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May 17th, 2017: I did a lot of VERY SUSPICIOUS INTERNET SEARCHES for this comic, and I have this many regrets: maybe a few? – Ryan

Watchmen by Alan Moore
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Modern comics events seem to demand endless lead-ins and spin-offs, and sadly Doomsday Clock, from the blockbuster team of Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, is no exception to this trend. Watchmen, the extended prequel to Doomsday Clock, feels wholly unneccessary to 2017’s much-anticipated DC Rebirth (TM) event. For a start, it’s not even by Geoff Johns – how big a clue do you need that DC see ‘Watchmen’ as simply a cash-in? The storyline has been farmed out to a British writer-artist team who are given the task of introducing us to the universe which will “collide” with the DCU in this winter’s mega-event.

It’s an important job and one which might have been suited to a special issue or even an annual-length story, but no – DC had to drag things out to 12 long issues – for comparison purposes, the Death Of Hawkman (in which Hawkman dies) was only alotted 6 issues. Watchmen includes several issues focusing on characters who don’t even survive to take part in Doomsday Clock! And don’t get me started on the sequences set on yet ANOTHER part of the DC multiverse, where pirates still rule the waves – yes, it’s a cool concept for an alternate Earth, but an editor should definitely have stepped in and asked for a bit of clarity.

In general the editorial reins are rather lightly held on Watchmen – for all the criticism Mr DiDio has received for interference, it’s a certainty he wouldn’t have made the basic mistakes here. While Dr Manhattan is clearly Superman and Nite Owl is Batman, it’s very unclear who each of the various Justice Society analogues (the ‘Minutemen’) are meant to be. If this DCU veteran couldn’t follow it, what hope does a new reader have? Also at no point is the membership of the Watchmen clearly delineated, and the team never really come together to solve the threat – an attempt at a clever bait and switch which goes sadly wrong in the hands of this inexperienced creative team.

The threat itself is handled marginally better, though aside from a couple of cool spreads the stiff artwork can hardly stand comparison to previous DC events like Blackest Night and Forever Evil which set the highest standards for realism in superhero action. A little more variation in page layout wouldn’t have hurt!

The story is along the lines of Identity Crisis (a comic those curious about Watchmen should investigate for a REAL universe-shaking interrogation of the superhero form – it’s strictly for adults, though). A hero lies dead and his fellow crime-fighters have to investigate – but might one of their own be responsible? Quicken the pace and introduce some more action and you might have a tense storyline here, but instead the writer is too busy showing off all the backstory he’s worked out for this universe, and there’s a LOT of backstory. I only hope some of this stuff pays off in Doomsday Clock because otherwise it’s yet another rookie error by creator and editor – SHOW DON’T TELL GUYS. If I wanted pages of prose I would read a novelisation. All this background simply obscures the story beats: the creators could learn a lot from modern storytelling in my opinion. Apparently the writer has already vowed never to work with DC again, and frankly it feels like they’ve dodged a bullet. I can’t imagine they were queueing up to work with him after this.

So overall Watchmen is a dud, with no recognisable DCU heroes appearing, and fans of Doomsday Clock should probably save their money for some of the awesome variant covers I expect to be announced. Only a couple of things save Watchmen from being a complete turkey – HERE BE SPOILERS I guess! The squid monster at the end is very cool, though once again a pretentious storytelling decision to cut to AFTER the fight against it lets the comic down. And there is one character who stands out from the rest – a badass hero called Rorschach who is absolutely driven to hunt down evil with zero, and I mean zero, compromise. He gets some extremely cool scenes and if he shows up in Doomsday Clock – which looks unlikely but keep your fingers crossed – expect Johns and Frank to crush it. In the right hands this guy could be a serious breakout star.

But on the whole this is a rip-off and yet another slap in the face to fans. It’s so different in style and substance from what we expect from an epic DCU story in 2017 that it’s almost impossible to see how it’s going to connect to Doomsday Clock. In Johns We Trust – but this is his toughest job yet.

View all my reviews

I.

Scientific American notes a recent study saying that a third of drugs approved by the FDA over the past ten years have since been recalled, been given new boxed warnings, or been given new “safety communications”.

A few people have asked me whether this means the FDA is too lax and needs to tighten its standards. Let’s look at this in more detail.

What the study actually says: of 222 drugs approved by the FDA in the last ten years, only 3 (1.3%) were taken off the market. Another 30% or so received “boxed warnings” or “safety communications”, basically the FDA’s way of adding new rules to their safety information. For example, the FDA might approve a drug for the general population, then issue a boxed warning saying “actually, we noticed that this drug can cause seizures as a side effect, don’t take it if you have a history of seizure disorder”.

The most serious category are the drugs taken off the market. As mentioned above, these are about 1% of the total. This doesn’t sound like the story of a weak regulatory agency failing to do its job. This sounds like a really impressive success rate. In fact, if our standards are so stringent that we’re insisting on a 1% false positive rate, I’m kind of horrified thinking of all the false negatives we must be throwing out.

But doesn’t even a 1% false positive rate mean the FDA failed in some way?

No. Let’s consider the most recent psychiatric drug to be withdrawn. This is nefazodone, an antidepressant withdrawn after the discovery that it causes liver failure once every 300,000 patient-years. That is, if 300,000 patients took it for one year, there would be one extra case of liver failure.

How, exactly, do you want to discover this in pre-approval studies? An average drug study has maybe 500 patients. Do you want to run an average drug study for six hundred years? Or do you want to figure out how to run a drug study that’s six hundred times bigger than average? And these numbers are underestimates – one extra liver failure might be a coincidence. You’d want to see two or three extra liver failures before you start thinking the drug might be involved. The average clinical trial costs something like $50 million. Are you sure you want to multiply this number by six hundred to catch a side effect that will affect one out of hundreds of thousands of people?

So what we actually do is post-marketing surveillance. The FDA demands an average drug study on 500 people to make sure that there aren’t any common problems. Then over hundreds of thousands of patients over the space of decades (nefazodone was out almost ten years before it got withdrawn) people collect records and see if there’s any unusual disorder that happens more often when people are on the drug.

Here’s another example from earlier this year: the FDA issued a safety communication that a new drug called Viberzi can cause pancreatitis in people who don’t have a gall bladder. I’m not sure how many patients in the original approval study didn’t have gall bladders, but I bet it wasn’t enough to draw any useful conclusions from. Should all drugs be delayed until they can do separate studies in the gall-bladder-less population? And how would we know beforehand that gall bladders were the problem? Why not separate studies in people with one kidney? People taking antidepressants? Red-haired people? Chinese people? Don’t laugh, Tegretol has a fatal side effect that’s only been observed in Han Chinese.

And then you do the kidney study, the antidepressant study, the red-haired study, and the Chinese study, and darnit, you forgot to look at people who eat way more sauerkraut than any normal person. There you go, linezolid just killed your patient.

You are never going to be able to figure out everything pre-approval. At best, you can prove that the drug is reasonably safe for the vast majority of people. Then later you find something that only happens once in a hundred thousand years, or only to people without gall bladders, or only to Han Chinese, or only if you eat too much sauerkraut. And then the FDA issues a safety communication about it. That’s what it looks like when the system works.

II.

Except I want to look a little further into FDA safety communications and boxed warnings, the large majority of the events found in the study. Some of these are important updates about things like the drug being dangerous to people without gallbladders. Others are…well, the FDA really likes warning people about stuff.

This February, the FDA issued a safety communication about chlorhexidine, aka antiseptic soap. This has been used since the 1950s by loads of surgeons, doctors, and random people who need antiseptic soap for something, and it’s currently a WHO Essential Medication. The FDA wanted us to know that, during fifty years of worldwide use of this product, about one person a year had experienced a severe allergic reaction (by comparison, there are 200 deaths a year from peanut allergies). The safety communication said that if you found yourself having a severe allergic reaction to antiseptic soap, you should call 911.

Last summer, the FDA added a boxed warning to all benzodiazepines (Valium, Xanax, Ativan, Librium, etc) and all opiates (morphine, Norco, Percocet, Vicodin, Oxycontin, etc) warning doctors that it could be dangerous to prescribe those two classes of drugs together. Doctors, who had been warned against prescribing those two classes of drugs together for fifty years, collectively said “well, duh”, and then continued prescribing those two classes of drugs together the same as always, because dealing with anxious people who have chronic pain is really hard.

In 2006, the FDA added a boxed warning to warfarin, saying it could cause major bleeding. Warfarin is a 50-year old medication taken by millions of people each year, which has probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives over the past half-century. It’s an anticoagulant, which means the whole point is to make your blood clot less and bleed more. Mentioning that warfarin can cause major bleeding is a lot like mentioning that sleeping pills might cause tiredness, or weight gain pills could make you fat. Nevertheless, after fifty years and tens of millions of patients, the FDA decided to issue a boxed warning about this. The medical community collectively say “Well, duh” again and got on with their lives.

Also in 2006, the FDA added a boxed warning to Ritalin, saying it might slightly increase the risk of heart disease in children. Everyone kept prescribing it anyway, and later on some better studies showed that it might not slightly increase the risk of heart disease in children. I’m not sure what the current status of this debate is, but it sure hasn’t stopped like half the children I meet from being on Ritalin.

In 2004, the FDA added a boxed warning to every single antidepressant – yes, every single one – warning that they might increase suicide risk in teens. There is still a heated debate about this, with some recent review articles seeming to confirm, and other people pointing out that, when the FDA warning discouraged people from giving antidepressants to teens, teen suicide attempts suddenly went way up. Anyway, antidepressants are hardly alone here – other psychiatric drugs that received boxed warnings include all typical antipsychotics, all atypical antipsychotics, all benzodiazepines, all stimulants, lithium, Depakote, Lamictal, and I think literally every single psychiatric drug except buspirone.

