Andrew Hickey

Earlier this week, I did something very stupid, if very human, which I now regret. I posted a photo of some flowers on Twitter.

They were blue, pink and white flowers, growing up a bank, interspersed with cow parsley. The reason I shot the photo, and later posted it, is that I thought the flowers were rather good. They are, in effect, the view from our west-facing bathroom window right now, following on from earlier snowdrops and aconite. The bank, under an old beech tree, tends to be dark. Framed against its grave shade, the flowers looked delicate, cheerful, happy. Surely no one could object to a photo of happy flowers?

Not for the first time, however, I had underestimated Twitter. Within 48 hours, someone I don’t even know — a follower of a follower — launched an attack. How dare I post a photo of non-native bluebells?

For such the flowers were, and indeed are. Well, I knew that our blue, pink and white flowers were Spanish bluebells, not native ones. I’d never claimed anything to the contrary. Soon, however, I was being furnished with links to websites — there are plenty of them out there — decrying Spanish bluebells. Apparently Spanish bluebells, characterised as ‘coarse’ and ‘scentless’, come over here, pollinating our innocent native Hyacinthoides non-scripta, crowding our bluebell woods with horrid half-caste bluebells. Send them home!

Leave aside the question — probably unanswerable — as to why I or anyone else should care what some follower-of-a-follower thinks about my bluebells. Let’s consider native and non-native plants instead, and what we ought to think of them.

When we bought our Norfolk house in 2011, and a small adjoining property (previously associated with the main house) more recently, the garden was one of the main attractions. Like the house, it has a history. There is a ‘terraced garden’ (that big bank, in fact) surviving from c. 1750, and a few William Robinson-esque rockeries presumably c. 1900. Photos from the 1940s, coupled with anecdotal accounts of the number of gardeners employed by the owner at that time, imply a thriving, well-kept, handsome mid-century garden. From the mid-1960s onwards, however, everything went downhill. At first we assumed that the garden we met in 2010 had what might be called ‘good bones’ — old trees, large shrubs, a broadly sensible layout — but, apparently, very little else besides.

This wasn’t, as it turned out, entirely accurate. For one thing, the property developer who had owned the house immediately before we did was a great devotee at the altar of Roundup. Once the toxic spraying stopped, as it did the moment we arrived, it was amazing to watch what sprang back to life. There were ‘weeds’, of course — let’s skate, for the moment at least, over the subjectivity bound up in that heavily-freighted little word — but also poppies, fuschia, day lilies, aconite, two types of cyclamen. And there were bluebells, too — Spanish bluebells.

For those Spanish bluebells were nothing to do with me. I did not plant them. For heaven’s sake, if I’d have been planting, I’d have planted native bluebells, if only because like everyone else who has gardened here, I am a creature of my time and place, and we live in a time and place that embraces native bluebells.

For the record, we did quite a lot of planting when we first arrived, for all the usual reasons — to resolve aimless sight-lines, to ensure privacy, to repair damage done by recent neglect or ignorance. And when we planted, we invariably used native shrubs and trees. For one thing, we wanted our offerings to be of some benefit to the local wildlife, as well as to our human friends, and this is a safer bet with entirely native planting. But we also wanted what we planted to fit in. Just as using the ‘wrong’ brick or architectural detail makes a house stand out from its environment, often not in a good way — just look at some of the terrible toffee-coloured brick, dodgy mansard roofs and out-of-scale fenestration used in our own Norfolk village — the ‘wrong’ planting can jar too. Hence our emphatic and modish allegiance to hazel, spindle, box, holly, bird-cherry. On the odd occasions when our planting went off-piste, we indulged in nothing more exotic than the odd — or, to be more accurate, entirely mainstream — viburnum, or a couple of nineteenth-century varieties of lilac.

Admittedly, when it came to herbaceous plants, we ventured slightly further afield — although not in every case. The meadow, obviously, has received regular offerings of Emorsgate meadow mix for lime and chalk soils, as have the two newly-constructed chalk banks. I wonder what my site supervisor, once an arable farmer and a very practical man, would say to me, were he to discover how much I spend yearly on re-introducing precisely the annoying, unprofitable weeds he and his forefathers laboured for so many centuries to eradicate?

But when it comes to the garden, as noted, I have to confess to planting quite a few non-native plants. These include verbena, spurges, hostas, hellebores, pansies, wallflowers, stock, snapdragons, pinks, crocus, narcissus, snowdrops, tulips, lilies, and as many old roses as circumstances, budgets and domestic harmony will allow. Meanwhile in the vegetable patch we have the usual heritage potatoes, cucumbers, kale, onions and garlic, as well as herbs such as rosemary, sage, coriander, parsley and hyssop.

Nor have I grubbed up the non-native species planted here by previous generations of gardeners — the poppies, fuschia, day lilies, aconite, cyclamen and, yes, Spanish bluebells mentioned above. As far as that goes, one of the most tiresome invasive weeds we have in Blakeney is alexanders — apparently brought to Britain by the Romans as a sort of forerunner to celery. Like rabbits, pheasants, wheat and barley, alexanders are non-native. They are also everywhere in north Norfolk.

None of the plants listed above is a native English species, at least not in the forms I have planted. Yet at the same time, they are part and parcel of what most of us would understand as an English Garden.

And this, ultimately, is why that attack on the Spanish bluebells seems so odd to me.

On one hand, I understand entirely the point about non-native species hybridising with native species, hence undermining a degree of biodiversity any sane human ought to cherish, for purely practical, if not aesthetic or even spiritual reasons. Jut as domestic cats are perhaps the greatest enemy of Britain’s native wildcat, due to a marked lack of fussiness when it comes to making kittens, Spanish bluebells do, manifestly, present a threat to native bluebells. In fact, having said that the bluebells in my garden are Spanish bluebells — Hyacinthoides hispanica — closer inspection reveals that at least some of our Spanish bluebells have evidently crossed with H. non-scripta, thus producing an intermediate termed H. massartiana. I think this must be the case in many gardens, particularly old ones. This is perhaps a pity, although it would matter rather more if there wasn’t a national collection of bluebells to deal with precisely this issue.

Yet on the other hand, gardens are, by definition, unnatural enterprises. Through a happy coincidence, the day on which I experienced the unwanted bluebell attack also brought, via the post, a copy of Penelope Hobhouse’s Plants in Garden History (1992). This extraordinary volume, combining as it does a wealth of archival research with decades of hands-on gardening experience, might as well be subtitled ‘a history of moving plants far beyond their native range, cross-breeding them with other plants and otherwise doing unnatural things with them’, because that is pretty much what has happened to plants during their sojourn in man-made gardens. Intentionally or otherwise, as soon as humans started to move from place to place, they brought their plants with them, and in doing so, altered the world in which they found themselves — as they would have done in any case, humans also being non-native in Britain. A preference for native bluebells is just as arbitrary as a preference for non-native ones. Action to preserve native species against intruders is, ultimately, an ‘unnatural’ intervention in a very natural process of migration, hybridisation and evolution.

This is the problem I have with books like George Monbiot’s Feral. I understand the romantic impulse behind that whole project, the driver of Monbiot’s surging prose. What puzzles me slightly is the apparently total lack of self-consciousness regarding that romanticism. ‘Reinstating’ a wilderness is not a natural process. Rather, it’s exactly the same human impulse to make existing things the way we want them to be, different than they are at present, that has motivated gardeners even since someone in the near East a few tens of thousands of years ago decided to try to grow a date palm where no date palm grew before. Or to put it another way, it’s the same impulse that leads person to christen some little yellow flower a weed, while his friend sends off for yet another expensive bag of little yellow flower seed. It’s the same impulse that created the formal terrace garden behind our house in the 1750s, but also the impulse that heaped up the stone to make all those little rockeries c. 1900. It is, in short, just another style of gardening, with a different set of snobberies underpinning it.

This isn’t to say that any of these approaches is wrong, by the way. Rather, it’s admitting that genuine wilderness is the one thing we cannot set out to create — and that a preference for wilderness is a matter of taste, not objective superiority. Wilderness is, as it were, at best a half-remembered Eden, the gates of which have long been barred to us. Who can be surprised that we differ in our attempts, inevitably futile, to find a way back in? Also, I am sure the urge to improve on nature is as natural as human impulses come. To that extent, anyway, we are nature, not something outside it. Why the need to be pompous about different attempts at ‘improvement’?

For a few days after the bluebell attack, I wondered whether that stranger’s tweets would make me hate my mongrel half-breed bluebells, or at least think them somehow less happy, less beautiful. In the end, however, I think I now love them even more. They are non-native, yes — but so are lots of other people and things I care about. What’s more, they are part of the actual narrative of the land on which I live — their introduction, their growth and haphazard propagation, and now this stupid, revealing argument over them — and as such are a real thing, a genuine thing, in all their robustly non-native glory, speaking at once, rather paradoxically, of continuity and change, the world that is as well as the world that might be. And no, whatever Twitter might throw at them or me, I would not wish them otherwise.

And so the fleas are parting company with the dying rat. If there's one thing to be said for the various celebrities deserting Max Clifford now he's been found guilty of sexually assaulting four young women, one of whom was only 15 at the time, at least they're being open and honest about having paired up with the man now being described as the king of sleaze by the very sleaze merchants he worked hand in glove with.

Clifford's downfall signifies an end of an era for British journalism just as much as the closure of the News of the World did. Along with Murdoch himself and Kelvin MacKenzie, Clifford must rank among the most significant figures of the post-Sun tabloid world, and also as one of those chiefly responsible for the race to the gutter.  Where the sex scandal had once been mainly confined to the Sundays, Murdoch's relaunched Sun served it up on a daily basis. By the time MacKenzie took over as editor in 1981, Clifford was starting to build his empire, the famous headline "FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER" the end result of his handiwork.  As was also typical of many Clifford-brokered stories, it wasn't true. Nor was he anything but brazen when caught out, as Roy Greenslade relates of another story sold to the Sun during the period. Clifford had presented a man who claimed to have slept with a soap actress, only for her lawyers to quickly discover the supposed lover was in fact gay. "Some days he's gay, some days he's straight. This happened on straight day," was Clifford's response.

When it's someone's job to tell lies, to deceive people, whether they be tabloid journalists and in turn the general public, and when they are also so open about doing so, it raises the obvious question of whether you can believe anything they say.  Did he really hold sex parties for the best part of two decades, as he claimed in his autobiography, where household names including Diana Dors were among those attending?  During the trial he quite happily accepted being described as the "ringmaster" at the shindigs, a role he "liked to have" in life in general.  In an interview at the time the book was released he told Carole Cadwalladr to him it was "another sport" and also that he had been "greedy".  Perhaps as he has so often Clifford was simply embellishing a fact to the point where it becomes indistinguishable from fiction: Dors told the News of the World of sex parties hosted by her first husband Dennis Hamilton, parties that would have taken place when Clifford had just entered his teenage years.  Whether later claims in her own autobiography of further such soirees are any more reliable is open to question.

If we do take Clifford's word for it, then around the point he got out of the car keys in the bowl game he reached the peak of his powers.  He represented Mohamed Fayed, sold the story of Antonia De Sancha's affair with David Mellor, and although almost forgotten now in comparison to Mellor shagging in his Chelsea strip (as invented as John Major tucking his shirt into his underpants was), entered into a "partnership" with Mandy Allwood, the woman pregnant with octuplets.  Clifford negotiated a deal with the News of the World where the amount paid for the exclusive rights to the story would increase for each baby born.  The contract was written in spite of advice from doctors to abort some of the foetuses to give the others a better chance of survival.  Allwood went into labour after 19 weeks; three days later all eight babies were dead.  She would later claim Clifford had told the press about the location of the funeral despite her asking for it to be kept private.

With the demise of the Screws and the switch of so much celebrity gossip to the instant world of social media, Clifford's grip on the biggest clients also seemed to have slipped.  He kept Simon Cowell, but most others seem to have went elsewhere.  Not that this affected what Piers Morgan once described as Clifford's "get out of all jail card".  Cadwalladr in her piece wrote of the double life Clifford had been leading at the time, in a relationship with his PA, who was married, just not to him.  The only hint of this in the press came in the Mail, in a diary item.  No journalist or paper wanted to take the risk of offending such a major source by going any bigger on his hypocrisy.  Grace Dent in the Independent suggests "rumours" had circulated about Clifford's "approach" to young women, but if there had been any wider investigation than just that into his past then it most certainly didn't get into print.

Similarly to how the wider media failed to expose Jimmy Savile while he was alive despite it seeming as though almost everyone in Fleet Street and at the BBC had heard the whispers, it was left to the women themselves to find the strength to go to the police and give their accounts of how a man who subsequently wielded such power abused them.  These same papers are the ones demanding to know why the then Liberal party didn't do more to investigate the accusations made against Cyril Smith, despite the fact that at the time they themselves didn't follow up the allegations in the Rochdale Alternative Paper, repeated by Private Eye.  Such cover-ups are only possible when the self-styled defenders of freedom also fail to investigate without favour.  Anyone expecting some humility, even introspection from the papers without whom Clifford couldn't have operated were always likely to be disappointed, but as so often, their silence on the role they played is deafening.

For those of us who’ve learned to actually be aware of sexism and racism, it’s incredibly frustrating how the same stupid pathetic arguments about sexism keep getting regurgitated, over and over again, by clueless guys. It’s exhausting and frustrating to constantly answer the same stupid, bullshit arguments. But if it’s frustrating to a white guy like me, just imagine what it’s like for the people who are actually affected by it!

This rant is brought on by the fact that lately, there’s been a movement in the tech/engineering community to try to actually do something about the amount of sexism in the community, by trying to push conference organizers to include speakers outside the usual group of guys.

