Andrew Hickey

The question of how information escapes from evaporating black holes has puzzled physicists for almost forty years now, and while we’ve learned a lot we still don’t seem close to an answer. Increasingly, people who care about such things have been taking more seriously the intricacies of quantum information theory, and learning how to apply that general formalism to the specific issues of black hole information.

Now two students and I have offered a small contribution to this effort. Aidan Chatwin-Davies is a grad student here at Caltech, while Adam Jermyn was an undergraduate who has now gone on to do graduate work at Cambridge. Aidan came up with a simple method for getting out one “quantum bit” (qubit) of information from a black hole, using a strategy similar to “quantum teleportation.” Here’s our paper that just appeared on arxiv:

How to Recover a Qubit That Has Fallen Into a Black Hole
Aidan Chatwin-Davies, Adam S. Jermyn, Sean M. Carroll

We demonstrate an algorithm for the retrieval of a qubit, encoded in spin angular momentum, that has been dropped into a no-firewall unitary black hole. Retrieval is achieved analogously to quantum teleportation by collecting Hawking radiation and performing measurements on the black hole. Importantly, these methods only require the ability to perform measurements from outside the event horizon and to collect the Hawking radiation emitted after the state of interest is dropped into the black hole.

It’s a very specific — i.e. not very general — method: you have to have done measurements on the black hole ahead of time, and then drop in one qubit, and we show how to get it back out. Sadly it doesn’t work for two qubits (or more), so there’s no obvious way to generalize the procedure. But maybe the imagination of some clever person will be inspired by this particular thought experiment to come up with a way to get out two qubits, and we’ll be off.

I’m happy to host this guest post by Aidan, explaining the general method behind our madness.

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If you were to ask someone on the bus which of Stephen Hawking’s contributions to physics he or she thought was most notable, the answer that you would almost certainly get is his prediction that a black hole should glow as if it were an object with some temperature. This glow is made up of thermal radiation which, unsurprisingly, we call Hawking radiation. As the black hole radiates, its mass slowly decreases and the black hole decreases in size. So, if you waited long enough and were careful not to enlarge the black hole by throwing stuff back in, then eventually it would completely evaporate away, leaving behind nothing but a bunch of Hawking radiation.

At a first glance, this phenomenon of black hole evaporation challenges a central notion in quantum theory, which is that it should not be possible to destroy information. Suppose, for example, that you were to toss a book, or a handful of atoms in a particular quantum state into the black hole. As the black hole evaporates into a collection of thermal Hawking particles, what happens to the information that was contained in that book or in the state of (what were formerly) your atoms? One possibility is that the information actually is destroyed, but then we would have to contend with some pretty ugly foundational consequences for quantum theory. Instead, it could be that the information is preserved in the state of the leftover Hawking radiation, albeit highly scrambled and difficult to distinguish from a thermal state. Besides being very pleasing on philosophical grounds, we also have evidence for the latter possibility from the AdS/CFT correspondence. Moreover, if the process of converting a black hole to Hawking radiation conserves information, then a stunning result of Hayden and Preskill says that for sufficiently old black holes, any information that you toss in comes back out almost a fast as possible!

Even so, exactly how information leaks out of a black hole and how one would go about converting a bunch of Hawking radiation to a useful state is quite mysterious. On that note, what we did in a recent piece of work was to propose a protocol whereby, under very modest and special circumstances, you can toss one qubit (a single unit of quantum information) into a black hole and then recover its state, and hence the information that it carried.

More precisely, the protocol describes how to recover a single qubit that is encoded in the spin angular momentum of a particle, i.e., a spin qubit. Spin is a property that any given particle possesses, just like mass or electric charge. For particles that have spin equal to 1/2 (like those that we consider in our protocol), at least classically, you can think of spin as a little arrow which points up or down and says whether the particle is spinning clockwise or counterclockwise about a line drawn through the arrow. In this classical picture, whether the arrow points up or down constitutes one classical bit of information. According to quantum mechanics, however, spin can actually exist in a superposition of being part up and part down; these proportions constitute one qubit of quantum information.

That’s the protocol in a nutshell. If the words “quantum teleportation” mean anything to you, then you can think of the protocol as a variation on the quantum teleportation protocol where the transmitting party is the black hole and measurement is performed in the total angular momentum basis instead of the Bell basis. Of course, this is far from a resolution of the information problem for black holes. However, it is certainly a neat trick which shows, in a special set of circumstances, how to “bounce” a qubit of quantum information off of a black hole.

IT IS well known that in America, "extreme" working hours (slogging for more than fifty a week) have been getting more widespread in recent decades. In a famous paper from 2005, Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano showed that the share of employed, 25-to-64-year-old men who usually work 50 or more hours per week on their main job rose from 14.7% in 1980 to 18.5% in 2001. But much less is known about people in Europe. New research from Anna Burger, of the Central European University, presents some interesting findings.

The first chart in her paper clearly shows that, especially for the highly-educated, extreme working hours have been getting more popular since the 1980s. For instance, in the Netherlands, often seen as a haven of sensible working practices,...Continue reading

“It is fair to say,” writes historian Heather Williams about the Antebellum period in America, “that most white people had been so acculturated to view black people as different from them that they… barely noticed the pain that they experienced.”

She describes, for example, a white woman who, while wrenching enslaved people from their families to found a distant plantation, describes them as “cheerful,” in “high spirits,” and “play[ful] like children.” It simply never occurred to her or many other white people that black people had the same emotions they did, as the reigning belief among whites was that they were incapable of any complex or deep feeling at all.

It must have created such cognitive dissonance, then — such confusion on the part of the white population — when after the end of slavery, black people tried desperately to reunite with their parents, cousins, aunties and uncles, nieces and nephews, spouses, lovers, children, and friends.

And try they did. For decades newly freed black people sought out their loved ones. One strategy was to put ads in the paper. The “Lost Friends” column was one such resource. It ran in the Southwestern Christian Advocate from 1879 until the early 1900s and a collection of those ads — more than 330 from just one year — has been released by the Historic New Orleans Collection. Here is an example:

The ads would have been a serious investment. They cost 50 cents which, at the time, would have been more than a day’s income for most recently freed people.

Williams reports that reunions were rare. She excerpted this success story from the Southwestern in her book, Help Me To Find My People, about enslaved families torn asunder, their desperate search for one another, and the rare stories of reunification.

A FAMILY RE-UNITED

In the SOUTHWESTERN of March 1st, we published in this column a letter from Charity Thompson, of Hawkins, Texas, making inquiry about her family. She last heard of them in Alabama years ago. The letter, as printed in the paper was read in the First church Houston, and as the reading proceeded a well-known member of the church — Mrs. Dibble — burst into tears and cried out “That is my sister and I have not seen her for thirty three years.” The mother is still living and in a few days the happy family will once more re-united.

I worry that white America still does not see black people as their emotional equals. Psychologists continue to document what is now called a racial empathy gap, both blacks and whites show lesser empathy when they see darker-skinned people experiencing physical or emotional pain. When white people are reminded that black people are disproportionately imprisoned, for example, it increases their support for tougher policing and harsher sentencing. Black prisoners receive presidential pardons at much lower rates than whites. And we think that black people have a higher physical pain threshold than whites.

How many of us tolerate the systematic deprivation and oppression of black people in America today — a people whose families are being torn asunder by death and imprisonment — by simply failing to notice the depths of their pain?

Cross-posted at A Nerd’s Guide to New Orleans.

Lisa Wade is a professor at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. Find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

(View original at https://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Go fourth and multiply

The Labour leadership election hasn’t gone according to the Blairites’ plan, to put it mildly.  Dan Jarvis declined to run and Chuka Umunna launched an in-and-out campaign that prefigured the performance of England’s top order in the last Test, leaving Liz Kendall as the sole standard bearer of the right of the Labour party in the contest.

She has chosen, probably unwisely, to drop some truth bombs on her electorate.  This has not gone down well.  Social media amplifies the voice of the left wing, which has freely characterised her as a Tory.  Many have suggested that with her views she ought to decamp to the Conservative party, often with an invitation of sex and travel thrown in.

For whatever reason, her campaign has not ignited.  Right now it seems probable that she will finish last: Paddy Power are quoting 1/6 on this and given the one published opinion poll has placed her a distant fourth, that price is hard to argue with.

Let’s assume that Liz Kendall indeed comes a poor fourth and that Jeremy Corbyn does well.  (Those assumptions are consistent with all the evidence we have, so we should plan on that basis).  How should the Blairites react to such a comprehensive rejection of everything they stand for?

They effectively have five choices.

1) Knuckle down quietly

The Blairites could accept office under a new leader taking a more leftwing direction, hoping to influence policy direction rightwards in whatever ways they can.  This is what most Blairites did under Ed Miliband, hoping by their loyalty to secure a more favourable candidate on the other side of the general election.  But far from deciding that the party had swung too far to the left, the membership appears to have concluded that the party was too right wing or was simply led too ineffectually.

Even before the leadership election is over, there is talk of a second leadership election in 2018 or even sooner.  Some Blairites will hold out for that hope.  There is no evidence at present that the party will then take a more Blairite view of the world at that point.  Nor, given the way in which British politics focuses on the party leader, is there much hope of dragging policy rightwards in any very significant way.

2) Sulk

The Blairites may feel that the new leadership direction is too leftwing for them and decline to serve in the shadow Cabinet, but remain quietly on the backbenches, occasionally giving coded speeches.    This would again be on the premise that at a later date the party would swing back in their direction.  As noted above, there is no particular reason to assume that this will happen any time soon.

3) Noisily oppose within the party

The Blairites may decide to fight, fight and fight again to save the party they love.  Tony Blair obviously thinks this would be the way forward.  In his conversation with Progress on 22 July, he said that ” ‘Unity’ does not work if you’re all together in the bus going over the edge of the cliff”.

If the Blairites are going to fight, they need to decide what victory looks like.  Right now, it’s not at all clear that they know the answer to that question.  It’s still less clear that they can win any battle that they pick.  They may do better fighting a guerrilla war, ambushing the leadership on specific topics where they can more easily command popular support.

This type of action would need sustained co-ordination among the Blairites.  To date they have not shown any organisational skills in opposition.  If this is their option, they need to caucus.

4) Leave the Labour party

If the Blairites decide to caucus, might they do so in a different party where their aims might be achieved more effectively?  That again begs the question what their aims are.  I identify the guiding thread of Blairites as the pursuit of power to implement social justice by pragmatic means and by building broader public confidence in the means of implementation.  Given the parlous state of the Lib Dems, they are not going to offer power any time soon.  The Conservatives do not focus on the plight of the poor to the extent that most Blairites believe necessary.

Might the Blairites found a new party?  Any defectors will be doing so without the blessing of Tony Blair, who has said that he would not leave the Labour party if Jeremy Corbyn wins, declaring himself Labour through and through.

The SDP was founded by a similar breakaway group, but the circumstances were more conducive to success.  Three of the four founding members of the SDP were more considerable than any of the current Blairites active in politics (the same is not true of the eminences grises, of course).  Secondly, the SDP was founded at a time when the Labour party were heading left and the Conservative party were heading right simultaneously.  Right now, the Conservatives at least are trying to look as if they are occupying the centre ground.  Nor have the current generation of Blairites exhibited organisational prowess.  And even in much more favourable circumstances, the SDP fizzled in seat numbers at the 1983 election.

The odds are firmly stacked against those seeking to found new parties and none of the current crop of Blairites looks to have the appetite for such a challenge.  While individual MPs may defect to other parties, I do not expect them to do so en masse.  In point of fact, I suspect that defections to the Lib Dems by disillusioned MPs not traditionally identified as Blairites are more likely.

5) Retire

Being a politician is not compulsory.  The Blairites aren’t obliged to keep staking out a position without wider support.  Many of them are young and ambitious.  If politics is not going to help them achieve their ambitions, they may choose to look at new opportunities in the private sector or in senior NGO positions.  Rather than do anything dramatic, they may simply fade away.

If they follow this course of action, the left of centre of British politics will hollow out.  Nature abhors a vacuum and the question will be whether their voters get co-opted by the Lib Dems or by the left of the Conservative party or whether the new left Labour can hang onto them.  None of those three options will look attractive to Blairites.

