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July 29th, 2017: San Diego Comic Con was AMAZING: I met so many great and interesting readers, got to meet some people that I really admire, and won two (TWO!) Eisner Awards, for my work on Squirrel Girl and Jughead! IT WAS PRETTY AMAZING!! – Ryan

Looking at critics of Venezuela makes me feel like intelligent religious believers when confronted with some new atheists: they’re attacking nothing I believe in. The shortcomings of the Chavez-Maduro government in no way whatsoever undermine my conception of socialism.

What is my conception? You might think I’m going to set out my blueprint of a socialist Utopia. You’d be missing the point. Capitalism was not the conscious design of a single mind, but rather it evolved. The same should be true for socialism.

For me, socialism is a system which fulfils, as far as possible, three principles.

One is real freedom. Oliver Kamm praises a liberal order as one in which – in contradistinction to state socialism  - “embraces value pluralism, in which citizens are free to pursue the goals that matter to them.” I share this ideal, but I fear that capitalism does not sufficiently achieve it. Under capitalism, millions of us are compelled to work in often oppressive and coercive conditions. Our goals are thwarted. Perhaps Marx’s biggest gripe with capitalism was not its injustice but its alienation; the fact it prevents us from pursuing our goals.

In this context, a basic income is crucial. It would enable people to pursue their own lives. It would empower Cory Doctorow’s walkaways.

A second desiderata is voice. As Phil says, “socialism involves a deeper, more thoroughgoing democratisation of social life.” At the political level, this requires institutions of deliberative (pdf) democracy – not simply imbecile “speak your branes” referenda. At the economic level, it requires worker democracy.  

One reason for this is that procedural utility matters: happiness requires not just good outcomes, but ways of reaching them that give people a say.

A second reason is that Hayek had a point: knowledge is inherently dispersed and fragmentary and unavailable to a single mind. Centralized control is often inferior to decentralized aggregation methods. (As I’ve said, it is bosses who believe in central planning, not Marxists like me). It doesn’t follow from this that we need an unfettered free market – but it does follow that we should consider mechanisms for deploying the wisdom of crowds. Proper democracy is one such.

The third value is equality. I don’t mean here any particular Gini coefficient. Instead, what matters are two things.

One is how inequalities arise. I’ve no problem with some people getting rich if people freely reward them for good service – Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain argument has no force for me – although luck egalitarianism justifies them paying some extra tax. For me, a socialist economy would be one in which inequalities due to exploitation, rent-seeking and rigged markets would be minimized. Actually-existing capitalism does not do this (pdf).

The other is their effects. Inequalities of income spill over into inequalities of respect and political power. To me, this is unacceptable. My socialism would accept Michael Walzer’s blocked exchanges (pdf) – ways of preventing inequalities in one sphere from spreading to others. Also, it’s plausible that current inequalities (of power, not just income) are a barrier to economic growth. An acceptable socialism would sweep these away.

What role would the state play in this?

I suspect it wouldn’t be a large one. We Marxists are wary of the state simply because it is often used for reactionary and repressive ends. A big state can be (and is) captured by capitalists. Nationalization, for example, cannot be sufficient for socialism simply because it can be reversed. Marxism is in some respects very different from social democracy.

Instead, a big role for the state is to facilitate the transition to socialism, by encouraging socialistic institutions. Some call this accelerationism, others interstitial (pdf) transformation. Again, a basic income is crucial here: it enables people to walk away from oppressive capitalism (if they choose) and into cooperative ventures or self-employment. Also, the state could help spread coops by encouraging public sector mutuals and using procurement policies to favour them and penalize hierarchical firms. Massive housebuilding also has a role: cutting the cost of housing would free people from the debt and rent bondage that compels them to submit to capitalism.

The general principle here is to empower people to reject exploitative capitalism (if they want). This would so squeeze profits that capitalists would have to transform into more egalitarian forms or die. (The state is, of course, needed to smooth this process).

As for the place of markets in all this, it should be what it is now - a narrow technical matter: does this particular market work and if not can we make it do so? It’s perfectly possible – I think desireable – to have freeish markets without (pdf) capitalism.  

Personally, my socialism would have a perhaps big role for entrepreneurship – just not the sort that rips people off.

It should be obvious to everyone that this vision of socialism is massively different from that of a centrally planned dictatorship.

Of course, this vision of socialism differs from many others’, though it should be compatible with many of them: I’d hope there’s a parallel between it and Robert Nozick’s framework for utopia.

What all this is definitely not, of course, is statism, nor the illiberalism of Maduro’s government. Maybe the tragedy of Venezuela brings Jeremy Corbyn’s judgment into question. But it tells us nothing about my sort of socialism.

Researchers found that they could confuse the road sign detection algorithms of self-driving cars by adding stickers to the signs on the road. They could, for example, cause a car to think that a stop sign is a 45 mph speed limit sign. The changes are subtle, though -- look at the photo from the article.

Research paper:

"Robust Physical-World Attacks on Machine Learning Models," by Ivan Evtimov, Kevin Eykholt, Earlence Fernandes, Tadayoshi Kohno, Bo Li, Atul Prakash, Amir Rahmati, and Dawn Song:

Abstract: Deep neural network-based classifiers are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples that can fool them into misclassifying their input through the addition of small-magnitude perturbations. However, recent studies have demonstrated that such adversarial examples are not very effective in the physical world--they either completely fail to cause misclassification or only work in restricted cases where a relatively complex image is perturbed and printed on paper. In this paper we propose a new attack algorithm--Robust Physical Perturbations (RP2)-- that generates perturbations by taking images under different conditions into account. Our algorithm can create spatially-constrained perturbations that mimic vandalism or art to reduce the likelihood of detection by a casual observer. We show that adversarial examples generated by RP2 achieve high success rates under various conditions for real road sign recognition by using an evaluation methodology that captures physical world conditions. We physically realized and evaluated two attacks, one that causes a Stop sign to be misclassified as a Speed Limit sign in 100% of the testing conditions, and one that causes a Right Turn sign to be misclassified as either a Stop or Added Lane sign in 100% of the testing conditions.

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August 11th, 2017: Sorry if Lord of the Rings isn't actually about lording rings over people!! I'm PRETTY SURE it is though – Ryan

Carl Packman on Twitter has described my vision of socialism as “entrepreneurial Marxism.” I like that. Entrepreneurial Marxism is necessary, roughly compatible with Marx, and feasible.

Let’s start with the necessary. Here, we Marxists have a paradox. On the one hand, Marx thought that socialism required material abundance: it was the solution to Keynes’ problem (pdf) of what to do with our leisure time. As G.A.Cohen put it:

[Marx] thought that anything short of an abundance so complete that it removes all major conflicts of interests would guarantee continued social strife, "a struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business". It was because he was so uncompromisingly pessimistic about the social consequences of anything less than limitless abundance that Marx needed to be so optimistic about the possibility of that abundance (Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality, p10-11)

He thought capitalism would deliver such abundance: “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed.”

This might, however, be too optimistic. Over the last ten years, productivity has almost stagnated – something we’ve not seen (except briefly in the 1880s) since the start of the industrial revolution. This suggests we’ll need a form of post-capitalism which delivers economic growth. Now, I’ll concede that a centrally planned economy might be good at generating growth in the sense of more of the same; it can deliver more pig-iron. But this isn’t the sort of growth we need now.  As Gilles Saint-Paul points out (pdf), growth must come from an increased variety of products. Centrally planned economies are lousy at this. Decentralized entrepreneurship is better.

And such entrepreneurship isn’t wholly incompatible with Marx. To Marx, it is our human nature to work and produce:

In creating a world of objects by his personal activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.)

It’s for this reason, largely, that he condemned capitalism. Capitalism, he thought, forced us to do meaningless drudge work under the domination of others, and thus alienated us from both our nature and each other. It’s for this reason that Jon Elster has written: “Self-realization through creative work is the essence of Marx’s communism.” (Making Sense of Marx, p521.)

It’s likely that, for some at least, this self-realization will take the form of working under one’s own steam. In fact, Marx saw this:

A being does not regard himself as independent unless he is his own master, and he is only his own master when he owes his existence to himself. (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, quoted by Erich Fromm)

Marxists have traditionally interpreted this as to mean that collective self-mastery is necessary, through democratic control of the means of production. That’s true enough. For some people, though, it might mean individual own-mastery – working for oneself.

But wouldn’t this entail the very exploitation of others that Marx hated?

Maybe not so much. Even under capitalism, the profits (and hence exploitation) from innovative activity are small. And the prospects for exploitation under post-capitalism might be less, to the extent that intellectual property laws would be less friendly to incumbents and because fulfilling work elsewhere would make it hard for entrepreneurs to attract labour without offering something decent.

But wouldn’t this kill off innovation and entrepreneurship? Not necessarily, and not simply because I suspect a lot of such activity arises from intrinsic motives such as the urge to create things and solve problems. It’s also because there’ll be offsetting stimuli to entrepreneurship. One is that higher aggregate demand would close the innovations gap. Another is that post-capitalism would ensure a high supply of finance, for example via a state investment bank. And a third is that lower rewards to rent-seeking would force some bosses out of cushy monopolies and bureaucracies and into entrepreneurship.

