Martin Meenagh blog

The Vital Small Differences The Photograph is of the president's little known future relative, 'Barack Gorbachev'. I have mislaid the attribution but will restore it later today. I suggested last year that Mitt Romney, in a post-election broadcast, was callous to urge bankruptcy for the Detroit motor industry. Mr Romney, whose father was governor of Michigan and a candidate for president of the United States in 1968, is immensely rich. He has a grasp of business. He knows that American bankruptcy is not really the same as bankruptcy in Europe, but in fact is a court-based protective scheme in many instances, which often allows businesses to carry on or to reincarnate themselves easily. The federal government didn't heed Mr Romney's advice, and yesterday admitted that Detroit would have to go out of business, but only when measures to protect workers and to try and maintain companies after restructuring or international mergers took place. The small difference is th...

The State of Iran The painting is a Persian miniature from 1330, which can be viewed amongst others here . Paulinus has a very powerful piece today on the state of modern Iran. He points out three things which my reflections at the start of the year on what a deflation-related oil decline will do to Iran missed. Firstly, he notes the massive demographic slump into which Iran has fallen in the past twenty years. It is not having enough children, its population is falling, and its growth has not been great enough to provide a comfortable landing in the form of investments or social services for the present ageing population. Secondly, he notes a study that suggests some 90% of Teheran's prostitutes have passed the university entrance exam. Prostitution is a desperate choice, whatever escort agencies are keen to say to young women, and we can only surmise that poor women are suffering even more. I dimly remember women reputed to put it about when the rent came due when I was young, a...

An Incredibly 'Trippy' Burka Video I strongly suspect that the following video is a hoax. Then again, the Afghan situation is so mad I wonder if anyone could tell. It is a musical effort, involving the song 'my mother wears a Burka' and one can fast-forward past the German introduction if that doesn't make things spacier for you. A proper salute to these young women if it isn't a hoax.... h/t Madam Miaow

Some People Don't Let Up Washington being a place of almost unbelievable duplicity and mischief, I wanted to record a thought here. Joe Biden--whom I have made affectionate fun of here on the blog--is actually a very open, reasonably funny sort of a man. He has tried to bring up a normal family. He is the Vice-President of the United States. So, when I see stories about Biden's daughter taking cocaine , and that they are linked to his invention of the term 'drug czar', I can't help wondering if the part of the administration which is at the moment most vulnerable is just being softened up. There is a dynamic which will play upon Obama-sympathising minds as the economic situation becomes tougher and the administration, as they all do, gets paranoid. It will escalate when their policies start to fail and they are tested abroad. It is that the coda which has motivated the right for a very long time--the idea that the destruction of the Nixon administration was some sor...

David Milliband Again News from a forein countrie came As if my treasure and my wealth lay there; So much it did my heart inflame, 'twos wont to call my soul into mine ear; And so forth and so on . It has been some time since this blog touched upon the doings of Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Mr David Milliband , who is 14. On those occasions when Mr Milliband was mentioned, he was on a 'green' bender. The Prime Minister and others, in so far as they cared at all, were clearly running foreign affairs, and Mr Milliband was in charge of an the destruction of lives, the increase of food prices, and the diversion of water supplies to bio-fuels. And green taxes. Unfortunately, this all fell through, but not before I found a clip of the hand-puppet 'Sweep' from the Sooty show in which Sweep imagined himself to be 'superdog' and incompetently tried to save the world before ending up rooting around the rubbish bi...

Just in Case Anyone Doubts What is Going On The Iranian Revolutionary Guard may not be under the control of their government, but they certainly represent the Islamic regime. They have been providing money to some of the worst killers in the world, possibly with North Korean money gained from helping that country in its mad rocket scheme in Asia. That money has been used to buy off local elements to transport Iranian medium range rockets in Sudan, whose genocidal and utterly discredited regime is not happy at having been found out . Those rockets were being transported to Egypt earlier this year, in an operation co-ordinated by a Revolutionary Guard. They then would have been delivered to Hamas. Hamas, which is remarkable in being all rogue element and no mainstream, would then have continued its repression in Gaza, and continued to derail the two-state solution to the Palestinian problem, by dropping very great explosives on Israel, which would have been pushed into a response by a b...

