Chicken Little goes EU

One of the absolute benefits of being in the EU is that the apparatchiks of Brussels force us to Do The Right Thing. Although successive Irish governments have been not doing the right thing on, say, water quality because it costs more than they believe Joe and Josie Poblacht will countenance. But an expert consultation or a Tribunal? That is something governments can get behind because a) the costs are finite, rather than an indefinite commitment b) there is patronage and nepotism prospects in filling the expert panel.

One of the EU requirements is that each member state is required to engage in future proofing by publishing a national risk assessment NRA every three years. This can be performative box-ticking, as when my binfo project students were obliged to cogitate on whether eye-strain or back-pain was more likely for screen-staring desk-johnnies. That's silly, but unless someone thinks about disasters, we're gonna be wrong-footed and under-prepared when something adverse occurs. On Sunday 19th May 33mm of rain fell on Cappoquin, Co Waterford causing flash flooding: that was a mess and the clean-up costly, but is it likely to happen again in our lifetimes? If so, "we" should do something about it; if not then not.

RTE reported on the 2023 National Risk Assessment NRA carried out by the Government Task Force GTF on Emergency Planning [full PDF] - go TLAs. Essentially the GTF was tasked to think what could possibly co wrong?. A bit like the DNR end of life issues which were codified by the Irish Council for Bioethics 20 years ago. Any risk assessment, National, or otherwise, usually tries to calculate relative risk as the product of an event's impact multiplied by its likelihood; usually on a 1-5 scale for each parameter. I've clipped [R] their assessment of Tech Risks: H Cyber Attack is rated more worrisome than I Undersea Infrastucture, J Gas/Elect outage or K Oil Supply. I guess we weathered the loss of Russian oil 2 years ago? 

impact is  assessed w.r.t. 

• people [1 = less than 20 deaths to 5 = more than 250 deaths; with injuries in proportion]
• environment [1 = local simple to 5 =  heavy widespread long-lasting]
  
• economy [1 = <1% of annual budget i.e. less that €1bn up to  5 = >8% of the budget]
• essential services [ 5 = Failure of services essential for society to work]
  
• society [5 = Community unable to function without significant support]

likelihood is scored: 1 = 100 years between occurrences . . . 5 = happens at least once a year

For the GTF some things were No Worries on a national plan level: Volcanoes Fog RTA Rail-Crash Radiation Civil-Disorder Disinformation Drought Heatwaves Wildfires Hazmat-Accident Structural-Collapse. These events may be Cappoquin serious but are "most appropriately managed at departmental, agency or regional level".

As far as poss, the NRA was evidence driven which is different from headline driven.  Eee but the press do love a car crash and a gangland shooting. These events almost always make the [tut tut watch me be shocked] news and the rest of us have been trained like Pavlov's dogs to respond in like vein. Irish train crash takes precedence over any Indian train crash; unless (bridge-failure + precipice + dozens of dead) applies. Or I guess (train + bomb + dozens of dead) gets the RTE editorial juices going.

Nevertheless, the GTF did canvass public perception and cross-reference this to The Evidence. Which gave them an opportunity to use a coxcomb plot [bloboprev]:

Note that the scale is 0 (well 1 really) to 25: the latter scoring 5 for likelihood x 5 for impact. Mr & Mrs Poblacht are probably over-anxious about water supply and trawlers dredging up the internet but think plane crashes happen elsewhere and rarely. But it just needs one Kegworth on Irish soil and that will change public perception in line with reality.

The GTF identified "Emerging Risks" which they reckoned would make the cut when their successors were required to carry out another NRA in 3, 6, 9 years time: AI; AntiVaxx; Biodiversity loss; Climate change; Drones; Heatwaves; Invasive species; Lithium fires; Super-HGVs [bridge, precipice, I guess?]. The Public were also asked to submit their list of Future Horrors but that generated only 310 responses [clearly the GTF didn't work tooo hard to get the word out, because I would defo have sent in a list of cranky anxieties]. You can track down the 310 list at p.43 of the GTF NRA PDF.

