Martin Meenagh blog

  Presidential election flaws before 2000. The Constitution of the United States prescribes that the president will be elected by a combination of popular vote and elite ‘filtering,’ normally though the electoral college, but in exceptional cases through the Congress. In 1788, The Federalist Papers (No 68) which was written to try to persuade and reassure New Yorkers of the sense of the Constitution, said that this process would ‘afford little opportunity to tumult and disorder’ and that it was a practical obstacle to ‘cabal, intrigue, and corruption.’ This model did not even hold for the first presidential election, as Alexander Hamilton intrigued behind the scenes to humiliate John Adams, who was nevertheless elected vice-president. Processes on paper run alongside regimes, the acceptable and perceived ways of doing things, in the minds and activities of the individuals and communities involved. This is especially true when processes are set out in a document as simple and ...

 Hello everyone. Rather against what passes for my judgement (a quality any of you might well have formed an opinion on by now,) I've started on the third novel, Triskelion . This is largely because I have been dreaming about it as well as letting it intrude into my waking thoughts, as every truly obsessive hobby should, and, well, better out than in, as they say. I have the structure of the book clear in my head and want to finish off this phase of the Carr adventures properly and soon, so I'll put a draft chapter up every week or so at least. My projected date for publication is Spring next year, so the book might have a slightly different aspect to its winter siblings, but it'll be none the worse for that. After all, I'm writing it. It probably couldn't get any worse.  My wordpress site is now hosting my political history notes for students, which have reached 100,000 words in the latest iteration and which I will be putting into the form of a cheap online book i...

 I've got a little jaded about blogging, and am also somewhat suspicious of Google's recent unforced assurances that BlogSpot is safe. I'd also like a fresh start. So, after 16 years, I'm going to move to martinmeenagh.wordpress.com  for my personal blog, and to www.commonwealthtuition.com  for my business one.  The uploads of my latest bad novel on the associated page here will continue until I have at least finished volume 2, and I intend to maintain the economics site that I have associated with this blog too. Otherwise, thanks for all the comments, connections, and fun over the years, and good luck to you!

 Hello all. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into cyberspace, I've opened a new page under the working title 'Red Knight' for the next novel. This is a great hobby, which I should have taken up sooner, and the characters are too insistent in my head for me to leave them in here. Apologies in advance for the prose, story etc....

 The massacre in Srebrenica, and the surrounding craven behaviour of European and UN forces, was one of the lowest points of the past fifty years. Today should be marked as the day when one of the chief architects of the business is sentenced in The Hague. It seemed appropriate to put up a small note on what does not feel like the triumph of the rule of law.

 I've put a new quick-ish summary of the economic background to 1970s and early 1980s policies up on the other blog, should anyone be interested. 

 Afternoon viewers, hope all is well wherever you are this oddly wet and cold day. I've got a little time on my hands so have been adding to economics notes on my public economics blog , if you fancy a little verbal confusion and tortured prose of an afternoon :) Happy Hunting! 

The 2021 May elections have not seen the overwhelming Scottish National Party ‘breakthrough’ that the nationalists were clearly hoping for, although this was arguably a matter of a few chance votes. The election did, however, see a significantly higher turnout than was present in other British elections, with 63.2% of eligible voters voting (as opposed to just over 42% in London, for example.) Despite this, only three out of seventy-three constituencies changed hands, and the winning party had single-digit majorities in sixteen seats. The second Party prioritising independence, Alba, did very badly, and the third, for whom independence was not an overwhelming priority, the Greens, gained seats. This leaves a mixed argument for those who claim that the vote was a ‘mandate’ for independence. The idea of a mandate is that an election is defined by one issue, and that a majority produced amongst diverse districts can be said to settle a question put by those who call the election. This is ...

 My facebook friend John Medaille is always talking about how economics texts don't contain chapters on what property is or a proper definition of economics, as a rule. Martin Kelly, whom I respect enormously, seems to like the beginning of my attempt from the book of American essays below: 

 I've had two 'learning books' out during this long year of lockdown. My ongoing project, or at least one of them, is to add to that with the Rend My Prey thriller which is spinning into madness on another page of this blog, and to add a more professional Economics textbook. Textbooks prices are crazy these days and economics has been shrouded in obfuscation and expense, so as usual, I'm putting the raw notes I use with my students up free, and will compile them over the summer. If you are interested in that sort of thing, have a look over on the economics blog  (www.ukeconomicsonline.blogspot.com )

  Much of the skill involved in verbal reasoning is located in the capacity to unlock the tone of an author and to see the scaffolding of language that has generated it. This often involves looking at the points where an author changes tense, and carefully looking at the objects of their sentences and at word-order in the rhetorical points they make. It is possible to become somewhat overly sensitive (to the point of pretension) but the skill is deadly serious; a person who can parse, dissect and extract meaning from sentences is in possession of a very great skill.   Consider the passage below;   It would then be a campaign unlike the ones which had preceded it. Counting by the full spectrum of complete Right to absolute Left, the political differences would be minor, but what would be not at all minor was the power of each man to radiate his appeal into some fundamental depths of the American character. One would have an inkling at last if the desire of America ...