This essay is going to need some substantial (though obviously not total) revision, and keeping the original in circulation feels wrong. A revised version will appear in the generally available edition of Neoreaction a Basilisk that will come out in 2017. 

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October 24th, 2016: Phew! What a safe comic after all that spooky All Hallow's Eve terror. I for one can feel my sanity returning!! – Ryan

Jack Chick's cartoons were infused with the abominable fancy -- the idea that the supreme delight awaiting true believers in Heaven would be that they got to watch the eternal torment of wicked sinners in Hell. That was pretty much the essence of Chick's faith. He wasn't driven by his love for God or for God's love for us, but by the eschatological hope that one day God would settle all the arguments he was never able to win here on earth -- settle them with remorseless, bloodthirsty finality.

 
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Marginal "Marginal evidence for cosmic acceleration from Type Ia supernovae".

This is genuinely upsetting news for me: Locus is reporting the death of Sheri S. Tepper, who wrote the Hugo-nominated novel Grass among many others, and who was given a lifetime achievement award by the World Fantasy Convention just last year. Tepper was in her late 80s, and had an accomplished life outside of her considerable writing career, including being an executive director of the Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood in Colorado, so one can’t precisely say this is an unexpected development. But she was one of my favorite science fiction and fantasy writers, and an influence on my thinking about SF/F writing, so to have her gone on is still a deeply depressing thing.

Also a bit depressing: That Tepper, while well-regarded, is as far as I can tell generally not considered in the top rank of SF/F writers, which is a fact I find completely flummoxing. Her novel Grass has the sort of epic worldbuilding and moral drive that ranks it, in my opinion, with works like Dune and Perdido Street Station and the Earthsea series; the (very) loose sequel to Grass, Raising the Stones, is in many ways even better, and the fact that Stones is currently out of print is a thing I find all sorts of appalling.

If you haven’t read Grass, I really suggest you find it and put it near the top of your SF/F reading queue. You won’t be disappointed (and if you are, then, well, I don’t know what to tell you). It’s a stone classic. Not everything that Tepper wrote worked for me, which makes her like literally every single writer I admire; but the things of hers that did (these two novels, The Fresco, Beauty, The Visitor and others) have stayed with me year in and year out.

Aside from her considerable talents as an author, Tepper stands as a reminder that it’s never too late to write. Tepper didn’t publish her first novel until 1983, when she was in her 54th year of life; she wrote something like 40 total, the most recent published in 2014. It’s never too late to write; it’s never too late to write a classic novel; it’s never too late to be a great writer, whether or not the genre has entirely caught up with you yet.

Farewell, Ms. Tepper. Your voice will be missed. I’ll keep reading what you have left us.

I was a couple of months late in turning in The Collapsing Empire; I originally planned to have it to Tor before Worldcon this year (which was mid-August) and ended up sending it to my editor literally the day I left for New York Comic Con, which was the first week of October. Some of that had to do with fine-tuning and changing bits of the story to make them more effective, plus travel and life in general.

But a whole lot more had to do with the 2016 presidential election. There were entire weeks where I got up each day, fully intending to go straight into writing on the book, and instead ended up checking Politico, the Washington Post, Five Thirty Eight and a whole other host of political sites, and got myself wound up enough that it was a miracle if I got any writing done at all, much less hit my daily quota. Now, I’ve written books during presidential elections before, and I’m easily very diverted by them. But my level of distraction has never been this bad before.

At New York Comic Con, I confided to another author about my book being late because of the election, and her reaction was basically to say YES SO VERY MUCH THIS and then we were joined by an editor, who was all OH MY GOD BASICALLY ALL MY AUTHORS ARE SAYING THIS, and then suddenly I didn’t know whether to feel better or worse. On one hand, it was a bit of a relief to know I wasn’t the only author whose schedule was bunged up by the election; on the other, what a mess this election has been if whole swaths of writers have been knocked off course by it. I could go into why this is, but I think you all already know my opinion about this election so we can take it as read for now.

My question to you is: Is it just us? Or have you found that you (or others you know about) have been knocked out of your usual level of work productivity because of this election as well? Has obsessively refreshing poll trackers and political feeds and Twitter kept you from the timely performance of your duties, or, if you still manage to get stuff done on time, is it still a challenge to keep your mind on task? More than usual?

Let me know. I’m actually really interested.

 

"They didn't tell us we could do that": Brexit, Mayism, and the economics of nationalism.

Nobel prize overturned? No dark energy, no accelerating expansion of the universe?

The racist and sexist history of keeping birth control side effects secret.

A burning philosophical question: dumpster fires vs tire fires.

(CONTENT NOTE: This post mentions racism and xenophobia, media sexualisation of children, sexist and racist harassment and sexual assault.)

This week, the 2016 Weird Awful News Machine has heavily featured Match of the Day presenter and crisp-advert-man Gary Lineker. Front-page tabloid headlines calling for him to be sacked, politicians attacking and defending him, debate still raging all over the internet… What on earth did Lineker say that was so huge and controversial it created this massive media storm?

“The treatment by some towards these young refugees is hideously racist and utterly heartless. What’s happening to our country?”

 

…Oh.

Yep. That’s really it. Very non-confrontational, doesn’t blame anyone or anything directly, he even includes the phrase “by some” which you’d think would combat the usual not-all-white-people-not-all-Brexiters-not-me-not-me-not-me brigade.

Here, Lineker was criticising people and publications who responded to the arrival in the UK of fourteen – yes, fourteen – teenage refugees from Calais by scrutinising their photos, declaring them to “not look like children”, and then being all furious and hateful because they must be lying about their age. (Heavy sarcasm incoming…) It can’t be because people grow and age at different rates and adolescence is a particularly awkward time, with some children barely in secondary school being deemed fully grown (usually by those who want to sexualise them – the Daily Mail is particularly familiar with the “all grown up” trope) while some young adults are told they don’t look old enough to have left school. It can’t be because these refugees have seen horrors and devastation that no child should have to go through. Nope, apparently they have to be liars, because we as a society assume all refugees are lying about their situation (which conveniently means not having to feel guilty about the UK’s part in creating and maintaining their situation) and secretly after “our” money, “our” jobs, “our” resources… wait, who is this “our”? There’s the racism. I would then say the heartlessness is the fact that *fourteen* refugees arrive and the immediate response is anger over the fairly slim chance that a few of them are adults, because heaven forbid we help an 18-year-old get a roof over their head and the chance of a fresh start rather than a 17-year-old, right?

