Andrew Hickey

With all the talk at the moment of a potential Labour split, I thought it might be useful to take a look back at the history of the last major split in the party by reading Crewe and King’s history of the SDP, specifically the early sections on the formation of the party. I#m not going to recount the full history, but I think there were two interesting points in the SDP’s formation that tend to get overlooked in discussion of any potential current split.

First of all, the crisis that led to the foundation of the SDP had been brewing for a long time. Labour’s divisions over Europe had been around for a long time, and the rebellion by Jenkins and others over British membership of the EEC had taken place almost a decade before. On the left of the party, Tony Benn and others had been busy organising and developing the ‘Bennite’ movement for over a decade. There’d been a gradual process of alienation that had made the right-wingers who’d eventually form the SDP consider their position in the Labour Party over a long period of time. The conclusions people came to were after years of tough struggles against the left in local parties, trade unions and the NEC. People had a much longer time to feel they were no longer welcome in the Labour Party and might do better elsewhere.

As an example, Roy Jenkins’ Dimbleby Lecture that was later seen as paving the way for the SDP was delivered in November 1979, while the Limehouse Declaration that established the party wasn’t until fourteen months later in January 1981. There was a long process both of preparing the ground for a new party and people deciding they needed to leave Labour. Then as now, the act of getting someone to defect from a party was a major task, as it’s a major shift in their life and relationships that requires time to achieve the psychological change needed to do it.

The second key point is that this long period building up to a split had led to the creation of various formal and informal groups that would provide the foundations of the SDP. These groups – the Manifesto Group, the Campaign for Labour Victory etc – weren’t founded with the intention of creating a new party but helped provide networks for those dissatisfied with the direction of the Labour Party. Again, this was a process that took place over time and in a number of different groupings – it’s worth noting that the original ‘Gang Of Three’ (Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers) were meeting and planning quite separately from Roy Jenkins and his supporters. Different groups coalesced over time, and the idea of a split emerged over time, it wasn’t a simple process of everyone deciding one day to do it.

The important lessons to learn for today are that any party split is going to be the end of a long process, not something that happens smoothly and quickly. (And as I’ve discussed before, there have been many many more times when people have said a party will definitely split than actual splits) The changes in the Labour Party have happened at an incredibly fast pace – the SDP came after a decade or more of Benn attempting to achieve what Corbyn’s done in less than a year. The gap between Jenkins’ Dimbleby Lecture and the foundation of the SDP is about the same as the gap between the last general election and today.

We’re still at a stage where most of the people who might split see their future as trying to win back the Labour Party, and aren’t close to breaking off all the ties they have with it. Maybe there will be a split in the future, but the lesson from the founding of the SDP is that it will take time to get them to that position, it’s not something that’s going to happen quickly.

The Press from York wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Stan Freberg died a year ago last April. If he hadn't, he would have been 90 years old today.

Please forgive me if instead of writing wholly about him, I write a little about myself in this piece. I am a fortunate man in that I was inspired by a lot of talented folks when I was younger and then went on to know and even to have close relationships with many of them. My mother always told me that when she was pregnant with me, she was a steady watcher of Time for Beany, a pioneering television show with miserable production values but brilliant writing, acting and concepts. I got to know well the three main talents behind that show — Stan, Daws Butler and Bob Clampett.

They were all very gifted, influential men. They were all very nice to me. They all treated me as an equal even though I clearly was not. (As far as I could tell, all three treated everyone as an equal, including people who were amazingly even less their equal than I was.)

I remember vividly playing Stan Freberg records over and over and over again in my parents' bedroom when I was a child. That was where the one record player in the house was and almost any time one of them wasn't sleeping, I could go in there, shut the door and listen to Freberg over and over and over. I did not "get" all the cultural references. Often, he was parodying something about which I knew nothing other than that his parody, whatever it was making fun of, was quite wonderful.

I'm not the only person who felt this way. A Freberg-Butler record that aped and spoofed Jack Webb's TV show Dragnet was a smash hit in Australia several years before Dragnet was ever seen or heard in Australia. People just thought it was a funny record.

Stan made funny records. Stan made funny commercials. Stan made funny voices in cartoons. And it wasn't just that they were funny. They were also memorable. They stayed with you because they not only got to your sense of humor but to other portions of your brain. He made you laugh but he also made you think.

"Made you laugh but he also made you think." That's a cliché used to promote a lot of comedians who were lucky if they could make you do either but it was really true in Stan's case. I always felt a little more creative and smarter when I listened to Freberg or got to be around Freberg. I'm not saying that I actually was either of those things…but I felt like I was. Maybe that's almost the same thing.  One thing I did observe that even into his eighties, that mind of his was always working.  It was a tad slower but it was always working.

One time, I was sitting in his living room talking with him while his wonderful wife Hunter was out running an errand.  They were nearly inseparable and she took such good care of him but just for a half-hour, they were apart.  Stan was telling me an anecdote and as he was nearing the punchline, the doorbell rang and I went to accept a parcel from a U.P.S. driver.  By the time it had been signed-for and the guy was gone, Stan had forgotten where he was in his story.  I started to prompt him but he said, "No, no…let me come up with it myself."  It was kind of a personal challenge at his age.

All on his own, he remembered where he was and he started to resume the story.  That's when the phone rang.  The person who'd sent the package was calling to see if it had arrived yet.

Stan said, "Yes, it just got here.  Yeah, I know it was supposed to be here two days ago but you should have specified Next Day Delivery."  Then he added, "And while you were at it, you should have taken out Punch Line Insurance on it.  That's where you pay a few bucks extra and they guarantee the delivery man won't interrupt a joke you're in the middle of telling."

I don't know if the person on the other end of the line laughed but I sure did.  If Stan had still been in the advertising business, I think U.P.S. could have had a whole new campaign.

The post Remembering Stan appeared first on News From ME.

From New York Magazine:

There are those who can happily while away a long road trip with the companionship of a good book, their minds flying away with the plot even as their bodies remain motionless in the passenger seat of a car plowing along a freeway. And then there are those — well, there are those for whom this all sounds very nice in theory but who know that in reality it would probably result in nausea at best, actual vomit at worst. Carsickness is an annoying quirk of human physiology, but it’s one that has more to do with your “idiot brain” than you’d probably think, as neuroscientist and author Dean Burnett explained yesterday in an interview with NPR’s Fresh Air.

. . . .

Typically, when you’re moving about, your muscles are in motion, your eyes are observing the distance you’ve covered, and, whether you know it or not, you’re also relying on the “balance sensors” in your inner ears. These are “little tiny little tubes full of fluid,” Burnett explained, “and the motion of that fluid tells us where we’re going. So, if we’re upside down, we can tell. And if we’re going fast, we can tell, because this fluid just obeys the laws of physics.” The thalamus pieces all of this information into a kind of “explain it to me like I’m 4” message to your mind about where you are in space.

But when you’re in a car, your unsuspecting thalamus is picking up all sorts of mixed signals. Your muscles are motionless, and yet your eyes can see that you are, in fact, moving along, and quite quickly. And then there’s the problem of the aforementioned fluid in your inner ears, which are “rocking around and sloshing because you actually are moving,” Burnett explained. More on that:

So what’s happening there is the brain’s getting mixed messages. It’s getting signals from the muscles and the eyes saying we are still and signals from the balance sensors saying we’re in motion. Both of these cannot be correct. There’s a sensory mismatch there. And in evolutionary terms, the only thing that can cause a sensory mismatch like that is a neurotoxin or poison. So the brain thinks, essentially, it’s been being poisoned. When it’s been poisoned, the first thing it does is get rid of the poison, a.k.a. throwing up. And as a result — so, like, as soon as the brain gets confused by anything like that, it says, oh, I don’t know what to do, so just be sick, just in case. And as a result, we get motion sickness because the brain’s constantly worried about being poisoned.

Your poor dumb brain is only trying to help, in the best way it knows how, in other words. For some, reading a book only compounds the confusion. “When you’re in a car, you can look out the window. You can see things going by. You can see the passage and the movement itself,” which means that, for some people, the sight of the world outside the car passing by “sort of balances the system,” Burnett said. “The brain’s going — oh, look, things moving — I must be moving — and then sort of calms down the sickness response.” But when you read, you’re focused on the page, and as such, “you’re shutting out a lot of external visual information,” he continued. “So it sort of increases the sensory mismatch, which is causing the sickness in the first place … You’ve got no visual information to try and help allay the brain’s concerns.”

Link to the rest at New York Magazine and thanks to Matthew for the tip.

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My friends who want to see Donald J. Trump in the White House will probably want to skip this post. As you know, here at newsfromme.com, we believe that following the election is following the Electoral College breakdown. Everything else is just noise.

The map looks pretty darn good these days for Hillary Clinton with even usually-red states like Arizona and Georgia possibly in play. More significant is that she seems to have a double-digit lead in Pennsylvania. The Trump "path" to 270 votes has long involved flipping Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, all of which Obama won twice. Clinton is also up in Ohio and Florida — around six points, last I looked.

If Trump loses any one of those three, victory is very difficult but still mathematically possible. A lot of other states that now look safely blue — say, Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire — would have to go unexpectedly crimson. Clinton has consistently led or tied in every major poll of all three except for one apparent outlier in Pennsylvania.

If he loses two of the three…well, his chances of becoming president aren't a whole lot better than yours. At this rate, you might even beat him.

Can this all change? Sure but I think it's going to take something more than Trump calling her a mentally-unstable liar. That kind of attack loses its effectiveness when increasing numbers of voters think it best describes the guy hurling it. (A good question — one I doubt can be answered with any certainty — is to what extent what we've seen in the last week or so is a matter of voters liking Hillary more or liking Donald less. It's surely both but I get the feeling it's mostly the latter.)

Obviously, Trump's situation will improve but to knock her out, he needs a Game-Changer. A sudden financial crash is looking unlikely, especially after last week's Jobs Report. A major terrorist attack on American soil might shake things up but it's far from certain that one would drive voters to Trump, a man with no history of expertise in foreign affairs and a lot of recent gaffes.

The most likely scenario would be some huge, undeniable scandal proving that "Crooked Hillary" was indeed crooked. If you cruise the right-wingier sites, you'll see a constant certainty that such a scandal has been found and proven beyond any doubt whatsoever, and that an even bigger one will be revealed any day now. Each of these, going back many years, was or is certain to drive her from the race and into prison.

If I were a Hillary-hater, I think I'd be real tired right now and disappointed in all the folks who, dating back to Whitewater, told me that they absolutely, definitely had the goods on her and that there was zero chance of her getting away this time. I might still think she was evil but I'd adopt an "I'll believe you have the proof when she's actually indicted" attitude. Maybe that's just me.

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

Owen Smith, the anti-immigration candidate who has risen without trace to challenge Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour Party leadership, has been making hay with this apparent contradiction between Corbyn's current and past statements:

Confusion over Article 50https://t.co/hVPnt6QOpc …

— Owen Smith 2016 (@owensmith2016) August 6, 2016

I think I've made it clear that I am not a Corbyn fan. However, it's clear to me that when he said "Article 50 has to be invoked now" on 24 June, he meant "We are now in a situation where Article 50 has to be invoked at some point", and did not think that he was calling for the immediate invocation of Article 50.

It was incompetent of him to express himself in the way that he did, and incompetent not to clarify as rapidly as possible with his real view (whatever that may be) when it became clear that his words were being interpreted in the form that they came out of his mouth rather than the form they had had in his head before he spoke. He expressed himself poorly on the morning after a sleepless night, and failed to absorb any speaking points which might or might not have been prepared for him by party staff. A competent leader would not have made that mistake in the first place, or would have rapidly corrected by scheduling a major interview to set the record straight (and journalists would have been cutting each others' throats to get that interview). But it's a mistake rather than equivocation.

It was a very big mistake, because both the MPs who I linked to in my previous post saw this very statement as effectively the final straw. (Thangam Debbonnaire: "On the day after the referendum he asked for an early Brexit... That was the tipping point for me". Lilian Greenwood: "we heard Jeremy calling for the immediate triggering of Article 50. Without any discussion with the Shadow Cabinet or the Leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party... How can that be right?")

For those who had worked closely with him, and who would theoretically have been among those populating the ministerial benches of a Corbyn-led government, it seemed entirely in character for Corbyn to have suddenly adopted a new policy position on a crucial issue of national importance without preparing colleagues for it (never mind consulting them), rather than considering the possibility that he might have misspoken - a possibility that I haven't even seen his supporters raising. It seems that Corbyn's poorly chosen "now" triggered the mass resignations from the shadow cabinet of the following couple of days, and thus was the spark that exploded the current leadership crisis (which looks likely to continue for at least twelve months after Corbyn trounces Smith in the coming ballot).

Needless to say, my analysis doesn't change my view about the urgency for Labour to get a competent leader. For me this isn't about policy at all (there seems little to choose between the two candidates, and where I can discern a difference I generally feel closer to Corbyn's position), it's about two of the most basic political leadership skills: communicating clearly and consistently, and building a good team around you which may well include those who have not always supported you. Corbyn is deeply incompetent on both counts, and the Labour Party and the British political system need and deserve better. The problem is, I'm not convinced that a better option is currently available.

I have read and can recommend G.K.Chesterton's novels The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday.

I have not read his The Flying Inn, but I can cut and paste from Wikipedia with the best of them:

The Flying Inn is a novel first published in 1914 by G. K. Chesterton. It is set in a future England where the Temperance movement has allowed a bizarre form of "Progressive" Islam to dominate the political and social life of the country. Because of this, alcohol sales to the poor are effectively prohibited, while the rich can get alcoholic drinks "under a medical certificate".

