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December 11th, 2014: If you've been reading Dinosaur Comics since 2008 hoping that this topic would finally be addressed in a reasonable manner, I HAVE SOME KINDA GOOD FRIGGIN' NEWS FOR YOU, MY FRIEND. – Ryan

So imagine it's the fall of 1966, and, since you and your family have recently moved to the new high-end subdivision, you want to get to know your neighbors better. What better why than hosting a dinner party, after which you'll play a game? Perhaps you'll invite the neighbors on either side of you, and the those from the three houses on lots that are across from yours and those other two neighbors! And next Friday, the kids will all be at the school dance!

You have lots of new recipes to try out!

But the real fun will come after dinner, when you break out that album you bought over the summer, the one you got as soon as you heard about it back in July, the one on the Frisky record label, featuring everyone's favorite quizmasters, Phyllis Hedeman, James Dukas and Jerry Roberts, "NAME THAT TRIVIA!". It came with even answer pads for everyone, see?: 

Name That Trivia Answer Pad, Side One (JPG)  |  Name That Trivia Answer Pad, Side Two (JPG)

You've touched the needle down on the record just to see if the questions are too hard or too easy, but they seem just right for people of your vintage. Things like:

"Remember 'Pebeco'? What would you do with it?"

and

"what was that chased away that villian, 'Mr. Coffee Nerves'?"

and

"What was a Hooverville?". 

This sounds like a LOT of fun! Here's hoping your party goes well!

Phyllis Hedeman, James Dukas and Jerry Roberts - Name That Trivia, Side One (MP3)

Phyllis Hedeman, James Dukas and Jerry Roberts - Name That Trivia, Side Two (MP3)

Front Cover (JPG)  |  Back Cover (JPG)

Comments can be sent to bobpurse@gmail.com

To those who wish I'd get back to talking about Show Biz and Comics: Sorry but this blog is largely about what's on my little mind at the time and what's on it right now is this: The moral disconnect in a nation where folks who are hysterical at the tiniest, arguable failing of their political opponents can then dismiss a program of torture that was both misrepresented and ineffective.

I'm starting to buy into the theory — Daniel Larison is one of many advancing it — that we didn't really torture to stop that utterly-mythical ticking a-bomb in Times Square. We tortured because the folks in charge had to prove to themselves and each other how tough they were.

From Chris Meadows via TeleRead:

The Apple anti-trust case continues to have some interesting fallout. The EFF today issued a press release concerning Judge Denise Cote last month dismissing some charges in a related case, trumpeting that Cote had ruled that stripping DRM for fair use purposes is legal. I’ve read the 20-page opinion, and I’m not so sure. Here’s what I know.

The case pertains to Abbey House, the operator of the “BooksOnBoard” e-book store. In March, 2014, Abbey House (and two other defunct e-book store operators) filed suit against Apple and the Agency Five alleging that their implementation of agency pricing drove their stores out of business. In August, Judge Cote ordered them into mediation.

Meanwhile, two of the publishers, Simon & Schuster and Penguin, filed a countersuit against Abbey House. The suit pertained to an announcement Abbey House had posted when it was going out of business, encouraging customers to back up their e-books—and it mentioned they could use Calibre to strip the DRM. “Many argue that this is a legitimate use as long as this is being done for personal use of eBooks purchased, not for piracy. We are told this is in the spirit of the eBook license and that it is common practice.”

. . . .

Cote dismissed the charge of contributory infringement, ruling that the publishers didn’t have a case because they couldn’t point to any specific example of actual infringement—which is to say, cracking the DRM and then uploading the copies to peer-to-peer or even just sharing them with friends, rather than just cracking the DRM for the fair use purposes of backing media up or transferring it to other devices. There has to be an actual infringement for Abbey House to be contributing to for it to be liable for contributory infringement.

. . . .

The contractual claims relied on language in the contracts. Cote dismissed the Penguin claim because the clause Penguin was using, insisting that customers had to agree not to break the DRM when they bought the books, applied only at the time the books were sold; the contract didn’t say anything about breaking it afterward.

Link to the rest at TeleRead

To say that Ed Miliband does not have a particularly compelling personality is a statement of the obvious. His non-political hinterland is small and mostly pedestrian. The only remotely interesting thing about him is the brutal ambition that led him to betray his brother David- until then widely seen as the more gifted of the two- and drive him out of politics.

Nevertheless his clumsy geekiness could be sold as some kind of a positive- you may not have picked him for your playground football team, but maybe, at least, he has some kind of intelligence.

Not any more.

His latest declarations on the so-called "war on drugs" are not merely pathetically banal, they are almost entirely- indeed dangerously- wrong. They fact that he has only "read about cannabis" marks him out from the large majority of his generation who certainly have inhaled: so indeed the playground geek does actually live up to his stereotype. Despite this lack of knowledge, however, this has not prevented the Labour leader from suggesting that the failed war on drugs should nonetheless be continued, because to abandon it "sends the wrong signals to young people"

As police forces across the country facepalm themselves in contemptuous amazement, it is worth taking a step back and thinking about, you know, actual evidence rather than "wrong signals".

In report after report, from pressure groups, concerned worthies and the law enforcement officers themselves, it is crystal clear that the criminalisation and prohibition of many narcotics has not only become totally counter-productive, it has created even greater social ills than the simple use of the drugs themselves would have caused. The costs rank in in the billions of dollars and have caused untold human misery.

For Ed Miliband to dismiss the urgent need for wholesale reform of legislation as it concerns illegal drugs "because it sends the wrong signals" is the ultimate in contemptible gesture politics: to fail to do the right thing, because it might look bad.

Ed: not only are you a shit, you are an incompetent and unworthy shit too. 

For this alone you are not fit for public office.        

Q: What is simultaneously nonexistent, no big deal, vital to national security, worth doing because the victims were evil, and all in the past anyway so who cares?

A: Why, the CIA torture report, of course!

It was released yesterday to the sound of too many Americans making excuses, from the usual bleatings of the above to simply “THE USA IS AWESOME!” (Even on MetaFilter, which is usually better than this, there’s someone yelling about the “ticking bomb scenario” which (a) has never actually happened and (b) is possibly the case where torture would be the least effective.)

The same GOP which felt the public needed to have endless investigations into Whitewater and Benghazi is outraged that anyone would waste the public’s time on whether or not a bunch of brown people were tortured. They can’t believe that anyone would think this is something worth looking into and it may put CIA assets at risk or spur violence. Unlike, say, exposing Valerie Plame, drone striking innocents, or torturing people.

Sadly, the revelations have come as no surprise to a lot of us, and shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. Bush and Cheney both admitted to it years ago. The weird thing about having this discussion now is that we already had it before. The exact same one. In fact, if you count Abu Ghraib (in which the right wing gladly served up Lynndie England — a woman — as certified Angus scapegoat, having her represent the “bad apples” that we now know were actually approved policy) we’ve had this exact same discussion at least three times. Why even talk about the fact that the CIA hasn’t had its hands clean for decades when we’re (some of us, at least) ready to feign shock and outrage by literally the exact same story three times?

“Feign shock and outrage”, who am I kidding? The American public not only knew the CIA was torturing people, they were all for it! They’d pay PPV prices to watch. Whatever the excuse of the moment pretended to be, the reality was, the majority of Americans wanted that torture to be happening and wanted it to be as awful as possible, because the majority of Americans are hateful ghouls with the empathy levels of five-year-olds. And honestly, the ones who relish the news simply because of their bloodlust are still above those who are all for it because at least this means it’s not them being frozen to death or “rectally infused”.

One of these water-carriers is a guy you might remember from a Nobel Peace Prize awards ceremony, Barack Obama. His outrage at the findings (once they were revealed against his administration’s wishes) was so weak that cricket pee rejoiced in finally getting out of last place.

Responding to the report, Barack Obama said the US owed a “profound debt” to the CIA but accepted that some of its techniques were “contrary to our values”.

“These harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests. Moreover, these techniques did significant damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies and partners. That is why I will continue to use my authority as president to make sure we never resort to those methods again.”

You’d think a lame-duck, nothing-to-lose president would have more to say than that, but this is Obama we’re talking about, who every morning wakes up and thinks that today will be the day when the GOP finally loves him. Besides, he and Holder already agreed in 2008 not to prosecute anyone except for a Lynndie England here and there. Between not prosecuting torture by the CIA or the near-destruction of the world economy by US banks, one might wonder what exactly we have a Justice Department for.

So there you go. We found out that yes, the CIA tortured people, and it was even more brutal than anyone imagined, especially considering that many of the victims shouldn’t have been in our gulag to begin with. However, one of our major parties doesn’t care, the majority of the population is proud of this, the highest official in the opposing party can’t be roused to any meaningful action, and, best of all, the gulag is still open with no plans to change that in the future.

It’s been a banner year for the land of the free and the home of the brave, the greatest nation on Earth. I can’t wait to see what fresh horrors 2015 has in store.

There's one thing Fred Kaplan doesn't believe in the Senate Report on Torture. He doesn't believe George W. Bush didn't know about it earlier than the report says.

Oddly enough, I think this puts Fred in agreement with Dick Cheney. Cheney denounced the report (which he claimed to not have read much of) as "crap" and one of his assertions was reported as follows…

Cheney said he also rejects the allegation that his boss, President George W. Bush, was kept in the dark. "He was in fact an integral part of the program. He had to approve it before we moved forward with it," Cheney said. "He knew everything he needed to know and wanted to know about the program."

That's not a very stirring endorsement of Bush, and the last part of Cheney's statement in a way contradicts the first part. Did Bush know everything or did he avoid learning everything in order to have the kind of "plausible deniability" that Fred writes about? Fred says there's no way what the C.I.A. did was a rogue operation. Cheney said the same thing. On other matters, I think they disagree.

Rick Perry is biblically illiterate, sanctimonious, and … um … and I forget the third one.

But he’s not alone. The governor of Texas is just the most recent of many, many, far too many Christians who have disgraced themselves by misquoting Jesus to support the precise opposite of what he said. And this needs to stop.