This leads us nicely into the often overlooked distinction between offence and harm. If Lineker is wrong (which he isn’t) then what are the consequences? At worst, an adult refugee gets the assistance they need. You could make the argument that a child refugee would be missing out on that assistance, but frankly the problem there is how limited the numbers are in the first place because immigration even to escape war and persecution is so demonised. As for the people who are angry at Lineker’s statement, I’m not sure the arrival of f o u r t e e n refugees, whatever their age, affects them or the “general public” they claim to represent much at all. It’s not about the risk of harm. It’s about offence.

I’ll make that clear: The Sun (which, as awful as it is, does for some reason hold a lot of sway over public opinion and, in turn, political opinion)  called for a man who talks about people kicking a ball around to be sacked from that job because they’re offended that he had a completely unrelated opinion different from their own. That’s the situation. So where the heck are the free speech brigade?

They were out in force when Richard Keys and Andy Gray, who also talked about people kicking a ball around, were dismissed for making sexually derogatory remarks about women and stating a female linesman was not fit for the role due to her gender – remarks that reinforce prevalent sexual harassment of women and existing barriers to women in male-dominated careers, i.e. causing harm rather than just offence, but were still seen by many as just “banter”. They were out in force when alt-right pundit Milo Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter for repeatedly violating its terms of service, culminating in sustained racial abuse and harassment against actress Leslie Jones – such harassment and abuse can and does cause long-lasting psychological harm, but as the tweets in the link show, that was seen as suppression of free speech over offence. And, of course, a couple of weeks ago *actual US presidential candidate* Donald Trump pretty much admitted to sexually assaulting women – I hope I don’t need to tell you that sexual assault is harmful, but Trump and his supporters dismissed this as “locker room banter”, and he’s still running for President even though I could continue this “harmful statements defended as free speech” paragraph forever just on the Trump campaign alone.

As the above incidents and many more show, there are a lot of people around who apparently care about nothing more than freedom of expression, no matter how much these views can cause real harm to the rights and freedoms of others (or “special snowflakes looking for offence” as they’d put it). These people use their (mistaken) conception of free speech to attack everything from combating harassment to using trigger warnings. So in comparison to that, you’d think a football presenter and crisp enthusiast who just said refugees are people and should be treated as such would be an easy case, right? But nope, just silence.

Apparently “some people are being racist and heartless towards these refugees” is just too radical a statement.

It’s almost as if those who criticise taking hate speech seriously don’t actually care about freedom of speech; only freedom to hate.

[Read in black and white]

Forward, out of error,
Leave behind the night,
Forward through the darkness,
Forward into light!

One hundred years ago today, Oct 22, 1916, suffragist activist and lawyer Inez Milholland Boissevain collapsed at the podium.

She was on tour as a member of the National Women's Party, and giving a speech in Los Angeles. Her health had been failing for some time, but she wouldn't desist from her activism. Her last words to her audience were "Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?" She was rushed to a hospital. She died a month later, November 25th, 1916. She was thirty years old.

Milholland – most of her activism was done before she married, so she is generally known by her maiden name – was staggeringly charismatic, a leader of women who convinced two-thirds of her class at Vassar to enroll in her campus suffrage organization, despite it being forbidden by the administration. She lead many protests herself 1911-1913. She had an inspired sense of the theatrical and the symbolic, and became the face of the suffrage movement to many as "The Woman on the Horse":



Yes, that's a crown she's wearing.

What is that woman doing gotten up like that? Well, first of all, she was at a protest she helped organize, in Washington D.C., March 3rd, 1913. It was a parade the day before President Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, of ultimately about 8,000 marchers. It was a "march in a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded". Wikipedia also goes on to say the march was "monumental in advancing women's suffrage in the United States".

As you might expect, dressed like that, she was out in front, literally leading it.

Why she'd dressed like that, well, that has to do with the symbolism and rhetoric used by the women's suffrage movement, in the US and in England. As the National Women's History Museum explains:

Herald/Angel as Symbol

In addition to color imagery, both the [American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)] and the [National Women's Party (NWP)] used an allegorical figure, the Herald/Angel. This symbol, a female figure, sometimes shown with wings, sometimes blowing a trumpet, was based on an angelic figure created by Sylvia Pankhurst for the British movement. The Herald appeared in various forms in the United States, with sword or trumpet, used primarily by organizations in the New York area influenced by Blatch and her Women's Political Union. It was also used by the National Woman's Party. Both these groups had especially close ties with the British movement.

To general American audiences, probably not specifically familiar with the Pankhurst origins, these Herald figures appeared as angelic reminiscences in the long tradition of idealized Goddesses of Liberty and Justice, of the figures America and Columbia. Such images were visually familiar in this country since the early Republic in both formal prints and works of art, widely circulated political cartoons and broadsides, and in folk tradition. The Herald/Angel was incorporated by American mainstream suffrage in a direct line of development from the 18th-and-19th century American tradition of the Goddess or archetypal woman in classically draped form to represent abstract civic virtues, and the personification of countries and political parties.

In the United States, these Herald/Angel figures were frequently backed by, or displayed with, rays of sun, or sunbursts (the use of gold). The symbolic meaning of this merging of the figure with the color gold was heralding the dawn of a new day. In the U.S., particularly in NAWSA, the herald figure often blended with a woman carrying a torch, again the color gold.

What you probably don't know, because I just dropped you in the middle of their online exhibit and you don't know what they just spent several pages explaining, is that gold, or yellow, was the color of the US women's suffrage movement. Long before "the yellow ribbon" came to be associated with supporting the troops, the yellow ribbon was such a symbol of women's suffrage, that one of the movement's songs was "The Yellow Ribbon". The world still has a great bounty of yellow suffrage ephemera, a lot of it ribbons.

As the exhibit explains, the color yellow was adopted by US suffragists sort of as an accident of history – it came out of an earlier political effort in Kansas, where the state flower is a sunflower, and they adopted the sunflower as a symbol, which was where the yellow came from – but quickly became representative of a whole complex of symbols and ideas, having to do with "light" and "enlightenment" and dawn and heralds and annunciating angels. The enlightenment of which they spoke was both the enlightenment of women, themselves, and the enlightenment they were seen as bringing to the larger society.