Which way will they jump?

All the options right now will look invidious to the Blairites.  On the most optimistic outlook, their star is going to be occulted for some years.  They are not a homogeneous group and they may well take different options.  But my best guess is that the greater portion of them will seek to oppose the new leadership from within.  If that is correct, the Labour party is going to look divided for some years to come.  Plan your long term betting accordingly.

Antifrank

Lord Bonkers once described Cornwall as being littered with the gaunt remains of the tin mining heritage industry. (If I recall rightly, he was in those parts because he feared Paul Tyler was turning into the Beast of Bodmin every full moon.)

Now it seems North West Leicestershire will soon look much the same. The legal challenge to the closure of the Snibston Discovery Museum near Coalville failed today and it will be gone before the end of the month.

This is a horribly difficult time for local government, but it is hard to resist the feeling that the Conservative-controlled county council would have made more effort to save Snibston if it had been devoted to fox hunting or agriculture.

by Cas Faulds

As an autistic person, I have multiple facets to my identity – just like everyone does.   One of those facets is that I am also a parent.   My son is autistic, and I know what it is like to sit with professionals and be told how limited your child is.  I know what it is like to receive a diagnostic report that includes horribly negative words about deficits, and I know what it is like to have to explain that to other people in your child’s life including teachers and family members.

So, based on that, I would like to offer some advice to parents who have gone through this process that I wish someone had given me when I was there.

Take the diagnostic report, full of the language of the pathology paradigm, and reword it to reflect the neurodiversity paradigm.

How?

The best way that I can explain this is to give you an example:

From a report:

X appears to have impairments in communication and social interactions.  In addition, he was reported to have several restricted and repetitive behaviors.  Specifically, he was noted to have difficulties engaging in a social conversation, high pitched vocal tone, impairments in use of eye contact, difficulties socializing and interacting with other children, and limited emotional reciprocity.  He also collects rocks, has an inflexible adherence to routines, displays heightened sensitivities to light and loud noises, and finds it hard to cope with changes to his daily routine.

No, that doesn’t say anything positive at all!

So, how can I reword this to say something positive?

X has differences in his communication style and social interactions.  He prefers to engage in behaviors that are comfortable for him.  Specifically, these include conversations that remain on topic and relevant to him.  He prefers not to make eye contact because it is uncomfortable for him, and he prefers interacting with children who are older or younger than him, rather than only interacting with his age mates who can be less predictable.  He loves collecting rocks because he is interested in the different shapes and substances that rocks are composed of.  X prefers predictability in his daily routine, and enjoys being in sensory friendly environments.

Why?

Why should you do this?  Why go to the effort of rewriting a professional report?  Because you are going to have to introduce your child to teachers and therapists and you’re going to have to do that more than once.  When you do, you want to do that from a place of strength rather than a place of weakness.  You want to highlight your child’s unique potential rather than place limitations on them, and you don’t want to have to confront all those negative words every time you do this.  This way, you have the words you need to ensure that your child receives the support that he/she needs without trading in his/her dignity.

As an autistic person, I wish that my parents had accepted me for being me, rather than trying so hard to make me into their version of me.  Their efforts to make me into their version of me were unsuccessful but it did result in me feeling as though there were things wrong with me.  For my son, I want him to be able to be him, without having other people give him the message that there is something wrong with him.  This way of introducing him to people who will work with him sets the tone from the beginning that you value I value my son for exactly who he is and I will not allow them to try to change him.

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Somewhere in Labour HQ this morning, a junior apparatchik is frantically scouring the party constitution and rulebook, attempting to find a Graham Chapman Rule that allows the party’s NEC to step in and declare that the leadership election is over because it’s all getting too silly. I’ll admit that my own party’s leadership election has been occupying my attention for the last couple of months, so I may have missed some developments in Labour’s but it does appear to have gone particularly silly over the last few days, culminating in a poll that shows Jeremy Corbyn could actually win. The summer is traditionally the ‘silly season’ of British politics, and Labour are putting on a fantastic end of the party pier show for us all to enjoy. Anyway, some thoughts:

Leadership elections are hard to poll. First, you have to find a sample of party members, affiliated members and newly registered supporters. Then you need to make that sample representative of the party membership as a whole, which is difficult because you don’t have the benchmarks to judge your sample against. I don’t doubt that YouGov have tried their best to ensure this poll is representative – and given the size of their panel and the information they have on them, they’re possibly the only pollster who do stand a chance of doing it right – but there are lots of variables in play here. The broad picture – Corbyn ahead, Burnham and Cooper fighting for second, Kendall slipping back in fourth – is probably right, but the figures attached to them may not be.

But, this poll will help Corbyn the most. One of the interesting factors in the breakdown of the results is that while Corbyn leads in both groups of voters, he’s got an overwhelming lead amongst affiliates and supporters. One of the key drivers of his campaign has been to appeal to the wider left outside the Labour Party to encourage them to sign up to vote for him, and this seems to be working. A poll that puts him in the lead is a great recruiting tool because now they can persuade people that they’re not wasting their £3 in signing up to support him, because he has a genuine chance of winning.

For the others, while it does show that they might need to rally around an ‘anyone but Corbyn’ candidate, it’s hard to see them getting people to sign up as supporters of the Labour Party in order to stop Corbyn winning. Corbyn has a ready pool of people to go and target to grow his electorate, but it’s hard to think of a large group of people who’d do the same for one of the other three. Surely almost anyone with a pressing desire to keep the Labour Party moderate is already a member?

The curse of the Serious People and their Serious Politics. Part of the movement into the Silly Phase of the leadership contest has been the inevitable arrival of various newspaper comment pieces and TV appearances by Labour’s Very Serious People to wearily scold the party membership for not being Serious People who want to vote for Serious Politicians. This has culminated in the reappearance of the Most Serious Politician himself, Tony Blair, to explain to the Labour membership that they should be forming a movement that calls for him to be restored as leader immediately doing absolutely nothing that disturbs the consensus.

As Jennie pointed out the other day, the exasperated sigh of benevolent paternalism that accompanies most of these interventions is apt to backfire as much as it is to succeed. For all his faults, Corbyn offers a vision of hope to the Labour membership and the wider left, not capitulation to the ruling narrative and the continuation of austerity seemingly for ever. I’ve said before that this Daily Mash piece proves that the best truth is often in satire and a message of hope, even if it’s nothing more detailed than Maybe Not That in response to Endless Austerity For Everyone, is always going to play better with this electorate. The world looks quite differently to most Labour voters who aren’t Very Serious People in the Westminster bubble.

Even if Corbyn doesn’t win, Labour’s internal dynamics are changed. Maybe the poll is wrong, and Burnham or Cooper will win by a comfortable margin (I’m hoping for Cooper, so I can still hope to point smugly to this post in the future) but unless it’s wildly and badly wrong, Corbyn will gather an impressive share of the vote and will have signed up lots of new people as Labour members and supporters. It’d be a huge show of strength by the Left within Labour and whoever the new leader is, they couldn’t ignore it. As Corbyn’s vote looks likely to substantially eclipse Kendall’s, the left of the party will have a much stronger case to be involved and included compared to the party’s right. Will the new leader seek to accommodate them, or keep freezing them out in the hope they’ll drift away? Do they decide to hang around and hope for better luck next time, or set off on their own?

Are Labour mirroring the Tories in opposition? Ed Miliband was Labour’s William Hague: promoted to the leadership after a short Parliamentary career beating more favoured candidates because the party thought he was a new and fresh choice. Despite occasional chinks of light and numerous shifts in policy and direction, his party remained mired in roughly the same position for most of his tenure though was convinced that the new Government was an aberration and they’d just sleepwalk into power. At the election, his campaign featured a campaign to save a national institution (for him it was the NHS, for Hague the pound) that the electorate outside of his own party weren’t convinced was under threat and he went down to defeat.

Having done that, Labour are now echoing the Tories of 2001 by having a chaotic leadership election in place of a debate about the party’s future that could well elect a figure from the party’s fringe who’s benefited from MPs voting against their preferred candidate (IDS’s supporters voted tactically to keep Portillo from the member ballot, Corbyn’s been nominated by MPs who don’t support him). So, which veteran MP gets to play Michael Howard and remove him in 2017?

What happens if Corbyn actually does win? Nothing dull, I think we can be sure of that. While some in the Corbyn camp are already plotting the first purge, no one actually knows what sort of leader he would be. He’d likely be the least-experienced leader of a major party since the war having never held a frontbench position. Some compare him to Michael Foot, but Foot had been a Cabinet minister under Wilson and Callaghan, and had decades of experience as a senior Labour figure, while Corbyn has been a backbencher for 32 years. He wants to bring back Labour’s Shadow Cabinet elections, but who would actually stand for them given how few MPs there are from the left in the Labour Party?

What would the reaction of the Labour right be? Should they hang on in there and hope he is the new IDS so he can be dumped, hopefully contaminating the whole idea of a leader from the left on the way? Or do they decide that the SDP had the right idea, they were just a few decades too early? Lots of Very Serious People would welcome a Party of Sensible Non Boat Rocking Centrists, but could they get the critical mass to make it work? Electing Corbyn throws everything into flux, and it’d be foolish to make predictions at this point. That won’t stop many people doing so – I look forward to the Sun or the Mail showing us the nightmare of life in Britain under the communist jackboot of Comrade Corbyn – but for now all that speculation just threatens to be silly enough to summon the spirit of Graham Chapman, telling us to stop.

I.

A lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists envision a future of small corporate states competing for migrants and capital by trying to have the best policies.

But the Internet is about as close to that vision as we’re likely to find outside the pages of a political philosophy textbook. And I am far from convinced.

Let’s back up. Internet communities – ranging from a personal blog like this one all the way up to Facebook and Reddit – share many features with real communities. They work out rules for punishing defectors – your trolls, your harassers – and appoint a hierarchy of trusted individuals to carry out those rules. They try to balance competing concerns like free expression and public decency. They host cliques, power grabs, flame wars, even religious strife. They try to raise revenue, they establish a class system of Power Users and Premium Users, they deal with resentment from people who aren’t getting their way. They develop a culture.

The job of a community leader, be they a blogger or the CEO of Facebook, is a lot like the job of the Mayor of New York City: create a pleasant community where talented people will want to live and work, where wrongdoing is met with swift punishment, and where you can collect revenue without annoying your constitutents too much. But it’s even more like a hypothetical corporate state CEO in a Patchwork or Archipelago – wield absolute power, tempered by the knowledge that your citizens can leave at any time – and if they don’t, skim a little off the top of their productive activity.

In theory, this is supposed to lead to amazing communities as corporate states optimize themselves to get more customer-citizens and new polities arise to take advantage of deficiencies in the old.

In practice, we tried this with the Internet for a couple of years, and then moved to the current system, where individual sites like blogs and little storefronts are in decline and conversation and commerce have moved to a couple of giant corporations: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Amazon, Paypal.

These companies aren’t exactly monopolies. To some degree, if you’re unsatisfied with Facebook you can move to Twitter. But they’re not exactly competitors either – there are a lot of things Facebook is good for that Twitter fails completely, and vice versa. It’s like Coca-Cola vs. milk: in theory you’ve always got the choice to drink either in place of the other; in practice you usually know which one you need at any given time. In that sense, there’s no real Facebook competitor except eg Orkut or Diaspora, which no one uses.

Which suggests one reason why these sites are so dominant: their main selling point is their size. Facebook is the best because all of your friends are on it; if I made a much better Facebook clone tomorrow no one would go unless everyone else was already there (Google found this out the hard way). Amazon is the best because you can buy pretty much everything you want there; Paypal is the best because most sites take PayPal. So not only do they have no competitors, but it’s really hard to imagine one ever arising. In order to compete with Facebook, you not only need a better product, you need a product that’s so much better that everybody decides to switch en masse at the same time. The only example I can think of where this ever worked was the Great Digg Exodus, where Digg screwed up their product so thoroughly that everyone simultaneously said “@#!$ this” and moved to Reddit.

So instead of “let a thousand nations bloom”, it ended up more like “let five or six big nations bloom that we can never get rid of”.

II.

