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August 22nd, 2016: Today is the day I add "sandos" to my spell check dictionary. OH YES. NO REGRETS. – Ryan

The myth of the placebo effect.

Interesting story about what the PLP will do if Corbyn wins the leadership contesthttps://t.co/X0Hc8AsJPL pic.twitter.com/WGrWK24bkS

— TSE (@TSEofPB) August 21, 2016

Labour MPs set to hoist Corbyn by his own petard?

There’s an interesting story in today’s Sunday Times (££) which Politicshome have covered for free here, it says

The Sunday Times reports the “party within a party” framework will be based on the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, which counts Mr Corbyn as a member.

According to the paper, the rebels will look to sign up more than 100 MPs to join the Co-operative party, Labour’s sister party, and sit on the green benches as “double hatted” MPs.

The group will appoint their own whips in parliament to co-ordinate rebellions where they disagree with Mr Corbyn’s policy and look to change the rules to appoint an elected Shadow Cabinet, as previously called for by the party’s deputy leader Tom Watson.

It will draw up policies on areas including Brexit and national security, the Sunday Times reports.

The rebels apparently prefer the creation of a new group on Labour benches to forming a breakaway party.

They argue Mr Corbyn and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, both members of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, would struggle to criticise the move after they voted against the Labour leadership from the backbenches when in power.

“Corbyn voted against the leadership more than 500 times,” said one rebel leader.

“We’ve only done it a dozen times. We’re just getting started. There will be a new grouping within the PLP a lot like Corbyn and McDonnell had. We will stick together for mutual support. We will have our own approach on the economy and Brexit and national security.”

The Co-operative party has held an electoral agreement with Labour since 1927 that allows them to stand joint candidates in elections.

The plan is to also box in Corbyn, ‘if Corbyn wins, Tom Watson, the deputy leader, is planning to push for the reintroduction of elections to the shadow cabinet so moderates can return to the front bench after resigning en masse after the EU referendum.’

My succinct precis of this is that the PLP are expecting Owen Smith to lose, and that they will not split if Corbyn wins, bet accordingly.

If you’re less charitable, you could say that those Labour MPs who resigned from the shadow cabinet a couple of months ago are looking at a facing saving way of getting back into the shadow cabinet.

TSE

In 2006 I published an essay - The problem with children today: The Liberal Democrats and children
 - in a collection edited by Graham Watson.

The section on childhood obesity seems relevant today.


The problem and the conventional solutions

One topical area of concern about children is obesity, and it provides a convenient way into the debate about the travails of childhood in Britain today.

… even after adjustments for meals eaten outside the home, and for consumption of alcohol, soft drinks, and confectionery, average per capita energy intake seems to have declined by 20 per cent since 1970.

We see sport as crucial to the nation’s health and well-being. With child obesity trebling in the past decade, it is time the Department of Health took a far greater role in promoting sport and active living.

Here’s the truth – children don’t want to play sport on badly-drained 1950s scraps of land. They want showers, fences and floodlights. They want quality facilities.

Research suggests that in 20 years the ‘home habitat’ of a typical eight-year-old – the area that a child can travel around on their own – has shrunk by nearly 90 per cent.

You know that famous mystery writer? The one whom death stalks wherever she goes? Turns out bad luck doesn’t cause death to follow her. She provokes it all—for a reason.

And this time, someone will stop her.

A student at a writing workshop has a secret agenda. Yes, she wants to become a bestseller. But first she must deal with the competition—in a wholly unexpected way.

“Murder, She Workshopped,” by New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, as well as other online retailers. 

Murder, She Workshopped

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

The free story will be available for one week only. If you missed this one, click on the links above. There’s another free story lurking somewhere around the site. Track the story down, read, and enjoy!

 

Tagged: books, food, library, lunch, sensory, social anxiety, social awkwardness, socialising, student, work

Some people on the internet are getting very excited at the (unconfirmed) reports of an "Earth-like" exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri, a mere 4.25 light-years away from Earth. If correct, the planet is orbiting in the liquid water zone around our nearest stellar neighbour and is of the same order of mass as the Earth. (Note that this could mean anything from Mercury to Neptune in scale: it's very approximate at this stage. Earth-like in exoplanetography does not mean it's a habitable new eden suitable for colonization, it just means "not a gas giant like Jupiter or a tiny dwarf like Pluto".)

So here's a reality check.

The report allegedly comes, not from the Kepler planet-finder space telescope, but the La Silla Observatory. It hasn't been confirmed yet and ESO aren't commenting. If confirmed it'll be big news for exoplanetography, but there's a huge caveat attached to it which you can bet your bottom dollar the regular news media will miss completely in the aforementioned excitement:

4.25 light years is roughly 40 trillion kilometers (or 25 trillion miles, if you're American).

I don't want to minimize the significance of the discovery; it's certainly a good addition to the list of potentially habitable exoplanets here, but you will note that 4.25 light years isn't an order-of-magnitude improvement over the previous winners for Earthlike proximity, such as Wolf 1061c (13.8 light years away) or Kapteyn B* (12.76 light years away). We're talking about the difference between 40 arbitrarily-huge-units and 100 arbitrarily-huge-units. So how should we contextualize these arbitrarily-huge-units?

Currently, the most distant visited body in the solar system is Pluto, at 7.5 billion kilometers. The New Horizons probe flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015. It was launched on January 19th 2006 by a booster and upper stage combination that blasted it straight up to solar escape velocity, with a speed of 16.26 km/sec (58,536 km/h), making it the fastest human-made vehicle ever: it then executed a Jupiter gravity-assist flyby to slingshot it out past Pluto, where it arrived nine and a half years after departure.

This veritable speed racer of an interplanetary probe would thus require a mere 31,600 years to reach Proxima Centauri (if indeed it was pointed in the right direction, which it isn't).

Yes, but what if we sent a probe using (wave hands) some vastly better propulsion system that exists only as a series of paper studies, you may ask? For example, use an M2P2 plasma sail to hitch a ride on the solar wind? Well, that might reach the dizzy speed of 500km/s, in which case it might actually get to Proxima Centauri in less than a thousand years (just). This seems, from my reading, to be the best we can hope for in the near future—nuclear-thermal rockets don't offer anything like as much of a performance boost over chemical rockets as one might naively think, and it's kind of dumb to postulate a spacegoing fusion reactor until we can get one to work on Earth (and figure out what to do with the gigawatts of waste heat it'd be spewing out when mounted on a spacecraft in vacuum, which as you know is a rather good insulator).

What if we leave the engine back home? Put an M2P2 sail on a probe, but instead of relying on the solar wind, point a plasma beam at it in order to maintain thrust throughout the voyage (this is called a MagBeam propulsion system)? Now we're talking ... but such a beam generator is going to have to be constructed and operated in space (down here there's too much atmosphere in the way), and it's going to take a lot of power to generate significant thrust, much less to ensure enough of the plasma beam reaches the probe to continue generating thrust once the probe is significantly far away from home. NB: when I say lots of power, I'm talking of the same ball-park as the entire electricity production of the USA to keep pushing a probe of the same sort of size as New Horizons for a few years.