Hence suffragist images of classically draped women carrying torches, blowing trumpets, and bearing banners. Some of the images were printed objects (some examples) from playing cards to pamphlets. But suffragist activists also used enactment and tableaus to communicate:

One example of this American tradition appeared in a tableau staged along "The Golden Lane" at the 1916 Democratic political convention in St. Louis. "Midway on the Lane was the St. Louis Fine Arts Building and here a symbolic tableau was posed on the flight of steps leading to the entrance, the chief figure of which was the Goddess of Liberty (in white, flowing, classical garb, carrying a torch), impersonated by Mrs. David O'Neill of St. Louis."

You'll notice that Milholland, like O'Neill appearing as Liberty, wore white. So were the other women in The Golden Lane:

"A line of women dressed in white with yellow sashes and parasols, spaced four feet apart, stood along the curb beside their state suffrage banners on both sides of the street, forming a lane through which the Democratic delegates must walk . . . to the Coliseum on the opening day of the convention."

And so were the women following behind Miholland March 3, 1913, as this photo shows.

Though suffragist protesters carried golden yellow banners and wore golden yellow ribbons and sashs, they often wore white, especially in the earlier years. Suffragists wore white at marches in protest of their purity and virtue. From the exhibit:

The wearing of white for women demonstrators had a long history in this country beginning with temperance demonstrations in the 19th century. Some men ridiculed the temperance protestors in their street demonstrations, saying that women on the streets must be women of the streets! Temperance workers began wearing white clothing during their protests to denote their personal purity and the purity of their Cause, a tradition followed by the suffrage demonstrators after them.

Meanwhile, back in the 21st century, PopSugar.com argues that Clinton wore white to the last debate as a reference to suffragist activists.

Such as Inez Millholland, personally embodying the light of justice and righteousness dawning upon the Capital, riding at the head of a column of 8,000 women.

Millholland was shockingly beautiful, a topic of much contemporary commentary; what she did with that beauty for her movement was shrewd. Wikipedia says "she was always disappointed that she was better known for her looks than her brains", but she knew what she had and how it might be employed. She was a living, breathing rebuke to every ugly caricature in the media – of which there were many – of suffragists as ugly harridans; her presentation of herself as a white-clad angel leading an army of women threaded the needle between the images of maternal domestic laborer and loose woman. She used her beauty to make strength beautiful, to make political resolve beautiful, to make weilding power and authority beautiful. She presented her fellow women with an image of self-actualization which was glorious – and aspirational. She invited women who saw her to want to be her – to be like her: noble, proud, serene, pure, benign, righteous, fierce, authoritative. She invited the men who saw her to respect her, to literally look up to her as she passed by on the street, to see her as resplendent and powerful, and deeply connected to the civic virtues to which this country laid claim. She promulgated an image – an imagining – of what other ways a woman might be in society than those that had previously been much admitted.

Civil rights movements need many different kinds of people. The names that come down to us most often are the deep thinkers and incendiary writers. But no mass movement goes anywhere that doesn't actually go somewhere – typically out into the streets. Crucial to the success of such movements are also those who get everyone else up on their feet and marching. The rabble rousers and the organizers.

The other thing they need is martyrs.

That's the other thing she provided the movement. From the exhibit:

The National Woman's Party wasted no time in elevating Milholland to sainthood and glorifying her death for the cause. Her memorial service was a brilliantly staged pageant of suffrage imagery and symbolism. On Christmas Day, 1916, the Woman's Party staged the first memorial service ever held for a woman in the United States Capitol. Statuary Hall was ornately decorated with the Woman's Party colors:

"Between the pillars of the balcony hung... pennants of purple, white, and gold - the tricolor of these feminist crusaders.... Presently... boy choristers... marched into the hall chanting: 'Forward, out of error,/ Leave behind the night,/ Forward through the darkness/ Forward into Light.' Behind... came a golden banner with the above words inscribed on it. This was a duplicate of the banner that Inez Milholland bore in the suffrage parade in New York. Behind the golden banner came a great procession of young women... the first division in purple, the next in white, the last in gold, carrying high the standards which bore the tricolor."

Speeches of tribute followed. Maud Younger of California delivered the memorial address, eulogizing Milholland in familiar symbolic terms: "She was the flaming torch that went ahead to light the way - the symbol of light and freedom..."

After Milholland's death, the National Woman's Party widely circulated an idealized poster of her, clad in flowing white robes, with gold helmet and star, riding a white horse and carrying a banner with the legend, "Forward Into Light." The poster quickly became a classic as well as the official logo of the National Woman's Party. "Forward Into Light" became the Party's official motto. A reduced version of the logo continues today, rendered in purple, on all the Party's official stationery and correspondence.

When I first learned how Inez Millholland died, and what was made of her death, I was pretty cynical about it. Inez Millholland, the "woman on the horse", the woman "who died for the freedom of women" as that famed poster says, died of a illness, about which I know a thing or two. Milholland had pernicious anemia, and I was pretty sure she didn't get pernicious anemia by being a suffragist. I mean, it wasn't like she took a bullet for the cause, right?

There are a variety of ways one can develop pernicious anemia. Fundamentally, it's a potentially fatal disability of the body to extract vitamin B12 from food; it's death by B12 deprivation. It can be secondary to a number of other conditions, but in some people, it's just congenital. It's apparently genetic. Sometime, usually in midlife, your body just loses the ability to digest B12. And then you die.

Or you did, back in 1916.

Two things of note happened in 1920. One was that the suffrage movement finally succeeded: the nineteenth amendment of the Constitution was passed, and the women of America attained the right to vote at last. The other was that Dr. George Whipple published a research paper reporting the first successful treatment for pernicious anemia.

Six years after that a cure was found; the doctors who published their findings in 1926 won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for curing what had previously been a fatal disease.

So, here's the thing. If Milholland had taken it easy, if she hadn't exhausted herself on her political tour, she might have lasted a bit longer. Maybe even four years. Maybe even to 1920.

But she didn't. Her family, concerned for her, asked her to take it easy, and she refused. Her work was too important. Women's suffrage was too important.

In the end, I find myself reluctantly coming back around to the NWP's position: yeah, actually, Inez Milholland really did die for for the freedom of women. She worked herself to death for the sake of getting American women the vote.

But not for herself. Ironically, even had Inez Millholland survived to the passing of the nineteenth amendment, she would not have been eligible to cast a vote, due to a different sexism then enshrined in federal US law. At the time, a US citizen lost their citizenship if they married a foreign national and were a woman, as Millholland had and was. Because of whom she married and her sex, her American citizenship was stripped from her, and she was no longer an American in the eyes of the law.

