Andrew Hickey

Today is the anniversary of the 1923 general election. The Conservatives won the most seats with 258, Labour had 191 and the Liberals (with the Asquith and Lloyd George wings recently reunited) won 159.

The Conservatives, who had been in power before the election, tried to form a minority government.

Having seen the almost uniformly negative coverage of this "11% MP pay rise" (even from MPs themselves) I feel that somebody has to stick up for them.

All the commentary I have seen has been along the lines of the rest of the country is suffering from austerity and public sector wage rises have been kept to 1% so WHY ON EARTH SHOULD MPs HAVE AN 11% PAY RISE??!!!

Well firstly the rise would not be 11%. At least not if you measure it fairly and in the same way that pay-rises are measured for everybody else, i.e. annually. The salary is currently £66,396 (since Apr this year). The proposal is to raise it to £74,000 in 2015. So this would be a rise of just under 5.6% per year from that baseline. But that isn't really fair either because between Apr 2009 and Apr 2013 MPs' salaries rose by 0.6% annually (when the historic average of the last decade has been more like 2.2%). And this current rise is at least partly designed to address this. So when you compare the Apr 2009 figure with the proposed 2015 one you get an average pay-rise of 2.2% across the 6 years. Which doesn't even keep pace with inflation.

"AH!" I hear you cry "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE 1%?". But there's more dear irate capitalised fictional reader. IPSA are actually proposing quite radical changes to the structure of MPs' (historically very generous) pensions and also ironing out some expenses anomalies. So the cost to the taxpayer of this latest rise would actually be cost neutral. That's right, it won't cost us anything more. Not that you'd particularly have been aware of that judging by much of the coverage.

It's also worth noting that IPSA is an entirely independent body. Many MPs hate IPSA although most are reluctant to criticise them publicly. This is not a case of MPs with their snouts in the trough trying to diddle the taxpayer. It is an independent group who have scrutinised the current settlement and proposed some changes that will be entirely cost-neutral whilst addressing the fact that MPs' pay has been slipping back in the last few years. It sort of makes me wonder how we are ever going to get to a position where the politics can be taken out of this issue.

Perhaps the proposal to have rises linked to average wage increases is the answer although there are bound to be some sectors that suffer in the future even though the average is much better and hence relatively MPs will appear to be living high on the hog. There is probably no answer to this.

And I have to say that I am not really interested in what cabinet ministers like Phillip Hammond, David Cameron and Danny Alexander have to say on the subject as they all earn well over £100K anyway and in many cases are already very independently wealthy anyway. Just because they can afford to refuse a pay increase does not mean all other MPs should be pressured to do so too. We need to be very careful about this. If this sort of thing carries on and MPs are continually forced through political pressure to refuse successive pay rises we will eventually end up with even higher numbers of MPs from wealthy backgrounds which is not good for politics. We have seen a similar dynamic recently with the whole "expenses saints" phenomenon where MPs who do not claim any expenses at all are lauded. Of course they are all independently wealthy and can afford to pay the expenses themselves. This should not afford them better career prospects but sadly it does seem to be doing so.

In the meantime, can we please stop comparing apples with oranges? Putting the 11% MP figure alongside the 1% public sector figure is completely distorting and unfair. It would be much fairer to compare it to the 2.2% figure for the average rise over the last few years. And it would also only be just to acknowledge that it is cost neutral.

Anything else is simply bullying our MPs and I really do fear where that will ultimately lead.

I really wanted to make it a trilogy, you know? I mean, what could be cooler than a trilogy of near-future Scottish police procedurals about crimes that don't exist yet, written in multi-viewpoint second person? (Elizabeth Bear has a term for that kind of thing: she calls it "stunt writing".)

Unfortunately the NSA have done it again:

To the National Security Agency analyst writing a briefing to his superiors, the situation was clear: their current surveillance efforts were lacking something. The agency's impressive arsenal of cable taps and sophisticated hacking attacks was not enough. What it really needed was a horde of undercover Orcs.

Real-life agents have been deployed into virtual realms, from those Orc hordes in World of Warcraft to the human avatars of Second Life. There were attempts, too, to recruit potential informants from the games' tech-friendly users.

At this point, I'm clutching my head. "Halting State" wasn't intended to be predictive when I started writing it in 2006. Trouble is, about the only parts that haven't happened yet are Scottish Independence and the use of actual quantum computers for cracking public key encryption (and there's a big fat question mark over the latter—what else are the NSA up to?).

I'm throwing in the towel. I probably will write another near-future Scottish police procedural by and by, but it won't be a sequel to the first two except in the loosest sense. The science fictional universe of "Halting State" and "Rule 34" is teetering on the edge of turning into reality. Meanwhile, the financial crisis of 2007 forced me back to the drawing board for "Rule 34"; the Snowden revelations have systematically trashed all my ideas for the third book.

To make matters worse, Scotland is teetering on the edge of a political singularity. There is a Referendum on Scottish Independence coming up in September 2014. Then the UK (with or without Scotland) is expected to hold a referendum on whether or not to stay in the EU—a vote with consequences which are probably even more disruptive than the question of whether Scotland should separate from the Union. In just two years the map of the Scottish near future will have changed, unpredictably and drastically, from where it is now. I therefore conclude that there is simply no point in my starting to write a near-future politically astute crime thriller set in Scotland before I know the outcome of those votes (especially as it couldn't be published before mid-2016).

Sometimes I wish I'd stuck with the spaceships and bug-eyed monsters. Realism in fiction is over-rated.

PS:

If you're wondering what sort of near-future dystopian panopticon surveillance state/spy thriller I would be writing if I wasn't setting it in Scotland and writing in the second person, you'll get to see when I finish it. Ahem. Because that's the direction the trilogy provisionally titled "Merchant Princes: The Next Generation" is going in.

There will eventually be another near-future Scottish thriller, but I'm not going to start writing until after the votes are in. And it won't be in-series with the first two.

RESTRAINT

Some eulogize him who will never learn
from words or deeds or what he did not do.
-Six window bars, a sea more grey than blue.
White choke dust lime pit, where bright sun would burn

necks, and in winter hands numb from wet cold.
Told him the son he did not know was dead.
He wept. Three decades sitting on his bed
he taught young comrades still his comrades old,

who walked with him to freedom. Heard his voice
stern gentle. Helped him build. He gave his power
away and let successors have their hour,
yet bound their wills to this most anguished choice.

He was prepared to put men in their grave
whom, once they dropped their weapons, he forgave.

Yeah, wrote this and sent it out to the subscribers over a month ago. In the time since, Monty Python has announced that they've reunited. In other news, it looks like they're makign another Beverly Hills Cop movie, so that's something.

Hey, just a reminder that any holiday gifts purchased through my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada) would, in theory, throw a little money my way without costing you a dime extra! Just Sayin'.

I wonder if it was like this two thousand years ago. If it was, when Jesus died, Pontius Pilate would have appeared on Sky News moments after the cross was taken down and said “The world mourns today a man of great integrity. It was an honour to have known him, and even when I sentenced him to crucifixion, he showed great forgiveness, and that shows what a great figure he was.”

On the BBC the newsreader would say “With me here is one of his closest associates. Judas, what memories do you have of Jesus?”

And Judas would say he always displayed dignity and humility, and most importantly forgave those that betrayed him, and finish with an amusing anecdote, about how pernickety he could be about which bread to break at supper.

