Van Dyke Parks has a new single out on the Bella Union label (also available from iTunes): “I’m History” b/w “Charm School.” “I’m History,” a lament for John F. Kennedy and lost hope, is a brilliant and moving song. It begins with a scene of Kennedy at the height of his Kennedyness, hosting a White House dinner for forty-nine Nobel Laureates:

When John F. Kennedy dined at the White House
he summoned the brightest and Nobel elite,
and he recalled the collection of talent
when Jefferson sat down alone there to eat.
He threw the laughter aside, said it can’t be denied,
there are those with no food at our feet.
That is history, brother and sister, to me, that’s history.

The song’s end, “in the dark before dawn,” evokes the 1932 Bonus Army and (less literally) the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign and the 2011 Occupy movement:

And in a city of tents those with no recompense
are encamped on the broad White House lawn.

The people, yes? Well, maybe. A voice says “Move on,” and the singer folds up:

And I could paint you from old Deuteronomy
a richer picture to fix your economy,
but I’d offend you my friend, I surrender, the end. I’m
    history.

There is an imperfect but intensely exciting live performance of “I’m History” on YouTube — voice, piano, and bass. The recording though gives us what might be called the Full Parks — the song scored for strings and woodwinds. I’d like to see a single with both conceptions: call them “I’m History” and ”I‘m History Too.”

“Charm School” (written with Ira Ingber) suggests tropical and western vistas. It is a instrumental full of delights — steel drums, strings playing piano-like figures, snatches of slide guitar. According to Van Dyke’s tweets, “Charm School” has been kicking around for twenty years. Like all worthwhile music, it knows no time but its own and sounds like nothing but itself.

[“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone”: John F. Kennedy, April 29, 1962.]

If you’re the sort of person who reads this blog, you may have heard that 23andMe—the company that (until recently) let anyone spit into a capsule, send it away to a DNA lab, and then learn basic information about their ancestry, disease risks, etc.—has suspended much of its service, on orders from the US Food and Drug Administration.  As I understand it, on Nov. 25, the FDA ordered 23andMe to stop marketing to new customers (though it can still serve existing customers), and on Dec. 5, the company stopped offering new health-related information to any customers (though you can still access the health information you had before, and ancestry and other non-health information is unaffected).

Of course, the impact of these developments is broader: within a couple weeks, “do-it-yourself genomics” has gone from an industry whose explosive growth lots of commentators took as a given, to one whose future looks severely in doubt (at least in the US).

The FDA gave the reasons for its order in a letter to Ann Wojcicki, 23andMe’s CEO.  Excerpts:

For instance, if the BRCA-related risk assessment for breast or ovarian cancer reports a false positive, it could lead a patient to undergo prophylactic surgery, chemoprevention, intensive screening, or other morbidity-inducing actions, while a false negative could result in a failure to recognize an actual risk that may exist.  Assessments for drug responses carry the risks that patients relying on such tests may begin to self-manage their treatments through dose changes or even abandon certain therapies depending on the outcome of the assessment.  For example, false genotype results for your warfarin drug response test could have significant unreasonable risk of illness, injury, or death to the patient due to thrombosis or bleeding events that occur from treatment with a drug at a dose that does not provide the appropriately calibrated anticoagulant effect …  The risk of serious injury or death is known to be high when patients are either non-compliant or not properly dosed; combined with the risk that a direct-to-consumer test result may be used by a patient to self-manage, serious concerns are raised if test results are not adequately understood by patients or if incorrect test results are reported.

To clarify, the DNA labs that 23andMe uses are already government-regulated.  Thus, the question at issue here is not whether, if 23andMe claims (say) that you have CG instead of CC at some particular locus, the information is reliable.  Rather, the question is whether 23andMe should be allowed to tell you that fact, while also telling you that a recent research paper found that people with CG have a 10.4% probability of developing Alzheimer’s disease, as compared to a 7.2% base rate.  More bluntly, the question is whether ordinary schmoes ought to be trusted to learn such facts about themselves, without a doctor as an intermediary to interpret the results for them, or perhaps to decide that there’s no good reason for the patient to know at all.

Among medical experts, a common attitude seems to be something like this: sure, getting access to your own genetic data is harmless fun, as long as you’re an overeducated nerd who just wants to satisfy his or her intellectual curiosity (or perhaps narcissism).  But 23andMe crossed a crucial line when it started marketing its service to the hoi polloi, as something that could genuinely tell them about health risks.  Most people don’t understand probability, and are incapable of parsing “based on certain gene variants we found, your chances of developing diabetes are about 6 times higher than the baseline” as anything other than “you will develop diabetes.”  Nor, just as worryingly, are they able to parse “your chances are lower than the baseline” as anything other than “you won’t develop diabetes.”

I understand this argument.  Nevertheless, I find it completely inconsistent with a free society.  Moreover, I predict that in the future, the FDA’s current stance will be looked back upon as an outrage, with the subtleties in the FDA’s position mattering about as much as the subtleties in the Church’s position toward Galileo (“look, Mr. G., it’s fine to discuss heliocentrism among your fellow astronomers, as a hypothesis or a calculational tool—just don’t write books telling the general public that heliocentrism is literally true, and that they should change their worldviews as a result!”).  That’s why I signed this petition asking the FDA to reconsider its decision, and I encourage you to sign it too.

Here are some comments that might help clarify my views:

(1) I signed up for 23andMe a few years ago, as did the rest of my family.  The information I gained from it wasn’t exactly earth-shattering: I learned, for example, that my eyes are probably blue, that my ancestry is mostly Ashkenazi, that there’s a risk my eyesight will further deteriorate as I age (the same thing a succession of ophthalmologists told me), that I can’t taste the bitter flavor in brussels sprouts, and that I’m an “unlikely sprinter.”  On the other hand, seeing exactly which gene variants correlate with these things, and how they compare to the variants my parents and brother have, was … cool.  It felt like I imagine it must have felt to buy a personal computer in 1975.  In addition, I found nothing the slightest bit dishonest about the way the results were reported.  Each result was stated explicitly in terms of probabilities—giving both the baseline rate for each condition, and the rate conditioned on having such-and-such gene variant—and there were even links to the original research papers if I wanted to read them myself.  I only wish that I got half as much context and detail from conventional doctor visits—or for that matter, from most materials I’ve read from the FDA itself.  (When Dana was pregnant, I was pleasantly surprised when some of the tests she underwent came back with explicit probabilities and base rates.  I remember wishing doctors would give me that kind of information more often.)

(2) From my limited reading and experience, I think it’s entirely possible that do-it-yourself genetic testing is overhyped; that it won’t live up to its most fervent advocates’ promises; that for most interesting traits there are just too many genes involved, via too many labyrinthine pathways, to make terribly useful predictions about individuals, etc.  So it’s important to me that, in deciding whether what 23andMe does should be legal, we’re not being asked to decide any of these complicated questions!  We’re only being asked whether the FDA should get to decide the answers in advance.

(3) As regular readers will know, I’m far from a doctrinaire libertarian.  Thus, my opposition to shutting down 23andMe is not at all a corollary of reflexive opposition to any government regulation of anything.  In fact, I’d be fine if the FDA wanted to insert a warning message on 23andMe (in addition to the warnings 23andMe already provides), emphasizing that genetic tests only provide crude statistical information, that they need to be interpreted with care, consult your doctor before doing anything based on these results, etc.  But when it comes to banning access to the results, I have trouble with some of the obvious slippery slopes.  E.g., what happens when some Chinese or Russian company launches a competing service?  Do we ban Americans from mailing their saliva overseas?  What happens when individuals become able just to sequence their entire genomes, and store and analyze them on their laptops?  Do we ban the sequencing technology?  Or do we just ban software that makes it easy enough to analyze the results?  If the software is hard enough to use, so only professional biologists use it, does that make it OK again?  Also, if the FDA will be in the business of banning genomic data analysis tools, then what about medical books?  For that matter, what about any books or websites, of any kind, that might cause someone to make a poor medical decision?  What would such a policy, if applied consistently, do to the multibillion-dollar alternative medicine industry?