You see, it’s a sad fact that engineering, as a field, is incredibly sexist. We don’t like to admit it. Tons of people constantly deny it, and make excuses for it, and refuse to try to do anything about it. Many people in this field really, genuinely believe that technology is a true meritocracy: those of us who succeed because we deserve to succeed. We see ourselves as self-made: we’ve earned what we’ve got. Anyone else – anyone else – who worked as hard as we do, who’s as good as we are, would succeed as much as we have.

Unfortunately, that’s not reality. Women and minorities of all sorts have a much harder time in this community than the typical guy. But when you try to do anything about this, the meritocrats throw a tantrum. They get actively angry and self-righteous when anyone actually tries to do anything about it. You can’t actively try to hire women: that’s discriminating against the guys! You’re deliberately trying to hire inferior people! It’s not fair!

I am not exaggerating this. Here’s an example.

Summing it up, turning away qualified male candidates and accepting potentially less qualified female candidates just to meet a quota is not only sexist, but is a horrible face to put on the problem. My wife is a nurse. A female dominated field. I also own a construction company. A male dominated field. In neither field would you see a company or an organization suggest hiring one gender over the other to satisfy a ratio.

What exactly is being accomplished by limiting the speakers at an event, or your employee base to an equal male / female ratio? Turning away qualified candidates and hiring purely based on gender, or religion, or race? What does having a program like Women Who Code, PyLadies, Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, etc… accomplish? The short answer; very little if anything. In fact, I believe groups like this have the potential actually do more harm than good. But I’m not here to debate the minutia of any of those groups so I’ll summarize;…

Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone seriously suggest that you should
turn away candidates based purely on gender, or race, or whatever.

What we do advocate is recognizing that there are people other than white guys in the world, and maybe we should actually include them once in a while.

The majority of people running tech conferences are white guys. When they think about inviting people to come speak, they’re naturally going to start off with a list of “Who do I know who’d be a good speaker?”. The nature of the tech community is that the vast majority of people that they immediately think of are going to be men – because the majority of people they’ve worked with, and the majority of people they’e seen speak at other conferences were men.

People love to handwave this, talking about how it’s just that the field is so male dominated. It’s true that it is, but there are many problems with that as an excuse:

1. The male domination of the field isn’t meritocratic. We discriminate against people who aren’t like us at every level – from elementary school teachers discouraging little girls from being interested in math, to college classmates harassing women in their classes, to people conducting job interviews and making hiring decisions.
2. The actual fraction of women who work in tech is much larger than the fraction of women in leadership, or who are invited to give talks at conferences.
3. There are a shocking number of women who are driven out of technology and engineering by harassment by their male coworkers.

People get really angry when we say thing like this. Part of it is that old meritocracy thing: you’re saying that I didn’t earn my success.

Guess what? You didn’t. Not entirely. No one succeeds solely on the basis of their own merit. There’s always a huge amount of luck involved – being in the right place, having the right body, having the right parents, having the right opportunities. Yes, hard work, talent, and skill helped you get to where you are. It’s a very large, very important factor in your success. But if you were born to a different family, with exactly the same abilities, you might not have ever had any chance at succeeding, despite equally hard work.

The other side of this is actually a sign of progress. We’ve come to accept that racism and sexism are bad. That’s a really good thing. But in our black-and-white way of seeing the world, we know that sexism is bad: therefore, if I’m sexist, I’m a bad person.

That’s not true. Sexism is a deeply ingrained attribute in our culture. It’s pretty much impossible to grow up in the US or in Europe, or in China, or in India, or in Africa, without being constantly immersed in sexist attitudes. You’re going to be exposed – and not just exposed, but educated in a way that teaches you to have the attitudes that come from your culture.

Recognizing that you’ve grown up in a sexist culture, and acknowledging that this had an effect on you and your attitudes doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you human. Refusing to admit that your culture had any influence on you, and continuing to discriminate against people because you can’t admit that you might do something wrong? That’s what makes you a bad person.

I’ve told this story before, but it’s a damned good story, and it’s true, and it’s not hearsay: it’s my personal first-hand experience. It’s part of my own awakening to just how pervasive gender bias is.

A long time ago now, I worked for IBM Research. My third year working there, I volunteered to be the summer student coordinator for my department. The previous year, IBM Research had hired around 100 summer students, and exactly one of them was a woman. The vast majority were white guys, with a sizable minority of Chinese and Indian guys. The pool of candidates was nowhere near that skewed. It’s definitely true that men outnumber women in computer science by a sizable factor, but not 99 to 1. Our candidate pool was more like 5 men to 1 woman.

So, that year, the powers that be at the company decided that we needed to do something about it. What they decided to do was allocate a reasonable number of summer student slots to each department based on the departments budget, and they could use those slots to hire anyone they wanted. If they hired a candidate who was a woman or minority, they didn’t count against the budget. (Note that they did not reduce the number of students we were allowed to hire: they allocated based on the usual budget. They set up an additional budget for the extra students.)

My department was one of the smaller ones. We were allocated 5 slots for summer students. The day we started allowing people to request students, all 5 were gone within a couple of hours. The next day, the guy across the hall from me came to my office with a resume for a student he wanted to hire. Of course, it was a guy.

I told him that we couldn’t hire him – our budget was gone. But if he could find a woman, we didn’t need budget to hire her.

He threw a fit. It was the angriest I ever saw him. (Most of the time, he was a really nice, mellow guy, so he was really upset about his!) It was discrimination! Sexism! Unfair! He carefully went through the resume database looking for the best candidate, not the best male candidate. We were refusing to hire the most qualified candidate! On, and on, and on. I finally got rid of him, after pointing out at least a dozen times that I was just a lowly junior engineer, not someone who made the policy.

The next day, he was back in my office. He was practically bouncing off the walls: he’d gone back to the resume database, and he’d found a woman who was even better than the guy he’d wanted to hire.

This is the point of the whole story. He wasn’t some nasty, spiteful, misogynistic twit. He wasn’t being deliberately discriminatory. He wasn’t consciously screening out women’s resumes. But the fact is, when he went through the resume database without being forced to consider women, he’d eliminated the resumes of every single woman. He was going through a database of 1000s of resumes, and in that process of quickly skimming, he skipped over a more qualified candidate, because she had a woman’s name.

This is what happens in the real world. We don’t deliberately try to be sexists. We don’t act in a deliberately sexist or discriminatory way. But we’re part of a culture that has deeply ingrained sexist attitudes. We’re taught, by the way teachers treat boys and girls differently in school. We’re taught, by the way that society treats us differently. We absorb the message that when it comes to things like engineering, women are inferior. Most of the time, we don’t even really notice that we’ve absorbed that. But we have. It’s been hammered into us so many times, in so many ways, in so many settings – it would be shocking if we didn’t pick it up.

I’m using my experience at IBM as an example, partly because it’s such a vivid demonstration, and partly because it’s impossible to figure out the real names of anyone involved. But I’ve seen the same kind of thing happen in every job I’ve had where I’ve been involved with hiring. It’s not usually deliberate, but it’s very real.

The point of things like the pledges to not attend conferences that don’t have women and minorities as speakers and participants isn’t because we want to exclude the most qualified speakers. It isn’t because we want to force conference planners to include less qualified speakers. It’s because we know that it’s easy, without trying, to exclude some of the most qualified speakers, because the people running the conference don’t notice them.

They’re just like my friend at IBM: they’re not deliberately trying to exclude women. But if they don’t actively try to think about people outside the usual pool of guys like them, they won’t include any. And if they don’t, then they’re priming the next round of conference planners to do the same: if everyone you’ve seen give a great talk at a conference is a guy, then when you’re planning a conference and you try to think of some great speakers to invite, then who’s going to come to mind?

I’m particularly annoyed at the snipe that the author of the quote up above takes at “Girls Who Code”. GWC is a great organization. If you actually take the time to listen to the people who run it, you’ll hear some appalling true stories, about things like young women who go to college to study computer science, and on their first day in class, have classmates telling them that they’re in the wrong classroom: this is a programming class, not a class for chicks.

We have a community where we treat women like that. And then we rant and rave about how horribly unfair it is to do anything about it.

Rats have destroyed dozens of electronic voting machines by eating the cables. It would have been a better story if the rats had zeroed out the machines after the votes had been cast but before they were counted, but it seems that they just ate the machines while they were in storage.

The EVMs had been stored in a pre-designated strong room that was located near a wholesale wheat market, where the rats had apparently made their home.

There's a general thread running through security where high-tech replacements for low-tech systems have new and unexpected failures.

The premise of Garfield is simple: Garfield the cat suffers from severe depression, a condition which he self-medicates through eating. He cannot be at peace, he always finds fault in his environment, in those around him, in the very constraints of the three-panel universe in which he resides.

In these earliest strips, before Garfield slimmed down, he is enormous, a giant wedge of orange fat. He is more than an animal: he is pure mass, exerting a powerful gravitational pull on everything around him. His owner Jon, the dog Odie, all the food - falls to him, falls into him irresistibly.

He is appetite incarnate: from the root word carnis, Latin for "meat," incarnated means literally to be placed into meat, to be animated in flesh. The risen Christ is a manifestation of God incarnated, the spirit made to animate a hollow shell of gristle and bone. Garfield is the force of appetite. He cannot be sated. He cannot be placated. He will never be satisfied - the moment of relief from his hunger never arrives.

In his world he is both God and damned: every element of reality bends inexorably to him, but even given this he can never be fulfilled. The more he eats, the more he desires to eat. Imagine an eternity of everything you ever wanted without the moment of release granted by satiation - and then imagine Garfield, supreme monarch of a realm of endless suffering.

Updated, Tuesday 6th May: For the latest news, see this post.

Update 2, Tuesday 6th May:: Also see this email from IHP, which seems to contradict the information given over the phone to some people.

Latest news (8th May) is on this update blog post.

It has just come to light that the main source of HRT for trans women apart from the NHS has been closed down. Estrogen has long lived in a strange spot in drugs legislation as it is illegal for a pharmacy to sell it to you without a prescription – but it is quite OK to buy it. For years, people have been buying it online to the extent that it is not considered unreasonable by doctors for someone turning up at a Gender Identity Clinic to already be on HRT. Given the length of NHS waiting lists this happens in around half of cases. (Edit: See in the comments below for recommendations of alternate sites to use. I cannot vouch for any of these personally – yet – and I don’t know if they have been affected by whatever caused the IHP shutdown)

For some, obtaining HRT online is the only way they can get it, as some NHS organisations have “red-listed” supplies and completely cut off non-private sources. Unless you can afford a private prescription (Way more costly than the drugs themselves, which the NHS actually makes money on via the prescription charge) then IHP was the only legal way of obtaining HRT, even if not having HRT would leave you undergoing chemical menopause due to being post-operative.

Unfortunately, a recent international crackdown on less legitimate online pharmacies seems to have caught IHP up. On the European site you are now asked to provide a prescription with any order, as well as payment options being restricted to American Express (Hard to get hold of in the UK) only:

The alternate sites, that are not branded as being UK or EU specific, have sometimes escaped some of the changes pushed upon the European version but there is no such relief here. There is simply no payment option presented and it is impossible to proceed.

For comparison, here is what you see if you provide a US shipping address on the .biz or .vu sites: the eCheck payment option appears.

I have written to IHP to try to find out more information on what has happened, but in the mean time for those affected, the following advice from Jess Key may prove useful:

Affected by IHP closure? Your GP is can prescribe WITHOUT GIC. Take http://t.co/AsvaVexsAr and http://t.co/LXNbtR2MFe pic.twitter.com/yjUJaQY9Gq

— Jess Key (@jesszkey) May 4, 2014

If GP refuses you are entitled to a second opinion. If still refuse get referral to a hospital endo. If endo refuses get 2nd endo opinion.

— Jess Key (@jesszkey) May 4, 2014

Before I start, I should probably apologise for abandoning FeministAspie for several months… again. Sorry about that. I don’t have a particularly good excuse for it, either; just being really busy with uni then worrying so much about neglecting the blog that I was too scared to sort it out, I guess. In an attempt to reduce all this worrying about it and actually maintain a consistent blog again, I’m planning to focus more on actually writing and reading blog posts as opposed to attempting to keep a fast-paced and often-full-of-conflict Twitter feed under control, so I probably won’t be on Twitter that much apart from posting links to blog posts I like, at least at first. Anyway, the following is an attempt to coherently write about something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot recently.

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I generally tend to be very wary of the rhetoric surrounding teaching autistic people to be “socially appropriate”; often, this is merely code for “preventing harmless stimming because neurotypical people think it’s weird” or “forcing eye contact because that’s what neurotypical people do” or “do everything in your power and more to magically be neurotypical regardless of what actually helps you” or, well, “conditioned compliance”. (For more on that sort of thing, see “Socially Inappropriate” by Musings of an Aspie). As a general rule, if so-called “behaviours” aren’t actually causing any harm to anyone, it’s none of your business. Yet there often seems to be so much more emphasis placed on suppressing harmless autistic body language than there is on encouraging actually important social skills that can and do cause upset for all involved parties if things go wrong. In other words, amongst all the “if you just try harder you’ll become like us and we’ll see you as a full human being” ableist stuff, there are aspects of social appropriateness which are important. Consent and respect for personal boundaries is one of them.