The plot centres on the adventures of Humphrey Pump and Captain Patrick Dalroy, who roam the country in their cart with a barrel of rum in an attempt to evade Prohibition, exploiting loopholes in the law to temporarily prevent the police taking action against them.

Far-fetched, you will say, but have you read this report in the Guardian?

MPs considered nationalising a Whitehall pub to avoid a drinking ban while they are relocated to the Department of Health’s offices for the duration of refurbishment works at the Palace of Westminster. 

Richmond House, which hosts the department, is one of three government buildings owned by Middle East financiers who have bought into an Islamic bond issued by the government. One of its stipulations is that no alcohol will be sold on the premises. 

To get around the restriction, some MPs proposed taking the Red Lion pub, located between parliament and Richmond house, into public ownership and banning entry to the general public.

Important buildings in Whitehall sold to foreign owners? That sale took place under the Coalition so, if it worries you, we Liberal Democrats cannot escape our share of the blame.

But let it serve as a reminder that, for all there willingness to wrap themselves in the flag, the Conservatives will do anything for money.

I am reminded of a House Points column I wrote back in 2005:

People think the cricket authorities are stuffy, but really they are the most shamelessly commercial administrators of all. There are now logos on the players' clothing and painted on the field of play. For the right price you could probably get your company's slogan tattooed on the President of the MCC's buttocks.

Results for the bump seen in December have been updated, and indeed, with the new 2016 data — four times as much as was obtained in 2015 — neither ATLAS nor CMS [the two general purpose detectors at the Large Hadron Collider] sees an excess where the bump appeared in 2015. Not even a hint, as we already learned inadvertently from CMS yesterday.

All indications so far are that the bump was a garden-variety statistical fluke, probably (my personal guess! there’s no evidence!) enhanced slightly by minor imperfections in the 2015 measurements. Should we be surprised? No. If you look back at the history of the 1970s and 1980s, or at the recent past, you’ll see that it’s quite common for hints — even strong hints — of new phenomena to disappear with more data. This is especially true for hints based on small amounts of data (and there were not many two photon events in the bump — just a couple of dozen).  There’s a reason why particle physicists have very high standards for statistical significance before they believe they’ve seen something real.  (Many other fields, notably medical research, have much lower standards.  Think about that for a while.)  History has useful lessons, if you’re willing to learn them.

Back in December 2011, a lot of physicists were persuaded that the data shown by ATLAS and CMS was convincing evidence that the Higgs particle had been discovered. It turned out the data was indeed showing the first hint of the Higgs. But their confidence in what the data was telling them at the time — what was called “firm evidence” by some — was dead wrong. I took a lot of flack for viewing that evidence as a 50-50 proposition (70-30 by March 2012, after more evidence was presented). Yet the December 2015 (March 2016) evidence for the bump at 750 GeV was comparable to what we had in December 2011 for the Higgs. Where’d it go?  Clearly such a level of evidence is not so firm as people claimed. I, at least, would not have been surprised if that original Higgs hint had vanished, just as I am not surprised now… though disappointed of course.

Was this all much ado about nothing? I don’t think so. There’s a reason to have fire drills, to run live-fire exercises, to test out emergency management procedures. A lot of new ideas, both in terms of new theories of nature and new approaches to making experimental measurements, were generated by thinking about this bump in the night. The hope for a quick 2016 discovery may be gone, but what we learned will stick around, and make us better at what we do.

Filed under: History of Science, LHC News Tagged: #LHC #Higgs #ATLAS #CMS #diphoton

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August 5th, 2016: Did you see this amazing visualization of Romeo and/or Juliet? I HOPE YOU DID BECAUSE IT'S SUPER RAD – Ryan

This post, Everything Is Broken, by Quinn Norton, is excellent. Much of it I know, but there were some astute, surprising, and in retrospect obvious observations. E.g.:

Then there’s the Intelligence Community, who call themselves the IC. We might like it if they stopped spying on everyone all the time, while they would like us to stop whining about it.

After spending some time with them, I am pretty sure I understand why they don’t care about the complaining. The IC are some of the most surveilled humans in history. They know everything they do is gone over with a fine-toothed comb — by their peers, their bosses, their lawyers, other agencies, the president, and sometimes Congress. They live watched, and they don’t complain about it.

In all the calls for increased oversight, the basics of human nature gets neglected. You’re not going to teach the spooks this is wrong by doing it to them more. [...] Humans are mostly egocentric creatures. Spooks, being humans, are never going to know why living without privacy is bad as long as they are doing it.

Also, she talks about something I've tried to write about but I get so mad I blow my wording circuit:

A few years ago, I went to several well respected people who work in privacy and security software and asked them a question.

First, I had to explain something:

“Most of the world does not have install privileges on the computer they are using.”

That is, most people using a computer in the world don’t own the computer they are using. Whether it’s in a cafe, or school, or work, for a huge portion of the world, installing a desktop application isn’t a straightforward option. Every week or two, I was being contacted by people desperate for better security and privacy options, and I would try to help them. I’d start, “Download th…” and then we’d stop. The next thing people would tell me was that they couldn’t install software on their computers. Usually this was because an IT department somewhere was limiting their rights as a part of managing a network. These people needed tools that worked with what they had access to, mostly a browser.

So the question I put to hackers, cryptographers, security experts, programmers, and so on was this: What’s the best option for people who can’t download new software to their machines? The answer was unanimous: nothing. They have no options. They are better off talking in plaintext I was told, “so they don’t have a false sense of security.” Since they don’t have access to better software, I was told, they shouldn’t do anything that might upset the people watching them. But, I explained, these are the activists, organizers, and journalists around the world dealing with governments and corporations and criminals that do real harm, the people in real danger. Then they should buy themselves computers, I was told.

That was it, that was the answer: be rich enough to buy your own computer, or literally drop dead. I told people that wasn’t good enough, got vilified in a few inconsequential Twitter fights, and moved on.

Not long after, I realized where the disconnect was. I went back to the same experts and explained: in the wild, in really dangerous situations — even when people are being hunted by men with guns — when encryption and security fails, no one stops talking. They just hope they don’t get caught.

The same human impulse that has kept lotteries alive for thousands of years keeps people fighting the man against the long odds. “Maybe I’ll get away with it, might as well try!”

As for self-censoring their conversations in the face of hostile infrastructure, non-technical activists are just as good at it as [long list of previously described examples of being terrible about one's own security]. They blow.

This conversation was a wake-up call for some security people who hadn’t realized that people who become activists and journalists routinely do risky things. Some of them joined my side of the time-wasting inconsequential Twitter fights, realizing that something, even something imperfect, might be better than nothing. But many in the security scene are still waiting for a perfect world into which to deploy their perfect code.

I just want to re-emphasis this: "some security people [...] hadn’t realized that people who become activists and journalists routinely do risky things."

I have so much to say about all this, maybe if I can keep my cool adequately, I'll say some of it in a separate post.

I haven’t accomplished much in the last month because the news has had me genuinely stressed out. 2016 has had far too much news, most of it alarming, and I’m trying to back away from following it obsessively. In part that means getting back to writing and drawing, as a distraction. So I finished roughly two thirds of this review in early June and the rest just now; if it seems disjointed, there’s your reason.

---

Jacqueline Koyanagi’s Ascension, a space opera novel, came out a few years ago. I read it recently, having chosen it at random. It’s not bad. It’s not perfect, either, but it meets and exceeds my baseline criteria for “good.” For about half this post I’ll explain further; then, as is my habit, I’ll use this book review as an excuse to wander off on a tangent: What is starship-crew space opera (of which this is an example) usually doing? Why is it more common in media SF than in print? And what do fans get out of it?

Ascension is narrated in first person by its protagonist, Alana Quick. The prose is good; it’s clear this book has paid some attention to word choice. Like, in this world starship mechanics are called “sky surgeons,” and Alana describes her work as “stitching together humanity’s lifeline.” Which tells you Alana sees ships as living organisms, and thinks of her work less as engineering than as lifesaving medicine. Alana’s complex enough that when she did something crazy impulsive–as she does more than once, because that’s her personality–I never lost patience.

Her first impulsive decision is to stow away on the starship Tangled Axon. She wants a job. More importantly, she wants to know why the crew were hired to deliver her sister to the big Wal-Mart-meets-Google corporation that literally travelled from a parallel universe to dominate the run-down local economy. The Tangled Axon’s crew is not thrilled to find Alana in their hold, but for now they’re stuck with her because shortly thereafter everyone’s framed for blowing up a planet.

Ascension is about a starship crew accepting a new member and might appeal to the same audience that liked the similarly themed The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. I don’t think Ascension is as successful a novel because its world doesn’t feel as complete or lived in as The Long Way’s. The Tangled Axon’s crew rarely interact with anyone outside the main cast. Granted, they are fugitives, and their isolation adds extra complications since Alana is chronically ill and running out of medication. But it feels like the characters live in a bubble, or a movie with a limited budget for speaking parts. The one person they seek out for help tidies herself away by dying as soon as she’s told them what they need to know. Even the big villain is, in a sense, part of the family.

Ascension’s universe is a backdrop in front of which the characters work out their relationships. Despite the presence of generic cargo crates I’m not sure I understand how the Tangled Axon earns a living when it’s not having an Adventure. And although Koyanagi tries, the crew don’t seem to react to the destruction of an entire planet with the warranted level of blue-screen-of-death horror. On the other hand, another story with this flaw is the 1977 film Star Wars, which I’ve heard has done well for itself. On the other other hand, having only recently finished Ascension I already cannot recall how destroying a planet fit into the villain’s master plan.

Anyway, that one thematic parallel to The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet started me thinking about Starship SF, and the kinds of stories it tells. Starship SF is the space opera subgenre that brings together a disparate bunch of characters and watches them mess about in a starship. Starship SF novels exist, including Ascension and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, but the best known examples are TV series–Farscape, Firefly, Red Dwarf, Blake’s 7, Star Trek. These shows like to tell different kinds of stories in their individual episodes. But it’s arguable that their overall series-long stories are, at least in part, about found families or families of choice.

Starships are central to space opera TV shows in a way they usually aren’t in novels; they have a budgetary incentive to set as many scenes as possible on their standing set. (One redemptive reading of Ascension’s lack of interest in the universe beyond the Tangled Axon is that its insularity mirrors Starship SF’s affection for the bottle episode.) A spaceship is a terrarium floating in a void, by necessity an enclosed, self-sufficient world. The crew can’t leave because beyond the walls is airless vacuum–literally nothing. Stick some random people in this situation and it can go one of two ways. One is horror, the breakdown of a miniature society under pressure, as in the movies Alien or Sunshine. The other, more suited to a series, is for the crew to come together as a community. Or a family. Starship crews can be metaphors for either, or both, which is where the consolatory element comes in. These communities, like families of choice, at least aspire to work out their problems and make a safe space for all their members.

I spent the last year re-watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I hadn’t seen in ages. Coincidentally the blog Vaka Rangi by Josh Marsfelder reviewed the series episode-by-episode at around the same time, so I followed that as well. Gene Roddenberry thought of ST: TNG as utopian SF: the Federation is a post-scarcity society where nobody’s poor because anyone can get whatever they need from a replicator; everyone values self-improvement over money and status. In his reviews Marsfelder repeatedly suggests that, yeah, ST: TNG is utopian, but it’s not the Federation that’s the utopia–we don’t know how the Federation works[1], and the Enterprise often has to fix situations the Federation’s screwed up. The Next Generation’s utopia is the Enterprise itself, because the crew models better ways to resolve conflicts than the truculent posturing passing for drama in grittier SF. The crew, and whatever guest stars have shown up this week, are stuck with each other. If they can’t keep the Enterprise community functional while they’re between planets… well, leaving is more complicated than opening an airlock and walking away. The characters have their differences but The Next Generation’s focus is on how they work them out and come to understand each other.

In written science fiction space opera and military SF are so closely linked they’re often conflated, but that’s not the path The Next Generation took. Yeah, Starfleet looks like a military organization–they have ranks and uniforms–but it’s unlike any military we know. The characters rarely relate to each other like soldiers in a disciplined chain of command. (The episodes where The Next Generation modeled itself on military drama were usually the ones where the show went off the rails.) The Enterprise feels like an office staffed by close and supportive employees. More than that: the bridge crew relate to each other in a way that feels as close as a family. And they really do appear to be each others’ primary family: Star Trek did not have an unlimited recurring cast, so most of the crew have just one or two literal relatives. The only one with an American-style nuclear family is Chief O’Brien.

Most televised Starship SF resembles ST:TNG in that their long-term emotional arcs are about disparate people forming family-style emotional bonds. Firefly is about people who initially don’t understand each other becoming a family. Farscape is about people who initially don’t understand each other becoming a family. Red Dwarf is, despite Arnold Rimmer’s best efforts, about people who initially don’t understand each other becoming a family. Even the Blake’s 7 crew feels a bit like a family, though they’re a dysfunctional one and the series ends in a messy divorce.

You might, if inclined, divide ensemble TV series into two broad groups: the edgy ones, spectacles of people ingeniously betraying and undercutting each other (A Game of Thrones, Battlestar Galactica, House of Cards), and the consolatory ones whose characters support each other and come together to solve problems. Whether these ensembles are SF like ST:TNG, crime dramas like Leverage, or even sitcoms like The Simpsons or Community, the ways the characters relate to each other feel similar. Their emotional arcs take familiar routes regardless of genre. Either a character is emotionally tied up in the A plot (Worf’s family is caught up in Klingon politics, Starfleet wants to disassemble Data), or the B plot is about someone working through emotional issues that tie into the A plot thematically (Data wants to understand some human foible, Barclay is working on his psychological issues). The rest of the cast help them through their problem to an emotional epiphany.[2] Scenes where Geordi explains humanity to Data or Picard works through an ethical dilemma with Guinan aren’t all that different in function from the part of a Simpsons episode where Marge Simpson inspires Homer to briefly locate his better side. You could drop the characters from another ensemble show (maybe not The Simpsons, but certainly Community or Leverage) into a Star Trek show and the usual styles of Star Trek stories would still make sense in a way they would not make sense with, say, the characters from A Game of Thrones.