(4) I don’t understand the history of 23andMe’s interactions with the FDA.  From what I’ve read, though, they have been communicating for five years, with everything 23andMe has said in public sounding conciliatory rather than defiant (though the FDA has accused 23andMe of being tardy with its responses).  Apparently, the key problem is simply that the FDA hasn’t yet developed a regulatory policy specifically for direct-to-consumer genetic tests.  It’s been considering such a policy for years—but in the meantime, it believes no one should be marketing such tests for health purposes before a policy exists.  Alas, there are very few cases where I’d feel inclined to support a government in saying: “X is a new technology that lots of people are excited about.  However, our regulatory policies haven’t yet caught up to X.  Therefore, our decision is that X is banned, until and unless we figure out how to regulate it.”  Maybe I could support such a policy, if X had the potential to level cities and kill millions.  But when it comes to consumer DNA tests, this sort of preemptive banning seems purposefully designed to give wet dreams to Ayn Rand fans.

(5) I confess that, despite everything I’ve said, my moral intuitions might be different if dead bodies were piling up because of terrible 23andMe-inspired medical decisions.  But as far as I know, there’s no evidence so far that even a single person was harmed.  Which isn’t so surprising: after all, people might run to their doctor terrified about something they learned on 23onMe, but no sane doctor would ever make a decision solely on that basis, without ordering further tests.

Ben Yagoda. How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them. New York: Riverhead Books, 2013. xiii + 175 pages. $15 paper.

I am always looking for new and better books to use when I teach prose writing to college juniors and seniors. Thus I found my way to Ben Yagoda’s How to Not Write Bad. Its premise — that novice writers can improve greatly by learning what not to do in their prose — is sound. But the book is a disappointment.

I found an examination copy of the book in the mailbox one morning last month, right before meeting this semester's writing class. Feeling the show-and-tell spirit, I brought the book to class and opened at random to page 52 and a discussion of the semicolon. I read the first two sentences aloud:

My initial thought is to limit this entry to one sentence: “If you feel like using a semicolon, lie down until the urge goes away.”

That is because when my students utilize this piece of punctuation, a substantial majority of them utilize it incorrectly.

My students winced, at least some of them. I winced too. We winced for the same reasons: the condescending tone, the ponderous diction. Utilize ? My students know better. And substantial majority ? Why not most ? What’s especially puzzling: elsewhere in this book, as I was to discover, Yagoda advises against such ponderousness. He even recommends use for utilize. It may be that the diction in the sentences I’ve quoted is meant as a joke, but the joke, if there is one, will likely be lost on a reader who wants to understand the use of the semicolon, a mark of punctuation that many teachers of writing would say is not so much misused in student writing as merely absent.

Yagoda's brief treatment of the semicolon is not likely to be of much use to such a reader. The passage continues:

[W]hile it is tempting to outlaw semicolons and just move on, that would be too easy. For one thing, there is a particular circumstance when a semicolon absolutely has to be used. This is a series of three or more items, one or more of which contain a comma.

It’s an odd presentation that begins with this relatively exotic matter before discussing the semicolon's use in joining complete sentences. And why particular circumstance? Why absolutely ? Elsewhere in the book, Yagoda says of particular that it “usually adds nothing to a thought except four syllables.” And he says that absolutely and similar qualifiers make a writer sound “mealymouthed.”

On to the primary use of the semicolon:

A semicolon can be used to connect two independent clauses if the clauses aren't already linked by conjunctions (and, but, although, etc.).

This advice is highly misleading, because it fails to distinguish between coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet) and subordinating conjunctions (such as although, because, whenever): the latter cannot introduce independent clauses. Yagoda leaves unmentioned the words that often signal semicolon territory: conjunctive adverbs (such as however, nevertheless, therefore) and transitional phrases (as a result, even so, in fact). Thus his presentation of the semicolon is grammatically confused and alarmingly incomplete. And a brief discussion of comma splices a few pages earlier in the book gives no indication that however is a word often found somewhere to the right of a semicolon. To the contrary: the sample sentences in that section of the book carry the unintended implication that because however is not a conjunction, it plays no part in joining sentences:

Tuition will go up again next year, however, it will be the smallest increase in five years. [Given as wrong.]

Tuition will go up again next year. However, it will be the smallest increase in five years. [Given as correct.]

Tuition will go up again next year, but it will be the smallest increase in five years. [Given as correct.]

The sentence that’s conspicuously missing:

Tuition will go up again next year; however, it will be the smallest increase in five years.

Or better:

Tuition will go up again next year; the increase, however, will be the smallest in five years.

The problems in my randomly chosen passage are present throughout the book. The writing is breezy and often condescending: “I certify this is an actual student sentence,” Yagoda writes of one especially bad sentence. How great to be the sap who’s responsible. Yagoda’s presentation of the word mindfulness (the idea of the mindful writer runs through the book) would not pass muster in an essay for freshman comp:

A word you see a lot nowadays is mindfulness. I confess I don’t know exactly what it means; something having to do with meditation and/or yoga, I believe. But the concept can definitely, and profitably, be adapted to writing.

Has Yagoda not heard of Thich Nhat Hahn? Or even Wikipedia? But also: why does he give mindfulness a pass and not count it with deal breaker, difference maker, and meme as a contemporary cliché? Try a Google search: mindful asset planning, browsing, cooking, driving, exercise, facilitation. Mindfulness is everywhere. I am lost.

And why does Yagoda clutter his sentences with empty prose additives like definitely (“definitely, and profitably, be adapted”)? Again and again, his writing violates the book’s precepts, not wittily but clumsily, as if neither writer nor editor was paying attention. Words that Yagoda prohibits — actually and the previously mentioned particular — turn up in his sentences often (actually, twelve times; particular, seventeen). The words definitely and simply (which are not on the hit list but should be) turn up five and seven times respectively. The book cautions against clichés, yet there are many: “bad boys” to “smoke out,” “clean bill of health,” “thunderous applause,” “train-wreck,” even a reference to a sentence “riddled” with clichés. Right before advising against unnecessary quotation marks (air quotes or scare quotes), Yagoda uses them: “eventually, you will streamline the process and ‘hear’ yourself write.” He uses such quotation marks elsewhere too: “selected and processed by an editor, and then ‘published.’”

What’s worse is that some of this book’s advice about writing is unhelpful or mistaken. At one point Yagoda recommends quotation marks for titles (“Gone with the Wind”), but elsewhere in the book he recommends italics for titles of “books and other compositions.” (Sample sentences in How to Not Write Bad are always in italics, which would make for maddening complications in showing the use of italics with titles.) Yagoda’s advice about the Oxford or serial comma — “choose a style you like, and stick with it” — ignores the overwhelming support for this comma in American English. Says Garner’s Modern American Usage ,

Although newspaper journalists typically omit the serial comma as a ‘space-saving’ device, virtually all writing authorities outside that field recommend keeping it.

In other words, it’s a question you shouldn’t be deciding for yourself. Yagoda’s presentation of skunked usage casts the possessive followed by a gerund (“I don’t like your talking about the senator in that tone”) as a mistake, but “you talking” is the problem, as the sample sentences make clear. And concerning the use of the word this alone (a pervasive problem in student writing), Yagoda blithely advises substituting the word that : “it can be slipped in,” he says, “without doing any damage. You didn’t hear it from me.” Such advice won’t do.

As with Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence, the real difficulties of writing good prose come in for little attention. Trying to figure out the writing conventions that apply in a field? Read “the best practitioners” and “maybe even copy down some of their sentences and paragraphs. Eventually you’ll get a feel for the expectations.” Tangled syntax? Just be mindful:

If, every time you put down a sentence, you go over it unhurriedly, you’ll learn to pick up on any ambiguities or confusion. To fix them, just shuffle and reshuffle the elements of the sentence, as if you were putting together a bouquet of flowers.

And three pages from the end of the book, we’re told that the “key issues” we now must consider are “cadence or rhythm, variety, novelty, consistency, and transitions.” In the word of many a Brooklynite before me: Sheesh.

Though this book is marketed for use in writing courses, its design alone makes it an unlikely choice for that purpose. Yagoda suggests that a teacher direct a student to “the appropriate entry in the book” to solve a writing problem. But finding, say, II.B.4.d. will be easy for neither teacher nor student: the book has no chapter headings, no index, and only a sketchy table of contents. Sections II.B.4., for instance, has five parts, a. through e., none of which are identified by page number or topic in the table of contents. It’s not surprising that Yagoda himself gets lost in this maze, directing the reader to the non-existent II.I.C.2., and referring to II.C.2.d. when he means II.D.2. Imagine the fun I’ve had working out the details of this paragraph.