It makes me really uncomfortable when people (especially neurotypical people) try to explain away incidents of harassment, disregarding lack of consent or sometimes even assault with the “autism is to blame” mentality, particularly when the perpetrator’s neurotype is unknown and people are making huge assumptions often based on probably-false stereotypes. (The plan is to keep this gender-neutral for the most part; I do think it’s really important to take patriarchy into account, but I’ll get to that towards the end.) For a start, it’s hugely ableist to assume that autistic people are incapable of understanding boundaries and/or consent issues. By no means am I saying this isn’t an issue at all. In hindsight, my early teenage years and first few crushes were a series of messy, steep learning curves about how to handle those feelings, how personal space worked, and general Not Creeping People Out 101. It wasn’t pretty. But eventually, after a few bad experiences, rounds of “you can’t do that” from other people and later being introduced to consent issues through feminism, I picked that stuff up. I imagine this is much easier for some people than for others, and I’ll get back to the importance of education on consent issues later, but for now, my point is that equating “autism” with “not taking no for an answer” does a lot of harm to autistic people in terms of stereotypes.

It also overlooks that autistic people are often more susceptible to being victims of this sort of thing than our neurotypical peers, for various reasons. Firstly, there’s the whole “not picking up on ‘obvious’ social cues” thing. Secondly, many autistic people, even those who are normally very verbally fluent, begin to lose verbal ability under stress, when overloading or for countless other reasons; in a society where even a clear “no” or “stop” is often discounted and anything short of that is seen as a “yes”, this can be and has been exploited. Thirdly, sadly, conditioned compliance is a thing (TW for description of rape, abuse, compliance training and ableism in the link), making it even harder to “escape” these situations.

In addition, this mindset takes the blame away from a much wider culture which contributes to lack of respect for consent. Not all autistic people show complete disregard for boundaries (although, as with any group of people, of course some do) and likewise, not all people who show complete disregard for boundaries are autistic (although, as with any group of people, of course some are). Further, to assume that problems such as these are caused almost solely by being unable to read social cues is to ignore other factors such as the more general male entitlement phenomenon and, well, a society which tends to not really let people say “no” very much (and not just in sexual/relationship contexts, either). In fact, the “autism is to blame” fallacy is also guilty of favouring the perpetrator; there’s a lot of emphasis on the possibly-autistic perpetrator potentially not picking up cues any less subtle than a clear “no”, but little thought for their possibly-autistic victim who, having gradually learned (or been actively taught) over time that their dissent is just over-reacting and that they should cause as little fuss as possible, unwittingly finds themselves being assumed to want something they don’t and doesn’t have the tools to object. I’ve been there. It’s pretty awful.

As well as, you know, not massively stereotyping autistic people and throwing us under the bus unnecessarily, what we really need is a shift towards consent culture, where clear communication of consent (or lack thereof) is the norm, as opposed to simply assuming consent unless stated otherwise. We need more widespread education on these issues, for people of all genders and neurotypes, and this includes giving people the tools to set boundaries without fear as well as to respect them. We need to get rid of the “boys will be boys” mentality, and I think that in particular ties in really well with the concept of presuming competence in neurodivergent people. Assuming that somebody is incapable of understanding boundaries so not even trying to discuss it only creates a vicious circle. And that contributes to stereotypes which, frankly, we could really do without.

Tagged: ableism, actuallyautistic, boundaries, consent, disability, feminism, presuming competence, stereotypes, victim-blaming

[Epistemic status: loosely based on a true story]

AIDS Specialist: You know, people think AIDS is a death sentence. But how long do you think the average person lives after getting HIV?
Me: I don’t know.
AIDS Specialist: Thirty years! Isn’t that amazing? You can get HIV, and probably you’ll live another three decades!
Me: Really?
AIDS Specialist: Yeah.
Me: So, the trick is, give yourself HIV when you’re eighty, then live to be a hundred ten.
AIDS Specialist: I like you.
Me: Really?
AIDS Specialist: No.

And a few weeks later:

Me: Do you have a family history of alcoholism?
Alcoholic Patient: No. Why?
Me: Well, I am trying to figure out whether to prescribe you this medication, and studies suggest it works best in patients with a genetic predisposition to alcohol abuse.
Alcoholic Patient: I don’t understand.
Me: The medicine only works if one of your parents drinks too much.
Alcoholic Patient: Well, I think I can get my dad to start.
Me: NO!

Every time I read The Prince I become more convinced that it is a work of sarcasm.  Not conscious sarcasm perhaps, but sarcasm nonetheless. 

It is the product of bitter disappointment and disillusion.  This man, Machiavelli, had been a fierce Florentine patriot, a republican, a defender of the revolutionary city after the popular ousting of the plutocratic Medici psuedo-kings.  He lost the game and, having been tortured and exiled, he sat and wrote what is supposed to be a job application to the triumphant Medici... and it turns into the first open admission (in modern European letters) that ethics and politics are separate and often irreconcilable. 

It is coded, deliberately or not, to imply that the failure of Republican hopes in the face of the Medici stemmed from a failure to be sufficiently ruthless against them, to be as utterly cynical as the Medici themselves.  In the process, Machiavelli praises Cesare Borgia as the perfect Prince.  The Medici had regained their status in Florence partly owing to an alliance with the bellicose Pope Julius II, who had been one of the Borgia's most implacable enemies. 

Gramsci famously argued that the book was aimed at the common man, because the leaders to whom it was supposedly addressed already knew everything Machiavelli was saying.  They just didn't talk about it.  In this reading, The Prince might become the whistleblowing of ruling-class secrets.  If you convert much of the advice into mordant irony, you find a book that laments a world in which people like the Medici can prosper precisely through a secretive, two-faced instrumentalism based on the most pessimistic view of mankind possible.  Of course, for the Prince himself, the most pessimistic view of mankind is actually the most optimistic, because it posits humanity as a weak and easily-exploited mass of flesh-puppets. 

The essentially double-edged nature of the rise of modernity (i.e. bourgeois social relations) is expressed in the book's implicit recognition of this.  Part of the promise of modernity, of its greater openness and ductility and possibility, is an inextricable co-habitee: opportunistic political tyranny based on the utilisation of people as counters, bargaining chips.  Money.  To be banked, exchanged, invested, harvested.  The market is the basis of Medici power.  They make society a market in which people are the tokens.

Machiavelli may have come to accept this view in the counter-revolutionary period after the fall of the Florentine Republic he championed, but I don't think his disillusion equates to an easy reconciliation with the kind of 'realpolitik' people often take from the book.  On the contrary, the book seems more like Michaelangelo's Last Judgement on the wall of the Sistine Chapel - a work of melancholy recognition of the failure of the liberatory promise of the renaissance, destined to be perpetually overlooked by the ceiling upon which the optimism is forever frozen.

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May 1st, 2014: If you want to create the 20th Century History Song List based off of these songs, I think you'd find that a lot of them are actually PRETTY GREAT?? – Ryan

Steve Moore (centre) at the Brinklow Crescent burial mound. Photo by Mark Pilkington

"Don't go and see it, it'll be shit" - Steve Moore

I don’t know who Bomani Jones is, because he is involved in sports media, and generally speaking, I would rather bathe in hydrofluoric acid than listen to sports talk radio.  However, he had some things to say about l’affaire du Donald Sterling that were so sensible and righteous that they should have shamed anyone who didn’t think of saying them first.  (Ta-Nehisi Coates was also on point when the subject of Sterling hit critical mass, but Coates is so relentlessly competent and eloquent that it’s almost boring to point out how good he is.)

Donald Sterling is, at least for the moment, the owner of the perpetually underachieving Los Angeles Clippers franchise of the National Basketball Association.  He was recently brought low in the estimation of most of the American public when tapes of him saying extremely impolitic things about black people became widely circulated; his punishment for this more-grotesque-than-normal display of racism has been public scorn and humiliation, the loathing of the public and his own players, and a lifetime ban from the NBA, and may ultimately include his ouster as the Clippers’ owner (though for this he will be more than fairly compensated; “after all,” as an equally image-conscious businessman once said, “we are not communists.”

The usual suspects — a mix of libertarians with an imperfect understanding of the First Amendment, conservatives terrified that they might not be able to use the word ‘nigger’ as much as they would like, run-of-the-mill racists, and contrarian liberals — squeaked that Sterling’s punishment was too harsh, and that no one should be deprived of his livelihood just because he privately voiced his socio-sexual panic at the thought of black cock (as if ownership of the Clips was Sterling’s meat and potatoes rather than a huge, expensive, money-losing status symbol).  That this was pure nonsense was obvious to pretty much everyone with sense, and the collective conscious of America giggled appropriately at the poltroonish circumstances and cheered lustily when NBA Commissioner Adam Silver unceremoniously tossed Sterling out of the Billionaire Boy’s Club.  A wrong, it was generally agreed, had been made right.

As the justifiably furious Jones pointed out, however, it was the wrong wrong, and the right wrong hadn’t been made right at all.  Sterling’s fall from grace had come suddenly — in the middle of a news cycle stuffed to the gills with delightful reminders of American bigotry – and was funny because of its circumstance.  It was largely engineered by a former girlfriend of his, likely in response to a lawsuit against her by Sterling’s wife, and was doubtlessly made without his knowledge and released without his consent.  All of which is of only moderate interest and relevance to the endgame; Sterling was, regardless of the circumstance, shown to be a putrid bigot who should by no means have such a loud voice in the affairs of the nation, and I will shed no tears about what particular combination of self- and public interest led to his ouster from the public sphere.  The only problem is if one believes that this is the first time Sterling has ever done something racist, or that it is the worst racist thing he has ever done, or that it is such a particularly damaging thing that it has finally made him worthy of public censure.  And anyone who knows even the least little thing about Donald Sterling knows that none of those things are even remotely true.

Sterling made his millions in real estate — and, specifically, he is well-known to be a brutal, deceptive, and particularly despicable slumlord.  He has been hauled to court time and again over his discriminatory housing practices, and he has lost; these cases have cost him millions, and they are not secrets, but matters of public record.  Over and over, Sterling has been found guilty of driving minority tenants out of his ‘better’ (that is to say, whiter, which is to say, more profitable) properties and into broken-down, under-repaired, poorly maintained, and often dangerous slums.  The revelations in these court records reveal plainly what kind of a man Sterling is, and what kind of a man he has been since the beginning:  not a comically out-of-it old fool who was baited into revealing his harmless racism by a conniving piece of tail, but a deliberate and calculating villain who has, among other things, compared the black and Hispanic residents of his apartment buildings to vermin; contrived to drive out minority renters by under-servicing them; and dispatched his wife, under false pretenses, to survey his buildings and target black and Hispanic tenants for eviction.  He is, in short, a shrewd and self-centered serial racist whose bigotry stems not from his status as a old white jerk whose time has passed, but from his status as a greedy and deliberate lawbreaker who employs racism as a blunt instrument to pummel maximum profit out of his properties.  Bomani Jones, on his way to bury a friend whose murder was the product of ruined inner cities caused by exactly this sort of discriminatory housing practice, furiously preached that America has decided to crucify Donald Sterling for an almost harmless manifestation of racism, after having completely ignored for over 20 years his participation in a far more toxic and dangerous one.

So, too, the case of rancher Cliven Bundy.  FOX News, the National Review, and more than a few Republican politicians made this freeloading creep into a cause célèbre until he clumsily tripped himself up by dint of some drearily predictable comments about “the Negro” and the accompanying comfortable-honky speculations about whether or not said Negro might have been better off as a slave.  These, to me, are perfect examples of what is meant by, but almost never used to indicate, the concept of political correctness:  Sterling and Bundy were pilloried because the things they said, specifically about black people, are no longer correct, in the sense that even though a lot of people still believe them, it simply will not do to say them out loud.  Sterling was not laid low because he spent the last four decades getting obscenely wealthy by the systematic deployment of racial discrimination, but because he had the bad luck to run afoul of a vengeful mistress who cajoled him into saying something racially offensive out loud.  Bundy was not brought down because he spent 20 years siphoning the value from land that rightfully belongs to you and me, and refusing to pay a fair cost for that land because of some deranged sense of racial entitlement, or even for summoning hordes of gun-toting insurrectionists to bluff up his claim to the ‘right’ to exploit that public property; he was brought down because he had the bad taste to ignorantly pontificate in front of those flunkies about how we got it all wrong after the Brothers War.

The problem with these responses is that they are far too easy.  They allow us to indulge our favorite (and, increasingly, only) kind of rebellion:  media outrage and internet activism.  They let us whip ourselves into a self-righteous frenzy of moral rectitude from the complete and total safety of our offices, our homes, and our smart phones, engaging in the easiest possible means of removing a perceived threat:  making fun of them and their cluelessly flagrant contempt for decent values.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with this per se; I will never disparage the value of disrespectful mockery, biting satire, and straight-up goofing on some tone-deaf old fuck whose brain is stuck in the 19th century.  Goodness knows I do enough of it.  But the reason I do it is the same reason everyone else does it:  it’s easy.  It’s free.  It’s so cheap it costs us literally nothing, a stance for which we get virtual pats on the back in the form of retweets and likes and which never risks us tasting blood behind our teeth.  And worst of all, it leaves the greatest villains — the men and women who run society, who twist the laws and strangle solidarity to fatten their bank accounts and put themselves atop a pile of broken social contracts but are smart enough to never, ever let words escape their lips that would lead to such a public relations disaster — completely off the hook.

