Martin Meenagh blog

Past the One Thousand Post Mark The picture is a rendition of the 'mystery airship of 1896', which I found at unmuseum . This blog began on August 6, 2006. In a post that afternoon, I warned about the lack of legitimacy of a government that seventy-eight of every hundred people with a vote had not voted for. I noted the serious corruption of parliament by professional politicians, the instability of bond markets, the unreliability of a defence procurement industry that was not independent, and the opportunity to finally redeem himself that Tony Blair might have grasped. I was fixated on a constitutional structures, but aware of how many people were alienated from and angry with the state of things--and that, at a time when the credit crunch was discernible only as a worry on the horizon. Obviously, I could go on in like vein. I think the interesting question is what really has changed, since I have, a bit. A list of things that derive from sundry posts, not advanced a propos of...

Banning the Burka What, really, is M.Sarkozy's point? In my experience, (though it is a dangerous thing to say it) most women, regardless of culture, will do, wear or say silly or dangerous things at some point in their life if they think another woman is validated for doing so. Incredibly high heels, drinking binges, eating disorders, feminism, the construction by rings of long necks or by boxes of square heads or feet--they've all been done, and all been sustained by the choice of women and the views of other women. Banning anything is not going to work, and is unenforceable for people who aren't doing things that require them to show their body or to have peripheral vision. So assaulting those who wear the burka is a statement of cultural determination, that they are not wanted here. We use the most misleading excuses; burkas are imposed by men who beat or intimidate the women . Leaving aside all the women who probably do that too, the obvious answer is to jail the oppre...

Lacan and the Bible The west, in the past forty years, has more or less given up its patrimony. Art, religion, philosophy, and, critically, education, have been subjected to the rule that what is ideal and desired is to be found inside our own distorted selves, and not in the world outside and behind us; not in what is real. This impulse disguises itself in many ways. People now lack basic social intelligence, for instance. Over the course of the past few years, I have been shocked by how little facts, or reason, or courtesy actually matter anymore in what passes for political or intellectual debate. Courtesy is not a matter of form; it is the substance of the principle of charity. If you really want to understand what another person is saying, or writing, you have to listen and read closely and on the basis that they will gain the benefit of the doubt. You don't have to be some Lucian rabbinical exegete to know that there is a percentage in civility; indeed, some on the American r...

A Message to 'Ed' Milliband Edward Samuel Milliband, a goon a few years older than myself, has written to me this morning. His letter interrupted all the Michael Jackson jokes I was getting and forwarding, half shamefully, so I read it. 'Ed' is a minister, who demanded somewhat peremptorily via a non-specific email (I have the cabinet office e-mails and will forward any bounced message in due course) demanded that I pledge myself to 'future generations' and make a 'Copenhagen pledge' over 'climate change'. I'm fairly sure Mr Milliband doesn't mean the 1826 pledge of the famous Norwegian, Mr Haagen Mathieson to a country other than his own on the principle 'ubi bene ibi patria' . I think he means he wants to piddle some of my money away on a cultish delusion. If you get a letter from Ed, reply in like terms and see what happens; I suspect the result may be the same as his pledge process--b***er all--except it will be considerably ...

Farrah Fawcett Dies One of the icons of my childhood--as a small me, I had an absurd crush on her and used to get embarrassed when she was on Charlie's angels and so on--died today. She was only 62, and had been battling cancer. May she rest in peace.

Pressure Your Congressman The Deeply Silly Carbon Sequestration and 'Cap and Trade' bill is up for a vote in the United StatesHouse of Representatives tomorrow. It would not 'stop' global warming (even if it was happening, which it isn't), it will waste money, create regulation, destroy business, and create massive problems in federal constitutional law which will rebound in unexpected ways on you, if you are an American citizen. The ever-excellent Wattsupwiththat.com have highlighted the issue this morning. I wanted to direct the American portion of my small readership to the article, and also to suggest that you could e-mail your Congressman. Nancy Pelosi has admitted that, as of Tuesday night, she did not have the 218 votes needed to pass this delusional , job-destroying nonsense . The United States cannot afford this.

