Martin Meenagh blog

A Little Perspective On A Hot Afternoon at the End of September "The aggregate of our joy and suffering thousands of confident religions ideologies and economic doctrines every hunter and forager every hero and coward every creator and destroyer of civilization every king and peasant every young couple in love every mother and father hopeful child inventor and explorer every teacher of morals every corrupt politician every "superstar " every "supreme leader " every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." --Carl Sagan

The Speed of Light is a Universal Invariant... in a vacuum. In other media, it can be exceeded, as Oliver Heaviside (who ought to be a hero of this blog, but who for some reason is not, and about whom I have been reading) predicted back in 1888. I've always thought that one of the examples of particles travelling faster than light in a dielectric medium, the Cherenkov radiation of advanced nuclear reactors, is just beautiful. It makes me think of Elinor Wylie's Address to My Soul , for some reason. My soul, be not disturbed By planetary war; Remain securely orbed In this contracted star. Fear not, pathetic flame; Your sustenance is doubt: Glassed in translucent dream They cannot stuff you out. Wear water, or a mask Of unapparent cloud; Be brave and never ask A more defunctive shroud. The universal points Are shrunk into a flower; Between in delicate joints Chaos keeps no power. The pure integral form, Austere and silver-dark, Is balanced on the storm In its predestined arc....

Just a Little Thought, From the Book of Corinthians 1Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 2And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing. 3And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing. 4Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, 5Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; 6Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; 7Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. 8Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. 9...

Two Presidential Songs One from Dana, and one about Derry....

Courtesy of @JimSheridan on Twitter.... An observation on the Irish Presidential Race. And a message from one of the candidates.

Something for the Connoisseurs Amongst You

Insurgencies Everywhere... but not reported here. In Berlin, the 'Pirate Party' opposed to the cartels who somehow manipulated the Bundestag into a copyright law has shot forward to 8.5% of the vote. It's a regional election in a city state, and I know that odd things can happen in such places, but it neatly illustrates the libertarian turn that the Depression, or pre-depression, or whatever you want to call it, is taking in some places. Ron Paul's win in the California straw poll would be a neat counterpart, except there, the electorate was miniscule and Paul spent a huge amount of money securing it. His managers appear to be running for Congress in a presidential election. This mismatch won't do his message any good. The last big depression saw the rise of authentic American demagogues. Talmadges, LaFollettes, Coughlins, Longs, Sinclairs and FDR himself played to the Alcibiades gallery, whilst Europe and Britain were wracked with Mosleys, Hitlers, Mussolinis, and...

A Neat Graphic from the New York Times Almost certainly, because of the shenanigans involved in the funny-money capitalisation of banks and the manipulation of East Asian and Russian funds the web of debt has got worse in the past year. However, I thought that readers might like to have a look at the graphic below as it illustrates the previous story. There's something rather karmic about the trap that Western states have got themselves into. Having allowed Africa to be held hostage to private banks until Gordon Brown and others released indebted states from the London club and Club de Paris at the turn of the century, the Europeans are now staring at their own version of banking badness. Any debt-swap would have to suspend rights of private property, nationalise bank debt, and impose cancellation in violation of most of the precepts by which the southern continent was starved for six decades; and it would have to do so in violation of the emerging powers and the corporate syndica...

As Things Become More Desperate... Imaginations rise to the challenge with ever more desperate solutions. Students at the Europe Business School have come up with an elegant solution to the European debt crisis, which is based upon a simulation. The simulation supposes that mutual write-offs of debt are possible, so that states and organisations could forgive one debt owed to another in return for their own forgiveness of that other's debt. Were such an approach to be adopted, 64% of overall debt would disappear, and in some cases debt would be reduced to as near 0 as makes no difference. The corrolary, of course, would be the destruction of the counterparty, debt-default, derivative, and interconnected global banking industries. As Tyler Durden at www.zerohedge.com notes; this study provides a simple way to see how a fiscally-joined and central Treasury-based system 'could' come out stronger. However, the path to that 'potential' strength will be littered with t...

Let Freedom Ring in Persia--if it can What I wrote two years ago is, sadly, still what I would say today.