There’s also the issue of proportionality.  This is, far and away, my biggest beef with so-called ‘social justice warriors’, the otherwise well-intended and even virtuous activists who nonetheless dedicate themselves to such fripperies as gender accounting, tone policing and concern-trolling.  In focusing on the lack of rectitude in the language of those who are often their allies, they are expending vast energies on trifles while the real bad guys run absolutely amok in the background.  While they scoff and huff over pronouns and pop-culture representation, the real enemy is every day crafting legislation that allows them to irreparably poison the planet and bankrupt the public tills without punishment, to reify slavery in the form of a profit-mad prison system, to bind women eternally to a cycle of choice-free childbirth and inequality, to destroy the very ideas of equitable income and everyday survival, to eliminate every possible shade of diversity and build a war where there are only two conceivable distinctions between humans:  the rich and the little people.  I would never argue that one should give up one’s causes, and some of the people who fight these battles are the most admirable people I have ever known; but as long as we focus on using the right terminology instead of fighting the more important fight — which, though many May Days have passed since that dreadful first one in 1886, has never stopped being the bosses against the workers, the landlords against the tenants, the owners against the owned — many of them are simply complaining about problematic language on the long and slow-moving queue to the entrance of a labor camp.

If we somehow manage to throw off the heavy yoke of false consciousness, if we figure out a way to stop voting against our own interests, if we realize that there are people who have to be taken out and taken out for good — and recognize that they might just have to be taken out in a way that costs us a lot of sweat and blood — then we can do something about the true enemy, the parasitic rentier class and its ideological toadies who talk us into the grave while their bosses take away every possible chance at a decent life.  Once that’s done — once we put a system in place that checks the forces who see everyone but themselves as just a cheaper pair of hands to run the machines — then we can concentrate on other important issues like using the right words for things, and making sure our media fully reflects the diversity of our society.  That’s important work, and it needs to be done; and it’s a fight that can be won.  The progressive nations of Europe have won it, or at least are winning it, despite powerful forces trying to distract them from the fight.  But right here, and right now, we need to focus on restoring some kind of economic balance, some kind of recognizable democracy, some attempt to physically wrest the reins of power from those who have them so tightly knotted around their wrists, before we can engage in any other meaningful fight.  We cannot count on the monied class to make the occasional comment about race, gender, or sexuality so crass that we unite behind the idea of not listening to them anymore; we no longer have the time to to wait for the leaves to fall so slowly from the dying tree.  We don’t have the excuse of not knowing for sure who the enemy is; we simply lack the will to do anything to stop him that isn’t easy or fortuitous.

The song asks us:  is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?  We are very rapidly running out of answers.

Lately we’ve been enjoying possibly the most subversive show on network television. It’s a show that’s breaking all the rules, challenging all the paradigms, clasting all the icons. Every time I watch it I’m amazed they let it on the air, and in prime time, no less. It’s Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

FOX, the network that would bring us hobo fights if they’d let ‘em, has given up an hour a week to a straight-up show about science. How insane is that, even given that it’s a pet project for the Family Guy guy? (Let’s not do the FOX News thing. FOX the channel has always been out of step with its brownshirt brother, and this is no different.) For an hour a week a black man, hired for his knowledge instead of his resonant yet buttery voice, tells you about the wonders of scientific discovery. In a time-slot that could have gone towards a reality show where they fool poor people into thinking they won the lottery.

And it’s a science show with actual science in it. It doesn’t haul in mermaids and UFOs and ghosts and psychic powers and other kookery to get the ratings up. While it doesn’t go into a lot of complicated detail on some of the scientific principles, it also doesn’t shy away from digging into the actual science as much as it can. It’s not too embarrassed to be smart.

This embrace of actual science has caused the show to have to flat-out say, “look, some people believe in an alternate religious explanation for this and they are wrong.” Practically right out of the gate it had no patience for Creationist nonsense, but instead of ignoring it, it straight-up took it on. And in the latest episode, it talks about how the petroleum industry bought its own pet scientist to assure everyone that eating lead was completely okay despite massive evidence showing that lead-filled gasoline was poisoning the hell out of the world. A corporation doing something wrong? Environmental catastrophe being hushed up to make money? Scientists on the take? Say it ain’t so, Neil!

Now, a lot of the folks this will bug don’t see anything new here. As far as they’re concerned, the liberal media is allatime saying hateful and hurtful things about the one true and unquestionable religion and also Christianity. But for these people, all it takes to qualify as bashing capitalism is to simply not cheer for capitalism for a moment. For them, a non-white person on TV talking shit about Jesus and petrochemicals isn’t news because this is how they see everything always. But for me, wearing a different set of blinders, it’s pretty amazing to see someone in mainstream primetime TV just cold saying that Genesis isn’t true fact.

(And of course, they have been bugged, and are demanding “equal time” and what-not, as though there’s enough time in the world to make creationism equal to science.)

Now, I’m not saying the show is perfect. It often zips from subject to subject a little too fast for me, and ‘d like to see a little more depth in each episode and a little less breadth and also its theme song is boooooooring. But I’m going to cut it some slack because god love it, it’s there. An African-American scientist is telling me about actual science on real TV and by gum I’m gonna sit down and listen to him.

I've been playing catch-up on SF/Fantasy films/TV that passed me by.  (Here be spoilers.)


Enders' Game

Did you ever see a movie so bad you genuinely start to think you licked a toad at some point?  If not, look no further.  Not quite as offensive as the book, but only because it seems to have been drained of any ideas at all... in the same way that you drain butchered farm animals of their blood.  Which is a fate you start to long for after more than half an hour of looking at Asa Butterfield's sullen, gormless face.  Harrison Ford makes it worth watching for his open, blatant boredom.  One empathises.


Pacific Rim

The level of disregard shown for plot logic - even their own heavily-established plot points - is so brazen as to be almost admirable.  Beautifully made.  But making this story beautifully is a bit like taking ages to weave a tapestry for your grandma out of the finest silks with a message on the front that gets her name wrong.  The little girl who plays young-Mako is a better actor than most of the main adult cast.


X-Men Origins: Wolverine

(Yes, I know it's ancient.  There were reasons for me seeing it now.  In fact, I think it goes to my credibility that I can honestly say I never watched it at the time.)  I see one of the guys who ended up doing Game of Thrones co-wrote this.  So he never needed George R. R. Martin's influence to get him interested in heavy-duty misogynistic woman-fridging and needless rapeyness.


The Wolverine

(Okay, so I kind of like the Wolverine.)  I should've mentioned the weepy Asian woman stereotype under Pacific Rim.  So I'll mention it here instead.  There's a fight scene on top of a bullet train that is exactly the sort of thing that the character of Wolverine should be doing.  It's the sort of thing that he, and only he, could do.  Trouble is, there has to be someone on top of the train with him... someone who, in this case, isn't a guy with an adamantium skeleton, the reflexes of a wild animal, and claws that can help him defy gravity and inertia... so... umm...


The Machine

Seriously?  An 'is the A.I. alive' storyline?  A naked fembot?  Again?  In 2014?  By the way... the main character has a little girl who is sick, and he puts her brainwaves in his fembot, who speaks in little-girl-voice, and who walks around naked, and with whom he has obvious sexual tension.  So, creepy much?


Believe

Psychic/telekinetic little girl and her Dad on the run from sinister government types.  Just go and watch Firestarter instead.  The story is essentially the same, and even if you don't like it, at least it'll be over quicker.


Gravity

A bravura exercise in saying absolutely nothing.  Virtuoso silence.  Like space itself, spectacular nothingness.


By the way, Sandra Bullock's character in Gravity is in mourning for a dead little girl.  Hey, SF writers... could we just leave the little girls alone for a bit?  This is getting worrying.

“Heil Hitler,” cutting through the air, bringing a chill to the summer night. I knew the voice, the curling insinuating sneer in it; there was no mistaking its owner. But I didn’t need to hear the voice to know it was Hessler. He was the only one that the men posted at the doors of my study would have allowed in.

I turned around snappily; you never let the Schutzstaffel men know that you were afraid. He could have had a pistol at the ready, to send me to Valhalla (or to Hell), but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of fear. As it turned out, all he had in his hands was that brown leather briefcase he always carried. I gave a lazy salute and got right to business. “All right, Hessler. What does the stargazer want this time?”

The stargazer, of course, being Karl Ernst Krafft, Hess’ personal astrologer and the Führer’s advisor on mystical affairs. And I? His dogsbody, his factotum. When Krafft managed to convince Herr Hitler that some arcane object or another would be of benefit to the war effort, I was the one dispatched to retrieve it from whatever dank cave or desert pit held it. Sixteen confirmed kills under Richtofen in the last war, a peerless Junker heritage, one of the best fencers in the country, a record of dedicated service to the Reich, and six years’ experience in intelligence, and my reward was to be an errand boy for that tiny, paranoid Dutch doll of a man. My family’s history had left me an accidental knowledge of the supernatural and the paraphysical, and I had turned that legacy to the task of acting as deliveryman for one of the Reich’s most minor lights.

“Herr Krafft will not be sending you on any more missions for a while, Karlheinz,” Hessler breathed. He used my given name as he used his superior rank: as a slap in my face. “He has…fallen out of favor with the Führer.”

I let my surprise show: a foolish mistake. But I was geniunely shocked. Krafft was an incompetent, a self-serving egomaniac, perhaps even a total fraud — but so too were such luminaries as Speer and Goebbels, and they still enjoyed Hitler’s ear. And when a death’s-head of a man like Hessler used the phrase ‘fallen out of favor’, it meant only one thing: the camps, then doom. “Really. What was the final straw? The Spear of Destiny? The loss of the Ark? Or did he simply cast one too many erroneous horoscopes for Rudi’s tastes?”

“Gallows humor becomes you, Karlheinz. Take care lest it suit you too well.” He lit one of his pilfered French cigarettes directly in front of my face, knowing how much I despise the habit. “The truth, as you know, is that the war effort has been going poorly since the Allied invasion of Normandy. Krafft’s trinkets and artifacts have failed utterly, and the discovery of certain documents suggesting that he in fact painted us rosy visions of victory while privately prophesying the destruction of the Reich were the last straw. The Führer feels it is time for a reappraisal of the entire strategy of our paranormal activities.”

Inside, I allowed myself to brighten somewhat. I had faith in the supernatural; I had seen too much in my years to doubt. But I felt that I could be of far greater service at the front, in the field, or even in the air. Perhaps they had finally realized this in Berlin, and were dismantling Krafft’s boondoggle. Perhaps I would be assigned to where I could do more good. “You don’t say. And what does this reappraisal involve for me, Colonel Hessler?”

“The Führer wants some healing crystals. And a, er…a dreamcatcher.”

“I…I beg your pardon?”

Hessler narrowed his eyes. For the first time, I realized that he wasn’t enjoying this any more than I was. His normal gloating tone at sending me on some fool’s errand was entirely absent. “Karlheinz, the Führer has come to believe that…” He paused uncomfortably. “Has come to believe that ‘before we heal the world, we must first heal ourselves’. He is also of the opinion that ‘our dreams may’, erm, ‘may with effort become our reality’. To that end, he wishes for you to acquire some healing energy crystals. And a dreamcatcher.”

“What…I am not confident I know what a dreamcatcher is, Colonel.” I was rather at a loss.

“It’s all contained in the dossier,” he said, spilling the contents of the satchel. I rifled through the gilt-edged briefing papers as Hessler continued; the leader of the Third Reich apparently wished for me to fetch a small wooden contraption laced about with string. It looked like something my seven-year-old son would make at Crafts Camp.

“He would also like a…” Hessler looked at his miniature leater notebook. “A witch ball.”

“A witch ball.”

“It’s a glass ball. You hang it in your window. Apparently the Führer is concerned with, er. With evil spirits coming in through the dog flap.”

I rolled my eyes. “Hessler, you can’t be serious. I have brought Hitler the head of the spear that pierced the side of Christ. I have brought him the mummified hand of Fatima herself. These things look like junk that a Gypsy couldn’t be troubled to sell.”

He glowered sternly at me. “I am serious, Herr Arkane. Deadly serious, in fact.”

“And where am I meant to acquire these…this magical knick-knack shelf?”

“The crystals and the dreamcatcher are native to the American southwest. The witch ball is native to the folk traditions of northern England and Ireland.”

“But…”

“And the Führer suggests you use all speed in gathering them. He says that,” and here he paused again, as if swallowing what he really wanted to say, “he says that ‘time is the gift we give ourselves anew with each passing hour’.”

“Er. Well.” I wondered if I should state the obvious, and eventually concluded that at this juncture it wouldn’t make any difference. “Not to put too fine a point on it, Colonel Hessler, but Great Britain and America are hostile enemy nations. They are unlikely to give me free rein to travel, as did the Middle Eastern and African states.”

“Exactly, Karlheinz. This will be a mission of great danger and delicacy. In fact,” he emphasized, his voice filled with an emotion that I had not before encountered in the man, “you might never return, if you aren’t careful.”

It was clear now. “I see,” I said, and spoke the truth. “I shall leave right away.”

“Herr Arkane,” he said, sounding almost desperate. “You know, I have been to the States, before the war. I could be of some assistance, perhaps, as a guide. Or teaching you how to blend in with the natives.”

“I’m not sure, Hessler,” I said, hissing the name. I finally had him in a corner, and intended to enjoy it. “I tend to work best alone.”

“Please, Karlheinz,” he stammered. “I can’t take it anymore. The wind chimes. The macrobiotic food. The smell of patchouli. The East Indian fellows he meets with in the morning. You’ll not repeat this to anyone, but he contorts himself on these tiny mats, wearing nothing but a loincloth. The Führer is not the most…attractively put together man.”

“All right, Josef,” I said. I decided I’d rather risk his company until we could make our escape than listen to him blub. “I’ll make arrangements immediately.” I cocked an eyebrow. “Is it really that bad?”

“Worse. I’m not even going to tell you about Project Drum Circle.”

Al Feldstein, who helmed most of the E.C. Comics and turned MAD Magazine into the most-read humor publication in the history of the world, has died at the age of 88. He passed at his home in Livingston, Montana where he retired in 1984 to spend his days painting. No cause of death has been announced.

