Years ago I read an article by Martin Rees, in which he surveyed the options for what the dark matter of the universe might be. I forget the exact wording, but near the end he said something like “There are so many candidates, it would be quite surprising to find ourselves living in a universe without dark matter.”

I was reminded of this when I saw a Quantum Diaries post by Alex Millar, entitled “Why Dark Matter Exists.” Why do we live in a universe with five times as much dark matter as ordinary matter, anyway? As it turns out, the post was more about explaining all of the wonderful evidence we have that there is so much dark matter. That’s a very respectable question, one that I’ve covered now and again. The less-respectable (but still interesting to me) question is, Why is the universe like that? Is the existence of dark matter indeed unsurprising, or is it an unusual feature that we should take as an important clue as to the nature of our world?

Generally, physicists love asking these kinds of questions (“why does the universe look this way, rather than that way?”), and yet are terribly sloppy at answering them. Questions about surprise and probability require a measure: a way of assigning, to each set of possibilities, some kind of probability number. Your answer wholly depends on how you assign that measure. If you have a coin, and your probability measure is “it will be heads half the time and tails half the time,” then getting twenty heads in a row is very surprising. If you have reason to think the coin is loaded, and your measure is “it comes up heads almost every time,” then twenty heads in a row isn’t surprising at all. Yet physicists love to bat around these questions in reference to the universe itself, without really bothering to justify one measure rather than another.

With respect to dark matter, we’re contemplating a measure over all the various ways the universe could be, including both the laws of physics (which tell us what particles there can be) and the initial conditions (which set the stage for the later evolution). Clearly finding the “right” such measure is pretty much hopeless! But we can try to set up some reasonable considerations, and see where that leads us.

Here are the important facts we know about dark matter:

• It’s dark. Doesn’t interact with electromagnetism, at least not with anywhere near the strength that ordinary charged particles do.
• It’s cold. Individual dark matter particles are moving slowly and have been for a while, otherwise they would have damped perturbations in the early universe.
• There’s a goodly amount of it. About 25% of the energy density of the current universe, compared to only about 5% in the form of ordinary matter.
• It’s stable, or nearly so. The dark matter particle has to be long-lived, or it would have decayed away a long time ago.
• It’s dissipationless, or nearly so. Ordinary matter settles down to make galaxies because it can lose energy through collisions and radiation; dark matter doesn’t seem to do that, giving rise to puffy halos rather than thin galactic disks.

None of these properties is, by itself, very hard to satisfy if we’re just inventing new particles. But if we try to be honest — asking “What would expect to see, if we didn’t know what things actually looked like?” — there is a certain amount of tension involved in satisfying them all at once. Let’s take them in turn.

Having a particle be dark isn’t hard at all. All electrically-neutral particles are dark in this sense. Photons, gravitons, neutrinos, neutrons, what have you.

It’s also not hard to imagine particles that are cold. The universe is a pretty old place, and things tend to cool off as the universe expands. Massless particles like photons or gravitons never slow down, of course, since they always move at the speed of light, so they don’t lead to dark-matter candidates. Indeed, even particles that are very light, like neutrinos, tend to be moving too quickly to be dark matter. The simplest way to get a good cold dark matter candidate is just to imagine something that is relatively heavy; then it will naturally be cold (slowly-moving) at late times, even it was hot in the very early universe. Ordinary atoms do exactly that. It’s possible to have very low-mass particles that are nevertheless cold; axions are a good example. They were simply never hot, even in the early universe; we say they are non-thermal relics. But in the space of all the particles you can imagine being cold (in some ill-defined measure we are just making up), it seems easiest to consider particles that are heavy enough to cool down over time.

Getting the right amount of dark matter is tricky, but certainly not a deal-breaker. Massive particles, generally speaking, will tend to bump into massive anti-particles and annihilate into lower-mass particles (such as photons). If our dark matter candidate interacts too strongly, it will annihilate too readily, and simply be wiped out. Conversely, if it doesn’t interact strongly enough, we will be stuck with too much of it at the end of the day. The sweet spot is approximately the interaction strength of the weak nuclear force, which is why WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) are such a popular dark-matter candidate. Again, this certainly isn’t the only kind of possibility, but it seems very natural and robust.

We need our dark matter particles to be stable, and now we’re coming up against a bigger issue than before. There are plenty of stable particles in nature — photons, gravitons, neutrinos, electrons, protons. All the ones we know about are either massless (photons, gravitons), or they are the lightest kind of particle that carries some conserved quantity. Protons are the lightest particles carrying baryon number; electrons are the lightest particles carrying electric charge; neutrinos are the lightest particle carrying fermion number. All of these conserved quantities are the result of some symmetry of nature, following from Noether’s Theorem. So if you want your dark matter candidate to be relatively massive but also stable (or nearly), the most straightforward route is to have it carry some conserved quantity that follows from a symmetry. What quantity is that supposed to be? Symmetries don’t just grow on trees, you know. The most robust kinds of symmetries are gauge symmetries, which entail long-range forces like electromagnetism (associated with conservation of electric charge). So arguably the easiest way to make a stable, massive dark-matter particle would be to have it carry some analogue of electric charge. (This is exactly what Lotty Ackerman, Matt Buckley, Marc Kamionkowski and I did with our Dark Electromagnetism paper.) Axions, always wanting to be the exception to every rule, get around this by being so low-mass and so weakly-interacting that they do decay, but extremely slowly.

Finally, we’d like our dark matter particle to be dissipationless. And here’s the problem: if we follow the logic so far, and end up with a massive neutral particle carrying a new kind of conserved quantity associated with a gauge symmetry and therefore a long-range force, it tends to have dissipation. You can make magnetic fields, you can scatter and emit “dark photons,” you can make “dark atoms,” what have you. It’s not necessarily impossible to make everything work out, but it’s probably safe to say that you would expect dissipation if you knew your particle was coupled to photon-like particles but didn’t know anything else. There’s a straightforward fix, of course: if your particle is stable because of a global symmetry, rather than a gauge symmetry, then it isn’t coupled to any long-range forces. Protons are kept stable by carrying baryon number, which comes from a global symmetry. However, global symmetries are generally thought to be more delicate than gauge symmetries — it’s fairly easy to break them, whereas gauge symmetries are quite robust. Nothing stops us from imagining global symmetries that keep our dark matter particles stable; but it isn’t the first thing you might expect. Indeed, in the most popular WIMP models based on supersymmetry, there is a global symmetry called R-parity that is responsible for keeping the dark matter candidate stable. This is kind of a puzzle for such models; it wouldn’t be hard to imagine that R-parity is somehow broken, allowing the lightest supersymmetric particles to decay.

So should we be surprised that we live in a universe full of dark matter? I’m going to say: yes. The existence of dark matter itself isn’t surprising, but it seems easier to imagine that it would have been hot rather than cold, or dissipative rather than dissipationless. I wouldn’t count this as one of the biggest surprises the universe has given us, since there are so many ways to evade these back-of-the-envelope considerations. But it’s something to think about.

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July 13th, 2015: Thanks to Beth for suggesting I look into this woman! – Ryan

...

The greatest single problem with the fetishisation of the Doctor as an action hero - and this isn't just true of the post-Tennant version, it was also true when Tom Baker was running out of control circa 1978 - is the belief that the Doctor's main function is to "save people".

No, that's Superman you're thinking of. Saving people is a side-effect of what the Doctor does.

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

Anxiety disorders are the most common class of psychiatric disorders. Their US prevalence is about 20%. They’re also among the least recognized and least treated. We have sort of finally beaten into people’s thick skulls that depression isn’t just being sad, and you can’t just turn your frown upside down or something – but the most common response to anxiety disorders is still “Anxiety? So what, everyone gets that sometimes.”

But it’s hard to describe how disabling anxiety can be. A lot of people with nominally much worse conditions – depression, bipolar, even psychosis – will insist that they want their anxiety treated before anything else, because they can live with the rest. On the other hand, while a lot of people with psychosis have enough other problems that treating the psychosis barely puts a dent in their issues, a lot of people with anxiety would be happy and productive if they could just do something about it.

Since I’ve gotten some positive comments on my discussion of depression treatments I thought I’d go through some of the things I’ve seen used to treat anxiety. I’ll include the same disclaimer:

This will be inferior to reading official suggestions, but you will probably not read official suggestions, and you may read this. All opinions here are my own, they are not endorsed by the hospital I work at, they do not constitute medical advice, I have a known habit of being too intrigued by extremely weird experimental ideas for my own good, and you read this at your own risk. I am still a resident (new doctor) and my knowledge is still very slim compared to more experienced professionals. Overall this is more of a starting point for your own research rather than something I would expect people to have good results following exactly as written.

I’ll mostly be talking about what’s called generalized anxiety disorder, with some applicability to panic disorder. Social anxiety, specific phobias, et cetera are their own thing, as is anxiety secondary to other illnesses – but some of the advice may cross over. I’m not going to get too into diagnosis, because generalized anxiety disorder is pretty much exactly what you think it is and a lot (though not all) of this will be applicable for subclinical anxiety as well.

I. Diet And Lifestyle

You didn’t think you were going to get out of this part, did you?

Pretty much every study – epidemiological or experimental, short-term or long-term, has shown that exercise decreases anxiety. The effect seems limited to aerobic exercise like walking, running or swimming, preferably for longer than twenty minutes. Various mechanisms have been postulated including norepinephrine, endogenous opioids, and decreased inflammation.

There’s less agreement on diet. The people who hate fat says high-fat diets cause anxiety. The people who hate carbs say high-carb diets cause anxiety. The people who hate processed food say processed foods cause anxiety. The people who recommend fish oil for everything say insufficient fish oil causes anxiety. None of it seems super credible, but Mayo Clinic has some suitably bland advice.

The one very important connection – if you drink too much coffee, or any other source of caffeine, that will make you anxious. I once had a patient come to me with severe recurrent anxiety. I asked her how much coffee she drank, and she said about twenty cups per day. Suffice it to say this was not a Dr. House-caliber medical mystery.

Also needless to say: get enough sleep. Seriously. Get enough sleep.

Many people find that various breathing exercises or other sorts of mindfulness activities can be helpful in the short term and sometimes build skills useful for the long term. My hospital gives people these handouts on breathing techniques and progressive muscle relaxation. I’ve made fun of HeartMath in the past, but I only learned about them because many people find some success, probably placebo-ish, with their quick coherence technique. If you’re an overachiever and want to get really into this sort of stuff, people always say good things about yoga and especially pranayama breathing. Studies seem to back this up (1, 2, 3) though you’ve got to be careful to weed out the studies by very religious Hindus trying to prove they’ve been right all along.

Meditation has similarly positive results. Here’s a study showing that an intervention to teach patients meditation resulted in decreased anxiety with p a meta-analysis of 39 studies finding an effect size of about 0.6 (medium) in the general population, and an effect size of about 1.0 (large) in people with anxiety disorders. But here’s an equal and opposite review that found only “equivocal” results. As far as I can tell, most people investigating meditation think it works pretty well. The meditation techniques that seem to work best are mindfulness meditation and transcendental meditation. You can learn a little about mindfulness meditation here. In order to learn about Transcendental Meditation, send a check made out for $5000 to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, PO Box….

II. Therapy

Cognitive-behavioral therapy works okay for anxiety just like it works okay for everything else. The Big Graph O’ Effect Sizes says that psychotherapy on average has an effect size of 0.51 in generalized anxiety, compared to medication’s 0.31. This shouldn’t be taken too seriously – the confidence intervals overlap and there’s a wide range of efficacy for different medications – but you won’t be doing any worse by going for the therapy first. Even the Cochrane Review, famous for never drawing any conclusion other than “more research is needed”, is tentatively willing to say that psychotherapy works for anxiety disorders. Their study trends towards finding that cognitive behavioral therapy works better than supportive therapy, but is unable to prove significance – apparently more research is needed.

