Martin Meenagh blog

Notburga's Song, for Mooncat Rather unexpectedly, over on Berenike's Blog , Notburga has posted ' If You're Going To San Francisco' . I associate the place with several summers and two women who were very important in my life. The music reminded me of them. Since my beloved is at the moment several thousand miles away in the other direction (temporarily), and obviously not reading this blog, here's a lovely song about the streets by the bay. The wolf has been kept from my door this summer by a course I taught for Berkeley, and by income from an office that needed running when a friend went off to californialand, so I am tetra-grateful to the Golden Gate. Good luck to you, wherever you are, and goodbye to this fag-end summer of the good years. I understand your silence.

Caritas in Veritate 2 At the risk of disappearing even further up myself, the use of Botticelli's Birth of Venus in this post is twofold. It's a pretty picture. And there are reasonable interpretations of the picture as a Neoplatonist skit on the transformative effects of love in the world, which also allow reflection on the fairly sleazy human background to the story of the models that raises a smile. People and pictures, like ideas, are such mixed things.... Martin Kelly has been re-reading the Pope's encyclical, Caritas in Veritate , and has been very struck by the Pope's call for global governance of some kind. I think that is not an unusual call from the papacy; it thrives, after all, as a supranational institution. However, my friend's post has made me think that Josef Ratzinger's vision for the Church and the World is beginning to reveal itself. As with all people I don't know, and whose works I have not the time to fully understand, anything I write...

One for My Family I've always believed that the census returns for Donegal were lost in the Civil War. I therefore thought that there would not be much record of my grandfather, to whom I was close, who was born in 1904. However, I've found a birth certificate here --I know my Aunt reads the blog--which details two five year old 'sons of farmers', both called Hughie Carr, both in Donegal. Can you tell which one is Grandad? All the rest are named as 'scholars', though the two here could not read. Click on them to see the birth certificates. Does anyone have any sensible suggestions for how to trace a man whose name was changed and whose family circumstances were altered either here or in Magharafelt or Cookstown, partly because Unionists wouldn't let Catholics register too-Irish names and partly for other reasons? My Dad was a man of several identities.... Just as an aside, I also wonder about putting birth certificates on the web like this. It's not just...

On the Last Day of August... The picture is Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, by Rembrandt, from 1633 . Most people I know are worrying about how they are going to get through September. I long ago learned that anger, and fear, were conjoined monsters of no real worth to anyone, but that they sprang from despair. That's why the church in its wisdom makes the latter, with its embrace of nothingness, the fount of the most serious sins. What more can one do, than recall the demented Man of La Mancha dreaming impossible dreams? At least the old loon lived , and not just because he had Sophia Loren at his side, in her prime (when was she not?). I want an excuse to play this fantastically mad clip, and hope it inspires. Good luck, next month, and don't give in--strap yourself to the mast and dare those waves on :)

Does Free Speech Extend to Films Paid for by Corporations Criticising Politicians? The Supreme Court of the United States may be about to proffer an answer. In oral argument, the United States has claimed that it can ban any book paid for by corporate money, and presumably that was also the view of the Solicitor General and the Administration Check it out . And someone get an oxygen tank ready for Michael Moore....

How many laws does it take to change a light bulb? Sometimes, governments overlook things, and proceed on a mistaken basis. In the past, they then went to parliament, apologised, and passed retroactive legislation that legalised what they had done with the consent of Parliament, and the proviso that they acknowledged how exceptional such a retroactive provision was. One famous old example, for instance, was when Herbert Morrison, under pressure of the Blitz, nationalised the fire services in England without putting the appropriate regulations in front of parliament because he made a mistake about the law. Peter Mandelson's grandad, at least (and unusually), had the grace to be ashamed of himself . Tonight, Christopher Booker , as reported over at EU referendum, seems to have turned up an instance of forceful government behaviour that is more typical of the contempt for Parliament and the rule of law that is associated with his grandson. The great historian of France, Richard Cobb,...

So where did all that money from the American bailout go? Some time ago, a fairly neat example of effective congressional questioning , which is an amazing thing in itself, revealed that the proper inspectors of the federal reserve did not know where the bailout bill money for banks had gone. Trillions just went for a walk, apparently. The government, which I suspect was getting friendly and foreign banks to buy dollars and bonds with money it had printed in return for keeping quiet about the level of debt toxicity in those banks, was not about to help. Now, that nice Mr Bloomberg's telegraph operation is suing the federal reserve in an effort to find out. Just as the September/October bond issue, the next oil spike, the unemployment figures, and the new healthcare debate kick off, the 'Fed' may be forced to disclose where the cash went . Right. Good luck with that. I'm told Ulan Bator is quite nice at this time of year. It has four hotels with bathtubs, and everything ...