---

ETA: Inez Milholland Boissevain's widower, Eugen Boissevain, remarried. His second wife was Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she wrote this:

To Inez Milholland
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Read in Washington, November eighteenth, 1923, at the unveiling of a statue of three leaders in the cause of Equal Rights for Women

Upon this marble bust that is not I
Lay the round, formal wreath that is not fame;
But in the forum of my silenced cry
Root ye the living tree whose sap is flame.
I, that was proud and valiant, am no more; ---
Save as a dream that wanders wide and late,
Save as a wind that rattles the stout door,
Troubling the ashes in the sheltered grate.
The stone will perish; I shall be twice dust.
Only my standard on a taken hill
Can cheat the mildew and the red-brown rust
And make immortal my adventurous will.
Even now the silk is tugging at the staff:
Take up the song; forget the epitaph.

---

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So said Alec Shelbrooke, a Tory MP who has hitherto flown beneath the radar of this blog, of Gary Lineker.

But he can be both. There are plenty of precedents.

The great John Arlott fought Epping for the Liberal Party at the 1955 and 1959 general elections.

Not only that: he was a regular panelist on Any Questions? which made him about the best known Liberal in the country before the party's revival under Jo Grimond.

A second member of the Test Match Special team, Alan Gibson, was a supporter of the Liberals. He fought Falmouth and Camborne in 1959.

And, as Andrew Hickey remined me on Twitter today, David Icke was one of the Green Party's principal spokespeople when  he still worked for BBC Sport.

If Shelbrooke would prefer a right-wing example, he need look no further that Denis Compton.

While a member of the BBC's television commentary team for test matches he fronted the organisation Freedom in Sport, which sought to re-establish fixtures with Apartheid-era South Africa.

So Gary Lineker could certainly be a political activist and a BBC sports journalist if he chose. So far, of course, he has done no more than offer an opinion.

How the Web became unreadable: against low-contrast typography.

"Software architect" is an illegal job title in the UK.

The third presidential debate is in the books, and while the noisiest news coming out of it is about a petulant white nationalist blustering on stage about whether or not he’ll concede the election if he loses, as if that matters for the legal transfer of power (it doesn’t; it’s just that if he doesn’t, he makes himself look even more like a child than he already does), the most interesting thing about the debate — and all the debates, if you ask me — is how very fine a job Hillary Clinton did in each of them. Not just for herself, although she did just fine for herself in each of them, answering in detail when she chose to, and generally effectively deflecting when she didn’t.

No, her real skill was in getting Donald Trump to self-own, debate after debate. There’s the saying that one should not interrupt an enemy when he’s making a mistake; well, Clinton didn’t interrupt Trump, but she did prompt him, winding him up and then letting him spew, not only on the debate stage, but on Twitter and in rallies afterward. She wound him up and let him flail ineffectually at her, as if his onstage taunts and bluster were anything compared to what she’s put up with for over 30 years, but well aware how Trump grumbling that she was nasty or how he was going to put her in jail would play to the large majority of America that isn’t circling around in Trump’s ouroboros of denial. She positioned him to lie and lie again, not just about political subjects in general, but about what’s actually come out of his very own mouth. She made him make himself look like a fool, and she did it without breaking a sweat.

Ezra Klein of Vox has a longer piece on what Clinton was up to and how she did it, which I largely agree with, so I won’t go further into it here. Suffice to say, however, that Clinton played him, once, twice, three times (a lady!), and he never seemed to figure it out. But then, why would he? Trump is apparently mentally unable to conceive of being dunked on by a woman, which left Clinton free to dunk on him at will. Trump has no one to blame but himself — not that he would ever do that — but Clinton gets all the credit for happily exploiting his weaknesses.

This is one reason, incidentally, why the current GOP shibboleth that Clinton would have been defeatable if only she had been up against a different candidate is mostly wishful thinking. Clinton isn’t winning just because she’s up against Trump, and she didn’t cream Trump in the debates just because Trump is so very fabulously incompetent. She’s winning because she’s prepared — she knows her opponent, she knows his weaknesses, and she made him reveal them himself. And she would have done it to anyone the GOP would have thrown her way.

Honestly, now: Does anyone really think that Clinton wouldn’t have shredded Ted Cruz, that pulsating globule of smugness, in any debate they might have had? Yes, Cruz was a nationally-ranked debater in college. That’s very nice for him. Clinton would have walked him into his own wankery, the off-putting self-regard that makes everyone want to find a way to stop talking to him five seconds after he opens his mouth, and let that awfulness happen while he spewed his dominionist nonsense. And let’s not even imagine what she would have done to poor, unprepared Marco Rubio, although the words “chew toy” do come to mind.

Indeed, the only person in the GOP field who I think would have given Clinton a run for her money might have been John Kasich, whose largely-pragmatic and well-seasoned demeanor is not terribly dissimilar to Clinton’s. But the GOP’s not about pragmatic and well-seasoned anymore, and even then I think Clinton would have his number sooner than later — he’s got a temper on him, and she’d poke him until he popped. A Kasich-Clinton debate score would be closer, with no knockouts on either side, but I think in the end she’d win on points.

The fact is, Clinton is and continues to be underappreciated for her own hard-won political skills. It’s easy to say she’s not a natural politician like her husband or Barack Obama (the latter comment being ironic, considering how many comparisons to Spock he endured early on), but here’s a point to consider about “natural” talents — they can be lazy, because, after all, if you can get the “A” with almost no effort, why go for the “A+”? Trust me, I know a little bit about the laziness of “natural talent” and how difficult it is to put in the extra work to go from merely good to something better.

Clinton is not a natural politician. She works and works and works and makes a better effort than everyone around her and just keeps on coming. And if people underestimate how formidable that makes her, as Trump so obviously has, and as smarter politicians than Trump also have and continue to do despite all available evidence? Well, I suspect that’s just fine with her. She’ll do to them what she did to Trump in the debates. And then she’ll keep going.

Today on Medium: I wrote an essay about what I’ve learned from subscribing to every presidential candidate’s email list.

I occasionally tweet interesting tidbits from the emails I receive, but today’s essay is a longer, sustained dive into an observation that struck me as interesting…

In February, I subscribed to all the presidential candidates’ email lists.

Since then, I’ve gotten over 1,000 requests for money. Today is the 17th of October, and so far, this month, I’ve heard from Hillary Clinton’s campaign 32 times and Donald Trump’s 53 times. (Carly Fiorina chimed in once in support of Trump, too.)