Exposure therapy can also be useful for panic attacks or specific phobias. This is where they expose you to the thing you’re scared of (or deliberately initiate a panic attack) and keep doing it until you stop being scared and start being bored. According to a bunch of studies it works neither better nor worse than cognitive-behvioral therapy for most things, but my unsupported impression has always been that it’s better at least for panic disorder. Cognitive-behavioral therapy seems clearly superior for social phobia.

You can get psychotherapy from any qualified psychotherapist, a category including counselors, social workers, psychologists, and sometimes psychiatrists. Ones who use “a school” (for example, describe themselves as practicing cognitive behavioral therapy) are usually considered better than those who don’t (“Oh, I do a little of everything with every patient”). If you can’t find (or don’t want to find) a good therapist, there is preliminary evidence that a good self-help therapy workbook (“bibliotherapy”) is about as good as real therapy – including for anxiety (study, other study, yet another study).

I have no special insight into which self-help workbooks are any good, but The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Anxiety: A Step-By-Step Program seems to get pretty good ratings.

III. Medications

To be tried after diet and lifestyle interventions when possible.

Medication can work either instead of or in addition to therapy. There are at least seven categories of commonly used conventional anxiety medications: SSRIs, SNRIs, antihistamines, antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, benzodiazepines, and azapirones. These can be divided into mostly-acute (antihistamines and benzos) and mostly-long-term (SSRIs, SNRIs, anticonvulsants, azathioprines), with antipsychotics kind of being a tossup. Depending on whether you just need to get through the occasional panic attack or whether you’re in a chronic unremitting anxiety state, you might want one, the other, or both.

You probably know antihistamines (example: Benadryl) from the many common over-the-counter members of this class. They have some mild short-term anti-anxiety effects. Benadryl will work in a pinch if you need something without a prescription, but the most commonly used anxiolytic antihistamine is hydroxyzine (“Vistaril”, “Atarax”), which is a bit more powerful and less likely to make you fall asleep. As far as anxiolytics go it’s pretty safe as long as it doesn’t make you too sleepy. If you just need something to take the edge off the occasional anxiety attack, this works fine.

Benzodiazepines (examples: Xanax, Ativan, Valium, Klonopin) are very effective in the short-term but also very controversial. In some people they are very habit-forming and can produce a picture very similar to addiction to alcohol (which they chemically resemble). Keep in mind how bad an idea it might be to become extremely addicted to prescription pills that you may suddenly lose access to depending on how your doctor is feeling (you might expect doctors would take the difficulty of coming off these drugs into account, but you might expect a lot of things from doctors that don’t always happen). Studies suggest benzodiazepines can sometimes build tolerance, and that after a month or two of frequent use, they lose their positive effect and you need them just to feel normal. That having been said, a subset of patients – and I can’t tell at this point if it’s a majority or a minority – go on benzodiazepines, do very well, stay on them for long periods without getting dependent, and never have anxiety again. It’s kind of a crapshoot. The most generally recognized “safe” use of benzos is the occasional Xanax to deal with rare but very stressful situations (for example, flying on an airplane if you’re scared of heights). Other people say Klonopin is safer than some of the others and that it’s worth a shot as long as you realize that “Klonopin dose gradually creeping upwards” is a sign that you’re getting into a bad place and need to react immediately. Most people recommend trying other things first before you come here, but once you’ve exhausted other options these can be a powerful last resort.

SSRIs (examples: Prozac, Celexa, Lexapro, Zoloft) are the mainstay of chronic anxiety treatment just like they’re the mainstay of chronic everything-else treatment. As usual, they have real but modest effects after about a month or so, more in some people and less in others. As usual, if one SSRI doesn’t work for you, you might want to try another. These are pretty safe aside from the sexual side effects. Some people get mild withdrawals if they go off these too quickly, so don’t do that. A lot of people use both an SSRI for chronic treatment, plus either an antihistamine or benzo for “break-through” anxiety.

SNRIs (examples: Effexor, Cymbalta) are like SSRIs, but for two neurotransmitters instead of one. This is supposed to make them a little bit more effective. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. Fewer sexual problems than SSRIs, but worse discontinuation syndrome. They’re a good second-line chronic medication if SSRIs don’t work. Effexor is probably the best.

Azapirones (example: BuSpar) is, unusually, a rare drug which is specifically targeted at anxiety, rather than a being a repurposed antidepressant or something. BuSpar is very safe, not at all addictive, and rarely works. Every so often somebody comes out with a very cheerful study saying something like “Buspar just as effective as benzodiazepines if given correctly!” and everybody laughs hysterically and goes back to never thinking about it.

Anticonvulsants (examples: Depakote, Neurontin, Tegretol, Lyrica) are seizure medications that sometimes sort of work for anxiety. Most of them have strong side effects and limited utility. The exception is Lyrica (pregabalin), which is pretty new but has shown excellent safety and efficacy in studies. It doesn’t have an FDA indication for anxiety and it’s pretty expensive, so you might have a hard time getting it, but it is at least a well-kept secret.

Atypical antipsychotics (examples: Seroquel, Zyprexa, Abilify, Geodon) are, as always, overused. Most of them either make you gain lots of weight, put you at increased risk for heart rhythm problems, make you feel terrible, put you at risk of permanent movement disorders, or all of the above. They do often treat anxiety, sometimes very well, and psychiatrists like them because they’re good all-purpose no-nonsense drugs with big advertising budgets, but unless you’re also psychotic consider trying some other things first before you try these.

An article in Journal of Psychopharmacology tries to compare the efficacy of all of these classes of drugs and gets the following effect sizes (bigger number = bigger effect):

Pregabalin: 0.5
Antihistamine: 0.45
SNRI: 0.42
Benzo: 0.38
SSRI: 0.36
Azapirone: 0.17
Alternative medicine: -0.31

(remember, other studies suggest psychotherapy is around 0.5)

I heavily challenge the claim that antihistamines are more effect than (or anywhere near as effective as) benzos. I don’t know the confidence intervals on these numbers, so I would suggest reading it as “Everything is about equally effective, except azapirones which aren’t as good”. Their “alternative medicine” category was mostly kava and homeopathy, and I have no idea why it came out negative (kava’s pretty good, and homeopathy shouldn’t separate from 0).

There are also some less commonly used drugs that might help people who don’t respond to any of these.

As usual, MAOIs are very effective, moderately dangerous, and super hard to get. They seem to work especially well for panic disorder and social anxiety.

Clonidine is a medication usually used to control blood pressure. It’s somewhat effective against anxiety and some people think it should be used more. But it can cause you to become too sedated (abnormally low heart rate) and in some people it makes anxiety worse for some reason.

Beta-blockers (example: propranalol) are another blood pressure medication. It is especially effective against somatic symptoms of anxiety – racing heartbeat, shaking, et cetera – and sometimes getting rid of those can make the anxiety go away entirely. It’s most famous for its use against performance anxiety: about a third of musicians use them in concerts, and I’ve heard similar rumors about public speakers, actors, et cetera. I used to think this was a little-known piece of trivia, but whenever I bring it up to doctors (“Hey, did you know some people use beta-blockers for performance anxiety”) the usual response is “Oh, yeah, I prescribe myself some of that when I have to give a presentation at grand rounds.” They don’t seem quite as good for longer-term anxiety disorders, though some people have had good results with them.

I once saw an excellent psychiatrist whom I deeply respect try everything on a patient with severe treatment-resistant anxiety with no results whatsoever until finally he came to Thorazine. This treated the patient’s anxiety pretty well, at the cost of provoking quite a bit of anxiety in the doctor.

Without meaning to give medical advice, and with the caveat that you should ask your doctor for their opinion – one good pharmacological treatment algorithm for anxiety disorders is:

If you just have occasional outbursts that bother you, take occasional doses of hydroxyzine.

If you have a longer-term problem, start with an SSRI. If that doesn’t work, either try more SSRIs and SNRIs, or go to Lyrica. You might as well be on BuSpar somewhere in the process too. If none of that works, choose your poison (or have it chosen for you) among MAOIs, benzos, clonidine, or antipsychotics.

IV. Alternative Treatments

To be used out of curiosity or desperation only – you have other options and these are not guaranteed safe or effective.

Massage therapy, acupuncture, aromatherapy, and everything else in the category of “unnecessarily medicalized relaxing thing” all perform very well as long as you don’t look too hard for a suitable control group. Yes, these are probably placebo, but they’re very effective placebos and if they both work I would rather take a placebo than an antipsychotic.

Inositol and l-theanine are both found in small quantities in the diet (inositol in some vegetables, theanine in tea) and supplementing them has been inconsistently found to help with anxiety. Inositol had some preliminary evidence for effectiveness in panic disorder, but a more recent meta-analysis was unimpressive. I can only say that I have some anecdotal evidence of extremely positive reactions to inositol, but we all know what they say about anecdotal evidence. Keep in mind that the dose used in studies is way larger than the dose anyone will give you – usually corresponding to about 20 of those 500 mg inositol pills a day. This makes it expensive and inconvenient, and most people just compromise by taking so little inositol it shouldn’t possibly be able to have any effect. L-theanine also has a lot of small studies in support, although there’s some question on whether it works on its own or whether it just has useful synergistic effects with caffeine. Sun-theanine is generally considered the most effective form, and recommended dose is about 100 – 400 mg. Both these supplements are afaik very safe and a good option for people who want to test things that might or might not work but have minimal risk. Magnesium should also be in here somewhere.

GABA is the main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the nervous system, and a lot of these other interventions are attempts to convince the brain to release more GABA or potentiate the GABA that’s already released. Can we just cut out the middleman and ingest GABA pills directly? The supplement industry would like you to think so, and you can certainly buy them anywhere supplements are sold, but it’s generally believed that orally ingested GABA can’t cross the blood-brain barrier. The Russians have developed a modified version of GABA that doesn’t have this problem; called picamilon, it seems to be a pretty popular anxiety treatment on the other side of the Pharmacological Iron Curtain. It’s pretty easy to get as a non-prescription supplement here in the West. There are very few studies on it, the ones that exist are in Russian, and I have nothing to go on but a couple of anecdotal reports, most of which are positive (though I personally noticed no effects). But the mechanism of action is plausible, and the long history of successful Russian use at least suggests it probably won’t kill you immediately. Most common dosage seems to be about 100 – 300 mg.

The nootropics/supplement/nutraceutical community also suggest ashwagandha and bacopa for anxiety; various low-quality studies support the use of both (ashwagandha meta-analysis, bacopa study 1, bacopa study 2, bacopa study 3). Bacopa may take several months of frequent use before it starts working; I tried it briefly and had to stop because of gastrointestinal side effects, which are pretty common. There’s also some worry around heavy metal contamination. Swanson’s and Nootropic Depot’s are two that have third-party testing showing they’re uncontaminated.

Kava is a traditional drink from various Pacific islands with anxiolytic properties. Multiple meta-analyses including a Cochrane review find it to be an effective anxiety treatment, but its safety is in question after reports of several cases of liver failure caused by the plant. This may be yet another case of people exaggerating freakishly rare side effects; the risk has been estimated at less than one in a million doses (though remember that if you take it daily for ten years, that number bcomes 1/300). Others suggest a rate as low as one in a hundred million but this assumes zero underreporting; others challenge this assumption. Possibly it is only poorly prepared kava causes liver problems; for traditionally prepared kava, look for preparations that specify they are made from root/rhizome material only. The American Academy of Family Physicians recommends that:

Physicians who supervise patients taking kava for the treatment of GAD should take care to avoid the following: (1) high dosages (more than 300 mg per day); (2) combining kava with hepatoactive agents; (3) using non-root preparations; and (4) exposure for longer than 24 weeks. Use of WS1490 standardized kava extract is also recommended. If these safety precautions are followed, kava can be appropriate therapy for selected patients diagnosed with GAD

Don’t take kava if you have any liver problems, if you’re on any medications that might interact with it, or if you plan on drinking alcohol at the same time. Consider talking about it with your doctor first and getting plans to check liver enzymes regularly.

