Martin Meenagh blog

Corelli and the Christmas Concerto The image is of Monet's Thaw at Vetheuil, 1880/1. He's not normally someone I'm keen on, but the cold is hiding momentarily here and I thought it appropriate. Vetheuil is where the Seine ice-blocks for Paris used to come from, but Monet painted them because the mini-icebergs crashed and rolled eerily when a thaw set in . That was back in a previous period of global cooling, of course I'm a great believer in the idea that Christmastide is what we should be celebrating, and that it does not properly finish until the 6th of January. Having had a wonderful time at home with my family, experiencing the generosity and Christmas spirit of my relatives, I thought at mid-point that a little Baroque was in order, and this sprang to mind as I travelled back down to London today. I wish that I could have trusted the camera on my blackberry to put a picture up for you of how the snow was melting in a mist, deceiving itself that it was evaporating w...

What We Should Do in an Ideal World, (and what we may be pushed into anyway) Once more, and with feeling.... 1) Institute one, flat rate of tax at 15% on profits, consumption, income, and land values--with no loopholes, no complications, and a £12000 earnings allowance 2) Abolish Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs and instead require individuals and companies to electronically declare pay through a bank, whilst receiving income credit through banks and post offices 3) Abolish one third of all local government, starting with any seat in which electoral turnout is under 25% 4) Privatise the Russell Group, and allow remaining universities to merge into a National University of Britain run on Open University lines 5) Abolish the Departments of Business, Culture, Media and Sport, Children and Families, and International Development 6) Withdraw all subsidy from rail transport and allow the collapsed companies into social ownership 7) Provide for a referendum on membership of the European ...

Palin, Obama, and stuff.... I've often taken a much more sympathetic view of Sarah Palin's skills and talents than many in the blogosphere, at least on this side of the Atlantic. A while ago, I found it impossible to sustain any sort of respect for the Honourable representative for Moonie Ponds, however; her peevish attempts to isolate journalists and to play upon her children's illnesses, her wilful ignorance, and her narcissism struck me as an attempt to embed the worst aspects of Richard Nixon into some shopping channel Harpy, and I just started ignoring her. The Republican party's establishment seems to have had much the same idea. With increasing force in recent days, the Bushes, Krauthammers, Coulters, and Roves have all fired their arrows into Hughie Long's lost, confused high school bully of a daughter. People forget how conservative the Republicans actually are, partly because of their tendency to dress up in cowboy boots whilst pretending to be stupid. Sin...

Tyranny and Corruption in the Late West If tyranny is to come in North America, it will come cozily and on cat's feet. It will come with the denial of the rights of the unborn and of the aged, the denial of the rights of the mentally retarded, the insane, and the economically less-privileged. In fact, it will come with the denial of rights to all those who cannot defend themselves. It will come in the name of the cost-benefit analysis of human life Actually, George Grant's magnificent Red Tory discomfort with the modern liberal version of the 'rights agenda' is an interesting one, given that it is now about four years older than myself. I've always thought that it went further than North America, as he referred to Canada, too. People often think of 'Human Rights' as a given, sprung forth like Venus from a clamshell out of the mind of the enlightenment, and some have built a career on that sort of misunderstanding--but what, actually do they mean? I can't...

Made it... so far I've been snarfling around the internet looking for appropriate Christmas carols and am feeling a little alienated by the Americanisation of lots of hymns. By that, I mean the breathy, tremble-voiced and somewhat creative attempts of people to sing with a face that suggests something somewhere between ecstasy and hard calculation of the price of a parquet floor . It's even worse when English people do it in the hope that they sound like they're from Ohio. So, anyway, here's 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing' , which has a lovely if dodgy bit of near-Arian theology in transition of the second verse ('veiled in flesh the Godhead see' and 'late in Time behold him come'). Oddly enough, three of the people most responsible for the first American Great Awakening of the early eighteenth century, which shook up the religious and social structures of the Western colonies, had a hand in this; George Whitefield, John Wesley and his brother Char...

De profundis clamavi J'implore ta pitié, Toi, l'unique que j'aime, Du fond du gouffre obscur où mon coeur est tombé. C'est un univers morne à l'horizon plombé, Où nagent dans la nuit l'horreur et le blasphème; Un soleil sans chaleur plane au-dessus six mois, Et les six autres mois la nuit couvre la terre; C'est un pays plus nu que la terre polaire — Ni bêtes, ni ruisseaux, ni verdure, ni bois! Or il n'est pas d'horreur au monde qui surpasse La froide cruauté de ce soleil de glace Et cette immense nuit semblable au vieux Chaos; Je jalouse le sort des plus vils animaux Qui peuvent se plonger dans un sommeil stupide, Tant l'écheveau du temps lentement se dévide! — Charles Baudelaire I remember the Fleurs du Mal as an old friend, since I spent some of my first scared days in Balliol, fresh up from Corby in my third floor room, translating them to keep calm, along with the odd prayer. I'm dead tired and in the depths of a huge amount of work righ...

