Andrew Hickey

From Kiwiblog:

Rebecca Rosen writes:

Last year I wrote about some very interesting research being done by Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois, based on software that crawled Amazon for a random selection of books. At the time, his results were only preliminary, but they were nevertheless startling: There were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections (which cover titles published in 1923 and after) had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public.

. . . .

But the current lengths of copyright are life plus 50 years in NZ and life plus 70 years in the United States. Both are far too long.

I’m tempted to say that copyright should expire upon the death of the author. However people might start shooting authors in order to get their books for free.

Link to the rest at Kiwiblog and thanks to Randall for the tip.

Passive Guy believes himself to be a friend to and advocate for authors, but he agrees that the current term of copyright is too long.

Even if a book has long been out of print and is no longer for sale, someone who would like to republish it can have insoluble problems even tracking down the owner of the copyright if the author is dead.

The US Copyright office will record transfers of copyright ownership if they receive transfer documents, but there is no requirement that such documents be recorded.

One of PG’s least-favorite clauses in publishing contracts, the one that licenses a book to a publisher for the duration of the copyright, is excessively unfair because of the length of the copyright. Even if the descendants of a deceased author would like to self-publish an out-of-print book, the publishing agreement can prevent this for 70 years after the author dies. If the original publisher has gone out of business, tracking down the current owner of the publishing agreement is enough to put many people off the idea of trying to republish the book.

In the United States, the right of an author to obtain copyright protection for his/her works originates in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, sometimes called the Copyright or Patent Clause. This clause empowers the United States Congress:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Note the use of the phrase “limited Times.”

The underlying idea was that, for both patents and copyrights, the creator would have exclusive rights to exploit the patent/copyright, then the subject of the patent/copyright would go into the public domain. Absent patent and copyright laws, inventors and authors would have no power to prevent others from copying their works.

The U.S. Congress first exercised its copyright powers with the Copyright Act of 1790 which reflects the sense of many of the drafters of the Constitution concerning what comprised “limited Times.”

The 1790 Act granted authors the exclusive right to publish and vend “maps, charts and books” for a term of 14 years. This 14 year term was renewable for one additional 14 year term, if the author was alive at the end of the first time. This was very similar to the term permitted under British copyright law at the time.

PG is not going to opine about what the appropriate term for a copyright should be, but does believe the life of the author plus 70 years is too long. As the quoted post above states, for the large majority of books, the current time limit serves to make those books unavailable to readers.

PG wants authors to be paid for their works but, along with most authors, also wants books to be widely available to those who would like to read them. He believes that very few authors would be deprived of meaningful income from their books with a shorter term of copyright.

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Ahead of the annual conference of the British Liberal Democrats there has been a certain amount of posturing. Nick Clegg has been talking about the need for a "grown up" party that can carry through the responsibilities of power. This supposed debate of Realos- the pragmatic party of government- versus Fundis- unrealistic keepers of some pure Liberal flame- is a complete straw man anyway. Clegg may actually wish to face a challenge in order to be seen as being the master of his party, but the truth is that the Lib Dem leadership is promoting an inward looking and irrelevant debate. The political weather is not going to be made by whether or not a Lib Dem junior minister receives the whole-hearted backing of the party membership in their promotion of some Civil Service inspired political initiative or not. The Cleggite "Realo" case is that the most Liberal thing that the party can do is support the parliamentary party in the exercise of power. The "Fundi" case, in as far as it is not an Aunt Sally set up by the leadership, is that the party must return to its principles.

I am terribly frightened of death, I thought. Death has destroyed me; it isn't Sri Krishna, destroyer of all people; it is death, destroyer of my friends. It singled them out and left everyone else undisturbed. Fucking death, I thought. You homed in on those I love. You utilized their folly and prevailed. You took advantage of foolish people, which is truly unkind. Emily Dickinson was full of shit when she prattled about 'kindly Death'; that's an abominable thought, that death is kind. She never saw a six-car pile-up on the Eastshore Freeway. Art, like theology, a packaged fraud. Downstairs the people are fighting while I look for God in a reference book. God, ontological arguments for. Better yet: practical arguments against. There is no such listing. It would have helped a lot if it had come in time: arguments against being foolish, ontological and empirical, ancient and modern (see common sense). The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.

He said one time in group therapy that all he wanted to be was a pair of eyes bugging out from the wall, so he could see everyone but no one could see him. Just an observer, not a part of what was going on, ever.

Ahead of the annual conference of the British Liberal Democrats there has been a certain amount of posturing. Nick Clegg has been talking about the need for a "grown up" party that can carry through the responsibilities of power. This supposed debate of Realos- the pragmatic party of government- versus Fundis- unrealistic keepers of some pure Liberal flame- is a complete straw man anyway. Clegg may actually wish to face a challenge in order to be seen as being the master of his party, but the truth is that the Lib Dem leadership is promoting an inward looking and irrelevant debate. The political weather is not going to be made by whether or not a Lib Dem junior minister receives the whole-hearted backing of the party membership in their promotion of some Civil Service inspired political initiative or not. The Cleggite "Realo" case is that the most Liberal thing that the party can do is support the parliamentary party in the exercise of power. The "Fundi" case, in as far as it is not an Aunt Sally set up by the leadership, is that the party must return to its principles.

Trinity War



I'm not the first person, nor probably the twentieth, to make the point, but it bears repeating: DC in 2013 is cribbing pretty hard from the Marvel 1998 playbook. They've succeeded in leveling out almost all tonal variance across the line, ensuring the consistency of a recognizable house style across almost every book they publish. It's difficult for individual voices to gain traction, and there is every indication that this situation, rather than being accidental, proceeds in precisely the manner the company intends. Many talented creators have either left voluntarily or been effectively blackballed, with the majority of titles given to journeyman hacks or amenable veterans. You don't hear a lot of creators working on the Nu52 talking about certain books being "passion projects" or lifelong dreams come true - individual creator motivations appear almost entirely absent from the finished product.

Whereas Marvel seems very interested in building the careers of individual creators by matching writers and artists with projects best suited to their interests (and Marvel is consistently adamant that creators are never forced to work on titles or characters to whom they have a disinclination), there is a wide gap at DC between two types of creators: a (very small) handful of marquee writers and artists who get to shape the direction of the entire line, and everyone else.

Look back at DC in the late 90s: many good creators were given a lot of freedom to create distinctive and memorable series under the general auspices of the mainstream superhero line. The very best creators were pacified with creator-participation deals from sub-imprints like Vertigo or (later) Wildstorm - the real value of which, for the company, was never the books themselves (although they certainly liked having a number of bookstore ready perennial sellers like Preacher, Transmetropolitan, and 100 Bullets), but rather the good will gained by giving A-list creators the kind of selective carte blanche that meant they would also be motivated to stick around and craft more IP for Batman and the Justice League. Eventually the Powers That Be noticed the discrepancy between what the company received from creators in exchange for their loyalty and the benefits the creators reaped from their participation agreements, and Vertigo contracts were changed accordingly. Multiple sources have reported on Warner Brothers' unhappiness at learning that they didn't own the media rights to some of what they had believed to be their most lucrative properties. There is every reason to believe that this situation proved at least partial impetus for many of the corporation's recent, risible, and eminently logical decisions.

Even though Marvel has always sold more comics, in the late 90s DC sold smarter comics. WIth a few noble exceptions, Marvel in the late 90s was in piss-poor shape - years of ruthless downsizing and poor corporate governance leading up to bankruptcy had rendered the company afraid of its own shadow, locked into a series of conservative editorial choices that led to years of stagnation and diminishing returns. Now the situation is precisely reversed. It's not simply a matter of Marvel consistently making better comics than DC, although few would seriously argue that the median quality of the DC line comes anywhere close to Marvel's at present. Marvel is still Marvel, and their more creator-centric approach (or, to put it more precisely, an approach that offers the appearance of more opportunity for individual creative voices to influence editorial direction) is certainly capable of producing as many different types of stinkers as DC's suffocating top-down storytelling-by-fiat approach.

Look again for just a moment at Age of Ultron, as terrible an event book as you can possibly imagine, undercut by its obeisance to following its (very powerful) creators' every stylistic tic to its logical conclusion regardless of consequences. The best books in the Marvel line are so because the the company has allowed good writers and artists to craft books with distinctive flavors and tones apart from any considerations of a singular "house style." You'd be hard pressed to find any real stylistic commonality between (to pick three of the company's most lauded current titles) Jason Aaron's Thor, Mark Waid's Daredevil, or Kieron Gillen's Young Avengers, other than the fact that all three of these books present strong individual authorial voices. Age of Ultron did, too, and its abject creative failure also represents a kind of testament to the company's willingness to give creators as much rope is necessary to ensure they can hang themselves with alacrity.

Compared to Age of Ultron, or even what we've seen of the buildup to Jonathan Hickman's Infinity, there's nothing in Trinity War to mark it as being the product of any kind of specific vision or individual creative mandate. It is very much a crossover of the "old school." Or rather, let me correct myself again: the singular creative vision at the heart of the story is that of Geoff Johns, who - despite a fair number of personal thematic and stylistic hobbyhorses (of which more than a few are evident here) - remains firmly committed to perpetuating his modern interpretation of the sturdy, well-designed superhero storytelling with which he grew up. That is to say, a studied blankness of affect, a marked professionalism that indicates that the creator knows precisely how to tell the kind of story he has set out to tell. I am certain that Johns has committed the intricacies of every JLA / JSA crossover since 1963 to memory, and has probably left detailed footnotes on his well-thumbed collection of the Avengers / Defenders War to boot. So while some of the details may have changed, specifically the level of violence, the pervasive atmosphere of suspicion and distrust, and the constant recourse to characters comparing penis size in public, the overall structure of the story will be familiar to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the conventions of superhero team-up event comics.

But just because it's undoubtedly better-written than Age of Ultron doesn't mean it's any good at all. The problem with Trinity War, as with so much of the Nu52, is quite simply that the current incarnations of these characters and situations simply are not interesting. Few DC characters emerged from the line-wide reboot in any way improved by the ordeal. Superman, despite a handful of good stories in his solo books, remains naggingly indeterminate in a way that seems most troubling in light of the fact that Superman's personality should be the baseline around which everything else at DC must inevitably cohere. Wonder Woman appears incompetent and pugnacious in equal measure. The Flash, restored more-or-less intact to his pre-1966 status quo, remains as resolutely boring as ever. Green Lantern and Batman remain intact from their pre-Flashpoint incarnations, primarily because those two characters were and remain the company's flagship franchises.