It’s significant that which plot is the A plot and which is the B plot is not always clear. On Star Trek shows–Voyager in particular–it isn’t unusual for an episode’s external threat to be a vague pseudoscientific problem resolved through perfunctory technobabble, with more running time spent on the character interactions that, structurally, might be some other show’s B plot.

Literary space opera usually doesn’t work like Starship SF TV shows; most starship-heavy novels are Military SF, or thrillers. Maybe that’s because a novel is, like a movie, a one-off event; even if it’s part of a series you’ll probably have to wait a year for the next volume. Starship SF audiences aren’t into plot so much as regular contact with their favorite characters. They want to see what the gang is up to this week.

Not that space opera fans don’t enjoy suspenseful action, special effects spectacle, and clever problem-solving, but in these series the chance to watch allies or co-workers becoming friends and friends becoming family is an important attraction. Starship SF is consolatory and aspirational, and I mean that in a positive sense. There’s a certain escapist pleasure in just watching a bunch of friends hang out.[3] To that extent, most of SF fandom’s favorite shows push the same emotional buttons for their fans as a show like Friends does for its audience. Mind you, I’m not saying Star Trek and Friends are interchangeable. The stories and themes they explore in addition to the weekly dose of camaraderie are different, and have different functions; if that weren’t true, they wouldn’t have different audiences. But they do both have that weekly dose of camaraderie, and it’s a point where their audiences have something in common. SF fans who write fan fiction love having their favorite characters just plotlessly hang out together; there’s even an entire subgenre transplanting characters from different settings into 21st century coffee shops.

I’ve wandered far from my original point here. But I think Ascension would appeal to the audience I’ve just described, who might find the characters’ non-involvement in the outside world to be as much a feature as a bug. Sometimes insularity is privilege or self-absorption. But sometimes it’s just that the outside world is the B plot.

(Or: when fiction comes true, part 93.)

I'm used to "Halting State" moments, when something I invented in a work of near-future SF slides disturbingly close to reality a few years later. I'm a lot less used to that happening in my more far-out/speculative fiction, though.

I'd classify the Merchant Princes series (including the forthcoming "Empire Games" trilogy) firmly in that category, even though chunks of it are set in a world so close to ours that even the folks in the headlines are familiar—it invokes parallel universes, after all, some of which exhibit rather less familiar takes on historical progress. One of the things I do in this series is to play with the history of development economics, very much in the non-quantitative SF tradition of asking "what would be the consequences if X happened instead of Y".

In the case of one of the parallel universes I explored in the first series, the X I picked was "suffocate the 18th century British industrial revolution in its crib by having England invaded by France in 1760 and subjected to internal tariff barriers managed by the Ferme générale in order to pay off the war debt" (which as you know, Bob, was the debt that in our history triggered the American War of Independence). And the conclusion I came to in my bumbling non-quantitative way was that you can suppress industrialization some of the time but not all of the time, and the same cultural, demographic, and resource-availability preconditions that gave rise to it in the North of England and the Scottish Lowlands were also emergent in Appalachia and Pennsylvania, so that the industrial revolution would probably kick off about a century later and on the other side of the Atlantic.

Anyway, the holy Crap moment for the Merchant Princes series has now arrived: economist Brad DeLong just did some interesting numerical analysis that suggests the scenario I came up with for time line three, the New British Empire, which underwent a late industrial revolution and demographic transition about 100-150 years after the British innovations of the 18th century stalled out holds up.

He started out by exploring the proposition that there was a high-level pre-industrialization local minimum, the so-called "gunpowder empire" stage, beyond which progress was unlikely: but concluded that such systems don't exist in a steady state—they're unstable. Once population exceeds a certain level they undergo a step change, beyond which the accelerating development of technology drives productivity and breaks the culture out of the previous Malthusian trap, leading in due course to wage growth, and ultimately demographic transition to a technologically innovative, wealthy, but low/zero population growth society (which is roughly where we are now). The basis for this exercise was extrapolation from an earlier paper by Michael Kremer which postulated that because technology is non-rivalrous high population spurs technological change; there's a feedback loop between agricultural productivity and a large enough work force to support the innovators who invent the machines with which to raise your productivity, so that once you exceed a critical threshold the process of development is bound to turn runaway. And using some very simple assumptions about long-term initial rates of population growth and productivity growth, the time-to-breakthrough that his model coughed up matches the New British Empire.

I confess: when I first started writing the series I pantsed the development of time line three. Initially it was a wheeze: how could I rig it to produce a pseudo-steampunk world for the original "A Family Trade"? But then I got caught up in the development model and realized that it's not a steampunk environment, or a gunpowder-and-sail empire: Miriam just happens to encounter it at a particular point in its development sprint, and doesn't recognize the applicability of Gibson's Rule -- "the future is already here: it's just unevenly distributed". But I'm really tickled to now have a solid, if speculative, numerical basis for the changes I needed for the new Merchant Princes trilogy.

There are a couple of corollaries, of course. One is that steampunk settings in the science fictional mode (as opposed to gaslight fantasy) are inherently unstable; unless you do what Rod Duncan did in The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter and add a deus ex machina (or a creepy secret police) that suppresses inovation, developing nation's gonna develop.

Another corollary is that development comes with a whole bunch of semi-predictable side-effects. Side-effects like: increasing agricultural productivity means more food and fibers. This means more hands available to work in factories doing things like turning fibers into fabric, as a result of which the price of clothing essentially goes into free fall (to get a handle on what that means, read this explanation of how much a shirt cost in the middle ages, and consider the etymology of the word "spinster"). Cheap clothing doesn't have to be repaired endlessly, so fashions begin to change from year to year instead of decade to decade: wearing clothing a la mode is affluence signaling, like driving a new car today. (A suit of clothes used to cost as much as a car does today, in real terms: and I mean ordinary clothes, not the elaborate court finery of the nobility.) Cheap clothing also frees up labour for other productive work, such as washing machines (and if you think washing machines are trivial consumer goods, watch Hans Rosling explain how wrong you are) and infrastructure projects (roads, railways, harbours, airports, phone networks). Automation is substitutable for labour which means more bodies are available for education which improves the quality of workers and thereby the quality (and utility) of the products they can create. Of course, highly educated and productive children are individually more expensive to raise than large broods of field labourers, so parents preferentially raise fewer of them, and the social and economic advantages of big cities ensures that the cost of living in a metropolis spirals ...

You can hold back some of these tendencies with top-down enforcement driven by some ideological imperative; consider the enforcement of religious dress codes in Iran or Saudi Arabia as examples. But such enforcement measures invariably kneecap some aspect of the developing economy: if you ban women or left-handed people from becoming brain surgeons, that reduces your maximum productivity. In an international setting, the nation-state that abandons arbitrary restrictions on social status or employment first has an advantage (and I'd like to cite the shift in English social attitudes to women working outside the home from about 1816 to 1916 as an example).

Another side-effect of this productivity growth is growth in the complexity of financial arrangements. Money isn't a physical entity like an electron, it's an exchange medium like a current flow. It becomes more useful when there's a lot of it, flowing fast: but you can't afford to let it stop moving and pile up in a vault somewhere, or the economic activity it energizes stops moving. Workers have to be paid and use their pay to buy food and goods, and factories have to sell goods (and farms, food) to generate revenue to pay their workers. Governments kickstart the process by creating debt (in the shape of tax obligations) then issuing currency (to pay for useful stuff governments need, like roads and armies) that people can exchange and use to pay their taxes. As productivity grows, the flows of money required to represent exchanges within the economy also have to grow. But: what I said about allowing hoarding of money? If you don't allow some hoarding you get shocks as disjoint elements of the circulation can't keep up with each other. Savings are needed as a buffer to smooth out flows in the force. And the complexity of financial instruments is a response to noise in the system, as people seek better and more reliable ways to protect their investments against sudden happenstance.

Does this sound familiar? Because it ought to: it's the story of our last two centuries.

Pulling back from the tight-focus shock for a moment, we know that development isn't inevitable. If there are no large reserves of coal and iron to mine you're unlikely to get widespread deployment of steam engines. If it's easier for your second sons to set out and march into unoccupied territory and set up farming than to try and eke more food out of a smaller subdivided family farm, you won't get increases in population density until you butt up against the Malthusian limits. If your political system generates a succession crisis that can only be resolved by a brutal and destructive civil war once every generation, that's not going to be conductive to long-term capital accumulation and investment, or to development of a culture of respect for the rule of law (including observance of any form of property law not enforced at swordpoint). If your religion insists that women are chattel and slaveowning is just fine, then the aristocratic beneficiaries of such a system have little incentive to improve productivity and conditions that benefit their perceived inferiors. But the ability of a pre-industrial empire to enforce social norms globally is hampered by their ability to operate on a worldwide scale: no global system of social control that can block industrialization is possible to a state or agency that hasn't acquired the means of rapid communication and transportation (unless it emerges in the future as an accidental side-effect of resource depletion—if Olduvai theory holds water, then future civilizations won't be able to easily reindustrialize because we'll have consumed the necessary prerequisites. So, if you disregard Olduvai theory and don't rate the possibility of a global hegemonizing anti-technology religion that can exist in the absence of the thing it demonizes, it looks like industrialization somewhere should be the rule rather than the exception in sufficiently long-lasting secondary world fiction/thought experiments.

(Finally, I'm getting a really strange feeling here. It was one thing to be getting Halting State moments from a work of fairly rigorously extrapolitive near-future fiction; it's another thing entirely to be getting them from the Merchant Princes series. Let's just hope we don't suddenly get confirmation that the Many Worlds explanation for quantum mechanics is actually true and we live in an Everett-Wheeler cosmology!)

This morning, President Obama said "I think the Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president." I figure we have about an hour before Trump fires back with both barrels and proves it.

Here's my theory: That there was a meeting recently — at the Democratic National Convention or somewhere else — to plan how to make sure Hillary wins. Someone gets up and says…

Okay, now we just have to keep Trump perpetually pissed-off and screaming. Mr. President, we want you to insult him on Tuesday. Say something about him being unfit for office. Senator Warren, you take Wednesday. Hit him about not releasing his taxes and say it must be because he's broke. Mr. Vice-President, I have you down for Thursday…

Biden pipes up and asks, "Can I make fun of his tiny hands?" And then the guy chairing the meeting says…

We'd rather you didn't. I have Bob Reich set for the Sunday talk shows. He's going to say, "My God, that man's hands are smaller than I am!" Maybe you could say something about Trump University or Trump Steaks. Then we still need someone on Friday to hit him on the sex angle. You know, he wants to bang his daughter or he has a tiny dick. Just anything that'll keep him screaming…

The post The Master Plan appeared first on News From ME.

The irony of Nick Mamatas’ new novel I Am Providence being released during the week in which the World Fantasy Convention got a spate of criticism over some of its program items is so perfect that I wonder if it wasn’t somehow planned. It’s not, I’m sure (probably). But still. Now, how does the latter event fit with the former? Read on below.

NICK MAMATAS:

A not-so-dirty, not-so-secret but still rarely discussed fact of publishing is this: if you’re even a little well known, one day a publisher may call you and ask you to write a novel. Not just any novel either, but a novel based on idea they already have kicking around. Sometimes you’ll get a new name, a new face, like a secret agent or a witness to a mob murder. Other times, they want you for you.

Jeremy Lassen wanted me for me, for a book he could bring to Skyhorse Publishing in New York. And that book was a parodic novel about E. T., with the kids now in their forties and forever traumatized by their encounter with Keys and the government bureaucracy. I’m the same exact age as Elliott, and when people in publishing think traumatized losers, for some I reason I often come to mind. Then the pesky attorneys got involved and that project was killed.

Later that week, Jeremy called me again and meekly suggested, “Uh…Zombies 11?” He knew that idea—undead Frank Sinatra planning a posthumous heist—was stupid as it was leaving his mouth.

Then, a month later, another contact and another idea.

“Hey Nick, how about something like Bimbos of the Death Sun?”, referring to Sharyn McCrumb’s humorous cozy murder mystery set at a science fiction convention.

“Fuuu—” I began.

“Meets True Detective!” Jeremy finished.

“….uiiine. That sounds fine!” It was 2014. Discerning, intelligent people still liked True Detective.

The project, originally called Madness of the Death Sun, was a perfect fit for me. It’s practically a stage of human psychological development: hit middle age and write a mystery novel about one’s workplace in which the most loathsome employee has been brutally murdered, and all one’s co-workers are suspects.  The author makes himself or herself the sleuth! Novelists work alone, but fandom is pretty much a workplace for pros in the field of fantasy and horror. The True Detective angle of course suggested Lovecraft fandom as a niche within a niche, and who is the most hated person in the Lovecraftian world…?

Ah, it’s me. So our poor victim, Panossian, is me. The me that has Armenian parents, not Greek ones. Who grew up in Massachusetts, not New York. Who wrote one failed novel instead of seven semi-successful ones. The me who never got it together, started a family, or found a real job. The me who isn’t so nice and sweet. Panossian is so changed from me that he wasn’t me at all. Hell, I’d slice his face off too.