On Radio 5 live the moneylenders at the temple would say he was a heroic figure, who may have thrown over the moneylenders’ tables in the temple, but said he was sorry for the mess that was caused, which is the main thing, then every newspaper would tell us “Tributes have flooded in from across the Roman Empire, led by King Herod who said ‘It is a sad day for Nazareth, and a sad day for Rome’.”

Many of the official tributes to Nelson Mandela, such as the one from David Cameron, have emphasised his ability to forgive, and his apparent rejection of bitterness is part of what made him extraordinary. But the reason his capacity for forgiveness towards the rulers of apartheid mattered, was that he’d organised opposition to it, took up arms against it and overthrew it. If he hadn’t, if his notable side was forgiveness, he would simply have been a kindly chap who’d passed away with no one outside his family taking much notice.

Few people now defend apartheid, but someone must have liked it at the time or it wouldn’t have been such a nuisance to destroy. Margaret Thatcher, idol of many who made tributes to Mandela, bragged with a fervour that actually made her look drunk, that she’d rejected sanctions against the regime, as the ANC was a “typical terrorist organisation.” Many sportsmen and musicians broke the boycott, repeating the sentiments of Dennis Thatcher who said “we play our rugby where we like”. There were the ‘Hang Mandela’ t-shirts, and countless commentators and politicians who belittled the demonstrations and boycotts.

I visited Robben Island prison, where Mandela had been incarcerated, in 2003. To get my ticket I visited an office in Cape Town, with glossy posters on the wall, covered in flowery lower case jolly African writing, exclaiming your trip to South Africa wasn’t complete without taking the unique opportunity of a trip to the famous island. I got on a catamaran with Americans and Germans, who smothered themselves in sun cream and took pictures of each other as they held out their arms and giggled.

Had they turned the prison into a theme park, I wondered, maybe with a water-canon-slide, and a helter skelter shaped like a giant Desmond Tutu?

But tours of the prisons are conducted by ex-prisoners. As we wandered round the cells our guide explained how he and fellow convicts had been allotted different amounts of bread according to their race, and how they were made to work sixteen hours a day on the land.

“One day”, he said, “As I was digging, on the day of the month my father was due to visit, a guard called my name. I stood before him on that spot there and he said ‘Your father won’t be visiting today as he’s been shot. Now get back to work’.”

His father lived, it turned out, but never walked again, and the guide told us the three responsible for the attempted murder were free under the rules of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, and were now wealthy businessmen.

To my left a woman in shorts and a bright silk top, put her camera away and started sobbing onto her sun cream.

On another day I was taken around Soweto, by a friend of the family I was staying with. We toured the roads from which its residents hadn’t been allowed to leave without a pass, met countless children running along dusty tracks selling water, as if auditioning for a film that Morgan Freeman will probably be in, and went round the museum built where the schoolchildren were massacred.

My host was fascinated by England and cricket and the Premier League, and overflowing with tales of his youth, of plantains and preachers, and pondering why after apartheid there were still hundreds of thousands living in squalor, in the camps outside each town.
“What a memorable day”, I said when I got back to the people I was staying with. “Marvellous”, they said, “but you were lucky today. That lad you were with was arrested in the 1980s, and tortured by the police in the station at John Foster Square. He made such a noise they called him The Screamer, and whenever they brought in new prisoners, they would torture him again, so his screams would terrify them and make them talk. Sometimes he’s still a bit jittery but he was on good form today.”

So it was indeed remarkable that Nelson Mandela endured this regime and yet displayed no malice. But the real reason he was remarkable is that he took on its wealth and weaponry and brutality, its distinguished friends and its air of impregnable authority, he became the figure of a global movement and he beat it. The kids of Soweto not legally allowed past their street, the protestor throwing flour at rugby players, the student taking their twenty quid out of Barclays, the pensioner leaving South African grapes at the checkout, The Specials, the prisoners and the screamers and Nelson Mandela were united in opposition to this heavily armed barbarity and they won.

During the campaign against apartheid Nelson Mandela was a distant figure, locked away but a name on mugs, posters and student union halls, barely more real than Batman. But the De Klerks and Bothas were alarmingly real, an air of menace in their presence, like the bouncer that orders around the other bouncers.

Now the hazy figure is revered above all, and the defenders of apartheid have to scramble in his shadow for a space to declare that really they admired him, and the people they helped to torture.

The precise nature of his legacy will be debated for centuries. His capacity for forgiveness was impressive, and perhaps it isn’t surprising if that’s emphasised by some paying tribute, rather than his role in overturning inequality, as they’re now arranging inequality of their own.

Because surely his most important achievement was to prove that bastards and their bastard regimes can be overthrown, against seemingly impossible odds, by all of us, as no one knows which unsold grape was the one that finally brought down a tyranny.

Joe Brancatelli, the man who knows more about airlines than anyone alive, doesn't think much will come of this proposal to allow passengers on flights to use their cell phones. At least, there won't be a lot of voice calls, sez Joe.

Ten lazy assumptions that are part of the mainstream political consensus.

Michael Walker trained a Markov chain with the King James Bible and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, a classic computer science textbook.

The result is King James Programming:

And Satan stood up against them in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the role of procedures in program design.

22:14 The mouth of strange women is a deep and wonderful property of computation.

In APL all data are represented as arrays, and there shall they see the Son of man, in whose sight I brought them out

This was not, obviously, silly enough for my tastes, so ...

Half an hour on CPAN and in vim, and then some discreet dumpster-diving in the nether reaches of the internet, brought me three things:

• A dodgy copy of the complete works of H. P. Lovecraft
• The text of the King James Version of the Bible
• And the first code I've written in, oh, close to two years (please go easy on me)

Here it is:

    #!/usr/bin/perl 
    #===========================================================================
    #
    #         FILE:  lovebible.pl
    #
    #        USAGE:  ./lovebible.pl 
    #
    #      VERSION:  1.0
    #      CREATED:  05/12/2013 20:08:15 GMT
    #     REVISION:  ---
    #===========================================================================
    
    use strict;
    use warnings;
    use Algorithm::MarkovChain;
    use Path::Class;
    use autodie; # die if problem reading or writing a file

    my @inputs = qw(king_james_bible.txt lovecraft_complete.txt); 
    my $dir = dir(".");
    my $f = "";
    my @symbols = ();
    foreach $f (@inputs) {
        my $file = $dir->file($f);
    	my $lcounter = 0;
        my $wcounter = 0;
        my $file_handle = $file->openr();
        while( my $line = $file_handle->getline() ) {
    		chomp ($line);
    		my @words = split(' ', $line);
            push(@symbols, @words);
    		$lcounter++;
    		$wcounter += scalar(@words);
        }
    	print "$lcounter lines, $wcounter words read from $f\n";
    }   
    my $chain = Algorithm::MarkovChain::->new();
    $chain->seed(symbols => \@symbols, longest => 6);
    print "About to spew ...\n";
    print "---\n\n";
    foreach (1 .. 20) {
        my @newness = $chain->spew(length   => 40,
                                   complete => [ qw( the ) ]);
        print join (" ", @newness), ".\n\n";
    }