Demotic chemistry

Tim James and The Blob are in the same business - spreading Science to The People. When I worked at The Institute, I generally embraced classes with a performative joy; to convince first myself and then the students that science was fun as well as being important. I won't have won over everyone in the room all the time because humor is quirky and sometimes misses the mark. Also jokes fall flat if you try too hard, or become dull if the script gets repeated too often. 

Mr James was a secondary school science teacher in Ipswich UK with an internet presence, who has written an explanatory book El⁸⁷ E¹⁰ Me⁴⁹ N²² Ta⁵ L⁶² How the Periodic Table Can Now Explain (Nearly) Everything. It's okay, and might be an appropriate gift for a youngster who isn't in Mr James's 2nd Year Chem Class but is having the curiosity leeched from their soul by an earnest dullard. But it might be a better book with a more ruthless copy editor who knows when to leave a joke in and when to cut the casual "I'm down with the kids" language. I have a rush of empashame because I know I fall into being too clever-by-'arf too often. One arresting turn of phrase may be funny; two such in the same sentence is merely confusing.

You can see what poor authors have to deal with by noting the different covers for the UK and US editions. The publishing world is where graduates from The Arts Block go to make a living. The joke of making a mock periodic table on the cover was a bridge too far for the US publisher who has kept the squares, coloured them irrelevantly and added some stock photo thumb-nails to make it look relevant to the contents. And who oh why, did they allow N²² to do through when everyone knows nitrogen is N⁷

Thus Chapter 7 Things That Go Boom explains explosions by referring to quantum chemistry and the orbitals of electrons. It's hard to make explosions exciting on paper when The SlowMo Guys do it on camera. But it is the natural place to talk about Alfred Nobel and his Prizes. "The prize money is substantial, numbering in the millions, and it comes from Nobel's estate built entirely on dynamite. Not literally, obviously. That would be stupid." There's a good joke in there, but as written it clunks. A real stand-up for science [calling Dara Ó Briain or Eddie/Suzy Izzard] would work harder on their patter because fewer words makes bigger bang (boom-boom). Later on the same page " . . . one nitroglycerine particle will react with another to produce a bunch of gases, mostly carbon dioxide and water." That a bunch of is down with the kids speak and superfluous. Tighter is crisper. But what do I know? Mr James no longer has to teach science to spotty youth, because he's done well enough as an writer to leave England and make his living in America as author and screenwriter.

America? Not to be confused with Tim James of The Chemical Free Body a Portland-based Woo Movement to help Bowel Movement: We are a mission-based organization that is passionate about helping everybody ignite their highest excitement in life by putting themselves and their health first. Our goal is to rescue one gut at a time with honest, pure and natural ingredients that taste great, and absolutely no harmful man-made chemicals, no binders or fillers, just pure concentrated nature! poo to that!

Pedantic, obsessive me applauds the idea that every one of the 118 elements is mentioned at least once in the text. This is not a text-book, and makes no claims to being a comprehensive romp through the periodic table. But it's also scrappy with dangling anecdotes like the relating bones of Clara Immerwahr's 1915 suicide without giving her any background - luckily The Blob supplies that. But maybe that's okay. It may spark some curiosity, which will drive further reading, and maybe a critical comparison of sources and some skepticism about "Facts".

Sniping aside, I stand by my assessment that this book will help more 13 y.o. [girl]s think that science is interesting and amusing enough to keep on with chemistry and physics at school. Unless they roll their eyes right out of orbit at the punny Brittese language.

modern women write

Reader's Log, stardate 15-05-24. I finished Charlie Stross's Dark State [his Empire Games prev] in a bit of a gallop just before a longish solo voyage by car. That's two down in a trilogy; but I'll need a while to recover from armageddon-anxiety before I put myself through Part Three = Invisible Sun.