I took the above photo of Al in the MAD offices in the mid-seventies. I made it clickable so you can enlarge it and see just what his workspace looked like — the typewriter on which he'd "spec" the type of every article in the magazine, the rubber cement jar, the proofs, the version of the potted plant "Arthur" on his window, the vintage MAD cover painting on the wall, etc. It is said that when Al edited MAD, he worked with a ruthless ethic, locking his door and rarely joining in on the general office merriment. He was obsessed with getting the magazine out on time and with utter clarity.

Some of those who worked for him (and me, when I visited and took this photo) thought he was cold and too business-like and that he showed surprisingly little sense of humor to be the editor of that publication. And it's true that a lot of its spirit and funny came from its superb roster of freelancers and from others in the office. A lot of what I laughed at, I now know, came from Assistant Editor Nick Meglin, for instance. But Feldstein was the guy who drove the bus…who got MAD on time after its founding editor, Harvey Kurtzman, proved unable to meet deadlines. And even if others discovered some of the great artists and writers who made that magazine so wonderful, Feldstein was the guy who recognized and hired the talent.

Before that, he was the editor-writer of Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, Weird Science, Crime SuspenStories and other legendary E.C. Comics. There were tons of imitations but the E.C. books stood out (and sold better), in large part because of Feldstein. We'd be hailing him as a giant of comics even if he'd retired after pressure groups forced E.C.'s comics off the stands. He didn't retire. He just left…and then one day, he returned.

Kurtzman, of course, was unable to keep the company's remaining title, MAD, on the newsstands with any regularity. He was also fighting with publisher William Gaines over the "package" (the cheap printing) and his deal. Finally, it came to a head: Kurtzman either had an offer from Hugh Hefner to create a similar magazine or he had reason to believe such an offer was looming. Either way, he went to Gaines and demanded 51% of the business or he'd walk. Gaines told him to run, not walk, and hired Feldstein back to run MAD. Since Kurtzman had been creating so much of the magazine himself and since most of his staff went with him to do the new magazine for Hef, Feldstein faced this absurd challenge: He not only had to get the publication on-time, he had to almost completely build a new talent pool of contributors. In short order, he had Frank Jacobs and Mort Drucker and Dave Berg and Don Martin and so many others who made the magazine successful. A bit later, he even hired a man named Sergio Aragonés.

I had the pleasure of spending a lot of time with Al at conventions. In retirement, he was a much nicer person than he was as an editor. He was also a little perturbed that so many people seemed to think Harvey Kurtzman did everything on MAD and that all those great E.C. Comics wrote themselves. He went to cons to remind people of his contributions and also to sell the very fine paintings he did. Some were western scenes. Others recalled his days with E.C. and MAD. You can still see some of them on his website.

Here's an obit on him. I will have more to say about what he did and why I liked him so much when I finish my current workload. This is a kind of tribute to the way he worked: I'm going to meet my deadlines and then write about him. That was how Al operated.

Imagine for one second a world wherein Garfield is the greatest comic strip in history.

Hold this world in your mind, cherish it, caress it. Upon returning to the so-called "real" world, you will find yourself unable to shake this idea.

The idea consumes you. It becomes a fixation. You want, you desperately need to look away, to think of something else - but your momentary glimpse of this strange alternate Earth has warped your perception.

You are trapped.

You now know the truth which has been unconcealed by this thought experiment: this alternate world, with Garfield poised at the pinnacle of achievement in the history of comics, is not a fantasy. It's not an imaginary story. You see through the facade of dreams and petty illusions and you realize that this world is our world.

This is the real world.

This is Garfield's world.

The current buzz-topic of the month is Thomas Piketty's magisterial tome, Capital in the 21st Century—currently at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, #5 in the UK, and in the sights of every right wing pundit, goldbug, and economic quack globally.

I have not read Piketty (yet) so I am about as unqualified to comment on his central thesis as anyone. But I've read the reviews, so I'm going to bloviate anyway—about the implications for a topic I occasionally obsess over, like a diseased cur chewing on an ulcerated hernia.

Piketty's central thesis (at second hand) appears to be that in an era of slow economic growth (like the 21st century to date) characterised by high rates of return on investment (ditto) the rate of capital formation outstrips the rate of wealth creation, leading to centralization of wealth and an increasing gap between the rich and the rest of us. Marketization and trickle-down economics have signally failed to close this widening divide, and so it follows that the deregulation of trade and investment and the reduction in taxation of assets that have typified the past forty years are damaging to the social fabric; if we want to reduce inequality we will have to go after the capital concentrations with a pointy expropriative stick. (Cue right-wing/libertarian meltdown in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...)

This interests me because it looks like a really fascinating opportunity for an experiment in libertarian paternalism.

I believe we can safely say that the custodians of those huge steaming piles of money that are sucking yet more money into their orbit like so many fiscal neutron stars will resist any attempt to take their shinies away, by any means—fair or foul. It doesn't matter whether the money can actually buy them anything useful—arguably in billion-up concentrations it can't: go ask Steve Jobs how much being CEO of AAPL extended his life expectancy—or even whether you own it (ask the board of the Welcome Foundation, for example); but you don't get to be in charge of a giant heap of green folding paper by giving it away at every opportunity.

But is it possible to persuade them to do something useful with their capital? (And by "persuade" I mean hold a gun to their head: compulsory nationalization and redistribution without compensation, or invest in something useful and at least nominally retain ownership of the investment ...) What if we offer them tax breaks for investing in some really long-term project that doesn't necessarily offer them a return on investment any faster than the overall GDP growth rate, but which protects the nominal long-term value of their assets while ultimately growing the size of the economy?

The characteristics of such favoured "safe harbour" investment vehicles should be: a really long-term goal, a high capital investment (nine to eleven digits) required to get the ball rolling, and some way of providing them with an assurance that expropriation at pitch-fork point is averted by the very nature of the investment. Oh, and it should eventually flip over into delivering economic GDP growth beneficial to the "little" people—us—without degrading the biosphere that we live in.

I've got two candidates for such investments: (a) commercial thermonuclear fusion reactors, and (b) colonizing Venus.

Fusion: we are not fifty years away any more. We're about thirty years and $100Bn away. Or we're about 8-10 years and $200Bn and a Manhattan Program level of urgency away—it depends on the political and legislative framework. However, building tokamak fusion reactors (like ITER) is never going to be cheap; to get 1Gw of electrical power out implies a 5Gw thermal reactor (and a third of its power is going to go into maintaining the fusion reaction). More realistically, tokamaks will come in 5Gw power output and larger sizes, making them an order of magnitude larger than today's big-ass 1Gw PWR, AGR, and AP1000 reactors. We're looking at startup costs of $25-50Bn per reactor, and a requirement for up to 1000 of the suckers if we want to roll it out globally as a major energy source.

So: it's a project that will plausibly soak up $25-50Tn and take 10-30 years to roll out while needing 30-60 years to break even and start to provide a return on the capital investment. A good way of making the Koch brothers atone for their sins while preserving the illusion of their wealth, right?

Naah, that's small beer.

Let's get really ambitious and propose a scheme that will cost trillions and take centuries. I am referring, of course, to the colonization of Venus. Venus is usually written off as a destination for human space colonization due, I am convinced, to a lack of vision. Everyone focusses on Mars, probably because Mars doesn't have a runaway greenhouse atmosphere with a surface pressure of around 93 bar and a temperature of 480 celsius. (Mars is cold, chilly, and sits in a near-vacuum—0.01 bar.)

However, there is one place on Venus that is actually rather more hospitable to our type of life than almost anywhere else in the solar system: 50-55km up in the troposphere, the pressure drops to between 1.0 and 0.5 that of the Earth's atmosphere at the surface, and the temperature declines to between 30 and 70 celsius. Furthermore, the gas composition is mostly carbon dioxide. CO2 is dense; with a molecular weight of 44 daltons, it's actually denser than breathable air (80/20 nitrogen/oxygen dimers, average molecular weight around 29-30 daltons). A balloon or Zeppelin full of human-breathable air would actually float as well in the troposphere of Venus as a hydrogen balloon does on Earth. "At cloud-top level, Venus is the paradise planet," as Geoffrey Landis puts it. More here, with links to papers in the footnotes: let's just say that my money would be on a million people living in the clouds of Venus being both cheaper and faster to achieve than getting a million people living on or below the surface of Mars. Although neither project is ever going to be cheap, and my money is on either one costing somewhere north of $10Tn just to get rolling.

Of course, there's no guarantee that colonizing Venus would work out. Or even that it might not prove profitable in the long term, resulting in the giant pile o'gold problem returning to haunt another generation. But some of the billionaire elite already seem inclined to boldly blow their fortune where no fortunes have been blown before. As Elon Musk says: "it would be pretty cool to die on Mars, just not on impact."

So. Should we encourage the custodians of the shitpiles of capital that are damaging our global social fabric to atone for their sins by offering them huge long-term investment opportunities in colonizing Venus and rolling out commercial thermonuclear fusion reactors? (Both worthy(ish) projects that demand a fuckton of money and time which, in our current circumstances, the shrunken machinery of government simply can't afford.) Or should we try and take their hoards away via some other means? And if so, what?

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April 14th 2006
I've updated Posterchild's Mario Blocks site with two new block installations, and my Webcomics Tattoos site with a brand new T-Rex tattoo on Donovan. Sweet! Jeff's Overcompensating has a Mario Block themed comic today too.

Mark and Lauren both sent in pictures of themselves in Dinosaur Comics shirts and they are both very cool looking people. I mirrored Lauren's picture but you probably wouldn't even have noticed if I didn't tell you!

Also, Ryan Callahan sent me his vision of a recent comic. Sweet! And if you're looking for another cool comic, I'd recommend Dead Eyes Open. It's in print, but you can also read excerpts and short comic stories on the site, and the comic itself is only 2.95 an issue. It's about a world where people start coming back as zombies, but they're just like us, only rotting. It's neat.

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April 29th, 2014: Today may well be the first day since my surgery that I don't take painkillers! The only pain left in me is the pain that cannot be killed (i.e.: I've had the Power Rangers theme song stuck in my head for several days) One year ago today: spending as much time thinking about ghosts as i assume ghosts spend thinking about me – Ryan

There has been some discussion both in my Inbox and on Twitter recently regarding the implications of the Same-Sex Marriage Act for Trans folk in England and Wales.

To try to clear things up, I have written the below (With my LGBT+ Liberal Democrats hat on, so it carries some weight) to the General Register Office. Their auto-reply promises a response within five working days, but I would imagine this one may take a little longer.

I am fairly confident of a positive reply in terms of all aspects of this with the exception of the wording to be used in a civil ceremony, which is less clear. (Although I have avoided phrasing the question below in such a way that it might unnecessarily provoke a negative response from the GRO) Sadly, non-binary folk are completely out of luck as the law requires use of either the word “husband” or “wife” in a civil ceremony. (Religious ceremonies can differ, the most notable example being that for the language used by Quakers is left up to them and is not dictated by legislation)

One issue was raised after I had sent this off, which is that buildings must be registered for same-sex marriage separately from registration of for mixed-sex marriage. Getting married without a GRC in an building which is inappropriately registered may cause problems further down the line – as to the nature of the problems people might face if the marriage collapsed, that’s one for the courts to sort out. I fear the answer would favor whoever can afford better lawyers which will often not be the trans person in the relationship. Updated 30/04: This statement was a misunderstanding on my part – you do not need to have a building registered separately for civil marriage, only for religious marriage.

Thanks to Jess Key for doing the digging around in the legislation on these last two points.

On contacting their local registry office, many people have been told that there is no requirement to specify legal gender when applying for a marriage license, (e.g. It is acceptable to apply with a passport rather than birth certificate) no requirement for legal gender to be revealed during the marriage ceremony and no requirement for legal gender to be revealed on the resulting marriage certificate.

This tallies with our understanding of the law and is a huge benefit to trans folk who have legally changed their name and live full time in their acquired gender but for whom it would not be desirable or would not be possible to change their legal gender. As well as the emotional impact of being incorrectly gendered on your wedding day, people in this position may have transitioned many years ago and fear “coming out” to friends, colleagues etc if their birth gender is listed on notices or referred to during the wedding ceremony.

Unfortunately, the advice given has been contradicted by DCMS who stated that marriage documents would all show birth gender for those not in possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate. At least some solicitors also seem to be unclear as to what the position is, in particular with the correct wording (husband or wife) to be used during the ceremony.

If you could clarify your understanding of the situation regarding this for people who do not hold a GRC, we would be grateful. Any references to official policy would also be useful.

[LPs. Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

I bought my first Ellington LP when I was in college: This One’s for Blanton, piano-bass duets with Ray Brown. I had read that Ellington’s piano style had influenced Thelonious Monk. That made me curious.

But where should you start? (And you should, really.) The answer, I think, is still The Great Paris Concert, now a bunch of files, and a ridiculously good buy from the usual sources.

Ellington plays all day today at WKCR.

Related reading
All OCA Duke Ellington posts (Pinboard)

I.

Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science.

That is, in let’s say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn’t tell you much until you give some other people who are taking a placebo drug you know doesn’t work – but which they themselves believe in – and see how many of them recover. That number tells you how many people will recover whether the drug works or not. Unless people on your real drug do significantly better than people on the placebo drug, you haven’t found anything.

On the meta-level, you’re studying some phenomenon and you get some positive findings. That doesn’t tell you much until you take some other researchers who are studying a phenomenon you know doesn’t exist – but which they themselves believe in – and see how many of them get positive findings. That number tells you how many studies will discover positive results whether the phenomenon is real or not. Unless studies of the real phenomenon do significantly better than studies of the placebo phenomenon, you haven’t found anything.

