Martin Meenagh blog

A Nice, Romantic New York Story; Kim Perez gets married Frankly, viewers, I'm a bit of a rat, and not just in the Chinese sense. I like clever and somewhat aggressive banter, funny, violent and commitment phobic femmes fatale, and I could charm monkeys off a banana wreath if I needed the flowers. I also have a general policy of staying near both a drink, a dispensary, and the door in dealing with most people, though a smile often helps. I am also far too clever for my own good whilst being simultaneously far less clever than I think. But I know it, see, which is half the battle. It's rather like the old Russian Imperial army, which contained a lot of slightly second rate stupid officers, but some of whom prospered because they knew they were. All of that aside, it is nice to see a genuine, Romantic New York kind of a story between two decent and somewhat inarticulate people manipulated by a weather channel that contains their friends now giving regular Daily Mail in-patients a...

Goodbye to all that; 27 steps away from the yellow Brick Road for the next decade The image, which is a beautiful one, comes from a site called ' stilettos on the run '. It is not concerned with the Neapolitan dispute resolution instrument beloved of earlier Sicilian generations, but rather with impractical footwear that make women look even more attractive. In Dubai. There are times when things are set, and times when they can be changed. Tomorrow, a vast Asian free trade bloc will be consolidated by the entry into agreement of China and Asean. Last week, Russia announced the completion of pipelines and ports that massively enhance its bargaining power by giving it the capacity to feed energy west or east. Peak oil went mainstream just before the announcements. Earlier this month, the United States admitted that it had no more money for any second stimulus, but moved towards a vast and complex healthcare bill that will cost over a trillion and which benefits the insurance ...

In the Land of Canaan The painting is a depiction of the madness of city life in 1914, by Kasimir Malevich . It was or is the subject of litigation between the painter's heirs and the city of Amsterdam . Malevich in a somewhat mad way, believed that art developed regardless of human beings. I prefer Auden's bar-fly and melancholy take on things myself. These ways do all secular thoughts go.... The numbers of Korean and Irish immigrants in the United States who commit suicide in the face of the Great Recession are growing. May eternal light shine upon them, and may they rest in peace. I think that that outcome, knowing both as I do, is an illustration of two very different things about the peoples of either end of Eurasia. Koreans tend to value hierarchy, and professional achievement profoundly, and seem strung on very taut and often electrified wires of academic progress. The Irish who leave Ireland and try for the big prizes are gamblers, but without the religion or the hist...

Al Gore Ties in Hopeless Rigged Election Shock Some time ago, in a spirit of Christmas charity, I put forward a list of people who could, potentially, be sent to Mars as a poll on this blog. It was my chief aim and cherished hope that Mrs Mary Rosamund Hilda Honeyball MEP, late of this blog, could finally achieve her life's ambition and understand what it felt like to win an election on the basis that people actually got to vote for her. She has been deprived of that feeling since serving in the European Parliament, you see, since members are appointed from a party list that some people in a pub in Streatham vote for. Anyway, all was set fair for Mary to win until--curses--I had the bright idea of inserting Al Gore into this rigged election. He's only gone and tied with her. Spoiler. Harold Stassen had classier swansongs. So now, Gore is going to Mars too. It really is warming , I suppose (unlike Earth), so he will feel happier there. Blast-off will be a simple matter of raisi...

Let Freedom Ring I know people who define themselves as Persian, and people who define themselves as Iranian. I am fascinated by their culture, and have a dim understanding of its complicated role in Europe's history. We have mostly been opposed, but civilisation links us. Today, as for the past year, the Iranian people are attempting to establish a sphere of freedom. These things cannot be imposed by bombs or outside pressure. It is one of my prejudices that a country saves itself when its own secure their freedom, and fight for it. So I'm thinking of the demonstrations in Teheran today . I understand that class matters in these things. We tend to sympathise with those who are like us, and in their conservatism and discontent with student revolutionaries, I would be more likely in a different world to be one of the police in Teheran in 2009 than a demonstrator, unless education and luck had freed me. I understand the wish to bash a hippie. However, I would hope that I'd un...

Martin Bubba. The Icon-style image is called nativity, from 2001. It is by He Qi (whom I like) and I found it on Duckmarx's flickr site, which is a wonderful collection. I'm spending a very pleasant Christmas week at my mum's place with my girlfriend. The snow, and the commonsense of the women around me, has sapped the life from any silly shopping expeditions. It has the duplicate advantage of allowing me to use it to justify my overeating and drinking. Ah, December. Sol Invicta was reactively austere compared to Saturnalia, I think, before both were overlaid, but it is odd how scaffolding and humanity will out. My faith in the better side of human nature is also, gradually, being restored, by odd and unexpected events. I missed my train to come here; an oversleep and a slight delay on the tube led to the theurgy of a millionth set of prayers to reinforce my calm. These aren't unexpected anymore. They are part of my life, and remind me of the living relationships aroun...

