Andrew Hickey

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This synopsis of Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA by Eric Thomas Chester casts an interesting light on David Miliband's new employer:

This book tells the story of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the largest nonsectarian refugee relief agency in the world. Founded in the 1930s by socialist militants, the IRC attracted the support of renowned progressives such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, and Reinhold Niebuhr. 

But by the 1950s it had been absorbed into the American foreign policy establishment. Throughout the Cold War, the IRC was deeply involved in the volatile confrontations between the two superpowers and participated in an array of sensitive clandestine operations. The IRC thus evolved from a small organization of committed activists to a global operation functioning as one link in the CIA's covert network.

Read more at questia.

I've learned three things from / about Google Images. Firstly, Doctor Who's remit is so vast that if you search for any term which even marginally impinges on history, science, or popular culture, sooner or later you'll get a picture of Katy Manning posing with a Dalek. Lesson two is that the reverse applies, and that if you enter the name of any non-monster-related story, you'll find yourself wondering what the Hell right-wing American conspiracy theory has to do with "The Hand of Fear". The third point is that Google Images really needs some sort of "New Who Filter", so that when I search for pictures of Silurians, I don't have to look at that repellent half-human abomination from 2009. Or any of the Silurians he met in "The Hungry Earth". Sticking with the first two lessons, however, here's my Google Images scrapbook for the last month.

No, it's not "our" one, and nor was Robert Banks Stuart attempting to warn us. Scarily, though, it fits the timeline of the Doctor Who universe for HIV to have been dug out of the Antarctic permafrost in 1976-80. In case you think this sounds fatuous, bear in mind that the New Adventures did the plant-like-alien-parasite-as-AIDS-metaphor in 1992 ("Love and War"), and it worked brilliantly.

Bellal was the most notorious photobomber on the planet of the Exxilons.

I like this partly for its nostalgia value (the very sight of it evokes the primal smell of tea-time, then the despair I felt when I realised I'd missed episode two of "The Krotons" in an age when we had no reason to think we'd ever have the chance to see it again), and partly because it demonstrates the difference between BBC-Then and BBC-Now. Computer-driven design means that even the PR material for "The Power of Three" looked like an ad for "The Bourne Ultimatum". Which may be apt, given that recent

Doctor Who sees the big-budget action movie as aspirational, but in 1981? "Yeah, we need a caption-card for that Five Faces thing. Here are some back-issues of Doctor Who Magazine and a pair of scissors. Oh, and they've just invented this thing called Pritt-Stick, have you tried it?"

This is from 1924, although the description of "a White Man - lost in the wild - who turns native" suggests that it's What Cliff Jones Does Next. Then we have...

...originally published in 1938. I refuse to believe that Barry Letts / Robert Sloman didn't read at least one of these when they were young. Also, if Doc Savage is "The Man of Bronze", then his version of the Green Death is probably just verdigris.

In the 1970s, all

Doctor Who jigsaws were based on a nine-year-old's fan-fic.

We're so used to thinking of Roger Delgado as the Sexy Older Man that we forget what he was like when he was younger: the sort of character actor who, were he around today, would be second-in-command to a terrorist leader grudgingly played by Art Malik. But what we really learn from this photo is where Derren Brown got his powers of hypnosis. Clearly from his father, a mysterious ex-army man called General Sam (Ret). Oh, Derren Brown was born in 1971...? What a coincidence.

After six months, the Transtemporal Stare-Out Championship still had no clear winner.

Not actually

Doctor Who, but another nostalgia trigger for anyone who happened to read DWM or Starburst in the early '80s, since it was on the back cover as often as Orca: Killer Whale was on the back cover of all Marvel comics in the late '70s. Yet see how the '80s-speak "Mutants" are clearly "Zombies" in modern terminology, the Z-word still having voodoo (rather than radiation-based) connotations in those days. I'm giving you a lesson in geek-linguistics here, and it's only slightly complicated by the memory of Doctor Who Monthly referring to the antibodies in the City of the Exxilons as "zombies" before the word was common playground-currency. Much to the confusion of we nine-year-olds, who had problems with anything more outré than Giant Robots with laser-guns.

The music critic Paul Williams has died. He founded Crawdaddy!, the first magazine of rock music criticism, and wrote frequently about the music of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. A sample, about “Fun, Fun, Fun”:

Notice that the rebellious, fun-loving, fast-driving hero of the song is female. Notice that in every verse, every line except the last ends in “now,” and it works! (One of the jobs of poetry is to capture not the actual words but the subjective impact of everyday speech.) Notice the understated, very specific, rhythmic sound of the words “fun, fun, fun” in the chorus, and the contrasting open-endedness of “away.” Notice the easy, natural, wildly complex interplay between the voices and combinations of voices. Notice the neat double meaning in the second verse, “A lot of guys try to catch her,” referring both to her elusive sexuality (“you look like an ace now”) and her automotive ability (“you drive like an ace now”). Notice how Dad’s futile attempt at discipline only serves to throw her (potentially) into “my” realm and bigger and better trouble. And I know you can't fail to notice one of the sweetest fade-outs ever, the brilliant ordinariness of the song totally transcended in two brief moments of soaring falsetto. Fun, indeed.

Paul Williams, from Brian Wilson & The Beach Boys: How Deep Is the Ocean?: Essays and Conversations (1997).

Related reading
Paul Williams website
Crawdaddy! archive (Wolfgang’s Vault)
Billboard obituary
Los Angeles Times obituary
You’re reading a post from Michael Leddy’s blog Orange Crate Art. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

Can it get any worse? Yes it can.

First, we had the vote in the House of Commons on 4th March on secret courts (compounded by last night’s vote in the House of Lords).

Then last Friday we had Nick Clegg’s speech on immigration.

Next on the agenda is the Communications Data Bill. The Drum reports:

The Communications Data Bill, which critics believe could introduce the most ‘intrusive’ powers for a Government in the West in order to store mass communications data, could be introduced in the coming weeks.

The Telegraph reports that the ‘Snoopers Charter’ as it has been nicknamed, could be included in the Queen’s Speech in May, which offers police and intelligence agencies the power to access the records of internet providers to record the activity of their customers.

According to a report from the Home Office, the new charter is necessary “to help in the investigation of crime,” with some communications data found to be longer retained “for business reasons.”

The argument for the bill is to help security services maintain a pace with technological advancement.

In February it was reported by the Daily Mail that the charter had already cost £400 million before any data had even been collected.

Yesterday, a report released by thinktank Demos suggested that police were putting together a centralised hub to ‘collect, store and analyse social media data.

Surely even Nick Clegg would oppose this? Don’t bet on it.

You may recall that, on 3rd April last year, there was a conference call on this very issue between some Liberal Democrat bloggers and some of Clegg’s advisers. By all accounts, this was a full and frank exchange of views. The most disturbing thing about that exchange was the advisers’ apparent lack of liberal instincts; they simply could not grasp why party members were up in arms. If this is indicative of the quality of advice Clegg is receiving, there is little wonder he is so insensitive to the party’s values and culture. But then if one is allocating blame, one is forced to ask why Clegg hires such advice in the first place.

On the night of that infamous conference call, Jonathan Calder advised Nick Clegg to consider this strategic question:

Who do you expect to vote for you at the next election? As my Liberator colleague Simon Titley never tires of pointing out, the Liberal Democrats’ great weakness is that our core vote is so small. We pride ourselves on working harder than the other parties, but the fact that we have to work so hard to persuade people to vote for us is really a sign of weakness.

What we need is a core of liberally minded people who naturally vote Liberal Democrat. If you put yourself on the other side of this debate from every civil liberties group in the country, it is hard to see why liberally minded people should vote for you.

So if you take my advice you will distance yourself from these proposals very loudly and very publicly.

Clegg’s performance on the issues of secret courts and immigration suggests that he is doing the precise opposite. He doesn’t agree with Jonathan Calder that the Liberal Democrat vote can be found among “liberally minded people”. He thinks it is in the same space that the other mainstream parties are trying to occupy: the mythical ‘centre ground’ (criticised recently by Tory MP Bernard Jenkin), with our old friends ‘Alarm Clock Britain’, ‘hard-working families’ and the ‘squeezed middle’.

Well I don’t know about you, Mr Clegg, but most members of the Liberal Democrats did not join the party and campaign so that they could blend in with the (small ‘c’ conservative) scenery. They joined to put liberal values into practice, and a liberal party that regards liberal issues as secondary or expendable has lost its point.

What with secret courts, immigration and now the snoopers charter, it is understandable if Liberal Democrat members’ anger is all used up on civil liberties issues at the moment.

But please spare some of your anger for this: the introduction of food stamps:

“Food stamps” arrive in Britain next month, when tens of thousands of vulnerable people will be issued with food vouchers in lieu of money to tide them over short-term financial crises.

Rather than, as now, offering a cash loan, most councils will from April offer new applicants who qualify for emergency assistance a one-off voucher redeemable for goods such as food and nappies.

Many of the 150 local authorities in England running welfare schemes have confirmed that they will issue the vouchers in the form of payment cards, which will be blocked or monitored to prevent the holder using them for alcohol, cigarettes or gambling.

In a perceptive piece in today’s Guardian, Suzanne Moore contrasts this news with the middle class obsession with food evidenced by the boom in TV cookery programmes. (It’s more food voyeurism than cookery; we can see from what’s on offer on the supermarket shelves that the middle classes aren’t cooking more but are actually relying increasingly on ready meals). She reveals that the switch from cash assistance to vouchers is not about saving money but imposing a moral view:

In this world of endless gastronomy, the superstar chefs say eat seasonally and simply. Again, this requires dosh. Choice costs. So what so we do for genuinely poor people? We take away even the most basic of choices. We infantilise them. They are not our problem any longer, but charity cases.

In order to treat people like this one must first vilify them. This has been the coalition project from day one: the immorality of those on welfare is the basic recipe. Repeat after me: austerity removes autonomy. We turn the vulnerable into villains, but even the most rabid rightwinger must pretend that little children should be fed. Do food stamps achieve this? This may indeed be the most ineffective way of administering aid. Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economics professor thinks so. In the past 40 years the use of vouchers and stamps has grown hugely in the US, but dependency has not stopped. Putting money into people’s hands may actually stimulate the economy, but that remains abhorrent to this government, except in its bizarre sub-prime house buying fantasy...