Trying to set up placebo science would be a logistical nightmare. You’d have to find a phenomenon that definitely doesn’t exist, somehow convince a whole community of scientists across the world that it does, and fund them to study it for a couple of decades without them figuring out the gig.

Luckily we have a natural experiment in terms of parapsychology – the study of psychic phenomena – which most reasonable people don’t believe exists but which a community of practicing scientists does and publishes papers on all the time.

The results are pretty dismal. Parapsychologists are able to produce experimental evidence for psychic phenomena about as easily as normal scientists are able to produce such evidence for normal, non-psychic phenomena. This suggests the existence of a very large “placebo effect” in science – ie with enough energy focused on a subject, you can always produce “experimental evidence” for it that meets the usual scientific standards. As Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it:

Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored – that they are unfairly being held to higher standards than everyone else. I’m willing to believe that. It just means that the standard statistical methods of science are so weak and flawed as to permit a field of study to sustain itself in the complete absence of any subject matter.

These sorts of thoughts have become more common lately in different fields. Psychologists admit to a crisis of replication as some of their most interesting findings turn out to be spurious. And in medicine, John Ioannides and others have been criticizing the research for a decade now and telling everyone they need to up their standards.

“Up your standards” has been a complicated demand that cashes out in a lot of technical ways. But there is broad agreement among the most intelligent voices I read (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) about a couple of promising directions we could go:

1. Demand very large sample size.

2. Demand replication, preferably exact replication, most preferably multiple exact replications.

3. Trust systematic reviews and meta-analyses rather than individual studies. Meta-analyses must prove homogeneity of the studies they analyze.

4. Use Bayesian rather than frequentist analysis, or even combine both techniques.

5. Stricter p-value criteria. It is far too easy to massage p-values to get less than 0.05. Also, make meta-analyses look for “p-hacking” by examining the distribution of p-values in the included studies.

6. Require pre-registration of trials.

7. Address publication bias by searching for unpublished trials, displaying funnel plots, and using statistics like “fail-safe N” to investigate the possibility of suppressed research.

8. Do heterogeneity analyses or at least observe and account for differences in the studies you analyze.

9. Demand randomized controlled trials. None of this “correlated even after we adjust for confounders” BS.

10. Stricter effect size criteria. It’s easy to get small effect sizes in anything.

If we follow these ten commandments, then we avoid the problems that allowed parapsychology and probably a whole host of other problems we don’t know about to sneak past the scientific gatekeepers.

Well, what now, motherfuckers?

II.

Bem, Tressoldi, Rabeyron, and Duggan (2014), full text available for download at the top bar of the link above, is parapsychology’s way of saying “thanks but no thanks” to the idea of a more rigorous scientific paradigm making them quietly wither away.

You might remember Bem as the prestigious establishment psychologist who decided to try his hand at parapsychology and to his and everyone else’s surprise got positive results. Everyone had a lot of criticisms, some of which were very very good, and the study failed replication several times. Case closed, right?

Earlier this month Bem came back with a meta-analysis of ninety replications from tens of thousands of participants in thirty three laboratories in fourteen countries confirming his original finding, p 10, Bayes factor 7.4 * 10⁹, funnel plot beautifully symmetrical, p-hacking curve nice and right-skewed, Orwin fail-safe n of 559, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

By my count, Bem follows all of the commandments except [6] and [10]. He apologizes for not using pre-registration, but says it’s okay because the studies were exact replications of a previous study that makes it impossible for an unsavory researcher to change the parameters halfway through and does pretty much the same thing. And he apologizes for the small effect size but points out that some effect sizes are legitimately very small, this is no smaller than a lot of other commonly-accepted results, and that a high enough p-value ought to make up for a low effect size.

This is far better than the average meta-analysis. Bem has always been pretty careful and this is no exception.

So – once again – what now, motherfuckers?

III.

In retrospect, that list of ways to fix science above was a little optimistic.

The first nine items (large sample sizes, replications, low p-values, Bayesian statistics, meta-analysis, pre-registration, publication bias, heterogeneity) all try to solve the same problem: accidentally mistaking noise in the data for a signal.

We’ve placed so much emphasis on not mistaking noise for signal that when someone like Bem hands us a beautiful, perfectly clear signal on a silver platter, it briefly stuns us. “Wow, of the three hundred different terrible ways to mistake noise for signal, Bem has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt he hasn’t done any of them.” And we get so stunned we’re likely to forget that this is only part of the battle.

Bem definitely picked up a signal. The only question is whether it’s a signal of psi, or a signal of poor experimental technique.

None of these five techniques even touch poor experimental technique – or confounding, or whatever you want to call it. If an experiment is confounded, if it produces a strong signal even when its experimental hypothesis is true, then using a larger sample size will just make that signal even stronger.

Replicating it will just reproduce the confounded results again.

Low p-values will be easy to get if you perform the confounded experiment on a large enough scale.

Meta-analyses of confounded studies will obey the immortal law of “garbage in, garbage out”.

Pre-registration only assures that your study will not get any worse than it was the first time you thought of it, which may be very bad indeed.

Searching for publication bias only means you will get all of the confounded studies, instead of just some of them.

Heterogeneity just tells you whether all of the studies were confounded about the same amount.

Bayesian statistics, alone among these first eight, ought to be able to help with this problem. After all, a good Bayesian should be able to say “Well, I got some impressive results, but my prior for psi is very low, so this raises my belief in psi slightly, but raises my belief that the experiments were confounded a lot.”

Unfortunately, good Bayesians are hard to come by. People like to mock Less Wrong, saying we’re amateurs getting all starry-eyed about Bayesian statistics even while real hard-headed researchers who have been experts in them for years understand both their uses and their limitations. Well, maybe that’s true of some researchers. But the particular ones I see talking about Bayes here could do with reading the Sequences. Here’s Bem:

An opportunity to calculate an approximate answer to this question emerges from a Bayesian critique of Bem’s (2011) experiments by Wagenmakers, Wetzels, Borsboom, & van der Maas (2011). Although Wagenmakers et al. did not explicitly claim psi to be impossible, they came very close by setting their prior odds at 10^20 against the psi hypothesis. The Bayes Factor for our full database is approximately 10^9 in favor of the psi hypothesis (Table 1), which implies that our meta-analysis should lower their posterior odds against the psi hypothesis to 10^11

Let me shame both participants in this debate.

Bem, you are abusing Bayes factor. If Wagenmakers uses your 10^9 Bayes factor to adjust from his prior of 10^-20 to 10^-11, then what happens the next time you come up with another database of studies supporting your hypothesis? We all know you will, because you’ve amply proven these results weren’t due to chance, so whatever factor produced these results – whether real psi or poor experimental technique – will no doubt keep producing them for the next hundred replication attempts. When those come in, does Wagenmakers have to adjust his probability from 10^-11 to 10^-2? When you get another hundred studies, does he have to go from 10^-2 to 10^7? If so, then by conservation of expected evidence he should just update to 10^+7 right now – or really to infinity, since you can keep coming up with more studies till the cows come home. But in fact he shouldn’t do that, because at some point his thought process becomes “Okay, I already know that studies of this quality can consistently produce positive findings, so either psi is real or studies of this quality aren’t good enough to disprove it”. This point should probably happen well before he increases his probability by a factor of 10^9. See Confidence Levels Inside And Outside An Argument for this argument made in greater detail.

Wagenmakers, you are overconfident. Suppose God came down from Heaven and said in a booming voice “EVERY SINGLE STUDY IN THIS META-ANALYSIS WAS CONDUCTED PERFECTLY WITHOUT FLAWS OR BIAS, AS WAS THE META-ANALYSIS ITSELF.” You would see a p-value of less than 1.2 * 10^-10 and think “I bet that was just coincidence”? And then they could do another study of the same size, also God-certified, returning exactly the same results, and you would say “I bet that was just coincidence too”? YOU ARE NOT THAT CERTAIN OF ANYTHING. Seriously, read the @#!$ing Sequences.

Bayesian statistics, at least the way they are done here, aren’t gong to be of much use to anybody.

That leaves randomized controlled trials and effect sizes.

Randomized controlled trials are great. They eliminate most possible confounders in one fell swoop, and are excellent at keeping experimenters honest. Unfortunately, most of the studies in the Bem meta-analysis were already randomized controlled trials.

High effect sizes are really the only thing the Bem study lacks. And it is very hard to experimental technique so bad that it consistently produces a result with a high effect size.

But as Bem points out, demanding high effect size limits our ability to detect real but low-effect phenomena. Just to give an example, many physics experiments – like the ones that detected the Higgs boson or neutrinos – rely on detecting extremely small perturbations in the natural order, over millions of different trials. Less esoterically, Bem mentions the example of aspirin decreasing heart attack risk, which it definitely does and which is very important, but which has an effect size lower than that of his psi results. If humans have some kind of very weak psionic faculty that under regular conditions operates poorly and inconsistently, but does indeed exist, then excluding it by definition from the realm of things science can discover would be a bad idea.

All of these techniques are about reducing the chance of confusing noise for signal. But when we think of them as the be-all and end-all of scientific legitimacy, we end up in awkward situations where they come out super-confident in a study’s accuracy simply because the issue was one they weren’t geared up to detect. Because a lot of the time the problem is something more than just noise.

IV.

Wiseman & Schlitz’s Experimenter Effects And The Remote Detection Of Staring is my favorite parapsychology paper ever and sends me into fits of nervous laughter every time I read it.

The backstory: there is a classic parapsychological experiment where a subject is placed in a room alone, hooked up to a video link. At random times, an experimenter stares at them menacingly through the video link. The hypothesis is that this causes their galvanic skin response (a physiological measure of subconscious anxiety) to increase, even though there is no non-psychic way the subject could know whether the experimenter was staring or not.

Schiltz is a psi believer whose staring experiments had consistently supported the presence of a psychic phenomenon. Wiseman, in accordance with nominative determinism is a psi skeptic whose staring experiments keep showing nothing and disproving psi. Since they were apparently the only two people in all of parapsychology with a smidgen of curiosity or rationalist virtue, they decided to team up and figure out why they kept getting such different results.

The idea was to plan an experiment together, with both of them agreeing on every single tiny detail. They would then go to a laboratory and set it up, again both keeping close eyes on one another. Finally, they would conduct the experiment in a series of different batches. Half the batches (randomly assigned) would be conducted by Dr. Schlitz, the other half by Dr. Wiseman. Because the two authors had very carefully standardized the setting, apparatus and procedure beforehand, “conducted by” pretty much just meant greeting the participants, giving the experimental instructions, and doing the staring.

The results? Schlitz’s trials found strong evidence of psychic powers, Wiseman’s trials found no evidence whatsoever.

Take a second to reflect on how this makes no sense. Two experimenters in the same laboratory, using the same apparatus, having no contact with the subjects except to introduce themselves and flip a few switches – and whether one or the other was there that day completely altered the result. For a good time, watch the gymnastics they have to do to in the paper to make this sound sufficiently sensical to even get published. This is the only journal article I’ve ever read where, in the part of the Discussion section where you’re supposed to propose possible reasons for your findings, both authors suggest maybe their co-author hacked into the computer and altered the results.

While it’s nice to see people exploring Bem’s findings further, this is the experiment people should be replicating ninety times. I expect something would turn up.

As it is, Kennedy and Taddonio list ten similar studies with similar results. One cannot help wondering about publication bias (if the skeptic and the believer got similar results, who cares?). But the phenomenon is sufficiently well known in parapsychology that it has led to its own host of theories about how skeptics emit negative auras, or the enthusiasm of a proponent is a necessary kindling for psychic powers.

Other fields don’t have this excuse. In psychotherapy, for example, practically the only consistent finding is that whatever kind of psychotherapy the person running the study likes is most effective. Thirty different meta-analyses on the subject have confirmed this with strong effect size (d = 0.54) and good significance (p = .001).

Then there’s Munder (2013), which is a meta-meta-analysis on whether meta-analyses of confounding by researcher allegiance effect were themselves meta-confounded by meta-researcher allegiance effect. He found that indeed, meta-researchers who believed in researcher allegiance effect were more likely to turn up positive results in their studies of researcher allegiance effect (p

It gets worse. There's a famous story about an experiment where a scientist told teachers that his advanced psychometric methods had predicted a couple of kids in their class were about to become geniuses (the students were actually chosen at random). He followed the students for the year and found that their intelligence actually increased. This was supposed to be a Cautionary Tale About How Teachers’ Preconceptions Can Affect Children.

Less famous is that the same guy did the same thing with rats. He sent one laboratory a box of rats saying they were specially bred to be ultra-intelligent, and another lab a box of (identical) rats saying they were specially bred to be slow and dumb. Then he had them do standard rat learning tasks, and sure enough the first lab found very impressive results, the second lab very disappointing ones.

This scientist – let’s give his name, Robert Rosenthal – then investigated three hundred forty five different studies for evidence of the same phenomenon. He found effect sizes of anywhere from 0.15 to 1.7, depending on the type of experiment involved. Note that this could also be phrased as “between twice as strong and twenty times as strong as Bem’s psi effect”. Mysteriously, animal learning experiments displayed the highest effect size, supporting the folk belief that animals are hypersensitive to subtle emotional cues.

Okay, fine. Subtle emotional cues. That’s way more scientific than saying “negative auras”. But the question remains – what went wrong for Schlitz and Wiseman? Even if Schlitz had done everything short of saying “The hypothesis of this experiment is for your skin response to increase when you are being stared at, please increase your skin response at that time,” and subjects had tried to comply, the whole point was that they didn’t know when they were being stared at, because to find that out you’d have to be psychic. And how are these rats figuring out what the experimenters’ subtle emotional cues mean anyway? I can’t figure out people’s subtle emotional cues half the time!