We might get a small probe up to arbitrarily high velocities if we cheat by using an engine that stays back home where we can keep it running, but then we run into other problems. Space is not empty and vacuum is not perfect. There are gas molecules (mostly neutral hydrogen) sitting around in deep space; on the order of 10² to 10⁶ atoms per cm³. This is vastly more tenuous than the best vacuum we can produce on Earth, but it's still going to be intensely damaging to any spacecraft we can design that would have to traverse it at speed. Roughly 1% of the ISM consists of helium atoms, and we have a technical term for an ionized helium nucleus travelling at roughly 2% of the speed of light—6000km/sec—we call it an alpha particle. At a notional 6000km/sec interstellar cruise speed (2% of lightspeed), a space probe is going to encounter up to 10,000 alpha particles per centimeter of distance travelled, or 6 trillion alpha particles per square meter of frontal area per second. That's 6 TBq of radiation; or in old money, 160-odd Curies. To get a feel for what this means, note that the Fukushima Daiichi reactor meltdowns released about 100 million Curies, so the front of our one-meter-square-frontal-area probe would receive that amount of irradiation every eight days from alpha particles alone (the situation is undoubtedly worse when you factor in proton and gamma radiation bombardment). It might be better by 2-3 orders of magnitude if I've over-estimated the density of helium atoms in the stellar vicinity ... but then you can simply change the bottom line from 3 nuclear reactor meltdowns per week per square meter to 3 nuclear reactor meltdowns per year per square meter.

It still doesn't make much difference: at 2% of lightspeed, Proxima Centauri is 212 years away.

Anyway, the point I'd like you to take away from this is that while it's really hard to say "sending an interstellar probe is absolutely impossible", the smart money says that it's extremely difficult to do it using any technology currently existing or in development. We'd need a whole raft of breathroughs, including radiation shielding techniques to kick the interstellar medium out of the way of the probe as well as some sort of beam propulsion system and then some way of getting data back home across interstellar distances ... and that's for a flyby mission like New Horizons that would take not significantly less than a human lifetime to get there.

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August 17th, 2016: DCAF was super fun, and the highlight had to be when a real-life magician came over with his bunny and then I got to pet the bunny. Did you see this amazing visualization of Romeo and/or Juliet? I HOPE YOU DID BECAUSE IT'S SUPER RAD. – Ryan

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August 19th, 2016: This comic is inspired by ghosts everywhere!! And their businesses too, I guess!! – Ryan

I spent some time last evening reading some political-type websites and read a lot of opinions about Donald J. Trump and Hillary R. Clinton. Since I want Trump to lose and lose badly, I was amazed at how often I winced at cheap and juvenile attacks on the man. There were plenty about Hillary of course, but there's something really wrong when I think someone's being unfair to a man I don't think has a fair bone in his body.

I won't quote any of them but perhaps you've seen these Naked Trump statues that some artist made and is installing in major metropolitan areas. I get the message but I don't think it's much more profound than an eight-year-old calling someone a doody-head.

You do understand, I hope, that I am not calling for censorship. People have a right to do that kind of stuff. I have the right to say I wish they wouldn't do that kind of stuff.

Then this morning, I awake to read that Trump said…

Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that. And believe it or not, I regret it. And I do regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain. Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues.

Well, of course he regrets it. He's seen the polls and what he was doing has him on the verge of losing big and maybe being widely disowned by his own party. And of course, an apology that vague — not specifying what is regretted — is pretty worthless. Sounds to me like the new strategy of the Trump campaign is Good Cop/Bad Cop. Others will call for Hillary Clinton to be hanged in the public square while Trump himself tries to look presidential. Anybody going to buy this? Anyone?

The post Today's Political Comment appeared first on News From ME.

I know some of you think I'm writing too much about the election and about Trump but my blog is about whatever's on my mind and what's there now is the Electoral College.

Right now, every major pollster has Hillary Clinton with what would seem to be an insurmountable lead in the following states: New York, California, Vermont, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Washington, Hawaii, Virginia, Rhode Island, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Oregon, Maine, Delaware, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, plus the District of Columbia. In most, she's up around ten points.

Those states total 258 electoral votes…so she's twelve shy of the 270 it takes to win.

Now, you hear a lot about Ohio (18 electoral votes) and Florida (29) and even North Carolina (15) and how Trump needs those states to have even a chance of winning. He does…but the point is that Hillary doesn't. She can get the twelve votes by winning Minnesota (10) and any one other state or just by winning Georgia (16). She can get it by winning Iowa (6) and Nevada (6). She can get it by winning Arizona (11) and any one other state. There are many routes.

At the moment, she's either ahead or neck-and-neck in all of these plus a few others. She probably already has Minnesota but there haven't been many polls there so you can't really award her the state…yet. The latest Monmouth Poll — that's one of the better pollsters — has her up nine in Florida…so there's more than double your twelve votes right there.

Trump is solid in seventeen states that will give him 139 so he's 131 short of the 270. There are thirteen "toss-up" states where neither is far enough ahead to claim a near-lock and those have 141 electoral votes. So Trump would need to win almost all of them or maybe flip a few states where Hillary has a solid lead.

As Nate Silver notes, Trump seems to be about to ratchet up the nastiness and accusations. That's the approach that got him where he is today — on the verge of being on the wrong end of a landslide. Still, my thinking is that Trump has no other choice.

If he suddenly starts acting statesmanlike and polite, it's not going to change the minds of anyone who already decided he was unfit. They remember…and in case they forget, there's loads of video around for the Hillary people to replay. Undecideds won't believe there's a new Trump…and of course, there's the very real question of whether he is actually capable of performing any other act. All he'd do probably is disappoint his base and cause less of them to turn out on Election Day.

Seems to me Trump's only hope is to sell hard the "Crooked Hillary" theme and hope something emerges that has a lot more substance than any of the allegations hurled so far. Even then, I think a lot of people would opt for Crooked Hillary over Crazy Donald.

The post Today's Political Thought appeared first on News From ME.

#916, 22nd December 2001

Robbie Williams quit a boy band because the grinning and flexing began to feel like a job, and feeling like a job meant feeling like a cage. He fled into pop stardom, and the cage followed. Rising up the TV ratings as “Somethin’ Stupid” topped the charts was Pop Idol, a show that was a four-month job interview for being a pop star, an announcement that the role was now a profession. And who was the blueprint for that these days? Who was the idol, the one with the X Factor? Nobody but Robbie. The Robbie of 1998, “Let Me Entertain You” and “Angels”, versatile, shining with charisma and desperate for love, was the model for what Reality TV spent the next decade hunting. He had wanted to do it his way: now his way was a template for sheer will-to-stardom. Meanwhile he looked for another jump. This time he went backwards: the swing era and the big bands.