Sometimes I hear from them many times in a day. “Let’s bug our subscribers incessantly,” the theory seems to go, “so they’ll be more inclined to give us money!”

The emails become an interesting lens through which to examine each campaign’s opinion of its supporters. Do they think they’re the type of people who’re driven by hope, or by fear? By sincere human appeals, or by stern orders? By pleading, or by threats? Or like Jeb!, by just being pathetic?

You can read the whole thing on Medium: The Junk Mail Candidate, by David Malki !

Previously in candidate correspondence: A Poem I Made from Jeb Bush’s Emails
Previously by me on Medium: I grew up in San Bernardino.

Monday:


Today Captain Clegg launched his third pamphlet on the challenges facing the UK due to Brexit. This one is about food and drink.

Nick Clegg at the National Liberal Club

If you’re still watching POLDARK on the BBC you will know it’s a tale of noble-but-impoverished workers of mine and land, ground down by the machinations of sinister bankers who manipulate the laws and the local dimwit Tory MP for their own ends, and so must turn to smuggling to get goods past the exorbitant import tariffs.

What you might NOT realise is that this is a BOLD sci-fi drama set in the DISTOPIAN post-Brexit FUTURE! With occasional topless scything.

And the reaction was basically terrifying. (To Brexit, not the topless scything!)

That’s not the position of Captain Clegg – who was at pains to point out that we should definitely be trying to save people from their fears by at least agreeing a Norway-style EEA agreement that maintains our trading links.

No, the fear was present in the questions arising, questions from small farms, from small retailers – corner shops and newsagents – who are all already staring down the barrel of disaster as the collapse in the pound sees their prices soar; the sort of everyday working folk whose concerns for their businesses and livelihoods and families are dismissed from the ivory towers of Conservatories like Jacob Rees-Mogg who’s never had to do a day’s work in his life and puts down the questions of ordinary people as “just more Project Fear”.

And another very good question came from the Commonwealth countries who can see their gateway deals to the EU via the UK collapsing and WTO trade tariffs of 40% on chocolate or 50-60% on beef and lamb being imposed by the careless diktat of Liam “Fantastic Dr” Fox, disgraced former Defence Minister and not-yet-disgraced (‘96 days and counting’) International Trade Minister.

Across the continent, the papers are not full – as Cap’s Nick put it – of the cunning of Mr Fox, the honesty of David Davis or the diplomacy of Boris Johnson. No, our friends and allies are instead AGHAST at the language and occasional downright xenophobia coming out of this chaotic Tory government, particularly things like the conference speech of the “Go Home” Secretary, Ms Green Amber Rudd. Less of a dog whistle; more of a traffic light stuck on stop!


Prime Monster Theresa May (or May Not) holds out against delivering ANY answers beyond Brexit means Brexit means a slap on the wrist for ministers who dare to speak the unspeakable, but insists that she has the power to Invoke Article 50 without taking a vote in Parliament. Talk about “taking back control!” Will those Tories – David Davis, John Deadwood, Peter Bone, Rees-Moggy? – who made such a BIG THING of Parliamentary Sovereignty call her to account? Or will they sell their principles in a heartbeat?

MPs were EXPRESSLY told that the Referendum would be only ADVISORY – or else they might have voted for more stringent checks, such as a two-thirds majority, or other thresholds – and those Brexiteers who are trying to say that in passing the referendum BILL Parliament has already voted on Brexit are clearly trying to take away the democratic and sovereign rights of Parliament.

Noted thinker A. C Grayling is writing to every MP to ask them why they are allowing this, and that they should demand a debate AND VOTE on the issue.

It is, after all, their DUTY to “take back control”.

It is clear that unchecked, Mrs Maybe’s unelected administration will see us BOUNCED into the most CHAOTIC TORY BREXIT!

Unilever and Tesco may have come to an accommodation that sees the Marmite back on our shelves, but that’s far from the end of it.

We currently SELL more than £18 billion of food abroad, one of our biggest export industries, and two thirds of that goes to the EU. Tariff and other barriers, like regulations or defining chocolate to be only high cocoa solids, that would exclude British chocolate altogether, will more than eliminate any benefits of the cheaper pound. And THEN we have to compete with the highly subsidised EU food production because THEY’LL still have the much-derided Common Agricultural Policy that WAS pouring billions into OUR farms.

But also we EAT more than we can GROW, so we have to BUY IN more than 25% of the food we need, and more than 70% of that is from Europe.

Companies importing food are going to face a choice of three options: put up prices – difficult in a cutthroat market with discounters already at their heels; cut into their own profits – which are already very tight, especially for small firms that import ingredients to make into prepared foods; or stop stocking certain lines altogether – the Marmite option.

For the moment, big importers will have their prices protected – either by long-term agreements with their suppliers or by insurance (called “hedging”) that will cover the higher cost of buying stuff with a pound that is worth up to 18% less.

But small companies who can’t afford big insurance are being hit with those choices already.

And even the bigger companies, their contracts will run out and, as Tesco discovered, new agreements will need to be made; those insurance policies are to smooth out short-term the ups and downs of the currency markets, not to protect long-term from a major devaluation. And then the higher prices will have to be paid.

In the next year to two years we will see a (first) big spike in food inflation, and that will hit the least well off the hardest.

We need to work RIGHT NOW to protect against an even bigger hit from collapsing out of the Single Market.

As Master Yoda so very nearly said of Bojo’s foreign policy: Victory? There was no victory. Begun, this clown war has.

Steve Bell in the Grauniad

The Pound collapsing. Marmite threatened. Inflation doubled. All that with years still to go before massive trade tariffs start really hurting ordinary people. The unelected new Prime Minister isn’t just throwing out Mr Cameron’s Conservatism – it’s a Great Repeal of every shred of Tory economic responsibility built from Mrs Thatcher’s Single Market and control of inflation.

What plans does Mrs May’s government have to make the Pound seem like it’s still worth anything? Now it’s already fallen to its lowest value since 1848 and with accelerating inflation about to slash all our cash?

Here are some EXCLUSIVE rival proposals.

• Unelected Prime Minister Theresa May wants to take Britain back to the 1950s. So rumours are she favours repealing decimalisation – because if the Pound has 240 pennies, that must mean it’ll have two and a half times the spending power, right?

• Unbelievable Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is said to have a much more flamboyant idea. Issue new banknotes on REALLY BIG pieces of paper so everyone can see the Pound is still huge (it’s just the economy that got small). The 350 million Pound note will be the size of a bus – but unfortunately no-one will be able to spend it.