If you accept poverty is the fault of poor people themselves, then you can refuse them choice or money, because you believe they cannot be trusted to spend it properly. Let them eat crappy cake while the rest of us carry on stuffing our faces with ever more exotic ready-meals. Or just say no to this sickness. Fasting is in after all.

How do you take even more away from people with nothing? You strip them of even the most basic of choices, that’s how. The notion of food stamps in a still wealthy country makes me gag. Swallow this and you will swallow anything. But that taste at the back of your throat is pure bile.

Oh, and if you still think that food stamps are justified because otherwise the poor will only waste their benefits on cigarettes and alcohol, the evidence suggests otherwise.

and continuity, everyone at least got to do celebrated party pieces. Were they pale imitations of what they had actually meaningfully accomplished in the past? Yes, but at least it was celebratory. It’s at least perfectly easy to sit down with The Five Doctors and have a good time. Whereas with Zagreus you just get four hours of listening to people putting in far more effort than the material deserves.
The person worst served in this regard is Paul McGann. And as with much of Zagreus, the worst part is the nagging sense that people are sincerely trying for quality. McGann spends virtually the entire story talking to himself, or, in other places, talking to a random set of sentences recorded by Jon Pertwee for a fan film mixed so as to be virtually unintelligible. It’s all very amnesia and uncertainty as to who he is, and it gives an awful feeling that the point of the exercise was to really give Paul McGann a chance to act. But like Minuet in Hell there seems to be a bit of confusion about what acting is: it’s not actually the practice of saving a poorly written scene. Yes, McGann is good enough to save most, though not all of the scenes he’s in, but it’s dreadful to hear him set on the task in the first place.

Yes, there are moments of real charm through all of this. The Alice in Wonderland stuff is a great idea. But even with that there’s a horrible cynicism to it. The story flirts with deciding that Doctor Who is really Carrollian before having Romana declare it all a lot of nonsense. Similarly, there’s obvious promise in the idea that maybe we’ll deal with a Doctor/Companion love story, except that Charley is characterized as being in love with the Doctor with all the complexity and subtlety with which Orllensa was characterized as the Russian one in Embrace the Darkness. It consists of nothing so much as Charley delivering the line “I love you” in a variety of different tones of voice. And that’s before we get to the TARDIS becoming a creepy jealous lover who tries to take revenge on Charley because of the Doctor’s loyalty to her. And, of course, almost everything to do with Uncle Winky feels a hair’s breadth from brilliance.

But let’s look at why it’s so bad. In particular, let’s look at the story’s central idea, the absolute duality between time and anti-time. We gave this idea a pretty thorough hiding back with Neverland, but there the objection was largely political. And, well, let’s face it, there’s still a fair chunk of Doctor Who fandom that wants to insist that the series is apolitical, so let’s switch gears and make the more straightforward objection: the time/anti-time dualism is just boring. It’s one of the oldest sci-fi tropes imaginable. It has no meat left on the bones. There is nothing whatsoever interesting to say about it. Absolute dualism is, in fact, so boring that when given it as a story premise back in 1978 Robert Holmes rebelled and wrote The Ribos Operation instead. The ensuing quarter century has done the concept no favors, as it happens. It’s still a dumb cliche.

Actually, the call back to the Key to Time is fitting. In the Mary Whitehouse entry right after The Talons of Weng-Chiang I noted that there’s a fairly linear chain of causality from sacking Philip Hinchcliffe to 1989. There are a lot of reasons for this, but in many ways the biggest one is simple: it’s the point where the BBC made an active decision that Doctor Who’s actual quality wasn’t a priority in making it. That Doctor Who lasted over a decade after that decision is, frankly, incredible. But there’s still a line in the series that happens there between the period of its history that made it a cultural icon and the period of its history that progressively squandered all of that goodwill.

It’s telling, then, that Zagreus engages almost entirely with the latter. That only Davison through McCoy appear in it is, of course, inevitable - the only other living Doctor was Tom Baker, and he wasn’t playing. But Tom Baker’s era is still tacitly represented through Romana, Leela, K-9, and the status quo of Gallifrey: in other words, the Graham Williams era. The Hinchcliffe era remains almost completely effaced. And anything before that is represented purely by Jon Pertwee as a ghost in the machine. Yes, the availability of actors limits that, but it’s not as though actors from the pre-Williams years weren’t available. Liz Sladen and Anneke Wills make brief appearances, and of course there’s the Brigadier. But the Brigadier is here in his role of “persistently recurring character,” which is a Nathan-Turner invention. But more to the point, there’s really no compelling reason why more actors from the series’ first fourteen years couldn’t be hired. There’s next to nothing in Zagreus that pays any conscious homage to the series’ roots.

And this is telling given how much of what is there is based on the series. To the point, in fact, where the material history of the series seems to speak through the narrative more than is intended. Unless the decision to have Davison’s character be the only one of the three pseudo-Doctors to contribute nothing whatsoever to the plot resolution and the decision to have Baker’s character be the evil one are actually deliberate swipes at their eras, in which case we’re back to the problem of the audio being breathtakingly mean spirited. But even if those are deliberate we’re stuck with the accidental haunting by the new series as Charley makes what was clearly meant as a joke about the location filming for The Five Doctors and declares that hell is apparently Wales.

And yet there’s no time for the early years of the series. Despite the fact that those were the ones in which it was a cultural icon. Those are the ones where its power actually resides. And yet all the wilderness years can do is pick over the corpse of the series’ decline. And, worse, pick over its own corpse. Even the worst of the Saward era wasn’t this petty and small-minded. Even Attack of the Cybermen had ambitions beyond fan politics. In this regard what is really telling about Zagreus is its basic premise: a multi-Doctor fortieth anniversary story that declines to have all the Doctors in it. The basic deferral of desire implicit in this just feels mean. “We know what you’re here for, and here’s something that’s conspicuously not it.” Yeesh.

For all that the wilderness years brought us tremendous innovations in Doctor Who, we’re left with this basic problem: they were built on sand. Their status as a post-traumatic era that was rebelling against the series’ cancellation put an upper bound on their overall quality. Because they were condemned for life to pick over the worst bits of the series in an attempt to explain and repair them, and were fundamentally cut off from the series’ actual strengths. It’s not, obviously, that everything after Season Fourteen was rubbish. There were grand moments there. But it is the back side of the classic series’ mountain: the period of steady decline as a cultural force until quality wasn’t even enough to save the show. There’s a sense of proper terror about the uphill part of that story. And a complete refusal to even attempt to match it. Not, obviously, in the sense of references to it, but in the sense of seeking the same aesthetic goals that the series sought. Instead we get the unsettling realization that in order to do a two-season run of McGann stories with no classic monsters and strange new settings Big Finish really believed they needed to do a big continuity wipe and shunt the Doctor into an alternate universe. Instead of, you know, just doing a run of innovative, exciting stories.

In that regard the best metaphor for Zagreus is probably its own: the strange and isolated projections that offer a distorted and corrupted shadow of what the series was. Visions of the series that are hermetically sealed, cut off from engagement with anything, trapped in an essentially hopeless cycle of almost-meaning. All Zagreus can do is chase its own tail, simultaneously demonstrating and rebelling against the way in which the history of the series destroyed it. There’s no way to fall out of this world. There’s no way forward from this point. There’s nothing that can possibly be done but to sweep the entire series away - to abandon the past entirely.

In other words, the only route that the series can possibly take in the wake of Zagreus is to stop treating Doctor Who as a historical object and to make Doctor Who for the present. This is inevitable: at some point history has to give way to the present.  This, in fact, relates closely to this blog and the question of when I’ll end it. The answer is simple: whenever it catches up to the present of Doctor Who and I lose all trace of the lens of history. (So right now the blog’s last entry will be on The Snowmen, but as of tomorrow it’ll be The Bells of St. Johns) I mean, I don’t rule out a short return engagement at some point in the future once there’s a season or two banked that I can work through, but as a thrice-weekly feature this blog ends when it catches up to the present. I’m expecting it to be in the early part of 2014.

We’re also, obviously, nearing the new series. We’ll cover Rose on May 1st, according to the current schedule. At the same time I’m going to move the blog to a personal website. The reasons for this are pretty simple - as this project draws to a close I’m going to want to transition smoothly to new things, and a more general website is going to make that easier. I want to start it along with the new series because I expect a traffic spike when I reach it. So the blog will be one part of a website that also contains, for instance, pages for all of my books because, well, I want people who are reading my blog to read my other stuff too.

This seems like a good time to update about some of those projects as well. The Pertwee book should be out towards the end of next week if all goes well - I've just gotten the last edits back, and am typesetting and doing the requisite fighting with Amazon's system. (Let's see if they accuse me of plagiarizing my blog again) The Wonder Woman book is halfway through my edits, and the decision on it is down to going with a small press or self-publishing, with that decision to be made within a few weeks. I don’t know the timetable on it if it goes out from a small press, but if I do end up self-publishing I expect late summer/early fall given the speed my copyeditor tends to work at. The manuscript for the book on the They Might Be Giants’ album Flood is due tomorrow, and to the best of my knowledge that’s out in November.

The next project I’m going to start work on is the second edition of the Hartnell volume. That will hopefully feature new cover art that matches the art on the Pertwee and Troughton volumes better, fresh copy-editing, a completely new essay on Galaxy Four, and new essays on a couple of books and audios - probably the first Destiny of the Doctor audio, A Big Hand for the Doctor, Auld Morality, and the John and Gillian comics. And, you know, a general looking over. I say hopefully because I’m planning on Kickstarting that project, since I don’t really have a great sense of the financials of releasing a second edition and pre-selling the amount that will cover my expenses would be helpful. If that falls through, well, we’ll figure something else out. After that I’ll start on the Tom Baker volume, or possibly volumes once I see the word count. (Given that The Deadly Assassin and Logopolis alone are as long as 1/4 of the Pertwee book, I have… concerns.)

I’m saying all of this now because we’ve reached a key point in the narrative. In September of 2003 the BBC announced that Doctor Who would be coming back as a television series run by Russell T Davies. That was the extent of the announcement at the time. Details were slow to emerge - as of September it wasn’t clear when, how many episodes, who the Doctor would be, or whether it was going to be a complete reboot of the series. The actual November 2003 issue of Doctor Who Magazine contained the first substantive interview with Russell T Davies about the series, where he revealed… basically nothing, save for the declaration that it was not going to be a reboot. News was thin enough that even after the announcement Doctor Who Magazine had an issue (339) that had no content related to the new series, simply because there wasn’t any.