How to Not Write Bad comes highly recommended, with Cynthia Ozick on the front cover and an unnamed Atlantic reviewer on the back, touting the book as appropriate for the “syntax-obsessed reader and writer” and “copy, grammar, and writing nerds.” But there is little that such readers will learn from this book. And for the student who wants to become a better writer, there are books far more helpful and trust-inspiring. They would include Claire Cook’s Line by Line, Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing, and Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences. I remain on the lookout for books as good or better.

[Are college juniors and seniors “novice writers”? In most cases, yes. Their writing experience is limited. “Empty prose additives” is a lovely phrase I’ve borrowed from Claire Cook.]

Last night I went to a concert that included a performance of the Bach Magnificat. (Bravo, musicians, and especially the fourth-chair violist.) How to get from Bach to inane ? The word at the end of this line of the text caught my eye: “Esurientes implevit bonis et divites dimisit inanes” (Luke 1:53). Or as the King James Version has it, “He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.”

So I looked up inane . Its source is the Latin inānis , “empty, useless, vain.” The Oxford English Dictionary traces the English word to 1662, when it meant “empty, void.” From the OED ’s earliest citation: “one little spot of an infinite inane capacity.” By approximately 1667, inane was working as a noun, meaning “that which is inane, void, or empty; void or empty space; vacuity; the ‘formless void’ of infinite space.” By 1710, the noun applied to persons: “an empty-headed, unintelligent person.” The OED ’s citation is from Alexander Pope’s correspondence: “Being all alike Inanes, & Umbratiles, we Saunter to one anothers Habitations & daily assist each other in doing Nothing at all.” And by 1819, the adjective came to apply to persons or their actions: “void or destitute of sense; silly, senseless; empty-headed.” The OED ’s first such citation is from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci: “some inane and vacant smile.”

And that’s my word of the day, whose etymology, early meaning, and secret life as a noun were all news to me.

[Umbratile? “One who spends his time in the shade” (OED ).]

The British Library has made available through Flickr more than one million images from seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century books. The image above comes from William Turner’s Journal of a Tour in the Levant (London, 1820). I like such stamps. I like circulation slips too.

This post from the British Library’s Digital Scholarship blog explains the project.

[Found via Boing Boing.]

FRAGMENTS 2

A hand that's stuffed with straw won't wave or flop
around when I am talking. Changeling hair
that I can't flick. They stole me, left me there
in my own place. I think there was a shop

they bought me in, one with a changing room
lost me in mirrors reached out pulled me back
love that withdraws you.Somewhere there's a crack
left in my soul. We weave self on a loom

made of the stories that our parents tell
yet we don't hear. The mistress of my soul
harshes the changeling. Yet I can't be whole
until I save his straw and weave it well

I cannot be unjust. I must shed tears
That wizened thing protected me for years.

FRAGMENTS 3

Children learn subtext even as they read
those first few sentences of family.
They're angry, there is something wrong with me.
Shoelace I can't quite tie; door-knobs that need

grasping in some way I don't know. I talk
too soft, too loud, too musical. My chair
rocks when I giggle. Hold my teddy bear
as if it were a doll. Learn to stick a cork

in everything I like. And when they burn
a book for telling lies that were half-true,
I watch the flames too hard. The things that grew
in me were all a subtext in their turn

I learned to hide, lie better. Found in shame
home more myself than face or given name.

Rich, white, male kid.  Drunk driving.  Killed and maimed people.  Got off with probation because he suffers from "affluenza".  Essentially, he couldn't help doing it because he was too privileged to know better.

It's so obvious, really, isn't it?  Shouldn't even need saying.  But.  Imagine a black person, a poor person, in the same position.  Would they be gently treated because society deprived them?  I'm not saying I want a 16 year old kid to be sent to one of those privatised totalitarian hellhole gulags that America calls 'prisons' for 20 years (though it would be a sharp lesson for him in what it feels like to be an ethnic minority, since those prisons are mostly stuffed with poor people, who are mostly people of colour).  I'm just pointing out the disparity.

Compare with the treatment of Glenn Broadnax.   Compare what happened to Zimmerman with what happened to Marissa Alexander (she is at least getting a new trial).

Things like that happen in their thousands every day.  I could fill up all the free memory Blogger has given me just describing, in the barest terms, things like that which happened in the last week.  And these are just anecdotes which illustrate the structural violence that underlies capitalism.

I've been told, on occasion, that my politics are "childish".  I decide to take that as a compliment.  Look at what passes for serious, mature, adult opinion and then tell me that childish ideas don't have anything to recommend them.  Besides, it's true.  At the root of all my political engagement is a boiling fury at injustice.  That's not a boast; it's something I can't help.  I read the news every day and 'that's not fair' tolls in my brain again and again.  That's the ultimate childish feeling: that rage at injustice, at unfairness, at double standards.  And it's righteous.  When you're a kid, you're too young to have learned all the lessons of life that sophisticated adults take for granted: that the world isn't fair and that's just the way it is and there's nothing you can do about it.  You're still naive enough to think life could and should be fair, and to be overcome by anger when it flagrantly isn't.  Like so many childish things, that gets beaten out of most of us, much to our detriment.  We could do worse than try to reconnect with that feeling that makes you want to stamp your feet and throw your toys around.

The great advantage of adulthood is that it brings the opportunity to focus that kind of anger at injustice in the right directions, away from oneself and one's own thwarted whims, towards the people most ill-treated, towards the most egregious double standards.

Of course, I don't always manage it.  I spend a lot of time on my own thwarted whims. 

At times I'm quite all right,
and then again,
A vacuum cleaner, insecurely stowed,
Shifting in a cupboard under the stairs,
Pushing the door open from the inside,
Gradually, inexorably,
As they always come,
From out the grave,
Can make me shiver to the bone,
And jump, and fear.

Although I neither fear,
In theory, the dead,
Nor yet, the vacuum.

Obamacare's death panels are alive and well -- at least among the imaginations of America's head and neck surgeons.

The journal Otolaryngology -- Head and Neck Surgery recently sent a questionnaire to to 9,972 head and neck surgeons that had 10 basic questions about the health-care law. It's one that Kasier Family Foundation created in 2010, which you can take yourself here.

The 647 responses that came back were ... depressing. Twenty-seven percent of respondents thought that the health-care law includes a "government panel [that] makes end-of-life care decisions for Medicare." This would be the so-called death panel rumor that ran rampant during the congressional debate over health care.

The Affordable Care Act did initially include a provision that would reimburse Medicare doctors for having discussions about, but not necessarily recommending, end-of-life options. But that was taken out in early 2011 after a front page article in the New York Times highlighted the issue.

The researchers also sorted the responses by doctors' opinions on the Affordable Care Act. They found that those who oppose the health-care law were more likely to believe that these panels exist. Forty-one percent of those who "strongly oppose the law" thought the panels existed, compared to 13 percent of those who are strong supporters.

The head and neck surgeons did better on the end of pre-existing conditions (93 percent knew about that provision but worse on coverage for undocumented immigrants (30 percent thought they would receive financial assistance, which they will not). The article is gated but available here.

Wednesday:

The latest figures show that unemployment has fallen to 7.4%, the lowest since 2009 (i.e. now lower than Labour left behind), and an email from Mr Danny Alexander arrives to celebrate that there are now thirty million people in work.

Inflation, down to 2.1% is also at a four year low.

So “Yay!”

But there’s also been a huge rise in people getting emergency food from food banks – as highlighted in today’s Opposition Day debate in the House of Commons.

We need to cast some light on this debate; we need some understanding of what’s driving this increase.

At the moment it’s all too easy for the Left to cry “Evil Tory Government” as though that was all the explanation necessary (and for some of them, all too often, it is); while the Right respond with “poor people have made poor decisions”.

(In fairness to Gove, he actually said “…so we need to help them”; that is, he meant to be patronising, not dismissive.)

The Tory responses in the debate – essentially to blame it all on Labour – won’t wash. Worse, they’re a cowardly approach, denying that the Coalition has changed anything.

The actual cold, hard, statistics – employment, inflation, interest rates, or my personal favourite the gini coefficient that shows that for the first time in thirty years, and uniquely among Western nations, inequality in the UK has actually fallen (as a result of the Coalition’s changes to taxes and benefits pushing the tax burden up the income scale) – all point to the UK having worked well together to mitigate the harm of the recession and to be moving into recovery.

