Martin Meenagh blog

The Internet has Passed from The US Government to a Private Non-Profit You can read about the new Affirmation of Commitments of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers here . I love the internet. The company that runs it, ICANN, grew under Uncle Sam; it is now a non-profit subject to a global committee. This is one of those days people will remember when someone works out how not to make it a footnote in a few decades time.

The American Police Force: Now That's Free Enterprise I was on a more than slightly strange, but entertaining, conspiracy site today when I came across a post which was intriguing, rather than diverting. America tends to look after its special forces and operatives. It also maintains 'arms length' organisations, partly out of legal concerns. For instance, Britain, as is well known, maintains that anyone of use to its intelligence services are 'agents' of one sort or another. All British agents are shielded from exposure and very few are paid, or directly responsible to MI5 or MI6, or SOCA, the SRS, or any of the other bodies. I've known some of them over the course of the years and they strike me as straightforward men and women, and fun over a drink. I have met Americans who 'served in Nicaragua' and so on, and I think that I did not impress them, mostly because at the time they turned up on my course in Oxford I was somewhat scared of them and they we...

Immanentizing the Eschaton Eric Voegelin once defined political legitimacy as essentially the product of a sort of gnostic political belief similar to those which emerged from religion. What he meant was, that people believe in political facts and systems because they think that there is some sort of order that can be understood by transcending facts and just asserting belief. 'I believe in democracy', for instance, or 'the nation defines us', or ' growth is inevitable'. Shorn of faith--true pistis off--people try to build heaven on earth and to live the afterlife now, and they fall down. I thought of this sort of unprovable gnosticism--gnostic because it generally doesn't go in for critical reflection or logical elaboration--when thinking of the latest prediction of economic recovery. Despite the evidence of their eyes, and of the dogs on the street, newspapers and the media seem determined to make people believe in mad, crazy things. For instance, the Ja...

My Mum My mother is in hospital for ten days from today. Please remember her in your prayers. She is strong, and she is loved, and, in this, she gets to win.

The Guardian, the Left, and Anticatholicism The picture is, of course, by Poussin. It details Helios and Phaeton with Saturn and the Four Seasons. A mad, arrogant driver who bit off more than he could chew. An embodied sun-cult. A god who ate his children, whose mother was Hel, and who killed his father. Some fake naturalistic pantheism. It was painted at a time when Europe was deep in corruption, demented ideological division, economic crisis and global cooling. Draw your own conclusions. As I understand it , a woman of middle class London Jewish heritage has written an article for middle class state employees, the earnest, benefit recipients with a degree, and rich people who consider themselves educated and post-protestant. That article has had a go at, broadly speaking, 'Popery and the Church'. Well, know your market; and, anyway, I don't blame anyone from that culture, even its periphery, for feeling at odds with the Catholic or Orthodox parts of the Church. After all,...

The Pernicious Delusion of Global Warming The twenty years before 1999 brought forth many pathologies. One was a crazy worship of ideal market systems and their imposition on everyday life, regardless of people; others included neoconservatism, faith-based abusive atheism, uncontrolled tort and human rights law, the definition of men and women as sexual beings alone, and Pelagian approaches to criminals. Another was global warming. These days, the lack of usefulness of these ideas is obvious to most people who do not take the media seriously. Unfortunately, those who do own, or who through the mechanism of credit think they own, the professions, the media, and the west, do take the media-political class seriously. That's because they staff it and live by it. The graph shows the red (adjusted, massaged, or unreliable) line of the warmists' extrapolations about temperature in the past two millennia; the black what actually happened according to a fuller sample; the green a merged...