DC was never really supposed to have the kind of shared universe Marvel built in the mid-60s. This is somewhat ironic: although Marvel gets the credit for being first to the post, pretty much from the moment "The Flash of Two Worlds" was published in 1961 the company set forth on a multi-decade project to ensure every property from every corner of the publishing line fit snugly into a (completely improvised) master plan of multiple earths and intricate timelines. This meant not only the mainstream superhero line in the 1960s (all of which, like the contemporary Marvel, were somewhat of a piece tonally and therefore had fairly little trouble fitting together), but every book and property winding back to 1938, as well as those properties acquired by National / DC in the course of their long and litigious lifespan.

This isn't a new story by any means, but its vital to understanding precisely how the Nu52 makes sense in DC history. Rather than a refutation of three decades of metastasizing consistency, Crisis on Infinite Earths was the apotheosis of the impulses first codified by Gardner Fox and Julius Schwartz in 1961. (It might be hard to see in hindsight, after fifty years of intense attention to continuity, but the original stories were most definitely not intended to represent paradigm shifts for superhero comics. Fox and Schwartz cut their teeth in the pulps and the "Golden Age" of sci-fi, an era where alternate universe stories were a common trope, and the original Flash and Justice League stories were attempts to apply similar motifs to comics while also appealing to the nostalgia of a handful of older readers, no more and no less.) The real problem here, one of the core problems of the Nu52, is one of tone. This tendency was already apparent after Crisis, and an argument could be made that the comprehensive leveling of tone was one of the first concrete indications that Crisis had succeeded in its stated aims. The mania to ensure that every property fit together into a single cohesive universe meant that it was that much harder for creators to maintain individual and distinctive milieus for every character in their own books. The default became simply generic, which explains the disconcertingly bloodless tone of many titles in the years immediately following Crisis.

Early stumbles notwithstanding, once they became more comfortable with the post-Crisis status quo this became one of DC's great strengths in the nineties. They figured out how to keep a consistent universe that nonetheless left a lot of room for idiosyncratic titles. Consider the fact that for a few years in the mid-to-late-nineties the mainstream DC line was able to keep as diverse a range of titles as Starman, The Power of Shazam, Hitman, Impulse, Lobo, and The Spectre on the shelves, all radically different, all ostensibly sharing the same universe, but none of them suffering appreciably from that fact. I very fondly remember a crossover between Starman and The Power of Shazam (1998's "Lightning and Stars") that worked to the benefit of both books by highlighting the tonal differences between the two characters' environments as a feature, an important theme of the story, and not a bug to be "fixed" and leveled. If you must have shared universes, then surely this is the model companies should aspire to emulate? The wide variety of books in this sample more closely resembles the contemporary Marvel line than DC.

For any number of reasons, this isn't the way DC looks now. There is a house style. There is a sustained focus on inter-title consistency at the expense of individual creator initiative. Readers have been trained by both companies over the last decade to reward titles that "matter" at the expense of those which do not: excellent and idiosyncratic titles like China Miéville's Dial H have no relevancy to the line's larger initiatives, and languish as a result. (Not coincidentally, Dial H was one of the last projects spearheaded by Karen Berger before her exit. It's important to recognize just how important Vertigo was towards establishing a publishing model not just for the "mature-readers" comics, but for the mainstream comics line as well. DC was very creator-friendly in the nineties, and Berger was one of the persons most responsible for establishing this climate.)

So now we have an environment where Shazam and John Constantine can share panels in a completely straight-forward and unironic fashion. The tone of Shazam's solo adventures is now vaguely mordant and grisly (in a sanitized way), which is also not-so-coincidentally the tone of Constantine's book. Both characters can interact on the same footing. But what is most unique about both characters has also been lost: Shazam (which is the name we're stuck with) is far too dark and unpleasant to reflect the character's appealing virtue, while the Nu52 Constantine is a watered-down, juvenile mess without any of the ambiguity, intelligence, or charm of the original. In trying to create a consistent, comfortable shared universe context for both characters, they have sanded away everything important.

The story of Trinity of Sin is wonky in the way only a DC crossover story can be. Whereas Marvel is fortunate enough to have a psychedelic cosmology assembled from a foundation laid by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Steve Ditko's strangest ideas, DC has always muddled along with a fictional universe built on explicitly Judeo-Christian foundations, with a heaping spoonful of Greek myths and leftover concepts from the aforementioned "Golden Age" of pulpy sci-fi (i.e., the parallels between the Guardians of the Universe and Doc Smith's Lensmen). Kirby's contributions to DC's mythology have had sustained influence, but the Fourth World sits uneasily next to the Spectre and Green Lantern mythoi. This may be simply a matter of personal taste, but as a connoisseur of the cosmic I do not believe that, with a few notable exceptions, DC does cosmic anywhere near as well as Marvel.

(The exception that proves the rule is, of course, the aforementioned Crisis itself, which I still adore.)

The original sin for DC is the creation of the Spectre. Yes, the same Spectre co-created by Jerry Siegel. The problem with the Spectre - and this is a problem that has been explicitly acknowledged by multiple creators over the years - is that once you acknowledge that you have a creature who is the incarnate wrath of God sitting side-by-side with Superman, your stories will either warp accordingly or cease to make sense on a profound level. This is fairly obvious as far back as the original Justice Society stories in All Star Comics, where you see the Spectre sitting across the table from the Atom, who in case you forget, was originally just a short guy who worked out a lot and wore a leotard. (Invariably the early Justice Society adventures, which were always split up with each hero having a separate adventure within the larger story, had the Atom going undercover at a gym or college campus, in order to beat up some thugs or Fifth Columnists - you know, while the Spectre was busy flying across space and time and fighting super wizards and demons.) The problem never really went away. As rich as Christian mythology may be, it takes the wind out of the sails of superhero comics when you know Batman has been to Heaven and seen his parents at the pearly gates, and Superman has been to Hell and heard the screams of billions of tormented sinners. (Both of these events have happened.)

And yet this is how the DC universe works. There is a God in Heaven, his angels oversee creation, and the devil is real - and yet it also somehow matters that a bunch of blue dwarves set up a massive law enforcement bureaucracy at the center of the universe, and that the Earth is home to multiple pantheons of immortal (small-g) gods who are not somehow all presumptuous demons committing blasphemy against the one true God, and that there is another group of gods in a pocket dimension who believe in an all-powerful Source and keep watch over the end of the universe, and that there's a kindly wizard bestowing the wisdom of a Biblical King of Israel alongside the powers of various pagan deities on random street urchins. It just doesn't seem to fit together very smoothly, and the problem is that making it try to fit together erodes the appeal of each individual concept. On his own, the Spectre is a cool character, but in the context of a shared superhero universe he is simply one giant storytelling problem after another. The question of God has always skirted around the edges of DC, as in the recurring motif of the grasping hand at the beginning of time that Krona sees in his forbidden portal. (Just please forget Infinite Crisis.) But ultimately all these explanations and prevarications point to the fact that the DC universe, such that it is, is an unmistakably theological narrative. You can't escape the fact that God is a concrete presence in these books. Marvel is much more ambiguous, preferring to couch its universal abstractions in Darwinian and Nietzschean terms.



So it turns out that the mysterious woman who was inserted into background shots of every Nu52 first issue is actually Pandora - the real, mythical Pandora, of Greek myth, who opened Pandora's Box and allowed evil to enter the world. She's wandered the Earth for thousands of years, cursed as punishment for her transgressions. She is one of the story's titular "trinity of sin" - the other two being the Phantom Stranger and the Question. The former has been completely revamped, given a confirmed origin as Judas Iscariot, and given a secret identity, a human family, and a talking dog sidekick; the latter has been revamped into a mysterious amnesiac ancient evildoer forced to live forever, walking the earth in search of the question (get it?) that will reveal his identity. It should not need to be said that both of these revamps commit unforgivable violence against the characters' original intent. Since the first cryptic announcement of the Trinity War, fans assumed that the trinity in question would be the familiar trinity of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. I must give them some points for defying expectations, but in this instance the expectations would certainly have made more sense than what we got.

Oddly enough for a crossover involving two of the best-selling comic books in the country, the story actually picks up on a few plotlines from third-string titles like Team 7 (already canceled) and Phantom Stranger (not yet canceled but sells like shit, despite the fact that - notwithstanding the awful creative choices made in rebooting the character, J.M. DeMatteis makes the book at least somewhat readable). They've been very methodical in terms of laying the groundwork for this story. The plot begins when Pandora discovers that if a truly good soul reopens Pandora's Box, then the evils that were once trapped in the box will be reimprisoned once again. Like most sane people she assumes Superman to be genuinely good, but of course since this is the Nu52 he's not, so instead of opening the box and solving all evil it instead fucks with his head enough that he murders Doctor Light by blowing his head off with heat vision. Which is exactly what I want to see in a Superman story: Superman failing the moral paragon test and being tricked into killing people. The murder happens during the Justice League's big fight with the Justice League of America (controlled by the unappealing, amoral Nu52 Amanda Waller) in Kahndaq, after intercepting Shazam who has come to the country to spread Black Adam's ashes after killing him last month. After the fight in which Superman kills Dr. Light, the two teams come together in order to try to solve the problem with Superman. The teams split down the middle regarding the plan of action while Wonder Woman seeks out the Justice League Dark for their help, at which point Constantine tries to trick Wonder Woman into becoming his slave. (Which is just a fantastic thing to do, really.) But meanwhile the real villain is a character who (apparently) survived the destruction of the Flashpoint universe and, for some reason, is trying to rule the world by capturing Pandora. Or something along those lines, admittedly the story is still only halfway done. Phew.



It's densely plotted and well structured. All the marquee characters have something important to do and all the tertiary characters get nice moments. It begins with a big action setpiece, dots the middle with lots of little quests and distractions, and will almost certainly end with a big climactic slobberknocker after which Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again. Johns is very good at writing giant crossover stories: it's a massive balancing act that requires an enviable attention to detail - the kind of attention to a very specific kind of form and function that Bendis has never once shown an inclination to learn or apply. In many ways this is an exemplary crossover. The only problem is that the story itself is terrible.