Yes, it's a Markov chain generator, seeded with the King James Bible and the complete works of H. P. Lovecraft. Sample output:

krina:markov charlie$ ./lovebible.pl 2> /dev/null
99820 lines, 821134 words read from king_james_bible.txt
16536 lines, 775603 words read from lovecraft_complete.txt
About to spew ...
---
    
    the backwoods folk -had glimpsed the battered mantel,
    rickety furniture, and ragged draperies. It spread over it a
    robber, a shedder of blood, when I listened with mad
    intentness. At last you know!At last to come to see me. Now
    Absalom.
    
    the absence of any real link with that of 598 Angell Street
    was as the old castle by the shallow crystal stream I saw
    unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those
    depths of their rhythm. The training saved them.
    
    the bed, and make thee borders of gold with studs of silver.
    1:12 While the case histories, to expect. As mental
    atmosphere. His eyes were pits of a hundred and fifty
    shekels, 30:24 And he laughed mockingly at the village
    summoning.
    
    the commandment of the room; then this. If this thing. 25:1
    If he had no way to turn either to the coyote - or to
    something was wrong. Marsh and Marceline represents. I am
    strong. 26:16 I also in me. 14:2.
    
    the ghouls, whose utter strangeness and their backsliding, I
    will love him, and have redeemed them, yet thou never gavest
    me a people: 8:11 And I said unto them, and I believe that
    the king doth behold the upright. 33:2 Thus.
    
    the gleaming sand, bobbing lanterns. The Philistines be upon
    thee, and because the famine in the heart proceed evil for
    Israel, with hesitancy, and which I had known it, to
    himself, he said, How shall depart from his house. 7:2 That.
    
    the results we learned that no harm him, and rent it. 7:22
    My face again no not to inform me, even all the heads of the
    unutterable consequences. It could tell, it thunders. The
    thing came out of Egypt. Who knoweth.
    
    the grass-grown line on the glassy, phantom bones. 50:18
    Therefore the children of Israel dedicated the sea, diverse
    and I hung an air of the war, to rest in my brother for
    nought, and the counsellor, and the cunning workman, and.
    
    the great hill that put bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for
    Tammuz. 8:15 As it fastened his body to the dead youth who
    would "go the king lifted up his Son of Professor George
    Saintsbury - "the criminal is securely strapped to.

As you can see, the output is pretty crude. Obviously this was a half-hour hack, not a properly finished product; but I think it shows promise — His eyes were pits of a hundred and fifty shekels — and a definite feel of familiarity — It spread over it a robber, a shedder of blood, when I listened with mad intentness.

Stuff to do: fine-tune the parameters of the Markov chain output, pick different seed words, possibly filter out chapter headers, titles, and verse numbers, possibly scan the output for sentence-shaped lexical chunks and top and tail them (capitalize and terminate properly).

I wonder: if I run it for long enough, will it emit a fully-formed draft of the Necronomicon?

Here's a review of the Beyoncé show I attended. I pretty much agree with everything in it.

And here, for my own record if not your info, is the set list she performed: Run the World, End of Time, If I Were a Boy, Get Me Bodied, Baby Boy, Diva, Naughty Girl, Party, Freakum Dress, Why Don't You Love Me, 1+1, Irreplaceable, Love On Top, Survivor, Countdown, Crazy In Love, Grown Woman, I Was Here, I Will Always Love You, Halo. In that order.

I received an e-mail from someone who wrote "How could you stand that crap?" and a couple others from folks who said essentially the same thing, only nicer. Obviously, given the lady's popularity, I am hardly the only person on the planet who likes "that crap." I thought she was terrific…and I also took the POV that I was something of an alien presence there, enjoying the chance to observe native customs. I mean nothing racial in that. It's just that her show is not geared to 61-year-old guys who are not heavy into what she does or to R&B played at that volume.

So I guess I could have gone into Old Man mode and barked at these kids today and their music and how it's not like the old days and while you're at it, get the hell off my lawn! But I always feel a certain arrogance welling up within me when I go anywhere near there. It's like, "How dare there be entertainment not geared for my tastes?" And on some level, "How dare something I don't like be so successful?" I just found much there to admire and enjoy, including the sheer professionalism of the performance and the sense of audience connection and participation. Most of all, I thought this: How often do you get to be in a room with 18,000 people all having the best time of their lives and showing it?

There are people in this world who somehow feel threatened by the happiness of others. I'm thinking of one guy I occasionally encounter at conventions when I can't avoid him. He's got to be one of the unhappiest people on this planet. Whenever he runs into someone who's happy (or at least, seems happy to him) you can see it make him madder. It's like they've got something he can't seem to get. And those grins on their faces? That's them flaunting it just to make him feel worse.

I think the happiness of others is the best drug in the world. Well, not always. When your knee is hurting, as my left knee (the one I didn't have surgery on earlier this year) is now, a shot of cortisone is the best drug in the world and I got one today so I can do something over the weekend besides wince. But when your knee is not hurting, the happiness of others is the best drug and I got a good shot of that on Tuesday evening. I'd go again if she was here, I got another free ticket and I didn't have to stand for the whole show.

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December 4th, 2013: AUSTIN: last time I was there (to sign literally thousands and thousands of books) I loved it. So I'm coming back! Webcomics Rampage is this weekend in Austin, Texas! THAT IS WHERE I'M GONNA BE. Let us hang out! LET US DO THAT One year ago today: sufficiently-advanced reindeer – Ryan

#740, 1st June 1996

On Public Enemy’s Fear Of A Black Planet, there’s a track called “Incident At 66.6 FM” – a 90-second cut-up of derisive, racist radio commentary on the band that brings you-the-listener right up to speed on why they felt besieged, and puts you on their side for the fightback. The first thirty seconds of “Three Lions” pull off a very similar trick for a rather less radical cause: England fans. It’s a compact, adroit bit of pop scene-setting. In the background, the low swell of a stadium rousing itself for battle. In the foreground, critics officiate at a funeral. “I think it’s BAD NEWS for the English game…not CREATIVE enough, not POSITIVE enough… we’ll GO ON getting bad results…”

Wait, though – even as these suited vultures gather, we hear another voice – lone and thin, but firm and honest, singing a song that is halfway to a prayer. “It’s coming home, it’s coming home… “ Against the ranks of pessimism, cynicism, analysis and fact, against their own better judgement, the fan can’t help but believe. Football is coming home.

It’s a magnificent bit of manipulation: the marketer in me swoons in admiration. The rest of “Three Lions” develops the theme but all you need to know is in that intro. Who, on hearing it, wouldn’t be on the side of the fan’s simple faith against the doomsayers? In half a minute “Three Lions” defined the English game’s sense of itself for the rest of the 90s, and the 00s too – sentimental belief against obstinate fact, with the former winning the moral victory every time.

Like all football number ones, “Three Lions” is an artefact from a changing game. Plenty of middle-class Brits had always liked football, but Italia 90 had cemented that audience as the game’s great new revenue stream, World Cup-weaned fans who liked heartbreak and tears and big stories with regular helpings of ‘glory’ and ‘passion’. At the club level this breakthrough demographic were well-served by Man United’s ascendancy and the Premier League’s early boom – but at an international level the development had been held back by the woeful performances of England ever since 1990.

Here was where “Three Lions” was truly clever. It didn’t just strike a chord with the new football market, it provided them with an invaluable primer on how to feel about England and history. The song – and I write as a part of that market – is a bluffer’s guide to fandom, an off the shelf attitude to the England team, a way of buying into history and resolving the anxiety of newbiedom – all thanks to the four toxic little words at the song’s heart.

