Phospholipids are substrate molecules for a wide range of lipid-derived signaling molecules, including diacylglycerol (DAG), phosphatidic acid (PA), 20:4n6, eicosanoid products, PAF, and lysophospha-tidic acid, generated by the action of PLA2, PLC, and PLD. The activation of these enzymes is complex, partly because of the large number of isoforms present within a cell and also because of the interdependence and coordination of their regulation. For instance, the bacterial peptide formyl-methio-nyl-leucyl phenylalanine (FMLP) binds to its receptor on neutrophils and activates the G-protein-regulated PLC^. PLC^ hydrolyses PI-4,5-P2 to form DAG, an activator of traditional Ca2+-depen-dent PKC isoforms, and inositol trisphosphate, which stimulates intracellular Ca2+ mobilisation. In addition, FMLP activates PC-specific PLD and cyto-plasmic PLA2. PLD generates PA, which also has signaling responses, including stimulation of NADPH oxidase activity, but which is also readily interconverted with DAG. Alkenyl species of PE are probably the major substrates for cytoplasmic PLA2, which is specific for molecular species containing 20:4n-6. This multitude of responses to a single agonist is highly coordinated and is typical of lipid signaling mechanisms in general. The activation of the various phospholipase enzymes is tightly regulated by a variety of protein kinases, phosphatases, and regulatory proteins, such that their responses are sequential rather than simultaneous.
Evidence suggests that phospholipid structure contributes to the coordinated regulation of phos-pholipase activation. PI-4,5-P2, the substrate for PLC, is an obligate activator of ADP ribosylation factor-dependent PLD; consequently PI-4,5-P2 must be regenerated after the transient activation of PLC, before maximal activation of PLD can be achieved. In addition, individual phospholipids can act as binding sites for a wide range of signaling proteins and enzymes, enabling their coordinated regulation at the membrane. Perhaps the best characterised of these systems is the generation of trace amounts of 3-phosphorylated PI, typically PI-3,4,5-P3, when PI-3-kinase is activated by insulin and growth factors. Signaling proteins containing appropriate binding motifs (plecstrin homology or PH domains) then bind to PI-3,4,5-P3 and initiate signaling cascades. The prototype of such protein is protein kinase B (PKB) also know as Akt. PKB undergoes a confor-mational change when bound to PI-3,4,5-P3, becomes phosphorylated, and then is active in the regulation of cell proliferation.
The mechanisms of action of dietary lipid modulation on these signaling pathways are largely unknown. There is good evidence that eating a diet rich in fish oil (containing 22:6n-3 and 22:5n-3) attenuates neutrophil-mediated inflammatory reactions. Part of this antiinflammatory nutritional effect may be to reduce the content of phospholipid species containing 20:4n-6, thus decreasing available substrate for synthesis of eicosanoid and leukotriene products derived from 20:4n-6. Alternatively, it may also result in part from the modulation of the spectrum of molecular species of DAG and PA generated by the various PLC and PLD enzymes. In this paradigm, altering the composition of substrate phospholipid will result in the formation of different DAG or PA species, which then have differential actions on target kinase enzymes. Because inositol phospholipids are generally composed of the 18:0120:4 species, activation of PLC1 will form DAG18:0/20:4, whereas hydrolysis of PC will generate predominately mono-unsaturated DAG species. It has been suggested, for instance, that individual isoforms of protein kinase C can be differentially regulated in response to different molecular species of DAG, thus providing a molecular basis for many nutritional effects on a wide range of cellular functions.
Despite extensive studies since the 1960s, remarkably little is understood about the fundamental reasons why cells expend considerable energy maintaining lineage-specific molecular species compositions of membrane phospholipids. Even for cell lines in culture, which can be grown successfully over many generations with grossly nonphysio-logical membrane phospholipid compositions, a degree of lineage specificity is maintained. The detailed metabolic processes that control membrane phospholipid composition are slowly being defined, and studies of the specificities and activities in intact cells of acyltransferase and phospholipid synthetic enzymes using gene transfection and sensitive analytical techniques such as ESI-MS will increase understanding of the fundamental mechanisms involved.


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text:
Do you believe what the newspapers say? The Inheritors, by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer
Kate 20thC, community life, Edwardian, fantasy, Ford Madox Ford (Hueffer), Joseph Conrad, oneupmanship, passion and secrets, political / social commentary, science fiction, the life of the times, the world of work November 10, 2016 November 9, 2016
This novel from 1901 is surprisingly easy to whip through, considering it was co-written by two heavyweights of English literature, Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford (in his earlier guise as Hueffer). Their writing style does not usually allow a fast and snappy read. They were both masters of the elliptical and the oblique, circumlocuting their subject in ever-decreasing circles, until the surrounding emotional atmosphere and social implications have been described so thoroughly that the reader feels intellectually blackmailed to draw their own conclusions about What Has Happened, and make sense of the space deliberately left blank in the centre of the action. Think Henry James, but with more left out.
I published an edition of The Inheritors some years ago, in my Political Future Fictions project, and read it again this week to kick off the next series of podcast scripts catch-ups from Really Like This Book, on newspaper novels (the first podcast was on a short story, so The Inheritors replaces it). The Inheritors is about the power of the press in the Edwardian period, which echoes powerfully in our own mediatised age. It's a speculation on what would happen if a person from the Fourth Dimension manipulated western finances and politics to bring about society's ruin. The newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines of the period are crucial, since they are the only way the public, and the markets, are given information. Other technologies exist for information dissemination – the ticker-tape reporting speeches in the House of Commons, and the telegram – but nothing is so powerful as the printed press, and whoever controls and manipulates the press, holds power.
The Conrad-Hueffer elliptical style of writing is well suited to science fiction, since it skates airily past the tricky details the reader doesn't need to know, while giving the plot-relevant points a fine focus. Granger the impoverished journalist is walking along a country road to visit a friend near Dover, and finds he now has a walking companion, a beautiful and enigmatic young woman who calmly tells him that she is here from the Fourth Dimension to pursue her nefarious plan to bring down western civilisation, and that he won't be able to do anything to stop her. The reader isn't told how she gets there, or why she should do such a thing, because that's not relevant, but instead is invited to observe Granger's charming masculine response, of laughing at and not believing anything serious that a woman says. Since Granger tells his story as a narrative, he exposes his own fat-headed stupidity in being drawn into the woman's strategy as her publicity tool.
She engineers a new commission for him, writing a character study of a repellently awful novelist (modelled on Hall Caine), which leads to more newspaper and magazine feature commissions that steadily exploit Granger's facility for cheap and easy writing, and lead him and his professional reputation away from sound judgement about hard news. Granger ascends the ladder of popular journalism, becoming a biggish name in the political camp that the alien woman wants to bring down. She is in there too, having announced that she is Granger's sister, and is mysteriously accepted as such by everyone, even Granger who knows that his real sister died years ago, and his aunt who couldn't care less. She adopts Miss Granger as a paying-guest companion, which repeats the lesson of how corruption begins: by giving easy money to someone in need of it, who then becomes your creature. Granger is obsessed by 'Miss Granger' and wants to be with her whenever he can. He is hoist by his own petard when he realises that by having admitted her to a fake family relationship, he is now responsible for her reputation, and assumed to be in a privileged position of knowledge for everything he writes. He also realises, a little too late, that he is now socially unable to persuade her to fall in love with him, which is a good indicator of this young man's self-absorption and disassociation from every moral value that ought to matter to him.