Christmas Poll My 'pointless polls' are back. You will have noticed (if they have started allowing newspapers back in the big house, having taped up the sharp edges) that a monkey is to be sent to Mars by the cash-and-publicity hungry Russian Space Agency. The lucky creature will be looked after by a robot until it dies. My poll question, which obviously could be added to if not for reasons of space, is, given that it might be cruel to send a monkey, which person should go instead? Remember, if you all vote for me--both of you--I'll be representing the human race when the Martians find me. My girlfriend says that it'd protect earth, as you shouldn't invade unnatural places where evolution happens in reverse.... Results on New Year's Day. Vote early and often. Here's an attractive woman with a ukelele, and a song. Ah, Christmas

OIL and the Future The graph depicts oil prices over the past few years. It can be found on the oil drum site. Oil is the nominal outward cause of the derivative crash; as prices spiralled, people found energy, transport and food costs growing. These limited disposable income and led to defaults, which stopped the banks' overleveraged and dishonestly validated derivatives market from functioning, leading to more defaults and further falls. Government overspending, borrowing hidden in private-finance and bond schemes, and over borrowing in the southern Eurozone combined with the epochal shift of wealth and income back to the high-saving, hard working Indian Ocean countries completed the collapse. You could have read about it all unfolding, and chuckled at my gradually dawning understanding of it all on this blog over the past few years. Oil, though, is an odd thing. Its price is affected by pipelines, the value of the dollar, and the growing demands of Asian countries, to the point...

An Improving Video For Christmas Here's the inimitable Nana Mouskouri singing 'Stille Nacht', which is a lovely hymn. Normal service will be resumed soon; I was teaching land and housing law for a good part of yesterday, before wandering around the new V&A medieval wing, and Harrods with my girlfriend (it all happens here--of which more later). I came home to the second fantastic home-cooked meal of the weekend, and then fell asleep, so no blogs. Still, I have been paying bills online this morning before an afternoon of teaching. All this ephemera makes me feel very happy, and not inclined to write yet another grinchy post. Good grief, I will be glad when this Great Recession is over--just in time for peak oil....

Light Blogging I am working like the crazy man I am, and have not been to bed before two for the past four days, up at six. So I apologise to my one demented reader for my lack of blogging. As I understand it, the world has stopped, and my readership has been reduced to rocking backward and forward in front of the special rubber screen in the big house with the Terry Wogan show on an electronic loop. Never fear, I'll be back. I'm trying to set in place a series of contracts so that I don't have to worry about money next year and just pay down the last of the debt before the interest rates that will follow on stagflation start to bite. It does involve a huge amount of work for small sums, but small sums pay bills on time, whereas the big fees used to come sporadically. If I want something more than a series of feasts and famine with the odd moment staring at the last can of beans in the cupboard, I have to put my shoulder to the wheel. Well, that's what I told myself in...

Subliminable Belor I find this photograph really quite funny. It's attached to a Daily Telegraph Article . Sarah Barracuda 's political instincts are, really, second-to-none, regardless of all the other stuff. She's sensed that most people 'get' the ridiculousness of the global warming lobby, and their isolation. She's tied it to the frequent flying president and first lady, and set the scene for an attack on their Kennedy-style-but-not-quite-as-elite parties at the White House and whatever rubbish emerges out of the Copenhagen conference, which is talking about global warming whilst she is standing outside, in the snow. She also claims not to be running for anything. Which is why she is wearing a military-style cap, cross (not crucifix, watch the Protestants) earrings, and a necklace on a bare chest to appeal to the older Irish and orthodox crowd in places like Maryland and Michigan, and the veterans and older republican males. And she's done that instincti...

The First Duty and Lily Lilley Everyday absurdities and cruelties are commonplace in this state, and probably always have been; they run alongside acts of kindness and compassion. For hundreds of years, however, English elites and their fellow travellers have thought of the ordinary people of the country as a mob. Sometimes they have reason; often they do not. One of the tragedies of England has been that those who believe themselves democrats and out to reform have usually and reliably ended up serving class interest, and those who might have worked with them have retreated into populist and violent reactions to get themselves and their moral economy noticed. Another is that every time the best education is opened to people, in a way that removes middle class advantage (I was reading of the Jacobean distaste for grammar schools because they promoted so many low-born people today), it is pulled back, often by its own working-class products. That's a debate for another time. I am ti...