What I’m saying is – the FDA issuing a safety communication or boxed warning doesn’t mean the drug was a mistake, or you should be scared that something went wrong. It’s a routine part of the pharmacological monitoring system. This doesn’t mean it should feel routine to your doctor – they should get worried every time a new one comes out and make sure they’re not inadvertantly harming their patients without gall bladders – but it should feel routine to somebody looking at this on the institutional/systems level.

III.

So does this study mean that the FDA is too lax and needs to tighten its standards?

I’m not sure. Maybe the best answer is “not necessarily“. We definitely shouldn’t be aiming for a 0% post-marketing event rate. Is a 33% post-marketing event rate too high?

I’ve seen a lot of discussion on this recently which I think takes shortcuts. It points out that the FDA has a higher/lower post-marketing event rate than European agencies. Or that the FDA takes longer/shorter to approve drugs than it did a couple of years ago. Or that its standards are stricter/looser than some comparable area of the federal bureaucracy.

None of this matters. What actually matters is the number of people helped by incentivizing new drug development and getting it to market quickly, versus the number of people harmed by the safety problems that slip through the cracks.

It looks like some of the post-marketing surveillance events here were pretty silly, while others were pretty serious – two people died from that drug that causes pancreatitis in people without gall bladders. Are those two deaths justified in the context of saving thousands of other people who had whatever condition that drug cures? I don’t know without a lot more work. The only study I’ve ever seen on this is stuff in the vein of Isakov, Lo, and Motazerhodjat, which always finds the FDA is too conservative. Maybe they’re wrong, but if someone wants to prove they’re wrong, they should do the same kind of cost-benefit analysis and let us know that they came to a different result.

The finding that 33% of approved drugs get post-marketing safety events may factor into such a calculation. But without the rest of the calculation, it’s just a meaningless number.

For no doubt others from our recorded pasts are also likely to suffer the similar biased cultural shredding of Colston and I suspect there will be further opposition from authentic Bristolians…
      R L Smith

The music committee's sole aim, it would appear, is to change the name of a certain Bristol building - something I supsect 90 percent of genuine Bristolians do not want.
     H. W White

And to the rest of you people living here, born and bred: do something. Don’t less this happen. Colson Hall is Bristol’s. It’s ours, yours and mine. It’s not theirs. 
     H.W WHite


While we’re about it why don’t we get rid of everything Italian (restaurants, food shops, etc) for all the slavery the Romans brought to our shores…and whilst on the subject, all our Danish pastry shops for the raping and pillaging the Vikings did to us.
     Tim Lalonde

My family came from France in the late 19th century…We’ve never sought an apology for Trafalgar, Waterloo, Agincourt…
     Tim Lalonde

…if we change the name of the Colston Hall then we also have to look at Wills, Cadbury’s and Fry’s, all philanthropic dynasties but no doubt something in their past would offend some people.
      “A Bristolian with a voting bug.”



While there are  those who would clearly prefer to see the name of Edward Colston eradicated from Bristol altogether, he was an always will be a part of our great city’s history, warts and all…
     Adrian Courtney Smith

Slavery was bad and we all say that now, but…
    “A Bristolian with a voting bug.”

Second paragraph of third entry (Doctor Who - The Edge of Destruction):

Issue 127 of Doctor Who Magazine (August 1987) reported the book was planned for the second half of 1988. It was brought forward when Doctor Who - Attack of the Cybermen was delayed. If it hadn't bee it probably wouldn't have had a hardback edition as W H Allen dropped these from July 1988.

This book's subtitle is A Comprehensive Guide to the Novelisations of Broadcast Doctor Who, and that's precisely what it is. It is only available as an interactive PDF where you can if you like (and I did) read through the entries in chronological order of publication rather than (as they are presented) in order of broadcast of the original story. For each novelisation, the gap in time between broad cast of the TV story and publication of the book is given (starting from -1 day, in the case of The Five Doctors) and the word count for all but the three most recent (shortest: Doctor Who - Planet of Giants, by Terrance Dicks; longest: Doctor Who - The Evil of the Daleks, by John Peel). There's then a listing of UK editions with images of the different covers, the blurb, the chapter titles, individual notes on each book including the fate of the original cover artwork where it is known, and then an account of foreign editions. It's full of odd little bits of trivia - why, for instance, did a Polish publisher decide in 1994 to translate Day of the Daleks, The Three Doctors, Revenge of the Cybermen and nothing else? I was also unaware that there are Australian novelisations of four Eleventh Doctor stories - The Eleventh Hour, Victory of the Daleks, The Time of Angels and The Lodger. Smith loses completist points, however, by including K9 and Company by Terence Dudley (as well as the Pescatons, the two Barry Letts Third Doctor audios and the Sixth Doctor missing stories) but omitting the Sarah Jane Adventures novelisations (which are actually not bad). Still, I mustn't complain; I don't have the time or energy to put this together and I am very glad that someone else does. You can download it for free.

It’s late, and I need to sleep so I should probably skip this update, but I’m probably not going to be able to do a post tomorrow either, as I’m going to an event at the LSE in the evening. And that’s why I want to write something now, because the event I’m going to is called “Illiberal Democracy in unstable times”. It’s focusing on Central and Eastern Europe, but it’ll be interesting to hear if any of the countries talked about have a policy proposal like this:

Firms will be asked to pay more to hire migrant workers and they in turn will be asked to pay more to use the NHS.
Theresa May will make a commitment to bringing immigration down to the tens of thousands target, which has been missed since 2010.
She will warn that “when immigration is too fast and too high, it is difficult to build a cohesive society”.
The BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg said that the prime minister would put forward an “uncompromising” message that immigration is too high and would come down under her leadership.

There’s your new Global Britain, folks. Open to the world, as long as none of them actually want to come here and work or study, and if they do then we’ll make sure they pay through the nose for everything, bury them in paperwork to allow them do it, and then expect them to be grateful for it. And it’ll cost us £6bn every year to do it. That’s strong and stable government for you. That’s about £120m a week they’ve got to find even before they start looking for the extra £350m a week the NHS is meant to be getting because of the supposed benefits of leaving the EU.

This isn’t strong and stable government, this isn’t even conservative government, it’s petty nationalism and a sign of just how debased our political culture has become that the media are just nodding along at nonsense like this.

Illiberal democracy in unstable times? We’re going to show them exactly what that means, aren’t we?

So I'm figuring that if the current Trump scandals unfold the way Nixon's did — and they may not — what happens next is a flurry of polls which G.O.P. leaders read to say, "If we don't get on top of this and we look like we're protecting and enabling this guy, we're going to lose the House and/or Senate." One of the things that did Nixon in was that Republican lawmakers saw their base splitting. If you were a Congressperson or Senator of that party, you saw that you could lose half of the Republican vote if you protected Nixon and half if you didn't. It's almost impossible to win another term if anywhere near 50% of your own party deserts you. It also makes you extremely vulnerable to a challenger from your own party.

I always thought one of the key "Nixon is doomed" moments of Watergate came when an obscure, well-meaning little rabbi named Baruch Korff started turning up everywhere in the news, identified as "Nixon's Chief Defender." You would have thought that Nixon's Chief Defender would have been a prominent Republican Senator, Governor or Congressman — but no. All those guys were hiding under their desks, afraid to link their future with their president's. I thought of that last night when several news stories said that Fox News was having trouble getting anyone important to come on and speak on behalf of Trump.

Rabbi Korff suddenly got a lot of air time because there was this void. No one else wanted to be Nixon's Chief Defender and the media — especially the three major TV networks and especially CBS — were desperate to have someone speak on his behalf. If they hadn't, they would have given credence to the argument that the press was biased against Nixon and ginning up the whole Watergate mess. So Korff was suddenly everywhere and though he meant well, I thought he did Nixon more damage than good.

Korff was a bad surrogate. He didn't know how to speak in sound bites and give short, quotable answers. He knew very little about Washington and nothing about the "spin" Nixon and his people wanted to put on his actions, so often the Rabbi's "defense" admitted things Nixon was trying to deny and vice-versa. (There's another parallel there to Trump. A lot of the official spokespersons who've been out there saying things on behalf of Trump have immediately been contradicted by other spokespersons or by Trump himself.  Nothing makes you look guiltier than not being able to get your story straight.)

Korff also had been a genuine hero during World War II helping Jews escape the Nazi onslaught. There were so many such heroes that his deeds had gone largely unheralded and he sometimes seemed less interested in championing Nixon than he was in talking about his own accomplishments. When Dan Rather asked Korff for a thirty-second statement about the latest Watergate revelation, he often got a ten-minute story about liberating concentration camps.

The rabbi looked silly with his self-promotion and sillier still when some of Nixon's anti-semitic remarks on the tapes came out…and of course it was not lost on some people that Korff was out defending Nixon because no one else would do it.

It may not play out quite that way with Trump because due to gerrymandering and polarization, more Republicans are probably in "safe seats" and less afraid of losing them. Then again, even those G.O.P. officials are afraid of Democratic victories and with Trump's growing unpopularity getting in the way of tax cuts, Medicaid cuts and other items on the Republican wish list. Already, some Republicans are at least looking like they support full investigations and maybe a Special Prosecutor.  Depending on what James Comey says in the coming days, there may be a stampede.