Zagreus, meanwhile, came out in November of 2003 as Big Finish’s big fortieth anniversary piece. Ostensibly, at least, it was meant to be the big deal of the fortieth anniversary - four Doctors together, big epic involving Rassilon, everything you’d expect. But by the time it had been served up it was no longer the main course, the fortieth anniversary having morphed unexpectedly into the negative-second anniversary, staring puzzledly at the onrushing future and trying to figure out what it was. Zagreus thus becomes impossible to read in its own context, as it never arrived in its own context. It has always existed in the context of the new series, even when there wasn’t a new series for it to exist in the context of.

In another sense, we’ve reached the present. We’re less than a decade in the past now, and while historicization is not impossible it is, at the very least, getting harder. The world we’re looking at feels very close to the one we live in. It isn’t quite - there are still huge changes to both Doctor Who and the world set to take place. But it feels like the present, or, at least, close enough to the present that distance seems impossible. And so it seems time to throw away the illusion and to admit that from this point on Doctor Who starts to collapse into a single ongoing moment instead of an unfurling past.

Obviously we’re still a full month from the new series. We’ve got quite a bit to do still: three more audios to wrap up our look at Big Finish’s main Eighth Doctor line, two after that to look at their Lucie Miller line, a long overdue look at the Doctor Who Magazine comics, the dying end of the BBC Books line, Scream of the Shalka, and a check-in on the whole Faction Paradox spin-off. But this scattershot approach to March mostly serves to highlight what the last days of the wilderness years were like - tying up the loose ends before a whole new cultural vision of the program came and washed everything else away. Certainly this is the same point that Happy Endings was for the McCoy era - the period where Paul McGann’s Doctor is at once the series’ present and its past. McGann’s Doctor, never as well-established as McCoy’s, was already fragile. He was already being unseated in November of 2003 by Richard E. Grant, and now he was being eaten by the future. Fittingly, he never even gets a regeneration scene, the only Doctor to just fade away into the past.

Of course, Zagreus hardly seems like stable ground to begin with. It was always hobbled by several obvious and significant problems like “being written by Gary Russell.” But even beyond that there’s something crushingly, awfully disappointing about Zagreus. It is, in its own way, even worse than Dimensions in Time, which at least had the decency to know that it was a naff comedy sketch. Zagreus, on the other hand, seems unsettlingly convinced that it is actually a serious attempt at a suitably epic anniversary story that’s been built to for nearly two years.

What’s puzzling, though, is that all the pieces seem in place. A story structured around the memories of the past instead of just name-checking things arbitrarily, a character arc based on actual emotions, a sense of whimsy and the fantastic, tons of great comparisons between Doctor Who and the classic tradition of British children’s literature, unabashed sentimentality and romance. On paper you should need to work to make this go wrong. And yet somehow it manages.

Perhaps what is most striking among Zagreus’s myriad of flaws is how mind-wrenchingly petulant it is. With The Ancestor Cell, at least, we have only Lawrence Miles’s word that Stephen Cole nicked large chunks of it from Lawrence Miles. This time there can be no such ambiguity. Zagreus is transparently and blatantly an attempt to do the War arc “right” and to show how the Eighth Doctor Adventures “should” have done a continuity reboot. So we have a predicted future war against an impossible to understand enemy that represents a new concept of time and history, Time Lords seeding their DNA through history so that evolved beings throughout the cosmos resemble them, Romana being corrupted by the Presidency, sentient and humanoid TARDISes, and what can broadly be described as a story based around big ideas. And on top of that, it isn’t even subtle about its beef. Neverland went out of its way to reference the Yssgaroth and Dronid, and Zagreus explicitly condemns the Eighth Doctor Adventures to an alternate universe from the Big Finish ones, actively and decisively forking the lines and spitting in the face of anyone who wanted to reconcile them.

More than anything, this gets at the problem with Zagreus. It’s using the big fortieth anniversary slot to write a gigantic “fuck you” not only to the other major Doctor Who line and to anyone with the temerity to enjoy it. That’s its idea of celebrating: picking fights with other fans. But this is hardly surprising, because at the end of the day that’s the bulk of what Zagreus is about. This is a story that has completely bought into the notion that the point of Doctor Who is big theories about the nature of Doctor Who. And…

Look, there just comes a point in a person’s life where they no longer give a damn about the nature of Rassilon. There comes a point when you’re just over that. Zagreus assumes that everybody is still desperately looking for epic accounts of the Time Lords, and it’s just… impossible to care. Instead one is left feeling sorry for everybody. There are scattered people who seem to be having fun - Nicholas Courtney and Colin Baker both enjoy getting to do villainous turns. And everybody is giving it their all. But listening, one just feels bad for the fact that actual people with lives are wasting them recording this. It’s like that awkward moment at a convention where someone asks a rambling and fanwank-laden question of an actor and the actor puts on their best professional face so as to not accidentally re-enact the William Shatner Saturday Night Live sketch. Except stretched out. For four hours.

It’s one thing when you’re doing fanwank in novels. Those, at least, don’t have any bystanders. But somehow it all gets sadder and more unfortunate when there are non-fans involved. I mean, everyone is getting paid, so that’s nice, especially for actors who aren’t exactly working full time, but the fact remains that it’s just embarrassing to hear everyone trotted out for their turn in this. I mean, even with The Five Doctors, a towering monument of froth

The novelist Stella Duffy and TV writer Helen Raynor are completely right when they point out how few Doctor Who stories have been written by women. It's ludicrous and pitiful, really. Raynor's own episodes are a distinguished exception to the norm, and were produced under the reign of Russell T Davies a number of years ago. The current crop of episodes in the 50th anniversary season seem, from a perusal of this week's Radio Times, uniformly Boys' Clubbish in terms of both writing and direction.


I'll not talk here about women writers in TV, or women writers in genre generally, or even women in science fiction and fantasy. There are brilliant women in all those fields, having their work produced and published.

But Doctor Who is a funny one, isn't it? For a show that seems so progressive in all sorts of ways...  it can be a bit behindhand at times.

There's no excuse for this, though. They need to sort it out. And it isn't good enough to suggest that Doctor Who is 'traditionally' the preserve of uptight, white, middle class male writers, and that it's everso tricky to change that - even in 2013.

Come on - not so long ago EVERYTHING was the preserve of uptight, white, middle class males...

And - while we're on - can i just say I thought the presentation of Amy Pond in Doctor Who was a bit sexist as well?



Old style Doctor Who had a few, rare, wonderful examples of Doctor Who written by women. Barbara Clegg wrote 'Enlightenment' for 1984's season - a rollicking metaphysical space opera featuring sailing ships racing through the solar system. The original show's run came to a close in 1989 with Rona Munro's 'Survival' - which, with its blend of suburbia and alien exotica, now seems very much ahead of its time.

(This is part of the “Autism Speaks, I Want To Say…” flashblog; click the link for more information.)

As Twitter-using feminists will no doubt be aware after the last few days, all too often there’s a double standard surrounding prejudice, hate and falsehoods – namely, that dominant groups can spread it (inadvertently or otherwise) as far as they like for as long as they like, but when the victims of this call it out, suddenly they’re the ones being hateful. And this double standard is as present in the autism community as it is everywhere else.

As summed up here by the brilliant Amy Sequenzia, the current conversation about (and usually not with autistic people) can be incredibly hurtful. It can feel like a constant attack. But when we point this out, we’re doing the “attacking”. We’re told we’re wrecking the “united voice” that’s usually just the voice of groups like Autism Speaks who refuse to listen to autistic people. (I wrote about silencing and unity last week and whilst it focuses on feminism due to the nature of this blog, I did have the neurodiversity movement in mind toward the end of that post.) We’re silenced by functioning labels – as summed up in this Tumblr post by Crown-Of-Weeds, we’re either too “high-functioning” to know what we’re talking about, or too “low-functioning” to be worth listening to (which, if it isn’t clear enough already, is unbelievably ableist). And when autistic people create change, we’re erased from our own activism; for example, as reported in detail here by Michael Scott Monje Jr., Autism Speaks reported the removal of offensive Google autocomplete terms about autism without as much as a mention for the autism flashblogs that demanded this (Autistic People Should and Autistic People Are - unfortunately I was unable to participate in these) or any credit for the person who led the campaign, Alyssa of Yes, That Too.

Those of us on the spectrum really shouldn’t have to fight through a million-and-one barriers like this just to be heard in the conversation about our own lives. In short, nothing about us without us. Thanks to flashblogs like this, autistic people across the spectrum are speaking out. Now all we need is for people to actually listen.

Tagged: ASD, asperger's syndrome, autism, autism speaks I want to say, flashblog, neurodiversity, silencing

Should companies spend money on security awareness training for their employees? It's a contentious topic, with respected experts on both sides of the debate. I personally believe that training users in security is generally a waste of time, and that the money can be spent better elsewhere. Moreover, I believe that our industry's focus on training serves to obscure greater failings in security design.

In order to understand my argument, it's useful to look at training's successes and failures. One area where it doesn't work very well is health. We are forever trying to train people to have healthier lifestyles: eat better, exercise more, whatever. And people are forever ignoring the lessons. One basic reason is psychological: we just aren't very good at trading off immediate gratification for long-term benefit. A healthier you is an abstract eventually; sitting in front of the television all afternoon with a McDonald's Super Monster Meal sounds really good right now. Similarly, computer security is an abstract benefit that gets in the way of enjoying the Internet. Good practices might protect me from a theoretical attack at some time in the future, but they're a lot of bother right now and I have more fun things to think about. This is the same trick Facebook uses to get people to give away their privacy; no one reads through new privacy policies; it's much easier to just click "OK" and start chatting with your friends. In short: security is never salient.

Another other reason health training works poorly is that it's hard to link behaviors with benefits. We can train anyone -- even laboratory rats -- with a simple reward mechanism: push the button, get a food pellet. But with health, the connection is more abstract. If you're unhealthy, what caused it? It might have been something you did or didn't do years ago, it might have been one of the dozen things you have been doing and not doing for months, or it might have been the genes you were born with. Computer security is a lot like this, too.

Training laypeople in pharmacology also isn't very effective. We expect people to make all sorts of medical decisions at the drugstore, and they're not very good at it. Turns out that it's hard to teach expertise. We can't expect every mother to have the knowledge of a doctor or pharmacist or RN, and we certainly can't expect her to become an expert when most of the advice she's exposed to comes from manufacturers' advertising. In computer security, too, a lot of advice comes from companies with products and services to sell.