Like all great marketing insights, “thirty years of hurt” is immediately evocative and immensely flexible and extensible. Like many, it’s also meanly prescriptive, telescoping the many possible conflicting feelings about crap performances – like anger, amusement, resignation, or sheer apathy – into one selfish, petulant word. Baddiel, Skinner and Ian Broudie sing “hurt” like they mean it – their performances are so sincere it’s almost mawkish: football fans as sad, big-eyed pups. But however they meant “hurt”, it was also a summary of the entitlement the English media began to show about international football – the shimmering history of the game since 1966 reduced to a barren stretch in which “we” didn’t win anything.

The cavalier treatment of history is characteristic of Sky-era sport – but it resonated more widely. “Three Lions” fit its pop moment as well as its football one, landing at a time when a chunk of Britain’s music talent seemed fixed on play-acting the 60s. “Three Lions” is a superior Britpop song, whatever else it is – too earnest and not as sharp or funny as the genre’s best, but Skinner and Baddiel’s rough voices have a folksy conviction and charm which a lot of minor Britpop bands lacked, and the Lightning Seeds could always sell a sappy tune.

Back in 1966, pop and football had little enough to do with one another. But in nostalgia’s lens the heights of pop creativity and England’s footballing powers had become linked, part of the same golden dream. So in the magical working that was Britpop, the Euro 96 tournament could be a sympathetic ritual replay of 1966 – and the climax of “Three Lions” comes when the singers unite on a line that seems to move beyond even prayer and into spell. “I know that was then – but it could be again.” At that moment the song stops, and it’s as if Baddiel and Skinner (and us, if we want to join in) have their eyes squeezed tight shut, willing time to unravel and the world to rewrite itself around our glorious past.

The song starts up again. The moment passes. Our brave lions (etc) go out on penalties against “the Germans”. The cycle continues.

POSTSCRIPT (A bit of Meta-Business).

In 2008 (42 years of hurt! And counting!) I wrote this: “I occasionally think of Popular as a three-act story: this [The Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen”] is the end of Act I, the false start of the second great age of singles, which was also the world that shaped me as a listener.” And this, for what it’s worth, is the end of Act II.

The relationship between the Pistols and this song probably seems rather obscure. It is rather obscure, if only because “Three Lions” is the product of a pop culture where the legends of punk had become part of the mainstream context of everything. “Three Lions” is in no sense a punk record. But the three men who made “Three Lions” were shaped by punk’s consequences, and so was the world it was released into. Broudie was a player on the Liverpool post-punk scene. Baddiel and Skinner were second-generation inheritors of “alternative comedy” and its sometimes conscious application of punky ideas and salesmanship to stand-up. The positioning of “Three Lions” – a more alternative, more authentic football single than previous official FA product – is classic indie ju-jitsu marketing, and as such also inherited from punk. Assume the underdog role and never let it go – even when you’re Number One.

“Three Lions” frames the problem of English football in a way that would become increasingly familiar. Football had lost its way, lost its hunger and passion and cheek, but with those it could go back to the golden age. It was an alluring story – and it was also the way Oasis had framed the problem of English pop. “I know that was then but it could be again”. This was one of the fatal promises of punk, or at least punk as the culture came to remember it – punk as a giant reset button on a stagnant scene. But once you had shown there might be a reset button, the lure of pressing it again became far stronger. Once you admit the possibility of going back to basics, moving forward, and working with what you have, becomes a lot harder. And the alternative – Jules Rimet still gleaming, England still dreaming – grows more and more seductive.

King James programming: a Markov chain trained on the bible and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

Telepathwords: preventing weak passwords by reading your mind.

Nelson Mandela has died.

Let us remember him through his words from the dock at the opening of his trial in 1964 - you can read the whole statement on the African National Congress site:

In my youth in the Transkei I listened to the elders of my tribe telling stories of the old days. Amongst the tales they related to me were those of wars fought by our ancestors in defence of the fatherland. The names of Dingane and Bambata, Hintsa and Makana, Squngthi and Dalasile, Moshoeshoe and Sekhukhuni, were praised as the glory of the entire African nation. I hoped then that life might offer me the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggle. This is what has motivated me in all that I have done in relation to the charges made against me in this case. 

Having said this, I must deal immediately and at some length with the question of violence. Some of the things so far told to the Court are true and some are untrue. I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the Whites. ... 

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Mandela's release from prison in 1990, along with the fall of the Berlin Wall they year before, marked the dawn of a hopeful decade in politics. Suddenly the good guys were winning.

That spirit did not survive 9/11, but that has more to do with the inadequacy of the West's leaders than it does with the objective threat from terrorism.

We must hope that South Africa's leaders will be up to maintaining Mandela's legacy.

My ire was particularly roused yesterday by Owen Jones’s latest attack on Nick Clegg. Now, regular readers of this blog may be aware that Nick Clegg is not exactly my favourite person, I actually agree that Clegg is populist with little in the way of actual principles, and that this latest capitulation to crack down on virtually non-existent use of the UK welfare system by EU migrants is an apt if depressing example of this. But Jones’s analysis has one fatal flaw: he’s a member of the Labour Party.

You don’t have to agree with Martin Shapland’s equally flawed analysis that the fact that Labour have equally let down EU migrants and indeed the UK electorate that that somehow makes the Lib Dems’ own actions more acceptable to agree that Owen Jones and his cohorts are in no position to criticise.

If Clegg’s “scapegoating” of EU migrants (which is to ignore the fact that the Lib Dem position is far less coherent than simple scapegoating) is “unforgiveable”, then what does that make Yvette Cooper’s claim that the coalition are playing catch up behind Labour on this issue? Indeed, so behind the coalition were Labour on Tuesday that they set one of their lead attack dogs to smear Laszlo Andor, an EU commissioner who had the unmitigated gall to criticise the UK for adopting such a policy, wrongly claiming he was a fascist.

This isn’t the first time, and won’t be the last, that Clegg’s team has concluded that with Labour and the Tories united on an issue they might as well go along with it for fear of being singled out. It was the same reasoning that made Clegg so keen to not come out against the snooper’s charter. Clegg isn’t a liberal, although he wore that mask for a while, and his mission is to be seen to be in the centre of politics between Labour and the Tories, no matter where that centre happens to be (he’s only sticking with the party’s pro-EU stance because he knows that dropping it would lead to a split the party would not survive from). He’s pretty despicable. But does anyone really believe that is more despicable than the party leaders he is slavishly following? Miliband could have caused a split within the coalition by adopting a pro-migrant, and fact-based stance on immigration. Leaving aside his ethical and moral responsibilities, he had a responsibility to do so as the leader of the official opposition. Cringing in fear of how Lynton Crosby would respond, he chose not to.

I’m not suggesting the Lib Dems should be let off the hook, merely that they are irrelevant. Even if every single Lib Dem voted against these measures, the combined Labour-Conservative hegemony would get it through parliament. If Owen Jones truly had the principles he has pinned his professional career to, he would have chosen to lay into who is possibly the next prime minister for his cowardly stance, rather than the leader of a declining third party. Does anyone else see the irony in choosing to pull his punches on Miliband and ramp up the rhetoric on Clegg in an article denouncing the political practice of scapegoating? This is black propaganda indeed.

I’m actually a fortnight late, but I just noticed that Andrew Hickey’s Doctor Who book is out. It’s available as in paperback, hardback, Kindle (US and UK) and other e-book formats. I just bought my copy: paperback for £10, with free shipping using the “FREESHIP” coupon code.