But people don’t believe statistics.

Or rather, they’ll believe a statistic that says the use of food banks has trebled, but not ones that say the economy is growing.

And with inflation still running ahead of wages it’s easy to see why: a lot of people still have to live with their pay frozen – yes, including MPs’, despite what you’ve heard; IPSA’s recommendation still only being a recommendation so far, but massively unhelpfully adding to the prevalent (and probably untrue) “them and us” narrative. By spreading the pain so broadly we’ve avoided the horror of huge spikes of unemployment that the recessions of the Eighties saw – unlike the Thatcher governments, the Coalition hasn’t “written anyone off” – but at the expense of a whole lot more people feeling the impact of 2008’s economic disaster.

This is why Labour get traction from their “cost of living crisis” rhetoric. It’s a cunning way of turning the Coalition’s “we’re all in it together” into “we’re all hurting” (particularly when tossing in the odd sly reference to the “1%” who somehow aren’t in it together), while stealthily dropping that “Plan B” that they’ve been banging on about since 2010. (And how has borrowing more and super-taxing the rich worked out for France, by the way, Mr Balls?) What it doesn’t disguise is that Labour still only have one policy and that it won’t work. (Hence Ed’s… er… difficult time responding to the Autumn Statement.)

Hysterical commentary from Labour supporters, cherry-picking this food bank statistic and saying “we haven’t had food parcels since the Second World War so things are worse than they have been since the Second World War” simply is not credible in light of the overall picture. We can’t compare the use of food banks now to how they were used in the recessions of the Eighties (or Seventies) because they simply didn’t exist then. In fact, as an extra-governmental route for the “haves” to help the “have-nots” they’re a perfect example of Mr Balloon’s “Big Society” (though the Conservatories have dropped that as quietly as Labour dropped Plan B).

But we cannot in conscience ignore this evidence either.

It’s no good denying that some of the decisions of the Coalition government have caused genuine hardship, either directly by cutting people’s benefits (through the benefit cap, through the second room bedroom tax, through continuing to employ the evil of ATOS) or indirectly by the increase in decisions to freeze or stop payments (decisions often later overturned).

Actually, Mr Iain Drunken-Swerve’s DWP (the Department of Workhouses and Prayer, a ministry well known for their accurate use of statistics) does deny that decisions to freeze or stop payments have led to more people using food banks. Which comes back to begging the question: what does?

The most urgent question has to be are more people in poverty?

(Let’s not mess about with terms like Food Poverty and Fuel Poverty as though people have a meaningful choice between the two; if you’ve not got enough to meet your basic needs you’re screwed one way or the other so what’s the difference.)

There are a number of fairly hefty policies in place that are supposed to stop this: Labour’s minimum wage and tax credits; the Coalition’s triple lock on pensions; Liberal Democrats also managed to strong-arm the Chancellor into indexing benefits in line with inflation through the difficult years when it was highest.

So are these failing? If so which, and how, and how do we stop them failing?

How much of this increase in food bank use genuinely reflects an increase in poverty? Is it possible that there are other factors? I can think of a couple of alternative, not to “explain away” the rise, but to try to think about there being more to the picture.

The most obvious would be people who were previously choosing “eat” over “heat” now have another option: instead of deciding that they must have food and then shivering under a duvet, they can now pay for the heating bill and go to the food bank and get some emergency supplies. What has happened is that an “invisible” poverty has become a visible one.

Another is what you might call the “NHS” effect. If help wasn’t there, people wouldn’t use it. Since its inception, NHS use has grown almost exponentially even as the nation has become fitter and healthier. Similarly, as more food banks are introduced, and more people become aware of food banks, so more food banks are used by more people.

It’s possible that that interpretation is even supported by the authors of that “use of food banks has trebled” statistic: the Trussell Trust, a food bank provider – in fact they describe themselves as “a Christian charity that partners with local communities to provide practical, non-judgemental help to people in crisis”. (Although that’s not an interpretation they would put on it as they’re not as non-judgemental about the Government, whom they blame for the “scandal” of their own success.)

Their accounts (available on the Charity Commission website) say that they’ve demonstrated that their franchise model is “scalable and sustainable”, which suggests that they’re not so much answering an acute need as having found a necessary niche.

(Incidentally, almost all the stories of food banks seem to stem from an October press release of theirs. Though oddly, in researching this, I came across virtually the same story – same source, the Trussell Trust, same number, 350,000 people needing food parcels – but from May relating to 2012.

I’m not saying it’s wrong; it looks a bit weird but it’s probably just a coincidence when the October story compares April to September 2013 with April to September 2012, while the May story is comparing April to March 2012 with April to March 2011. As they say: they helped as many people in six months this year as they did in their whole 2012/13 year. I’m not surprised they have to help more people in Winter when the choice between heat and eat becomes acute.)

Stories about the increase in the use of food banks serve as publicity for food banks; so the Trussell Trust’s press release is not just impartially informing us of the situation, it’s also advertising their product. (Indeed, Tesco, for example, are now encouraging people to donate a shop – at Tesco of course – to the food bank, so turning them into advertising for Tesco!)

You could also say that if people in need are discouraged by shame from looking for “hand outs”, hearing that many more people are using the food bank reduces that disincentive, in a way “permitting” the people who need the food to go and claim it.

Let me emphasise though that just because I can hypothesise alternate explanations for some of the rise in food bank take-up, that doesn’t mean that they’re right. That’s why we need to be asking questions.

I don’t want to rain on the economic parade, but Labour and Labour supporters have latched onto this as “A Big Thing”, and I can’t say that they’re wrong to do so. I know that it’s a big cause for concern, for me and many other Liberal Democrats. We’re concerned for the human tragedy, obviously, but also because it seems to fly in the face of statistics that say the economy is getting both stronger and fairer.

Policy ought to be evidence-based (and unlike Labour I won’t just grab a statistic and say “so there!”), and we need to understand what this piece of evidence is telling us, so these are questions for which we need an answer.

Excerpts from a project I don't actually have time for, but wish I did.

You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch


The webcomic XKCD once slyly pointed out that radio airplay of Christmas songs amounts to an extended nostalgia project for baby boomers, with the top twenty songs clustered neatly around the 1950s and 1960s. “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” is not among those top twenty, but is clearly part of the same trend, coming from the 1966 How The Grinch Stole Christmas television special.

It is difficult to account for its status in the Christmas canon on any grounds other than sheer nostalgia. Its only connection to Christmas is appearing in a holiday special. The lyrics don’t mention the holiday at all, instead just insulting the Grinch for six verses

Indeed, lyrically, the song seems almost anti-Christmas. It is a character piece meant to establish the main character of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when the entire point of the character is that he’s missing the holiday spirit entirely. But his overall character arc over the course of the special isn’t contained in the song.

More to the point, the overall point of the special is in many ways a split decision. Yes, the Grinch makes nice at the end, but the point of the special isn’t the eventual reconciliation, it’s the giddy thrill of the Grinch trying to steal Christmas. The special asks us to revel in perversity with the thin justification that order is restored eventually.

And this carries through to the song. On the one hand, the song is a description of the villainous Grinch and his awful ways. But as much as the song condemns the Grinch, its pleasure is clearly in the perverse excesses of its invective. One central joke of the song is the way in which the final line steadily increases in size, from “you’re a bad banana with a greasy black peel,” which fits the actual musical phrase, up to “I wouldn’t touch you with with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole,” which humorously crams too many syllables into one note, all the way up to “your soul is an appalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable, mangled up in tangled up knots,” a description in which there are simply too many adjectives. (“Mangled up in,” in particular, exists only to sustain the phrase a little bit longer.)

This excess is, of course, quintessentially Seussian. But what is striking is not just the excess but the way in which it is overtly contrary to the supposed sense of the season. But the story of the redeemed curmudgeon has obvious history in Christmas - most obviously with Ebeneezer Scrooge. And while these stories are ostensibly about their main character’s redemption, they also show an important carnivalesque inversion of the usual order of things. Their presence deflates the gaudy artifice of Christmas.

The truth is, nobody in their right minds doesn’t want to punch the Whos in the face around the third “Dahoo Dores,” cloying little snots that they are. The Grinch becomes the vehicle in which a counter-narrative to the enforced and hollow artifice of Christmas can be explored. For all that the song belongs to the baby boomer nostalgia that chokes the life out of the holiday, it’s also the needed tonic - the vehicle by which we all get our needed “bah humbugs” out.


