Andrew Hickey

Hey rascals
I hope you guys had a good labor day
I don’t remember mine so i’m sure I did
anyway today’s myth is from Iran
and was originally written down in a book
called the SHAHNAMEH
which is the PERSIAN BOOK OF KINGS
okay check it out:

so there’s this dude named Zal
he’s a prince of a part of the Persian empire.
A little background on Zal:
he was born with white hair and a baby beard
he looked like an old man baby, it was gross
so his dad Sam was like “ew get this gross baby away from me”
and left him in the wilderness
where he was raised by a magic bird
and eventually he became a great hero and his dad decided to love him
but he still has weird white hair so that’s always gonna be a thing.

Anyway Zal decides to spend some time strutting around his kingdom
and he ends up near a city called Kabol
which I assume is the same as modern day Kabul
but who knows?
anyway the prince of Kabol, Mehrab, comes to hang out with him
they party hard and it’s great
but then some courtier has to start flapping his dumb mouth
like “psst Zal I hear Mehrab has a hot daughter”
and Zal is like “FUCK”
and then Mehrab, who has no idea what’s going on
is like “hey bro do you want to crash at my house?
you know
the place where my hot daughter lives?”

so what do you think Zal does?
Does he
maybe
crash at Mehrab’s place so he can bang Mehrab’s smokin’ progeny?
uh no
that would be crass
instead he’s like “look dude I’m flattered
but we’re from totally different religious backgrounds
my dad is a king of Persia
your grandfather was a madman with snakes coming out of his shoulders
our families have fought each other since time immemorial
life is crazy
I think i’ll just remain here in my opulent tent, thanks.”
and Mehrab is like “ok fair enough”

so Mehrab goes back to his hot daughter Rudabeh
and Rudabeh is like “Hey
I heard Zal is out there
you know, the dude who was born as an old-man baby
what’s he like, is he gross?”
and Mehrab is like “omg he is definitely not gross
if there was a miss America pageant
but for men instead of women
and for Iran instead of America
well
the competition would probably have to be altered due to cultural factors
and gender norms
and also the fact that we don’t have televisions or sequins yet
but anyway I think he’d have a pretty good shot”
and Rudabeh is like “FUCK”

so what does she do?
does she steal away in the night
to fling herself into the arms of a lover she barely knows?
no, that would be irrational.
she sends a group of servants to hang out by a pond
where she’s pretty sure Zal will be
so they can find out if he’s cute
and they come back like “OMG HE SO IS.
IF THERE WAS A VERSION OF THE BACHELOR
BUT WITH ONE WOMAN AND A BUNCH OF MEN
AND YOU WERE THE WOMAN
AND HE WAS ONE OF THE MEN
ODDS ARE GOOD THAT YOU WOULD PICK HIM
even though he has weird hair”
and she’s like “yowza
tell that albino to get his lily white ass over here”

So Zal shows up at the walls of the palace that night
and Rudabeh is standing on the battlements
and he’s like “hey babe
i’m finding it difficult to smooch you from all the way down here”
and she throws her long luscious hair down over the walls
and she’s like “here, climb this.”
So what do you think he does?
does he scramble up this living rope ladder
forcing her to support his entire weight with her neck
while he simultaneously yanks on her scalp?
NO
THAT WOULD BE CRUEL
he brought a ROPE
because he’s not a fucking savage.

Anyway they spend the night making out
and in the morning Zal has to leave
because remember
his dad and Rudabeh’s dad are mortal enemies
but he can’t deal with this shit
so what do you think he does?
does he arrange to marry Rudabeh under cover of night
and then escape to somewhere far away and live in poverty?
No, that would be impractical.
He writes a letter to his dad Sam
like “Hey, remember how you abandoned me to be raised by birds
and then you felt bad and said you’d do whatever I wanted
welp
cashing in that dumb promise now”
and his dad is like “FUCK
this is EXACTLY the kind of dumb shit a kid raised by birds would think of
but I guess that’s sort of my fault
shit”
so he calls up his astronomers
to tell him if this is a good idea
and they’re all like “actually yeah
Zal and Rudabeh’s kid will be like the greatest hero ever
this is a win-win for you”
so Sam sends a letter to Zal like “yeah okay sure”

Meanwhile, though
Rudabeh’s mom Sindokht figures out what’s up
like, how her daughter’s about to marry their age-old enemy’s son
and she
well
she’s actually super reasonable about it
which would be surprising
if it weren’t for the fact
THAT EVERYBODY IS BEING SUPER REASONABLE IN THIS STORY
it’s like WHAT THE FUCK, PERSIA
DID YOU FORGET THAT MYTHS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT MURDER AND INCEST?
IS YOUR WHOLE COUNTRY JUST FULL OF KIND, CONSIDERATE PEOPLE
ALL OPENING DOORS FOR EACH OTHER AND NOT CLIMBING EACH OTHERS’ HAIR???
this is bullshit

anyway Sindokht goes to Mehrab like “hey husband
our hot daughter wants to marry Zal”
and Mehrab is like “I WILL MURDER HER”
FINALLY SOMEBODY IS BEING UREASONABLE
except Sindokht is like “Why don’t you sleep on it, honey
and in the meantime I’ll go see what Sam thinks of all this?”
and Mehrab
INFURIATINGLY
is like “yeah that sounds like a good idea.”

MEANWHILE, THOUGH
the high king of all Persia hears about this shit
and he’s like “SERIOUSLY?
HAVE YOU ALL FORGOTTEN
THAT RUDABEH
IS DESCENDED
FROM A DUDE
WHO HAD BRAIN-EATING SNAKES
COMING OUT OF HIS SHOULDERS???
THERE’S ONLY ONE WAY TO STOP THIS
AND THAT BURNING KABOL TO THE GROUND.”
which is just like, phew, right?
I thought I was gonna have to witness a happy marriage
and not a bloody massacre
BUT THEN SAM WRITES THE KING A STRONGLY WORDED LETTER
AND ZAL DELIVERS IT
AND THE POWER OF HIS LOVE
COUPLED WITH THE ASTONOMER’S PROPHECY
AND ZAL’S WISE RESPONSES TO A SERIES OF WEIRD FREE-ASSOCIATION RIDDLES
CONVINCE EVEN KING ASSHOLE OF PERSIA
THAT THESE TWO KIDS SHOULD BE MARRIED
FUCK THIS
JUST FUCK THIS
FUCK

anyway yeah they get married
literally everyone is happy about it so it goes awesome
everyone gives each other stupid expensive gifts
and true to the prophecy
Zal and Rudabeh have a magnificent son named Rostam
who goes on to accidentally murder his teenaged son during a duel
so I guess it all works out in the end.

The moral of the story
is that communication between enemy states
is essential to every relationship.

The end.

A long long time ago
or maybe just a long time ago
some internet person tried to pay me
to retell the Principia Discordia.
As payment I demanded twenty dollars in quarters
and photographic proof of having amused strangers in traffic
which i thought was a suitably discordian payment.
The person in question completely failed to deliver either of these things
which
now that i think about it
is probably a suitably discordian payment method

but rather than trying to transliterate the entire corpus
of the Epiphanies Rudely Imposed Upon the World by Her Royal Weirdness Eris Discordia
(whose most notorious achievement I have already documented in any case)
today I am going to tell you about the Goddess’s Only Begotten Son
EMPEROR NORTON
RULER OF THESE UNITED STATES
AND – FOR A SHORT TIME
PROTECTOR OF MEXICO

This is a real story about a real person
a real person born in England in like 1818
who grew up in South Africa
and only moved to the US when his parents died
/ when he realized how rad America was.
So Norton (whose first name is not actually Emperor
but is in fact Joshua)
shows up in San Francisco as a pretty rich dude
like, his parents were rich and then they died
and that made him rich because richness is i guess genetic
anyway Norton is a pretty shrewd investor
so he quickly turns his money into even more money
and then he comes across THE ULTIMATE FINANCIAL OPPORTUNITY

you see, China suddenly decides it’s not gonna export rice anymore
and San Francisco is full of Chinese people
who are used to having rice
so all of a sudden there is a HUGE demand for rice
and like NO RICE
so Norton buys up like a million tons of rice
and has it shipped to san Francisco
so he can be the big rice man.

BUT HE FORGOT ONE CRUCIAL THING:
CHINA IS NOT THE ONLY PLACE WHAT GROWS RICE
so all of a sudden these two huge ships arrive from peru
just brimming with fucking rice
and overnight Norton’s boatload of bucks
becomes a boatload of sucks.
He tries to get out of paying for all that rice
but his reasons are bullshit and everyone knows it
so within the space of like a week
dude is suddenly not rich anymore.

So what does Norton do?
Does he jump off the top of a building?
NO
HE DECLARES HIMSELF EMPEROR OF THE UNITED STATES
DUH.
Like, first he disappears for a little while
but when he reappears
he just starts writing royal decrees
and sending them to san Francisco newspapers
like “Hear ye hear ye, I’m emperor now”
or “Avast, congress is hereby dissolved”
or “Yarr, build a bridge over that there Oakland Bay”
oh fuck I slipped into pirate mode there for a second
although you have to admit
the only thing cooler than being emperor of the united states
is being PIRATE-KING OF THE UNITED STATES

but anyway yeah
Norton is totally serious about all of this
he’s all writing letters to Queen Victoria/Abe Lincoln
trying to marry one and moderate the other one’s civil war
he’s issuing his own currency
and selling royal bonds
and inspecting the quality of the streets and the police
but none of that is really that remarkable.
Crazy people believe crazy shit all the time
especially when it comes to their crazy selves.
What’s ACTUALLY insane
is how people RESPOND to this guy.
Restaurants accept his currency
and actively seek out his royal seal of approval.
The city council pays for him to have fancy clothes
like gold epaulets
and a coonskin cap with peacock feathers in it.
One time a police officer accidentally arrests him for being crazy
and people get SO CHEEZED
that the chief of police is forced to order his release
and issue a public apology
which Norton responds to with a ROYAL PARDON.
Boy, it sure is pretty dope to be white in America, huh?

YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S NOT DOPE TO BE IN AMERICA THOUGH?
CHINESE
at least not in the 1800s
who would have thought that the country that went on to intern the Japanese
would harbor anti-Chinese sentiments during the civil war era huh
yeah, people are straight rioting in San Fran
(which Norton explicitly forbade anyone from calling “Frisco” by the way
so keep that in mind)
and they really want to kill them some Chinese people
so they show up in Chinatown, bout to bust some skulls
and who’s standing there
rudely obstructing their murder route?
EMPEROR FUCKING NORTON
OBVIOUSLY
THIS IS A STORY ABOUT EMPEROR NORTON
KEEP UP.
Norton just stands in front of these rioters with his head down
and fucking prays at them until they feel awkward and go away.
Then he goes back to selling bullshit royal bonds to tourists.

Emperor Norton is like most people in that he eventually dies.
It’s a bummer, but he lived a pretty good life
and somewhere between 10 and 30 thousand people show up to his funeral
which is somewhere between 7 and 20 percent of the city at that time
oh, and do you remember that bridge he ordered built?
LOOKS LIKE IT GOT BUILT AFTER ALL
SIXTY YEARS LATER
THANKS ENTIRELY TO EMPEROR NORTON AND NO ONE ELSE
also I imagine there are some Chinese people who are happy they weren’t murdered.
That’s a pretty solid legacy
i gotta say.

I think the moral of this story is one we can all appreciate:
when life gives you lemons
declare yourself emperor
issue a proprietary currency
and then use that currency to buy lemonade.

Our tour leader was a short, wry, charming Armenian man named Tony. He was a history scholar and an irreverent cynic — both qualities that suited him well for the task of guiding a group of American college students all over Israel and the West Bank for several weeks in January, 1990.

As we prepared to visit each of the many sites on our formal itinerary, Tony would briefly summarize the prevailing scholarly understanding of its history, often highlighting the contrast between that view and the more popular legends surrounding many places. And, if you prodded him a very little, he’d also sometimes share his own opinion — which was sometimes persuasive, sometimes outrageous, and sometimes both.

Before we visited the Temple Mount, Tony offered his nutshell opinion of the site’s history. Before David, he said, the holiest site in Judaism was Hebron, regarded as the location of the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and Isaac were said to be buried.* But after David, Tony said, Jerusalem became the holy city and the most revered site. Tony thought this was largely a military development.

Hebron, he said, was indefensible and a lousy place for a king and general to build his capital city. Jerusalem, though, was perfect — high ground, water, just about everything you’d want for a Bronze Age walled city. The only thing it was lacking was some claim to holiness or sacredness that could trump the bones of the patriarchs in Hebron. So, Tony says, David and Joab probably cooked up the idea that the vaguely located “Mount Moriah” from the story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis was the same place as Jerusalem. David purchased land there and built a shrine, literally enshrining the place, and presto — he had a capital city worthy of a warrior-king.