Swing When You’re Winning, Robbie’s leap into the past, landed in a rising cultural moment for the Rat Pack and their era. A hipster swing revival in the USA – Squirrel Nut Zippers and their like – never really took hold in Britain, but a rising tide of biopics and reissues made the Rat Pack steadily more salient. They represented an answer to a particular cultural problem: what next for lad culture? The Loaded generation had rebooted new masculinity as old masculinity plus irony, but the lad mag formula of boobs, booze and bacon sandwiches was essentially metastable, too delicate a thing to live, for all its brashness. New laddism could either drop the knowing figleaf and collapse back into just plain blokiness – plenty took this option – or it could ‘grow up’. Keep the camaraderie and the bad behaviour but dial up the wardrobe, play it sophisticated. Frank, Dean, Sammy and the boys looked very appealing in this context. For a pop star wanting to make a parallel shift, seeking an opt-out from cheek, they were just as tempting.

But for a singer, the Rat Pack were also a trap. 60s Vegas wasn’t a theme park or a role-playing game, it was a high-stakes arm of the record business, and you needed chops to survive it as much as charm. Hand in hand with the rediscovery of the swing era vibe had come renewed appreciation by fans of how tightly arranged the records were, how rich their performances and phrasing. Put yourself in those shoes and it was easy to seem callow. Reality TV eventually caught up to Robbie again, with the “Big Band Weeks” so adored by Simon Cowell. These annual pantomimes seemed like Cowell indulging one of the few types of music he actually liked, but they were cannily competitive too: a showcase for technique as well as swagger. Though since neither were plentiful, big band weeks were still a chore.
That all explains why the singer, and the style, and the moment. The choice of song is simpler, I’d guess – it had been a big hit, and the availability of Nicole Kidman for a duet made it obvious. “Somethin’ Stupid” ushers Robbie into his swing phaselet on the arm of a bona fide Hollywood star. But does it dodge the big band trap? Can Robbie Williams wear Sinatra’s shoes?

Not really. But the failure of “Somethin’ Stupid” isn’t that it’s bad exactly. It commits a graver sin: it lacks all panache. The main thing Robbie had going for him was his sparky, snook-cocking cheek, and that’s the element he seems keenest to excise on his swing material. On “Somethin’ Stupid” he sounds subdued, cowed by the difficulty of the task he’s set himself. He sticks exactly to the Sinatras’ dual-vocal arrangement. That served a strong purpose for Frank and Nancy – it kept the song from sounding even creepier, and it stopped the father’s performance from embarrassing the daughter’s by the contrast. It worked for the song, too, casting it as an ironic comedy – two lip-biting lovers, neither knowing the other feels exactly the same way. But for Williams and Kidman it doesn’t come off like that – instead the blend of Robbie’s underperforming voice and Kidman’s unassuming one evens out into a unisex trot. A reverent approach meets a diffident performance – and Robbie’s leap into the past leaves him, for the first time, sounding half-hearted.

[Not meant as a claim that science doesn’t know something. More of an admission that I don’t know some things, and a hope to be informed about them by someone who does.]

Everyone knows about tolerance. The first time you take heroin, you get really high. The second time you take heroin, you get slightly less high. The nth time you take heroin, you barely feel good at all – but if you stop taking heroin, then you feel miserable. Your body adjusts, the receptors desensitize, whatever.

This is so simple that it took me forever to ask the obvious next question – how come this doesn’t happen for everything else? Supposedly if you have ADHD you can just stay on Adderall forever. Nobody says “The first time you take Adderall you can concentrate really well, the second time you take it you’ll concentrate less well, and the nth time you take it you can barely concentrate better at all.”

The psychiatry textbooks contain a sentence or two saying that “some” patients “may” develop Adderall tolerance, but it’s not something that we’re trained to expect. There are a lot of anecdotal reports online, but there are also anecdotal reports of people who don’t develop any tolerance at all after years and years. Hmm.

Also, people who abuse Adderall develop tolerance all the time, and keep having to up the doses just like heroin abusers do. This is a little weird – my pet theory is that people only develop tolerance to drug effects that aren’t FDA-approved uses – though how your receptors know what the FDA says I haven’t quite figured out. More seriously, it may be an effect of method of use – taking a small amount daily versus snorting a large amount of crushed tablet whenever you feel like it. Or it may be that tolerance to euphoric effects is worse than tolerance to stimulant effects.

(This seems true in general – I get euphoric effects from caffeine when I drink it very rarely; if I drink it more often, the euphoria goes away and I just feel a little more awake. This is important since it suggests tolerance isn’t just your body metabolizing the drug better, but actually a matter of receptor-level action – something I think everyone agrees is true, but which it’s always nice to have independent confirmation for.)

Sometimes tolerance gets weird. Antipsychotics are supposed to block dopamine receptors. Too much dopamine can contribute to psychosis, but it can also screw up the basal ganglia’s modulation of movement and cause you to make repetitive jerking motions all the time. People who have been on antipsychotics for too long may remain protected from psychosis, but start making repetitive jerking movements in a way consistent with too much dopamine. The theory goes that the receptors involved in psychosis haven’t developed tolerance (for some reason), but the receptors involved in movement modulation have developed so much tolerance that they’ve overshot their baseline and become supersensitive to dopamine. So by taking a drug that lowers dopamine, you get higher dopaminergic effects. In the worst case scenario, you end up with a condition called tardive dyskinesia, which is permanent. The receptors stay supersensitive forever and you will always make repetitive jerking movements. If you stop the antipsychotic, that will just make it (temporarily) worse – now you have supersensitive dopamine receptors and you’re not blocking them, so that means lots of repetitive jerking movements.

In this case, giving someone a drug has caused them to develop not just tolerance but supertolerance, where they are permanently worse than before. It’s as if taking heroin for long enough made you permanently miserable.

…which actually isn’t totally hypothetical. Some percent of people who abuse opiates like heroin get what’s called a post-acute withdrawal syndrome (PAWS), meaning that they feel depressed for months or years after they stop using the opiates. I treated a patient like for a while. I tried pretty much every antidepressant on him without success. He was just miserable. He’d been clean for about six months and I told him that he might just have to wait it out – it usually goes away after a few months to a year or so.

There is a poorly-studied but anecdotally very helpful treatment for PAWS: low-dose naltrexone. Naively, this sounds like the stupidest possible thing to try. It’s an opiate antagonist, meaning that you’re taking somebody who is undersensitive to opiates and blocking the tiny number of functioning opiate receptors they already have. It should be the only thing capable of making this already bad condition worse. Yet people swear by it. The theory is supposed to be the tolerance reaction again. Your body reacts to this opiate-blocking agent by releasing more opiates. So we’re treating a condition in which drugs that increase opiates cause you to have fewer opiates, by giving you a drug that decreases opiates which will cause you to have more opiates. How annoying is that?!