My long-held view though is that Nixon wasn't forced out of office by Democratic attacks so much as he was ousted by Republican defections. When Barry Goldwater said even he'd be voting yea on at least one of the impeachment counts, Richard M. Nixon knew it was all over. One wonders if Donald J. Trump will be as wise.

Let's go to the links…

• Jonathan Chait reports on the latest Republican spin: Trump didn't mean it when he asked Comey to shut down investigations. He was just joking. You're in lot of trouble when that's the best your supporters can come up with to support you.  ("Ladies and gentlemen of the jury…when my client took that gun and the note demanding cash up to the bank teller's window, it was just a prank…")
• Dylan Matthews explains what happens when a sitting president is accused of a crime. It doesn't work the way it would if authorities found out that you and I are operating that series of illegal cockfights.
• Paul Ryan is still supporting Trump, says Steve Benen. I suspect Ryan will defend Trump to the death…or until he gets big tax cuts for the rich, whichever comes first. This seems to have been a dream Ryan has had since he was about seven. At that age, I was dreaming of working for Hanna-Barbera writing Yogi Bear and Paul Ryan was saying, "When I grow up, I want to take away the health insurance of poor people so that rich people get even richer!"
• And Daniel Larison thinks that Trump is about to make things a lot worse for America in its relationship with followers of Islam. Trump making something worse always sounds like a safe bet to me.

Jimmy Fallon sorta/kinda regrets that when he had Trump on The Tonight Show, it was all fun and games with nothing of a serious tone. Before we pillory Fallon for not being harder on the guy, we oughta ask if Jimmy Fallon is even capable of being harder on anyone. I suspect that once the booking was made, it couldn't have gone any other way. At least Fallon didn't try to get Trump to play a round of some old TV game show…although To Tell the Truth might have been an interesting choice.

The post Your Wednesday Trump Dump appeared first on News From ME.

Second paragraph of third section:

"Hello, I'm Chuck," I say, formally introducing myself.

I am quoted (well, paraphrased) in the crucial second section, in which author Chuck Tingle, miserable after the defeat of Space Raptor Butt Invasion in the 2016 Hugo Awards, receives notification from the 2017 Hugo Awards adminstrator that he has been nominated this year. Let's just say for the record that the demands subsequently and consequently made of him as part of the Hugo process are not those actually required of Hugo finalists in real life.

Nobody likes that the US has the highest (second-highest after Seychelles?) incarceration rate in the world. But attempts to do something about it tend to founder on questions like “So, who do you want to release? The robbers, or the murderers?” Ending the drug war would be a marginal improvement but wouldn’t solve the problem on its own. And I’ve had trouble finding other ideas that engage with the reality that people are going to prioritize safety over reform and anything that significantly increases violent crime is a likely non-starter.

This was why I was interested to read the scattered thoughts in the effective-altruism-sphere about bail reform.

(source)

About a fifth of the incarcerated population – the top of the orange slice, in this graph – are listed as “not convicted”. These are mostly people who haven’t gotten bail. Some are too much of a risk. But about 40% just can’t afford to pay. They are stuck in jail until their trial, which could take a long time:

Length of time that defendants spend in jail before trial (source). Although 50% are out by day 7, 25% are still in by day 50, 10% are still in by day 150, and one was still in after three years

I talked to a correctional psychiatrist a few weeks ago who was telling me that conditions for inmates awaiting trial were worse than conditions for already-convicted inmates. The convicted inmates get officially integrated into whatever prison they’re in and receive various jobs and privileges. The inmates awaiting trial just sit in their cells doing nothing.

People who commit serious crimes might be looking at years or decades in prison. Do the few months they gain or lose because of bail really make that big a difference?

Yes. First, because most people aren’t looking at decades in prison. This article tells the story of a man accused of attacking some police officers; he claimed innocence and expected to be vindicated at trial. Prosecutors offered him a plea bargain of sixty days in jail, which he refused. But he ended up spending more than sixty days in jail waiting for trial, which kind of defeated the point.

Second, because much of the time this ends in people just taking the plea bargain. For example, the man in the article above almost took the plea bargain after serving sixty days in jail – an understandable choice, since it let him walk free immediately with time served. But this would put a guilty plea on his record, which would make it harder for him to get jobs in the future and reframe any further crimes he might commit as “repeat offenses”. If his case goes to trial, he might have been be found not guilty and avoid the black mark.

Third, because people who are detained pretrial end up getting longer sentences. Some of this seems to be because they’re less able to contact their lawyer and prepare a good defense. Some more seems to be related to prosecutors setting harsher plea bargains for imprisoned defendants because they have a worse bargaining position. And some more might be related to psychological factors where judges think of people who just showed up from jail as “more criminal” than someone who came to the court from their home.

This legal advice site advises suspects not to stay in jail before trial even if they don’t mind the environment and just want to get it over with. It confirms my friend’s suspicion that jails are worse for people awaiting trial than for convicted offenders, but also notes some other interesting aspects. People in jail have a bad habit of making incriminating statements that get reported and used against them on trial. Suspects out on bail can rack up prosocial accomplishments to list off at their trial – they give the example of going to a counselor and making restitution to victims. And they get the option to delay their case until the trail grows cold and prosecutors get bored and everyone just agrees to a lesser sentence.

(something I didn’t realize which is relevant here: 96% of felony convictions involve guilty pleas. Plea bargaining is the rule, not the exception, and anything which makes it easier or harder is going to impact the large majority of cases)

There have been a bunch of studies trying to determine to what degree bail vs. pretrial detention affects case outcome. Some early studies like this found that it could alter sentence length by about ten percent, but the data were necessarily not very good – there’s no way to randomize suspects, and the sort of hardened criminals who don’t get bail are the same sort of hardened criminals who maybe deserve tougher sentences. People tried their best to control for all observable factors, but this never works. Better is Gupta, Hansman & Frenchman, which tries a quasi-experimental design based on suspects’ random assignment to more or less strict judges who are more or less likely to demand lots of money for bail. Suspects who are assessed bail are 6% more likely to be convicted (they’re also 4% more likely to reoffend, which is weird but might be related to imprisonment hardening criminals and increasing recidivism). Stevenson tries a similar method and finds that inability to make bail produces a 13% increase in convictions, mostly through more guilty pleas.

This study also finds that size of bail was less important than whether there was bail at all, which confused me until they pointed out that most suspects are really, really poor. As per the Stevenson paper:

Some of these defendants are facing very serious charges, and accordingly, have very high bail. But many have bail set at amounts that would be affordable for the middle or upper-middle class but are simply beyond the reach of the poor. In Philadelphia, the site of this study, more than half of pretrial detainees would be able to secure their release by paying a deposit of $1000 or less, most of which would be reimbursed if they appear at all court dates. Many defendants remain incarcerated even at extremely low amounts of bail, where the deposit necessary to secure release is only $50 or $100.

The New York Times notes that

Even when bail is set comparatively low – at $500 or less, as it is in one-third of nonfelony cases = only 15% of defendants are able to come up with the money to avoid jail.

And from here:

The guy in the NPR article above – the one who might or might not have attacked some cops – was in jail for 60 days because he couldn’t make bail of $1000.

So bail causes people to be stuck in jail for months, increases guilty pleas independent of defendants’ actual guilt, and causes more convictions and longer sentences. Since many of the people harmed by this are innocent, or deserve less punishment than they end up receiving, this seems like an important point of leverage at which to try to fight incarceration. On the other hand, bail is supposed to serve a useful purpose in preventing suspects from running away. It is possible to do without?

Maybe. Washington DC is one of the highest-crime areas of the country, but it uses an alternative system without monetary bail which uses an algorithm to calculate risk, releases low-risk people, and keeps high-risk people imprisoned without bail. It looks like about 10% of Washingtonians, versus 47% of other Americans, are detained in jail pre-trial. Of Washingtonians released without bail, 87% show up for all court dates, and 98% avoid committing violent crimes while free.

I’m not able to find a good comparison between Washington and other jurisdictions, but this page on bounty hunters gives the unsourced statistic that 20% of people on bail fail to show up for court anyway. This equally-credible-looking site gives an equally unsourced statistic of 10%, and notes that these people are more likely to be flakes who forgot their court date than supercriminals who have donned a fake mustache and are on their way to the Cayman Islands. These numbers suggests that Washington’s no-show rate is about the same as everywhere else’s.

Bronx Freedom Fund is a charity that helps people pay bail. They claim that 96% of the people whose bail they pay show up to trial, which matches the numbers from Washington and the numbers from normal places where people have to pay their own bail. I am sure they select their beneficiaries very carefully, but if it’s possible to select a group of people who are definitely going to show up to their trial whether they can make bail or not, why are those people still in jail?

I can’t find any studies clearly proving this, but it looks like there’s no obvious and proven tendency for bail to improve show-up-at-trial rates, and some evidence that with good risk assessment and selection 90% of people released without bail will show up to trial, which may be around the same as the rate for people who do get bail. This would make all of the problems with bail not only outrageous but pointless, not even the unfortunate side effects of a generally-reasonable policy.

It looks like there are two possible solutions – one small and short-term, the other systemic and long-term.

In the short term, there are some great charities – like the aforementioned Bronx Freedom Fund – that pay people’s bail. If the people show up to trial (which, again, 90% or so do), then the charity gets its money back and can use it to pay more people’s bail, ad infinitum. This makes them very high-value per dollar.