Of course, I appreciate that all this will be sneered at from both sides – from Marxists claiming (with some justification) that I’m being unfaithful to Marx, and from some rightists who can’t get their tiny minds around the possibility that there are economic models other than capitalism and central planning. But I don’t give a shit.

I’ve come to think that Twain was wrong. The error here for misanthropic, disillusioned, cynical old Mark Twain was that he was not cynical enough.

A brief history of quantum alternatives.

Tolkien's map and the messed-up mountains of Middle-Earth.

Meet ME Where I'm At 
by Cindy Best and Joyce Shor Johnson
Published by Future Horizons

Meet me where I'm at is a very unusual book. It's half picture book and half workbook and I don't mean, the first few pages are one and the rest are the other.  This book seamlessly blends both at the same time.

The general idea of this book is to get children with special needs to let others around them know exactly "where they are at".

Instead of expecting children with special needs to stretch to meet their parents, teachers and friends on levels where they can't function well, this book aims to encourage them to advocate for themselves and ask others to meet them at their own level.

It's a very interesting concept which I've seen in adult work before. This is the first time I've seen this agenda come though in a book aimed at kids - and it's a very welcome move.

The main pages in "Meet Me Where I'm At" follow a standard template of;



Just because I do (some undesirable behavior) doesn't mean that I don't do  (desired behavior) .

meet me where I'm at 

When I'm feeling (specific emotion or mood)

I sometimes need to do (specific type of response)

The book covers topics such as not meeting the teacher's gaze when they talk, hitting, not writing things down, interrupting, leaving loud classrooms, being empathetic and resisting change.

Each of these sections has areas where the child is encouraged to describe the things that work for them. It's a great self-advocacy starter. 

It concludes with a reminder that all people are different and that everyone has value.

Meet Me Where I'm At by Cindy Best and Joyce Shor Johnson is published by Future Horizons and is available in paperback from Amazon, Booktopia and GoodReads. There's also a facebook page where you can talk about the book and make suggestions for further topics.

Honesty Clause; I was provided with a copy of this book free of charge for review purposes.

It’s become a cliché that the Tories want to return to the 1950s, before the age of mass migration and our entanglement with the EU. These, however, are not the only examples of Tories discomfort with the modern world. Tom Welsh says the Tory party is threatened by the large number of university graduates, and Amber Rudd seems befuddled by the internet.

This poses the question: why are the Tories so unhappy with the 21^st century?

It hasn’t always been so. Cameron and Osborne, despite being lamentably incompetent, at least seemed comfortable in today’s world – and not just financially. And whilst Thatcher spoke of Victorian values, her project was also one of modernizing the economy, at least by her own lights. Toryism has not always been a nostalgic yearning for the past.

In fact, to we relics of the 1980s, there’s something especially paradoxical about the ascendancy of reaction among Tories. I remember Cold Warriors celebrating Karl Popper’s vision of an open society: Thatcher called The Open Society and its Enemies a “marvellous book.” In some respects, though, we now have such an open society: migration; gender fluidity; less deference; and peer-to-peer communication which bypasses traditional hierarchies. And many Tories hate it.

Why? Here are two theories.

First, the 21^st century hasn’t delivered what the Tories hoped. They had hoped that the defeat of trades unions, privatization, cuts to top taxes, deregulation and fiscal austerity would unleash a dynamic, productive economy. It hasn’t.

This means we need to rethink the relationship between markets, hierarchies and the state – which means, of course, rethinking not just social democracy but Toryism too. May’s talk of the need for an industrial strategy was a dim recognition of this. But the Tories (perhaps temporarily, perhaps not) lack the intellectual resources for this task. Thatcher could invoke Friedman, Hayek, Popper and the architects of public choice theory. Who has May got?

I suspect one reason for the popularity of Brexit on the right is that, having vanquished unions and red tape, the EU is pretty much the only scapegoat they have left for the UK’s disappointing economic performance.

Secondly, and perhaps relatedly, the Tory base is breaking up.

One aspect of this is that the always uneasy coalition between business and social conservatives looks less tenable today than ever: the Brexit supported by old reactionaries is against the interest of finance and much of business. Today's Tories thus have a more precarious client base.

A second aspect is that the decline of property ownership and degradation of erstwhile good jobs has eroded one source of support for the Tories. In the 80s, young urban professionals (yuppies) were Thatcherites. Their equivalents today are Corbynistas.

I know I might well be guilty of wishful thinking in saying this. But it could be that the Tories are so unhappy with the 21^st century simply because it offers them nothing but the refutation of their beliefs and decline in their power.  

YouGov Aug 1 2017 poll

The contradiction can’t continue

While all the focus has been on the leadership machinations within the Conservative Party Labour is getting a free ride at the moment.

One things that Theresa May has got right is that her position is very much in line with the party support base as the the latest YouGov BREXIT tracker shows.

Corbyn’s view on the biggest issue of all is not shared by his voters or, as recent polling has shown, the party’s membership.

Once the post GE2017 red team celebrations have calmed this is going to become increasingly apparent. The coming parliamentary session is going to be dominated by the negotiations and the repeal repeal that there will come a time surely where Corbyn’s ambivalence will become a big issue.

Just because Corbyn has got away with being out of line so far doesn’t mean it will continue.

In the election campaign Labour was never subject to proper scrutiny because the widespread assumption was that the party was irrelevant. The Tories were going to be returned with a big majority.

As the BES polling showed opposition to Brexit was a big driver of the Labour vote.

PaddyPower have a market on which of May and Corbyn will quit first. The former is 1/12 while Corbyn is 6/1. He could be the value bet.

Mike Smithson

Follow @MSmithsonPB

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I think this is pretty significant and rather hopeful.

First, of course the first side to state a number will end up having to move towards the other side. The consensus around Brussels is that the final figure is likely to be €60bn, but allowing the €100bn to unofficially circulate was smart tactics. If the UK's opening offer is €40bn (rather than zero, as it was previously), we will likely reach a figure that both can live with in the end. (Probably nearer the €60bn because the EU has prepared better.)

Second, if the UK line is now that they will only pay if they get a trade deal, that is not really very far from the EU line that they can only have a trade deal if they pay.

Third, of course it is not true that the EU is refusing to talk about trade until it has "reached a settlement" on the three priority issues (money, citizens' rights and the Irish border). The criterion is that the negotiations must make "sufficient progress", a much weaker test; this is because the EU27 need to be satisfied that the British are negotiating in good faith, and at present there is considerable doubt about that.

It looks from here as if the UK government is presenting the EU's position as much more hardline than it really is, and a gullible press is uncritically accepting this line, thus enabling the British to present their inevitable caving in to the EU's real conditions, when it comes in due course, as a famous diplomatic victory.

This is all relatively good news, in that the chances of a catastrophic hard Brexit are being reduced and we are left the the merely awful spectacle of Brexit with some form of trade deal. But the work seems to have barely started on this in Whitehall.

Tom Porter, "New York Times cross word: NRA spokeswoman denies bizarre threat to 'fist' the publication", Newsweek 8/5/2017:

A National Rifle Association spokeswoman in a bizarre dispute denied that she threatened to "fist" the New York Times in a video atacking [sic] the publication.

In a video released Thursday entitled “Dana Loesch: We’re Coming For You New York Times,” former conservative radio host Loesch staring straight to camera accuses the publication of spreading "fake news," and promoting  “constant protection of your democrat overlords.”

However one section containing an unclear short f-word prompted debate on Twitter. 

“We’re going to [unclear] the New York Times and find out just what deep rich means to this old gray hag, this untrustworthy dishonest rag that has subsisted on the welfare of mediocrity for one two three more decades,” Loesch said. “We’re going to laser focus on your so-called honest pursuit of truth. In short we’re coming for you.”

You can watch the whole thing here. This is the relevant passage:

And the crucial segment:

As expected in contemporary American English, the /k/ or /t/ of fisk or fist is unreleased, and merges acoustically as well as articulatorily with a stop-like allophone of the initial /ð/ of the following word the. In the version of the spectrogram below, I've indicated the merged stop gap with a red double-headed arrow. There's a bit of spectral energy around 2000 Hz at the end of the /s/ frication — marked with a blue oval below — that might be an indication of velarity, but frankly I think the recording is completely ambiguous as to whether Ms. Loesch said "fisk" or "fist":

I'm confident that Ms. Loesch meant to say "fisk". But apparently not everyone is as conversant with 2003-era blogging lingo as they are with terminology for extreme sexual practices.  I have some personal experience that leads me to sympathize with Ms. Loesch on this lexicographical point: In January of 2004, I proposed "fisking" as a candidate for the American Dialect Society's 2003 Word of the Year, and was reminded that not everyone has the same linguistic experience:

One thing that surprised me at the ADS "Word of the Year" nominations session was that very few of the participants had ever heard of the term fisking. I nominated it but there was no uptake. Only one of the 30 or so people in the room indicated any familiarity with the word at all, and that was Grant Barrett, the webmaster of the ADS site. He argued that the word is limited to a small circle of ("like 23") warbloggers, who use it in a self-conscious way intended to spread it, rather than as a natural part of their vocabulary, and that it was unlikely to spread outside that narrow group or even to last as an item of subculture vocabulary. Given that no one else in the room seemed even to have heard of the word, I let it drop. ["ADS Word Of The Year is Metrosexual", 1/10/2004]