“Biblically, the poor are always going to be with us in some form or fashion,” Rick Perry said in an interview published yesterday in The Washington Post.

The reference there is to a story in the Bible, one repeated in three of the Gospels. Matthew and Mark both tell us the story happened in the house of Simon the Leper. John’s Gospel says it happened in the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus. But they all agree it happened in Bethany — in the house of the poor. Here’s the story from Matthew’s Gospel:

Now while Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment, and she poured it on his head as he sat at the table. But when the disciples saw it, they were angry and said, “Why this waste? For this ointment could have been sold for a large sum, and the money given to the poor.”

But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. By pouring this ointment on my body she has prepared me for burial. Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

The bit Rick Perry was attempting to quote is from verse 11 there: “For you always have the poor with you,” or, in the King James Version, “ye have the poor always with you,” or in the NIV, “The poor you will always have with you^a.”

People love to quote that bit. Christians especially love to quote that bit — Christians who claim to have read and understood their Bibles.

And, like Rick Perry, they all get it wrong.

Completely and utterly wrong. Backwards wrong. Perversely, cruelly, anti-biblically, priggishly, prickishly, sinfully, hellishly wrong.

Almost every time you see someone citing this passage, they’re invoking it the same way Gov. Perry is there — a shrugging acceptance that poverty is just the way it is and that there’s nothing we can do about it.

And that’s not what Jesus was saying at all.

You see that little superscripted “a” at the end of that phrase in the NIV translation? That’s a footnote. Scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see that footnote reads “See Deut. 15:11.”

That’s important. Jesus was quoting from the Torah. And you can’t understand what he said – or what his disciples heard him saying — unless you understand what it is he was quoting.

So let’s do that. Let’s “see Deut. 15:11.” Here it is:

Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.”

Already you can see that Jesus’ statement can’t be made to mean what Rick Perry et. al. are trying to twist it into meaning. The passage Jesus was quoting is not a complacent description, but an if … then statement. “Since … therefore …” Deuteronomy 15:11 says. Jesus only quotes the “since” part because he didn’t need to quote the “therefore” — he knew that his disciples knew the rest of that verse: “I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’”

That is what “The poor will always be with you” means in the Bible. In Deuteronomy and in Matthew, Mark and John. It means, therefore, we are commanded to open our hands to the poor and needy.

But we’re not done yet. Because just as Jesus’ remark in the Gospels is a quotation from Deuteronomy 15:11, that verse is also a direct reference to the verses that come shortly before it.

If you want to understand the verse Rick Perry is mangling, you have to read not just Deuteronomy 15:11, but also Deuteronomy 15:4-5:

There will, however, be no one in need among you, because the Lord is sure to bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a possession to occupy, if only you will obey the Lord your God by diligently observing this entire commandment that I command you today.

That’s the NRSV. Here’s the same passage from the NIV:

However, there need be no poor people among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the Lord your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today.

So here in Deuteronomy we read that “there need be no poor people among you” and then, shortly thereafter, that “There will always be poor people in the land.” Which is it?

Well, it’s the second one, because the first one is conditional. “There need be no poor people among you … if only you fully obey the Lord your God.” And then, six verses later, “There will always be poor people in the land.”

Zing. Moses is delivering an unsubtle slap there. “If you were obedient, there would be no poverty among you. … Since there will always be poverty among you …” Yes, he’s telling the people not just that they’re a bunch of disobedient bastards, but that they’ll probably always be a bunch of disobedient bastards. He’s telling them that poverty is the result of their disobedience — that they are to blame for its existence, and that they are responsible for it.

And that’s the same message Jesus is delivering to his disciples in all three versions of that Gospel story.

But that’s the exact opposite of what ignorant Christians misquoting Jesus are trying to say when they babble about “the poor will always be with you.” Those Christians are perverting that verse in order to deny all culpability and responsibility for or to the poor.

That’s wrong. That is, according to Moses and to Jesus, evil.

But we’re still not done, because the rest of Deuteronomy 15 is also important here if we’re going to understand what it means about following “all these commands I am giving you today.”

This is about Jubilee. This is about the year of the Lord’s favor — about the very set of commandments that Jesus quoted in his first public sermon, the Jubilee that Jesus identified himself with. So let’s look at this whole section from Deuteronomy, chapter 15, verses 1-11:

At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made to a fellow Israelite. They shall not require payment from anyone among their own people, because the Lord’s time for canceling debts has been proclaimed. You may require payment from a foreigner, but you must cancel any debt your fellow Israelite owes you. However, there need be no poor people among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the Lord your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today. For the Lord your God will bless you as he has promised, and you will lend to many nations but will borrow from none. You will rule over many nations but none will rule over you.

If anyone is poor among your fellow Israelites in any of the towns of the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward them. Rather, be openhanded and freely lend them whatever they need. Be careful not to harbor this wicked thought: “The seventh year, the year for canceling debts, is near,” so that you do not show ill will toward the needy among your fellow Israelites and give them nothing. They may then appeal to the Lord against you, and you will be found guilty of sin. Give generously to them and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to. There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.

Whether he knows it or not (and he clearly doesn’t know it), this is what Rick Perry is accidentally affirming when he tries to quote that passage from the Gospels. All of this.

Whenever you say “the poor will always be with you,” you are also saying “At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts.”

Whenever you say “the poor will always be with you,” you are also saying “do not be hardhearted or tightfisted.”

Whenever you say “the poor will always be with you,” you are also saying “be careful not to harbor this wicked thought.”

Whenever you say “the poor will always be with you,” you are also saying “do not show ill will toward the needy.”

Whenever you say “the poor will always be with you,” you are also saying “give generously and do so without a grudging heart.”

Whenever you say “the poor will always be with you,” you are also saying “be openhanded toward the poor and needy.”

And if — like Rick Perry or countless other lapdogs for the rich and powerful — you try to say “the poor will always be with you” without also saying all of that, then be warned. Because the poor may then appeal to the Lord against you, and you will be found guilty of sin.

 

 

 

 

I wonder if Russell Moore has ever heard of his fellow Baptist leader John Leland.

Leland wasn’t technically a Southern Baptist. Leland was born in Massachusetts, for one thing. And for another he died in 1841, several years before the Southern Baptist Convention split away from other Baptists in defense of slave-owners’ rights to serve as missionaries. But Leland also spent many years building churches and ministering in Virginia where he served in a leadership role as a member of the Baptist General Committee for that southern state.

Leland is remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for two events in the presidency of Thomas Jefferson. He helped to found the Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut, to which President Jefferson sent his famous 1802 Letter to the Danbury Baptists — the letter in which Jefferson wrote of the First Amendment as “building a wall of separation between Church & State” and reaffirmed “the rights of conscience” as a natural right of all people.

More memorable, if less consequential, was Leland’s response to that letter, provided in the form of cheese. A lot of cheese. As an expression of gratitude to Jefferson for his shared commitment to religious liberty, John Leland organized the creation of the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese — a 1,200-pound, four-foot wide cheese wheel made from the milk of every cow in Cheshire, Mass., where Leland was then serving as a pastor.

The big cheese had to be transported by sleigh, and it was John Leland himself who drove that sleigh the 500 miles from Massachusetts to Washington. The journey took three weeks, with the strange sight of the Mammoth Cheese drawing crowds at each stop along the way. As a Baptist preacher, Leland couldn’t resist such crowds, and he preached his way from Massachusetts to the White House, standing in the pulpit of his sleigh next to a ginormous cheese wheel which bore the inscription “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

But the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese was only the second most audacious thing John Leland attempted.

His more audacious project was undertaken during his years of ministry in Virginia. In 1789, Leland authored a resolution put before the Baptist General Committee of Virginia. That resolution called for a “great Jubilee” and the abolition of slavery in the state. It also declared slavery to be a “a violent deprivation of rights of nature” and “contrary to the word of God.”

Leland’s resolution, remarkably, was initially met with some enthusiasm. Consider that for a moment — it’s more startling than even the image of a sleigh-riding itinerant preacher bearing a half ton of hand-crafted, revolutionary cheese. In 1789, in the state of Virginia, a gathering of southern Baptists who were not yet officially Southern Baptists entertained a proposal from a Massachusetts abolitionist that would have freed all their slaves and declared the practice of slavery in Virginia to be “contrary to the word of God.”

Leland wasn’t laughed out of the convention and sent packing back to New England. His fellow Baptists in Virginia took this resolution seriously. They considered this proposal as something they might actually affirm and embrace and do. Leland’s resolution was sent out to the various regional Baptist associations throughout the state.

That’s when the push-back started.

The good Christians of the Strawberry Baptist Association, near Lynchburg, did not explicitly dispute the resolution’s argument that slavery was incompatible with scripture and human rights, but they worried that Leland’s Jubilee would create a humanitarian crisis among all those abruptly unemployed former slaves. The pious devout of the Roanoke Association fretted that the General Committee’s resolution took too simple a view of what they saw as a “very abstruse … set of complex circumstances.” Surely such a complicated issue was best left up to local congregations to decide.

Leland’s resolution was returned to the statewide General Committee in 1792, which quickly voted to dismiss it.

The non-cheese-related history recounted above is taken from Garrett Ryland’s 1955 book, The Baptists of Virginia, 1699-1926. Ryland says that this same pattern — initial support for abolition and Jubilee followed by local resistance and ultimate reversal — was repeated at the local and regional level in Baptist associations throughout the state. The Ketocton Association, for example, adopted a plan for the “gradual abolition of slavery” in 1796. Angry resistance from local congregations led to the repeal of that plan just two years later.

The resistance to Leland’s proposal from the regional associations shows that it probably never really had a chance, but this is still a tantalizing story. In 1789, the Baptists of Virginia came to a crossroads and saw that something else, some other way, might be possible. And they paused, for just a moment at least, to consider that before passing by on the other side.

