Martin Meenagh blog

The New Nativism and the Globalised West's Crisis One of the most striking mass movements of the nineteenth century, which is often confused with populism, was nativism. Nativists were typically working class anglo-protestants who viewed the mass immigration and job displacement associated with Imperial globalism as a direct threat to themselves. They drew upon what could be termed a tradition of disorder, and have been neglected in historical studies or mischaracterized as essentially a version of gang culture. I suppose that the most famous latter-day examples of nativists illustrate the point. They are American. The Know-Nothing Party was essentially built around anti-catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment in the great cities of the American east coast. They fit poorly into the right of the time, sharing aspects of Henry Clay’s wish to protect American (essentially Northern manufacturing) and Southern distaste for cheap immigrant labour and Irish political machines. Yet they were...

Two questions I'm off to Dublin on business. I note that the UK is about to collapse into oil strikes and insolvency. There are also nativist industrial strikes breaking out in wildcat fashion. There are two questions on my mind, which are tangentially related. Firstly, nativism is built into working class industrial history. Does anyone else see the similarities with the riots and strikes which surrounded the Royal Courts of Justice (built by Italian labour) in the 1870s? Secondly, with nationalisation on the horizon across business, how long will it be until companies maximise their values by invoking the human rights act? The mass conversions will make St Paul and the moonies look consistent....

Global Warming guru abjured by his NASA supervisor A hat-tip to wattsupwiththat.com . As one commenter puts it, 'the global warming house of cards is beginning to tumble'. My only caveat, having been bitten once by this sort of dodge before, is that I hope the letter in which Dr Theon issued his attack on James Hansen was genuine, and not a hoax.

Presidential Regenerations The headline, for non-British readers, confuses the presidents of the United States with time lord capacities on 'Doctor Who'. I refer to it because of the remarkable video below, which I found on the Athenaeum blog. In it, set to Ravel, extraordinarily lifelike paintings of the 43 men who have been President 'morph' into each other. The effect is really quite hypnotic, since it somehow makes the paintings more lifelike. Does anyone else notice how similar the eyes are and how successive presidents look like each other?

Holocaust Day I spent this morning teaching readings of the Book of Genesis to a Muslim and a Baptist person, and thought of the long life and sadnesses of the Jewish story. Via Bob from Brockley , I have also found this site, which hosts some beautiful Sephardic music from Greece the Nazis tried to destroy. To assault the Jews is to assault civilisation and life; the eruption of the Satanic principle last time, and its toxic outworking of the poisons built up throughout the European mind, proved it. And, guess what, Adolf? They are still here and still singing. They will so long as human beings exist, and then some.

Aid for Hospitals in Gaza and Israel I wanted just to remind readers that the facility by which one can 'text' a donation to hospitals in Gaza and Israel is still open. Here is the link. The facility is sponsored by the Board of Deputies, one of Britain's Jewish organisations, and is connected to the campaign for peace in Gaza and Israel. Texts cost £1.50. Intellectually, I am in two minds about disaster relief in war zones. I think that it is often as much about organisational empire-building and the appeasement of local tyrants as it is about stopping the development of a tradition of self-reliant liberty. It also strikes me that people will never stop fighting or start looking after their own patch if someone else assumes the role or freezes political facts on the ground. I notice how well Bangladesh started doing, for instance, when it relied on itself, and shudder to think how slavery would have endured in the United States if the international community of the day ha...

Timewasting Game From time to time I put timewasting games up on this blog. You will remember the great Brussels sprouts game from two years ago ; the variations on throwing a shoe at Bush; and the 'hit a cow' game I stole from Laodicea. Well, here's a 'throw money at Gordon Brown' game. I found it on Guido Fawkes' blog. There are trolls who turn up from various taxpayer-funded jobs on this site from time to time, but the glory of the game is that, even if they are initially offended, they will soon realise that the game is as much fun for them as for everyone! Enjoy.

That Obama Inauguration Oath, and Queen Victoria I didn't blog about the way Chief Justice John Roberts--a master of my Inn, and recovering from a stroke--'flubbed' the Obama inauguration oath the other day. I thought at the time that the oath would have to be retaken, even though Obama was clearly President from mid-day, oath or not. The trouble would have come if he had not taken an oath at all (something even Vice-Presidents realise when becoming president, even though they have already, generally, taken the oath at the inauguration). I have been even more reassured by the absolutely predictable observations of people who hold forth on legal method at the drop of a hat whilst never having bothered to crack open a law book. And, of course, by the fact Obama did re-do the vow. Still, it made me think of something I have not had time to research, until this morning. The American constitution has been read as non-monarchical, whatever the plans of General Steuben to bring ov...