Needing a new non-fiction earbook available now, I turned to Borrowbox and got a twofer. We'll Always Have Paris (9¾ hrs) by Emma Beddington (50 yrs) and The Hungover Games (5¾ hrs) by Sophie Heawood (45 yrs). If you read the Guardian, you will have read their earlier material, but as both are freelancers, you may have read their pieces in other media - not only print. These books are not entirely rom-com pink & fluffy but the troubles are bounded, normal.

I started with Paris not least because there was the promise of viennoiserie [L]. Bill Bryson realised as a youngster that he should have been born in Dusseldorf not DesMoines. Beddington reckoned that nothing she could buy in Betty's Tearoom in Yorkshire could hold a candle to a wobbly flan - pas trop cuit. She worked as a gap-year assistante in Normandie and read Modern History at University before starting work as a bilingual corporate lawyer. Along the way she fell in with a solid, reliable, lovable Norman, married him and had two children. They tried living in Paris. But she found Parisians cliquey, stand-offish, generally horrible and making no allowance for restless toddlers. Accordingly they retreated back to London but felt displaced and wrong-footed there. The collision of reality with romantic Casablancesque movie script caused poor Emma mental anguish requiring meds and almost destroyed their marriage. Even cakes couldn't make up for it. It didn't help that Beddington's resourceful supportive mother died in a freak accident at about that time. There is a happy ending which sees the family settled in . . . Bruxelles - which most would agree hasn't a patch on either London or Paris.

The Hungover Games is much funnier, perhaps because it is read by the author who knows when to play it for larfs. It is also a family story although one which is exactly half the size. Sophie Heawood moved to Los Angeles to interview celebs for the English press. It suited many publications to have an empathic body, down with popular culture, living at the heart of Celebristan. Much cheaper than flying a staffer out to the West Coast and finding on arrival that the target influencer had gone off the boil over the last 24 hours. Heawood had been in a long-term long-distance relationship with The Musician. Having just been told by her ObGyn that she'd never have children, the on-again couple had one free bonk too many (drink may have been involved) and she was pregnant.

Balking at the cost, emotional and financial, of delivery in Beverley Hills, she returned to a tiny house in the least fashionable sector of the East End of London, UK. Her family and friends are supportive, and as a free-lance she was able to WFH long before Covid opened that possibility to all-comers. The nicest parts of the book describe the close and teasing relationship between mother and daughter. 

A word of AITA advice to fellow patriarchs. If you have unprotected sex with your gfriend and she ends up preg, do not insist on a 3-way DNA test. It's disrespectful. For the rest, I am clearly not the demographic for reading articulate confessional autobiographies of much younger media women. So if I don't sound enthusiastic it's not really a useful datapoint.

Sunday 26May24

Mixum gatherum

• Slow Mo: All good fun till somebody loses an eye
• Rocketry: Arming the altimeter
  
• Williams: So much depends on a red without wheelbarrows
  
• UK: National Fruit Collection
• Alaska: Raised by bears in 1960s
  
• Scotland: Jings! MacAskill and pals go biking
  
• Mutualism: delousing a whale [R]
  
• Norway: Beavers on ice 
• Peru: [shell] fishing from cliffs
• Yorkshire: paragliding to Scotland = 100km 
• Canada: whoever doubted a dozen teenage girls could paddle across the wilderness, = 600km 40 days
• California: Tuolumne River Rangers
  

Probate woes

I think I've managed my transition from being a 👑subject to being a citizen without nationality-affirming surgery. It only took six years; six months on me getting my paper ducks in a row; 12 months on the Foreign Birth Registry FBR processing that stack; 54 months where my change in status failed to filter through to the other departments of state. My mother died during the journey which will simplify the journey for my sibs: I needed to bring her and her passport to a Notary Public to sware whom she was; the sibs can just send her Death Cert. 