Maybe that’s all that’s happening now with Russell Moore’s surprising “prophetic moment.” But maybe too, there’s some value in such brief pauses at the crossroads, even if those pausing are unable or unwilling to change direction just yet. Maybe such glimpses, however brief, of the possibility of a different path are helping to prepare them for the next opportunity, or for the one after that. Maybe someday …

Kind of an obvious insight, but the problem with Sorkin is that when you criticize his shows, you turn into a Sorkin character. — emilynussbaum (@emilynussbaum) December 7, 2014 I had no plans to comment on "Oh, Shenandoah," the now-infamous penultimate episode of Aaron Sorkin's final (?) TV series The Newsroom.  I've tried not to think about Sorkin since I gave up on The Newsroom two episodes

Wednesday:


When members of Maggie Thatcher’s Cabinet are telling you “whoa, that’s a bit right wing”, you might just want to rethink your plans for Judicial Review.

Of course, since Mr Christopher Greything usually responds to people who disagree with him by trying to abolish them, we might finally see some Lords Reform.

But the Coalition, particularly its Lib Dem ministers, are supposed to be a listening government. Let our Liberal Democrat Parliamentarians take this opportunity to say they have listened to the concerns of their Lordships and of our own membership and thought again and drop this dangerous bill.


I was ashamed – once again – at the long list of Liberal Democrat MPs voting to strike down the Lords’ amendments to the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill. People ask me to justify that. I can’t.

Was there some deal? Was it part of an arrangement to get Liberal Democrat priorities like infrastructure investment, apprenticeships or anti-tax-evasion measures through the Autumn Statement? Whatever it was, the deal’s clearly off now that past-master of the political attack George Osborn has “declared war” on the Lib Dems, saying taxes would rise if we’re in government (clue: this is not a secret, Master Gideon).

Heroically, the Lords – for shame, the House of Lords! – have once again ridden to the rescue. To lose one vote in the Lords may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose one hundred smacks of absolute bloody-minded stupidity.

But there is no shame in listening. We’ve been here before with the Snoopers’ Charter. (And look to be here again with the Snooper’s Charter II, but that’s another gripe.) Take on board that there are serious and well-founded concerns with the Bill and accept the changes. It’s not in the Coalition agreement. If you can’t bring yourselves to vote against it after you’ve voted for it, all that is necessary is to say Liberal Democrats will abstain.


This isn’t about defending our traditions of justice. Magna Carta, did she die in vain etc etc. People who insist on calling Judicial Review a “foundation stone” of our democracy are both overstating and undervaluing its position. Far from defending our traditional systems this is about enshrining necessary new ones. Our system is woefully short of checks and balances and far from being an ancient right, long taken for granted, this is a much-needed modern addition to our unwritten constitution, and not one to be tossed aside.

You might like to trace it back to the King’s Writ, but that’s a fig-leaf for a legal system that places much store on precedent. Really it is a judge-made development, taking off in the Nineteen Eighties, when somebody had to stand up to a government that was unrestrained by Parliament by dint of a huge majority, with much of its force added by way of the Human Rights Act, granting the courts the power, indeed the duty, to oversee the government’s compliance with our basic human rights.

In fact it’s not really compatible with Parliamentary Sovereignty – which is why Parliament keeps writing new and sillier laws to grant itself permission to ignore one judgment or another – but incorporating independent third-party review of legislation is a vital step towards properly holding the executive and legislature to account.

But that’s not the point.

And it’s not about humiliating the Secretary of State, Mr Christopher Greything, a Tory too dull to be described as a Sinister Minister of Justice, but who just won’t be told when he’s in the wrong.

It’s not that I don’t have any sympathy for a Department of Justice facing the austerity squeeze, that’s already cut legal aid to the bone. The numbers of Judicial Review cases have tripled since 2000; they’re very expensive; and, given the large percentage that the government wins, you can see how someone might think they are often vexatious or at least time-wasting.

There’s certainly a case for arguing that justice is already far too expensive: the courts are a rich man’s playground (and I do generally mean “man”), because taking any kind of action is prohibitively expensive for anyone without thousands – if not millions, just ask former Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell – to toss around. Most people cannot even think of going to court unless forced to by the most horrible of circumstances. Changing it from unthinkably expensive to impossibly expensive is surely address the problem in dramatically the wrong direction, though.

But that’s not the point either.

We came into the Coalition with a huge mandate for reform of Civil Liberties after years of Hard Labour eroding them. Detention without trial. Fingerprinting children. Almost the first thing we did, even before that Rose Garden Press Conference was nuke the idea of I.D. Cards.

Since then it’s been one rear-guard action after another, usually against Tin-Pot Theresa of the Home Office.

But Civil Liberties are not just some abstract legal discussion. Today’s revelations about the CIA only underline that unchecked power leads directly to abuse, and even torture.

So, the point is this:

Access to justice, standing up for the citizen against the bullies, protection against “The Man”: these are the things that my Party is supposed to be for!

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December 8th, 2014: If anyone wants to give me funding for S.H.E.R.L.O.C.K. vs. H.O.L.M.E.S., I am ready to entertain your suggestions and also dollars – Ryan

Support this week's full-text RSS feed by buying Garfield: His 9 Lives

Wait, what, Garfield? YES. Garfield: His 9 Lives obsessed me as a child and is amazing. Includes nine different stories across history and genres, including film noir pastiche and outright horror. A weird delight!

(What's the deal with these links? Click here for info.)

***

Family Circus, 12/6/14

OH MY GOD, THEY AREN’T HUMAN

THEY’RE ONLY PRETENDING

THE HUGE, DISTENDED CRANIA, THE MANGLED LANGUAGE

WE SHOULD’VE KNOWN IT ALL ALONG

WHAT DO THEY WANT

WHAT WILL THEY TAKE FROM US

HOW CAN WE DEFEAT THEM, OR AT LEAST PLACATE THEM

ALL OTHER COMICS COMMENTARY IS CANCELLED TODAY, HUDDLE IN YOUR BASEMENTS AND HUG YOUR LOVED ONES, LIFE AS WE KNOW IT IS OVER

This post, "OH GOD THE MOMENT WE’VE ALWAYS IMAGINED AND FEARED", originally appeared on The Comics Curmudgeon, which is the best blog on the Internet.

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Monday (cont.)

But why, I hear you ask, am I visiting them this Monday morning?

The answer is all to do with the European Union.

It seems that 70 years of peace are not enough to reconcile many to our membership of this excellent organisation. Nor does its sterling work weeding out the curlier bananas from our supermarkets cut the mustard any more.

So a few of us – I fear I cannot reveal any of the other names, but they are all Sound and many can be fairly counted as bigwigs – have got together to do something about this.

“What we need, ladies and gentlemen,” I told our first meeting, “is something spectacular to show what Europe can do.”

Various ideas were kicked around and it was eventually agreed that the most spectacular thing of all would be a European triumph in Outer Space.

It may be that this was my idea: I have taken an interest in interplanetary exploration ever since Raymond Baxter became the first Briton in space in Coronation year. Whatever the truth of that – I am not one to boast – discussion turned to the precise shape our Spectacular Thing should take.
Should we land on the moon? It’s been done. Mars? Everyone is talking about that these days.

Saturn? Terribly Far.

Someone said “We could send a probe to Uranus,” but I wasn’t having that.

Another cove suggested we land on a comet. It sounded a good idea, but it turns out the things don’t stand still, so that if you aimed a rocket at one it would be gone by the time you got there. I don’t suppose even the Department of Hard Sums at the University of Rutland at Belvoir could help with that one!

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• Confessions of a Knocker Up

Just a quick reminder that for the entire month of December my novels, Off to Be the Wizard and Spell or High Water are on sale over at Amazon US. The Kindle editions are $2.00 and the paper versions are only $9.50.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

(inspired by Zombies: Seriously, Enough, Zombies Are So Overdone, and Scifi/Fantasy Stories Editors Are Tired Of Seeing: Zombies)

He walked into my office and threw the manuscript on my desk with a thud.

“It’s called Thankful For Zombies. A zombie story where…”

“Nope,” I said.

His face deflated like a balloon. “But I didn’t even…”

“Zombies are overdone,” I said.

“But this is a zombie story with a twist!”

“Zombie stories with twists are super overdone.”

“But this is a story about an extended family who get together for Thanksgiving dinner, only to be interrupted by a zombie apocalypse. It’s a Thanksgiving story about zombies. You have to admit that the combination of zombies and Thanksgiving has never…”

“Done,” I said.

“Wait, really? The family starts out estranged and suspicious of each other, but then when they all have to work together to…”

“Done,” I said.

“How could that have been done?”

“Listen. I know you won’t believe me, but for the past ten years or so, the best literary minds of our generation have been working on creating zombie stories just different enough from every other zombie story around to get published. First the clever and interesting twists got explored. Then the mediocre and boring twists. Then the absurd and idiotic twists. Finally the genre got entirely mined out. There is now a New York Times bestselling book about zombies invading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. If your idea isn’t weirder than that, it’s been done. And that’s the logical ‘if’. If your idea is weirder than that, it has also been done.”

“I will get Thankful for Zombies published,” he said.

“You won’t,” I advised him.

“I just have to think of an original angle.”

“You really won’t,” I told him.

“The zombies are the good guys,” he proposed.

“Done.”

“The zombies are smarter than humans.”

“Done.”

“In the end, we ourselves are the zombies.”

“Done.”

“A human girl falls in love with a zombie.”

“Done.”

“Okay, fine. Toss the Thanksgiving angle. There’s got to be some zombie plot that will be fresh and new.”

“I promise you, there’s not.”

“Zombies in space.”

“Done.”

“Zombies from space.”

“Done.”

“Zombies are space.”

“Done.”

“Zombies in Victorian England.”

“Done‘”

“Zombies in Edwardian England.”

“Done.”

“Zombies in Shakespearean England.”

“Done.”

“Shakespeare was a zombie, and all of his plays are just the word BRAAAAAAIIINS repeated over and over again.”

“Done, for some reason.”

“A young zombie comes of age.”