Selank is an experimental Russian anti-anxiety medication going through their version of clinical trials. It’s a bit high-maintenance – you have to keep it refrigerated or else it decays, and the only two functional means of administration are injection or nasal spray – but anecdotal evidence is extraordinarily positive. No side effects have been found thus far, but needless to say by the time you get to “injecting experimental Russian medications into yourself” we have left the point where we can entirely guarantee this is a good idea. Ceretropic sells a nasal spray version, which is probably more convenient than having to inject it.

Phenibut is another Russian anti-anxiety medication, but it’s very addictive and dangerous. Even the fearless people of r/nootropics stay away from this one. Highly un-recommended.

Overall, the best evidence seems to be for l-theanine (especially if you drink coffee) and bacopa (especially if you’re willing to wait months for any effect), with picamilon also worth your time to try and Selank as an option for the very adventurous.

V. Conclusions

No treatment stands out as extremely effective, and the best route to dealing with anxiety probably depends on many factors like your amount of free time, your motivation, your access to medical care, and your willingness to put up with side effects. After you’ve fixed lifestyle issues, I think any of “self-help workbook”, “start SSRIs”, or “try l-theanine” are good first options. On the other hand, benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, and kava are all options I would hold off on until you’ve tried a couple of other things.

Like with the depression post, the most important conclusion you can take from this is that you have lots of options. Please don’t let people give you an SSRI and then give up. Work with your doctor. Anxiety actually has a pretty good prognosis if people work on it, but it can be a difficult and frustrating process. Just remember: there are lots of options.

PS: Relevant Onion

Following Nick Clegg's interview on The Sunday Politics this morning, it was his comments on future coalitions and electoral reform that the Guardian chose to headline.

However, these comments were interesting too:

He also claimed the caps on election spending had been broken in the election: "One of the things that needs to happen in the kind of technical postmortem about this general election is how on earth the Conservatives spent such vast American-style sums of money across the country from a centrally directed campaign, which ran a coach and horses through the financial limits on how local candidates can campaign. 

"So they were able to do that. We clearly were not able to match that remotely. I mean, it was a real David and Goliath battle for resources."

Quite who will carry out this postmortem remains to be seen.

I was not convinced by another of Nick's claims:

Clegg blamed the Lib Dem general election collapse on a late swing prompted by a fear that had its genesis in Scotland. 

He said: "My own view is something shifted very, very late in the day in England, in English constituency after English constituency."

First, because a cool look at the idea that Lib Dem MPs would hold on found the evidence wanting - even if I failed to draw the full, awful conclusions in this post from February.

Second, because the Lib Dem vote did not transfer en masse to the Conservatives. As Seth Thévoz and Lewis Baston have demonstrated, it splintered in several directions and the Conservatives gained many seats without increasing their vote at all.

Perhaps the Liberal Democrats need a "technical postmortem" too?

Shortly after I made my previous post about the Lib Dem leadership election, I got invited to a lunch with Norman Lamb in Brussels last Friday. As I wrote last weekend, I knew very little about Norman Lamb, except that he had been a minister in the coalition government and that he had the backing of a number of party heavyweights - though only one of the other surviving MPs (Farron has three other MPs supporting him, with Clegg and Carmichael silent as far as I can tell). So I went along, with my ballot paper in my pocket and an open mind, ready to change my #1 Farron vote if I was sufficiently convinced.

The discussion was a private one among a group of about twenty, most of them Lib Dem members based in Brussels, and concentrated entirely on policy; the leadership campaign was barely mentioned. I was impressed despite myself. As various friends who are more involved than I am have reported, Lamb is clearly cerebral and reflective, and wants to get the best information available from many different sources. He did not pitch us; he asked for our views (which I gave at some length, though he was nice about it afterwards).

So I ended the meeting reassured on substance at least, if Lamb rather than Farron is elected on Wednesday. However, my prejudice on style was reinforced: Farron speaks from the heart, Lamb from the head. At this point, I think the party needs passion as well as reflection. If the party ends up with Farron as leader and Lamb as spokesman on EU policy, there may be some hope of that. So I dropped my vote unchanged into the postbox on Rue de Treves as I walked back to my office.

“An explosive plot twist that no one saw coming”: that’s how a New York Times article describes Atticus Finch’s changed character in Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman. (Briefly: he’s an out-and-out racist.) Certainly those responsible for the publication of this work have long known that its older Atticus Finch is not the Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird. That the news has come out just days before the novel’s publication date (July 14) seems to me the result of careful, cynical calculation: the timing is right to produce maximum buzz with minimal damage to sales (the early orders are in).

Bewilderment about how the Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird could espouse the beliefs he holds in Go Set a Watchman bespeaks a failure to distinguish between fictional characters and human beings. “Atticus Finch” isn’t a human being, a moral agent, who devolved over time — which in itself would involve time travel, as Go Set a Watchman is the earlier work. “Atticus Finch” is the name of a character in two works of fiction. That the two works are wildly discrepant in their presentation of this character is a matter of a writer’s changing conception. “It’s sad to think that Atticus’s character is going to be tarnished,” says a teacher, as if the ugliness of Go Set a Watchman is going on Atticus Finch’s permanent record. (There is no human being for whom to make a permanent record.) Go Set a Watchman will require us to distinguish between what “our own desires” have made of Atticus Finch and “the literary truth,” says an academic, as if the Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird was really the old racist all along. Confusion upon confusion.

For me, the most exciting news about Go Set a Watchman is that the book is arriving in mid-July, which leaves open (at least in my mind) the possibility that a J. D. Salinger book will be arrive later this year. I don’t think it’s too cynical to imagine that publishers get together on the timing of these things.

[The tea cakes and lemonade affair is going to be pretty awkward, I suspect.]

Sameer ud Dowla Khan, a phonetician at Reed College, has written an open letter to Terry Gross, which starts like this:

While I am a loyal fan of your program, I’m very disappointed in your interview of David Thorpe and Susan Sankin from 7 July 2015. As both a phonetician who specializes in intonation, stress patterns, and voice quality, as well as a gay man, I found the opinions expressed in the interview to be not only inaccurate, but also offensive and damaging.

You can listen to that interview, and read the transcript, on the Fresh Air web site — "Filmmaker And Speech Pathologist Weigh In On What It Means To 'Sound Gay'":

Is there such a thing as a "gay voice"? For gay filmmaker David Thorpe, the answer to that question is complicated. "There is no such thing as a fundamentally gay voice," Thorpe tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. But, he adds, "there is a stereotype and there are men, to a greater or lesser extent, who embody that stereotype."

In his new film, Do I Sound Gay?, Thorpe searches for the origin of that stereotype and documents his own attempts to sound "less gay" by working with speech pathologist Susan Sankin.

Several other people have suggested that I write something about this interview, and so it was on my to-blog list. But Sameer sent me a copy of his letter as possible guest post, and I think it covers the ground quite well. So here it is:

---

Dear Ms. Gross,

While I am a loyal fan of your program, I’m very disappointed in your interview of David Thorpe and Susan Sankin from 7 July 2015. As both a phonetician who specializes in intonation, stress patterns, and voice quality, as well as a gay man, I found the opinions expressed in the interview to be not only inaccurate, but also offensive and damaging.

1. Straight people convey sexuality in their voice too
We know from decades of linguistic research that all people express themselves in ways that can convey an affiliation with a particular group or identity. We know that gender identity, sexual orientation, regional background, socioeconomic status, racial/ethnic affiliation, level of education, age, political beliefs, and many other social categories can be indexed through manipulations of voice quality, pitch, rhythm, vowel quality, consonant articulation, etc. Crucially, it’s not just the minorities of these categories who use such features; majority groups make use of these indexical features as well. For example, straight male speakers of American English are known to have deeper voices than straight male speakers of many other languages; even prepubescent boys in the US have been documented to have significantly lower pitch than girls of the same age, even though the two groups are physiologically indistinguishable in their throats. This trend has been getting more extreme since the 1960s, with American boys getting deeper and deeper voices with each generation.

This means that inviting a gay man to talk about how his voice conveys gay-maleness is (scientifically speaking) just as valid as asking a straight man to talk about how his voice conveys straight-maleness, how a white person’s voice conveys whiteness, how a middle class person’s voice conveys middle class-ness, how a college-educated person’s voice conveys education, etc. But I can say I’ve never heard of such an interview from your program or any program; this is only something that gets asked of women, gay men, African Americans, immigrants, and other people who are in a socially un(der)privileged position. The questions that get asked are “why do gay people/women have to talk like that?” or “why can’t blacks speak (what we consider) proper English?” instead of “why do straight people/men have to talk like that?” or “why don’t whites know how to speak (any variety of) African American English?”, etc. There is no logical reason why we should ask the questions like the former two and not questions like the latter two.

2. There’s no single “natural” way to speak
Not only is it inaccurate to label minorities as the only ones who convey their identities through their speech, it also perpetuates a misguided belief that there is a “natural” way to speak, or a way to speak that has no “styles”. This concept of “naturalness” or “authenticity”, which came up many times in your interview, assumes that only some people (i.e. minorities) are adopting “styles”, deviating from “natural” speech in order to convey their identity. This myth comes up all the time with another linguistic feature brought up in the interview, “vocal fry”. This type of voice quality, which linguists call “creaky voice”, “glottalization”, “laryngealization”, or a host of other terms depending on the specific acoustic characteristics, appears to index a number of social categories in American English: younger age, urban background, and (lately in the popular media) a sort of femininity. Ms. Sankin’s technical description of the voice quality was not incorrect (it does involve a slow vocal fold vibration with often incomplete closure), except for the part where she said it is harmful or unnatural.

Endless popular articles and podcasts (and your interview) describe “vocal fry” as a deviation from a natural voice quality, that it can be physiologically harmful to the vocal folds, that it grates on the ears, that it’s a “style” coming from singers of pop music, and that it should be avoided in order to be successful in life. None of these claims has any basis in reality. In truth, these voice qualities are used extensively in languages like Danish, Vietnamese, Burmese, Hmong, and many indigenous languages of Mexico and Central America (such as Zapotec, Mazatec, and Yukatek Maya), far more than they are in English – and as you might imagine, speakers of those languages do not suffer from medical problems in the throat any more than speakers of other languages. (I have no idea where Ms. Sankin got the idea that this is causing medical problems in the US; that’s simply untrue.) Those languages are just as “natural” as English is, and the voices used by speakers of those languages are just as
“natural” as those used by English speakers.

I could, but won’t (for brevity) get into detail about how Ms. Sankin’s claims about upspeak, filler words, and New York City vowels could be subjected to the same criticism I just provided for vocal fry. But when you step back and think about all the things that are identified as deviations from “natural” speech–vocal fry, upspeak, filler words, dentalized “s”, a wide pitch range, etc.–you notice that there’s only one thing that these features have in common: these are the things that are not traditionally associated with straight white educated male speakers of American English. And there we have it: what gets categorized as “natural” is just how people in power speak. And any feature that deviates from that is given labels like “unnatural”, “uneducated”, or just a “style”. Any sociolinguist could have said that in a second, but Ms. Sankin only provided this stigmatizing view instead.

3. This harms our community
Beyond the inaccuracies and the propagation of linguistic myths, the part that disturbed me the most in the interview was that your program is highly influential and well-respected (for good reason), and thus people across the nation will hear these opinions with a seriousness and receptiveness that they frankly do not merit. Interviewing Mr. Thorpe, a member of a minority group, to talk about how he is disgusted by features associated with that group, how he underwent therapy to try to rid himself of such features, how it is a part of his “self-loathing”, or how his disgust can be justified by the even more stigmatizing opinions of Ms. Sankin, is the wrong message to send to gay people, parents of gay children, members of any stigmatized minority, or the public at large. No matter what strides have been made in the past few decades, LGBT people are far more likely to be estranged from their families, suffer from depression, and attempt suicide. Hearing that self-loathing feeling inside them justified on an intellectual radio program can only be harmful. This will strengthen a narrow-minded view that gay men (and other minorities) are going out of their way to just sound that way, implying that even in their speech, their behavior is unnatural and undesirable.