Miss Granger allows the world to assume that she is the mistress of a very prominent European duke (modelled on King Leopold II, he who pillaged the Belgian Congo), leaving Granger in a very uncomfortable social position. He realises that to the world he apparently colludes with this liaison (since brothers always control their sisters' actions, right?) while writing popular magazine articles supporting the duke and his cause. To avoid the glances and sideways looks, Granger puts his head in the sand, so he will not see Miss Granger's ploys. The duke's aim is to extract large sums from the banks and the British government to build a great railway across his ducal fief of 'Greenland' (which stands for the Congo, though you'd think that Conrad and Hueffer could have chosen a better name), thus bringing yet more civilisation to the natives and exploitation opportunities for the whites. Remember who wrote Heart of Darkness in 1899.
Granger senses that something is up, but chooses not to look, and chooses to cling to Miss Granger's enterprise with the pathetic hope of being able to be near her. He refuses to see how the great financial and political crash of the (new) century is being engineered, bringing down financiers, politicians, investors large and small, and reputations in all directions. And then he accidentally finds himself in a position to stop it all, to make a choice between truth and his personal interests. On the evening that everything come to fruition, he helps the editor of his newspaper – racked by sciatica – to put the paper to bed, by arranging the sub-editing of a late news report about the culmination of the crash, and sending it to the presses. Granger is so preoccupied that – almost too late – he reads the final copy, and realises that he has the power to let the story die, or allow Miss Granger's machinations to succeed by printing a front-page story on the atrocities in 'Greenland' and the role of the British government in financing them.
The genius of this novel in illustrating the power of the press is showing how even if a journalist or an article is 'only' one cog in a machine, not responsible for the whole, they must still take responsibility for their own sphere, their own actions. In its day, the Edwardian press was the only public information medium, delivering publicity, swaying public opinion, driving the financial markets, revealing the truth, exposing lies, and giving journalists importance and influence out of all proportion to their intrinsic worth. The weak journalist is the flawed tool, to be exploited ruthlessly.
alien invader
social niceties
Published November 10, 2016 November 9, 2016
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2 thoughts on "Do you believe what the newspapers say? The Inheritors, by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer"
Gubbinal says:
Thank you for such an intriguing review. I have ordered a copy of the book. I really appreciate your insightful writing.
Thank you! I hope you enjoy it.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


In their 10th annual Red Tape Report Card, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) awarded more A grades than in their first nine years.
CFIB's report card grades governments along three criteria: strong leadership, comprehensive measurement of the regulatory burden, and whether or not the government has put a cap on regulations in place.
"Ten years ago most governments didn't even know how many rules they were imposing on their constituents—a shocking lack of accountability when you consider that regulations cost citizens a lot of time and money," said Laura Jones, CFIB's executive vice-president, in a media release Tuesday.
When the report card was launched the highest grade was British Columbia's B+.
This year, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, British Columbia, and Ontario all received A grades. Even the federal government received a B+.
Alberta and Yukon received a failing grade. Alberta holds the provincial record for worst grades over time, getting Ds and Fs since the report card was created.
This is the same group of whiners that don't want to pay their workers a decent wage.


MELROSE — Melrose Public Schools Orchestra Director Luke Miller is pleased to announce that after nearly two years of work with a composer in residency, students will perform four original pieces at the spring concert next month.
The show, which will be held on May 23 at 7 p.m. in the Melrose Veterans Memorial Middle School auditorium, coincides with the Melrose Symphony Orchestra's 100th season in 2017-2018.
In January 2017, Melrose Public Schools began working with composer Robert J. Bradshaw to research, write and produce four original compositions.
Throughout the year, Bradshaw visited the Melrose Youth Orchestra (grades two through twelve), Melrose Middle School Orchestra, and the Melrose High School Orchestra's ensemble rehearsals to coach students on how to write their own music.
At the end of the year, interested students submitted their ideas to Bradshaw for the composition project. Some provided melodies, while others submitted poems, drawings and even a calculus equation that was translated into music.
Bradshaw then worked over the summer to compose four original pieces. Every student who turned in a submission had their work featured.
Youth Orchestra: "All Around the World" — the name of one student's submission.
Middle School Orchestra: "I Decide to Wait" — a poem submitted by a middle school student. It will be read by a narrator with corresponding music in the background.
High School Orchestra: "The Meres of Ponde Fielde" — a three-piece movement that explores the history Melrose, with each section about one of the city's ponds.
Combined Piece: "Even the Darkest Night will End (while hope remains)" — features approximately 200 students of all grades and skill levels. The piece will also include several Melrose Public Schools orchestra alumni.
Melrose Public Schools would like to thank several community organizations for their support throughout this project: Victoria McLaughlin Foundation, Staples Foundation, Melrose Education Foundation, Melrose Orchestrators, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Melrose Cultural Council, Messina Fund for the Arts, Melrose Public Schools and Brad Hutchinson Real Estate.
The concert is free to attend, although a $5 entrance donation is suggested for adults, and $3 for seniors/students.
An award winning composer, Bradshaw's music has been heard around the world and is infused with modern culture and historical significance. His steampunk opera, Deus ex machina, won two gold medals and was named one of the top 10 albums of 2015 by the Global Music Awards. A devoted advocate for the availability of music education for all children, Bradshaw accepts residencies where he helps children compose and perform their own music.


This high-energy original Christmas spiritual is not to be missed! A driving gospel chorus alternates with contrasting verses, then a quote from "Angels We Have Heard on High" introduces a lively, hand-clapping, briefly a cappella refrain. A knockout!


text:
[Meet the team]: AI coach and robotics enthusiast, Ibe Denaux
by Margot Vanlaet | 26 February 2021 | News
After having worked as an engineer for a couple of years, Ibe thought it was time for a change. Coincidence or not, a new opportunity presented itself that had an eye for both his passion for IT and education. He decided to take the plunge, joined the BeCode team in September, and is now preparing the first batch of Ghent AI students for their new career path. Curious about how Ibe integrates his background in robotics into the training or about the projects he is currently working on? Then be sure to read the interview below!
Can you tell me a bit more about yourself?
"I was working as an engineer at Duco, but started looking for a new challenge. My sister had contacts at BeCode and advised me to apply. In September I started working as an AI coach at BeCode Ghent. I was always interested in education, but I found the step too big. However, coaching those who want to start a new career in this field seemed like a step in the right direction. At BeCode they were not looking for someone with years of experience in education. The preference went rather to someone with the necessary professional knowledge who can also function well in a social environment. The position seemed to fit me perfectly, so I decided to apply. A brief interview with management soon followed and I was hired before I knew it."
"Besides coaching juniors, I also work on several robotics projects. As these are time-consuming, I'm mainly focusing on small projects such as setting up (chat)bots. You don't have to invest much time in these projects and you get a lot of entertainment in return."
What robotics projects are you working on?
"Arai, a small robot that BeCode possesses, but that hasn't been used a lot so far. In the first phase, I hope to be able to make a connection between her and our Discord server, which is more challenging and time-consuming than I first thought. The possibilities are endless with this robot and you don't necessarily need a robotics background to program her. Some knowledge of robotics might be helpful, but it's definitely not a requirement."
How far along are you with programming the robot?
"I've managed to connect Arai to the Discord server, but due to insufficient time to train her, I've taken the connection offline for now. In the next phase, she will be programmed for marketing purposes. I hope to be able to connect the chatbot I developed to the robot, Arai, so she can conversate with people as well as answer their questions. In addition, I would also like to see her walking around the campus so she can interact with her surroundings."
You indicated that you also work on small projects, such as developing bots. Where did the idea come from?
"In celebration of poetry week, each class group was asked to submit a poem. This seemed like a unique opportunity to send in partially AI-generated contributions. The initial goal of the bot was to generate poems for poetry week, but in the meantime, the bot has become a source of entertainment."
What exactly do you have to do to generate a poem?
