Giving Nasc a shout

A good few years ago, The Boy was dating a podiatrist, or was it a chiropodist?  a foot doctor, in any case.  Her friends became his friends and a lot of them had been through foot-school together.  I was most struck by the fact that one of them, who practised in West Dublin, gave one day a week of her time to work in homeless hostels sorting out their feet. I'm thankful to have the use of my legs . . .and the appended feet; and appreciate how important keeping them in good nick is; but cutting corns and designing insoles is a long way from my vocation.  I was therefore full of admiration for Christine: grim as middle class feet might look like without shoes, those of the long-term homeless must be far more daunting.  It was such a direct way of doing good within her means which was a little better than tithing her income as the best Christians are expected to do. A day pro bono is 20% gross but less after a rapacious government has taxed it down to size,

More recently we were down on the coast doing some care and maintenance on the property. We enlisted the help of some younger and fitter people: a Georgian from საქართველო in the Caucasus; a Portuguese from Venezuela and a couple of South Africans. Within 24 hours we heard that family members of two [independently] of these youngsters were in trouble with the Irish immigration service.  Both relatives had to enlist the service of Nasc in Cork City to help them stumble through a maze of red tape. In one case having received a letter based on false information drafted by an apparatchik of the Irish system. It required a trip to Dublin for the fonctionnaire to retract the letter.

Nasc - which means link in Irish - has been in business for 16 years next month.  What business?  Try their mission statement: "Enable migrants and ethnic minorities to access justice and human rights and work to achieve a just, inclusive and equal society".  Ireland is not a bad country, dissenting citizens are not disappeared at midnight or banged up in concentration camps.  Nevertheless we have just this week been found guilty by Comité européen des droits sociaux CEDS / European Committee of Social Rights ECSR of violating the human rights of our Travelling Community; by failing to provide adequately serviced or adequate in number halting sites for these people to carry on their traditional lives in our midst. Travellers are definitely 'our own' and the government, local and central, can't look after them; so it is a big ask to expect the government to look after the tide of people which has washed up on our shores these last 20 years.  Nasc wants to be, has to be, entirely independent of the government if it is to give unbiased information and advocacy to the immigrants whom it serves.  They get a certain amount of help from the voluntariat: people like Christine but who care more about dark people than they care about dark feet.  But there is, has to be, a core of paid staff to provide continuity and defined areas of expertise.  They get funds from, for example, the Cork Education and Training Board CETB and the HSE Lottery Funds but their biggest fan is Atlantic Philanthropies.

Chuck Feeney made his millions running Duty Free Shopper DFS starting in Hong Kong in 1950. That was only a few years since the first ever duty free shop in the world was opened in Shannon Airport in 1947.  Not a lot of people know that the Duty Free idea was dreamed up by the catering manager at Shannon, Dr Brendan O'Regan.  Chuck Feeney, an Irish-American from New Jersey was thus an early adopter and made a lot of money selling cheap booze and expensive perfume to people waiting to fly.  In 1982, having ring-fenced enough money for himself and his family to live comfortably, he started Atlantic Philanthropies AP to give his fortune away. He is famous for his modest life-style; quotably saying that a man can only wear one pair of shoes at the same time.  For many years he insisted that the recipients of his generosity should keep the identity of their benefactor a secret. In 1996, his remaining stake in DFS was bought by Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH), which brought another stream of loot into the give-away bins.  The following year, he grassed himself up as Chuck-of-the-generous-hand in a pre-emptive strike before his anonymity was blown in a court case.

AP doesn't hand out money to everyone. It has interests in particular parts of the World (.bm .ie ,au .vn .za .us) and particular causes: ageing, children [$1million to Barnadoes], health, reconciliation and human rights. Giving chunks of money to Irish Universities in the 1990s is credited by some for helping to kick the Celtic Tiger into life.  So AP has made a difference. They also stumped up more than $11million to Free The Gays during the Marriage Equality Campaign last year.  This shows that a dollar [or two] in Ireland can leverage a huge societal change.  In the third world that dollar can leverage more because a) they have further to go b) the dollar's buying power is enormously greater. AP has given something like $40m to University of the Western Cape UWC outside Cape Town. That's where Cedric "TCoffee" Notredame and I taught a course in 1999; the students were hungry to learn in a way quite different from our experience in Europe. UWC declared bankruptcy the following year! Chuck Feeney's cavalry saved the day. With such enthusiasm for education, you know that the things [buildings, professors, equipment] that money can buy won't go to waste.

The best thing about Atlantic Philanthropies is that it has been so effective in off-loading the money that it is going to be wound up in 2020.  It would be easy to set up a self-perpetuating trust that will live on after the death of the founder. Such an entity would require a board of trustees and fund-raisers and a CEO and CFO and a roomful of drones to deal with solicitations for money. Feeney has no time for that and, at 85, not much time left. He reckons it will be more fun to see the last of his fortune redistributed than keep an extensive staff in the style to which they could easily become accustomed. This concept of Giving While Living has inspired, among others, Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates.

Mais revenons a nos Nascs! Accepting, welcoming and integrating them foreign johnnies from 180 countries into Ireland is, and will be, a big challenge. AP recognises that Nasc plays a key role in this process by providing independent advice and advocacy. Supporting a small catalyst for change is the best way to invest in an inclusive multicultural future for the island.  It's not [only] about the pierogies and bhindi bhajis!

Informed consent

 I had a swipe at the New England Aquarium & Sy Montgomery for keeping an octopus in solitary confinement, which might seem a peculiar position to normal folk who see octopus as, say, food. I've written quite a lot about ethics over the last eight years; concluding that ethics is hard.  If you are complacent about your ethics it's because you haven't thought about it enough. There are few, in the Western world, who condone slavery but plenty who think that professional boxing (licenced and regulated battery for profit) is an acceptable sport. It's not: just count the concussions and contact sport encephalopathy.

I don't know about you, but IF we agree that all people have human rights - regardless of colour, age, gender, sexuality or wealth - THEN it's difficult to draw the line at the edge of Homo sapiens and say that chimps don't have rights. I'm not, here, talking about prevention of cruelty to animals which was promoted and sponsored by some Victorian eccentrics, like "Humanity Dick" Martin, because it was bad for the immortal soul . . . of the perpetrator. Like Jeremy "Utilitarian" Bentham: "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"  Let's rather think about the Right to be Let Alone for chimpanzees.

Actually, forget about chimpanzees, they are largely beyond our control in forests or zoos. Let's think about dogs [and cats]. What are their rights? Actually what are our rights to own a dog? If Genesis 1:26 "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" is sufficient then you really haven't thought about it enough. 

In Ireland you're meant to licence your dogs [at €20/yr!] but apart from that anyone can own a dog - no requirement to be tested or examined as to competence. Virtuous people truck off to the local animal rescue to recycle a dog that has been abandoned and/or abused by the previous owners. The better class of rescue & re-homing centres have standards equivalent to human child adoption agencies. But [unfixed] bitches gonna pup and if you want a dog you can get a dog - and I have never been asked to show a dog licence over hundreds of hours of walking dogs. So many dogs, so little oversight.

The better class of owners will do their best to train their dog, and good for them. But my feelings about dog training has been coloured by Sy Montgomery's tales of training her dogs to stop, go, come and catch frisbees. I did a year of psychology in college and I know that using operant conditioning you can make animals do all sorts of mad antics: catch frisbees, jump through [flaming?] hoops, walk on two legs and come when called. But the dog? In what sense does it consent to this contract? With chimpanzees, the sense of the meeting in modern ethics is that we should treat them as well as, and with the respect due to, people. When, in 2005, we wanted to extend an evolutionary study of the human immune system to look for/at the equivalent genes in chimpanzees we were (quite properly) told to bugger off with any ideas about a blood sample. Because the chimpanzees in the local zoo were illiterate and therefore couldn't read and sign the consent form. 