The only proper version, of course, is the original Thurl Ravenscroft vocal (from the soundtrack, not the special itself, although both are glorious). His thundering bass relishes every syllable of the song, belting out the final lines of each verses with all the reckless glee they require.

Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!

"Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!," is a 1945 piece that is firmly from the XKCD-noted "baby boomer Christmas nostalgia" block. While there certainly are some appalling pieces of dreck shoved into the Christmas canon due to this sort of nostalgia (I’m looking at you, "Jingle Bell Rock"), it also has some songs of fairly solid pedigree, and it must be said, "Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!" is among them.

The place to begin, I suppose, is the triple repetition of the title. “Let it Snow!” would be sufficient by any means - nobody, in casual conversation goes for the triple title. But there it is, complete with exclamation points. There’s a frenzied excess to this - a case of protesting too much. The overreach makes it difficult or impossible to read this as a straightforward paean to winter weather. There’s a sort of mania to it that makes it about more than just the weather.

In truth “Let it Snow!” (let’s go for simplicity) is the stablemate of “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” written a year earlier. Both feature romantic couples facing inclimate weather and a decision about going home. “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is, of course, the single worst Christmas song ever recorded, being as it’s a vivid depiction of a sexual predator (named as “wolf” in the lyrics) browbeating and seemingly drugging a non-consenting woman (named as “mouse”) into staying the night.

But “Let it Snow!” addresses the same basic subject matter with relative panache. The perspective of whomever’s home the couple is staying at is eliminated, with the song being a single-vocalist number from the perspective of the person deliberating over leaving. The singer thus has all the agency in the song, and is thus allowed to engage in a flirtatious give-and-take without the looming threat of sexual violence.

And the lyrics are, indeed, a give and take. On the one hand, the singer seems to suggest departure - they are “still goodbying,” and speak of how they will in fact “go out in the storm.” And yet their behavior suggests otherwise - they’ve brought supplies for popping corn, and while they may be goodbying, the goodbyes are clearly stretching out too long. The song is, in other words, looking for excuses to stay.

The excuse settled on is, of course, the weather. And thus the triple repetition of the title makes sense - a desperate plea for it to snow enough to provide an excuse for the singer to stay, and the singer drawing out the visit in the hopes that the snow will finally pile up sufficiently that they cannot possibly get home.

So the song is engaging in a coy flirtation, nudging towards spending the night and the sexytimes that entails, but deferring it out onto the weather. This requires a delicate balance of delivery, however. Many performances, the Vaughn Monroe original included, end up with a flat, declarative tone that obscures the give and take of the lyrics.

Other skilled singers run aground in different directions - Frank Sinatra attacks the song with too much fervor, all confident charm, such that he revels in the snow. Doris Day, on the other hand, slows the song down so much that there’s no room for the quiet sexiness - the song folds in on itself, reveling in its own beauty and losing the interaction with the unheard host. Dean Martin keeps it more under control, with a lightly teasing tone in his vocals that captures the flirtation perfectly.

But in the end, the song begs for a female vocalist. For my money, Lena Horne hits all the right notes. As a politically active African American singer already blacklisted in Hollywood, she could take a swagger in the delivery that rivals that of Sinatra’s version. But where Sinatra’s version is a clunking boast of a man who knows he’s getting lucky tonight, Horne’s version is something altogether more satisfying. There’s a playfulness to her swagger that makes it clear that everyone is aware of the game being played. The periodic explosions of brass lean into the giddy excess of the title line. And the foregrounding of female sexuality makes it the polar opposite of “Baby It’s Cold Outside.”


There are very few sexy Christmas songs that even rise to mediocrity. But this is one of the proper good ones: a cheeky celebration of winter seductions. I admit to personal fondness for this - on our third date, the Woman came over to my house to watch Sherlock, which she’d never seen. Her spending the night was not a surprise, but a snowstorm left her stuck the next night as well, and this, combined with the idiosyncrasies of her schedule, led to her basically moving in. Let it snow indeed.

O Come, O Come Emmanuel


The only widely recognized advent song, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” is a piece of haunting anticipation. The chorus, with its exaction to rejoice, sits in marked contrast to the state of affairs described in the verses. Israel “mourns in lonely exile,” labor under “gloomy clouds of night,” and are on “the path to misery.” And yet the promised joy is entirely anticipatory - the only cause for rejoice offered is that Emmanuel will at some future point come.

The listener, in other words, is caught in a strange double bind. The song makes clear the misery of the present condition, and yet demands that we rejoice not because of the alleviation of suffering but because this suffering will at some nebulous future point be lifted.

Textually, the song descends from 6th-8th century antiphons called the O Antiphons, used in the last seven days of Advent. Each antiphon invokes Christ under a different name, stressing different aspects of his being.

The O Antiphons have a tightly wound structure, proceeding in order, O Sapienta, O Adonai, O Radix Jesse, O Clavis David, O Oriens, O Rex Gentium, and O Emannuel. The first letters in reverse spell ERO CRAS, translating to “Tomorrow, I will be there,” a clever bit of mirroring that is lost in the popular hymn, which moves O Emmanuel (the antiphon for December 23rd) to the first position, and sings an out-of-order selection of the others.

The standard progresion is Emmanuel, Oriens, and Clavis Davidica. That’s what’s used in the Robert Shaw Chamber Singers version on Songs of Angels - probably the best of the straight choral renditions - and on the Peter, Paul, and Mary version, which features Noel Paul Stookey accompanied by a choir. This latter version is a surprising treat, Stookey’s voice catching and trembling at the lyrics, soaring ecstatically on the “rejoices” while faltering in the verses. Few versions go further than that.

The lyrics used for the hymn date to the 12th century, and were originally a more rhythmic setting of the Latin text. This results in profound differences. The antiphons lack the strange call to rejoicing, and, indeed, do not focus particularly on present day suffering. Of the seven O Antiphons, only two, O Clavis David and O Oriens, focus on present misery, each using the phrase “tenebris, et umbra mortis,” or, in English, darkness and the shadow of death.

Beyond that, the rhythmic resetting dramatically alters the tone of the antiphons. The translation, O Emmanuel, for instance, goes from a fairly neutral text translating roughly “O Emmanuel, our king and lawgiver, the hope of the nations and their Saviour, come and save us, O Lord our God” to the bleak tone of abandonment struck by the initial verse.

This ambivalence of tone is fitting for a song drawn so heavily from the Book of Isaiah. A prophetic work, Isaiah describes the coming of the Messiah in largely militaristic terms, as a political revolution that will undo the tyranny of foreign rule, initially from an Assyrian monarch, and, in the latter portion of the book, from a Babylonian one. Upon the restoration of Judaic control of Jerusalem Yaweh will rule the world, and Jerusalem will be the seat of his power.

There is an obvious complication in reading Christmas in terms of Isaiah, then, which is that the Christian view of Christ as the Messiah leaves the bulk of these political promises unresolved and, more to the point, several millennia out of date. Within Christian theology the bulk of these become eschatological promises to be fulfilled in the Second Coming.

So when, in the 19th Century, John Mason Neale and Henry Sloane Coffin offered an English translation of “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel” and set to music a few years later by Thomas Helmore, who appropriated a 15th French processional for the purpose, the resulting song was one of yearning for remote objects.

It is worth, at this juncture, considering the state of Advent in the first place. From a Christian perspective in which Christ has been born, died, and been resurrected, what is anticipated is not an event but the commemoration of an event. Christmas does not itself change the theological state of the world. Emmanuel’s arrival does not come at the end of Advent. Which is fitting, as what is yearned for is the resolution to long dead political conflicts, framed in angry prophecy. Emmanuel, as written, cannot possibly come, as the world to which he is invoked is long since dead and buried.

The song, then, demands that we rejoice in the eventual arrival of something that at once cannot possibly arrived and has already arrived. The possibility of joy is, in other words, wholly absent from the song, leaving only the moment of suffering. And yet in that suffering comes a profound beauty. The song moves along in a minor key that breaks into the major key’s resolution at key moments - “Emmanuel” itself, in the first line, resolves from a D to a G, and the chorus begins with the G major, as opposed to the Em of the verse. Even as the song is contained in the minor key opening and finish.