James Earl 'Mikhail' Obama I was watching the appalling video of Budd Dwyer killing himself the other day (as you do, and may God have mercy on him) and reflecting on the American Congress. Dwyer was a Republican in the eighties in Pennsylvania. That's a state which was odd in that, because of nativisim and the way the Republican Party emerged in the steel areas a century ago, it had an Irish Catholic Republican machine in some cities. Anyway, Dwyer was accused of dishonesty as State Treasurer. His defence was undermined by a courtroom strategy involving other people engaged in by federal officals. Deeply wounded, and protesting his innocence, he called a press conference and killed himself. The link to the video is easily available through liveleak or google, but I won't put it up here. You can find it yourself if you want. Dwyer's tragic action was quite Roman. In my own mind, that is often a bad thing. His actual suicide stands in stark contrast to the delusion...

This Strange, late Summer World The economic crisis in which we are now enmeshed is, according to people who have been wrong for decades, 'easing'. I even saw a headline on one of the London freesheets the other day that the recession 'would be over in forty days'. Do cultures have muscles? Was that the last, atrophied spasm of a number dotted through the bible? Oh, who knows. I went off to Brunel to give another talk the other day, though, and, on the surprisingly pleasant Metropolitan line out there, I flicked through John Kenneth Galbraith's great history of the 1929 crash and the aftermath. People always fight the last war. My one demented reader will know that I wasn't a fan of bank bail-outs in the form they took, and that I think that the present crisis will, as I and others have been saying since 2007, take years to work out. So much is hidden--so much hidden unemployment, so much re-valuation of prices as ordinary goods rise in price and average incomes...

Edward Moore Kennedy I read about the death in bed of Edward Kennedy this morning, and thought of what is probably an inappropriate slow version of an Irish song-- The Holy Ground --which I've put below. The 'Edward Moore' in his name referred back to Honey Fitz's Secretary and his father's bagman on Wall Street and in London. He was a kind of strange angel to Joe Kennedy's monster. Nothing is ever pure with the Kennedys. What's that old saying; 'some people grow up and go into politics, they go into politics and sometimes grow up'. That's too trite though; not to have been killed in war, or by bullets, or by aeroplanes, or by drowning is, for a family of sacrifice and, often, self-destruction, a remarkable feat in itself. I find myself constantly comparing the good Kennedy did, and the tradition of communal, insider politics he advanced with the way Mary Jo Kopechne seems to have died, the way his brothers and sisters lived and left the world, a...

Bob's Challenge Some time ago, Bob from Brockley issued a challenge. He asked his readers to name texts which they believed should be read more widely. For some reason, I overlooked the piece, but since he was good enough to mention me, I think that I would list the following books, which I'd like to see alongside a good selection of poets and playwrights on every shelf; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcississm Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations Karl Marx, Das Kapital Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew , or The Passion , or The Authentic Gospel of Jesus St Augustine, The City of God , Confessions JGA Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment The Koran , and the King James Bible (especially the parts overlapping the Tanakh) Carl Richard, The Founders and the Classics Kant, The Prolgomena Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Tarmas, The Passion of the Western...

Michelle does Elmo The video below is very laudable, and I mean that. In it, Michelle Obama tells Elmo to eat a healthy lunch, and take exercise, whilst invoking Parents to be their own child's role model. I watched it whilst eating a bacon and sausage sandwich. Now I feel like a couple of lucky strikes, and maybe one of those 'French 75' brandy and champagne things. With cognac , not gin. You see, we have free socialised medicine. It allows one to drink cocktails invented at the western front in the mornings.

The Ministry of Defence is not up to the job I'd direct readers interested in why I write that to the EU Referendum blog, and to its sister Defence of the Realm , in the absence of any serving officer to talk to. Procurement of weapons, and the provision of safe vehicles and armour for British troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere (for whom I carry no candle, but to whom I am related) is now a rather sick joke. I don't hold myself out as competent in military affairs, or that interested. My tax money, however, is being used to send good young men and women out to die in ways that are avoidable, as well as to kill for reasons that are unclear. It seems fairly clear to me that the leadership of the armed forces, as well as (if not more than) the politicians are at fault. Is it time for a new review of why Britain needs a separate Army, Navy and RAF at the same time as having integrated procurement and 'tesco' style corporate targets for things like helicopter provision and...