(some people recommend that if you’re giving someone opiate painkillers, you can give them low-dose naltrexone at the same time to prevent development of tolerance. Giving someone an opiate and an opiate-blocker simultaneously seems kind of like the medical equivalent of digging holes and filling them back in again, but apparently it does something useful)

This means we have examples of all three of the following:

1. A drug that’s supposed to have effect X, and after a while it still has effect X (Adderall)
2. A drug that’s supposed to have effect X, but after a while it has no effect (heroin)
3. A drug that’s supposed to have effect X, but after a while it overshoots and has effect anti-X (Antipsychotics? Heroin? Naltrexone?)

You may notice that these are all three of the logical possibilities. So for example, if we gave someone a drug that was supposed to decrease anxiety, it might decrease anxiety, have no effect, or increase anxiety. If scientific hypotheses are about closing off parts of possibility-space, then the receptor sensitivity hypothesis isn’t doing a very good job.

But it’s actually worse than this, because I get the impression that different people will end up in different branches of this trilemma. Benzodiazepines are a special offender here. Some people can take Xanax once a day for anxiety, and it’s a perfect solution – it suppresses their anxiety, it never stops working, and they never become addicted – if twenty years later they get a good therapist who helps them treat their anxiety without drugs, they can stop the Xanax with just a couple of days of mild discomfort. Other people will lose all effect after a couple of weeks, up the dose, up the dose some more, and end up as total wrecks. I think this is much less common than most people say – my attending’s rule of thumb is “benzo tolerance develops for sleep but not anxiety” – but it certainly happens. And for that matter, I’ve met a few people who never seem to develop tolerance for benzodiazepine sleeping pills. You see this same pattern for opiates used as painkillers. I spent so many years confused about whether people develop tolerance to these or not, and my final conclusion is that some people do and some people don’t and if you try to find a coherent universal pattern here you will go insane.

And it’s actually worse than this. Drugs don’t just work differently in different people, sometimes the same person will cycle through totally different mechanisms of drug response. SSRIs have something called tachyphylaxis, where they’ll work really well for months and then suddenly stop working (the word means “fast protection”, ie you develop protection against the drug effects quickly). This is even more annoying than the other patterns – at least with heroin, it makes sense that the receptors will gradually lose their sensitivity. But here? In random people at random times, the drug just stops working suddenly. It might be after a month, it might be after a year, it might be after ten years. And then every so often you’ll try the drug again a decade later, and then it’ll work just fine. Why? Nobody knows.

Some skeptics have pointed out that this is exactly what you would expect if the drug had no real effect and it was just luck that people didn’t have depressive episodes while they were taking them, but we know SSRIs have some effect. And anyway, placebo tachyphylaxis isn’t any less weird than real tachyphylaxis.

One more weird thing: LSD users report very strong tolerance lasting about three days after a dose, to the point where a second dose the day after will do almost nothing. Rat experiments have shown this is definitely because of receptor downregulation and not just enzyme induction. Okay. But LSD is a pretty strong drug. If receptors are so down-regulated that you are essentially on negative one tabs of LSD, how are you remotely normal while the tolerance is in effect? Are people during their periods of LSD tolerance less crazy and creative than normal? What the heck is the 5-HT2A receptor even doing if decreased amounts of it sufficient to render LSD ineffective don’t have noticeable effects on consciousness?

This is my concern about naltrexone as well. Sometimes doctors give naltrexone to help with alcohol addiction, which usually works okay. The theory is that since naltrexone blocks opiates, and opiates power the endogenous reward system, alcohol will seem less rewarding. Fine. But shouldn’t everything seem less rewarding? I always worry that I’m just blocking my alcoholic patients’ ability to enjoy anything at all (of which enjoying alcohol is a subset), but that doesn’t seem to be how it works. This is about when I default to my theory of “receptors read the FDA labels for medications and make sure to only do what they’re supposed to”.

All of this annoys me for a few reasons.

First, psychiatry really doesn’t think about this enough (or sometimes at all). The pharmacology textbooks will tell you how effective a drug is, how long it lasts, how many side effects it has, et cetera, but not whether it’s going to produce tolerance or not. It’s mostly just assumed that it won’t.

Second, groups skeptical of psychiatry are always talking about tolerance and it’s hard to tell whether they’re right or wrong. For example, some people claim antidepressants cause tardive dysphoria – that like the antipsychotics that eventually give permanent repetitive jerking movements, antidepressants can make serotonin receptors permanently undersensitive (or something) and so make depression worse. Other people say that antipsychotics themselves can eventually screw up dopamine receptors in ways that make psychosis worse (though see here). My guess is that these problems don’t arise for most people, but I can’t explain why these things wouldn’t happen.

Third, I think something like this is involved in addiction. Addiction is highly genetic; some people can drink alcohol socially their entire lives and never become alcoholic; other people quickly get hooked. This seems related to the thing where some people are stable forever at their low dose of opiate painkiller, and other people quickly develop tolerance and need to keep increasing it. I’m sure there are other things involved in addiction, but this is probably one of them.

Fourth, how many interesting things are we missing because they’re stupid and make no sense? I don’t know who first discovered that low-dose naltrexone could help potentiate the effect of opiates, but there have got to be other things like that. Forcing your body to become more sensitive to its own chemistry seems like a good alternative to forcing more and more foreign chemicals into it.

Finally, the best drugs seem to be the ones we hesitate to use because they produce too much tolerance. Xanax, opiates, you name it. A version of Xanax that that didn’t produce any tolerance would be a holy grail of anxiety disorder pharmacology. Some way to switch off Xanax tolerance would be just as good.

And a tolerance-free version of heroin would be pretty interesting too – from a purely pharmacological perspective, of course.

I really loved the style adopted by Kyra when making her predictions this time last year. Based on a little more than gut instinct (ie reading every public blog post that I could find by anyone which mentioned the Hugo in the last couple of months), I am copying her example and making my predictions for this year's Hugos, in the order that the results will be declared on Saturday night (early Sunday morning this side of the Atlantic).

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
Who I think will win it: Andy Weir, slate's top pick this year but also supported by fans who felt he was deprived by slate last year
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: Alyssa Wong, youngest Nebula winner in decades
Who I think will win if if I am very wrong: I do not think that I will be very wrong

Best Fan Artist
Who I think will win it: Steve Stiles, only non-slate nominee, frequently passed over in previous years
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: Christian Quinot, slate's top pick
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: No Award

Best Fan Writer
Who I think will win it: Mike Glyer, only non-slate nominee, had a very good year until recent illness
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: Jeffro Johnson, slate's top pick
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: No Award

Best Fancast
Who I think will win it: No Award, all others are slate nominees
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: Tales to Terrify, the only one with significant non-slate following
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: The Rageaholic, slate's top pick

Best Fanzine
Who I think will win it: File 770, supported by slate and non-slate fans alike
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: I do not think I will be wrong
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: I do not think I will be very wrong

Best Semiprozine
Who I think will win it: Uncanny Magazine
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: Strange Horizons
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: Beneath Ceaseless Skies
[slate's top pick in this category is No Award]

