Martin Meenagh blog

Martin Kelly makes me think The picture is from the Sante Fe Art blog , and is of a pack of red wolves. It is by Carole Larouche, whose work I enjoy. Martin Kelly runs a great blog , and I am flattered that he has called me a friend. I recommend him to you. On his blog, he has noted my sympathy for the latest scapegoat, Sir Fred Goodwin. In replying to him, I had two thoughts that emerged and that have started a train. The first is the rather trite thought that New Labour, in trouble, does two typical things that connect it to its roots. In 1995, for instance, when in opposition, it launched a campaign against 'fat cats' which targeted Cedric Brown , the boss of British Gas. Mr Brown had risen from being a gas engineer to running a gas company, and was attacked viciously and personally for doing well in the context of what seemed at the time an obscenely cash-rich environment that New Labour was otherwise keen to expand. They called a man who had originally been an ordinary wor...

Camille Paglia's Letters Page The brilliant Camille Paglia, whose mind I admire a lot, engages with readers' letters every so often on her pages at Salon.com . If you are looking for diversion, I think that her clear, refined and humane logic is well worth a punt.

Gross Hypocrisy The picture is 'The Scapegoat' by William Holman Hunt The media and political class are currently engaged in personalising the banking crisis. They are doing this by making a pantomime villain of Fred 'the Shred' Goodwin. Mr Goodwin ran a failed bank. Before it failed, though it was rescued by billions in government money, Mr Goodwin negotiated a retirement deal. This was legal. In it, he asked for and received a future remuneration of £650 000 per year as a pension, which was to be achieved with the aid of a pension fund amounting to some £16 million. Outrage is now being stoked. Members of Parliament have not suggested, pace Thomas Hobbes (or local government in this country) that they, who voted for irresponsible budgets, should lose their pensions or pay for the budget shortfall personally. The Prime Minister, who was Chancellor for ten years, seems to have no intention of giving up his pension. The people who enthusiastically support the spending of...

Ash Wednesday The accompanying picture is by Stewart Kenneth More , whose paintings can be found on his 'wineink' site. If you like collecting, his works demonstrate his gem of a talent, though for the purposes of the law relating to misrepresentation I do not profess to any special knowledge. Part of me thinks that the face of the next four weeks should look like this, although a sacrifice for my faith should really be a celebration. It's Ash Wednesday, so I am going to give up alcohol--I was corrected by a friend this morning, who pointed out that 'drink' includes non alcoholic liquids, apparently--for lent. I love wine, as should be obvious from some of my more fantastic yet incoherent posts. Sacrifice occasionally is a very good thing and I recommend it to you. Giving up wine makes me think about Titian, Al Smith, prohibition, Greeks, and Calvinism. And drink. Look out for lots of faintly disguised postings in the near future.... UPDATE : Right, that's an e...

The Skylon Spaceplane One of the minor disappointments played out on this blog and precious few other places in the past two years was the failure of the airship industry to take off, as it were. I know that in this I'm past parody--I have a whole 'holiday village' somewhere beyond the satire hills of cyberspace--but I was really taken with the aeroscraft project, which has recently gone all military. Like Victor Chernomyrdin, I hoped for the best and everything turned out as usual. Various readers sent in details of a world helium shortage. This shortage was one that probably could never be resolved. This meant that airships, and the safe, clean, no hassle and low-security fantasy of the future which I entertained, fell slightly from my mind. However, hope springs eternal. British engineering has from time to time, and in the face of ridiculous odds, come up at various points over the past few centuries with stunning ideas. One of them that I recall, also with an aerial ...

Jade Goody I've blogged about Jade Goody before , and can only wish her the miracle she seems to be praying for. Her behaviour over the past few weeks, and in particular her human dignity, has been heartbreaking. I don't know the woman, and millions die every day, but she seems to have touched a real chord. I have also noticed women young and old who seem more aware of cancer, less frightened, and more determined to do something preventative about it here in London, in overheard conversations and chats with friends. I agree with Martin Kelly ; the behaviour of this former dental technician demonised by the media currently pretending to care in the past, in unwittingly inspiring those other women, and in the manner of her defiance of illness, has been heroic. God bless her. I just wanted to record that here.

Oscar Pistorius Oscar Pistorius, the 'blade runner' and a hero of this blog has been injured in a boating accident . He is undergoing emergency surgery. Here's to the speedy recovery of an exemplar of the human spirit!