Sailing Cars I am no fan of wind power at all, but I do like entrepreneurial science, and the spirit that underlies it. The Greenbird Ecotricity Team won the world land-speed record for wind-powered vehicles the other day. They are (like Reaction Engines , who are plotting the fabulous skylon spaceplane) a British outfit. They have used new materials, and a combination of sailing and aeroplane designs, to build a craft that can use the wind to go over 120 miles an hour. Their adventure would have been worthwhile for the fun of it--much like these students, who photographed space from a balloon--but it also apparently sets all sorts of standards for the use of new materials that Ecotricity are going to use elsewhere. When the oil runs down, I'm prepared to bet that carriage by sea , and by airship , are going to become important again--and (I don't make a nationalistic point) the engineering genius in these islands, which is forced to thrive in adversity, is going to have show...

Coal, Not Dole I've been for a read of AngloNoel's blog today, and he has an excellent piece on the coal industry, a might-have been and could-still be. Have a read if you have time!

Angela Merkel Frau Merkel is, as I keep saying, the smartest leader in Europe. I also admire the Federal Republic tremendously, and can see that it is now going to react to going through hell by keeping going, rather than pouring oil on the flames. Angie's just done for the Anglosphere's plan to inflate everything and crush ordinary people's pensions and pay. Well done. We'll all have unemployment; they have the moral courage to face deflation. We keep trying wastefully to stave it off in time for the political and media classes to claim their expenses to the full. The euro may break; Germany will clearly survive. There are very few rules these days in politics. One fairly reliable one is that people who ignore, patronise or attempt to bounce Angela Merkel usually end up roadkill. She sits up working, you see, and isn't mad. She reads the documents. As a model of a scientific woman in a position of leadership, she is much, much better than Margaret Thatcher. Well, I...

KD Lang, Hallelujah, Australia My regular correspondent, Mary, in Australia sent me this video of K.D.Lang singing Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah'. I once spent a great deal of time in Baltimore, with a veteran of America's war in Vietnam and his family. His wife was a lovely Indian woman, and his son, who must be grown now, was a credit to them. Anyway, he used to play Gorecki, and introduced me to Leonard Cohen songs, so I think of that time when I hear this. I heard such songs on that trip; I remember looking out of the Amtrak I took from DC on the Maryland woods and what might a hundred years or so have been called 'wilderness' whilst hearing an album of civil war songs and modern reconstructions from Ken Burn's Civil War. I got chills. Many thanks to Mary. Australian breakfast TV looks almost watchable (I don't have a telly, just a computer, which means that I can watch telly from anywhere, paradoxically so its interesting to me to see the clip!) ps. ...

Lost Time and a long, personal note I have, from time to time, suggested that the personal and gratuitous abuse of James Gordon Brown is wrong and unnecessary. Last year, I praised his efforts to erect 'firebreaks' to hold together the banking system until new, and comprehensive schemes could be put in place. Though I lost no opportunity to record here, for the few who read this blog and I suppose for myself, the disregard I had for the people around him, I always thought of him as deserving a break. I gave up on his party. Now, I'm very near to completely giving up on him. I don't know the man, though I was once offered a job with his staff by one of his associates in his office when they were in opposition, which I suspect was never going to happen anyway. I'd have opened my mouth and they'd have pulled the trapdoor lever, not because of the accent--I can shift that all over the place, though less than I used to--but because of the views. Class is practically ...

Just Perfect The video below is from Pope Benedict's last official visit to the United States. It shows the fine men of the United States Army singing 'the Battle Hymn of the Republic'--apparently sung at Jean Monnet's funeral , as well as that of my own father--on the White House Lawn. I just like the video. I've been thinking a lot about the European Communities and how they were transformed into the European Union. The question I can't resolve is at what point the liberalism--the functionalist and capitalist, Atlantic version--won out over the communitarian, Catholic pan-europeanism and why. 'Europe' is generally socializing, not socialist; its two collective, pan-european philsophies emerged from the rubble wrought by a third, Fascist-Naziism and proceeded to battle a fourth, Soviet socialism. When did undemocratic corporate Liberals win? I don't think that things were as simple as the entry of Britain, and Denmark in 1972, and wonder if DeGaull...