We were there during the First Intifada (which, of course, wasn’t yet called the “first” Intifada) and things were a bit tense in and around Jerusalem. More than a bit, really. Our formal college tour, led by Tony, was unable to take us to several sites because of the uprising or because the IDF had shut them down in suppressing it. We still went to Bethlehem — for Christmas (their Christmas, our Epiphany) — a visit that included multiple military checkpoints and lines of tanks. But Hebron was locked down and our scheduled trip there was cancelled.

But that unrest was, in 1990, kept removed from the Temple Mount. That site was off-limits, held in too great reverence by everyone in the region — Jews, Muslims, Christians, secular scholars — for it to become part of the field of play for the roiling political struggle unfolding throughout the rest of the region. Everyone we spoke to, across the broad array of political and religious perspectives we encountered, said the same thing. It was, at that time, unthinkable to carry that political struggle into the tangled complex of holy places that Moishe Dayan, in 1967, called “all that Vatican.”

This shared sense of keeping that site off limits wasn’t entirely due to religious reverence. It was also a matter of prudence — of a healthy respect for the fact that the Temple Mount is the focus of intense passions and apocalyptic visions for three major religions and, therefore, a powder keg it would be wise to keep safe from sparks. (And I’m sure Tony’s cynical follow-the-money perspective was also a factor. No one wants to scare away the tourists and pilgrims, he said. Everybody needs their money.)

All of that is why it is so frightening to have watched, over the past 25 years, as political violence has seeped into, and then concentrated on, this sacred ground. Hanan Ashrawi – a distinguished scholar, Palestinian legislator, and Anglican — is frightened by this too. “By imposing its own version of its concept of the Temple Mount on the third most holiest Islamic site, Israel is not only provoking the Palestinians, but the entire Muslim world,” she said, warning that politicizing the status of that site seems intended to provoke “a global holy war.”

Ashrawi is a Palestinian partisan, of course, and you’re free to disagree with her passionately partisan framing of the current conflict centered on the Temple Mount. But she’s not wrong about the stakes of that conflict.

The same sense of reverence that insulated that holiest part of the Holy Land from early struggles is driving the current struggle, which is about access to and control of that site. These fireworks in a powder keg are not due to concerns that the inviolable is being violated, or that the Others are desecrating the sacred, but rather about who is permitted and who is denied access to this invaluable holy place — and who gets to decide that.

When I visited the Temple Mount, in 1990, access to the site was shared and negotiated through an arrangement literally named the Status Quo. Nobody seemed completely happy or satisfied with that arrangement, but everyone was able to live with it — and therefore to live with each other. That Status Quo arrangement seems in jeopardy now and, because this holy site is immeasurably important to all sides, that threatens to destabilize far more than just who is able to visit these holy places. So this is one time when I think defending the status quo is both necessary and good.

But again, back in 1990, those extreme stakes were not yet on the table. The Temple Mount was off limits to the struggles of that time and the perpetual occupation, the Intifada, and the crackdown against it, did not in any way interfere with our visit to the site. And thus I was able to take this photograph of the Dome of the Rock:

It was a dim, drizzly day and I am a lousy photographer and that photo doesn’t begin to do the building justice. It is dazzling, overwhelming. The inside is awe-inspiring. It took me a moment to close my mouth and remember to breathe. We were instructed to take off our shoes as we entered. I might have done so anyway simply due to the knee-buckling beauty and majesty of the place.

This was not, for me, a religious awe — nothing like the sense I had on the shore of Galilee or among the ancient olive trees of Gethsemane. But I was awestruck nonetheless — by its sheer beauty, by the recognition that I was standing in a place centuries older than my own language, and by a recognition of what that place means and has meant to so many other people. That last one is difficult to describe, but its a tangible, pervasive sense of something like vicarious sacredness — a site that gives meaning to so many for so long is, in turn, given meaning by them, and we can experience a bit of that regardless of whether we share anything like their understanding of the place.

I somewhat glibly referred to this place the other day, expressing my frustration with the way the boilerplate, at this point cliché, description of the al-Aqsa site as “the third-holiest site in Islam,” has morphed from a fact into a factoid. The fact is fuzzily accurate. The factoid is misleading.

Yes, this Islamic holy site is “outranked” by two other sites — sites a non-Muslim like myself would not be allowed to visit, but reciting this kind of ranking amidst a host of other things ranked and rated and quantified sequentially can mislead us into thinking of “third-holiest” as something akin to finishing third in the weekend box office. Like it’s a bronze medal in holiness, or the Ron Paul-in-Iowa of holiness. And that’s not what it means. Not at all. The fact that its “holiness” is exceeded by those two other sites doesn’t in any way diminish its standing as a holy place. Being “third-holiest” does not, as the factoidizing repetition of that designation seems to suggest, mean that Muslims regard the site as anything less than wholly holy.

Consider ∞. Infinity means a number “greater than any assignable quantity or countable number.” But here comes a mathematician telling us about ∞+1. That’s a real thing, but its existence does not thereby make infinity less than infinite. It exceeds infinity, but it does not thereby diminish it.

Part of the problem here is that the word “holy” is nebulous – it can describe both a quality and a category. When we use it to describe a quality, then something can be comparably or relatively “holy” — holy, holier, holiest. And a quality that allows for something to be regarded as “holiest” also seems to allow for something to be regarded as holy-ish — as maybe a little bit holy, but not really. When we use the word “holy” to describe a category it tends to be more binary — either “holy” or not.

Further mucking things up is the confusing way that religions like to use it to mean both things at the same time — the holy of holies, the high holy days, the “third-holiest site,” etc. Thus, for example, it is accurate to say that Yom Kippur is a holier holy day than your average Sabbath. But if you flip that the other way to suggest that the Sabbath is in any way anything less that entirely and utterly holy — that it does not completely belong to the category of holy — then you’re going to run into problems. The “third-holiest” factoid invites similar problems.

But there’s also a real danger in the way this factoid is sometimes employed. In the “Bible prophecy” writings of some white American Christians, al-Aqsa’s status as the third-holiest site in Islam is often contrasted with the Temple Mount’s status as the first-holiest site in Judaism. The implicit — and sometimes explicit — idea there is that Jewish regard for the site therefore outranks its importance in Islam. It seems unfair to have one group’s first-holiest site interfered with by another group’s merely second-runner-up to holiest. And so they ignore the meaning of the fact and recite it as a factoid, twisting a statement that’s actually about the place’s immeasurable value to billions of people into a statement diminishing and dismissing its value to them.

And when I describe that as a real danger I mean exactly that. Tossing lit matches at the powder keg of the Temple Mount is a hobby for “Bible prophecy”-obsessed American Christians. They’re hoping for an explosion. They’re praying for it. They want to see the islamic holy site razed so that the Jewish holy site can be rebuilt so that the Antichrist they long for can come along to desecrate it. And then, they believe, RoboJesus can at last come back, kill the infidels, destroy the whole thing, and replace it with a holy site for them. At which point they win, I guess.

I said earlier that the fact behind this factoid was fuzzily accurate. “Al-Aqsa is the third holiest site in Islam” is an accurate statement, but it contains terms that are defined and understood in different ways by different audiences. Here’s how Gershom Gorenberg addresses this in his excellent, dismayingly insightful book, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount:

 Al-Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, is the third-holiest site in Islam. Near its center stands the Dome of the Rock — a gilded half-sphere rising from an octagonal base. The protuberance of bedrock inside the shrine traditionally marks the spot where Muhammad ascended to heaven on his nighttime journey from Mecca nearly 1,400 years ago. It probably also marks — a shimmering uncertainty is part of the landscape — the location of the Holy of Holies, the sacred core of the Jewish Temple. At the southern end of the esplanade is Al-Aqsa Mosque. To confuse matters, the name has a double meaning: Today any Muslim, at least in Jerusalem and the West Bank and Israel, will insist that the entirety of the Haram is Al-Aqsa, including the open squares between the shrines and the olive grove north of the Dome, all sacred ground.

(The cover of Gorenberg’s book features a splendid photograph of the Dome of the Rock, artfully framed in full sun by David H. Wells. Wells’ photo does a far, far better job than mine in capturing the beauty of the site, but I posted my photo here instead because I stood there and took it myself.)

- – - – - – - – - – - -

* In the book of Acts, Luke has Stephen saying the Cave of the Patriarchs was in Shechem (now Nablus), which is a long way in the other direction from Hebron. Shechem is also near where Tony thought Mount Moriah really was — by which he meant that was the location of the actual mountain referenced in the story, not that he thought the story actually happened.

A few weeks ago, Hensen et al., of the Delft University of Technology and Barcelona, Spain, put out a paper reporting the first experiment that violates the Bell inequality in a way that closes off the two main loopholes simultaneously: the locality and detection loopholes.  Well, at least with ~96% confidence.  This is big news, not only because of the result itself, but because of the advances in experimental technique needed to achieve it.  Last Friday, two renowned experimentalists—Chris Monroe of U. of Maryland and Jungsang Kim of Duke—visited MIT, and in addition to talking about their own exciting ion-trap work, they did a huge amount to help me understand the new Bell test experiment.  So OK, let me try to explain this.

While some people like to make it more complicated, the Bell inequality is the following statement. Alice and Bob are cooperating with each other to win a certain game (the “CHSH game“) with the highest possible probability. They can agree on a strategy and share information and particles in advance, but then they can’t communicate once the game starts. Alice gets a uniform random bit x, and Bob gets a uniform random bit y (independent of x).  Their goal is to output bits, a and b respectively, such that a XOR b = x AND y: in other words, such that a and b are different if and only if x and y are both 1.  The Bell inequality says that, in any universe that satisfies the property of local realism, no matter which strategy they use, Alice and Bob can win the game at most 75% of the time (for example, by always outputting a=b=0).

What does local realism mean?  It means that, after she receives her input x, any experiment Alice can perform in her lab has a definite result that might depend on x, on the state of her lab, and on whatever information she pre-shared with Bob, but at any rate, not on Bob’s input y.  If you like: a=a(x,w) is a function of x and of the information w available before the game started, but is not a function of y.  Likewise, b=b(y,w) is a function of y and w, but not of x.  Perhaps the best way to explain local realism is that it’s the thing you believe in, if you believe all the physicists babbling about “quantum entanglement” just missed something completely obvious.  Clearly, at the moment two “entangled” particles are created, but before they separate, one of them flips a tiny coin and then says to the other, “listen, if anyone asks, I’ll be spinning up and you’ll be spinning down.”  Then the naïve, doofus physicists measure one particle, find it spinning down, and wonder how the other particle instantly “knows” to be spinning up—oooh, spooky! mysterious!  Anyway, if that’s how you think it has to work, then you believe in local realism, and you must predict that Alice and Bob can win the CHSH game with probability at most 3/4.

What Bell observed in 1964 is that, even though quantum mechanics doesn’t let Alice send a signal to Bob (or vice versa) faster than the speed of light, it still makes a prediction about the CHSH game that conflicts with local realism.  (And thus, quantum mechanics exhibits what one might not have realized beforehand was even a logical possibility: it doesn’t allow communication faster than light, but simulating the predictions of quantum mechanics in a classical universe would require faster-than-light communication.)  In particular, if Alice and Bob share entangled qubits, say $$\frac{\left| 00 \right\rangle + \left| 11 \right\rangle}{\sqrt{2}},$$ then there’s a simple protocol that lets them violate the Bell inequality, winning the CHSH game ~85% of the time (with probability (1+1/√2)/2 > 3/4).  Starting in the 1970s, people did experiments that vindicated the prediction of quantum mechanics, and falsified local realism—or so the story goes.

The violation of the Bell inequality has a schizophrenic status in physics.  To many of the physicists I know, Nature’s violating the Bell inequality is so trivial and obvious that it’s barely even worth doing the experiment: if people had just understood and believed Bohr and Heisenberg back in 1925, there would’ve been no need for this whole tiresome discussion.  To others, however, the Bell inequality violation remains so unacceptable that some way must be found around it—from casting doubt on the experiments that have been done, to overthrowing basic presuppositions of science (e.g., our own “freedom” to generate random bits x and y to send to Alice and Bob respectively).

For several decades, there was a relatively conservative way out for local realist diehards, and that was to point to “loopholes”: imperfections in the existing experiments which meant that local realism was still theoretically compatible with the results, at least if one was willing to assume a sufficiently strange conspiracy.