The Endless Wars for Peace An appropriate Australian commentary on it all, for friends abroad.

A Walrus Exercising Right. Iceland told the Bankers to get stuffed and is rebounding, albeit on top of a volcano. Global warming is clearly not happening, and the carbon mechanism does not work; as Richard Feynman noted the great test of science is proof and there is no evidence for the folly at which our leaders are throwing money. Wikileaks has revealed a brutal world in which the US ruthlessly pursues its own interest--no surprise to those of us who knew of the jungle, but no-one seems interested or shocked. The US has responded by shutting down wikileaks servers, concocting a rape case, and calling for Julian 'Fox Mulder' Assange to be assassinated, 'cept he won't be because he has placed an insurance package on multiple sites on the internet and the key will be released if anything happens to him. Elsewhere in Gotham city, stagflation is taking a grip on the western heart and the Koreas are at daggers drawn, and we're all thinking here about a failed kleptocrat...

An attempt to make a video I am bored, so I have made a video. Please be gentle with it. Anyone can do it on xtranormal.com and it is a reasonable waste of time, which was one of the original points about this blog.

Pope Benedict and those Sex Gadget things I admire Joseph Ratzinger enormously. That isn't by the way, the blogging equivalent of 'with all due respect', a phrase which normally denotes the beginning of an insult. I do. I think that his subtle, nuanced dialogues with Jurgen Habermas are just an example of how two intelligent people should engage, and that his interviews with Peter Seewald grace my shelves. I swoon a bit at his obvious desire to recreate what some orders call The Great Church by finding some form of detente and then an entente with the Eastern churches, and I admire the daring of his command--sweeping up people from sundry heresies and pretensions and bringing them back to the Church. I also like the way he acknowledges that an awful lot of Catholic social thinking is very close to democratic socialism without the state-worship--in fact, a sort of socialist anarchism with God replacing the ego as the point of it all. If the left were collectivist anymore,...

Saturn's children..... There was a young lady of Riga Who smiled as she rode on a tiger They returned from the ride With the lady inside And a smile on the face of the Tiger Some Hedge funds are now betting on their own demise, as an FBI ritual sacrifice insider dealing probe widens. God bless them. At least, when it all comes crashing down around them, they can blame nature rather than choice. It's rather entertaining to see the G-men hunt high and low for just-big-enough sinners to throw overboard. Equally predictably, and typically, Angie Merkel is being much more consistent in her search for people to press the big stone down on. As far as I can tell, it's scaring the markets half to frenzy. I'm working like mad at the moment to pay down my (rapidly falling) debts before the eschaton hits the heliotropic device, as it were. 2011 is going to be awful for many, as 2010 is becoming, and it is no comfort to me to see the most gloomy of my posts since 2007 trumped alm...

MERS 2 The other day, I posted on what may be seen as a colossal fraud . American mortgages appear to have been wrongly validated . To save money and to get around state rules and taxes, banks and mortgage providers set up a shell company which 'electronically registered', and held title to, mortgages. They should not have done this. Worse, the shell company did not check the mortgages properly. People are under threat of being thrown out of their home, or have been thrown out of their home, on what are essentially false terms, and state attorneys-general are currently investigating. This is a huge bomb under US banks. The Congress, true to form, entertained a bill recently to post-validate the behaviour of the mortgage providers. President Obama, to his credit, vetoed it . The Congress attempted to over-ride the veto last night. Every single Republican present voted to override and to hand power to a vast, fraudulent mortgage industry (as far as I can tell). Most Democrats d...

What is the British Parliament these days? Mr Gerry Adams, a Member of Parliament, and a Member of the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly, and a Member of Sinn Fein , is seeking a seat in the Dail Eireann . What prodigious and explosive energy he must have secreted away. Many excited commentators seem to think that he will not resign his westminster seat and will, consequently, be the first member of both elected legislatures since partition; I qualify the point since I'm fairly sure that Seamus Mallon and Brid Rodgers were nominated to the Senead, though not at the same time they were MPs. Mallon famously lost a case on a related point in the ECHR. Dr Ian Paisley, a sonic consultant from the textual world, was also more or less an Irish member of the European Parliament as well as a Westminster man for a long time, as I recall. The Adams development would fit neatly with the Irish presidency, which has a history of occupation by individuals not necessarily from the Republic, as...