4. Why not talk to the experts?
It’s unfortunate and disrespectful to those who actually do research on these topics that no linguists or speech scientists were interviewed to provide an informed, objective, and non-stigmatizing analysis. Robert Podesva (Stanford University), Benjamin Munson (University of Minnesota), LeAnn Brown (University of Manitoba), Fabiana Piccolo (Nuance), Erez Levon (Queen Mary University of London), Ron Smyth (University of Toronto), Robin Queen (University of Michigan), Birch Moonwomon (Sonoma State), Lal Zimman (UC Santa Barbara), and Greg Jacobs (York University) are among many researchers who have studied the acoustics and perception of what is typically considered “gay men’s speech” and related varieties of American English. In the future, I would hope that these would be people you would invite to give an informed opinion.

I hope that through my criticism, I have remained respectful. I know your program to have high standards, and I only want these topics that are so close to me to be subject to the same standards you give to other topics in your interviews. I very much appreciate your time to read this.

Sincerely,

Sameer ud Dowla Khan
Assistant Professor of Linguistics
Reed College

---

Above is a guest post by Sameer ud Dowla Khan.

Update —Lisa Davidson, a linguist at NYU, was also inspired to write a letter to Terry Gross.

Some earlier LLOG posts on vocal fry, uptalk, and the connections between pitch range and biological sex:

"This is, like, such total crap?", 5/15/2005
"Uptalk uptick", 12/15/2005
"Angry Rises", 2/11/2006
"Further thoughts on 'the affect'", 3/22/2006
"Nationality, Gender and Pitch", 11/12/2007
"Mailbag: F0 in Japanese vs. English", 11/13/2007
"Uptalk anxiety", 9/7/2008
"Vocal fry: 'creeping in' or 'still here'?", 12/12/2011
"More on 'vocal fry'", 12/18/2011
"'Sexy baby vocal virus'", 8/15/2013
"Biology, sex, culture, and pitch", 8/16/2013
"Vocal fry probably doesn't harm your career prospects", 6/7/2014
"Real fry", 6/19/2014
"Freedom Fries", 2/3/2015
"You want fries with that?", 2/3/2015
"Sarah Koenig", 2/5/2015

And a few posts on whose ways of talking get negatively evaluated:

"Those slurry, sleepy southerners", 2/25/2004
"More illusions", 8/17/2005
"The social psychology of linguistic naming and shaming", 2/27/2007
"'At the end of the day' not management-speak", 9/26/2009
"When did managers become stupid?", 10/1/2009
"Language diversity", 2/6/2015
"Un justified", 7/8/2015

 

Tuesday, a group of cryptographers and security experts released a major paper outlining the risks of government-mandated back-doors in encryption products: Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications, by Hal Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steve Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, Matt Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, John Gilmore, Matthew Green, Susan Landau, Peter Neumann, Ron Rivest, Jeff Schiller, Bruce Schneier, Michael Specter, and Danny Weitzner.

Abstract: Twenty years ago, law enforcement organizations lobbied to require data and communication services to engineer their products to guarantee law enforcement access to all data. After lengthy debate and vigorous predictions of enforcement channels going dark, these attempts to regulate the emerging Internet were abandoned. In the intervening years, innovation on the Internet flourished, and law enforcement agencies found new and more effective means of accessing vastly larger quantities of data. Today we are again hearing calls for regulation to mandate the provision of exceptional access mechanisms. In this report, a group of computer scientists and security experts, many of whom participated in a 1997 study of these same topics, has convened to explore the likely effects of imposing extraordinary access mandates. We have found that the damage that could be caused by law enforcement exceptional access requirements would be even greater today than it would have been 20 years ago. In the wake of the growing economic and social cost of the fundamental insecurity of today's Internet environment, any proposals that alter the security dynamics online should be approached with caution. Exceptional access would force Internet system developers to reverse forward secrecy design practices that seek to minimize the impact on user privacy when systems are breached. The complexity of today's Internet environment, with millions of apps and globally connected services, means that new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated, hard to detect security flaws. Beyond these and other technical vulnerabilities, the prospect of globally deployed exceptional access systems raises difficult problems about how such an environment would be governed and how to ensure that such systems would respect human rights and the rule of law.

It's already had a big impact on the debate. It was mentioned several times during yesterday's Senate hearing on the issue (see here).

Three blog posts by authors. Four different news articles, and this analysis of how the New York Times article changed. Also, a New York Times editorial.

EDITED TO ADD (7/9): Peter Swire's Senate testimony is worth reading.

EDITED TO ADD (7/10): Good article on these new crypto wars.

EDITED TO ADF (7/14): Two rebuttals, neither very convincing.

George Osborn’s budget raises the threshold for the higher (40%) tax rate from the current £42,385 to £43,000. Since I am fortunate enough to earn that much, the £615 difference will now be taxed at 20% rather than 40%, saving me 20% of that £615 — that is, £123 a year, or about £2.37 a week. Whoopy doo. I don’t want to be ungrateful, but £2.37 a week is not going to change my life.

(The Telegraph claims this change could save me up to £1300 a year, but that seems to be flatly wrong. I can only assume they mean when the threshold has been moved all the way up to £50,000, as is the ultimate plan.)

So anyway, that’s me sorted out.

How about the people I know from my church — the Cinderford locals with jobs that pay less well? The news is not so good for them. Changes to Universal Credit, which affect the amount people can earn before benefits start to be withdrawn, will cost 3 million families an average of £1,000 a year. It’s a dead cert that some of those families will be in our church, which is in an economically depressed area.

So here is the impact of this budget: it’s going to take £1000 from the poorest working family we know (and note that this change is explicitly designed to penalise working families) and distribute that £1000 to eight people like me, so that we high earners can have an extra £123 per year.

Those poor families will be £20 a week worse off, so that I and seven others like me can have an extra £2.37. We’ll each be able to buy an extra craft beer, or tub of sun-dried tomatoes, or jar of marinated olives. Of course, the poor working family is going to struggle to afford break and milk, but hey, who cares about them? Not George Osborn, that’s for sure!

As Douglas Adams said: “Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor – at least no one worth speaking of.” And soon, so long as we stick to the austerity scripts, we’ll be rid of some of those troublesome poor people completely, like Greece, where tough austerity measures in Greece leave nearly a million people with no access to healthcare, leading to soaring infant mortality, HIV infection and suicide.

So. This is a vile, vile budget. It’s hideous and contemptible and vicious. It makes me ashamed to be British. Or, no, wait — it makes me ashamed that George Osborn is British. He robs from the poor and gives to the rich. It’s a filthy thing to do, and the fact that it’s done under the law makes it filthier, not cleaner.

Oh, and by the way, Britain, you voted for this. The Conservatives told you exactly what they were going to do, we said “sounds great, go ahead”, and sure enough they went ahead. Hang your heads in shame Labour and Liberal Democrats, for not offering the electorate an alternative. Hang your heads in shame, everyone who voted to have a government that would do this.

And I would say hang your heads in shame Conservatives; but it’s perfectly clear that they have no concept of shame.

Many thanks to Nick Forbes for tweeting this newspaper cutting from the 1992 general election campaign in Weardale.

Quick question: Which of the two Liberal Democrat leadership candidates was a member of the SDP? The correct answer is, of course, Norman Lamb who was a member of both the Liberal Party and the SDP (membership of both parties was allowed) while Tim Farron was only ever a member of the Liberal Party pre-merger.

I bring this up because in their endorsement of Norman Lamb for leader, the Economist makes the claim that Tim Farron is a ‘traditional social democrat’ while Norman Lamb is a ‘classical liberal’. (They also shockingly use ‘shoe-in’ rather than ‘shoo-in‘, making me wonder how far their subbing standards have fallen)

The idea that the Liberal Democrats are divided between two factions with pure unadulterated classical liberals locked in a life-or-death struggle with soggy social democrats is one common across many pundits and politicos. It’s based on the solid fact that the party was formed out of a merger between the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party, so naturally one would expect the factions in the party to reflect those divisions. It’s a fine supposition, weakened only by the fact that it’s utter bollocks. On a simple matter numbers I suspect that even before the post-election surge, most of the party’s members (including me) joined after the merger, and a large chunk of them now were likely not even born when it happened.

The narrative also ignores the actual history of and ideology of the two parties pre-merger. The Liberal Party was not stuck in the rut of holding the same policies it had held in Victorian times, and was certainly not a ‘classical liberal’ party. Under Grimond, the party had turned away from electoral pacts with the Conservatives in favour of seeking ‘realignment of the left'; under Thorpe the party had adopted the principles of community politics and the radical ideas of the ‘Red Guard’ of the Young Liberals began moving into the mainstream of the party; and Steel negotiated the Lib-Lab pact, then looked to work with Jenkins to realign the left. The dominant ideas in the Liberals from the late 50s to the end of the party were in the tradition of the New Liberalism of the early twentieth century, not the ‘classical’ liberalism of the nineteenth.

Meanwhile, the SDP was not especially committed to the principles of social democracy as it’s commonly understood – indeed, most actual social democrats remained in the Labour Party and helped draw it back towards the centre. The SDP’s aims were more around creating a party of the centre and realigning British politics (remember that this was after the 70s, when the old institutions of Britsh politics and the two-party system had begun to show their first cracks). Under both Jenkins and Owen, the party was much more about centrism and balancing extremes of left and right than it was about promoting even the mildest form of socialism. If anything, the party’s most symbolic issue under Owen was one of Britain retaining Trident rather than anything to do with economics or society. By the end of its life – and especially in its post-merger rebirth, SDP-ism had become little more than proclaiming the greatness of David Owen and complaining about how all the radical ideas of the Liberals needed to be reined in. The lack of any overriding identity for the SDP other than centrism can be seen in how its members scattered to the political winds – some to the Lib Dems, some to New Labour, others following Owen towards the Tories (and often going further than him in actually joining them).

If there’s any lingering tension within the Liberal Democrats that can be traced back to the two different parties it’s not a fight between right and left but rather one between centrists and radicals (though that was present to some extent in both predecessor parties, and exists in other parties too). Centrism is there in Roy Jenkins and his ‘great crusade to change everything just a little bit’, Owen’s defense of the elite consensus on nuclear weapons, Spitting Image’s early Ashdown ‘neither one thing nor the other but somewhere in between’ and this year’s ‘look left, look right, then cross’ rhetoric. It’s the sort of thing the in-house magazines of the establishment like The Economist love because it’s not about rocking the boat, just presenting a slightly liberal-tinged version of what the great and the good all agree on that doesn’t challenge any existing power. Radicals, on the other hand, are looking to change the system and cause a fundamental shift in the distribution of power, following in the footsteps of many Liberals before. That, I think, is a more fruitful way of looking at any differences within the party, rather than looking for divisions based on irrelevant squabbles from thirty years ago.

#885, 16th December 2000

“Stan” is a murder ballad. A song – not the first or last such Eminem recorded – about killing a woman. If this seems a strange way to look at it, it’s because the record takes pains to make its murder incidental. Its victim is nameless. We know Stan’s name. We know his brother, Matthew’s. We know Slim, the persona Stan is writing to, and we know Marshall Mathers, the man who replies. We even know a possible name for the child the murdered woman is carrying. We do not know her name. That isn’t where we’re supposed to be looking. The spotlight in the song is on the relationship between two men, star and fan. It’s how Stan would have wanted it.

Still, the murder is not incidental: it’s the climax of the record. All through the song, beautifully layered under the vocals, are background noises. They accompany Eminem’s conversational, half-spoken rapping and the unassuming, mid-tempo beat: literal scribbles in the margin of the track, encroaching thunder and rain. In the third verse, the rain is broken up by the wet swoosh of a car windscreen wiper, and, on cue, a woman screaming. Her death, and Stan’s, are what this track has been leading up to.

