Solnit

I've complimented Rebecca Solnit on the quality of her semicolons but tbh her status as a public intellectual has been on the periphery of my attention. Which is silly because I've been content to be [a bit skeptically] washed over by the certainties of, say, Malcolm Gladwell or Steven Pinker.  Not Richard Dawkins, though, he can go preen himself.

Solnit is perhaps most famous for getting her article The Uses of Disaster: Notes on Bad Weather and Good Government on postapoc kindness published in Harper's on the very day in 2005 that Hurricane Katrina whacked New Orleans and the delta. She paid attention to the unfolding drama of the Cajun Navy of little ships rescuing strangers from rooftops to eventually write that up as A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster [2009]. Contrary to what social [nature red in tooth and claw] Darwinists believe, it is not always a dog-eat-dog world when disaster strikes.

I'm now turning pages on Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities [2004]. Or rather a later [2015] edition with a long forward and some extra chapters to flesh out her theme. Grim as the world was when Bush&Blair sexed-up their data and invaded Iraq in 2003, a lot more shit passed under the bridge through the next ten years: polarizing political discourse and degrading the planet.

One point Solnit notes is the distressing tendency for us to identify The Other and then assume that they are the opposition. It doesn't have to be thus as she discovers when her fellow leftie tree-huggers from San Francisco are on an environmental workshop in a remote Nevada village and have to share the bar with <frisson> ranchers. Because ranchers and ramblers are uneasy bed-fellows in the wilderness. But over a couple of beers and a bit of listening, it turns out that the livelihood, the patrimony, of ranchers depends on keeping the landscape undegraded and they've been achieving this for several generations. The real enemy are real-estate developers and the military-industrial complex.

Rare ould times

Different strokes

• Killinkere, Co Cavan 1954 - how do you spell Kilinkere emigration?
• The favoritest tree in Melbourne
• Daft as a Fosh
• Duet
• Islandwurst - Enhanced actual reality without silly looking headsets
• PPE alert: No steel-caps for Vikings
• Cozzie idea for next Hallowe'en
• Suitings for chaps
• With one hair-dryer leap, she was free
• how to write a song
• Days of sail - Vasa cannons
• Ungreed Finnish style
• Roti generosity, Sikh style in BC

endnote

Who shall be saved?

History is bunk . . . because it's written by the victors, or at least the survivors.  Irving Finkel MultBlobPrev, the eccentric face of the British Museum, acquired a boxful of old diaries many years ago because it was too distressing to see them committed to a dumpster.  Journal-keeping was not part of his culture growing up and perhaps his fascination with The Other - he speaks fluent Assyrian cuneiform - made him start reading. Finkel is a bit of a card with an understated sense of humor; reads supposed diary:
Mon: Got up, went to work, der dee der
Tue: Couldn't be bothered to cook anything; had a cold sandwich
Wed: Went out in the garden
Thu: Saw God . . .

His thesis is that, diaries are a special window on [subjective] truth because private. This privacy is an important plank in the save-the-diary platform - old diaries often have a lockable clasp or magical injunctions [R] on the outside or are written in code - the juicy bits anyway. Old diaries are a once-secret window into the ordinary lives of ordinary people for the time they were written. Not the same thing at all at all as the political diaries which get published in a lucrative deal when a government minister is caught with his fingers in the till and has to resign. Those diaries are self-conscious from the outset and are writing history in way that discards truth in favour of a deceptively glowing account of being in the right. Such a diary is seen as part of the perp's pension pot. Me, all through my schooldays, I kept a diary . . . for an average of 15 days each January. Because someone would give chaps like me a Lett's Schoolboy Diary [not dissimilar to the red volumes L from 60 years earlier] or a fountain-pen, or both, for Christmas. But I lacked the stamina - or indeed the interest - in recording the boring round of normal life: failing to do my music practice; inadequately preparing for Latin translation class; having my head flushed down the t'ilet by somebody bigger than me.

Finkel and fellow diary-geek Polly North established a permanent collection of discarded diaries in London in 2009 called The Great Diary Project. They will last a lot longer than the record of my daily life recorded as e-mails through the 1990s: indeed that archive has already gone forever. And the GDP is still actively soliciting new/old material: they'll take anything diary-like because they have sufficient humility to refuse the task of gate-keeping: Who knows what will seem important to researchers in 200 years time?