Did I say my mother died, in the fullness of her years, . . . 52 months ago? I did. Because she was born in 1920, she did really well on property lottery. In 1967, my parents bought (as their first, late, step on the property ladder) a quaint 300 y.o. cottage [see R] 50km NE of Charing Cross for £13,000 and sold it in 1983 for £110,000. They had just retired, and parlayed their windfall into a larger, new, home 210 km WSW of Charing Cross. I think they paid £65,000 but I know that house was sold 38 years later for £500,000! That's a 7% ROI year-in-year-out for half a century. Without gaming the system, or even trying, my Mum had almost become a millionaire. It's impossible for her granddaughters to repeat that 🎩↪🐇prestidigitation. Life isn't fair when a majority go f⊗ll-metal capitalism and f⊗ck the future.

You may wonder why, given my mother couldn't take it with her, I haven't been standing rounds dahn the local to celebrate the Lotto-adjacent windfall. The answer is dahn the local not British no more and . . . Probate. The parental estate is still tied up in the clutches of HM Courts and Tribunals Service. which is responsible for the administration of criminal, civil and family courts, tribunals, and the probate registry in England and Wales. The Internet allows that there are extraordinary delays in the process "it is now taking anything from 8 weeks to 8 months to obtain a Grant of Probate". . . . or in our case more than halfway through eight years.

In 2008, there were 30 full time Probate Registrars scattered across the nation, each office with a staff of ~10. Then the crash, performative austerity and slashing cuts to services across the government. In 2017, there were only 3 Registrars and 150 people left to process the finances of death. The number of effectives have been creeping up but so has the UK population: 2008 = 62 million; 2023 = 68 million = 10% more people. Even ignoring what any excess deaths from Covid did to the backlog. "excess deaths"? depends whom you ask More or Less has one credible answer. The death rate in Western Democracies is about 1%/year. That's 680,000 wills to process. Apparently, like in a pharmacy, while Phram Techs do the grunt work, The Pharmacist has to sign off each script; so in Probate one of the Registrars has to approve each grant of probate = that's a frankly incredible ~600 a day every day for each of the Probate Top Guns.

In April 2024, the Justice Committee of the UK Parliament held an enquiry into the Probate slow down which is mildly entertaining and fairly informative but isn't going to light a fire-cracker under HMCTS let alone revisit the disastrous decisions made by Tory rich-boys Cameron and Osborne in 2008. But one point made by the witnesses is that counting probate employees is not good enough. The Effectives are few, the Noobs are many and the former must take time out from processing probates to training less experienced workers - institutional knowledge has been gutted. It's always fun to see who in the room [eg L] is bored-and-distracted while their boss is helping the enquiry. The camera is ON, your phone is OFF, do not pick your nose as displacement activity.

But I love being down in the weeds as a fly on the wall when experts thrash out the details of their magisteria. See my obsessive hangin' out with the UKSC. If you want to cross-check which Justice Committee members have the least kind attitudes to the bereaved, here is the members list -  Kieran Mullan looking at you. 

Current legislation w.r.t. wills in UK is still working off 19thC law. Will's now aren't written on parchment and witnessed by The Doctor and The Laird: an unsent txt msg has been granted probate elsewhere, as have video wills and paperless office wills with a digital signature, Far from being down with the digital present, the HMCTS can't even process a simple "I leave it all to my kids equally per stirpes" in a timely and predictable fashion.

Foot note: "A new online system, with new software was being trialled with a limited number of law firms before lockdown. Since lockdown the online system has become compulsory for anyone applying for a Grant to administer an Estate, however the online system does not deal with all situations, including many common ones, so paper applications still have had to be made in a number of instances." A new online system! This will cause a sinking feeling in anyone who has been following the Horizon Post Office story.

Rory's MP Story

It is the greatest of all mistakes,
to do nothing because you can only do little.