There's been quite a bit of twitter and media fuss about the "We're coming for you" video — "Fist Or Fisk? NRA’s Bizarre Ad Has A Confusing Message For New York Times"; "Dana Loesch shoots down journalists who misheard her when she said NRA wants to 'Fisk' the New York Times"; "'Fisk' is currently one of Dictionary.com’s most searched words thanks to an NRA video threatening The New York Times"; "Apparently, the NRA Does Not Want to 'Fist' the NYT, but It's Still 'Coming for' the NYT"; "“We’re going to ???? the New York Times”"

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Dana just tweeted at me saying she said "FISK" not Fist" – but I have to note the NRA tweet included #ClenchedFistOfTruth as a hashtag. https://t.co/DDJw2ydlZS

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) August 4, 2017

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Dana Loesch fans pretending that they had heard of the word fisk before like 5 minutes ago. pic.twitter.com/LUkPhi1cYq

— MeltLikeButta (@jwbutta) August 4, 2017

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"Fisk. Now that's a word I've not heard in a long time. A long, long time." pic.twitter.com/vCC5UQkj3D

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) August 4, 2017

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FWIW, "fisk" was a fairly current blogging term abt a dozen years ago. And @nra has used #clenchedfistoftruth as a hashtag prior to …

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 4, 2017

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So maybe fisk will now be able to make the transition out of lexicographical purgatory? We can only hope.

Get ready for ambushes and unexpected Commons defeats

For me the biggest UK political news this week has been the FT’s report that the Tories have failed to reach agreement with Labour at Westminster on MP pairing. This is the long standing practice that allows government MPs to miss a Parliamentary votes because an opposition one agrees not to take part as well.

For ministers the ability not to have to be in the Palace of Westminster during a specific period can be critical in order for them to carry out their jobs. Think of those who have to be overseas or, say, get stuck in Belfast because of thick fog at Heathrow.

I must be one of the few people still writing about politics now who were journalists during the 1974-1979 parliament. This was the one when under Wilson and then Callaghan’s LAB quickly lost its majority. Then I was a young man at BBC news doing regular stints at Westminster and watched in amazement at the mechanisms required just to get simple procedural motions through.

Large numbers of opposition MPs, for instance, would appear absent from Westminster giving the government whips confidence to allow some their individual MPs not to be there. Then suddenly, just minutes before the vote, scores of them would flock back, by which time it was too late for the whips to round up the votes to match it and the government faced a defeat.

That looks set to happen time and time again.

Getting the government’s business through is going to be very challenging and Labour, still flushed with what they see as a success in their part depriving TMay’s of her majority, are going look for every opportunity to make life difficult.

The absence of a pairing agreement is stage one.

Mike Smithson

Follow @MSmithsonPB

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This next weekend Wonder Woman is very likely to crack the $400 million mark at the  domestic box office, which in itself is a significant feat (only 26 other films in the history of cinema have managed it) but is particular good news for the Warner Bros. studio and its DC universe of films, after the critical failures of the two most recent DC films, Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad, both of which Wonder Woman has now outgrossed…

… Well, sort of. Wonder Woman is the undisputed champ of the three films in the domestic box office arena, but in the global arena, right now (and, given the late date of Wonder Woman’s theatrical run at this point, probably ultimately), Wonder Woman’s overall box office performance is right in line with BvS and Suicide Squad, and both of those films have outperformed WW’s box office in key areas. BvS has a larger global gross ($873 million to $790 million), and Suicide Squad has a larger foreign box office ($420 million to $393 million). At this point, two months since release, it’s possible but unlikely WW might catch up with those numbers (it’ll be easier for the film to pass Suicide’s foreign BO than BvS‘ global). But when all the theatrical grosses are tallied, again, Wonder Woman’s box office performance is likely to be right in line with its DC siblings’ performance.

Given that Wonder Woman’s box office overall is not substantially different than that of BvS or Suicide Squad, why is it being hailed as the savior of the DC universe film franchise? There are a few reasons. One, both BvS and Suicide were critical (if not financial) flops, dark and gritty and depressing slogs that no one really seemed to like all that much, even if the films did in fact pack people into theaters — $330 million and $325 million in domestic grosses are excellent returns. Wonder Woman, on the other hand, was a critical success — which was useful for itself but also deemed important for the future of the DC franchise as a whole. Three critical flops would (presumably) have made it difficult to sell the Avengers-like Justice League film that’s next on the slate.

Two, despite global box office being the primary engine for Hollywood these days, domestic (i.e., US and Canada) box office is still hugely influential in terms of perception. As an example, this summer’s The Mummy is widely considered to be a flop despite the fact that worldwide it’s grossed $400 million to date. Had The Mummy done $200 million domestically and $200 million foreign, it wouldn’t be seen as a flop; if it had done $300 million domestically and $100 million in foreign sales, it’d be one of the summer’s winners. Wonder Woman outgrossed its DC siblings here at home, and “here at home” optics still matter.

Three, the financials of Wonder Woman are probably more advantageous to Warner Bros than BvS or Suicide. First, it was a cheaper film to produce: $125 million, where BvS was twice that, and Suicide was $150 million. Second, Warner (generally) gets to keep more of the money a film grosses domestically than internationally, where the grosses have to be shared with distributing partners and are otherwise divvied up in less advantageous ways.

Finally, because Wonder Woman is a woman-centered superhero film with a woman director, and the common wisdom was that the film outperformed financial expectations. Why this bias persists is a long discussion for another time (it’s worth noting that only one other film has outgrossed Wonder Woman domestically so far this year, and that’s Beauty and the Beast, another woman-focused film, and the one film remaining on the theatrical schedule this year that will outgross it will be The Last Jedi, which also has a woman as the protagonist), but it’s there.

It’s worth pointing out that of the four reasons I’ve given here, three of them are explicitly perceptual, rather than about the financial bottom line, and the one that’s about the financial bottom line is probably the one least publically discussed out of all of them. The perceptual issues aren’t fake issues (I’ll explain why further down) but I think it’s worth pointing out that, perception aside, Warner Bros’ DC universe films from BvS onward are doing just fine financially, with an average box office of $802 million globally between them, and an average domestic gross of $350 million. Which, incidentally, is higher than the average domestic and worldwide gross of the (to date) 16 Marvel cinematic universe movies, which are $306 million and $776 million, respectively.

Which leads me to think a couple of things. The first is that generally film quality doesn’t mean all that much for a superhero film’s box office as long as it has a) brand name recognition and b) some really excellent marketing behind it. Two thirds of the DC films get knocked for being crap, but those two films also outgrossed ten of the sixteen Marvel films both domestically and worldwide, all of which have better critical reputations than BvS or Suicide.

Next up, even if Wonder Woman had been a critical flop, I think it’s an open question as to whether that would have had a major negative impact on the financial performance of Justice League, the next DC film in the release barrel. To be clear, I think Wonder Woman’s critical and perceptual superiority to BvS and Suicide is beneficial — it now means JL is likely to get to or even surpass $1 billion in worldwide grosses (and get more than $400 million domestically). But I suspect that had Wonder Woman not been a perceptual and critical smash, JL would still end up in the same $750 million-to-$850 million range the other DC films have managed to this point. These are essentially fool-proof movies, which all things considered, has been a very good thing for Warners, indeed.

This means I also suspect that even if Wonder Woman had not been a critical success, it still would have done reasonably well at the box office: In the $250 million-to-$300 million range domestically and double that globally. And again that’s down to familiarity and marketing and the long pent-up desire to have a woman superhero head up a movie, and especially Wonder Woman, the best-known woman superhero. The critical/perceptual box office premium here is significant — roughly 25% of the box office gross — and nothing to discount. But recent box office successes in the form of Beauty and the Beast, The Force Awakens and Rogue One shows us that established franchises (Star Wars and Disney live action remakes, respectively) don’t automatically take a financial penalty for having women in the lead role (I’m not even bringing up Twilight or Hunger Games here, which established themselves in the lit world before jumping over to film). Wonder Woman, I think, would have been perfectly financially successful even if it had only been critically received only marginally better than BvS or Suicide Squad.

The real issue here, to my mind, is how there’s still any hesitancy to front women characters in franchises, superhero or otherwise. There’s pretty clearly no significant financial penalty for doing so if your franchise is already up and running and your marketing is focused; honestly, at this point there’s only upside, if you manage to make the film better than its male-focused franchise siblings. That upside is perceptual in the short run, as it largely was here with Wonder Woman. But in the long run it’s likely going to add to your franchise financial bottom line. In this case, Justice League will almost benefit from Wonder Woman’s perceptual halo.

And further out than that — well. It will be interesting to see which film will have the bigger opening weekend: The next Batman, or the next Wonder Woman. I do know which one I am more interested in seeing right now.

Wednesday

As a fluffy elephant, I’ve noticed you monkeys are in the habit of being bang-up sure things are going to turn out well. Even when they’re not.

It’s called OPTIMISM BIAS.