Martin Kelly's Message to Sana Martin Kelly has put out a call for bloggers to link to a post of his. It involves a person, in the UK, who wishes to become a Christian. She may well be in fear of her life. Martin wishes as many people as possible to see the post and, if she requires it, for the person involved to contact him. He found her story on this site. I have never met Martin; indeed, I do not know what he looks like. But I like and trust him through the honesty of his blog. So here is the link. Go and have a look.

One of the Things Barclays Was Not Telling Us I have put up two posts; one at the end of last summer, one the other day. They concerned the bullet I referred to Barclays Bank as 'dodging', in which I was being heavily sarcastic and covering myself. I suggested, more seriously, that there were--and this is common knowledge--a great many rumours about the scale of Barclays debts, their possible investments, and their Asian funding. None of these rumours have been proved and I can proffer no evidence. I must therefore assume them to be false. What is not false is the revelation this morning that Barclays have engaged in a deal with Qatari investors which, if the bank runs into trouble and participates in a government rescue package, will deliver full control of the bank and its assets to Qatar . This aspect of the deal arises out of a straightforward contractual clause. If Barclays renege on it, I presume that they will not be able to return monies or pay any additional sums to th...

Global Cooling It's a perennial theme of this blog that the global warming which may or may not have been evident in the 1980s and 90s ended in 1998. I think that the arguments for the warming being related to things like the Pacific Oscillation and, especially, the sun, are convincing. I don't, of course, think this as a scientist, because I'm not, but because human-based global warming, or human and carbon-based warming is so obviously silly. As Lyndon Johnson said to George Wallace once, 'Never bulls--t a bulls---tr', and I am world class at that sort of thing. My blog is but a pale, platonic cave-style reflection of my talents in non-dishonest bovine scatology. Anyway, every serious scientist I know also tells me that the greenhouse mechanism cannot work chemically in the atmostphere. I noticed three non-zany stories this morning that made me sit up and take notice, however. Firstly, as the inimitable SolarCycle24.com points out, the solar cycle does not seem t...

A New British Anthem for the Latest Low I thought, in an optimistic spirit of change, that I might suggest a new anthem for Britain. I have reproduced it from youtube in order to illustrate the post and because no other suitable video was available. This blogspot is not, of course, hosting the anthem. Just for the avoidance of doubt. My spirit of change is in part a function of the banks being about to collapse, the credit rating of the country being on the edge of being downgraded, the cost of borrowing growing, the tax deadline looming and the political-media class and their children and their children's children still being in charge. Oh, and the government and bankers are now going around and sagely slapping jowls against quivering chins and silent, determined faces as they prepare to print money. I am sure that all of this looks better in the original, early Twentieth-century, German. Have a very nice day in whichever lucky British successor state or North European democracy y...

Six Anthems I found myself weeping a little at the inauguration today, which I watched when I got home from a day of teaching. Aretha Franklin, old now, sang 'My Country 'Tis of Thee , which many would have thought of as Britain's dreary anthem. In fact, it's as much of an eighteenth century song as the Drinking chant, To Anacreon in Heaven , which became The Star Spangled Banner . Haydn much improved God Save the King when he made it the Kaiserlied , partly to discourage the French militarists of the day. The son of a wheelwright and a cook , Haydn made his way through what was basically isolation in a Hungarian estate to provide the anthem of the Hapsburgs. A free man forced to be original in the Volkerkerker , which in truth was a freer and gentler place than the Prussian-led abomination which borrowed the tune for a time. Somewhere along the road of life, I developed the misconception that Beethoven used it too, to impress upon his fellows the possibilities of varia...

Art and Tony Hart When I was thirteen, in the autumn after my father died, I was already being put in for 'O' levels by my school. These were the school leaving examinations usually reserved for sixteen year olds. Our Lady and Pope John XXIII Comprehensive school-- I always thought the 'Roman Catholic' which they added was redundant--needed to do something with me and anyway, in the years before the national curriculum and school inspections doing things to broaden a mind were allowed. So, all that year, after one of the hottest summers of the nineteen eighties, I did exams. I did English language, Mathematics, Geography, and Art, then the next year seven of the new GCSEs, then the year after an Advanced Supplementary exam in English Literature, a type which has long been abolished. My favourite was art. This was largely for four reasons. The first was that I was trusted to be in the art room alone at lunchtimes. I could explore the smells of the cupboard, and was indul...