Best Professional Artist
Who I think will win it: No Award, all finalists are slate candidates
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: Larry Elmore, slate's top pick
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: I do not think I will be very wrong

Best Editor, Long Form
Who I think will win it: Sheila Gilbert
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: Toni Weisskopf
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: Vox Day, slate's top pick

Best Editor, Short Form
Who I think will win it: Sheila Williams
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: Ellen Datlow
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: Jerry Pournelle, slate's top pick

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
Who I think will win it: Doctor Who, “Heaven Sent”
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: Jessica Jones, “AKA Smile”
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: “The Cutie Map” Parts 1 and 2, the slate's top pick

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
Who I think will win it: The Martian, slate's top pick but with much wider support
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: Mad Max: Fury Road

Best Graphic Story
Who I think will win it: The Sandman: Overture, slate's top pick but also the only good nominee
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: I do not think I will be wrong
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: No Award

Best Related Work
Who I think will win it: No Award
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: I do not think I will be wrong
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: Between Light and Shadow by Marc Aramini, slate's top pick

Best Short Story
Who I think will win it: “Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: I do not think I will be wrong
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: Space Raptor Butt Invasion by Chuck Tingle, slate's top pick

Best Novelette
Who I think will win it: “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: “Obits” by Stephen King, slate's top pick but with wider support
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander, only non-slate finalist

Best Novella
Who I think will win it: Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold, slate's top pick but with wider support
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: I do not think I will be very wrong

Best Novel
Who I think will win it: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Who I think will win it if I am wrong: Uprooted by Naomi Novik, slate's top pick but with wider support
Who I think will win it if I am very wrong: Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

Let's see what happens...

Brexit is not going to happen, but it might need a second referendum.

After I posted the previous item, I saw this. You all know this site called Breitbart, which is so right-wing conspiracy oriented that a lot of conservatives disown it. It's the main site that supported (and may still support for all I know) James O'Keefe, the guy who goes out with hidden cameras and phony names and tries to get people to say things he can edit into "proof" of some right-wing conspiracy belief.

Anyway, the folks at Breitbart decided that the mainstream polls showing Hillary ahead were all bogus so they commissioned their own…and it showed Hillary running five points ahead of Donald Trump, which is the low end of what the mainstream polls say. Most of them have her at around eight. So Breitbart more or less validated the pollsters that show her beating Trump.

But wait. Given the rep of Breitbart, you have to wonder. Might this not be a trick to establish some credibility for their poll? If they came out showing Trump clobbering her, everyone would dismiss it as another Breitbart phony deal like all those claims of evidence that Obama is a gay Muslim or that Planned Parenthood broasts or deep-fries unborn children.

By saying she's five up, they look kinda reasonable. Then next week, they can announce she's three points ahead. Then by the second week in September, they can have them neck-and-neck…and in October, Trump supporters will have a poll they can point to and say, "Those are the real numbers! Trump is twelve points ahead!"

I wouldn't put it past them.

The post P.S. appeared first on News From ME.

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August 10th, 2016: I'll be at the DARTMOUTH COMICS ART FESTIVAL this Sunday! This is my first East Coast show in A DECADE so I hope everyone can come. ESPECIALLY those of you not in the East Coast. It's beautiful! The food is amazing! The music makes me do a chefs kiss!! COME SAY HI AND READ SOME AMAZING COMICS! Did you see this amazing visualization of Romeo and/or Juliet? I HOPE YOU DID BECAUSE IT'S SUPER RAD. – Ryan

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← previous	August 12th, 2016	next
August 12th, 2016: I'll be at the DARTMOUTH COMICS ART FESTIVAL this Sunday! This is my first East Coast show in A DECADE so I hope everyone can come. ESPECIALLY those of you not in the East Coast. It's beautiful! The food is amazing! The music makes me do a chefs kiss!! COME SAY HI AND READ SOME AMAZING COMICS! Did you see this amazing visualization of Romeo and/or Juliet? I HOPE YOU DID BECAUSE IT'S SUPER RAD. – Ryan

As you might have noticed I haven't been updating this blog very often for the past six weeks. This situation is going to continue for at least another three weeks, and I think I owe you an explanation.

I spent the back end of June and the first three weeks of July on the road, which kind of explains the paucity of updates back then. But then I got home and ran straight into two huge jobs: one scheduled, and one completely unplanned. The scheduled job—checking the page proofs (final PDF images of the book, as it will be published) for Empire Games went smoothly and to plan. But the other was an emergency, and it's still ongoing, because ...

... BREXIT broke my next Laundry novel, and I'm having to rewrite it.

Obsessive readers of the Laundry series will have figured out that CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN comes to a peak in 2014. "The Delirium Brief" was set in summer of 2013, culminating in the Last Last Night of the Proms in early August; "The Nightmare Stacks" is set in March/April of 2014, and the new novel, "The Delirium Brief" was set in April/May of 2014—a 2014 in which the stars have come right and the Lovecraftian horrors have finally come out to play. I wrote a first draft of "The Delirium Brief" in October '15 to January '16, and it was generally okay, for a first draft: it sagged in places, there were plot holes, and the ending was too abrupt (that's a common failing of mine), but this is basically stuff you fix in a subsequent round of polishing and redrafting before it even goes near an editor's desk. So I put it on a baking tray to cool while I worked on other projects (the "Empire Games" copy edit pass, starting work on "Ghost Engine", edits on "Dark State" ...) because it wasn't due in until September and there'd be plenty of time. Right?

Then the Brexit vote happened and over the next two weeks of utterly surreal political chaos it became apparent that I had a Problem.

No Laundry novel tells a single story. There's a bunch of stuff happening that fits between the covers of the book, but there are also continuous plot strands reaching back and forth to other books in the series—and shout-outs to reality to either side. And one of the key underpinnings of the series is that it deals with a department of the British civil service, with (presumably) some degree of accountability and a less-than-total disregard for law and administrative protocol.

The core story line for the first draft of "The Delirium Brief"—this is a spoiler, but it's a spoiler for a novel that will not now be published—followed the premise that after the catastrophic failure of containment at the end of "The Nightmare Stacks", the Laundry has come to the attention of the Cabinet Office, with a vengeful and affronted Prime Minister (whose career has been tarnished by the shit-storm thrown up in Leeds) who is all too eager to listen to anyone who can offer him a way to evade responsibility for an organization which, to be fair, he was unaware of. There follows a game of political musical chairs that will be familiar to fans of Yes, Minister as a new Ministry of Magic is established, a politician not totally dissimilar to Michael Gove is assigned to lead it, the Laundry is detatched from the Ministry of Defense and handed over kicking and screaming to the new Ministry, and then the usual privatisation and outsourcing ideology is applied. (And if you don't believe they'd privatise the Laundry, you haven't been paying attention to British politics for the past three decades.)

There is of course an action plot as well, and various other side-quests (you wanted to know what happened between Bob and Mo? I've got their relationship counseling transcripts in the can), and a markedly bloodthirsty climax, but the central plot armature of the novel was about how the Laundry handles politicians in full-blown panic mode in the wake of a crisis.

