'Nother Solent

I don't feel too well today

, so this is your lot: Letter to the Pocket Man by Tony Woodlief of Sand in the Gears.

That little pocket is like a Roach Motel for keys; they check in, but they don't check out. To release them I have to drag the entire pocket apparatus out of my pants and tug, pry, and curse. My children don't need to see this.

Furthermore, you need to understand something about decent people. When they see a grown man hunched at the waist, straining and tugging at his crotch region, they don't generally look closely enough to see exactly what he's doing. So even though I'm doing nothing more than trying to get MY keys back from YOUR little pocket prison, I look like a pervert to my fellow citizens. Being neither a street person nor the 42nd president of the United States, this is a humiliation to which I have been unable to grow accustomed.

"Sand in the Gears" is by turns very funny and very moving.

Vaccines and Evolution.

Jo, a.k.a. Squander Two writes:

One thing that you haven’t mentioned about vaccinations (unless it was in an older post and I missed it, ’cause I’ve been a tad occupied of late), is this fact about the nature of bacteria and viruses: they evolve. Yes, it is certainly true that, the fewer people who are vaccinated, the more prevalent the disease becomes, but that doesn’t really get around libertarian arguments: it’s still up to the individual whether they wish to defend themselves against the disease, and that’s fair enough. (Are libertarians supposed to support a parent’s “right” to risk their child’s life, though? Anyway.) The far more serious problem is that, the more prevalent a disease becomes, the greater the opportunity for the organisms that cause that disease to evolve to the extent that they may eventually be able to beat the vaccines. At that point, choice is simply removed from the system for everyone, as those who choose vaccination find that it is useless to do so – and that’s why vaccinations are a genuine public good.

Successful evolution is what has made it impossible to eradicate influenza while smallpox is now effectively extinct. Flu mutates a lot quicker, coming up with a new variation every year, immune to the previous year’s vaccine. One of the main reasons flu is able to do this so effectively is that Chinese farmers keep ducks and pigs in close proximity and pigs can catch both duck flu and human flu. The two varieties of virus meet up in the pig, swap a few genes, turn into a hybrid virus that combines all the strengths of the previous two and is sufficiently different to them both to be immune to vaccines that worked on them, and jump back from pigs to humans. It then spreads from China to the rest of the world. (No, vaccination wouldn’t prevent this one, but it’s still a nice example of the problem, and I thought you might find it interesting.)

Something doctors have had a lot of trouble persuading AIDS patients of is that two HIV+ men having sex should use a condom. Both men think, “I’ve already got HIV, and so’s he, so what’s the problem?” The problem is that there are a number of different strains of HIV, and unprotected sex between carriers allows those strains to meet up and swap genes, thus producing more powerful hybrid strains – which is already happening. Eventually, a significant number of patients will end up with a new type of HIV that proves resistant to existing anti-HIV drugs.

So, at the moment, we’re talking about a vaccine that protects against measles. And, as long as measles remains a rare, non-epidemic disease, that will continue to be the case. But, once it becomes an epidemic, there is a significant chance that we will be up against an increasing number of different diseases in the measles group, and, eventually, we could find that our vaccine doesn’t work on one of them. And that’s the one that’ll sweep through the population.

If there’s a libertarian out there that has an explanation of how this could be managed by property rights, I’d love to hear it. But, as far as I can see, this is one thing that does come under government’s remit: it boils down to protecting people from other people, after all.

I should just add that, in spite of my affected air of authority, I am not a biologist or an epidemiologist or anything like that, so, if someone with more credentials than me (or any credentials at all, really) contradicts any of the little details in what I’ve written, they’re right and I’m wrong. But the main gist of what I’m saying is certainly true.

Airbrushing out De Gaulle.

March 10 was the sublime moment when the internet allowed Terrance of Fainting in Coyles to leave duty as a something or other in Brussels and enter destiny. That was when he fisked this unintentionally hilarious speech to commemorate the Entente Cordiale. And if you think my "sublime moment" stuff was OTT, read the speech.

Two letters on doggy poo.

Not really, they came on e-mail.

Peter Cuthbertson writes:

I suspect you were more on target than you realised when you wrote of the "hottest political issues of our times".

In a lecture on political participation, my politics professor assured us that dog mess is revealed to be a major, MAJOR concern of a great many people whenever big efforts are made to understand what issues people care about and want sorted out.

Make of that what you will ...

Ed writes:

Now, to move on, what's all this about dog s**t? I live where no council has yet had the temerity to put one of those basket things- probably because they'd get left for many a stinky week before emptying. I did however once get roped into taking someone's dog for walks around the suburbs of York. I couldn't believe it when she handed me the trowel and a plastic bag, having never had contact with it (if you know what I mean) before. I'm not sure it's all fine and dandy either: people are prissy enough as it is, without humbling themselves in service to the suburbs with fastidious s**t-shovelling. I mean, drunkeness is an epidemic, and people apparently openly poo and wee and puke in the streets, but the next day they'll all remember to scoop their dog poop for the community. Irony of Ironies when it's human poop we're more likely to step in. Genetically modified dogs must be the way forward- to poop less, and more like rabbits in consistency.

Quite. Yes. A project like this could restore the profession of Mad Gene-Splicer to public esteem. Raising the tone a little, I've long thought that living teddy bears would be cute.

Chongryun.

Run a Google search for this euphonious term and you will learn a strange story.