“Done.”

“A middle-aged zombie wonders if her single-minded focus on career success has prevented her from becoming the kind of zombie she wanted to be when she was younger.”

“Done.”

“An elderly zombie contemplates death.”

“Zombies are already dead.”

“Then I can…”

“…and yet it’s still been done.”

“A zombie in the Vietnam War.”

“Done.”

“A hippie zombie at Woodstock.”

“Done.”

“Strong female zombies.”

“Done.”

“Jewish zombies.”

“Done.”

“Black zombies.”

“Done.”

“A gay zombie struggling to fit into a homophobic zombie society.”

“Come on, this is the 21st century. Done like ten times. One of them won the Booker.”

“Gender-questioning zombies.”

“Done.”

“An immigrant zombie comes to America, with nothing but the decaying shirt on his back, knowing only a single word of English.”

“All zombies only know a single word of English. Also, done.”

“Nazi zombies.”

“Done.”

“Vampire zombies.”

“Done.”

“Pirate zombies.”

“Done.”

“Obstetrician/gynaecologist zombies.”

“Done.”

“Zombie Hitler.”

“Done.”

“Zombie Henry VIII.”

“Done“.

“But what if it was told from the perspective of Anne Boleyn?”

“Done.”

“Zombie Leonardo da Vinci.”

“Done.”

“Zombie Jesus.”

“Done. By three guys named Matt, Luke, and John.”

“Zombie Buddha.”

“Done.”

“Zombie Mohammed.”

“Done. As is the author, if you get my drift.”

“Zombie Zoroaster.”

“Done.”

“A parody subverting zombie stories.”

“Super done.”

“A parody subverting zombie stories lampshading how overdone they are.”

“Super duper done.”

“Hmmmm.” He thinks for a second. “Hold on, I’m remembering something from my college math class that might work here. You take all the zombie novels ever written, and you put them in some well-ordering, for example from first to last published. Then you make a new novel, consisting of the first page of the first novel, the second page of the second novel, and so on. But you change each page just a little bit. Since we know the first page of the new novel is different from the first page of the first novel, and the second page of the new novel is different from the second page of the second novel, by extension we know that there is at least one page on which the new novel is different from each zombie novel currently in existence. That means that the new story is provably original.”

“Done.”

“I don’t think you understand; it’s mathematically impossible for…”

“No, I mean there’s a story about a zombie doing that.”

“Oh.” He furrowed his brow. “A zombie superhero.”

“Done.”

“Steampunk zombies.”

“Done. I think now you’re just trolling me.”

“Motorcycle gangs of zombies.”

“Done.”

“A zombie story that’s a metaphor for how…”

“Done.”

“I didn’t finish!”

“You didn’t have to.”

“A zombie gets cancer.”

“Done.”

“A zombie gets depression.”

“Done.”

“A zombie tries to write zombie fiction.”

“Done.”

“A zombie tries to write zombie fiction about a zombie trying to write zombie fiction.”

“Done.”

“A zombie tries to…”

“It’s done all the way down.”

“Young free-spirited zombies trying to see America.”

“Done.”

“A story that starts off as being about a fantasy society of knights and damsels, but at the very end it’s revealed everyone is a zombie.”

“Done.”

“A story that starts off as being about a young woman’s struggle to succeed in 1980s Wall Street, but at the very end it’s revealed everyone is a zombie.”

“Done.”

“A story that starts off as being a paleontology textbook about the fauna of the Lower Cretaceous, but at the very end it’s revealed everyone is a zombie.”

“Twist zombie endings are done.”

“A zombie…a zombie riding a giant purple emu through 17th century Ireland teams up with the pre-ghost of Thomas Jefferson to investigate a crime in which time-traveling flamboyantly gay sapient hippos have murdered the Secret Protestant Pope in order to initiate the Jain apocalypse, with liberal quotations from and allusions to the works of Edgar Allen Poe Thomas Pynchon and the medieval Rolandic cycle, and also the whole thing is a metaphor for Republican resistance to climate change legislation.”

I thought for a moment. “Okay,” I said. “That particular plot has not, technically, been done. But no one would read it.”

“They will,” he said.

“You’d be wasting your time to write it.”

“I’m writing it,” he said.

“Suit yourself. Put it on my desk when you’re finished, and I’ll take a look at it. But your chances aren’t good.”

“I don’t care,” he said, and left.

I sighed, finished up my last couple of pieces of paperwork, and shambled home from the office. On the way out, I ate my secretary’s brain.

The constant flow of GB-wide surveys is giving a distorted picture of what is going on

Just about every day at the moment I find myself having to Tweet or write on PB that general elections are not decided by national party vote shares but by first past the post elections in 650 separate constituencies.

This has never been the case more so than in what has for decades been regarded as Labour’s most important bastion – Scotland where 59 of those constituencies are.

The demographic data suggests that Scotland represents just 8.68% of the total number of voters in a GB-wide sample. So if LAB, and this is being generous, has, lost to the SNP a third of those who voted for the party in May 2010 that accounts for just 1.2% of the GB-wide vote share.

Yet in terms of seats that fall of 1.2% in GB vote share could be catastrophic for the red team maybe reducing its current contingent of 41 Scottish seats to fewer than 10.

The surge in SNP support could be even more disastrous for the LDs who account for 11 of Scotland’s 59 MPs.

Yet in spite of these huge developments there have been just three Scotland only three Westminster voting polls since the week of the IndyRef in mid-September. What could be totally re-shaping the UK political map is based on the views of just three thousand Scottish voters.

We urgently need more Scotland-wide polls and we also need single constituency surveys to test whether some of the SNP surge is being tempered by the impact of incumbency and maybe anti-SNP tactical voting.

We are promised some single seat Scottish surveys from Lord Ashcroft but this urgently needs to be supplemented by frequent Scotland-wide polls.

In the meantime we get at least 8 GB polls a week. Cannot just part of that effort be diverted to Scotland?

That is my plea.

Mike Smithson

2004-2014: The view from OUTSIDE the Westminster bubble

Follow @MSmithsonPB

The Con-Lab gap drops to just 1% – the closest it’s been since Jan 2012

Convention says that as an election approaches, the public will put aside their flirtation with protest parties and return to the serious business of choosing a government for the country. Well, convention be damned. Five months today will be the last day of campaigning before the General Election yet far from returning to the traditional Westminster parties, voters continue to leave them in ever greater numbers. The way things are going, the winner – if such a term is appropriate – will not be the one that wins the most but the one that loses the least.

Once again, the biggest loser in November was Labour, down another 1.6% last month, amounting to a loss of 3% over the last two months and almost 6% since the same time last year. By contrast, the Conservatives remain marooned within a point of 31.5, as they have been for almost a year and a half. Indeed, driving home the degree of flat-lining is the fact that not only did they score 30.9 this month but they did so last month and also in November 2013. Such precision is a coincidence but the overall story is not. The Lib Dems too remain in much the same range – approximately 8-9% – that they’ve occupied since June.

Instead, the electorate continues to turn to what were once called the minor parties; a term which is in danger of becoming obsolete albeit that their current vote shares wouldn’t impact greatly on Westminster were they to be reproduced next May.

The overall scale of that change is quite remarkable. Until about 2012, it was unusual to quote parties outside the Big Three separately. Were that convention still followed, Others would have polled 28.6% in November: within touching distance of the Tories and Labour. Put another way, there’s been a net swing of some 18.7% from Con, Lab and LD to Others since 2010.

UKIP are, in some ways, the biggest beneficiary of this and although down slightly on their October score, they still had their third-best ever month in the opinion polls, to add to their second by-election success. Perhaps more interesting was that even with UKIP polling so strongly, the other (former?) minor parties also continued to rise in the polls, with their combined score rising to 12.4%: by some way their highest ever and not far off double those parties’ share in the 2010 election.

In fact, ‘Others’ is almost entirely a combination of the Greens, SNP and Plaid following the collapse of the BNP. Unfortunately, the two nationalist parties get lumped together which given their contrasting fortunes isn’t helpful. Even so, assuming that Plaid are still in the doldrums, these figures remain excellent for the SNP. The Greens make their debut in the PB poll average series this month and are up from 4.6% to 5.7%: a level which may act as more than nuisance value on the left-of-centre, even if not to the same extent that UKIP is on the right (and which indicates a substantial number of saved deposits).

What’s clear is that those who expect ‘normality’ to reassert itself are placing their faith entirely in models of the past; there is no evidence whatsoever that this is happening this time, nor that it will happen. That’s not to say it won’t – some factors such as election-time media coverage do favour the established parties and late swings can happen; simply that the electorate continues to move in the opposite direction, to the extent that it’s entirely possible that no fewer than six parties could top a million votes next year when previously no more than three have (excluding the unusual circumstances of 1918). We live in interesting times.

David Herdson

In the previous discussion thread, someone mentioned having a problem with one particular far-future (well, set 400 years hence) SF novel that disrupted their reading of it so badly that they ended up giving up on the book. Interestingly, I had the exact same problem (and ended up bailing 50 pages before the end of a 1100 page novel—there's your sunk cost fallacy in a nutshell). And I think it's worth taking a look at it, because it's one of my own pet shibboleths and I'm bored and I want to take it out for a walk today.

Because I don't want to name and shame the guilty on the front page of my blog I'm putting it below the cut. But, for reference: the 1100 page novel I bailed on was Pandora's Star by Peter Hamilton, and it also put me in mind of most of the novels of Jack McDevitt (but notably his far-future Priscilla Hutchins Alex Benedict series). There are other authors I could point to, but you can take these as type specimens for the pathology.

These are not bad authors and they don't write terrible books: that's part of what makes the problem so jarring for me. And the nature of the problem? It's that the stories they're telling are set in a far future (hundreds to thousands of years hence), in an interstellar human polity (gifted with interstellar transportation technologies that are notably within the reach of ordinary people). And yet the civilization they portray can best be described as "Essex suburbia goes interstellar" in the case of "Pandora's Star" or, in McDevitt's case, Whitebread Middle American Suburbia to the Stars. The gender politics, religious framework, ideologies, fashions(!) and attitudes of today—specifically, of a type of Anglophone developed-world middle class lifestyle that lots of folks aspire to—has become a universal norm. And nothing else gets much of a look in.