It's interesting that the word "grooming" has been borrowed from domestic animal care to apply to the mechanics of achieving gratification in another, seepy, repellent, world where the balance of power is really unequal. Consider whether dogs are being groomed to accept their enslaved state by treats, attention and walkies. Or la la la can't hear you - that will work also.

Me, I don't think it's cool of Captain von Trapp to dress his kids in sailor suits and come to a whistle. Ditto dogs. It's not so long ago, that powerful people in the USA could own slaves. The right of married Irish women to refuse sex with their husband was not vindicated in Ireland until 2002. I think the tide of history is running with me on this one. We've freed the gays; now to free the hounds.

Cherish

In the 00s, I spent a lot of time poring over the the text of Bunreacht na hÉireann / The Irish Constitution; especially Article 40 - Personal rights; Article 41 - The family; Article 42 - Education and children. My interest was pushed by our desire to educate our children at home a right which is, for complex 1930s Realpolitik reasons to do with the protestant middle class, specifically allowed by Article 42.

In my head, at such times, is the aspirational phrase  "cherish all the children of the nation equally" even those who are, in the widest sense of the word, different. The Blob has been hot-and-bothered about unequal treatment in cases of medical misadventure; the vulnerable; orphan drugs for rare diseases; the imprisoned. I'm not the only one who recognises the power of this ideal. Cherish was founded in 1972 to advocate for lone parents and their, then "illegitimate", children.

In a recent episode of hot-and-bothered, I searched the constitution for cherish and came up almost empty. Only mention is Article 2 "Furthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage" which is about Chicago policemen and the diaspora rather than small citizens in diapers.

Turns out the cherish phrase is from a much shorter, more shouty, earlier document The 1916 Proclamation:

The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally . . .

These children, no more than De Valera's Article 2 children, are not small humans below the voting age; they are rather mythic children which have sprung from the loins of Cathleen ni Houlihan or even Caitlín Ní Uallacháin the personification of Ireland. A bit like Athena being abstracted, fully formed and in armour for the fray, from the head of Zeus. The Proclamation Children are grown-arsed adults being required to wave the flag and ready to die on the barricades. Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom . . . supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe . . . and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good. 

Full disclosure: the picture [L] is not Caitlín but rather the Madonna by Margarito d'Arrezzo; the oldest painting in the care of the National Gallery in London and recently restored to something nearer the artist's original intention.

My point is that for human rights, it's a cop out to refer to precedent or defer to authority. We have to fight for these rights for ourselves against a penny-pinching and complacent bureaucracy. But more important we have to fight for the rights of the dispossessed because, by definition, the ability to advocate for themselves in curtailed. To the barricades! To the picket lines!

Tintin Tutu

Q. What do Tutu and Tintin have in common?
A. Tibet.
Which makes it seem like a tennis-elbow-foot game that is heavy on alliteration. I'm referring to a weird connexion between the cartoon character and the South African bishop in the mind of the Dalai Lama and/or his government in exile.  Twenty years ago, they shared a Light of Truth Award which is given personally by the Dalai Lama to the recipient.  It's not like a Nobel prize which comes with a gold medal and a stonking amount of folding money.  Rather, as it says on the tin, the prize is a humble butter-lamp, such as you might have guttering in front of a statue of the Buddha in a darkened shrine in the Himalayas: it is purely symbolic. And it is given to someone whose actions have illuminated the plight of the Tibetans with respect to democratic freedoms and human rights. Other winners have been Heinrich Harrar, Lewis Thomas, Richard Gere and Václav Havel. The connecting theme seems to be any writer or celebrity who has mentioned Tibet in a favorable light. The Hergé Foundation got its lamp because of Tintin in Tibet:
Now I'm a fan of the Dalai Lama, I think he has a sense of humor [and he knows when material is not original] and a definite and distinctive presence which he's used to promote a vision of happiness and spiritual meaning far beyond the borders of his inaccessible country. And he's made an effort to bridge the gap between the non-overlapping magisteria of religion and science.  He was, for example, invited to address the 2005 meeting of the (US) Society for Neuroscience.

But it needs a pinch of salt to hear the once upon a leader of a medieval theocracy, which maintained its inequable power into the middle of the 20th century, take the high ground on discussion of human rights and democracy.  I'm not saying that Red China has dealt the Tibetan people a better hand of cards, but I can also see why young native Tibetans might have been tempted to take a revolutionary path given the political situation immediately before the invasion of the Red Army and the mass immigration of Han Chinese into Tibet.  It's also fashionable. with 20/20 hindsight to give Tintin's creator Hergé a good drubbing for being racist and anti-semitic; as well as condemning him for surviving and working in Nazi occupied Belgium.  But casual anti-semitism and thinking in racial stereotypes was completely part of the furniture in the 1930s and 1940s: it was effectively invisible and unheard at the time. The anti-semitic jibe has a damned if you do damned if you don't air to me. Rastapopolous, despite the Greek name and Hergé's insistence that his stage villain was Italian, is clearly Jewish because of his nose. If you expect your team to be slighted, then it's as easy to take offense as the dueling hidalgos of the Spanish tercios who felt their honour to be constantly impugned. It's much easier to point the finger at the sins of others than to identify your own unconsidrred certainties. Alan Moore has a defense in a parallel attack about his cartoon depictions. If you think you would have behaved and thought any differently in Brussels in 1942, you are a liar or a fool or a saint and there are very few of the latter walking this earth.

Cut once, suffer much

As regular readers of The Blob know, I teach Human Physiology in The Institute. My only qualification for taking on this task is that I have a body and that I have a boundless interest in finding out how it ticks. All sorts of things, which I took for granted four years ago, I now appreciate as marvels of engineering.  We encounter bone when two heads clunk together on the sports field; or in the middle of a Sunday leg-of-lamb; or as part of a fossil dinosaur - all of these bring to mind mineral or rock rather than tissue. But that would be a false conclusion because bone, while solid, is in a constant state of turn-over, energy consumption and metabolism; why else would it be laced with blood capillaries? Embryonic development sees a cartilaginous matrix outlining the skeleton becoming progressively mineralised as calcium phosphate is laid down to give the neo-bone better engineering properties: harder, less bendy, less likely to fracture under stress. The rate and position of this 'ossification' is determined partly by genetics and partly by the environment: the more it is used the stronger it gets, just like muscles. And vice-versa: a year of weightlessness in the Space-station or a long-term spell in a hospital bed will see significant loss of bone density.

One of the most wonderful examples of bone remodelling is in the symphysis pubis [L at the 'bottom'] during labour. Like many systems shaped by evolution, the human skeleton is a kludge: trying to optimise a number of vital attributes even when they are competing against each other. In our case, over the last couple of million years we have a) started to walk upright on two legs so we can see over the long grass and carry things with our hands and b) acquired an enormous head: all the better to write The Blob with.  The pelvis has required significant remodelling to accommodate these two competing interests. For best traction in the long run after a dying antelope, we need the pelvis as a solid ring connecting both femurs and providing solid attachment for muscles. To deliver the outsize head of a full term baby [cartooned L as a fat red oval], we'd like some flexibility 'down there'. Amazingly most women achieve this: when it matters the very rigid cartilaginous connexion between the two pubic bones softens up as the constituent protein collagen is partly replaced by a protein called [what it says on the tin!] elastin. That makes a little more space, a little more give, and a marginally easier birth. It is driven by the same changes in hormonal flux that are dilating the cervix and contracting the uterus. I know two women who, after delivery, were unable to restore the status quo ante and retained the flexi-pelvis for months afterwards: it was, and is, for them on a spectrum between uncomfortable and bloody painful.  But for most women that's the way to achieve the best good enough solution: by a temporary change and then back to 'normal'. Engineering - it's often by the seat of the pants: what works sufficiently well is what we get to use.
Warning!

What follows is a story of pain and outrage and 

not for the faint of heart; I write through tears.