One area of health that is a training success is HIV prevention. HIV may be very complicated, but the rules for preventing it are pretty simple. And aside from certain sub-Saharan countries, we have taught people a new model of their health, and have dramatically changed their behavior. This is important: most lay medical expertise stems from folk models of health. Similarly, people have folk models of computer security. Maybe they're right and maybe they're wrong, but they're how people organize their thinking. This points to a possible way that computer security training can succeed. We should stop trying to teach expertise, and pick a few simple metaphors of security and train people to make decisions using those metaphors.

On the other hand, we still have trouble teaching people to wash their hands -- even though it's easy, fairly effective, and simple to explain. Notice the difference, though. The risks of catching HIV are huge, and the cause of the security failure is obvious. The risks of not washing your hands are low, and it's not easy to tie the resultant disease to a particular not-washing decision. Computer security is more like hand washing than HIV.

Another area where training works is driving. We trained, either through formal courses or one-on-one tutoring, and passed a government test, to be allowed to drive a car. One reason that works is because driving is a near-term, really cool, obtainable goal. Another reason is even though the technology of driving has changed dramatically over the past century, that complexity has been largely hidden behind a fairly static interface. You might have learned to drive thirty years ago, but that knowledge is still relevant today. On the other hand, password advice from ten years ago isn't relevant today. Can I bank from my browser? Are PDFs safe? Are untrusted networks okay? Is JavaScript good or bad? Are my photos more secure in the cloud or on my own hard drive? The 'interface' we use to interact with computers and the Internet changes all the time, along with best practices for computer security. This makes training a lot harder.

Food safety is my final example. We have a bunch of simple rules -- cooking temperatures for meat, expiration dates on refrigerated goods, the three-second rule for food being dropped on the floor -- that are mostly right, but often ignored. If we can't get people to follow these rules, what hope do we have for computer security training?

To those who think that training users in security is a good idea, I want to ask: "Have you ever met an actual user?" They're not experts, and we can't expect them to become experts. The threats change constantly, the likelihood of failure is low, and there is enough complexity that it's hard for people to understand how to connect their behavior to eventual outcomes. So they turn to folk remedies that, while simple, don't really address the threats.

Even if we could invent an effective computer security training program, there's one last problem. HIV prevention training works because affecting what the average person does is valuable. Even if only half the population practices safe sex, those actions dramatically reduce the spread of HIV. But computer security is often only as strong as the weakest link. If four-fifths of company employees learn to choose better passwords, or not to click on dodgy links, one-fifth still get it wrong and the bad guys still get in. As long as we build systems that are vulnerable to the worst case, raising the average case won't make them more secure.

The whole concept of security awareness training demonstrates how the computer industry has failed. We should be designing systems that won't let users choose lousy passwords and don't care what links a user clicks on. We should be designing systems that conform to their folk beliefs of security, rather than forcing them to learn new ones. Microsoft has a great rule about system messages that require the user to make a decision. They should be NEAT: necessary, explained, actionable, and tested. That's how we should be designing security interfaces. And we should be spending money on security training for developers. These are people who can be taught expertise in a fast-changing environment, and this is a situation where raising the average behavior increases the security of the overall system.

If we security engineers do our job right, users will get their awareness training informally and organically, from their colleagues and friends. People will learn the correct folk models of security, and be able to make decisions using them. Then maybe an organization can spend an hour a year reminding their employees what good security means at that organization, both on the computer and off. That makes a whole lot more sense.

This essay originally appeared on DarkReading.com.

There is lots of commentary on this one.

You'll remember our differentiation strategy, as outlined on a napkin by Richard Reeve early on in the government and helpfully reproduced below...


Having spent some time establishing that we are a 'grown up' party of government by working hand in hand with the Tories, in the middle of the parliament we will slowly start to extract ourselves from their grasp, reasserting our own liberal character and credentials, in good time to make it clear that we offer an alternative to the British people at the 2015 General Election.
I always thought it was a mistake. And I have to ask- how is that going?
On the one hand policies that are undoubtably Liberal Democrat feature heavily on the governments programme. The problem is - having spent so long 'not having a cigarette paper between us' that the Tories can claim them just as much as we have. And surprise surprise - they are claiming them, with Conservative Home saluting David Cameron for delivering on Equal marriage, protecting the Aid budget and  the £10k tax band.

Many in the Lib Dems will point out that this will fool few people (and equally that none of these go down well with the Tory grass roots). I think they're wrong (at least on the first part). The Tories have got a lot of money to spend reminding people that it was George Osborne who stood up in the house and announced the £10K band, that the Equal Marriage Act was proposed by a Tory Secretary of State at the DCMS, that the two SoSs responsible for International Aid have been Andrew Mitchell and Justine Greening. None of that will be fair - but they have big pockets. If they want to own those policies in the minds of the British public - they probably have the ammo to do it.
Meantime, we do ourselves no favours at all in trying to re-establish our own liberal credentials. Look at the latest three big moves by the leadership - on Secret Courts, Media regulation and now Immigration. We can argue the whys and wherefore of these policies, but if we are meant to be now pursuing a strategy of strongly differentiating ourselves from the Tories, I would suggest that this is a curious way of going about it. We look less liberal than them. Which is quite an achievement.  
I've always said the non -differentiation strategy was a mistake from the start. But it was the road we went down. If we're going to make it work we need to start reminding people of what we believe in our hearts
The last couple of weeks makes me wonder if the leadership in Westminster hasn't rather forgotten that napkin. 
Nick - its time to be all liberal again. Could you get on with it please

The major political parties are worried that the voters will blame them for the state of the economy at the next election. But with opinion polls showing that voters share the blame between the last Labour government, the current coalition and the problems of the world economy, there is little to be gained for any party in trying to revisit the past and apportion blame to their opponents. Why?

In his big immigration speech today, David Cameron took an axe to the rhetorical and philosophical basis of the Coalition's welfare reforms. I don't think he intended to do so, and few people seem to have picked up on it, but the implications of his remarks are nevertheless profound.

I'm referring to this. Rhetorically addressing an East European migrant, the sort who might be tempted to "come and take advantage of our generosity without making a proper contribution to our country" he first reminds them of what conditions are already imposed on British jobseekers:

You will be subject to full conditionality and work search requirements and you will have to show you are genuinely seeking employment.
If you fail that test, you will lose your benefit.

But then he goes further:

And as a migrant, we’re only going to give you six months to be a jobseeker. After that benefits will be cut off unless you really can prove not just that you are genuinely seeking employment but also that you have a genuine chance of getting a job.

But why would that help reduce the benefits bill? Surely anyone who is genuinely seeking work has a genuine chance of finding it? After all, the whole sanctions regime, which has been steadily cranked up during the past decade (under Labour and Coalition governments alike) and which can now lead to a claimant being thrown off jobseekers' allowance for three whole years, is based on the assumption that such incentives will encourage people to get back into work. An assumption that being out of work for a long period is a personal failing that can be corrected by a strong kick up the backside.

But in that case, what does having "a genuine chance of getting a job" mean?

It means, presumably, that you can be genuinely seeking work, genuinely doing everything that the DWP requires of you, and more, to get off benefits and into employment, and still not have a genuine chance of a job.

Cameron is talking about migrants. But there's no logical reason why it this applies only to migrants. He mentions inadequate spoken English as one possible barrier to finding work, which will form part of a "robust" test applied to unemployed migrants. He doesn't mention the other criteria that will be applied, but it's not hard to think of ones that apply equally to native jobseekers. Such as: low educational attainment, age, a drink problem, a patchy employment record, or (most of all, perhaps) lack of available jobs.

Because it is a truth universally unacknowledged (by mainstream politicians, at any rate) that there are many unemployed people who have no real chance of getting a job, however often they have their benefits stopped and however many workfare schemes they are sent on. To acknowledge this fact, though, would make a nonsense of much of the political debate around welfare, which seems premised on the assumption that the way to reduce unemployment is to make life as difficult as possible for the unemployed.

Foreigners can be told to leave or starve, but what is to be done with British-born people who, according to what are now going to be formally devised criteria, have "no genuine chance of a job." Informally, we have the answer: they are going to be forced to work, not for the national minimum wage (which would at least be reasonable) but for the inadequate benefits that they had hitherto been given while "looking for work". But workfare programmes, thus far, have been justified on the principle that they exist as a stepping stone towards proper paid employment, even though someone working a full week at a fairly intense (if unpaid) job is likely to have insufficient time and energy for useful job-hunting. No politician has yet suggested that performing state-directed labour for around a quarter of the national minimum wage is meant as an alternative to normal employment. Not yet.

But perhaps the way is now open for such an admission, as the new concept of "genuine chance of employment" is tried out, initially on migrants from other EU countries. The next development in benefits conditionality might be precisely this, that after a period (perhaps two years, perhaps one, perhaps even six months) of permitted job-hunting a claimant will be subjected to a "genuine chance of employment" test, and anyone failing it will be put onto underpaid work for life.

I can imagine some employers being quite enchanted by the prospect of not having to pay unskilled workers properly, or at all. Of course it will distort the labour market, taking away jobs from paid employees: but they needn't despair, because after a suitable interval they'll become eligible for workfare too.

The power of the RSS reader.

Religious spin-doctor Cristina Odone has today used what she calls “a huge hit”, US TV mini-series The Bible, to attack the BBC, secularism and, basically, the whole 21st Century. Her propagandaggrandisement in today’s Daily Telegraph, the journal of pre-Enlightenment fantasy, rests on the twin absurdities that 13 million US viewers is “a huge triumph” and tells us anything about British religion or TV viewing.

Ms Odone’s bigging-up of the so-called “History” Channel ignores three important facts.

First, though she claims the BBC ignores religion, in fact the money of all licence-fee-payers by law has to pay for making religious programmes. By choice, happily, almost none of us watch them.

Second, she fails to mention that by any measure you like – church attendance, church buildings, opinion polls of belief – the USA is vastly more religious, and even more vastly Christian, than any country in Europe except the Vatican, and certainly has a wildly different religious make-up to the UK. Despite our having an established Church, again by law. It seems that on two for two, Ms Odone’s demand for people to be forced into religion in law not only irks the silent majority of us who the screaming zealots seize cash from and boss about, but it’s clearly doing no good for religion, either. So perhaps she should pause in her authoritarian diktat that the US so-called “History” Channel’s Bible series should be “compulsory” here, in schools, on the BBC, and presumably by strapping every viewer to A Clockwork Orange-style eye-restraining chairs.