A Night with Alexander Boot The picture is of Ilya Repin, of Tolstoy in His Study, 1891. I found it on IlyaRepin.org . I spent a great night a few days ago at the Thomas More Institute , which sponsors talks on civic values and ethical engagement in public life. The speaker was Alexander Boot , who gave a paper on his interpretation of Tolstoy. He is a scintillating, learned man. Alex escaped the KGB in the early nineteen seventies, and went to live in Texas and New York, where he met his talented, funny wife. His experiences seem to have added to his moral appreciation of the damage his great Russian predecessor had done, and to the contempt for Marxism as the vicious nonsense which it is that I share. Tolstoy always struck me as a contradiction; a vegetarian hunter who relished the kill, a narcissist who went as far as proclaiming himself the best Christian ever, and, before Solzenitsyn, a guaranteed name-drop to attach to whatever western agrarian populist fantasy you were pushing ...

The Smartest Leader in Europe Seems to Have Been Re-elected I know that it is not saying much, given the competition, but I admire Angela Merkel, and the federal republic of Germany. She's won a new term . It may be that she can start the work of renewing the great, peaceful country that constitutes seventy per cent of the eurozone's economic weight. It may be that Europe is slipping away; that godlessness, and corruption, and the swirling, crashing lanes of what seems to me very like a long, extended financial crisis, might bring us finally down, a tributary of the Indian Ocean again. At least, though, Europe now has a chance. If the mad, deceptive ambitions of the European Union, and the materialist parasites who have burned or wasted Europe's heritage, and education, and economy, are to be restricted or reversed, where do you think the effort will come from? Bribed electorates? Revolt? A Euro collapse? Dream on. The courts of a free Germany and the sense of ordinary peo...

Red Sky in Morning... Australians take warning. Mary from Australia sent in the accompanying picture of her back garden, which reveals the orange-red sky of Australia during the dust storm . Nature is an amazing thing isn't it? I was also struck by Anthony Watt's observation this morning that all that nutrient-rich dust that swept over the continent is now going to go and feed the ocean. Australia's had years of drought--what are their own soils like? Earth rolls on....

The Ukraine's Got Talent I've just seen the following video, which has, as I understand it, won the Ukrainian version of Britain's Got Talent . It is every bit as moving as Susan Boyle's great moment, which I put on the blog, and breathtaking. It also speaks to a much deeper cultural memory, of the great patriotic war. I love the internet. I hope that my Australian readers are safe and sound today since the dust seems set to turn Sydney into a set for some Martian film--good luck Mary, stay in, and stay safe. If you have any video or pictures of the dust storm , send them over and I'll put them up. HAT TIP: First Post

Support Your MEP Mrs Mary Hilda Rosamund Honeyball MEP (pictured) has finally gone too far. Her Assistant has had enough of the beatings and the relentless, aspidistra-based abuse, and he's walked. Well, I say walked. I'm not surprised. If I was made to carry a special sized laptop on my back, type with a pencil in my teeth whilst holding pot plants, or read my posts obsessively, I'd walk off too. 'Mumbles' was last seen pushing a wheeled truss with his poor, broken arm near the Chocolate Museum in Brussels. Apparently he's in Camp Jungle now, in Calais. He'll sleep again, they say, but not soon. When he disappeared, he was muttering something through his broken teeth to Jacqui Smith's husband . Something big. Something about Glynnis Barber MEP and Harriet Harman. Anyway, she's after a new assistant to help out in the special school . I strongly encourage my many demented readers to apply. Bring chain mail and a tub of E45, and be prepared to watch...

Shana Tova and Eid Mubarak! Nuff said, though late. I thought about that because Bob From Brockley has an excellent piece of sufi music on his blog, which is very relaxing. More than that 'I will derive' stuff anyway....