Now I needed two other main characters—a murderer, and an amateur detective. I was talking to a Lovecraftian friend of mine while working on the book proposal, and asked her if she would like to be “my” killer, or my vengeful friend the sleuth. She said, “Sleuth, of course! I’m all about Law & Order!”  (She meant the TV show, not the sociopolitical-legal system.) So she got a few personality changes and action heroine upgrades—kung fu, green hair, the ability to examine a faceless head on a mortuary slab without vomiting onto it—and was cast. When I was done, she wasn’t herself at all either, but someone new: Colleen Danzig.

All the other attendees of the Summer Tentacular…well, they are made up. Like the disclaimer at the front of novel says, “All characters appearing in this work are fictitious, especially you. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” No more pesky lawyers for me!

In the year since the book, now called I Am Providence, was completed, we’ve experienced a fair share of controversies in fandom: the successful movement, which I supported, to eliminate the bust of Lovecraft as the World Fantasy Award and the creation of a far-right literary award that adopted its own version of a Lovecraft bust; a keynote speech widely regarded as Islamophobic at a major Lovecraftian convention; and the continuing dismissal of women writers working in the Lovecraftian mode and pointedly negative reviews of a women-only Lovecraft anthology. Then there was that horrible second season of True Detective.

Also over this past year, several authors have read I Am Providence in manuscript form and, to a person, they’ve all said the same thing about my tour of the murderous underbelly of organized fandom:

“Nick, you were too kind.”

—-

I Am Providence: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

 

Veering away from the regular format, this is part one of a two part interview with producer/engineer/historian/author/singer-songwriter Andrew Sandoval. In 1990, at the age of 17 he wrote the liner notes for and sequenced The Monkees' Missing Links 2 album for Rhino Records. Since then he's produced countless reissues and rarities collections (Big Star, The Kinks, Bee Gees, Turtles, Beach Boys....), was nominated for a Grammy in 2010, has authored two books and countless liner notes and has been Tour Producer for The Monkees since 2011. The Monkees are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year and Andrew has been a huge part of making it a year to remember for Monkees fans, with the critically acclaimed (!!!!) new album, Good Times! as well as a Blu Ray box set of every Monkees episode, plus their film Head and tons of recently unearthed rare stuff. Our chat took place at the Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom (New Hampshire) on the afternoon of July 16, 2016.
Enjoy! Look for Part Two in a week or so. 

http://wheresthatsoundcomingfrom.podomatic.com/entry/2016-07-27T08_46_52-07_00

or listen (and subscribe!) on iTunes

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ep.-17-conversation-andrew/id665759667?i=1000373212617&mt=2

A Very British Scandal
John Preston
Penguin Books, 2016

John Preston breathes new life into the familiar story of how Jeremy Thorpe came to be tried for conspiracy to murder at the Old Bailey by making Peter Bessell his hero.

Bessell was Liberal MP for Bodmin between 1964 and 1970, as well as being a lay preacher and a dodgy businessman. He was a loyal friend to Thorpe, yet became the chief prosecution witness in the Liberal leader’s trial.

This was because he had already found what David Holmes, the best man at Thorpe’s first wedding and one of his co-accused in the dock of the Old Bailey, was to find during the trial: Thorpe would drop any friend in it if he thought it would save his own skin.

Preston is in little doubt that Thorpe was guilty as charged. Most readers will share that view when they have finished his entertaining and engrossing book.

In the course of it he confirms a favourite story from the affair: Andrew Newton, who shot Norman Scott’s dog Rinka and seems to have tried to shoot Scott himself, first went to look for his victim in Dunstable, only to discover that he should have gone to Barnstaple.

Preston also reminds us that Scott’s wife’s sister was married to the comic actor Terry-Thomas.

There is, however, no mention of the fact that another of Thorpe’s fellow defendants, George Deakin, was the uncle of the guitarist in Black Lace of ‘Agadoo’ fame.

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August 1st, 2016: Still feeling bad about goofing off to go see that movie!! It was the Star Trek movie and I could not resist!! – Ryan

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Over on Metafilter, there's discussion of two Consumer Report articles [1, 2] about what CR describes as the dangers of "nutritional supplements". Both the articles themselves and most of the discussion thus far at Metafilter betray some very fundamentally confused thinking about this topic, that I'd like to set straight.

A "nutritional supplement" is a legal category that is an artifact of American law. (Other countries, I gather, do something similar. Can't speak to them.) In the US, we have the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the purpose of which is to regulate certain ingestibles[*] (and certain equipment). The FDA has established categories of regulation for ingestibles sold to the public. You think you know what those categories are – what is meant by them – but as the above referenced documents illustrate, most people really don't. One of those categories is "drug", aka "medication". One of those categories is "food". And one of those categories is "nutritional supplement".

The difference between these categories is what regulations apply to them. More specifically, the difference between them is what is allowed to be printed on the packaging, or otherwise claimed in the marketplace by its sellers.

Metabolize that for a moment. The difference between a food and a drug and a nutritional supplement is in their marketing.

This is not a bad thing! I think it's a great thing, except for the part where nobody much understands it. The FDA is attempting (mostly) to regulate information about the things we put in our bodies, not curtailing our liberty to do so. It doesn't always get this right, but that's the fundamental principle of what's going on.

As per the FDA, a "drug" is a substance that has a particular effect on the human body. Anything sold to the public with a claim of such an efficacy is a drug, and one may only legally sell a drug to the public if the FDA has certified that truth claim of efficacy. When the FDA "approves" a drug, what they are actually approving is the vendor claiming in the marketplace that the substance causes an effect on the human body. In essence the FDA is saying, "Okay, yes, this company has demonstrated to our satisfaction, though conducting scientific experimentation, that this substance does this thing they says it does."

Meanwhile, a "food" is really anything somebody might put in their body through the ailimentary canal. The FDA does not certify foods for efficacy of anything. The FDA requires that nothing sold as a food claims in any of its marketing, whether in advertisements or on the package, that it causes any specific effect on the body.

"But Siderea," I can hear somebody thinking, "Don't some food products claim they're good for you?" Yes, they do! Very carefully. With weasel words. For instance, consider Cheerios™: they tell you on the package that the product is made of a certain thing, and they tell you on the package that that regularly eating that certain thing has been shown scientifically to reduce heart attacks, and that therefore it may be the case that eating Cheerios could reduce your chance of heart attacks. They very, very carefully do not cross the line of telling you that consuming their product will reduce your chance of heart attacks. Because that hasn't been scientifically proven to the FDA.

And also, they tried it and the FDA noticed and came down on them like a ton of bricks (Wikipedia):

In May 2009, The U.S. Food and Drug Administration sent a letter[22] to General Mills indicating that Cheerios was being sold as an unapproved new drug, due to labeling which read in part:

• "You can Lower Your Cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks"
• "Did you know that in just 6 weeks Cheerios can reduce bad cholesterol by an average of 4 percent? Cheerios is ... clinically proven to lower cholesterol. A clinical study showed that eating two 1½ cup servings daily of Cheerios cereal reduced bad cholesterol when eaten as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol."

The FDA letter indicated that General Mills needed to change the way it marketed Cheerios or apply for federal approval to sell Cheerios as a drug. General Mills responded with a statement that their claim of soluble fiber content had been approved by the FDA, and that claims about lowering cholesterol had been featured on the box for two years.[23] In 2012, the FDA followed up with a letter approving changed labeling, declaring all other 2009 matters "moot", and requiring "no further action."[24]

Notice: what made something a drug in the eyes of the FDA was the truth-claim on the package. So long as the manufacturer didn't directly claim to the public that Cheerios prevents heart attacks, it was in the "food" category, not the "drug" category. The FDA told them, "If you're going to claim that efficacy, then you're claiming it's a 'drug', and we will regulate it as such."

Now, it's not that eating Cheerios was proven not to prevent heart attacks. It's not (to the best of my knowledge) that somebody tried to prove Cheerios-eating reduced heart attacks, and failed. It's that the heart-attack preventing properties of Cheerios have never been scientifically examined. Nobody's done the experiments necessary.

Because here's the thing: proving to the FDA that something is effective enough to have a truth-claim of efficacy on the package is astronomically expensive.

Science isn't free. Conducting scientific trials is hella expensive. Scientists are highly trained professionals, and they need to eat and pay rent and service some scary student loans; experiments are a really amazing amount of work to conduct. So the FDA certainly doesn't do it for you (then it would come out of our taxes). If you want to put a truth-claim of efficacy on your product, so you can sell it for more money to more people? You pay for it.

General Mills, Inc, which makes Cheerios, had not decided that it's worth the big, big bucks it would entail to have that science conducted. They could have (presumably) done so, and have Cheerios certified as an anti-heart attack medication... but why bother? Their business model is selling Cheerios as a food, and to do that, they don't need to prove efficacy. General Mills walks right up to the permissible line of truth-claims on packaging, and leeeeeans over it a bit, but now is scrupulously on the side of not claiming it product prevents heart attacks.

What the FDA does regulate foods for a few things. The first is truth claims of identity. The FDA requires that if the bottle says "Maple Syrup", the stuff in it had damn well have come out of an Acer saccharum tree. Hence the existence on grocery store shelves of something called "Pancake Syrup", which is largely HFCS and brown food coloring, and tastes like maple syrup only to the extent you are suggestible. One is totally allowed to sell a sweet brown viscous fluid maple-syrup-substitute condiment to top pancakes that isn't maple syrup, just so long as you don't claim it's maple syrup.

The second is truth claims of composition. Cheerios proudly states on the front of the box that it's 100% made of a certain ingredient. I'm pretty sure that the FDA has some rule that defines "100%" as something like "anything over 98%", which is why the front of the box can claim "100% this stuff" and the side of the box reads "[and also] Modified Corn Starch, Sugar, Salt, Tripotassium Phosphate, Wheat Starch. Vitamin E (mixed tocopherols) Added to Preserve Freshness." The FDA requires that food products list on the packaging their ingredients, so consumers can know what they're putting in their bodies. If the FDA finds that there are ingredients in the food that aren't listed on the package, it punishes the manufacturer. If the package says it's 100% parmesan cheese, it had damn well better not be partially made of wood pulp. Presumably, if your 100% parmesan cheese lists wood pulp in the ingredients, you're good to go. ("Now with sun-cured, hand-felled Abruese poplar!" Essential Everyday(tm), call me!)

The third is purity. So far, all the regulations I've listed have had to do with intent: what the manufacturer thinks they're doing, and what they've intended to do. Does the manufacturer intend their product to be bought to treat an illness? Does the manufacturer intend their product to be actual maple syrup or something else? Does the manufacturer intend their product to have wood pulp in it? We could call that the design of the product. But products, however designed, must then be actually manufactured, and, well, there's many a slip twixt test tube and lip. We can think of purity, then, as a measure of how accurately the product conforms to the intent of the manufacturer. If there's something in the product that's not on the label because the manufacturer decided to put it there and conceal that fact, that's a violation of the truth claims of composition. But if there's something in the product that's not on the label because the manufacturer screwed up in manufacturing, that's a violation of purity.

Interesting legal angle: I'm a little hazy on the boundaries here, but I gather that purity of food is predominantly but not exclusively regulated by the USDA, while the purity of drugs is regulated by the FDA. It's the USDA which tries to ensure that the meat you buy in the store doesn't have more than the allowed amount of samonella bacteria in it. It's the FDA which tries to ensure that your methylprednisolone acetate doesn't have meningitis-causing fungus in it.

To make that more explicit, yes, the FDA also regulates drugs for these three same things – truth claims of identity, truth claims of composition, and purity – as it regulates foods for.

My impression is that the FDA's standards for identity claims, composition claims, and purity for drugs are much stricter than for foods, but I don't actually know that for a fact.

Unlike truth claims of efficacy, the FDA doesn't evaluate identity claims, composition claims, or purity in advance. For one thing, purity can't be evaluated in advance, only on an ongoing basis. And the FDA doesn't have the scope or funding to be continuously monitoring all products under its purview for compliance with purity standards. At best it spot-checks. More commonly, it only investigates after something bad happens, suggesting a problem.

Manufacturers of foods aren't required to get prior authorization to manufacture a food of certain identity or composition. The FDA checks up on them, if at all, after the product goes to market. Efficacy claims a pre-moderated, all other claims are post-moderated.

Which brings us to another important thing: safety. The FDA regulates products, both food and drug, for safety, but not, perhaps, in the way you thought.

The FDA can require a product be pulled off the shelves for being unsafe to consume, but for some reason seems very reluctant to exercise that power. If you want to do something insane like manufacture and sell pennyroyal-flavored cake frosting as a food, I think there's nothing but common sense stopping you from setting out. Once your customers start getting sick, you can expect the FDA to investigate and then maybe order all your product pulled from the shelves, and prosecute you for something like reckless endangerment or murder, and you can expect to be sued into oblivion by your victims or their survivors.

If, however, you start selling pennyroyal-flavored cake frosting as something that "REGULATES YOUR MENSES!" the FDA, if it comes to the FDA's attention, isn't going to wait for it to hurt or kill someone. The FDA is going to crack down on you for selling an unapproved cake-frosting drug, same as it busted General Mills for selling an unapproved breakfast-cereal drug.

Here's where things get really weird. One of the differences between the FDA's "food" category and the FDA's "drug" category is that the FDA mostly won't tolerate the selling of a food that kills or maims people in the regular course of use. But it does permit drugs that kill or maim. Of course it does: otherwise no chemotherapy, for one thing. Chemotherapy is the fine art of giving someone just enough heavy-metal poisoning that they survive but their tumors don't. A lot of powerful medications work on the same principle. I have what's looking like a permanent injury to my left hip due to a course of ciprofloxicin I took in 2011 for an antibiotic resistant infection. I'm not complaining: I enjoy not being dead.