"Natural Language Processing relies on neural networks. A neural network is a fairly complex network of neurons that builds connections with other neurons in that same network. The ultimate goal of such a network, in the context of NLP, is to predict what the next word will be in a sequence of words. The network is trained using a dataset, which in this case comes from Wikipedia. By training the network, it will understand which words are related to each other and thus will be able to predict which word is next in the sequence. So if you were to enter the search term chess, the network will think of king, queen, rook, knight, etc. The poetry bot works similarly. The words that will appear will be poetry related."
What stages did you go through in developing the bot?
"In addition to the poetry bot, I created a
chatbot. The chatbot and the poetry bot both rely on GPT-3, the latest NLP model from OpenAI. I just had to create an interface between our server and the API of GPT-3 so that you receive a response when you interact with the bot. The more input the bot receives, the more correct its prediction will be."
"When making a prediction, the chatbot must take into account some character traits (sarcasm, friendly and helpful) and the previous conversations it has had with the user. But the larger the input sequence, the more expensive it is to generate output and the longer it takes for the user to receive a reply. I, therefore, set up the bot so that it only has to take into account the character traits as well as the last two interactions with the user when formulating an answer."
So Python and knowledge of NLP are important when developing bots. What other technologies did you use in the development process?
"I actually used very few technologies. These bots have Discord as an interface and to set them up, you only need to be able to program in Python. Even knowledge of NLP is not really necessary, but it helps you understand what's going on behind the scenes, how to increase the performance of your bot, and what context is important when making a prediction."
"If you weren't going to use GPT-3, there are a lot of other technologies that are also covered in the training that you can use. Logically you start with interpreting and processing your data. To build your model you can use tools like GPT-2. Designing and training your own network, in turn, can be done via Tensorflow or Pytorch."
"During the last chapter of the training, the juniors are introduced to neural networks and how to train them using data. So they would be perfectly capable of realizing similar projects."
Did the juniors help develop the bots?
"I designed the chatbot in one evening because the juniors had a week off and I had no one to talk to. The bot also replaced me during Simplon training – obviously in the proximity of a coach. The bot may be a fun tool, but it can never act as a full-fledged coach."
"The chatbot, also called Ibot Denaux, is the little brother of the poetry bot. This bot does not generate poems. It is mainly intended for entertainment purposes, but it can also explain concepts. Nevertheless, it is important to take these answers with a grain of salt. The context of the bot is defined as "sarcastic," so it lies and jokes quite easily. It's fun for the students to see what's possible with AI."
What, in your opinion, is the added value for the juniors of such projects?
"This way, they can get acquainted with the technologies behind a chatbot. This kind of project should also show them that NLP can also be used for fun purposes. The goal of this project is actually twofold, to give them a target and to entertain them"
Can the other promotions also use your bots?
"The chatbot can only be used by the Ghent AI students, but it is possible to integrate it into the other servers. The poetry bot is openly accessible."
Do you have plans to develop similar bots in the near future?
"I'm afraid that people would quickly get tired of me if I only develop bots. It doesn't take much effort and it's fun to make them, but I want to avoid overloading the servers. But who knows, if a nice idea pops up."


text:
The best books on Austrian Economics
recommended by Peter Boettke
The professor of economics discusses the contributions made by the Austrian School. He introduces recent books by Austrians, explains what we can learn from Mises and Hayek, and argues that economics is the sexiest subject.
Interview by Sophie Roell, Editor
Human Action
by Ludwig von Mises
Individualism and Economic Order
by Friedrich Hayek
Calculation and Coordination
by Peter Boettke
The Invisible Hook
by Peter Leeson
After War
by Christopher Coyne
1 Human Action by Ludwig von Mises
2 Individualism and Economic Order by Friedrich Hayek
3 Calculation and Coordination by Peter Boettke
4 The Invisible Hook by Peter Leeson
5 After War by Christopher Coyne
What is Austrian economics? How does it differ from standard economics?
Like a lot of things in economics, it's the opponents that give the labels to people. The people who were practising economics at the University of Vienna thought they were just doing economics. It's the critics who said, "Oh! That's those Austrian economists." It's a label that gets to be associated with a set of propositions, both analytical – about the way you study economics, its methodology – and about the policy conclusions of economics. Representatives of that tradition came out of Vienna in the late 19th and early part of the 20th century. They then migrated to the London School of Economics, and to Switzerland, and eventually to the United States, where they held positions at places like Harvard, Princeton and Chicago. They coalesced around New York University, which became a hub of teaching Austrian economics.
So where are most Austrian economists now? Are they in the US?
It's a worldwide movement, but I would say the place that has the strongest concentration of Austrian economists in the US is George Mason University. Outside the US, it's probably Madrid, at King Juan Carlos University, and there is also Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala. Then there are a lot of people sprinkled here and there. It's not necessarily full-blown Austrian economics. Here at George Mason as well, it becomes a mix and match of different ideas in economics that people find interesting.
Analytically, the biggest difference between the Austrians and their mainstream brethren is a focus on processes of adjustment and changing conditions, as opposed to static or equilibrium states of affairs. In a supply and demand curve, a standard economist would focus on the price and quantity vector that would clear the market. The Austrians want to talk about all the exchanges and activity that take place that results in that vector being discovered and the market being cleared.
Can you give an example?
Imagine if refrigeration wasn't an option and you had some fish to sell. You start selling them at $10 a fish, and this many people buy the fish. After a while it slows down and you still have some fish remaining. As the day wears on you're trying to get rid of the fish because they're going to spoil. So you adjust your price down, you sell it at $8 a fish, or $6 a fish or $5 a fish. Eventually the market clears and all the fish find a buyer. In standard economics, we talk about the price and quantity vector that would clear that market, and the formal techniques of economics – a series of simultaneous equations – would get us to that vector. The Austrians don't disagree with that price and quantity vector. But they want to talk about all the activity, a lot of which is what we call entrepreneurship – people adjusting the price, arbitrage opportunities and so on. Eventually you get to that vector, but your focus isn't on the vector, it's on all the stuff that goes on before it's discovered.
From this example, and also from the books you've recommended, I get the sense that it's a lot broader than regular economics?
Yes, because Austrians want to talk about the institutional environment within which economic activity takes place. They want to talk about cultural frames of reference that form the priors that rational actors have. They want to talk about the fact that we each have different priors, because we're diverse individuals who have different perspectives on the world. Somehow, we have to reconcile these differences through the exchange processes in the market. So, the books series that I edit at Cambridge with Timur Kuran – it's not an Austrian series, it's just a straight-up economics series, but its title is "Cambridge Studies in Economics, Cognition and Society". It's a very broad notion of social science, of which economics is a part, rather than the idea that economics is somehow separated from all the social sciences.
Is Austrian economics considered "heterodox" by the mainstream establishment?
This is complicated because on the one hand it is. If you go to the official classifications in economics, and look up Austrian economics, it will be listed under modern heterodox economics. But in most cases, when people think of heterodox economics, it's economics that challenges the basic presumptions of economists. So if you follow the debate that has been going on at Harvard, they had the walkout on Greg Mankiw's class [Ec10, the basic economics class that Harvard offers as part of its core curriculum for undergraduates]. What the students object to is that Greg Mankiw teaches the invisible hand, ie how through the exchange process individual interests can be reconciled in the overall public interest. People think that's too ideological. Then Steve Marglin [who teaches a course called Economics: A Critical Approach] did his talk on heterodox economics. He talks about the fact that markets are exploitative, there's injustice, there's irrationalities. For heterodox economists, markets don't satisfy, they exploit. They deny the invisible hand. The Austrians don't.