And so in a song that is concerned with an impossible arrival from outside its confines the only moments of joy come from within the captive, mourning, and exiled world itself. This is advent - a period of anticipation not of some external force but of an internal state to be achieved.


Loreena McKennitt’s setting of the song, from her album A Midwinter’s Night Dream, is particularly moving. She reverts to the Latin lyrics, increasing the austere remove at which the listener is situated with regards to the promised arrival. In the absence of intelligible phrases we get only the music’s haunting tremors of hope in amidst the minor key gloom. Underneath the surface she goes one verse extra, adding the verse derived from O Adonai, which does not sing of present gloom but of “ancient times” in which the Lord existed “in cloud, and majesty, and awe,” a perfect representation of the gorgeous distance of the song’s promised beauty. As the song calls for the coming of what has already happened, we are left in the cold present, reaching the spots of warmth that we have.

You know all those right-wing bloggers and columnists who like to attack the left for being too politically correct to celebrate Christmas properly?

I wonder if any of them will have the courage to condemn the Conservative-run Hammersmith & Fulham Council for sending this appalling card to their tenants.

Bitcoin just crashed 50% today, on news that the Chinese government has banned local exchanges from accepting deposits in Yuan. BtC was trading over $1000 yesterday; now it's down to $500 and still falling.

Good.

I want Bitcoin to die in a fire: this is a start, but it's not sufficient. Let me give you a round-up below the cut.

Like all currency systems, Bitcoin comes with an implicit political agenda attached. Decisions we take about how to manage money, taxation, and the economy have consequences: by its consequences you may judge a finance system. Our current global system is pretty crap, but I submit that Bitcoin is worst.

For starters, BtC is inherently deflationary. There is an upper limit on the number of bitcoins that can ever be created ('mined', in the jargon: new bitcoins are created by carrying out mathematical operations which become progressively harder as the bitcoin space is explored—like calculating ever-larger prime numbers, they get further apart). This means the the cost of generating new Bitcoins rises over time, so that the value of Bitcoins rise relative to the available goods and services in the market. Less money chasing stuff; less cash for everybody to spend (as the supply of stuff out-grows the supply of money). Hint: Deflation and Inflation are two very different things; in particular, deflation is not the opposite of inflation (although you can't have both deflation and inflation simultaneously—you get one disease or the other).

Bitcoin is designed to be verifiable (forgery-resistant) but pretty much untraceable, and very easy to hide. Easier than a bunch of gold coins, anyway. And easier to ship to the opposite side of the planet at the push of a button.

Libertarians love it because it pushes the same buttons as their gold fetish and it doesn't look like a "Fiat currency". You can visualize it as some kind of scarce precious data resource, sort of a digital equivalent of gold. Nation-states don't control the supply of it, so it promises to bypass central banks.

But there are a number of huge down-sides. Here's a link-farm to the high points:

Mining BtC has a carbon footprint from hell (as they get more computationally expensive to generate, electricity consumption soars). This essay has some questionable numbers, but the underlying principle is sound.

Bitcoin mining software is now being distributed as malware because using someone else's computer to mine BitCoins is easier than buying a farm of your own mining hardware.

Bitcoin violates Gresham's law: Stolen electricity will drive out honest mining. (So the greatest benefits accrue to the most ruthless criminals.)

Bitcoin's utter lack of regulation permits really hideous markets to emerge, in commodities like assassination (and drugs and child pornography).

It's also inherently damaging to the fabric of civil society. You think our wonderful investment bankers aren't paying their fair share of taxes? Bitcoin is pretty much designed for tax evasion. Moreover, The Gini coefficient of the Bitcoin economy is ghastly, and getting worse, to an extent that makes a sub-Saharan African kleptocracy look like a socialist utopia, and the "if this goes on" linear extrapolations imply that BtC will badly damage stable governance, not to mention redistributive taxation systems and social security/pension nets if its value continues to soar (as it seems designed to do due to its deflationary properties).

To editorialize briefly, BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions. Which is fine if you're a Libertarian, but I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behaviour which are unfortunately wrong).

TL:DR; the current banking industry and late-period capitalism may suck, but replacing it with Bitcoin would be like swapping out a hangnail for Fournier's gangrene. (NSFL danger: do not click that link)

This is a really interesting idea. From the grant page:

Working class, blue-collar, poor, and homeless writers have been historically underrepresented in speculative fiction, due to financial barriers which have made it much harder for them to have access to the writing world. Such lack of access might include an inability to attend conventions, to purchase a computer, to buy books, to attend college or high school, to have the time to write (if, for example, you must work two jobs simply to pay rent and feed a family, or if you must spend all your waking hours job-hunting for months on end). The SLF would like to assist in finding more of these marginalized voices and bringing them into speculative fiction.

You are eligible for this grant if you come from a background such as described above, if you grew up (or are growing up) in homelessness, poverty, or a blue collar / working-class household, or if you have lived for a significant portion of your life in such conditions, especially if you had limited access to relatives/friends who could assist you financially. We will give preference to members of that larger pool who are currently in financial need (given our limited funds).

There are of course more details at the link above.

I don’t think it would come as much of a surprise that I think this grant is a good idea. Writing is easier when you have a little bit of headspace to do it in — a headspace that’s not crowded with worries about work and bills and whether the super-old computer you write on is about to implode, taking your work with it. That’s what I see that grant offering: That little bit of headspace to let creativity happen.

Again, details at are the link. Check it out and share it with folks for whom it could be useful.

I just read this online…

Harold Camping, the California preacher who used his evangelical radio ministry and thousands of billboards to broadcast the end of the world and then gave up public prophecy when his date-specific doomsdays did not come to pass, has died at age 92.

Camping's most widely spread prediction was that the Rapture would happen on May 21, 2011. His independent Christian media empire spent millions of dollars — some of it from donations made by followers who quit their jobs and sold all their possessions — to spread the word on more than 5,000 billboards and 20 RVs plastered with the Judgment Day message.

When the Judgment Day he foresaw did not materialize, the preacher revised his prophecy, saying he had been off by five months. The preacher, who suffered a stroke three weeks after the May prediction failed, said the light dawned on him that instead of the biblical Rapture in which the faithful would be swept up to the heavens, the date had instead been a "spiritual" Judgment Day, which placed the entire world under Christ's judgment.

But after the cataclysmic event did not occur in October either, Camping acknowledged his apocalyptic prophecy had been wrong and posted a letter on his ministry's site telling his followers he had no evidence the world would end anytime soon, and wasn't interested in considering future dates.

"We realize that many people are hoping they will know the date of Christ's return," Camping wrote in March 2012. "We humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing."

You know, I'm sure Mr. Camping did a lot of good for people during his life. I'm sure he also lived very well off donations. And I'm sure that selling people on this end-of-the-world nonsense did more damage than an awful lot of the evils he preached against.

I'm well aware of the values of most religious teachings but when you're trying to convince people that you have a direct pipeline to God, you're not much different from Sylvia Browne, telling people that she can put them in touch with dead relatives…and all it will cost is your common sense and most of your money. Atheism is on the rise in this country and I don't think it's because of people like Harold Camping. The people who followed him will always follow someone like that.

But religious folks who have a little healthy skepticism left look at a man like Camping…and then they look at their own religious leaders. A friend of mine named Cindy left her church because the officials there took a kind of "no comment" approach to Camping's tales of the impending Rapture. They didn't want to criticize him…and to Cindy, it looked a lot like a matter of professional courtesy. She didn't see enough difference between them and him to have any faith in that church.

Recently Megyn Kelly, on Fox News, made the argument that both Jesus and Santa Claus were “really” white. Let’s put aside for the moment that fact that one is an entirely fictional character and the other is a character for whom very little historical evidence exists.

She’s right about Santa Claus–he was mostly imagined by Thomas Nast as white partly, as I’ve argued before, because the modern version of Santa Claus was closely linked to the Union cause in the Civil War, and the nation state that emerged as a result. It was a benevolent and abundant white North Mast imagined through Santa Claus.

But what about Jesus? Was he white? I have no idea what people in Jerusalem looked like in the time of Jesus. But historically, Americans have found this a vexing problem.

The nat­u­ral­iza­tion law of 1795, Congress’s first statement on citizenship, stated that nat­u­ral­ized cit­i­zen­ship was only available “to free white per­sons.” According to this law a non-white person could never move here and become a citizen. A non-white person born in the US was a citizen, at least until the Dred Scott case, but to immigrate and become a citizen you had to be a “free white person.” Although most americans don’t know about it, this law was in force till the 1940s.