Fine, you interject, but surely no one literally believed these little experimental imperfections would be the thing that would rescue local realism?  Not so fast.  Right here, on this blog, I’ve had people point to the loopholes as a reason to accept local realism and reject the reality of quantum entanglement.  See, for example, the numerous comments by Teresa Mendes in my Whether Or Not God Plays Dice, I Do post.  Arguing with Mendes back in 2012, I predicted that the two main loopholes would both be closed in a single experiment—and not merely eventually, but in, like, a decade.  I was wrong: achieving this milestone took only a few years.

Before going further, let’s understand what the two main loopholes are (or rather, were).

The locality loophole arises because the measuring process takes time and Alice and Bob are not infinitely far apart.  Thus, suppose that, the instant Alice starts measuring her particle, a secret signal starts flying toward Bob’s particle at the speed of light, revealing her choice of measurement setting (i.e., the value of x).  Likewise, the instant Bob starts measuring his particle, his doing so sends a secret signal flying toward Alice’s particle, revealing the value of y.  By the time the measurements are finished, a few microseconds later, there’s been plenty of time for the two particles to coordinate their responses to the measurements, despite being “classical under the hood.”

Meanwhile, the detection loophole arises because in practice, measurements of entangled particles—especially of photons—don’t always succeed in finding the particles, let alone ascertaining their properties.  So one needs to select those runs of the experiment where Alice and Bob both find the particles, and discard all the “bad” runs where they don’t.  This by itself wouldn’t be a problem, if not for the fact that the very same measurement that reveals whether the particles are there, is also the one that “counts” (i.e., where Alice and Bob feed x and y and get out a and b)!

To someone with a conspiratorial mind, this opens up the possibility that the measurement’s success or failure is somehow correlated with its result, in a way that could violate the Bell inequality despite there being no real entanglement.  To illustrate, suppose that at the instant they’re created, one entangled particle says to the other: “listen, if Alice measures me in the x=0 basis, I’ll give the a=1 result.  If Bob measures you in the y=1 basis, you give the b=1 result.  In any other case, we’ll just evade detection and count this run as a loss.”  In such a case, Alice and Bob will win the game with certainty, whenever it gets played at all—but that’s only because of the particles’ freedom to choose which rounds will count.  Indeed, by randomly varying their “acceptable” x and y values from one round to the next, the particles can even make it look like x and y have no effect on the probability of a round’s succeeding.

Until a month ago, the state-of-the-art was that there were experiments that closed the locality loophole, and other experiments that closed the detection loophole, but there was no single experiment that closed both of them.

To close the locality loophole, “all you need” is a fast enough measurement on photons that are far enough apart.  That way, even if the vast Einsteinian conspiracy is trying to send signals between Alice’s and Bob’s particles at the speed of light, to coordinate the answers classically, the whole experiment will be done before the signals can possibly have reached their destinations.  Admittedly, as Nicolas Gisin once pointed out to me, there’s a philosophical difficulty in defining what we mean by the experiment being “done.”  To some purists, a Bell experiment might only be “done” once the results (i.e., the values of a and b) are registered in human experimenters’ brains!  And given the slowness of human reaction times, this might imply that a real Bell experiment ought to be carried out with astronauts on faraway space stations, or with Alice on the moon and Bob on earth (which, OK, would be cool).  If we’re being reasonable, however, we can grant that the experiment is “done” once a and b are safely recorded in classical, macroscopic computer memories—in which case, given the speed of modern computer memories, separating Alice and Bob by half a kilometer can be enough.  And indeed, experiments starting in 1998 (see for example here) have done exactly that; the current record, unless I’m mistaken, is 18 kilometers.  (Update: I was mistaken; it’s 144 kilometers.)  Alas, since these experiments used hard-to-measure photons, they were still open to the detection loophole.

To close the detection loophole, the simplest approach is to use entangled qubits that (unlike photons) are slow and heavy and can be measured with success probability approaching 1.  That’s exactly what various groups did starting in 2001 (see for example here), with trapped ions, superconducting qubits, and other systems.  Alas, given current technology, these sorts of qubits are virtually impossible to move miles apart from each other without decohering them.  So the experiments used qubits that were close together, leaving the locality loophole wide open.

So the problem boils down to: how do you create long-lasting, reliably-measurable entanglement between particles that are very far apart (e.g., in separate labs)?  There are three basic ideas in Hensen et al.’s solution to this problem.

The first idea is to use a hybrid system.  Ultimately, Hensen et al. create entanglement between electron spins in nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond (one of the hottest—or coolest?—experimental quantum information platforms today), in two labs that are about a mile away from each other.  To get these faraway electron spins to talk to each other, they make them communicate via photons.  If you stimulate an electron, it’ll sometimes emit a photon with which it’s entangled.  Very occasionally, the two electrons you care about will even emit photons at the same time.  In those cases, by routing those photons into optical fibers and then measuring the photons, it’s possible to entangle the electrons.

Wait, what?  How does measuring the photons entangle the electrons from whence they came?  This brings us to the second idea, entanglement swapping.  The latter is a famous procedure to create entanglement between two particles A and B that have never interacted, by “merely” entangling A with another particle A’, entangling B with another particle B’, and then performing an entangled measurement on A’ and B’ and conditioning on its result.  To illustrate, consider the state

$$ \frac{\left| 00 \right\rangle + \left| 11 \right\rangle}{\sqrt{2}} \otimes \frac{\left| 00 \right\rangle + \left| 11 \right\rangle}{\sqrt{2}} $$

and now imagine that we project the first and third qubits onto the state $$\frac{\left| 00 \right\rangle + \left| 11 \right\rangle}{\sqrt{2}}.$$

If the measurement succeeds, you can check that we’ll be left with the state $$\frac{\left| 00 \right\rangle + \left| 11 \right\rangle}{\sqrt{2}}$$ in the second and fourth qubits, even though those qubits were not entangled before.

So to recap: these two electron spins, in labs a mile away from each other, both have some probability of producing a photon.  The photons, if produced, are routed to a third site, where if they’re both there, then an entangled measurement on both of them (and a conditioning on the results of that measurement) has some nonzero probability of causing the original electron spins to become entangled.

But there’s a problem: if you’ve been paying attention, all we’ve done is cause the electron spins to become entangled with some tiny, nonzero probability (something like 6.4×10^-9 in the actual experiment).  So then, why is this any improvement over the previous experiments, which just directly measured faraway entangled photons, and also had some small but nonzero probability of detecting them?

This leads to the third idea.  The new setup is an improvement because, whenever the photon measurement succeeds, we know that the electron spins are there and that they’re entangled, without having to measure the electron spins to tell us that.  In other words, we’ve decoupled the measurement that tells us whether we succeeded in creating an entangled pair, from the measurement that uses the entangled pair to violate the Bell inequality.  And because of that decoupling, we can now just condition on the runs of the experiment where the entangled pair was there, without worrying that that will open up the detection loophole, biasing the results via some bizarre correlated conspiracy.  It’s as if the whole experiment were simply switched off, except for those rare lucky occasions when an entangled spin pair gets created (with its creation heralded by the photons).  On those rare occasions, Alice and Bob swing into action, measuring their respective spins within the brief window of time—about 4 microseconds—allowed by the locality loophole, seeking an additional morsel of evidence that entanglement is real.  (Well, actually, Alice and Bob swing into action regardless; they only find out later whether this was one of the runs that “counted.”)

So, those are the main ideas (as well as I understand them); then there’s lots of engineering.  In their setup, Hensen et al. were able to create just a few heralded entangled pairs per hour.  This allowed them to produce 245 CHSH games for Alice and Bob to play, and to reject the hypothesis of local realism at ~96% confidence.  Jungsang Kim explained to me that existing technologies could have produced many more events per hour, and hence, in a similar amount of time, “particle physics” (5σ or more) rather than “psychology” (2σ) levels of confidence that local realism is false.  But in this type of experiment, everything is a tradeoff.  Building not one but two labs for manipulating NV centers in diamond is extremely onerous, and Hensen et al. did what they had to do to get a significant result.

The basic idea here, of using photons to entangle longer-lasting qubits, is useful for more than pulverizing local realism.  In particular, the idea is a major part of current proposals for how to build a scalable ion-trap quantum computer.  Because of cross-talk, you can’t feasibly put more than 10 or so ions in the same trap while keeping all of them coherent and controllable.  So the current ideas for scaling up involve having lots of separate traps—but in that case, one will sometimes need to perform a Controlled-NOT, or some other 2-qubit gate, between a qubit in one trap and a qubit in another.  This can be achieved using the Gottesman-Chuang technique of gate teleportation, provided you have reliable entanglement between the traps.  But how do you create such entanglement?  Aha: the current idea is to entangle the ions by using photons as intermediaries, very similar in spirit to what Hensen et al. do.

At a more fundamental level, will this experiment finally convince everyone that local realism is dead, and that quantum mechanics might indeed be the operating system of reality?  Alas, I predict that those who confidently predicted that a loophole-free Bell test could never be done, will simply find some new way to wiggle out, without admitting the slightest problem for their previous view.  This prediction, you might say, is based on a different kind of realism.

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September 16th, 2015: This comic was going to give Batman the powers of all his enemies until I realized that Poison Ivy pretty much did the trick. Not bad, Miss Pamela Isley! – Ryan

I was called to summate this motion. It passed with no votes against.

Good morning conference,

The state of transgender healthcare in this country is a complete pig’s ear. The state of healthcare for intersex people is far worse.

At the first session of the Women and Equalities Select Committee’s inquiry into transgender issues a couple of weeks ago, one MP asked, if she went to her GP and told them she had been struggling with her gender identity and needed help, how long it would take before she got any kind of treatment.

She didn’t get a clear answer, so I’ll give one now. The answer is years.

Years

And that’s for a prescription of HRT drugs which are basically harmless and cost about as much as ibuprofen.

This happens because of systematic neglect by the NHS. It happens because of pig-headed commissioners who would rather squander their budgets on the worsening mental health of trans people desperate for treatment, while they wait years, and while their lives collapse around them. They’ll spend two, three times as much money as it would cost to cure people to keep them in a state of distress.

It happens because clinicians, working at the front line, have told me that they do not get the support they need from their trusts, that they are overworked and under-resourced. That other clinicians think they’re wasting their time working with a bunch of weirdoes.

A recent study revealed that the most dangerous time for a transgender person is immediately after they have requested treatment, because that’s the point at which the dam has burst, and the thing they’ve been suppressing for years has gushed through. If denied help at this point, the study found that around half of them will attempt suicide.

Medical neglect of transgender people is pushing them into suicide.

But however badly transgender people have it, intersex people have it worse in many ways. We have heard about how they are mutilated as babies, often based on whether the length of their sex organ passes an arbitrary threshold.

The scalpel ham-fistedly assigns them as boys if it’s beyond certain length, and girls if it’s not. This often sterilises them in the process. Their parents are told not to discuss it with them as they grow up.

They are then treated with further surgery and a cocktail of hormones to try and force them into the gender role medics chose for them at birth, and then at 18, when they are often suffering from a litany of health problems and traumatised by what is done to them, funding dries up.

Those who subsequently seek gender reassignment, to try and fix what was done to them, often have a harder time accessing it than trans people do. Trans people who, ironically, have almost no access to medical intervention before they are 18.

We have heard that trans people are treated poorly by equalities law. That it’s legal to fire us, that it’s legal to sack us from certain jobs, that it’s difficult to gain legal recognition, and even that process is subject to spousal veto.

Intersex people have no legal recognition at all. At the LGBT+ Lib Dems fringe yesterday, prior to this debate, we heard that intersex people are as common as redheads. The shocking way society treats them represents collective guilty secret shared by us all. The way the medical community treats both trans and intersex people betrays a medical community that has not learned from the decades it spent trying to “normalise” lesbian, gay and bisexual people.

Conference, it has to stop, and it has to stop now. Please vote for this motion. Thank you.

The photo at left above is our pal Frank Ferrante who, as you know, plays Groucho Marx in a wonderful touring show that I plug here more often than I plug my own endeavors.

The photo at right is of Robert Kanigher, a writer and editor who worked in comics for years, mostly for DC. What do these photos have in common? Answer: They're constantly being misidentified on websites. Hundreds of pages identify the shot of Frank as the real Groucho and this photo has even turned up on several Groucho CDs and DVDs. The picture of Mr. Kanigher is often identified as a shot of Bill Finger, who worked for DC Comics for much of the same time.

Why the frequent mistakes? Because people are looking for a photo of Groucho or Bill Finger and they go to Yahoo! or some other search engine, search for the name and these photos come up. Right this minute, if I go to Google and search for "Groucho Marx," the shot of Frank is the second thing I see.

