas universal. At a time when no one in the UK is being allowed to ask or to think anything sensible--not by oppression, but by constant diversion, it makes sense to look at what is happening to the rest of the world. I do not mean the creaking eurozone, which, sooner or later, is now going to tear unless vast resources are thrown after Italian debt. Nor the United States, where the next President will find himself facing a recessional power which needs to cut its spending and rebuild its infrastructure. What's going on in the plains and mountains of central Asia? I don't mean this as some mad diversion, Russell Brand for bores. This country has failed to do what it should have done twenty years ago--expand nuclear power and keep the coal industry going. It is therefore going to be dependent on foreign oil and gas from places very far away, and therefore upon their politics. This count...

Russell Brand Emerges with some sort of honour This is bizarre. The world is burning, and the anti-BBC crowd are out in force to condemn a flighty comedian with a half-genuine otherworldly image who made some sex jokes to another celebrity's answerphone, because he got excited. The said other celebrity is old and well loved, and has hung around show business all his life, so therefore has no clue that his granddaughter--a 'self described satanic slut' --actually has a sex life. Indeed, to read the press, Andrew Sachs should be protected from all that since the old should be patronised when not being ignored. This protection does not extend to protection from gangs of press outside the door demanding interviews, obviously. Said unkempt comedian, who seems harmless enough and who spends his life alternating between a sort of aggressive and surreal wit, the usual soppy prejudices, and lots of sex, apologises and resigns. What he did was clearly wrong, but you have to note tha...

Obama High Hopes Song I like the Kennedy Song from 1960--an intentional kick at 1952's 'I Like Ike' cartoon. I even, on the same basis, have time for 'Sweet Adeline', which JFK would belt out on cue. Here's a link to a film of a male impersonator, Ella Shields , doing the same thing in the 1930s, especially since the other version of Ted Kennedy doing it is just awful. Ella Shields, by the way, sang one of my favourite ever songs, 'Burlington Bertie from Bow' beautifully. Isn't the internet amazing? It always moves me to think, when seeing people laughing and smiling a near century ago on the screen, that almost all these smiles and lives must be played out, all the dramas over by now, god rest them. Those children are old and their adventures run, those adults gone, those bright and weary eyes all lidded by earth or about to be. Still, the tune on the link is a lovely one. They liked it too, those legions of the vanished, and by some act of confab...

The West's Dilemma A recession, or a war, in the past could bring people together and restore a sense of our community. It cannot do so now. Debt has been loaded on individuals and paper inflated out of all control. In addition, the structures of reflection and communication in society have been taken over by people of no faith and few morals, with a self-serving ethic dressed up in righteousness. They have no intention of protesting at the transfer of vast sums of public money to the financial industry; at illegal wars; at anti-family cults; at the sexualisation of everything; at abortion; at an environmental cult demonstrably not based on science; or at any reified desire of any id, anywhere, unless that of an acceptable social outcast. But you can complain about two radio characters on the BBC or engage in a harmless but oh-so-thrilling bit of militant atheism on the buses, if it takes your fancy. This country could renew itself, but it feels to me this morning like a Western st...

A Transparent Attempt to Generate End-of-the-Month Hits in an Idle Moment I am glad that the Barack Obama Nazi Death cult assassination plot was foiled. Things could have ended up like JFK, RFK, or Malcolm X . Then one would have had a sort of crazy Dreyfus-affair type investigation of the sort some would like to have into the Iraq War or the death of David Kelly , but on a fantastically large scale. Now internet users can go back to looking for naked pictures of Sarah Palin or Pamela Anderson's breasts , not to mention evidence of Jack the Ripper whilst debating Jesus and Mohammed in the context of Islamism--that modern freemasonry . The small size of such debates would not matter, and could divert people from the menace of urban rats or the depression that would be a consequence of contemplating the financial armageddon for even a second. Coming to the topic of recession would be depressing in itself. Those are not, after all, subjects that could hold us in a state of raptur...