And that's my point: drugs often involve serious tradeoffs in safety that foods do not – and that's actually sensible.

But the upshot of that is things sold as foods actually are held to higher standards of safety than are things sold as drugs.

That sounds weird to us, because we expect drugs to be more carefully monitored and checked for safety than foods. They are. Safety is one of the things assessed as part of the clinical trials necessary to get the FDA to approve something as a drug. The FDA is more likely to know about the safety issues of a drug than a food because it had to receive information about the safety of the drug before they allowed the drug to go to market – information it didn't require of the food. But given that information, the FDA isn't necessarily going to forbid the drug from going to market. It isn't even particularly likely to. Rather the FDA will require that that information be printed on the packaging, and it may restrict sales to be by prescription, so a medical professional is overseeing the administration of the drug to the patient, and monitoring the safety of the situation.

As I said above, the FDA's job isn't primarily to regulate the availability of foods and drugs, per se, but to regulate the information about foods and drugs, such that consumers (and prescribers) know what they're buying.

The FDA only very rarely orders products removed from the market for being unsafe. It orders products removed - or reclassified, or relabeled – for being mislabeled or otherwise sold with misrepresentative marketing: for making claims of efficacy that it hasn't verified, for making claims of identity which are false, for making claims of composition which are incomplete, for not being purely what it was claimed to be. You are welcome to sell products that can kill your customers – so long as they are classified as drugs and you fully disclose the risk.

I would go so far as to propose the following: there is no such thing as a safe drug. I'm not arguing against taking drugs. I take drugs. But, daredevil that I am, I also ride in automobiles and cross Mass Ave on foot. I use my seat belt and look both ways, respectively, because I know perfectly well neither of those things are "safe". I don't do them because they are "safe", I do them because they are beneficial, and I have decided the benefits are worth the risks.

In the exact same way, I would argue that a drug is an ingestible of which the benefits of taking may outweigh the risks of taking. If you knew the risks of ingesting it were minimal, such that you didn't even have to wonder about the benefits, that would be a food. Thus we could say that a drug is a dangerous food.

Obviously, drugs vary in their dangerousness. We think of aspirin as pretty safe – but aspirin can cause gastric ulcers and can exacerbate bleeding conditions. If you have an injury and take aspirin, the bruising will likely be worse than if you didn't. That doesn't mean you shouldn't take aspirin. It means that if you have a condition that involves bleeding, you might want to evaluate the risks of complicating it by taking aspirin, possibly consulting a medical professional; you may well decide the risk is worth it. When I took that ciprofloxacin, I'd read the insert, and the part that said "may cause tendon injuries", and weighed it against the phone call from my doctor's office which said, "the lab said this is what your bacterial culture proved most susceptible to".

To a first approximation, the power to heal is the power to harm, and the power to harm is the power to heal. If a substance has enough effect on you to do you any good in some circumstance, there is probably also a circumstance in which that very same effect is deleterious.

In the same way sex educators went from, in the 1980s, speaking of "safe sex" to, in the 1990s, speaking of "safer sex", we should always be thinking of the safety of drugs as relative, not absolute. Not because we should be frightened of them unto eschewing them, but because we should respect their power and accept consciously and with full knowledge the risks we take when we do take them – or acceptance of our ignorance and the risk that might entail.

Which brings us to the third legal category: nutritional supplements.

A nutritional supplement is an ingestible product that doesn't have the safety presumption of a food and for which no benefit has been established to qualify it as a drug.

That doesn't mean nutritional supplements don't have medicinal benefits. It means that if a given nutritional supplement does have medicinal benefits, that fact has not been scientifically proven to the FDA and nobody's paid the FDA the fees necessary for that certification.

(As an aside, it is in approximately[**] nobody's financial interest to establish that a plant product has medicinal benefit because you can't patent a naturally occurring plant. If one plant-product vendor proves that St. John's Wort is an antidepressant, at very great expense to themselves, there's absolutely nothing stopping all their competitors from rushing out, planting fields of St. John's Wort, shoving it in bottles, print them "SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN TO REDUCE DEPRESSION" on them, and selling them – all without having to bear the financial burden of conducting the clinical trials. The difference with drugs that are novel chemical compounds is that those you can patent; if you discover a synthesized chemical compound has medicinal properties, you can get exclusive rights to sell it, making clinical trials (at least sometimes) economically viable. For botanicals, nobody (commercial) wants to be the sucker to pay for the trials. But I digress.)

If you like, you can think of taking a nutritional supplement as being an "alpha tester" for a drug. There may be some reason to think the supplement will benefit you, but folks who are selling it to you are legally forbidden from offering you any assurances that it will work to any purpose at all.

The whole point of the FDA having a "nutritional supplement" category is to allow people the freedom to buy and sell substances of speculative benefit. The category of "nutritional supplement" is what allows you to try for yourself ingestibles which may have medicinal benefit for you, without having to wait for the government's permission. If you take a nutritional supplement, you're on your own: the FDA is only going to regulate that product for claims of identity and composition and for purity (and then, only after reports of a problem.)

So, for instance, one of the things on that list from Consumer Reports, linked above, as a potentially dangerous nutritional supplement is caffeine powder. The FDA is totally fine – well, legally fine – with companies selling 100% caffeine powder, just so long as it's actually 100% caffeine powder and duly labeled. The FDA has also issued a press release suggesting consumers are absolute morons if they ingest it:

The FDA is warning about pure powdered caffeine being marketed directly to consumers, and recommends avoiding these products. In particular, FDA is concerned about pure powdered caffeine sold in bulk bags over the internet.

The FDA is aware of at least two deaths of young men who used these products.

These products are essentially 100 percent caffeine. A single teaspoon of pure caffeine is roughly equivalent to the amount in 28 cups of coffee.

Pure caffeine is a powerful stimulant and very small amounts may cause accidental overdose. [...] It is nearly impossible to accurately measure pure powdered caffeine with common kitchen measuring tools and you can easily consume a lethal amount.

The problem with 100% caffeine powder is not that it doesn't do what it's claimed to do – nobody's claiming it does anything except function as a stimulant, which, yes, it does – it's not that it's not actually caffeine powder, it's not that it's deliberately adulterated or accidentally tainted with anything. Quite to the contrary: the problem with 100% caffeine powder is that, holy shit it's 100% caffeine powder. And something being exactly what it says on the tin is not a problem the FDA usually does much about.

Because maybe you have some legitimate reason to buy 100% caffeine powder, and know how to use it in a way sufficiently safe to your appetite for risk. The FDA is not the boss of you. If somebody wants to sell you pure, unadulterated, authentic 100% caffeine powder, and you, in your wisdom, decide to buy it, it's a free country, knock yourself out. The FDA just wants you to know what you're getting into, is all. Then on your own head be it.

There does come a point of dangerousness where the FDA steps in. Also on the Consumer Reports list is comfrey, a plant. In 2001, the FDA issued an advisory to manufactuers of products containing comfrey, notifying them that they were doing the equivalent of selling pennyroyal-flavored cake frosting:

To: American Botanical Council,
American Herbal Products Association,
Council for Responsible Nutrition,
Consumer Healthcare Products Association,
National Nutritional Foods Association,
Utah Natural Products Alliance,
American Association of Oriental Medicine, and the
American College of Acupuncturists and Traditional Medicine.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is issuing this letter to communicate to you our concern about the marketing of dietary supplements that contain the herbal ingredient comfrey (Symphytum officionale (common comfrey), S. asperum (prickley comfrey), and S. x uplandicum (Russian comfrey). These plants are a source of pyrrolizidine alkaloids that present a serious health hazard to consumers when they are ingested. FDA asks that you share this information with your members.

The letter goes on to say:

The agency strongly recommends that firms marketing a product containing comfrey or another source of pyrrolizidine alkaloids remove the product from the market and alert its customers to immediately stop using the product. The agency advises that it is prepared to use its authority and resources to remove products from the market that appear to violate the Act.

Consider how remarkable that is: the FDA is saying, "We think this kills people, so we suggest – strongly, yes, but this is not an order – that you stop selling it. In fact, we're so convinced this is lethally dangerous, that we're prepared to actually use our federal-government-granted powers to force you to stop selling it – but we're not doing that yet."

Here's where we come to a problem. The usual popular discourse around nutritional supplements is a dialectic between two equally unfortunate poles. On one hand is "Nutritional Supplements are Good!": usually the sentiment is that nutritional supplements are just gentle, "natural" drugs-but-not-really. On the other hand "Nutritional Supplements are Bad!": usually the sentiment is that nutritional supplements are worthless snake-oil not-really-drugs and a blight on our society because of how they trick people into spending money on Things Not Blessed By Science.

I consider both foolish. If anything, I want to argue that Nutritional Supplements Are Neither Good Nor Bad Because You Cannot Generalize Across the Entirety of "Nutritional Supplements" Because "Nutritional Supplements" Are Definitionally the Miscellaneous, "We Don't Know For Sure What These Do Yet" Category.

Nutritional supplements are terra incognita. They are things about which the risks and benefits have not been entirely – or even at all – figured out. Nutritional supplements are the deep end of the pool, and there is no life guard, and it's not a pool but the open ocean, potentially with currents and hazards that are not immediately evident.

But most importantly, both the "Nutritional Supplements are Good!" and the "Nutritional Supplements are Bad!" share one supposition: nutritional supplements aren't really drugs. For the "are Good!" side, not really being drugs means they lack all the scary power-to-harm in "real" medication. For the "are Bad!" side, not really being drugs means they lack all the virtuous power-to-heal of "real" medications.

I think these positions coexist with this shared fallacy because consumers consider the categories of "food" and "drug" as demarcating a kind of spectrum of efficacy, between which "nutritional supplements" falls. This is a set of categories of natural kinds: a "food" is something that doesn't have much effect on the body beyond sating hunger, while a "drug" is something that has a big effect on the body. A "nutritional supplement" is imagined to be a kinda-medicinal food-like-thing. That's certainly what its name suggests.

But as I said at the beginning, these three things are legal categories, most especially the category of "nutritional supplement", which is basically an artifact of the FDA trying to respect the rights of people to put in their bodies whatever things they want, while still managing the public policy issue of the risk to the populace of the free market in strange, potentially fatal drugs.

Consumers have got the idea that nutritional supplements are "medicines, light" or "fake medicines" – that they were less dangerous, if less powerful, than "real" drugs. This is exactly wrong.

There's nothing stopping a nutritional supplement from turning out to be just as powerful and dangerous as any drug. Or from being a dud that does nothing. Or – remember what I said about lacking the assumption of safety of a food and the proof of efficacy of a drug – from being dangerous with little benefit and no up-side at all. Or from turning out eve to be highly beneficial with minimal dangers.

In fact, there's nothing stopping a nutritional supplement from turning out to be an actual known drug.

This has to be the weirdest case on the Consumer Reports list: red yeast rice (Monascus purpureus). It is a naturally occuring source of lovastatin. Yeah, turns out, red yeast rice totally will lower your cholesterol, because it has Mevacor in it. It's an actual medication, with all the scary side effect profile as well as all the exciting clinical power of that actual medication. The problem with red yeast rice as a nutritional supplement isn't that it's not powerful, and isn't that it's not red yeast rice, and not that it doesn't have medicinal value. The problem with red yeast rice is that it's got an actual patented drug in it.***

Anything parked in the "nutritional supplement" category should be treated as a medication so powerful and dangerous it would normally require a prescription, a medication about which you know nothing – and you should treat it as such until you have evidence to the contrary. You should know what you're getting into by taking a nutritional supplement, and the first thing you should know is that you don't know what you're getting into.

Just because you buy it in a cheery, middle-class grocery store with clean tile floors and bright florescent lights, where it sits on shelves next to your vitamin pills and your cold remedies, just because you buy it in an incense-scented "natural herbs" hippy store where it sits on shelves between reusable grocery totes and books on self-discovery through writing poetry, does not mean that the contents of the bottle have been wrapped in the loving supervision of civilization that you take for granted. It may come wrapped in the signs and sigils of calm, safe, placid, daily life, but make no mistake: nobody checked to make sure that what's in that bottle is "safe" for you to consume – but nobody's going to stop you if you want to buy it and take it in the hope it will benefit you.

You should no more grab a random bottle of nutritional supplement off a store shelf and say, "Hey, this looks interesting, I'll try it", than you should eat the leaves off random bushes. It's pretty much doing the same thing.

The only reason you should be taking a nutritional supplement at all is that you have some source of information that suggests a good reason to believe it would benefit you – a source you have some reason to trust. That's sort of the baseline requirement, and while it's necessary, it's not sufficient. You have to do your own due diligence. Spend a little while at a search engine learning what the thing you're thinking of taking is. Don't just read pages promoting the supplement; check it out on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia page on red yeast rice actually explains about the lovastatin issue. Check it out on drugs.com or webmd.com. Maybe search for the name of the product followed by "recalled"; maybe search for the name of the product followed by "side effects" or "adverse effects". Definitely search on the name of the product followed by "interactions with" and, in turn, the name of each other drug and nutritional supplement you take.

And then if you're going to take it, I recommend understanding that you're doing an uncontrolled experiment where N=1. Take really detailed notes and keep really good records. Make sure you have a baseline recorded before you take it the first time – you don't want to be later wondering, "Was that always that color?" if you can avoid it.