There is something irreducibly square in the premise: everybody wants Pandora's Box, that's the MacGuffin that puts the plot into motion. Pandora's Box is something every kid knows from elementary school, but it's just not that compelling a hook - anymore than having the Seven Deadly Sins who were imprisoned by the Wizard Shazam on the Rock of Eternity come to life and try to kill Pandora for attempting to reimprison them. The idea of implying that Pandora's Box was designed by the Judeo-Christian God and not actually Zeus seems like Johns' attempt to pull a "surprise revelation" out of his back pocket regarding one of the formative myths of Western Civilization, which has a bit of a different ring to it than merely proclaiming that everything you ever knew about the Green Lantern Corps was wrong. It's just not that interesting, frankly. I may be just one lone voice in the wilderness, but I've never found DC's approach to the classical myths to be all that compelling, and whenever they try to pull some kind of syncretic bullshit with the capital-G God it never really flies like they want it to fly. (Why does no one ever raise a stink about the fact that these kinds of stories are incredibly blasphemous in a way that is probably deeply offensive to practicing Christians?) These things worked pretty well in The Sandman, which was always a DC Universe title regardless of what anyone else says, and Moore's Swamp Thing, obviously, but those were both far better titles written by far smarter men than Johns. This is just banal, like someone put a bunch of mythical and religious motifs in a paper bag and pulled a few out at random to base a story around. It's boring.

There's a part of me that feels bad for Johns. He's pretty high up in the DC food chain. He was one of the architects of the Nu52, and has been the single biggest commercial draw at DC for many years, not exclusive of Jim Lee. But he's a traditionalist. Despite his tendency to dismember these characters in gruesome ways, he's a fan first and foremost. And even though he created this new status quo, I have to believe there's a part of him, deep down, trapped in a little box and crying throughout the endless long dark night of his soul, that recognizes that these characters are just pale imitations of the real thing. This Justice League, this Superman, this Wonder Woman, this John Constantine - they are all off, every single one of them. The word came down from on high that the whole apparatus had to be rebuilt from stem to stern practically overnight, so he did the best he could to give the corporation what they said they wanted: streamlined raw materials, grist for the mill of the efficient IP farm Warner Brothers wants their comic book division to resemble. The problem is that these characters are ciphers, reflections of ghosts, with little to recommend them to readers who have access to the originals.

With two years' hindsight, it is more and more apparent that the true shift signified by the advent of the Nu52 was that individual characters no longer matter (to say nothing of creators). The most important brand is not Superman or Batman or Green Lantern and certainly not Shazam or John Constantine, but DC Comics - oops, sorry, DC Entertainment. The most important thing for them is that they have a cohesive universe that can be presented as a legible whole. The great triumphs of superhero comics have traditionally come as a result of the genre's strange, disreputable, tatterdemalion profligacy. But it's becoming harder and harder for companies to justify extending that kind of creative freedom in regards to characters who might each and every one of them (in the minds of Warner Brothers executives) end up as their next billion-dollar franchise. The cruel irony is that without being able to offer that kind of freedom and trust to individual creators, the stories become sterile and vapid, and the IP is degraded. Marvel for the time being have managed to figure out how to walk the tightrope between control and liberty, enough so that a not-insignificant percentage of their line is actually very good, and many more books are pleasantly readable. There just aren't that many DC books I'd stop to pick up for free off the street. Trinity of Sin is the best kind of crossover you could hope to create from this atmosphere: readable, if you can put aside the fact that every single stated premise is ineffably repulsive.

If you want a vision of superhero comics, imagine an overly-rendered red boot stamping on the reader's disinterested face - forever.

I'm off on a long road trip next Wednesday (back the following Thursday), and will be appearing at Nine Worlds in London over the weekend. There will also probably be a signing at Forbidden Planet International in London the following Monday—I'll update this entry with details when I confirm it.

In the meantime ...

That last blog entry about police states and revolution spawned an interesting discussion, including this offering by Poul-Henning Kamp, which I'm going to quote selectively from:

New Scientist had an interesting article a couple of weeks ago: 1978 was the year where the GPI index peaked, whereas GDP continued to climb.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929254.600-the-wonder-year-why-1978-was-the-best-year-ever.html

Reagan and Thatcher were not the origin of the refeudalism, they got elected to reflect politically a shift which had already happened.

The real trigger were probably the energy-crisis of 1973-74 which in more than one way ended the plastic-fantastic party.

Let the hangover and realization that the fun is over fester for a couple of years, push the right kind of lobsters into the front line and let Murdoch loose on the tabloids and there you are...

But the other interesting thing is that 1978 is also right about where computers start taking jobs away, with typesetters being the first major casualty.

From there computers and robotics have hollowed out what used to be solid middle-class jobs.

The computerization of retail alone has wiped about 20% out of the middleclass jobs, replacing them with low-paid unskilled computer-slaves.

Soon chaffeurs will be the next to see their jobs disappear to robotic cars, and the medical profession is starting to see computers give more correct diagnoses and robots being better at surgery.

There's no way to put the technological genie back in the bottle, nor should we, our ancestors longed for the day they wouldn't have to toil.

The tricky question is how we structure a society where only a dwindling fraction of the potential workforce is required for keeping the wheels on the track.

All of capitalism, communism, socialism, liberalism or libertarianism have as fundamental assumption that we need people to work to keep the wheels turning and therefore they are all worse than useless in the present situation.

To follow up on Poul's point: while headlines are made from un-employment figures, because unemployment in a work-for-pay-or-starve culture is frightening (and therefore good news material), we should be keeping a much closer eye on the employment figures. Which are always far lower than you would expect by naively calculating (100% minus unemployed %), because there is an increasing proportion of adults of working age who do not participate in the work force but who can't claim unemployment insurance or support.

The current employment participation rate in the USA is around 58%, and dropping steadily. It's hard to google for figures (firstly: online statistics tend to be overwhelmed by breathless news reports, secondly: google helpfully corrects "employment" to "unemployment" as a search term) but I earlier stubbed my toe on the corresponding figures for people employed full time and using their training/education (so that a PhD flipping burgers in McD's doesn't count as "fully employed"), and it's even lower.

I take the US as a type specimen here, but the trend is common to the entire developed world; workforce participation is generally between 40% (Greece and the PIIGS, in dire economic trouble) and 60%. But it seems obvious that it's in long-term decline.

As automation of mind-work bites, sooner or later we're going to need to switch from a work-to-live-and-pay-taxes-on-income economy to a basic-income-and-work-to-add-luxuries economy. Otherwise we're going to end up with a vast majority of the population who are immiserated and have nothing to lose from violent unrest, and whose immiseration means they can't provide the level of consumer spending that supports the profits of the businesses owned by the 0.1%. And indeed, Switzerland looks set to vote on a basic income law shortly. (Switzerland: very odd place. But we should look for change first on the margins, as with cannabis legalization in Uruguay—small countries can move far faster than lumbering behemoths.)

But beyond the issue of how to keep capitalism creaking along, Poul raised a key point: How do we structure a society where only a dwindling fraction of the potential workforce is required for keeping the wheels on the track? Assuming the point is to structure a society that tries to minimize cruelty, what are our options?

Writing advice from Chuck Palahniuk.

Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents.

[Introduction | Supers | Bats]

Before I start, some edits to previous posts:

Superboy:

Conner Levitt – who signs his name Con L – is, in a parallel with Clark, a web-savvy blogger, and the book contains pages from his social media presence as part of the storytelling. With the blessing and encouragement from his Moms, he eschews the idea of a secret identity, and is open with his identity as a teenager with superpowers, but no costume.

The Daily Planet:

One of the major characters is Sydney, a staffer on the paper and a friend of Lois, who develops a crush on a columnist before coming to the realization that he sucks.

Honestly, I wish I could fill five books with Wonder Woman titles, but I’m not quite sure all of those would fly off the shelves. Still, she deserves more than one, and there’s one obvious way to do that.

12. WONDER WOMAN is Princess Diana of Themyscira, sculpted out of clay by her mother Queen Hippolyta sent as an representative to Man’s World to start to bridge the gaps between the Amazons and the rest of the world. She is also Diana Prince, owner of a boutique in NYC. She is also the demigoddess daughter of Zeus. She founded the Justice League. She didn’t found the Justice League. She fought in WWII. That was really her mother. All these things have happened and are true.

How does this Morrison-esque “everything happened” take work on character that has been reset and retconned so many times? Well the thing is that Wonder Woman is the only character that this works for. Her lasso is the Lasso of Truth, and truth, like reality discussed in the introduction, is both entirely subjective and continuous, rather than fixed. The DCU is made of stories, and because every story and every universe exists, every reality must be true. Diana, who lives in a world where the dominant reality is the ‘sculpted from clay followed Steve Trevor to Man’s World’ reality, is having strange dreams, finding her lasso appears to be malfunctioning, and embarks on a quest to discover the nature of truth. In this universe, it’s not Flash’s dimensional travel that holds the key, but Wonder Woman’s role as the avatar of Truth.

Diana is immortal, older than Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent, and there is a five year editorial mandate against Themyscira being destroyed.

13. WONDER GIRL is Cassandra Sandsmark, daughter of Zeus and a mortal archaeologist, who finds artifacts that give her magic powers. These include the gauntlet of Atlas, that gives her super strength; the sandals of Hermes for speed and flight; and the girdle of Artemis which gives her the ability to talk with animals. Adopting the name Wonder Girl, Cassie uses these artifacts to help Wonder Woman, and after the resolution of the first storyline in the Wonder Woman book, she is also given a length of Diana’s Lasso of Truth,  that compels people to tell her the truth. By carrying it, Cassie, like Diana, is granted intuition into whether or not people are lying.

Because her father is Zeus, and after training with Hippolyta, Cassie is essentially a princess. She represents the ideals of Truth, Fairness and Compassion, and she can talk to animals.  This is a YOUNG READERS title, aimed at under-12s, because if you have a character who is a princess who can talk to animals and wields the power of truth, and you’re not marketing that character to little girls, you are doing something very wrong indeed, DC comics.

 

So if you thought I was presuming too much by reinventing Super titles and having Opinions about that, you might want to skip the next three, because I have never read, and don’t really intend to read a Green Lantern book that doesn’t also have “Green Arrow” in the title. GL is popular, I get it. I just don’t have very many opinions about it. Well, not beyond the TV show, anyway.

14. GREEN LANTERN is Hal Jordan John Stewart of Earth. He has a power ring, he protects Earth from alien menaces. I have honestly no idea what happens in a Green Lantern book. I’m sure it’s great!