Rats, Bricks, and Bees Once, the use of arcane or apparently absurd statistics or observations was the prerogative of elite university seminars, which later percolated into books. David Hackett Fischer, for instance, could note the price of bricks from medieval times onward and devise whole theories of inflation from them. Richard Cobb could tell you all about the French Revolution from his storehouse of information about Parisian drains, and the insane number of cahiers de doleance that demanded that the revolutionary French state 'kill all rabbits, pigeons and monks'. So, in that spirit, I've been training my eye on the ordinary things of life, and, surprisingly, found all my prejudices confirmed. I'm sure that that's a first for a blog. Take rats, for instance. Or rather, take the view of the National Pest Technicians Association on rats. The NPTA suppressed 9 million rat births last year, and each year publish a 'rodent report' which, obviously, is su...

Dr Doom I discovered the website of Dr Nouriel Roubini , 'Dr Doom' today. I did so via a slew of reports. He is obviously differently and more qualified than I, but I note that my views over the past few years on the state of the world economy and his correspond. He clearly knows far more than me about the details of what Martin Kelly calls the economics cult. All of which raises a question to my mind. If I, on a sort of wing and a prayer economic analysis, and he, with a zillion degrees in subjects other than my own, could have seen what was coming--why couldn't others who were paid to do so? Were they wilfully blind, greedy, or just daft?

The course of the Long Crisis Another Red October , this time different. Long established certainties are falling by the day. The pound, for instance, was more stable under Wilson and Callaghan in the nineteen sixties and seventies and maintained more of its initial value , than in the past year--a lunatic observation. If it holds for another year and becomes established truth, we will know how wrong the paladins of the new economy were when they proclaimed that something had tectonically shifted in the world. Only a fool would predict with absolute certainty how the plunge into the long crisis is going to work out. Some of the steps on the way, however, seem to be very clear. A capital flight from the Mediterranean and Austria could well see the euro-crisis that has been more or less inevitable (I got some things wrong in my December 2007 prediction) spill into reality. The core countries of the 'Rhineland model'--Germany, Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands--may...

What every man and woman on earth should have the chance to find A song of Cape Breton that reminded me of Ireland, and of London, and Manhattan, and of the township of Indian Trail in the Union County of North Carolina , and of everywhere else that I wasn't born to but where a person might feel at home.

Mary Honeyball MEP In recent months, this blog may have given the impression that Mary Honeyball MEP was a figure of Paisleyite proportions. Links to sites such as 'Mother Reilly meets the Vampire', 'The Magic Roundabout' and 'The Da Vinci Code' may have conveyed the impression, based only upon Ms Honeyball's stated opinions and speeches, that she was attached to a bigoted caricature of my church. Further depictions of her as some sort of unelected, latter-day Titus Oates for abortionists may have furthered that impression. However, we should not as citizens allow the culture wars to break out here. If public language is radicalised, and if we are all driven into last ditches, or brought to enjoy the thrill of crises of conscience when we could as free people find things we could work together on, only those who have an interest in an atomised, warring society, where all are suspicious of all, will win. If the standard we take from the internet is the viral ...

Sex Education and children The truth is that very few people need to be educated about sex , especially not children. People in general need to be educated about themselves and others as human beings. The best way to do this is to give people an inner life and a disciplined mind that contains stores to be drawn upon in idle moments. Good flows from good. That way, the impulse for empty gratification won't be a driving demon, just a part of being human, and people might grow into individuals who would not only feel ashamed if they used another, but who might also see how silly a thing sex was. It makes fools of all of us, and yet many in this identity-driven consumerist society insist on defining themselves and others by it. So, no sex education for kids--but teach them all about the Lays of Ancient Rome . In Latin. It's much more rational and it will be of practical benefit when all the buses and trains break down and the planes are grounded. I daresay that a capacity to establ...