It’s a truism that the First Amendment only protects citizens from the government, not from other citizens. Nothing stops a private college from expelling any student who criticizes the administration, and nothing stops a private business from firing any employee who doesn’t support the boss’ preferred candidate. We apparently place our trust in the multiplicity of the market to maintain some semblance of freedom; out of thousands of competing companies, not all will ban the same political positions; if too many did so, other companies would start offering freedom of speech as a benefit and poach the more repressive companies’ employees and customers.

It’s a little concerning that we accept this argument about freedom of speech when we don’t accept it for anything else. We don’t trust the free market to necessarily preserve racial equality – that’s what anti-discrimination laws are for. We don’t trust the free market to necessarily preserve worker safety – that’s what OSHA and related regulations are for. We don’t even trust the free market to necessarily preserve fire safety – that’s why federal inspectors have to come in every so often to make sure you’re not secretly plotting to let your employees fry. Whenever we think something is important, we regulate the hell out of it, rights-of-private-companies to-set-their-own-policies be damned. But free speech? If you don’t trust the free market to sort it out, the only possible explanation is that you just don’t understand the literal text of the First Amendment.

The argument for non-discrimination laws is that discrimination isn’t just random noise. If a couple of companies here and there decided to discriminate, then they might be easily overtaken by nimbler companies willing to take any employees and customers who came to them; and even if they didn’t, a couple of companies here and there discriminating wouldn’t be the end of the world. The argument for non-discrimination laws is that discrimination can take the form of global social pressure in favor of discrimination, enforced by punishing defectors, to the point where certain races can find themselves locked out of the economy altogether.

Concerns about freedom of speech come from much the same place. Back when homosexuality was really taboo, you’d have a very tough time finding any reference to it, let alone a positive reference to it, in any newspaper or TV channel in the country. All the big companies knew that talking about it (or letting their editorial staff talk about it) was the sort of thing that could get them in trouble, and they had no particular incentive to do so – so they didn’t. Yes, eventually they reversed that policy, but I’m not exactly going to be able to cite an example that didn’t later become okay and still have everyone believe it’s a good example of something it was wrong to have banned!

But even when homosexuality was banned from formal discussion on the news, there was still the opportunity to discuss it with your friends in private. I don’t know much about the history of the gay rights movement, but I understand it was a few small groups of like-minded people who managed to coordinate such discussions among themselves using non-mass-media that started some of the activism that eventually led to it become accepted more generally.

Nowadays that’s a little more complicated. If every company in the world decided that their profit margin required them to appear Tough On Homosexuality, it wouldn’t just mean no mass media editorials. Insofar as a lot of the public square has been annexed by Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, the discussion can be kept out of the public square in a way it couldn’t have been previously. Insofar as the economy relies on PayPal and Amazon as a currency system and marketplace respectively, companies can just decide that currency cannot be used to support gay rights, in much the same way that for a while currency could not be used to support WikiLeaks. The nuclear option is that Google decides not to show gay-related sites in its search results, so that you could make as many persuasive arguments for legalizing homosexuality as you want and no one would ever find them unless you knock on their door and hand them the URL directly.

(The thermonuclear option is that browsers just include some code to refuse to render any site relating to homosexuality, and now you’re done. But that is ridiculous – who would ever believe that browser companies would take it upon themselves to be the arbiter of people’s personal beliefs about homosexuality?)

This is not entirely theoretical. You want some really weird porn? You probably won’t find it on Amazon, according to the delightfully-named article Amazon’s War On Bigfoot Erotica. After they got bad press for hosting some kind of out-there stuff, they decided that anything which offended too many people’s sensibilities was a liability. This echoes a much more serious decision from a few years earlier: Paypal threatened to suspend the accounts of any companies selling sufficiently gross erotic books. Booksellers, many of whom made only a tiny percent of their profit from erotica, claimed that their hands were tied; if you can’t use PayPal, selling on the Internet suddenly becomes a much more dubious proposition. This story has a happy ending; Paypal eventually amended their policy to limit it to much more specific cases. But for a while, it was touch-and-go enough that a few people started wondering: “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t have entrusted our entire commercial infrastructure to a private company with no accountability.”

Advocates of net neutrality like to worry about a “two-tiered” Internet, where the companies that can make sweetheart deals with the ISPs are easy for everyone to access, and everybody else can only be accessed with a bit more money and a bit more trouble. Well, I worry about a two-tiered marketplace of ideas. Write decent erotica, socially approved erotica where everyone has heterosexual sex and then goes to church afterwards, and you can sell it on Amazon, collect profits using PayPal, talk to your friends about it on Facebook, and advertise on Reddit. Write weird erotica, the kind that other people might find offensive, and you might have to start your own website, take payment via some inconvenient method like Bitcoin, have trouble advertising it by word of mouth, and not be able to talk about it on literary discussion forums. It’s not that you’ve been banned from writing your erotica. You can write it. It’s just that practically nobody else will ever hear about it or buy it, except maybe the tiny fraction of people who are already extremely clued-in to the weird erotica scene and know exactly where to look for it.

This isn’t so much different from the old days when nobody would talk about homosexuality. Indeed, one could argue that the modern world is friendlier to people with unpopular ideas – there are more opportunities to self-publish, to bypass traditional bookstores, and to get covered in weird niche news outlets.

But at the same time, the amount of the information ecology controlled by private companies has increased drastically, and if private companies don’t like you, now you have entirely new problems.

III.

I used to think that there was enough demand for a free marketplace of ideas that if a company become too restrictive, another one would spring up to replace it. Then I suffered through the conflict between Reddit and Voat.

Reddit recently alienated (no pun intended) some of its users, who decided to move en masse to an alternative Reddit-like platform called Voat, whose owner promised not to restrict content unless it was illegal (in his home country of Switzerland, which permits a lot). I don’t want to get into the details too much (though I did explain my perspective on it on Tumblr), but suffice it to say that (one) (small) part of the problem was that people thought Reddit was failing its free speech principles by cracking down on various unsavory groups.

HL Mencken once said that “the trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.

So while some small percent of Reddit’s average users moved over, a very large percent of its witches did. Sometimes the witchcraft was nothing worse than questioning Reddit’s political consensus. Other times, it was harassment, hate groups, and creepy porn.

(I don’t want to get into the eternal “you’re hosting child porn!” versus “photos of clothed fifteen year olds aren’t child porn, they’re perfectly fine!” debate, except to say that when the universe finally runs down, and we all succumb to entropy, the second-to-last post on the ultra-cyber-quantum-internet will be “posting holograms of neotenous transhumans is totally in conformity with the First Law Of Robotics as long as they are older than thirteen million years and created the hologram themselves”, and the last post will be “lol u r a perv”)

I feel obligated to say that, in spite of CONSTANT MEDIA SMEARS, Reddit’s community is amazing, puts in astounding effort to help its members and fight for good causes all over the world, and that the representation of weirdoes and neotenous-transhuman-hologram people is no higher than any other part of the population. But that’s not zero. And a disproportionate number of those people became interested in the new site.

Already, we see why the typical answer “If you don’t like your community, just leave and start a new one” is an oversimplification. A community run on Voat’s rules with Reddit userbase would probably be a pretty nice place. A community run on Voat’s rules with the subsection of Reddit’s userbase who will leave Reddit when you create it is…a very different community. Remember that whole post on Moloch? Even if everyone on Reddit agrees in preferring Voat to Reddit, it might be impossible to implement the move, because unless everybody can coordinate it’s always going to be the witches who move over first, and nobody wants to move to a community that’s mostly-witch.

But the problem isn’t just natural self-sorting. The problem is natural self-sorting, plus enemy action. Remember, the big corporations do what they do because it’s what everyone in society is demanding. To break from that mold is to pretty much set yourself up as everyone’s enemy and invite retaliation. The media and Reddit’s SJ community quickly denounced Voat as Public Enemy No 1; as a result, in its first week it got DDoS attacked, deleted by its hosting company with no explanation except “the content on your server includes politically incorrect parts”, and had its PayPal account frozen. As a result, the Great Reddit Exodus was placed on hold while they tried to get their site back up, and by the time they did Reddit had switched CEOs and the momentum was gone.

Advocates of free-market governance and “let a thousand nations bloom” like to talk as if overly restrictive laws in one polity will immediately result in the rise of other competing policies that throw off their shackles and outcompete the first. But even on the relatively lawless Internet, where startup costs are so low that a random student from Switzerland can decide on a whim to take on one of the largest websites in the world, it’s way more complicated than that.

IV.

Actually, the whole Reddit thing left a bad taste in my mouth.

It would be paranoid to say that there are people for whom fighting against free speech is a terminal value, but let me make a slightly weaker claim. There are people who consider themselves the protectors of decency, who notice that their opponents are usually using the value “free speech” to oppose their demands, and so “free speech” to these people becomes the equivalent of “small government” or “tolerance and equality” or “family values” – a value which most people agree is good, but which has gotten claimed by one side of a political argument so hard that for the other side it becomes an outgroup signal and sign of cringeworthy bad arguments which must be shot down. These people don’t quite have fighting free speech as a terminal value, but you might as well model them as if they do. These are the people who say “freeze peach” in the same way other people say “but mah jawbs!”

And these people have a winning strategy. I’ve seen it with Reddit and any other website that gets on their bad side. The strategy is weaponized stereotype campaigns. If a site tolerates witches, describe it as a witch site about witchcraft populated entirely by witches. It’s super easy. By happy coincidence, Slate even has an article calling people out on it this very week.

Think about it like this. No matter how many brilliant artists, scientists, and humanitarians Islam produces, in the mind of a good chunk of Westerners it will always be associated first and foremost with terrorism. Redditors, Diggians, Tumblrites, 4chanistas, Instagramastanis, Slashdotmen, Metafilterniks – all are groups that the average person knows a whole lot less about than they do Muslims. A concerted campaign to irrevocably identify an entire online community with a few atrocious actions by its worst members will succeed pretty much instantly. There are 36 million Redditors, so unless they advertise solely in the saint demographic, we expect the worst members to be pretty bad. Therefore, Reddit is at the mercy of anyone with the resources to start such a campaign. Reddit Inc’s main asset is its brand, so it has every incentive to cave – even a principled leadership would rather make a few administrative changes than sacrifice the whole to save some Holocaust deniers or whatever.

After that, the site’s userbase has two options – either suck it up, or go off somewhere else. Go off somewhere else, and they’ll get DDoSed, taken down by their host, and slowly starved of money like Voat, at the same time as the same media forces accuse the new site of being a hot spot for witchcraft – this time with good reason. The new site might not die out completely, but it will be sufficiently established in the hearts of everyone as a Bad Place that it will be stuck in the same equilibrium as central Detroit – only people with no other options will go there, because it is inhabited mostly by the sort of people with no other options.

The worst possible end-game for this is the two-tier marketplace of ideas mentioned above, with an unfortunate twist – everyone knows that the second tier is inhabited entirely by witches, and therefore being on the second tier is sufficient to convict you. Unpopular ideas are gradually forced out of the first tier by media smear campaigns, and from then on everyone believes the effort was justified, because it’s one of those second-tier ideas that you only find in the same sites as the racists and trolls and child pornographers. You’re not a second tier kind of person, are you? No, we didn’t think so.

I have no particular solution to this. Certainly the well-intentioned solutions other people are working on, like a decentralized crypto-Reddit that can’t be moderated even in principle, are unlikely to help (hint: what is the most striking difference between Bitcoin marketplaces and normal marketplaces?) My primary hope is that it’s just not a real problem. Certainly there has been very little in the way of speech restriction so far, and what little there has been has been against things which, on the object level, I’m happy to see gone. It’s entirely possible that we’ll escape with only a few things banned that probably deserve it. I certainly hope this is the case.

I’m just annoyed that we’ve gotten ourselves in a corner where we have to depend on hope.

Take someone’s EEG as they squint really hard and think Hello. Email that brainwave off to a machine that’s been programmed to respond to it by tickling someone else’s brain with a flicker of blue light. Call the papers. Tell them you’ve invented telepathy.

Or: teach one rat to press a lever when she feels a certain itch. Outfit another with a sensor that pings when the visual cortex sparks a certain way. Wire them together so the sensor in one provokes the itch in the other: one rat sees the stimulus and the other presses the lever. Let Science Daily tell everyone that you’ve built the Borg Collective.