Imagine a two-by-two matrix, in which the rows are defined by whether you are dealing with a simple problem situation, or a complex problem situation. The columns are social order or social disorder. Then you look at the individuals pursuing their individual self-interest. What's going to result? In simple problem situations – where agents are perfectly informed, they live in large number situations and are dealing with homogeneous products – you can get social order, because no one individual can influence the effect on any other individual. But once you introduce complexities into the system, the system no longer generates the invisible hand, and you can get disorder. So in a simple problem situation with free markets everything is popcorn and candy canes, and then we move to a complicated problem situation and we get unemployment and irrational exuberance etc. This is Keynesian economics and market failure theory – all very mainstream.
What Marxists believe is that even under simple problem situations, the market can't do its job – you get monopolies, you get exploitation. Classical economists, Austrian economists, and New Institutional economists reside in the box that starts with a complex problem situation but nevertheless gets you social order. The way you do that is not based on the behavioural assumptions of the actors, but on the institutional assumptions underlying them, ie things like the political, legal and cultural context within which individuals engage and exchange. If that context is the right context, then even in the most difficult of situations, individuals can generate social order. They can cope with their ignorance, they can take care of uncertainty. When the market goes astray, it's not because there is something wrong with the market mechanism, it's because the rules under which the market mechanism operates have got distorted.
Are you saying mainstream economics can't handle the complexities of the real world?
This is why methodology of the social sciences matters. It defines not only what we consider to be good questions, but probably more importantly what we consider acceptable answers. A lot of people within mainstream economics would like to handle complexity, and we see them constantly striving to do it, but they constrain their efforts by certain methodological straitjackets. They claim they have to fit things into formalistic models, otherwise it's not a good answer. One of my favourite books is by Richard Nelson, who teaches at Columbia, about evolutionary economics. In that, he makes a distinction between what he calls "appreciative" theory and "formal" theory. What he means is that there is a theory that all economists agree to when they talk to one another about what goes on in markets, about entrepreneurship, about innovation.
Schumpeter uses the phrase "creative destruction". For example, you have Tower Records, it does very well, then innovation comes in and eventually Tower Records goes out. We can tell the story about how markets operate in that way, and we can develop an appreciation for it. What we can't do is put it in a model, and our formal, official theory is the modelling exercise. So there is this disjoint between the appreciative theory we can talk about, and the formal theory which limits what we can talk about to only those things that we can formally prove in a deductive model. Austrians aren't challenging the appreciative theory of neo-classical economics. In fact they're very much part of the neoclassical tradition. It's just that the Austrians want to talk about things like dispersed knowledge, heterogeneity, uncertainty – not just risk, but real uncertainty – and institutions, how institutions arise to allow us to cope with our ignorance and our uncertainty and to ameliorate the frictions that exist in the world. Rather than seeing the frictions as the thing that destroys the model we have, or prima facie evidence that the market is not very efficient, they play a positive role.
Let's talk about your books. The first you're recommending is Ludwig von Mises's Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. This is definitely a very broad book, looking at psychology, at philosophy and so on. The title of the last chapter was my favourite: "Economics and the Essential Problems of Human Existence".
Do you believe that Michele Bachmann reads this book at the beach?
Put it this way, in the first chapter he starts off talking about "praxeology", which is certainly a word I had to look up. And in my edition, he uses some words which aren't just derived from Greek, but are actually in Greek. So I'm very impressed she can read it at the beach. It's also about 1,000 pages long. I know you love this book, but I'm not sure how many people other than Michele Bachmann are going to be able to get through it, so give us some highlights.
Mises was not just some quack, he was a serious economist. He was named a distinguished fellow of the American Economics Association in 1969, and he won the highest medal for scientific achievement in his home country of Austria. There is a great article by Paul Samuelson on who would have won the Nobel Prize in economics if it had started the same year as the other Nobel Prizes, and Mises is on his list. This book was originally published by Yale University Press, and John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a review of it in The New York Times.
Mises made at least three significant contributions to economics. The first contribution is in money and business cycle theory. What Mises tried to show is how money is central to all exchanges, because in a monetary economy, goods trade for money and money trades for goods. Goods don't trade directly with other goods. Since money is one-half of all exchanges, if you screw around with money, you're going to screw around with all the exchanges in the economy. He postulated that when the government distorts the monetary unit, through the manipulation of money and credit, it can generate boom-and-bust cycles. So rather than the business cycle being inherent to capitalism, it's a consequence of distortions caused by the manipulation of money and credit.
Hasn't what just happened with the housing boom and bust proved the Austrians right then?
There's a Wall Street Journal profile on me, in that vein. People do argue this. This is why Paul Krugman gets so incensed. You know you're doing something right when people get really mad. There are technical issues involved here that make this more nuanced. I have an e-book called The House that Uncle Sam Built which is a short little piece directed at the general public that tries to tell this story, how the Austrian story is consistent with what we've seen.
Tell me about von Mises's next contribution.
His second contribution was on the controversy over socialism, and whether it could engage in economic calculation. To put it simply, economic calculation helps you sort out – from the array of technologically feasible projects – those which are economic and those that aren't. For example, you don't want to build railroad tracks out of platinum, you want to build them out of steel. Platinum might well be technologically superior – smoother, longer-lasting – but it costs too much. The idea of socialism was to completely transcend the market economy, but if I don't have prices and I don't have exchange ratios established on the market because I have abolished commodity production, how am I going to know that I have to use steel?
Mises came in and said: Let's assume that ends of socialism are highly desired – I'm not going to engage in a battle over ends. What is it socialists want to achieve? A burst of productivity, leading to an overcoming of the conflict between classes. What is their means to attain that goal? Collective ownership over the means of production. Rationalisation of production for direct use and not for exchange will produce this burst of productivity that will overcome scarcity and therefore the conflict between the classes. What Mises said was: Your means are in conflict with your ends, because you can't engage in economic calculation. You're not going to get rationalisation of production, you're going to have endemic waste. He was the first person to demonstrate that. As the history of the Soviet system played out, including its early history from 1917-21, it seemed to play out Mises's argument. Socialists were always making compromises with respect to their original plan, trying to jerry-rig it, and you get on this treadmill of economic reforms that characterise the entire Soviet period. Then, eventually, it unwinds in the late 1980s, and you even have people like [left-wing economist] Robert Heilbroner admitting that Mises was right.
Which is obvious with hindsight, but is worth pointing out was not necessarily clear at the time Mises was writing. The arguments that socialism was a better way of organising the economy were very persuasive at the time.
Mises makes his argument in 1920, but the socialist calculation debate really takes place, in the English language, in the 1930s, in the middle of the Great Depression. For a lot of economists, socialism is an alternative to the capitalist order, which they see falling apart in front of them. So they're attracted to it. Then you have the 1940s, where you're fighting a battle against Hitler. Your ally is the Soviet Union, which has gone from a peasant economy to a military contributor – an amazing transformation of an economy – and because of that is able to help defeat Hitler. After World War II, everyone understands socialism isn't too pretty in the Soviet Union, and Stalin is not exactly a nice guy. But if only we could have democracy with it, it would be wonderful. That's where Hayek eventually comes in and challenges this idea as well. But at the time Mises is writing, it's not at all clear that capitalism is superior to socialism.
You'd better get on to his third contribution.
Mises's third contribution is an argument about methodology in the social sciences. He argues that human sciences are different from the natural sciences. His methodological argument cut against the trend of the times, which was to move towards a unity of science approach – what's right for physics is right across the board. Mises talks about methodological dualism. To communicate this simply, he used to say: "If you throw a rock into water it sinks; if you throw a stick into water it floats; if you throw a man into water he must decide whether to sink or swim." What does that mean then for the way we approach the social sciences? If you think about economists, in the 18th and19th centuries – John Stuart Mill, David Hume, Adam Smith – they were philosophers. The way they reasoned was like a philosopher. When you get to the mid-20th century and you look at Paul Samuelson, he's not a philosopher any more, he's more like an engineer. His books look like engineering or chemistry books. There was a transformation of economics – it became a tool of social control.