• Unshackled-by-reality Brexit Secretary David Davis is understood to favour adopting the leaf as legal tender, so we can all become immensely rich. This has two extra advantages: the Remoaner city dwellers will be immediately impoverished; and when the Pound and the economy have become so small they’re practically non-existent, Britain can proudly remember who won by calling our new currency The Leave.

• (As this is already the fiscal policy of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, there’s a terrifying prospect of a cross-party consensus between the Free Money and Unicorns Grow On Trees thinkers on both sides of the Commons.)

• Obviously there isn’t a proposal from Disgraced Defence Minister and Not Yet (‘97 days and counting’) Disgraced Minister* Without Any Actual Role Liam Fox, because he doesn’t have any actual role. But as in the absence of a proper job he spends all his time contradicting anything David Davis says, watch out for Dr Fox taking matches near any woods. Though obviously none of his government ‘colleagues’ allow him to play with matches anyway.

What isn’t funny is that these plans above are more coherent and detailed than anything the Tory Government’s bickering factions have shared with us. What’s even less funny is that while they fight among themselves without a plan, the Pound continues to fall and the really big inflation dangers get ever closer. Take a read of Nick Clegg’s analysis: Food, Drink and Brexit. The threat to all of us ordinary people from rising prices is scarier than anything for Halloween.


In other news, everyone remembers the one absolutely clear, no-ifs, no-buts, no arguing about exactly what it means commitment made by the Leave campaign – that there would absolutely definitely be £350 million extra for the NHS. Every week.

This week, unelected Prime Minister Theresa May said that that wouldn’t happen. In fact, the NHS must make £22 billion of cuts instead.

And then she said that any elected MPs who dare to ask for a vote on her proposals weren’t “respecting the will of the British people”. What about respecting the will of all the voters who voted to “Take Back Control” and Parliamentary Sovereignty? It’s a kick in the face to them now Parliament’s told instead that all decisions will be made by a tiny ruling elite that not one voter chose to run the country. What about respecting the will of all the voters who voted for £200 billion a year extra for the NHS? It’s a kick in the face to them now an unelected Prime Minister is cutting it by £22 billion instead. Call that “respect”?

So What Does Brexit Mean?

The unelected Prime Minister is committing us – against everything the voters were told in June – to a “Hard Brexit”. Throwing away Mrs Thatcher’s Single Market. Rising prices. Crashing the Pound. Trashing the economy. Call that “Conservative”?

Some commentators don’t want to use the word “Hard” because it sounds butch. Macho. Tough. Decisive. When it’s actually just painful. Panicky. Reckless. Damaging. Without a plan. Ideologically extreme. Not giving a toss about kicking ordinary people in the wallet. It’s as if the Tory Government is trying to cost us all as much as possible.

Some people call this “Chaotic Brexit”.

For some it’s “Expensive Brexit”.

What does Mrs May’s Brexit mean? For me, there’s only one word for our unelected Prime Minister’s ‘plan’.

MAYHEM.


*This joke via Millennium Dome, Elephant, in his own excellent analysis of the increasing threat to the British economy from Mrs May’s wreckers.

Last night I was at the Mile End Institute‘s first ‘In Conversation With’ where Professor Philip Cowley was talking to Gisela Stuart MP. It was an interesting discussion, though I did find a lot of her answers to direct questions annoyingly evasive and coupled with a refusal to take responsibility for anything. A case in point is that she won’t take any blame for their being no plan on the Leave side for what happened next, as that’s David Cameron’s fault, and the £350m for the NHS pledge was nothing to do with her, but she’s adamant that we shouldn’t remain in the single market because that was somehow clearly agreed in the referendum campaign.

However, there was one area where I found her arguments very contradictory. Near the start she was waxing lyrically about the wonders of the British way of government and how different it was from the continent. This included our electoral system and the ability of people to throw out governments. Now, my personal opinions on the efficacy of our electoral system differ, but let’s look at it from Stuart’s perspective. The British system effectively allows the electorate to periodically change their minds, throw out one way of doing things and bring in an entirely different way.

Which made what she said later very strange. No one should be trying to overturn Brexit, and we should all be joining her new organisation to make it happen. Suddenly, the great ability of the British system to allow people to change their minds is nowhere to be seen, and anyone trying to prevent it happening is against democracy. This is exactly what doesn’t happen in the British system, even in her view of it. The people are free to change their government, but opposition doesn’t disappear just because of the election result. One vote does not cast an eternal mandate that cannot ever be disputed, and it’s entirely within the right of anyone to question and challenge the entire Brexit process, up to an including overturning it. To argue otherwise is to argue for dictatorship, not democracy, and is a very long way from ‘taking back control’.

(And now for a quick plug and disclaimer, as the Mile End Institute is part of Queen Mary, University of London where I work, and Philip Cowley is one of my PhD supervisors. The next event in the In Conversation With series is on Monday 31st October, and will feature Kenneth Clarke. Tickets are free, and you can find more information by clicking here)

Triangle ABC is larger than triangle DEF. How do you think triangle DEF feels about this?

It's a joke from an old Punt and Dennis radio show,but I thought of it when I read that some 'soft' subjects are no longer to be offered at A level.

According to the Independent, these include History of Art, Statistics, Classical Civilisation and Archaeology.

These strike me as perfectly valid areas of study for a sixth-former: Statistics is one of the many subjects I wish I knew more about.

More fundamentally, as the joke above shows, any subject can be hard of soft depending on how you examine it.

Somewhere behind the pressure to stop offering such subjects is the idea that teenagers are raw material for the economy without individual talents of interests.

The cull of soft subjects was an initiative from Michael Gove. However, since then he has told us that "people in this country have had enough of experts".

So why bother with academic rigour at all?

Sun

Zac’s 23k majority looks strong

One of the most predicted by-elections of this parliament, at Zac Goldsmith’s Richmond Park, looks set to come about if the government, as expected very shortly, announces that it is going ahead with the expansion at Heathrow.

Zac, of course, was the Tory candidate in May’s London Mayoral election and would likely have resigned his seat then if he’d beaten Sadiq Khan. That wasn’t to be but Zac’s long-standing threat to resign if LHR3 goes ahead remains. He reiterated it again over the weekend and there can be little doubt about his intentions.

Such has been the high possibility of a by-election there that the Lib Dems already have a candidate in place and much groundwork has been done for a campaign. Other parties the same.