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* I'm going to use the word "ingestible" to mean something deliberately introduced into the body for it to metabolize, not just things eaten or drunk; it includes that which is breathed, snorted, injected, absorbed through the skin, etc.

** The one fascinating exception to "approximately nobody" is apparently China. I'm not clear what's going on here, but I gotten the impression that the People's Republic of China is behind efforts both to substantiate Traditional Chinese Medicine, and to find new applications for extant agricultural products. I keep running across research into novel medicinal applications of well-known food stuffs or other botanicals, either conducted by Chinese researchers, or funded by the Chinese government.

*** This is where I throw up my hands in the air and admit I just don't understand drug patent law.

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[Read in black and white]

About Ted Cruz's speech at the Republican National Convention last week – the one at which he snubbed Trump by rather spectacularly, willfully, pointedly failing to endorse him? The one that shocked the party and sent it into convulsions of outrage?

I'm hearing a lot of people say that Cruz, by betraying Trump and renegging on his pledge to endorse the winning candidate, has burned his bridge with the Republican party. I'm hearing a lot of people say that Cruz is betting that Trump will lose in November.

He's betting no such thing.

Or rather, he's betting both that Trump will win and that Trump with lose.

Sure, if Trump loses, Cruz will be positioned to be the "obvious candidate" with a morals platform to "get the Republican Party back on track", for 2020.

But what happens if Trump wins?

There's two lines of criticism about Trump, and only one gets much airtime: that Trump is morally bad. But there's this other problem with Trump, much less discussed but widely apprehended: Trump is an incompetent bozo who will wreck anything with which he is entrusted. Trump is not a mere inept ideologue who earnestly if misguidedly shoots higher than he can hit; Trump has no goals beyond his own venal satisfactions and will blithely destroy things both from callous indifference and the momentarily studious delight of a child pulling the wings off flies.

For all that Cruz's address to the convention was about principles and morals, Cruz has his eye firmly on the other problem: Cruz knows perfectly well that Trump can't manage his way out of a paper bag. Trump's own campaign can't manage well enough to invite the right speakers, avoid plagiarism, or summon up enough reading comprehension to realize what Cruz's speech said when they read it in advance and green lit it. Precisely contrary to what Trump claims, Trump is an incompetent who surrounds himself with incompetents.

Cruz is looking into the future with a gimlet eye, and seeing that a Trump administration will be a fiasco. What happens if Trump wins? Trump will fail. Trump will do such a disasterously bad job at even the things the Right wants, he will not just discredit himself, he will discredit the Republican party. (I mean, even more.) Consequently, by 2020, the Republican party is going to need a savior. Cruz just positioned himself perfectly to be that savior – the charismatic, back-to-our-principles, evangelical-to-libertarian bridge-building savior the Republican party will need in four years.

There is an outside chance that a Trump administration will so ruinous that the RNC decides not to support a Trump bid for re-election. I'm not sure that's ever happened, but nothing is impossible any more; in that case, there's Cruz waiting for them. But let us say that the party remains controlled by fools, who back Trump for a second term; he loses, badly, in 2020, ushering in a Democratic president. In 2024, the GOP will need a charismatic candidate to run against the Democratic incumbent who can distance himself from Trump. Voila.

If Trump loses, Cruz wins. If Trump wins, Cruz wins. Come 2020 or 2024, Cruz is going to be the obvious presidential candidate for the GOP, and will stand an excellent chance of getting elected, regardless of who wins 2016.

There are people impressed with Cruz's principles. There are people impressed with Cruz's chutzpah. There are people impressed with Cruz's equanimity in the face of hatred.

Me, I'm impressed with Cruz' play of the game. Damn, that is the finest political maneuvering I've seen in... maybe ever. That is a real life Xanatos Gambit [warning: tvtropes] I tell you what.

Twelve years ago I watched then-senator Obama address the DNC, and remarked I had just seen the first black president of the USA. So I'm putting this out there today. I'm calling the election for Cruz – the 2024 election.

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This post brought to you by the 104 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

No comment catcher today. This one's short.

[Read in black and white]

One of the characteristics of hipsterism is the "ironic" affectation of styles and tastes of working-class people. This use is called "ironic", but what that means in how the term is widely being employed to describe hipsters is: taking a pose of pretending to like something that it is understood to be unlikable.

And by "unlikable", mean something the hipster and his social milieu might consider "uncool". One commentor on hipsters and irony [here] observed, "It turns out that irony is a really convenient way of allowing yourself to like things that normally wouldn’t be cool to like."

"Uncool" is an interesting term. It means "beneath me". Coolness, as alluded to here, is a pose of social superiority and a standard of social acceptability; to say something is uncool is to say it is unworthy, insufficient, beneath one. As the way the commentor uses it illustrates: coolness is about what other people would think of you for liking something. To demonstrate uncool tastes is to lose social status.

So to make explicit what lies implicit: when hipsters "ironically" don clothing associated with working class people, when hipsters "ironically" profess tastes for products associated with working class people, they are communicating "we all know I couldn't possibly actually like this, because we all know that this is unworthy and beneath us."

It's a way for one middle-class person to make sport of working-class tastes and styles with other, likeminded middle-class people. It's a way for middle-class people to affirm to one another their middle-class-ness by exoticizing and putting down that which signifies the working-class.

Social classes are cultures and the "ironic" adoption of working-class cultural elements by culturally middle-class people is cultural appropriation.

There are edge cases of cultural appropriation – examples which raise the question of cultural borrowing and the legitimacy of remixing – and the use of a culture's characteristic appearances or practices to mock them is not any such edge case. Dressing up as a working class person to sartorially communicate, "isn't it funny for me to be dressed like one of those people", to people of your own (middle) class is pretty unambigiously one of the nasty, supremacist, punching-down sorts of cultural appropriation.

This explains much, first of all why so many people loathe hipsters without being able to say why. Class as culture, as I explained before, is invisible to Americans even while it's the air we breathe. Social class is real, and when we encounter matters of social class, we typically have no language to express what we're observing. When people find themselves outraged at the casual contempt expressed in the "ironic" appropriation of working-class culture, they have no way to just say that.

Consider this page of anti-hipster humor, which starts off,

Hipsters couldn't incite more blind hatred if they were all ginger-haired Al-Qaeda members. But why? Could it be their taste in music? Fashion sense? Attitude of superiority? Perhaps. Or perhaps it's their stupid, ugly faces. We may never know.

It goes on to attribute to hipsters, among other things, that either hipsters have "trust funds" and pretend they thrift when buying things at trendy stores, or are actually "poor and car-less, but I still think I'm better than you." The phrases "trust funds" and "think [he's] better than" are idioms used to signify class snobbery; what is being indirectly attributed to hipsters is class snobbery. I think that's exactly right: taking a pose that one is pretending to like working-class style instead of admitting one actually likes working-class style, because admitting that would be conceding the worth of working-class tastes is indeed snobbery.

There may be those who read this who identify as hipsters, who immediately respond that they don't do it to put anybody down. Oh, I understand full well that hipster's intended audience is not working-class people, it's fellow hipsters, and more broadly fellow middle-class people. In exactly the same way as the white chick who dresses up in a Native American headdress at a rave does not intend to communicate anything by it to actual Native American people – indeed, nothing could be father from her mind than the possibility she would encounter actual Native American people – in exactly the same way as the white guys who don blackface at a frat party do not intend it to communicate anything to black people, nor even to be beheld by black people, the hipster appropriating working-class style doesn't intend his performance of "irony" to be read by or even witnessed by working-class people. This sort of thing is always an in-joke, and when "outsiders" – those people appropriated from, who are presumed to be absent and thus assigned to "outside" the social group in which these things happen – object, the offenders so often respond that those appropriated-from don't understand, that it didn't mean anything, it was just a joke.

The hipster who appropriates working-class culture isn't doing it to belittle working-class people to their faces, and isn't doing it out of any animus towards working-class people. The hipster didn't think of them at all. The hipster didn't think them worth considering. That's how this sort of cultural appropriation works: by erasing from mind the existence of the people who constitute the culture one is using as a foil. And using them as a foil is what "ironic" use does. It uses another culture as a foil to affirm one's standing in one's own culture. It positions those whose culture is appropriated as inferiors who like the wrong things. It isn't meant as mockery, but that's what results.

You don't have to have any intent to put anybody down for it to be snobbery; all it takes is an earnest belief in one's self-evident superiority.

Considering the disrespect, unintentional though it may be, implied in assuming mutually held contempt or disregard for somebody's culture, it should come as no surprise that it sets people's hair on fire.

And one need not be in the appropriated-from group to have that reaction. One can also have a furious visceral reaction to the implication that one would agree with that contempt or disregard. One of the things about irony – like sarcasm – is that it proceeds on the assumption of an agreement in values. One may take great umbrage at the implication, "we're all classists here", the same way a white person might react to being told a racist joke that, by the very fact it was "confided" in them by another white person, implies, "surely you're a racist too".

One may also take umbrage at how that's actually a subtle, elusive sort of cultural policing, implying there a "right" set of things to like, and liking the "wrong" sorts of things opens one to mockery. I think for many adults, the social pressure to only like the right sorts of things wasn't too welcome in high school, and is none too welcome now.

As per above, adopting a working-class style "ironically" does the trick of letting one secretly value some cultural expression of working-class culture – while continuing to disvalue working-class culture, and particularly working-class people. People who wear a lower class' clothes "ironically" are people who can identify one another as fellow members of their own class, and not "mistake" someone actually from that lower class, wearing their culture's clothes, for a worthy person. This is precisely an issue with cultural appropriation which many other theorists and activists have pointed out with regard to ethnic cultures; it's no different with class cultures.

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This post brought to you by the 104 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

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Lord Bonkers begins to give his account of a notorious evening.

Ryan Coetzee's barbecue at the Hall 1

Looking back on the affair, I should have entered a firm nolle prosequi when Freddie and Fiona telephoned me proposing a barbecue at the Hall as a thank you to everyone who worked on the side of the angels in the recent unpleasantness. However, I dithered and, sensing weakness, they put Ryan Coetzee on the line. I suggested various alternative ways of raising the morale of the troops, such as a party at the Smithson & Greaves Brewery, but he was adamant: “I’m telling you, man, there’s nothing like a brai.”

So it was that, a few days later, the great and good of the Remain campaign made their way up my drive. The Rutland weather, as it so often does, obliged with a warm, still evening. All in all, it was a glittering occasion.

My doubts reawakened when I learnt that Coetzee proposed barbecuing a whole wildebeest to feed the growing throng. “Are you sure you will be able to cook the thing through?” I asked. “Of course I will, man,” he returned. “We just need to get a good blaze going.”

That he certainly did, aided by a pallet of unsold copies of Ad Lib that I had arranged to be sent up from Great George Street. It’s just that, as I did point out at the time, he had sited that blaze Terribly Close to the Hall.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

I'll be damned if I'll pull out of Europe

Beware of faragespawn

Liberal Democrat titans of the 2010 parliament

And so another week in the company of Rutland's most popular fictional peer draws to its close.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Ryan Coetzee's barbecue at the Hall 2

You have no doubt read what happened next in the newspapers. So let me just pay tribute to the doctors and nurses of the Royal Rutland Infirmary for coping with so many cases of food poisoning, and I can honestly say that the Rutland Fire Brigade excelled itself.

Let me also praise the Well-Behaved Orphans: armed with buckets, they formed a human chain to bring water from my ornamental lake before the professionals arrived. Most of the water they brought was poured over Coetzee and Freddie and Fiona rather than the blaze, it has to be admitted, but I did not like to Say Anything. (Incidentally, the outside cuts of the wildebeest were rather good.)

Do not mourn the damage to the Hall too deeply, gentle reader. To be honest with you, I have never much liked that wing. As I sit here gazing out at the blue waters of the Mediterranean, I have my plans for its rebuilding laid out before me among the breakfast things.

I decided against employing the services of an architect – those fellows are full of the silliest ideas and do sting one terribly. Instead I have drawn up the design myself, with the help of a builder from the village. The busts of great Liberals (Mill, Masterman, Elizabeth Shields…) set amongst the castellations of the roof are, I flatter myself, a happy touch.

As to the barbecue: after deep refection I have convinced myself that poor Coetzee would have made no better a job of organising a piss up in a brewery.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

I'll be damned if I'll pull out of Europe

Beware of faragespawn

Liberal Democrat titans of the 2010 parliament

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Ryan Coetzee's barbecue at the Hall 1

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July 29th, 2016: Yesterday I saw a movie IN THE AFTERNOON because I was feeling decadent! Then I felt guilty about all the work I wasn't doing so I can't give it my full recommendation >:| – Ryan

I did a bunch of interviews yesterday talking about the late/great Jack Davis, including one for BBC Radio which also ran on NPR here. I'll post a link when I get one.

A point I made in one of them is worth expanding upon here. I always thought there was something neat about the origin of MAD in terms of its original art crew. As you may be aware, MAD started because Harvey Kurtzman was writing and editing — as well as occasionally doing some of the drawing — for two EC war/adventure comics, Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales. Kurtzman was a slow, meticulous worker who carefully researched the stories he wrote, insisting on a degree of historical accuracy that few in comics have ever matched or cared about.

He would also do rough layouts for every panel and he was known to spend days drawing these over and over until he was satisfied they were as good as they could be. That usually turned out to be about three days after when the artist expected the work. Among those who worked with Harvey, there was some disagreement as to whether this was an example of Harvey being a perfectionist or Harvey being one of those neurotic artists who is afraid to ever declare his work "done." Wally Wood, who worked over a lot of those layouts, thought the latter.