Ummm, yes....the gaiety of nations. Rosebud. The House of Lords, (10.32 pm, column 1536) . After Dinner, late one night in early November . A Lord, big in the city, with a string of jobs for Labour and Tory administrations behind him. A claim to have deprived the IRA of over a £billion. A mysterious offer of £ 22 billion by an unidentified International Foundation ...and an official denial. What in the wide world of sports is happening? Has everyone gone mad? This is nuckin futs. I suppose vodafone could just have indicated a willingness to pay their tax bill . Or, maybe, the same sort of fraudsters who claimed to be able to produce 'Kennedy securities' a year ago are about their business again, and preying on vulnerable elderly city scions, who are in their way admirable self-made men. They didn't fool the Commercial Secretary to the Treasury, though, who seems to have gone to the trouble of turning down the offer. That individual, by the way, is Lord Sassoon, and among...

St Martin de Porres It was the feast day of the saint after whom I am named (though my confirmation name was Bernard) the other day. I somewhat shamefully forgot it, and Martin in the Margins remembered. So, in a spirit of Christian charity, I have lifted Mary Lou Williams' 'Black Christ of the Andes' from his site in order to reproduce it here. For some reason, as with many things about Catholicism which I reflect on fondly, it reminds me of a Star Trek song in a Star Wars world. I've put 'Beyond Antares' beneath it. Happy listening!

Economics is for Donkeys I have added the interesting populist/distributist Mr Piccolo (trading as 'Economics is for Donkeys ') to the blogroll. He's worth a visit, I think.

MERS: The Mirror Crack'd Land Registration is sometimes a complex business. This is because law in English speaking countries (in general) allows a range of equitable and legal instruments to coexist; in a sense the mirror that land registration holds to reality is double-glazed and somewhat misted. However, a growing number of state legislatures are now finding that the mirror is very badly cracked. The story is complex, (and explained well here ) but it boils down to this. Because of securitization and financial innovation--that whole vast world of credit default swaps, bistro products, mezzanine risk, cds squared and cds cubed--mortgage companies and banks developed a huge volume of business. To avoid inefficiency, and state and county taxes, they created a very strange front company to technically own all mortgages in America, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems. This company could not under state laws nor under existing federal law own mortgages properly, because front co...

Just a Note It's another busy day, and blogging will remain very light for a while (especially as I am currently recovering from the flu) but I thought that I would put this link to Carlo Cipolla's Basic Laws of Human Stupidity up here. The laws are insightful, enjoyable, and seriously helpful as a guide to life, I think. I quote; Whether one considers classical, or medieval, or modern or contemporary times one is impressed by the fact that any country moving uphill has its unavoidable σ fraction of stupid people. However the country moving uphill also has an unusually high fraction of intelligent people who manage to keep the σ fraction at bay and at the same time produce enough gains for themselves and the other members of the community to make progress a certainty. In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people is still equal to σ; however in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overton...

An Advice Column from a Foreign Country I am very busy at the minute, but want to take the opportunity of a day spent mired in 'flu pills to post the following correspondence, which was published in a newspaper in South Carolina. You may have seen it. The extract is taken from a viral e-mail entitled 'Why Men Should Not Write Advice Columns' Dear John, I hope you can help me. The other day, I set out for work, leaving my husband in the house watching TV. My car stalled, and then it broke down about a mile down the road, and I had to walk back to get my husband's help. When I got back, I couldn't believe my eyes. He was in our bedroom with the neighbor's daughter! I am 32, my husband is 34, and the neighbor's daughter is 19. We have been married for 10 years. When I confronted him, he broke down and admitted that they had been having an affair for the past six months. He won't go to counselling, and I am afraid I am a wreck and need advice urgently. Can y...

The Rally to Restore Sanity, and Congressional elections The image is one taken from the Marvel/Disney Mashups series and is available here . I thought it appropriate to what is being billed as the coming Republican win in the American congressional elections. America being the sort of republic it is, it has often been difficult for entertainers to avoid being dragged into politics. Properly speaking, politics is the business of everyone in America, after all. Charlie Chaplin was an enemy of the FBI without knowing it, Bob Hope rallied troops in the Vietnam war, P.T.Barnum became a state representative in Connecticut, and Mort Sahl campaigned for what he believed to be necessary disclosure in the first Kennedy assassination. Barnum, as ever, is interesting on the point; he sought election after bankruptcy, humiliation, and lawsuits, presumably on the basis that things couldn't really get much worse so he might as well give it a go. So the waters in which Steven Colbert and Jon St...