Waterboarding 1901 The picture is from the British seventies comic 2000AD, and depicts Tomas de Torquemada, future leader of the human race. 2000AD was a highly innovative British comic much affected by punk, which you can read about here . I'm tired and a bit ill at the minute, so took to a hot bath after a long day with Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex , all about the first President Roosevelt. It's odd the things that jump out. Here's testimony described as a 'confession', but noted as publicity on page 101, from 'The Anti Imperialist League' . It seems to have been given during the Congressional investigation of America's occupation of the Philippines . The book was written in 2001. "Witness after witness testified to widespread use by American soldiers of this traditional torture, developed by Spanish priests as a means of instilling reverence for the Holy Ghost; (the Spanish Inquisition seems to have thought that they were rebaptising heretics)...

Light Blogging Many apologies for the lack of demented rants recently--though I suspect that if I left things a little longer my hits would actually start going up. I have been working like a mad person, and am down in the country for my little Sister's wedding today. Normal service will soon be resumed. I hope that everyone is having a good December so far, though I've been paying attention to the unemployment figures and met a soon-brother-in-law last night who has been burying friends from the Iraq conflict regularly. These are not light times,but today is going to be very happy for me. One question has occurred to me which I would have blogged about if I had time. This present crisis is in large part a banking crisis. Big countries have been put on life support whilst small ones have gone down. That's why Ireland and Iceland are in the state they are in. Does the pattern of collapses and weakness in the UK suggest that 'the North' and Scotland are functionally s...

Utterly Pedestrian Observations I thought that, tired as I am from what I suppose I should call a major 9-hours a day fundraising effort if I wanted to 'big it up', I would just be honest about this post. I have been supplementing my usual doings with law and economics tutoring across the capital, and frankly I'm a little exhausted. Still, I'm not so exhausted that, in between the mental hail marys and the quiet voice behind my eyes that tells me no thing of beauty is as lovely as the women I have known, or the fierce love in my girlfriend, I can't help but reflect about art. I like art. Specifically, I like the feeling that I have when I look at it, decode it, contextualise it, and then reflect that I am a person who likes art. It is an utterly solipsistic and somewhat philistine narcissism, aided and abetted by my low-to middlebrow tastes and somewhat neurasthenic palate, which drives me. It has, however, led to a good bit of reading of serious art tomes, and the ...

Happy Eid Eid Mubarak to all my demented Muslim readers, of whom there are a few. I wanted to say thank you again to the kind Bengali gentleman who shared generously the samosas his wife had made, and his companionship and conversation with me today. I will reciprocate with Mince Pies....

One more time.... Here is the order of battle in the current depression. Please refer back to every other post here since 2007 1) Derivative markets will fall, which will panic governments 2) Money will move into stocks and shares after banks are 'stabilised' 3) Stocks and shares will slide as global imbalances and bank weakness are revealed 4) Treasury bonds and government securities will rise irrationally 5) Defaults by governments will panic remaining investors into gold and commodities 6) Analysts and politicians will use transport costs, energy costs, or perceived exchange imbalances--or 'climate change'- and the threat of social breakdown to tout protectionism 7) I wish you all Good-Bye and head for Donegal with a bag of platinum and a year's supply of meat. Peak oil, peak globalisation, and food problems will complicate matters and make them more volatile, as will the exact length of time it takes for lagged unemployment to hit, and for monetary base inflatio...

Momentous Are Those Things That No One is Listening To We'll listen to bankers saying that the ten-billion costs of refunding unfair charges would have meant that they would charge for all accounts and ATMs, even though they now say that the cost would have been much lower. We'll listen to members of the political media class lying about global warming, and we won't haul them up over peak oil or when their lies are exposed. We'll listen to the Governor of the Bank of England saying that two banks he saved were on the edge of collapse--and not mentioning others. We'll listen to social workers saying the grotesque child abuse and largely unremarked destruction of working families they perpetrate regularly is unimportant compared to the good that their schemes do. We'll pretend civil unions are really only gay unions and that the idea of a pact of solidarity and equal treatment was never implied into the sale to the electorate of them--even though the House of Comm...

People And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— [They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”] My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin— [They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”] Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all:— Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume? The picture is by Blake, and depicts Pity and the child of Los, the blacksmith of the heart and fallen prophet who gets her 'up the duff'. People are such an odd blend of culture and learned behaviours. I'm growing increasingly suspicious...

Choose Life

Time will Reveal All The painting is by Heeremans, and depicts a winter scene on the walls of Amsterdam. I like the Dutch painters, and would happily direct readers not just to this site on Heeremans--who was a dealer-entrepreneur as well as a painter-- but to Jonathan Israel's great works on the Dutch republic and the Enlightenment as Christmas reading. As I and many other bloggers have been writing for some years now, the dogma of global warming is just that. Dogma. A belief system, and not a particularly impressive one at that, upheld by scientists whose grants and incomes depend upon toeing the line and a vociferous group who are more than prepared to play the game of personal destruction. Those many scientists who have expressed serious doubts about the mechanism of carbon-dependent anthropogenic global warming have been traduced, ignored or dismissed. In part, that has been because mainstream journalists are what EU Referendum has called 'parti pris' to the warmist...