Nerds of the World.... Amongst whose number I probably ought to be counted. Here is a funny parody of 'I will suvive' based around calculus to which someone has just introduced me. Who said mathematicians were not creative? Ladies and Gentlemen (as with most of my insights)--'I Will Derive'

Parthian Madness. I have a history of panicking about a Persian war. It is because, short of invading Russia in winter, such a war seems to me the ultimate madness. Sundry Americans who consider themselves citizens of the 'arbiter of Eurasia', like the old realpolitiker Zbigniew Brzezinski, are now contemplating trying to stop one by contemplating shooting down Israeli aircraft that launched any attack. Henry Kissinger did a similar raindance during the '73 war, when he and Richard Nixon made a virtue of holding back from Israel, or at least appearing to, until the Israelis thought they needed the Americans (though the reality may have been a little different). Kissnger, Macnamara before his redemption, the Rostows, Dean Acheson, Paul Wolfowitz and Brzezinski are all, essentially, all formed, essentially, an liberal Imperial party in the mid-twentieth century. They devolved, as the century wore on and turned, into the neoconservative's window dressing, since that parti...

The Pittsburgh Summit The G-20 meeting is going to take place in the former Steeltown of Pittsburgh. As part of their study of the meeting, graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public and International Affairs have created a 'voices of 21' site, on which articles and interviews about the summit will be posted. A former student of mine, John Hartmann, has written one, and has done an interview with me; if not posted, the fault will be entirely my own, since John is an able writer. Anyway, I thought that I would put a link to the website up as an antidote to the torrent of nonsense that you may or may not be hearing from the mainstream press about the G-20 in the coming days. Check it out! Meanwhile, here's the government bond-approved theme song of the meeting, for your delectation...

Debtor's Revolt Video 3 I deliberately put that apostrophe before, rather than after, the 's', this time. Ann Minch has heard from the Bank of America, following her attempt to get some sort of revolt against credit cards going. Not just anyone, but the Vice-President of the Bank, I think. The more I think about this, the more it seems a strange blend of consumer complaint and the very old American tradition of debt-defaults that kicked off the scrip campaigns and farmers' revolts that took off in the American colonies before the stamp act. It's possible to over-pathologize though. Ultimately, this was a strong woman who wanted to be treated fairly, and because she was first, she got the publicity to create the conditions for it. She has identified that 'tea parties and letters to representative have done squat' , and wants a 'cyber-revolution' to follow her actions. One shouldn't really mess about with women who have been anywhere near childbirt...

Business On-Line I've gone into the internet tutorial business to make a little extra money. Armed with a web-cam and a microphone, I can teach undergraduates or sixth-formers for the money cost of my time and the additional price of their having to stare at my online face for an hour--for which, I suppose, I should reduce the fee. There does seem to be a lot of work out there for Saturday mornings and the evenings. I was thinking of this today (and yes, I know it's bad for my health) when I wandered onto the website of Mrs Mary Rosamund Hilda Honeyball MEP , late of this blog. She is depicted with her colleagues at the top of the post. You can search for most of my car-crash encounters with my soi-disant representative in Brussels in the archive. By some bizarre alchemy, she usually gets the best of things, largely by doing nothing and not responding. Mary is supporting a campaign for 'fairness' in online selling. As far as I can make out, some of the commentators wan...

A New Hero of This Blog In the past, I've noted, for what it is worth, various heroes of this blog. So, for instance, you'll find in the archive three posts on the 'blade runner' , Oscar Pistorius, who runs on carbon-fibre blades and is good enough as an Olympian to make it in the full-bodied league. He has evidently blazed a trail, since I saw someone in Chelsea the other week grabbing an orange juice from a shop after running, and resisted the temptation to ask him about his artificial legs. After all, interrupting joggers isn't always that good an idea, even in cooldown. I've also managed to link Peng Shuilin, who (last year at least) was prevailing over the lack of an entire lower body . Well, I have a new hero of the blog today to add to their number. Yvonne Hossack is a Solicitor. In Britain, Solicitors are often treated as a junior or sleazier branch of the legal profession, which is ridiculous. The reason, I think, is threefold. Barristers (even non-prac...