In any case, Kurtzman's snail-like pace hurt his income. He was working in a business that paid its talent by the page. More time spent on a page meant fewer pages produced and fewer pages produced meant less income for the creator. Harvey often complained to EC publisher William M. Gaines that this was not fair. Al Feldstein, who wrote and edited EC's horror, crime and science-fiction comics was making three or four times as much money by virtue of producing three or four times as much work.

Gaines reportedly suggested that Kurtzman come up with another comic he could do for the firm — something that wouldn't require a lot of research and that perhaps could be written quicker. There was some disagreement between the two men as to which of them suggested it be a humor comic but somehow, MAD emerged — first in conventional comic book format, then later as a slick magazine. Almost needless to say is that Kurtzman's income did not go up because he spent just as long on a MAD page as he did on Frontline Combat page.

What I always thought was wonderful was this: The art for Kurtzman's war comics was being done by Wally Wood, Will Elder, John Severin and Jack Davis. When it came time to do the funny comic, you'd think he'd have to go out and find different artists…but he didn't. The early issues of MAD were drawn primarily by Wally Wood, Will Elder, John Severin and Jack Davis — and if he had scoured the entire industry and considered everyone who could hold a pen or pencil, he couldn't have done any better.

When I interviewed Davis for my now-outta-print book Mad Art, I suggested to him that that moment was a turning point in his career as an artist. He not only agreed but said, "Well, of course!" It was the first time his "funny" style had been in print — and as good as his more serious illustration was, the humorous Davis style was what made him famous and beloved. In fact, if you now look at his more serious work, he almost looks miscast; like a funny artist got stuck with the wrong material. He did great work in that "wrong" style but you can kinda see his funny side peeking through now and then, here and there, straining to bust out.

In a very real sense, Jack was happy to escape working exclusively in his less cartoony mode. He was never comfy doing the horror comic stories for EC…and wouldn't you know it? They often gave him the most gruesome scripts, figuring that his lighter touch would make things more comedic and therefore more acceptable. One of his most famous horror stories for them — "Foul Play" — involved a baseball game with the parts of a dismembered corpse used for bases, baselines, etc. Its writer-editor Al Feldstein told me, "We crossed the line on that one. We caught hell for it and I can only imagine how bad it would have been if someone other than Jack had drawn it."

That first issue of MAD sixty-four years ago was a real turning point for comics in many ways. One of them was the artistic liberation of Jack Davis.

Jack was, by the way, the last surviving contributor to that issue but for Marie Severin, who did the coloring. A lot of obits about Jack say he was the last surviving EC artist. If you don't count Marie, he was the last of the folks who drew regularly for that line but a few occasional contributors like Russ Heath and Angelo Torres are still with us. Still, it's not inaccurate to say that the passing of Jack Davis represents the passing of an era, as well as the passing of a great artist and a great gentleman.

The post More on Jack Davis appeared first on News From ME.

As I did last week with the Republican National Convention and Trump, some thoughts today on the Democratic National Convention and Clinton:

1. At the beginning the DNC certainly looked like it had all the fixin’s for an RNC-level shitshow, what with the Dead-End Berners and e-mails and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s career imploding in real time. But then a funny thing happened on the way to the shitshow: it all got managed. Wasserman-Schultz was ridden out of town on the nicest, most face-saving rail that could be found, Bernie Sanders and the majority of his delegates were publicly honored and catered to, and the ones that wouldn’t be mollified were first put in their place (via the good graces of Sarah Silverman) and then on later nights generally counteracted and out-chanted on the floor.

Meanwhile, up on stage, the A-list of Democratic politics and of Celebrityland went out, hit their marks, gave their speeches that ranged from dully competent to oh, wow, and without exception endorsed Hillary Clinton, as they were supposed to. All of which is to say, this convention went off about as well as it possibly could, especially considering the potential for chaos that had unloaded itself earlier in the week.

Remember how last week I asked how Trump could be trusted to manage an entire country if he couldn’t even handle a four-day self-advertisement? To flip it around, the competent running of this particular four-day self-advertisement does not imply the Clinton and the Democrats will also run the country well, but, Jesus, the mere, simple competence of it, even with its concomitant drama, is like a cool glass of water after a hard wander in the desert.

This year a major difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is simply this: They both had their shitshows, but only the Republicans put theirs up on a stage and called it a convention.

2. During President Obama’s speech on the third night, I started seeing tweets and comments from GOP operatives that were, bluntly, a little shell-shocked at how much better and, honestly, more adult Obama and the other DNCs speakers’ speeches were than what transpired at the RNC the week before. The general gist of the tweets was “Waaaaaaah the Democrats are stealing our stuff” — meaning the themes of patriotism, military honor and, yes, “real American-ness” had found their way into the DNC speeches when they should have been at the RNC.

It’s certainly true the Democrats swept up all that iconography, gave it the slightest of twists to the left, and held it up for all to see. But two things here. One, it never was the GOPs to own exclusively in the first place, particularly when the rhetoric of the GOP rarely jibed with the policies of the GOP. The Democrats have as much right to them as the GOP does. Two, well, what the hell did the GOP expect? You left all that iconography just lying around because you’re off nominating a self-interested blowhard who is trying to scare the shit out of enough old white people to get into the White House. What did you think was going to happen? The Democrats were just going to leave it in the yard for you to come back to in 2020? Rumor is, the Democrats would like to win the presidency.

As others elsewhere have noted, the problem with the Democrats using these themes previously is not that they couldn’t use them, but that given the high-volume co-option of the themes by the GOP, it seems like the Democrats were saying, “hey, us too,” which is not a good look. This year, they don’t have to worry about that, and of course that’s no one’s fault but the GOP’s. The other thing about that is that now that these themes are in the Democrats’ hands, the GOP’s attempt to use them later is likely to have that “hey, us too” feel to it, which will not be a good look for them, either.

3. In my lifetime, there have been contentious conventions on both sides of the US political aisles, blockbuster speeches and speeches that have left craters of careers, lots of drama and excitement (and lots of oh lord why are we even running this in prime time it’s sooooo boring). But I don’t think there’s ever been a convention season where the contrast between candidates and parties has been so sharp. Right now, the Democrats are the party of the grown-ups: They have detailed policies and a plan and a system in place and a presidential candidate who has the resume and experience for gig. The GOP has a candidate who retweets white supremacists and “jokes” about asking the Russians to hack his opponent, and whose policy stances are “Trust me, it’ll be great,” and “You’re all doomed without me.”

This should not be a close contest. That it is a close contest (right now) is a testament first to the twenty-five years that the GOP and conservatives have spent demonizing Hillary Clinton, and second to the effectiveness of the GOP and conservatives in creating an epistemic bubble inside which millions of (largely white, largely older, largely less educated) people live, trained to be suspicious of facts, trained to see political opponents as traitors, trained to be afraid first and anything else after that.

And yes! When you say those things in sequence out loud, it sounds ridiculous! But yet here we are in 2016 with Donald Trump, ignorant, hateful, horribly afraid Donald Trump, as the Republican candidate for president. He didn’t appear out of nowhere. The way was prepared for him over decades, by people who couldn’t see that they’d laid the way for an incipient demagogue who would have no loyalty to them or their political goals, such as they were. They didn’t see that the person who would be tasked to stand in his way is the person they’d spent a quarter century convincing those in bubble land is one of the gravest threats to America that had ever put on a sensible pantsuit ensemble.

Again, someone elsewhere said it first, and I’m just repeating it because it’s true: This year is not about Democrat versus Republican, or conservative versus liberal, it’s about normal versus highly fucking abnormal. The conventions were just the easiest compare-and-contrast manifestation of that schism. You may not like the Democrats, but they’re coloring inside the lines. The GOP isn’t coloring inside the lines; they’re not even coloring inside the book or using crayons. What they’re doing is splashing pig’s blood on a wall and scrawling ALL HAIL THE ANGRY CHEETO with the gore. This is where we are in 2016, and it does us no good to pretend otherwise.

So yeah, all you GOP operatives moping about how much better the Democratic convention was than yours: This is on you and your party. You built this over the course of a quarter century. And if you have anything left in your brain other than a Pavlovian revulsion response to Hillary Clinton, you know what you should be doing between now and November.

4. Certainly Hillary Clinton didn’t waste any time trying to pull in the folks who have not gone entirely around the bend; her speech, which started slow but picked up steam, was an open invitation to anyone horrified by the concept of Trump to get on the Clinton bandwagon. This year the Democrats are dragging their nets wide, as they should; here’s a chance for them to flip the “Reagan Democrats” script that was played out three and a half decades ago, and bring in the right-leaning folks who are sensibly concerned about the current state of things. This is your campaign, she said, over and again, to the people who in a year not written by a speed-addled hack novelist would be voting for a Republican. She’s not wrong.

(This is, incidentally, why at this point she can blow off any remaining Dead-End Berners. She’s made her obeisance to her left flank and put their goals into the platform, and now she’s moving to haul in the many more millions in the middle. If the few remaining DEBs can’t get with the program, fuck ’em. Let ’em vote Jill Stein, then.)

Clinton is not and is never likely to be the orator either her husband or President Obama are. Her cadence in the first several minutes of her speech was a cross between Christopher Walken and a junior high assistant principal droning through the morning announcements. But she picked up when she got to the meat of the speech which consisted of a) lots of policy wonkiness, and b) punching Trump square in the nose. Her speech included a lot of applause lines that shouldn’t have had to be in there; as much as I loved her saying “AND, I believe in science!” it’s goddamn 2016. The idea that a candidate for the President of the United States has to use that line to differentiate herself from an opponent who even in the worst case scenario will garner tens of millions of votes is a tragedy for everyone involved.

The speech, and Clinton, did what needed to be done: Show Clinton as a reasonable human being with reasonable goals and a reasonable plan to implement them, and stand as a contrast to the ambulatory tire fire that is Donald Trump. Both of these are relatively low bars, so it’s not at all surprising she cleared them, and probably with some margin. We’ll see what happens in terms of polls from here. My suspicion is that Clinton gets some air between her and Trump, no doubt aided by Trump’s Russian adventures in the last week.

Clinton particularly got Trump’s number when she said that a man who can be taunted by a tweet shouldn’t be given nuclear launch codes. Trump’s response — of course — has been to embark on a furiously pissy tweetstorm, which makes her point. She did a pretty good job of messing with his toys.

5. There are three months between now and Election Day, and anything can happen, but I’ll go ahead and make a prediction now, which is essentially the same prediction I’ve been making all along, which is: Hillary Clinton is going to win this election, and in the end I don’t suspect that electorally speaking it’s going to be all that close. Trump is betting on older, less-educated white people and the built-up hatred of Clinton to get him in. That leaves Clinton literally everyone else in the country. With literally everyone else in the country, Trump’s trend lines don’t look all that great. I think literally everyone else in the country is going to be motivated to vote against him. I think he’s going to lose.

What I want to know is what happens then. I mean, I know what I think is going to happen with the GOP — confronted yet again with demographics and the general horribleness of their current philosophy of obstructing for political purity, they will of course double down once more on whiteness and truculence. It’s what it’s trained its base to demand, and inasmuch as it will (probably) keep the House after November, there’s another couple of years to ride this out at least.

But I genuinely want to know what the plan is from there. Trump is a racist and bigot and he is the GOP’s candidate for president because GOP primary voters put him there. The party’s not dog-whistling anymore. The party can’t pretend it stands for all Americans with him as its standard bearer. The GOP can’t hide any longer that it is, flatly, a white nationalist party. Whatever else it stands for, that’s front and center. Trump put that there, and the GOP primary voters put him there.

How does the GOP come back from that? After election day they can all look at each other and agree to never speak of 2016 again, but here’s the thing: There’s still literally everyone else in the county. They are not going to forget 2016, or that Trump was the GOP standard-bearer, or that the GOP went along with him. They are going to remember. They are going to remember for decades.

The Democrats have their own issues — the Dead-End Berners are a sideshow but a hard left is there and real and it’ll be interesting to see how the Democrats handle them, especially if this election gifts them a wide swath of center and center-right voters — but they pale in comparison to the GOP’s issues right now. And the thing is, again, it’ll just be easier for the GOPs not to deal with them and to, again, double down on whiteness and obstructionism. I think it’s going to kill them over time. The last one in the GOP room won’t have to turn out the light; the power will have been cut long before.

(Of course, Trump could win, in which case the GOP’s short-term problems are solved, at the expense of literally everything else that will be affected by boosting an ignorant racist nihilist into the White House. I don’t see this being a great option either, certainly not for the rest of us, nor in the long run for the GOP.)

6. I think Clinton will win the presidency, and I think her speech last night went a long way to helping with that. She made the argument that she was worthy of the job, not simply that she was last anchor post before the abyss. Likewise the DNC, especially contrasted with the RNC, showed who are the competent folks in this election cycle. Both mattered, and I think both will help seal with deal with a number of possibly reluctant voters. This was a good convention for Hillary Clinton, and for Democrats.

With that said, don’t forget that Hillary Clinton really is the last anchor post before the abyss. I said it months ago and I will say it again now: No one should be voting for Donald Trump for president. If you are historically a Republican voter, consider your other options. Clinton is there, but if that’s a bridge too far, there’s Gary Johnson, who, I say again, has an actual platform and policies that are probably closer in line with what your values are than Trump.

Likewise, no one should be complacent about this election. Register to vote. If your state is making it difficult for you to vote, know now so that well ahead of election day you can jump through all the stupid, intentionally-placed hoops preventing you from registering. Know what you need in terms of IDs, etc to vote (yes, it sucks. Do it anyway). Bother everyone you know who is eligible to vote to do the same. Do it today. Hell, do it now.