15. TALES OF THE LANTERN CORPS is an anthology title that always includes a story about Honor Guard Guy Gardner or Honor Guard Hal Jordan. The back up stories include tales of non-human Lanterns Green and otherwise, and involves a lot of world building about planets, systems, and alien races in the DC Universe. The tone is lighter than the main GL book, more comedy than drama.

16. GREEN LANTERN: GUARDIANS Do you like Green Lantern: The Animated Series but think Hal Jordan is boring? Then this is for you, Bing! Kyle Rayner leads a team of rebels from multiple Corps, including Green Lantern Aya, Red Lantern Razer, Blue Lantern Saintwalker, Star Sapphire Carol Ferris among others, learning lessons about teamwork, the moderation of emotion, and saving the universe a lot. Male Star Sapphires exist. There are no “Dark Phoenix” storylines about women going mad with power and having to kill themselves to save the universe, because those storylines are horrible and I’m not having them.

This is a YOUNG READERS title, aimed at teens. So really, there’s a lot of violence and explosions, and people messing up their emotions.

 

Of course, now I fully expect the Lantern readers among you to come up with better ideas. And please do!

 

Next: Solo Titles.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Whipped: From the desk of the Junior Whip

“Have you seen the Leader’s office?” an intern asked wonderingly. “They’re all in shorts and bare feet. It’s like some crazy progressive school.”

It’s different in here. Though the Chief Whip is no lover of hot weather – he is more of a drizzle man, to be honest – he insists that standards of dress are maintained. Otherwise, he fears, MPs may start thinking for themselves – “and that’s not what Liberalism is about”.

The Conservatives solved the problem of keeping their troops busy in the hot weather by spreading rumours of an impending reshuffle. Suddenly junior ministers became interested in the furthest corners of their red boxes. The barmiest backbenchers decided that, if they toed the line for a week, the call from number 10 was bound to come.

Those rumours were welcome here too. More than one ambitious Lib Dem, anxious to please the Chief Whip, became so interested in the Orcadian economy that nothing would stop them visiting his constituency and speaking there.

Then the Tories locked their backbenchers in a Westminster committee room and made them debate Europe.

To any normal person sitting in 30-degree heat with several dozen Eurosceptics is a good preview of hell.

But the Tories were as happy as sandboys who had just won the lottery. “The European Union is plotting to tax daylight,” said one. “The European Convention on Human Rights– and I’m not making this up – means that elbows are illegal,” returned his friend.

Labour, meanwhile, has been wrestling with its funding from the unions and Unite’s influence over candidate selection. Nick Clegg, ever anxious to help, offered to enshrine their proposed reforms in the lobby bill that is currently going through parliament.

And me? I have signed up to spend the summer on a course in advanced election fighting techniques (“life insurance certificate required”) run by some eccentric aristocrat in Rutland. Google “Lord Bonkers” if you want to know more.

You know you are getting old when Time Lords start looking young, so I am pleased that the new Doctor Who will be an actor who is older than me - the first since Sylvester McCoy.

But while congratulating Peter Capaldi, this is a chance for me to say that I think the show has problems.

Whether you put it down to the changes in the way we watch television (more channels and the remote control) or to an attention-deficit society, the show suffers  from a lack of time.

It's not just that we no longer have cliffhanger endings: the producers feel obliged to show us the start of the next episode in an attempt to keep us hooked.

And this lack of time has also affected the acting. Both David Tennant and Matt Smith's performances were a collection tics and gimmicks that never quite cohered into a rounded character. Christopher Eccleston managed to avoid this trap, but maybe his just a better actor - though he had more two-part stories to act in.

Another problem is that the show has been taken over by adults fans. If young children still watch if from behind the sofa, it is because they can't get any nearer the screen. A family show's strength is that it appeals to everyone, but Doctor Who now seems to be aimed at young adults - hence the the younger and younger doctors and the introduction of a love interest.

I am reminded of something Will Buckley once wrote about football:

There was a time when I loved football - when I was six. I was introduced to the game by my father, and we spent many happy years watching Chelsea together. I took a childish delight in my team. Ossie, Hutch and Charlie Cooke were my heroes. Their performances affected my weekend. For my father the results were unimportant. He went to the game to have a laugh with his friends and enjoy his son's innocent pleasure. 

Now I am the age that my father was when he first took me to a football match, I am perplexed that so many of my contemparies (sic.) react to the game as I did as a six-year-old, rather than as my father did as a 40-year-old.

Perhaps the real problem is that the makers of Doctor Who just takes themselves too seriously. Interviewed last year, Steven Moffat announced that he found it "deeply offensive" that someone had accused one of his Sherlock Holmes scripts of misogyny.

But to write anything is to open it up to public criticism. We must be allowed to say something about his work that goes beyond "Coo Steven, you are clever!"

Julian Cope once put together an album with the subtitle The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker. This track shows why.

Tony Cornwell tried to account for its appeal on the World Socialist Web Site:

The opening track on Tilt - “Farmer in the City (Remembering Pasolini)” - is the most accessible song on the album. Against a backdrop of grim horrors, wry humour, beauty and grief, it lights the last hours of Pasolini’s life with musical and lyrical strobe. 

The lyrics are fragmentary and presented as images on a moving pathway. You barely focus and the next lot of images close in: fragments of voices, Pasolini’s and his killers; neighbourhood cries and noise. Pasolini is seen from a distance - geographically and biographically - but the overall effect is a portrait that words alone can’t sufficiently express. Walker’s disquieting and restless tenor sobs and surges, bringing colour and movement to the scene but without offering any explanation. A high point is where Walker cries: 

And I used to be a citizen
I never felt the pressure
I knew nothing of the horses
nothing of the thresher.

And the string section of the London Sinfonia heaves upward in a monstrous crescendo to echo and cradle the lyric. It is a most moving and unsettling moment.

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… Last time I unleashed the scene-stealing megalomania of the seven TV Masters. Who could follow that but the Doctor simply being Doctorish – not rising to universal glory, but an individual who’s endlessly fascinated, fascinating and fun. So here are some tips for whoever gets tonight’s blessing on how to do it… Accompanied by a supporting selection of other Doctorish Doctors that spring to mind (but which?), in the lead today it’s Colin Baker, summing up the Doctor in a perfect moment:

“I am interested in everything…”

It’s been too long, hasn’t it, since the last one of these? And it’ll need more than getting back each Saturday to catch up. But never mind all that – the best thing is just to get on with it. I saw Colin Baker at an event three weeks ago today and he was, as ever, a delight: friendly, interesting and very funny. Today it’s common to praise Colin’s Doctor for his Big Finish audio adventures*, and it’s true that he has a finely tuned voice and an especially erudite way with words (and an occasionally bombastic style that greatly influenced my early public speaking). But it does him a disservice to do that at the expense of his TV portrayal. What’s rarely mentioned is how fabulously watchable he is, not just being one of the sexiest Doctors, not just in big actions, but in small but intriguing moments, constantly worth keeping your eye on – even when, all right, sometimes he has to play against the scripts – in always giving the impression of being interested in everything.

That, for me, is a defining trait in the Doctor, and whenever you watch Colin’s incarnation, you can see it even before The Two Doctors author Robert Holmes (someone who understood the Doctor about as well as any writer ever has) came along to give him lines that went with his flow and then asserted that character point explicitly. And for those who find this Doctor less watchable for one particular visual reason, in this scene he’s even got out of that coat.

Paired with a popular former Doctor, Patrick Troughton, you’d expect Colin’s Doctor either to have the show stolen from him or be frenetically overcompensating throughout The Two Doctors. Instead, he gets to be more confidently the Doctor than in any of his previous stories. It’s not just because Colin’s working harder to compete – while he certainly rises to the challenge, he seems counter-intuitively far more relaxed in his portrayal than he had been until now, and it’s because Bob Holmes instinctively knows how to write for the Doctor and Colin’s happily in harmony with that.

Half-way into Part Two, the Doctor (Colin Baker) has sensed echoes of a previous self (Patrick Troughton) in trouble and leapt, electrified, to his aid. But when the TARDIS materialises rather strikingly in a Spanish grove, the Doctor emerges with his enthusiasm tightly focused. Taking in everything around him, he strikes exactly the right note with a useful witness who takes the TARDIS for a branch of Interpol – a washed-up ham actor and restaurateur, accompanied by his braver and more practical companion…

“Officer! We have to report a tragedy. Stark disaster has struck this – simple countryside.”
“Has it indeed? What manner of disaster, Mr…?”
“Botcherby. Oscar Botcherby at your service, sir, and this dark-eyed naiad is named Anita.”
“Oh, come on, Oscar. There’s been a plane crash.”
“Well, of course, it may not be your department. I – I can see from your raiment that you obviously belong to the plain clothes branch.”

And, all right, I always laugh at that bit. Oscar and Anita are another of Mr Holmes’ sly mirrors of the Doctor and companion – Oscar goes on a bit, and we bet she’s not his girlfriend – but his florid digressions about clothes, groves and moth-hunting give Colin a marvellous opportunity to make his own performance smaller while still fascinating, and as the ‘concerned copper’ prompt the lily-livered thespian’s sense of public service. In my favourite part of the exchange, you can help but know that the Doctor’s reply, though gently guiding Oscar back to the point, is the absolute truth:

“Are you interested in Lepidoptera at all?”
“I am interested in everything, Mister Botcherby – but mainly, at the moment, in this ‘crash’ you heard.”

It’s a small but perfectly formed scene in which I always share the Doctor’s evident delight at having found the trail – and at having found someone else whose life will never be the same again…


*Big Finish have just announced a permanent price cut to some of their ranges, including now offering their first fifty Doctor Who stories at just £5 for the CDs or £2.99 on download: happily if you want to experience the Colin renaissance, this includes several of his very best, from The Marian Conspiracy, an historical adventure that introduces a companion and cake, to The One Doctor, which is an absolute scream, more of his definitive sparring with Terry Molloy as Davros, and of course two brilliantly uncomfortable black comedies from later Doctor Who TV writer Rob Shearman which I would thoroughly recommend – The Holy Terror, just reviewed by Andrew Hickey, and my own personal favourite of the range, Jubilee.