To the Austrians, economics is not a tool of social control, it's a framework for helping us understand humanity, its history, and our plight in the world. Hayek had a great phrase about this. He said that the curious task of economics is "to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design". Hayek's Nobel Prize address was called "The Pretence of Knowledge". He was going after the idea not only of socialism, but of large-scale macro models. Because in the mid-20th century, and going up through the 1970s, the economy was envisaged like a bathtub. One spigot was monetary policy and the other was fiscal policy, and an economist's task was to turn those spigots on to make sure the water rose to the level in the bathtub that was consistent with full employment.
Mises and Hayek stood in complete opposition to that view. Even more so than Milton Friedman, because he's arguing over which is more effective – fiscal or the monetary policy, but he's still telling us we're in control of the levers. What Mises and Hayek are saying is that that whole way of thinking about the economy reflects a pretence of knowledge – that we know what the full employment output level would be, that we know exactly how much water to let in, and how much to let out – whereas in reality, if we make a mistake with any of that, the water comes gushing out all over our bathroom floor, or it drains completely out and we have nothing.
The belief that social sciences should be like social physics is built on an assumption which Mises says you can't make. Therefore you mischaracterise what the task of economics is – you send economics in a direction which is totally different from our heritage, of what we got from David Hume, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say and John Stuart Mill, and then Carl Menger, and then Mises, Hayek, and other people in the 20th century, like Jim Buchanan.
So your view is that the profession took a wrong turn with Paul Samuelson?
That would be the argument, yes.
And do you agree with it?
Personally, yes I do. But there were a lot of things going on leading to this, one of which was that Samuelson was the brightest boy on the block, and when the brightest boy on the block goes in one direction, everyone else follows him. We're in the midst of the Great Depression and World War II and this is a promise that we can avoid these kinds of problems. Then, the profession was really becoming professionalised, in a way that previously it wasn't. People like John Stuart Mill were gentleman scholars. It wasn't this whole professoriate, these departments and tenure and all those battles. Keynesian economics, post-World War II, dominated the entire profession. Everyone became a Keynesian and at the graduate, elite levels, it became a totally Samuelsonian project.
Samuelson had the intellectual entrepreneurship to write both the Principles of Economics textbook – which became the standard textbook for freshmen – and the standard graduate textbook. He dominated both ends of the economics profession. It's a phenomenal intellectual achievement, independent of what you think about the content. I think Samuelson is worthy of intellectual attention, I just think he sent us in a wrong direction.
This idea of Hayek's that you can't know much – is that what leads the Austrian school towards libertarianism? And isn't this libertarian element the reason it's embraced by the Tea Party? Though I detect from your tone, also in your email, that you don't particularly enjoy that connection.
What the position makes you have is not libertarianism, or anything like that, but humility. The economist is nothing more than a student of society, and any economist that tries to represent themselves as a saviour of society should be subject to ridicule. Let me read to you from Adam Smith, the section with the invisible hand explanation. He's with Mises and Hayek on this humility point, even though the book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, is written as advice to statesmen:
"What is the species of domestic industry which his capital can employ [ie what he should invest in], and of which the produce is likely to be of the greatest value, every individual, it is evident, can, in his local situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him. The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in which manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it."
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith calls him "the man of system" who is arrogant in his own conceit. Hayek comes back to this in an essay, "Individualism True and False", and he tries to explain where the system goes. He writes:
"The main point about which there can be little doubt, is that Smith's chief concern was not so much about what man can occasionally achieve when he was at his best, but that he should have as little opportunity as possible to do harm when he was at his worst. It would scarcely be too much to claim that the main merit of the individualism which he and his contemporaries advocated is that it is a system under which bad men can do least harm. It is a social system that does not depend for its functioning on our finding good men for running it, or on all men becoming better than they are now, but which makes use of men in all their given variety and complexity, sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes intelligent, and more often stupid. Their aim was a system under which it should be possible to grant freedom to all, instead of restricting it, as their French contemporaries wished, to 'the good and the wise'.
"The chief concern of the great individualist writers was indeed to find a set of institutions by which man could be induced, by his own choice and from the motives which determined his ordinary conduct, to contribute as much as possible to the need of all others; and their discovery was that the system of private property did provide such inducements to a much greater extent than had yet been understood."
That's really the Austrian position. It doesn't fit on a placard for a party to march with. Now we get to a situation which goes haywire for a variety of reasons. We have these big bailouts and the economy doesn't kick back up to the extent that people thought it would, you have this big bill that's out there in terms of the public debt. There's an anger out there, that politics is no longer connected to the people, that it's these special interest groups. The Tea Party aren't just against Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, they're not big fans of George W Bush, either. They want to penalise the guys on the right as well. They're looking for people to read, and that say stuff that is somewhat similar, and they listen to Glenn Beck and they start reading Hayek. I just don't think it's relevant to the scholarly assessment of the ideas of Hayek to point out that Glenn Beck likes him, just like I wouldn't look at Paul Krugman's ideas differently because Rachel Maddow likes them.
It's definitely the case that people have turned to Hayek and Mises as iconic figures. Mises stood against the tide of Keynesianism and animal spirits with his alternative theory about the manipulation of money and credit; he stood against the socialists. And they [the Tea Party] say, "Oh. Who was against socialism and who was against Keynesianism? Those are our theorists." The critics of Austrian economics have used their recent popularity to try to tar and feather them. That's why people like me get snarky in response. We shouldn't, we should be more level-headed, and say, "OK, there's good things about Austrian economics, there's bad things about it, and all we're trying to do is improve and go forward. We really just want to understand the economy."
But to me, libertarianism is a by-product, not an assumption going in. If you look at Mises and Hayek, neither of them are natural rights thinkers. Most libertarianism – if you think about Ayn Rand or even Robert Nozick – derives from an individualist rights perspective. Mises and Hayek are all about consequentialism. If you can show them that the means of collective ownership would generate more successfully the ends of liberty, fraternity and equality, they'd say, "OK, yes, let's have collectivism!" But because collectivist means undermine those goals, what they say is, "Maybe we ought to rethink this."
Let's get on to the book of essays by Friedrich Hayek that you've recommended, and you've already quoted from: Individualism and Economic Order. He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974, and my understanding from mainstream economists is that his big insight – particularly critical for studying financial markets – is that prices don't just reflect supply and demand, but also information.
Yes, he has a famous essay called "The Use of Knowledge in Society". What he tries to argue is that the price system systematically communicates dispersed information that you and I hold. If you and I go to the store, we'll have different subjective preferences. We express those subjective preferences in trade-offs that we make when we buy some goods and not others. That gets communicated to other people via prices in the market – you don't have to pick up the phone to find out. The subjective trade-offs that you and I make have become objective information for other people in making their trade-offs. The price system is a giant telecommunications system. It tells me about relative scarcities of goods. A classic example of this is gas prices over the last year. We don't need to know whether there has been an increase in supply of gas or a decrease in demand.
Or what the political situation in the Middle East is.
No, all we need to know is that the price of gasoline has fallen quite a bit since the summer. Then, when I make a decision on whether to take a trip or not, because it's a lot cheaper, I'll likely increase my consumption of gasoline. This is all communicated through the price system without any of us having to know in detail what is going on.