Before introducing the third and most absurdly abused fact that will fisk Ms Odone on her own shaky ground, I should point out that I do not believe TV ratings to be any guarantee of quality, just as I do not believe majorities should be able to push around minorities (or, in this case, vice versa), even when by her own argument we should ignore the Godly Torygraph’s tiny readership in favour of the Satanic BBC’s many millions, causing her entire vindictive rant to disappear in a puff of logic. But as Ms Odone wants to command her beliefs to be “compulsory”, and as she’s using the dubious testament of television ratings as her foundation, this is the appropriate ground around which to march to bring her ludicrous fabrication tumbling down.

Third, like any good spin-doctor Ms Odone cherry-picks the top viewing figure of 13 million for one “huge hit” episode (not telling us how far ratings have dropped since then) for the so-called “History” Channel’s Bible-story mini-series, just as the programme itself cherry-picks only the most popular bits of the Bible. She exalts this, again in her words, “huge triumph” to disprove the spooky, invisible US atheist conspiracy which televangelists and the lunatic far right make up stories of to raise so many millions. And yet, it surprises me by suggesting that, against all other evidence, perhaps big-budget Christianity in the USA isn’t looking that healthy after all…

The Facts – Ms Odone, Look Away Now (oh, she already has)

The USA is a country of 316 million people (I’m doing Ms Odone the favour of assuming that her pet series’ top rating only included the USA and not world-wide ratings, though as with all her ‘facts’, she isn’t clear). 13 million viewers is a “huge triumph” of, er, just 4.11% of the population. Ms Odone will no doubt tell you that’s an overwhelming majority. That doesn’t mean you should believe her.

By way of one simple factual comparison, the UK is a country of 61 million people. Cherry-picking one huge hit episode, Doctor Who – Voyage of the Damned (guest-starring Kylie Minogue), that was watched by 13.3 million people in the UK alone. That’s 21.11% of the population.

Much as I love it, Doctor Who is not my religion. In my view, it would be absurd and wrong to suggest on the basis of this factual like-for-like comparison that Doctor Who (or Kylie) is far more important than the Bible to the people of the UK, let alone extrapolate that Doctor Who – were it not for the evil conspiracy against it by US TV – is really, deep down, five times as big for the US population as Christianity.

Yet that absurd nonsense is exactly the way that Cristina Odone has extrapolated US viewing figures to scream that everyone in the UK should be ‘compulsorily’ bossed about. It seems that while UK schools’ compulsory religion does no good for most of us, sadly UK schools’ compulsory maths lessons did even less good for Ms ‘Dunce’ Odone.

Of course, it’s unthinkable that she knows that what she’s saying is a nasty, cynical lie to justify her outrageous authoritarianism, because, after all, she mentions the Ten Commandments. Though she claims no-one knows them any more, I do. And “Thou shalt not bear false witness” is one Ms Odone should know, too.


Ms Odone will no doubt point, scream and call for me to be burnt – ‘compulsorily’ – as I’ve just noticed that, as luck would have it, this is my 666th blog post on here.


Update: I’ve been fact-checked in an especially embarrassing way for a chap who bristles every time people misspell my own name. I apologise to Ms Odone for my mistake, and have corrected her Christian name from “Christina” to Cristina each time I used it.

Well now, what do we have for you today? Hmm…it seems to be the entirety of the 1941 comedy classic, Hellzapoppin’ starring the comedy team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. This started life as a Broadway revue, opening on September 10, 1938 and running for 1,404 performances. That would be an impressive number now but it was really impressive at the time. Throughout the thirties, only two other plays managed to have more than 500 performances.

The show’s success was attributed to a number of factors. In no particular order, they were that Olsen and Johnson were always scurrying around New York doing crazy promotional stunts; that superstar columnist Walter Winchell loved the show and plugged the hell out of it; that the show kept changing so people came back to see it again and again; and that it was indecently funny. In addition to its long Broadway run, it also became a cottage industry: Its producers sent out all sorts of touring companies and spin-off sequels with different casts and (often) different material.

The movie was made while the original New York version was running and it opened a week or two after the show closed on Broadway. Olsen and Johnson were the only two cast members from the show who were seen in the film, which used some songs and sketches from the stage but not a lot. For the most part, the movie was an original creation and it set some sort of industry record for not only breaking the fourth wall but annihilating it. It was successful enough that Olsen and Johnson made more films — some of them quite funny — but with diminishing box office. The two men are largely forgotten today…I suspect because while their scripts were often hilarious, they themselves weren’t. Shemp Howard is probably the funniest one in this film, which is really quite hilarious at times. As you’ll see if you clear the next hour and twenty minutes and click below…

I'm going to start with three data points.

One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.

Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up.

And three: Paula Broadwell, who had an affair with CIA director David Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels -- and hers was the common name.

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.

Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about us. Unmasking Broadwell's identity involved correlating her Internet activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product. Everything is now being saved and correlated, and many big-data companies make money by building up intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources.

Facebook, for example, correlates your online behavior with your purchasing habits offline. And there's more. There's location data from your cell phone, there's a record of your movements from closed-circuit TVs.

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

Sure, we can take measures to prevent this. We can limit what we search on Google from our iPhones, and instead use computer web browsers that allow us to delete cookies. We can use an alias on Facebook. We can turn our cell phones off and spend cash. But increasingly, none of it matters.

There are simply too many ways to be tracked. The Internet, e-mail, cell phones, web browsers, social networking sites, search engines: these have become necessities, and it's fanciful to expect people to simply refuse to use them just because they don't like the spying, especially since the full extent of such spying is deliberately hidden from us and there are few alternatives being marketed by companies that don't spy.

This isn't something the free market can fix. We consumers have no choice in the matter. All the major companies that provide us with Internet services are interested in tracking us. Visit a website and it will almost certainly know who you are; there are lots of ways to be tracked without cookies. Cell phone companies routinely undo the web's privacy protection. One experiment at Carnegie Mellon took real-time videos of students on campus and was able to identify one-third of them by comparing their photos with publicly available tagged Facebook photos.

Maintaining privacy on the Internet is nearly impossible. If you forget even once to enable your protections, or click on the wrong link, or type the wrong thing, and you've permanently attached your name to whatever anonymous service you're using. Monsegur slipped up once, and the FBI got him. If the director of the CIA can't maintain his privacy on the Internet, we've got no hope.

In today's world, governments and corporations are working together to keep things that way. Governments are happy to use the data corporations collect -- occasionally demanding that they collect more and save it longer -- to spy on us. And corporations are happy to buy data from governments. Together the powerful spy on the powerless, and they're not going to give up their positions of power, despite what the people want.

Fixing this requires strong government will, but they're just as punch-drunk on data as the corporations. Slap-on-the-wrist fines notwithstanding, no one is agitating for better privacy laws.

So, we're done. Welcome to a world where Google knows exactly what sort of porn you all like, and more about your interests than your spouse does. Welcome to a world where your cell phone company knows exactly where you are all the time. Welcome to the end of private conversations, because increasingly your conversations are conducted by e-mail, text, or social networking sites.

And welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant.

Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we've ended up here with hardly a fight.

This essay previously appeared on CNN.com, where it got 23,000 Facebook likes and 2,500 tweets -- by far the most widely distributed essay I've ever written.

Commentary.

EDITED TO ADD (3/26): More commentary.

EDITED TO ADD (3/28): This Communist commentary seems to be mostly semantic drivel, but parts of it are interesting. The author doesn’t seem to have a problem with State surveillance, but he thinks the incentives that cause businesses to use the same tools should be revisited. This seems just as wrong-headed as the Libertarians who have no problem with corporations using surveillance tools, but don't want governments to use them.

As some of you probably heard, last week Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) managed to get an amendment passed prohibiting the US National Science Foundation from funding any research in political science, unless the research can be “certified” as “promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.”  This sort of political interference with the peer-review process, of course, sets a chilling precedent for all academic research, regardless of discipline.  (What’s next, an amendment banning computer science research, unless it has applications to scheduling baseball games or slicing apple pies?)  But on researching further, I discovered that Sen. Coburn has long had it in for the NSF, and even has a whole webpage listing his grievances against the agency.  Most of it is the usual “can you believe they wasted money to study something so silly or obvious?,” but by far my favorite tidbit is the following:

Inappropriate staff behavior including porn surfing and Jello wrestling and skinny-dipping at NSF-operated facilities in Antarctica.

It occurred to me that the NSF really has no need to explain this one, since a complete explanation is contained in a single word of the charge itself: Antarctica.  Personally, I’d support launching an investigation of NSF’s Antarctica facilities, were it discovered that the people stuck in them weren’t porn surfing and Jello wrestling and skinny-dipping.

Regular readers will know that a bugbear of this blog is political jargon, the stock phrases and clichés that litter politicians’ speeches.

Bravo, then, to the Telegraph’s Tom Chivers for spotting the worst thing about George Osborne’s budget speech, a major flaw that eluded other journalists; the grim phrase “aspiration nation”:

It’s hard to imagine a way you could abuse the English language more efficiently. It rhymes, for a start, which makes it sound (as a colleague put it) like the name of a bad instrumental jazz album. It is also simultaneously trying to sound clever (“Aspiration! It’s like hope, except it’s got four syllables”) and patronising us (“OK peons, this should be simple enough for you to remember”). For a two-word phrase, that’s good going.

Osborne is not the only culprit:

Every Budget, every major political speech, has to have its own “Aspiration Nation” moment these days. A worthy subset of the population needs to be defined, its undeserving opposite implicitly criticised; the speaker and their party is thus placed on the side of the angels, the hard-working strivers and the little man crushed between the uncaring cogs of the economic machine. “The squeezed middle”, “Mondeo Man”, “Alarm-clock Britain”. The PR teams and focus groups that form the withered heart of 21st-century government create these labels in the hope that a large enough demographic group hears them, thinks “Yes! I am financially squeezed/drive a mid-range saloon/own an alarm clock! This man/woman has seen into my soul and knows the true me: my hopes, my dreams, my morning routine. He/she can be trusted with stewardship of this country”, and puts a cross in the appropriate box.

Despite the competition, Chivers rates Osborne’s catchphrase the worst of the bunch:

...of all of these stupid, intelligence-insulting little nonsense-phrases, “aspiration nation” is surely the worst. The horrible jargony feel, as if the speaker is about to demand that we action it, going forward; the sheer unoriginality of it, a pointless rewording of all the “hard-working families” and “strivers, not shirkers” that we have heard with such unrelenting tedium for however many years.