This is not because any person at Google thinks that's Frank. It's because of the way search engines work. Almost every time the Google "spiders" that crawl the Internet come across that photo, it's adjacent to the words "Groucho" and "Marx." Google isn't saying it's a photo of Groucho. It's saying that photo relates to the term "Groucho Marx."

Same deal with Kanigher. In point of fact, photos of Kanigher and of Bill Finger are very scarce. When Kanigher passed in 2002, I searched high, low and everywhere to locate one to use with my obit of the man. I couldn't find one and had to do without.

In 2014, we presented Kanigher posthumously with the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. For this, as administrator, I had to track down someone in Kanigher's family so we'd have someone to present the award to. I located his daughter and she supplied several photos to me, the best of which was this one…though it was torn and had sections of his face missing.

I did some fancy Photoshopping to clean it up and it was used in the announcements and press releases and such. Anyone who uses it now has taken it from there, which is fine with me. But it's annoying to see people who are writing about the criminally-undercredited Bill Finger display it as a photo of Bill Finger.

(And you've probably figured out why they think that. If you search for "Bill Finger," it's one of the top hits. That's because of the award. That photo may never have appeared on the 'net more than an inch or so from the phrase, "Bill Finger.")

Devout fans of Groucho Marx or Bill Finger have been known to get exasperated when their heroes are represented by photos of others. The Marx fans have to put up not only with photos of Frank dressed as Groucho but of other folks like photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt in Marxian makeup.

They're right to be annoyed at art directors and web authors who can't tell the difference…but the root of the problem is that they don't understand this: Google Images isn't saying that's a photo of Groucho Marx. They're just saying that's a photo that is often accompanied by the words, "Groucho Marx."

The post False Faces appeared first on News From ME.

Jack Larson, who would surely have preferred to be identified as "Playwright Jack Larson" than "The guy who played Jimmy Olsen" has died. Mr. Larson, who often fibbed about his age, would probably also have liked it if all the obits (like this one) were not revealing he was 87.

He actually had a pretty impressive career writing plays and opera librettos but of course, his role as "Young Olsen" on the George Reeves Superman show was a hard thing to escape. The series was done on a pauper's budget but worked I thought, largely because of the acting abilities of the leads. And no one did more to make it a classic than Jack Larson.

I had the pleasure of meeting him on several occasions when he'd agreed, probably after much prodding, to make an appearance in connection with that role. He always seemed like it was a burden in his life, one he occasionally had to make peace with. He was very fond of Noel Neill, who played Lois Lane…and Noel, who loved the attention (and fees) she got for her past work on the series, occasionally dragged him to some event.

Both, of course, experienced the yin and yang of their casting in that classic series. The good was that it made them famous and that despite the rotten pay and killer hours, it was in many ways a great experience. The bad was the rotten pay, the fact that their contracts kept them from pursuing other opportunities at the time, and that when it was over, there seemed to be no acting work for either.

That led Larson into writing plays. As a guy who was such a good actor, he must have often wondered where that career would have gone if he'd said no to The Adventures of Superman.

One time, I went in to do an on-camera interview for one volume of those shows on DVD. Larson and Neill were scheduled after me and on my way out, I ran into them in the lobby. Noel, who I'd interviewed not long before at a convention, introduced me to Jack, though I'd met him before. Ginning up some small talk, I said to both of them, "They'll treat you wonderfully in there. The makeup lady is a special joy."

Larson blanched and said, "Makeup? Do I have to have makeup?" I said, "No, I had to have makeup. I don't look like I belong on camera unless they do the same job on me they used to do on Lon Chaney."

He said, "I just don't like makeup. I don't like being on camera at all these days."

I said, "Well then, you made the right career transition. But you were awfully good on camera when you did like it. You know, it's not the fabulous scripts and lavish production values that made those shows so popular that fifty years later, people want to buy DVDs of them."

He smiled and said, "It was George."

I said, "George and those two people who played reporters." I was serious about that. He grinned and I'd like to think he accepted the compliment. Because he really was terrific on that show. So was Noel. And George.

The post Jack Larson, R.I.P. appeared first on News From ME.

The Poisoner is a biography and account of the trial of William Palmer, who was convicted of poisoning a friend and suspected of poisoning any number of others in the 1850s.

The Poisoner is the kind of narrative history I like: one that doesn’t try to read like a novel, but will leave the main path and go into detail whatever historical topics the main subject touches on, like gambling, forensics, and insurance fraud. A single story expands into a fuller picture of life at the time. It might be a little dry in places, but I like history to err on the side of dryness.

The jacket copy promises “an astonishing and controversial revision of Palmer’s life” but you can’t trust jacket copy. You know the riddle about the guy on the right who always tells the truth, and the guy on the left who always lies? The guy on the left is a book jacket. Anyway. There’s little doubt that Palmer killed John Parsons Cook. The Poisoner’s revision to the standard narrative is that Palmer was not a criminal mastermind. Charles Dickens started a Household Words essay on Palmer by calling him “the greatest villain that ever stood in the Old Bailey dock” and explained in typically Dickensian hyperbole that Palmer’s calm demeanor at his trial was the sign of a manipulative and devious mind. This, thought Dickens, was a man with “carefully laid plans” and “secret knowledge of the difficulties and mysteries with which the proof of Poison had been, in the manner of the Poisoning, surrounded.”

I came away from The Poisoner picturing Palmer as the serial poisoner equivalent of a W. C. Fields character. He probably didn’t poison as many people as some think. (People died around Palmer a lot, but in nineteenth-century England people died around everybody a lot.) Anyone who spends time on the internet is likely to have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect: the idea that the people most incompetent at a task will be too incompetent even to recognize their own incompetence. The concept originally occurred to the psychologists who named it after they heard the story of a bank robber who thought he could make himself invisible to security cameras by rubbing lemon juice on his face. Palmer was, in fact, probably not much more skilled when it came to murder. Maybe Dickens was convinced Palmer had to be a master of deception because it was easier than believing the authorities weren’t very good at detecting poisoners.

Nineteenth century forensic science made poison investigations difficult. Judith Flanders’s book The Invention of Murder discusses a mid–19th century poison panic in which lower-class women were convicted of poisoning family members and acquaintances on little evidence. What struck me when I read that book was how similar the suspects seemed to the accused in earlier witch trials. Many suspects were outsiders who had something “wrong” with them–a reputation for promiscuity, a bad temper, more children than they could support. Accusations often occurred in small communities and might be based on gossip. At trials “experts” testified who had never previously seen wounds or poisonings of the kind in question. In many cases statements were believed or disbelieved based on the witness’s social class.

When I read about nineteenth century criminal investigations what strikes me is their lackadaisicalness. The investigation of the Ratcliffe Highway Murders, the first 19th century British murder of note, began with sightseers trooping through the crime scene. From there the police had a very slow learning curve. The authorities of the time tend to come off less like police than like sapient prairie dogs who’d maybe seen some police once from a distance.

Then I look at how many wrongful convictions we have in the modern United States, and I wonder how much we’ve actually improved.

The Palmer investigation was nearly as haphazard. John Parsons Cook’s post-mortem was held at a inn. This was common since inns had large public rooms and it had not yet occurred to the police that, hey, maybe they ought to build more places they could use for postmortems. The supervising doctor didn’t bring his instruments because he hadn’t realized he was expected to actually perform the post-mortem; instead a chemist’s assistant and a medical student did the dissecting. No one objected when Palmer himself horned in even though the victim’s stepfather considered him a suspect. When the student removed the stomach Palmer sort of accidentally on purpose shoved him, spilling the stomach contents. It and the intestines were placed in a sealed jar. The jar then disappeared when no one was looking. When the doctors noticed this Palmer cheerfully said he’d put it by the door because he “thought it more convenient for you to take it away.” Somehow a hole had developed in the seal.

The postmortems didn’t find any strychnine in Cook. The jury convicted Palmer because as soon as Cook’s stepfather challenged him he did everything he could to incriminate himself, including blurting things he could have followed up with “Did I say that out loud?” At the postmortem the supervising doctor heard him say “They won’t hang us yet.” William Palmer didn’t lose a battle of wits to a brilliant detective. He was just a rather stupid person whose luck finally ran out.

Conspiracies, criminal masterminds, and brilliant psychopaths are all over pop culture. We’ve built entire TV shows around impossibly skilled assholes like Hannibal Lecter, Dexter, and Pale Imitation of Francis Urquhart. Counterintuitive as it seems, these stories are comforting. No one could blame us for falling prey to the well-directed malice of a master criminal, and no one could blame the police for convicting the wrong guy. Those master criminals are smart. That real police might be fallible or even corrupt, that we’re less likely to be targeted by a genius than randomly endangered by a doofus with an assault rifle… Those ideas aren’t just frightening: they’re indignities.

(Reprise.)

When I was a child, the Radio Times was my hero.

Or this:



(You can, of course, click any of these for a better look.)

Friday:


Tory: "The Rich will solve all your problems; give tax cuts to the Rich."
Labour: "The State will solve all your problems; take taxes for the State."
Liberal: "People are the only people who can solve our problems; how do we help everyone?"

It is more urgent than ever that the Liberal Democrats put forward an economic platform that will actually liberate people from poverty, as opposed to the Tory position of exacerbating the advantage those with capital have over those without AND Labour's fantasy economic policy of printing and spending money to solve every problem under the sun.

could be UK economy ;)

This platform should build on the Coalition policy of shifting tax from the poor to the rich and from income to wealth.

I've said before that we should be taxing WEALTH (money that is buried in vaults and assets doing nothing) rather than INCOME (money that is doing work generating employment and business).

Nothing makes it more apparent that the Tories have switched direction without the guidance of Nick and Danny and Vince than Gideon's post-election tearing up of the Coalition policies that were effecting greater equality. Shifting tax-cutting to the wealthy (through his long-desired Inheritance Tax cut) and the better off (by raising instead of lowering the 40% threshold and so passing the bulk of the benefit of the rise in personal allowance up to the already earning mores).

So in the short term we can plug away at pointing out how the Coalition reduced inequality, invested in education and created opportunity and that the Tories have turned their back on all of that.

But to answer the question "What are the Liberal Democrats for?" we are going to need a bigger, bolder plan.

There are TWO BIG questions to ask ourselves:

What do we want our economy to do – what should we make, grow, tend and sell – and how should our economy work?

What do we do?

Three quarters of the British economy is in the service sector and a very large part of that is in financial services.

This is both a strength and, as the crash of 2008 taught, a vulnerability. To address that, we need both to reform our financial services and to broaden our economy out to be less reliant upon them.

I don't want to indulge in the "banker bashing" that is common from a Labour Party keen to absolve, or at least deflect, from their own complicity. Simply smashing up the existing banks, or driving them away with ever-higher costs of doing business, would still, even after the crash, be killing a goose that lays quite a few of our golden eggs.

But with Master Gideon flogging off the Royal Bank that we Own of Scotland at knock down prices to his city mates, we are fast losing the golden opportunity we had to make the changes needed: to complete the sensible reforms of the banking sector that Vince Cable set in motion, and encouraging a greater DIVERSITY of banking, growing local banks that will better serve the needs of millions of people who are working in small enterprises.

Our banking sector is completely out of scale with the needs of most of our people. We need banks that are SMALLER and more LOCAL so that they are responsive to the vast majority of people and businesses in Britain which are SMALL businesses. We need to look at recreating the local bank, with the bank manager who knows and cares about their customers. Banks that are small enough that the government CAN afford to step in and save them if they fail.

Outside of finance there are three main areas for growth that we already know of.

The first of these is housing, in fact construction generally. The Chancellor has founded his reputation and the recovery on the shifting sands of a house price bubble. That's not good. Far too few houses are being built, and the ones that ARE being built, for example all over London, are not affordable homes for families, but investment opportunities for the new Chinese millionaires and Russian oligarchs. Instead of boxes in the sky we should be building homes and communities. The lack of decent housing (and the schools, shops, hospitals and other infrastructure that goes with building a proper town) lies at the heart of the unrest and frankly shaming attitude towards immigration. The economy will benefit from immigration, but we need to be directing that benefit to the people impacted by pressure on home and wage.

Secondly, there is energy. The Tory government in the pocket of Big Carbon and Big Nuclear has almost literally burned the flourishing Green Revolution that the Lib Dem energy secretaries Chris Huhne and Ed Davey so carefully and successfully nurtured. It really is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Gideon appears to be staking everything on tearing up the Home Counties in search of fracked gas. Adding more CO2 emissions cannot be the answer, investing further into burning stuff that we soon end up needing to import cannot be the answer, particularly when we have the opportunity to harness wind and wave, tide and thermal to become a net energy exporter.