Here's a youtube comment to one of the above-cited videos: I am thrilled to have discovered the Great Diary Project as a home for a very special diary.  This covers the period 1810 to 1839 mostly in Somers Town, London, but also a trip to France and later to Yorkshire.  I now live in Oregon, USA, and have mailed the diary to where it will be appreciated.

oooo mask data

 God forgive me for sins in a past life but I found myself watching the schoolboy slaggin' that passes for government by democracy in the country next door. I guess I was suckered into it by, and I quote: "Apoplectic Speaker goes fully mental". This is not to hold up Dáil debates as the epitome of Ciceronian cut-and-thrust. And in any case, the debate is irrelevant here because I noted that St Jacob of Mogg [prev] disdained to wear a mask in this crowded and poorly ventilated room. Two snap shots:

Conservative benches:

Labour benches:

Tally [excluding Starmer and Johnson as actually speaking]:
Con masks v nomask = 27:22 = 55%
Lab masks v nomask = 27:0 = 100%

Pharmaaaaaargh

I am being battered by Pharma, Gerard Posner's [RR with wife Trisha the power behind the throne] 2020 800+ page hatchet-job on Big Farmer Pharma: the subtitle is Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America. which more or less says it all - S&S publisher's summary. Posner is a diligent investigative journalist who has written similarly chunky anti-conspiracy books on the JFK and MLK assassinations; so this sorry tale about price-fixing cartels, evidence fudging, bribery and patriarchy across the industry is a volte face in approach.

MegaPharm has seen the serial consolidation of thousands of competing pharmaceutical firms into a couple of handfuls of huge, rich, multinational conglomerates with turnover greater than most countries [there are 228 countries]. Ireland ranks 35th with a revenue of $93billion, but is disconcertingly pwned by the pharmaceutical industry with thousands of voter's wages dependent on pharma production lines across the country.

Pharma	Revenue	Country	Revenue	Rank
J&J	$56bn	Ukraine	$56bn	51
Pfizer	$52bn	Qatar	$52bn	53
Roche	$49bn	Chile	$51bn	54
Novartis	$47bn	Slovakia	$43bn	55
Merck	$47bn	Pakistan	$43bn	56
GSK	$44bn	Algeria	$41bn	57
Sanofi	$40bn	Peru	$35bn	58
AbbVie	$33bn	Kazakhst.	$30bn	59
Takeda	$31bn	Luxemb.	$28bn	63
上海PH	$27bn	Morocco	$27bn	64

GSK Started small in 1830 as Smith & Gilbert . . . & Kline [1870] & French & Richards [1891] & Nathan [1947] & Horlicks [1969] & Beecham [1990] & Glaxo Burroughs Wellcome [2000]. There are, of course, economies of scale: big facilities are more efficient than small. But those big facilities demand more sales so that the [capital intensive] production lines are never idle. MegaCorp can reduce the wage bill on the manufacturing side by off-shoring production to Indonesia or Ireland but the herds of "detail-men" coursing about the country talking to prescribers in their surgeries are mostly white, mostly men and all on delivery bonus. Their salaries, and those copy-editting in the advertising department, are part of the reason for the handsome retail mark-up over production costs.

The other reason is the claim that developing novel therapies is intrinsically expensive . . . because novel - so many bright ideas scattered on the floor of Reality Station: failed at one of the many stages where the creative spark is walked up the hill to a safe drug that actually works to alleviate suffering. Doesn't work in a Petri dish; doesn't work in mice; doesn't work women; does work in some women but kills a disconcerting number of other women. Not to worry about that though, if the FDA prevents sales in the USA, there is a vast market in South & Central America.

It didn't have to be like this. Posner's thesis is that the growth and development of the American Pharmaceutical industry went in a particular direction because of Arthur Sackler:  a charmer who had a way with words and a relentless entrepreneurialism: so many companies, so many wholly-owned subsidiaries so many inter-dependencies. Posner had to become a forensic accountant to shovel through a mountain of documentation to determine that Sackler (or his brothers or his wives or his cronies) was the beneficial owner a named $$$ company with a registered address somewhere in America or Europe. He realised that doctors were the key nexus in the distribution of drugs: if you could get your product front-and-centre with a GP then there were potentially hundreds of sales to the doctor's patients. Direct mailing of promotional copy, often masquerading as objective impartial science, helped as did free samples to try on vulnerable patients. Side-effects? Contra-indications? there was nothing to be gained by emphasising those! And the detail-men who appeared, all smiles, in person: they were trained more in empathy than in evidence. 