I have a lot of work to do at the minute... And lots of time on my hands in which to do it. A concentrated, disciplined few days of writing, the avoidance of social activity, and a monastic application to duty will see me right. Yep. That'll do it. IN the Jewish PaRaDeS tradition--or, more properly speaking, in thirteenth century Kabbalah--the 'S' stands for Sod, which is a word for the highest approach to this level of reality. Some described it as the romantic union of man and god, which I can't help revealing my essentially trivial spirit by smiling at. I mean--'Sod Kabbalah?'. You'd have to be from the Atlantic archipelago to understand the pun. The phrase 'sod it' is therefore applicable to devoted duty. I mean, who do I think I am, a New York teacher in the rubber room ? I've been watching loads of old films, reader. I love film. It's such a mutable medium, and as usual my tastes vary between the lower half of the pool and the most pret...

Why Shouldn't The People Elect The Speaker? There have been 139 Speakers of the House of Commons and 23 Speakers of the United Kingdom Parliament. A new one has just been elected . The job is essentially to preside and to referee the debates and business of the Commons, though a Speaker's Committee, a Lord Privy Seal (usually the government member of the House of Commons) several administrators and Deputies and a Sarjeant at Arms also have a role. The House of Commons is meant to represent, but not deputise for, the people. I draw the distinction because the idea is one of 'virtual representation', a fiction from the time of limited franchises which sits very well at the moment with a country where almost eighty per cent of those with a vote did not vote for the government. It means that Members of Parliament are meant to exercise their judgment. In the past, Lords and Kings menaced the Commons, so the House genuinely and by default represented the people, or at least t...

Just In Case Anyone Doubts What Is Going On (2) : Iran I am conscious that there may be times when I appear to view things from my own little tower. So, I thought that I would just remind myself and readers what the world outside my head is like. This is the Iranian 'Power Structure', according to the Associated Press. This is how it works. It is for the Iranians to decide their future. But I would hope that those warm, clever people I know would understand, without offence, that I hope the people, and the spirit of law, win.

Take Advantage of the Recession and Reform the State Once more, with feeling.... 1) Abolish Government departments purporting to deal with trade, communities, overseas aid, culture, regions and nations, and higher education. Scrap carbon taxes, and landfill regulations. Create a basis of reasonable evidence before health and safety concerns can be applied against individuals. 2) Introduce an autonomous, outside audit of the Ministry of Defence procurement, Private Finance Initiative and government transport subsidies, with subpoena powers and the legal right and privilege to publish whatever it wants at the end of a defined period. 3) Allow failing universities to collapse and merge them into a national university, with distributed campuses, one degree, and modular units; allow those who think they can to become private corporations. 4) Introduce open primaries, the alternative vote, and recall elections. Abolish expenses and set one payment for members of parliament, with full transpa...

Just What is The Common Good? The picture is of Thomas Aquinas, which I found on R.Joseph Hoffman's somewhat unorthodox but deeply learned blog. I can't think who the Saint reminds me of in the picture; Spencer Tracy, perhaps, or a puffy version of Bruce Wayne. Why does religious philosophy always make me think of Batman? I've been reading Thomas Aquinas lately as I've come to the view that he was something of a republican, which this paper got me onto . There are hints in his works. Overtly, Aquinas points us to a Christian Monarch as an ideal, but his comments on the practicality of governing systems illustrate that he thought Kings would descend to tyrants; that aristocracy would fall to oligarchy; but that, ultimately, republics would only be menaced by democracy if they forgot the rule of law. There's a tremendous republican strain in American Catholicism too. It got the North American church more or less declared as heretical, for instance, in a crisis peopl...

For Those dying and living in Iran I have nothing of worth to write that I have not already said; I wish that both Ahmendinajad and Mousavi could both lose, and take the fascists running things down with them. I note the stories about Rafsanjani's funding of some of the protests, and I can see that the people in Paris and Los Angeles who really are for a secular republic aren't saying much at all, from their comfortable eyries. I like those Iranians whom I have known immensely, and I respect Persia's history. Yet I can also see that there are people dying for their country and their freedom there. They may fall; they may not. Peoples, like individuals, should be allowed their own destiny under God; or, at least, they should be allowed a time when they think that they can write their history for themselves. I thought that I'd put a song that their green clothes and banners reminded me of up, for no really good reason at all, and that I'd say a prayer, for what it is ...

