Martin Meenagh blog

Ed Milliband's Inspirational Precursor A beaten fraternity? A very shaky grasp of history, reality, or any basic sense? A desire for a really stupid and futile gesture on the part of a beetlebrowed and somewhat disturbing example of the youthful saturnine? Yes, I've got it. The following video contains swearing, for those who would be offended. In other news, 1) Labour antagonises and winds up Catholic voters by embracing, well, narcissism and Satan 2) Labour loses its soul and loads of votes 3) Harriet Harman tries to make the faith illegal (before backtracking) and then notes, almost subconsciously, how 'the Catholics' and 'the Labour Party' (note her distinction) worked closely in the past tense. Dots. Join. It isn't hard. On balance, I'd rather be in Philadelphia. Mrs Mary Honeyball , late of this blog and the David Milliband Guantanamo tribute band , has not yet commented over at her special place....

Goodbye Johnny Dear I used to listen to this song, in a different version, in my grandmother's house on an old grey-and-purple suitcase record player that she had upstairs. This version, by a Portugese lady, makes me think of a drunken man I once met on the tip of Manhattan, near the Staten Island Ferry, who never forgot Ireland, and of bars in Baltimore, and Chicago. It's very moving and maudlin and speaks very much to what the strong once had to do, the last time Ireland exploded. I think that I might make good Irish songs a regular feature of this blog. My own mother, for those of you who have sent in notes, is doing very well, is very strong, and I'm proud of her.

Dr Vincent Cable In recent years, along with others who pass for more serious commentators, I may have given the impression that Dr Vincent Cable--a 'serious' economist with real world experience, an interesting personal story and a sort of two-thirds predictive take on the instant world economic crisis--knew what he was doing. I now realise that I was wrong and I ask for the forgiveness of my colleagues in the Great Market. Along with everyone else, I heard Dr Cable yesterday point out that business and finance tend towards monopoly. I was under the impression that Adam Smith , Friedrich Hayek , and Milton Friedman (to a lesser extent) would have agreed. Dr Cable also spoke of how bankers had, through greed and deliberate flouting of the letter and spirit of leveraging rules and the construction of fantastically confusing products, almost brought down the economy of the west. He did not then explain how the vast outpouring of electronic money to postpone a crisis caused in pa...

A Viral Message for Americans and their Friends My God, I agree with Thomas Friedman about something. Have a look at this paragraph from his latest article; "Studying China’s ability to invest for the future doesn’t make me feel we have the wrong system. It makes me feel that we are abusing our right system. There is absolutely no reason our democracy should not be able to generate the kind of focus, legitimacy, unity and stick-to-it-iveness to do big things — democratically — that China does autocratically. We’ve done it before. But we’re not doing it now because too many of our poll-driven, toxically partisan, cable-TV-addicted, money-corrupted political class are more interested in what keeps them in power than what would again make America powerful, more interested in defeating each other than saving the country." Disenthrall yourself from that partisan sugar rush of self righteousness and aggressive whining that your media and political class plays on, cut down those f...

For My Mother and Aunt

The Time of the Preacher in the Year of '01 The original Edge of Darkness is much, much better than the typically competent Mel Gibson film. Buy it or rent it if you have the time. Here's a clip of the great Joe Don Baker's turn as Darius Jedburgh, which, to his credit, Ray Winstone didn't even try to approach. The year of '01...when the killing began.

Just to reflect on the great secular state Before I go off for a bike ride, I just thought that I would reflect on the great secular UK State. You know. The one that has over sixty thousand children in care, rising on some figures to eighty thousand. The one that costs £696 billion per year , rising to over a trillion by 2011. The one that gives a million a year to Marie (friend of Hitler) Stopes International to abort baby Africans, whilst contemplating an academic qualification in sex for schoolchildren that could very easily see Teachers breaking anti-paedophile laws if they taught it. The state where pensioners, two million of whom live in poverty , burn books to keep warm ; where four million children and eight million adults live in poverty. The State that gave its money to the banks who are now busily screwing people right left and centre; the state where sixteen per cent of deaths in 2007-8 were the result of 'continuous deep sedation'. The same state that charges p...