For at least 3 decades, hundreds of women in Ireland were subjected to a procedure to speed the process of birth. In particular is was seen as a more acceptable alternative to Caesarian section in cases where the pelvis was narrower than 'normal'. In some cases, the Ob&Gyn man explicitly invoked John 16:21 "A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world." In other words, so long as a fit and healthy baby [preferably a boy] was delivered, any amount of pain and indignity was what had been ordained. It became fashionable to do a 'symphysiotomy' [cutting through the symphysis pubis with surgical shears or a special circular saw] in the labour ward. There is no way for the pelvis to return to running&jumping mode after birth if it has been cut in half by a patriarchal goon in surgical scrubs. It was also intrinsically dangerous for the baby whose head was precious close to the cutting blade. Symphysiotomy fell out of fashion sometime in the early 1980s and the 1,500 women who were "Survivors of Symphysiotomy" SoS suffered in silence: too embarrassed to talk about things 'down there'; too meek to get angry; to isolated to seek help.

In 1999, in the course of her PhD research into the relationship between the catholic church and the medical profession in Ireland, Jacqueline Morrissey turned up too many cases of the invasive intervention to be credible as "nothing to see here, move along quietly". The current take on the debacle is that repeated caesarian section was seen as leading to a recommendation of sterilisation which was repugnant to the catholic mores of the time. The far more radical symphysiotomy was believed to permanently open up the birth canal, so that women could continue to have babies ad maiorem dei gloriam.  Dr Morrissey's finding percolated out to the media and hundreds of disabled women realised that they were not alone but had been subjected to a mass experiment in dubious birthing practice without their consent, let alone with informed consent.  There is a suggestion that 'experimental' symphysiotomy was carried out in Ireland to perfect the technique for the Third World where C-sections were not generally safe or available.  An early symphysiotomy could make subsequent births easier and less likely to indicate a[n unavailable] C-section.  Whatever the validity of this position, it wholly down-played the subsequent and continued pain and discomfort of the mother.

After the scale of the problem surfaced, there was a predictable closing of the ranks by the Health Service and the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (IOG). If you couldn't supply paper-work in the form of hospital records [from, say, 1952!] then your claim was either thrown out or subjected to hoop-jumping scrutiny that tended to exclude equivocal cases. The fall-back position was that symphysiotomy was normal best practice at the time. That was rejected by anyone who took the trouble to look at the data from Sweden or the UK or anywhere else but New Guinea or the Congo, where special conditions applied. A redress scheme was reluctantly instituted in which women who had unequivocal proof of the intervention could claim compo. Pay-outs of €50,000, €100,000 or €150,000 were made, mostly at the lower end of the wholly arbitrary scale. You can see why a cash-strapped exchequer would want to limit access to the funds: 1,500 women x €50,000 is €75million! Why, that's [slightly] more than we pay each year to keep our 200 haemophiliacs in working order. The women were also expected to indemnify the government from any subsequent legal action if they 'took the soup' and pocketed to €50k. Such muzzle clauses are repugnant to natural justice but also to the UN Commission for Human Rights. The Redress Scheme stopped entertaining applications at the end of 2014. Earlier this year, they started to wind-up its affairs and announced that it would shred their accumulated symphysiotomy records this weekend unless individual SoS women came to collect their papers in person from Hawkins House in Dublin city-centre.  SoS and others are objecting to this 'extinction shredding is forever' action and are trying to put a stay on its implementation.

The shredding sounds like further evidence of cover-up and obfuscation by The Man . . . until you hear that the Redress Scheme records are copies of the original files held by the HSE. Nevertheless, here is a valuable consolidated record of a sorry story in the history of modern Ireland that would be useful for research and investigation by historians, statisticians, epidemiologists, human-rights activists. Therein lies the rub: who should/will get access to these highly personal and emotive records?  You've got to have some sympathy for The Patriarchy: damned if they gather and store personal data for no clearly defined reason and damned if they destroy personal information lest it be misused by Johnny Whoever down the line.

Magna Carta

 . . . a funny name for a girl. I got myself  caught in a vortex of covidiotology and almost went under. But I Bobbed up and lived to tell the tale. From the public discourse, you'd think that me-exceptionalism is a symptom of Covid-19 but that's just ascertainment bias. All but the saintliest of us think that "I'm just popping in" allows us to park in the disabled parking spot (it's always empty, innit?). But we'd have the grace to be mortified if we found someone unloading a wheelchair in the roadway when we just popped out. 

A peculiar coven of scofflaws has arisen in England who are a) not about to be stopped going about their business by an invisible virus b) are familiar enough with medieval Latin to cherry-pick a clause from The Magna Carta to assert their rights over any rules, regulations and laws which it suits them not to obey. Here's the owner of a softplay area in Liverpool who is protecting his clients [and their grandparents] from SARS-CoV-2 with a magic text pinned to the door. That text is from Clause LXI which sets out the mode of redress if King John failed to adhere to the strictures laid upon him by Clauses I through LX. I believe we could all benefit from sight of Clause LXI so we know of what we treat:

Cum autem pro Deo, et ad emendacionem regni nostri, et ad melius sopiendum discordiam inter nos et barones nostros ortam, hec omnia predicta concesserimus, volentes ea integra et firma stabilitate (in perpetuum) gaudere, facimus et concedimus eis securitatem subscriptam;

videlicet quod barones eligant viginti quinque barones de regno quos voluerint, qui debeant pro totis viribus suis observare, tenere, et facere observari, pacem et libertates quas cis concessimus, et hac presenti carta nostra confirmavimus; ita scilicet quod, si nos, vel justiciarius noster, vel ballivi nostri, vel aliquis de ministris nostris, in aliquo erga aliquem deliquerimus, vel aliquem articulorum pacis aut securitatis transgressi fuerimus, et delictum ostensum fuerit quatuor baronibus de predictis viginti quinque baronibus, illi quatuor barones accedant ad nos vel ad justiciarium nostrum, si fuerimus extra regnum, proponentes nobis excessum, petent ut excessum illum sine dilacione faciamus emendari.

Et si nos excessum non emendaverimus, vel, si fuerimus extra regnum, justiciarius noster non emendaverit infra tempus quadraginta dierum computandum a tempore quo monstratum fuerit nobis vel justiciario nostro, si extra regnum fuerimus, predicti quatuor barones referant causam illam ad residuos de illis viginti quinque baronibus, et illi viginti quinque barones cum communa tocius terre distringent et gravabunt nos modis omnibus quibus poterunt, scilicet per capcionem castrorum, terrarum, possessionum et aliis modis quibus poterunt, donec fuerit emendatum secundum arbitrium eorum, salva persona nostra et regine nostre et liberorum nostrorum; et cum fuerit emendatum intendent nobis sicut prius fecerunt.

Et quicumque voluerit de terra juret quod ad predicta omnia exequenda parebit mandatis predictorum viginti quinque baronum, et quod gravabit nos pro posse suo cum ipsis, et nos publice et libere damus licenciam jurandi cuilibet qui jurare voluerit, et nulli umquam jurare prohibebimus. Omnes autem illos de terra qui per se et sponte sua noluerint jurare viginti quinque baronibus de distringendo et gravando nos cum eis, faciemus jurare eosdem de mandato nostro sicut predictum est.

Et si aliquis de viginti quinque baronibus decesserit, vel a terra recesserit, vel aliquo alio modo impeditus fuerit, quominus ista predicta possent exequi, qui residui fuerint de predictis viginti quinque baronibus eligant alium loco ipsius, pro arbitrio suo, qui simili modo erit juratus quo et ceteri. In omnibus autem que istis viginti quinque baronibus committuntur exequenda, si forte ipsi viginti quinque presentes fuerint, et inter se super re aliqua discordaverint, vel aliqui ex eis summoniti nolint vel nequeant interesse, ratum habeatur et firmum quod major pars eorum qui presentes fuerint providerit vel preceperit ac si omnes viginti quinque in hoc consensissent; et predicti viginti quinque jurent quod omnia antedicta fideliter observabunt, et pro toto posse suo facient observari.