Then, when the time comes, vote. This one is different. This one you shouldn’t sit through. This one really, truly, matters.

Three months to go, people. Get on it.

So, before Hillary Clinton puts a cap on the DNC convention with her appearance tonight, let me talk a little about what I think of her as a presidential nominee, (mostly) independent of the fact of Donald Trump as her opponent for the office. And to talk about her as a presidential nominee, I need to talk a little bit about me as a political being.

And who am I as a political being? As I’ve noted elsewhere, among the various political labels that have been used over the last several decades, I’m probably closest to what used to be called a “Rockefeller Republican,” a person who is relatively socially liberal but relatively economically conservative. But that label doesn’t precisely describe me, either. I am both of those things, generally, but it doesn’t get to the root of my political ethos.

To get to that, I need to go back to high school, to a class I took called Individual Humanities. The class was the brainchild of teacher Larry McMillin, and it was a year-long class (interestingly, divided between the last half of one’s junior year and the first half of one’s senior year) that took a look at portrayals of the individual in Western Literature — from Oedipus Rex through Joan of Arc through Huckleberry Finn — to chart the development of the idea of the individual and what it means to be one, in the larger context of  western civilization.

The specific details of the class are something I’ll leave out for now, but the takeaway of the class — the summation of its goals — was to argue that one of western civilization’s great achievements was the development of the independently acting and thinking individuals who saw as their greatest life crisis service to their community. Which is to say: In our world, we get built to think for ourselves, and when that happens, we realize we can’t be in it just for ourselves.

And, importantly, this ethos and the benefits thereof are not the purview of one group or class. Everyone should be encouraged to develop into who they have the potential to become. Everyone in turn uses that realized potential for the overall benefit their community or communities.

Well, that sounds communist! Yes, I suppose if you wanted you could argue that “from each according to ability, to each according to needs” is an expression of this concept, but then again, so is “TANSTAAFL” as long as it’s applied alongside “Pay it forward”; even the concept of noblesse oblige holds its echo. Like the “golden rule” which is found in most major religions, the concept is adaptable to a number of situations. The important things: Development of people as individuals; recognition of the individual’s responsibilities to their communities.

This is, to my mind, a powerful, adaptable and moral ethos, first because it encourages each of us to find our full expression and to develop those gifts we have within us — to become us — and at the same time reminds us that these talents and gifts need to be used not only for ourselves but for the benefit of others. It’s not (just) self-interest, or even (just) enlightened self-interest; it’s realization of self and a commitment to others as the result of that realization. It doesn’t mean one can’t do well for one’s self; most of us are not built to be monks. It does mean you should see “doing good” as an equal or higher goal than “doing well.”

This idea of the enlightened individual in service to their community is a significant part of my own personal ethical toolbox; likewise, it’s part of my political thinking as well, and a thing I want to see in politicians.

Along with this ethos, I have a very large streak of pragmatism, which is to say, I generally think it’s okay to get half a loaf when the full loaf is manifestly not on offer. Should you go in saying “sure, I’ll take half a loaf”? No, go ahead and see how much of the loaf you can get — if you can get the whole damn thing, good on you. But if you get 80% or 50% or 25% or whatever, depending on circumstances, well, fine — that fraction can be a basis to build on. Applying “All or nothing” thinking to every situation is for amateurs, nihilists and fools.

So, let’s apply both of these concepts to Hillary Clinton. I think that Clinton has shown amply over the years that, whatever personal ambitions or her willingness to cash a check for speaking fees (and as an ambitious person who occasionally speaks for money, I don’t see either as inherently a problem), time and again she’s put herself in service. Not with 100% success and not without flaws even when successful, but there are none of us perfect, and the end result of her putting herself back into the arena again and again is that much of that service has had an impact. Her ambition and service are not just about her and what it gets her. She’s done much, and at a high level, for others.

As for pragmatic — well, look. One does not work at the levels she does and has for decades without it, and if there’s any ding on the Clintons as a political couple, it’s their willingness to make a deal. Again, I don’t see that as necessarily a bad thing, even if one’s line for “acceptable deal” is elsewhere than theirs. This is definitely a “your mileage may vary” sort of thing, but I’m okay with the mileage I get out of it.

Independent of anything else, Clinton is an attractive presidential candidate for me for the reasons noted above. Service and pragmaticism go a long way for me. In the context of where the GOP is right now, and who they are fielding as their candidate this cycle, it’s not even a contest. In the case of John McCain and Mitt Romney, the two previous GOP presidential candidates, even as I disliked their overall policies and plans for the country, I could not say they had not acted in service to their communities and country, or that they didn’t have the ability to be pragmatic when being pragmatic was what was needed. I can’t say that about Trump. There’s nothing in his past actions that suggests he’s in this life for anyone but himself.

But Hillary Clinton is — is what, exactly? A criminal? Corrupt? Dishonest? Evil? Terrible? Awful? A bitch? Satan in a pantsuit ensemble? As I’ve noted before, a quarter century of entirely outsized investigations into her life and actions have come up with nothing criminal or found corruption that rises to indictable levels. As for the rest of it, whatever Clinton’s own personal characteristics, she also had the misfortune of stepping into the political spotlight concurrent to the GOP wholesale adopting the Gingrich playbook of demonizing the opposition. She’s had an entire political party and its media apparatus spending two full decades telling the world she’s a bitch, and evil, and a criminal. It’s still happening; the Republican National Convention resounded with the words lock her up, lock her up, lock her up. And yet she is still here. She is still in service. Now, you can see that as ego or delusion or the inability to take a hint. I see it as an unwillingness to yield the floor to those whose political playbook is simply “demonize your opponent,” with the rest to be figured out later.

(And make no mistake — should Clinton win the presidency, the fury isn’t going away. The GOP is all in this year with sexism and bigotry and hate, and at this point it has no other gear; it literally cannot do otherwise without entirely losing its primary voter base. This is what the Gingrich playbook has gotten the GOP. It’s made them fury addicts, and the withdrawal symptoms are as likely to kill them as not.)

Maybe ultimately the issue is that she’s not likable, i.e., she’s not the candidate you’ll have a beer with. Well, now there’s Tim Kaine for that if that’s important to you; he’ll have a beer with you, and if you have too many he’ll take your keys when you’re not looking, pretend to help you look for them when you’re ready to go, and then let you sleep it off on the couch. But honestly, I’ve never gotten that whole construct. One, I don’t need to have a beer with my President; I assume they have other things to do. Two, if that’s a controlling aspect of your presidential decision making, I mean, if it actually is important to you, then you’re the problem and you need to pull your head out and maybe have more relevant criteria, or at least put “beer buddy” as far down the goddamned list as possible.

And three, says who? I don’t need Clinton to be likable in order to vote for her for president, especially as I’m not likely to ever meet her and spend time with her and have late night phone calls where we gossip and share secrets. She’s not my friend. But I also don’t find her unlikable today, and I don’t remember that ever being the baseline of my opinion of her (she’s had unlikable moments, to be sure. Welcome to being human). But then, I also don’t tend to think women who express opinions, or who don’t feel the need to excuse their ambition or their place near the top of the power structure, are inherently unlikable. Let’s not pretend that in fact that’s not a problem, still, for a lot of people — and that this being a problem hasn’t been exploited by others.

(Also, you know. Maybe it’s a personal quirk, but I just don’t get that invested in politicians as inspirational figures. I’m perfectly happy with them being essentially colorless and efficient and boring. Maybe even prefer it!)

At the end of the day, without reference to any other aspect of this particular presidential race, Hillary Clinton offers more than enough for me to vote for her. With reference to other aspects of this race — namely, that Donald Trump’s candidacy is as close to being an actual existential threat to US democracy as we’ve had, possibly ever — voting for Clinton becomes not only a preference but a moral necessity. I can’t not vote for Hillary Clinton in this election. So it’s nice to know I would have been happy to vote for her, no matter what.

Another PSA announcement: If anyone’s trying to email me, I’m not ignoring you. I haven’t got email for going on 4 days now. Alleged attempts by Dreamhost (the ISP that hosts rifters.com) to fix the problem have so far succeeded in changing its status from from “Everything’s pretty much cool, just a bit of leftover email congestion for a couple of users” to “critical problems, no estimated fix time, you’re hosed, we’ve disabled comments on the status update page, and we won’t even pretend to answer any follow-up queries.” So I don’t know when I’ll have a chance to even read any emails, much less respond to them.

In the meantime though, have a look at this expanded Director’s Cut edition of a recent Nowa Fantastyka column.

*

The study looks almost perfect, if ridiculously low-tech: the kind of thing an undergrad might do with a budget of $3.50. All you need is a mirror, a piece of Plexiglas, and a bunch of ants.

Oh, and blue paint. The whole thing comes down to blue paint.

Start with the Plexiglas. Put Ant A on one side, Ant B on the other. Ant A shows no reaction to its buddy at all. So far so good.

Stick it in front of a mirror. Now it pays attention. Goes up to the glass, taps its reflection, shows interest it never showed with the real ant on the other side of the plexi. Interesting.

Maybe it’s reacting to something in the mirror, some chemical in the silver backing perhaps. So put a dot of blue paint on its head and put it in front of the mirror again. This time it checks out its reflection and starts grooming its head, as if to get rid of that weird-ass dot that just appeared there. It never tries to groom its reflection, which is where it actually saw the paint.

This is starting to get creepy.

Okay, um, maybe it could just feel the paint up there. Maybe it itched or something. So try a speck of brown, ant-coloured paint, something that won’t be visually obvious in reflection.

No grooming.

Put a speck of blue paint on the back of the head, where the ant can’t see it in a mirror. No grooming.

I’m not one to jump to conclusions, but I’m having a hard time interpreting these results in any way other than: ants recognize themselves in mirrors. Which means they pass a test frequently used as an index of self-awareness, a test that even some higher primates fail.

The stats seem sound, generally returning P-values of less than 0.001 (for the statistical neophytes in the crowd, that means the odds of getting those results by random chance are less than 1 in 1000). But the remarkable thing is, the researchers didn’t even do stats on most of their results. They couldn’t do stats, because there was no variation in the data. All the face-painted ants groomed their faces once they saw themselves in a mirror; none of the unpainted ones did. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such clean data in a behavioural study before.

What is this simple-yet-profound experiment, this rock-solid research with the batshit crazy results? Why, it’s “Are ants capable of self recognition?“, by Marie-Claire Cammaerts and Roger Cammaerts. Where will you find it? In the Journal of Science, a publication whose website veritably screams JunkWoo. The title bar on its website looks like a banner ad for generic penis pills. Just below that you’ll see, for some reason, a stock photo of a smiling dude in safety goggles and a yellow hard hat. “Instruction to Author” is either a typo or a tacit admission that every paper in the journal is written by the same person under different pen names. Even the journal’s name seems designed to encourage confusion with more respectable platforms (“the journal, Science?” “American Journal of Science?” “Journal of Science Education?”) while simultaneously discouraging investigation into its actual pedigree. (Google the phrase “Journal of Science”: you’ll get 67,000,000 hits. I scrolled through the first 300 and couldn’t find a single link to the actual journal.)

The Cammaerts are not flakes. They’re well-published in respected, peer-reviewed journals. I don’t know what they’re doing in the Journal of Science, unless they lost a drunken bet at a party somewhere. Or maybe their results are just so incredible that no one else would publish them.

I’m thinking maybe it’s that second thing. If you go to Wikipedia’s page on “Mirror Test”, pull back the curtain and read the backstage discussion, you’ll see editors and commenters stating that they “flat out don’t believe those results”, even while others praise the methodology that produced them. The idea that ants can self-recognize just opens too big a can of worms.

And yet, Cammaerts and Cammaerts are not entirely alone. Way back in 2010, writing in the top-of-the-line Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Björn Brems described research suggesting that fruit flies have Free Will. It wasn’t “free will” in the classic sense— it basically amounted to any behaviour complex enough to make you unpredictable to predators— but as anyone conversant with the literature will tell you, that’s pretty much the only kind of free will we humans can lay claim to as well (albeit with more bells and whistles). And just this year, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ran a piece called “What Insects can tell us about the origins of consciousness“, by Andrew Barrona and Colin Klein.

Barrona and Klein argue that vertebrate consciousness is seated in the midbrain, which acquires information about both the organism’s internal state and its external environment. It integrates these into a model that generates behavioural goals— if your internal state is too hot then move somewhere cooler, that sort of thing— and relays those goals to the motor system. The midbrain contains all the elements necessary to sense, navigate, and survive in a given environment. Barrona and Klein argue that such integration is the root of consciousness, and point out insect brain structures serving the same functions; they conclude that insects should experience comparable levels of awareness. (Nematodes, lacking comparable structures, would not.)

It’s important not to go off the deep end here. There’s a huge difference between consciousness and self-awareness, between sentience and sapience (and a belated thankyou to Leonid Korogodski for hammering that difference home to me many years ago); an organism can have conscious experiences without consciously reflecting on their own existence. And the Mirror Test has always struck me as a questionable metric for self-awareness anyway (for one thing, it’s easy to envision an algorithm that recognizes the self without being aware of the self). But the traditional view of insects as mere computer programs wrapped in chitin, utterly deterministic in their behaviour, appears to be wrong. Stimulus A does not always provoke Response B, as you’d expect from purely deterministic reflexes; sometimes the insect is focused on other input, sometimes it can be distracted. We are learning that insects pay attention to things. It seems increasingly likely that their experiences are conscious ones, to at least some extent. Consciousness may be far more ancient, far more widespread than we ever suspected.

Which means that suffering is, too, by the same token.

I’m not sure why, but I bet that explains a lot.