The competitive marketing which Sackler started and was taken up by everyone else in the industry - except The Losers - meant that far more scripts were filled than was strictly necessary. This worked serially for

• A for antibiotics - penicillin, tetracyclin, etc. each in turn developed anti-biotic resistant strains like MRSA and CRE. As we blame the Chinese for Covid-19, so we should blame the USA as the breeding ground of untreatable pathogens through the 1950s and 1960s
• 80% of US antibiotic pharma goes to farmers! 140,000 tonnes annually mostly as growth promoters and/or prophylaxis against overcrowding in feedlots
• Psychotropics: Valium, Librium, Adderall, Prozac, Xanax . . . 600 million scripts in the USA in 2018 costing $30 billion. That's only $50 a pop: huge numbers of sales means the price is low for each. Contrast with orphan diseases with only a few punters: Vimizim costs 10,000x more per dose.
• Oral contraceptives and hormone analogs. Diethylstilbestrol was widely prescribed for a variety of real and imaginary ailments. Alan Turing was chemically castrated with this estrogen-like chemical before he committed suicide. Estrogens have a wide variety of physiological functions beyond regulating the menstrual cycle and the side-effects of oral contraceptives indicate the extent of that empire: blood-clots, cancer, stroke. It didn't help that decades of women were give 10x more estrogen than was needed for preventing pregnancy.
• Orphan drugs - meant to help folks suffering from minority diseases - is being flim-flammed into an excuse to charge $whatever+50% because The feds will pick up the tab

The narrative proposed by Big Pharma is that only entrepreneurs can discover and develop new therapies and that profits from sales are ploughed back into the drug-discovery program. But actually, it's more profitable to develop a me-too drug as a slight variant of a successful product and fight that through the patent courts; rather than sit back and think real hard about a truly innovative therapy. I  recommend Pharma to anyone with a tendency to utter cries of rage and despair at the lives and treasure consumed on the altar of this Moloch. Don't come at this book for scientific explanations, however, as these are often sketchy: Posner went to Law School and didn't see the need to learn a PhD's worth of biochemistry under the cosh of publication deadlines.

Eponymous adzeAx

 You need the right tool for the job. If you're just futzing around in a corner of the haggard clearing nettles and "dirt", then anything with a steel edge will do: a scythe, a bill-hook, a shovel. But to work for hours, it's definitely worth investing in something fit for purpose and preferably fit for your build. Thus my well-used and much beloved scythe is adjustable for the spacing of the handles and the pitch of the blade. Someone with longer legs or shorter arms should really adjust the settings or use their own cutter. Like wise if you're five-feet-nothing you're better off sawing the last foot off the handle of your shovel. Apart from my scythe, the handiest implement in my tool-shed is my azada - a Spanish chopping spade. It's downward action is the best for tilling a potato patch or clearing a drain. You basically cannot buy one in Ireland, which is a loss.

Let's hear it for Ed Pulaski, the leader of a fire-crew in the Idaho Hills during the Big Blowup of 1910 when 1 million hectares of forest from Montana up into British Columbia went up in smoke. Fire is no respecter of an international border. A change of wind caused the blaze to surround Pulaski's crew of 45 foresters. But, knowing the local terrain from long experience, he led the crew to an abandonned mine adit and forced them to stay there lying on the ground until danger was past. 40 of the men survived many of them injured from burns and smoke inhalation [Microdocumentary by Steffen Riley]. 

We only know this story because in the following years Pulaski developed and pushed a particular design of chopper which came to be named eponymously: it's not an ax-adz or an adze/axe or even a Pulaski Ax it's a Pulaski. During the 1930s, this design spread out from the Northern Rockies all over North America with the appro of the US Forest Service. The front end is a (razor-sharp) axe for felling brush and brashing larger trunks. The other side of the shaft sports a heavier-duty curved blade for chopping roots and dirt, and generally depriving the fire of fuel. Seems to do the job. But really the basic design goes back 2,000 years to the Roman legionary's dolabra.

Talking of antient historie, I'll give a shout to Pat the Salt's favorite tool-about-the-site: the griffán or graff which is superficially identical to a Pulaski. It's a pick-axe with two blades: one at right-angles to the other: a wider grubbing blade backed by a shorter sharper blade that destroys tree roots. Much heavier than my azada so not imo useful unless you have biblically stony ground to break up . . . as last Saturday when we were planting trees.

Sunday Fourteen

1. Private Eye, satirical magazine, was founded 60 years ago. Current editor Ian Hislop reflects [R]
2. Olde times? Sinclair in the 1980s - minute 59 for local connexion.
3. Older times: vikings were a mixeDNA bag
4. Older runs: Hurricane Hawkins [105] runs 100m
5. Ked'la Gueule, Transhumance, Rondeau . . . avec paroles. The process. Practice your French Béarnaise
6. When I'm dead with Eric Bogle
7. Weaving the sea into submission with fascines - basketry alert
8. Nazaré waves - hydrogeology alert
9. Gravitational waves - Schiehallion alert
10. What's in a name? Transalert
11. Capucine Korenberg: MicroForensics of Hokusai's Wave [preview]
12. 24 pounder long guns: experimental history in Sweden
13. Citroën DS - historical engineering in France
14. Evergiven in dry-dock - inertia, origami in China