Et nos nichil impetrabimus ab aliquo, per nos nec per alium, per quod aliqua istarum concessionum et libertatum revocetur vel minuatur; et, si aliquid tale impetratum fuerit, irritum sit et inane et numquam eo utemur per nos nec per alium.

Wusses without a classical education can find a modern English translation. The base-line is that the rights which are transgressed by regal malfeasance will be vindicated by 25 barons of the country. But actually the message is hidden in plain sight in lines 3-6 of the Latin. I edit to make this clear

facimus et concedimus  de regno quos 
   I       can            do
voluerint,  totis viribus suis observare, tenere
vot            I            vont

Similar appeal used in Australia invoking Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One tweet: "Don't mistake inconvenience for oppression". Because successful politics is the art of the possible and you had better choose the hill on which you are prepared to die. Rohin Francis [on vaccines], a cardiologist from London and my current favorite health commentator, is pushing Dunning-Kruger single malt: for the man who has everything but doubt.  

But science is hard: policy is hard: fairness, even if an aspiration, is hard; integrating noisy data and drawing correct conclusions is hard. Clipping a snippet off the internet and laminating it is a cinch. But really, would you use that sheet of paper to stop a bullet? Nope? Same thing with the virus. And here's Eleanor Janega, a qualified, articulate medieval historian in why you're deluded to put your trust in a charter which has long since been formally repealed and which cobferred zero rights upon proles like you and me and Mr Softplay. And a legal-eagle view. All this triggered by MeFi post with added commentary.

Thou shalt not . . .

. . . take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. Exodus ch20v7

Hmmm that's interesting: there was only One God for the writers of The Bible and back in those intolerant exclusive times, it was probably okay to take the name of the other chap's god in vain. It's also rather peculiar archaic language that could do with defining:

take in vain (v.): use a name, such as God, without proper respect. abuse, misuse, pervert - change the inherent purpose or function of something. [freedictionary]. That's the closest I can come to blasphemy in the Ten Commandments.  I'm on blastdamny because I touched on it in my film review on Sunday and it must have come up in my 'mind' because of the Invisible Referendum on the subject later this month. It is invisible because we have a presidential election same day, same place..

The Referendum Commission does some defining of terms also, so we know what we're voting for on 26th October 2018. Quoting the Defamation Act of 2009:

. . . the Constitution says that the publication or utterance of something blasphemous must be a criminal offence. Publication generally means a statement in written or permanent form. Utterance generally means a spoken word or statement. The Constitution does not itself define blasphemy. 

The legal definition of blasphemy is contained in the Defamation Act 2009. That Act says that a person publishes or utters something blasphemous if they: 

• publish or say something that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and
• intend to cause that outrage.

Not so simple now where things written disappear [think snapchat] and the spoken word may be captured for all time lodged in The Cloud. Not to mention all the possibilities for seamlessly altering the record with electronic whizzery. The thing about free speech is that it allows people to utter the unthinkable and so provides an opportunity to question the unconsidered certainties of our lives and the society we live in.

• In my lifetime, it was widely believed that it was A Good Thing for adults to hit children (with a stick). [prev]
• Right now it is legal for men and women to get into a ring and thump each other as a spectator sport. [prev]
• In my lifetime, in Ireland, birth certificates of those born out of wedlock were counterstamped "Illegitimate". By 1975, when The Boy was born, it was illegal to put my name in under "Father" and I was relegated to another distant box: Witness: Bob Scientist (father). 
• In my lifetime, black kids in USA were educated in separate schools, had separate water-fountains and had to move to the back of the bus. 
• In my lifetime, it was okay to smoke in the back of the bus, in pubs and in designated areas of aeroplanes. [prev]
• Right now, it's okay to bang families up in a single room in a hotel because we value property rights above human rights. [prev]
• Right now, children are coming to school without breakfast [prev]
• Right now, it's impossible to get timely speech therapy if you have no money. That's something which is "useless if delayed".
• Right now, it's very difficult to get effective support or treatment for any mental health issue - jaysus even if you have money it's hard [prev] "useless if delayed"
• Right now, the Rehab Hospitals of Ireland are so poorly resourced that is vanishingly unlikely to get timely attention after traumatic injury. UNtimely attention is largely a waste of money and time and hope. "useless if delayed"
• Right now, sexual violence is meted out on women (in and out of marriage; in and out of doors) every day and only a minority of these outrages are reported and a vanishingly small proportion are prosecuted.

But right now, in Ireland it is an offense to poke fun at the other chap's religious beliefs, which beliefs are privileged above his actions. My gaffer taught me a simple set of ethical values: "My rights end where your nose begins". That means that you and me both AND the other feller need to be let alone to get on with our own lives without being told how to behave by The Man. If we are offended by the other chaps assertions then it is up to us to muster better arguments rather than applying duct-tape to his gob and singing la la la can't hear you. Things hidden tend to fester and then to smell: bringing them into the open is first step to bringing people to account. For the whole litany above, it requires us - you and me - to be brought to account for tolerating it in the home [or hotel!] next door.

Marriage referendum wrap

It may seem like a distant memory but the resounding, if far from unanimous, Yes in the Marriage equality Referendum is only last week.  Before we move on to free other dispossessed groups in our society, I'd like to share a few images and ideas in case you missed them. I am partial to a touch of irony and I reckon that satire is one of the most powerful forces in a free political society. Satirical irony is about the only vehicle for public dissent in un-free societies: it depends on The Man being too pompous and dense to get the joke. One of the key posters in the No campaign was a pious nonsense about what children deserve [Top L] as if a happy family is joined at the lip. They might reflect on Ecclesiastes ch10v16 "Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child". The actual family whose idealised image was used by the No-people, turned out to be decisively Yes-people and had a new image [Top R] generated in the same colours as the original.  The message is opposite and the relationship looks healthier - they are all looking in the same direction and the child is getting only 1/3 of the attention. [Below L] is another take on the colour-scheme, privileging food and love above the precise quota of the adults in the household: "children deserve a decent meal and loving parents: gay or straight" And you have to love the angry multilayer of the last message [Below R]: you can't think of a better reason to vote No than that you have no time for Elton John. It's the sort of logic that comes down the hot-line from heaven to announce that God says No. Here is a useful archive of election literature on the Mar-Ref which also hosts a backlog from Ireland's previous trots into democracy.
There was a huge response from the Irish diaspora, with people loading themselves on trains, planes and boats to come home to vote because they wanted to be part of a movement. It was caught and displayed on a twitter trendmap illustrating the number of people on their way home. I can't get a figure on the actual numbers of vote-eligible returnees that is higher than 60,000, about the same as the number of new voters like Dau.II on the supplemental register.  Those groups together wouldn't have made a difference to the result, but it makes a fine story about what people will do for issues they care about. And I think a great many people were affected [using the word unmanned in this context is a little edgy?] by the door-step campaign of Ross Golden-Bannon so that no child, no teen, would have to go through the misery he experienced growing up gay in Ould Ireland. Read it if you haven't done so already - it is painful but redemptive.

That same Dau.II will be leaving her teenage years behind this September two years after leaving home to become a tax-paying, financially independent citizen working in the catering trade.  She got herself on the register, got all her pals on the register and got her ass down to City Hall on Friday at 0700hrs to vote before opening up the restaurant for first shift.  On the way across town to work, she encountered a group of three Yes campaigners handing out leaflets and urging folks to vote Yes. Dau.II pointed to her Tá badge and said "I gave already".  They were just delighted [if tears weren't shed at least lips trembled] to see their hopes and hard work canvassing in the drizzle for weeks vindicated by this democratic first-timer carrying a sunnier and warmer future in her hands so early in the day.  When she told me this story I said "You must have made their day", but she replied "The Day made our day".

