10 top things about foot and mouth

Happier days at Pirbright: The Surrey County Vaccine Farms

The 10 top things about FMD 2007.

10. Never mind the disinfectant, send the whitewash. A dramatic improvement in government media/presentational skill, mirrored by no raising of the game by editors, compared to 2001. See 8, 7 below.

9. Scientists are often psychotic, in the clinical sense meaning they have lost touch with reality. Any reality. Ground reality. System reality. Media reality. The award goes to Sir Brian Follett for his sagacity in the Sunday Times: “The reason we slaughter animals is because, in island countries, it works. We can keep the virus out.” A healthy debate in the bioscience community about vaccination would be welcome but it is so odd that those who obstruct vaccinations use arguments that are simply ludicrous and false.

8. Journalism in Britain is quite dramatically terrible as anyone can tell you when they observe the coverage of something they know plenty about. The absence of scientifically trained journalists is very apparent as it was in 2001. Rolling news channels by far the worst – torrents of drivel, 24 by 7. This is the syndrome that we saw with the media in the run-up to the war in Iraq. A dependence on authority to timetable events and establish the agenda, ignoring all contrary evidence or burying it on page 94. The BBC is consistently mediocre.

7. The media tropes are identical. Terrible disease. Tragedy for farmers. A threatened cow named Mabel in a petting zoo. The editors cover every big story by habit. This is why they prefer stories that “come back” so they can order the clips and cover them like last time. A dirty media secret is that editors do not like anything too new – they don’t understand it and have no precedent to inform their decisions.

6. Mediocrity of civil service. By which I mean the the glamorous chief vet who frankly wasn’t that hot, though she will now get a K. Not as sinister as Scudamore but she did everything she could to keep the approach NFU friendly, and I predict the vaccination kits will not be used. She pretended vaccination is an option while never intending to use it unless someone put a bullet to her head. So far, she’s got away with it. I think it’s a cynical tactic. I exempt the local field Defra office in Surrey who have distiguished themselves by being actually human. It has been my own experience as the owner of a registered farm (currently on the very edge of the surveillance zone) that the worker bees at the local Defra office do try to be helpful, despite the insane orders they receive from headquarters.

5. NFU more digusting than ever and why they are taken seriously is a disease of public policy. Literally. The government is required to consult them under a 1947 Act passed by a Labour government that idiotically thought they were empowering a union. What we have, despite recent reforms, is a monster in which not all members even get to vote, and the last five bosses have been knighted. This is a corrupt relationship in the sense of mordant decay. It produces terrible public policy. They are so unbelievably slippery and unconvincing. They are probably reading this wondering whether to sue me but some one is reminding them of MacDonalds.

4. Internet has dramatically improved networking and communications for us “troublemakers” who object that government policy is unscientific, brutal and disgusting. But while the networks are activating quickly, frankly we lack real political clout. We do not have a clunking great fist. The challenge is to convert our command of the facts and superb intelligence into meaningful pressure. I admit this is a tough problem when our democracy is so intangible, and note that it is a problem not unique to this issue.

3. This time around there is some interesting potential for lawyers. I imagine there are going to be some rewarding issues of liability and indemnity to fight about. This will pay for some very beautiful houses in France and a lot of very good claret.

2. Pirbright should be closed and the entire operation moved to a rocky island off Scotland, preferably.

1. Gordon Brown has been bloody lucky. So far.

This is my best guess at the moment. If the outbreak gets much worse then this list becomes inoperative, of course, and I will have to do it over.

Matthew Weaver is back today in The Guardian. Not to be missed. Ditto Warmwell. Rapidly improving Sheepdrove blog has good piece on “vaccinate to live.”

Christine Lagarde to France: think less, work more

“Il faut cesser de penser et se retrousser les manches.”

Christine Lagarde, the former Baker & MacKenzie lawyer, has been parachuted in by Sarko as France’s new finance minister. The formidable Madam Lagarde is already nick-named “the American” for her pains. She is in charge of steering Sarko’s omnibus finance bill through the national assembly. This is a bill in favour of work, employment and buying power – the so-called “Tepa” project – Travail, Emploi, Pouvoir d’Achat.

Lagarde described the 35 hour week as a symbol of the right to be lazy, “the ultimate expression of this historic tendency to consider work as a form of servitude.” Le Canard Enchaîné summed this up under the headline: “Christine Lagarde sees the idle everywhere!”

Declared Christine: “Choisissez un travail que vous aimez, et vous n’aurez pas à travailler un seul jour.” This is somewhat out of touch with reality, judges le Canard, noting that she was drawing a 600,000 euro pay check before moving to the public service. The Canard suggests that a fulfilling career as an international lawyer and minister may not be for everyone. This may or may not be fair. You obviously do not need to have read much philosophy to have such a job, it seems.

And I tend to think she is right to suggest that work can have a certain dignity, and that the French too often overlook this, conditioned by 19th century literature to regard money as filthy, labour as contemptible and money making unrepublican. It is true that you would have this impression, if force fed Germinal for your Bac by some bitter and twisted teacher/functionary.

One is however distressed by Madam Lagarde’s expression of regret that France is a nation that thinks too much. It is all very well demanding that France “must stop thinking, stop dithering and simply roll up its sleeves.” But stop thinking? In the 24/7 globalised economy? I wait to be convinced.

Is this evidence of an American military-industrial conspiracy? Le Canard suspects as much. After all, Madam Lagarde, hailed by Sarko as the best ever French finance minister, is a known Atlanticist and a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. So perhaps she is undermining Badiou and Lacan as part of a covert CIA program to replace all French penseurs with American ones?

Again, I am not sure. Doubtless she has been conditioned by Anglo-Saxon attitudes, but could this alone account for Madam Lagarde’s disrespect for French thought? It is hard to know how we would even think, without the French. Is she utterly unaware of this? Isn’t this one of France’s strategic national assets, alongside nuclear power stations and the Rafael fighter jet?

This was an appalling speech. One does not need to be a populist to do better. But why one would make a speech arguing about the desirability of thought seems difficult to explain. Not a populist, maybe. Or not human.

The Canard is right to note that as finance ministers go, she beats all records.

Text of speech here.

Bush the merciful

Karla Tucker – Bush sneered at the request to show mercy

George Bush has not commuted a single one of the 155 death sentences for which he has been responsible as governor of Texas and president of the United States. Not that he is without mercy. Scooter Libby, a political crony of the vice president convicted of obstruction of justice and sentenced to prison, will not spend a day in jail, thanks to Bush’s intervention.

Bush smirked as he sent Karla Tucker, the cutest of his victims, to the lethal injection chamber, accounting for nothing the horrendous circumstances of her life and what seemed subsequently to be genuine remorse for her actions. Crowds outside the prison cheered as Karla Tucker was killed. Karla Tucker was of course merely a former drug addict and prostitute who used to hang out with the Allman Brothers band, whereas Libby was a graduate of Andover Academy and Yale.

An excellent contribution here from Antigram.