Mystic Marty Speaks I hate myself for writing this when I promised not to, but I want to record what seems to be happening in the American presidential race for myself if for nothing else. As I thought would happen, the pre-primary race has become a sort of demolition derby. Ms Bachmann, with no route to 2016, absolutely has to tear down Mr Perry with allegations of crony capitalism, health scares about cancer injections for little girls, and whatever else comes to hand. She started to do so last Monday night. Perry is vulnerable because he looks, talks and walks like a cowboy but is actually a sort of centre-statist in Texas terms with fairly big vulnerabilities in terms of immigration and education. People forget that Texas is a country in itself, and swaggering and right wing as it may seem, it contains large blocs of liberal and hispanic voters, and people who think that gummint should work for them, as well as huge numbers of federal employees. One cannot win that state as a dome...

Let's Free The Banks of England This country clearly has a problem, which is both domestic and global. There are multiple causes, which have been laid out on this and better blogs many, many times since 2006. We have an unbalanced world in which the dollar and the euro are failing to reflect value, because people who do not produce the dollar are accumulating and using it, and because states in the euro are locked into unrealistic exchange rates. Money is beginning to replicate the Cuban Peso, having different values in different places, and electronic cash is undermining a system that emerged in the quaint days after world war one. A succession of reforms to global bank and tax regimes have resulted in twenty years of madness to 2008, and might now lead to thirty years of drawn-out collapse. In addition, an energy and food crisis is competing with a growing population and culture imbalance to threaten everyone. So it's time again for modest proposals. Here's one. British r...

I promise, I absolutely do, not to write anything at all about this.... Given the row last time when she started getting people shot, it's all for the best anyway. From Pauline Bonaparte to Jeanne D'Arc, with my infatuation in between ; what a career.

The History of Truth, for the Markets and Experts In that ago when being was believing Truth was the most of many credibles More first, more always, than a bat-winged lion, A fish-tailed dog or eagle-headed fish, The least like mortals, doubted by their deaths. Truth was their model as they strove to build A world of lasting objects to believe in, Without believing earthenware and legend, Archway and song, were truthful or untruthful: The Truth was there already to be true. This while when, practical like paper dishes, Truth is convertible to kilo-watts, Our last to do by is an anti-model, Some untruth anyone can give the lie to, A nothing no one need believe is there

Mosler Bonds; a Call to Patriots or a Prudency Vampire? There has been a great deal of speculation, amongst those inclined to agree with the financier and businessman Warren Mosler , that 'there is no problem so great that tax cuts or spending rises cannot solve it.' This speculation centres on the possibility that so-called 'Mosler bonds' could help solve the sovereign debt crisis. The idea of such bonds is that citizens or legal persons with taxable business in a state would buy the bonds at above-savings and inflation interest rates (currently that would be around 7-8%, on a long-term basis). These bonds could be sold to other citizens or legal persons, or leveraged. Their distinctive quality would be that, in the event that the State defaulted on the bonds, the value of the bond could be set against tax liabilities. This would be such a constraint on states that the bonds, in theory, would be stable, and they would stabilise investment and confidence. I t...

Gold Fingers China I've thought for some time that it makes sense for China to develop a long-term plan to float the renminbi yuan. China would benefit from the development of reserve status and interior investment, and could address it's deficit with dollar-denominated ASEAN commodities as well as escape from the parasitic political interdependence which it has developed with the United States. Floating a currency is no easy matter, however. If China simply allowed people to trade in it's cash, the RMB would simply rocket, the dollar would be undermined, and China's export and lending advantages with the US would become millstones. Equally, developing an internal market with foreign money might put China on the course to even higher inflation and to the dependence on foreign markets and metastasizing derivatives which it loathes. So there are, logically, four things that China ought to have been doing for the past three years. I've detailed suspicions ab...

Abortion Ought to be a Secular Issue.... For most of history, what is now the Catholic position on abortion (which has continued to be that of the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox, uniate and old Catholic Churches in schism, and some heretical organisations) has been that life should not be loosely disposed of. The religious position is not really confused. With a lawyer's eye, it is possible to find some gaps in the Christian addendum in which to insert pro-choice arguments, but the process is a shaky one to say the least. Tertullian, for instance, based his arguments on Moses' extension of the Lex Talionis to anyone who attacks a pregnant woman and causes her to give birth prematurely. Even we punish this , however, and the passage referred to has to be extrapolated several times before we get to the woman actually procuring a premature birth. It actually refers to a mutable liability for assault. Moving on, both the book of Psalms (51:5) and James place emphas...