The Beloved is still wearing her Tá and her Yes badge and was very taken with the cartoon by Annie West [L] of the diaspora coming home to vote. Then she heard that it was available in a limited edition, with the proceeds going to support SpunOut, a group with a brief to listen to and empower the 16-25 youth.  I've tribbed SpunOut before for their direct and accessible approach to talking about sexually-transmitted diseases. ANNyway, TB ordered up a copy of the print and it arrived on Thursday last with a limited edition authentication number of 51/1,201,606.  They are clearly anticipating that all the Yes voters will want a copy!

In 1990, in the wake of Italia '90, Ireland elected their first ever female President, Mary Robinson, who was not only a woman but also a well-known civil rights activist who had campaigned for birth-control and defended David Norris in the European Court of Human Rights in an action that led to the decriminalisation of homosexual acts. After 7 years of that Mary, the people elected Mary McAleese, another Constitutional lawyer who was also qualified in Canon Law, and who goes along with the legalistic details of church doctrine to be clearly against abortion and divorce. But bucking the temptation to pop her into the Catholic Right bin, it turns out that she is a founder member of the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform. Here she talks, briefly, about her position on Marriage Equality - driven by her long embrace of gay people and their rights . . . but also by the fact that her son came out at the age of 21 after a decade of painful soul-searching.  Here she is talking at greater length to the BLT youth group BelongTo. And for balance, here is Breda O'Brien, [home-educator, catholic apologist, Panti-basher, Irish Times columnist and prominent talking head for the No campaign] pointing out that to have McAleese speaking out on either side of a Constitutional Referendum was, if not a constitutional crisis, at least counter to convention among ex-Presidents. Fairy nuff, but then she segues seamlessly into her comfort zone of casting up lurid and irrelevant images about the consequences of marriage equality for surrogacy and the future [probably bad] of gay children raised without a mother AND a father. Of all the images cast up by marriage equality, we now have to find head-room for an Irish girl lost in Copenhagen looking for a Danish sperm-donor to complete her family - thanks a bunch, Breda, but that's just weird.

This is standard propaganda from her Rückschrittlichgruppe the Iona Institute. They have a handy cartoon to help simple ordinary people get to grips with the key issues. This was mercilessly . . . pilloried by Tara Flynn. I dunno, mate, but if having a mother is so important for child development (another theme in the Noes heads) how much better to have two mums?!
It turns out that, in the end, even Hitler voted Yes.

Anyway, it's all over - even the post-result shouting "fix!" has died down - a week has passed and the sky hasn't fallen.

Non-invasive

Abdominal surgery can be dangerous even in modern times under a well-practiced surgeon. Quite apart from leaving a sponge or a clamp behind when they sew up, nobody can supervise the healing of the internal sutures.  If you're unlucky, you can get adhesions in the wrong places as the tissue remodels across the gap. So when Pat the Salt went all yellow on his 90th birthday 2.5 years ago, we were concerned that the removal of the gall stones blocking his common pancreatic duct would lead to trouble. The immune / inflammatory /healing system [it's essentially the same machine] tends to run down and get crotchety in old chaps like Pat and me. We were delighted, therefore, when the problem could be solved with a tube down his gullet and a brief pulse of ultra-sound to fragment the stones. At least, even if surgery was indicated, Pat could have signed an informed consent form having been apprised of the risks and potential benefits.

About 15 years ago, I was discovering and characterising immune genes while working in St Vincent's Hospital. The human genome was available and we were trawling through the chromosomal sequences looking for anti-microbial peptides. As evolutionary biologists, we asked whether these genes and their protein products might be present in chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, our nearest relative. It turned out that a big cheese in Dublin Zoo was the son of our family lawyer and I approached him as a fellow member of the Protestant Mafia. "Next time you take a blood sample from one of the chimps, can we have 1ml to help push the frontiers of science?". Phlebotomists always take 10ml from sufficiently large animals [less for mice!] and there's always some to spare after the vet has carried out all the necessary tests. Well really, you would have thought I'd proposed to vivisect his daughter! We certainly could not have any blood for any purpose except to service the well-being of the bled chimp. The point being that our primate relatives cannot do informed consent, but effectively deserve the same consideration as humans, which rights are vindicated by the appropriate ethics committee. IF we filled in the appropriate forms, submitted an application, secured approval from StVs Ethics Committee and the Zoo's Ethics Committee then maybe we could get a chimpanzee turd to analyse. With PCR, and the fact that intestinal epithelial cells are continually being shed into the fecal matter, that would have been enough for our purposes. But the required bureaucracy put a stop to our gallop and we drifted off to chase down easier prey on the prairies of science.

These reflections on the recent past came to mind because of a paper published this year by Dan Bradley's [prev as Samaritan] group in TCD. They went back 1000 years to analyze the provenance of The York Gospels [R title page], a beautiful and exceeding rare Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscript. Over the last 20 years, Bradley has built up an expertise in Ancient DNA - making sense of the signal that remains after the DNA of the originally living thing has degraded to wisps and fragments. They have to be super careful to avoid modern contamination because there is more, and better preserved, human DNA on a pair of unwashed hands than in a whole neolithic femur. Needless to say, librarians, archivists and curators have been unwilling to let scientists go at their inventory with a hole-punch . . . no matter what the scientific question. What they were prepared to do was allow Bradley's people to have [part of] the sweepings from a restoration project where the pages had been cleaned up with judicious use of a rubber eraser. The pages of the Gospels were made of parchment (cleaned, cured artiodactyl skins) which is pretty robust but even so, enough sheep and goat cells were present in the rubbings for Bradley to identify the species. Most of the pages were calf Bos taurus but some of them, maybe later infills for missing or damaged pages, were sheep Ovis aries skin. The original scientific paper [1Mb PDF] with details of methods and results. One of those details is the phrase ". . .large volumes of eraser waste (150-250μl)" that's about equivalent to the eraser on top of your pencil, which is a bucketful in nanotech speak.

Bradley and Co have to be circumspect and cautious in their reading of the data but The Blob can throw some of that caution to the wind. One of the sampled pages had sufficient material of sufficient quality to call the breed of cow which contributed it: it looks N European / Norwegian Red / Holstein-Friesan. [Norwegian Blue is a sort of parrot] Two other pages may fall outside that range, which may suggest a provenance from much further afield. That provokes an intriguing image of trading animal skins across the continent in the Dark Ages, like the stone axe unearthed near Canterbury with provenance from the Apennines in Italy [bloboprev].  They also found differences in the amount of human contamination of the artiodactyl traces. This is supposed to be either from more or less handling / reading on pages or more recent handling during restoration.

If you can find human DNA on the folios, you can also find traces of the human microbiome if you look for them. That's a whole other level of complexity because we are all toting about maybe 10,000 different species of bacteria and each one will have a characteristic DNA signature. The most informative way of approaching these data is a multivariate statistical analysis, comparing the Gospel traces with the known human microflora. We know that our different crevices and orifices harbour quite different communities. The bugs on the York pages fall decisively in the midst of the bacteria which inhabit our noses and skin and quite different from oral or fecal samples. This suggests that medieval scribes and readers sneezed a good bit but that they washed their hands between bathroom and lectern. Good thing too, it's The Gospel after all. The Muslim attitude to hand-washing has always been more proscriptive,

Leeson Street madelaine

Last year, as this year, I mentored a couple of students in the MSc in Pharmeceutical Regulatory Affairs  aka PharmRegs. I was unable to shake one of last year's crop loose and we are still in contact as I watch his pilgrim's progress through the hostile environment of post Twenty-Seventh Amendment of the Constitution which limited the rights to citizenship-by-birth in Ireland. It's not super-hostile in a BLM manner but it's always harder in Ireland for those who have the best tan. Anyway DrV has been working in a Community Pharmacy in South suburban Dublin since the beginning of lockdown. It's been a logistical nightmare because he's been unwilling to let go the bed in the house he shares with a couple of Indian pals in Graigcullen Co.Boondocks. Digs near his work and then a long ragged journey on public transport when he had a few days off work for normal human relations with normal human beings . . . and plenty of dhal.