It CAN be useful. Having evolved the ability to imagine the FUTURE, you’d all be plunged into clinical depression without it.

(And I’m not making this up: people with low optimism bias tend to suffer with depression.)

But it also leads to assuming that WARNING SIGNS don’t apply to you:

Government Health Warning – I won’t get cancer.
Speed limits – I’m a safe driver!
Brexit cliff-edge ahead – Project Fear!!!!


So, a year into this Brexit shambles, and with the government making an art form of “masterly inactivity”, leaving things till WAY after the last minute, some Quitlings* are taking “nothing is happening” as a SIGN that really – really! – things are working out OK after all.

(*© @HickeyWriter)

This, as they say, is FINE.

originally from K.C. Green’s Gunshow comic #648

The leading lights (in the moth to flame sense) of the Vote Leave campaign are of necessity becoming adept at PIVOTING their arguments.

“a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way” (farrage) was swiftly transformed into “the will of the people”.

“No one is talking about leaving the Single Market” (hannan) has become “Everyone knew we would leave the Single Market”.

And now “We will be better off” is being rebranded as “We all knew there would be a period of adjustment” with a view to ending up at “Everyone accepted there was a price worth paying” (especially since we expect our kids to be paying it long after we’re gone).

This is particularly evident with this YouGov polling in the Indepretendent

“71 per cent of over-65s would accept a big economic hit – and half are willing for family members to lose their jobs”

That is – notice – RETIRED Quitlings saying they “accept” one of their family who is still working to PAY FOR THEIR BADWORD can lose their job to satisfy their ideological fix.

Nice.

But in spite of being thrown under the bus by Generation Baby Boom(and Bust)er, we still see responses of DENIAL from people who are just too OPTIMISTIC to see the warning signs.

Millie says: “So far there has not been any damage, quite the opposite.”

Ross adds: “Who says the economy will be ruined?? I'm not seeing a problem.”

It’s the sort of thing that might provoke an EPIC RANT… oh look, here’s Daddy Richard:

No damage? Not noticed anything?

Do you notice your electricity price?

British Gas are putting up prices by 12%. You can link that directly to the fall in the £, because energy is priced in $ so our costs have shot up.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40787555

Do you notice your food?

Those “great” trade deals on the table – well, it appears accepting American food hygiene standards means washing chicken in bleach because they don’t have the animal welfare standards that Europe does, and just try to kill all the bugs at the end of the process.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4742712/Why-chickens-washed-chlorine.html

Do you notice your holidays?

People going on holiday seeing four hour delays to enter Europe. That’s just a taster for what happens when we close our borders. That “taking back control” goes both ways.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4748182/EU-border-checks-leave-UK-tourists-queuing-FOUR-hours.html

Do you notice the big picture?

Growth is down to a puny 0.3% - we’ve gone from the strongest economy in Europe to the weakest. So much for Europe “holding Britain back”.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40726833

Thousands maybe tens of thousands of jobs going from the city to Paris and Frankfurt. Oh they’re only bankers. But highly paid bankers who contribute a lot in taxes to paying for our services.
https://www.neweurope.eu/article/negotiations-not-banks-leaving-london/
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-latest-jobs-jp-morgan-us-bank-moving-staff-eu-a7836366.html

The Chancellor has a £25 billion hole in his budget. (says independent IFS report) That’s bigger than £350 million a week… no sign of that for the NHS yet either by the way.
http://news.sky.com/story/hammond-facing-25bn-budget-black-hole-ifs-study-10649553

Do you notice the NHS is in crisis?

40,000 shortfall in numbers of nurses because – surprise – the nurses from Europe took those people saying “go home” seriously.
http://metro.co.uk/2017/06/12/nhs-facing-major-crisis-after-brexit-leaves-hospitals-40000-nurses-short-6704236/

Do you notice that no one knows how to solve the problem of the border with Ireland?

Because it’s impossible. You simply cannot have a hard border with the EU and soft border with the Republic at the same time because the Iris border IS the EU border.
https://www.irishcentral.com/homepage/brexit-border-battle-about-to-change-irish-british-relationship-forever

Expecting the Irish to implement expensive and dubious electronic tracking to make it easy for us to leave, or worse telling the Irish that we will put British customs points in their ports (as though there hasn’t been 300+ years of conflict over exactly that sort of behaviour) is not approaching a solution. It’s making things worse.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-40750999

Speaking as someone who was in Manchester when the Arndale was blown up AND in Canary Wharf the day THAT was blown up, I’d really like us not to mess up the peace process.

Did you notice that our power and influence in the world has evaporated?

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/uk-defeated-in-united-nations-vote-on-ownership-of-chagos-islands-a3571901.html
We lost that vote because the EU members who we have just rebuffed all abstained.

Did you notice Cornwall got shafted?

Don’t count on those promises that subsidies would be replaced like-for-like. Leave-voting Cornwall was getting £60 million in EU regional development fund money. They asked the government to guarantee it would be replaced. The government just flat refused to say that they’d be making sure regions didn’t lose out when we leave Europe.

George Osbourne was promising money to Cornwall in his last budget saying “when the South West votes blue, their voice is heard”. Maybe not so much these days.

And if they’ll do that to Cornwall…

Did you notice that the government just FORGOT Gibraltar?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4370054/Spain-handed-right-BLOCK-Gibraltar-Brexit-deal.html


And last, do you notice anyone, anyone at all taking charge?

http://news.sky.com/story/cabinet-rift-over-free-movement-deal-post-brexit-10967163

We’ve wasted a year, had a pointless general election that left the country even more confused and divided. And the Prime Minister’s gone on a walking holiday – or taken a hike – while the Cabinet are all fighting each other.

This is a total disaster. An utter dog’s breakfast of a Brexit.

REALLY what is your excuse for not noticing?

The answer to Daddy’s question is these people are EMOTIONALLY invested in their vote.

FACTS that say this was a BAD CHOICE are personally HURTFUL.

Nearly HALF of Leave voters say that DO NOT WANT to pay a price for leaving.

Offer them something for nothing; give them nothing for something

The only way to square that circle is to avoid the evidence altogether.

So they protect themselves from getting hurt by NOT NOTICING.

It’s an EXPLANATION. But not an EXCUSE.

Democracy – REAL Democracy – requires active and, more importantly, INFORMED participation.

But people don't WANT to be informed. As we've seen, people don't LIKE facts when the facts are painful. So they get NEW facts that agree with their decisions. That's why most people are so widlly MISinformed about Europe and the EU.

You would think journalism as a profession would seek to correct this, wouldn't you

That's why the referendum we were given was a SHAM, bodged together as a fix-all for the Conservatory Party by Mr Balloon, and now taken as an excuse to escalate her personal grudge against the European Court of Justice by Mrs Mayhem.

If we are going to fix this – and MY optimism bias says we CAN fix this – we are going to need to turn our arguments around, show people that the BETTER Way is now clearly to make up with Europe, retake our place IN the community with our FRIENDS.

We need to win the OPTIMISM and then we will WIN.

The Times

Why the SNP could be in trouble

There’s a fascinating analysis in the Times by James Kanagasooriam of Populus of what would happen in Scotland’s 59 seats if the hree main parties there CON, LAB and the SNP each secured 30% of the vote. The projected seat totals are in the chart.

The balance of the 59 Scottish seats would go to the LDs which would once again return to its historical position as the third party st Westminster.

The reason is, of course, the first past the post voting system which favours those with large variations in support in different seats and penalises those parties whose support is more evenly spread.

Kanagasooriam notes:

“..Labour’s “youthquake” delivered surprising levels of support for the party. This was especially true in Glasgow and Edinburgh; particularly when comparing the Labour 2017 general election performance (27 per cent) with the Scottish parliament election the previous year (19 per cent on the constituency vote). It’s clear that younger voters, and those more inclined to want an independent Scotland defected to Labour in large numbers during the general election campaign. The Tory surge was, to a degree, expected. The return of Scottish Labour less so. Both together lead to losses that SNP politicians and advisers could scarcely believe on election night.

… a large number of 2015 SNP supporters simply stayed at home this year. Areas with the highest SNP vote share in 2015’s general election experienced the biggest decline in turnout in 2017…”

Back at GE2015, on 26 months ago the SNP won 56 of the 59 seats north of the border which was reduced to 35 at GE2017. Given the volatility of UK politics big changes can happen in short period as we saw with UKIP between 2015 and June 8th.

With so many rich picking apparently available in Scotland with the SNP’s decline the UK parties, as I was suggesting last week, should select leaders who are Scottish. LAB under Gordon Brown increased its Scottish vote share at GE2010 while falling back sharply elsewhere.

Mike Smithson

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My recent move has already paid off in terms of increased access to the Bay Area intellectual milieu, by which I mean wacky outlandish hypotheses about completely random stuff. The other day a few people (including Ben Hoffman of Compass Rose) tried to convince me that Pharaoh Djoser was the inspiration for the god Osiris and the Biblical Joseph. This sort of thing is relevant to my interests, so I spent way too long looking into it and figured I ought to write down what I found.

The short summary is that the connection between Djoser and Osiris is probably meaningless, but there’s a very small chance there might be some tiny distant scrap of a connection to Joseph.