I’m not sure how much to trust BFF’s self-reported statistics. I see that on their front page they mention that “defendants who await trial in jail are 4x more likely to be sentenced to time in prison”, which is much more than any of the studies above report and which is probably a misleading uncorrected raw estimate. I see they say that “$39 can help us secure someone’s freedom”, which since average bail is something like $500 and only 2.8% of bails are less than $50 might be more of a “this is the lowest bail that has ever occurred in history” than any kind of representative estimate. But I don’t really hold it against them to give technically correct but misleading numbers in an advertising pitch. The question is – what are the real numbers? GiveWell and Open Philanthropy Project have been looking at them, but I can’t find a complete writeup, so let me do a terrible and very approximate job of trying to estimate them myself.

They note that their average bail is $790. Supposing that their 96% success rate is true, the average case costs them $30 – they cite a similar figure in their own literature. If, as they say, the average pretrial detention period is 15 days (which more or less matches the chart above), they can keep someone out of jail for $2/day even without selecting the worst cases.

They also note that their clients get cleared of all charges about half the time, compared to only 10% of the time for people in jail. I don’t know how much of this is selection effects, but suppose we take it at face value. And suppose that an average prison sentence for whatever kinds of petty crimes these people commit is two months. That means they’re saving the average suspect about 25 days worth of prison sentence, and improves their cost-effectiveness. I’d say this comes out to about $0.75 per jail day prevented, but that might be double-counting some people who, had they been in jail, would have had the time deducted from their sentence. Let’s say somewhere between $0.75 and $2.

A confusion: their 2014 annual report notes that they received $53,000 in donations and helped 140 people, suggesting a cost of $380 (not $30) per person helped. In 2015 they helped 160 people with $120,000, suggesting a cost of $750 per person that doesn’t seem to improve with scale. A similar organization, Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, got $404,800 from Good Ventures, and boasts of helping 1,100 people, for $367/person (this is a very rough estimate; it assumes this is all in the same year and they got no other donations).

I’m not sure why these numbers are so much bigger than the ones derived from first principles, but taken seriously, if we continue to assume that each successful case saves an average of forty days in jail, they prevent a jail day for about $10.

We compare to other efficient charities. GiveWell thinks it takes antimalaria charities about $7500 to save a human life. If that person lives another 20 years, that’s about $1/day.

So using their own numbers, these bail-related charities might be able to prevent imprisonment at the same cost-per-day as other charities can save lives. Using less optimistic numbers, they might be able to prevent imprisonment at about ten times the rate. Depending on where you fall on the death vs suffering philosophical tradeoff, this might be attractive. I’m confused these charities haven’t received more attention, if only to debunk them properly.

And even though everyone likes to talk about how individual charity doesn’t work and only systemic change can make a real difference, paying the bail of 50% of the people in the United States currently awaiting trial would be well within the abilities of one philanthropic-feeling billionaire, after which the money could be recycled again and again for the same purpose. I agree this is a kind of hokey calculation since it doesn’t include the overhead cost of getting the money to the suspects, but it’s still shocking how small the amounts involved are compared to other social problems.

In the long-term, we probably need some kind of criminal justice reform. The Obama administration seemed to be pursuing some kind of fourteenth amendment argument to get a court ruling that monetary bail was illegal. Some libertarian groups like Reason and the Cato Institute are on board. Some charities, like Equal Justice Under Law, are supporting the same cause.

I don’t think that bail reform is the largest or most important change that could be made to the US criminal justice system. But I think it might be tied with drug reform for the easiest. And given how well politics has been going lately, this might be a good time for lowered ambitions.

In honor of the day, here's a rerun of a post I did here on October 9, 2012. It's the story of my mother's career as a TV star, which did not last long. A lot of careers as TV stars have lasted even less time than hers did…

One day in 1992, completely out of nowhere, my mother made the oddest request. She asked, "Do you think you could get me a job as an extra on a TV show?"

I wouldn't have been more surprised if she'd asked me, "Do you think you could arrange for me to be shot out of a cannon?" She was 70 years old, widowed and retired, and she seemed well adjusted to that life. At no point had she ever expressed the slightest interest in show business or working again, nor did she need money. She had my father's pension and if that had been insufficient — which it never was; not with a good health insurance plan as well — she had me. This was more like a whim. When she'd worked at the grocery store, she'd worked with a couple of folks who'd done extra work and it sounded…well, maybe not so much fun as interesting.

I warned her. There were extra jobs and there were extra jobs. Some required walking back and forth hundreds of times in shots or running or moving about. She could walk then but being 70, she had her limits. She said, "I was thinking…maybe in the jury in a courtroom scene. There are a lot of shows on these days that do scenes in courtrooms and they need older people because older people sit on juries." That made a fair amount of sense. Not a lot of walking for extras who play jurors. I asked her if she had a show in mind. She said, "Well, the one I really love is L.A. Law."

She couldn't have picked an easier show for me. One of my best friends, Alan Brennert, was one of the Supervising Producers on L.A. Law. I phoned him up and twenty minutes later, my mother had a job. I told her I'd take the customary 10%.

It was also a good pick for geographic reasons. L.A. Law shot at the Twentieth-Century Fox Studio which was about five blocks from where she lived. When I resided in that house and had meetings at Fox, I sometimes walked to them. That is, by the way, a really good way to upset the guards at the gate. They always had a drive-on pass ready for me but there were no walk-on passes and they didn't know what the heck to do.

She was quite excited about her job. One of the things she said to me was "I wish I'd thought of this a few years ago before Jimmy Smits left the series. I love him. I'd love to have watched him work." I avoided telling her something Alan had told me; that the Special Guest Star on this particular episode was, as luck would have it, Jimmy Smits.

The day before the gig, she got her first inkling that maybe extra work wasn't something she would love. An assistant phoned and gave her a call time of 6 AM. She briefly considered retiring then and there but decided to soldier on. She was to bring several changes of clothes and report to a certain gate at that ungodliest of hours. Which she did. She drove over that morning and they told her where to park. It was on the opposite end of the lot from where L.A. Law filmed and getting from her car to the stage, she got quite lost. By the time she found where she was supposed to go, she was exhausted from hiking the length and breadth of a pretty big studio.

She was put in a room with the other extras, all of whom were seasoned veterans at this kind of work. They were cordial to her but not particularly welcoming, especially when they found out she hadn't gone through the usual extra casting process. Extras take great pride in their art or craft — whichever they see it as. The notion that someone could just waltz in and do it via an "in" seemed to annoy some of them. It was like, "Hey, we had to work to get here." But no one was rude to her. Not openly, that is.

An hour or so later, the director came into the Extras Room and looked them over. He made a few suggestions about wardrobe and makeup…and designated my mother to be the foreperson.

Now, understand: That just meant she'd be in a certain chair on the set. Other than that, nothing about her participation on the show had changed. But many of the other extras quietly (and later, audibly) objected. It is the dream of almost every extra in almost every job to be upgraded; to have the director or producer suddenly decide to give them a line or two to utter. It makes the money they're being paid go way up and it magically transforms them from Warm Bodies into Actors. They tell tales of it happening, just to reassure each other that it can — "Didja hear? Last week on that Clint Eastwood movie, Jody was upgraded to an Under Five." That is a very big deal.

My mother didn't want an upgrade. She never thought she was an actress. She was a little old lady who could look like a juror sitting there. That was the extent of her ability and she knew it and if they'd tried to give her a line, she would have said, "I can't do that. Give it to someone else."

Still, the other extras were worried. Picking her to be foreperson increased the chance she'd be given a line from…oh, about one chance in ten thousand to one chance in five thousand. Maybe not quite that much. But she heard one of the other extras go up to the Associate Director soon after and tell him, "Listen, that woman is not a professional. If they decide they need a juror to speak, it really should go to one of us." As it turned out, they never needed a juror to speak.

An hour or so later, they were herded onto the set. My mother just sat there in the jury box, delighted to be watching Jimmy Smits addressing the jury. They filmed for about an hour, then the extras were told to return to the Extras Room for a while. Mr. Smits had to rehearse his big, six-page scene before filming would resume.

They all settled back in for a while and my mother listened in on the conversation. It had turned to the topic of Recent Jobs From Hell. One extra told about having to work all night in a scene where rain was being simulated so they were hosed down every two minutes. Another told of a director making them run back and forth for hours in 100° weather, inhaling smoke from smoldering smudgepots. Yet another had a tale of bad food and no toilets on location. As my mother listened, extra work began to sound less and less appealing.

Just then, the Associate Director came in and said, "Mr. Smits would like you in the jury box while he's rehearsing." All the extras started to get up but the A.D. said, "No, just the foreperson," meaning my mother. Smits just wanted her there. As she made her way out to the set, she heard one of the extras muttering, "They'd better not give her a line."

She sat in the jury box for about 40 minutes as Jimmy Smits practiced his long, long speech, pleading his case to her. In the finished show, it wouldn't look that way at all. In fact, you'd never even know she was the foreperson. But on the set that day, Smits argued his view of the matter on hand as if his life depended on convincing Dorothy Evanier. She later told me, "If it had been up to me, he would have won the minute he opened his mouth."

When he was properly rehearsed, the rest of the extras were brought in and the cameras moved into position. Unnoticed by my mother, Mr. Smits went and changed his footwear.

The floor on the set was wood and in the earlier scene, his shoes had made a bit too much noise for the microphones. For just such an occasion, they had special socks that looked like dress shoes and the actors would often wear them to cut down on footstep sounds. Smits was wearing a pair of these as he launched into his big, impassioned, just-rehearsed scene with the cameras rolling. There was a shot of him approaching the jury box and my mother. It never got into the finished show but no one knew at the time it wouldn't. It would have been a shot of Jimmy Smits and my mother with him unburdening his soul to her. Imagine that if you will.