He sent me a text last week to say that he'd landed a new gaff in Upper XX Leeson Street at the ropier end of salubrious Dublin 4 - where all the embassies are. Nice for him but a vortex to me because, for about 8 months in 1977-1978, we lived in the same house! Not the whole house, mind for either party. DrV has brought the mountain to his Mohammed by persuading his two pals from Tamil Nadu to give up the ould country house and shift gear into the turmoil of the city. They have a whole floor, two double bedrooms kitch bath liv etc.  

In 1977 we inherited a single room 4.5 x 5.0 m with a big Georgian window looking out over the street. I say 'inherited' because these flats and bedsits were valuable assets and you'd be sure to let your network know if you were off the Philadelphia or Dortmund to earn a crust. Bedsits are now illegal in Ireland because the are though to constitute an affront to human dignity and the Rights of Man. But I lived a succession of these private spaces when I was a student and was as happy there as I am now with our mighty farrrm of land where you can't hear, let alone smell the neighbours. We, at that time, were Herself, myself and The Boy, who turned 2 in that room. It was a bit cramped but sure beat a Citroen Dyane which we'd called home for the whole of Summer 1977. 

We still had the car when we lived in Leeson Street and would beetle off to New Ross some weekends to visit The Beloved's family. I'd be sure to bring home a trunk full of fire-wood to send up the chimney of the open fire-place with which the room was heated. In those days you'd be much more likely to throw on a gansey than throw the switch on the central heating. I'd also slope off along the adjacent Grand Canal after dark and scavenge fallen branches for 'sticks' and kindling. A little triangle of park at Wilton Place had particularly rich pickings. Years later the headquarters of Science Foundation Ireland looked out over that park, little appreciating how hard it was to keep scientists warm in Ireland before SFI started to lurry cash into the enterprise.

As well as free sticks, I also cruised about looking for bits of timber. It was probably there that I made an exceedingly uncomfortable arm-chair from a tea-chest. And definitely there that I built a timber platform bed in one corner of our home. The slightly louche brother of a friend presented us with a 2.4 x 1.2 m sheet of laminated MDF for the lid of the platform. It was super-smooth and washable in stark contrast to the other parts of the structure: I had a saw and a hammer but no plane. Underneath, I made a micro-bed for The Boy and a desk for writing. We definitely didn't advertise these structural changes when the landlord came to collect the rent on Fridays. But I still think we improved the utility of the space. The Beloved's sister didn't object when we set off for Foreign in June 1978 and she inherited the gaff on Leeson Street.

Binder twine

It's not going to happen but it's pleasant to imagine Rory Stewart as Prime Minister across the water. I written about him, and his not a complete waste of trees book before. He's a patrician and a landed-gent and the MP for Penrith and the Borrrders since 2010. On Mayday this year he was appointed to the Theresa May cabinet after another resignation as Secretary of State for International Development. He has previously held the Prisons and Africa portfolios. Those are pretty dark and probably thankless areas to manage but he's not afraid of 'difficult' having walked alone (except for the dog) in midwinter across a chunk of Afghanistan in 2002. From that I take it that he's happy in his own skin (and in his own boots) and has reserves of self-reliance. A small-small example of this competence is the fact that he delivered his own firstborn in the bathroom at home, when things came on a little too quickly. He's shown above taking tea and talking to camera in a BBC documentary about his history of Afgho. Here's a shorter talk about his long walk. And finally is his Desert Island Discs gig.

He's been a diplomat in Indonesia (East Timor times) and Montenegro (Kosovo [prev] times) and Iraq. After hanging up his Foreign Office pinstripes, he taught Human Rights for several years in Harvard. From there he returned home in the belief that he could make a difference in his own country as he had endeavoured to do in some of the most benighted, conflicted regions of the world. The UK doesn't yet have roaming gangs of AK47-wielding hoods tooling around the country in jeeps, but the country is definitely conflicted over Brexit. Here's Stewart trying to make sense of the Brexit situation with James O'Brien. And also lost as to how to solve the conundrums of 21stC society: how to square the circles of fairness, ambition, rights, responsibilities and freedom. My impression is that the other Eton-and-Oxford [k]nobs have lived a very constrained and sheltered life, the only people outside their own circle with whom they have had a conversation is the head gardener.  Stewart au contraire has talked long and hard, in Farsi and Serbo-Croat, under conditions where getting the wrong sense of what he heard could mean that people died. A man who can make valuable diplomatic contributions in the Balkans might be able to thrash out an agreement between the Centre-Left and Centre-Right of British politics.

To be successful in politics you've got to know your shit and think on your feet. Here's Stewart, in a ten minute journey across space and time, giving MPs more than anybody needs to know about hedgehogs. That is rhetoric at its best, that's what they teach kids at Eton - how to persuade people to your view while <look up there!> persuading them that your wealth and their poverty is not what We want to talk about. At the end of his speech Stewart rejects the hedgehog as a metaphor /mascot for Britain.

Here's a hymn to binder-twine triggered by an unfortunate tweet by Rory Stewart about his constituents. Ah baler/binder twine, the farmer's friend!

• Strong enough to keep hundred's of kilos of hay in a tight round bale
• Thin enough to cut quickly with a clasp-knife
• Doubles as a shoe lace
• Holds up the trousers
• A short bight tied under the knee stops harvest rodents running up the farmer's leg to bit his parts
• Key-chain
• Frapping for a broken tool handle
• Support for bean stalks
• Suspend a lamp from a beam
• Clothes-line
• Hair-tie
• Cat's cradle for the weans

When we came to the farm 20+ years ago, there was almost enough baler-twine. I would see great lengths of it un-wound in the hedges and stop the car to salvage it. Every bale of straw we bought came with 30m of the stuff for free. We had enough for me to make [really terrible, asymmetric] netting with it. But now it's all gone: hay and straw are baled with a couple of turns of hideous micro-filament netwrap, which is more 'economical' than twine. Netwrap is single use that leaves nothing but tangle and clutter, I hate it.

Would you live forever?

Kerls, wollt ihr ewig leben? or Ihr Racke, wollen sie ewig leben?  Hunde and Scheisskerls have also been suggested as how Frederick the Great addressed his retreating soldiers as they ran away at the Battle of Kolin in 1757.  Translation {rogues | rascals | dogs | buggers} would you live forever?  Well would you?  Under any circumstances?

A few days ago, I left a post hanging with a challenge to look well-hard at some of the unconsidered/invisible certainties that we all take for granted now which will look silly and cruel to our grown up grandchildren.  Eeee when I were a lad it was taken as perfectly natural and indeed A Good Thing to hit children with a stick when they had contravened some rule or merely annoyed an adult in the same room. Not many people hold that view now. I couldn't articulate the certainty that was lurking at the back of my mind when I issued the challenge but it was something about chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes or Pan paniscus) and their rights.  We share about 98.5% of our DNA with a random fellow human and 97% with a random chimpanzee.  We are only now in this century beginning to accord our nearest rellies some rights. About 12 years ago, when we were busy discovering genes in the newly released human genome, it seemed obvious that we should enquire about whether those genes were present in Pan.  We were told by Dublin Zoo that a blood-sample was out of the question even after the vet had drawn some for the health and happiness of those in her care; that a hair-follicle would be too much of an invasion.  But if we filled in an appropriate battery of forms we could ask for some chimpanzee shit from which we might hope to extract enough DNA from shed colonic epithelial cells to analyse.  As chimpanzees couldn't sign an informed consent form, it was actually easier to get human samples.

But a much more relevant question has surfaced on TYWKIWDBI channelling some serious fury by Scott 'Dilbert' Adams.  This is summed up by the first anguished sentence "I hope my father dies soon.".   Adams' articulation of the dilemma as "If my dad were a cat, we would have put him to sleep long ago. And not once would we have looked back and thought too soon." tolled a bell for me because we terminated our dog Rashers  a year ago yesterday. We didn't do that casually; Dau.II was still living with us and Rashers was Her Dog.  I'll also point out that "intra-muscular ketamine/lidocaine followed by intracardiac phenobarb" is not a quick death and it didn't look easy either but it's a lot better than using carbon dioxide.  Nevertheless, I'm sure we made the right decision, and the law of the land i which we currently live agrees.