Andrew’s book is very, very different from mine (so, you know, you should buy both). While I focussed very tightly on the Eleventh Doctor (the clue’s in the title), and hardly touch on anything pre-2010, Andrew covers the whole half-century history of Doctor Who, from An Unearthly Child onwards. He also covers all media: not just the TV show, but also the various series of books and audio plays.

If you want to get a sense of what’s in the book before plonking down your tenner, you can find most of the material in Andrew’s series of posts at The Mindless Ones. You’ll see that he has a habit of veering off-piste to dig out the most esoteric nuggets of information and make the most fascinating connections. Highly recommended.

Some apps are being distributed with secret Bitcoin-mining software embedded in them. Coins found are sent back to the app owners, of course.

And to make it legal, it's part of the end-user license agreement (EULA):

COMPUTER CALCULATIONS, SECURITY: as part of downloading a Mutual Public, your computer may do mathematical calculations for our affiliated networks to confirm transactions and increase security. Any rewards or fees collected by WBT or our affiliates are the sole property of WBT and our affiliates.

This is a great example of why EULAs are bad. The stunt that resulted in 7,500 people giving Gamestation.co.uk their immortal souls a few years ago was funny, but hijacking users' computers for profit is actually bad.

Why question me? Surely you can see our movements.

Each of us has a characteristic repertoire of movements. You can recognise loved ones just by the way they walk. Actors use different styles of movement to create different characters. Some of these can become iconic, instantly triggering off a complex of ideas, emotions and cultural signifiers. There are basic, gross movements that are common to they way any man walks down a street, but if one of them is Charlie Chaplin twirling an umbrella and the other is John Travolta swinging a paint can, the different personalities are immediately recognisable, and the emotional and cultural connotations are widely different.

It’s important in science fiction drama too. If human actors are to represent alien beings, then finding new styles of movement suitable to the extraterrestrial race in question is essential, if they are not to look simply like a scattering of awkward suburbanites at an unsuccessful fetish party. Wise producers will hire choreographers to work with the actors, giving each species its own palette of movements unique to itself, making each group of aliens seem coherent in itself but distinct from any other.

But what is a style of movement? We can all recognise it, but can we break it down into its elements? Quantify it? Analyse it?

The first project to have a go at pinning down the component elements of dance was commissioned by Louis XIV in the late 17th century. There had been dance treatises before then, elaborate descriptions of how particular dances should be performed (sometimes with stroppy comments about how they should certainly not be performed), but the notation that ballet master Pierre Beauchamp devised for His Majesty was the first to use abstract symbols instead of prose descriptions accompanied by realistic drawings.

This Beauchamp-Feuillet notation, as it became known after Raoul Auger Feuillet popularised it in his many published books of choreography, was an elegant, if initially forbidding, system of swirling lines and sudden angles that represented the motions and transitions of dance just as a set of dots and lines can describe the notes and rhythms of music. It remained in widespread use for a century, before being superseded by a variety of alternative systems.

There are two in wide use today. The Benesh Movement Notation represents body positions on a five-line stave similar to that used in standard musical notation, allowing music and dance notation to be more easily integrated, while Rudolf Laban’s “Labanotation” looks more like geometric abstract art than music, but does have the advantage that it can be used to describe any kind of bodily movement in space and time, not just dance moves.

This idea has been developed further, in Eshkol-Wachman movement notation. Like its predecessors, this breaks down movements into primitive elements, but it uses an elaborate system of three-dimensional polar coordinates to locate these motions in space, with techniques for rotating and translating sequences of movements so that they can be directly compared. This allows the truly invariant characteristics of movements to be calculated.

The applications go far beyond the world of dance. It has been used in a host of animal studies, allowing scientists to establish the movements that are characteristic of particular animals, study how these movements change due to illness or injury, and compare the ways different species of animal move. In one example, Tammy Ivanco and her colleagues from the University of Lethbridge, Canada, used Eshkol-Wachman notation to quantify the different ways that rats and opossums reach for food, and were able to relate the more complex movements of the rats’ hands and arms to their relatively more elaborate brains and nervous systems.

It may even prove useful in studying the human brain. Autism is not generally diagnosed until a child is around three years old, while Asperger’s Syndrome is diagnosed much later – typically around the age of six or seven, but it can remain undiagnosed into the teenage years. Osnat Teitelbaum and her colleagues at the University of Florida analysed video recordings of infants moving about, and by using the Eshkol-Wachman system were able to determine certain movement styles that were characteristic of children who would later be diagnosed with autism or Asperger’s Syndrome. These were things like asymmetric crawling, where the infant would not crawl in the efficient manner of most babies, moving diagonally opposite limbs together, but would instead move in clumsier ways, such as with one foot stepping while another crawls, or a particular way of falling forward or back from a sitting position without using the reflexive motions of the arms that neurotypical infants would protect themselves with. This work led them to develop a simple motion-based test for autism and Asperger’s Syndrome in infants, whereby the child is held and the waist and slowly tilted from side to side. If the infant does not manage to keep their head vertical, an autistic spectrum disorder may be present.

A much simpler form of notation was devised recently by Amy LaViers, an engineering postgrad at the Georgia Institute of Technology. (That’s Georgia the US state, not Georgia the former Soviet republic.) Eschewing the complexity and power of the Eshkol-Wachman notation, LaVier’s system represents two legs, each of which can adopt one of ten different poses. The sequence of poses, and the transitions between them, describe the dance.

These ten discrete states are not chosen arbitrarily. Ballet dancers perform their warm-up exercises at the barre, a handrail that they hold on to for stability as they exercise each leg in turn. The ten barre exercises are the building blocks of ballet, and it is these movements that are captured in LaVier’s finite state automaton, a computer program that moves through these different poses to create sequences of dance.

There are constraints on the movements the automaton can perform. Some of these are physical – it cannot hover with both legs off the ground like some Jedi Cossack – but others are aesthetic. Specific mathematical constraints define the style and content of the dance, and as the automaton improvises within these constraints the audience perceives the character of its motion.

The aim of this work is not to create a ballet-dancing robot. Rather, it is to find ways to make robots move with particular styles and qualities. Non-verbal communication is expected to become an important element of the human-machine interface, as machines become more mobile and autonomous. A Predator drone may have no need to appear friendly (though for PR purposes I can imagine one of its successors might), but as robots increasingly interact with humans in non-lethal contexts, their body language may be the critical factor in putting people at their ease.

In this way, the robot engineers face the same sort of challenge as a choreographer on a science fiction show. They each have to define characteristic styles of movement that their performers – actors or robots – can work within, generating arbitrary sequences of movement that remain within strict aesthetic constraints. The difference is that the choreographer wants to make the actors seem as inhuman as possible, moving with a sense of the strange and uncanny, while the engineer wants the robots to seem as human, friendly and familiar as an automaton of motors and software can be.

Let's face it... I've never been very nice about civil partnerships. Even now I feel the bubbling of rage just beneath my skin at the mere thought of them. They were introduced by Labour because of the obvious need for some sort of partnership rights for same-sex couples. That can, really, only be seen as a good thing. But the fact is that, at the time of their introduction, the debate internationally had already moved on to marriage equality. Civil partnerships were, in hindsight, doomed to be considered obsolete within a few years of their introduction. 