And then I got a ringside seat at a real political crisis and got to see how the people I was satirizing reacted and ... nope, nopety-nope, nopetopus:

I thought running in circles like headless chickens, squawking, and settling scores was as far as it would go. I didn't anticipate three simultaneous constitutional crises, the main Opposition going all Night of the Long Knives, the Prime Minister resigning and his principal adversary balking and then his principal supporter-turned-adversary being stabbed in the back and then ... but it gets worse: Boris Johnson, previously noted for winning The Spectator's competition for the most libelous poem about President Erdogan of Turkey is appointed Foreign Secretary and the first crisis he has to deal with, less than 48 hours after taking office, is a failed coup d'etat against Erdogan? And Boris is the great-grandson of Ali Kemal Bey? Who ordered that? I couldn't put something like that in a work of fiction: everyone would laugh at it, and for all the wrong reasons!

... The TL:DR is that I have had to trash an entire draft of the next Laundry novel because I tried to satirize British politics, and British politics is beyond satire.

So I'm currently not blogging much because I don't have time, because I am feverishly restructuring and rewriting a novel titled "The Delirium Brief" for a deadline that is all too close. Luckily most of the material in the book that didn't concern political shennanigans at the top table is recyclable with a little bit of elbow grease. I'm not writing an entirely new book: I'm just doing the equivalent of open heart surgery on an existing one, ripping out the damaged cardiovascular system and implanting a whole new primary plot—which I'm not going to spoiler by describing here—and suturing all the left-over bits together.

Enough David Brent, Brexit is serious!

It is almost a cliché that those who lecture and scold others about morality turn out to be hiding their own immorality. How many anti-gay politicians and crusaders have gotten caught soliciting others of the same sex in restrooms? How many of those who expressed outrage and called for the impeachment of Bill Clinton turned out of have unclean hands themselves?

Well, add another one to the books.

Back in the late eighties, every TV show that would have him on gave a forum to Dr. Thomas Radecki, a founding member of the National Coalition on TV Violence. He was everywhere attacking sexy movies, videogames and comic books. My friend, the fine comic book creator-publisher Denis Kitchen debated Dr. Radecki once on Larry King Live and did, I thought, a pretty good job of it — though it's hard for someone who isn't a full-time, well-compensated crusader to hold his own against one who is. (You can watch that episode here.) Radecki even testified as an expert witness in many courtrooms, blaming media for…well, just about everything.

Radecki submerged and stopped being a doctor in 1992 when the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation revoked his medical license for "engaging in immoral conduct of an unprofessional nature with a patient." He eventually got it reinstated but surrendered it in 2012 amidst accusations of trading drugs to patients in exchange for sex…and how sick do you have to be to enjoy sex on that basis?

In August of 2013, he was arrested for overprescribing drugs and, again, trading them for sex with patients, one of whom wound up bearing his child. This past June, Radecki was sentenced to prison for not less than 11 nor more than 22 years.

But don't be harsh about the man and don't adopt a smug smile and say anything about hypocrisy. He couldn't help it. I'm sure it was all those sexy movies, videogames and comic books he had to study in order to advocate their banning that turned him into a pretty repulsive human being.

The post Doctor in the Clink appeared first on News From ME.

These are the red lines Europe won't cross in Brexit talks.

I used to be a huge Star Trek fan.

I watched TOS reruns repeatedly and religiously in high school. Even watched the cartoons. Bought the James Blish episode adaptations, then the (better-written) Alan Dean Foster ones, then an endless series of mostly-forgettable tie-in novels (a few written by the likes of Joe Haldeman and Vonda McIntyre). I reread the Gerrold and Whitfield commentaries until the pages fell out of their bindings. I wrote Star Trek fanfic.The very first con I ever attended was a mid-seventies Trek con at the Royal York. I was pulling graveyard in the Eaton Center’s IT department that summer; I’d work from 10pm to 10am, stumble down to the con for the day, stumble back to work again at night. (My most vivid memory of that weekend was Harlan Ellison introducing his then-wife as the love of his life on Friday evening, then publicly excoriating her as a faithless slut on Sunday afternoon. Not quite sure what happened in between. I may have dozed.)

I still have the original Franz Joseph blueprints of the Constitution class starship hanging around somewhere, along with the Technical Manual and the Medical Reference Manual and the Star Trek Concordance and the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology and— I kid you not— the official Star Trek Cooking Manual (authorship attributed to Christine Chapel). I always hated the third season but I blamed NBC for that, not the Great Bird of the Galaxy. I endured The Motionless Picture, breathed a  sigh of relief at The Wrath of Khan, grimly held my nose and watched the first two seasons of Next Gen until they put Gene Roddenberry out to pasture so it could finally get good.

Of course, this was all seventies-eighties era. Eventually I got tired of lugging a steamer trunk’s worth of paperbacks back and forth across the country and unloaded most of it onto Goodwill. I only made it halfway through DS9, got less than a season into Voyager before giving up on it (honestly, I wanted to throw in the towel after the pilot), and made it about as far as the easy-listening opening-credits song for Enterprise before deciding I’d had enough. I was clean and sober for years afterward, and proud of it.

Point is, I’ve earned a certain amount of ST cred. I didn’t just know episodes, I knew writers (on of my happiest moments was when Norman Spinrad raved about my work in Asimov’s). So I’d argue that my opinion, while watching these Abrams reboots coming down the pike, is not entirely uninformed.  I mostly loved the first one even though it went of the rails in the third act, even though it arbitrarily relocated a whole damn planet (Delta Vega) from the very edge of the galaxy (where it lived in TOS’s “Where No Man Has Gone Before”) to mutual orbit around Vulcan for chrissakes, a planet which has no moon (“The Man Trap”). I mostly hated Into Dumbness for far more reasons than I mentioned in passing back in 2013. Didn’t really weigh in on either of them here.

A couple of weeks behind the curve, though, we finally checked out Star Trek Beyond, our hopes stoked by its stellar rating on Rotten Tomatoes (No, I will never learn): 216 professional critics, 180 of whom applauded.  And finally having seen it for myself, I gotta ask that Ratey-One Eighty: What the fuck were you on?

Spoilage follows.

For starters, forget the bad science. Or at least, forgive it; Star Trek has never been the go-to franchise for rigorous verisimilitude, and that’s okay.  Forget the depiction of “nebulae”   as impenetrable fogs of cloud and rocks jammed so cheek-to-jowl that they’re forever colliding with each other. Just accept whatever weird biological mechanism grants you immortality by turning you into a horny toad (the lizard, not a sexually-aroused amphibian). Forget the fact that we shouldn’t even be using starships any more, since Into Darkness showed us Federation transporters reaching from Earth to the Klingon homeworld without straining, and communicators that did the same without any noticeable time lag.