The presence of a dead woman in the song makes matters more dramatic, certainly. In some eyes, it might even ennoble proceedings. In a somewhat notorious – and slightly tongue-in-cheek – piece for the Guardian, critic Giles Foden poured praise on Eminem as a poet, specifically making a comparison to the “dark” and “ironic” poetry of Robert Browning. I remember studying Robert Browning in school – a teacher was big on the same poem Foden compares “Stan” to, “My Last Duchess”. It’s dark and ironic because, you see, we gradually realise the narrator killed his last duchess. Eminem and Browning, linked across time by brilliance, irony, bodies.

The screams, when they cut into the soundfield of verse three, are visceral, some of the most unpleasant sounds to appear on any number one. Yet at the same time they’re corny, a bit of gruesome theatre to appease any Slim Shady acolytes who’ve been getting wriggly wondering where the funny stuff is. They’re visceral, I thought at first, because they’re corny – ultimately decorative in just this way. A shot of casual sadism, a dollop of murder to make a psychological study just that bit more hardcore. (Or, with a nod to Foden, more prestigious).

But I realised the murder does more than that. Stan’s nameless girlfriend is a sacrifice the story makes. For what? To prevent “Stan” being a particular kind of tragedy. Imagine the song without the murder: it’s a tale of how art can fill empty lives but can’t always save them, tracking Stan through fandom and obsession and finally self-destruction. But, for all his obvious delusion, you’d never have to stop feeling sorry for the guy, whose sympathy Eminem is skilful enough to make sure you lose only gradually in any case. Without the murder, the centres of the song shift. One of them is the moment where Eminem speeds up Stan’s cadences when he describes cutting himself, the urgency and vividness of Stan’s letter spiking up towards a burst of stresses (”it’s like adRENalin the PAIN is such a SUDden RUSH to ME”). Another is the slurred rambling of Stan relating a half-recalled bullshit urban myth about Phil Collins as he drives himself to his death, the mis-remembered song title the most perfect and somehow heartbreaking touch in a song full of astonishing choices.

I have to think about the song that is, not the one that isn’t, and the central narrative choice – the woman’s murder. It stops Stan being a tragic figure; turns him contemptible, an everyday monster. Why is it so important he becomes that? Partly it’s because the collapse in our sympathy for Stan means we might not lose too much sympathy for Marshall Mathers, the reasonable, reply-writing narrator of the fourth verse. Here’s where there’s some real old school irony, if you want it – Eminem’s carefully manicured, offhand, self-portrait as a busy but generous star, befuddled by but polite and helpful to his obsessive fans.

If listeners sympathised with Stan, Eminem’s dismissal of his self-harm – “I say that shit just clowning dog, how fucked up is you?” – would stand revealed as callous. But because we know Stan really is fucked-up, fucked-up enough to kill someone, Eminem has a shot at seeming wise. The same goes throughout his response. We know Stan is a monster, and because of that the song can treat his obsession as monstrous – most famously, the “we should be together, too” kiss-off line of the second verse, which, because the guy turns out to be a psycho, gives “Stan” a gay-panic overtone Eminem got called out on.

Often in stories, writers use a woman’s casual death as a spur to build the hero’s character. Here, it’s a device that makes clear who the hero isn’t, absolves Eminem by revealing Stan as just another murderous guy. Absolves him of what, though?

To answer that we have to remember how chippy and defensive “The Real Slim Shady” was behind its bonhomie, how keen Eminem was to promote himself as both a scourge of pop culture and a man besieged, with everyone from “feminist women” to Christina Aguilera trash-talking him, trying to pull him down. At the centre of the criticism was his misogyny and homophobia, the impact on his young fans of songs like the venomous “Kim” or “Bonnie & Clyde 97”, where the trunk murder motif first showed up. “Stan” is born from those traits too. But it’s also just as much a creature of its battling context as “Real Slim Shady” was. A key line – hidden in mid-rant, slurred mockingly by the drunk, desperate Stan – is “see Slim, I ain’t like you”. It’s more heavy irony – Stan has finally become exactly like Slim. But it’s only Slim he’s like – who never could have replied, because he’s not real. If “The Real Slim Shady” was Eminem trolling his critics, “Stan” comes on as him taking them in absolute earnest. He imagines their worst nightmare, the fan so deranged he actually does imitate Slim Shady. He plays the scenario out to its inevitable, horrible end, and then turns to camera and says, look, if anyone did this, it’s because they’re a psycho.

That’s Eminem’s point, one you might recognise from the weary defenses popular culture has to mount, time and again, against its censors. No, Grand Theft Auto doesn’t cause violence. No, heavy metal doesn’t cause suicide. No, Slim Shady isn’t an accessory to murder – Eminem getting his arguments in here before the media can find a real-life case to pin on him. It’s a familiar defense because it’s right. But long before “Stan” was released, a more nuanced criticism grew up alongside these simple-minded parades of direct cause and direct effect. Cultural influence isn’t the thunder and lightning, its the rain, falling steadily, eroding and altering things so gradually. “Stan” is a narrative, made up of authorial choices: one of those choices is to kill a woman to make a point about the men in its story. And as women were pointing out long before “Stan”, the rain of female bodies in so many stories, treated so incidentally, makes normal an idea that they are props, adjuncts to the story of a man. Just as his girlfriend is to Stan, whose motive may be unlikely, but whose crime is all too familiar.

“Stan” ends on a pratfall – Eminem’s “it was – damn!” which tilts the whole track into being a dark shaggy dog story or cautionary tale, if that’s how you want to take it. While he might have been surprised how the song took off, it’s obviously no throwaway. He takes immense care over the performance and its bravura execution. It’s undeniably a hip-hop track, and the hip-hop community picked up on it, taking “stan” into the language as a dismissive marker for fans committed beyond reason. But it also doesn’t sound very much like hip-hop. The tether of Eminem’s flow to the beat is gossamer; he’s using his skills as a rapper but never so you notice he’s rapping. The ancestry of “Stan” includes much rap storytelling but also older country and pop spoken novelties – cornball yarns like Red Sovine’s “Teddy Bear”, and the death stories so popular in the 70s. Eminem’s skill lets him be far subtler, of course. The epistolary mode – first time at number one since 1966! – means we don’t need a unifying narrator to dilute the psychodrama, and his mastery of internal rhymes lets Eminem keep control of the rhythm while hardly ever drawing attention to it. I don’t particularly enjoy listening to “Stan” – the final verses are a little too cynical and voyeuristic for me. But every time I do play it I hear something else in Eminem’s performance. In execution, it’s peerless: no other record does what this does.

That performance – and the novelty – quickly made “Stan” Eminem’s most famous track. But it goes deeper, too. The relationship between star and fan has been the centre of pop for decades. It’s the dream of becoming someone else, and maybe becoming yourself through that. An inherently chancy process. Still, anyone from Bowie to Madonna, from Presley to Gary Barlow, might have told the story of their number one fan, and with dozens of different outcomes, most less cruel than “Stan”. Eminem’s fortune is to find that story at the start of a time when the barriers between everyone are thinning – where almost anyone might have an uncomfortable fan, an obsessive enemy, an awkward request or confession landing in their laps at any time. No wonder a song which explores, verse by verse, how much identificaton is too much can still sound uncomfortable.

We are all sometimes Marshall Mathers now? Maybe, but we are just as likely to be Stan, not the murderous Stan but the Stan who has a shitty day and drifts away and puts songs on. Marshall was that guy too, which is why those verses sound human, not just ominous – why “Stan”, like the best ballads, is a song you can hear and hope maybe this time it’ll turn out better. It’s important to Eminem that he dash our sympathies for Stan, but it’s important that not all the song’s tenderness be wrecked alongside them. Which is where the second woman in “Stan” comes in.

Dido’s refrain, threaded through the song like a flyleaf between each chapter, was the first most listeners – to Eminem or anyone – heard of her. It’s sweetly sung, but with a slight reserve, a disengagement from the cold-tea despond of life she’s describing. Her detachment is designed to resolve, in the chorus of “Thank You”, into gratitude: a stock songwriting contrast, not too far in tone from All Saints’ “Black Coffee”. In “Stan”, of course, that chance of resolution is cut off. The only source of release is the picture on the wall, and the cycle begins again. Even though Dido’s voice is a lull and her interludes narcotic, her “not so bad” is the portion given to hope in this bleakest of great hit records. It’s not much. The endless drizzle, the numbed delicacy, and that glimpse of imaginary empathy – these are what precede, and survive, Stan and his girlfriend’s catastrophe. The same anomie, and the same rain, introduce Marshall’s reply as introduced Stan’s first letter. What was accomplished? Nothing.

Just to warn you, what you’re about to read is sort of a far-too-soppy post about love. I don’t mean romantic love, though. I don’t even mean platonic love, although I could just as easily describe how the love and care and support and patience of family and friends is absolutely invaluable when things get tough. But today I want to talk about something else entirely; the unique, concentrated, powerful, hard-to-articulate feeling of an autistic special interest.

The giddy joy of the initial phase of research-research-research-consume-consume-consume, the flappy stimmy delight of engaging with it again or in a new way, the happy relief of wondering whether you have special-interest-feelings for the thing anymore only for them to come rushing back at the first sign of new material, the excitement of talking about it to someone who’ll actually listen, the occasional realisation that I love this so so much that I don’t know how to begin conveying it to others, all that makes special interests valuable in and of themselves. Every so often I encounter neurotypical people who talk about special interests as if their only value is that they could be made into a career, usually followed by neurotypical parents of autistic children bemoaning the fact that not all special interests can be “made productive” in this way – something that I think is also true of my own even as an adult. But so what? Neurotypical children (and adults) are allowed to play and relax and have fun without having everything they like turned into either a job or therapy, so why can’t we? Even if that’s all a special interest does, it is still so, so valuable.

For me though, even as an adult whose special interests have absolutely no relation to my career choices, I find that they are productive in other ways. One of them in particular has worked wonders with my university social life and my general ability to strike up a conversation, for example. But again, it’s not all about meeting the requirements of a neurotypical world. Sometimes, it’s about getting through the impossible and surviving that world without falling apart. And for that, that feeling is a not-so-secret weapon.

This isn’t the case for everyone on the spectrum, but my special interests are quite consistent. I know they’re there, always, if I need them, and no matter what the rest of the world is doing to me at any given moment, I know that I have something to cling to. Something safe, but more than that, something that will make me incredibly and undeniably happy despite everything else. Yeah, it’s a crutch, but so is alcohol and dominant society gives people flak for not partaking in that one!

Past experience has shown me time and time again that I can get through pretty much anything armed with my earphones and special interest material. This feels a bit like a superpower. Not only can they get me through pretty much anything but they can also sometimes be the reason I’m trying to overcome something huge in the first place – my other big special interest goes against all my sensory issues, and yet I go through with it because I’m like a moth to its flame, and I cope because the cause of the problem itself is also like super-effective stimming. It’s a confidence thing too; in theory this shouldn’t work, but in practice it always Just Does, and the obstacle in front of me is downgraded from “basically a meltdown on a plate, literally impossible” to “really really difficult and at times it seems impossible but you’ve got this, your own obsessions have got your back”.

My brain last week was weirdly like the setting of one of those old legends; the most terrifying beast of all had returned far stronger than ever before and brought the whole city to its knees, but the beast was slain (er, for another year…) by a force that was, against all the odds, even more powerful still.

A force that I think of as love.