US Oil consumption vs production Euan Mearns at the oildrum website has a very stimulating article from which I extracted this graph. Follow the money, Mark Felt said to Bernstein and Woodward. Today, the money leads to the world's expensive, and declining, source of primary energy. Peak oil has not gone away, you know....

Keith Olbermann on How George Bush ignored Al-Qaeda, and Clarke's Plan to Take Them Down Courtesy of Martin in the Margins , here is an American liberal laying out some of the case against George Bush. He is, of course, ultimately accountable for his administration, but I wonder what would have happened had Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz all fallen under a bus is 1999. What would a Bush adminstration forced to rely on Colin Powell or John McCain have looked like? Would 9/11 or the invasion of Iraq, or the destructive increase of the national debt--the unholy trinity of charges that will haunt Bush--ever have happened? Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News , World News , and News about the Economy

A Little Light Relief What are your top looneytunes? I mean theories or beliefs which are falsifiable, or easily disproved, but which people cling to in the belief that they are absolutely right and that they have found a coda to politics or meaning? Here are mine; 1) Lee Oswald didn't kill JFK. ( He did ). 2) The Destruction of the Twin Towers is an inside job (good grief) 3) Global Warming is (a) real and (b) man-made (Pffft) 4) Paul McCartney is dead (tell Heather Mills). 5) Killing lots of people will unleash a wave of democracy in Islamic or Baathist Tyrannies. 6) The Bible Code; any Bible Code' post Calvinist literalism in general 7) Atheism as a certainty 8) The idea that a culture of rights can solve all problems 9) The idea that the free market is a pristine, non-cultural model 10)The idea that Enlightenment liberalism is not an exhausted revolt against Catholicism 11)The idea that smoking is always wrong 12)Scientific speculation put forward as cosmological certaint...

The British Crisis, Year Thirty The image is of Rothko's black and grey series. It always suggests to me the 'magnificent desolation' which the lunar astronauts said they found upon looking on the moon from its surface. Britain is now in a worse debt position than it was in 1976 . It is realistic to talk of unemployment climbing to five million, even though analysts predict 3.4 million --up from 3 million last October as a prediction. Soon, they will start telling the truth. The government has offered more to banks, many of which appear to be bankrupt, than the United States government offered after world war two to a near-bankrupt Britain. Loans to the US took until 2006 to pay off. The train companies would collapse without subsidy. Even the rich-loving business secretary realises that there is something defective about British management . Overstuffed local councils who are elected by minuscule proportions of the voters now have a power, thanks to a government elected by...

John Titor World The image is by Jacek Yerka, a Polish artist, and was found here . I think high quality derivative surrealism is the order of the day! The John Titor Hoax has produced, in its time, quite a bit of entertainment on the internet. Titor was the pseudonym of a hoaxer somewhere in the United States, who insisted that he was from the year 2036. He made various predictions about the world, and references to time travel probably culled from a combination of a Michio Kaku book , a copy of Scientific American, and a good collection of Keith Laumer stories. The latter link, by the way, is to a nice fan website which contains the priceless line, 'We had a wonderful visit, that is, until the lasts few minutes when Keith pulled a German Lugar, aimed it at my chest, and told me to leave'. I've known women like that. Titor wove what seemed at the time an unbelievable scenario, to those not steeped in counterfactualism, the cold war's Armageddon cultural strains, and ...

Barclays Faces a Bullet--Again The picture is of Annie Oakley, the western gunslinger, entertainer and babe. During the great boom-- I am conscious I should be droning on like some Dads Army character in relating this--I formed a very low opinion of bankers, and, for various reasons, of some of the people in charge of Barclays Bank. Over the past year, no end of people who should know have identified Barclays as a bank which is, if not in trouble, then not wholly transparent in its practices. Barclays is a major British Bank, the investment arm of which, Barclays Capital, is one which people would have every right to believe is overextended but which Barclays insists is not. One scenario, for instance, would have them panicking last year, stitching up an Asian loan, then throwing it into the US bond bubble to try and get the money back quickly. I have of course just made that up. There is no indication, as yet, that it actually happened; but I lack the experience in dealing with accou...