Thirdly, there is the creative arts sector. Again, the Tories actions appear utterly counter to good husbandry of this important and growing sector, putting a petty vendetta against the BBC ahead of its vital place in nurturing talent in writing, acting, directing, design, music and many other forms of performance and support. Handing out tax breaks to Star Wars with one hand while snatching a sixth of the BBC's budget with the other is beyond muddled and into schizoid.

The so-called culture secretary has recently spoken of the BBC damaging the commercial value of news. This is so FUNDAMENTALLY wrong it is hard to grasp. The entire free market economy DEPENDS on free and equal access to information. If news has a COMMERCIAL value, then people are PAYING to get an INSIDE edge on people who DON'T have that information. In a previous generation TORIES actually legislated to make that ILLEGAL. So this current idiot doesn't even understand his OWN dogma.

Providing news freely and fairly is a PRIMARY PURPOSE of the BBC, and indeed no state can properly define itself as a Liberal Economy WITHOUT a BBC-equivalent making sure that all the people have the same opportunity of information.

I'd add something else. While our military is overstretched and our military adventurism has done nothing but make itself despised across the world, what saving grace does the UK still possess in international influence?

Soft power. Study after study after study says so.


The one area where we still lead the world, the one thing where we can make more of a difference than anyone else, the one real good we ca do in promoting our values, is 'soft power'. Cultural influence. Persuasion by ethos. And our leader in that is the BBC.

This Tory government won by appeals to narrow nationalism and economic competence. The BBC boosts both our national power and our economy.

The Mail is based in Bermuda to avoid British tax; the Telegraph in Sark for the same reason; News International makes its tax affairs even more murky, and Mr Murdoch changes his nationality according to what flag of convenience he needs. Why does Mr Cameron take his lessons in nationalism from this bunch of tax exiles and foreign billionaires? Why does he take his lessons in morality from phone hackers and ex cons?

The Prime Minister boasts of wanting to take the fight to ISIL, meaning he wants to spend more money and lives that he won’t pay but we can't afford on yet more foreign adventures. Because that's what Prime Ministers always do. But he won't spend far less money and waste no lives by supporting the BBC in doing something we're actually effective at.

This is spitefully cutting noses off both his faces.

(The BBC, by the way, treat the Liberal Democrats in a totally shoddy way, consistently underrepresenting us in political discussion. So it's in no way in our political interest to defend them. But it's the right thing to do, so we should do it anyway.)

How do we do?

Our current model of the economy requires most people to work most of their lives.

Our politicians, of Right AND Left, even make it a virtue to be enslaved to labour – "Hardworking families" are worthy of merit; we all know the jibes at the "other" sorts of families, whether from Tory or Labour front benches (though, who knows, Mr Corbyn may deliver a change to this rhetoric – I wait to see).

In the not-too-distant future this will simply not be viable.

While it may be a little early to panic that "the robots are coming" in the medium term – which we need to be thinking about – there will be many areas of the economy where those whose capital controls the means of production will become able to replace human labour with robots and computers.

Self-driving cars are the next major technological innovation on the horizon. Self-driving cars means self-driving taxis and self-driving lorries. And that's jobs just gone. Robots will work longer hours and deliver safer and in more timely fashion, and won't stop for food or a fag or a toilet stop or for dogging. Of course you won't be able to hold them responsible for refugees clinging to the underside of the truck either – maybe there'll be more jobs in security [unhappyface].

[Arrest the programmers! Or arm the robots! Tell them to target all illegal passengers! That couldn't possibly go wrong… ]

An economy of robots may be able to generate a higher level of GDP (though who would buy all their robotic output becomes a problem) but if we stick to the current model with more and more people locked out of employment, then the levels of inequality will make today's divide between rich and poor look like a socialist utopia.

Now, the Conservative might not see anything wrong with that. And based on past performance, Labour would be quite happy to recruit a client state of people trapped on benefits and tax credits beholden to the government on sufferance of good behaviour. But Liberal Democrats believe in ensuring that no one is enslaved by ignorance, poverty or conformity.

So we are going to need an economy that shares out the GDP in a greatly different way to the current one.

To start with, we need to be looking at the way that the limited company works. As a tool, it's had incredible success, but it remains a form of organisation designed in the Nineteenth Century and places power almost entirely in the hands of directors who have little accountability to even their shareholders let alone their workforce.

Our working lives ought to be so much more about who we work with rather than who we work for. So we need to be looking at organising small enterprises (at least initially) in more collective/shared ownership/(yes, John Lewis) ways.

And I've also made no secret that I would like us to look again at a Citizens' Income.

Experiments have shown that simply giving money to people is a stimulus to the economy. Certainly they might just spend it, which in itself generates economic activity, but also it will empower people to start their own business, or take the time to write music or their novel.

The keys to increasing GDP are available resources (time, money, skills, health) and confidence.

The current economy is built on job INSECURITY, driving more and more people to work longer and longer hours. We need to find ways to give people back their TIME. And with it, the CONFIDENCE to do their own thing, or to change jobs, or just to walk away from bad jobs.

The Greens pitched the Citizens' Income as a handout. To people who believe in fairness that seems a self-evident good. But those are the very people you DON'T need to sell the idea to. To a lot of people, it sounded like taking money from the workers and giving to people who, well, weren't.

I'd rather rebrand (sorry) it as a British Dividend – an investment in growing the economy of the whole country and a reward for success when we do. Remind people of the parable of the talents. And ask if we all had some of the advantage of the Rich, how much more might we achieve?



I endorse Andrew Hickey's suggestion that Labour's new leadership does open up British politics to genuine gaps between the three leading Parties, and to be genuinely about debating differences again.

That should inspire us to experiment and come up with some genuinely radical ideas.

Folks have pointed me toward this Huffington Post piece, begging self-published authors not to write four books a year, because the author (Lorraine Devon Wilke) maintains that no mere human can write four books a year and have them be any good. This has apparently earned her the wrath of a number of people, including writer Larry Correia, who snarks apart the piece here and whose position is that a) the premise of the article is crap, and b) authors should get paid, and if four books a year gets you paid, then rock on with your bad self. I suspect people may be wanting to have me comment on the piece so I can take punches at either or both Wilke or Correia, and are waiting, popcorn at ready.

If so, you may be disappointed. With regard to Correia’s piece, Larry and I disagree on a number of issues unrelated to writing craft, but we align fairly well here, and to the extent that I’m accurately condensing his points here, we don’t really disagree. One, there are a lot of writers who write fast and well, for whom four books a year of readable, enjoyable prose is not a stretch. And, you know. If you can do that, and you want to do that, and you see an economic benefit to it, then why not do it?

Two, there really isn’t a huge correlation between time writing and quality of the finished work. Yes, as Wilke notes, The Goldfinch took Donna Tartt eleven years to write, and she got a Pulitzer for it, but so what? A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, was famously written in three weeks and is generally considered to be one of the great novels of the 20th Century. We can have an argument to which novel of the two is better, but that’s not the point, and anyway no matter what the two are within hailing distance of each other. The point is, again, there’s not a huge correlation between time writing and quality of finished work, particularly when one is cherry-picking one’s examples.

How much time does it take to write a novel? As long as it takes. I wrote Redshirts in five weeks; it took me most of a year to write The End of All Things. Which is better? It’s a subjective call. On average it takes me three to four months of daily work to write a novel. Would my novels be better if I took two years each on them? Maybe, but I kind of doubt it. I write the speed I write because that’s the speed I write. If I inherently wrote faster, then they would take less time. If I inherently wrote slower, then they would take more. I suspect the inherent quality of the work would remain about equal, because I am the writer I am.

Also, you know. What a “novel” or “book” is, is a very fungible thing. The term “novel” encompasses a book like The Goldfinch, which is almost 300,000 words, and Redshirts, which was 55,000 words, not counting the codas. The more-or-less official lower length of a novel is 40,000 words; at the other extreme, Alan Moore’s novel Jerusalem, slated for publication next year, is a million words long. I don’t recommend trying to write four Jerusalems in a year. But on the other hand, four 40,000 word stories? That’s entirely doable for a very large number of writers.

Moreover, with specific reference to self-pubbed folks, they have a considerable amount of flexibility toward the length of their books. All of my novels are contracted to be around 100,000 words, because that makes for a nice-sized book on the bookstore shelf (this is one reason, among others, why I added the codas to Redshirts). I have some flexibility there, but add up the total word count for all my published novels to date, and you get very close to 100k as an average word count number. Self-pubbed books can be considerably shorter, and many are. So again, four books of competent, readable prose is not a stretch in that case.

The economic argument for writing that much in a year is pretty simple: If you do, you give yourself more sales opportunities; there are more targets with which to draw in new readers and to keep continuing readers happy. Wilke might argue that these all aren’t Pulitzer-quality works, but even if they aren’t: So what? Not everything readable has to be in serious contention for the Pulitzer. It’s okay to eat a cheeseburger; it’s okay to read the literary equivalent of a cheeseburger. Believe it or not, some people will read both The Goldfinch and a literary cheeseburger! Because people are like that.

With all that said, I suspect that at least part of what Wilke was aiming at was that one shouldn’t feel compelled to write four books a year, just because a self-pubbed author (or any other type of author, for that matter) read something somewhere that said four books a year was what every self-pubbed author should or must do to make money. And you know what? If that’s actually part of Wilke’s argument, then she’s correct.

She’s correct for a couple of reasons. One, and most simply: Not everyone can write four books worth reading in a year, regardless of length. Because here’s a thing: There’s more to a book than word count. There’s also what you do with the words, not to mention general plotting and organization and, moving away from the purely “creative” aspect, production and distribution, the latter aspects of which self-pubbed authors have to attend to directly (other authors get the benefit of a publisher to deal with a lot of that). Some people have a lot of bandwidth for this sort of stuff; other people don’t.

If you’re one of the people who don’t, then aiming for four books in a year, every year, isn’t going to be beneficial for you. You’ll end up drained and fatigued, and writing/producing inferior work, and it will be obvious. You’ll be punished for it, in the sense that people will stop paying you for your work. If you’re writing four books worth of crap, well. People will eat cheeseburgers, but very few people will eat crap. Don’t serve up crap.

What is actually important for writers to do, all of them, regardless of publishing method, is to find their pace for how they write, and what they write. One writer can happily crank out four books a year, in which case, good for them. Another writer will take years to write a book they’re happy with. In which case, good for them, too. These two writers should not try to write at each others’ pace; they’ll both be unhappy.

Nor is it 100% certain that the “four books a year” writer will make more money than the “one book every few years” writer. Andy Weir, as far as I know, has only one book, but that one book is The Martian, so it’s a reasonable guess he’s making more than almost every “four books a year” author. The four books a year author has more shots on goal, but if your one shot hits the bullseye, then it doesn’t matter. Yes, I did just mix metaphors there. Deal with it. Point is: money is possible at every speed.

Which bring me to my next point: be aware that there’s more than one recipe to making money as a writer. I write a novel in three to four months on average, and I have a backlog of story ideas, so it’s a pretty safe bet that I could write three or even four novels a year. I don’t. Why? Well, because I do other things with my time that make money, and also, make me happy. One novel a year, more or less, plus my other activities, has done very well for me. Other writers publish more and are happy; others publish less and are also perfectly happy. There’s not a right path for everyone. There is, however, likely a best path for you.

(Nor is it a given that every writer should have as their hard goal for writing “making money.” It’s a fine goal — I’m all for it! — and if indeed you want to write as your primary means of income then clearly you have to factor that into your workflow. But not every writer wants to, or should. You can be a writer, and be a professional writer, and do other things too. It’s allowed. And indeed, in many circumstances it can offer you more flexibility for your writing than being a full-time writer allows. Just to put that out there.)

So how many books should you write in a year? As many as you like, and as many as you can do, within your ability, for the sort of writing you want to do. What you need to do is to discover what your own capabilities are, and then work within them. Write the books you would want to read, and buy. If you can do four of those a year, great. If you do one of those every eleven years, that’s good too. Most writers, I suspect, will fall in between those two data points. That’ll work.

The First Lady of Cartoon Voices, June Foray, celebrates her 98th birthday today — the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Natasha Fatale and Granny (owner of Tweety and Sylvester) and Jokey Smurf and Magica DeSpell and Mrs. Cauldron (on The Garfield Show) and Cindy Lou Who and if I list them all, this post will run into her 99th birthday and maybe the big 100.