Cash Totters Money in its modern iteration is almost everywhere a faith-based initiative. The paper that you may or may not have near you with the stamp of some national figure or euro-monument on it is backed only by the confidence of markets. It is adjusted to real value by how much of it people demand, a process which is measured very inefficiently and late in most places. It may be that you have a currency that is backed by another, or perhaps by some commodity; looking at my site meter, I doubt it. But what would happen if it fell away? I saw two stories this week that grabbed my attention, to which I'd direct bored readers (I must have at least a few :)). One is the intriguing tale of how some in Japan are trying to escape persistent 'zombie deflation' and arrogate total control of interest rates to a central authority, rather than individual transaction in money, by raising the idea of phasing out cash. I think that this is, at the minute and probably well into the f...

James Gordon Brown's Rocky Moment The image is called 'The Boxer', and a full version is available here . It can be purchased as a painting, apparently. It was quite a sad thing for me to lose almost all my faith in the image manufactured of Gordon Brown over the years earlier this year. I admired the non-Oxbridge heaviness of the man's determination. What seemed to others (including some of my commenters, whom I respect) his charmless brutality seemed to me understandable given the contemptible people in the political, media and financial classes whom he had to deal with every frustrated day of his life. He'd lost the cut out that left him kind to others who weren't those people, I thought. I've withheld myself on the blog too, since it is a public, if little noticed thing, from blaming the man generally for collective sins. It was once truly said that there are few things more unattractive than the English middle classes shifting the blame for their own gr...

Journalists: Do This Right. I am in Hammersmith and Fulham, and have an idle moment. So, let's have a look at the local Member of Parliament's expenses. He's Greg Hands MP. Greg Hands' expenses are 'redacted' , but the names of printing companies--one printing company--he paid a great deal of money to for perfectly legal printing--is Metloc limited. He did so twice. He also gave my taxes to Hammersmith Conservatives . Off to Companies House. Using their search tool, you find out that Metloc Ltd is a small private firm, as you would expect. You could order information about directors, but that would take too long. For the record, Metloc Ltd have been established for over forty years and there is nothing but praise for them on the web. So, Google it. Metloc printers turns up associated with Committee member S Metcalfe, an honest, perfectly legal businessman who in 2007 was paid about a quarter of the annual average wage in a payment for printing by the Epping For...

Barack Obama Kills One Of God's Little Creatures Live on TV OK, that was a shameless attempt to generate hits. Actually, he swatted a fly, though I'm sure that it won't be long before some discover as much of a liking for flies as they now have for the Iranian people and Mr Mousavi, responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in the eigties and apparently mixed up with the foundation of Hezbollah. Ah, what a whacky world. The President of the United States, by the way, clearly has some awesome reflexes there.

Is the Pope Jewish? There's a mad question for you, and it isn't of a piece with my former scurrilous transmission of rumours about President Ahmedinajad. There are some engaging whimsies from Rabbis about past Jewish popes on the web--here's one from the Jerusalem Post --and of course the standard loony line that John Paul was because his mother was pretty and intelligent and in Poland. It strikes me as a way of being offensive on many levels, a bit like Wonkette's observation that Jesus once argued with God about the human's dinosaur playmates, or the recent Daily Telegraph Poll which detailed how Jesus 'was the number one dead person most Britains would like to meet'. He's up there with Princess Diana, apparently. I can see why he wept. For the record, I agree with this catholic blogger that it would have been a privilege for the pope to have been related to the saviour in that way. I think that this all started because the he did so much wonderful...

The Mystery of the Bonds Has anyone else seen this very strange story, which has elements of a criminal farce and which others insist is much bigger? Basically, as Andrew Leonard details , $134 billions of United States Bonds seem to have turned up in the hands of smugglers from Japan. Semi-serious people from the markets then started wondering if these were 'secret bonds' which the United States had been propping Japan up with for years without telling anyone (including, it seems, the Japanese people, who have been through twenty or so years of economic hell). Amidst suggestions that the North Koreans were attempting to destabilise the west, Joseph Cannon has pointed the finger at a shady Filipino business person, and a religious cult. The ' Italians and Germans', by which I presume people mean the authorities, say some of the bonds are real, and that they date back to the nineteen thirties . I presume that this means that Italy's shady government could then conf...