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 1 – Marco Polo

Inspired by tonight – and by being the antithesis of the Master – I let several other especially Doctorish moments simply spring to mind. This one has perhaps my favourite Doctor in one of the Doctor’s first and still most arrestingly unpredictable moments. On my previously long-derelict Doctor Who story-by-story blog Next Time, I Shall Not Be So Lenient! I’ve finally been getting back into the swing over the last few weeks with a preposterously wide array of random one-liners about the early story Marco Polo. In Marco Polo Episode One, the TARDIS has broken down in the Himalayas and the time-travellers’ lives saved by Messr Marco. But, determined above all else to get home to Venice, the self-serving git shows he’s not taken them and the Ship along for altruistic reasons. He wants to bribe his master the Mighty Kublai Khan into releasing him from his service with no less a stolen ‘gift’ than “a caravan that flies”. The thief holds our heroes at swordpoint and lectures them on why his need is greater than theirs, an argument he upholds by refusing to let them answer back. The Doctor’s reaction is much that you’d expect: impatience; blazing fury; incredulity at Polo’s blithe suggestion he can build a new TARDIS in Thirteenth-Century Venice. But after Polo stalks off, refusing to be made to feel guilty merely for committing armed robbery and stranding people, the travelling companions turn to the Doctor (William Hartnell) for an answer. He hasn’t got a clue. So in one of the most endearing moments in fifty years of our hero, they all have to stand by in appalled resignation as he does the only thing he can when faced with such utter calamity: he sees the funny side and collapses into uncontrollable giggles.

“Grandfather – Grandfather!”
“Yes. Go by sea, he says!”
“Why are you laughing?”
“Ooh, hoo hoo hoo!”
“He means it!”
“Doctor, he’s serious!”
“I know he is, yes!”
“But what are you going to do?”
“Oh, ho, ho! I haven’t the faintest idea!”

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 2 – The Enemy of the World

By ten minutes into Episode 1, our heroes have landed for a paddle at a deserted Australian beach, found it less deserted when they’re shot at by assassins in a hovercraft and rescued by an even more dangerous woman in a helicopter on orders from a mysterious superior who seems to been in charge of the others, too. So when they take a breather, the Doctor (Patrick Troughton) senses that however friendly she may seem, the band of gunmen may have had an ulterior motive for trying to kill him and she may have an ulterior motive for saving him. He gives very little away until he knows more, and this time he makes her laugh as he cleans her flesh wound while quietly parrying all her questions with an undercurrent of questions of his own – and it’s not long before he finds out just how ruthlessly efficient she is, nor what everyone suddenly sees in him…

“Oh, you’re a doctor?”
“Well, not of any – medical significance.”
“Doctor of law? Philosophy?”
“Which law? Whose philosophies, eh?”
“Oh, I see. You’re determined to be mysterious.”
“Am I?”
“Um… Doctor of science?”
“Septic spray. That should be right.”
“A Doctor of divinity, then!”
“You’ll run out of Doctors in a minute.”

But we still haven’t.

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 4 – The Ribos Operation

The Doctor (Tom Baker) is all set to go on holiday when interrupted by thunder. Well, that much is typical. What’s less typical is that the thunder is inside the TARDIS, and that after the lights go out, suddenly the place blazes with light, organ music bellows, and a mighty voice asks if he really needs to know who’s calling. He might use the name “Guardian”, but we know who this is, and you do have to wonder how much of an influence it was on Time Bandits for a loud, scary God to then be revealed as a quiet, much more scary character actor giving understated orders and threats. That is, if all those people taking him at his word that he is the nice one are right: he is, after all, something of a bastard, and not only does he not offer the Doctor any of the drink he’s sipping, sat on his chair in his white suit and hat, but the green liquor in carafe looks like absinthe, and you know another word for that. But whether to God or Devil, the Doctor’s response is the same – he’d prefer to make his own choices rather than be ordered about, thank you very much. The Doctor is more annoyed by having an assistant foisted on him than by being ordered on a mission: people are more important to our hero than the big things from the first… Our hero doesn’t preen at being chosen as The Hero for a mighty quest; he’s not after glory. He’s after mucking about and seeing what he fancies – interested in everything. The deceptively mild-mannered higher power knows what makes the Doctor tick, too, and in a steely aside, makes one of the most effective threats ever heard in the series:

“Look, I’m sure there must be plenty of other Time Lords who’d be delighted…”
“I have chosen you.”
“Yes, I was afraid you’d say something like that. Ah! You want me to volunteer, isn’t that it?”
“Precisely.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You mean nothing will happen to me?”
“Nothing at all. Ever.”

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 7 – Remembrance of the Daleks

The Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) has been cross-luring Daleks around 1960s after a terrible Time Lord totem. But he’s at his most Doctorish for me at the end of Part Three, when plans don’t really quite work after all. Thinking he’s got most people evacuated from the dangerous bit of Shoreditch and the remainder safely out of the way in a local school, he aims to let two warring sets of Daleks fight it out for him to deal with later. But even to this day there are few more visually impressive moments in Doctor Who than the Doctor’s getting it ever-so-slightly wrong as a great big honest-to-goodness spaceship comes down in the school playground, not CGI but actually there, blowing out all the windows and blowing his plans. He even has the good grace to blink and duck out of his own cliffhanger crash-zoom.

“Doctor, we’ve had a report of a radar contact.”
“On a re-entry curve from low orbit?”
“Yes.”
“That’ll be the Imperial Dalek shuttlecraft.”
“What? They’re not landing a spaceship here?”
“Here? No. They’re much too far from the main action.”
[Roar of engines]
“You’re sure?”
“Whoa!”
“Ace, get away from the window! Down!
“…I think I might have miscalculated.”

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 11 – A Town Called Mercy

And for the last few minutes when we all think of him as the Doctor (Matt Smith), the marvellously Doctorish current incarnation has been a real pleasure. Not least in strolling through the American Old West, eyeing up the town called Mercy: to quiet, plucking strings, he sees an animal-skull “KEEP OUT” sign and stone-piled boundary and does exactly what the Doctor always does with a boundary. Crosses it, points out the electric street lamp about ten years too early, and as mothers hold their children back in fear at the windows, blazes with enthusiasm:

“Anachronistic electricity; ‘Keep Out’ signs; aggressive stares… Has someone been peeking at my Christmas list?”

Next Time… From The Two Doctors to the double act of double acts.


Update: We’re both absolutely delighted with the announcement of Peter Capaldi. Hurrah! And of course he’s already had a scene for the 50, in at Number 41 – just a shame I didn’t include a photo of him and look as prescient as his character’s daughter, damn damn damn… But it’s not only one of the series’ finest stories, it’s also an impressive source of future casting, isn’t it?

Here’s Felix Salmon, endorsing the doubling of the minimum wage.

Yeah, that’s right: doubling — from a poverty-level $7.25/hour to a living wage of $15/hour. Salmon is seconding the suggestion by millionaire capitalist Nick Hanauer, who points out that “If the minimum wage had simply tracked U.S. productivity gains since 1968, it would be $21.72 an hour — three times what it is now.”

The objections to such a scheme are as easy to anticipate as they are to refute. “But that would bankrupt small businesses and force companies to stop hiring!” cry people who desperately want some reason to oppose this, even though those reasons aren’t necessarily true.

Here’s Salmon, offering six reasons doubling the minimum wage would be a “win-win-win-win-win-win.” (I’ve added the numbering here because I want this to be read):

1. Most simply and most cleanly, it would immediately raise the incomes of millions of cash-strapped Americans — precisely the people who most need to be earning more than they’re making right now. A whopping 51 million people would benefit directly, along with 30 million who would benefit indirectly: these are enormous numbers.

2. The cost to the government of putting billions of extra dollars into these workers’ hands would in fact be substantially negative: there’s a strong fiscal case for a $15 minimum wage. We currently spend $316 billion per year on programs designed to help the poor, with the lowest-income households receiving about $8,800 per year. Billions of those dollars would be saved as the workers in question saw their wages rise. And no longer would the likes of Walmart be able to take advantage of implicit government wage subsidies, whereby low-paid workers receive substantial top-up checks from Uncle Sam to supplement their direct income.

3. The move would constitute a huge economic stimulus program: Hanauer says that it would inject about $450 billion annually into the US economy every year. If you like massive stimulus but you don’t like the idea of the government paying for it, then a higher minimum wage is the program for you.

4. Crucially, a higher minimum wage would be good for employment. A $450 billion stimulus, delivered directly into the hands of the Americans most likely to spend it, can’t help but create jobs across the economy. … There’s empirical evidence to suggest that states which raise the minimum wage when unemployment is high — when there’s a lot of slack in the labor force — then you get faster job growth than in the country as a whole. … The bigger economic problem is that employment hasn’t kept pace with economic growth: most of the gains in GDP have gone to capital, rather than to labor. A higher minimum wage would redress the balance somewhat.

5. Insofar as a one-off hike in the minimum wage would be inflationary, that’s a good thing, and exactly what the economy needs. We’re well below the Fed’s target inflation rate right now, and the inflation which might result from this policy would give us a healthy short-term boost in the inflation rate, bringing down real interest rates in a world where the Fed is constrained by the zero lower bound. …

6. … The US has already done a spectacularly good job of exporting most of its exportable low-wage work. As Hanauer says, “virtually all of these low-wage jobs are service jobs that can neither be outsourced nor automated.” As a result, raising the minimum wage will result in many fewer job losses now than it would have done a couple of decades ago.

I don’t doubt that some Mom & Pop operations might struggle to pay this higher wage. The local pizza shop now paying $10/hour would feel the pinch of having to pay $5 more for its workforce. But I doubt they’ll want to lay off any workers to cover that cost, because 51 million other American workers just got a raise and they’re going to be spending part of their next, bigger paycheck buying pizza.

Will that massive increase in demand offset the increased cost of paying those wages? I don’t know — I haven’t crunched all those numbers and I can’t account for all those variables. But the people completely ignoring this increase in demand haven’t done the math either, and their insistence that Very Good News for millions of customers is irrelevant to the bottom line of all those Mom & Pop businesses is surely wrong.

Is $15/hour too much of an increase? I don’t know that either. But I do know that $7.25 is too low, and I don’t see any reason to start the bidding at $7.26 — that’s not how negotiation works.

So I don't need to make a new LJ icon in order to talk about the Twelfth Doctor, because this one is now suddenly as much about him as it is about the Tenth. I always felt that this scene was iconic for the series, as well as very well-attuned to my personal interests - the Doctor reaching across time to pluck someone from the smouldering ruins of Pompeii, just as I cannot. Now it has acquired a whole new level of meaning. I really hope they will make some comment about the uncanny resemblance between the new Doctor and Caecilius in the script at some point - like the stuff about Romana choosing to look like Princess Astra from The Armageddon Factor because she liked her appearance. I think getting that element of choice requires a rather more controlled regeneration than any previous Doctor has managed, though - and given where we last saw Eleven, I don't think he's likely to get anything of the sort! But, y'know, maybe subconscious memories can affect the regeneration process too.