But Hayek has an influence far beyond his own writings. In the recent financial crisis, the efficient market hypothesis has, it's true, taken a beating, but you could point out that the kernel of truth in there is embedded in Hayek's idea. The stock price gives full and complete information of what's available on the market at that time, and that gets communicated through the system. Hayek also influenced information economics in general. There's Leonid Hurwicz who won the Nobel Prize [in 2007] for his contribution to mechanism design theory. He was working on information processing. Hayek's writings set off a research programme to study how it is that information gets communicated within a complex system, and a variety of different people have picked up on that, and worked with that idea and taken it in directions that even Hayek couldn't have envisioned.
As a left-of-centre European, I was quite nervous about reading Hayek. But given the era he was writing in – the early to mid 20th century – when socialism was still considered a viable alternative to capitalism, the book seems pretty sensible. In fact there was nothing in it I particularly disagreed with.
And it's not as if Hayek met leftist intellectuals and said, "Curse on you". For example, Abba Lerner, a market socialist and author of The Economics of Control, wrote his doctoral dissertation [on which the book is based], under Hayek's direction. Hayek is the antithesis of the idea of economics as control. Even those guys that went in directions different to Hayek are all trying to provide answers to him.
So he's not right-wing?
I don't think he considered himself on the right or on the left. He didn't like socialism, so if socialism redefines the political landscape so that anyone who is a non-socialist is a right-winger, then Hayek is a right-winger, which is more or less the American context. We like to pick caricatures, and the debate in the US is not sophisticated. In Europe, Hayek is an old liberal, and he remains a European liberal throughout his whole life. He's for restraint on the abuse of power by the state, he's for the expansion of human liberties.
Let's move to the present, and your last three books. You wanted to pick one of your own. What about The Elgar Companion to Austrian Economics?
The Elgar Companion is a big book with a lot of short essays about Austrian economics. My other books are much more about specific things, so, for example, I've written three books on the history and practice and collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union, and the transition from it. My book Calculation and Coordination is the last one on that, all essays in post-socialist transition. The easiest way to understand that book is that in order for us to go someplace, we have to go from here to there. If you ill-define where you started from, or where you're going, your ride is going to be totally different. To move from socialism to capitalism, that's a here to there idea. So we have to define, first and foremost, what the here and now is, what that system actually is like, and then where we want to go with it. Do we want to look like the US or Britain? Do we want to look like Sweden or Western Europe?
Part of what goes on in the book is trying to straighten out what socialism actually looks like at the point of its demise, because that's our start state. What I try to show is that a lot of the mistakes that took place during the 1990s were because we didn't define the start-state correctly. We also ill-defined the end-state, and as a consequence we got on the wrong bus for economic reforms. What I'm doing is trying to get the history right and then get the political economy analytics right, and then trying to use both of those to explain that from that original history it was logical that we ended up with the system that we ended up with, rather than the system that we wanted to end up with.
So if you ask a question which was a popular policy question at the beginning of the 2000s, which is "Who lost Russia?", you can understand from my book that it was not because of the IMF or the World Bank. It's because of political economy questions. That's why the title is Calculation and Coordination, when you establish the institutions that permit economic calculation, you generate the advanced economic coordination that's possible in a complex system. When you have institutions cutting against the ability to engage in economic calculation, don't be surprised when people substitute out economic logic for political logic and as a result you get not economic coordination, but political interest groups that form and become dominant and control the system.
So you've chosen this book to demonstrate what modern Austrian economists are doing with the field?
Yes, I'm one representative. There are a whole bunch of people. Calculation and Coordination is an effort to take Austrian economics and apply it to a real world policy-relevant issue, which is the transition from communism to capitalism.
You gave me two other examples as well. One was the The Invisible Hook, by Peter Leeson, which is a really fun book about pirates.
I gave you these two books because I think economics is both a deadly serious subject – ultimately it's about life and death, whether people are living on $2 a day or if they can have longer and healthier lives – but it's also this fascinating subject that you should read with a great smile on your face. As I tell my students, economics is the sexiest subject you will ever study.
I think The Invisible Hook does a fascinating job of communicating to people the enjoyment of just thinking through a problem like an economist. Pete takes on the organisation of pirate ships and points out how pirates represented a community in and of themselves. Even in a world of thieves, they had to respect rights in order to be able to coordinate with one another. He goes through and explains the elaborate methods by which they organised their activities on a ship. Those ships were not as small as we might think, the ventures actually required people of diverse ethnic backgrounds and sexual preferences, and yet somehow they came to work together. They signed actual constitutions among themselves. So it's a fascinating read, it's all about the secret economics of the pirates and how they organised their ventures, and how actually their ventures, a lot of times, were more humane than those of the Royal Navy.
Do you agree with his analysis, ultimately?
I'm persuaded by the economic logic. I don't know enough about the history to offer an informed criticism of some of the things he might say. What carries the weight for me is the fact that he is pursuing the rational choice model and I can see the logic of what he is saying. But at some level, with this book, the people who would be the best judges of the empirical validity of what he's arguing would be pirate historians. When I read his book, what compels me is the logic of his argument and then the history as illustrations of that logic, so I'm completely swept up in it – I find it this great story. If I knew more about pirates, I'm sure I'd have quibbles with him.
I loved his point about Blackbeard, probably the most fearsome pirate that ever lived. According to this book, Blackbeard did such a good job of looking scary and promoting his reputation for bloodthirstiness, that he never actually had to kill a single person.
Yes, there is a lot of stuff about signalling in the book – also why they show the Jolly Roger to protect their investment, the ship. Pete really makes economics come alive, to explain things that we normally wouldn't think of as subject to economic analysis. He's amazingly talented and he really does make economics jump off the pages for people who read him.
The last book you've recommended is After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy, by Christopher Coyne.
This book is amazing. Coyne took on the topic of how successful the US can be at exporting democracy and the free market in after-war situations. This became a big venture in the 20th century, when the US became much more aggressive about this idea that we could intervene to try to help make other countries better off. Part of it was for geopolitical reasons – after 9/11 we believed that one of the things we had to do was make the Middle East more conducive to free markets and democracy, because then it's less likely to generate terrorists. So then the question is, is that an effective strategy? Coyne takes the strategy as stated by the officials, and then assesses whether the means employed are successful. He uses a very low threshold, which is, after the US intervention, after the country is supposedly settled, does it meet the standard on the Polity Index of modern day Iran? What he found was that in US-led efforts, basically somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the efforts failed to meet even that minimum standard.
Yes, I'm looking down his list of 30 or so invasions that have taken place, and it's not looking too good.
Right. Everybody points to Japan and Germany, but he points out that before the war, Japan and Germany had very high measures of civil society. In most of these other places, what you're trying to do is create civil society, and at the point of a gun is not a very good way to do it. So I think Coyne really does show the futility of our efforts. All these efforts at war – the loss of lives, the billions of dollars spent – got us what?
If only this book had been around before the invasion of Iraq. It could have saved more than 100,000 Iraqi lives.
That's what you think, right? In Coyne, there is not a lightness to his pen, in the same way there is with Leeson. Leeson is dealing with an entertaining topic. Coyne is dealing with a deadly serious topic. Both of them are bringing to bear the kind of economics that comes out of Mises and Hayek, to address why it is people should care about economics and why it is that their caring should not lead them to be sombre and boring, but actually fun and enjoyable, while talking about very sad subjects sometimes.
Thinking through the conclusions of After War, I'm thinking that if the US wants to invade a country successfully, France would be a good choice.
Chris's point, if you think about what he's saying, is that imagine you have to put two pieces of a puzzle together. You have a piece and you have to find a piece that fits exactly in it. Chris is arguing that that bedrock of institutions is there prior to our intervention. When we try to intervene and press on them puzzle pieces that don't fit with their bedrock of institutions, we get distortions. It's like putting a square peg into a round hole – you'd have to force it, it wouldn't really look too good, and your puzzle wouldn't get completed. Because of this issue of underlying institutions, Japan and Germany were able to accept the puzzle pieces. That's why he ends by saying it's not going to be about war and imposition, but about trade and development. That's what's going to allow that cultural piece, that bedrock piece, to morph into a piece accepting of other pieces. All we can do is give them the opportunity to benefit from free exchange with other individuals. If you give people the freedom to choose, they'll move in that direction, but what you don't have is the ability to put a gun to the back of someone's head and make them engage in freedom.