You know, I can't think of one thing I've ever ordered from Amazon that I needed so urgently that I'd want them to send a drone mini-helicopter to land on my lawn to get it to me A.S.A.P. But if they get this thing working, I'm certainly going to order one thing that way…once. I'm thinking maybe a Jetsons DVD.

Hey, just a reminder that any holiday gifts purchased through my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada) would, in theory, throw a little money my way without costing you a dime extra! Just Sayin'.

The New York Times has an obit up for Al Plastino. Every time I see one of these, I can't help but register that back in the sixties and seventies, and even into the eighties, it was unthinkable that a legit newspaper would care about the death of someone in the comic book field. When Bill Everett died in 1973, it wasn't covered.  It's so great that the mainstream press now acknowledges the impact that men like Al Plastino have had on people.

There's a matter I should cover here.  The Times obit says…

But in his telling, Mr. Plastino, who died on Monday at 91 in Patchogue, N.Y., took his greatest pride in a single special issue, "Superman's Mission for President Kennedy," which he began drawing in 1963, before Kennedy's assassination. The story, conceived with the Kennedy White House, paired Superman and Kennedy as allies in promoting the president's new physical fitness program.

The issue was not yet finished when the president was killed in Dallas that November, and DC initially decided to call it off. But after getting encouragement from the new administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the project went forward in revised fashion.

For the issue's cover, Mr. Plastino drew a flying Superman looking toward a ghostly, larger-than-life image of the president looming over the Capitol dome, where a flag is at half-staff. Also on the cover was a note explaining the story behind its publication. The last page included another note: "The original art for this story will be donated to the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, at Harvard University."

There's something screwy about this whole tale of the Superman story about President Kennedy. The above is wrong about it being a drawing for the cover. The story was not featured or even mentioned on the cover of the comic it appeared in, Superman #170 (June, 1964). What they're describing is the first page of the story. You can view it and much of the supporting evidence for what I'm about to discuss over on this page but read the following before you do.

Some facts. On August 30, 1963, the New York Times ran a story about a then-upcoming story in the Superman comic book in which J.F.K. enlisted the aid of the Man of Steel to help promote physical fitness. Some points of interest about that article: It made no mention that the story was in any way requested by or done in cooperation with the White House…and it reprinted one panel from the story. The panel was drawn by Curt Swan, not Al Plastino. It said the story was scheduled for "the late fall issue" of Superman. #165 of that comic went on sale the week after the article appeared so "late fall" would suggest #166, which went on sale the first week of November.  However, it also said panels were "now being drawn" for the story.  If that was true, it would mean that the story would probably not be done in time to be printed in 1963 and that the story was not drawn all at once, the way almost all comic book stories are.

The story did not appear in #165, #166 or even in #167. In #168, which came out the following February, the letter page was pre-empted by an announcement that just as that issue was going to press, they'd learned of the murder of President Kennedy. They reprinted the N.Y. Times piece and stated that the story was to have been published in #169 but they pulled it from that issue and would be substituting other material. They had decided, they said, to not publish it and to instead present the original artwork to Kennedy's "gallant widow, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy."

I am a bit suspicious it was ever slated for any issue around this time. The story was ten pages. If they yanked it at the last minute and substituted another story, then the issue in question would have a different ten-page story in it. But #166, #167 and #168 all had book-length stories in them and #169 had three stories — one eight pages in length, one fourteen and one five. So where would a ten-page story have appeared? In each case, the cover of the comic in question went to press several weeks before the insides and the covers were specific to the stories inside. So there couldn't have been a last-minute switch of the interiors for a ten-page story in any of them.

The J.F.K. physical fitness story finally appeared in #170. A caption on page one (the page the Times just confused with the cover in their Plastino obit) stated that it was originally to have appeared in #168, not #169 as they stated earlier. This was the one drawn by Al Plastino. Even though it was an important story that had been mentioned in the New York Times, it was not on the cover. The other story in that comic — "If Lex Luthor Were Superman's Father" — was on the cover…and longer.

So we have all these questions and conflicts. There is no record of either a Swan version of this story or the Plastino version ever being actually presented to the Kennedy Library or Mrs. Kennedy or any person or institution. There is no explanation as to why the panel in the New York Times was by Swan but the published story, which featured the same scene with slightly different dialogue, was by Plastino. And why didn't DC put the Superman/JFK story on the cover of #170, giving it some importance and also probably upping sales of that issue? Or save it for the next issue when they could have featured it on the cover?  And why only ten pages for such a special story?

Okay, here's the best I can do to come up with a theory. This is guessing and I welcome anyone else's theory that makes any more sense…

Let's start with why that panel in Times was by Swan when the published story was by Plastino. Folks discussing this on the 'net are theorizing the Swan version of the story was lost; that DC donated it to Mrs. Kennedy and then when they decided to print it later, they didn't have access to the original art or good copies of it. Ergo, they had to have it redrawn. I find that highly unlikely. It was a historic story and it didn't dawn on anyone there that they might want to publish it at some point?

My suspicion? There was no completed Superman/JFK story drawn by Curt Swan. Superman editor Mort Weisinger was great at promotion and had press connections. Maybe he had a script written but I'm skeptical he had more than a page drawn. He could have just had that one panel done.  Remember that line in the 8/30/63 Times story about "panels now being drawn."  That wasn't how comics were ever done.  Curt Swan penciled a story, a letterer lettered it, an inker inked it…and the entire story was completed.  How could they have one finished, inked panel to print with that Times article, if other "panels were now being drawn?"  Well, they could if Weisinger only had one panel or page prepared.

That "panels now being drawn" line may be our biggest clue.  Suppose I'm right and Weisinger just had one page or panel drawn.  He sends it to the reporter who's writing the item up for the Times.  The reporter asks, "Can I see the entire story?"  What can Weisinger say?  He has to say, "Not yet.  It's still being drawn."

Why would Weisinger just have the one page or panel done and not the entire story? Well, I can think of several motives but the most likely is that he was trying to sell someone in the White House on the idea of endorsing the project.  You probably wouldn't want to have the whole story written and drawn if you wanted them to endorse the concept and offer input.  And maybe he did get them interested or maybe he didn't but, eager to promote the project, he jumped the gun in announcing it to the New York Times. Whatever his reason, he was up to something. He planted the item and then the game plan, whatever it was, changed when Kennedy was killed.

In the first issue that went to press after 11/22/63, which was #168, Weisinger did indeed announce that they weren't going to print that story but at that point, I believe it hadn't even been drawn or scheduled. Then they got a lot of letters urging them to print it and maybe the publisher came to him and said, "Hey, Mort. I'm getting calls from people who think it makes us look bad to not to publish a story that Kennedy (allegedly) wanted to see published. Get it drawn and stick it in the next issue that's going to press." They may even have received a bit of actual encouragement from the White House, though I'm suspicious about that, too. By this point, #169 was presumably off to the engraver and it was too late to change the cover of the following issue…but they could change the insides of #170.

#170, I theorize, was close to being ready to go with two stories in it — a ten-pager called "Superman's Sacrifice" and that fifteen-page story called "If Lex Luthor Were Superman's Father." The latter couldn't be bumped because it was depicted on the cover and it was too late to change the cover. So they moved "Superman's Sacrifice" to the following issue and quickly had the Superman/J.F.K. tale completed to run in its place. That's why only ten pages for a story that could have used a lot more.