The Fenian Foggy Dew Just a song I like, about Ireland's almost-abortive revolution. When growing up, I knew the tune as that of 'McAlpine's Fusiliers' about the Irish workers who built England's roads. Really, the Irish built the roads, Germans and Italians built the law courts (decorating the Royal Courts of Justice floors with Hindu Swastikas), and the Poles now do the plumbing and electricity, amongst other immigrant groups. The Jamaicans and Bajans drive the trains, and the Bangladeshis and Ugandans, and the Indian diaspora, look after our bodies and accounts. The Lascars manned the ships. Fish and Chips came from the Jewish East End, the Indians, and Celts built the Empire, and then took it down, and the Canadians, Africans and Australians provided the materials, and the Kiwis fought the Battle of Britain with disproportionate honour, unsung. I'm tempted to ask mischievously what it was that the English did, except serve with little reward the 7000 famili...

Science Corner Well, CERN still hasn't blown us all up, and the time saved has been one of fantastic discovery and contention. I was too busy and distracted to blog this last Summer, but I was fascinated by the science stories that caught my eye. Let's start, Paracelsus-style, with the big and go down to the small. John Gribbin has long been an interesting physicist, and wrote a book once on Entropy which I read in a hot car in a car park, near a fish and chip shop, when I was fourteen or so--long ago. His central contention, as I recall, was that the very nineteenth century physics idea that thermodynamics, and specifically the second law, formed some sort of binding Hobbesian statute in the universe, was unquestionable. Consequently, matter and energy would proceed with diminishing return to an inevitable heat death in some impossible future. At the time he wrote, one may as well have quoted the Bhagvad-Gita as raised the idea of white holes and a multiverse. These were manic...

A Short Instructional Video about English Atheists This isn't a third world country. Third world countries are doing well at the minute, largely because the Chinese have bought them. Here's a public information film. I ought to dedicate it to Mrs Mary Honeyball MEP , but what's the point? She will keep on being appointed from a party list to the European Parliament regardless, and anyway, she's keeping her head down of late. Apparently, she haunts the corridors of Brussels dressed only in a shroud and brambles, resolved to speak only of yogurt. Tell this blog if you have a sighting of her, though photographs--I'll say this now-- will be treated with skepticism and sent for independent verification.

Down Louisiana Way This is what the Rivers look like these days. Words fail me, which probably doesn't matter in the face of the ruined livelihoods, cancers, and nightmares that Haliburton, Transocean, and BP have wrought.

Should America Privatise the Dollar? Extraordinary times require extraordinary thoughts. It's very late, and I thought that I would revisit an old theme; the reestablishment of competing currencies. My one demented reader will remember my interest in the legal nature of Scottish and Northern Irish notes, which are issued by their banks, and in scrip in the United States. That's because memory can be sharpened in a padded cell. Really though, with the stimulus getting nowhere (though maybe it forestalled or postponed a collapse ), with electronic and fiat money inflating the west and preparing us for what I still think is odds-on a nasty stagflation, why not? In New York two hundred and fifty years ago, one could have traded in, and saved in, and lent in, any one of a choice of dozens of currencies. Colonial governments could not keep up, and banks and individuals were put to the test; if their notes were any good, and backed by something credible, people would use them. If not...

Of Iron Domes and European Shields She looked over his shoulder For vines and olive trees, Marble well-governed cities And ships upon untamed seas, But there on the shining metal His hands had put instead An artificial wilderness And a sky like lead. W.H.Auden's lines on the Shield of Achilles seem appropriate this morning, when three stories about missile defence came under my eye. The best peace is the peace of the strong, of course, and one way of securing strength is to have a collective shield. Treaty-based shields of mutual protection, outside of NATO, have not really proven that much use in the past century, and the peace of Empires isn't conscionable, as well as being inherently unstable. Trade undermines war, and diplomacy forestalls it, usually, but it is the normal way of men to kill each other for resources or ideas. That's not to be cynical, just realistic. It's Sunday, and I believe that the light of Christ can bring true peace, but I know enough of peopl...