NotBurke

I am a total fanboy for Rory Stewart [R as Minister for Flooding]. He prefers shank's mare to a ministerial car or a white [inside and out] aid-workers 4x4. You can't smell the drains from a car. And you definitely can't imagine Third World poverty from an office in London, let alone imagine solving it. Along with 200,000+ other people, I listen in to his TRIP podcast with Alastair Campbell on the regular. It's a footballer's sort of earner. But, for Stewart, it's not, and never has been, about the money . . . not least because he never lacked [Dragon, Eton, Balliol] for it growing up. Even a second tier patriarch like me [Titchfield, Canterbury, Dublin] knows that financial stablity in childhood does wonders for your assurance . . . and sense of entitlement.

Readers have walked a while with Rory along the Scots Borrrder (with Rory's aged Dad) and on his walk across Afghanistan (with Babur the enormous stray dog) which he wrote up as The Places In Between. That's one source of connexion [apart from the Patriarchy] for me because I've been on a couple of life defining long-walks.

I've just finished the third book in the Trilogy where Stewart walks the tightrope of party politics; from getting selected as Tory candidate for MP for "Penrith and the Borders" in 2009 to being drummed out of the party 10 years later for opposing the illegal antics of Boris Johnson in getting Brexit done. Parliamentary language and practice can be a lot more internecine and hostile than walking between villages in the Afghan winter. I don't read A Lot of books, but I almost always finish those I start. But 50 pages into Politics on the Edge, I almost had to stop because the political creatures with whom Stewart is forced to sup in Parliament are just such terrible people: ambitious, bullying, craven, dim, entitled, fibbing, greedy, hypocritical, indolent, joyless. But I soldiered on because that's what Rory Stewart would do and did. Because he was brought up in a tradition of service and wanted to make a difference. Alan Johnson MP in his Guardian review finds this book is a vital work of documentation: Orwell down the coal mine.

Stewart learned, the hard way, early on, that you can't fix all the World's woes in one session of parliament, so you have to pick your battles: for your constituents, for the country, even for foreign johnnies if you acquire a portfolio in the Department for International Development. You have to be prepared to fail: fighting The Man to make the A66 to Penrith safer by extending the dual-carriageway sections has achieved promises, plans and feasibility studies but still no tarmac despite 30 years of local asking. He took his local responsibilities [duty!!!] seriously and experienced suicidal ideation when red faced by a comment about baler twine holding up his constituent's trousers [bloboprev]. 

And he took his ministerial business seriously. Notably as Prisons Minister when he went out across his bailiwick visiting a different prison every week of his tenure. And maybe . . . a bit . . . turned around the appalling statistics on how prisons were not working: filthy, violent, under-resourced. But nobody can achieve much if butterfly politics keeps churning the briefs. Stewart held five [5!] different ministerial portfolios during his three years near the top of the political food-chain. Just when hapless ministers get the mettle of one crew of civil servants and start to implement policy, Kaos reshuffles everyone into different roles equally outside their competence and experience. Soldiers are sent to mete out Justice, while barristers take up arms in Defence in a musical chairs of performative amateurism.

Possibly alone of the 650 MPs arguing for the country's future, he read all 500+ pages of the Brexit Agreement negotiated by Theresa May's government. But detail and competence is not what modern politics requires. An expert's considered opinion can be trashed with a catchy soundbyte; a slogan can win an election. Because inertia, vested interest and money (lack of) prevent almost any change happening, few fault the empty sloganeer for failing to deliver. Pointing out that a No Deal Brexit would be a disaster for Britain and Ireland didn't butter any parsnips in the hustings for the Tory Leadership. Rory Stewart, honest, diligent, patriotic might be the Best 21stC British Prime Minister they never got. If you can't wait to get the book (I was +100^th on the reserve list at the library), this book launch article in the Guardian covers much of the same ground.

Politics on The Edge won the British Book Awards non-fiction narrative award a week ago.