Would Causing a Bank Run Get the Attention of Our Masters? French Activists have a way of identifying a barricade in their sleep. France is, after all, a country where notebooks are not lined for writing but squared for graphs. So far, the Spanish general strike of the 29th September, the Greek and French protests, and the incipient German revolt against the strictures of the euro have made little headway. But here's a Cartesian solution for you. Why not cause a bank run , so that, on December 7, large numbers of people withdraw their money from the banks all at once? I can't believe it possible, because so many have debts, and those who have credit may well just roll their eyes . However, the idea is insidious and destructive genius because it goes to the heart of the only thing the people in charge focus upon, other than their mirror. Genius, mes braves! Who knows, it may even get Sarko to go to Baden-Baden , albeit in his new 'bling' 'plane . I would be inclined...

Is Socialist Spain friendlier to Big Bank badness than the USA? One of the strongest distributist critiques of socialism and capitalism is that both tend to lead to the state throwing in its lot with large oligopoly businesses. The 'servile State', with its material or utilitarian calculus is often a friendlier place for those who can ease the path of nationalised policies with compliance. Small businesses and local economies tend to be grit in the oyster, though their products do not seem as valued as pearls. Indeed, Chesterton's observation in Lepanto that pearls are the product of sickness is probably just about the only thing of his that would appeal to the tidy minds of those locked in corporations--should they ever read poetry, and they may--and those in political parties who have never had a proper job in their life. A contrast which illustrates the point springs to mind. In the United States of America, many families are walking away from their mortgage. Still othe...

Another Hero of This Blog Award Reviving an intermittent tradtion, and not forgetting the other recipients , I thought that I would award the latest badge to science in general and the people who came up with cochlear implants in particular. Watch this child's face as he hears his mother's voice for the first time; the effect is just beautiful. H/t Peter Kennedy on facebook (he has his own blog here ).

Monsignors Suing Priests I have in the past, on multiple occasions, made my view of the libel courts clear, I hope. I understand that people have reputations that are sometimes only defended legally, but I wish that they did not go near m'learned friends and I am never pleased to hear that people have resorted to them without attempting other recourse first, or just firing back on their own columns and sites. I've got posts stretching back years to show that, before you ask. I write as a non practising member of the bar in a personal capacity; do not go to law if you can help it and try never to reach for the libel lawyers. Wile. E. Coyote's ACME bombs would do you more good. But, really-- a priest being issued with a libel threat by a Monsignor for correction on an obvious point of Catholic theology ? I knew that 'liberal' Christians were intolerant, but this takes the biscuit . English bishops apart from +Vin, are useless, but I hope at least that Rome is watchi...

Stagflation Coming Abraham de Moivre, the probability theorist (and I'm sure that that phrase is often on the tip of your tongue) is widely celebrated as a man who predicted his own death. Rouse Ball tells the tale in his 1908 History of Mathematics ; The manner of his death has a certain interest for psychologists. Shortly before it he declared that it was necessary for him to sleep some ten minutes or a quarter of an hour longer each day than the preceding one. The day after he had thus reached a total of something over twenty-three hours he slept up to the limit of twenty-four hours, and then died in his sleep. I quite like the sound of deMoivre. He is more famous for his ideas on complex numbers and trigonometry, and his association with Newton, Halley, and the Royal Society, but as probabilists go, he was right on the button. Or Charon's two pennies, if you will. There's a proper lover of his subject for you, and unlike his predecessor Girolamo Cardano he does not ap...

The Coal Question I've been relaxing in the bath after a good meal and a snooze--as one does--and found myself occupying my time with an economics text. It keeps me off of Amazon.com (I've reviewed 'head shot' on there, about the physics of the JFK murder and have got into quite a neat dialogue with other nutters) and it also provides a use for books, since my beloved kindle is not waterproof. My watery text was, as far as it goes, a sort of 'whiz bang' summary of economic history and techniques and rather good for that--David Orrell's insistent critique of the way economists expect certainty and balance, Economyths . He sums up economists' collective failings as 'physics envy', which I think a little unfair since he points out how many of the founders of the discipline were amateurs like myself. Anyhow, I was struck by two things. One was a description of Pascal's triangle of fractal risk and its elaboration as a Sierpinski gasket . This m...

Managing Decline The United States is clearly unable to uphold the responsibility of maintaining a global currency. This is not in itself a devastating conclusion. After all, the particular responsibility involved was never voted on by the American people, whatever John Bricker and others wanted. It emerged in the middle of the nineteen forties as the extension of the displacement of the British Empire and the export of a security guarantee and interventionist policy to the the rest of the world. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the GATT/WTO settlement implied the CIA, the NSC, the Pentagon, and the other accoutrements that the USA acquired under Roosevelt and Truman, not altogether to the good of the republic. Anyway, we have now had nearly half a century of deficits, in trade and in the federal budget, and one deliberate and determined reversal of an attempt to remedy the situation in order to deliver tax cuts to the rich after 2001. World prices in dollars have c...