There’s been a lot of loose talk lately about hive minds. Most of it doesn’t live up to the hype. I got so irked by all that hyperbole— usually accompanied by a still from “The Matrix”, or a picture of Spock in the throes of a mind meld— that I spent a good chunk of my recent Aeon piece bitching about it. Most of these “breakthroughs”, I grumbled, couldn’t be properly described as hive consciousness or even garden-variety telepathy. I described it as the difference between experiencing an orgasm and watching a signal light on a distant hill spell out oh-god-oh-god-yes in Morse Code.

I had to allow, though, that it might be only a matter of time before you could scrape the hype off one of those stories and find some actual substance beneath. In fact, the bulk of my Aeon essay dealt with the implications of the day when all those headlines came true for real.

I think we might have just hit a milestone.

*

Here’s something else to try. Teach a bunch of thirsty rats to distinguish between two different sounds; motivate them with sips of water, which they don’t get unless they push the round lever when they hear “Sound 0″ and the square one when they hear “Sound 1″.

Once they’ve learned to tell those sounds apart, turn them into living logic gates. Put ‘em in a daisy-chain, for example, and make them play “Broken Telephone”: each rat has to figure out whether the input is 0 or 1 and pass that answer on to the next in line. Or stick ‘em in parallel, give them each a sound to parse, let the next layer of rats figure out a mean response. Simple operant conditioning, right? The kind of stuff that was old before most of us were born.

Now move the stimulus inside. Plant it directly into the somatosensory cortex via a microelectrode array (ICMS, for “IntraCortical MicroStimulation”). And instead of making the rats press levers, internalize that too: another array on the opposite side of the cortex, to transmit whatever neural activity it reads there.

Call it “brainet”. Pais-Vieira et al do.

The paper is “Building an organic computing device with multiple interconnected brains“, from the same folks who brought you Overhyped Rat Mind Meld and Monkey Videogame Hive. In addition to glowing reviews from the usual suspects, it has won over skeptics who’ve decried the hype associated with this sort of research in the past. It’s a tale of four rat brains wired together, doing stuff, and doing it better than singleton brains faced with the same tasks. (“Split-brain patients outperform normal folks on visual-search and pattern-recognition tasks,” I reminded you all back at Aeon; “two minds are better than one, even when they’re in the same head”). And the payoff is spelled out right there in the text: “A new type of computing device: an organic computer… could potentially exceed the performance of individual brains, due to a distributed and parallel computing architecture”.

Bicameral Order, anyone? Moksha Mind? How could I not love such a paper?

And yet I don’t. I like it well enough. It’s a solid contribution, a real advance, not nearly so guilty of perjury as some.

And yet I’m not sure I entirely trust it.

I can’t shake the sense it’s running some kind of con.

*

There’s much to praise. We’re talking about an actual network, multiple brains in real two-way communication, however rudimentary. That alone makes it a bigger deal than those candy-ass one-direction set-ups that usually get the kids in such a lather.

In fact, I’m still kind of surprised that the damn thing even works. You wouldn’t think that pin-cushioning a live brain with a grid of needles would accomplish much. How precisely could such a crude interface ever interact with all those billions of synapses, configured just so to work the way they do? We haven’t even figured out how brains balance their books in one skull; how much greater the insight, how many more years of research before we learn how to meld multiple minds, a state for which there’s no precedent in the history of life itself?

But it turns out to be way easier than it looks. Hook a blind rat up to a geomagnetic sensor with a simple pair of electrodes, and he’ll be able to navigate a maze— using ambient magnetic fields— as well as any sighted sibling. Splice the code for the right kind of opsin into a mouse genome and the little rodent will be able to perceive colors she never knew before. These are abilities unprecedented in the history of the clade— and yet somehow, brains figure out the user manuals on the fly. Borg Collectives may be simpler than we ever imagined: just plug one end of the wire into Brain A, the other into Brain B, and trust a hundred billion neurons to figure out the protocols on their own.

Which makes it a bit of a letdown, perhaps, when every experiment Pais-Vieira et al describe comes down, in the end, to the same simple choice between 0 and 1. Take the very climax of their paper, a combination of “discrete tactile stimulus classification, BtB interface, and tactile memory storage” bent to the real-world goal of weather prediction. Don’t get too excited— it was, they admit up front, a very simple exercise. No cloud cover, no POP, just an educated guess at whether the chance of rain is going up or down at any given time.

The front-end work was done by two pairs of rats wired into “dyads”; one dyad was told whether temperature was increasing (0) or decreasing (1), while the other was told the same about barometric pressure. If all went well, each simply spat out the same value that had been fed into it; they were then reintegrated into the full-scale 4-node brainet, which combined those previous outputs to decide whether the chance of precip was rising or falling. It was exactly the same kind of calculation, using exactly the same input, that showed up in other tasks from the same paper; the main difference was that this time around, the signals were labeled “temperature rising” or “temperature falling” instead of 0 and 1. No matter. It all still came down to another encore performance of Brainet’s big hit single, “Torn Between Two Signals”, although admittedly they played both acoustic and electric versions in the same set.

I’m aware of the obvious paradox in my attitude, by the way. On the one hand I can’t believe that such simple technology could work at all when interfaced with living brains; on the other hand I’m disappointed that it doesn’t do more.

I wonder how brainet would resolve those signals.

*

Of course, Pais-Vieira et al did more than paint weather icons on old variables. They ran brainet through other paces— that “broken telephone” variant I mentioned, for example, in which each node in turn had to pass on the signal it had received until that signal ended up back at the first rat in the chain— who (if the run was successful) identified the serially-massaged data as the same one it had started out with. In practice, this worked 35% of the time, a significantly higher success rate than the 6.25%— four iterations, 50:50 odds at each step— you’d expect from random chance. (Of course, the odds of simply getting the correct final answer were 50:50 regardless of how long the chain was; there were only two states to choose from. Pais-Vieira et al must have tallied up correct answers at each intermediate step when deriving their stats, because it would be really dumb not to; but I had to take a couple of passes at those paragraphs, because at least one sentence—

“the memory of a tactile stimulus could only be recovered if the individual BtB communication links worked correctly in all four consecutive trials.”

— was simply wrong. Whatever the merits of this paper, let’s just say that “clarity” doesn’t make the top ten.)

The researchers also used brainet to transmit simple images— again, with significant-albeit-non-mind-blowing results— and, convincingly showed that general performance improved with a greater number of brains in the net. On the one hand I wonder if this differs in any important way from simply polling a group of people with a true-false question and going with the majority response; wouldn’t that also tend towards greater accuracy with larger groups, simply because you’re drawing on a greater pool of experience? Is every Gallup focus group a hive mind?

On the other hand, maybe the answer is: yes, in a way. Conventional neurological wisdom describes even a single brain as a parliament of interacting modules. Maybe group surveys is exactly the way hive minds work.

*

So you cut them some slack. You look past the problematic statements because you can figure out what they were trying to say even if they didn’t say it very well. But the deeper you go, the harder it gets. We’re told, for example, that Rat 1 has successfully identified the signal she got from Rat 4— but how do we know that? Rat 4, after all, was only repeating a signal that originated with Rat 1 in the first place (albeit one relayed through two other rats). When R1’s brain says “0”, is it parsing the new input or remembering the old?

Sometimes the input array is used as a simple starting gun, a kick in the sulcus to tell the rats Ready, set, Go: sync up! Apparently the rat brains all light up the same way when that happens, which Pais-Vieira et al interpret as synchronization of neural states via Brain-to-Brain interface. Maybe they’re right. Then again, maybe rat brains just happen to light up that way when spiked with an electric charge. Maybe they were no more “interfaced” than four flowers, kilometers apart, who simultaneously turn their faces toward the same sun.

Ah, but synchronization improved over time, we’re told. Yes, and the rats could see each other through the plexiglass, could watch their fellows indulge in the “whisking and licking” behaviors that resulted from the stimulus. (I’m assuming here that “whisking” behavior has to do with whiskers and not the making of omelets, which would be a truly impressive demonstration of hive-mind capabilities.) Perhaps the interface, such as it was, was not through the brainet at all— but through the eyes.

I’m willing to forgive a lot of this stuff, partly because further experimentation resolves some of the ambiguity. (In one case, for example, the rats were rewarded only if their neural activity desynchronised, which is not something they’d be able to do without some sense of the thing they were supposed to be diverging from.) Still, the writing— and by extension, the logic behind it— seems a lot fuzzier than it should be. The authors apparently recognize this when they frankly admit

“One could argue that the Brainet operations demonstrated here could result from local responses of S1 neurons to ICMS.”

They then list six reasons to believe otherwise, only one of which cuts much ice with me (untrained rats didn’t outperform random chance when decoding input). The others— that performance improved during training, that anesthetized or inattentive animals didn’t outperform chance, that performance degraded with reduced trial time or a lack of reward— suggest, to me, only that performance was conscious and deliberate, not that it was “nonlocal”.

Perhaps I’m just not properly grasping the nuances of the work— but at least some of that blame has to be laid on the way the paper itself is written. It’s not that the writing is bad, necessarily; it’s actually worse than that. The writing is confusing— and sometimes it seems deliberately so. Take, for example, the following figure:

Four rats, their brains wired together. The red line shows the neural activity of one of those rats; the blue shows mean neural activity of the other three in the network, pooled. Straightforward, right? A figure designed to illustrate how closely the mind of one node syncs up with the rest of the hive.

Of course, a couple of lines weaving around a graph aren’t what you’d call a rigorous metric: at the very least you want a statistical measure of correlation between Hive and Individual, a hard number to hang your analysis on. That’s what R is, that little sub-graph inset upper right: a quantitative measure of how precisely synced those two lines are at any point on the time series.

So why is the upper graph barely more than half the width of the lower one?

The whole point of the figure is to illustrate the strength of the correlation at any given time. Why wouldn’t you present everything at a consistent scale, plot R along the same ruler as FR so that anyone who wants to know how tight the correlation is at time T can just see it? Why build a figure that obscures its own content until the reader surrenders, is forced to grab a ruler, and back-converts by hand?

What are you guys trying to cover?

*

Some of you have probably heard of the Dr. Fox Hypothesis. It postulates that “An unintelligible communication from a legitimate source in the recipient’s area of expertise will increase the recipient’s rating of the author’s competence.” More clearly, Bullshit Baffles Brains.

But note the qualification: “in the recipient’s area of expertise”. We’re not talking about some Ph.D. bullshitting an antivaxxer; we’re talking about an audience of experts being snowed by a guy speaking gibberish in their own field of expertise.

In light of this hypothesis, it shouldn’t surprise you that controlled experiments have shown that wordy, opaque sentences rank more highly in people’s minds than simple, clear ones which convey the same information. Correlational studies report that the more prestigious a scientific journal tends to be, the worse the quality of the writing you’ll find therein. (I read one fist-hand account of someone who submitted his first-draft manuscript— which even he described as “turgid and opaque”— to the same journal that had rejected the much-clearer 6th draft of the same paper. It was accepted with minor revisions.)

Pas-Vieira et al appears in Nature’s “Scientific Reports”. You don’t get much more prestigious than that.

So I come away from this paper with mixed feelings. I like what they’ve done— at least, I like what I think they’ve done. From what I can tell the data seem sound, even behind all the handwaving and obfuscation. And yet, this is a paper that acts as though it’s got something to hide, that draws your attention over here so you won’t notice what’s happening over there. It has issues, but none are fatal so far as I can tell. So why the smoke and mirrors? It’s like being told a wonderful secret by a used-car salesman.

These guys really had something to say.

Why didn’t they just fucking say it?

 

 

 

(You better appreciate this post, by the way. Even if it is dry as hell. It took me 19 hours to research and write the damn thing.

(I ought to put up a paywall.)

Here’s a 5-minute interview that I did with The Naked Scientists (a radio show syndicated by the BBC, and no, I’m not sure why it’s called that), explaining the P vs. NP problem.  For readers of this blog, there won’t be anything new here, but, well … you might enjoy the rest of the hour-long programme [sic], which also includes segments about a few other Clay Millennium problems (the Riemann Hypothesis, Navier-Stokes, and Poincaré), as well as a segment about fat fish that live in caves and gorge themselves on food on the rare occasions when it becomes available, and which turn out to share a gene variant with humans with similar tendencies.