Just as he was reaching his emotional peak, my mother suddenly looked down and made a face as if to say, "What the hell is that on his feet?"

Someone screamed, "Cut!"

Someone else scurried over and told my mother she should be looking at Jimmy Smits, not at his feet. She was embarrassed. A few of the other extras grinned a bit and my mother later reported she could hear them thinking, "See what happens when they hire a non-professional?" But Smits himself told her it was fine; that they were shooting the scene a couple different ways and would be cutting from one take to another. She hadn't ruined anything…or so he assured her.

The rest of the shooting went without incident. They were in and out of the Extras Room a few times, sometimes waiting in there for hours unsure if they'd be needed again at all. But there was good food available and my mother had brought along a few books…so all in all, not a horrible day.

Around 6:30 PM, more than twelve hours after she'd reported for duty, the A.D. came in and released the extras, meaning it was time to go home. My mother was gathering up her things when Jimmy Smits walked in, handed her a rose and thanked her for helping his performance. I have never met Jimmy Smits but as far as I'm concerned, he is the most wonderful human being ever in show business…and that includes me. My mother called his gesture the best moment of her acting career.

It was also the last moment of that career. It was dark when she got out and she was exhausted and it took forever to make it back to the car. The next day, she told me, "If a nice man hadn't come by in a golf cart and taken pity on me and given me a lift, I'd still be there."

All the time, she recalled something one of the friendlier extras had said to her at one point. He'd said, "This show treats us better than any other show in town." Taken in concert with the horror stories she'd heard, that seemed to be true. When I asked her when she wanted me to get her her next job, she said, "Never. I figure if that's as good as it can be, I'm going to quit while I'm ahead."

When the show aired, she got a call from a friend back east who recognized her. That was probably the second-best moment of her time trodding the boards. She also liked a VHS tape I made for her of the episode. I don't think she ever watched it because she kept forgetting how to use her VCR but she really liked the special label I printed up for it. It said, "L.A. Law starring Jimmy Smits and Dorothy Evanier." She looked at that often and occasionally would complain to me about the order of the names. I found that cassette the other day when I was cleaning out a shelf at her house and I thought I ought to tell this story here.

The post Tales of My Mother #4 appeared first on News From ME.

Laura Silver from BuzzFeed has been following Tim Farron on the campaign trail in Cornwall:

Amplifying doubts about Brexit could be a pivotal strategy for Farron and his party. [Andrew] George, the Lib Dem parliamentary candidate, wants to tell the Brexit-supporting fishing industry that the likes of Nigel Farage played a “cruel hoax” on them by suggesting there would no longer be quotas on the number of fish that could be caught if Britain left the EU, or that foreign boats could be banished from British waters. 

“It’s the equivalent of putting it on the side of a red campaign bus. It’s as honest as that,” he added. 

Johnny, a fisherman BuzzFeed News met in Padstow who preferred to not give his surname, said he voted Leave but that his perspective could be shifting as he fears the fishing industry had been “sold up the river”.

Elsewhere she finds Tim Farron's low media profile (almost inevitable in a new leader) and the aftermath of coalition as barriers to votes returning to the Liberal Democrats.

Dispiriting afternoon doorknocking - lots of people saying they just won't vote this time. They didn't vote LD before, but even so :( #fb

— Julian Huppert (@julianhuppert) May 15, 2017

There was a rare outbreak of honesty from a general election candidate today as Julian Huppert, who hopes to regain Cambridge for the Liberal Democrats, sent this tweet.

Generally, of course, every candidate reports that they have received "a great reception on the doorstep". So much so that you see people making fun of such tweets whenever they appear.

Why do they do it?

One reason, as I blogged a couple of years ago, is this:

Let me to take you back to a Guardian account of the Hartlepool by-election of 2004 and what happened to the Liberal Democrat candidate Jody Dunn: 

On August 27, Dunn had written in her blog about a dispiriting evening out canvassing with Simon Hughes. "It didn't just rain last night, it poured," she wrote. "In fact the evening became one of the more farcical moments of the campaign. We'd picked what appeared at first to be a fairly standard row of houses. As time went on however, we began to realise that everyone we met was either drunk, flanked by an angry dog or undressed." 

We have all had evenings of canvassing like that. But the account goes on: 

The blog had continued with a joke about how Dunn looked like Worzel Gummidge in the rain. Ed Fordham had checked the copy as usual before posting it online. Nothing he read had sounded alarm bells. 

The Labour printing machines turned again, and this time Hartlepool woke up to the news on its doormat that Dunn had accused them all of being "either drunk, flanked by an angry dog, or undressed". 

And given the opportunity, other parties would no doubt behave just as Labour did. 

So it's much safer always to say you have received a great reception on the doorstep than tell the truth.

Spotted on a lamppost in Lewes.

So, I’ve been following this thing that’s been happening in Canada, where (briefly), Hal Niedviecki, a white editor of a literary magazine, in an edition of the magazine focusing on the indigenous writers of Canada, wrote an editorial in which he encouraged white writers to include characters who weren’t like them, saying “I’d go so far as to say that there should even be an award for doing so – the Appropriation Prize for best book by an author who writes about people who aren’t even remotely like her or him.”

This outraged a bunch of folks, and Niedviecki ended up apologizing and resigning, which in turn outraged a bunch of other (mostly white) literary and journalistic folks, some of whom briefly started going about on social media about actually trying to fund an “Appropriation Prize” before at least a few of them realized that maybe they shouldn’t be doing that and started backtracking as fast as they could.

(You can catch up with all of this here and here.)

As I’ve been reading this, I think I have a reasonably good idea of what was going on in the mind of Niedzviecki. I suspect it was something along the line of, “Hey, in this special edition of this magazine featuring voices my magazine’s reading audience of mostly white writers doesn’t see enough of, I want to encourage the writing of a diversity of characters even among my readership of mostly white writers, and I want to say it in a clever, punchy way that will really drive the message home.”

Which seems laudable enough! And indeed, in and of itself, encouraging white, middle-class writers out of their comfort zones in terms of writing characters different from them and their lived experience is a perfectly fine goal. I encourage it. Other people I know encourage it. There’s more to life than middle-class white people, and writing can and should reflect that.

But it wasn’t “in and of itself,” and here’s where Niedviecki screwed up, as far as I can see:

1. In an edition of his magazine about indigenous writing in Canada, his essay pulled focus away from indigenous writers to focus on white, middle-class writers, (probably unintentionally) signaling who was really more important here.

2. He tried to be clever about it, too, and the failure mode of “clever” is “asshole.” Specifically, the crack about the “Appropriation Prize,” which probably sounded great in his head, and by all indications sounded pretty great to a bunch of other mostly white Canadian authors and journalists.

3. Which is a point in itself, i.e., the easy conflation of “diversity of characters” with “appropriation.” Very basically, the former says “I as a writer acknowledge there’s more to the world than me and people like me and I will strive to represent that as best I can,” and the latter says “The imaginary version of people I’m not like, that I have created in my head, is as valid as the lived experience of the actual people I claim to represent in my writing.” And, yeah. Maybe these two should not be conflated, even if it makes for a punchy, memorable line in an essay. Also, if you genuinely can’t tell the difference between these two states, you might have work to do.

(This is why the white Canadian authors/journalists yakking about funding an Appropriation Prize are particularly clueless; they’re essentially saying “Hey! Let’s give money to white writers for the best fake version of people they’re not!” Which is not a good look, folks, really. Words do mean things, and “appropriation” doesn’t mean a good thing in this context.)

This whole event really appears to fall into the category of “Well-meaning person does something they thought would help and instead makes things worse.” Niedzviecki thought he was championing diversity in Canadian writing — because (I have no doubt) he actually does wish to champion diversity in Canadian writing — and instead blundered into controversy because lack of understanding about what he was doing, or at least, lack of understanding of how what he was doing would look outside of his own circle of experience. He meant well! But he showed his ass anyway.

And, well. Join the party, Mr. Niedzviecki! There are many of us here in the “We Showed Our Ass” club. And judging from the response to the piece, and Mr. Niedzviecki’s decision to resign his post, more are joining as we speak. “Cultural Appropriation: Why Can’t We Debate It?” asks one Canadian newspaper column headline, from another white writer who clearly doesn’t understand what “cultural appropriation” actually means and seems confused why other people are upset by it. Niedzviecki, to his credit, seems to have picked up the clue. Some others seem determined not to. And, look. We all show our ass. The question is whether we then try to pull our pants back up, or keep scrunching them down to our ankles, and then poop all over them and ourselves.

****

Now, related but slightly set apart (which is why I’ve separated this part off with asterisks), let me address this issue of diversity of characters in writing, using myself as an example, and moving on from there.

I’m a white male writer of North American middle-class sensibility, and I try from time to time to write characters that are not like me, because it reflects the reality of the world to do so, and because in science fiction I believe we write the futures we want to see, and I want to see diversity. How do I do, writing these characters who are not like me? Well, that’s for other people to decide. But here is my thought on doing it, which I take from Mary Anne Mohanraj’s essays here on the subject:

a) I should write diverse characters.
b) I’ll screw up sometimes, and when I do people with the lived experience I’m trying to represent will let me know.
c) I’ll learn and when I write diverse characters again, I’ll try to do better. If I make mistakes again, they’ll be new ones, not the same ones over again.
d) Repeat until dead (or I quit writing, which I suspect will happen simultaneously).