The best of all possible third worlds.... David Leonhardt, at the New York Times, has come in for a righteous kicking for his interpretation of the latest financial and monetary figures in the United States. In his column, he fixates on wage and inflation data to suggest that workers who have kept their jobs are in a better position, because of falling headline inflation, than at any time since the Clinton boom. Just seven days ago, he was suggesting how Americans and the west faced a decade with no income gains . Please--integrate, integrate. The headline inflation figures are covering differentially rising prices, or falling incomes, which amounts to the same thing--best characterised as a reassertion of the value of things over money and money-wage jobs. Some things, which people use a lot, are maintaining their price or growing; some things, which are pointless or indulgences, are collapsing in price. Those are things which we used to buy a lot of, and define ourselves by. Many th...

With Thanks to 'Shortbus'.... I've been on the shortbus site and found these great headlines from the last depression. From 1931; From 1932; From 1934; Here's President Obama declaring the depression averted the other day; here is Ben Bernanke declaring the recession over . At least the Chairman recognised the threat . Of course, we could be in a mirror-world now. On one side, there is a world (around the Atlantic and Pacific rims at least) in which jobs are shedded, bills rise, creditors default, and businesses collapse as people desperately try to withdraw consumption and, when not living from them, build up savings. Look through the looking glass, though, and you will find another world. In it, some vast electronic monetary shell game is going on in which governments chuck money covertly between themselves and no one listens to talk about derivatives . You cannot mix a high wire act with the indian rope trick, especially not above the fire. This is going to end in ...

A British Soldier's Pay.... Following this backward-and-forward between myself and the Exile, this week, I thought that I'd look at his suggestion that soldiers' poverty is a significant feature of the new British crisis. The figures are quite straightforward. A new entrant to the British Army will get just over £13,377 per year. Pay is subject to tax. Average wages seem to hover around the £17,000 mark. The Ministry of Defence does not provide homes for all soldiers' families, and many of those that it does provide are well below par . Not surprisingly, many British people don't take the Army's deal. The Army therefore tends to supplement its numbers with troops from other countries, reinforcing a long and now post-Imperial tradition. About ten per cent of the British army seems now to be foreign. These troops are often paid less in terms of benefits and pensions, than British troops. When they wish to settle here, Gurkha campaigns aside, they often meet with...

If Ann Minch's Debtors' Revolt Were to Take Off.... Then the credit card companies would, rather depressingly, exercise an option to kick the unpaid debts into the taxpayer-sponsored TALF fund, according to this blogger . Unless, of course, it had run out of cash.

Food Banks and Hunting I travel regularly to the South West of England, to give a seminar I enjoy. Whilst waiting for my train afterwards, I often while away an hour or two in one of Bath's cosy, relaxed pubs, or in the hotel bar across from the railway station. Just overhearing people this past year has been interesting. There was a significant migration of London service businesses and creatives and so on to Bath, for instance, some time ago. This has tended to raise prices in a city in which asset values were pushed up by the demand of older people who'd made their money, and the restriction of supply of houses anyway. Yet wages do not seem to have significantly risen. Some of the working people to whom I've chatted there, or who I have overheard, are on London weekly wages--but per month. I've talked to engineers who have found time tight and their consultancy money disappearing. Just about everyone as far as I can tell is on their uppers. So I was interested in the...

It's Clearly Youtube Day And I can't resist putting up Las Vegas in the Hills of Donegal . Dear Matrix; please put Donegal in Chicago and Manhattan, with Las Vegas in it, and stick it and the good bits of the rest of the island in Australia, with a long enough bridge that you can get to Korea but hide when you've annoyed them. Message ends. Nurse? Nurse?

What is rocker chick up to? A few days ago, I put up a video of the lady in this post, whose name I think is Ann Minch. She's clearly had a great deal of trouble in her life, but she seems sincere. She's very upset with her bank for changing the terms on which she pays back her debt, presumably because of a punitive charge. She appears to be trying on her own to face down that change and to restore what she thinks is the debt she accumulated on the terms on which she accumulated it. She is also trying to encourage a 'revolt' against 'Wall Street'. Being as she is an evangelical christian, and a Western lady, I worry who she thinks are 'the globalist masters' of those banks. Not too much though, because she seems a good, solid person. There is a long American tradition of christian, local citizen's rebellion against big entities, from Sam Adams to Martin King. It makes it hard to pigeonhole American populism as 'left' or 'right', and a...