Djoser, who ruled Egypt around 2680 BC, was a pretty impressive guy. Egypt had been unified by one of his predecessors a few generations before, but they’d let it get un-unified again, and Djoser’s father was the one who reunified it. Djoser inherited a kingdom of newfound peace and plenty – and made the most of it, starting lots of impressive infrastructure and religious projects. His chief minister Imhotep was famous in his own right as a polymath who invented medicine and engineering (he may also have been the first person to use columns in architecture). He was later deified for his accomplishments. Djoser and Imhotep cooperated to build the first pyramid, the Step Pyramid at Saqqara.

Osiris was a legendary god whose worship was first recorded around 2400 BC. The legends say he was a wise and benevolent Pharaoh of Egypt in some unspecified distant past before being killed by his brother Set. One thing led to another, and he eventually ended up as the god of death and resurrection and the underworld. Scholars have long debated the exact origins of the Osiris cult, and tend to attribute it to some historical memory of something or other but disagree viciously over the details.

The argument I heard for Djoser inspiring Osiris hinges on a couple of points (there may be others I didn’t get). First, the times sort of match up – this legend of the wise king Osiris first appears just a century or two after Djoser died. second, Djoser was a big fan of an Egyptian symbol called the ‘djed’, a weird column shape thing. Djoser included djeds all over the step pyramid he and Imhotep built together, and may have kind of had an obsession with the thing (and why shouldn’t he? – if I helped invent the column, I’d talk about it a lot too). Meanwhile, the djed is traditionally considered the symbol of the Egyptian god Osiris. And third, if you’re going to deify a pharaoh into the god of death and resurrection, the beloved and powerful ruler who invented the first pyramid sounds like a pretty good candidate.

I think this argument is probably wrong. For one thing, although nobody can prove Osiris existed before the death of Djoser, everybody suspects that he did. In The Origins Of Osiris And His Cult, Egyptologist John Griffiths appeals to some early inscriptions that might name Osiris, and concludes that

There is a strong likelihood that the cult of Osiris began in or before the First Dynasty in connection with the royal funerals at Abydos, [although] archaeological evidence hitherto does not tangibly date the cult ot an era before the Fifth Dynasty

A common consensus is that he began as a local deity of the city of Busiris and (as mentioned above) the necropolis at Abydos. Djoser has no connection to either city, and in fact was the first king not to be buried at Abydos. His building a pyramid is less impressive than it sounds; all the Egyptian rulers were into building big tombs, and he just took it to the next level.

Djoser liked djeds, but so djid lots of Egyptians. They were popular long before Djoser and remained popular long after him; among their many fans may have been such pharaohs as eg Djedkara, Djedkheperu, Djedkherura, and Djedhotepre. The djed started out as a general fertility symbol, later became a symbol of the god Ptah, and only became fully associated with Osiris a thousand years after Djoser’s djeath. This makes it hard to argue Osiris got associated with the djed because of some cultural memory of Djoser.

This is kind of weak evidence against the theory – a speculation that Osiris is older than he looks, a little bit of confusion around when Osiris became associated with his sacred symbol. But it was a weak theory to begin with, so weak counterevidence convinces me.

So let’s get to the more interesting claim – that Djoser inspired the Biblical Joseph.

This comes from a monument called the Famine Stele, written two thousand years after Djoser’s death but telling a legend that had grown up around him. According to the stele, in the time of Djoser there were seven years of famine. Djoser asks his chief minister Imhotep for help. Imhotep investigates and finds that the problem is related to the god Khnum. He prays to Khnum and offers to worship him better, and Khnum appears to him in a dream and says that okay, he’ll make the crops grow again. Djoser and Imhotep repair Khnum’s temple, the famine ends, and everyone lives happily ever after.

The parallels to the Joseph story are pretty apparent. A seven year long famine. A Pharaoh who begs his chief minister to do something about it. A dream that provides the solution. Sure, the crocodile-and/or-ram-headed god Khnum gets left out of the Biblical account, but that sounds like just the sort of thing the Hebrews would conveniently forget.

There are some other differences, of course. The Joseph story involves seven years of plenty before the famine; the Imhotep story doesn’t. Joseph gains his chief ministerial position because of the famine incident; Imhotep is already in charge when the famine begins. God gives Joseph a rational planning strategy; Imhotep uses divine intervention directly. But isn’t there still a suspicious core of similarity here?

Creationists think so. They get really excited about this connection since it seems to link the Bible to a verified historical event (for values of “verified” equal to “someone made a stele about it two thousand years later, and in fact after the Bible itself was written”). Back during the presidential campaign, Ben Carson got soundly mocked for saying the pyramids were silos for storing grain. Everyone attributed this to his warped fundamentalist Christian view of history, but nobody thought to ask why fundamentalist Christians seized on this falsehood in particular. The answer is: if the pyramids were grain silos, then the link between Joseph (whom the Bible says built grain silos) and Imhotep (whom Egyptian records say built pyramids) becomes even more compelling.

Awkwardly for the creationists, this doesn’t even match their own hokey Biblical history. There are various different Biblical chronologies, but they mostly date Joseph around 1900 – 2000 BC – too late to be Imhotep, who lived closer to 2600. Also, don’t tell anyone, but the Bible is probably false.

Atheists have a better option available – they can claim that the Egyptian legend of Imhotep inspired the Israelite legend of Joseph. This is the strategy taken by a Ha’aretz article, which first roundly mocks any identification of Imhotep with Joseph, saying that this makes no sense and is totally stupid, and then adds:

There is a consensus among the majority of biblical scholars that the Joseph story dates, at the earliest, to the 7th century BCE, namely 2700 years ago. Many Judahites were residing in the Nile Delta at the time, as proven among other things, by the existence of a replica of the Jewish First Temple in Jerusalem on the island of Elephantine. It seems these Judahites may have been behind the adoption of the Imhotep tale as an Israelite story.

It doesn’t cite which scholars it’s talking about, or explain why they suddenly backtracked from their “there is no connection between Joseph and Imhotep shut up you morons”, but the overall point seems pretty plausible. Remember, the 7th century would have been just a few centuries before the Famine Stele was written, and the Djoser/Imhotep famine legend might have been popular in Egypt around this time. It sounds just barely possible that some Jews might have rewritten it with an Israelite protagonist the same way a bunch of pagan goddesses and even the Buddha ended up as Christian saints.

(or, for that matter, the Egyptians could have rewritten the Bible story with an Egyptian protagonist, although it seems less likely for cultural transmission to go that direction given the two cultures’ relative sizes.)

Or maybe none of that happened. Wikipedia’s article on the Famine Stele points out that a seven-year famine was a weirdly common motif all across the Ancient Near East, citing eg the Epic of Gilgamesh:

Anu said to great Ishtar, ‘If I do what you desire there will be seven years of drought throughout Uruk when corn will be seedless husks. Have you saved grain enough for the people and grass for the cattle? Ishtar replied. ‘I have saved grain for the people, grass for the cattle; for seven years o£ seedless husks, there is grain and there is grass enough.’

I don’t know if all of this derives from the same proto-Near-Eastern source, or whether seven year famines are just sort of a natural kind (compare all the different cultures that have something like “may your reign last a thousand years!”). But it warns us against leaping into accepting this too quickly. This is especially true in the context of atheists’ haste to believe things like “Christ is just a retelling of the Osiris myth!” or “What if Moses was really just Akhenaten” that later turn out to not really make that much sense. Part of the lesson I wanted to teach with Unsong is that this sort of thing is too easy, and therefore we need to increase our guard. I don’t know how to weight this, but maybe say there’s like a 30% chance

As a perfect example, here’s a completely insane work of Biblical apologetics claiming that a totally different pharaoh associated with djeds corresponded to the Biblical Joseph.

June Foray died this morning, just 54 days shy of what would have been her 100th birthday. This was not unexpected. I saw her just six weeks ago and she was very small and very frail and just about ready to go. Her sister had died not long before and her brother-in-law died shortly after that visit.

She was, of course, the premier female voice talent of her era. I don't know who the runner-up was but whoever it was, she was in a distant second in terms of hours logged voicing cartoons and commercials, dubbing movies, doing narration, appearing on radio shows and records…even providing the voice for talking dolls. A few years ago when Earl Kress and I assisted her with her autobiography, we foolishly thought we could whip up a near-complete list of everything she'd done. Not in this world possible. I know more of June's credits than most people and I'd be surprised if I know 10% of it.

She was Rocky the Flying Squirrel. She was Natasha Fatale. She was Nell Fenwick. She was Jokey Smurf. She was Cindy Lou Who. She was Granny, owner of Tweety. She was Witch Hazel. She was Chatty Cathy. She was thousands of others.

Most of all, she was June Foray, a talented workaholic who for decades, drove into Hollywood every weekday early in the morning and went from recording session to recording session until well after dark. Everyone hired her because she was always on time, always professional and what she did was always good. It was her good friend, director Chuck Jones who said, "June Foray is not the female Mel Blanc. Mel Blanc is the male June Foray."

June Foray was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on September 18, 1917. The talent she exhibited at an early age was encouraged by her parents and by age 12, she was appearing on local radio dramas playing children's parts. By 15, she was working steadily on a wide array of series and was playing roles that were often older — much older than she was.