People who care about their pets and livestock have been culling them for as long as they've had them.  Putting an animal "out of its misery" is standard practice.  We terminated one of our sheep in the summer when she developed a tumour on the spine that knocked her hind legs out of use and didn't respond to medication.  The fallen-animal removal man came before the vet, as it happens, and he is licenced to shoot animals to hurry them over the line.  He did this with discretion and dispatch and it was all over a lot quicker than the drug cocktail method.

If we do this because we care and because we deplore the idea of suffering in animals with which share our space, why do we take a precisely opposite stance when we start talking about our own kith and kin?  In Ireland we haven't even established the right to dispose of our own lives as the sorry case of Marie Fleming established before the Supreme Court last April.  Fleming is in the last stages of multiple sclerosis (MS) and wants to establish the right to call it a day when she feels the time is right.  The Irish Judiciary wants to protect the most vulnerable in society from being offed by their guardians.  Justice Susan Denham invited the government to legislate for an extremely circumscribed set of circumstances in which  a right to die can be established. 

I may come back to this in 2014, because I'm interested in End of Life Issues, but for now I'll just draw attention to the disconnect, the internal inconsistency, which allows us to kill animals in circumstances where we are forbidden to kill people.  There are definitely worse things than dying.

Up yer Balkans

Let's waltz over to the other end of Europe and ask with AtlasObscura what-in-heck they speak in The Balkans. Like the whole Eskimos have fifty words for snow story, the answer to that question depends on definition. The word Balkan derives from the Balkan Mountains. which are located more on less where the word BULGARIA appears on the map above and [so?] the Balkan peninsula is defined as all the land South of where Ακρωτήριον Μαλέας / Cape Malea looks across at Κύθηρα / Kythera . . .  until it's not. Lots of Greeks would sweep their capes about them and leave the Balkans with a disdainful nothing to do with us, we're Greeks. Well I'm very sorry but if you participated in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 then you are part of the problem ... solution ... Balkans. In 1971, I knew a helluva a lot about the Balkan Wars because I was doing History at school in England and we pored over The Origins of the First World War in fine detail.

I was looking for a more recent map of the region, but couldn't find one that was free of political tinder. Is Kosovo a country? What do we call the part of Jugoslavia that was Socialist Republic of Macedonia? A recent treaty with the Greek government has agreed on Republic of North Macedonia Република Северна Македонија. Although there was a huge protest in Athens when the terms of the Treaty of Prespa [June 2018] were actually implemented in February 2019. My ear to the ground is my [Macedonian] Greek roomie at The Institute who explains patiently why those people north of the current Greek border have no rights to the heritage, symbols, names and history of Alexander the Great Greek. I button my lip. But Prime Ministers Zaev and Tsipras [L with flags] look young and tie-less so I have hopes that the agreement will stick . . . until the next national elections.

If Balkan is defined as participating in the Wars before The Great War, then the Balkan languages include Greek, Albanian and Romanian [all Indo-European R source]. The last, weird-and-wonderfully, is a romance language ultimately based on Latin although the Romans only occupied Dacia across the River Danube for only 200 years 2 millennia ago. It's a long way to Italy, France and Spain. Albanian is an Indo-European tongue but on a distant branch not really any more like Slavic tongues than Irish or Greek or indeed Romanian. There are two dialects Gheg in the North and Tosk in the South. Tosk is, as in happens, a co-official across the borrrder on North Macedonia because several isolated Toskan communities were the wrong side a dotted line drawn by [k]nobs a long way away at another peace conference. And that's the problem in the Balkans - as it is in Belfast - if you see The Other as a SWOT threat rather than a SWOT opportunity. Me, I'm delighted that you can buy pierogi, garbanzos, pizza, camembert and cilantro is Irish shops and anticipate that we'll soon be borrowing words from Yoruba and Polish. And tbh I don't care a jot-or-tittle what your position is on transubstantiation.

Jugoslavia was set up after WWI as the Kingdom of the South [југ-; jug-] Slavs as a grab-bag of melting pot left over from the Ottoman Empire. Say what you like about Ottomans they were tolerant of People of the Book [Jews and Christians, as well as Muslims] in a way that many modern countries are unable to manage. There were several instances in the Balkan Wars where local Jewish communities fled their homes with retreating Ottoman troops because they feared a pogrom from the victors. Where is the largest and longest established Islamic community in Europe? Bosnia where +50% of the people are Sunni Muslims.

That's not so much an introduction as a random ramble through the distant reaches of The Blob. Let's revenons a nos Slavs and Dan Nosowitz' Atlas Obscura ramble through SerboCroat. Part of the problem is that Serbs, because they tend to be Orthodox have adopted a цириллиц алпхабет [cyrillic alphabet] while Croats are Catholics and look to the West for their latinica orthography. The fresh Balkanisation of the region, polarised by the wars that followed the demise of Jugoslavia, has resulted is a lot of unhelpful further-polarising selective deafness. That chap in the sentry-box the other side of the border? I canna gripe a worrrd t'bugger says. Here's how hard it is: the universal declaration of human rights is very worthy and inclusive:

• Croatian: Opća deklaracija o pravima čovjeka
• Bosnian: Opća deklaracija o pravima čovjeka
• Serbian: Opšta deklaracija o pravima čoveka [Опћа декларација о правима човека]

Can't see the diff, me. But, because of 'national' vanity and exceptionalism, you now get absurdities like Croat perps demanding a translator when up before the Serbian courts [and doubtless vice versa - I'm not going to be accused of demonising Croats]. It's like passportless folk from Oklahoma and Iowa insisting that the speak American rather than English. We've seen how you betray your origins by your usage of a very few words. Heck my own family segregates into Papishes and Planters. The unfortunate sectarians in The North cannot reliably identify the religion of their neighbours by their language or diction - they have twitch the net curtains to closely observe the school uniforms leaving the garden-gate next-door.

Rights to writes

Science Week was last week and the science community in Ireland did its best to get science out into the public popular domain through the Zoomiverse; because in person events are still impossible. In general face-time is better but on-line is an opportunity to participate in events which would be geographically impossible. I can get to a zoomevent in Cork as easily as Dau.II who lives there. Wexford Science Café's Going Viral gig had both the main speakers dialling in from Dublin. If Dublin, why not Kazakhstan?

Why not indeed? and the Postgraduate forum of Waterford Institute of Technology, in a mighty coup, managed to get an interview with Алекса́ндра Аса́новна Элбакя́н / Alexandra Elbakyan [R,R] the creator of Sci-Hub, the pirate server which allows everyone access to the scientific literature. They also rustled up a Russian/English translator [R,L]. Despite widespread publicity, only about 40 people thought it would be worth an hour of their time to hear a quiet revolutionary. It was recorded!

I put her in the same bin as Greta Thunberg [prev] who galvanized the climate change movement. Clearly global warming is The existential crisis from which we cower, but getting the most out of the creative scientific minds on the planet is a substantial component to to solving that problem.

Caitlin Moran maintains that institutions [countries, corporations, charities] which deprive arbitrary cohorts of people from participation are stupider than those which are inclusive. It's just the math: if you prevent women from contributing you are halving the sample size from which to bounce ideas off. [Two half ideas being a solution] Insofar as women are different from men, with different ways to doing things, it's even worse. Same if you exclude la francophonie, blacks, gays. poor people: echo-chambers do not induce a creative ferment. Young Alexandra [she turned 32 on 06Nov20] is a computer programmer from Kazakhstan. Ten years ago, during her undergraduate degree, she found it impossible to get access to the scientific literature from Almaty, KZ. Kazakhstan, depending on how you squint, has a GDP per capita about 1/3 of Ireland's. Working at The Institute, it was impossible to do legitimate scientific literature searches because the suits were unwilling to fund the library's access to the scientific literature. Can't have been easier in KZ.