Free Speech Should Not Be A Crime I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church and the religion with which it is associated. I think that I can defend it intellectually, and with argument. I think that reasonable people could disagree, and that as citizens we can operate within a civic space when we are of different religions. I also think that speech should be as free as possible, and that, anyway, our actions will be weighed long after our words disappear. So I was sad to see the United Nations adopting a mad policy of limiting speech against religion the other day. I am also sad to see Gordon Brown and Evan Harris thinking that they can buy off catholics with heavy-handed assaults on the position of the Queen and the Church of England (which I have no particular time for) today, whilst trying to shut down debate. h/t The Committee to Protect Bloggers

Join the Dots, 1,001 World temperatures are falling. As the oil drum points out, with impeccable sourcing behind its assertions, oil price rises precipitated a fall in aggregate demand that then pulled the houses built on debt down, at the same time as crazy profits from global financial expansion in part funded by energy markets exploded. Now, output from, and investment in, renewable energy, existing nuclear plant, gas and oil are all falling at the same time. Just before stimulus turns into runaway inflation, we face a major restriction on energy; and even if stimulus fails, we'll face declining power generation. By 'we', I mean this strange, Atlantic entity that passes for a globalised state. Soon, though, that word will mean British people, and Irishmen, and Americans, and the other names again. We'll still be people; but adversity has a way of bringing those around you home, as it were. Were it not for carbon-regulation measures put in place by the Lysenkoism th...

Candidates David Lindsay , whose blog I enjoy even though I do not always agree--why should I?--is standing for election in his constituency. I wish him well. There is a core of integrity to the man, and his ideas are often stimulating, so he should be placed in front of the voters.

Good Grief A Peruvian who sits for South East England in the European Parliament--not an institution beloved of this blog--has given a rather good, if slightly Oxford Unionish, speech in response to Gordon Brown. How on earth did he end up dumped in Strasbourg with the 'special needs' class?

Cold Fusion Confirmed? Apparently, some US Navy researchers are suggesting they have experimentally confirmed their cold fusion research . ITER and CERN will both teach us about the manipulation of particles, energy, and the use of thorium, and about things we can't even begin to envisage right now and, sooner or later, someone in Europe or America will bring pure, cheap, non-fossil energy to us. It could bring on a golden age for humanity. I pray to God they've found one way to it. What a great future we could have, if we could reject despair, death cults, and stupidity and live as free people in faith and reason, with abundant energy. There are days when some small news, appearing in the darkened places as though light were pretending to be fleeting shadow, makes me feel very good indeed. This may all be a dodge to get funding before April for clean energy research . But, rather than waste money on global warming rubbish or stuffing the mouths of bankers, we should be showeri...

I'd be a liberal in Donegal Here are two videos. They're based on the same tune. One is Heidi Bruhl, who died young, singing 'Ein Hundert Mann und Ein Befehl' with the voice of an pacifist angel against war--a disarmed Michael or someone--and then the version in the original American, which is really quite stirring. Both were big hits, and seem to symbolise the Atlantic divide in the cold war. I might point out that Fraulein Bruhl was singing in 1966, in the best Germany there has ever been.

The Extraordinary Peace of Modern America in the Recession I was thinking today, somewhat idly, of the European image of America as a violent society, and of how much less that is true today than the norm, at least in domestic terms. One could make a case that America has been violent since before birth; that its penchant for republicanism was a practical consequence of stockades grown to enforce encroachments on Indian land after the seven years' war . At least, had you a time machine, I'm sure that that is what the Green Mountain boys would tell you. But my mind turned to one short period, between 1921 and 1943. It was one which many would acknowledge as critical to the creation of the modern United States. One of the interesting things about it is how horrifically violent it was, and how its systematic racial violence would never be repeated. If it had been, even in the riots of the nineteen sixties, there would not be an America today. 1921 saw the Tulsa riots , character...