What we don’t know is whether Zac himself would fight the seat as an independent. He’s said to be hugely popular locally and saw a huge increase in his vote at GE2015. His majority was 38.9% which looks impregnable.

Large parts of his seat used to be in Lib Dem hands and the party has a strong organisation. So we could have a three way fight with Zac facing the reinvigorated Lib Dems and an official Conservative candidate. This could be very hard to call.

I’d think that the official Tory would be third.

Mike Smithson

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October 14th, 2016: Still on my book tour! COME SAY HI TO ME AND MY PALS – Ryan

I suppose it says something about unemployment or the economy but in many large cities, areas have sprung up where almost anyone who can work up a neat-looking costume can hang around and pose for photos with tourists in exchange for tips. This reportedly goes on a lot in Times Square in New York and on Fremont Street in Las Vegas.

In Los Angeles, the main place is on Hollywood Boulevard near the famed Chinese Theater and the massive Hollywood-Highland entertainment center. Right now if I was broke, I could make myself a Batman costume, go up there every day and charge people five bucks — or whatever the market would bear — to take a selfie or snap with me.

As this article explains, there are those who don't like these street performers. They block traffic (some say) and there are occasional reports of fights or accidents or tourists who are somehow ripped-off for more than a modest tip. There is talk of limiting their presence or requiring permits or something. In Vegas, only a certain number are allowed at a time and they're confined to little painted areas on the street. Since in Vegas everything has to be some sort of gamble, the performers "win" certain assignments of time to certain areas via a lottery.

New York also limits them to certain areas. L.A. is still considering what, if anything, to do about them. At the moment, they are regulated but not limited.

Friday, for reasons too trivial even for this blog, I had to walk amongst them to get to somewhere I had to go. I've seen them while driving by — and it is kinda funny to spot a guy in a Spider-Man costume and someone dressed like a giant Elmo from Sesame Street waiting for a bus together. This was the first time I'd walked through the gantlet.

There wasn't a lot of diversity in costumes Friday. There were maybe twenty costumed folks wandering about and posing and around a third were ladies dressed as Catwoman. At least two were dressed and made-up as Marilyn Monroe in the white outfit she wore in famously in The Seven Year Itch. There was one ambitious homemade Minnie Mouse costume and a large, elaborate Transformer…and a half-dozen Spider-Mans.

Most of the Spider-Men wore store-bought costumes but there was at one guy who'd made his own — and not too well, I'm afraid. It looked good from afar but up close, it was pretty amateurish and unimpressive. In the comic book origin story, young Peter Parker — after being bitten by a radio-active spider and discovering it had given him awesome powers — sewed his own costume. I couldn't help but think that his probably looked about as unprofessional as the one this street performer had made for himself.

There were also a couple of street musicians, a few artists offering to do your caricature for a fee, and one sculptor who was ready to render your likeness in clay — also for a fee. MAD magazine artist Tom Richmond, who I know reads this blog, will no doubt be just thrilled (but unsurprised) to hear the following. All of these artists had samples of their handiwork posted to demonstrate the skill they offered. One of the caricaturists was demonstrating his by displaying a number of Tom Richmond drawings as if he'd done them. Not the first time I've seen Tom ripped-off like that.

If I were asked to vote on whether these folks should be banned, I have no idea how I'd vote. Here's a page where some Yelp! reviewers tell of their experiences and post some photos. The experiences are mostly negative but I suspect what would drive someone to post a Yelp! review would more likely be a negative encounter than a positive one.

There was something rather festive about the scene. A lot of tourists head for Hollywood Boulevard and are usually disappointed. It's not a glamorous place, you don't rub elbows with movie stars and there isn't that much to see or do. Clearly, a lot of people were happy the costumers were there.

One thing that struck me: Everyone was taking photos — of the costumed people, of the footprints in the Chinese Theater courtyard, of the stars embedded in the street, of each other. Years ago when I was up there, you saw a lot of cameras but now everyone had a smartphone out and was snapping like crazy. It was a little difficult to walk down the sidewalk because of all the bodies out there but it was impossible to get through without ruining a photo someone was attempting to take. I couldn't help but get in a number of folks' vacation pictures and videos.

The only unpleasantness I saw was that someone snapped a photo of one of the Catwomen without asking permission or offering a tip. She immediately turned on the photog and said, "That'll be five dollars!" The camera wielder didn't want to pay her the five dollars so he started apologizing and saying "I didn't know" and she berated him saying, "Hey, this is how we make our livings. Do you think we're out here for your pleasure?" I didn't see if he forked over any currency but I did notice children staring at Catwoman's apparent villainy.

As I said, L.A. is apparently deciding what to do about this. I have a hunch how it will end.

I'm thinking that one of these days, the folks over at Disney are going to decide that they're missing an opportunity for some free advertising. They'll hire some kids, dress them up as characters the studio is currently promoting, and send them out to Hollywood Boulevard to pass out discount ticket and pose — free! — with tourists. Other studios will follow suit and once there are folks out there in better costumes, not charging and also giving out freebees, the non-pros will not be able to compete and will vanish.

I don't think I like this ending. Corporate America can take the fun out of anything.

The post Hollywood Boulevard Heroes appeared first on News From ME.

I turn 52 next week, and I have a confession to make: I feel like a complete failure at "adulting". Adulting, loosely defined, is that set of activities and behaviours which we judge to be characteristics of grown-ups. You can stop now and make your own list: what I'm going to suggest, speculatively, is that you probably feel like a failure at adulting too. (If you don't, you can stop reading here.)

I'm not alone in this self-defined failure. Lots of people I know, my own age and younger, also admit to feeling like failed adults: "I haven't grown up" is merely the tense-shifted version of "I don't want to grow up". But what does this really mean?

Well, in addition to formal educational processes, we humans learn like most mammals—by observing and imitating. Play in young mammals is all about practicing life skills, but unlike most animals we have a huge load of cultural skills to acquire, stuff we aren't born knowing more or less how to do and just need some practice to get right. And we work out what an adult is, and does, by observing the adults around us.

To say I feel like a failure at adulting doesn't mean I am a failure. I'm a middle-aged novelist who lives in an apartment he owns, has a car, is married, and so on. If I make a checklist of things grown up humans do (as I suggested in the first paragraph above) I actually come out pretty well insofar as the things I don't do are mostly optional. But I still feel like I'm missing stuff. So ... why?