When she finally graduated high school, her family moved to Los Angeles, California so that June could break into national radio, which she did in no time. A short list of the programs on which she was heard would include The Cavalcade of America, A Date With Judy, Sherlock Holmes (with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce), Mayor of the Town (with Lionel Barrymore), The Whistler, The Billie Burke Show, The Rudy Vallee Show, Stars Over Hollywood, The Al Pearce Show, This is My Best (with Orson Welles), Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge, Baby Snooks (with Fanny Brice), Dr. Christian (with Jean Hersholt), I Deal in Crime (with Bill Gargan), Jack Haley’s Sealtest Village Store, Glamour Manor (with Kenny Baker), Phone Again Finnegan (with Stu Erwin), The Charlie McCarthy Show (with Edgar Bergen), The Dick Haymes Show, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Bob Hope Show, The Penny Singleton Show, Presenting Charles Boyer, Tex Williams’s All-Star Western Theater, Red Ryder, The Screen Directors’ Playhouse, The Screen Guild Theatre, The Lux Radio Theater, The Great Gildersleeve, My Favorite Husband (with Lucille Ball), Richard Diamond: Private Detective (with Dick Powell), and Martin Kane, Private Eye. She was a regular on the popular comedy series, Smile Time, which introduced her longtime friend Steve Allen to much of America.

When television came along, June was there with roles on Johnny Carson's first TV series, Carson's Cellar, and dozens of other programs including Andy's Gang, where she worked with the man she'd soon marry, Hobart Donavan. They were married until his death in 1976.

Experts disagree as to when June did her first animation work. She usually cites the role of the cat Lucifer in Disney's Cinderella (1950) and she did much work for Mr. Disney, both in front of the microphone and also posing occasionally as a model to aid the animators. In 1955, she began voicing dozens of characters for Warner Brothers cartoons and then in 1959 came Rocky and His Friends, the show on which she first played Rocky the Flying Squirrel. In fact, she not only voiced the plucky squirrel but most of the female (and even a few male) voices for the many cartoon shows produced by Jay Ward.

June was in fact heard in the cartoons of every major animation producer located on the West Coast for years, including MGM, UPA, Walter Lantz and Hanna-Barbera. She continued to work in animation well into her nineties and in 2012 won her first Emmy Award for her role as Mrs. Cauldron, a witch seen around the world on The Garfield Show. Some claim that victory made her the oldest performer to ever win an Emmy. She was later awarded an honorary one.

Her voice was also heard on hundreds of live-action TV shows, including Baretta, The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., Green Acres and The Twilight Zone. For the latter, she was the voice of "Talky Tina" in a memorable episode that called for June to play the evil side of the popular talking doll she voiced for Mattel Toys, Chatty Cathy. She has been heard (but not seen) in dozens of motion pictures including Jaws, Bells Are Ringing, The Hospital and The Comic.

June was active in the film community, having founded the Los Angeles chapter of Association Internationale du Film d'Animation (the International Animated Film Association) and serving multiple terms on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She was also a wonderful lady and someone I loved dearly. A lot of us are going to spend the rest of our lives bragging unashamedly that we got to know and/or work with June Foray.

The post June Foray, R.I.P. appeared first on News From ME.

One aspect of June Foray's career we haven't touched upon is how she established herself as the go-to gal for voiceovers in the Hollywood community. There were casting directors who could name two dozen men who did that kind of work…and a grand total of one woman — June. One of her competitors was a lady who once told me she was jealous of June until she (the competitor) realized this: June wasn't getting all those jobs because she was sleeping with anyone or bribing anyone or anything of the sort. The folks who did the hiring were going to June for the same reason you'd go to a doctor who had a 100% reliability for curing whatever ailed you.

That was why when I was casting cartoons, I hired her. Well, to be honest, at first I hired her because there was a certain thrill to be working with the lady who'd voiced Rocky and Natasha and Nell and other characters. But I kept hiring her because there was no one better. She understood the scripts and took direction well. She was versatile enough to handle anything I threw at her. She was utterly cooperative and patient when we had delays, and she was early for every single job.

One day, I let a young, wanna-be voice actress sit in on one of our recording sessions to see how it was done. Finding herself in the lobby with the legendary June Foray, she seized on the opportunity to get some advice and asked, "What's the most important thing I need to learn?"

June asked her, "Well, let's say you get a job and your call time is for 11 AM. What time do you get there?"

The lady said, "Oh, I'd make sure I was there at least ten minutes early."

June said, "Well then, you're fifty minutes late. You should be there at 10."

About six weeks ago, I went to visit June in her home and I decided to take someone with me. I thought it might brighten June's mood to be reminded how influential her work has been for several generations of other performers…someone like Julie Nathanson. Here's a photo of Julie in her natural habitat, which is in a studio recording something for someone…

She posted this story to Facebook and with her permission, I'm going to share it with you here…

Six weeks ago, my friend, Mark Evanier took me to meet June Foray. Throughout my career of voicing animation, I had somehow never met June and I'd always wanted to. As is the case for so many of my colleagues, she has been a hero to me. A pioneer, a legend, a brilliant force of creative nature. And a truly influential hero.

Mark knew how much I wanted to tell June what she has meant to me. That her versatility made me feel (nearly) fearless in the booth, and excited to see how far I could stretch. That her humor paved the way for so many other comedic, female voices. That her tenacity, drive, and absolutely pure love for the work of cartoon voice acting made me feel concomitantly inspired and almost normal. That she had shown – time and again – that being more than one thing was beautiful. Or at least, more than one character. The fact that she voiced both Rocky and Natasha on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show always floored me. And today, it reminds me just how many different voices we all have to share. Not just actors. ALL of us. We humans. We are so many things. And that's everything.

Anyway, anyway.

I told June all of this on that hot afternoon six weeks ago, in her living room. I sat, teary-eyed, on a little chair before her…and I thanked her for all she had done. She was so visibly happy and touched. It made my heart sing. I had such a delicious feeling of gratitude for the opportunity this visit had afforded me. I walked around her home, staring at animation cels from decades upon decades of cartoon joy. I thanked her again. And then we left.

And now…she's left.

Mark encouraged me to share this story at our "Business of Cartoon Voices" panel at Comic-Con last weekend. Which I did. Certainly more concisely than I have in the preceding paragraphs.

But this last little part is why I'm sharing it here. I had asked June a burning question that day. And her answer was nothing short of perfect.

ME: How did you know it was okay for a woman to be funny?

(June looked at me like I'd asked her how to make a flying pancake out of turtles.)

JUNE FORAY: It was born in me. A woman can do anything. It was never a question.

That's a pioneer. You just do the thing.

Rest peacefully, June. Thank you for being such a gracious host to me in your home, and to so many memorable characters in our hearts.

The post June and Julie appeared first on News From ME.

One of the appeals of Marvel Comics in the sixties was the wonderful rapport we readers felt with the makers of those comics. In some ways, I preferred the content of certain DC books but there was no denying the impersonal, sometimes condescending tone to those comics' letter pages and house ads. The DCs felt like your uncle was telling you a story. The Marvels felt like a friend was the teller…and that friend didn't regard you as a child. If you wrote to DC, you wrote to "Dear Editor." If you wrote to Marvel, you wrote to "Dear Stan and Jack" or "Dear Stan and Steve" — but mainly to Stan.

That came from Stan Lee, of course, but a lot of it was by way of the lady he described as "My Gal Friday, Fabulous Flo Steinberg." That was Stan-Speak for "secretary" and it was appropriate to make a bit of a star out of her because she did so much to enhance the company's image. She corresponded with readers, wrote to fanzines and just seemed to be an important presence in that office. I later learned that she did practically everything there that did not involve the actual writing or drawing of the comics.

She went to work for Stan around 1963 and for a time, the office consisted of her, Stan (who'd stay home to work on scripts a day or two a week) and the occasional presence of artist Sol Brodsky, who'd come in a day or two a week on a freelance basis to design ads and covers and to do art corrections. Eventually, the operation grew and eventually, Flo tired of the grind. When the publisher refused her a $5 raise in 1968, she quit. She relocated for a time in San Francisco and dabbled in the publishing of underground comics. She finally found her way back to New York and a proofreading job at Marvel. She died last Sunday at the approximate age of 78.

In my never-ending quest to know as much about Marvel History as possible, I spoke with Flo on a couple of occasions. She was sweet and friendly…and not that I was looking for it but she didn't have a bad thing to say about anyone in the creative end of Marvel. Stan was great. Jack was great. Steve was great. Everyone there was great though the greatness did not extend to the folks in the business division. She told me that one of the reasons she got into publishing in the seventies was that she'd seen so many people do it wrong that she figured she could do it right.

Still, she was one charming lady. Stan, when you're right, you're right. Flo was fabulous.

The post Flo Steinberg, R.I.P. appeared first on News From ME.

Some various thoughts on where things are today:

1. Hooray for senators Murkowski and Collins and McCain, and also every single Democratic senator for knocking back this bullshit that was so egregious that they literally had to take the vote in the middle of the night because it couldn’t stand up to scrutiny in the light of day. The fact that 49 GOP senators voted for a bill that they knew was trash is depressing, but, horseshoes and handgrenades.