Let’s put all that aside, and consider these questions instead:

• Stripey-warrior-girl Jaylah is hiding from Krall’s forces in the wreck of the Franklin, which she has cleverly cloaked to avoid detection. But the Franklin was originally Krall’s ship; he was the one who crashed it on Altamid, back when he was Edison. So why doesn’t he know it’s there now, even though it’s invisible? In fact, why doesn’t the fact that his crashed starship has suddenly vanished raise all manner of red flags, draw attention to Jaylah’s hideout rather than concealing it?
• Krall— and presumably his whole merry band of lizard-faced minions— are actually human, physically modified as a side-effect of alien life-extension tech. (At least, if his minions weren’t Franklin crew, someone please tell me where they came from; we’re told that Altimid’s original inhabitants abandoned the place centuries ago). So what’s this weird alien language they’re speaking throughout most of the movie, the one that we require subtitles to comprehend? I’m pretty sure it’s not French.
• The last twenty minutes of the movie or so— basically, the climax— revolve around Kirk chasing a “bioweapon”— imagine that the Smoke Monster from “Lost” had its own Mini-Me— around the vast variable-gravity reaches of Starbase Yorktown. The weapon is on the verge of detonation. Kirk has to fly around and pull on a bunch of levers in a specific sequence to open a convenient airlock and suck it into space. One of the levers gets stuck. The clock ticks down. And not once does anyone say Hey, we’ve got transporters— why don’t we just lock onto the motherfucker from here and beam its squirmy black ass into space?

I mean, seriously: transporter technology and warp drive are the two most iconic  technologies of the whole 50-year-old franchise. Not using the transporter— not even mentioning it— is like putting an asteroid on a collision course with the Enterprise, then expecting us to believe that everyone on the bridge has just kinda forgotten  they can simply move out of the way. Such scenarios do not inspire you to grip your armrests and wonder how our heroes will escape this time; they inspire you to cheer for the fucking asteroid.

Two of these three quibbles are mission-critical plot elements; the story falls apart without them, yet they make no sense. And there are other issues, smaller issues, that chipped away at my increasingly desperate attempts to squeeze a bit of enjoyment out of this rotten fruit.  The lighting was incredibly dark, even in locations that should have been brightly lit; it was as if the theatre’s main projector bulb had burned out and someone was filling in with a flashlight. The sound was almost as muddy as the lighting;  at one point, Caitlin swore she heard someone make reference to “the dudette with the clitoris”, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell her what else it might have been.

Much has been made of Beyond‘s “return to basics” in terms of characterization, which seems like a fancy way of saying that Spock and McCoy get to trade jabs again like they did in the old days. That’s true; but these jabs are soft and flaccid things, never as funny or poignant as some of the sparks that flared between Kelly and Nimoy back in the sixties. “I do not blame him, Doctor.  He is probably terrified of your beads and rattles”; “They do indeed have one redeeming feature. They do not talk too much.”; “I know why you’re not afraid to die: you’re more afraid of living!”

Remember those?

Now take a moment to consider just what Star Trek Beyond has driven me to: it has driven me to praise (albeit in a relative way) the quality of the dialog in sixties-era Star Trek.

I could go on. I could complain about the absurdity of a soldier who felt abandoned by the Federation because “Starfleet is not a military organization”— despite the fact that Starfleet’s ships are armed to the teeth, and carry out military engagements with the Federation’s enemies, and are crewed by uniformed people assigned military ranks who follow a military chain-of-command. (Yup, no military organization here. Just the galaxy’s best cosplayers…)  I could remark upon the surrealism of two Starfleet captains locked in mortal combat while berating each other about their respective Captain’s logs: I read your diary! Yeah, well, I read your diary!—

Evidently, in this timeline, Starfleet captains tweet their logs for all to see. You might be forgiven for wondering if this doesn’t constitute some kind of security issue, were it not for the fact that Starfleet is not a military organization.

I could also go on at lesser length about the good things the movie served up. The FX were great, when you could see ’em.  Nice to see a Universal Translator that needs to be programmed now and then, and which actually voices-over audible alien dialog instead of magically reshaping the speaker’s sounds and mouth movements into English. I liked the almost-sorta invocation of nearest-neighbor algos to explain the schooling behavior of the alien swarm, even if they used a hokey made-up name and hand-waved the exploit. The acting was fine; the cast, for the most part, both honor and improve upon the legacy they’ve inherited. And—

Well, to be honest, that’s pretty much it. Not great Star Trek. Not a great movie.

And you know what really doesn’t make much sense? I’ll still probably go see the next one when it comes out.

Maybe I shouldn’t have tossed all those paperbacks after all.

 

 

I write funny things professionally, and have done for years. I’ve made a fair amount of money and even won some awards for funny things I’ve written. So as a professional writer of funny things I have thoughts on Donald Trump’s oblique joke yesterday about how great it would be if a gun nut assassinated Hillary Clinton and/or some of the judges she might appoint. As with many examinations of humor, this will not be particularly funny. You have been warned.

1. Of course Trump’s comment was a joke, and as someone who has told more than his share of inappropriate jokes to his later regret, I’m pretty sure I can model Trump’s brain process to getting there. He’s up on stage, he’s pissed off that he’s losing, he’s with a sympathetic crowd that wants him to say something punchy, and he has no goddamn filter at all, because why would he, his brand is “I say what I think” and his brand has gotten him this far. So out of the woodwork of his brain comes the clever observation that well, actually, some jackass with a gun could offer up a lead veto to Clinton and/or her judges, and out it went through his teeth. Trump didn’t give it any more thought than that: pop! into his head, push! out of his mouth. Maybe three tenths of a second from conception to utterance, if that. This is was not a statement he’d been consciously planning months to say.

Was it a joke? Sure. Was it funny? Like most jokes, it depends on whether you’re the audience for it. It didn’t work for me. Should Trump have said it? Immaterial, since it was said.

Should it be excused as “just a joke”?

Well, but, see. Here’s the thing about that: There’s no such thing as “just a joke,” and Trump of all people knows that.

2. The first problem with saying “it’s just a joke” is that people very often use that phrase to mean “I get to say/enjoy a horrible thing without penalty.” Well, as a professional writer of funny things, I feel perfectly within my rights to call bullshit on that. Jokes don’t come out of nowhere. They are the product of a presumably thinking brain just like any other speech, and like any other speech they are susceptible to the same scrutiny and criticism. Just like any other speech the context of the joke is useful, too.

So here’s the context of that joke: Donald Trump is a man who has pursued the presidency through racism and white nationalism and by insinuating criminal activity on the part of his opponents (or their families), who has encouraged foreign agents to subvert the US election process (another “joke”) and who is actively training his base of support — angry and scared white people, many of whom have a nearly-fanatical attachment to their firearms — to consider the election process rigged if it does not produce the result they want. Then, at a political rally, as the GOP candidate for president, while speaking about the 2nd Amendment and arguing how his opponent Hillary Clinton wants to get rid of it — to get rid of his angry white supporter’s firearms! — he drops a little joke about how, well, actually, they could oppose her, nod nod, wink wink.