The Continuing Pressure on Iran As I write, vast naval armadas are off the coast of Iran. The Straits of Hormuz are in theory subject to the International Convention on the Law of the Sea and its provisions about the extent of coastal waters, but this has not been tested--yet. The United States has taken a position in which it seeks, through straining muscles cramped by financial crisis, to pressurise the murderous government of the Islamic republic. At a time when oil prices are falling , and Iranian treasury revenues are consequently declining, when inflation is rising, and when Teheran's middle class is growing, hardliners yet have hope that they can unite their nation around an outside threat. Precious little else these days would. Persia and all the other nations within that country are easily inside one of the most fissile of those states which seek to contain the disparate remnants of millennial Empires. Have a look at these headlines on 'Iran Daily' or the 'Te...

The Campaign For Public Ownership We now have a Facebook Group--have a look. I'll try and add to it in the next few days. The case for social ownership, co-operatives, and equity-for-subsidy deals, as well as the public ownership of natural monopolies providing quasi-public goods and the election of commissioners for subsidised or public industries grows by the day. The long crisis I and others blogged about for years is upon us--but why sit back and do nothing? Ideology doesn't matter when the tides come in, only the sense to see what you have to do. Lend a hand, build a movement....

Sarah Palin and Harriet Miers Inferences are being drawn all the time about John McCain's character from his nomination of Sarah Palin as his running mate. It occurred to me today, as I was teaching, that there is actually quite an overlap with George Bush's nomination of a qualified (but no more than that) Supreme Court candidate. Harriet Miers . Both Miers and Palin are renegade catholics who turned to evangelism; both attracted support from the conservative base and scorn elsewhere; Miers was accused of being a 'demographic' candidate and a Bush family lawyer, Palin of having been appointed just because she was a woman. The media and political class came down very hard on Miers, who withdrew her nomination eventually, to be replaced by Justice Alito. Sarah Palin is now semi-detached from the McCain campaign but cannot be removed from the presidential ticket. I wonder--is she a Miers in the making, McCain's Quayle--or a new Nixon?

London's Atheist Buses London buses next year will carry a poster . It will say 'There's probably no god; stop worrying and enjoy your life' or something along those lines. Richard Dawkins seems happy, since, apparently, people of faith don't think and this will make them. Good grief. I'd quite like to see the sort of phrase that would have made David Hume and Blaise Pascal smile on those trashy bendy buses. And, as a member of a church who'd be proud of a multilingual, brilliant pope who can think in Latin and who invokes the injunction 'credo ut intelligam' quite often, I'd be happy for people to think. Catholicism's logic (and most of the women attached to the church) are but two of the reasons to be attracted to it, along with the prospect of a monopsonist god who could turn water into wine and die for love. That's the thing, isn't it? You may or may not have faith, reader. It's none of my business. I know awful believers and...

Back to the Moon India is preparing a moon launch, once a staple of western news, albeit for a brief period. Chandrayaan-1 is currently on the rocket pad and ready to go. The irony is that I learned this through the New York Times . You can look at the Indian Space Research Organisation's pictures of their trip, upon which NASA is piggybacking, here . One of India's former Presidents, APJ Abdul Kalam, can lay claim to the provenance of one of the devices , being as he is 'The Missile Man of India' as well as 'the People's President'. China, of course, has already been-- last year . Both new powers want to map and to mine the moon. There is a palpable sense of the west passing away at the moment, which is, I suppose, constant to a certain sort of Catholic mind. We preen ourselves on the way Holy Mother Church takes us out of time, and then return to find change and decay all around--and we've been doing that since before the Hellenistic soup in which Cath...

Global Cooling after all? The picture depicts an ice cave ceiling in Bavaria and can be found at this site. The University of Alabama in Huntsville seem to have come up with this graph, which I found on the excellent watts up with that science website. UAH have been previously questioning the 'globality' of global warming by the simple expedient of looking at the figures , and they were one of the first to actually question the sloppy statistics of the International panel on Climate Change, albeit indirectly. They looked at real numbers. The IPCC and the global warming crowd, by contrast, depend upon highly unreliable temperature recordings from stations often situated near air conditioning outlets or, in one notorious case, which are defunct. There is an accumulating body of evidence that, just as we are committing billions of dollars, euros and pounds to the very poor faith-based reasoning of global warming, the earth is cooling and the sun is going through a minimal phas...