Distributist Aims and Policies; 4x4 I've tried to base my understanding of Distributism not on the essentially humanist but non-economic Chesterbelloc, but rather on what people have written of it over the years and my own elaborations of Distributism's logic. Here, with thanks to John Medaille and Anthony Clooney, is a list of things before I move on. I make no concessions to the absurd worry that I have just had that I'm more a blend of Glenn Beck, Ignatius Donnelly, and John Kennedy Toole than I wish to be. One Taking its cue from Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum , as reinforced by Pope John Paul II's personalism , Distributists think that modernity placed too much emphasis on aspects of people--class, race, sex, ideas--and not on the dignity of people as a whole. This meant that the human person, as defined by themselves and their relationships to others, was lost, and that society became heartless. Two. Distributists look to a vaguely-elaborated but clearly defin...

Eid Mubarak To any Muslim readers, I'd just like to say, Kul'aam wa antum bekhair, which I am reliably informed is the accompanying 'best wishes for the year' invocation. One of the most important things to do in the world at the minute is to try to get beyond the easy 'we' and 'they' gang language that takes over human affairs when sundry people are trying to blow themselves and others up. Shalom!

Trying to Understand Economic Justice The picture is of Phryne of Thespia being tried in Athens. Phryne was a good time girl who became fabulously rich. She was scandalous, but aware of her charms, and was once arraigned before Judges because she got into the water (inspiring statues of Aphrodite amongst others) in the nude, in full view of the citizens. Her lawyer was eloquent, but the Jury looked severe; so, clever thing, she got her kit off and asked for an alternative verdict. She was acquitted on all counts. Gerome isn't, of course, St Jerome , but I thought of him. He used to have a really good time in one way or another (I presume barely ethically, with drink or women, though you never know), and then feel so guilty he'd periodically reevaluate himself. What better example for modern economics? Over the course of the Summer, I spent a great deal of time attempting to understand what people meant by justice. Augustine said that states without it were bands of robbers --s...

A serious and sensible debate in the Late West Over the course of the summer, I have had quite a fun time over at Conservative Cabbie's blog. There are many on the American right, some of them acting in good faith, who believe that the Park 51 centre in Manhattan, which contains a place in which to pray, is some sort of 'ground zero' provocation. I don't believe this, and was reminded of the nativist attacks on the Church in the nineteenth century, and anyway, I thought that Americans had the right to believe whatever they pleased on private property with their own money in their own time. There isn't a wholly orthodox church in the place. The American Heresy , the Nation of Islam , the Scientologists , and the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints spring to mind and, well, have you ever met an American Episopalian ? I mean, its vaguely intellectual but copacetic only on Venus. So, there was I, bumbling along after my long summer break from blogging, when my...

Comedy Gold Well, of a sort. I was going to post the Buckley-Vidal streetfight alone, but, well, William Buckley and the Hippies--what more could one ask? Can you imagine how drunk Buckley would have had to be to put up with this discussion? This looks to me like a doped version of Saturday Night Live's skit involving Betty White and PBS. I just want the hulk or someone to burst in at the end, Blazing Saddles style, and start tapdancing. I am reliably informed that life at many minor seats of learning is very like this, but Buckley is admirably restrained throughout. I'd have gone nuts, and become mischievous. 'Are you a Hippie, Mr Sanders, and if not, wherein not?'

Quote of the Month. I know, it's the first of September--goodbye to that strange Summer of '10--and there are twenty-nine days to go. I could not, however, resist. Belvoir Castle is the seat of the 11th Duke of Rutland. It is in Leicestershire, near Grantham, where the nuts come from. It is not, patently the ruin of Belvoir Fortress , left over from a Crusade in the Holy Land, though this failed to stop Algerian hackers from taking over its website in the confused belief that it was. Here's what a spokesperson for the Duke had to say; We've nothing to do with the Middle-East. I just help to organise the teddy bears' picnic Quote of the month, so far. Here's how Hamas view children's toys.