Judd Gregg is Right If what is going on keeps going on, the United States of America will approach bankruptcy. Then what happens is anyone's guess. My only cavil is that it isn't wholly the Administration's fault, it's the Congress, and the political class, and the journalists who will all have pulled the wall down. You can watch Senator Gregg below; and below that, what happens when you mine the land stupid and forget about the ocean. Watch the whole of the latter video, it's awesome (h/t The Secret of Newton ). Embedded video from CNN Video

The Centre of the Solar System is not the Sun I found the picture on The Daily Galaxy , which is an interesting site. It's called 'Copernicus'. The solar system has a barycentre , as I (a non-scientist) understand it. That means that the planets tend to pull a little bit, placing the centre of the solar system's 'gravity well' a bit away from the sun. Last year, some Australian scientists speculated on the length of solar cycles and on the effect on the sun-- a sort of dimming--when the large planets were all pulling at once. They set dates. They suggested that, on previous occasions when a multiple 'pull' happened, earth's temperature fell by one to two degrees over a short period. These were consonant with the 'little ice ages' that were marked by wars, religious change, and political revolutions in the northern hemisphere, presumably because of the effect on food production, disease, and economic growth, as well as the pressure on Europe...

Climate Change I got the picture of an Astrolabe--a thing of beauty made for what 'The Secret of Newton' calls a 'glorious error'--from the Oxford science museum website. Evidence emerges by the day for the proposition that the sun, whose energies are stored by the seas drive our climate, not carbon dioxide, as if it needed any explaining. Now, thanks to solarcycle24.com , which I've been touting on this blog for over a year, and the ever-excellent Wattsupwiththat.com , here's some more. Go to Anthony Watt's site for more, and for a full discussion by scientists of the graphs below. Jennifer Marohasy should also be credited, along with Dr Craig Loehle and Dr Roger Pielke. The titles are important because greens and others have now taken to calling opponents mad, isolated or unqualified. That is how these people behave. The implication of the evidence now making it past the mainstream media is, literally, chilling. The oceans are becoming colder, sunspots ar...

Pope Leo, the Chinese and Guns Sometimes in life, you get the feeling that bigger things with deeper purposes are scarily near the surface of events.... I spent Thursday afternoon in Bath, with my seminar of American students. We talked about the legacy of the British seventeenth century to the American revolutionaries, and I tried to 'Atlanticise' the intellectual history of republicanism. Afterward, waiting in Bath (which is beautiful, like Oxford without the malice, and somehow deeply English) I re-read Alan Fimister's chapters on the Leonine social magisterium. My head's been on fire since then. This is what happens when you stop drinking for Lent. There is of course always the possibility that I am in the early stages of some neural dementia, or that my head is too warm and I need a haircut. Everyday reality is more often than not the source of our most pretentious and deep-thought schemes. But Dr Fimister's work on the Thomist view of the republic somehow gell...

Death of a Blogger An Iranian Blogger seems to have died just for being a blogger , apparently by his own hand. He had been incarcerated in an Iranian prison. I wanted to record the sadness of the news; may eternal light shine upon him, O Lord, and may he rest in peace. Via the City of Brass site above (which I found via EU Referendum ) I have also come across The Committee to Protect Bloggers , which if you are interested in global free speech is worth a look. I have not, by the way, been somehow converted to liberalism; I think that everyone should have the same chance to be right and to be heard as the Pope, and vice versa ....

On the Sand, in the Heat, on a Galapagos Beach I admire the Irish, Israeli, and American republics, and am a citizen of the first. I live, in my head, in a European space that may be passing away. It may, in fact, be long gone, killed off by the poisons of prosperity and the anti-Christian mania of the modern European Union. Yet I don't dislike the British monarchy; I was born and grew up here, after all. I've known good men who would have fought and died for it when they wore a uniform, but escaped that fate. I am a British subject too, whether I want to be or not, and the crimes of the crown over the centuries should not be visited upon the wearer, nor their child. I've met the Queen a few times, once outside her small church in Windsor after the one and only Anglican service I have ever been to, and she seems a nice and dutiful woman. Her husband was, on the occasions I've been anywhere near him, funny and straightforward. I was unsettled by the Diana hysteria, and I...