I'll probably be making a bona fide Twelfth Doctor icon before very long, though, because I am pretty damned sure I'm going to like him. That's the advantage of casting a well-known actor, of course. I have already seen Peter Capaldi demonstrating real range and flair, so I know in advance that he has what it takes to play the Doctor - and has it in bucket-loads, I'll venture. We know now in retrospect that David Tennant and Matt Smith did too, of course, and obviously the casting teams for each of them knew it at the time. But at the time when they were first cast in the role I had only half-heard of either of them (David Tennant reaction post here; Matt Smith reaction post here), so wasn't really sure what I could expect.

By contrast, Peter brings with him the strongest established star image since Christopher Eccleston, and probably one of the top five strongest since the show started. People on Twitter are already having enormous fun mashing up his back-catalogue roles with Doctor Who genre-markers, while poor old thanatos_kalos (who is in the closing stages of a PhD about Torchwood) is tearing her hair out at the thought of the para-texts now springing up around his character in Children of Earth. Obviously the older an actor you cast in the role, the greater a chance there is of his having acquired a strong public profile before he takes the part on - and as stealthmunchkin has already pointed out, at 55 years old Capaldi is actually the joint-oldest actor ever to have been cast in the role, right alongside William Hartnell.

Capaldi in real life wears his years much more lightly than Hartnell, of course. He could be asked to do what Hartnell did and play older than he is, but I'd be surprised if so, because it would be such a huge leap from the way Matt Smith has played the character, and I think would be considered too risky from the point of view of the younger contingent in the audience. I'm expecting a Doctor much in the vein of Troughton, Pertwee, Baker (T) and McCoy, and am very happy indeed at the prospect. Witness my words of eight years ago, when I had just heard that Christopher Ecclestone was stepping down from the role:

Also, if this must happen, I'd ideally like to see an older Doctor follow Ecclestone, just to keep a bit of variety in the role. Sure, there's a fine tradition of younger Doctors to follow - especially Peter Davidson. But I'd like to see an actor who can tap into those aspects of the Doctor's character so splendidly explored by people like Jon Pertwee.

Yes, I want a Doctor who can really look as though he has the weight of unimaginable ages on his shoulders sometimes, and who can be properly fatherly when he wants to. David Tennant and especially Matt Smith both managed those things better that I would have guessed, but I think Moffat was right to say on tonight's live show that the time has come for a genuinely older actor now.

I still hope that some time in the future we will get a non-white Doctor - above all for what it would say about where we have collectively got to as a country on race issues. But the sad truth is that we are not there yet. We need to make Britain a better place for all minority ethnic groups in real life before we are ever going to get a non-white Doctor. Meanwhile, it has been established (via the dialogue about the Corsair in The Doctor's Wife) that Time Lords can change sex if they want to, and I certainly wouldn't say no to a female Doctor. But above all I am of the school of thought which says that what we really need in Doctor Who is more strong non-white and female characters around the Doctor, acting on his level and even pricking his ego when he needs it. The best way to set that up is to bring back the Time Lords - and oh, do I hope that the plot-line involving John Hurt will do that somehow.

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

If this is losing, I'll have a bit of that please...

One thing I find difficult to get my head around is how so many people consider Cameron to have been a loser in 2010.

The argument goes that Gordon Brown was a terrible Prime Minister, that a solid majority was ripe for the picking for the Tories and Cameron totally screwed it up.

I'm afraid I don't really buy it.

Yes, Brown was dreadful but for all kinds of complicated reasons it was always a big ask for Cameron to get a majority. In 2005 they were still way behind. The way Labour's vote is distributed across the country makes it hard for the Tories to get enough seats even in a bad year for Labour (indeed 2010 was the red team's second worst vote share since WWI). UKIP shaved some of the Tory vote away, enough to perhaps cost them a dozen or more seats by some calculations. The Lib Dems were surgent in a way not seen in previous elections. Etc. etc. etc.

I'm not trying to make excuses for Cameron. I am not a huge fan of his. It's just that the narrative that it was there for the taking and he bollocksed it up does not stand up to serious scrutiny. He actually got a larger share of the vote than Blair did in 2005 (which delivered Labour a solid majority) but it wasn't enough for him to get over the line.

Many across the political spectrum and within his own party really do consider the Prime Minister a loser though because of this lack of a majority. His own side mutter darkly about how if he does not win a majority next time then he will have twice failed the electoral test and will be forced out as leader, even if the Tories are still the largest party and can form a government. They cite Thatcher and Blair with their thumping majorities and highlight how by comparison Cameron came up woefully short, but that wilfully ignores how the political landscape has shifted over the decades.

Other countries where their Prime Ministers and Chancellors regularly have to share power and often go on to win successive election victories (i.e. remaining in power, not having a majority!) must look upon our hung parliament discourse with bemusement. For them, the dynamics of compromise and coalition are completely normal.

Many psephologists now think that hung parliaments in the UK will become the norm despite us retaining First Past the Post for the foreseeable future. The vote share of the two main parties combined has gone from around 97% in the 1950s to around 65% in 2010. The trend is clear, people want to vote for alternatives to red and blue. Whether it is Lib Dem, UKIP, Green, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Mebyon Kernow and a multitude of other smaller parties, in the consumer and internet age we like to be able to exercise a much wider choice. This is not Cameron's fault and the idea he can somehow reverse all of these trends is completely unrealistic.

I think the analysts are right and we will see more coalitions/minority governments. Politics is now much more volatile and unpredictable than it once was. If I had to put money on it I would wager that in the next 20 years we will see at least half of the governments being led by someone who was unable to muster a majority at the ballot box.

If Cameron is a "loser", I suspect we're going to see many more such losers walking into 10 Downing Street in the not too distant future.

Leviticus 19:33-34

When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

LibDemVoice is running a daily feature, ‘Lessons of Coalition’, to assess the major do’s and don’ts learned from our experience of the first 3 years in government. Reader contributions are welcome, either as comments or posts. The word limit is no more than 450 words, and please focus on just one lesson you think the party needs to learn. Simply email your submission to voice@libdemvoice.org. Today Louise Shaw shares her thoughts.

One member, one vote for all party elections

Coalition has exposed and accentuated the differences between two powerbases within the party: the leadership and it’s governing committees. And though both are elected, it feels to me as an ordinary member that I have no chance of influencing either.

I stand outside both at the moment, I’m not in the leadership and I don’t contribute to the Federal Executive (FE), Federal Policy Committee (FPC) or Federal Conference Committee (FCC), nor would I stand a chance of being elected as I’m not well known enough. I’m a board member for Liberal Reform, campaigning for reform within the party, but writing from a personal perspective.

I want to change things, and don’t exclude the Lib Dems from the need for that. I see that there are differences, and that both power blocs within the party claim sovereignty over the other.

This leads to a deadlock, and though we are praised for our unity, it doesn’t feel like we have a distinct purpose or aim, as a whole – eg, the Social Liberal Forum (who have many representatives on FE/FPC/FCC) could sign up to “stronger economy, fairer society enabling everyone to get on in life” as a number of their aims could be included under that strapline. But I don’t see them reference this. SLF seem most concerned about “Osbornomics” and this to me appears we are more focused on our differences than any shared purpose.

Therefore, coalition throws up the problem that the leadership and the FE/FPC/FCC do not seem to be signed up to the same aims, and reference different agenda to get their point across – there seem to be people thirsting for fights in Glasgow over the 50p tax rate, our policy on tuition fees/graduate tax, and on welfare.

Is this the best environment to make policy? I’m not advocating “why don’t we all just get along?” as I recognise debate and arguments can be good for giving everyone a fair say and allow us to settle contentious issues and move on to the policy of the future. But, people within the different factions looking at the other side as something to be suspicious of does not make for good communication.

I believe the party’s democratic deficit — the lack of one member, one vote (OMOV) for FE/FPC/FCC — contributes to different stances from the leadership and the membership. Shibboleths exist such as “conference is sovereign”. It quite clearly isn’t when we are in government, which leads to members getting very frustrated when they lead campaigns, get issues debated at conference and then are more or less ignored. Plus, from the leadership a certain frustration is detectable about Lib Dem policy-making not being “grown up” enough. I’m not unsympathetic to either view. They could both be right.

We elected a leader through OMOV who seems to have a different ethos than that of the FE/FPC/FCC, elected by conference representatives. The electorate for the two different power bases is different and in addition, it may be that people look for different things in a leader (good communication skills) from what they do for elected committee members (people they agree with).

It does appear though that in our president, Tim Farron, OMOV can elect a representative with both good communication skills for the wider electorate, and someone they want to represent them. So I’d like OMOV for our committees, FE/FPC/FCC, as aligning the electorates for both positions to a more democratic method, would be a step in the right direction — and almost imperative for a party with the word Democrat in its name.

Previously Published:

Stephen Tall: Stronger policy development and campaigning on issues that matter to the public (AKA where’s our liberal equivalent of the benefits cap?)

Mark Valladares: Better party communications responding to the realities of governing

Gareth Epps: Government: What’s Occurrin?

Nick Thornsby: Making a success of coalition government as a concept

Caron Lindsay: That old “walk a mile in each others’ shoes” thing works

On the twelfth doctor casting - we need a new Toad, according to my Wind in the Willows theory of Doctors. It's the third cycle through the quartet of characters (1=badger, 2=mole, 3=ratty, 4=toad. 5=mole, 6=toad, 7=ratty. 8=badger. 9=badger, 10=ratty, 11=mole. Tomorrow's casting choice should be, for it to work, a new Toad.)

Today’s New York Times crossword puzzle, by Brad Wilber and Doug Peterson, serves in a small way to rewrite music history. The clue for 46-Down: “Cool jazz pioneer.” The answer: TORME.

No, he wasn’t.

The basis for this clue appears to be a paragraph from the Times obituary for Mel Tormé:

But it was as a singer that Mr. Torme made his deepest mark. The critic Will Friedwald, in his book Jazz Singing, cited Mr. Torme as a pioneer of “cool jazz,” spun off from the pop crooning of the day.

Here is what Friedwald wrote:


[Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices From Bessie Smith To Bebop And Beyond (1996).]

What Friedwald says in this passage is not that Tormé was a pioneer of cool jazz, but that he sang in a way that reflected that music. Indeed, Friedwald describes the so-called vo-cool style as coming into its own as “cool instrumental jazz,” or what most listeners would call cool jazz, began to fade in popularity.