Lockerbie Anomalies Legal Truths are not the whole truth, whatever the oath people take when giving evidence. For instance, a legal fact is often established in court by applying a limited 'but for' test; 'but for this clause/act/omission or so on, the event in question would not have happened'. It is one of the most notoriously casuistic areas of law. For that reason, we have no death penalty and a criminal cases review commission which now regularly looks into miscarriages of justice. The State still gives up those whom it has unjustly caught in its nets grudgingly; but at least it does not murder them in the name of society, in this country at least. In the nineteenth century, there was not even a court of appeal. By some mystical (and officially useful process) twelve good men and true, or fifteen in Scotland, were held to be able to discern factual truth to the point where men and women could be strangled or broken by the state. Truth seems to have been no respecte...

The Great August Game Last Summer, the oil wars touched Georgia . Vladimir Putin won a decisive victory and seriously damaged the troubled euro-American scheme of a non-Russian oil line to central Asia by moving to protect Russian communities in the Caucasus. There were other aspects to the game that summer, not least for those who died, which I blogged about at the time. Now--and I have Conservative Cabbie and his mate Ronnie to thank for this--the game is on in the Americas. Barack Obama's Chevron-associated National Security Advisor seems to have stitched up a deal with George Soros in which the American Administration will pony up billions to back a Brazilian oilfield exploration. Chevron and Petrobras, the Brazilian oil firm, have been working together for some time. The first serious production from one of their fields has begun this summer, for instance. Now, they wish to exploit the Tupi field in the Santos basin. Great and probably exaggerated claims are being made fo...

Kim Dae Jung Kim Dae Jung is dead. He suffered for his freedom, tried to do his best by his country, and started no wars. I do not wish to wade into what are Korean matters (not that it would matter anyway), nor to embrace all that hyperbole about 'The Nelson Mandela of Asia'. Kim made serious economic mistakes at the behest of the globalisers. Nor am I making a sectarian point about the first Catholic leader of the Republic of Korea. It's just, well, I admired the man, and hope that he rests in peace.

That Lurking Eleventh Amendment.... I've had a great day lurking with friends around a nasty three-way murder trial at the Old Bailey . Afterward, over drinks, we fell into conversation about American state debt, which as my one demented reader knows I think a critical element of the present crisis. Several dozen States in the USA are now in theory insolvent , and are basically deferring the moment when they will have to confront this fact. When they do, the federal government will find itself constrained from coping. States are already rolling out all the tricks in the book; California, for instance, is kicking down on the poor and vulnerable, taking over county, city, and school credit capacity, and issuing a sort of scrip in the form of IOUs. Not to go all 'eternal recurrence' about this, but it has happened before. Except not in the context of the sort of global overcapacity and vast debt, equity and income imbalances that is leading even Ambrose-Evans Pritchard to toy...

My Mum My mother received what was almost an official all-clear today. My amazement at here formidable, indefatigable strength, grows. For all of you who sent in best wishes and prayers at the start of the year, thank you. And Thank God for the NHS, and the care she has received!

And Now For Something Completely Different Thanks to an enterprising and very clever young Irishman, Daithí de Faoite, any plasma rocket flying to Mars in the future will have an Irish tricolour on the side . I suppose that's one way to escape the New Depression. Qapla!, as they say in Klingon pubs in Dublin.... Here's an Irish song about travel that I hope the rockets play. Ladies and Gentlemen, The Leaving of Liverpool.

The Congressional Healthcare Bill in America I spent a good deal of this morning and yesterday reading over the proposed American healthcare bill (or at least, a compound version; there appear to be five doing the rounds). I don't want to blog on the details of it immediately. It's also a bill, which may well stall in the Senate or be overtaken by events, and which could yet be critically amended. It is the product of Congress, not the administration per se, and the lawyers have not yet got at it. I had some instant worries about it though. In no particular order, I'll list them; Firstly, it can't allow individuals to choose their doctor and treatment in the long run; instead, it will practically formalise the role of doctors as salaried employees of large medical groups. Sarah Palin is onto something with the idea that this will then allow essentially ideological or non-medical outlooks on, say, euthanasia, abortion, transgender issues, or non-emergency treatments of c...