In "Pandora's Star" there is at least the fig-leaf explanation of rejuvenation technology, allowing the wealthy to return themselves to physical youth every few decades (while the poor presumably die, senile and in pain in a gutter—but this is glossed over). One would expect a certain cultural conservativism (if not sclerosis) to set in under such circumstances. McDevitt's work ... I didn't notice him making such excuses, although in mitigation I'll admit his age: he didn't begin writing in earnest until after reaching what most of us would consider to be retirement age, and perhaps this colours his outlook.

You can make an argument for writing SF in this mode in that it allows the lazy reader to ignore the enculturation issue and dive straight into the adventure yarn for which the SFnal trappings are just a brightly-coloured wrapper.

But I still find it really weird to read a far-future SF story that doesn't deliver a massive sense of cultural estrangement, because in the context of our own history, we are aliens.

Imagine yourself abducted by a mad Doctor in a time machine shaped like a blue Police Box (itself an anachronism in today's smartphone-networked world) and dumped on the streets of your home city a century ago, in 1914. Let's suppose the Doctor is friendly enough to give you the free run of a wardrobe so that you are reasonably turned-out for a person of your gender, age, and status in that time and place: and a wallet containing enough cash to live comfortably for a week (to rent a room in a B&B and to eat, and to do a bit of judicious tourism: not enough to invest in a start-up business and disrupt the time stream; meddling is strictly forbidden). How familiar are you going to find things?

The answer is actually "not very". Because ...

You speak a dialect of the local language, it's true. But you have some words or terms that nobody recognizes ("atom bomb"), some words that have changed meaning radically thanks to the spread of technical neologisms ("virtual", "computer") or social change ("queer", "nigger"), and there are other words and slang that you probably don't recognize because they were quaintly dated back when your parents were in diapers ("masher").

The architecture and layout of cities will be vaguely familiar, especially if you're British (our buildings tend to be old and well-maintained). Some things will be mildly disorienting (the lack of street markings, traffic lights, and so on). Some items will be disgusting (horse shit everywhere, and the flies they attract). It may be hard to tell the difference between a shop front and somebody's living room, if you get away from the market stalls. And it may be hard to tell the difference between a contemporary crack house and the typical living conditions of the early 20th century poor, except that the junkies and dealers often have electricity and running water and don't sleep that many to a room. The rich, as always, are different: private yachts, palaces, grand houses, and a degree of insulation from the poor that is familiar today.

If you're British and less than 50 years old you probably don't know how the pre-decimalization currency system works. I mean, you literally don't know how to count the change after making a purchase. Or how to read prices. (It's a non-decimal system with three different levels of currency—big, medium, and small—and differing conversion ratios. Like imperial weights and measures, only crazier.)

Foodstuffs you expect to find are unavailable and exotic (bananas, kiwi fruit, curry), and stuff nobody in their right mind would eat is routinely sold (tripe, kidneys, beef hearts) and eaten. Just don't ask about food hygiene standards.

Don't ask about medicine, either. There are no antibiotics, tuberculosis and other infections kill as high a proportion of the population as cancer does today, and about 30-50% of infants die before the age of 5. People's attitudes to death and birth are alien—lots of babies, lots of baby funerals, lots of adult funerals, people dying at the age of 40 is taken for granted, and everyone has thirty cousins, aunts, and uncles.

Political views agreed on by today's conservatives are seen as dangerously close to socialism: you don't want to know what passes through conservatives' minds in 1914. (Hint: have a happy fun google search.) Social views: ditto. Racism of a kind that would make the Ferguson Police Department blush was normal, and as for gender relations, the freedoms and status in civil society enjoyed by women in 1914 in the UK or the USA were in some respects behind Iran in 2004. It wasn't a good time and place to be female unless you were financially secure or had a very forward-looking male guardian.

... And that's the whistle-stop tour of social change in just one century in the decades leading up to the society that this peculiar mode of SF takes to be the unassuming touchstone of future humanity.

It's worth noting, incidentally, that much of the social change that led up to the current cultural matrix was driven by technological change. Better medicine and family planning techniques gave us the basis for a society in which we don't go to a different infant's funeral every month, in which bananas are cheaper than potatoes, people aren't worn out unto death by fifty, civil rights for people who aren't rich white males are at least recognized as theoretically desirable, and in which you probably aren't dying of tuberculosis. So why do repeatedly we see the depiction of far future societies with cheap interstellar travel in which this hasn't bought about massive social change as a side-effect (other than the trivial example of everyone having a continental sized back yard to mow)?

Seriously, I feel that if I'm writing far-future SF, I've got a duty to at least try and portray a plausible society. And while I'd be the last person to argue that western suburbia is implausible (after all, we've got it), if there's any constant in human society it's change. Which is why I find far future settings that don't give me a hard time implausible, unless there's some overriding reason (such as a cultural critique or some kind of playing-card-tricks-in-the-dark postmodern commentary going on). Far future extrapolation: if you're not doing it to the cultural normals as well as the setting and technology, you're doing it wrong.

Yesterday we discussed how the “biblicism” of white evangelicalism is a relatively recent historical innovation — something that could not and did not exist until the printing press and biblical translation had progressed enough to allow most Christians to own and read their own Bibles for themselves.

As a simple matter of history and technological possibility, such biblicism was impossible for the first 15 centuries of Christianity. During all that time — the majority of the history of the faith – most Christians simply didn’t have the access to the Bible that Christians today take for granted. For the vast majority of Christians, the Bible was something you heard read by others in church. Something like a daily devotional “quiet time” just wasn’t an option.

That began to change in the 16th century and into the 17th, when technology, translation and literacy for the first time in history made it possible for revivalist, “Bible-believing,” biblicistic evangelicalism to emerge.

But white evangelicalism did not emerge in a vacuum. It evolved in an ecosystem. It grew up in, and was shaped by, the context around it. No sooner did Christians gain this newfound access to their own Bibles than they began to argue over the meaning of those Bibles, and what those scriptures had to say about the world around them. For the first time in history, these Christians had to figure out, for themselves, how to read their Bibles, and they did so based on how they wanted to read them to apply to the world around them.

And that brings us to this post from the Moorfield Storey Blog, “Evangelicalism and Slavery: Historic Allies, Not Enemies.” That post takes a critical look at the 2006 Michael Apted film, Amazing Grace, which tells the story of Reed Richards William Wilberforce and his efforts to outlaw the slave trade in Britain.

Wilberforce is, indeed, someone who deserves all the laurels and honors we can send his way. He played a vital role in the history of the abolition of slavery. But, as the MSB post says, the film suggests more than that — presenting its story as though Wilberforce invented the abolitionist movement:

The city state of Venice outlawed slavery in 960, Iceland abolished it in 1117, Spain did so in 1542, Poland in 1588, etc. Wilberforce gets attention for two reasons. First, English-speaking people tend to only pay attention to the history of English-speaking countries. Second, Wilberforce is promoted by fundamentalists because he was an evangelical Christian. Evangelicals are working hard to take credit for abolitionism.

Notice all these other countries where slavery was abolished first, which evangelicals do NOT mention. None of them were Protestant, and none had a prominent evangelical involved. So, they can’t take credit. Thus, as far as modern evangelicals are concerned, abolitionism started with Wilberforce.

Yes. The problem isn’t that Amazing Grace is a hagiography of William Wilberforce. The problem is that it is a hagiography of contemporary white evangelicals — projecting ourselves back in time with Wilberforce as our surrogate and stand-in.

That’s a problem, not just because it fudges Wilberforce’s story, but because it rewrites our own history in an attempt to consecrate our present-day status quo. That reduces Wilberforce — who, again, deserves better — into just another incarnation of the Hollywood White Savior. It makes him Kevin Kline in Cry Freedom, or Gene Hackman in Mississippi Burning. Or Stellan Skarsgård in Amistad. We can tell Wilberforce’s story, or we can flatter ourselves by making him our revisionist Mary Sue. But we can’t do both. (See also: Eric Metaxas’ autobiography of Mary Sue Bonhoeffer.)

The Moorfield Storey Blog discusses the way a similar self-hagiography is at work in the popular mythology of Wilberforce’s contemporary, slaver-turned-hymn-writer John Newton:

Amazing Grace implies that Newton converted to evangelical Christianity and, as a result, became an abolitionist. This actually is not true. While both are true — eventually — the one was not caused by the other. Newton, in fact, was a slaver. His job was to sail slaves to the Americas where they were sold. Newton continued to do this well after his so-called conversion. Newton became an evangelical in 1748. He continued selling slaves until he retired from the sea in 1754 because he wanted to become an Anglican priest. Newton was quite happy to use violence against slaves and used torture to wring confessions from those he thought guilty of planning their own freedom.

A third of a century after his retirement as captain of slave ships Newton came out in support of abolitionism. So, if his conversion to evangelicalism made him an abolitionist, it took almost four decades to do so.

Newton wrote that after his conversion he just never gave a thought to the morality of slavery. He said he never thought of it and that not a single friend, evangelical or not, thought it wrong to enslave people. He considered his job as slaver “the line of life which Divine Providence had allotted to me.”

We like to tell ourselves that Newton became an abolitionist because he converted to Christianity, but it would be more accurate to say that he eventually became an abolitionist despite his conversion. That conversion immersed him in the biblicism of evangelicalism, which at that time approached the subject of slavery with the same “literal” and “plain-reading” hermeneutic that white evangelical biblicism promotes today.

(“Hermeneutic” is seminary-speak for the overall way we approach and interpret a text. Biblicism tends to involve pretending one doesn’t need a hermeneutic, and therefore doesn’t have one, which is never possible nor true.)