Tagged: Autism, special interests, stimming

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July 10th, 2015: COMICS ON THE INTERNET, poppin' fresh for you!! – Ryan

Author John Ellsworth received an email from The Authors Guild which he posted on his blog, forwarding a link to PG:

From Authors’ Guild 7/9/15:

We announced our Fair Contract Initiative earlier this summer. Now our first detailed analysis tackles today’s inadequate e-book royalties. At the heart of our concern with the unfair industry-standard e-book royalty rate is its failure to treat authors as full partners in the publishing enterprise. This will be a resounding theme in our initiative; it’s what’s wrong with many of the one-sided “standard” clauses we’ll be examining in future installments.

Traditionally, the author-publisher partnership was an equal one. Authors earned around 50% of their books’ profits. That equal split is reflected in the traditional hardcover royalty of 15% of list (cover price, that is, not the much lower wholesale price), and in the 50-50 split of publishers’ earnings from selling paperback, book club, or reprint rights. Authors generally received an even larger share than the publisher for non-print rights (such as stage and screen rights) and foreign rights.

But today’s standard contracts give authors just 25% of the publisher’s “net receipts” (more or less what the publisher collects from a book sale) for e-book royalties. That doesn’t look like a partnership to us.

We maintain that a 50-50 split in e-book profits is fair because the traditional author-publisher relationship is essentially a joint venture. The author writes the book, and by any fair measure the author’s efforts represent most of the labor invested and most of the resulting value. The publisher, like a venture capitalist, invests in the author’s work by paying an advance so the author can make ends meet while the book gets finished. Generally, the publisher also provides editing, marketing, packaging, and distribution services. In return for fronting the financial risk and providing these services, the publisher gets to share in the book’s profits. Not a bad deal. This worked well enough throughout much of the twentieth century: publishers prospered and authors had a decent shot at earning a living.

How the e-book rate evolved

From the mid-1990s, when e-book provisions regularly began appearing in contracts, until around 2004, e-royalties varied wildly. Many of the e-rates at major publishing houses were shockingly low—less than 10% of net receipts—and some were at 50%. Some standard contracts left them open to negotiation. As the years passed, and especially between 2000 and 2004, many publishers paid authors 50% of their net receipts from e-book sales, in keeping with the idea that authors and publishers were equal partners in the book business.

In 2004, we saw a hint of things to come. Random House, which had previously paid 50% of its revenues for e-book sales, anticipated the coming boom in e-book sales and cut its e-rates significantly. Other publishers followed, and gradually e-royalties began to coalesce around 25%. By 2010 it was clear that publishers had successfully tipped the scales on the longstanding partnership between author and publisher to achieve a 75-25 balance in their favor.

The lowball e-royalty was inequitable, but initially it didn’t have much effect on authors’ bottom lines. As late as 2009, e-books accounted for a paltry 3–5% of book sales. Authors and agents ought to have pushed back, but with e-book sales so low it didn’t make much sense to risk the chance of any individual book deal falling apart over e-royalties. We called the 25% rate a “low-water mark.” We said, “Once the digital market gets large enough, authors with strong sales records won’t put up with this: they’ll go where they’ll once again be paid as full partners in the exploitation of their creative work.”

E-books now represent 25–30% of all adult trade book sales, but for the vast majority of authors the rate remains unchanged. If anything, publishers have dug in their heels. Why? There’s a contractual roadblock, for one: major book publishers have agreed to include “most favored nation” clauses in thousands of existing contracts. These clauses require automatic adjustment or renegotiation of e-book royalties if the publisher changes its standard royalty rate, giving publishers a strong incentive to maintain the status quo. And the increasing consolidation of the book industry has drastically reduced competition among publishers, allowing them more than ever to hand authors “take it or leave it” deals in the expectation that the author won’t find a better offer.

The elephant in the room

And then there’s the elephant in the room: Amazon, which has used its e-book dominance to demand steep discounts from publishers and drive down the price of frontlist e-books, even selling them at a loss. As a result, there’s simply not as much e-book revenue to split as there was in 2011when we reported on the e-book royalty math. At that time, publishers made a killing on frontlist e-book sales as compared to frontlist hardcover sales—at the author’s expense—because, as compared to today, the price of e-books was relatively high.

When we analyzed e-royalties for three books in the 2011 post, “E-Book Royalty Math: The House Always Wins,” we found that every time an e-book was sold in place of a hardcover, the author’s take decreased substantially, while the publisher’s take increased.

Since 2011, we have found that publishers’ e-gains have diminished. But the author’s share has fallen even farther. Amazon has squeezed the publishers, to be sure. The publishers have helped recoup their losses by passing them on to their authors.

These were our calculations for several books in 2011. The trend was obvious. Compared with hardcovers, each e-book sold brought big gains to the publisher and sizable losses to the author when the author’s royalties are compared to the publisher’s gross profit (income per copy minus expenses per copy), calculated using industry-standard contract terms:

Author’s Royalty vs. Publisher’s Profit, 2011

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

Author’s Standard Royalty: $3.75 hardcover; $2.28 e-book.

Author’s E-Loss = -39%

Publisher’s Margin: $4.75 hardcover; $6.32 e-book.

Publisher’s E-Gain = +33%

Hell’s Corner, by David Baldacci

Author’s Standard Royalty: $4.20 hardcover; $2.63 e-book.

Author’s E-Loss = -37%

Publisher’s Margin: $5.80 hardcover; $7.37 e-book.

Publisher’s E-Gain = +27%

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand

Author’s Standard Royalty: $4.05 hardcover; $3.38 e-book.

Author’s E-Loss = -17%

Publisher’s Margin: $5.45 hardcover; $9.62 e-book.

Publisher’s E-Gain = +77%

What’s happening now? We ran the numbers again using the following recent bestsellers. Because of lower e-book prices, the publishers don’t do as well as they used to, though they still come out ahead when consumers choose e-books over hardcovers. But authors fare worse than ever:

Author’s Royalty vs. Publisher’s Profit, 2015

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doer

Author’s Standard Royalty: $4.04 hardcover; $2.09 e-book.

Author’s E-Loss= -48%

Publisher’s Margin: $5.44 hardcover; $5.80 e-book.

Publisher’s E-Gain: +7%

Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande

Author’s Standard Royalty: $3.90 hardcover; $1.92 e-book.

Author’s E-Loss= -51%

Publisher’s Margin: $5.10 hardcover; $5.27 e-book.

Publisher’s E-Gain: +3.5%

A Spool of Blue Thread, by Anne Tyler

Author’s Standard Royalty: $3.89; $1.92 e-book.

Author’s E-Loss: -51%

Publisher’s Margin: $5.09 hardcover; $5.27 e-book.

Publisher’s E-Gain: +3.5%[1]

Exceptions to the rule

It’s time for a change. If the publishers won’t correct this imbalance on their own, it will take a critical mass of authors and agents willing to fight for a fair 50% e-book royalty. We hope that established authors and, particularly, bestselling authors will start to push back and stand up to publishers on the royalty rate—on behalf of all authors, as well as themselves.

There have been cracks in some publishers’ façades. Some bestselling authors have managed to obtain a 50% e-book split, though they’re asked to sign non-disclosure agreements to keep these terms secret. We’ve also heard of authors with strong sales histories negotiating 50-50 royalty splits in exchange for foregoing an advance or getting a lower advance; or where the 50% rate kicks in only after a certain threshold level of sales. For instance, a major romance publishing house has offered 50% royalties, but only after the first 10,000 electronic copies—a high bar to clear in the current digital climate. But overall, publishers’ apparent inflexibility on their standard e-book royalty demonstrates their unwillingness to change it.

We know and respect the fact that publishers—especially in this era of media consolidation—need to meet their bottom lines. But if professional authors are going to continue to produce the sort of work publishing houses are willing to stake their reputations on, those authors need a fair share of the profits from their art and labor. In a time when electronic books provide an increasing share of revenues at significantly lower production and distribution costs, publishers’ e-book royalty practices need to change.

[1] In calculating these numbers and percentages for hardcover editions, we made the following assumptions: (1) the publisher sells at an average 50% discount to the wholesaler or retailer, (2) the royalty rate is 15% of list price (as it is for most hardcover books, after 10,000 units are sold), (3) the average marginal cost to manufacture the book and get it to the store is $3, and (4) the return rate is 25% (a handy number—if one of four books produced is returned, then the $3 marginal cost of producing the book is spread over three other books, giving us a return cost of $1 per book). We also rounded up retail list price a few pennies to give us easy figures to work with.

Likewise, in calculating these numbers and percentages for the 2015 set of e-books, we are assuming that under the agency model—which is reportedly the new standard in the Big Five’s agreements with Amazon—the online bookseller pays 70% of the retail list price of the e-book to the publisher. The bookseller, acting as the publisher’s agent, sells the e-book at the price established by the publisher. The unit costs to the publisher are simply the author’s royalty and the encryption and transmission fees, for which we deduct a generous 50 cents per unit.

Link to the rest at John Ellsworth and here’s a link to the Authors Guild website

Here’s a link to John Ellsworth’s books

The first unfettered Conservative budget for 18 years contained all the meanness towards the young, poor and disabled that you would expect.

But there was one initiative that I welcomed.

The move to cut public spending on tax credits while obliging employers to pay higher wages is surely right.

Tax credits are a way of subsiding bad employers from the public purse and are a move towards the intermeshing of the power of the state and the power of capital that Belloc warned about in The Servile State.

It may well be that some poor people will be worse off as a result of these changes - it is a Tory budget, after all - but the direction in which it is taking public policy is the right one.

March 30, 2009 on this site, I told you this story that you won't believe. It was not long after my amazing friend Kristine passed away…and one of the amazing things about Kristine was that when you were around her, amazing things happened — things like this…

Okay, I'm going to tell you a story here that will cause some of you to think my brain has gone condo and I'm suffering from severe delusions. The following, however, actually occurred. If you're skeptical, drop an e-mail to anyone who knows me well. They'll tell you these kinds of things always happen to me. I don't know why but they do. This involves my friend Kristine Greco, a lovely lady who passed away last week at a way-too-early age.

Kristine Greco

I have a mammoth collection of comedy records. Always have. Some time in the sixties, I began actively collecting the work of the great bandleader, Spike Jones. I've amassed just about everything he ever recorded — that's a lot of 78s and 45s and LPs — and the stuff I don't have on original discs, I have on tapes or (more recently) MP3s. If you're familiar with his wonderful, wacky work, no explanation is necessary as to why I was drawn to it.

I never met Mr. Jones (he died in 1965) but in the seventies, I found myself working with a number of his former associates. Lennie Weinrib and Billy Barty were on several of the shows I wrote for Sid and Marty Krofft. A couple of his former musicians had become film editors and were working down in the basement at Hanna-Barbera. One of his former writers, Eddie Brandt, had worked at H-B before I got there but left to open a nostalgia store, selling old books and old records, and I sometimes shopped there and chatted with him. There were a few others. At the time, no one had done a book about Spike Jones and I started to think I might be in a good position to write one. I put the notion to a friend who was an editor at the kind of publishing house that might handle such a thing.

He promptly threw chilly water on the idea. Said he, "A couple of people have thought of writing a book on Spike Jones but they all gave it up. They couldn't find enough material. Now, if you could approach his family and they'd agree to cooperate, maybe…"

That kind of discouraged me. I didn't know any relatives of Spike Jones. Or so I thought.

Spike Jones

As I mentioned here a few days ago when I was saying goodbye to her, I met this wonderful lady named Kristine Greco when we were both working on Welcome Back, Kotter — she as an actress, me as a story editor. A year or two after that, we were going back to her place after a movie…and for some reason, I still remember what it was. It was Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. We were walking into her apartment and I was somehow talking about things I was working on. I said, "I've been thinking of doing a book about a man named Spike Jones. He was a great bandleader back in the —"

Kristine interrupted me and asked, "You mean, Uncle Spike?"

That's what she said. That's what the lady said: Uncle Spike. I gasped, "What do you mean, 'Uncle Spike?'"

She said, "Spike Jones was my uncle. I thought you knew that."