Indentured servants

Goddamn but we really shouldn't be eating meat. Think of the methane plume - it's 30x to 80x worse for the planet than CO₂. But we definitely shouldn't be insulating our conscience by buying meat in neat trays, wrapped in cling-film and having a BB date next to the price. You get a pass (or at least an annual quota) on meat which you have seen alive in a field and dismembered yourself. You get a passer's pass on the actual killing because you won't practice it often enough to be able to carry out the task humanely. 

20 years ago we were pushing the frontiers of science discovering how the chicken immune system worked. In particular how Campylobacter is tolerated in chicken guts but gets flushed from ours in distressing Niagara outfalls. The research was ultimately set to benefit the chicken production and processing industry. Over the years we met with a few of the players - policy wonks from Dept. AgFood&Fish; vets; meat packers. Over lunch with one of the latter we were informed that their Health & Safety notices were printed in thirty different languages.

That's because, at the price that Irish consumers are prepared to pay for meat, and under the conditions in which meat is 'processed', it is hard to persuade Irish people to work. I recently got a disturbing insight into the economics of running a meat-packing factory one county over from Chateau Blob. A palomino runs various evening classes in a community centre nearby and several of their clients work a long shift in the factory and stagger into class to learn some English and other skills. It must be nice just to sit down. It's possible that their living arrangements are sufficiently spartan that two hours in the warm on Tuesday and Thursday nights is a welcome break. You may be sure that these strainséirí are being paid minimum wage. It's hard work. The factory canteen offers them dinner for €19.95 including dessert. 

That's TWENTY YoYos for lunch in the works canteen!! When I worked in The Institute, lunch was €4.85 (two meat options, fish on Fridays) and €4.25 for vegetarianos. In the factory they give with the right hand and take with the left.

Unintentionally funny marketing literature produced by the factory?

"Thin Flank is located in the abdominal region and consists of the muscles and fasciae integrating the abdominal wall. It can be prepared from a rear four to 3 ribs. the previous extraction of macabre, it is separated from the cuitril colita".
A short session with Auntie Google turned up the original eSpanish: Se puede preparar a partir de un cuarto trasero a 3 costillas, previa extracción del matambre, se lo separa de la colita de cuadril.
Which a more competent translator renders as: It can be prepared from a 3-rib hindquarter, prior to removing, the flank is separated from the tail of the rump.  

And while we're in the zone of exploiting foreign labour so that we can consume extras without having to agonize about the true costs, Peter Hebblethwaite [R], the CEO of P&O was back before the Business Committee of the UK Parliament last week. He was asked with rhetorical flourish how he could justify paying the crew of cross-channel ferries 25% of the UK national minimum wage. After establishing that "it was important to compare apples with apples" Hebblethwaite acknowledged that he couldn't live on £4.87/hr but that foreign johnnies were beating path to the gangway to work for P&O. The 'guaranteed' bonus and 'guaranteed' overtime (which is impossible to avoid while rostered at sea) brings the average weekly wage up to [drum-roll] 50% of the UK minimum wage.

You may recall that in 2022, P&O let all their unionized employees go and replaced them with eager and hungry mariners from India, the Philippines. And P&O don't employ any of these fire-and-rehire seafarers; they have out-contracted HR to an agency, who do the ugly part of of crewing and retention, so that P&O management don't have to see [metaphor alert] the sheep getting slaughtered for cheap fares/food while they rake in the C-suite Christmas bonus. 

Two days after Hebblethwaite's grilling, Natalie Elphicke, the MP for Dover, found that Rishi Sunak's Anglo-Rwandan government was insufficiently cruel and defected to Labour. You may recall that, in 2022, Elphicke voted in parliament to send P&O's unionized mariners down to the dole-office and then rocked up to lead a march protesting against P&O. Heckling ensues!! Elphicke's husband Charlie was the previous MP for Dover but at the time of the 2019 general election, he was on bail before being found guilty of multiple charges of sexually assaulting his staff. Terrible people, no shame. I was born in Dover, but left 3 months later and only returned to a) visit m'grannie b) catch a ferry to France. So I didn't vote for either Elphicke.