But, unlike me, she wasn't prepared to put her research on hold and, inspired by anonymouse, hacked a path past the commercial pay-walls to the golden seams of peer-reviewed papers. Being Aleksandra of the Generous Hand, she was happy to share her software with anyone she knew . . . and anyone they knew and <shazzam> Sci-Hub was born in 2011. It has made possible about 60 final year research projects at The Institute because my students could make a reasonable review of the literature in their chosen field. I can always ask my pals in proper universities if I really need a PDF of an article, but that's a finite resource of social capital. 

Needless to say, the Big Five academic publishers were severely pissed off that about 1 billion papers had been downloaded over the last ten years. Including several dozen served to my project students. The Big Five business model would have required each punter to pay $35 for a PDF of each paper.  I don't think anyone claims that we-the-poor-scientists owe Elsevier $35,000,000,000 because if we did have to pay $35-a-pop, we'd be, let's say, far more focussed in our reading - to the great detriment of Science, Inc. Nevertheless, a court in the US has awarded Elsevier $15 million in punitive damages against Elbakyan and Sci-Hub. She is officially now in hiding lest she gets extradited to serve time in a US penitentiary.

Last Friday "in Waterford", she seemed to be quite even-keeled about her trials [in absentia] and tribulations and was taking the fight to The Man by citing Articles 19 & 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

• Article 19.
• Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
• Article 27.
1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

That is a loada bollix not practically useful: more or less on par with Mr Softplay claiming Magna Carta supports his decision to open his ball-pit of spittle during the pandemic. Arm-waving about your rights in such general terms is going to butter no parsnips in court. A far more effective way to combat the profit-taking and general rapaciousness of academic publishers is through collective action. 

1) At the moment each university Librarian negotiates the best deal they can and signs a non-disclosure agreement, so that their peers are in a similarly weak position. Groups of librarians (let us call them a union?) have far better bargaining power: UCal blew off Elsevier last year. 

2) Each Scientist has considerable power to decide where to publish their latest findings. But they tend to go for journals with the highest impact, which are almost all commercial ventures, because their credibility, rep, promotion, all depend on "impact metrics".  Politics being the art of the possible, the scientific collective could finger the most rapacious journals and refuse to submit their work there. Collective action is far more difficult than competitive action. They could with an easier conscience refuse to referee articles pro bono for commercial publishing ventures. Some further thoughts in Sci-Pub and Sci-Hub from Rohin Francis another Elbakyan fan-boy.

On 2017 the Journal of Hymenoptera Research published a paper describing two new species of Ichneumonid [prev] parasitoid wasps Idiogramma elbakyanae and Gelanes horstmanni. That's a pretty cool way to put one over on an annoying rival! although the [Russian] lead author on the JHR paper wasn't coming from that direction.  "The [first] species is named in honour of Alexandra Elbakyan (Kazakhstan/Russia), creator of the web-site Sci-Hub, in recognition of her contribution to making scientific knowledge available for all researchers". Nevertheless, Elbakyan was not amused and, seemingly pulled the Sci-Hub plug on ".ru" All 150 million inhabitants of Mother Russia in retaliation. The gloves are off! 

Most science people agree that there is something rotten in the heart of scientific publishing. Several things actually. The rich corporations are getting richer by the cartel while the poor bloody infantry of science can neither afford access to the literature nor the cost of publication. Actually, most reputable journals will publish worthy papers if the authors declare that they have no money for the page charges: doubtless it will help if you hail from The South. While on the wings are a buzzing swarm of parasitoids predatory publishers who will publish any old shite if you pay them a fee of several hundred US$s. 

The world would be a poorer place without Alexandra Elbakyan. Bitcoin is the only way you can contribute to her cause, because Paypal won't entertain her.

More women in Science

Guinea worm gone

I got a real good education in Graduate School in Boston. It was partly the formal courses which I sat on "subjects" that we didn't know existed in TCD back in Dublin: a whole semester on 'evolution' with Lynn Margulis, ditto 'mammalogy', ditto 'physiological ecology', ditto 'multivariate statistics'. But I also learned a lot from my fellow students: eating ice-cream & loading a salad bowl, for example. My boss, a man of wide interests, recommended that I read his old Parasitology text-book, which was on the shelves down in the basement where I was living. He was an aficianado of Dracunculus medinensis the Guinea worm.  You can hardly admit to loving this parasitic invader, but you can nevertheless be fascinated by its life cycle and the peculiar methods used to rid patients of the adult worms.  Dracunculus lives part of its life in tiny copepod crustaceans which swim about in tropical fresh water. When they are consumed my mammals, including people, who drink the water, the copepods get dissolved by the stomach acid and the Dracunculus larvae burrow through the wall of the intestine and develop into adults among the wobbly bits over the next 3-4 months. When a female worm meets a male, they love each other very much, the male sinks back exhausted and dies from his exertions, the female begins a slow shoving journey through liver and lights, muscle and fat, until she comes to rest just beneath the skin. Somehow this creature, knows where the legs are and tends to come to rest in the lower legs. But occasionally she gets blind-sided by other low hanging appendages and heads for the hand or <eeeuuuw> the scrotum. Her journey is exquisitely painful to the unwilling host.

Evolution has shaped the female Guinea-worm's behaviour to facilitate the continuation of her life cycle. If the skin above the lurking female gets wet, then she burrows rapidly to the surface and sheds thousands of eggs into the water in the hope that some of them will encounter a copepod. This sensitivity to water can be used to start a cure: wrap the leg in a wet towel then when the end of the worm breaks the skin surface you can seize it and e v e r  s o  s l o w l y draw the whole worm out. As she can grew to 80cm in length, this pulling can take several days.  You wrap your winnings round a twig or pencil to stop the whole thing slithering back into the flesh.  If you pull too hard then the bloody worm breaks and you have a serious case of septicaemia on your blistered legs. I'm sure that there were experts at these delicate extractions in many sub-Saharan villages.

I use the past tense advisedly, because at more or less the same time I was reading about Guinea-worms in Boston, retiring President Jimmy Carter was thinking about what he was going to do for the rest of his life. His existential solution was to endow the Carter Centre on some derelict urban blight in Atlanta, Georgia. This institution was established with the brief "to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering".  Grand for a mission statement but What to do next in detail?

• First build a complex of offices and auditoria, a library and museum, all set in lovely parkland, 
• Then appoint a Board of Trustees packed with the great and the good and capable of networking their way to solutions.
• Have the Board appoint Effectives to do committee work and decide how the substantial, but not infinite, endowment can be most effectively leveraged.
• Launch some specific projects: preferably those that will yield tangible results within the life time of the soon to be ex-President.
• It's also important to have projects that can be written up in a headline + 600 words by the Washington Post.

And it was so. Tuberculosis, Malaria, HIV/AIDS were left to other groups [Gates Foundation for example] with far deeper pockets. Along with election watching, the abolition of the death penalty and conflict resolution, the Carter Centre decided that they would take on the dreaded Guinea-worm which at the time in the mid 1980s infected 3.5 million people, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. The map shows countries in which the worm was endemic in 1985, the hatched countries are those that still had worms 20 years later.  Now I read in Nature 10th Feb 2016, that Dracunculus has almost gone the way of all smallpox.  A combination of Carter Centre monogrammed winding-pencil distribution [kidding!]; water filters, education and political barracking has reduced the disease Dracunuliasis to a mere 22 cases in four countries for calendar year 2015: an astonishingly effective 100,000-fold reduction.  At one point, President Carter bluffed his opposite number in Ghana that with his clout he could persuade science to start calling Dracunculus the Ghana-worm.  “There isn’t a Guinea worm left in Ghana now, Carter told journalists with a grin . . . "  The remaining four benighted nations - Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, and South Sudan - are beset with civil wars that not even Carter's mediators can stop.  Civil war rides with pestilence and makes it really difficult for health-care workers to get where they are needed.