And yes, I know that there’s a good chance that some of them voted “yes” because they were confident that an 80-year-old man with cancer not long for his job would give them cover against frothy primary voters back home, but there’s only so far that sort of thing goes. Rob Portman, the Republican senator from Ohio, isn’t up for re-election until 2022. “Primary cover” isn’t a thing he needs at the moment.

(His excuse: He wanted it to go into committee with the House GOP. Uh-huh. This would be the same House GOP that passed a bill so awful that the Senate wouldn’t touch it. This is the group they were hoping to punt to, in order to come up with something better. Yeah, okay.)

2. I’m especially pleased that this is an only-barely-metaphorical kick in the nuts to Mitch McConnell, who basically flouted every lawmaking convention the Senate has in order to present a series of top-down, heartless “let’s repeal Obamacare because fuck that dude” bills, only to have them stuffed back in his face with every vote. In his rush to eradicate the major policy achievement of a black man, McConnell did appear to forget that the ACA does, in fact, help millions of Americans, including Republicans, have insurance, and helps the rest of us with that whole “no more of that pre-existing conditions or payment caps bullshit” thing it has going. McConnell didn’t give a shit about his constituents, or Americans in general with this. He just wanted the win, to have a win and to kick at a man who isn’t in politics anymore. He got what he deserved with this monumental and serial defeat.

(“But how is what McConnell did any different than how the ACA was passed in the first place?” Well, for starters, there’s a difference between an entire political party actively deciding not to participate in the crafting of legislation, as is what basically happened with the ACA, and the senate GOP deciding not to involve the Democrats, or indeed, most of the members of its own caucus, as happened with the Senate repeal bills. There’s more, but let’s move on, shall we.)

3. And no, I don’t expect this to be the end of it. On a practical level, the GOP wanted to gut the ACA because it would make it easier to get its upcoming budget deal done. On the impractical level, Trump loathes Obama and anything to do with him, not only because Trump’s a bigot but because every day he’s in office makes it clearer how much better a president Obama was than he is. McConnell also hates Obama for being Obama, and Paul Ryan just wants to destroy the social net for the old and sick because he’s an awful inhuman bucket of turds. They’re going to find their way back to the ACA even if the vast majority of Americans want them to leave it alone or — heck! — maybe even make it work better. They can’t leave it alone. They are constitutionally unable to. I’m happy this round of nonsense has been beaten back, but I’m not under the illusion they won’t try again. They will try again.

4. All of this nonsense does again bring to the fore a thing we already knew about the current GOP, which is that it isn’t for anything, other than shoving as much of America’s wealth as it can into the hands of the very rich. For the last eight years, its major policy theme was “whatever Obama wants, we’re against,” and now that it is in power, its major policy theme is “Whatever Obama did, we’ll repeal.” The problem they’re running into, as this dundersplat of a vote shows us, is that Obama’s policies did actually make people’s lives better, and also that sooner or later “not that” has to be replaced by something.

There was no there to the GOP’s proposals — nothing that would do what Trump and they promised, which was to make health care better. There wasn’t a single proposal the GOP offered that didn’t involve millions of people losing insurance, Medicaid being slashed and costs climbing for everyone else, and all but the “skinny repeal” basically were stalking horses for wealth transfer and setting the social net on fire. It’s not in the least surprising that at the end of the day, the excuses the Senate GOP gave for fronting these atrocious bills were “Look, we said we were going to repeal it” and “We know we’re going to pass a horrible shit bill but maybe the House GOP will save us from ourselves.”

I’m not going to say that there’s nothing in the GOP and/or Trump administration’s policy portfolio that isn’t explicitly about making the rich richer or just rolling back Obama policies without regard to the sensibility of those policies, but I have to admit right off the top of my head I can’t think of all that many, and even the ones that I theoretically would be before (infrastructure, rural broadband) I simply don’t trust Trump or the GOP to do without basically devolving them into a crony feed.

5. On a personal note, here’s a true fact, which is that the last week has been shit for my productivity because I’ve been waiting for the Senate to basically take health care away from a whole bunch of my friends, who as creative people buy their insurance policies on the individual market and who would (depending on which version of this bullshit passed) been priced out of insurance, would have had to deal with pre-existing conditions or policy caps coming up again, or would have found it impossible to find an insurer. And not only creative people, I will add. I live in an area where a number of my neighbors are farmers or independent contractors (truck drivers, etc). They would go onto the repeal trash pile as well. It’s hard to focus on writing when your friends are talking about how losing their insurance, or, having pre-existing conditions or caps reintroduced, might kill them.

“Oh, well, that’s melodramatic.” Fuck you, it’s not. Not having the “right” job (i.e., a job with a company large enough to have a decent-sized risk pool), or losing a job, should not come with the increased risk of death or incapacitation or bankruptcy due to medical needs our fucked-up system has decided to price out of range of normal humans’ ability to pay. The only reason I wouldn’t be in the same boat as my other creative, self-employed friends had the ACA cratered is my wife’s 9-to-5, benefits-paying job — and even then ditching the ACA would have still had an impact on us due to caps and pre-existing conditions.

6. Here’s something that is possibly melodramatic, also involving me: If any of these bullshit senate health care bills had passed, it might have made a difference regarding whether you’d get my next book on time. Not just because I’d be worrying about health care for all my pals (and my family, to a lesser but real extent). It would also be because Mitch McConnell would have learned that creating bills in a back room, filling them with completely punitive bullshit and not showing them to anyone yet still expecting his caucus to vote straight-line for them is a thing that works. I mean, shit. It came within one vote of working this time; had McCain not decided to do his maverick shtick one more time for shits and giggles, McConnell would right this moment be planning to do up his tax bill entirely in a back room with him and maybe five or six special friends. We already have an executive branch with an alignment of “chaotic authoritarian”; the last thing we need is a functionally authoritarian branch of government to go with the incompetent authoritarian branch we already have.

I’m less than 100% inclined to give McCain too much credit for his downvote — he could have nipped all this shit in the bud earlier in the week, and in any event his modus operandi to date has been “talk like a maverick, vote the party line,” and I think there was more than a whiff of personal aggrandizement going on. Depending on his cancer treatment, McCain may not ever come back to the Senate, and McCain wanted a dramatic moment for the movie of his life, when Tom Cruise finally wins the Oscar on the strength of his portrayal of McCain’s “thumbs down” moment. But to the extent that he excoriated McConnell’s bullshit process to produce these bills and then voted down the bills produced by this bullshit process, good on him. That may have been even more important in the long run than the particular vote, and the particular vote was extraordinarily important.

If McConnell’s authoritarian gambit had worked, he would have known he could continue to get away with it for everything — and he would have kept at it. And that’s not something I could have just tuned out. I’ve been having a hard enough time concentrating as it is. It’s hard to write about the future when the present is on fire. If I can get a nice stretch of time where I’m not worrying about a non-trivial percentage of the people I know freaking out about whether lack of insurance is going to kill them or a family member, I can focus on, you know. Actual work.

Yes, in fact, that’s the secret to getting work out of me: A functioning, democratic government that isn’t actively trying to screw over a whole bunch of people I know and care about. Who knew?

Leaving aside everything else that is wrong and immoral about this proposed ban, at the moment there are something like 11,000 trans people currently serving openly in the US services and reserves. They are there legally, and it is currently their right to serve openly. Trump’s ban, at first glance, appears to take away their right to serve their country, and takes away their jobs, their incomes, their benefits for themselves and their families — for no other reason than something which yesterday was not illegal nor an impediment to serving their country with passion and distinction.

Make no mistake: Trump is affirmatively and explicitly taking away a right from American citizens, a right they already had and enjoyed. This is a big right: The right to serve in one’s military openly, without fear of punishment for who you are.

If Trump will take away one right from Americans, he’s not going to have a problem taking away other rights as well. Why would he? Trump is the living embodiment of “If you give a mouse a cookie” — if he gets away with one thing, he’ll go ahead and try to get away with something else. He’s already trying, of course.

I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anyone that I support the right of transgender people to serve openly in the military, a thing they already have done, any more than it will come as a surprise that I support the rights of transgender people generally. But as important as it is for me to explicitly say I support transgender rights, I think it’s also worth asking people who oppose these rights, or other rights enjoyed by people not exactly like them, whether they are comfortable taking away fundamental rights these American citizens already have — and if so, what leads them to believe that their own rights, rights they already enjoy, are not also placed in jeopardy by that precedent.

If the answer boils down to “well, that will never happen to me,” as it inevitably will, it’s worth examining why they think they will forever be immune. The answer will be instructive for everyone.

And also, they’re wrong. If you can take away an existing right of an American simply because of who they are, then you can take away a right of any American simply because of who they are — or what they are, or where their ancestors came from, or what they believe, and so on.

I said on Twitter this morning, “Today, as has almost every day in this administration, offers each us of a chance to understand the dimensions our own moral character.” And so it does. And so it will, every day, I expect, until it is done.

christophoronomicon:

fieldofblackbirds:

shaelit:

spinningyarns:

madmaudlingoes:

assassinregrets:

im just

the cherokee language has a verb tense that specifically notes the exclusion of a person in the conversation

so there’s i’m going, you’re going, we’re going, and we’re going (but not you) 

i love it

This is called “clusivity” and it’s found a bunch of languages, including Chechen, Vietnamese, Samoan, and Quechua.