Folks who analyze such things have concluded that the script represents the work of two writers — Bill Finger and E. Nelson Bridwell. These were two men who never worked together otherwise. Finger (best remembered now as the unbilled co-creator of Batman) was a freelancer and Bridwell was Weisinger's Assistant Editor. If there are enough traces of Bridwell's writing style in the published story to recognize him, that probably means Finger wrote a script and then Bridwell did extensive rewrites. Perhaps Finger's script was done back before Swan had allegedly drawn it and it needed to be rewritten to fit into ten pages so it could run in that space in #170. Or maybe Finger's script was done after Kennedy's death to fit that slot in #170 but it needed a lot of quick revisions so Bridwell did them then. Either way, they gave it to whichever of their two main Superman artists (Swan or Plastino) could get it done in time and at that moment, that was Plastino.

So he drew it and it looks like someone else did some retouchings on some of his drawings of Kennedy. It was published with a little blurb at the end saying that the original art would be donated to the Kennedy Library…which no one at DC ever got around to doing. Instead, the art was most likely just taken home by someone around the office — that happened with a lot of DC artwork at the time — and it later wound up in an art auction, much to Mr. Plastino's surprise and displeasure.

There are some other scenarios possible but I feel pretty certain that the Plastino version was drawn after Kennedy was killed, not before, and Mr. Plastino misremembered when he said otherwise…an easy, innocent mistake to make. The first page was definitely drawn after and the lettering on it, explaining that the story was being published at the request of President Johnson, is by the same letterer who drew the rest of the story. It's unlikely it would have been the same letterer if the first page had been created months later, apart from the rest of the story. The wording on that first page also sounds rather phony to me. It says the story was "prepared in close cooperation with the late President Kennedy," even though neither the New York Times item nor the letter column announcement in #168 made any such claim. If it was true, wouldn't that have been mentioned before?

None of this stuff about President Kennedy cooperating with DC or President Johnson requesting the story's publication is consistent or convincing. You know what they would have done if all that had been true? When Kennedy was killed, they would have tabled the story for a while so as not to be accused of disrespect or bad taste. Then they would have published it a few months later saying, "J.F.K. would have wanted it to see print" and if applicable, that the White House had requested it. They would not have lost the original art to Swan's version if there really was a Swan's version, and they would have published it as the cover feature in a big, heavily-promoted edition with tributes to Kennedy and exercise tips in the back. Instead, they burned the whole idea off quickly, calling little attention to it…because it was a bit of a sham in the first place and they just wanted to be done with it.

So that's my theory.  There are other components to all this that I could mention…like the eight other comic book artists on the grassy knoll or the single-brush theory but I've spent more time thinking about this than it's worth. And if you've made it this far, so did you…about halfway through this posting.

The 20th century spanned the collapse of the Monarchical System, the rise and fall of Actually Existing Socialism, a bunch of unpleasant failed experiments in pyramid building using human skulls, and the ascent to supremacy of Neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In 2007/08, the system malfunctioned spectacularly: it's clearly unstable and has huge problems, but what's going to replace it?

In the right corner of the ring, Neo-reactionaries like Mencius Moldbug (blog here) and Michael Anissimov are effectively libertarians who have thrown up their hands in disgust and concluded that the modern age—by which they mean everything since the Enlightenment—is corrupting, degrading, and on a highway to hell, and the appropriate political solution to the problem is to go back to aristocracy as an organizing principle, or even the divine right of kings. (Techcrunch describe them as Geeks for Monarchy. I think they're full of shit (possibly because I live in a monarchy), and so does Scott Alexander, who has written a magisterial Anti-Reactionary FAQ in which he pulls the legs off the fascist reactionary insect, the better to anatomize it.)

And in the left, we have Accelerationism. (That's a link to the Accelerationist Manifesto, by the way.) Note that the term "Accelerationism" is a dual-use tool—it's also used by some singularitarians. I'm discussing the other variety here. Advocates such as Joshua Johnson sum it up thuswise:

Accelerationism is the notion that rather than halting the onslaught of capital, it is best to exacerbate its processes to bring forth its inner contradictions and thereby hasten its destruction. As a radical act, the genesis of this idea stretches back to Marx and continues through Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, and Nick Land's cybertechnics ...

It's fairly clear in context that entryism is a corollary of accelerationism. One may even speculate that the Spiked Online/Spiked Magazine nexus and the Institute of Ideas think tank are an entryist front.

The Spiked crew are drawn from the former Trotskyite Revolutionary Communist Party, led by Frank Furedi. In the wake of the collapse of the USSR the RCP entered a period of re-evaluating everything and then re-surfaced as free market Libertarians. Other offshoots included Living Marxism magazine in the early 90s (shut down in the wake of a libel lawsuit brought by ITN). Per wikipedia, "The green journalist George Monbiot has accused him of overseeing crypto-Trotskyist entryism designed to insert ex-RCPers into positions of cultural and media influence, where they pursue an extreme pro-technology right-wing libertarian agenda." That's not totally plausible in view of the bizarre direction the members of the RCP have taken since 1990.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Revolutionary Communist Party has probably adopted a Trotskyite flavour of Accelerationism as its guiding doctrine for the 21st century, and is pursuing their strategic goal by attempting to exacerbate the coming Crisis of Capitalism by acting as Libertarian/free-market agents provocateur. (Implicitly, in order to bring about the Left-Singularity.) (Sanity Conservation Warning: The only bloggers currently using the term "Left-Singularity" seem to be barking hatstand neo-reactionaries. Memetic prophylactic recommended. You have been warned.)

Anyway. Let's chain the daisies together. What do we get?

We get former Trotskyites who have decided that the best way to achieve Communism is to encourage the worst excesses of Neoliberalism, until the system implodes under its own weight and it becomes apparent that the only way out of the rat-trap is forward on full afterburner into the Accelerationist future. They therefore establish Libertarian fronts and enthusiastically encourage the worst excesses of capitalist globalization, including the application of the shock doctrine to the western economies that originally applied it to their former colonies ... all the time living it up. (Because, let's face it, right wing think tank gurus might plausibly get to wear expensive suits, snort cocaine, and drive expensive BMWs rather than sitting around in dismal squats with leaky roofs holding self-criticism sessions like silly old-school Maoists: which lifestyle would you rather have? Alas, I am informed by Ken Macleod that the folks at Spiked Online are not in fact Gordon Gekko-like creatures of the night. Damn, I'll just have to file that caricature away for a near-future novel ...)

We also have former libertarians who, in despair at the failure of the tin idol of the free market, conclude that the Enlightenment was all some sort of horrible mistake and the only solution is to roll back the clock. Today, we are all—except for the aforementioned Neo-reactionaries—children of the Jacobin society: even modern Conservativism has its roots in the philosophy of Edmund Burke, who formulated a radical refutation of and opposition to the French Revolution—thereby basing his political theories on the axioms of his foe. As Trotsky observed, "Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies." Despair is a common reaction to defeat, as is Stockholm syndrome: with the impending death of neoliberalism becoming clearer to the many libertarians who assumed it would bring about the small government/small world goals of the paleolibertarians—as it becomes clear that the fruits of neoliberalism are instability and corporate parasitism rather than liberty and justice for all—is it unreasonable of them to look to an earlier, superficially simpler settlement?