That hermeneutic — or anti-hermeneutic, really — requires one to acknowledge all of the biblical passages permitting, commending or commanding slavery and to treat them as “The Word of God” and, therefore, as “the ultimate authority and measure of all truth.” And because this biblicist anti-hermeneutic cannot allow for any contradictions or transformations in the infallible, unchanging “Word of God,” it glosses over, spiritualizes, “harmonizes” and otherwise dismisses all of the many, many liberationist biblical texts and themes, which it cannot permit to be read as conflicting with or undermining — let alone over-ruling — the proof-texts that defended slavery.

Evangelical abolitionists like Wilberforce, Newton (eventually), and Lewis Tappan (Sarsgård’s character in Amistad) appealed to a different hermeneutic, and were therefore severely criticized by their fellow white evangelicals for rejecting the authority of the scriptures, abandoning the Bible, denying the Word of God, etc. etc. (For a sense of those anti-abolitionist critiques, just go to the Gospel Coalition blog and look at everything they have to say about, for example, Rachel Held Evans. Different century, same argument.)

John Newton became a born-again white evangelical Christian on March 10, 1748, but he did not cease to be a slave trader. He simply became a slave-trader who no longer drank, swore or gambled.

That was the effect of Bible Christianity. But this was not a side effect, it was the purpose of the thing. This was the effect that the anti-hermeneutic of Bible Christianity was designed to produce — a form of Christian piety that defended unjust structures, slavery in particular. Bible Christianity defended slavery because that was what it was designed to do.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I've been very intrigued by the story of the identification of Richard III's remains, published in Nature a couple of days ago. For an occasional genealogist like myself, the connection between the historical lines of descent and the genetic evidence was particularly intriguing. It is pretty amazing that two separate and verifiable mother-to-daughter lines, one of 17 generations and one of 19, were provably established from Richard's sister, Anne of York, to people alive in London today.

The first line of descent, to cabinet-maker Michael Ibsen, included a number of women whose husbands and fathers - or in one case, daughter/sister/aunt - were notable enough to have made it to Wikipedia. I edited the relevant articles to make reference to this (Sir Robert Constable, Henry Chomley, Thomas Belasyse, Sir Henry Slingsby, John Talbot, Sir Henry Gough, Barbara Spooner Wilberforce, and Edward Vansittart Neale). When the findings were first announced in February 2013, it was also stated that another line of descent had been identified, but that the living individual concerned did not wish to go public. I wondered whether this might be a descendant of the musician Margaret Harrison, referred to in an earlier Guardian piece (one-time fiancée of Percy Grainger, daughter of the painter Peter Harrison and the writer Alma Strettell); and if so whether this would really help much, given that such a person would have been not so many generations removed from Michael Ibsen; any failure of methodology with regard to his lineage would likely apply also to Margaret Harrison and her descendants.

But in fact it turned out to be much more robust. Wendy Duldig, a social policy researcher, is descended from a different daughter of Sir Robert Constable and his wife Catherine (née Manners), Richard III's great-niece, back in the early 16th century, with an extra two generations in her lineage compared to Michael Ibsen. Only two of the intervening links in Wendy Duldig's mother-daughter line had close family members who made it to Wikipedia (Sir George Wentworth and Sir Benjamin Truman), though one of them was painted by Gainsborough.(Truman's granddaughter Frances Read, see right). I found this in itself interesting - it shows that even without historical notoriety, the present-day researcher can pursue good genealogical links through the ranks of the upper middle classes.

It shouldn't be very surprising that such lineages rise and fall in income bracket and level of social prominence over the centuries. Taking it in the other direction, consider Mary Garritt, the wife of Thomas Webb, a surveyor in Stow-on-the-Wold in the mid-18th century. Her daughter Frances (1775-1862) married Thomas Salisbury, landlord of Marshfield House in Yorkshire. Their daughter Anne (1806-1881) married another gentry type, Edwyn Burnaby of Baggrave Hall in Leicestershire. Their daughter Caroline (1832-1918) married a widowed clergyman who was the grandson of a duke. Their daughter Nina (1862-1938) managed to bag an earl as her husband. Her daughter Elizabeth (1900-2002) did rather better than a mere earl. Her daughter, another Elizabeth, was born in 1926 and is still alive; those of you in the UK and Canada will find her depicted on certain useful everyday objects, ie money. But her direct female line ancestry can be traced back only six generations before it is lost in Gloucestershire.

These lineages are in fact very fragile. 17 generations on, Michael Ibsen is 57, and he and his siblings have no children, so the lineage from Sir Robert Constable's older daughter will die with them. 19 generations on, Wendy Duldig, in her fifties, is not reported to have siblings or children either. Had Richard III's remains been discovered forty years later, there might have been nobody around to compare his DNA with. There may be other undocumented maternal line descendants still around, daughters whose descendants were written out of the record for reasons easy enough to envisage; but the Leicester researchers seem to have done a pretty thorough job and it's difficult to imagine that much slipped past them. On the other hand, we know for certain that everyone alive today had at least one female-line ancestor who was alive in 1485. We must all be descended maternally from a fairly small number of women even going back only a few centuries. Mitochondrial Eve is reckoned to have lived 100,000-200,000 years ago, but for a lot of us, our most recent common maternal ancestor will have been much closer to the present day.

A couple of demographic notes. The average mother-daughter age difference in Michael Ibsen's lineage is 30.5 years, which is perhaps a little older than I had expected. The average mother-daughter age difference for Wendy Duldig's lineage is 27.5 years, which I find less surprising. The biggest generational jump is 42 years, between Michael Ibsen's grandmother and his mother. There are just four other births to mothers over 35 among the 33 births in the two lineages - Michael Ibsen's great-grandmother, her grandmother, Wendy Duldig's grandmother, and poor Anne of York who at 37 died giving birth to Anne St Leger in 1476, the link that kicks off the entire process. At the other end, there are no provable teenage mothers, though it's quite likely that at least one of the uncertain early 16th century 20-year-olds would have qualified.

Three women are known to have outlived their daughters (one seventeenth-century, two eighteenth-century). Two of these lived to over 90 (both born in the seventeenth century and living to the eighteenth century). The average lifespan of the women born in the fifteenth century was 43.5 years; of those born in the sixteenth century, 47.8; of those born in the seventeenth century, 62.4 (skewed by the nonagenarians, though the Duldig lineage is also pretty robust in general in that era); for both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 70.6 years; and for the two born in the twentieth century, 79. (I have no data on the ages of the fathers.)

It's also interesting to note that Michael Ibsen's family emigrated to Canada, and Wendy Duldig's to New Zealand; but both Ibsen and Duldig have ended up in London.

Finally, the newspapers had great fun with the other side of the story, that the Y-chromosome analysis for male descent failed; comparison of Richard III's DNA with that of several known descendants of the fifth Duke of Beaufort showed that they did not have a common male ancestor in Edward III, as had been thought from historical records, so therefore at some stage the recorded father-son link did not reflect the biological facts. Does this mean that the entire British royal line is illegitimate? Well, probably not - or at least not for that reason!!! Four generations separate Richard III and Edward III, but the fifth Duke of Beaufort was 15 generations removed from his royal ancestor; on the face of it, it's therefore almost four times as likely that the bogus link is on the Beaufort side rather than the York side. On top of that, of the 15 Beaufort side links, only the first two are shared with Henry VII. So if for some peculiar reason you believe that Elizabeth II has a right to rule Britain and various other places due to Henry VII's descent from John of Gaunt, you can probably rest easy.

In his very first address to Congress — in the speech where new presidents first detail their priorities for the nation — George W. Bush devoted a few moments to an unlikely topic: racial profiling.

"Too many of our citizens have cause to doubt our nation's justice," he said, "when the law points a finger of suspicion at groups instead of individuals."

The issue had, in fact, played into the 2000 election. The national news was full of stories of doctors and lawyers and NFL players stopped for "driving while black," in seemingly every state from California to Massachusetts. Both candidates that year were asked in a presidential debate if they would support a federal law banning racial profiling, and they said they would. Before Congress, Bush was unequivocal.

"Earlier today, I asked John Ashcroft, the attorney general, to develop specific recommendations to end racial profiling," he announced. "It's wrong, and we will end it in America."

More than a decade later, with a rare moment of bipartisan momentum long past, Bush's promise remains unfulfilled. Communities across the country still chafe at the profiling they perceive in state immigration laws that allow police to disproportionately challenge the status of Hispanics, in surveillance of local Muslim communities, and in statistics showing that blacks are still interrogated by police on the street at a far higher rate than other groups. Black drivers, nationwide, are twice as likely as whites to be arrested during a traffic stop.

The consequences of this racial profiling are as evident as ever: in the frayed relationships between police and minorities, in the deep distrust among minorities of the justice system, and in the racial tension in Ferguson, Mo.

Now, President Obama and his soon-to-depart attorney general, Eric Holder, are coming closer to finishing the job that Bush started. The Post reported Friday evening that Holder plans next week to announce new Justice Department rules for racial profiling, banning its use in national security cases. "The changes will also expand the definition of profiling to prevent FBI agents from considering factors such as religion and national origin when opening cases," The Post reported.

However, in a sign that the United States is not ending racial profiling altogether, the new regulations will allow officers and agents at the Department of Homeland Security to racially profile, including at airports and the southwest border. That may disappoint many civil rights activists who've waited over a decade for the new policies. (Full story here.)

The administration's efforts are the culmination of 13 years of activism and debate. After Bush declared that profiling was wrong in 2001, a bill was introduced in Congress, the End Racial Profiling Act, that attempted to make good on his promise.

It required federal agencies to stop the practice, and local agencies that wanted federal money to do the same. By the fall of 2001, though — after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 — the will to tackle the issue waned. People who opposed profiling black drivers on New Jersey highways found they felt differently about profiling Muslim passengers at airports.

When he came to office, Obama inherited much of the same problems that Bush described. Holder vowed to pick up where Ashcroft left off, putting the weight of the federal government more firmly behind a policy to eradicate racial profiling.