With that said, while I think it’s useful for me to have diverse characters in my writing, I also think it’s even more useful for publishing to have diverse writers. This is not just because of some box checking sensibility but because other writers tell stories, create characters and interrogate writing in ways I would never think to. I’m a pretty good storyteller, folks. But my way of storytelling isn’t the only way it gets done. As a reader I like what I like, but I also like finding out about what I didn’t know I’d like, and I even occasionally like reading something and going “wow, that was so not for me but I get that it’s for someone.”

This is relevant because even when I write diverse characters, they get filtered through me, and while that’s fine and I think necessary, in a larger sense it’s not sufficient. I’m not running me down here. I give good character. But as a writer I know where my weaknesses are. Some characters I will likely never explore as deeply as they could be explored by other writers, because I am not able to write those characters as well as others could. I strive for diversity in my writing. But my writing won’t ever reflect the diversity that literature in general should be capable of. You need writers whose lives are not like mine for that.

White writers adding a diversity of characters into their work is one thing. Publishers seeking out and publishing a diversity of writers is another. A fall down happens when people — writers, editors, and publishers — appear to think having the former is somehow equivalent to the latter, or that having the former is sufficient, so that the latter is optional, if the former is present. It’s not. The former can be laudable (if it doesn’t fall over into appropriation, which it can, and when it does is its own bag of issues), but it’s not and never is sufficient. A field of literature that comes only from one direction is bad literature because it’s incomplete literature. There’s more to it and it’s being missed out on. And that’s a much larger issue.

So, yes. Good on me and any white writer for having diverse characters. Go us! But if your argument about diversity in writing and publishing is centered on that, and not on an actual diversity of writers, you’re missing the point in an obvious way. Everyone who isn’t a white writer is going to notice.

I tried writing about the James Comey firing earlier in the week and got mostly a lot of GRWARRRRGHNNNNGHFFFFFK out of it, so I decided to let it be, and anyway, at this point there’s very little to add to it that hasn’t already been said elsewhere, mostly relating to Trump being incompetent, possibly criminal, and in all cases a schmuck.

That said, I think it’s reasonable to address a point that both Trump and his various apparatchiks have been petulant about, namely that no one on the left liked James Comey and many people thought he should have been booted from the job, and yet when Trump booted him, they freaked out. Isn’t this what they wanted? I mean, hell, just before he got punted, I wrote this tweet about him:

So you would think I would be among the ones cheering the punting. As much as I roll my eyes at the Trumpkins, I think it’s reasonably fair for them to be confused about this.

Well, here’s an answer:

Let’s say there’s this guy who is an enormous asshole and everybody hates him and wishes that he’d get, like, hit by a bus or something. Then one day, a bus indeed comes up on the curb, smacks into him and basically turns him into paste. Does everyone then pin a medal on the bus driver? Well, no, the bus driver just killed someone. Now we look into why the bus went up on the curb. And if in this particular case the bus driver just happened to be someone the enormous asshole was investigating for possible criminal activity (because the enormous asshole was maybe a cop or a private investigator), well. There might be cause for concern. Especially if the bus driver then says “I was driving around looking for him in order to hit him with a bus!” to Lester Holt in a televised interview.

An even shorter, analogy-free version is: It’s allowed to both believe Comey wasn’t very good at his job and that Trump fired him in order to impede the FBI’s investigation into his, his campaign’s and now his administration’s ties to Russia. And while the first is a problem, the second is stuff impeachments are made of.

That Trump appeared to think that the annoyance of the first would make people brush aside the potential criminality of the second is yet another reason why he’s not actually very good at his job. So there’s irony there, at least.

Dear Mr Stross

I'd like to apologize in advance, but after consulting with my colleagues in other departments at Reality Publishing Corporation, I'm afraid we can't publish your book, "Zero Day: The story of MS17-010", as things stand. However, I'd like to add that it was a gripping read, very well written, and we hope to see more from you in future!

Because the plot of your yarn is highly technical, we engaged a specialist external reader to evaluate it. And they had some unfortunate words to say on the subject of plausibility. I attach the reader's report, in the hope that you might consider amending your manuscript accordingly.

Signed

E. S. Blofeld, Editorial Director

READER'S REPORT

Short version: while Stross can clearly write workmanlike, commercial prose, the plot of "Zero Day" does not hold up to scrutiny. In fact, it reads like a mash-up of popular conspiracy theories, alarmism, and bad Hollywood thriller cliches. Also, the characterisation is spotty: the shadowy villain remains off-screen for the entire novel (and apparently gets away with their crime), the hero who saves the day only appears in the last chapter, and the overall lack of thematic resolution at the end of the novel is painful. We suppose this is a side-effect of telling a story as a collage of blog entries and web news reports, in an update of the style pioneered by John Dos Passos: it's innovative but ultimately unsatisfying. Also, the C++ code listings are a major obstacle for the non-technical reader.

Now, to the problems with the plot:

We start with a shadowy US government agency, the NSA, systematically analyzing the software of the biggest American computer companies in search of vulnerabilities. So far, so plausible: this is one of the jobs of an intelligence and counter-espionage agency focussed on information technology. However, instead of helping Microsoft fix them, we are supposed to believe that the NSA hoard their knowledge of weaknesses in Microsoft Windows, a vitally important piece of their own nation's infrastructure, in case they'll come in handy againt some hypothetical future enemy. (I'm sorry, but this just won't wash; surely the good guys would prioritize protecting their own corporate infrastructure? But this is just the first of the many logical inconsistencies which riddle the back story and plot of "Zero Day".)

Next, the plot takes a turn towards faceless anonymous parties (lacks drama!) as someone calling themselves "the Shadow Brokers" leaks a huge trove of classified NSA documents to WikiLeaks, who in turn dump it on the internet. These documents are the crown jewels of cyberwarfare, but they're apparently just lying around on the NSA's internal network for anyone to grab. WikiLeaks, we are led to believe, may be a front for the Kremlin (twirls evil moustachio villainously) but if this is the case and they're acting for the KGB why would they disclose such vital American secrets? Spies just don't do that sort of thing. Also, who is supposed to have smuggled these secrets out of the NSA headquarters, and how? Did they use a thumb drive? Email it to themselves? This is a huge missed opportunity for tension and plot development and it's completely absent from the manuscript as reviewed.

Anyway, this preposterous intelligence leak shows up on the internet and includes details of a vulnerability in Microsoft's file sharing system, codenamed ETERNALBLUE. This only really affects older Windows systems and can be blocked by simply switching off legacy file sharing support, so it's no big deal, but Microsoft dilligently release security updates through March, including a fix for vulnerability MS17-010, as the NSA black ice is renamed by people who don't get their ideas for codenames out of bad technothrillers. (ETERNALBLUE was part of a release of code that also gave us such interesting names as EDUCATEDSCHOLAR, ETERNALROMANCE, and ERRATICGOPHER. Oh to be a fly on the wall at the classified NSA committee meetings discussing the deployment of their weaponized ERRATIC GOPHER ...)

Then, one day in May, all hell breaks loose.

Someone unknown—as noted, this novel is very short on identifiable people the reader can relate to—takes the code for a piece of ransomware usually distributed as an email attachment, and turns it into a payload for ETERNALBLUE, which is a worm—capable of directly infecting other machines on the same network without human intervention. And in a matter of hours, the new malware, known as Wanna Decryptor, infects the entire British National Health Service, a Spanish cellphone company, FedEx, and over a third of a million computers whose owners had lazily failed to enable automatic security updates from Microsoft.

When a piece of "ransomware" infects a computer, it starts by stealthily encrypting all the personal documents, pictures, and spreadsheets on the PC. Only when it has finished does it pop up a window to warn the PC's owner, and issues a ransom demand. The bewildered human is instructed to go to a website and buy $300 worth of BitCoin, an electronic token called a "cryptocurrency" by some, and to pay the ransom in order to unlock all their files—if they don't do so within three days, the ransomware will permanently delete them.

Normal ransomware spreads by attaching copies of itself to email messages and sending them to everyone in the victim's address book. This means it won't propagate unless someone is so foolish as to ignore their antivirus messages and click on the attachment. But Wanna Decryptor doesn't need to do this—it uses the magic NSA code in ETERNALBLUE to scan the internet for targets. It's a worm—a boringly old-hat idea first introduced into fiction by SF author John Brunner in his 1977 novel "The Shockwave Rider". (To this extent, the plot of "Zero Day" isn't even original.)

One is supposed to believe that evil genius hackers (unidentified) using code stolen from the most secretive of espionage organizations by some third party (also unidentified) and released for free on the internet, took someone else's poor quality malware (author unidentified) and turned it into a cyber first-strike weapon that causes carnage worldwide because millions of responsible computer operators fail to apply vital software security patches for months after they're released? This beggars plausibility.

But then it gets worse.

In the foreground, ambulance despatch systems are going down: clinical information systems are offline: hospitals are declaring major incidents and trying to revert to paper and pen: operations are cancelled except in case of life-threatening emergencies because doctors can't review X-rays and medical records: the entire Telefonica cellphone network stops being able to handle billing and orders in Spain: FedEx's parcel network is inaccessible: Deutsche Bahn train signaling is disrupted across half of Europe ...

And a mild-mannered British computer security expert who is on his week off gets home from lunch with a friend, checks a work website (implausible! He's on holiday!), sees something odd, and kills the world-threatening zero day exploit dead by registering a domain? And then takes a couple of hours to realize that the evil genius responsible for a global terror attack helpfully left an "off" switch that anyone could flip?