Throw Money At Nuclear Fusion That headline more or less sums up my opinion frankly. I don't much care for carbon-related global warming arguments, though those determined to perform hatchet jobs on clean coal technology seem to. They'll kick and scream before we are forced to reopen the mines and to send those men back down into the dark for their country. Given that we have gained a breathing space from the global slowdown's culling of oil and gas prices, we probably have the time for such a pointless fight, but politicians probably don't have the energy. However, it does strike me as crazy that this country is prepared to throw money at windmills--literally-- and the funny-money carbon trading market , and not at nuclear fusion technology. Look at this webpage on the polywell fusion reactor--which is being developed for a minuscule cost . Or consider the implication of this report on nuclear fuel 'waste' ; it may be that recent fission power schemes in thi...

Historical Materialism and the Right There's a headline for you. Anyway, the ladies and gentlemen over at the anti-tax site, Burning Our Money , have reproduced this graph, which I thought that I would display. I'm not, obviously, wholly an historical materialist--but let's hope that what is depicted is just some sort of statistical or logarithmic coincidence.

Nationalising the Olympics I think that corruption and bad behaviour probably infect any political system. In Britain, the trough that public capital projects have become for demonstrably second-rate private companies has undermined the cause of privatisation far more than any left-wing argument ever did. Today, though, sees a new phase in the country's re-engagement with social ownership. Now that public control is an option for banks--the very heart of the model of capitalism adopted in recent years--it is a potential solution to each new problem. I'm not that keen on sport because I don't really have the sports gene. We are constantly being told, however, that sporting competitions like the olympics are about essentially public virtues, if privately embodied. We are told that the show will be uplifting, and in almost Roman terms that it will improve public life. Until recently, the public were meant to pay taxes through local authorities to a quasi-private body that woul...

What are Darling and Brown thinking? I praised Gordon Brown as a person a few days ago. I wrote that his economic plan for banks had precluded meltdown. It did. The problem of under capitalised banks and vast government over borrowing, allied to a ridiculous card-sharp derivatives casino has been the principal transport that has taken this society over the edge. The road it ran on was the destruction of manufacturing industry and the building societies, and vast and irresponsible offers of consumer credit. The speed with which have proceeded to this point was unopposed by any land-based lending of building societies, or alternative sources of investment, such as tax-favoured co-operatives, independently endowed universities, or government-investment schemes such as Ken Livingstone's late plan for tube bonds. But we are here now. After playing a very good game for the past fortnight, the government seems to have been spun or to have slipped (I can't tell which) into a reckless p...

The Heliosphere and Solar Cycle 24 I have, from time to time, been posting on the apparent quiet of the sun. I should make clear why. I am in no way convinced by the collection of 'consensus' and lobby-driven groupthink we have all experienced in the past fifteen years when it comes to global warming. I know very able chemists who inform me that the suggested process by which carbon dioxide becomes a greenhouse gas is not in conformity with any idea of atmospheric science they have. I can see that climate does vary and change over sweeps of time. Explanations based around the cosmic wind, cloud cover, thermohaline currents, or even the solar system's passage through the galactic plane and the possible presence of dark matter seem to be valid. I can't tell. I'm not a scientist. I note, however, how hysterical the proponents of carbon-related global warming shut people down who raise the issue. Such behaviour raises my suspicion, because I do know about how herds deve...

Myers-Briggs Tests There are many streams to personality tests. Some came from attempts by the likes of Binet to identify special children; some from army needs to grade recruits, as in Kansas; some from psychometric hubris associated with the high tide of non-physiological behaviourism; some with a tendency of corporations to fall prey to folly if sold well. However, the libertarian site 'The Devils's Kitchen' yesterday provided a nice link to one that can be done online, which declared me an 'INTP', or, at a pinch an 'ENTP'. The associated failures and strengths explain a good bit about this online diary, I would have thought. If you have an idle moment--and I know the recommendation isn't as good as the insane Brussels Sprouts timewasting game I sent you to defy the ghost of John Calvin with at the start of the year-- have a look .