Holder's promise, though, lingered for the last four years, the review of federal policy dragging on even as he announced he would step down from the department as soon as a new attorney general is confirmed. Civil-rights groups have grown anxious waiting for it, as several incidents —  from the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., to the shooting of Michael Brown, to the death of Eric Garner — have fanned racial tensions across the country.

On Monday, speaking in Atlanta about the tension that erupted in Ferguson, Holder hinted that he would finally announce such changes, unveiling "rigorous new standards" on the use of race by law enforcement — "to help end racial profiling," he said, "once and for all."

The new policy will be one of the last major accomplishments of Holder's tenure, a central pillar of his civil-rights legacy.

Gaping loopholes

Civil-rights advocates did not get the federal law they sought under the Bush administration. (The End Racial Profiling Act has been introduced, to no effect, in every Congress since). They did, however, eventually get an important document from the Department of Justice -- an 11-page "guidance regarding the use of race by federal law enforcement agencies."

In that 2003 decree by Ashcroft, the federal government for the first time defined racial profiling, and in stark terms:

'Racial profiling' at its core concerns the invidious use of race or ethnicity as a criterion in conducting stops, searches and other law enforcement investigative procedures. It is premised on the erroneous assumption that any particular individual of one race or ethnicity is more likely to engage in misconduct than any particular individual of another race or ethnicity.

Racial profiling in law enforcement is not merely wrong, but also ineffective.

Its use by law enforcement, the document said, also "has a terrible cost" to individuals and the nation's values.

"I think people were surprised that something like this could come out of John Ashcroft and the Bush Administration — pleasantly surprised," says Laura Murphy, director of the Washington Legislative Office of the American Civil Liberties Union.

But the guidance, which prohibited racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies, also contained some gaping loopholes, making it a valuable statement of principles but a hollow tool for enforcing them.

First, the principles: The DOJ acknowledged that racial profiling is actually ineffective. This is especially noteworthy, since even today prominent officials have continued to dispute the idea, even if they don't use the word "profiling." Up until the end of his tenure last year, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the city's aggressive stop-and-frisk program for disproportionately targeting the groups that he said commit disproportionate amounts of crime.

Neither opponents of racial profiling nor the 2003 federal guidance deny the right of law enforcement officers to use race in responding to specific descriptions of criminals. Officers don't have to ignore the race of a suspect if he's described as "black, 5'10", wearing a gray sweater."

Racial profiling, rather, refers more broadly to the kind of calculation Bloomberg was describing: That if officers stop more blacks, they will increase their chances of finding criminals, because criminals are more likely to be black.

That "profiling hypothesis," as law professor David A. Harris puts it, has repeatedly been proven wrong. Harris' analyses have found that racial profiling actually makes police less accurate, not more so, in catching criminal activity. That's because it wastes resources on false positives among people police would never otherwise stop (black lawyers on their way to work), and because the focus on race diverts attention from the clues that actually do hint at criminal activity.

"If you want to know if somebody is involved in, say, transporting drugs on a highway, if you want to know whether somebody might be up to no good in an airport, you should watch with unrelenting intensity what they are doing, not what they look like — because that’s the only good predictor," says Harris, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Harris often hears people justify profiling Arabs at airports as "better safe than sorry." But, in fact, by making law enforcement less accurate, Harris argues that profiling potentially makes communities less safe. And this effect is further compounded by the mistrust that arises in heavily profiled communities, where residents are wary of reporting crime or of cooperating with law enforcement.

Ashcroft's 2003 guidance, however, also included important loopholes. The document applied only to federal law enforcement agencies, not local ones. And it carved out exceptions for the two broad cases where profiling is most relevant to federal work: in national security and border integrity.

DOJ's piercing language on the costs of racial profiling did not apply, in other words, to terrorism investigations, airport screenings or border patrol. They left open the ability for federal agencies like the FBI to map Muslim Americans living in Michigan, for example, to track potential terrorist threats. They granted wide latitude to Customs and Border Protection, which operates well inside the U.S. border.

"The exceptions were written so broadly that they basically swallowed the rule," says Farhana Khera, the executive director of the legal advocacy organization Muslim Advocates.

Familiar numbers

Shortly after protests began this summer in Ferguson, decrying unequal treatment of blacks by local police, numbers came out that seemed to support the protesters' point. Racial profiling data compiled by the Missouri attorney general found that black drivers were the target of 86 percent of traffic stops in the city last year, and 93 percent of traffic stops that ended in an arrest. By contrast, blacks make up 63 percent of the local population over 16.

Those numbers are not so different from data the ACLU compiled in the 1990s for a series of lawsuits that helped turn racial profiling into a national story and a subject of presidential debate. In one suit against the Illinois State Police, the ACLU found that Hispanics, who made up less than 1 percent of the driving-age population in several counties outside of St. Louis, made up nearly a third of stops there for speeding less than five miles over the speed limit.

Similar disparities occur today far from St. Louis: In New York City, young black men in 2011 were involved in a quarter of stop-and-frisk cases, while making up less than 2 percent of the city's population. In Boston, police data show that blacks, who make up about a quarter of the city's population, were involved in 63 percent of encounters with police from 2007-2010.

This critique doesn't necessarily imply that law enforcement should interact with each demographic group in exact proportion to its share of the population. But such extreme disparities reveal that police are stopping many minorities who've committed no crime, and leaving young black men in particular at risk when police stops escalate into deadly encounters.

The numbers on continuing racial disparities in police profiling reflect the environment — and the anger — Holder inherited when he announced, in 2010, that the DOJ would review and update Ashcroft's original guidance. In the years since then, civil-rights advocates have lobbied intensely. They pushed Holder to eliminate the national and border security loopholes. They have pushed him to add religious protections, too, to cover Muslims and Sikhs who've felt particularly targeted, often because of their appearance, since Sept. 11.

They also wanted Holder to extend his reach to local law enforcement agencies, by insisting on the same anti-racial profiling standards for departments that receive federal resources, such as free hand-me-down military equipment, community-policing grants, or those body-camera funds Obama also announced this week. In many contexts, after all, Washington has used federal resources as leverage to influence local policy. As attorney general, Holder otherwise has no control over policies set by local police departments.

(It is not clear if the new policy will require action of localities, though the new rules are expected to serve as guidance for local police.)

Advocates have been repeating these requests for several years now, in new reports and open letters and public pleas.

In recent days, as Holder prepared to finally announce the new standards, advocates said they were anxious about what he would say.

"They can repeat back to us everything that we’ve asked for, but they have not shared a draft, they have not said 'we can do this, but we can’t do that,'" said Murphy of the ACLU earlier this week. "They have been more tight-lipped about this policy than George Bush’s Administration was when the guidance came out in 2003."

That reality suggests, ironically, that it may have been easier for John Ashcroft to denounce racial profiling in 2003 — to declare that the American "goal of 'liberty and justice for all' recedes with every act of such discrimination" — than for the nation's first black attorney general, and first black president, to say so today.

"Every time this administration tries to have a conversation about addressing racial problems in this society, they’ve gotten slammed," Murphy says. "Everything from the beer summit to Holder’s speech on ‘we're cowards’ on issues of race — they just have been treated like no other administration. And I think it’s totally unfair, and it’s had the effect of chilling certain actions on their part."

Recent events have aggravated the constant open would of race in America. They haven’t ripped off the bandages or the scab because neither has ever been really applied. There is a deep racial divide in this country, and its effects reach through every area of society.

In the wake of the Mike Brown and Eric Garner grand jury decisions, we are not only hearing from a black America that is crying against injustices imposed upon it, but also a white America that feels it is not being treated fairly. In an effort to begin a healing process, I’ve come up with a plan that I think addresses the major concerns being expressed.

I’m proposing a trade. From now on, only white people would be allowed to use the n-word. In addition, November would be declared “White History Month”. And one cable channel will be set aside for a White Entertainment Television network. I think these are reasonable provisions.

In return, 98.8% of all Fortune 500 CEOs will now be black, as will 99% of the Senate and 91% of the House of Representatives.

I think this is an equitable trade, as it gives white people what they seem to want most — access to a certain word and specialized history months and television channels — and black people what they want — economic and political power. I’ve actually tilted it a little in favor of whites, since they currently just want equal access to the n-word but I’m proposing they can have it completely. I hope black folks are okay with that.

I’m forwarding this proposal to President Obama, who incidentally will be the first of 43 black presidents we’ll have until we let a white guy again have a turn.

The BBC adaptation of John Masefield's The Box of Delights was broadcast weekly in the run up to Christmas 1984. I was too old for such matters in those days - I am not sure that I even watched it - yet somehow I have become one of those for whom these programmes are part of a modern Christmas.

One weakness haunts Masefield's book and the television the series: the revelation at the end that "it was all a dream".

In an article for Lancet Psychiatry looking at Christmas and dreams, Simon Guerrier takes the idea of the story as a dream seriously:

What does Kay's dream in The Box of Delights reveal about his desires and anxieties? For all the magic, there's a sense of the real world as sinister and foreboding: gangsters and murders are in the news, there's a sense of danger in the darkness outside the house, and when Kay goes to deliver a message some boys throw stones at him. Rat, a friend in The Midnight Folk, has now become a villain and Kay's description suggests the politics of the schoolyard: “Kay had heard that everyone had dropped him”. 

There's a sense, too, of issues with authority: clergymen who turn out to be criminals, or the police inspector who several times ignores the evidence Kay brings him. A psychoanalyst might link these things to the fact that Kay's parents are absent—he's looked after by a guardian, Caroline Louisa. 

Alan Seymour's adaptation of the story for television ... deftly adds to this sense of Kay's own anxieties informing the dream. In the first episode, Kay sees large Alsatian dogs running through the countryside. “Many people have them now”, Caroline Louisa tells him, “for protection”. We're not told from what. 