You can see the problem right away though–what does “white persons” mean? Does it refer to “race,” or does it refer to skin color? In a series of cases, starting after the Civil War, state courts and eventually the Supreme Court tried to answer this question. Below are a very few examples taken from the long list at Ian Haney-Lopez’s website

It’s an odd list–note that “Mexicans” come up only once, and are declared white. Jews do not appear. Although there’s been plenty of anti-semitism, as far as I know Jews were always allowed to become naturalized citizens under the 1795 act. Although Armenians and Afghanis were suspect, according to the law, italians were not and never appear.

People from the middle east were a significant problem though. Are Arabs white?  For example in 1914 a Syrian, George Dow, was rejected by South Carolina’s District Court on  the ground that Syrians were “asiatics” and not white, and not eligible for citizenship. Dow appealed, arguing correctly that European Jews were admitted as citizens, and that Syrians and Jews were both Semitic peoples and thus white. He added that he came, literally, from the land of Jesus Christ. Did the court think Jesus Christ was not white?

The judge responded that European Jews were a religion, not a race. And although he had his doubts about the whiteness of non-european jews,

 Judge smith simply dodged the Jesus question, suggesting that whatever Jesus may have looked like, he didn’t look like Mr. Dow.

He clearly implies that Jesus was racially distinct from Syrians, although no one can doubt Jesus was a Jew, and the Jews have only become, according to the judge, europeanized since the beginning of the diaspora.

Dow’s case eventually reached the Supreme Court where the South Carolina decision was overturned. The Supreme Court ruled, in Dow vs. United States (1915), that:

 

it seems to be true beyond question that the generally received opinion was that the inhabitants of a portion of Asia, including Syria, were to be classed as white persons. It is true that Syria and the contiguous countries of Asia near the Mediterranean have been subjected to many changes in their inhabitants through conquest and other causes, and that the present inhabitants have racial descent from many different sources. Yet… they must be held to fall within the term “white persons” used in the statute.

The Court clearly seems unhappy about this. Syrians are dark and not white seeming, yet they are white, even though the court has its doubts

While it’s tempting to argue that the most important aspect of Christianity is its clear universalism, there have always been attempts to equate christianity with whiteness and with white nationality. Before the Civil War, Polygenists argued that the story of Adam and Eve was the story of white people: there must also be a black Adam and Eve and an Asian Adam and Eve, but the the Bible is the story of white people. That those people were Jewish, and/or racially “semitic” was always a problem. It’s still a problem: Jesus is still often depicted as an unambiguously white man  whose religious gift is closely linked to the United States itself:

This is a white Jesus giving the Constitution–as if he wrote it himself–to mostly white people. He’s backed by symbols of nation. This is presumably the Jesus Megyn Kelly had in mind? This or the twentieth century, hollywood-lit, unambiguously white Jesus of Warner Sallman

As mentioned here before, Thomas Nast began depicting Santa Claus in more or less his modern form during the Civil War.  His Santa spread gifts to soldiers in the field and to families reunited by furlough. Nast very closely linked Santa to the order, affluence, and generosity of the Union, and offered Santa’s benefits to those southerners willing to stop being naughty and start being nice.

These images connect Santa Claus to nation, and specifically to the triumphant north. They have room for some black people–like McNaughton’s painting–but it’s overwhelmingly a vision of white people.

So Megyn Kelly is sort of correct. “Santa Claus” in his modern form has always been not just white, but a symbol of white nationalism. And jesus has always been both a symbol of universalism and also a symbol of a very specific white nationalism.

 

 

Note: The “racial prerequisite” cases culminated in the early 1920s. In the case of Ozawa v US the Supreme Court decided that Japanese persons were white in color but not caucasian, and could not become citizens. Then a few weeks later it heard the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, a “high caste hindu,” and decided that Asian Indians were caucasian but not white, and could not become citizens. Ho Ho Ho.

DC Comics has announced that they have acquired the original art to that Superman story that Al Plastino drew about President Kennedy's physical fitness program. They will be donating it to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, MA.

As you probably remember, when the story was first published in 1964, it was announced that the art would be donated to an appropriate venue and that was not done. It wound up in the hands of some private collector and was resold at least once before turning up in a recent auction. When Mr. Plastino passed away recently, he was fighting to stop the sale. The folks at DC have done the right and proper thing to bring this matter to a close and to honor a promise made to one of their most prolific contributors.

I almost hate to bring this up but that story had a writer and that writer's work is also being donated and presumably put on display. The writer was apparently Bill Finger, who's regarded by many as a co-creator of Batman and other iconic characters associated with Batman. The current management of DC cannot put a credit for Finger on Batman comics or movies due to a contract made long ago with the other co-creator. It would be nice if Mr. Finger wasn't forgotten on this achievement, as well.

We need to talk about TED.

The SWP have appeared dead in the water for months, since the revelations of sexual violence and attempts at cover-up like an inept, less popular and worse-dressed Catholic Church. And yet, like cockroaches, they have survived.

The latest horror to come to light is a phrase uttered to applause at their conference:

We aren’t rape apologists unless we believe that women always tell the truth – and guess what, some women and children lie

At best, this statement can be interpreted as unabashed, unapologetic rape apologism. At worst, one wonders why they’re laying the groundwork for smearing children who have survived sexual violence as liars, and what else may emerge.

Following this statement, the SWP has once again haemorrhaged members, and some are once again celebrating the death of the party. I hope this is true, but sadly I suspect that we’ll be seeing this gang of misogynists shambling on, long outstaying their welcome. After all, they’ve survived this long.

Part of the problem is the SWP are everywhere. As well as their folding tables and newspaper salesmen, and the chap who shows up with a legion of placards screaming the SWP branding, you’ll find them in other places. They get themselves elected into positions on trade unions. They have a number of front organisations, including Unite Against Fascism, Unite The Resistance and Right To Work.

There’s a lot we can do to hasten the demise of the SWP. First and foremost, we absolutely must not organise with these fuckers. We must not organise with the SWP itself, and we must not organise with the front groups. This is harder than it sounds, given they have attempted to monopolise resistance, but it’s absolutely crucial if we are to take a stand against sexual violence.

We must make sure that they are completely and utterly unwelcome in our spaces. Wherever there is a SWPper, have the words “misogynist” and “rape apologist” ringing in their ears, as anyone with principles left long ago. Vote them from elected positions, and scream at them in the streets. If they do not leave, direct action may be necessary. Be critical not just of the SWP, but those who try to defend them, like the AWL did.

This is not a ban. It is simply standing up.

And finally, we need to create a climate wherein misogyny and rape apologism are thoroughly unwelcome in all of our organising spaces. It’s not enough to challenge it when it comes from the SWP–after all, everyone hates them. We need to put the necessity of safer spaces front and centre in all that we do.

I look forward to the demise of the SWP. I look forward to the demise of misogyny in my organising spaces even more.

Further reading:

I heard you have an SWP problem (thenameoflove)

Kill the SWP inside your head (me)

This comic was originally published (in black & white) in 2008! The version above, colored by Anthony Clark, appears in my book Emperor of the Food Chain.

Click here to read the Scripture that accompanies it in the book.

This is an interesting story from World War II about trust:

Jones notes that the Germans doubted their system because they knew the British could radio false orders to the German bombers with no trouble. As Jones recalls, "In fact we did not do this, but it seemed such an easy countermeasure that the German crews thought that we might, and they therefore began to be suspicious about the instructions that they received."

The implications of this are perhaps obvious but worth stating nonetheless: a lack of trust can exist even if an adversary fails to exploit a weakness in the system. More importantly, this doubt can become a shadow adversary. According to Jones, "...it was not long before the crews found substance to their theory [that is, their doubt]." In support of this, he offers the anecdote of a German pilot who, returning to base after wandering off course, grumbled that "the British had given him a false order."

I think about this all the time with respect to our IT systems and the NSA. Even though we don't know which companies the NSA has compromised -- or by what means -- knowing that they could have compromised any of them is enough to make us mistrustful of all of them. This is going to make it hard for large companies like Google and Microsoft to get back the trust they lost. Even if they succeed in limiting government surveillance. Even if they succeed in improving their own internal security. The best they'll be able to say is: "We have secured ourselves from the NSA, except for the parts that we either don't know about or can't talk about."