Like most of us, my first experience of observing adults in the wild was as an infant, watching my parents. And—I mentioned that I'm nearly 52?—I'm not giving the game away if I say that my parents are not youngsters. They grew up and came of age in the 1930s and early 1940s; they, in turn, will have internalized their own models of adult behaviour from my grandparents, (only one of whom I ever met). And they came of age during or prior to the first world war.

So here's the thing: I suspect that when I was a pre-teen I internalized a model of adult behaviour that is familiar to anyone under 30 today mostly from TV shows like Mad Men. Men wore suits and hats and went out to work, women wore dresses and stayed home to raise kids, the trappings of material success included cars and maybe a black and white television and a vacuum cleaner (a luxury item in 1950s UK) and air travel was exotic. People went to church (or in the case of my family, synagogue) and society was determinedly homogeneous and a little bit bigoted on the side. And because I don't wear a suit and tie and smoke a pipe while surrounded by my nuclear family in our suburban house I feel kind of slightly like a giant overgrown kid who never managed to grow up and attain the complete grown-up checklist.

This is of course complete bullshit. It's imposter syndrome for grown-ups, and about as valid as imposter syndrome ever is. The reality of being an adult was never like that for everyone, except perhaps the rich and famous role models; it's just that the image of middle class success in the prevailing cultural narrative supplied a template, and insecure, frightened people who are trying to convince themselves that they're adults try to conform to what they perceive as the expectations of everyone around them. The generation that lived in 50's suburbia in turn had inherited their mental map of adult behaviour from their parents. They probably felt like adulting failures too—as witness the sky-high rate of tranquiliser use and alcohol and tobacco addiction in real-world mid-20th century suburbia. And you can trace it back further. The conformist parents of the 1920s were probably trying and failing and feeling like utter failures at being a Victorian paterfamilias or home-maker, or faintly inadequate because they couldn't afford to employ a cook, a maid, and a butler (the Victorian equivalent of a microwave oven, a vacuum cleaner, and a broken metaphor).

We base our vision of an aspirational lifestyle on our parents, who in turn got it by looking at the culture they grew up in (and their parents in turn). The rich are okay; they can afford to buy whatever trappings they think they're supposed to have—butlers for the mansion, finishing school for the kids, whatever. "Downton Abbey" was popular for the worked example of the classical lifestyle of the rich that it supplied: a place for everyone and everyone in their place, including the viewers sitting in front of the TV and wondering if that was why mum was always so fussy about positioning the cutlery just so when laying the table for family dinner. (It's not like the silver spoon novel doesn't have a history.) But the rest of us are struggling to find relevance in a slew of anachronistic cultural detritus that we'd be a lot happier if we simply learned to let go of.

So if you're slouched in front of your laptop wearing a hoodie and joggers while listening to 80s bubblegum pop on a streaming audio channel, and if you've got a collection of bobble-heads or models of the Starship Enterprise on your desk, and your kids (assuming you have any) are wearing retro fashions that remind you of photos of your parents back when they were dating, relax: you are not a failure! Cultural change happens over generations and you're going with the flow rather than trying to cling onto the past like these folk. As Terry Pratchett said, "inside every 80 year old man there's a bewildered 8 year old boy wondering what the hell just happened to him." Give that 8 year old a hug, and tell him he's doing just fine.

The single most vital thing I learned at the neurologist this week was: I really need to read up on Immanuel Kant.  Apparently he made a pretty valiant stab at rescuing the concept of Free Will from science, but only by redefining science itself as an unreliable construct.  Or something. My neurologist is pursuing a PhD in philosophy. It made for some really interesting conversation in and around the needles he kept sticking into my muscles, and the little jolts of electricity he used to make them jump.  And the utterly unremarkable spikes and scribbles scrolling across the monitor.

Nothing to see here, he says. Judging by my reported symptoms and the way I winced when I pulled myself onto the examination table, he thinks it’s rheumatological. I pointed out that it was a rheumatologist who’d sent me to a neurologist. It was like being on the phone to Dell Tech Support.

He tells me that this is what I want, that the moment a doctor gives you a firm diagnosis then there’s definitely something wrong with you. I find this a surprisingly quantum-mechanical way of looking at it— it doesn’t exist until you measure it— but then again, the dude is pursuing a philosophy degree. And if any medical professional is going to find something wrong with you, you don’t want that person to be a neurologist.  Neuro is bad. Neuro always seems to mean wasting and spasms and paralysis and death. You never hear about people who come down with a fully understood, trivially-treatable neurological condition that can be cured with a couple of Advil. Nobody ever comes down with Singular Sclerosis.

This particular neurologist says it’s not unusual for weird suites of symptoms to manifest without ever leading to a definitive diagnosis. At the same time, he admits that my particular suite— the ability to run 10K without incident, coupled with fever and near paralysis when I walk the same distance— are “unusual”.  He has no explanation (although I myself am starting to wonder about a malign post-hypnotic suggestion somewhere along the line).

My strength seems to have largely returned at least, even if the pain and stiffness persist. My main fear is that some trivial bit of exertion— taking out the garbage, trying to hold more than three cats at once— might kick me past the Invisible Threshold and into another collapse. At which point, I guess I go to Emergency while all those acute symptoms are still on display, and tell them to figure it out.

Sometimes, apparently, this stuff just goes away on its own. If you’re lucky.  Whether I am depends on whether you put more stock in the fact that I survived Flesh-eating disease, or the fact that I came down with it in the first place.

Anyway. It’s not cancer, and it’s not Lyme (the blood work finally came back). It’s not arthritis or PMR or myositis or Giant-cell arteritus. And now it’s not neurological either (although I’ve got a card that gets me to the front of the line in case of another collapse). Who knows, maybe it’s gluten after all. Or maybe I’ve got some kind of weird new disease yet undiscovered by Science.  Maybe they’ll name it after me when I’m dead.

Just in case, I’ve prevailed upon The BUG to agree to the following terms: if it turns out that I do have something terminal and incurable, I get to stop working and just play video games in whatever time remains to me. It could be a slow, lingering death— it might take 40 or 50 years to kill me— but at least I can take comfort in the fact that my wife has agreed to let me pass with some semblance of dignity.

Speaking of which, a video game is what I’ll be writing about next time I sit down here. Enough of this open-ended, narratively-unsatisfying medical whingeing.  Next time I’m gonna review SOMA, only a year after it came out.

They say it was partly inspired by me.

101 ways to screw up when making a fake online identity.