When Herne and Kay transform into animals, in the book it's a delight but on television they're constantly in danger: as stags, they're chased by wolves; as birds they're chased by a hawk; as fish they're chased by a pike. Herne has to teach Kay to look out for these threats. Later, when Kay meets Arnold of Todi—the inventor of the box of delights—where the book had Kay rescue him, here Arnold turns on Kay and tries to trap him back in time. Interestingly, Kay's magical friends can't help him—he's saved by his friend Jemima, in the “real” world, calling out his name. 

The television version gives us a clearer sense of where Kay's dreams begin: after two clergyman have tricked him in a game of cards so that he owes money to the poor box, and after he's met the kindly old man that his dream turns into Cole Hawlings. The police inspector reveals that Kay has always had an interest in magic: they've often swapped tricks from the pages of The Magician. But there's still a sense of disappointment at the end that it's all been a dream. 

It doesn't help that both book and television version are set over several days, with Kay going to bed and dreaming, and even asking aloud if the magical events he's caught up in might be dreams. In fact, it is more than disappointing: it's cheating.

I fear that is right, though my heart was lost to A Box of Delights some time in the 1960s, when I heard a radio adaptation of it.

You do not hear much about Masefield's The Midnight Folk, but my literary hero T.H. White loved it and cited it as an influence on his The Sword in the Stone.

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December 4th, 2014: Sorry I didn't warn you this comic had magically flying banners in it and is therefore ULTIMATE CLASSY!!! Today is a shipping deadline so if you want RAD ITEMS at CONVENIENT TIMES, now is a great opportunity to check out the sweet items!! – Ryan

News emerged yesterday* that the Gender Recognition Panel (GRP) is delaying and possibly denying legal gender recognition because a trans person has had children whilst living in their new gender – an act which is completely unjustified, given that the Gender Recognition Act does not require someone who has transitioned to refrain from sex that may get them or their partner pregnant.

At best, this delay is of questionable legality and reveals a dangerous element of (hopefully inadvertent) transphobia in the decision making process of the panel, likely fueled by ill-informed and sensationalist media coverage.

But at worst, the panel are willfully intruding into the area of reproductive justice. Coercive sterilisation of trans people has long been a major concern, but one that was until yesterday limited to countries other than the UK. Questioning the commitment of any trans person who has the audacity to exercise their reproductive rights is simply an attempt to force de-facto sterilisation via the back door, something considered a human rights abuse by the Council of Europe.

What is also of concern is that the panel based the decision to request more information on the publication of a newspaper article. This has the effect of penalising those who engage with the media as part of a campaign for equality. It will also hinder people who, as is often the case with members of the trans community, have been outed without their consent and have had deliberately misleading or inaccurate information about them distributed in order to sensationalise a story.

In an older case, the panel delayed an application because a doctor correctly decided that the information that a trans person had a wife and children was of no relevance and did not include it in their report. Another doctor did mention it, and thus the panel decided it should investigate further to ensure the first doctor was giving his opinion “in light of the correct factual situation”.

It is entirely possible that the Gender Recognition Panel does not realise the gross errors it is making, as having any experience of trans matters is not a requirement to sit on the panel. According to the Gender Recognition Act, “the only persons who may be appointed to the [panel] are persons who have a relevant legal qualification (“legal members”), or are registered medical practitioners or registered psychologists“. There is no further requirement given, beyond specifying exactly what legal qualifications legal members needs.

That means that being a doctor or lawyer in any field whatsoever is a more necessary qualification for determining someone’s gender than having any first hand experience of the topic whatsoever.

PS. If you have had a similar experience with the Gender Recognition Panel delaying an application because you have had a child, UK Trans Info would like to hear from you – email info@uktrans.info.

The original tweet, although anonymous and not made by the original applicant, was removed the following day as the person to whom this happened is worried that publicity may affect their GRC application

On a totally unrelated note, for the entire month of December my novels, Off to Be the Wizard and Spell or High Water are on sale over at Amazon US. The Kindle editions are $2.00 and the paper versions are only $9.50.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

The open-plan office trap.

Wednesday:


Do we really want another stimulus for the housing bubble? Really?

Raising some taxes is good (bankers and Starbucks, though… well, how amazing brave to pick those targets).

But hasn’t Chancellor Osborn sworn he wasn’t going to raise any more taxes? I dectect the hand of Danny Alexander; it’s of a piece with his efforts to tackle tax evasion and reduce opportunities for tax avoidance.

The extra funding for the NHS appears to have come from… underspedning in the NHS. Master Gideon as Baron Munchausen will thus clear the deficit by pulling himself up by his own bootstraps.

And there’s a distinctly Janus-faced feel to some of the Conservative’s pronouncements, crowing over our outpacing of other European economies while simultaneously whining about how this makes us too attractive to those waves and waves of immigrants, coming over here fixing our plumbing and so on.

Equally it seems very off to boast that our GDP is going up but our contributions to the European Union are going down in the same statement where you complain that Amazon’s profits go up but the tax they’re paying go down. Sauce for the Christmas Goose, you would have thought.

Ed Balls has some good questions, but no answers.

Why is it that the tax receipts have fallen short of expectations? Ignore the flashy rabbit-from-hat Stamp Duty give-away; this is the central question of the Autumn Statement. The Chancellor boasted that he’d be reducing the deficit in spite of falling revenue, but that’s not the same as having an explanation. Could it be that Mr Balls is finally right about something, and below inflation wage increases have hammered the Treasury’s income too?

I remain convinced that having more people in work but with lower wages across the board is a fairer way of sharing the pain of economic disaster than the ‘Eighties approach of dumping the bottom three million on the dole; nevertheless, it does point to Balls having a point, and it plays well to crosslink Labour’s “cost of living crisis” narative to the Tories failure on their own terms to cut the deficit.

And while it might be fairer, it might not be good politics to give everyone a resentment against the government instead of just a minority who you can marginalise. Labour have clearly been trying a number of formulae – “squeezed middle”, “one nation Labour” whatever it was Mr Milipede forgot to say this year – to try and saddle this resentment to their political cause.

(It’s ironic that the non-Labour left have largely undermined this by shreiking and carrying on that marginalising a minority is exactly what the government is doing – helped, it must be said, by the Tories’s rhetoric and Iain Drunken Swerve being allowed to continue to exist.)

But low wage inflation isn’t the whole story. The dramatic fall in the oil price – generally welcomed by the Chancellor as a good thing, not least because falling energy prices makes Labour’s energy price freeze policy look rather silly – has a knock-on effect in terms of treasury income as it reduces the fuel duty, VAT, petroleum tax, supplementary charge to corporation tax and even the climate change levy.

(And while we’re at it: building a whole load of new roads is hardly in line with the “greenest government ever” line, and rather more school of Mr Balloon’s “drop the green carp”. And, as Jennie reminded us, probably counter-productive – if you want to improve travelling by road… spend the money on public transport. The number of road users is a function of price and convenience versus the alternative, so you would reduce congestion by making it preferable for people to tavel by train. The government appears to be doing the opposite. I suppose it might drive receipts from petrol taxes back up.)

Plus the UK’s economic growth has not yet translated into a boom in consumer spending, again forestalling a surge in VAT receipts at HMRC. In fact, largely the growth seems to be being directed into the housing bubble, which brings us back to point one.

Even so, granted Mr Balls has some grasp of some of the cause of the government’s income not coming up to scratch, it’s still a bit of a leap from there to “and Labour will fix this by…[insert policy when we think of it]”.

George Osborn has some answers that need questioning

Which leaves us clinging to nurse in fear of something worse. Though what could be worse than nurse being revealed as Master Osborn in a pinafore?

The Chancellor’s promise to clear the deficit by 2018 – although more realistic than Labour’s “sometime” in the next Parliament aspiration – is undermined not so much by his already having failed at this once (seriously, giving the finite nature of British Parliament’s you have to start out with a plan for one term at a time; given the slow reveal of the scale of the problem, the Coalition’s cautious approach balancing cuts with stimulus – again at Danny Alexander’s urging – has trod a fine line that has ended up closer to the Liberal Democrats timescale for cutting the deficit than the Tory’s and seems to be paying off, at least at the moment), but much more by the frankly fantastical idea that almost all the remaining cuts can come from the benefits, largely in-work benefits, paid to working age people.

Employment is already at record high levels. (This is a good thing!) But without some unforeseen huge increases in wages – again, see Mr Balls point – it is difficult to see any substantial ability to cut the support we need to give to keep these jobs viable.

On Sunday, on the Andy Marr show, the Chancellor was challenged on the way that spending cuts have fallen largely on not merely “welfare” but specifically on working age benefits. Pensioners have largely weathered the economic storm protected by the Coalition’s triple lock. The Tory Treasury team have clearly war-gamed this one, as Master Gideon came out with a very convincing-seeming answer: “Oh but I have hit the pensioners – I’ve taken half a trillion out of pensions by raising the retirement age”. Well, that’s quite an impressive hit against your core vote, isn’t it?

But take a moment to think about it: raising the retirement age does not affect existing pensioners; it’s actually another blow to those of us in work saving money by putting off the day when we will be able to claim back some of the fortune we are currently paying in.

And of course these cuts depend largely on the Tories being in power after the next election. Vince Cable – who has been quietly getting on with the business of being business secretary: increasing investment to manufacturing and boosting apprenticeships (notice the National Insurance cut to help more there) – has written to the Office for Budget Responsibility to ask them to point out how the Tories’ “no tax please were the British Tea Party” approach is wildly at odds with the Liberal Democrats’ fairer, balance tax and cut policies.

Overall, this was a typically theatrical financial moment from a Chancellor who has learned all his lessons from Gordon Brown. The splash of largess to catch the headlines; the smoke and mirrors over where the money comes from; some nasty medicine in the details; the hidden hand of the Liberal Chief Secretary trying to steer us a little away from full-throated Thatcherism and a little towards more social justice.

This is the course we are committed to now: from here on it’s full tilt towards the General Election and (subject to Nigel Farage and the Tory suicide-squads on the back benches derailing them onto Europe again) this is the ground that the Chancellor has laid out. It is, as President Clinton used to say, the economy, stupid.

And believe me, George Osborn is the economy… and stupid.