Hillary and the Congo Hillary Clinton is in the news today after a fairly robust, if graceless, response to a mistranslation ; I assume that she was tired and don't want to vent some pointless spleen (though I have never been a fan). The other day, I put up a post asking 'what did you do in the African holocaust ?', attempting, in a small and admittedly pointless way, to get people to note how that jungle's wars have consumed millions. Systematic rape against men and women is now an evolved feature of the conflict, which is substantially fuelled by demand for materials critical to modern technology, like coltan. In the midst of things, the United Nations has proved deeply flawed, and has even been host to the same Satanic darkness which did so much damage to the church. To her credit, the Secretary of State is attempting to draw attention in a much bigger way to what is going on , though God alone knows what anyone from outside in their right mind could do about it. ...

US Government Healthcare Objections One of the great things about the internet, and there are many, is that people with time on their hands are prepared to do things (for whatever reason) that mainstream journalists and politicians just wouldn't even if they had time. This blogger , for instance, seems to have read the entire House of Representatives Bill on healthcare and to have identified controversial issues within it, from his own standpoint. Meanwhile, the upmarket liberal e-zine Salon.com attempts a refutation here , without actually mentioning (I think I'm right in writing) specific passages of the bill. I will write a fuller blog on the bill myself, in time, but there is a genuine dilemma for some Americans in embracing the proposal as it stands--and, of course, it needs to be reconciled with any Senate version and signed by the President yet. I also think that there are serious constitutional problems with it, (which I'll elaborate on later too), though whether t...

Who's Afraid of the Latin Mass? There are at least nine rites in the western Catholic church, which define the order and conduct of mass. Some of these rites are best in vernacular languages, some in Latin. Latin is the language of the Roman Catholic church. In England and Wales, there has been extraordinary resistance to the idea that some masses could be conducted in Latin, according to common or older rites. This also seems to have spilled into resistance to the use of the most common modern rite in Latin as well. I always thought this somewhat pointless (as, no doubt, do you reader). There is a straightforward, hymn-and-handshake type of a mass which I am used to, which is--what would be the phrase, spoken-choral or Borg, depending on you point of view--and of great comfort. I've found it in churches of great racial and class diversity in London and elsewhere, and it is repeated all over the world. I love some of cheery mixes of traditional and modern hymns and stand-up r...

A Celtic Song With pictures from Hibernia; Fear a'Bhata , The Boatman , for two friends.

Das Kapital selling well in Germany.... Except, it's Archbishop Reinhard Marx's cheeky book on the need for catholic moral underpinnings to the mixed economy. This one has fooled quite a lot of leftists and commentators, but fits into a very old Catholic tradition. The Church has long believed that capitalism without humanity, solidarity and justice has no future, and, frankly, its been around long enough and surrounded by enough sin in its time to be listened to. All you Americans pigeonholing me as a socialist should take note of that. In the 1990s, communitarians and followers of Amitai Etzioni in general convinced themselves that they had distilled a 'third way' between capitalism and socialism. I thought at the time that any secular thory purporting to derive community duties in coexistence with liberalism was going to hit the buffers of human nature fairly hard. It also seemed to me that basing claims on either social democratic meliorism or some dirigiste-insp...

Is it because I is a g**ger? I was once told by a senior anaesthetist in Chicago that he dreaded working on redheads. This was, he said, a consequence of finding out, when he was working on a football player with flame-red hair, that the mutant hair also carries with it a mutant response to painkillers. Basically, redheads feel pain less , and are harder to dope . Does that make us necessarily tougher, or generally more foolhardy? Or both? I can think of a good few red-haired Marines, and Jewish people, and of course the Tudor gang, the Normans, or Churchill, as less than shrinking violets. Obviously, its because they is titian, innit?. I thought this the medical equivalent of an urban myth, but now a growing body of evidence seems to suggest that it is true . So, there you go. Here's me rationalising my general weird mix of patience, cowardice and stamina as Christian self possession, and in fact it's evolutionary. Are there any other redheads out there surprised to find this...

A Jacksonian Republican Party Democrats in the United States frequently lay claim to the heritage of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. They present the two as tribunes of the revolutionary people, and Jefferson-Jackson dinners are often occasions at which aspiring candidates can strut their demotic stuff, as it were. Both Presidents were opposed to coalitions made up of those they saw as 'elitists' and federal empire-builders, in the Federalist or Whig Parties. J-J (to employ a short and composite form, a bit like the creators of San Trovaso in Venice) were nationalists, tough on foreign crime, sure of their often violent support, and ferocious in the support of presidents who protected the republic. They upheld gun rights and, those of the traditional holders of property, emphasised the rights of States, and an armed citzenry, and in general thought all opposed to them belonged to some conspiracy, probably associated with Europe, to take away their Scots-Irish and democrat...