Queen Noor, Pat Buchanan and Richard Haass on the Gaza issue Glenn Greenwald's blog , like many as I get older, is to the left of mine. I nevertheless find it stimulating and interesting. Greenwald is a former professor of constitutional law in the United States and a critic of the American media and political class. I thought that I would put both parts of a fascinating discussion on the 'Morning Joe' television show, which Dr Greenwald 'headlined' on the blog. In it, Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations , and the former Nixon bagman, presidential candidate and paleoconservative Patrick Buchanan discuss Israel. I've had a look at Buchanan's website today, and frankly am not putting up a link to it ; google if you want it. As an aside, there is an interesting confluence, and not just on Israel, between the views of the European left and American conservatives now. I'm not sure that, historically, that is unu...

The IMF need money I try to keep this blog responsible. But, well--the IMF ? Running out of cash ? Begging for money via Gordon Brown since last October? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Ha.

Gas and Wind ; the Energy dimension to the Gaza war Gaza has gas reserves; Russia is in effective control of Central Asia; America depends upon Kazakhstan for the Afghan War. The image is a chess piece from Samarkand, which I found (despite being unable to play chess) on the chess theory website Interesting things are happening in the central asian gas markets . I know how that opening sentence must read, but the price you pay to heat your home, if you are one of the many already ripped off by multinational gas companies, is directly linked to it. In addition, once one understands what is happening, the menacing image of a Russian bear put about by those who are keen to portray the Ukraine as a small, victimised and shivering country is put into perspective. Russia has, in an attempt to make Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan part of its solar system, promised them European prices for their gas. Gazprom, the Russian supplier, is therefore in a bind if it raises European prices too much. The ...

Can He? Herbert Hoover was a hope-filled and inspiring public leader once. He won a landslide, based in part upon his reputation as the man who saved and rebuilt Belgium after the Great War, his status as a political outsider and engineer, and his general emphasis on competence. Jimmy Carter had a similar, if less weighty appeal in 1976, though he was obviously far less helped by the Ku Klux Klan than Hoover was. Barack Obama is being treated as though he were some sort of superman whose policies were substantially different from most of the American political class. They are not. Mr Obama appears to be a much smarter and more pliable version of the sub-class of American academics who step into politics, a sort of electable combination of Dan Pat Moynihan and Woodrow Wilson. I think that the challenge before him is being vastly underestimated. Within half a year, he could very well find himself up a creek. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the Democrats in Congress--the peop...

The Board of Deputies Hoax : Sources Revealed Last week, a message was sent out purporting to be from both the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council. These two, as I understand it, are at odds. It suggested that a demonstration for peace in Gaza and Israel had been cancelled. It was beautifully written. I put it up with a sigh. It then became obvious that the note was a hoax. I therefore corrected my blog, and questioned whether or not the hoax was malicious. It now appears that the hoax came from a site which I generally admire, and which is life-affirming and very cheeky, called Jewdas.org . They have provided an explanation of why they did what they did. I think that the sentiments expressed are as high as those in the original note, but the spirit of anarchy and confusion with which they were delivered undermined the point. They did have one, however, and just so that you can make up your own mind about this little mystery (in which I was a somewhat un...

Good Luck to Calum Carr I noticed today that Calum Carr has closed his blog. I used to enjoy it, and wish Calum and Mrs Carr well. Quite a few blogs are closing and I haven't got round to properly filtering my links list yet, but I hope that evaporation is just a natural process. Blogging is, like football to Alan Latchley , many things, but I love it very much and am always sad to see that someone has stopped. In Calum's case the closure seems a hopeful thing, as he has discovered new ways to concentrate on the family he loves so much. Good luck to him! Here are the beautiful and tuneful Celtic Woman group, singing 'you raise me up'. I found the song on Calum's site and wanted to share my discovery. Celtic Woman - You Raise Me Up - Ireland 2006 - STEREO by bigvideofan

Arboreal Ursine Scatology Revealed The image depicts a Roman 'waning silver' or inflation coin. Towards the end, the currency had been expanded so much by the use of lower metals that silver was practically fictive as a description, and not even the old remembered gold. The level of wishful thinking and delusion involved in respectable economic comment is somewhat shocking. It has been obvious for some time now that a global recession has taken hold ; yet some people, simplistically, seemed to believe that a falling pound was in some fashion a counter to this. Rest assured, captains of industry said--once exports become cheap, we will have an export-driven stream of income, just like Japan after deflation or Germany after reunification. Dream on. Did no-one think to ask to whom we were going to sell? Unless the world has given up any correspondence to logic, it strikes me that this country's commentators are refusing to accept reality. We have a world built around Chinese g...