I wrote last year about the Brown's of "Sister Wives" fame and their campaign to end Utah's regressive laws on "religious cohabitation".

Utah has, I'm sure you'll know, a long and complicated relationship with both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and polygamy. In the 19th century polygamy was a central tenet of the LDS Church and they played a cat and mouse game with federal authorities to keep the "Principle" alive in Utah. By the 20th century the federal authorities had won and the LDS Church gave up the "Principle" in order for Utah and the church itself to commence normal relations within the Union.

By the middle of the 20th century the LDS Church was busy rebranding itself and, in so doing, sort to ever further distance itself from its polygamous past. It did this with the help of Utah state authorities and passed, in 1973, a law which banned living with more than one person as if you were married.

“A person is guilty of bigamy when, knowing he has a husband or wife or knowing the other person has a husband or wife, the person purports to marry another person or cohabits with another person.”

Not only did this allow authorities to intervene in some cases of abuse among fundamentalist Mormons, it also became a rod to beat those who were causing harm to no one else. A couple of years ago the Brown family themselves fled their beloved Utah home and settled in Las Vegas in order to avoid jail for the adult members and family separation.



Now the Brown's have won a victory that will allow others of their faith to practice non-legally binding plural marriage without fear. This is absolutely fantastic news, marking another step forward for freedom. It may be appealed however so fingers crossed this ruling is a keeper.

As predicted last year Lawrence v. Texas (which ended US state's anti-sodomy laws in 2003) played its part:

“Consensual sexual privacy is the touchstone of the rational basis review analysis in this case, as in Lawrence.”

Gay rights lead to human rights. Good times!

In an interview with Speccie editor, Fraser Nelson David Cameron gives an interesting insight into how his party will present itself at GE2015

“..The coalition is still strong and radical, he says, ‘but because of what I see as the problems facing Britain — and what I want to do next as Prime Minister — I feel very passionately that I want single party government’. It’s strange, I say, he doesn’t come across as a man held captive by the perfidious Liberal Democrats. ‘I don’t believe that you succeed in government by sitting around whingeing about what you can’t do,’ he says. ‘But I’m happy to tell you — and Spectator readers — privately that there’s a good list of things I have put in my little black book that I haven’t been able to do which will form the next Tory manifesto.“

That’s fine except it is exactly the message that the Lib Dems will try to put over as well. For their main hope of beating off the CON threat to most of the seats they’ll be defending is that LAB>LD tactical voting to block the Tories continues.

In this context the more Cameron highlights the things that the LDs have stopped his party doing the more that it makes the case for such anti-CON tactical voting.

The great hope of the Tories is that in the LAB>CON battlegrounds the 2010 LDs will stay with their allegiance and that in the CON>LD ones that LAB voters will stay with the red team.

Concerted tactical voting in both sets of marginal seats makes the CON majority aim that bit more difficult.

Mike Smithson

Blogging from OUTSIDE the Westminster bubble since 2004

Follow @MSmithsonPB

The Washington Post has a detailed article on how the NSA uses cookie data to track individuals. The EFF also has a good post on this.

I have been writing and saying that surveillance is the business model of the Internet, and that government surveillance largely piggy backs on corporate capabilities. This is an example of that. The NSA doesn't need the cooperation of any Internet company to use their cookies for surveillance purposes, but they do need their capabilities. And because the Internet is largely unencrypted, they can use those capabilities for their own purposes.

Reforming the NSA is not just about government surveillance. It has to address the public-private surveillance partnership. Even as a group of large Internet companies have come together to demand government surveillance reform, they are ignoring their own surveillance activities. But you can't reform one without the other. The Free Software Foundation has written about this as well.

Little has been written about how QUANTUM interacts with cookie surveillance. QUANTUM is the NSA's program for real-time responses to passive Internet monitoring. It's what allows them to do packet injection attacks. The NSA's Tor Stinks presentation talks about a subprogram called QUANTUMCOOKIE: "forces clients to divulge stored cookies." My guess is that the NSA uses frame injection to surreptitiously force anonymous users to visit common sites like Google and Facebook and reveal their identifying cookies. Combined with the rest of their cookie surveillance activities, this can de-anonymize Tor users if they use Tor from the same browser they use for other Internet activities.

Via Nick Mamatas,this article about writer Colin Wilson, who passed away in the last week, which begins: 

How dismayed the late Colin Wilson would have been if, through some of the occult powers in which he believed, he had been able to read his own obituaries.

The man whose first book The Outsider caused him to be lionised in 1956 by the literary greats of the day has been remembered in several blogs for his later novel Space Vampires, which inspired a famously trashy Hollywood film. In the broadsheets, the life of a self-proclaimed genius has been given the faintly amused treatment favoured by obituarists when dealing with a life of eccentricity or failed promise.

Yet there is sort of heroism in the way that Wilson, having been abandoned by those who once praised him, remained loyal to his own talent, living a life of writing, reading and thinking –probably in that order.

The article, which you might be able to tell from the excerpt, is playing both ends of the game with regard to Wilson (which is why Nick pointed it out, I suspect — to mock it). Wilson would be dismayed, but on the other hand he did what he wanted, but on the other other hand here’s a checklist of things to avoid if you want your obits to be properly reverential.

And, I don’t know. One, I think if Mr. Wilson is still sentient after his death, he’s got other, more interesting things to think about than his obits; I suspect at that point worrying about your obits would be like worrying about the end-of-year assessment of your kindergarten teacher once you were out of college (“Nice kid. Hopefully will figure out paste is not for eating.”).

Two, if Mr. Wilson had any sense at all — or any ego, which by all indications he certainly did — then he recognized (before he passed on, obviously) that to the extent he and his work will be remembered at all, obituaries, transient news stories that they are, are insignificant. He’ll be remembered for the work, and the status of the work in the context of history is not settled at the time of the obituary.

Salient example: Gaze, if you will, on the New York Times obituary for Philip K. Dick, on March 3, 1982. It is four graphs long (the final two graphs being two and one sentences long, respectively) — which for a science fiction writer is pretty damn good, when it comes to obits in America’s Paper of Record, but which, shall we say, does not really suggest that Dick’s notability would long survive him. Now, look at the voluminous record of writing about Dick in the NYT post-obit — an index of five pages of thumbsuckers. Pre-death, I find one note about Dick in the index, and it’s one of those Arts & Leisure preview bits.

So, yes. The obit was not the final word, because the work continues — or at least, can. In Dick’s case, the majority of his fame has come after his death, alas for him. He (nor any of us) would not know that from the four paragraphs in the NYT on 3/3/82.

I noted it before and will like do so again: As a creative person (or, really, any other sort of person), you have absolutely no control how history will know you, if indeed they know you at all. For most creative people, to the extent they are remembered at all, they will be remembered for one thing, because the culture at large only has so much space for any of us. You won’t get to choose which one thing for which you are remembered. If, for Wilson, the one thing he’s remembered for is Space Vampires rather than The Outsider, then that is still one more thing for which he is remembered than the billions of us who go to our graves and are swallowed up by them. So well done him.

But even then, the culture’s memory is not infinite. Wilson’s work, one way or another, is not likely to survive the vicious cultural culling that happens over the course of time; it’s unlikely to be remembered by anyone but academics in a hundred years, or even them long after that (nor, to be clear, will mine, or the unfathomably large majority of works being created today). The good news is the judgment of the obits will have passed from this world long before then. And in any event the sun is going to swell up into a red giant in five billion years and likely swallow up the planet, so that’ll be the end of all of it.

(Obit for the sun: “A long, pedestrian life followed by a brief illness; survived by Jupiter, three other planets and numerous moons and comets. In lieu of flowers, please donate to the Orphaned Trans-Neptunian Objects Fund.”)

I don’t know Mr. Wilson to any degree — I am one of those who knew him best for creating the source material for Life Force, which was a terrible movie — but my wish for him was that he lived the sort of life where he didn’t actually care what his obits said, and instead enjoyed his life and left work that had the possibility of speaking for itself, over time. If you’re a creative (or indeed any other) person, let me suggest you don’t worry about your obits either. As well as you can, live the life you want to live and make the work you want to make. After you’re gone, it’ll all be sorted out or not. You won’t be around to worry about it. Focus on the parts you’re around for.

Nearly one year on, these are the things I remember.