So if you're writing a serious book of Austrian economics, it won't need to have equations in it?
No. Most standard economics assumes that the relationships we are trying to understand can be captured by a continuous function that's smooth and twice differentiable. What the Austrian analytics suggests is that life is not actually a continuous and smooth function that's twice differentiable, but instead a lumpy function, a discrete function, in which there are all kinds of difficulties in the ability for us to model them the way our standard approach does. So, instead, what we engage in is discursive reasoning. You use the logic of economic action, the logic of choice, you worry about opportunity cost and presume individuals are doing the best that they can, given their situation. But notice, even in that phrase, you have to spend a lot of time specifying what that situation is. That situation is full of historical context and institutional details. A lot of your story is made up of the specification of the context in which economics decisions are made.
Austria Economics
Peter Boettke is a University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University, the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism, Vice President for Research, and Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at GMU.
Brigid Grauman on Jewish Vienna Books
Peter Temin on An Economic Historian's Favourite Books
Jonathan Kwan on The Austro-Hungarian Empire
Peter Boettke on Austrian Economics Books
David Edmonds on The Vienna Circle
Books by Peter Boettke
Why Perestroika Failed
The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism
The Elgar Companion to Austrian Economics
by Peter Boettke & Peter Boettke (editor)


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This entry was posted in A Dance of Shadows on April 30, 2015 by Epiphany
Spending four years under house arrest hadn't prepared Nate for roommate blowup. Especially not this early in the morning.
For the first fifteen minutes of Jia and Alley yelling at each other, Nate pulled some clothes on, checked his email and ended up doing some stretches to limber up for the day. When they showed no sign of stopping, he wound up killing a few minutes watching Perpugilliam play his World of Warcraft account, which had gone sadly disused since he'd enrolled in school. His female cat had been one of the first victims of his ability when it had first manifested four years ago. The son of a Dominator and a Possessor, Nate's baseline power was overwriting people with himself; his memories, his personality, everything he was. And for the last four years, Nate had lived under house arrest with only Perpugilliam to keep him company. At least the government had allowed for a second computer so she could keep herself entertained. He couldn't imagine how boring the life of a cat could be otherwise.
The yelling stopped at some point but he finished up watching Perpugilliam's raid before daring to poke his head out. Quiet murmuring from the bathroom suggested Finn Barnaby and Amara English were in there together. God. Finn was arguably his best friend but the black Brit and his girlfriend had grown increasingly syrupy. Not in a 'Ew' sort of way but more in a third wheel sort of way. He didn't want to know what the two of them might be up to in the bathroom and he had no plans to stick around to find out.
Making a face, Nate quickly hurried down the stairs and surveyed the battlefield. Jia Sun and Eli Amsley stood out on the lawn talking, visible out the bay windows behind the three couches against the far wall. The Chinese girl's arms were crossed, her face rigid, every inch of her tense. Eli, by contrast had his hands on her shoulders and a look of deep calm on that freckled goateed face. They were the most recent couple here at Lambert Acres but, in their own way, the cutest. Jia was a high achieving, relentlessly focused woman driven to make up for getting pregnant last year and failing out of the HCP. Eli was the only person here not a part of West Private's Hero Certification Program…and even Nate had to admit he liked the relaxed, mellow atmosphere the Voice Major projected.
A quick glance out the window in the front door showed movement from inside the shop. Alley Amherst must be out there, working out or something. The arguable leader of the Lambert Acres crew, the fit blonde soldier-turned-HCP student was mercurial beyond belief, shifting from informal to rebellious to frightening intensity at a moment's notice.
She was also crushing on Jia, which was part of the current problem at home. No sign of Danielle Wyngarde, if that's really who'd spent the night with her. The thought of the white-eyed silver-haired girl and Alley hooking up made something in his stomach turn over. Was it repulsion? He didn't think he had a problem with Alley's sexuality but she was the first gay girl he'd ever met and it was…well, it weirded him out a little. Or maybe it was the fact that Dani was Jason's sister, the same Jason that had fathered the baby Jia had last year.
Complicated. All of this was way too complicated. The whole thing made him feel a bit nauseous. A few months of student life surrounded by people still hadn't fully inoculated him against the culture shock from growing up so isolated, from having virtually no human contact for four years before this.
Nate shook his head and turned towards the kitchen. That's when he found himself alone with Julie Campbell.
She looked amazing. Her wavy brown hair was brushed out but she still wore pajamas. Looking at her…Nate shifted his eyes down to the floor before he could react, before his thoughts betrayed him. Julie was an Advanced Mind, telepathic and able to hear everything he thought. Telepathy in the real world wasn't like Star Trek. It was more like Babylon 5. People were natural transmitters, broadcasting everything. Telepaths just had the receiver switch flipped on. They had to train to tune the noise out.
Except Julie couldn't. Although she and Jia were best friends from last year, Julie was the only person in the house here with a job; him. Nate was a Dominator, Class A on the Listing of Restricted Abilities. Because his ability was even more dangerous than that, he had a permanent guard of two Advanced Minds. Mike Cavril during the day on campus and Julie during the hours outside of school. If he tried using his ability outside of a strictly controlled classroom setting, they were under orders to shut him down, disrupt his thoughts or scramble his brains or God knows what.
Of course, she couldn't actually do that as it turned out. His ability was faster than hers. But she still stayed. Because no one knew she couldn't stop him? Or because she-
A cough from the kitchen broke up that thought half-formed. Nate swallowed hard against the surge of feelings rising in him, feelings that made him break into a sweat and shiver with the chills when he thought of her. They'd shared a kiss once. He remembered the feel of her hand in his. But-
"Have some breakfast, Nate," Julie said, her voice soft and almost inaudible from the kitchen. "Eli made hashbrowns and lots of eggs."
Shuffling, Nate entered the kitchen and took a plate before ladling up half of it with hashbrowns.
"Rough morning," he said, for lack of anything better to say.
"Oh I know," Julie said, grimacing slightly. "I've stopped listening to everything at this point."
"I'm surprised you don't just do that most of the time." Nate shuddered. "You know, sci-fi makes it look cool but I've heard most people think about noise most of the time or something."
"Mmmmm, not noise exactly," Julie hummed thoughtfully. "It's more like…channel flipping really fast. Thoughts pop in, they think about them and that leads to another thought and so on and so on all within a matter of seconds. It's like walking down the hall at school and catching a few seconds of one conversation before you walk out of range only to pick up another conversation just after, except all at once."
"How did you deal with it growing up?" Nate looked at the beautiful brunette as if for the first time. His own ability had consumed his youth but the weight of it had taken so much of his attention, he'd never really thought about what abilities would be like for others.
Julie shrugged. "Every Advanced Mind I've talked to seems to have had a bit of a different experience. We all have a slightly different mix of it, you know. In my case, I'm actually less sensitive to thoughts than most. I can still hear everything unless I shut it out but it's…I don't know, not as loud so I have to pay more attention to make thoughts make sense?"
"Huh." Nate almost said something but thought better of it.
Not that it helped when the girl sitting on the other side of the kitchen island where they ate breakfast at could pick up thoughts. She flushed slightly but managed a smile. "I always wanted to be a Hero growing up but, like you, my parents originally assumed I wasn't strong enough of an Advanced Mind when others tutored me and told them what I told you. But every mixture is a bit different. I'm an adequate tele and teke but what I'm really good at is affecting thought. I was better my freshman year than half Advanced Minds are in their senior."