I'm sorry, this is just silly.

In fiction, we rely on the reader's willingness to suspend their disbelief in the lies we are telling them. Willing suspension of disbelief can be abused if the story lacks plausibility, and this part is totally implausible! The WCry worm (as it is thankfully abbreviated) switches itself off if a random-seeming domain name has been registered and a web server exists to serve it. Why? The mastermind who wrote this weapon obviously knows about bitcoin, and by extension, how blockchain works; surely they could have contrived some sort of cryptographically secure way to protect their kill switch?

This is the digital equivalent of the James Bond movie where the evil mastermind's lair from which the nuclear missiles are to be launched features a prominent red button labelled SELF-DESTRUCT, which, when pressed, does in fact cause the missile base to self-destruct. And which is not guarded, booby-trapped, or in any way concealed, so that when a Mr Bean figure walks in, slips on a banana skin, and happens to catch his fall on the wall switch, the evil plan for world domination is stopped dead in its tracks.

Come on, Mr Stross, you can't expect us to believe that!

Summary: well-written, but short on characterization and the plot, while dense, makes essentially no sense and relies on a Deus Ex Machina ending to allow the hero (who only shows up at the eleventh hour) to triumph bloodlessly.

This morning the BBC announced it’s lineup of General Election specials. They are listed in the table above. Surprisingly UKIP, which has 377 seats is being given an Andrew Neil interview but the Greens, with 468 candidates, are not

But unlike May, Corbyn, Farron and Sturgeon there will be no place for either the Greens or Nuttall in the Question Time Leader Specials.

Last time it will be recalled that the BBC’s Question Time Leader special was probably the most significant broadcast event of the campaign. A very knowledgeable and hostile audience had been lined up for each of them. No doubt the same will happen this time.

Overall the lineup looks fairly similar to what happened two years ago but with the Lib Dems being given a greater presence.

ANOTHER DATE FOR YOUR DIARY. We are hoping to arrange a PB Gathering in London on Friday May 26th. I'l publish the details when this is finalised.

Mike Smithson

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May 12th, 2017: GIVE SHERLOCK A SHERHOUND 2017 This weekend is TCAF! I'll be at the the Toronto Reference Library with all sorts of COOL COMICS AND BOOKS. It's an entirely free show and my very favourite one, so if you're around, you should come say hi! – Ryan

Fox hunting is one of those issues which a small number of people on either side of the argument feel very strongly about. It is something could change votes for those with firm views.

The poll findings above from today’s ComRes survey for the Daily Mirror shows that across the political divide the ban on foxhunting is strongly supported even by CON voters.

So TMay’s comments that she is in favour of hunting and will allow a free vote, assuming she wins, has unnecessarily opened up an issue where she is on the wrong side of public opinion.

Tony Blair knew of the political potency of fox hunting when he was PM by always returning to the issue when he was in some trouble. So the legislation that’s currently on the statute books was very much the result of Blair trying to change the narrative in the aftermath of the Iraq War.

This is an area where the LAB movement can largely come together because as well as the animal welfare issues fox hunting is very much perceived as something that “toffs” do.

By raising it at this time TMay is reminding people that the Tories are the party of “toffs” – a move that risks galvanising some traditional LAB support. In any case support for fox hunting is very much a rural issue and there are few marginals in rural areas.

The polling numbers are unequivocal – TMay should leave well alone and not dilute her strong Brexit message.

Mike Smithson

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Labour’s draft manifesto was leaked just after my post last night, which means people have had twenty-four hours to make all the jokes they want about it before I got a chance to do anything about it here. However, it does reveal something interesting about political behaviour that people – especially those involved in politics – don’t often understand. Taken individually, a lot of Labour’s policies like rail and energy renationalisation, or banning zero hours contracts are very popular, but Labour still trail in the polls and Corbyn – closely associated with a lot of these popular policies – isn’t popular. There are two main reasons for this.

First, is that most policies on their own tend to be popular, especially when they’re presented with no downsides. Second, and more importantly, most people don’t think about politics in the way people heavily immersed in the political system do (and that’s going to include most, probably all, of you reading this). I wrote about some of this a while ago in a post on John Zaller, but the main person of interest in this is Philip Converse who proved over fifty yesrs ago that most of the conventional wisdom about people’s opinions is wrong. He found that most people have what he called ‘nonattitudes’ on most political issues, because they don’t think about them. Asked to give an opinion on something, and not allowed to say ‘I don’t know’ either by the pollster or social pressure, they’ll give an essentially random answer. When it comes to picking who to vote for, they’re not weighing up all the carefully-considered and fixed opinions they have on a wide variety of issues, they’re responding to whatever considerations and associations are foremost in their mind at the time. It’s why asserting that ‘public opinion’ wants something (or that the ‘will of the people’ exists) is so problematic because in most cases, the public aren’t thinking about something enough to have an opinion on something.

(This, by the way, is why opinion polling is so hard and why question design is as much art as science, as you need to discover if people have actual consistent beliefs as well as finding out what they are)

Nominations for the election closed today, so we’re now in the stage of the election where various people at the BBC, PA and other organisations are collating information from local authority PDFs to get their election news up to date. If you’ve got time to help out with an open source project to share data about candidates, then you might want to check out Democracy Club.

Here in Colchester, our candidate austerity continues to bite. In 2015 we dropped from nine candidates to six, and this time we have just four. If this rate continues then at the next election we’ll have to find a way to have two-thirds of a candidate. In other trivia, this is the sixth election since Colchester became a single seat again in 1997, and in all that time, across all parties, we’ve had just two female candidates.

(EDIT: Turns out I should check for myself and not take someone else’s word for it. There are five candidates in Colchester this time)

In other nominations news, Zoe O’Connell has compiled her list of trans politicians standing for election and found that there are six at this election, which is a record. I also wonder if Helen Belcher, the Liberal Democrat candidate in Chippenham, is the first trans candidate in a seat formerly held by their party?

(If you’re looking for information on other representation, there’s some early figures from the Constitution Unit at UCL, which will no doubt be updated now nominations have closed)

Now we have lists of candidates, I’ll soon be able to start looking through them for some of the more fringier political parties standing, though I do wonder if there’ll be a lot fewer this time because a snap election means people have less time to get organised and raise the funds for an election campaign. However, there’s not the time to do that today, but there is time for Election Leaflet Of The Day, which almost went to a Tory newspaper that appears to be called ‘Strong and Stable Leadership’ but it looks so generic that I’m assuming you’ll get a copy through your door soon. Instead, to follow up on the news about trans candidates, the award goes to one of them: the Green Party’s Aimee Challenor in Coventry South.

In four weeks time we’ll be in the post-Sunderland results gap. Is anyone excited by that thought?

It's reached Market Harborough. It's reached a Market Harborough school where, in an earlier life, I was a governor.

The Daily Mail reports:

A primary school has been accused of 'going back to Victorian times' by insisting children walk around the grounds with their hands behind their backs. 

Teachers at Market Harborough Church of England Academy say the antiquated rule is for the 'safety' of pupils and to encourage a 'calm' atmosphere. 

The ruling is also in force when youngsters finish their lunchtime break and return to classrooms. 

Angry parents have dubbed the new rule 'draconian' and blasted the school in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, for 'going back to Victorian times'.

I blogged about this bizarre idea when it was imposed upon a London primary school. Now it has arrived here.

The Mail quotes the Harborough school's head:

'As part of our commitment to providing a safe and orderly environment, we have recently introduced the practice of children gently placing their hands behind their backs as they move round school in large groups, or when they enter the building at lunchtimes.

I love the 'gently' - as though children placing their hands behind their backs with insufficient care might be a risk.

The answer is clear. The people of Market Harborough must point at the people responsible for this decision and roar with laughter whenever they appear in public.

Today we had the shock news that British election law is so weak that it’s very very hard to actually break it (which is probably why Phil Woolas was so shocked that a court found he actually had). The main problem, I find, is that what people think election law should be is a very long way away from what it is. For instance, a number of times I’ve heard people (of all parties) complaining about a leaflet, a poster, or something else and saying they’re going to go and complain to the Returning Officer. The Returning Officer has no powers to intervene in electioneering, merely ensure that the election process itself is carried out properly – for most electoral complaints, the sole recourse is a legal process that starts with complaining to the police. It does lead to some particularly perverse situations, like a letter advising you to vote for party X in your constituency doesn’t count as local expenditure because it doesn’t mention the candidate’s name. If you’re wondering how parties can get in under the very low constituency election spending limits yet still bombard you with paper for the next four weeks, that’s how. (It’s also one of the reasons why sites like Election Leaflets are so useful to see what sort of things are happening)

All that doesn’t stop filling in the forms to record your expenditure at the end of the election being a laborious and tiresome process, especially when your candidates suddenly give you a receipt for a bunch of posting they did without telling you or something similar. I was an agent for local elections once, and it was a somewhat interesting experience, but never ever again.

You may have noticed in some of the coverage from France that there are very prominent timers visible during all the debates showing just how much time a candidate has used or has left, and those limits are strictly enforced. It’s another example of something in British politics that’s been half-heartedly reformed over the years, but no one’s actually gone on to finish the job and do it properly to ensure elections are truly fair and balanced between all contenders.

If you’re reading this blog, then I tend to assume that you do have some knowledge about how the election works, but even so you might find MySociety’s Beginner’s Guide To The Election interesting and useful. Over my time in politics I’ve heard variations of all the questions they have on that page, and many more besides, and it’s often quite staggering to see just how little we do to educate people about just how the system works, and how much of it is assumed.