"I didn't know that," I replied. His name had never come up in our conversations and I wasn't in the habit of asking women if they were Spike Jones's niece. (I should have started. I later found out that another actress I worked with, Judy Strangis, was also a niece of Spike's. In fact, Judy's the one who called me the other day to tell me about Kristine.)

It turned out Kristine not only was a niece of Spike Jones but when she was around six, she'd even sung on one of his records. Spike was married to a singer named Helen Grayco. Helen Grayco was born Helen Greco and she "Americanized" her surname early in her career.

Standing there in Kristine Greco's apartment that night, I felt like I'd made a wrong turn at the Twilight Zone and wandered into a Hitchcock flick…but it got weirder. I asked her, "Where are all of Spike Jones's personal papers and such?"

She said, "Well, a lot of them are in my garage. Remember those boxes you just parked your car next to?"

I'd been parking next to those boxes for a year or so when I visited her. We went out to the garage, opened up the top box and right there we found a bunch of animation-style storyboard drawings. Back when he was doing one of his TV shows in the fifties, Jones sometimes employed cartoonists to create visual gags which he and his band used. There were about two dozen of these drawings and many were by the great cartoon director, Tex Avery, some of them even signed. Here's one from a series of gags which had Spike sitting on a piano playing the trombone while his "feet" (actually someone else's hands) played the piano…

The others weren't signed but appeared to be by two other artists. Both had familiar styles and one looked like it just might be the legendary magazine cartoonist, Virgil "VIP" Partch.

"You can have them if you like," she said…and she also loaded me down with old sheet music and programs and Spike souvenirs. One treasure I keep on my desk here looks like a gold-plated railroad spike but it's also a can opener…and it says "Spike Jones" on the side of it.

At the time, I was working at Hanna-Barbera. The following Monday, I took the storyboard drawings in and showed them to my office roommate. My office roommate at the time was Tex Avery.

He was sitting there with an older gent…a visitor I didn't recognize. When I showed Tex the drawings, he did one of those "takes" that the Wolf in his cartoons did when he found Droopy where he didn't expect him. "My God," he gasped. "We were just talking about Spike. I loved writing gags for him."

I asked him if he could identify the drawings done by others. He said most of them were by Roy Williams. Roy was the Disney storyman who appeared on The Mickey Mouse Club as the Big Mooseketeer. "What about this one?" I asked, showing him the one I thought might be by Virgil Partch.

"Oh, that's one of his," Tex said, pointing to the gentleman in his guest chair. "This is Virgil Partch."

That, fortunately, is about where the incredible coincidences end. I wound up going to lunch that day with Tex and Vip — they drank and talked, I ate and listened — and we had a very nice time. Kristine soon introduced me to Spike's son, Spike Jr., who was (and still is) a very successful producer. We lunched and talked about me writing a book and also about other projects, but nothing ever came of any of it. I was too busy to tackle the book or anything else just then. A few years later, I heard that a fine historian-author named Jordan Young was doing a Spike Jones bio so I gave him all the material I'd amassed and he produced a much better book than I would have. You can order a copy of it here.

That's the story.  I told you you wouldn't believe it.

The post A Story You Won't Believe appeared first on News From ME.

Wednesday:


Master Gideon's it's-not-an-emergency emergency budget will be hailed as a triumph by all the usual suspects; the "living" wage announcement feted as a brilliant coup.

They'll love the Inheritance Tax cut; they'll delight in raising the Personal Allowance that goes to the well-off (and goes against everything the Coalition did); they'll relish the allowance for dividends (favouring unearned income once again); they'll thrill to the grinding oppression of the working classes.

It's a budget for rent seekers, not workers.

It's a budget for the old, not the young.

It's a budget for the dead rich, not the poor living.

In the Treasury, the Chancellor reviews those final Budget figures

The big flashy "rabbit from hat" moment was that introduction of a compulsory £9/hour "living" wage (by 2020), which – along with action on Non-Dom status taxpayers – was pinched straight from Hard Labour's 2015 manifesto. (In fact Mr Milipede was promising only £8/hour by the end of the decade, so that fox was well and truly shot).

Alongside their COMPLETE CAPITULATION on the Benefit Cap (caving in to the Conservatory rhetoric about "benefit street" culture, even though it's total Boss Hog Wash) leaves the Far Too Loyal Opposition floundering.

Even the "spending someone else's money"-ness of saying "Business must pay for a compulsory living wage!' is tres Milipede. But by foreswearing mere 1% pay rises for the public sector, isn't he saying: "Do as I say, not as I do"? (Clue: yes!)

The living wage according to the Living Wage Foundation should be £9.15 in London and £7.85 everywhere else.

So that £9 is does not sound too bad. (We cannot assume that inflation will be nothing forever, but even if it gets back on the 2% target from next year those figures are likely to be around a £9.90 and £8.50. So still okay for those not in the Capital, if a bit more squeaky for That Londoners.)

There's a sort of circularity to it all.

At the moment the (Tory) reasoning goes: the Government collects tax and then pays it back to people as Tax Credits thus subsidising jobs that do not pay a "living" wage – now they take away the tax credits but will force companies to pay more, and raise the personal allowance so that the income tax on that is well who knows more? Less? The same? All of the above?... but George will cut the companies' Corporation Tax rate to the lowest in Europe... so we are still subsidising the same companies to pay those jobs.

(Of course, I would usually point out that "not taxing" is not the same as subsidising… and that's true here too! If the companies lay off the "living" wage workers… they still get to keep the tax cut! Trebles all round!)

It's certainly not that I'm an enormous FAN of the Tax Credits system. Mr Frown invented it as a fix so that he could count it as "negative" taxation (while also Empire-building, so he could control a share of benefits from the Treasury). They ARE somewhat redistributionist, gathering up tax and giving it to lower income earners.

My main objection is that you have to fit into the right categories, you have to be deemed "worthy" by the Chancellor, in order to qualify and that strikes me as dangerous, handing largely unaccountable power to an office in Whitehall (and all the minions of the bureaucracy, with no offence to the Hon. Lady Mark). Mr Frown gained a moderate amount of infamy from the way that each year his budget would change who the "good" people were in a way that ENTIRELY COINCIDENTALLY reflected his own changing life circumstances – new baby = child trust fund; off to school = extended child tax credits and so on. That's moderately quaint. And also obviously massively corrupt.

(On top of that, I don't like that they're too complicated for anyone to understand, resulting in them going wrong all the time and causing hardship when the Government comes round to snatch back the money they've already given you.)

So I don't think there'd be anything terribly wrong in allowing the Tax Credits system to die a natural death by RAISING WAGES so much that Tax Credits became unnecessary.

What I don't think is a good idea is putting the cart as it were before the horse. And then flogging the horse to within an inch of its life.

As I said about Greece: making poor people poorer does not magically make them richer.

And the cuts to tax credits are a bit EYE-WATERING: currently there's a taper set so that you lose 41% of each pound you earn over £6,420; Gideon has upped that taper to 48% and almost halved the starting point down to £3,850. So – for those who jump through the hoops to qualify – that's an effective marginal tax rate of 48% on earnings at the bottom end, and you start paying it on a much lower wage. Compared to 45% on earnings over £150,000.

How all in it together are we?

And don't even THINK about trying to get out of poverty by working or educating yourself. In a calculated DOUBLE-SNUB to younger people, the living wage ISN'T going to apply if you are under 25 AND he's abolishing maintenance grants – adding another twenty-five grand to your student loans.

It would be TERRIBLY easy to say: "those students who wanted to punish the Lib Dems over tuition fees – how's that working out for you?".

But in truth this is just desperately COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE, undoing the GOOD that the Liberal Democrats in the Coalition tried to do for increasing social mobility, and undermining the ENTIRE COUNTRY by reducing the incentive to educate our workforce to higher-paying jobs.

Similarly, freezing all benefits for five years – billed without irony as "to allow salaries to catch up"(!) – goes against every effort that the Liberal Democrats made in Coalition to protect the most vulnerable. And slashing the Employment Support Allowance that enables people with disabilities to participate in the workforce is just going to damage not just their lives but the amount they contribute to the country.

Oh and he's chopped the cap on welfare payments from £26,000 to £20,000. For what can only be described as "reasons", we happen to know that finding an extra £500 a month is, ahem, "quite difficult" even when you're on Daddy Richard's salary. So goodness only knows how you're supposed to manage when you're on a low income and in-work benefits or no income at all.

And of course his TOTAL COWARDICE of making the BBC decide whether or not to cut the benefit of free TV Licences to the over-75s. (They decided to take the hit.) A kicking for Auntie Beeb always proving a real crowd-pleaser with the rabid right on the backbenches – not to mention the dead tree media barons.

"Hello, I'm George. Pwease can I be leader next!"

So them's the LOSERS; who's the WINNERS?

There are substantial tax giveaways… to the favoured middle-classes. The rise in the Higher Rate threshold on top of the rise in Personal Allowance is a complete reversal of the Coalition years' policy that NARROWED the band so that ALL of the benefit of raising the Personal Allowance went to Basic Rate taxpayers. Now, Higher Rate taxpayers will get TWICE the benefit of basic rate payers, plus extra ON TOP. (Combined I think they're worth about £200 a year.)

Master Gideon has also done a thing with dividends – pretty much making up a whole new tax, in fact, "Dividend Income Tax", separating the taxation of dividends from other income and giving it its own Personal Allowance. He toasted himself for saying that it would be possible to receive up to £17,000 in income without paying any tax, but a lot if not all of that would be from UNEARNED income – so it promotes "rent seeking", rather than working to or investing in creating wealth.

(On the good side, this may have slightly restored the tax credit for pension funds that Mr Frown raided back in 1998; that's good for me – or anyone with a pension – as there a better chance of them not going BUST before we retire. And it's good for City pension fund managers. But less so for the economy more widely, as money that is saved in pensions – i.e. sunk into the stock market – isn't circulating in the wider economy generating profits).

And of courses there's a million pounds free of Inheritance Tax.

It's almost as the though the Baronet doesn't WANT people to earn money. Why bother when he can get it for nothing from daddy?

On top of it all, his target for getting the budget into surplus has slipped another year (since March!) which suggests this really wasn't the time to be throwing tax away. Growth predictions are down as well – not a lot he can do about Greece or China, to be fair – but slashing capital spending on his "Northern Poorhouse" and withdrawing cash from the people most likely to spend it and giving it away to people to put in non-productive investments point very much the wrong way for growth and much more towards a repeat of 2011's short sharp STOP.

Does make you wonder where from his hat he plans to pull the EIGHT BILLION QUID he promised for the National Health Service. Again. And – in another multi-billion bung as a sop to those wingnuts on the Conservatory right – the 2% of GDP he's guaranteed to spend on guns and bombs. Maybe the RABBIT ate it?

On the whole I think it was a flashy and "clever-clever" budget, but lacking in any real substance, biased towards people who already have capital (in large supplies) and with the potential seriously to undermine the country's recovery by prolonging austerity and cutting the money being spent.

As an advertising feature called "What Did the Liberal Democrats Ever Do For Us?" I think this is a work of crazed genius. As a programme for recovery… well, I hear Yanis Varofakis is looking for a job…

The proof of the pudding will be in how we all feel in a year's time when we'll know if he's killed growth stone dead. Again.

Or in 48 hours' time if it implodes the way his "Omnishambles" budget did.

PS:

*Yes, they tried to bury an announcement on lifting the hunting ban too.

This is an interesting story of a reviewer who had her review deleted because Amazon believed she knew the author personally.

Leaving completely aside the ethics of friends reviewing friends' books, what is Amazon doing conducting this kind of investigative surveillance? Do reviewers know that Amazon is keeping tabs on who their friends are?

There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that has always been imprinted on me. In my mind, I see an image of Data and somebody else slowly moving about inside what appears to be some kind of alien spacecraft. The walls are all odd, geometric shapes coloured silver blue. There's a cool, yet dark, lighting to the scene. I think the episode is “A Matter of Time”, but I can't know for sure.