Jim Pickard and Sarah Gordon report in the Financial Times that three "senior figures" from the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats" are angling, with the help of some Sainsbury money, to lead the pro-EU campaign in the forthcoming referendum.

Who are these titans?

Will Straw, an associate director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, is expected to lead the group as executive director. Mr Straw stood unsuccessfully as Labour candidate in the Rossendale and Darwen constituency in May’s general election. 

He has joined forces with Ryan Coetzee, a South African who was strategy director for the Lib Dems ahead of the election 

The third political member is Lord Cooper, a former director of strategy in Downing Street under David Cameron. Lord Cooper joined the House of Lords last September and is co-founder of Populus, an opinion polling firm.

The journalists are tactful in not mentioning that Will Straw is best know for being Jack Straw's son, and that Ryan Coetzee's strategy led to the loss of 49 of the Liberal Democrats' 57 MPs.

You have to ask if this trio is the best the pro-European forces in Britain can come up with.

"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake."
Nineteen Eighty-Four

How I think democracy works

How Harriet Harman thinks democracy works.

What Harriet Harman thinks happened at the 2015 election.

What I think happened in the 2015 election

What I think the point of the Opposition is.

What Harriet Harman thinks the point of the Opposition is.

"I can't think why you would want to spend so much time here Doctor," said Felix, "it seems a very odd place to choose as a regular holiday destination."

"I think it's rather pleasant," said the Doctor brightly, "especially since we cleared out the former management."

"The former management?" asked Felix.

"Oh, Drumlins Westmore tried to enclose this place a little while ago," said the Doctor.

"Drumlins Westmore?  Sounds like a British general.  General Sir George Drumlins-Westmore OBE."

"Ha!  No, it's a corporation.  The Drumlins Westmore Interplanetary News and Entertainment Media Group.  Or something like that.  There's probably an Inc in there too somewhere.  They set up a department on one of their office worlds devoted entirely to fiction.  Hired loads of struggling wannabe authors.  Lured them in with promises of agents and publishing contracts and regular meals."

"You mean they started publishing novels?  They created a sort of novel factory?"

"No, they didn't publish anything.  They got the writers to spend all day writing stories featuring brilliant, dynamic, hyper-capable, unbeatable employees of the Drumlins Westmore Corporation.  Heroic corporate accountants and lawyers and lobbyists and marketing executives.   Capitalist atlases who never faltered in their noble determination to cure all of society's ills by privatising everything... into the hands of Drumlins Westmore, naturally.  The writers took to it with depressing ease and speed.  As a rule, the more principled a writer, the quicker they accomodated themselves to the work.  You should've heard the byzantine self-justifications I had to listen to.  Anyway, the fictional Drumlins Westmore employees from the stories all appeared here as a matter of course.  And, also as a matter of course, they immediately set about taking over.  It worked too.  Effectively, Drumlins Westmore pulled off a hostile takeover of the Land of Fiction."

"But that's all over now?" asked Felix.

"Oh yes," laughed the Doctor, grinning so widely Felix thought her head was about to split in two, "we couldn't be having that sort of thing now could we?"

They walked and the Doctor expounded.

"It's the people you meet here, you see.  That's why I keep coming back.  That and a strange feeling I get... a feeling of coming home.  But in a good way."

"It doesn't seem entirely safe here," said Felix, "even without those Drumlins and Westmore gentlemen."

Felix looked around warily, as if expecting a corporate accountant or a marketing executive to leap out at him and attack.

He was still somewhat on edge after half an hour of hiding behind a rock from a platoon of huge robotic tripods.  He and the Doctor had spied them in the far distance.  The Doctor had insisted they duck out of sight, just in case.  Even so, she had leaned around the rocks and spied on the things with her telescope.  Felix had taken a turn.  Through the telescope he saw them, metallic tendrils flailing from the bulbous bodies suspended at the tops of their tall and jointed legs.  They were lumbering towards a far-off cluster of settlements connected by rivers, backed by gorges, and interspersed with farmland filled with grazing sheep.

"Most household accidents happen in the home," said the Doctor absently.

Felix was getting accustomed to her sometimes oblique way of speaking.

"Nowhere is entirely safe," he translated, with the rueful air of someone announcing the solution to a riddle five minutes after everyone else in the room had figured it out.

They had been trudging uphill for almost half an hour, and were nearly at their destination.  The dirty winding road ended at the gates of a deeply improbable-looking castle.  Felix thought it looked like something from the tales of Hoffman... except for the colour scheme, or rather the lack of one.

"Should we not have helped the people in that country?" asked Felix, "Those tripod things did not look pleasant."

"The people of Erewhon can look after themselves," said the Doctor.

Felix looked up at the massive, grey castle door as they approached it.  It was set into the grey stone walls.  The portcullis was grey.  The drawbridge upon which they stood was grey.  The water in the moat beneath their feet was grey.

He looked down at his own body.  His pale grey hands emerged from his darker grey sleeves.  At least his army greatcoat was still more or less the right colour.

"This will wear off, won't it Doctor?" he asked.

"You've already asked me that," said the Doctor.  Inspecting a closed hatch in the door.  She looked entirely at ease with her greyness.  It suited her somehow.

"Well, it is a matter of great concern to me," replied Felix.  "I do not wish to be in black and white for the rest of my life."

"This land is in black and white," said the Doctor, "I don't know why.  It just is.  We'll go back to being the way we were once we leave."

She turned back to him.

"Besides," she said, "I think you look very fetching in monochrome.  A young soldier of the Kaiser's Army, like you.  Suits you.  Although I suppose that, for the full effect, you should be moving at about 16 frames per second."

"I feel ridiculous.  I feel like Charlie Chaplin."

"Nothing wrong with that," said the Doctor, "Chaplin was a genius."

"A genius?" snorted Felix, "making those ridiculous films?"

"I'm enormously tempted to make a bigoted remark at this point.  A remark involving a certain European nationality being notorious for lacking a sense of humour."

"Oh they were funny enough," said Felix, affecting a mature loftiness, "it's just that I always found them disturbing too... jarring."

"Benjamin would've understood," said the Doctor.

"Benjamin who?" asked Felix.  The Doctor had never mentioned anyone called Benjamin to him before.

"Slightly after your time," said the Doctor sadly.

Felix felt foolish and ignorant.

"Of course, I've met Chaplin here," said the Doctor, "or rather some of his characters...  only the early ones for some reason.  If you meet any, you could ask them for some pointers about coping with life in grayscale."

"I'm glad this amuses you," said Felix, looking down again at his own silvery grey skin.

"Honestly Felix," said the Doctor approaching him and putting a hand on his shoulder, "don't worry.  You'll get used to it.  Trust me."

"Maybe I don't want to get used to it," protested Felix.

"But Fee, think of the aesthetics of the thing!  The silver screen has a magic all its own!  And black and white captures such mood, such atmosphere, so many dimensions!  Think of Man Ray!  Think of Murnau!"

"Some more things slightly after my time?" asked Felix.

"I did you no favours," said the Doctor, "whisking you out of Europe just as Modernism was about to take off for real.  Not that Murnau was all that modern in anything but technology."

"You got me out of the war," said Felix.

"True," said the Doctor, "and I don't suppose there was ever anything more Modern than that war."

Felix looked down.

"Do you still feel guilty about leaving it?" asked the Doctor.

Felix nodded.

"Should I not have stayed to fight?  Is that not what you do?"

"I fight my wars, or the wars of people who want my help.  I don't fight for kings and empires."

"We were told we were fighting an empire.  The British empire."

"Empires don't fight other empires to end empire."

"I had a duty to my country."

"You had a right to your life."

"I'm not sure I had the right to leave my friends behind."

"Like Sassoon," said the Doctor, sounding sad and lost.

Felix looked at her.

"A poet," she said, "again, after your time.  But only just."

"You just can't help yourself, can you?"

The Doctor bit her lip and looked down.   

"What I'm trying to say is that these things..." she hunted for the words, "well, they're never just... black and white."

Felix smiled in spite of himself.

"I know, I know," he said with a weary chuckle, "life is... what's the phrase?  Nothing but 'shades of grey'?"

"Yes well, let's hope we don't meet anybody from that book," said the Doctor.

"State your name and attribution," barked a stentorian voice from behind them.

The Doctor whirled round.  The hatch in the castle door had opened. 

"I am the Karkus," growled the Doctor, jutting her pointy chin forward so that her battered top hat tilted alarmingly close to falling off the back of her head, "Earth; 21st Century; comic strip creation; the Hourly Telepress."

"Not autheticated," said the voice flatly.  The hatch snapped shut.

"Oh," said the Doctor, looking crestfallen.

She looked genuinely at a loss, which amused Felix almost as much as it alarmed him.

"That should've worked," she said, "it always has before."

"What do we do now?" asked Felix.  He was rather hoping the Doctor would suggest retracing their steps, maybe making a return visit to the Blue Angel.  He'd rather liked that barefoot dancer.  And the place had felt like home... albeit a part of home he would never have dared to visit back in the old days.  The Doctor hadn't liked it much.  "I'm more of a Weimar girl myself," she had muttered.

The Doctor shook her head slightly, as if to clear it, and turned back to the door.  She rapped on it smartly with her knuckles.

The hatch snapped open again.

"State your name and attribution," said the voice from within, exactly as before.

"I am the Karkus," repeated the Doctor, using the same truculent growl, but this time augmenting it with what Felix could only imagine was meant to be a germanic accent of some kind, "Earth; 21st Century; comic strip creation; the Hourly Telepress."

"Not authenticated," said the voice again and, as before, the hatch snapped shut... or rather, it tried to.  On this occasion, however, the Doctor had suddenly whipped a long spoon out of one of her pockets - at least, Felix assumed that was where it had come from - and jammed it into the open hole before the hatch could close.

"Hang on a mo, old chap," she said, dropping her false voice completely and reverting to her usual curving, flowing Bolton accent, "could you tell me why my attribution is not being authenticated?"

There was silence from within.

"I mean," continued the Doctor, "I realise that the bureacracy here has become considerably less efficient since the departure of the Master Brain... and that's all to the good, don't get me wrong... but even so, you must be able to tell me what's gone wrong, yes?  Hmm?  Pretty please?  With sugar on top, and so forth?"

"Query accepted," said the voice after a dubious silence.

"Well that's a start," said the Doctor, nodding approvingly and keeping a firm grip on her long spoon.

The silence resumed, but it somehow seemed to have become a busy, concentrated silence.  It had become the silence of activity.

"Why do you carry a long spoon on your person?" asked Felix, even as he reflected that he really should have learned not to ask questions like that by now.

"You never know when you might need to sup with the Devil," said the Doctor, "especially here... though I have grounds for thinking that particular character might have escaped some time ago..."

"Query response," barked the voice from behind the door, "The character known as the Karkus is already logged as being within the Citadel."

"Aaaaah!" exclaimed the Doctor, "I see!  Well that's no problem!  Check your records and you'll see that the Karkus went through many versions before his eventual retirement from the strip section of the good old Hourly.  Many of those versions are completely incompatible with each other in terms of backstory, style, etc, to the point where they must exist in seperate continuities.  Blimey, he was officially relaunched and rebooted at least twice.  And that's without counting the so-called 'Young Karkus Adventures'... but nobody likes to talk about those.  You should've heard Zoe on the subject.  You wouldn't think she even knew words like that."

"Do you claim to be a variant iteration?" asked the voice from behind the door.

"Yes," said the Doctor immediately, "that's it.  That's exactly what I'm claiming.  I'm a variant iteration.  That's what I am all right.  Oh ho yes.  I'm a variant iteraion, me.  No question."

She looked across at Felix and twitched her eyebrows at him.  He had to cover his mouth to suppress a laugh.

There was another little slab of busy silence before the voice asked.

"State details of your variation," said the voice cunningly.

The Doctor's eyes narrowed, making her look like a chess player whose opponent had just done something unorthodox with a bishop.