A completely irresponsible meme Why are there so many cases of Alzheimer's disease ? Just to see how quickly this attracts hits, here is a link to the Lancet. The Lancet is a distinguished medical journal that has recently estimated the incidence of dementia at 24.3 million people worldwide, with one new case every seven seconds. This will increase to 81 million by 2040. Here is a link to a respected Johns Hopkins study suggesting that 13% of Alzheimers cases are actually Creutzfeldt-Jakob "Mad Cow" disease. Dementia is a sad and debilitating condition. I have seen what it does to families, though I saw the effects of bouts of vascular dementia, as I recall it being, not of an accelerating and total condition like Alzheimer's. There are hundreds of varieties of dementia. CJD is also a horrible illness which provokes dementia. Links between it and alzheimers diagnoses which have been speculated upon for over thirteen years have not been proven. But if our society can...

Statism in the United States of America The picture is of course of Thomas Jefferson. When out of the presidency, he defended states' rights in the name of freedom; when in it, he sent the USS enterprise to crush North African pirates and Muslim slavers, abandoned black revolutionaries like Toussaint L'Ouverture, attempted to subvert Judges, and bought Louisiana, stretching from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, from Napoleon without asking Congress. It used to be difficult to use European terms in the USA. 'The State' could of course mean the local sovereign entities which are far more than mere administrative units, but which also have histories and aspirations as political units that Europeans, especially from big countries, never quite understand. 'The Federal government' was a phrase apt to be mistaken. Its public face, the presidency, was often confused with the Congress, whose semi-permanent and semi-dynastic political class, with their media support structur...

The British Car Industry Amongst other things, I am a member of what was the Transport and General Workers' Union, now subsumed into Unite. In fact, I am a branch unto myself. I have received an email from the dual monarchy at the top of the Union (hence the Austrian flag), and, despite my apparent levity, I would ask you if you were remotely sympathetic to pass it on. We throw money at worthless bankers and yet throw working people on the scrapheap in this country when they're done, and its wrong. Here's the message; Dear Colleague, I am writing as I need your help. BMWs decision to sack 850 agency employees, giving many of them only an hours’ notice and with no intention to offer any of them a penny in redundancy pay, is an act of sheer industrial brutality. While we know there are difficulties in the motor industry worldwide at the moment this is no way to deal with them. Some of these workers have been employed at the plant for several years, something which is itself a...

The relationship between Temperature and CO2 for 400,000 years As seen on wattsupwiththat.com . It can be found in greater detail here . Temperature variation is cyclical, and C02 follows temperature. Memorise that, and repeat--and buy ski thermals while they are cheap. Most indicators suggest that we are in for long term cold shortly, not least the sun (though the proper response there is, I guess, that we could be just seeing the bottoming out of solar cycle 23).

The Beginning of Wisdom? The picture shows the figures of Grief and History which stand on the peace monument to the west of the American Capitol. Reports have long been in the papers that one of the founders of Al-Qaeda, Sayid Imam Al-Sharif, known as Dr Fadi, currently in an Egyptian prison, has turned on Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri. This has apparently upset Al-Zawahiri so much he has seen fit to rubbish Dr Fadi and then to pen two hundred pages of rebuttal. You can read about Zawahiri's defensive screed here. Dr Fadi has been for some time engaged in a theological recantation of violence and has followed the logic of his enlightenment. Read the reports yourself . They have been around since 2007, but have not really registered with the media here (or with me, that much) before. Fadi's testimony could, I suppose, be some sort of intelligence exercise. However, it seems real. Dr Fadi claims that Bin Laden and his gang were directly responsible for 9-11 and that th...

Absolutely Heartless I've come down from all my la-di-dah observations and thought that I'd have a look at the British press. So three pensioners are smoking by an external door, on private property. Local government jobsworths turn up and begin a process that gets their club fined £5000 and they are fined £1000 each . For goodness' sake. I do hope that they properly recycled their rubbish and made sure to separate it out and not to let the lid of their bin go more than an inch above its closing capacity , and that they put it out at the right time . Not to do so is illegal. I hope that their nurses or home helps, if they have any, don't offer to say a prayer for them. They'll lose their job, or maybe just be suspended . I am glad that they got to be pensioners, as so many others will not . I hope that their local government tax isn't rising as high as the average is in a time of deflation. I hope that they were never exposed to infected blood products or to h...

Damon Buffini I'm not quite sure what to make of this story. Damon Buffini, a multi-millionaire in the City, and a very accomplished man, seems to have heard staff he regarded as lazy and ungrateful at the upper levels of management complaining about restaurants. He subsequently forced them all to eat two-day old Big Macs whilst reminding them of how lucky they are. It's nice to know that Saturn--in the form of a sort of globalisation guevara--could force his children to eat rather than devouring them, as in Goya's painting. How broken do people have to be not to walk out, though? I guess from his point of view, if they had any spine they'd be in business on their own. The whole thing is horribly fascinating.