A quick bit of electoral pact news: the Greens have announced that they’re not standing in Lewes, to give the Liberal Democrats a better chance of retaking the seat, while in South West Surrey a combination of withdrawals and decisions to not do any campaigning appear to make Dr Louise Irvine of the NHA Party the best-placed challenger to Jeremy Hunt. The prospect of actually removing the Health Secretary has so overjoyed Labour HQ that they’ve…suspended the membership of some of those who made the decision. The ‘we must stand everywhere’ tendency amongst all the parties is actually a lot newer than you might think, but like so many British things, people act as though it’s an immutable law that’s been in place since the dawn of time rather than a few decades ago, and breaching it will cause horrible things to happen.

We shall see the outcome of all these deals tomorrow, when nominations close and we get the lists of who has been nominated, and just whether any party may have accidentally made an error on their nomination papers which means they won’t be standing a candidate. I believe the standard time for nominations closing is 4pm, so watch out for local council websites being slammed with requests for candidate lists from then on.

And when you know who’s standing, don’t forget to take the chance to take part in my election prediction competition, described as “the geekiest general election prediction competition yet” by one participant.

And finally, time for Election Leaflet Of The Day, and one that will definitely be counting towards local expenses as it mentions the candidate’s name quite clearly. It’s from Edinburgh South MP Ian Murray, though while his name is clear, let’s play a game of ‘which party is he a member of?’ A clue: it’s not Open Britain, even though that’s the only political organisation to get a mention on the front page. Can you spot the references to his party anywhere? And should everyone hand correct bar charts before scanning and uploading a leaflet they’ve received, like the recipient of this one did?

And for once, the big pledge everyone’s excited about today isn’t election-related, it’s that there’s going to be a Judge Dredd TV series. Honest. Just like the announcement that there’s going to be a return of Blake’s 7, which is something that’s definitely going to happen any day now.

YouGov: LAB vote holding up in London poll. LDs up 6.
(Changes on GE2015)
LAB 42% -2
CON 36% +2
LD 14% +6
UKIP 6%-2
GRN 3% -2

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 10, 2017

LDs hoping for gains in the capital

There’s a new London poll from YouGov out in the Evening Standard which tells the story of GE2017 in a very different way from what we’d been getting used to.

The big national voter movement, as has been widely observed, has been from UKIP to CON. That means that the CON performance is very much linked to how many UKIP votes there were last time.

In London, of course, UKIP has always struggled and at GE2015 secured just 8% of the vote which was the same as the LDs. So although we see the Tories rise in this latest poll the picture is nothing like elsewhere.

The big movement has been to the LDs who are hoping to pick up some of the seats lost at GE2015. Their CON targets are Twickenham, Kingston and, of course, holding on to Richmond Park won in December’s by-election. They are also hoping that Simon Hughes can win back Bermondsey and Southward from LAB and they are putting a big effort to unseat Labour’s ultra-Leaver, Kate Hoey in Vauxhall.

Labour could be in trouble in the east of London in constituencies where UKIP had higher GE2015 shares offering the prospect for the CON advance. Eltham and Dagenham & Rainham look like possibles. The big question for the blues is whether their gains can offset possible losses to the LDs.

Mike Smithson

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Here are two very funny men: John Cleese and Peter Cook…

The post Today's Video Link appeared first on News From ME.

The problem with Jeremy Corbyn is not his left-wing politics, The problem is that he is no good as a leader.

On the great issue facing the country - Brexit - he has managed to convince Leavers that he supports Remain and convince Remainers that he supports Leave.

We saw that in microcosm today.

This morning he announced that the issue of Brexit is "settled", dismaying those of us who hope Britain will yet escapte this self-inflicted disaster.

This afternoon he refused seven times to say he would definitely take Britain out of the EU, dismaying those who still believe Brexit is the cat's pyjamas.

And then there is the inept way he and his team handle the media. This goes right back to the night he was elected Labour leader and that grim-faced silent walk as journalists tried to interview him.

Today he told Buzzfeed News that he would stay on as Labour leader if he lost the election. Then he denied to the BBC that he had done so and Buzzfeed were banned from Labour events.

Sure enough, Buzzfeed was able to produce a recording of Corbyn saying just what it reported he had.

So don't see Corbyn as a socialist martyr, See him as a bloody useless leader.

That’s the local elections out of the way, we’ve all had a nice weekend break of following the French election (and for those wondering where the British En Marche! is, try my post on the problems of creating a new centre party) which means there’s now nothing in the way between now and June 8th. Yes, it’s time to get your head down and head directly for the general election, and wonder if we’ll be praying for a brick wall to get in the way of that head-on running between now and then.

Before you suffer a major head trauma, though, don’t forget that I launched my election prediction competition today. No prizes, and it needs skills in geography as much as it does guessing voting behaviour, but hopefully enough of you will find it worthwhile enough to make it a worthwhile competition.

Let’s talk about electoral pacts. And before you all scream and say ‘no, not again’, this is about Northern Ireland, where the lack of pacts does mean some more seats might be in play for interesting results. The DUP and UUP have stood down in, respectively, Fermanagh & South Tyrone and North Belfast, but there’s no deal in East and South Belfast which makes it more likely that SDLP will hold South Belfast, while the Alliance Party’s chance of winning in East Belfast will be helped if there are both DUP and UUP candidates there. Everything in Northern Ireland is happening in the shadow of the Assembly election earlier this year (and the prospect of another later this year) and it will be interesting to see how much voters attribute praise and blame to the different parties for their role in the deadlock over that.

I know people with more knowledge of Northern Ireland and its politics do read this blog occasionally, so feel free to correct me on any points I make. However, I would say that it is interesting to look at the Northern Irish press during the election campaign as it’s a very good way of getting both a look at an election where the issues are very different, and a different perspective on what’s going on here in the larger of the British Isles from people semi-detached from that campaign.

Only time for a short post today, but let’s not forget Election Leaflet Of The Day, which is loved by some, all, or none of you. There are still a bunch of council election leaflets going up on there, which I assume is people loading stuff up there late. At least I hope so, or some candidates really need to have a word with their delivery teams if they’re not getting literature out until after the election has happened. And this time, we get to see one of the party leaders in action with a letter from Labour’s candidate for Islington North, a certain Mr Jeremy Corbyn. It may be a particularly historic document as perhaps the first time his constituency campaigning has been totally in line and on message with Labour’s national campaign.

This time next month, it’ll be all over bar the Dimbleby. Look forward to that, if nothing else.

1. In Scotland, Yes lost the referendum, but the 45 per cent who backed it united behind the SNP and became an unstoppable force in first-past-the-post elections. But it is the 52 per cent who backed Leave who have united after the European referendum - or largely so - and united behind the Conservative Party. That is the problem that has made other parties dream of a progressive alliance.

2. Jeremy Corbyn is electorally toxic, which makes an electoral agreements between Labour and other parties impossible. He would drag them down with him. You may think this unfair, but it is a fact.

3. Prospects for cooperation between the Liberal Democrats and the Greens are limited because, with the exception of Brighton Pavilion, Green targets are Liberal Democrat targets too. And these days the Greens seem closer to Corbynite Labour than anyone else.

4. Two years ago the Liberal Democrats were in a coalition government with the Conservatives. Even with the game-changer of Brexit, it would puzzle the voters if we now announced that keeping them from power was more important than anything.

5. There are many good people in the Labour Party and we should seek to work with them. The comments by Vince Cable of Rupa Haq today were obviously true and not a gaffe.

6. So out line should be 'No coalition with Corbyn' and we should leave open the possibility of cooperation with Labour at some point in the future.

7. If we do have arrangements with the Labour Party they must be agreed locally - as has already happened in a handful seats - and not be imposed from the centre - it may be that the culture of the Labour Party makes this impossible. As a survivor of the Alliance years I remember the effort spent on seat negotiations and how little was gained from them.

8. The best arrangements are probably tacit ones where parties agree not to campaign in each other's target seats. This is more or less what happened between the Liberal Democrats and Labour in 1997 and it was very successful.

9. Remember that parties cannot deliver their voters en bloc to another party.

10. If the voters want to get rid of the Tories, they will organise themselves to do so, as 1997 proved. In more than one Liberal Democrat target seat, Labour came from third place to win.

GE2017 seat spreads from @SportingIndex .
CON 396-401
LAB 152-158
LD 16-19
UKIP 0.1-1
GRN 1-2
SNP 44-47
https://t.co/rSKroIPwt1 … … … …

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 8, 2017

Latest Spreadex Commons seats spreads
CON 395-41
LAB 152-158
LD 16-19
UKIP 0.1-1
GRN 0.75-1.75
SNP 44-47https://t.co/m9B2DFvQv3 … … … …

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 8, 2017

The biggest loser on the betting markets since the election was called have been the Lib Dems. The opening prices were at 26 to 29 seats following the widespread assumption that the party would be in a position to appeal to remain voters from either Labour or the Conservatives.

Even last Thursday, local election day, the Lib Dems were on 24 SELL and 27 BUY. Although they put on votes on that day they saw a net loss of seats which has prompted a mass selling.

With both SpreadEx and Sporting Index they are now at 16-19 seats.

You can see a situation on June 8th where the party increases its vote share substantially from GE2015 but struggles to achieve seat gains.

I am waiting until we know what has happened with the Crown Prosecution Service which is considering bringing charges against GE2015 CON agents and candidates following the CON expenses investigation.

If this happens it will have a big impact in the seats concerned most of which were previously Lib Dem.

Mike Smithson

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