A few years ago, the late Earl Kress and I assisted June with the writing of her autobiography. Before we started, we figured we knew everything she'd done and boy, were we wrong! As we find out, not only did we not imagine the length and breadth of this lady's career, it turned out she didn't even grasp it. For close to three-fourths of a century, she was so busy working in cartoons (and radio and commercials and dubbing movies and…) that she couldn't track all she'd done.

I remember one day when she phoned me and said, "Mark, I just got a residual check for a Frank Sinatra movie called Dirty Dingus Magee! Was I in that?" Apparently, yes. I haven't seen it but June probably looped a couple of voices somewhere.

This is an amazing woman. For around four decades, she was the "workingest" voice actress, working at the top of a highly competitive field. (Do you have any idea how many people think they can do voices?) 5-6 days a week, she would work from morning 'til after dark going from session to session to session. Everyone wanted to hire her because she was the best at what she did.

It has been a pleasure and an honor to know her and to work with her. And it's a pleasure and an honor to wish her a happy birthday. I have some other things to say about her but I have to save something for her 99th birthday, her 100th birthday, her 101st…

The post Happy Birthday, June Foray! appeared first on News From ME.

DC Comics has announced that they've reached some sort of agreement or awareness or deal with the Bob Kane estate or — well, I don't know what it is — so that "Bill Finger will be receiving credit in the Warner Bros. television series Gotham beginning later this season, and in the forthcoming motion picture Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice."

This is a very good thing and I don't know anything more about it than what's in the press release. I'm guessing though that it isn't a deal with the Kane estate, which has always insisted that as per past agreements, Bob Kane be credited as the sole creator of Batman. Past DC execs have tried and failed to amend that because even Kane himself, not long before he died, admitted it was not right. I'm going to assume that DC has decided that they can give Finger some sort of credit that won't violate the Kane deal, and I hope they're also paying some kind of significant money to Finger's grandaughter, Athena.

Without getting too deep into this again, I occasionally mount a slight defense of what Mr. Kane did to his partner, Mr. Finger. It may not have been right but it was not unusual in those days for one guy to sign a strip and for all others who contributed — even if they did substantially more than the guy who got sole credit — to remain largely anonymous. Finger in his lifetime did loads of comic book work unconnected to Batman and Kane, and didn't get his name on 98% of that, either.

The credit, whenever it appears, should say "Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger." Since the press release doesn't promise that, I assume that's not what's happening here…but even partial credit in some areas is way more than no credit in any areas so some justice has been done. Some justice, as we all know, is a whole lot better than no justice.

We will continue to award the Bill Finger Award each year at Comic-Con International to writers who have received insufficient credit and/or rewards for their work…and some of us will continue to lament that Bob Kane did not put things right before he died. Batman would have.

The post Happy Bill Finger News! appeared first on News From ME.

Unlike many in my own party, I remain utterly unreconciled to the majority of the political positions that Jeremy Corbyn has taken in his long and hitherto undistinguished career.  I think that virtually all of his foreign policy positions are not merely mistaken but actively dangerous. Most of his economic ideas are wholly wrong and would fail if enacted. So the fact that on some constitutional positions he is closer to the Liberal Democrats than to his own party does not- and should not- leave most of our party particularly enthusiastic. 

Dear Police Chief Larry Boyd,

A "hoax" is when someone else deceives you, not when you deceive yourself, or when you leap to baseless conclusions out of ignorance. The term you are looking for is "mistaken", but it modifies a different noun than the one you clearly so desperately want to characterize.

Deliberately calling something a hoax when you know it is not is to falsely allege a blameless person has committed an infamous act. The term for that is "slander", when spoken, and "libel", when written.

Sincerely,
Siderea

I.

It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing.

You may have read about one or another of the “cardiologist caught falsifying test results and performing dangerous unnecessary surgeries to make more money” stories, but you might not have realized just how common it really is. Maryland cardiologist performs over 500 dangerous unnecessary surgeries to make money. Unrelated Maryland cardiologist performs another 25 in a separate incident. California cardiologist does “several hundred” dangerous unnecessary surgeries and gets raided by the FBI. Philadelphia cardiologist, same. North Carolina cardiologist, same. 11 Kentucky cardiologists, same. Actually just a couple of miles from my own hospital, a Michigan cardiologist was found to have done $4 million worth of the same. Etc, etc, etc.

My point is not just about the number of cardiologists who perform dangerous unnecessary surgeries for a quick buck. It’s not even just about the cardiology insurance fraud, cardiology kickback schemes, or cardiology research data falsification conspiracies. That could all just be attributed to some distorted incentives in cardiology as a field. My point is that it takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist.

Consider the sexual harassment. Head of Yale cardiology department fired for sexual harassment with “rampant bullying”. Stanford cardiologist charged with sexually harassing students. Baltimore cardiologist found guilty of sexual harassment. LA cardiologist fined $200,000 for groping med tech. Three different Pennsylvania cardiologists sexually harassing the same woman. Arizona cardiologist suspended on 19 (!) different counts of sexual abuse. One of the “world’s leading cardiologists” fired for sending pictures of his genitals to a female friend. New York cardiologist in trouble for refusing to pay his $135,000 bill at a strip club. Manhattan cardiologist taking naked pictures of patients, then using them to sexually abuse employees. New York cardiologist secretly installs spycam in office bathroom. Just to shake things up, a Florida cardiologist was falsely accused of sexual harassment as part of feud with another cardiologist.

And yeah, you can argue that if you put high-status men in an office with a lot of subordinates, sexual harassment will be depressingly common just as a result of the environment. But there’s also the Texas cardiologist who pled guilty to child molestation. The California cardiologist who killed a two-year-old kid. The author of one of the world’s top cardiology textbooks arrested on charges Wikipedia describes only as “related to child pornography and cocaine”.

Then it gets weird. Did you about the Australian cardiologist who is fighting against extradition to Uganda, where he is accused of “terrorism, aggravated robbery and murdering seven people”? What about the Long Island cardiologist who hired a hitman to kill a rival cardiologist, ahd who was also for some reason looking for “enough explosives to blow up a building”?

Like I said, it takes a special sort of person.

II.

Given the recent discussion of media bias here, I wanted to bring up Alyssa Vance’s “Chinese robber fallacy”, which she describes as:

..where you use a generic problem to attack a specific person or group, even though other groups have the problem just as much (or even more so).

For example, if you don’t like Chinese people, you can find some story of a Chinese person robbing someone, and claim that means there’s a big social problem with Chinese people being robbers.

I originally didn’t find this too interesting. It sounds like the same idea as plain old stereotyping, something we think about often and are carefully warned to avoid.

But after re-reading the post, I think the argument is more complex. There are over a billion Chinese people. If even one in a thousand is a robber, you can provide one million examples of Chinese robbers to appease the doubters. Most people think of stereotyping as “Here’s one example I heard of where the out-group does something bad,” and then you correct it with “But we can’t generalize about an entire group just from one example!” It’s less obvious that you may be able to provide literally one million examples of your false stereotype and still have it be a false stereotype. If you spend twelve hours a day on the task and can describe one crime every ten seconds, you can spend four months doing nothing but providing examples of burglarous Chinese – and still have absolutely no point.

If we’re really concerned about media bias, we need to think about Chinese Robber Fallacy as one of the media’s strongest weapons. There are lots of people – 300 million in America alone. No matter what point the media wants to make, there will be hundreds of salient examples. No matter how low-probability their outcome of interest is, they will never have to stop covering it if they don’t want to.

This has briefly gotten some coverage in the form of “the war on police”. As per AEI:

Is there a “war on police” in America today? Most Americans think so, and that’s understandable given all of the media coverage of that topic. A Google news search finds 32,000 results for the phrase “war on cops” and another 12,100 results for “war on police,” with sensational headlines like “America’s War on Cops Intensifies” and “Bratton Warns of Tough Times Ahead Due to ‘War on Cops’.” A recent Rasmussen poll found that 58% of likely US voters answered “Yes” to the question “Is there a war on police in America today?” and only 27% disagreed. But data on police shootings in America that were reported last week by The Guardian tell a much different story of increasing police safety.

According to data available from the “Officer Down Memorial Page” on the annual number of non-accidental, firearm-related police fatalities, 2015 is on track to be the safest year for law enforcement in the US since 1887 (except for a slightly safer year in 2013), more than 125 years ago. And adjusted for the country’s growing population, the years 2013 and 2015 will be the two safest years for police in US history, measured by the annual number of firearm-related police fatalities per 1 million people.

When politically convenient, it is easy to make Americans believe in a war on police simply by better coverage of existing murders of police officers. Given that America is a big country with very many police, even a low base rate will provide many lurid police-officer-murder stories – by my calculation, two murders a week even if officers are killed only at the same rate as everyone else. While covering these is a legitimate decision, it can be deceptive unless it’s framed in terms of things like whether the rate has gone up or down, whether the rate is higher or lower for the group involved than the base rate in the population, and it still seems scary when you explicitly calculate the rate.

But a Chomskian analysis would ask whether the talk of a “war on cops” is really a uniquely bad example of journalistic malpractice, or whether it is bog-standard journalistic malpractice which is unique only in being called out this time instead of allowed to pass.

Let’s stick with coverage of police for consistency’s sake. I’ve made a very similar argument before regarding claims of racist police shootings (see Part D here), but let’s avoid that particular rabbit hole and consider a broader and more unsettling point. We all hear anecdotes about terrible police brutality. Suppose, in fact, that we’ve heard exactly X stories. Given that there are about 100,000 police officers in the US, is X consistent with the problem being systemic and dire, or with the problem being relatively limited?

I mean, it’s hard to say. Quick Fermi calculation: if I can think of about one horrible story of police brutality a week, and assume there are fifty that aren’t covered for every one that is, then per year that makes…

But wait – what if I told you that number was a lie, and there were actually 500,000 police officers in the US? Suddenly the rate of police brutality has decreased five times from what it was a second ago. If you previously believed that there were 100,000 police officers, and that the police brutality rate was shameful but that decreasing the rate to only one-fifth its previous level would count as a victory, well, now you can declare victory.

What if I told you the 500,000 number is also a lie, and it’s actually way more cops than that? Do you have any idea at all how many police there are? Shouldn’t you at least have an order-of-magnitude estimate of what the police brutality rate is before deciding if it’s too high or not? What if I told you the real number was a million cops? Five million cops? Ten million? That’s a hundred times the original estimate of 100,000 – shouldn’t learning that the police brutality rate is only 1% of what you originally estimated (or, going the other direction, 10,000% of that) change your opinion in some way?

(No, I won’t tell you how many cops there actually are. Look it up.)

I feel this way about a lot of things. The media is always giving us stories of how tech nerds are sexist in some way or another. But we may suspect they want to push that line regardless of whether it’s true. How many tech nerds are there? A million? Ten million? How many lurid stories about harassment in Silicon Valley have you heard? Do we know if this is higher or lower than the base rate for similar industries? Whether it’s going up or down? What it would look like if we actually had access to the per person rates?

By now you’ve probably figured out the gimmick, but just to come totally clean – cardiologists are wonderful people who as far as I know are no less ethical than any other profession. I chose to pick on them at random – well, not quite random, one of them yelled at me the other day because apparently contacting the cardiologist on call late at night just because your patient is having a serious heart-related emergency is some kind of huge medical faux pas. I don’t think anyone has ever claimed that there’s any general issue with cardiologists, and as far as I know there’s no evidence for such.

If you read Part I of this post and found yourself nodding along, thinking “Wow, cardiologists are real creeps, there must be serious structural problems in the cardiology profession, something must be done about them,” consider it evidence that a sufficiently motivated individual – especially a journalist! – can make you feel that way about any group.

My new book Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century is finally loose in the UK - being sold in shops, downloaded as ebooks onto Kindles and as audiobooks onto phones. It will be published in Canada on October 6th and America on November 10th, with Spanish, German, Dutch, Greek, Turkish and Romanian translations on their way. There are, I'd like to think, versions for everyone.



Everyone, that is, except those who don't want to read an entire book. What about those people?

Now, my friend the artist Shardcore had been playing around with automatic text compression software. If you have a long document to plough through, you can run it through this software and it will create a shorter version which, in theory, will retain the most important information. And the results are pretty impressive, so long as you set it to shorten the text by no more than about 40%. If nothing else, it highlights the differing levels of redundancy in the prose styles of different writers.

If you try to shorten the text further, the results aren't quite so good. Information, nuance, insight and meaning are all lost. If you try to shorten the text by 99.5%, all you get is a bunch of unrelated random sentences.

This is, clearly, a dumb and pointless exercise that only a fool would inflict on their hard-crafted work.