The Real Iraq War Questions Gordon Brown announced a review of the Iraq War the other day, which will be conducted in secret. This is in stark contrast to the way the American government dealt with its various policies and strategies in Iraq, which was basically to feed Bob Woodward access and named sources, including the President, whilst the war was still going on, which allowed him to write four books about it. Given all the blood the war spilled, and all the infighting they detail, the books are somewhat anaemic, and not surprisingly the CIA comes quite well out of them. In my view it shouldn't. As a general guide to what was going on, though, the books are--especially the last of them, The War Within --readable and clear. Britain, however, is another matter. Even when the state here was alive and not undead, it was pathologically secretive. Debate about its activities was and is predictably silly, and the recent Inquiry, under Sir John Chilcot, is already being argued about b...

The Right to Self-Determination and a 1989 in the Middle East The painting is Persian, and depicts female musicians from the Hasht-Behesht Palace ("Palace of the Eight heavens"), in Isfahan, Iran. It is dated 1669. Amazing things, it seems to me, are happening in Iran at the moment. I think that there are at least four layers to understanding them, or beginning to (which I do not by any means profess to fully do). Ancient cultures die hard. The first point to note is that the Islamic republican experiment of creating a rule of the people and a civic space under an all-pervasive interpretation of the Islamic religion is as doomed as Cromwell's commonwealth. As the Pope noted in 1996 , when he was cardinal Ratzinger, Sharia implies the shaping of society from beginning to end; it can exploit such freedoms as our constitutions give, but it cannot be its final goal to say, 'Yes, we are now a body with rights, present in society just like the Catholics and the protestants....

It's Bloomsday The image is, as far as I can tell, by Norm Beattie, and is to be found on the World of Taxis website. June 16 was the day James Joyce had his first squeeze with Nora Barnacle, though he had met her six days before. He immortalised the date in his depiction of the day in Dublin in 1904 recorded in Ulysses . I love Ulysses , though it took me a long time to really read it, as opposed to my first, struggling encounters. In some part of my mind, it sits alongside an old, eighth century Irish poem in which a priest talks of how in love with his Psalm-Book he is. It could have been Hillel, or the compilers of the Midrash, or the Bavli Talmud, or the lovers in the Song of Solomon for all its elemental grace; How good to hear your voice again, Old love, no longer young, but true, As when in Ulster I grew up And we were bedmates, I and you.... The poem is a long one, and appeals to me greatly. I won't put it all up in this post, but will get round to it in the future. I...

A World Turned Upside Down.... The image comes from the fun Plastic Man Platitudes site, which brought back memories of a nineteen seventies childhood scouring various Corby newsagents for imported and reprinted American comics and wishing US Saturday morning TV was available here. I recommend the site thoroughly as a great diversion. We're almost at the mid-point of 2009 now, and a cursory glance at the by-ways of the internet suggests a very disorienting world (though when was it not?) For example, Haaretz is presenting a poll with what seems to me to be a fantastically small sample group, even given Israel's size, suggesting that between 78 and 83% of Israeli Jews believe that they could live with a nuclear Iran, though 59% would still support attacking that country if it looked as though it was going nuclear. I find the poll frankly unbelievable, but am prepared to believe that Israelis are much more sophisticated than most in the west allow for--in fact, I know the citize...

Jack Eddy The great wattsupwiththat.com are currently promoting a petition to get the late solar scientist Jack Eddy memorialised by having the current solar minimum named after him. Here is what Anthony Watts says about it; Jack Eddy was a solar scientist who discovered the sunspot period known as “Maunder Minimum” in the 1970’s, and despite intense academic pressure of the consensus then, argued that this demonstrated that our sun was not constant, but indeed a slightly variable star. A humble man, he didn’t even name his discovery after himself as some scientists are known to do. Jack Eddy recently passed away, as announced on WUWT You can read more at the above link or sign the petition here --I already have and I encourage you to do so too.

The Wall Street Journal Turns Its Thoughts to a United States Break-Up I've written about the growing, though still small logic of an Article V convention to reimagine or limit the federal government of the USA before . I've also noted the growing appeal of secession, nullification (none of which I think are constitutional, but that's for a different post) before too. Now, the Wall Street Journal has turned to ground usually occupied by Dmitri Orlov , and given Paul Starobin a chance to argue that American inventiveness in the next century may well lie in transforming or breaking the federal entity. These stories are now breaking through into the mainstream and becoming more and more popular. As I write, one of the inevitable consequences of the global crisis--the saga of state insolvency within the USA--has begun to bite in California. Within a year to eighteen months, we may be facing much higher food prices , because of global cooling and biofuel nonsense, and inflatio...