A Little Friday Light Relief There haven't been any 'sightings' of the Loch Ness monster in ages. However, there is a roaring trade in these troubled times in snake-monsters , Forest wildmen and man-apes like Bigfoot (most of which, disconcertingly, are identified by their red hair ) and UFOs. The old John Titor hoax is good for a laugh and clearly still has some juice in it. Even the Scandinavians are in on these bliks , as it were. This sort of thing, I suppose, is the intellectual equivalent of the abominable spray-cheese, some convenient way to abuse life and forget whilst not challenging the society that could serve it up to intelligent people one little bit. Here's what the quirky Forgetful Rainn site thinks of it. Here's a funny video of something strange, horrible and huge in the water in Sweden or Scotland or somewhere like that. In the words of the great Rolf Harris, can you guess what it is? UPDATE : More timewasting. I think that allotments can be g...

Roger Scruton on Secularism I found via Bob from Brockley this copy of a lecture given in Calgary by Roger Scruton, not so much on secularism as on why religious people should uphold the secular. Bob's site , by the way, is as good as ever. Scruton's piece is typically clear, interesting and challenging, particularly to Muslims, but to any believer. It's in the City Journal , which I haven't read for some time but which can usually be counted on for at least one good article, so if you do want-- pace the subtitle of this blog--to waste some time, have a read. There is a dialogue going on between secularists and those who are faithful but also theological, and fideists ( a very different set) which is bubbling away beneath the surface of things. The Pope, for instance, has now called twice for healthy secularism, once on the white house lawn and once in France . Indeed, the Holy Father's words on how to redefine laicite and work together on climate change, educati...

What did you do in the Great Boom, Daddy? The watch is a Vacheron Constantin Historiques American 1921 , designed to pay homage to the 1920s. The years after 1989 were in large part characterised by lost opportunities. In part, this was a consequence of exhaustion and ideological derangement after the long Cold War. In part, opportunities were lost because of disorientation at the rise of China and then India in the west, and in part because technology and money and particularly silly but effective political movements and campaign techniques stupefied everyone. A herd mentality hardened into an iron determination to impose a limpid model of the free market everywhere, with the inevitable 'externalities'--the human or physical consequences of markets which did not fit into ideology--actually fuelling lawyers and environmentalists in their 'useful adversary' role. Central and eastern Europe, in particular, were leveraged, mortgaged, and sold off by the likes of people wh...

Car Cloning The United Kingdom is frequently described as a surveillance state. It is worth noting that it is also a state in which there is a great deal of street crime , and in which identity theft is running at very high levels. We also jail fewer people per crime than comparable states. Recording identity and movement doesn't therefore protect that many people. I was struck by a conversation with a person today though in which the man I was talking to insisted that he had been the victim of 'car cloning', which I had not previously been aware of. He had, he said, been photographed in a bus lane by a speed camera and had paid the fine rather than dispute his licence plate, but had realised subsequently that he could not have been at the place and time where his putative car was photographed. On research, car cloning happens a lot. Individual licence plates are copied, attached to similar models of car, and driven in the same general area for a quick turnaround. It's...

Covert War : What is it good for? The picture is Giotto, The Judas Kiss On 16 October 1962, Robert Kennedy was given plans to escalate an undeclared but very real clandestine war in Cuba. The plans included the demolition of a railroad bridge in Pinar del Rio; a grenade attack on the embassy of the People's Republic of China; the mining of Cuban harbours; attacks on oil tankers; and attacks on oil refineries in Havana and Santiago. Kennedy wanted action. The plans mooted that day, some of which were put into action, were illegal, but he got action that turned to ashes in his mouth. In October, as the Cuban missile crisis escalated, one group was infiltrated to plant dynamite at a copper mine. Their dynamite was discovered, they were abandoned, and the miners who would have been killed for doing their country's business, buried alive or crushed in a mine, were saved. In other circumstances, the actions outlined for Kennedy that day could have led to war. They would not only have...

Plus ca change, plus de la meme chose This is turning into quite a night of intellectual contrasts, as they don't say in football (or at least, not in those words). Then again, I wouldn't know, since I have no understanding of most sports. I was very pleased to discover the distributist piece in the post below this afternoon, and now--thanks to Martin in the Margins --I've found this fairly pure example of Enlightenment anti-culturalism from Denmark. The argument, in an online journal called Eurozine, is typically focussed on a very pure argument that the individual and their rights trump any culture, creed, or group, and is intellectually coherent. I guess it comes near to being a pristine, if slightly second-order and rationalist, example of Europe's natural and secular counterweight to the Catholicism that largely produced its culture. My natural tendency is to synthesise; I guess, in this instance, I should settle for the task of balancing two incompatible ideas at ...