"I'm... sorry but I'm from a Karkus strip in which the Karkus has lost his memory.  Dull storyline.  But then the amnesia plot is always dull.  At least, I imagine it is.  I can't actually remember."

"You also fail to match the physical description and set gender of the character," said the voice.

"It was part of the my storyline," replied the Doctor instantly, but with a touch of desperation, "the character changed gender.  Some people didn't like it, but there you go.  I'm still the same inside.  You should see me under these clothes.  All muscles and pectorals and washboards and that kind of thing.  They use my before and after photos in adverts on bit torrent sites.  I got ripped in three weeks."

More silence.

"There are no records in our files of such a storyline," said the voice, now sounding openly sardonic.

"Of course not, that storyline was lost.  Someone junked it to save shelf space of something.  They never found any of it, despite the best efforts of fans."

Silence.

"Oh for goodness sake!" exclaimed Felix exasperatedly, "I thought you said this place was a democracy now!"

"Democracies run on paperwork just as much as tyrannies," said the Doctor, "but you have a point."

She turned back to the hatch.

"Look here mate," she said, adopting a tone of chummy familiarity, "we're all working stiffs here, amirite?  I realise you've got a job to do, and I realise it's an important job, and I admire how seriously you take it, but... has it really come to this?  Checking and double checking the minute details of a chap's life, just because she wants to walk through a door?  Who is it that you think I am?  What mischief do you imagine I might be planning to get up to in there?  How long has it been since the White Robots and the Toy Soldiers got reprogrammed and went off to live together in that big commune?  A long time.  There's even a generation of their kids now, I understand.  Has there been any trouble since then?  Beyond the obvious trouble you're bound to get in a world where Iago is friends with Richard III, I mean?"  Her voice adopted a slightly wheedling tone.  "C'mon, we're all fictional characters together, aren't we?"

"Are we?" asked the voice after a long pause.

"Yes," said the Doctor, "of course."

The hatch opened a little way and the Doctor withdrew her spoon.

"Not authenticated," said the voice, and the hatch snapped shut.  This time, unimpeded.

"Reminds me of Herr Weißhaupt at the hotel," said Felix, "He was only the doorman but you would have thought he owned the place."

"Hmm," said the Doctor, frowning and looking at her spoon, which now had an unsightly dent in it's long handle, "I only wanted to look around the castle.  Retrace my steps.  Set off a few alarms by walking though some light beams.  A bit of nostalgia."

"Nostalgia literally means 'the pain of the past'," said Felix.

"I know that," snapped the Doctor.

Felix felt himself blush.

"I'm sorry," said the Doctor.

"No, I'm sorry," said Felix, "it comes of being a schoolmaster's son.  Papa always liked showing off his knowledge.  I suppose it rubbed off on me."

"I'm hardly one to talk," said the Doctor.  "Perhaps we should go and see Ichabod Crane.  Now there was an insufferable schoolmaster.  And goodness only knows who he stayed that thin with his appetite."

Felix was relieved.  The awkward moment had been erased as the Doctor had ridden off on another of her trains of thought.  He wondered for which station it was bound.  All he knew was that he wanted to be along for the ride.

*

They trudged back down the long, winding, dirty path.

They met some fascinating travellers on their way.  A voluble Irishwoman called Molly Bloom, a young governess of steely intellect and dignity called Miss Eyre whom the Doctor approached with something like reverance, and a pair of Russian aristocrats named Myshkin and Oblonsky who were travelling together in mutual fug of amiable bemusement.  Felix took an instant liking to two young men they met further on, Messers Nickleby and Smike.  Nickleby and Felix had a good long chat about the ethics of classroom discipline.  Felix's father had been notably lenient, which Nickleby applauded.  Smike said little, but sat under a tree with the Doctor, shyly eating chunks of cheese which the Doctor had found in one of her pockets wrapped in a piece of brown (which is to say grey) paper.  The Doctor insisted he ate them, telling him he needed fattening up. 

Felix began to see what the Doctor meant about it being the people here who drew him back again and again.  Having said that, the Doctor studiously avoided some of the travellers.  She wanted nothing to do with a superficially charming Italian man who introduced himself as Count Fosco.  And when they encountered someone called Humbert, the Doctor immediately kneed him in the groin, took his stepdaughter by the hand, and walked off.  Felix asked what was going on but the Doctor only muttered something about a nice turn of phrase being no excuse.  She chatted naturally enough with the young girl, who trotted along beside her with an air of bland lassitude.

The Doctor then stopped for a long chat with a dogged land surveyor who called himself only 'K'.  She advised him solmenly not to bother trying to get into the castle.  "No point," she said, "trust me." 

"Hang on a minute!" said the Doctor suddenly, startling K.  She abandoned the conversation with him (which was only going round in circles anyway) and turned to the little girl, who was now chatting with Felix by the side of the road.

"You," she said, pointing at her, "you're still in copyright!"

*

"Why are we going back?" asked Felix.  He was feeling weary and exasperated, but he was also concerned about he Doctor.  She was anxious, upset, frantic.  It was hard to tell with her face rendered only in silvery grey, but she seemed to have gone very pale.

"You heard Dolores!" the Doctor replied, shouting back to him from over her shoulder as she strode ahead, "you heard what she said!"

Young Dolores - whom they had left in the care of Miss Eyre - had told them that she and her stepfather had 'escaped' from somewhere.  From the account she gave, Felix thought the place sounded like a cross between a prison and a gigantic filing cabinet.

"I don't understand why those people were being held prisoner," said Felix.

"Well, Humbert deserves to be locked up," said the Doctor, "but the point is, he wasn't locked up for the right reasons.  He and the girl were being kept locked up because they're still in copyright!  That's why you never meet late Chaplin characters!  The rights to the movies he made after 1918 are all still owned by someone!  All these years I've been coming here and I never realised!  Never stopped to think about it!  You never meet anyone here who's still in copyright!  So where are all the copyrighted characters being kept?  Hmm?  I never thought about it!  Never let it trouble me!  I just never asked the question!"  She was fuming with herself.  "I just accepted it!  'It's just the way it is', I said to myself!"

"Like the black and white," said Felix.

The Doctor stopped abruptly and faced him.

"Exactly," she said, and she looked downcast and ashamed, "You were right Felix.  We shouldn't just accept the things as they are.  We should always question.  'Doubt everything', as old Charlie-boy used to say on his daughter's questionaires.  We should always worry about how the world we're in works, and how it changes us."

She turned on her heel and resumed striding up the path towards the castle.

"Well," panted Felix, "since I'm so wise, perhaps you'd like to answer my very pertinent question!"

"Which of your many pertinent questions are you referring to?"

"The one about why we're going back to the castle."

"Because that's where Dolores said she escaped from!"

"But my point," said Felix, stopping to hunch over, hands on knees, and dry heave from exhaustion, "was: why are we going back there when we know we can't get in?"

The words came out as little more than a whisper, but the Doctor seemed to hear them anyway because she called back: "Because I've just remembered something."

"What?" gasped Felix, making a valiant effort to straighten up and get started again.

"Continuity!" shouted the Doctor.

*

They collapsed back at the castle doors.  Felix fell face down into the dusty grey dirt and had to traverse the final few feet to the drawbridge crawling on all fours.  Even the Doctor was showing strain by this point.  She was wheezing loudly and sweat was pouring down her now indisputably pale face.  She had even abandoned her beloved astrakhan jacket because of the heat.  It lay in a crumpled heap by the side of the road about a quarter of a mile away. 

"I'm dying," groaned Felix, "I haven't had to run that far and fast since training..."

"You'll survive," croaked the Doctor.

Felix looked over the side of the drawbridge at the grey water of the moat below... far too far below to be reached.

"Do you think they'll let us in for reasons of compassion if we beg for water?" said Felix, "Is that your plan?"

"No," said the Doctor, "We don't need to rely on compassion.  What we need..." and here she seemed to self-consciously gather herself up and address herself to the silvery sunniness of the heavens, "...is the strength of Karkus!"

In any other context, Felix would have assumed that what he saw next was an hallucination brought on by heat and exhaustion.  As he squinted through his tear-filled eyes he saw a man appear out of nowhere in an explosion of stylised zig-zags.  The man was about seven feet tall, and seemed to be made entirely out of muscles.  The ridges on his bare chest were so defined they looked as though they had been picked out in black, as if someone had painted a vast spider's web across his front.  The muscles heaved and rippled like an obscene, fleshy bouncy castle.  The man was wearing a back cape, black leather gloves, and a black leather mask and skull cap reminiscent of those worn by medieval executioners.

"You will get up," shouted the man hectoringly, and in a psuedo-germanic accent even more ridiculous than the one the Doctor had adopted earlier, "and put the hands above the head."

The man glared down at Felix, and his grey eyes displayed an alarming mixture of malice, contempt and pig ignorance.  And yet, there was something strangely noble about him.  It was as if he had self-consciously turned his truculence and anger into a shield by which to camouflage the ridiculousness of his appearance.

Felix was irresistibly reminded of old Feldwebel Bendel, who had somehow managed to instil terror in all the young recruits despite being short-sighted, nasal, duck-footed, and so small and skinny that he almost disappeared behind his disproportionately vast moustache. 

Unfortunately, the dignified effect that the strange man had achieved with his weaponised arrogance was somewhat undermined by the appearance of the actual weapon he held in his hand.

"Or what?" gasped Felix, "You'll shoot me with that thing?"  He indicated the 'gun' with his eyes.  "What is it, a child's spinning top?  A miniature model of a Christmas tree?  A piece of abstract sculpture?"

"This is my anti-molecular ray disintegrator!" declared the man, sounding genuinely as if he expected Felix to be awed and terrified.

"A what?" asked Felix.

The man seemed momentarily at a loss but he rallied himself quickly.

"It is a powerful gun!" he declared.

"Pfft," said Felix, and allowed himself to collapse back onto the ground.

"I said get up!" bellowed the man.

"I know guns," said Felix, as if talking to the dirt, "I've shot them and been shot at with them.  That's not a gun.  That looks more like a new type of egg whisk."

The man actually growled. 

There was a polite cough from behind him.  He wheeled round, surprised.

"Hello again," said the Doctor, conversationally.

"Ahh!" exclaimed the man, mouth wide open and teeth gleaming.  He looked satisfied with his new opponent.  He put his 'gun' back in his belt and spread his arms.  He faced the Doctor in a battle-ready half crouch.  He snarled.  He pounded his rippling chest.  He slapped a fist into his palm.  His triceps competed with his biceps for which would bulge the most.  His feet pawed the ground like a tiger getting ready to lauch itself at a crocodile.  His eyes gleamed.  He raised both fists.  He quivered like a coiled spring.  He yelled a belligerent and triumphant "Rrrrraarrrgghhh!" sound.  He sprang.

4.8 seconds later the Doctor had him on the ground, sobbing, in a full nelson.

Felix wanted to facetiously complain about the Doctor's use of an illegal move but he couldn't get the words out for laughing.

"Mercy!" bawled the man.

"Do you submit?" demanded the Doctor, pushing one of her knees viciously into the small of his back.

"I submit!  I submit!"

She released him and rolled back into a sitting posture.  She crossed her legs.  All aggression seemed to have suddenly drained out of her.  She now looked relaxed, affable and amused.  Her hat had fallen off.  She looked around and saw it lying in the dust a few feet away, but seemed not to be in a rush to retrieve it.

The huge man picked himself up off the ground and stood directly in front of her.  His attitude was a curious hybrid of resentment and humility.  Then he fell to one knee.

"Command me, Mistress," said the man.

The Doctor grinned and shook her head.  She ruffled her hair to knock out some of the dust.

"Fetch my hat would you, Karkus old chap?" she said to the man as he seethed meekly at her.

Felix boggled as the man obediently jumped up and trotted over to the Doctor's hat.  He picked it up and brought it back to where she was sitting.  He held it out to her like a lady-in-waiting offering Marie Antoinette a fresh eclair.

"This is the Karkus!?" spluttered Felix.

"That's him," said the Doctor, "the man himself.  In his first and most famous version... the version of him which appears out of thin air when summoned by someone who needs him.  As I eventually remembered."

"Oh," said Felix, "I see.  But why would he come when called by someone needing help and then attack the way he did?"