Here, then, for those who have no desire to read an entire book, is Stranger Than We Can Imagine algorithmically compressed by 99.5% into about 400 words of near-gibberish:

What the hell happened to the human psyche? An omphalos is the centre of the world or, more accurately, what was culturally thought to be the centre of the world, or, perhaps more accurately, was the idea that an artist challenged the art establishment by presenting a found object sufficiently interesting for that idea to be considered a work of art? The wars that did occur after the defeat of Napoleon were brief. Do what thou wilt. In April 1904 the British poet, mountaineer and occultist Aleister Crowley dictated a book which, he believed, was transmitted to him by a non-human intelligence called Aiwass. Naturally, they dispensed with the restraints of customary morality and of reason.

Buñuel told Dalí of a dream in which ‘a long tapering cloud sliced the moon in half, like a razor slicing through an eye’, but there is a big difference between the world at the sub-atomic level and the human scale world we live in. I wanted to make something sacred. The English maverick theatre director Ken Campbell also recognised that this level of ambition could arise from science fiction. When Clov says that the world is going out, but he has never seen it lit up, I could say ‘Well I have.’ Antoine Roquentin initially suspects that the repulsion he has begun to feel towards existence may not be a product of the objective world, but rather something internal that he projects outwards, and Parsons would pioneer the solid fuel rocketry that would take America into space.

For real liberation to be enjoyed by men and women, neither can be reduced to a passive role. Greer argued that the way forward for women was to recognise their innate self-worth and become fully sexual creatures, but Rees-Mogg and The Rolling Stones were not, perhaps, as politically different as they might first appear.  Seeing how systems flipped from one state to another brought home just how fragile and uncontrollable complex systems were. The idea that a Western democratic politician from a mainstream political party could gain office with a platform that aimed to reduce corporate power became increasingly implausible, and I happen to have Mr McLuhan right here. If you want to understand postmodernism you should spend a few hours playing Super Mario Bros, a 1985 video game designed by Japan’s Shigeru Miyamoto. It would not be properly investigated, not least because of his charity work.

The full text, I should add, is possibly the only book to have been lauded by both Alan Moore and the Daily Mail, which means it must make more sense than the above.

--Was the sermon good?
--Yes.
--What was it about?
--Sin.
--What did the preacher say?
--He was against it.
               Calvin Coolidge, attrib.

If you find yourself wondering, or just feeling, "Why is everyone I wind up dealing with an asshole?" you might want to consider the possibility that you have set up an asshole filter. Asshole filters are an extremely common phenomenon, and an extremely common problem.

An asshole filter happens when one has set of norms which results in one primarily, or at least disproportionately, coming into contact with assholes.

It doesn't occur to most people that filtering for assholes is even a possibility for what could be going on. The popular alternative is to just conclude that everyone or "all y'all" are assholes, since that is what the world looks like when one is inadvertently filtering for assholes. To the extent that the possibility occurs to people, the usual assumption is that assholes are being actively attracted. And while that can happen, it's not as ubiquitous as the pattern of repelling non-assholes.

Assholes are abundant. Non-assholes are also abundant, maybe even more so than assholes, but there's no shortage of assholes. Consequently, if you start repelling non-assholes, there will be plenty of people left, all of whom are assholes. You don't have to actively attract assholes to have an asshole-rich experience; the baseline ambient level of assholes is high enough that draining away the non-assholes is sufficient to reveal it. If you unwittingly have been repelling non-assholes, you will get the impression that everyone is an asshole, because you're still surrounded by plenty of people, but everyone left – that is everyone you come into contact with – is, in fact, an asshole.

Now, you may be thinking, "Oh, you mean repelling non-assholes by being an asshole?" While that certainly can happen, that's not what I'm here to explain today, because that's not particularly mysterious. Frankly, far more mysterious is how being an asshole doesn't always, or maybe even often, drive away the non-assholes – something the phenomenon I'm describing goes some way to explaining. If you've been thinking that being a non-asshole should protect you from assholes, and that hasn't been working for you, and you're getting bitter about that, well, I have some news for you.

An asshole filter is a situation one creates that causes non-assholes to reduce contact with you at a disproportionate rate (like at all) than assholes.

The simplest way to do this is to ask politely.

An asshole filter happens when you publicly promulgate a straitened contact boundary and then don't enforce it; or worse, reward the people who transgress it.

Here's an example. Fred is a department head for a convention; he has a staff of people working directly under him, and they and he wrangle a huge number of convention attendees' arrangements. Fred initially had his personal email address as the contact for his department, and started drowning in emails; he'd forward them to his team, but him having to do that manually was a big bottle neck. So he has a distribution address set up for his department, so his staff get all emails set to it. He promulgates the policy (on the website, on FB, in publications), "Please do not email my personal email account about convention business. Please send all convention correspondence to fredsstaff@fredsconvention.tld." Sometimes, Fred's staff doesn't get back to emails to the department address all that fast. What happens?

Well, two things: some people use fredsstaff@fredsconvention.tld and some people use Fred's personal email.

Who uses the officially designated email address?

• People who feel strongly about following rules.
• People who feel following the rules is generally a good idea.
• People who respect Fred's request because they're generally respectful.
• People who respect Fred's request because they like Fred personally.
• People who don't want to antagonize Fred.
• People who realize the problem Fred is trying to solve and want to be cooperative to reduce the burden on Fred.
• People who feel it important to respect role boundaries.
• People who are concerned that overwhelming Fred will cause their request to get lost.

Who uses Fred's personal email address?

• People who can't be bothered to learn and follow procedures.
• People who feel rules are for other people.
• People who feel they should get to cut in line.
• People who don't feel keeping track of what other people prefer is all that important.
• People who aren't troubled by the thought of pissing off Fred, either because they don't care whom they piss off or because they think Fred is of no account.
• People who feel entitled to get their way.
• People who feel satisfaction when they find an illicit "shortcut" to getting what they want, that "suckers" are too "chicken" to use.

In short, the decent, cooperative, law-abiding people all use the departmental email address, even though it doesn't work a well as they might like, while the assholes continue emailing Fred directly.

What I have been using the word "asshole" to represent is the concept of transgressiveness. Perhaps a more accurate term would be willingness to transgress.

The concept of transgressiveness is one of the most powerful lenses I know with which to look at people's behavior – possibly because it is is a perspective so absent from our culture. It is a phenomenon that is real, but for which we have no words – except "asshole". When we call someone an asshole, pragmatically speaking what we're usually trying to express is that that person transgresses others' boundaries. We might also say, if asked to explain, that the person so described is selfish, in that they want to get their way even (or especially) at the expense of others; we might describe them as rude or disrespectful, meaning that their conduct shows contempt for others' boundaries.

I call it a lens because it's a concept that when it slides into place suddenly makes the leaves on the trees of human behavior become oh so much clearer.

I've been talking about "assholes" and "non-assholes" as if they were binary, exclusive fundamental traits, but of course they're not. People's emotional relationships with transgressiveness are complicated. At the very least transgressiveness can be considered on a spectrum; but it might be more sensible to consider it multidimensional: there may be multiple kinds of transgressivenesses, and multiple sorts of relationship to them.

But even with all that complexity, when you set up a situation in which other people's choices are between, on the one hand, respecting your espoused wishes and being significantly disadvantaged, and, on the other hand, transgressing against your wishes to be effective, you have essentially posed a test that discriminates against those who are less willing to transgress against your espoused wishes: an asshole filter.

If you tell people "the only way to contact me is to break a rule" you will only be contacted by rule-breakers.

But wait, it can get worse. If, despite telling everyone to use the departmental email address, Fred personally handles – expedites – the requests of people who email him at his personal email account, he is now rewarding those who transgress.

So far, I've been talking about being an asshole (or not) – that is, transgressiveness – as a fixed trait. But that's not how personality works, even assuming it is a personality trait. If it is a personality trait then it's more like a "set point" for something that varies with circumstances.

Which means if you reward it, you will get more of it.

Here, Fred is reinforcing transgressive behavior (and reasoning). This is behaviorism's operant conditioning, like the pigeon getting the pellet for pressing the lever. Each of the people who transgressed his boundary and got a goodie from him just "learned" – not just cognitively up in the neocortex, but deep in the lizard brain – that transgressing boundaries works out great.

When a person transgresses your boundaries and you reward them, you incline that person to transgress even more in the future.

But what happens when word gets out that the way to get things accomplished is to email Fred directly at his personal email address?

Because we are social monkeys who can communicate with one another, and also are bad at keeping secrets, when Fred reinforces the transgressive behavior of one of the garrulous hairless apes, to say nothing of several of them, he is in all likelihood eliciting transgressive behavior from the rest.

Now people who previously thought things like "Oh, I don't want to bother Fred because he asked not to be bothered" might start thinking things like, "Well, I know he asked not to be bothered, but apparently he doesn't mind all that much?" and "I don't want to disrespect the rules, but if Fred isn't going to follow his own rules..." and "Well, screw Fred. Here I am trying to be obliging, and I'm getting treated second class."

When word gets out that Fred rewards the people who transgress his boundaries, he runs the risk of escalating the baseline transgressiveness of everyone who finds out. It may not be a lot, and it won't be universally to the same degree. Some people will sigh or grumble but not email him personally. But everyone gets the message, "Fred's preferences don't much matter; when Fred says something, he doesn't much mean it."

(As a side note, quite aside from people's level of transgressiveness, either as a personality trait or at a moment in time, when you set up a system whereby the honest, rule-following people get screwed and the transgressors are rewarded, you should expect that the honest, rule-following people with whom you ultimately deal, who didn't cross over to transgressiveness, will be wicked pissed. Not only will you be dealing with transgressive people being transgressive, you will also be dealing with non-transgressive people being confrontational. Politely, circumspectly, firmly, icily confrontational.)

And here's the thing. Fred may be the sweetest, mildest-mannered person. (You may know a Fred. You may be a Fred.) He is one of those non-assholes who grows in bitterness over the fact that even though he's so respectful and kind to other people, his inbox is nonetheless full of emails from assholes. Not just people who are assholes because they emailed him directly despite his asking them not to do that. People who are, on average, that much less polite in how they speak to him, that much less reasonable in what they expect of him. The person who feels much too important to have to wait in the regular queue is also more likely to be the person who feels much too important to have anybody but the department head personally expedite his arrangements. The person who feels their impatience is more important that Fred's comfort is more likely to be the person who feels expressing their displeasure is more important than how Fred feels about getting yelled at.

There may be an important sense in which it is Fred's very agreeableness that set up the asshole filter. If the reason, as so often is the case, that Fred indulges the people who email him directly is because he is someone who, when confronted with another person clearly and firmly communicating their own wishes (such as strongly implying, "I want this dealt with, by you, immediately") does not want to disappoint them, then it's Fred's very concern for the feelings of others that leaves him unable to insist upon his own boundaries. Fred experiences the insistence of others as a reciprocal of his own boundary assertions; he may even on an unconscious level (or consciously!) mistake the insistence of others for a boundary assertion even when it pretty clearly isn't.

So here's another way to look at Fred's situation. Fred doesn't want to have to disappoint anybody, especially anybody being really insistent. But he's feeling overwhelmed by how many bids on his attention this project causes. So he has set up a system that delegates, say, half the work to other people – the easy, pleasant half. The law-abiding folks work with his staff as directed, while the transgressive people skip the line to work with him. He has relieved himself of dealing with half the work, but the half that's left are the tough customers.

From that perspective, that looks almost reasonable. Fred is getting what Fred wished for: less work coming in to him, and he doesn't have to refuse people what they want. We can even imagine a savvier Fred setting that up deliberately. "You guys are front-line; I'm your boss, so I'll handle the problem clients." The problems are (1) that Fred is getting something he didn't realize came with that package, a more concentrated dose of entitlement and disrespect in the cases he does handle, causing him to feel like, "People Suck", and (2) by rewarding transgression he is cultivating more of what he doesn't want.

Fred doesn't realize it, but his two wishes are effectively in conflict, at least the way he went about it. He has to give up one of them – or at least downgrade it as a priority. Either he needs to not promulgate a rule about not contacting him at his personal email, or he needs to make peace with refusing people what they want. He got into trouble when he issued an edict he was unwilling to enforce.

"Enforcement" is an idea with which plenty of agreeable people are uncomfortable because they have a certain vanity in their agreeableness: if they have to refuse somebody something, their self-concept as an agreeable person takes a ding. (The single best advice I have to give is never identify with your virtue because that way lies madness, or at least neurosis, but that's a topic for another post.) If one can disentangle one's ego from being agreeable even momentarily, one quickly sees there are many highly agreeable ways to refuse people things. This, indeed, is what diplomacy is for. And there's less diplomatic responses, too, if one prefers.