Is it too much to hope that the Liberal Democrats will turn their backs on this sort of soulless, hackneyed language? Apparently it is.

One of the best things about last week’s budget went unheralded among Liberal Democrats, probably because it was not something for which the party could claim sole credit (although Liberal Democrat MP Greg Mulholland played a big part in achieving it).

The Chancellor announced that the hated beer duty escalator would be scrapped, for good. Not only that, but the 3p rise in beer duty tax planned for this year was cancelled. Even better, beer duty was cut by 1p.

CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale) explains the significance of this move:

Beer duty will no longer rise automatically every year 2% above inflation, in turn keeping down the cost of your pint down the pub.

Since the escalator was introduced in 2008, beer tax has increased by 42%, driving up the cost of a pint and driving consumers away from their local pubs. In that time, 5,800 pubs have closed for good.

The brewing of craft beers is a booming industry in the UK, whose growth was being stunted by excessive taxation. Pubs, meanwhile, are a vital community resource and their loss corrodes society. The soaring price of beer is not the only reason pubs have closed but it is major contributory factor, encouraging more people to buy their beer from supermarkets and drink at home. Far from reducing irresponsible drinking, the beer duty escalator was counterproductive. It is a Labour policy we are well rid of.

The campaign is not over, though. We need to ensure that the tax cut is passed on to customers. As Greg Mulholland points out:

Greg has also previously called on the Minister to insist on a guarantee from the big pub owning companies that if, as we hope, the beer duty escalator is scrapped, that they pass this on and lower prices to their tenants so that this extra revenue is passed on to licensees and to pub customers and not simply into the pockets of the large pub companies to service their unsustainable debt levels.

And there’s another fly in the ointment. The wine and spirit industry has complained, with some justification, that it is unfair to single out beer for favourable treatment. Expect a legal challenge under EU competition law.

I cannot flirt. Or I can for about 15 seconds. Then I get flirt Tourettes and say or do something dreadful. But then I can’t be flirted with either. I either don’t notice it or I find it horribly off-putting. Because on the whole I am 12 years old when it comes to boys. I still call them boys. I am almost 40. I still ‘go out to play’ with my friends. I call work, ‘school’ I call my bosses ‘the grown-ups’. And I am 12.

There’s something going on at the moment. I’m inching closer and closer to my optimal weight for my height and the nearer I get to that, the more elfin my bone structure becomes and the more visible to the opposite sex I get. Which I hate. No, really. You have to remember that I am 12. I am not all that interested in boys, never really have been. I like science and writing and doing projects and I’m the youngest Patrol Leader in my Guide company. If we saw a boy in the woods, we would set fire to him. I’ve never been one for all that looking and liking and mooning over stuff…but no – men are now actively trying to catch my eye. ‘Good’ says my friend. ‘I DON’T LIKE IT’ says I. Tonight there were two of them in the same seat (at different times) I accidentally smiled at the first and then it got all awkward because I hadn’t meant it. I suppose that’s why I hate flirting, I feel honour-bound to be as sincere as possible…(to the point of rudeness) if I don’t like you I will ignore you, if I like you I will be nice, if I like you in a special way, I will blush and have to hide in a corner giggling for a long time. I am…twelve.

I read through my travel diaries from the early 2000s and was surprised to have completely forgot what I was like after dark. During the day, photos, art, seeing, doing…by night, talking to hundreds of strangers, inadvisable shots, being invited to secret bars…and I sort of wonder what Thailand will be like now…it’s a social sort of place, but I’m not who I was back then…and although this trip is very much an advance of sorts, kind of the beginning of the rest of my life…it is mainly a retreat…I have chosen where I am going and what I am doing to delight every last particle of me. I like water and cycling and nature and ancient things and sunsets and glamour and Thai food and whisky and adventures so y’know – Thailand has all that. But now I am older and I am so very me these days, will I be resolutely independent or will I fall in with people as often happens as you drag round Thailand? I hadn’t really thought about it until I read back to my younger diaries…you blunder around and you talk and you make and change plans and you split off…but I don’t think that’s my thing any more. I have two hotels booked for my first night – one just round the corner from the centre of everything…and one sleekly elegant, away from all that – I shall make my choice the day before I fly.

And the more I think this through, the more I know that aloof feels more right. I walk by myself. I shall swim in my pool at the top of my ivory tower and I shall cycle through ruins at dawn and I shall find a hornbill swooping through the trees and swim off my secret rocky bay to the beach around the corner…and it doesn’t matter…nothing matters. It will be glorious.

Todays press is full of stories about the speech Ed Milliband will make later today setting out the policies that Britain needs to move us forwards.

Mr Millibands key ideas are bank reform, infrastructure investment and a 10% tax rate.

This comes from the leader of a party that believed that light-touch regulation would be best for British Banking, and as a result presided over the biggest failure of British Banking since the 1920′s.   The sub-prime mortgages, the fixing of libor rates, the bank bailouts and the failure now to invest in small business and mortgages is all down to 13 years of failed Labour government, and the man that Mr Ed has put in charge of sorting all this out was the man who was behind the original failures, Ed Balls.  I know that they say that two Ed’s are better than one, but the joke is wearing thin.

This comes from the Leader of a Party which not only invested less in infrastructure in 13 years of Government than the coalition has invested in 5 years, but which ran for the last general election on a platform of reducing infrastructure spending even further.  Furthermore Labour’s key mechanism for making infrastructure investment was the disgraced Private Finance Initiative in which they handed over our hospitals and schools to the private sector, for them to rebuild them and rent them back to the state.  It was Labour’s privatisation of our hospitals that has caused the financial crisis the NHS now faces.  Labour has also threatened to remove the ring-fencing of the NHS budget, which will result in a 20% cut in NHS funding under their plans, clearly the NHS is not safe in Labour’s hands.

This also comes from the Leader of a Party which introduced a 10% tax rate and then withdrew it.  Thanks to Liberal Democrats in Government everyone who would have benefitted from Labour’s 10% tax rate has now been lifted out of paying tax altogether.  Labour’s proposal is to bring millions of people back into tax by lowering the tax threshold and re-introducing a 10% tax rate.  They are doing this in order to fund a VAT cut that will only benefit people who are spending more than £ 28,000 on vatable goods.

I would point out that with an average wage of around £ 21,000 most Manchester residents will never spend that amount of money.  What’s more, even those who do will have had to pay for their fuel, rent, and basic food before they begin to spend that amount.  It is now absolutely clear that the Labour Party is a party for the rich, leaving the poor to be protected by the Liberal Democrats who, in Government, have lifted over 2 million people out of paying tax all together, and have cut taxes for over 25 million people in this country.

The Liberal Democrats have also secured:

• £ 2.5 billion in additional investment in education through the pupil premium and nursery places for all 2 years olds;
• Massive investment in research and development into new technologies such as Graphine;
• Billions of pounds of investment in our railways;
• Billions of p0unds of investment for new housing;
• Billions of pounds of investment in small business and green investment;
• Bulk energy switches saving ordinary people money on their fuel bills;
• The Leveson inquiry resulting in protection of personal privacy;
• The abolition of the National ID Cards;
• Withdrawal of British Troops from Labour’s illegal war in Iraq;
• The recognition of the Military Covenant in UK law for the first time;
• Over a million more people employed now than when Labour left office;
• Youth unemployment falling for the first time in 20 years;
• Manufacturing industry rising as a percentage of GDP from 8% to nearly 20%;
• Steel being manufactured in the UK again;
• Britain being a net exporter of cars for the first time since the 1970′s;
• Ringfencing of our NHS Budgets, and an end to Labour’s privatisations;
• The biggest pensions increase since the state pension was introduced;

And much, much more.

Mr Milliband has a record of 13 years of failed Labour Government to fall back on, no wonder he is trying to distance his party from everything it did back then.

And we almost figured out how we'll get along /
And given time we'll find it strange to be alone.



Factory Showroom

Factory Showroom was They Might Be Giants' last album on Elektra before being released from their contract. It brings the second great phase of their career to a close: at this point you can split the band's career neatly in two, with their first seven years spent as a thoroughly DIY independent duo, and the second seven years signed to a subsidiary of one of the largest media conglomerates on the planet. It wasn't an unprofitable partnership: although the marketing for their later albums left something to be desired, the success of Flood gave them access to a far larger fanbase than they could ever have reached at the time through conventional independent labels. Historically, They Might Be Giants are a band that has appealed predominantly to, well, nerds - and since nerds have a tendency, once they become fans of something, to never, ever stop being fans of that thing - leaving Elektra and Warner Brothers wasn't the deathblow that it might have been (and actually was) for many more popular bands. They left Elektra with their fanbase intact.

But what of the album itself? Coming on the heels of the five albums and change that preceded it, it's hard not to regard Factory Showroom as something of a relative disappointment. Especially after John Henry, the album sounds reserved, downright conservative in places. It showcases a band that has finally managed to cement its image of itself in its own mind. This is not to imply that They Might Be Giants had ever been anything other than themselves. From the very first synthesizer chords of "Everything Right is Wrong Again" on their self-titled debut, TMBG never sounded like anyone but themselves. But what that meant changed a great deal in the years between their debut and John Henry. Every new album had represented a significant change from the previous album. It's not hard to see the basic DNA that songs like "She's an Angel" and "End of the Tour" share, despite the eight tumultuous years separating the two recordings. But its also hard not to see that the years between their first and their sixth album had seen the band change and evolve from extremely enthusiastic but nonetheless sloppy amateurs to highly professional working musicians with serious technical chops. They had always had a knack for writing hooks and building deceptively complex power-pop melodies, but suddenly over the course of a long decade of hard work they had become very good at their jobs as musicians.



This was not an unmixed blessing. The word that comes to mind when listening to Factor Showroom, more than any other, is "professional." This is a band that has figured out how to do basically anything it wants in the studio. The genre pastiches on which the band had cut their teeth stopped being quite so weird and became, well, credible. "S-E-X-X-Y" opens the album with a dead-on white-funk burlesque, complete with horn section and Love Unlimited string vamps. It's a remarkably well designed replica of a specific sound. It's also one my least favorite TMBG songs, and my dislike it such that I usually just skip it when I listen to the album now.