"It's a bit dirty, old bean," said the Doctor to the Karkus, as if mildly outraged at being offered a dusty hat.

The Karkus started brushing the hat with his hand, looking stoical but thoroughly at a loss.  Felix got the sense that he would instantly be happy again if asked to crush the hat with one fist, or stamp on it, or tear it to pieces with his teeth.

"Ah well," said the Doctor, readdressing herself to Felix, "that's the Karkus you see.  That's how he works.  If you want his help, you have to beat him.  At least, that's how it works with this version."

"What kind of hero is that?"

"In some ways he's a bit like Wonder Woman," said the Doctor.

"Who?" asked Felix.

"An Amazon," said the Doctor, accepting her now-dusted hat from the Karkus. "Another comic strip creation.  She originally furthered her creator's strangely utopian fixation on bondage.  Part of the original point of the character was that she was tall, powerful and gorgeous, and frequently got tied up... and then tied other people up.  Thrills galore there, if that's your thing.  The Karkus is similar in that he was invented by a woman writer who liked the idea of a character who was your typical muscle-bound, misogynistic meathead of a male supervillain but who had to become the slave of any woman who could beat him up.  They summon him, he attacks them, they win, he becomes their slave.  That's the formula... at least of this version of the character, before they ballsed him up, before men got their hands on the comics and decided to feel oppressed by the concept.  Classic Karkus - proper Karkus! - spends his entire time being physically vanquished and dominated by beautiful women who then lead him around like a puppy dog, ordering him about.  Which is precisely what has just happened again, you'll notice," she added, smoothing a stray slab of her hair behind one of her ears before placing her hat back on her head.

"Isn't it enough for you that you have me to run around after you doing everything you say?" asked Felix.

"Don't be churlish, Fee," said the Doctor, "you know you love it."

"I'd also quite interested in meeting this Wonder Woman," said Felix.

"We'll see what we can do," said the Doctor.

"Should I take away his gun?" asked Felix, indicating the Karkus.

"No need," said the Doctor, "his gun doesn't exist.  Can't do.  It's stupid."

The Karkus looked down at his belt where his gun had been.  His mouth turned very thin and his chin wobbled slightly, but he said not a word.

"All right?" asked the Doctor, raising an eyebrow at him.

"Yes, Mistress," said the Karkus sullenly, "I am your slave."

"Yes you are Karkus, my old buddy," said the Doctor, "yes you are.  And you have to do everything I say, don't you?"

"Yes Mistress," said the Karkus.

"Yes," said the Doctor. 

And though she was smiling, and her tone was jocular, there was anger in her eyes.

"Uh oh," said Felix.

He'd seen that look before.

One defining feature of Parliament for the last eighteen years has been the size of the Government’s majority: the massive majorities of Tony Blair’s first two terms followed by the smaller, but still easily workable, majorities of Labour’s third term and the coalition.

This Government, by contrast, has a majority of just 12. In theory, that should make everything much more difficult for it. As Alex Harrowell has pointed out, getting anything through in that situation requires a much more different style of whipping than anything we’ve seen since 1997. When your majority is decently sized, you don’t have to worry too much about little groups of rebels or more mundanely if one of your MPs spends too long at a reception and doesn’t make a vote. Your majority can soak up hundreds of little blows like that, and it can even be good party management to allow people to blow off steam by rebelling.

With a majority that’s only just above single figures, you’re in a different game altogether. Half a dozen organised rebels can sink an entire bill and suddenly the whips’ office finds itself having to keep track of three hundred MPs, making sure that ministers don’t get sent too far from Parliament when a big vote is looming, while making sure that backbenchers are staying in the precincts of Westminster instead of getting home for an early night. One of the most important parts of the Major Government was the work his Chief Whips (Richard Ryder and Alastair Goodlad) and their teams had to do to keep everything going.

Even with a strong whipping operation that does get things through in close votes, the narrative changes. At the moment, the Tories are trying to present themselves as a hegemonic force in British politics, pushing through a series of controversial changes to not just change the law but to frame the discussion around them in their terms. They’re not acting like a party with just 37% of the vote and a slender majority in Parliament, and when Labour sit on their hands (like they did on last night’s welfare reform vote) that framing is allowed to go unchallenged. What should be a story of how the Government could only just get its proposals passed instead becomes one of Opposition disarray.

Given the general willingness of Tory MPs to be lobby fodder, the Government isn’t going to be damaged by a single close vote or even a defeat, but its ability to define the terms of political conversation can be progressively undermined by consistent Parliamentary opposition. John Major – who started with a larger majority than this – was made to look weak not by a single vote, but by a long series of narrow victories and constant stories of emboldened Tory rebels having to be bought off with concessions to get anything through Parliament. The story stopped being about ‘the Government is going to do X’ but instead became ‘what concessions will the Government have to give to get something vaguely resembling X through Parliament?’

In a situation like this, the prime task of the Opposition – and this applies to all the parties within it, not just Labour – is to create that pressure on the Government so it has to fight to get every vote through. (And even if it does get through the Commons, the Lords offers another tough challenge given its current makeup) There are faultlines in the Tories on just about every issue they want to push through Parliament, and if their whips have to start looking at every bill knowing there are 300 votes against them on it, things start getting tough both for the whips and for the backbench MPs who find themselves continually listening out for the division bell knowing that missing just one vote will give them a big black mark on their record.

The Tories are nowhere near as dominant as they’re pretending to be. Concerted pressure from the Opposition parties working together can both show that and thwart Tory attempts to define the political narrative.

Chapter One

It was a quiet southern night, hot and humid like a woolen blanket pulled over the head of a sleeping person. It was comfortable but it was also not comfortable, a little bit like being suffocated by pudding.

Jem sat on the porch looking at the fireflies dancing across the lawn. He was holding a mason jar filled with sweet tea, the kind made just for sipping while sitting on the porch looking at the fireflies dancing across the lawn. The whistle from the evening train sounded in the distance as the locomotive pulled out of the station on its way to Macomb or Atlanta or another location somewhere in the South.

From a distance there appeared a figure walking on the road towards Jem's house. It was a woman - a female - carrying a suitcase. She appeared to be about the same height and build as Jem's sister, Scout, on whom he had been waiting to arrive home on a trip from the North, where she had settled after leaving the South. She didn't live in the South anymore, because she had left for the North, and had lived there for a while prior to her returning down South for what she had told him was a short trip. On second examination, however, it actually was Scott herself just then, carrying a suitcase and walking down the road.

"Howdy, Scout," Jem said to his sister Scout as she walked up the walkway to the porch.

"Hello, Jem," she replied. "What are you doing on this fine southern night?"

"Just sitting on the porch looking at those fireflies dance across the lawn. Thinking about things, you know. About the South. About history, and the wages of prejudice, and why men cannot be good to one another, as one does."

"I see nothing has changed here in the South, brother."

"One could almost say that the South was a region where history never quite moved forward, almost," he replied, "at least that is the conclusion that I often reach on my musings about the unique historical destiny of the the region we call home, the American South."

Scout sat on the porch swing next to Jem (Jem was sitting on a porch swing) and laughed. She was four years younger than her brother, but in many ways she was wiser. One of those ways was that she was smarter than him.

"Silly Jem, always worrying." Jem was, in fact, often worrying about things.

"Well, you know, Scout, we didn't all leave for the fancy North."

"No, we all didn't," Scout concurred.

"But since you ask, I was thinking about our childhood, and the events of our childhood. Do you remember that Atticus used to tell us that you should never kill a mockingbird, because it is a sin to do so?"

"Why yes I do, Jem. In fact, I remember it often because father spoke of it often."

"Yes. It was such a resonant and thematically significant statement."

"But like many things relating to our beloved father, Atticus Finch, I see now that the sentiment was flawed."

"Why, how is that, sister?"

"Because it is not factually true that one should never kill a mockingbird. There are circumstances under which it is in fact permitted to shoot a mockingbird."

"Such as when, Scout?"

"If a mockingbird is on your land, you can shoot it because it belongs to you. If you see a mockingbird on someone else's property, you may not shoot it because then it is not your property."

"But Scout, I don't believe Atticus was referring to who literally owns the land on which the birds are sitting."

"If he wasn't," she replied, "he should have been. All rights are merely extrapolations of property rights, after all, and without clearly delineated property rights we exist in a state of criminal anarchy."

"But there are lots of things that don't have to do with property, Scout."

"Like what?"

"Well, like justice and kindness, and being nice, and humid evenings in the South."

Scout laughed again. "Jem! You are very funny! But don't you know 'justice' is a myth and kindness is weakness?"

"I do not, because that goes against everything we were taught by our father Atticus when we were very young."

"'Justice' is a lie told by the weak in order to justify their resentment of the wealthy. The belief that the coercive power of the state can be used by the poor to even the score with the capitalist class is Communistic."

"I don't think I follow you, Scout."

"Jem," she said after pausing for a moment, "do you know about the Makers and the Takers?"

"Why, no."

"There are two kinds of people in this world. There are people who make things, who exert their will on the world in order to wrest order from chaos, to create and to guide the advancement of the human race. Do you follow me?"

"Yes Scout, so far."

"Well, the other kind of people are the Takers. They resent Makers because they are jealous and know they do not have the strength necessary in order to create things and steer the destiny of nations. So they band together in order to use the sum of their weakness to topple the strong from their position of natural superiority."

"But that doesn't make sense, Scout. There's lots of people who don't have much, and they're not all bad people."

"I don't think you understand what you're saying, Jem. If they were strong, robust, physically capable, and mentally focused, would they be poor?"

"Well, you know, some people fall down on bad luck -"

"Luck is an excuse used by Takers to describe inequality, when the only true source of inequality is nature itself. If you are wealthy, you are already strong, robust, physically capable, and mentally focused, or else how would you even be successful?"

"Well, I guess that makes sense . . . "

"Of course it does. It's self-evident - the strong rule because they are strong. A child can understand that."

"But that's not justice, Scout. Justice is . . . well, justice is right and wrong."

"Jem, what is right?"

"Why, you know. It's what Atticus told us about being kind and decent and never judging a man until you can walk a mile in their shoes."

"We were indoctrinated as children to believe that compassion was a source of strength, when in reality compassion is the wellspring of weakness."

"Well, I know that's not true."

"Why do you know that? Because Atticus told us?"

". . ."

"Think about this: you may think charity is a form of compassion, but isn't charity more accurately described as a form of slavery?"

"I really don't understand, Scout."

"It's not hard! To act selflessly - why, there is no greater obscenity in the world! To act for someone else - it's a contradiction. If a person acts against their own interests, why, they're insane. Self-interest is the highest motive of civilized mankind. Far from virtue, charity is the greatest possible sin."

"But what about kindness?"

"Just what is kindness?"

"Why, it's being good to one another, being nice and courteous and helping one another."

"Helping one another? Help yourself, brother. If you give other people the opportunity, they will take everything from you. And if you let them, well, you deserve every bad thing that happens."

"I don't believe that."

"Well, whether or not you believe it, it's the self-evident truth. The Takers are always going to be waiting to catch you when you fall, which is why you must be ever vigilant against their depredations. Never live for another, or you will find yourself their slave."

"Well, I guess if someone steals from me, they're bad."

"And it's worse still to invite the thief into your house and tell them to make themselves comfortable. You pay your taxes, right?"

"Why, of course I pay my taxes, Scout."

"We all have to pay our taxes, because the criminal government holds an advantage over us in physical strength. Through coercion, they can steal a proportion of our hard-earned assets, and the proportion of our assets they can seize with impunity is the proportion to which we are made into slaves by the criminal government."

"But taxes pay for things like roads, and bridges, and schools."

"All of which could be handled far more efficiently by the private sector. If bridges need to be built, an entrepreneur will invest the time and resources to build that bridge, and it's a certainty that his bridge will be more effective than any bridge the government could build. And if he takes the risk necessary to build the bridge, isn't it only natural that he be allowed to profit off his invention?"

"Well, I guess so . . ."

"You guess correctly! The government is in reality a cartel dedicated to corruption and wealth redistribution, and it is the responsibility of the sovereign individual to resist this act of theft however they can."

"But what about things like courts and police officers?"