Distributism The Catholic Workers' movement was important to the origins of the Labour Party in this country, and also, of course, to Christian Democracy in Europe. Guild socialism , which was a sort of secular counterpart (though it sprang from different sources) was also embraced in the late twentieth century by critics of Liberal progressivism who wished to recover a communitarian left, like Christopher Lasch . ChesterBelloc made up Distributism on the back of Rerum Novarum in one of my favourite pubs, which is now haunted by shady barristers from the Court of Appeal and people maintaining their blood alcohol levels. Shadows still sway from journalists who could once be found in the place but who got parted from their shade by the fumes of wine when Britain had a King. So, imagine how happy I was to find the following quality hand out on The Distributist Review. Feel free to link to it, or to download it. It's not just a document of intellectual history, but also increas...

The Story of Our Coming Times The picture is Sustermans' Galileo The world is full of lies, late and soon. It opens your eyes, to consider how much deceit and self-deceit is practised, however. Sometimes, just following government figures for 'apparent deficits' and balances of payments and then realising that they don't count public-private investment or the effective underwriting of banks does it for people. At other times, an assessment of whatever the conventional wisdom happens to be and the ferocity of its proponents when questioned is the thing that brings illumination. I think that there are two themes--not necessarily exclusive ones--which will shape the history of our times when it comes to be written. The credit crunch, bizarrely, in itself might not; most people today don't remember or have never learned about the panics of 1819 , 1837 , and 1873 (The first 'Great Depression') that helped shape America and the British Empire, let alone that of ...

An Asian Woman 'Does Her Nut' I have noticed a marked increase in people behaving strangely and aggressively in this country as pressure deepens and the depression bites. In other places, where pressure is normal anyway, people often 'flip'. The video below has become an internet sensation. In it, a distressed Chinese woman reverts to the age of around two and has a magnificent tantrum on the floor of an international airport because she has been dawdling in the duty free and missed her flight. I myself have noticed over the years similar behaviour in some, of all backgrounds, sexes and conditions, though not at airports. One small unknown person even went mad and had a continual go at me for having a cigar in the near-empty street yesterday evening, to the extent of throwing stones. I hope that they breathed in, eventually. More people should do this to people other than myself. It keeps the authorities on their toes. It's the sort of thing which should be done in ...

The Co-operative Party I've added the unoffical co-operative party blogsite to my linklist, and will add others over time. I always liked them, mostly.

Mary Honeyball's Strong Condemnation of Allegedly Unethical Labour Lords A while ago, Mary Honeyball MEP condemned very strongly members of the upper house of the United Kingdom who were accused of unethical practices. She made a very strong point which was one of the few good ones she occasionally comes up with in the midst of a farrago of nonsense and confusion, the poor woman, about such behaviour. She has also been absolutely transparent about her expenses. Then the post failed to make it onto her new wordpress blog. Then the Home Secretary was embroiled in the scandal which may yet force her to resign, and which has compromised the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord Moonie, who were an odd couple sharing Gordon Brown's old flat as I understand it even though the Chancellor was claiming that his lodging meant that it was his London home, qualifying him for a huge expenses supplement. Letters for the latter day Klugman and Matthau still arrive there. There is no suggestio...

The British Government Wants to Borrow Another £100 Billion Cross posted to the Campaign For Public Ownership and Facebook The Government's strategy of throwing money at things and hoping for the best has failed. It is now trying to borrow, but Britain's economy is bankrupt and the usual lenders are in desperate straits. So, time to stop, and think. Why not cut government spending and cut taxes, whilst expanding public ownership? This country cannot, at the minute, afford the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, especially if it thinks that it can afford the 2012 Olympics. It cannot afford a vast expensive renewal of seaborne nuclear weapons. It cannot afford the European heavy-lift air transport it's ordered and which will now be a decade late. It cannot afford to pay for charities and lobby groups out of spurious public grants, it cannot afford the expenses of Members of Parliament and it cannot afford about a third of local councillors or European Parliament legislato...

Britain is Runnng Out of Gas Reserves Here's an interesting link to some signs of the times. The British government's response to the gas company Centrica's embarrassment in supply has been to reaffirm a long standing policy not to dare buy anything from Iran , but rather to go on a mad acquisition spree that seems to have bought only a little time. We are going to need coal and nuclear power, and if we are not to start building and digging 'in desperate extremis' as Ernie Bevin would have put it, we should start now.