Are the media about to ruin Obama's prospects? Politics in America has its precedents, as much as anything else. It has always been a rough-and-tumble game that has shocked Europeans. Nothing yet said about John McCain or Barack Obama compares to the bile dripped on Thomas Jefferson , or the acid thrown at Grover Cleveland at both ends of the nineteenth century; indeed, it doesn't even compare to the comparatively polite assaults on Franklin Roosevelt or Bill Clinton in the twentieth. In just over two weeks time, Barack Obama may be able to enter upon the course of the presidency with one stunning fact to his credit (and perception is reality in mediaworld); he will have won without noticeably negative personal campaigning. There have been attack ads. Nothing, though, about Cindy McCain, very little about John McCain's health, very little about Sarah Palin. That is a prize. It may change the way that people think they can win, and therefore change campaigns, because many p...

Cognitive Dissonance Over the past few years, a core of new right journalists have pushed wars , lauded freewheeling markets , endangered pensions, and behaved with varying degrees of shabbiness to anyone who opposed them. The culture of 'find the enemy' scheming that they learned either on the left, or in opposition to paranoid versions of it, has been well spent. The personal tragedy is that they are all intelligent, successful people who are demonstrably not reliably wrong in their grasp. Some I admire . So when they hold to things they know just can't be true, and they must know it, and they've all done it, what am I supposed to think? Worse, when they encourage some of the genuinely troubled or just plain nasty people who write in under their posts, and they know they are doing it, what is going on? Let me be clear. I mean Stephen Pollard, Oliver Kamm, Daniel Finkelstein, Irwin Steltzer, Janet Daley, David Toube and, unfortunately, Melanie Phillips. I have had di...

What if Obama is elected, and the Right goes nuts? The United States is a republic marked by a fetish of domestic peace and a very long record of political violence. One doesn't have to reach back to Gary Nash's interpretation of the revolution to see that. Andrew Jackson's supporters terrified the respectable with the sort of easy violence and bitterness that their General's career had been characterised by. Native Americans and Black people, no angels of peace as historical groups, could testify to the violence inherent in American society. To a very large extent, American freedom was won by the combination of legal method and very great political violence, of which the apotheosis was the Civil War. This combination when successful had a very great and instantly rewritten effect; when not, became ' conspiracy ', 'random event' or unknowledge . I note that, of three genuinely American religions-- Mormonism , Scientology, and the Nation of Islam --many...

Britain needs less and better democracy, not more. One of the more interesting developments of the past few years is that of a vulgarised political-media class in Britain which loudly proclaims its lack of religious belief and then fetishises elections as sacred. They even support bombing people and starting wars to spread their creed. I've been thinking about this in the past week since a predictable chorus of outrage emerged about the decision by Britain's unelected, insulated House of Lords to throw out a messy proposal by the government to keep those arrested under terrorist legislation in jail without charge for at least 42 days. This country retains a sensitivity to liberty, for all the administrative depredations on freedom, which is very great. I note, for instance, that the development of a European Arrest Warrant is now exposing the practices of many of the continental states. Greece, for instance, seems able to keep ordinary suspects in prison for at least eighteen ...

Cigar Thoughts Today saw a long day of work, then a good couple of hours at the gym. So, rather typically, I have just cooked myself a paella, and am working away at a good bottle of chilean wine whilst chewing--this just seems vulgar, but my neighbours can't take smoke-- a Por Larranaga cigar given as part of a set by a friend. What a life. Still I enjoy my work, so I feel no guilt. I love a good cigar though am fairly sure that my heart couldn't take too many. There's a box of Hoyo de Monterrey Excalibur to my left, on a table beneath the image of a lovely Italian woman I once stayed in Versailles with; and in a dusty box I have a series of maturing Upmann signatures, including a brace of Henry Clay . Their eponymous hero is someone I'm coming to like by the day, never having much been taken with Andrew Jackson. Cigars are such a civilised pleasure, cherry and wood scents mixing and merging with the acidulous tang of their aftertaste. It's what a cigar does to my...