"We need courts, obviously, but I don't see any reason why private institutions couldn't establish and maintain courts a lot more efficiently than the government. After all, wouldn't a private court be far better able to adjudicate contracts?"

"But it seems to me that if courts were private, the person who could buy the court would be able to get any kind of rulings he wanted."

"Exactly! So the person most deserving of 'justice,' to use your word, would be guaranteed to receive justice in 100% of all cases."

"But what about police?"

"The same principle applies. Police exist to maintain the inviolability of property rights. Therefore, it makes sense that a private police force would be better positioned to protect property rights, as opposed to a public police force that must, perforce, naturally follow the illegitimate interests of the criminal government."

"Well, that's fine, but what about murder? Surely, no one can buy the right to murder?"

"Can't they, though?"

"I really don't follow you, Scout."

"Why, it's absurdly simple. Murder is an act of killing, an act wherein one sovereign individual consciously and without hesitation takes the life of another sovereign individual, therefore depriving him of life and limb. Right?" "Well, I guess so."

"So doesn't it stand to reason that truly exceptional individuals, individuals gifted with the natural strength and intelligence that places them above the ordinary run of man, already can murder as they wish?"

"That doesn't make any sense!"

"It's difficult to grasp, perhaps, because it's so simple. You agree, don't you, with the simple proposition that A=A, right?

"Well, of course, that's just common sense."

"Exactly! And so if one thing is always equal to itself, then doesn't it follow that the ability to take a life freely creates its own justification for doing so?"

". . ."

"There should be no gap between impulse and execution. Deliberation is for the weak who require rationalization to excuse their actions. The ability to act creates the necessity of action. To act otherwise is . . . why, it's just unnatural. Makers have the responsibility to act in accordance to their wills. To believe otherwise, to be swayed from self-actualization by the 'logic' of the Takers, well, that's ludicrous."

"But but that reasoning, I can do anything and claim it's right simply because I can."

"Now you get it, Jem! I knew you understood what I was saying. Does it make any sense to you that even an infinite number of negative numbers can ever equal a positive number?"

"Well, of course not."

"Then why should the will of the majority - the mass of slaves, the Takers - ever be able to counter the will of the Maker? Shouldn't the righteousness of one powerful man always be greater than the mass of parasites known as 'society'?"

"Alright, I follow you so far, but what about prejudice?"

"What about it?"

"How do these ideas eliminate prejudice?"

"They can't! Prejudice is, at its core, a market inefficiency."

"OK, Scout, I really don't understand now."

"Markets work best when all actors can act according to the best knowledge they possess, right? Therefore, acting out of prejudice, if we accept the premise that prejudice is a kind of ignorance, simply hurts those who do so."

"Well, I guess I see that . . ."

"And if the victim of prejudice can't overcome that kind of market inefficiency, well, aren't they really victims of their own weakness?"

"I don't know, Scout . . ."

"The worst thing you could do is to accept the solutions presented by the criminal government for redress in the case of racial prejudice. You can't legislate the market. The only way you can conquer the market is through strength of will."

"That seems harsh, to me."

"Maybe it does, but maybe that kind of 'harshness' is the real justice. Have you ever thought of it that way?"

"I guess not! But I still don't understand how it isn't a sin to kill a mockingbird. I mean, all they do is sing and bring music to the world, with no hope of recompense."

"A mockingbird is an animal. It is incapable of conscious thought and action. Can a mockingbird excavate the mountains and the earth to bring forth iron and stone with which to express its will through the act of creation? Can a mockingbird build factories to create smoke to blot out the sun, to serve as a reminder of the glory and strength of man? Or is a mockingbird essentially a Taker, living on your land, eating the fruit of your garden, subject to your rule?"

"I guess so!"

"If the mockingbird is alive on your property, then the mockingbird is your property. Therefore, you have every right to kill or not kill that mockingbird as you wish. If someone else kills your mockingbird, however, then they have committed a sin against you, by violating your property rights."

"Well, you sure are smarter than me, Scout. I guess you've learned something up in the big city after all. But there's one thing I'm still confused of - just how do you protect your property from the Takers who are always trying to tear you down?"

"Well, in this case, the answer is simple: if someone keeps killing your mockingbirds, you should go set a watchmen to protect them."

"It all makes perfect sense now."

"It sure does, Jem. It sure does."

The Kindle version of  Missy’s first book, We Could Be Villains, is on a temporary price reduction. For a limited time (through Tuesday, July 21st) you can get it for 99 cents in the US, and 99p in the UK!

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Tagged: food

Why you don't need two-factor authentication.

I have a few friends who are worried about the fact that Donald Trump is at or near the top of the polling for the G.O.P. nomination. Every election cycle, we have this concern: Yeah, you'd kinda like the opposition to nominate the candidate who'd make the worst president because he'll be the easiest to beat…but what if the worst guy wins?

These friends all seem to forget how long we have before the primaries, let alone the actual election. Voters now have the luxury of saying they back the guy who puts on the best show in the press and on the news and, in Trump's case, have the best name recognition. Who the hell even knows who George Pataki is these days?

(Funny Typo: I just typed "Michael Pataki," then went back and corrected it. Michael Pataki was a character actor. George Pataki is the former governor of New York. Even I forgot who he is.)

As Daniel McCarthy notes over at the American Conservative site, Trump is leading a very weak pack and if you look at the actual numbers, ain't doing so good. If anything, he's an indicator that Republican voters don't know who most of the folks running are or don't see any reason to favor one over the other. Eventually, they'll have to get serious about picking a candidate but they have a long time to window shop before that moment.

In the meantime, it's kind of fun watching Trump piss off one group after another. But right now, it's not about becoming President of the United States. It's the same strategy he employs in the business world: Making sure his name is all over the place. It takes a lot more than that to win an election.

The post The Donald appeared first on News From ME.

As Damien Walter noted recently on twitter, some time between 1995 and 2010, the human species began to develop functional telepathy. (Actually, the first sign of this became real on October 29th, 1969, but exponential growth from a small base takes a long time to become noticeable.) We now have over a billion human beings on the internet, and so many devices that the IPv4 address space is saturated: within the next decade we can expect multiple new satellite internet constellations (such as OneWeb and rivals) to bring pervasive internet access to the globe. Smartphones are pushing down into the sub-$50 space where they're affordable even by those living just at the global poverty threshold (and the decline in global poverty over the past decade is working away at the other end). It no longer looks implausible to suggest that almost everybody will be online by 2025.

A side-effect of this process is that we're becoming used to a constant background roar—the global id in full throat, blasting us with the prejudices, rumors, superstitions, bigotry, and (less obviously) love and passion of the entire human species. Everyone being online means that anyone can in principle yell in your ear at any time, be it encouragement or rape and death threats.

So far we seem to have handled the telepathy thing relatively well. It hasn't provoked a nuclear war, or even very many social media targeting drone strikes. It has provoked total panic among authoritarian political leaders, with its concomitant ability to facilitate flash mobs, and a much quieter level of paranoia and near-panic among national security organizations, but compared with the consequences of the development of the printing press it's pretty benign. However, we're still in the early days.

More significantly: Markets. Some would say we're entering the post-capitalist era; certainly it's interesting to speculate on the effects universal functional telepathy (lies and all) are going to have on how we handle business. The internet disintermediates supply chains, but there's a catch: you have to be able to find your customers, or your root supplier, before you can cut out the middle-men. Currently we're seeing a land-rush by new middle-men trying to stake out their position as the Sultans of Search: Amazon and eBay were first wave, but the likes of Uber or AirBNB are now trying to occupy the equivalent space in vertically segmented business niches (personal transport and rented short-let accommodation respectively). The current 2015 cruel joke is that to identify a new Silicon Valley start-up opportunity you just have to figure out what your mom no longer does for you now you've moved out of her basement and productize it. But that's not going to last forever.

One of the performance drivers of an internet startup is the ability to automate and replicate a service that formerly scaled up by adding human bodies—travel agents are replaced by Hipmunk or Kayak, for example. But a side-effect of this is that there's a constant pressure to deliver the same automated search results for less money, on fewer processor cores. It's a race to the bottom and it ends when search becomes free at the point of delivery. Which might, to a first order, sound like a recipe for "sponsored search results" and biased results, but when you can open multiple browser tabs and do meta-comparison across product comparison websites for virtually zero cost, such lying informational lacunae will be found out fast.

Ultimately most of those middle-men are doomed: they simply can't add enough value to stay viable as information arbitrage brokers in a telepathic world.

So where do we go from there? (Is telepathy compatible with the continued existence of capitalism?)

I've checked in at a few websites that had previously defended Bill Cosby. I wanted to see if recent revelations — that he'd admitted under oath he'd obtained quaaludes to prep at least one woman for "sex" — had changed any minds. Some folks have given up their defense of the man while the others have doubled down or even bet the house. (The New York Times has even more from his deposition.)

And by the way, I put "sex" in quotes because when one party doesn't consent, it isn't sex. It's rape or molestation or some term that doesn't imply any sort of love.

Some folks now admit they backed a loser and I don't think that necessarily speaks ill of them. To me, there were more than enough accusations — and enough of them with no visible motive to lie attached — to conclude he was guilty of at least some of them. But erring on the side of demanding more evidence or sticking by a person who's been good to you…well, that's not the worst trait in this world.

Sticking by him in light of this and practically declaring that no evidence ever will change your mind, as a few have, is something else. And it's a something else that has little to do with the facts of the case. To repurpose a line I've used here before about politicians: Some people think that never admitting you're wrong is the same thing as always being right. Not if you live in the real world, it isn't.

It's all such a shame because I used to love Bill Cosby as a performer. One of the greatest evenings I ever spent in an audience was watching him do stand-up (sitting down, actually) at Harrah's in Reno. He amused me on TV and records but seeing him live doing about an hour…that was amazing. Five minutes in, you understood why he had the stature he had. Without doing anything you could really classify as a "joke," he had us laughing and hanging on his every word from the moment he took stage to the moment he exited.

I remember that evening and I absolutely understand why people didn't want to believe the stories…why they still went to see him performing live even after the Tales of Rape began coming out. I might even understand why his wife (since 1964!) is sticking by him, denying that which seems undeniable.

I may have mentioned this before here but years ago, I worked for a TV producer who cheated relentlessly on his wife…and she knew it. He wasn't, insofar as I know, consorting with anyone who did not gleefully consent but he was cheating constantly. He had his own apartment just for such activities and would spend two or three nights a week in it. The other nights, he spent in the huge mansion he shared with his wife where he was, trysts aside, an absolutely wonderful husband.

He cared for her. He loved her. He gave her everything she might have wanted except for fidelity. If she called him at work with a problem, he dropped everything and ran home to take care of her.

Now that I think of it, does the word "cheating" apply if she knows and agrees, as this wife did, to go along with it? She did because she decided the alternative was worse. She was at an age where she didn't want to be alone in life and didn't want to start dating…and like I said, he was apparently a great partner in her life in so many ways. Divorcing him, she decided, would be worse for her than putting up with the adultery. A friend who knew them better than I did told me, "She figures that sooner or later, he's going to lose his sex drive and that stuff will go away. Plus, she really loves him."

I don't pretend to know what's going on in the Cosby marriage. I cringe at all the theories from people who've never met either one but know exactly how it must be. Maybe it's like what went on with this producer I knew…but maybe it's not. My point — and I really have one — is that relationships come in all kinds and what works for some couples may make zero sense to other couples. We don't know…and that part of the story is really none of our business.

What is our business is that we're seeing a great comedian destroy himself and his legacy. Others aren't doing it to him. He's the one who slipped the quaaludes into the drinks — an action, as I think I once pointed out here, that is despicable even if no molestation follows it.

At one point, I thought he might be able to ride it out…disappear for a while, then ease his way back into the public eye. No way. Too much proof has now come out. He might dodge the civil suits but he'll never escape public wrath and I think that's a good thing and not just because he deserves it. It's a good thing because a lot of people need to be reminded every now and then that rape is not a harmless prank.

Also, there are a lot of very famous, rich people out there who think they're untouchable; that they can do equally loathsome deeds and their money and celebrity will protect them. They need to be reminded that if Cosby can get caught, anyone can get caught.

The post The Last Cosby Show appeared first on News From ME.