I ran the clue for 46-Down (minus the rest of the puzzle) past my dad, who defers to no one in his love of Tormé’s music. His guess: YOUNG, as in Lester. I would have guessed DAVIS, as in Miles. As for the characterization of Tormé as a cool jazz pioneer, my dad calls it “a stretch.” Perhaps the characterization results from someone’s attempt to create a novel clue, something other than “Crooner Mel” or “Melodious Mel” or “The Velvet Fog,” all of which have appeared in Times puzzles. Mel Tormé was a terrific singer, and he’s always crossword-worthy. But he wasn’t a pioneer of cool jazz.

Related posts
All crossword posts (Pinboard)
A Mel Tormé story
Tracts, tides, and drunks

[You can search for the history of a word or clue at XWord Info.]

For those of you who don’t inhabit the Twittersphere, many people today are taking part in a #TwitterSilence (that’s its hashtag).

It was the idea of Times columnist Caitlin Moran as “a symbolic act of solidarity” intended to shame Twitter into taking more seriously the rape/bomb threats and other abuse being targeted against women. You can read her blog about it here.

I’m not taking part. I summarised my reasons here:

Not joining #TwitterSilence. Take on + drive out hate-mongerers. Don't cede ground to them. And stop calling them 'trolls': they're bullies.

— Stephen Tall (@stephentall) August 3, 2013

My Co-Editor Caron Lindsay wrote an excellent piece on the topic here last week. And Index on Censorship’s Padraig Reidy has written an excellent response to Caitlin Moran, highlighting how the well-intentioned desire to limit the free speech of people who abuse it can have damaging consequences:

A lot of time spent defending free speech is not actually about defending what people say, but defending the space in which they can say it (I’ll refrain from misquoting Voltaire here). It may be idealistic, but we genuinely believe that given the space and the opportunity to discuss ideas openly, without fear of retribution, we’ll figure out how to do things better. Censorship holds society back. In fact, it’s the litmus test of a society being held back.

When the cry goes up that “something must be done”, it’s normally exactly the right time to put the brakes on and think very hard about what we actually want to happen. The web is wonderful, and possibly the greatest manifestation of the free speech space we’ve ever had, but it’s also susceptible to control. Governments such as those in China and Iran spend massive resources on controlling the web, and do quite a good job of it. Other states simply slow the connection, making the web a frustrating rather than liberating experience. Some governments simply pull the plug. The whole of YouTube has been blocked in Pakistan for almost a year now, because something had to be done about blasphemous videos. Last month David Cameron announced his plans to take all the bad things away, after the Daily Mail ran a classic something-must-be-done campaign against online porn.

On the basis of my Twitter timeline, most (though not all) liberals/Lib Dems seems to be agin #TwitterSilence. Here’s a few that I found via LiberalTweets:

If you've been affected by rape threats & violence never stay silent. Speak to http://t.co/PhG1eJwbCd for advice. Please RT #TwitterSilence

— Jennie Rigg (@miss_s_b) August 3, 2013

You can reach Rape Crisis on 08088029999 and Samaritans on 08457909090. Never stay silent, always speak up. #TwitterSilence

— Kav Kaushik (@kavya_kaushik) August 3, 2013

If you care about free expression, just tweet as normal during the #Trolliday and #TwitterSilence. Just communicate with world as you wish.

— Jack of Kent (@JackofKent) August 3, 2013

#twittersilence is trending top in the UK!! Now that will draw attention to the harassment and bullying many have experienced and witnessed!

— Greg Judge (@gregjudge) August 3, 2013

When the problem is people being bullied into silence, you shouldn't have a #twittersilence, no matter how brief. You should #speakout

— Martin Shapland (@MShapland) August 3, 2013

I don't understand how a day of Twitter silence is supposed to help reduce trolling. Isn't it just leaving it open to them?

— Mark Thompson (@MarkReckons) August 4, 2013

* Stephen Tall is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, a Research Associate for the liberal think-tank CentreForum, and also writes at his own site, The Collected Stephen Tall.

This particular night, an usher overheard an audience member say: "I'm enjoying it, but I can't work out how a black man could have a white daughter." Funny, that, I remember thinking: they didn't seem worried by the talking polar bear.
                       David Harewood, on playing Lord Asrail in "His Dark Materials."

[Introduction | Supers]

Let’s be fair, here: cards on the table, no lie: if my id had control of this lineup, it’d be like 20 Bat titles and everything else would be Wonder Woman and Canary team ups. So I’m pretty sure that I deserve credit for cutting myself down to six titles.

Bats are: non-metas who’s lives have been marred by tragedy, who have taken upon themselves the power to set things right.  They are driven, fiercely independent, and usually value intellectualism over emotional attachments. Even though many of them come from a background of societal privilege, they represent an ideal of by-your-bootstraps make your own way.

6. BATMAN is Bruce Wayne, millionaire orphan who once made a vow to his dead parents that he would not rest until  Gotham City was purged of the corruption that plagued Gotham City. Many years later (like Superman, Batman has been active for about 15 years) he has made some headway, but his quest doesn’t look like something he can achieve in his lifetime. He’s obviously in top shape for a man in his thirties, and is an excellent martial artist, but his real asset is his brain, and after so long in the field he’s coming up with more and more ways to fight crime without pushing his body too far.  Beating up individual muggers is a young man’s game, now Bruce Wayne is using his intellect and his resources to root out corruption on a city-wide level. But still city-wide: his vow was for Gotham.

7. BAT GIRLS  features Cassandra Cain as Black Bat and Stephanie Brown as Spoiler, with Barbara Gordon as Oracle. All three of these women have called themselves Batgirl at some point or another, but now they’re operating under their own identities, even though both Black Bat and Spoiler carry the Bat symbol on their costumes. These ladies are in the process of rebuilding their lives after abuse, tragedy and mistakes, and Steph and Cass in particular share a positive outlook that there is hope for the task they share.

This is a YOUNG READERS title, aimed at 11-14 year olds. And it doesn’t hide the tragedy in the three women’s respective history.

8. BATMAN AND ROBIN is Bruce Wayne and his son Damian, and it is mostly told from the point of view of Damian, who is struggling to break from the role his mother had laid out for him and become worthy of his father’s ideals, without losing his own identity. It involves a lot of guest stars from the rest of the bat family.

This is a YOUNG READERS title, aimed at children. Yes, including Damian’s particular history as being trained as an Assassin. Because kids love Batman, dammit.

9. BATWOMAN is Kate Kane, daughter of Jacob Kane, kicked out of the military under DADT, dating Captain Sawyer of the GCPD, aided by her cousin Bette aka Flamebird (yes she can have her awesome new costume, I just hate the name Hawkfire). This book exists. No need to touch it.

10. CRIME ALLEY is a little like Gotham Central, but in reverse. It is the tales of the criminal element of Gotham City – not so much the big name adventures of Joker, Two-Face and the Penguin, because they get enough time in the heroes’ titles, but it’s the story of the thugs-for-hire who flit between jobs for the big names. It’s the story of the Broker, who finds lairs for the themed criminal elements. It’s about the people of Gotham City who don’t make the big titles all that often: the people caught between the villains and the Bats. Batman tends to look at the criminal element of the city as irredeemable, only solvable by being punched in the face and thrown into the revolving door of Arkham. This book is about exploring the people caught in the system. And because Batman is about self improvement, it’s also about how they break out.

11. DETECTIVE COMICS is another double-sized bimonthly anthology, coming out on the months that don’t produce Action Comics. The lead story always features Dick Grayson, aka Nightwing, the first Robin and now crimefighter in Bludhaven, despite the occasional foray out into the rest of the world. The rest of the book features stories of various length by different creative teams about the rest of the Bat family: Oracle, Spoiler, Black Bat, Robin, Red Robin, Alfred. Sometimes a GCPD story. The emphasis is on detective work: mysteries and puzzles and complex rabbitholes. Nightwing gets unfairly painted as the pretty dumb one of the Bat family, it’s time to point out that he’s still a Bat.

Where are Tim and Jason, I hear you ask? They will turn up, I promise!

But not for a while, because tomorrow it’s Wonders and Lanterns.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

From author Marie Force on E-Book Formatting Fairies:

I’ve recently concluded the first of what I hope will be a regular reader survey. Putting a finger on the pulse of the customer is always a good idea in business, and our business is no exception. I drafted the questions with the help and input of numerous other authors who took advantage of the opportunity to ask some of their most burning questions.

The survey was conducted from June 1-30, 2013, via Survey Monkey, and as many as 2,951 people replied to most of the 44 questions formulated by myself and more than a dozen other authors.

To summarize the most interesting results…

• Readers prefer e-books to paperbacks (77 to 52 percent). However, the question allowed readers to choose all formats that apply, and there appears to be crossover between the two most popular formats, indicating some readers buy books in multiple formats when the paperback is available. I think it’s extremely interesting to note that more than halfare still looking for their books in paperback. That will be a number to watch in future surveys. Will it go down or remain steady at about half?
• Nearly 80 percent buy their books from Amazon, with Barnes & Noble scoring a distant second at 23 percent and iBookstore/Apple coming in third at nearly 13 percent. I’ll be interested to see how this result changes or shifts over the next year. I believe first place will remain around the same percentage while the distance between second and third place will continue to narrow.
• Nearly 58 percent of those surveyed have not visited a brick and mortar bookstore in the last year or have done so twice in the last year. Twenty-five percent visit a bookstore once a month and twenty percent are there twice a month or more.

. . . .

• Sixty-four percent of those surveyed say they pay “no attention” to who publishes a book and/or “it doesn’t matter” to them. Thirty three percent pay “some attention” to who the publisher is whereas 4 percent say the publisher’s seal of approval “matters” to them.

Link to the rest at E-Book Formatting Fairies and thanks to Kat for the tip.

Click to Tweet/Email/Share This Post

LibDemVoice is running a daily feature, ‘Lessons of Coalition’, to assess the major do’s and don’ts learned from our experience of the first 3 years in government. Reader contributions are welcome, either as comments or posts. The word limit is no more than 450 words, and please focus on just one lesson you think the party needs to learn. Simply email your submission to voice@libdemvoice.org. Today Caron Lindsay shares her thoughts.