Some languages just side-eye harder than others.

No wait, please come back. How does this work? Like, is there a conjugation system so it’s everyone by me, everyone but you, everyone but him/her/it, etc.? Or is the change made on the noun, so there’s like the root verb hanging there and everyone knows SOMEONE is being excluded, but you don’t know until the indication pops up on the word for “you”?

In all the examples of this I’ve heard it is just for first person plural. So there’s we as in me and you vs we as in me and someone else. It’s not everyone but you. For instance, in English if you say, “what are you up to tonight” and I say, “we’re going to dinner,” it might be ambiguous whether I meant something like “you and I made dinner plans for tonight, remember?”  or “I can’t hang out with you because I made dinner plans with someone else.” Many languages have first person plural pronouns and conjugations which clarify that

Exactly. The OP made the whole thing really unclear by calling it a “tense”, but it’s not. It’s a person. As in “1st person” (I), “2nd person” (you), etc. Clusivity is about how some languages do not have one but two separate 1st person plural markings (pronouns, affixes on verbs, etc.): an inclusive 1st person plural that means “you, me and possibly others”, and an exclusive 1st person plural that means “me and others, but not you”.

That’s all clusivity means. It’s a very useful distinction mind you, but it’s not dark magic!

If English had clusivity, we could imagine that instead of “we” we might have “wein” and “weex” (we-inclusive and we-exclusive). So you’d get: 

Wein are going
Weex are going

And of course you’d need object and possessive forms, so you’d also have:

They like usin
They like usex

Ourin chocolate
Ourex chocolate

If a language with verb inflection, like Spanish, had clusivity, we could imagine that instead of “vamos” there might be “vamosi” and “vamose” (again for inclusive and exclusive). These would be in your present tense paradigm along with voy, vas, va, etc. 

Except that pronouns and verbal inflection tend to be pretty old parts of the language, so they almost certainly wouldn’t be formed after the grammatical descriptive terms which came around much later. But that’s how it could show up on pronouns or inflectional endings. 

It’s kind of like when a language has formal and informal second persons – they tend to show up on pronouns and/or verbal inflections. 

#926, 18th May 2002

I have been playing a lot more country music than usual lately, thanks to recommendations by wise friends of foundational albums. It seems to me that listening to country is, inescapably, listening to tradition. Country artists emerge within a tradition and while they may modernise, criticise, expand, revive, reinvent or inherit that tradition, they do not reject it. Roberto Calasso, the Italian philosopher of tradition and ritual, was talking about Vedic seers and the Catholic Church rather than Garth Brooks when he waxed lyrical about how tradition confers a gauze of quasi-mystical legitimacy on individuals and institutions, but the point applies just as well.

Calasso is no idiot – a conservative via pessimism rather than conviction, he knows full well that legitimacy and tradition are just what happens when enough people have chosen to forget past thefts and usurpations. Country music isn’t really more authentic or sincere than all the other kinds, but the investment in tradition gives it an aura of sincerity, of straight-talking honest-truthing God-fearing realness, whose aesthetics and effects are visible enough even if the aura itself is often flimsy. (Calasso understands that the gauze of legitimacy is, by its nature, quite easily shredded – he just thinks that what happens after tends to be worse. What he makes of former Boyzone singer Ronan Keating is unknown, but may be guessed at.)

What makes country music great is that this aura is itself a gateway to expression and tonal play – once the tiresome question of “do they mean it, man?” is taken off the table, the music is opened up more to camp, schmaltz, vulgarity, corn, lust, metaphysical awe and dread, and yes, honest attempts to couple with thorny adult problems and emotions, of which, whether I actually like it or not, “If Tomorrow Never Comes” is one.

A music that embraces tradition must also embrace ageing, mortality, loss, the residue other musics can ignore in their pursuit of the ephemeral moment. “If Tomorrow Never Comes” weighs that moment in the scales of eternity, adds slide guitar, and gently suggests that you, dear listener, could be spending it better. The sentiment is folksy, not much more than “remember to call Mom”, but it’s framed with the utmost gravitas, the weight of nocturnal fear and past regrets apparent in Brooks’ rueful, oaken voice. The fact that, despite its obvious craft and serious theme, I don’t much care for the song is probably because I’m a shallow soul terrified of acknowledging my own mortality.

Or it might be because I’ve listened to Brooks’ take once and Ronan Keating’s around twenty times, at which point the concept of ‘eternity’ starts to feel uncomfortably real. Country is rooted; boyband and post-boyband pop has (or had) the opposite problem, coming out of the gate with the stereotype that it’s ephemeral. Just like with country, the best pop doubles down on this, embraces heat and flash and joy, dares you to forget it. But Westlife – and solo Ronan, who generally takes the same approach – break from this, putting dependability above all else.

The result is a particularly gruelling, straining kind of music, desperate to please but not to surprise. Characteristically, the arrangement drops Brooks’ relatively spartan twang for an avalanche of suet: soupy strings, cloying synth beds, a distant flutter of piano, the odd digital click to create a pretence of rhythm. Ronan’s voice attempts the kind of lachrymose yearning Enrique Iglesias pulled off on “Hero”, but he just sounds callow. And as a song about death and responsibility, it’s wretchedly inadequate. There were always platitudes lurking under the surface of Garth Brooks’ song: Keating takes them for its core.

History: is it about kings, dates, and battles, or the movement of masses and the invisible hand of macroeconomics?

There's something to be said for both theories, but I have a new, countervailing theory about the 21st century (so far); instead othe traditional man on a white horse who leads the revolutionary masses to victory, we've wandered into a continuum dominated by Bond villains.

Consider three four five, taken at random:

Mr X: leader of a chaotic former superpower with far too many nuclear weapons, Mr X got his start in life as an agent of SMERSH the KGB. Part of its economic espionage directorate, tasked with modernizing a creaking command economy in the 1980s, Mr X weathered the collapse of the previous regime and after a turbulent decade of asset stripping rose to lead a faction of billionaire oligarchs, robber barons, and former secret policemen. Mr X trades on his ruthless reputation—he is said to have ordered a defector murdered by means of a radioisotope so rare that the assassination consumed several months' global production—and despite having an official salary on the order of £250,000 he has a private jet with solid gold toilet seats and more palaces than you can shake a stick at. Also nuclear missiles. (Don't forget the nuclear missiles.) Said to be dating the ex-wife of Mr Y. Exit strategy: change the constitution to make himself President-for-Life. Attends military parades on Red Square, natch. Bond Villain Credibility: 10/10

Mr Y: Australian multi-billionaire news magnate. (Currently married to a former supermodel and ex-wife of Mick Jagger.) Owns 80% of the news media in Australia and numerous holdings in the UK and USA, including satellite TV channels, radio stations, and newspapers. Reputedly had Arthur C. Clarke on speed-dial for advice about the future of communications technology. Was the actual no-shit model upon whom Elliot Carver, the villain in "Tomorrow Never Dies", the 18th Bond movie, was based. Exit strategy: he's 86, leave it all to the kids. Bond Villain Credibility: 10/10

Mr Z: South African dot-com era whiz kid who made a fortune before he hit 30. Instead of putting his money into a VC fund he set his sights higher. By 2007 he had a tropical island base complete with boiler-suited minions from which he launched satellites and around which he drove an electric car: has been photographed wearing a tuxedo and stroking a white cat in his launch control center. Currently manufacturing electric cars in bulk, launching absolutely gigantic rockets, and building a hyperloop from Boston to Washington DC. Exit strategy: retire on Mars. Bond Villain Credibility: 9/10 (docked one point for trying too hard—the white cat was a plush toy.)

Mr T: Unspeakably rich New York property speculator and reality TV star, who, possibly with help from Mr X, managed to get himself into the White House. Tweets incessantly at 3AM about the unfairness of it all and how he's being persecuted by the false news media and harassed by crooked politicians while extorting fractional-billion-dollar bribes from middle eastern regimes. Has at least as many nukes as Mr X. Rather than a solid gold toilet seat, he has an entire solid gold penthouse. In fact, he probably has heavy metal poisoning from all that gold. (It would explain a lot.) Bond Villain Credibility: 10/10

Mrs M: After taking a head-shot, M was reconstituted as a cyborg using a dodgy prototype brain implant designed by Sir Clive Sinclair and parachuted into the Home Office to pursue a law-and-order agenda. Following an entirely self-inflicted constitutional crisis and a party leadership challenge in which all the rival candidates stabbed each other in the back, M strode robotically into 10 Downing Street, declared herself to be the Strong and Stable leader the nation needs, and unleashed the world's most chilling facial tic. Exit strategy: (a) Brexit, (b) ... something to do with underpants ... (c) profit? Bond Villain Credibility: 6/10 (down from 8/10 before the 2017 election fiasco.)

I think there's a pattern here: don't you? And, more to the point, I draw one very useful inference from it: if I need to write any more near-future fiction, instead of striving for realism in my fictional political leaders I should just borrow the cheesiest Bond villain not already a member of the G20 or Davos.