So now you've heard their story. It's time to tell the other side.

“A Matter of Time” is another of Rick Berman's rare solo contributions, and marks his first stab at a topic that seems to fascinate him and inspire a lot of his future creative work on Start Trek: The ramifications of time travel. In particular, what kinds of social norms and mores would crop up in a universe where time travel technology is commonplace. As it pertains to this story, Berman cites the “Mark Twain” feeling” of “what Leonardo da Vinci could have done with a calculator or Alexander the Great with a shotgun”. But while Professor Berlinghoff Rasmussen may not technically be a historian, this doesn't mean he's just a simple con-man with a time machine either.

Yeah, Rasmussen was one of ours. Bad seed; went rogue. More or less harmless in the scheme of things, mostly because he was also terrible at his job. We found the time pod adrift in space, probably crippled during one of their skirmishes. We brought it to him for analysis and to keep it safe, hopefully so we could finally get some answers about this damn war. The agents found out, of course. They came to us and told us we had to return it because it would endanger the future-Their future, naturally. Our thinking was that they'd spent so much time meddling in our present, it'd only be fair if we poked around in theirs for a bit to see for ourselves what all this was about. Of course, Rasmussen thought it would be an easy way to make some extra coin.

The thing that struck me the most about “A Matter of Time” is how aware of its own structure it is. For 97% of its running time, it's very straightforwardly one kind of story: Rasmussen's presence prompts the Enterprise crew to realise that Penthara IV is not going to be a run-of-the-mill mission; that something genuinely historic is going to happen. And the knowledge that it will, and they aren't allowed to know anything more about it than that, forces the crew (most notably Captain Picard, but Commander Riker, Geordi, Doctor Crusher and Deanna as well) to consciously think about their own decision making processes and ethical standpoints. It's not shoehorning conflict into Star Trek: The Next Generation for the sake of conflict, it's another manifestation of what travelling on the Enterprise means: That you get to know yourself better and grow as a person because of that. And that act in Captain Picard's ready room between him and Rasmussen has got to be one of the all-time greatest exchanges in the series, even if it hinges on patently nonsensical temporal mechanics technobabble. And it all culminates in that wonderfully glib, but true, line from Rasmussen: “Everyone dies, Captain! It's just a question of when!”.

Where I come from, there's a great war being fought for control over the time-space continuum. Throughout history wars have always been waged for ideological reasons, but try to imagine what forms those ideologies take when the battlefield is history itself. With time travel technology, we now have the capabilities to reshape time to suit our tastes. Every textbook and every story is real, and also a possible weapon. Did you hear what Rasmussen said about his “areas of interest”? Those dates were not picked at random to pad out his cover story. There's a critical battle going on in the 26th century, and depending on which side ends up on top the tide of the war could be permanently shifted. But they've made it so their battles are not contained to their times anymore: They imposed themselves into our existence and made their war ours. And regrettably, our war is now about to become yours as well. Perhaps it already has-I...I can't know for sure anymore.

Of course this thread gets seemingly subverted and abandoned in the final moments when it's revealed Rasmussen is actually a con man. It could be argued that, as was the case with Q in “Hide and Q”, doing this robs Rasmussen of a unique perspective from which to critique the Enterprise crew, but I actually don't think this hurts the story that much, if at all. Though I think “A Matter of Time” would have worked just as well as it does now had Rasmussen not been a con (and in case I've not been clear it works really, really well: This is one of my favourite episodes), the fact that he is adds one more wrinkle to an already intriguing story. Because in essence this means Rasmussen is undercover, in other words, he's playing a role. Remember how one of the strengths Star Trek: The Next Generation has built for itself out of its numerous production adversities is a multilayered knowing performativity where characters take on roles that may not be technically theirs, but that need to be filled. In essence, they double up and play understudy as a coping mechanism to deal with critical pieces of their performance getting crippled from the outset.

Rasmussen knew about it. About them. We all did. Don't underestimate the ingenuity of our engineers. He picked his marks smartly and meaningfully-That was probably his best attribute. He met with them because he had seen what they were going to become in one possible destiny. I think somebody from your time once said something like “every ship to bear the name Enterprise has made history” or something to that effect? If only he could know just how right he really was. Understand, while Rasmussen might have been shortsighted and let his personal flaws get the better of him in the end, he was a good man. I knew him, and can tell you he was profoundly changed by his experiences. Maybe not enough, but he played his part with aplomb when he was called on to do it. We can only hope we'll be able to do the same when our time finally comes for us.

What Rasmussen does here is play the role of interlocutor to Captain Picard perfectly. He might not be exactly what he seems, but neither is this story. And neither are the Enterprise crew, for that matter. A compelling argument could be made that they're gaming the Federation and the structure of Star Trek in much the same way Rasmussen games them here: They're Starfleet's flagship but interact with their superiors with what can best be described as malicious compliance: They embody the ideals the Federation claims to stand for, but in doing so they reveal that the Federation in truth doesn't stand for them at all. And that's a massive embarrassment to Earth that makes them look terrible, and rightly so. If Rasmussen makes a mistake it's that he betrays the Enterprise crew's trust (an egregious error as Shocking Betrayal!-style conflict is a tentpole of the kind of hack writing Star Trek: The Next Generation must purge itself of). Or maybe it's that he got overconfident and blew his cover: As Captain Picard says at the end, they never would have suspected him had he stolen less shit. In the end, Rasmussen's only crime is that he's not as good a con artist and performer as he needed to be.

(It helps of course that Rasmussen has such a fantastically talented actor to bring him to life: Matt Frewer, of Max Headroom fame. Apparently he was written with Star Trek fan Robin Williams in mind, but he was too busy filming Hook at the time, necessitating a recast. Frewer's great in the part though, bringing a perfectly balanced sense of tone and mania to the performance that's neither overly broad or overly similar to his equally quirky (though for different reasons) iconic character. And somehow it feels fitting that he's playing a renegade fighting against the forces of teleology.)

I suppose I'm opening myself and my people up to criticisms of arrogance. You could ask “how could you be so presumptuous as to want to reshape reality?". Well, that's a criticism you could level at every single one of our rivals and our enemies. And to yourself, actually: You may or may not have consciously come to terms with this yet, but reality is nothing except what you believe it to be. That old phrase “perception is reality”? Another quote that's more true than people realize. We all exist within our own realities unknowable to anyone except ourselves. And time? Time can only be known through history, and history is a story we tell each other. And stories are real. You've already heard someone else's story, and now this is ours. We will be heard at last.

Data, at Penthara IV!

La Forge remained below.

Gordon Brown’s 2001 exemption rule has a huge loophole which should never have been agreed

From 1980-84 a big part my then job at the BBC was to deal with the PR and political issues relating to the corporation’s prime income source, the TV licence. None of the challenges that was as sensitive or as problematic as what should be done about the oldies who were required to pay the same fee as everybody else.

There had been a long-standing campaign for oldies to get free licences which at one point in the early 80s saw some pensioners deliberately trying to get themselves sent to prison for non-payment of fines over their refusal to get a licence. The idea was that their incarcerations would be the focus of marches and other demonstrations.

This was dealt with by secretly paying the outstanding fines and licence fees of the would be TV licence martyrs who were then released from jail much to their annoyance.

On its return to power in 1997 LAB took up the cause of free TV licences for pensioners and in the 2001 general election year the current scheme was introduced by the then chancellor, Gordon Brown in a move to offer something to help win the pensioners vote.

His plan was simple – all those aged 75 or more would get free licences irrespective of their financial circumstances. The massive problem was that the rules were drawn up far too widely so that any household with someone of that age living there qualified for the benefit even if everybody else there was younger.

The result is that we now have the nonsensical situation in which one in six of all TV licences are now paid for out of central taxation irrespective of the incomes of everybody at the address.

Clearly that has to change and the only households which would qualify are those where everybody is 75+.

My reckoning is that Osborne has made his move to make the BBC fund this knowing that there’ll be less political damage to the Tories if the BBC is seen to be be trying to close down the Gordon Brown loophole and not the government.

This is pure politics. Let the Beeb and not the Tories take the flak.

Mike Smithson

Follow @MSmithsonPB

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Ed Miliband's approach to the last five years reminded me of Neil Kinnock's failure in the 1980s. Both thought that constantly reminding the voters how selfish Conservatives would be enough for Labour to win.

Yes, the Tories are extraordinarily selfish. The problem that Labour faces is that many voters agree with this analysis but still vote Conservative anyway.

In part this is because we are all selfish to some degree, but it also has a lot to do with Labour's inability to convince voters that they are competent to run the country.

It follows that in order to win Labour need to do something more than attack the Tories: they need to sound like a government in waiting.

Note that this does not necessarily mean sounding more right wing: it just means sounding different and more competent than they do at the moment.

The problem for Labour is that the candidates who have something to say - Liz Kendall and Jeremy Corbyn - do not expect to win. That is why they can say what they really think.

The two front-runners, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, are so anxious about alienating different constituencies (the press, party members, the wider public) that they find it hard to say anything at all.

Mary Creagh and her short-lived candidacy gave the clearest example of this. Her replies to Justin Webb's questions were so convoluted that he had to summarise them for her.

For this reason I suspect that the next Labour prime minister is not taking part in this election. I also suspect that his name is Dan Jarvis.

Tuesday:


As a member of an ethnic community (namely white people*), it has been brought to my attention that we're in danger, as a community, of "tacitly condoning" extremist language from my fellows because they are "people like me".

These people prey on young British men and women, trying to persuade them to travel to foreign countries thousands of miles away, to perform acts of terrible violence with high explosives.

I mean, of course, people like Mr Michael Fallon, Secretary of the so-called Ministry of Defence (by which we mean Attack) who thinks we should be exploding things in Syria.


There seems to be something about Syria that EXEMPTS politicians from remembering what actually happened. If it's not Mr Milipede claiming he "stood up to President Obama" (when in fact he and Mr Balloon basically cancelled each other out with very similar "let's bomb Syria" motions) then it's Mr Fallon saying we should "think again" about attacking people who we were never thinking of attacking and defending the people who we WERE thinking of attacking!

I think there's a name for how this happens: it's called "lazy journalism" – "Oi! Newspapers! Look at the record and CHALLENGE people when they MAKE this STUFF UP!"

Of COURSE things are more COMPLICATED than just "bombing people bad".

Our history – in the last ten years, or a hundred years, or a THOUSAND years(!) – is one of sticking our fluffy noses into the Middle East and making a mess. So we've got RESPONSIBILITIES and AMENDS to make.

And the Not-Islamic Not-a-State terrorists (should we call them NINAS to keep the Prime Monster happy?) are, as far as I am able to judge from their actions, among the most horribly evil people on the face of the planet, and if they come anywhere near us then we would be quite right to fight them off with the full might and power that the West could deploy.

But they AREN'T anywhere near us. And we certainly do not seem willing to deploy enough might and power to defend the people in the region that we say are our friends. And deploying only the tiny fraction of the full might and power that we can be bothered to send – while still fully capable of flattening large areas of any Middle-Eastern country – doesn't half badword off the survivors!

If you want to intervene, then (a) get a UN mandate and (b) send enough troops actually to do the job. Lobbing bombs in the general direction of people you don't like just so you can feel better… that's what TERRORISTS do!

We have in the West an "ultimate weapon" that for all the undoubted impressiveness of all that might and power is INFINITELY more successful than ANY amount of ordinance: it is called PEACE. Sometimes it is called prosperity.

It is why Ukraine is willing to stand up to Vlad the Bad. It is why hundreds of thousands are willing to throw themselves in leaky boats to cross the Mediterranean.

So I KNOW it's COMPLICATED, but can we at least START from a position of HUMBLY accepting that we keep messing up and that SWAGGERING around THREATING to EXPLODE people is, to say the least, not helping.

Today is "7/7". We should remember. And we should do BETTER.



*white ELEPHANT people, thank you.