There are a few moments like that on the album. The problem with Factory Showroom, as well as a large percentage of their post-Elektra albums, is that the moment their ability to match the technical demands of their demanding compositions becomes most fully realized is also the moment when it becomes harder to justify making albums that sound weird for the hell of it. One of the reasons why their first handful of albums sound so distinctive is that, at least in the beginning, they were making it all up as they went. Listen to Flood, which sounds amazingly polished next to either of their first two LPs, and it still sounds bizarre even after twenty-three years: they're still just two guys in a room making music with a handful of instruments, drum machines, and primitive samplers. Sure, they can actually afford to have a few sessions musicians, but the sound of that album is still the sound of a band making delightfully weird music because their ambition can't quite keep pace with their limitations, in terms of both skill and resources. John Henry was their first full-band recording, but it's also a diverse and uncharacteristically dark album, very proficient but also undeniably haunted. There is nothing on Factory Showroom to match the strangeness of Flood or the appealing desperation of John Henry: this is a comfortable album made by competent musicians who were satisfied by the fact that, for perhaps the first time in their history, their reach no longer exceeded their grasp.

A while back John Flansburgh stated that Factory Showroom was his favorite of their albums. That makes complete sense. Factory Showroom was produced by Pat Dillett, famous for his work with artists as diverse as Brian Eno and Mariah Carey. The album is, consequentially, a really slick piece of work. If it sounds like I'm damning with faint praise, it's because I am. It's hard to speak objectively about Factory Showroom because, after being a fan for the better part of the decade, this is the album that got me to drop They Might Be Giants.

Which is not to say that I threw out all my CDs in a fit of pique, or refused to ever listen to new music again, or anything as dramatic as that. But coming on the heels of John Henry - still probably in the top three or four albums I've listened to the most in my entire life - Factory Showroom offered a picture of a band in whom I wasn't really that interested anymore. It's not as if they were unrecognizable - quite the contrary, the album represents the completely logical end point to which they had been traveling for the entire career. But even if this was what They Might Be Giants had always wanted - or, at least, always aspired (not quite the same thing) - to sound like, it seemed peaked and lifeless compared to every album that had preceded it. Perhaps - and I am not entertaining any illusions on this point - perhaps this is simply my own personal subjective reaction, of little value other than as a barometer of my personal feelings regarding a band I spent a large chunk of my formative years inhaling like oxygen.

There came a point where I stopped reading Robert Heinlein, and I know specifically why: when I read through a huge chunk of Heinlein's bibliography as a kid, I was disproportionately pulled to the huge novels he wrote in the last fifteen or so years of his life - regardless of the fact that they weren't very good. I really liked Time Enough For Love - I still have the coverless, beat-up paperback on a shelf next to my desk. I liked Friday a little less, I Will Fear No Evil even less than that, and by the time I got to The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and The Number of the Beast my enthusiasm had dimmed to dry obligation. I didn't actually read To Sail Beyond the Sunset until many years later when I was completing a book report on Heinlein, and boy, it really was just all the things that I grew to hate about his later novels wrapped up into one big, mediocre bow. I really liked - on paper, at least - the kind of syncretic, cosmic multiverse building he was doing in those later novels. But the execution was nowhere near as fun as books about people who build a dimension-hopping ship so they can travel to Oz and meet John Carter should have been. And because I stuck with Heinlein for longer than was healthy, I maintained a healthy distance from his work for years afterwards, and it wasn't until much later that I could pull my copy of The Past Through Tomorrow off the shelf and acknowledge once again that the guy had always been a good writer. The situation was that when he got older and was given a free reign to write whatever he wanted, he turned out to have a dearth of interesting things to say.

The situation with Factory Showroom was similar in many respects. It's not necessarily that They Might Be Giants didn't know how to edit themselves - quite the opposite. They had made a very solid album of indie-leaning pop rock that engaged the listener's interest from beginning to end. Going down the album's tracklist is almost like assembling a checklist of past and future They Might Be Giants songwriting themes (an ungenerous soul might even say "cliches"): you've got the radio-friendly rocker to head up the album after a false-start intro ("Till My Head Falls Off"), a story about misunderstood nerdy kids ("How Can I Sing Like A Girl"), a song about an anthropomorphized inanimate object ("Metal Detector"), a tongue-in-cheek song about another band ("XTC vs Adam Ant"), a fun ditty about a misunderstood historical figure ("James K. Polk"), and not one but two songs explicitly about mind control ("Spiraling Shape" and "The Bells Are Ringing"). Let's not forget two pure, unlistenable gimmicks - the "0 track" "Token Back to Brooklyn" (good luck getting that to play on your laptop's CD player), and "I Can Hear You," recorded directly to wax cylinder at the Edison Museum in New Jersey. It's not necessarily a bad thing to say that these songs follow established patterns, because any band or artist who has been around for long enough amasses a certain set of themes and repeating motifs, and the desire to avoid repetition has led more than one band down unprofitable blind alleys. The problem with They Might Be Giants is that they have been very prolific, and (it must be said), their fans have been extremely anal about cataloging their discography. It's not hard to detect the patterns, and once you can see the patterns, its really hard to unsee them and begin to accept them as formulae. Check out the page for "Mind Control, Hypnotism" at This Might Be A Wiki for an exhaustive list of all the songs in their catalogue that deal with these themes. There's nothing new under the sun, and nowhere is this more apparent than when you're scanning the track list of a new They Might Be Giants album in order to identify the new songs about mind control.



But again: even if I think - and still believe, even if the last few albums have been strong enough to pull me back into the fold - that Factory Showroom marked a good point to stop listening to They Might Be Giants, that should not be taken to mean that the album is without merit. On the contrary, one of the more frustrating things about the album is that even as the group is beginning to ossify into what would soon be revealed as its "mature" form, they are still capable of writing some damn fine songs. "Spiraling Shape" and "The Bells Are Ringing" may both be about essentially the same thing, but they are still among the Johns' best compositions. Either song would have fit perfectly into the running time of Flood or Apollo 18. I would even go so far as to say that both songs represent a good distillation of precisely why the group is so good to begin with: enduring melodies, clever lyrics, an undefinable sense of catchiness that defies the ability of the listener to fully dismiss the songs once heard. You will find yourself humming the tune to "Spiraling Shape" in the middle of the night many years from now, unable to remember the last time you heard the track but still able to recite the tongue-twisting bridge and chorus by heart. That's what they do, and they do it well.

The problem is not that the songs are bad, but that in many instances they seem slight. "James K. Polk" has become one of their signature songs, but it makes me grimace because it represents a turn towards the kind of empty clever-joke-as-cultural-signifier that would fast become a trademark of their work. The plight of being terminally awkward and knowing more about culture and history than about girls and dating is obviously the stereotypical dilemma under which the band and their fans labor, but Factory Showroom marked a turning point for me in terms of the band's willingness to play down to their fans' expectations of precisely what a They Might Be Giants album should sound like. It worked wonders for them: after the mixed response John Henry received, they probably felt they needed to shore up their support from precisely that constituency. This reaped large dividends down the road, after they left Elektra and had to once again rely on the support of their fans without any mediation.

My favorite song on the album, and a strong contender for my favorite They Might Be Giants song ever, is "Pet Name." On first blush this might seem to be an unlikely candidate for anyone's "favorite" TMBG track - it's quite uncharacteristically restrained, for one thing, downright sedate and quiet in a way that flirts with actual maturity. It's precisely the type of song that represents They Might Be Giants playing against type, and even though they've a few of them in their repertoire ("The End of the Tour" being the most famous example, but "You Don't Like Me" off Join Us is another fine example), they usually bring the house down. Flansburgh is, let's face it, not a particularly flexible vocalist, but he definitely sells the song - a melancholy ballad about a relationship sung in the past tense.

You just forgot your one pet name for me, /
And all those promises you said you'd keep. /
And it's a lucky thing, /
Because that sentimental stuff /
Doesn't suit you at all.

There's something about "Pet Name," for me, that serves not merely as an excellent climax for the album, but a type of culmination of the band's career to that point. You can draw a direct line from their earliest recordings through to the relative maturity and unquestioned virtuosity of Factory Showroom. The problem with the album is that this competency comes at a stiff price: where once the group had been defined by a creative restlessness that verged on fickle, they eschewed that kind of unpredictability for a solid and respectable mid-career inertia. I like "Pet Name" because it represents, for me, a "path not taken" in terms of the directions the group could have taken after Factory Showroom. I'm not going to make the claim that if They Might Be Giants had continued down that road they wouldn't have eventually landed somewhere uncomfortably close to "Adult Contemporary," or that they would have followed up Factory Showroom with something equally as ambitious or enduring as The Soft Bulletin. The late 90s is when the inevitable career comparisons between TMBG and the Flaming Lips short-circuit completely. After a few years spent in the wilderness the Lips made a massive shift towards producing something with a broad appeal that successfully jumpstarted their career by opening inroads to a large swath of fans who had either never heard or dismissed the band out of hand based on their reputation as a gimmicky one-hit-wonder. They Might Be Giants, on the other hand, spent the years following their exodus from Elektra turning ever inward, consolidating their fanbase by producing a string of releases dedicated to appeal to no one outside their (admittedly large and very vocal) fanbase.

Is it any surprise that it would be over a decade before They Might Be Giants released anything near as strong as their first five albums? They had a very successful decade following Factory Showroom and although I obviously do not begrudge them one iota of their hard-fought popularity, at the same time I cannot deny that I didn't like much of what they released between that album and The Else in 2007. It would be another four years after that before they released the preternaturally strong Join Us, an album specifically designed to sound as much as possible like their early 90s records.

Next: They might be big, they might be fake. They might be big big fake fake lies.>


(out of five)

I've said it before, but it bears repeating, "Missoula: We like it here!" was actually the city of Missoula's slogan at one time. "Reno is for Clydes" is just my personal opinion.

Thanks as always for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Christopher Lee Reads Stuff



Currently containing Dracula, Frankenstien and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Currently NOT containing his Heavy Metal Christmas album, although I could be tempted by a Christopher Lee Sings Stuff playlist at some point too...

(X-posted personal journal and spotification)

comments

We could’ve been anything we wanted to be
But don’t it make your heart glad
That we decided, a fact we take pride in
We became the best at being bad

If you don’t know it, it’s from Bugsy Malone, but for me it sums up a lot of my feelings about the coalition. I know it seems hopelessly naive now, but there was optimism back in May 2010, and a feeling that this was a government that might do things differently. Instead, that optimism has been methodically dismantled, piece by piece, as the government’s revealed itself to be even more cynical and mean-spirited than its predecessors, and the Liberal Democrat leadership has collaborated in this rush to the bottom, eager to prove that it can be just as horrendous in Government as the Conservatives and Labour.