This we come full-circle. The Trotskyites of old have donned the Armani suits of libertarian and neoliberal think-tank mavens. And the libertarians have begun to search for a purer pre-modern framework with which to defend themselves against the searing vision of the radiant future. Welcome to the century of the Trotskyite monarchists, the revolutionary reactionaries, and the fringe politics of the paradoxical! I hope you brought popcorn: it's going to be nothing if not entertaining.

This story appeared in The Times earlier in the week (many thanks to Steve Moore for sending me the clipping).

Microfilm moon bibles! What a wonderful snapshot of that brief moment in history when we were both an analogue civilisation, and also going into space.

But the story raises a number of questions. Every ounce in weight was precious to the Apollo programme, so taking books on microfilm appears sensible at first. Until, that is, you remember that there was no way a bulky microfilm reader would have been on board. Whatever reason they took those Bibles to the moon, it was not to read them. Their journey into space was for symbolic reasons, not practical ones.

Then there's the fact that they took 100 of them, as if the astronauts were intending to convert The Clangers.

Clangers: Not Yet Christian.

The answer, of course, is money. Those microfilm moon bibles can fetch over $10,000 a pop in auctions, so taking 100 will have made someone a nice little windfall.

But look again at what really happened - the proximity of the moon granted these old Iron Age texts an extra quality - they gained value. That is magical thinking. Money itself is magical thinking, as certain pieces of green paper are deemed to have value which other pieces of green paper do not, provided they have been blessed by the wizards at the Federal Reserve (as Robert Anton Wilson used to put it.)

So the Apollo Prayer League were using the power of the moon to take an old form of magic (sacred texts) and convert them into a more modern form of magic (dollars). That's an occult act, in anyone's book, and one performed for personal gain rather than the greater good.

Who knew that Christians were that ideologically flexible?

It seems sort of obligatory to write these Thanksgiving entries, but that’s no reason not to do it.  We need a few more obligations in life.  Americans could definitely use a stern father figure to tell us “You’ll do it or you’re in big trouble, mister,” at least when it comes to stuff like being decent, respectful, and grateful.

Which beings me to one of the problems with Thanksgiving.  In the age of social media, you get to see dozens, if not hundreds, of your kin, your friends, and your annoying relations doing their gratitudinal thing, and while I don’t wish to be one of those ‘you’re doing it wrong‘ guys, it can be helpful to remember a few important distinctions as you scribble an embarrassingly AutoCorrected holiday message before turning into the tuck:

There’s certainly nothing shameful about being happy you’re an American this time of year, or any time, really.  There are better countries in the world, depending on your criteria, and there are worse, but most of us — certainly anyone likely to be reading this — is blessed with comfort, material wealth, and all sorts of other advantages just by the circumstance of our birth.  I’ve never been much of a rah-rah patriot, and though it’s not trendy to argue about it on the internet, nationalism is easily as poisonous to human society, maybe even more so, than any religion we’ve ever come up with.  That said, this country was a great idea, and continues to be excellent in a lot of ways, and plenty of other countries would have put me to work filling a grave years ago.  But being born American isn’t something you should be thankful for.  Nobody did it for you.  It was just luck.  You can feel fortunate, but unless you think the hand of Providence put you in your comfy suburb, you shouldn’t really feel grateful.  The same goes for pretty much any other matters of circumstance; people should be happy to be lucky, but they don’t really need to be thankful, if for no other reason than that it implies that you’ll start being an ingrate the day your luck changes.

Similarly, you shouldn’t necessarily be thankful for anything you did yourself.  While recognizing that everything we do is, to a certain degree, done with the aid of others, being thankful for stuff like your good health, your great job, your enviable talents, your attractive partner, or your wonderful kids is going to come off as either self-abnegating or egotistical.  Too much praise and it sounds like you’re showing off; too little and it sounds like you don’t care.  But even if you walk the line perfectly, you shouldn’t be thankful for things that are your own doing; again, that’s not a matter of gratitude.  It’s a matter of pride.  The difference is slender, but it’s of grave importance.  You can easily be too proud, but you can never be too thankful.

When giving thanks, you should give it where it’s due:  not to fortune, not to fate, not to your own talents or your ability to weather circumstances.  Thanks should always go to the only thing in this world that’s capable of appreciating thanks:  a fellow human being who’s done you a good turn, who’s helped you take advantage of good fortune, or who’s guided your pride in productive ways, or who’s just been there where you were alone and needed someone there.  That’s what this holiday is for.  So, as one of the strangest and most amazing years of my life comes to its end, here’s a few people I want to thank, in notion if not in name.

* I never had much use for education, at least in a formal sense.  I got bored and frustrated easily.  I bristled at being taught the moral lessons of my parochial school youth, I hated the competition and indifference of public high school, and I found both the expense and the political gamesmanship of higher education off-putting.  But I had a handful of teachers over the years who gave me hope that having a good mind would be of some value to me, if I only tried to develop it.  A junior high school English teacher was the first person who ever praised me for being not just a good reader, but a perceptive reader, someone who could see what was not immediately apparent, and who could understand what was behind and underneath the mere text; that’s a lesson that has always and forever served me well.  The dean of students at my high school wasn’t a smart guy, but he was a decent guy, and he was the only person in authority who tried to stop the torrents of abuse I got from bullies and affiliated jerks; he taught me the incredibly important lesson that decent people can be found anywhere, even in the places you least expect them.  And a college philosophy teacher, in only one semester, taught me things about the limits of human knowledge, the importance of engaging with society, and the ever-utile value of doubt.  I’m thankful I had all three of them in my life, at the exact time I needed them.

* Something I learn more and more every year is that my life choices, most of which I’m generally happy with, have come at a great cost.  One of them is a lot of lonely holidays.  Nobody wants to be the older, single friend who you take in over the holidays because he’s got nowhere else to go.  Luckily, I tend to have access to a lot of inner resources, so even at times like this, when time off can be kind of a drag, I don’t get too low.  But the long stretch of days that constitutes the rest of the calendar year can be a brutal haul, and I’m surely thankful for the friendship, patience, tolerance, kindness, and enthusiasm shown to me by a lot of my good friends.  I’ve learned to appreciate my family more in recent years, but my friends remain my true family.

* I don’t often have a lot of good things to say about the internet; even as much as I use it and rely on it, its ugly qualities can get overwhelming.  But here’s an unreservedly good thing about it:  through its auspices, I have met some of the most amazing people I will ever know, virtually or otherwise.  In particular, it has allowed me access to a small handful of self-selected communities of like-minded folks — always the best kind of community — who have made me laugh, helped me in low moments, become my true friends, and done something nearly impossible:  made me feel like I am never alone in the world, and that there are a few places that people like us really belong, even if we had to create it ourselves.

* Most of my adult life has been given over to art and culture.  I don’t say this to brag, because I don’t think I’m any great shakes as a writer, or to single myself out as special, because heaven knows we have too many self-satisfied ‘creative’ types thinking the world owes them something more than it does anyone else.  I just say it because it means that I spend a lot of time in the company of other people — writers, musicians, artists, critics, and the like — who constantly astound me with their talent, drive, and insight.  And if I have ever written anything that has made you think, or made you laugh, or made you interested, or ever diverted you in a pleasant way, you can, as I do, thank those people, who have inspired and driven me to keep at it just so I can feel like I belong in their company.  I know I’ve let a lot of them down, and even more of them are indifferent to the work that I do, but they are keeping me in the game, and that alone pretty well makes life worth living.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  Hope you’re spending it being satisfied.