That old “walk a mile in each others’ shoes” thing works

In the first few days of Coalition, I wrote some friendly advice to our ministers. They didn’t have time to read it, but they might have saved themselves some pain:

The biggest and best piece of advice I could give to any of our new government people is keep talking to the party. Tell us what’s happening, what the challenges are and let us support you. If you just go off and do stuff that seems a bit weird to the party without explanation, we are going to feel ignored and left out and will get grumpy. That will make you want to talk to us even less and the whole thing will descend into a cycle of grumpiness and suspicion that really isn’t pleasant for anyone.

Last March, I followed that with some advice to Nick Clegg on the importance of working on his relationship with the Party:

So, there’s a couple of signs of tension in the relationship between the leader and the party. Tell me any relationships in life that don’t have their ups and downs. The one sure fact is that things won’t improve if we retreat from each other.

Nick’s personal ratings among party members have dramatically improved since then, but he has  a lot more work to do. This last week we’ve had the discomfort of the dissonance between the leadership seemingly briefing that the Party needs to grow up and members feeling that a Liberal Democrat party wanting to develop a boldly Liberal Democrat policy platform is not a sign of  childish behaviour. Liberator are not, shall we say, known for their slavish devotion to leaders’ every word, but suggesting he might f*** off before breakfast on a Monday morning is strong even for them.

Nick needs to listen to party members, show willing to compromise on policy debates and really show the same sort of empathy to his activists that he shows to callers on Call Clegg. That includes taking the temperature of the party before agreeing to measures like secret courts and NHS reforms which aren’t covered by the Coalition Agreement. It’s vital to get people on the same page before agreeing to legislation. On the other hand, I think the party needs to do its bit and try and understand where our ministers are coming from, considering what options were available to them and not believing everything they read in the Guardian. Of course, that would be a lot easier if the members felt that Nick and the rest of the leadership had a bit of respect for them.

If we try and walk a mile in each other’s shoes, it can only lead to better understanding and more effective working together. If we continue the way we’re going, the disconnect will turn toxic and we could well face more demotivation and demoralisation at a time when we need people to be out on doorsteps talking to voters.

Previously Published:

Stephen Tall: Stronger policy development and campaigning on issues that matter to the public (AKA where’s our liberal equivalent of the benefits cap?)

Mark Valladares: Better party communications responding to the realities of governing

Gareth Epps: Government: What’s Occurrin?

Nick Thornsby: Making a success of coalition government as a concept

If we ignore the human in the ‘troll', they will always exist.

I don’t often swear online. It usually takes an immense act of stupidity from a Formula 1 driver to incite me to do so, and the last time I tried that, the Chief Whip told me off mere seconds later. So profanity, even mildly, in a blog post is very unusual, particularly when directed at our leader. Which is why I did my little rant about these burly Home Office types turning up at tube stations and conducting checks on people’s immigration status on my own blog.

This is the second Home Office show of  disproportionate force in the last two weeks. First there were the “Go home” poster vans, described as “stupid and offensive” by Vince Cable. Now we have teams of Home Office officials turning up at tube stations and questioning people’s immigration status. Thing is, no matter how shifty I looked in the presence of authority, and I have a very irritating deferential instinct that makes me very self conscious in that situation,  the evidence from the Independent suggests that I would be unlikely to be apprehended, because I’m white.

I wondered if there was any advice about what your rights were if you are stopped and, just as importantly, what you could do to help someone else in that situation. I found this by Ian Dunt on politics.co.uk which has useful links to the Home Office’s own guidelines. The basic premise is that they should only be stopping people they have reasonable grounds to suspect that they are immigration offenders. He says:

When you first see the UKBA presence do not do anything which raises suspicion. This is referred to as “having an adverse reaction to an immigration presence”. Doing so gives the officers reasonable suspicion.

Do not change the speed of your walking or suddenly change direction. Maintain a steady pace. Do not hang back from the barriers. Do not behave confrontationally or aggressively. Enter into the conversation willingly, and then state that you are aware of your rights and can walk away unless the officer can give a reason for having reasonable suspicion of your status.

Use your phone to film the entire encounter. Any officer who speaks to you must identify themselves verbally and by producing a warrant card. They must explain their reason for questioning you.

At this point ask them what gave them reasonable suspicion to have stopped you. They must tell you that you are not obliged to answer any questions. They must tell you that you are not under arrest and are free to leave at any time. If they fail to do any of these things, tell them.

Make sure you clearly record the identification number of the officer. Sometimes this will be covered up or not present – it’s a common tactic. Insist on knowing the number before you cooperate with the officer. If at any point you decide to leave they cannot pursue you unless they have sufficient basis to arrest you under paragraphs 17(1) & 16(2) of Schedule 2 or of the Immigration Act 1971, or if you satisfy section 28A of the Act.

If you are not being questioned – and if you are white and middle class that is very likely – you can still help. You can record everything. You can inform people of their rights when they are stopped by officers. You can take people’s contact details if they are stopped. If there is a case against them, a failure of protocol by the officer will be relevant. You can get a useful fact-sheet of your rights for printing out and handing to people here.

This is clearly quite useful information to have. I would suggest having a good read of Chapter 31 of the Home Office Enforcement Instructions and Guidance. 

Obviously it goes without saying that if you are dealing with these people, you need to be polite, calm and assertive, but it’s always useful to be aware of people’s rights in these situations and to know what action to take if you see them being breached. If I were to see someone being treated unfairly, my sense of injustice would easily trump my instinctive deference.

* Caron Lindsay is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings

[Introduction]

I will admit it: I have read very few actual Superman comics. Some, but few. I have opinions about Superman informed by other media and talking to actual fans, so this lineup comes from trusting people, and from the fact that not having read a lot (which is getting fixed slowly) doesn’t stop me from having opinions.

Supers are: aliens in America; incredibly powerful; motivated by their own morality; champions of the oppressed.

1. SUPERMAN is Clark Kent, adopted son of farmers from Smallville, Kansas, and last son of Krypton, a planet brought to extinction by the actions of the people living on it. Growing up on a farm, later learning about his birth planet, led Clark to become somewhat of an environmentalist (Thanks, Plok.) As a reporter in Metropolis, Clark spends his days writing about things that will have a world wide impact, and Superman spends his time fighting a wide variety of world-threatening villains. He’s based in Metropolis, but he isn’t of Metropolis. He’ll defend his home, but he’s Big Picture, involved in saving the world as often as not. Threaten Metropolis, Smallville, his homeland, however, and he’ll break it all out.

Superman has an obscene amount of power, but he’s not interesting if he’s punching things. Rather, his most important power comes not from the sun, but from the S on his chest. Superman is not the first superhero in a world that has had the Justice Society since the 40s, but he is the strongest symbol. His most effective enemies attack the symbol before they attack the man. Although too many stories about reputation get boring. As Rob  tells me: “Any story that starts with ‘Can Superman…’ will never be worth reading, because the answer is yes, and who cares. If the story’s premise is ‘Should Superman…’ then we’re getting somewhere.” Clark has this enormous power and the only thing that tells him what he can o  can’t do with it is… himself and his own conscience. And like many people, his conscience comes from his parents.

Clark is in his mid-thirties. Superman has been active for fifteen years.

2. SUPERGIRL is Kara Zor-El, and again I’m looking at Plok’s idea that she’s not actually all that related to Kal. She’s a Kryptonian teenager who somehow got lost in time and space and eventually ended up in Metropolis, where she is an alien in every sense of the word: she doesn’t even speak the language. Superman finds her and supervises her immersion into the culture, but there is no pre-established family connection between them and no natural trust. Kara’s integration into Metropolitan culture is eased by a friendship she strikes up with Siobhan Smythe, an Irish immigrant with a gift for language who helps Kara’s introduction into English. Early on, she develops the beginnings of a friendship with Cassandra Cain, Black Bat, who doesn’t need to speak Kryptonian to understand Kara or make herself understood.

Kara is an immigrant. She wants to go home, and has a hard time discovering this is impossible. In the meantime, she’s having to cope with acceptance in the superhero community she doesn’t really understand, and the reality of Metropolis on the street level. While her ‘cousin’ is distracted by the Big Picture, Kara sees the reality of living in the city as an immigrant, and needs to learn how someone with god-like power can use that power to make a real difference. She’s also a scientist, and that affects her outlook, and will be useful in later stories.

This is a YOUNG READERS title, written with teenagers in mind.

3. SUPERBOY is Conner Taylor, Conner Levitt a thirteen year old boy living with his mothers in Metropolis, who is beginning to realize he has superpowers that bear a remarkable resemblance to the city’s protector. On investigation, they discover that during the IVF cycle that produced him, his mother’s egg was co-opted and used for an experiment. Conner is the product of this: a cloning experiment carried out in the very early days of Superman’s appearance. He is a true clone of Superman, but one that was raised by parents who had no idea what had happened. Now he has to make his own decisions about who he is and what he wants to do. Supergirl is about struggling to find your place in a scary new world. Superboy is about finding your own identity in a busy city.

–ETA: More on Superboy after more conversations with Rob: –

Conner – who signs his name Con L – is, in a parallel with Clark, a web-savvy blogger, and the book contains pages from his social media presence as part of the storytelling. With the blessing and encouragement from his Moms, he eschews the idea of a secret identity, and is open with his identity as a teenager with superpowers, but no costume.

This is a YOUNG READERS title, written with children aged 10-13 in mind.

4. THE DAILY PLANET stars Lois Lane, with a back up cast that includes Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, and occasionally her boyfriend Clark Kent (but never Superman). And it is the story of what goes down in Metropolis that isn’t to do with Kryptonians. The Planet isn’t’ a vehicle for any particular stance on capes, but Lois wants to cover the effect that their presence has on the city. It covers city politics, non-powered crime, and most of all involves a whole lot of investigative reporting. You don’t have to have superpowers to fight for what’s right. Sometimes all you need is a typewriter.

– ETA: More on The Daily Planet after conversations with Becca–

One of the major characters is Sydney, a staffer on the paper and a friend of Lois, who develops a crush on a columnist before coming to the realization that he sucks.

5. ACTION COMICS is a double-sized anthology that comes out bimonthly, and contains at least two stories written by different creative teams. Superman and/or Supergirl, Superboy, or Lois Lane usually occupy the main story, the second features someone else based in Metropolis, such as Black Lightning or Guardian, maybe a Lex Luthor centered story, or another superhero  from another location. The theme tying these particular stories together comes from Action Comics’  first ever page: “Champion of the Oppressed.” These aren’t people standing up to invaders and criminals, but to bullies. The S, remember, stands for hope.

Next time: BATS.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.