I know that standard practice here is to tell the story of Clever Hans and then say That Is Why We Do Double-Blind Studies. But first of all, I’m pretty sure no one does double-blind studies with rats. Second of all, I think most social psych studies aren’t double blind – I just checked the first one I thought of, Aronson and Steele on stereotype threat, and it certainly wasn’t. Third of all, this effect seems to be just as common in cases where it’s hard to imagine how the researchers’ subtle emotional cues could make a difference. Like Schlitz and Wiseman. Or like the psychotherapy experiments, where most of the subjects were doing therapy with individual psychologists and never even saw whatever prestigious professor was running the study behind the scenes.

I think it’s a combination of subconscious emotional cues, subconscious statistical trickery, perfectly conscious fraud which for all we know happens much more often than detected, and things we haven’t discovered yet which are at least as weird as subconscious emotional cues. But rather than speculate, I prefer to take it as a brute fact. Studies are going to be confounded by the allegiance of the researcher. When researchers who don’t believe something discover it, that’s when it’s worth looking into.

V.

So what exactly happened to Bem?

Although Bem looked hard to find unpublished material, I don’t know if he succeeded. Unpublished material, in this context, has to mean “material published enough for Bem to find it”, which in this case was mostly things presented at conferences. What about results so boring that they were never even mentioned?

And I predict people who believe in parapsychology are more likely to conduct parapsychology experiments than skeptics. Suppose this is true. And further suppose that for some reason, experimenter effect is real and powerful. That means most of the experiments conducted will support Bem’s result. But this is still a weird form of “publication bias” insofar as it ignores the contrary results of hypotheticaly experiments that were never conducted.

And worst of all, maybe Bem really did do an excellent job of finding every little two-bit experiment that no journal would take. How much can we trust these non-peer-reviewed procedures?

I looked through his list of ninety studies for all the ones that were both exact replications and had been peer-reviewed (with one caveat to be mentioned later). I found only seven:

Batthyany, Kranz, and Erber: .268
Ritchie 1: 0.015
Ritchie 2: -0.219
Richie 3: -0.040
Subbotsky 1: 0.279
Subbotsky 2: 0.292
Subbotsky 3: -.399

Three find large positive effects, two find approximate zero effects, and two find large negative effects. Without doing any calculatin’, this seems pretty darned close to chance for me.

Okay, back to that caveat about replications. One of Bem’s strongest points was how many of the studies included were exact replications of his work. This is important because if you do your own novel experiment, it leaves a lot of wiggle room to keep changing the parameters and statistics a bunch of times until you get the effect you want. This is why lots of people want experiments to be preregistered with specific committments about what you’re going to test and how you’re going to do it. These experiments weren’t preregistered, but conforming to a previously done experiment is a pretty good alternative.

Except that I think the criteria for “replication” here were exceptionally loose. For example, Savva et al was listed as an “exact replication” of Bem, but it was performed in 2004 – seven years before Bem’s original study took place. I know Bem believes in precognition, but that’s going too far. As far as I can tell “exact replication” here means “kinda similar psionic-y thing”. Also, Bem classily lists his own experiments as exact replications of themselves, which gives a big boost to the “exact replications return the same results as Bem’s original studies” line. I would want to see much stricter criteria for replication before I relax the “preregister your trials” requirement.

(Richard Wiseman – the same guy who provided the negative aura for the Wiseman and Schiltz experiment – has started a pre-register site for Bem replications. He says he has received five of them. This is very promising. There is also a separate pre-register for parapsychology trials in general. I am both extremely pleased at this victory for good science, and ashamed that my own field is apparently behind parapsychology in the “scientific rigor” department)

That is my best guess at what happened here – a bunch of poor-quality, peer-unreviewed studies that weren’t as exact replications as we would like to believe, all subject to mysterious experimenter effects.

This is not a criticism of Bem or a criticism of parapsychology. It’s something that is inherent to the practice of meta-analysis, and even more, inherent to the practice of science. Other than a few very exceptional large medical trials, there is not a study in the world that would survive the level of criticism I am throwing at Bem right now.

I think Bem is wrong. The level of criticism it would take to prove a wrong study wrong is higher than that almost any existing study can withstand. That is not encouraging for existing studies.

VI.

The motto of the Royal Society – Hooke, Boyle, Newton, some of the people who arguably invented modern science – was nullus in verba, “take no one’s word”.

This was a proper battle cry for seventeenth century scientists. Think about the (admittedly kind of mythologized) history of Science. The scholastics saying that matter was this, or that, and justifying themselves by long treatises about how based on A, B, C, the word of the Bible, Aristotle, self-evident first principles, and the Great Chain of Being all clearly proved their point. Then other scholastics would write different long treatises on how D, E, and F, Plato, St. Augustine, and the proper ordering of angels all indicated that clearly matter was something different. Both groups were pretty sure that the other had make a subtle error of reasoning somewhere, and both groups were perfectly happy to spend centuries debating exactly which one of them it was.

And then Galileo said “Wait a second, instead of debating exactly how objects fall, let’s just drop objects off of something really tall and see what happens”, and after that, Science.

Yes, it’s kind of mythologized. But like all myths, it contains a core of truth. People are terrible. If you let people debate things, they will do it forever, come up with horrible ideas, get them entrenched, play politics with them, and finally reach the point where they’re coming up with theories why people who disagree with them are probably secretly in the pay of the Devil.

Imagine having to conduct the global warming debate, except that you couldn’t appeal to scientific consensus and statistics because scientific consensus and statistics hadn’t been invented yet. In a world without science, everything would be like that.

Heck, just look at philosophy.

This is the principle behind the Pyramid of Scientific Evidence. The lowest level is your personal opinions, no matter how ironclad you think the logic behind them is. Just above that is expert opinion, because no matter how expert someone is they’re still only human. Above that is anecdotal evidence and case studies, because even though you’re finally getting out of people’s heads, it’s still possible for the content of people’s heads to influence which cases they pay attention to. At each level, we distill away more and more of the human element, until presumably at the top the dross of humanity has been purged away entirely and we end up with pure unadulterated reality.

The Pyramid of Scientific Evidence

And for a while this went well. People would drop things off towers, or see how quickly gases expanded, or observe chimpanzees, or whatever.

Then things started getting more complicated. People started investigating more subtle effects, or effects that shifted with the observer. The scientific community became bigger, everyone didn’t know everyone anymore, you needed more journals to find out what other people had done. Statistics became more complicated, allowing the study of noisier data but also bringing more peril. And a lot of science done by smart and honest people ended up being wrong, and we needed to figure out exactly which science that was.

And the result is a lot of essays like this one, where people who think they’re smart take one side of a scientific “controversy” and say which studies you should believe. And then other people take the other side and tell you why you should believe different studies than the first person thought you should believe. And there is much argument and many insults and citing of authorities and interminable debate for, if not centuries, at least a pretty long time.

The highest level of the Pyramid of Scientific Evidence is meta-analysis. But a lot of meta-analyses are crap. This meta-analysis got p it isn’t even one of the crap ones. Crap meta-analyses look more like this, or even worse.

How do I know it’s crap? Well, I use my personal judgment. How do I know my personal judgment is right? Well, a smart well-credentialed person like James Coyne agrees with me. How do I know James Coyne is smart? I can think of lots of cases where he’s been right before. How do I know those count? Well, John Ioannides has published a lot of studies analyzing the problems with science, and confirmed that cases like the ones Coyne talks about are pretty common. Why can I believe Ioannides’ studies? Well, there have been good meta-analyses of them. But how do I know if those meta-analyses are crap or not? Well…

The Ouroboros of Scientific Evidence

Science! YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE! It was said that you would destroy reliance on biased experts, not join them! Bring balance to epistemology, not leave it in darkness!

I LOVED YOU!!!!

Edit: Conspiracy theory by Andrew Gelman

#785, 28th February 1998

In the mid 90s, if you were looking for alternatives to Britpop’s domination of the media you’d find fertile pickings – so fertile, in fact, that it turned into a whole line of attack. Take Britpop’s nostalgic, ironised relationship with the country’s pop past, and contrast it with trip-hop, or drum’n’bass, and their rapid innovation and pace of change. To make the argument even more enticing, Britpop stars were mostly white, while black and Asian British musicians played huge roles in the scenes held up against them. Nostalgic white past versus thrilling multi-cultural futurism: it was an almost irresistible frame.

But it was also too simplistic. One of the things the analysis left out – because Britpop left it out – was the heritage of immigrant communities within Britain – which ran back well beyond the cultural memory of Swinging London. Nostalgia could be a poison, but it could also lead to splendid, resonant music, so why impose conceptual limits on who gets to make that music? Black and Asian Britons had a 60s and a 70s here too. Fight the past with the future, by all means, but other pasts, and other nostalgias, were available, and could be just as vital. “Brimful Of Asha” proved it.

Cornershop came out of an angry, forgotten moment just before Britpop hit. They were Riot Grrrl fellow travellers with a taste for barbed theatre about ‘Britishness’ and the perceptions of where Asians fitted – the name, the “curry-coloured” vinyl, the righteous incineration of Morrissey photos. “Get on the streets and fight! The powers that be” shouted their clattery debut “England’s Dreaming”, whose video showed plenty of Union Jacks – and their scummier wavers.

But the music didn’t catch up to the rhetoric, and I doubt I gave them much of a chance, at least compared to thrilling Wiija labelmates Huggy Bear or the catchier political pop of Chumbawamba. And – as if it needs saying – they seemed as likely to get to Number One as any band in the habit of releasing split singles with Blood Sausage would be. Even less likely, you would say, than a Housemartins bassist becoming the hottest ticket in British dance music.

Some might argue – especially as Norman Cook himself has jokingly conceded it – that Fatboy Slim ruined “Brimful Of Asha”. It’s certainly true that the bits he slices out are some of the song’s most beautiful and important. Gone is the recital of Indian and other touchstones – “Solid State Radio – 45!” and all that – which adds so much texture and emotional weight to “Brimful”. It’s one of the great pop lists, like Kevin Rowland’s furious count-off of Irish writers in “Dance Stance”, or Daft Punk’s tribute to house pioneers on “Teachers”, a personal testament to how culture builds you. Gone also are the gorgeous bloom of strings that ends the song so perfectly.

These are harsh losses, particularly as it’s so easy to imagine Cook fitting them into the single mix – he’d only have to ditch a half dozen “bosoms”. But he keeps a lot of the parts of “Brimful” that matter, and his central idea – speeding it up – is a brilliant one. Cornershop are often a leisurely band – Tjinder Singh is particularly good at setting up friendly, fuzzy, loping grooves to build his ideas around – but sped up, the riff of “Brimful Of Asha” reveals itself as one of the era’s sharpest, a piece of propulsive mod swagger. It’s half-pilfered off “Sweet Jane”, but that had always been part of the point – rock belongs to Cornershop just like any other music they use.

But while it’s mostly a Cornershop record, “Brimful Of Asha” is recognisably a Fatboy Slim track too. Cook had a wonderful streak of remixes and original tracks around this time – this, “The Rockefeller Skank”, “Michael Jackson”, his mix of Wildchild’s “Renegade Master” – almost all of which used the same trick. They’re fast, goofily repetitive, breakbeat-driven dance records, then instead of dropping the beat out for the breakdown, they start cutting it up faster and faster, bringing the track to a delirious head so the drop back into the chorus is a different kind of release. It’s magnificently crass and it works almost every time. On “Brimful” he uses the “bosom for a pillow” line as the repeating core, then works the cut-up trick on “and dancing – and dancing – and dancing” – and it’s a wonderful, surging moment. With that and the amped-up riff, Cook gives back as much as he takes away: this and the original are two brilliant singles, not one spoiled.

What’s more, they’re two brilliant singles with the same emotional centre. “Brimful Of Asha” is one of those occasional number ones about how glorious and liberating music is. “Dancing Queen” is another, so is “Come On Eileen” Unlike those records, “Brimful” was not originally about dancing – it was about music and film not just as communal escape but communal resistance. An unbreakable thread linked the band of 1997 to the band of 1993. “We don’t care about no government warnings, about the promotion of the simple life or the dams they are building”, to quote the record’s most resonant, compact line, one the remix shrewdly keeps. But any song about that can be very easily diverted to dancing, which has a long, intimate relationship with community and resistance.

In either of its versions, “Brimful Of Asha” is wise, exciting pop: in one version slightly more wise, in the other slightly more exciting. It remains an inspiration. I’m writing this in April 2014: two months into what I grimly suspect might be years of Britpop retrospection. England, once again, is looking backwards. But just as then, that’s too simple a diagnosis. There’s no shame in looking backwards, the past is full of treasure – the key is not to hoard it but to use it, to come back out of the past and share what you find. That’s what Cornershop did, building a fragment of their heritage into a part of everyone’s – stepping forward at the dying days of Britpop to show what nostalgia was good for.

In a world of people who don't care what absolutely anyone talks about on Twitter, I would be fairly hardcore in my not giving a shit.  Compare me though to countless millions up and down the country, and I would actually be fairly soft in my convictions.  When then sections of the media search out anyone with a link, tenuous or otherwise, to the UKIPs, and discover, horror of horrors, that some have rather unpleasant views of the 140 character variety, and yet, and yet, the UKIPs support continues to grow, you would have thought it might have registered by now that your average UKIP supporter/sympathiser doesn't care what someone's said about Islam, or immigration.  If anything, if they've even heard about the controversy, it might make them more determined than ever to vote for the party.