Instead of taking the requests to his personal email immediately, Fred might:

• Solicitously offer to put the requester in touch with his staff, who will take good care of the requester.

• Sit on the request for a protracted period of time, wait and see if the requester contacts the officially designated channel, and if not, send the requester an email saying, "So sorry, I didn't see this in my personal email. I'll forward this to my staff at fredsstaff@fredsconference.tld."

• Set up a vacation autoresponder that is contingent on the name of the convention appearing in the email. "Fred will not be available at this address from $DATE to $DATE while he works on $CONFERENCE. To reach him about conference business, email him at fredsstaff@fredsconference.tld."

• Forward the requests in batches to his staff with a note that they are not to be handled until their queue through the designated channel is cleared.

• Let the requester in on the "secret" that the fastest way to get their request answered is by emailing fredsstaff@fredsconference.tld.

• Forward ("resend") the email to the fredsstaff@fredsconference.tld address, such that requester gets an email back from fredsstaff@fredsconference.tld, "Thank you for contacting fredsstaff@fredsconference.tld! Your email will be answered in the order it was received." (Not all email clients can do this. (And people wonder while I am so adamant about nmh.))

I'm sure you can think of others.

"But Siderea," I hear someone thinking, "What if someone has a really, really good reason for contacting me– I mean 'Fred'– at his personal email?"

Then you might want to make an exception to your policy in that case.

"But then I wouldn't be enforcing it."

Right.

"But... but... then wouldn't that contribute to the encouraging people to break the rule and email me personally?"

Yes. It's why people often get all in a tizzy about being asked to make exceptions. "I can't do that for you, because then everybody will want me to make an exception for them, too."

"So I shouldn't make exceptions?"

No, you should use your judgment about whether to make an exception or not. That's what it – your judgment – is for.

There are things you can do to mitigate the damage of making exceptions.

For one thing, you can build them in: "Henceforth, please email routine requests to fredsdept@fredsconvention.tld, and please don't email me directly, unless it's really urgent." Oh, look! Suddenly, it's not against the rules to contact you directly, so not only rule-breakers will be contacting you. The rule-followers will no longer get so cranky.

For another, it is useful to filter on people who realize and explicitly acknowledge they're asking for an exception, apologize for it, and trouble to make their case. "Fred, I'm sorry to bother you, but I emailed your department and haven't heard anything back in two weeks and if I wait much longer to buy plane tickets I won't be able to come." They're still going to get rewarded for emailing you directly, but hopefully their lizard brain will associate the reward with "asking politely and apologetically for a favor" rather than "disregarding people's wishes."

It also helps to make sure that you (Fred) indicate that this is an exception and you'd prefer not to make it (if that is indeed the case.) "That is a problem! Thank you for bringing it to my attention. While we generally prefer if people went through the departmental email, I'll certainly make an exception in this case."

If your exceptions are rare and well justified, and otherwise you firmly police the boundary, the word that will get out will be more like, "Emailing Fred directly is a long-shot that sometime works, but is usually useless." Which is surely better than "Emailing Fred is the way to go."

"Well-justified" here, by the way, doesn't necessarily mean having a "good" reason. If Fred's boss emails Fred directly to expedite Fred's boss's kid's arrangements, Fred might decide that's not the hill he wants to die on, and to make the exception.

It's up to you what risks you want to run. The thing is, one's judgment works on a GIGO basis, so it's imperative that you don't try to convince yourself that making exceptions when someone is transgressive has no negative consequences, just so you feel good about deciding to do that. If you reckon with the possible negative consequences of letting a transgression slide, and you feel it's better than the alternative, and so that's what you chose, then you've made a good decision, meaning one you will probably be able to live with.

I'm actually a big fan of making exceptions, and not being too rigid about rules. But then, I'm perhaps more willing than many to deal with people being transgressive.

Part of that is, clearly, because I perceive transgressiveness as a thing. When somebody demonstrates transgressiveness, I am not beset by a vague feeling or inchoate intuition. I'm like, "oh, hey, check out that person transgressing that boundary/rule/norm/etc. Let's see what other lines they cross." It's the difference between hearing a buzzing in the room with you, and being able to see clearly for yourself whether it's a mosquito, fly, or wasp.

Finally, one of the important things to note is that in Fred's scenario, the strength of the asshole filter is going to be mediated by just how unsatisfactory users' experience of the department email address is. After all, nobody is going to want to email Fred if it turns out that emailing the departmental email address is much more effective and pleasant than emailing him. He only has a problem when people have reason to think that emailing him might be more satisfactory than going through the designated channel. It is the differential between what people experience (or expect to experience) from the designated channel and what people anticipate experiencing by taking the illicit channel that drives the behavior.

If Fred can improve users' experience of the department email address, he will drain some of his swamp. Of course, that may not be possible, for any a number of reasons, both in Fred's specific scenario, and in any hypothetical asshole filter. It is in the cases where we can't fix the underlying situation, due to, e.g., limited resources that we have to be most careful that our handling of boundaries doesn't set up an asshole filter.

---

Some random loose change thoughts:

Asshole filters are not solely a phenomenon of organizational relationships. I've seen people manage to institute asshole filters in their dating lives. I am reminded of the immortal dialog from "Red Sonja" (1985) (h/t IMDB):

Red Sonja: No man may have me, unless he's beaten me in a fair fight.
Kalidor: So, the only man that can have you, is one who's trying to kill you. That's logic.

I presume someone, somewhere has managed to institute one in hiring – possibly one where the only way to apply for the job is to do something it says in the ad not to do, e.g. call the office. Certainly, shooting the messenger sets up an asshole filter: if there's no reprisal-free way of getting you bad news legitimately, the only way you'll get bad news will be... illegitimately. If you don't take feedback from people who are giving it to you in a mild-mannered way, you'll only wind up getting feedback from people who are jerks about it.

Setting a boundary and failing to enforce it is not the only way to set up an asshole filter. One may also filter for assholes more directly. For instance, gangs through history have required aspirant members to be willing to commit crimes to earn membership.

The term "transgressiveness" is not, to my knowledge, a technical term in psychology. The closest technical term is actually "antisociality", though that is usually only applied to pretty extreme cases (erroneously, in my opinion). Another term, not so much psychological but sociological, is "deviance". These are all not quite the same thing; I'm proposing transgressiveness as a parent category which includes both of those.

"Agreeableness" however, is a technical term in psychology. As far as I know, the use to which I put "agreeableness" above is perfectly consonant with the "agreeableness" scale of the NEO-PI personality system, which kinda-sorta maps to the Myers-Briggs F-function.

I managed to write that whole thing without using the word "nice". That was deliberate. I think the word "nice" is veeeeeery treacherous, the way it gets used, and throws more shadow than light. I may write a big post about niceness at some point.

I said above that our culture doesn't have a concept of transgressiveness per se. What it does have is the concept of disobedience, which is different. When one is disobedient, one is is violating rules or direct orders from a superior. It doesn't have to do with personal boundaries. It only refers to transgressiveness in a heirarchical power relation, not between peers. So disobedience is another form of transgressiveness, but not equal to it.

And then our culture has moral language for condemning people as bad, and those terms are typically applied to people for transgressing. But there's a real question about whether transgressiveness is the same thing as wickedness, q.v. Obedience to Authority, Stanley Milgram.

As I alluded above, transgressiveness can be complicated and people's relationship to it can be complicated. For instance, people who find the idea of sex "naughty" and like the idea of "naughty" sex are people who are sexually aroused by being transgressive. Maybe it's a fetish for transgression. For another, the entire concepts of the "loveable rascal" and the "daring maverick" is predicated on an admiration of a certain kind of transgressiveness, in a certain context. There's a phenomenon I call "The Designated Bastard", where agreeable people keep around people known to be transgressive in certain ways, so that they have someone who will police their boundaries for them – or at least that's the hope, though he who harbors the wolf may find his own sheep missing.

And transgressiveness has a role in all "Think Different" types. "Nevertheless, to be curious// is dangerous enough. To distrust// what is always said, what seems// to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams...." I think it is not an accident that MIT students' favorite sport is Breaking and Entering.

We may not in our culture have a concept of transgressiveness, but we still know it when we encounter it. cvirtue pointed me at this article about a study into "creepiness", that reports

They surveyed 1,341 people about what they found creepy and, among their findings, they found that people (1) find it creepy when they can’t predict how someone will behave and (2) are less creeped out if they think they understand a person’s intentions. Both are consistent with the hypothesis that being unsure about a threat is behind the the feeling of creepiness. [...]

Generally, people who didn’t or maybe couldn’t follow social conventions were thought of as creepy: people who hadn’t washed their hair in a while, stood closer to other people than was normal, dressed oddly or in dirty clothes, or laughed at unpredictable times.

Likewise, people who had taboo hobbies or occupations, ones that spoke to a disregard for being normal, were seen as creepy: taxidermists and funeral directors (both of which handle the dead) and adults who collect dolls or dress up like a clown (both of which blur the lines between adulthood and childhood)

If people we interact with are willing to break one social rule, or perhaps can’t help themselves, then who’s to say they won’t break a more serious one?

Sounds like the researchers' have found that "creepy" is our emotional experience of encountering transgressiveness we don't know what to make of.

We are constantly unconsciously aware of transgressiveness, because it's a matter of safety. De Becker's The Gift of Fear is about making one's unconscious awareness of transgressiveness conscious.

This is what makes cross-cultural contact fraught. When someone from another culture violates your culture's norms, they are suddenly unpredictable. They are in a sense transgressing (if your culture's norms are in force!) but it's unclear what meaning to make of that.

It is actually pretty common – all yall are in a bubble on this one – for people to assume that others who look similar but act from a different norm set are without norms at all; this is the culturally conservative logic that if an adult collects dolls, they're probably also an axe murderer. This is taking a crude awareness of transgressiveness and turning it into a cudgel.

There's something here about abstraction and understanding the concept of culture, but it's late and I'm tired so maybe some other time.

---

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The asshole filter.

And now for a big step backward, quality-wise.

It's not a bad joke overall. I do like that the card in the first panel could work for birthdays, weddings, or bar mitzvahs.

The art is, of course, terrible. I remember briefly thinking that I could use these images again, just swapping out the card and sign text to make different jokes. I'm glad I chose not to.

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Two years ago, writing after the end of Hannibal's first season, I called the show a rich but ultimately unsatisfying feast.  I admired a lot about Bryan Fuller's take on Thomas Harris's novels and their sadistic, cannibalistic central character: its use of visuals and music to set an almost oppressively dreamlike tone, its willingness to flout the conventions of good storytelling, its clever

• This book explains why Jeremy Corbyn now leads Labour. Its author died in 2011.
  The late great Peter Mair saw it coming.
  (tags: ukpolitics )

This is an entry to Mark Evanier's list of the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968. For more on this list, read this.

Most Famous Role: Snidely Whiplash in the Dudley Do-Right cartoons.

Other Notable Roles: Captain Hook in Disney's Peter Pan, Professor Waldo Wigglesworth on Hoppity Hooper, parts in The Phantom Tollbooth and several animated Dr. Seuss specials and a few others.

What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: Conried was very prolific actor logging hundreds of radio, film and TV appearances, often appearing as himself on talk shows and game show panels. His most notable film appearance is probably his starring role in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T and his most famous TV presence was the recurring part of Uncle Tonoose on The Danny Thomas Show (aka Make Room for Daddy) or maybe as the host of Jay Ward's Fractured Flickers. He can reportedly be seen briefly in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator.

Why He's On This List: Hans Conried was one of those voice actors who basically had one voice but it was a great one, developed on stage and radio, including his stint as a member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre Company. He usually played villains and had a way of making the bad guys uncommonly human and funny. That was one of the reasons he worked so much. Another was that everyone seemed to love having him around.

Fun Fact: There's a theatrical tradition in productions of Peter Pan for Captain Hook and the father (Mr. Darling) to be played by the same actor, thereby suggesting a parallel between the two characters. In Disney's 1953 animated version, the tradition continued with Conried voicing both — which probably went unnoticed by moviegoers, especially since the characters had such different designs. Some sources claim Conried was the first actor to play both roles but that's not true. The tradition dates back to the first stage productions of Sir James Barrie's work. (Just two years earlier in 1951, Boris Karloff played both in a Broadway production starring Jean Arthur as Peter.)

The post The Top 20 Voice Actors: Hans Conried appeared first on News From ME.

Tagged: bullying, friends, phone, social anxiety, social awkwardness, socialising

Don't teach a man to fish. Just give him the goddamn fish.