The Fantastic Four The accompanying image is called 'The Four Elements' and is by teakster . Evidence accumulates of an unwillingness on the part of the media and political class to deal with the medium or long term. We have installed in the west, as many commentators more seasoned than I have pointed out, a silly, drama-obsessed class who pass the buck for real political decisions that affect real people at the slightest opportunity. Instead, we have individuals who think that internal party disputes and their own trivial personality classes are politics. The west is sometimes slow to adapt. Perhaps all of this is just the backwash of the post-war prosperity that produced first a determined generation of practical idealists, forged in war, then a group of narcissists, then a group of ruined children armed with pointless loud argument machines where their minds should be. But time is running out. I was struck by how there seems at the moment a determined effort to assert that ...

Gregorian Chant A prayer to God, offered for the Holy Father in Africa and my own concerns. I once lived in a monastery, as a guest, for a few months in Washington DC and loved the peace of the souls there; in fact, at that time of my life, I was a little frightened of it too. When I returned to Oxford, I slowly worked up my thesis whilst occasionally listening to this sort of chant. Such is my bizarre head, I associate it with DC and New York. This particular example is very relaxing, if you like this sort of thing.

Statistics That Are Probably Just Made Up Anyway, But Which I learned From The Daily Mail The Daily Mail claimed late last year that 75,000 'white British' (its words) people were leaving a year. It claims that 400,000 Britons in general do; a stupendous sum. Firstly, I wasn't aware that anyone was recording racial category at the airports, and secondly, they may well be conflating people who leave for more than twelve months, say to backpack, travel, or work abroad, with people who go for good. Today, the Mail--which is superb as a mirror and inspiration for the people who read it, just beautifully suited to its market--claims that ' three quarters of Britons want unemployed immigrants to leave the country' . One in nine UK residents were born overseas, and over a million East Europeans have arrived since 2004. So many Poles are going home, in fact, having made as much as they needed to make to kick start their lives at home, and good luck to them, that Poland is ...

For St Patrick's Day Robert Emmet's last speech. A noble man on whom I reflected in St Stephen's Green, beneath his statue a few weeks ago. Here's the final paragraph, and the words follow; My lords, you are impatient for the sacrifice-the blood which you seek is not congealed by the artificial terrors which surround your victim; it circulates warmly and unruffled, through the channels which God created for noble purposes. but which you are bent to destroy. for purposes so grievous. that they cry to heaven. Be yet patient! I have but a few words more to say. I am going to my cold and silent grave: my lamp of life is nearly exinguished: my race is run: the grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom! I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world--it is the charity of its silence! Let no man write my epitaph: for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them. let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity...

We Shall Overcome Here's Bruce Springsteen in Bologna. I once stood in the cool of the cathedral on a hot afternoon there, after John Paul II called it the centre of European depravity ( which, by the way, was before I arrived) and was shown by one of Italy's daughters how, because of the peculiar architecture, a whisper could be carried between the arches. Whispers from such lips would overcome anything, and I've been listening to the Sessions band album tonight, so I thought that I would combine the two, especially given that my girlfriend doesn't read my blog.

A Disgrace to Europe The painting is by Chris Peters and, rather ironically given the subject of this post, is called Leave the Shame Behind. I thought it an appropriate illustration. You can see more of Mr Peter's art here , and buy some if you wish. I know that there is a very tangled history in the east. I know that Latvia suffered under Soviet tyranny , and I know that world war two was a very long time ago. But allowing the veterans and family of the Waffen SS to parade as though they were something other than the armies of the night and an eruption of the Satanic principle around Riga is, truly, beyond the pale. However, I'm forced to ask myself what pale I would impose that would define the public sphere, and what my right to do so would be. Some in Latvia view this matter as one of free speech and assembly, and I can't think of an argument against them other than to tell them to just shut up and be ashamed--which might work in my head, but which may not in theirs . ...