No Good Whatsoever Will Come of This But mmmmmmmmm..... imagine this with a diet coke with added citric acid, or a big cheap red wine and a toasted cigarette. Especially if you are medically inclined. When we get news of an approaching asteroid, this is breakfast.

Returning to my timewasting roots for a moment; I love this video, which I found on Mark Shea's site. I think that I'm right in saying that Wales and Singapore aren't on it, and others have pointed out that the Ukraine and Belarus are missing. Can you spot the countries it leaves out? With 192 or so in the world, I guess one of you could just count the ones it does mention, which still exist, and subtract to get a working guide....

Tough Times in the Irish Republic I keep hearing wrenching human stories about just how tough things have got in Ireland. The Republic is the one country hit even worse than Britain by the latest world crash, in part because it held the poisoned causes of the troubles closer to itself even than England did. I went frequently to Dublin in that time. One look at the landscape of euro-city, and you knew you were at the Dodge county line, or maybe Vegas. Unlike Vegas, however, it was obvious that what happened in Dublin wasn't staying there. For instance, one legacy of the Irish revolution all those years ago, aided in the west by the tendency of communities to cause real trouble to people who tried to interfere, was that when owned, land seemed yours . In England, all sorts of restrictions could be applied to it; in the booming Ireland to which the children of emigrants were returning ten years ago, one could build whatever one liked, paint it whatever colour, and sell it to just abou...

From Mary in Australia I'm always putting Australian anthem up here for reasons of my own. Mary from Australia has sent me a video of the New Zealand national anthem, which involves a rendition of 'God Save the Queen', (I think) 'God Defend New Zealand', and the Maori anthem and war dance. I was impressed by it, anyway, though I do like 'My country 'tis of thee' to the British tune. Many thanks, Mary!

Abide with Me, from Rugby I lived in Rugby for a few years when we ran 'The Wine Barrel' in the town (it is now, I think, the McDonalds, since it was unsaveable). I used to walk to school, at St Marie's there, and was first introduced to reading in the Public Library along the way when I was nine or so. Here's Hayley Westenra singing 'Abide with me' in the town. I thought of it when I thought about those homeless people in the videos below, and of the Japanese woman who couldn't stand earning a little as a temp and not giving her time to the homeless camp when there were people in deep trouble. You don't have to be Christian to be Christian, a lesson some of my co-religionists should understand....

The Tent Cities in America--and Elsewhere.... Earlier this year , I noted that tent cities were becoming a global phenomenon, and that they had spread across Asia and America with very little media interest. Now, one of the most popular American breakfast shows has taken an interest in just one of them, in Sacramento. With 'real unemployment' in America heading towards a fifth of the workforce (not counting illegal immigrants) on the government's own figures; with consumer credit having collpased ; with the stimulus bill almost played out; with numerous states effectively insolvent; with an increasingly unquiet rush away from the dollar; and with banks, the federal reserve and the federal deposit insurance corporation still hiding their lack of funds-- how long before tent cities appear in every city? It used to be said that globalisation created a first and a third world in every country. Here's the proof. If you are a conservative, are you really going to embrace ne...

“ We were looking to do something else, when we saw life is not the way we expected it to be " The title of this post is a quote from Larry Lyons at UCLA, when commenting on his and Heejong Kim's stunning research. They have discovered an interaction of the solar wind and the earth's magnetosphere which suggests a new, and unexpected form of energy transfer is going on in the wider solar system. Their work complements, and builds upon, other research into just how magnetism in the solar system works. In 1859 , the air was so charged during a solar storm that earth telegraphs could run without batteries. We should have known then what the sun and the winds between the worlds could do; but of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing. It is very early, and an unscientific point, but their work has uses. It adds to the tidal wave of circumstantial evidence that carbon-based global warming is nonsense. More importantly, because the global warming debate is effectively irrelevant...