Trump wasn’t making a private joke with friends in the comfort of his own ridiculously baroque home. He wasn’t writing satire (which is often not funny) or black humor in the pages of, say, the New Yorker. He wasn’t on the stage of a comedy club trying out five minutes of edgy new material in front of a half-drunk midnight crowd who are there to see someone else anyway. He wasn’t putting it in the comments of his liberal friend’s Facebook post about gun control. He wasn’t doing any of those things — although even if he were, he could still be held accountable for his words. Rather, he was, as the GOP candidate for president, at a rally of his supporters, in a race he is currently far behind in, joking about someone killing off Hillary Clinton, or whomever she appoints as a judge. He wasn’t there to make comedy. He was there, quite literally, as a political statement. That’s the context.

3. What, politicians can’t make jokes? Well, speaking professionally, it’s usually better when they don’t. They can’t all be Ann Richards. Every time Hillary Clinton attempts humor my desire to vote for her goes down a tenth of a percent. I don’t want or need my politicians to be funny. I need them to wonk out on unsexy topics like water rights and trade deals, and represent the interests of their constituencies. That’s the gig, not killing it for ten minutes at The Comedy Store.

That said, sure, if politicians can make jokes, why not? Yuk away. But again, jokes aren’t Get Out of Jail Free cards for saying horrible things. And when the jokes are, in fact, saying horrible things, like when the GOP candidate for president pops one off about maybe someone assassinating the Democratic candidate for president because of her alleged position on the 2nd Amendment, it’s all right to haul the joke out into the light and begin the utterly unfunny process of picking it apart to see what’s really going on there.

Why can’t you just let a joke be a joke? Because, to repeat, and as others have noted, it’s never just a joke. Jokes mean things, just like any other kind of speech. In fact, jokes often have greater impact, because jokes aim for the pleasure centers of our brain, not the analytical centers. The information of a joke hits in a place where you have fewer defenses against it, and fewer walls barring it from sinking into your overall worldview. This is why, among other things, you probably laugh at things you know you shouldn’t laugh at. It’s also why you’re probably quicker to excuse the content of a joke — it’s just a joke! — or to minimize the importance of what’s being said within one. How bad can it be if it made me laugh? And also, if the joke is saying something horrible, what does it say about me? You have a vested interest either way in explaining away your reaction.

Trump is not a great politician — indeed, if this election cycle has done anything, it has reminded us that the oft-derided skills of being a great politician are in fact useful and needed — but he is a marvelous bully, and like any gifted bully, he’s aware of how to use humor for its manipulative qualities. This is why he mocks his opponents and gives them silly names, why he says outrageous things, planned or unprompted and then immediately wraps them in the rhetoric of humor, and why all his defenders are instructed and prompted to explain away the jokes. He’s not the problem, you’re the problem if you can’t take a joke. No one wants to be accused of not being able to take a joke.

4. This is where once again I put on my hat as a writer of funny things to tell you the following:

• It’s okay not to be able to take a joke.
• It’s okay to think a joke is not funny.
• It’s okay to focus more on the content of a joke than the delivery.
• It’s okay to hold a joke to the same standard as any other speech, and to pay attention to the context in which it is delivered.
• It’s okay to be scared of a joke and the joke-teller. Sometimes that’s the right thing to be.

Finally and perhaps most importantly:

• Always question the motives of the person who is telling you “it’s just a joke.”

Why? Because, well, why are they saying that? Sometimes it’s because the person is a comedian, trying to convince you they’re funny (pro tip: if you have to convince someone you’re funny, you’re probably not funny to them). Sometimes the person who told the joke realizes they just stepped in it, and is trying to backtrack without making themselves look too much like an asshole. Sometimes the person is gaslighting you, trying to make you doubt yourself, for their own purposes. And sometimes that person is trying to normalize hateful rhetoric — or keep hateful rhetoric normalized — and is trying to make you defensive about seeing it clearly as what it is: hateful.

A person saying “it’s just a joke” isn’t always an asshole. But assholes are almost always happy to say “it’s just a joke” to make it look like the problem here is you. So when someone says “it’s just a joke” to you, that’s your cue for skepticism. Jokes mean things. Anyone who tells you otherwise either doesn’t understand the uses of humor, or is hoping that you don’t.

5. You are not automatically a bad person if you laugh at horrible things or find funny a joke whose content, on reflection, is not funny at all. You are a human being, and a skilled communicator — and Trump, for one, is a very skilled communicator — is going to play the changes on you. You might laugh because of the delivery. You might laugh because as a human you like the pleasure of laughing. You might laugh because of the context of the joke, or because it’s subversive, or because the butt of the joke is someone you dislike. You might laugh because the person telling you the joke is someone you admire. You might laugh because it’s expected. You might laugh because not laughing might be noticed. You might laugh because honestly you don’t know what else to do. You might laugh because it’s not safe to do anything else.

Laughing at a horrible joke is not the problem. Excusing that hateful and horrible joke as “just a joke” is the problem. The pleasure of humor don’t mitigate the damage it can do when the hate it offers slips into someone’s worldview, or simply reconfirms the hate they already hold. You’re not automatically a bad person if you laugh along with hate. You’re a bad person if you walk along with it. Humor makes it easy to take that walk. It’s up to you to resist moving your feet. The more you resist, the more you’ll recognize that hate actually isn’t all that funny.

6. Trump made a joke about someone assassinating his political opponent, or the judges she might appoint. Trump’s minions and enablers have been scurrying around trying to spin it, or mitigate it, or accuse people of misunderstanding it and anyway it was just a throwaway line, it was just a joke. But context matters and who is making the joke matters. Trump is a bigot and he’s ignorant and he is a buffoon and he has no filter but he is not stupid. He knows when he puts things out into the air that they are heard and that they are taken seriously. Even the jokes. Especially the jokes.

Trump wished out loud that someone would assassinate Hillary Clinton because inside, the screaming tantrum-throwing infant that Trump is wants her out of the way, and so does the slightly more grown-up version of him whose business model includes cheating contractors and workers out of their contractually-obliged fees and wages, and so does the 70-year-old version who has spent decades getting his way, who wiped the floor with the laughable opposition he had in the GOP primaries and sees no reason why he should do anything different than before, and is possibly confused as to why it’s not working any more, so just try harder. Does Trump actively want Clinton dead? No. But out of the way covers a whole lot of ground. Trump is a bully and he knows how to phrase a wish. So when that wish came howling out of his id up there on stage yesterday, he wrapped it into a joke and sent it on its way.

Trump made the joke because he knows, better than almost anyone, that there is no such thing as “just a joke.” He knows it, and the fact he knows it, and made the joke anyway, should scare the shit out of you.

As should this: When Donald Trump is president, he won’t have to make jokes anymore.

"Biased" fit for work tests penalise poorer people.

Brexit means Brexit, but in reality it's a long time away.