People are not supporting the UKIPs for their specific policies, mainly because apart from getting out of the EU they don't have any, or at least none that would much appeal to those who have flocked to their anti-establishment banner.  Their bedrock of support is built around what you could call the angry, embittered older man vote, if that is you wanted to further disparage a perfectly legitimate view of the world.  I'd wager all of us have one or two acquaintances who fit the bill: generally personable, but never happier than when complaining about something or other, whether it be the miserable attitudes of others (oh irony), the appearance of the youth of the day, or say, immigration.  Most don't use overtly racist language and instead are merely xenophobic.  Regardless, any suggestion that what they're saying is unacceptable is just grist to the mill, and provokes accusations of attempting to impose political correctness or censorship rather than engage in debate, which is precisely why UKIP's support seems to be increasing rather than falling away.

Call it a loathing for the political class, a general malaise about what's happened in recent years at Westminster, or what was merely once angry, embittered apathy, it now appears transformed into something with a massive potential impact. It's built around grievances, some legitimate, others not, and unless you haven't noticed, grievances are pretty much all politics seems to be about of late.

It's also a world view which has been fed drip by drip by the tabloids, even if they for the most part eschew UKIP and Farage themselves.  Sunny in an otherwise well argued post says the media have ferociously attacked the party, which is only true in the sense they've mocked the candidates, went on about Godfrey Bloom and laughed at Nigel Farage's German wife being the very best candidate to work as his secretary.  When it comes to why the UKIPs look set to sweep the board come the 22nd of May, it's because they've done just as much as the party to push their overview.  We had months of scaremongering about millions of Romanians and Bulgarians coming here at 0:01 on New Year's Day (politicians from the main three parties also joined in, it must be said), and despite their failure to materialise, the damage was done.  On the front pages today is the story of a multiple murderer getting just less than £1,000 in compensation for negligible damage to some of his possessions, while inside you can guarantee there'll be at least one outrage owing to perceived political correctness or barmy EUrocrats.  This dislike of modern Britain hasn't just come about organically: much as it is down to a sense of inexorable, unchallenged change for the worse, it's been best articulated not by Farage or Nick Griffin but the Mail, Express and Sun.  It's no coincidence the UKIP's spin doctor is former Express hack Patrick O'Flynn.

As for how you tackle this insurgency, the answer might be to just wait.  At the moment much of the UKIP's momentum is based on the coverage they continue to get, despite not having a single MP.  Caroline Lucas and the Greens would kill for such attention.  Taking them on in argument is unlikely to work even if someone with more of an idea of how to do battle with Farage than Nick Clegg takes up the challenge, such is the level of mistrust, not to mention the strength of conviction many of their supporters have about where the country has gone wrong, things that simply aren't going to be reversed.  Farage's biggest worry should be if, after all the hype and thousands of words predicting a victory in the European elections, his party then fails to win the largest share of the vote.  Such a result would bode extremely ill for the general election, when the most realistic hope is to get Farage into parliament and do damage to both Labour and the Tories.  The UKIP's support is definitely more broad-based than the BNP's was, but that doesn't mitigate against a similar collapse should the expected breakthrough not materialise.  This obviously doesn't deal with the underlying reasons for why UKIP has surged, yet it might require its withering away before the big three can start the proper, vital conversation with the voters they've abandoned. 

Wednesday

Last week’s debate with M. Farage, the Frenchman who leads the UKIP Party, went tolerably well for our own Nick Clegg, but I am called in this morning to help brief him for this evening’s second contest. I come armed with a particularly fine specimen of the orchard doughty – the sturdy, rugged staffs which I issue to my gamekeepers (for dealing with poachers) and tenant farmers (so that, red-faced and panting, they can wave them whist ineffectually chasing scrumpers).

“The very first time he tries to be clever,” I tell Clegg, “give him one across the snoot with this”. “Oh, I don’t think Nick should attack his opponent,” sneers one of the 12-year-old PPE graduates with whom our leader insists on surrounding himself these days. “I don’t mean Farage, you booby,” I return shortly, “I mean Dimbleby.”

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

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• Floreat Estonia
• The disappearance of the 11:15 from Nottingham London Road Lower Level

Stop me if I've told this one here before. I don't think I have.

My first few years as a television writer, I was teamed with a bright gentleman named Dennis Palumbo…and he used to sometimes remark that we complemented each other well. I'm not sure what I did that he couldn't do but he was a whole lot better than I was at the salesmanship and "pitching" part of our jobs. After we completed our stint writing on Welcome Back, Kotter, we decided to go in different directions and we remain friends to this day. And by the way: Dennis, if you're reading this, aren't we about due for a lunch?

The morning after we finished Kotter, I was offered a heap of comic book writing work so I had that to do. A few days later, I met with our agent, who now had the unenviable task of selling us separately. He and others had warned us that when a team splits up, producers are hesitant to hire one member for fear they'll get the one who just typed up what the other guy thought of. That wasn't how Evanier and Palumbo functioned — for good or ill, we each wrote approximately half — but there have been teams like that.

Stu the Agent was really good at selling his clients, even clients who had a handful of credits and no sample of their solo work. In a matter of days, I found myself going in for a meeting with the producers of What's Happening?, which was a pretty popular show that followed Kotter on ABC on Thursday nights. Around the Kotter offices, most folks seemed to think What's Happening? was a pretty mediocre show that only got good ratings because it had us as its lead-in. As I quickly discovered, around the What's Happening? offices, they thought Kotter was a pretty mediocre show that only got good ratings because folks would sit through it as they waited for What's Happening? to start.

Nevertheless, I came up with an idea they said they liked and we had some meetings about it and I'm still not sure why I didn't end up writing at least that one episode. In the meantime, Stu sent me in to meet the producer of a new variety show that Richard Pryor would be starring in for NBC. (For some reason, he sent me out for almost every show that needed writers and starred black people. I also co-wrote an episode of a sitcom called Baby, I'm Back, which starred Demond Wilson back before he was the superstar he is today.)

There were a couple of problems with me writing on The Richard Pryor Show, not the least of which was that I wasn't a big fan of Mr. Pryor. Everyone told me he was the funniest man on the continent but if he was, I hadn't seen it. I'd seen him perform live once — a surprise set at the Comedy Store — and it wasn't very good. In fact, it was so not good, he gave up and walked off stage well before the next guy was ready to go on. I'm sure he was great on other nights but I wasn't there when that happened.

Not that I admired everyone I ever wrote for but that suggested I just might not be quite in sync with the Pryor style. Another problem was that much of what I had heard was about using drugs and/or being black and I had no experience doing either. So I felt I was the wrong guy for the gig but I also felt that since Stu had set up the meeting, I oughta go. It was in a big building up on Sunset a few blocks from Tower Records so I decided, "I'll park for the meeting, go in and have it and then, after I don't get the job, I'll walk down to Tower and buy some albums."

That was pretty much how it went. The producer was a smart, nice man named Rocco Urbisci, who has since been responsible for a lot of fine specials with stand-up comedians. He was smart enough to instantly know I should not be hired and nice enough to spend fifteen minutes talking with me and pretending I would be properly considered. For the last five or so, we were joined by Mr. Pryor, who was working on something elsewhere in the office. He poked his head in to say goodbye to Rocco and on a whim, sat in on the end of my interview, saying absolutely nothing to me.

Ah, but I did hear him whisper something to Rocco that sounded like, "I thought you were going to interview more black writers instead of this parade of white guys." If that's what he said, I had no problem with it. As it turned out, The Richard Pryor Show was written mostly by a parade of white guys and I was glad I wasn't among them. (I later got to know several of them and it was not, they all said, a happy experience. Shows that get canceled after four episodes usually aren't.)

As I left the office that day, Richard Pryor and I shared an elevator down and managed some polite conversation. Then we exited the lobby together and both walked east on Sunset. As it turned out, we were both heading for Tower Records.

Pryor talked a little about how nervous he was about this new series and how he knew the kind of show he wanted to do couldn't fit in with network prime-time television. Feeling as I did that I couldn't fit in with the kind of show he wanted to do, I could relate but I didn't say that. I was trying to think of something pleasant and polite I could say to the guy that wasn't "Well, I think you're very funny." Because at that moment, I didn't particularly think that. I respected his success but like I said, he'd never really made me laugh.

Then, suddenly, he did. As we walked down Sunset, we passed a small strip club named 77 Sunset Strip. It's no longer where it was…and where it was was not at that famous address.

On the front of it was a big sign that promised Live Nude Girls and under that was a smaller one. It advertised some man's name and billed him as "The World's Foremost Erotic Magician." By this point, I was grasping for something to say to Pryor so I asked aloud, "What does an erotic magician do?"

Without missing a beat, Richard Pryor shrugged and said, like it should have been obvious, "Saws the woman in half…fucks one half. Then he fucks the other half." I practically fell over laughing, as much from the instantaneous delivery as the line itself. I guess I don't have to tell anyone that with Pryor, it wasn't so much what he said as how he said it.

It was three more blocks to Tower Records and those were the three funniest blocks of my life. Pryor was ticking off one idea after another of things an erotic magician might do — increasingly-filthy concepts involving sex toys and pulling silks and rabbits out of different orifices. I was laughing so hard, I literally had trouble walking. I remember thinking (a) I'd give my entire Kotter paycheck for a tape of this, (b) he could do this verbatim on a stage and kill, and (c) I have got to see more of this man performing.

He ran out of ideas for erotic magic about the time we reached Tower Records. I mentioned something about thinking I should pay a cover and a minimum for the walk, thanked him for the entertainment and we went our separate ways within that vast business. Like most record stores, it's gone now but once upon a time, it carried everything. Everything. Some customers found so much to purchase there that the place actually had a few supermarket-style shopping carts available.

As I browsed, I noticed a gentleman a few years older than me and wearing nicer clothes loading albums into one of those carts, practically filling it. At first, I thought he was a well-dressed store employee but closer inspection revealed it was Elton John. He appeared to be purchasing one copy of every record they had that he wasn't on.

A few minutes later, I passed Pryor who was flipping through albums in the jazz section and I pointed out to him the man I thought was Elton John. He looked, said it wasn't, then he looked again and said, "Hey, that is him. Come on." He motioned for me to go with him and I did, having no idea why he was asking me along. I guess he thought it would be rude not to.

As we approached him, Pryor had the same thought I'd had. He said, "He looks like he works here." I whispered back, "Ask him where the Jerry Vale albums are." Which he did. He walked up to Elton John and said, "Excuse me…can you tell me where the Jerry Vale albums are?" Without even looking at his questioner, Elton said, "Aisle three…easy listening" and then returned to his browsing.

Pryor said, "Elton? It's me, Richie. Richie Pryor." Elton John turned around, greeted him with a handshake and about half a hug and they began talking…and I found myself in an awkward if amusing position. Elton John nodded to me since I was obviously "with" Pryor…but Richard didn't introduce me. (I would have been shocked if he'd remembered my name.)

So I just stood there for ten or fifteen minutes like I was a part of the conversation. When either man laughed, I laughed. When one made an interesting point, I shook my head as if to say, "Hey, that's an interesting point." I probably should have just butted in and said to Richard, "Hey, it's been great hanging out with you but I have to run" then split…but I was just kinda curious to see how long it would be before either one acknowledged my existence.

Glancing around, I noticed a cluster of people at the front of the store all looking and pointing at us. It was easy to read their minds. They were all thinking, "That's Elton John…and that's Richard Pryor…but who's the tall clown in the bad jacket?" And in my mind's ear, I could hear strains of the Sesame Street tune, "One of these things is not like the others…" What you had there were three men: One of the world's top musical artists…one of the world's greatest comedians…and the guy who was writing the Scooby Doo comic books. Yeah, there's three of a kind.

Further glancing caused me to recognize one person in the cluster of folks trying to identify me — someone I actually knew. It was a guy also named Mark from our old Comic Book Club. I gave him a little wave, then returned to the discussion of which I was not a part. I nodded a bit more, laughed a bit more and then — when the two men began to promise to get together soon — I shook hands with Elton John, said goodbye to Richard Pryor and left. I'd bet good money that before they parted, one of them said to the other, "Who the hell was that?" And the other just shrugged.

That evening, Mark called me at home. With great hesitation and skepticism, he asked, "Uh, were you in Tower Records today?"

I said, "Tower Records? Let's see…Tower Records, Tower Records…Oh, sure. Richie and I stopped in and ran into Elton John there." Well, that was true.

Mark demanded, "How do you know Richard Pryor and Elton John?" I told him I was in talks about writing on Pryor's new TV show. That was true, too. I didn't lie but I said nothing to disabuse him of the impression that I was always breathing the same air as guys like that, people with that kind of fame and income. (Today, Elton John has so much money, he has Annie Leibovitz on staff just to take his selfies for him.)

When people tell me they know someone a lot more famous than they are, I sometimes wonder: Do they know this person the way I knew Richard Pryor? Which is to say, "Barely." Years later, I worked with the man on a couple of other shows…but I never got to know him that well. I got the impression few people did.

On those shows and just watching him on the screen, my estimation of him as a comedian improved considerably, though I can't say I ever agreed with those who hailed him as the best of his generation. I also became less inclined to write off any comedian as unfunny based on a small sampling of them. I'm more likely now to think, "Well, maybe I haven't seen this person at their best."

One time on this blog when I mentioned that I didn't think Richard Pryor was the greatest comic ever, a friend who thought that called to talk some sense into me. We had one of those discussions that goes nowhere because there's no right or wrong about things like that. What you find funny might leave me cold and vice-versa. Finally, he asked me what I thought was the single funniest Richard Pryor routine. I told him it was the one about the erotic magician. He said, "Huh?" He actually said that word: "Huh?" Then he added, "I've never heard his erotic magician bit."

I told him, "Well, I guess you don't know Richard Pryor as well as I do."