Clegg’s immigration speech on Friday was just the latest humiliation in this series. I’d say it shows him reaching the abject depths of political cynicism and triangulation, but there are so many times he’s gone and drawn deep and deeper from that well that I wouldn’t be surprised to see him going deeper on something else. LIke the immigration speech, it’ll no doubt start with a few paragraphs of boilerplate liberalism, then veer wildly into appeasing tabloid sensibilities and saying we must support invading Iran and introducing ID cards while removing all benefits from anyone Iain Duncan Smith doesn’t like the look of.

The one flash of a silver lining is that the mood in the party feels much more mutinous than it has done at any point in the last few years. The leadership have dumped so many petty humiliations on the membership in recent times, from secret courts to Clegg’s speech, that a lot of people seem to have finally felt the straw that broke their back. (For instance, see Stephen Tall’s post on LDV and the comments below it) Any residual goodwill from Eastleigh and the party conference has been dissipated, and perhaps the only thing preventing a full on howl of rage is that most activists have one eye on the fast-approaching local elections.

What we have to decide as Liberal Democrats is not just whether we as a party can take two more years of this, but whether the country can survive two more years of it. As I’ve stated before, we came into this government because we thought it was in the national interest to do so, but it’s now clear to me that we’re merely supporting a narrowly ideological administration that’s on the verge of condemning the country to years of economic stagnation while dismantling the social framework. I think it’s time to end the coalition, but I also think we’re now beyond the point where those in the party who want to continue it can just trot out the ‘we have to show coalitions work, that’s why we can’t leave before 2015′ line. You have to show what will actually be achieved in the next two years beyond getting to sit round the cabinet table and showing we can make ‘tough decisions’.

It’s also time to question whether we need to replace Nick Clegg as leader. He’s shown a complete disregard for the party and its opinions, and when his statements get reported as being party policy, despite them being the complete opposite, it drags us all down with him. The question we need to answer is whether we want a leader who’s at war with his party, and seems to want to replace it with another, more pliant, membership or one who wants to actually lead a liberal party and make the case for liberalism, instead of capitulating and triangulating in the face of any criticism.

To got back to the start, what kind of party do we want to be? A liberal party, making the liberal case or a party that ranks power over principle?

Related Posts

• Process stories
• Why Nick Clegg should be copying Michael Gove
• More developments on ‘shares for rights’
• A worrying silence on rights for shares
• On ending coalitions

Update (March 22): The Kindle edition of Quantum Computing Since Democritus is now available, for the low price of $15.40!  (Not factorial.)  Click here to get it from amazon.com, or here to get it from amazon.co.uk.  And let me know how it looks (I haven’t seen it yet).  Another Update: Just saw the Kindle edition, and the figures and formulas came out great!  It’s a product I stand behind with pride.

In the meantime, I regret to say that the marketing for this book is getting crasser and more exploitative by the day.

---

It seems like wherever I go these days, all anyone wants to talk about is Quantum Computing Since Democritus—the sprawling new book by Scott Aaronson, published by Cambridge University Press and available for order now.  Among leading figures in quantum information science—many of them well-known to Shtetl-Optimized readers—the book is garnering the sort of hyperbolic praise that would make Shakespeare or Tolstoy blush:

“I laughed, I cried, I fell off my chair – and that was just reading the chapter on Computational Complexity.  Aaronson is a tornado of intellectual activity: he rips our brains from their intellectual foundations; twists them through a tour of physics, mathematics, computer science, and philosophy; stuffs them full of facts and theorems; tickles them until they cry ‘Uncle’; and then drops them, quivering, back into our skulls.  Aaronson raises deep questions of how the physical universe is put together and why it is put together the way it is.  While we read his lucid explanations we can believe – at least while we hold the book in our hands – that we understand the answers, too.” –Seth Lloyd

“Scott Aaronson has written a beautiful and highly original synthesis of what we know about some of the most fundamental questions in science: What is information? What does it mean to compute? What is the nature of mind and of free will?” –Michael Nielsen

“Not since Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics has there been a set of lecture notes as brilliant and as entertaining.  Aaronson leads the reader on a wild romp through the most important intellectual achievements in computing and physics, weaving these seemingly disparate fields into a captivating narrative for our modern age of information.  Aaronson wildly runs through the fields of physics and computers, showing us how they are connected, how to understand our computational universe, and what questions exist on the borders of these fields that we still don’t understand.   This book is a poem disguised as a set of lecture notes.  The lectures are on computing and physics, complexity theory and mathematical logic and quantum physics.  The poem is made up of proofs, jokes, stories, and revelations, synthesizing the two towering fields of computer science and physics into a coherent tapestry of sheer intellectual awesomeness.” –Dave Bacon

After months of overhearing people saying things like the above—in the halls of MIT, the checkout line at Trader Joe’s, the bathroom, anywhere—I finally had to ask in annoyance: “is all this buzz justified?  I mean, I’m sure the book is as deep, hilarious, and worldview-changing as everyone says it is.  But, after all, it’s based off lecture notes that have long been available for free on the web.  And Aaronson, being the magnanimous, open-access-loving saint that he is, has no plans to remove the online notes, even though he could really use the royalties from book sales to feed his growing family.  Nor does Cambridge University Press object to his principled decision.”

“No, you don’t understand,” they told me.  “Word on the street has it that the book is extensively updated for 2013—that it’s packed with new discussions of things like algebrization, lattice-based cryptography, the QIP=PSPACE theorem, the ‘quantum time travel controversy,’ BosonSampling, black-hole firewalls, and even the Australian models episode.  They say it took years of painstaking work, by Aaronson and his student Alex Arkhipov, to get the notes into book form: fixing mistakes, clarifying difficult points, smoothing out rough edges, all while leaving intact the original’s inimitable humor.  I even heard Aaronson reveals he’s changed his mind about certain things since 2006.  How could you not want such a labor of love on your bookshelf?”

Exasperated, I finally exclaimed: “But the book isn’t even out yet in North America!  Amazon.com says it won’t ship until April 30.”

“Sure,” one gas-station attendant replied to me, “but the secret is, it’s available now from Amazon.co.uk.  Personally, I couldn’t wait a month, so I ordered it shipped to me from across the pond.  But if you’re a less hardcore quantum complexity theory fan, and you live in North America, you can also preorder the book from Amazon.com, and they’ll send it to you when it arrives.”

Much as the hype still grated, I had to admit that I’d run out of counterarguments, so I looked into ordering a copy for myself.

Submitted by Eliezer_Yudkowsky • 58 votes • 147 comments

Paul Christiano has devised a new fundamental approach to the "Löb Problem" wherein Löb's Theorem seems to pose an obstacle to AIs building successor AIs, or adopting successor versions of their own code, that trust the same amount of mathematics as the original.  (I am currently writing up a more thorough description of the question this preliminary technical report is working on answering.  For now the main online description is in a quick Summit talk I gave.  See also Benja Fallenstein's description of the problem in the course of presenting a different angle of attack.  Roughly the problem is that mathematical systems can only prove the soundness of, aka 'trust', weaker mathematical systems.  If you try to write out an exact description of how AIs would build their successors or successor versions of their code in the most obvious way, it looks like the mathematical strength of the proof system would tend to be stepped down each time, which is undesirable.)

Paul Christiano's approach is inspired by the idea that whereof one cannot prove or disprove, thereof one must assign probabilities: and that although no mathematical system can contain its own truth predicate, a mathematical system might be able to contain a reflectively consistent probability predicate.  In particular, it looks like we can have:

∀a, b: (a < P('φ') < b)  ⇒  P('a < P('φ') < b') = 1

Suppose I present you with the human and probabilistic version of a Gödel sentence, the Whitely sentence "You assign this statement a probability less than 30%."  If you disbelieve this statement, it is true.  If you believe it, it is false.  If you assign 30% probability to it, it is false.  If you assign 29% probability to it, it is true.

The way Paul's approach resolves this problem is by restricting your belief about your own probability assignment to within epsilon of 30% for any epsilon.  So Paul's approach replies, "Well, I assign almost exactly 30% probability to that statement - maybe a little more, maybe a little less - in fact I think there's about a 30% chance that I'm a tiny bit under 0.3 probability and a 70% chance that I'm a tiny bit over 0.3 probability."  A standard fixed-point theorem then implies that a consistent assignment like this should exist.  If asked if the probability is over 0.2999 or under 0.30001 you will reply with a definite yes.

We haven't yet worked out a walkthrough showing if/how this solves the Löb obstacle to self-modification, and the probabilistic theory itself is nonconstructive (we've shown that something like this should exist, but not how to compute it).  Even so, a possible fundamental triumph over Tarski's theorem on the undefinability of truth and a number of standard Gödelian limitations is important news as math qua math, though work here is still in very preliminary stages.  There are even whispers of unrestricted comprehension in a probabilistic version of set theory with ∀φ: ∃S: P('x ∈ S') = P('φ(x)'), though this part is not in the preliminary report and is at even earlier stages and could easily not work out at all.

It seems important to remark on how this result was developed:  Paul Christiano showed up with the idea (of consistent probabilistic reflection via a fixed-point theorem) to a week-long "math squad" (aka MIRI Workshop) with Marcello Herreshoff, Mihaly Barasz, and myself; then we all spent the next week proving that version after version of Paul's idea couldn't work or wouldn't yield self-modifying AI; until finally, a day after the workshop was supposed to end, it produced something that looked like it might work.  If we hadn't been trying to solve this problem (with hope stemming from how it seemed like the sort of thing a reflective rational agent ought to be able to do somehow), this would be just another batch of impossibility results in the math literature.  I remark on this because it may help demonstrate that Friendly AI is a productive approach to math qua math, which may aid some mathematician in becoming interested.

I further note that this does not mean the Löbian obstacle is resolved and no further work is required.  Before we can conclude that we need a computably specified version of the theory plus a walkthrough for a self-modifying agent using it.

See also the blog post on the MIRI site (and subscribe to MIRI's newsletter here to keep abreast of research updates).

This LW post is the preferred place for feedback on the paper.

EDIT:  But see discussion on a Google+ post by John Baez here.  Also see here for how to display math LaTeX in comments.

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