Back in World War II thousands of Koreans ended up in Japan, some taken by force as slave labour or "comfort women", others driven to emigrate by poverty. Their descendants, embittered by their experiences and by Japanese racial prejudice, stayed a race apart. In the fifties they pledged their loyalty to the Northern, Communist half of their divided homeland and with support from the North set up their own schools and social organisations under an umbrella body called "Chongryun."

Ironically these devoted acolytes of Kim Il Sung grew rich by the most capitalist of means. Chongyrun-operated (I had to change that from "Chongyrun-run") North Korean clothes factories at one time had a quarter of the Japanese market and many Koreans made a mint from pachinko parlours.

Chongryun is still going. It has declined, gradually for decades, as North Korea's star waned and South Korea's waxed, and steeply in the last year in the light of suspicions that it had a hand in facilitating the abduction of several Japanese to tutor North Korean spies (which is another irony considering that many of the Koreans are themselves descended from abductees). Yet the number of Korean-Japanese children presently attending Chongryun schools is not around seventy-six as I would have thought but tens of thousands.

A thought I had while walking the dog.

And while I thought, the dog acted.

I know you come to this blog for discussion of all the hottest political issues of our times, so here goes.

When I was a kid the idea of cleaning up after a dog had done its business in the street would have been regarded as only slightly less loopy than a dairy farmer going out into his field every morning and scooping up all the cow-pats. In those days all the dog-owner had to do to get his or her good citizen badge was drag the animal next to a lampost rather than letting it go right in the middle of the pavement. Nowadays things are different. I, like every dog owner I know, go out armed with a trusty plastic bag and, should the dog perform, add to the contents of the receptacles provided by the council.

Not everybody does, of course. I like to think that my friends are statistically skewed towards civic virtue. But it's undeniable that a rather large and rather good change in public behaviour has taken place. Furthermore the change was almost entirely voluntary and is enforced not by law but by social disapproval of those who break the rules. Sure, there is a sign on the poopy pot threatening a fine of £100 for letting your dog foul a public place but actual prosecutions are rare.

The physical infrastructure of bins and men in vans who empty them was provided by the council but could easily be organised privately. For all I know it already is, by private companies with whom the council has a contract.

So it's all quite nice and libertarian and now I think I'll talk about something else.

I've mocked Stephen Byers in the past.

I'm not mocking him now. This scathing attack on the Max Hastings article I posted about last Thursday makes me think a lot better of Byers.

Both Hastings' article and Byers' response appeared in the Guardian. I get the feeling there's a fair amount of shouting goes on across Alan Rusbridger's desk.

Talking of Hastings, it's dawning on me that the Great White Hunter has a bit of a thing about invitations. Mark Steyn reminded me of this article on the capture of Saddam Hussein where Hastings spake thus:

‘It is hard not to hate George Bush. His ignorance and conceit, his professed special relationship with God, invite revulsion.’

Really? For some reason I find myself imagining something like this:

*

Dear Revulsion & Friends

George Bush, his ignorance and conceit and his professed special relationship with God

will be

At Home

2-5pm this Saturday.

P.S. Guys, it's me really doing the inviting, Max!!! Only I don't want to say so because people might not want to come if they knew it was my idea. But I can trust you lot because you are Guardian readers, right ;-) Nudge nudge wink wink, eh!

The Scottish Executive is hard at work.

This august body is considering whether it should rule that Scottish teachers should scrap grades for essays and replace them with comments. The Scotsman reports:

Such classroom trauma [getting a C minus] may be consigned to history under plans being considered by ministers to banish the use of grades on pupils’ work and replace them with constructive written critiques.

This might be a good idea for all I know, or a good idea in many cases. Or it might be rubbish. Either way, why in the name of all that's holy are government ministers girding their loins to decide what red scribbles will appear on every schoolbook in Scotland? What do they know?

And did you notice the overwhelming statistical evidence from down South that prompted, nay forced, the Scottish Executive to turn their mighty brains to this vital topic?

The results of the King’s College study, which involved 24 teachers at six schools in the south of England, had seen clear overall improvement in pupils’ abilities after they had been taught for six-months using this method.

A Victory for Al-Qaeda in Spain.

Believe me, I don't like saying this. I don't like doing this. Once the line that "A vote for party X is a vote for the terrorists" gets into the political process it makes things much more vituperative. It breaks down the mutual assumption of good intentions that keeps peaceful discourse peaceful. It also puts people who want to vote for party X on the grounds of economic policy or some other respectable reason in an extremely difficult position. Yet helping to put that line into the political process is exactly what I am doing, within my tiny sphere, as I write this post.

Why am I doing it then? Because, unfortunately, my dislike of the message does not change its truth: Al-Qaeda are happy today. Terrorism worked. Clearly, obviously, educationally, it worked. The Spanish electorate let it work on them. My everlasting sympathy for the victims of the mass murder does not change that truth. My sympathy for the people who may have wanted to vote against the Popular Party for all sorts of decent reasons does not change that truth.

How many times in history has the same pattern repeated itself? While the enemy mass at the borders the small countries cower and dodge. In public they talk of alliances, of standing together, but in at the same time each nation tries to hint to Khan or Sultan that, as your Highness surely knows, we are not the leaders... we are just small fry... perhaps we can work together... you don't want to go for us...

Pained but relieved each little nation watches as the next blow of the enemy falls not on them but on their neighbour. Until their turn comes.

It's the same story now, except that the notion of borders has become irrelevant.

Keep safe, as they are fond of saying on the TV. Keep safe now! A good way of doing that might be to stay off the trains in the week before your country's next election.