"Affecting…like mind control?" Nate was surprised as yet another assumption he'd made was challenged. His Domination meant he worried about how easily he might influence others. It never occurred to him that others might influence him.
"More like mind steering," Julie said, smiling a bit around another bite of eggs. "You already know about me dialing up people's thoughts so they don't notice their surroundings. I can also kinda do what Mike did at that frat party. I can't really push emotions but I can turn up or turn down the intensity and frequency of certain types of thoughts, make it easy for something to come to mind or not."
"Give me a light side of the Force on that," Nate said. He immediately felt embarrassed at the geek reference but she only smiled more.
"Light side? Studying. I had a group of girlfriends back in high school, most of which weren't academic at all. But I just…dialed up how much they thought about what they were studying while we were in class or in study groups. And instead of being bored or doing their nails or thinking about One Direction, they…well, they found it easy to study and all the positive feedback they got from getting good grades meant they studied even more. They're all at Yale or Stanford, Ivy League all, and I wouldn't be surprised if they wound up becoming doctors, lawyers and scientists all."
"That's awesome!" Nate again opened his mouth but shut it before he could voice his thought.
"I've never gone dark side, I promise," Julie said, her smile slipping to a smirk. "But it's come up a few times in my Control classes. Amplifying thoughts of depression or apathy in Villains to cripple them so they stop committing crimes. Dialing up thoughts of mortality in henchmen, so they throw down their guns and run instead of facing Heroes. It's something I have to practice if I'm going to stay in the program, especially-"
She bit off her own sentence this time but it wasn't hard for Nate to figure out what came next. "Especially since you're spending so much time with me instead of focusing on your own work?"
"The standards are a bit different for Advanced Minds," Julie said. "But yes. I don't mind, though. It's nice to spend time with Jia. We were best friends last year after all. And…I like you, Nate."
He coughed on his hashbrowns. Choked. With effort, he managed to clear his throat. Ducking his head, Nate coughed once more before finally looking Julie in the eyes.
That's when he saw it.
What it was, he couldn't say. He didn't have the words to describe something he'd never noticed before. But it was in her eyes. Something lurked there, something Not Julie. He could feel it, now that he could see it.
"Julie, look at me."
The command of his Domination cracked through the air, seizing the girl he couldn't stop thinking about. She straightened and looked him right in the eyes. And the feeling of dissonance grew. There was a kernel inside of her that resisted…no, not resistance exactly but not obedience either.
"Have you ever met the Ringmaster?" he asked.
"Have I ever met the Ringmaster?" she asked back, those beautiful brown eyes absent yet eager. There was a rapture to her attentiveness, an eagerness to do anything he said.
"Tell me if you have ever met the Ringmaster."
The answer wasn't what he expected on several levels. He had to be sensing something in her, something compulsive. But his commands hadn't hit it. And it wasn't something the Ringmaster had left behind.
Or was it?
"Tell me what you've been told to do about me."
"I'm supposed to watch you and use my telepathy to jam your ability to Dominate if you try to use it. I'm also supposed to inform the Dean if I ever let you Dominate a situation like the frat party again."
"Oh shit, she knows?"
"Professor Goddard, Elaine Goddard, discovered the situation in my mind during a Focus class session. She reported it to Dean Diane Goddard, who told me to keep monitoring but to tell her if you did it again."
Nate's mind reeled. All this time, he thought his enrollment in the HCP hung by the skin of his teeth, if anyone ever found out about that frat party. A fight had blown out of control when Mike Cavril, his day-watch Advanced Mind guardian, accidentally turned all of the participants into combatants through a just-discovered facet of his ability. Alley had called Nate in to wipe everyone's minds and preserve Mike's cover. That was the day they'd discovered Julie couldn't think fast enough to stop his Domination.
But the Dean hadn't changed the security arrangements? Or had she. Nate glanced around the house and shivered, realizing for the first time that he had no idea what resources she had or if she had invisible layers of surveillance and control.
A thump from upstairs reminded him that he was just sitting there, Julie frozen with an abstracted smile on her face, waiting for orders.
"Has anyone ever told you not to tell me something?"
There. A faint flicker of resistance in those rich mahogany eyes. She opened her mouth and then shut it.
"Tell me what you were told not to tell me," Nate said. A small part of him felt guilty for prying into her head. But the larger, rational part of him reminded that small part that this wasn't Julie he was forcing. He still lacked the words to explain it but it was a foreignness that only stood out the more he looked at the girl with the dark auburn hair.
"I-"
Nate leaned. Not with his body but with his mind. He couldn't describe what he saw but he could see it. Just like that, he couldn't describe how he leaned but he could feel the resistance in her eyes and push against it. It felt like Gym class, felt like doing a pull up except with muscles that had never managed a pull up before. He pushed, failed, pushed again, failed, and leaned against it a third time and felt a little give.
Inch by inch, he budged it until suddenly the resistance fell away. Nate caught himself on the kitchen counter before he fell over into his half-eaten hashbrowns. An intense, hot, throbbing suddenly bloomed behind his skull. But as he reached for a glass of orange juice, hoping the cold would quench the fiery pain in his head, Julie suddenly spoke.
"I was told to love you."
Nate froze, half the orange juice swallowed, and set the glass down in haste. "You were told to what?"
"The exact words were: 'You will watch over Nate and keep him safe. You'll obey the Dean's orders unless they put him in danger, in which case you'll protect him instead. You will also come to like him over time, first with sympathy, then with friendship and finally romantically if he returns the feeling. If he comes to love you, you'll feel love for him in return. If he breaks up with you, you'll let him go but always feel fondness for him. Should an Advanced Mind probe and uncover these orders, you will remember that these orders were given before you ever met him and you will never remember who gave them to you'."
"Jesus Christ." Nate rubbed his temples, looked at the table, looked at the floor, then looked towards the stairwell when he heard another thump from the upstairs.
Julie waited, her face raptly empty.
"Who told you these orders?"
"Who told me these orders?"
"Tell me who gave you these orders."
Nate grimaced. "Remember who gave you these orders."
He expected resistance but, once broken, it seemed whatever command lurked in her eyes stayed broken for him. "I can't," she said. "I never knew who gave me these orders."
"Tell me when you received these orders."
"I'd just arrived on campus," Julie said. "I left my car in a parking lot and walked to the Registrar's Office to make sure my tuition was settled. That's when I received those orders."
"Tell me how you received them."
"I don't know. I just knew I had them. I was on the steps of Millican Hall and that's when I knew. I didn't hear them, no one spoke to me, I just knew them."
"I can't do this anymore." Nate groaned, gripped his roiling stomach and took several heavy breathes. Then he heard feet on the stairwell. "Julie, remember. I want you to remember these orders. Now."
Just like that, he released his ability. Then Nate broke into a cold sweat as he saw the look of utter horror fill the face of the girl he liked. She scrambled out of her stool, knocking it to the floor and backing up until she hit the sink and stopped.
Right then, Finn and Amara came downstairs. She looked freshly showered and glowy, radiant with young love as her fingers twined with Finn's. Nate's taller and more charming roommate flashed a smile at his girlfriend before glancing into the kitchen and tilting his head, picking something up.
"Julie," Nate said, looking back at his warden and would-be girlfriend.
She just shook her head, turned and bolted out of the kitchen backdoor.
"Blimey, mate, don't tell me you had a row with Julie of all people." Finn shook his nearly shaved head in dismay.
"Go get Alley, would you?" Nate said, swallowing down a lump of pain.
"…Nate, what-"
"We need to call the Major."
Finn's eyes dropped to Amara's puzzled face, then nodded once and rubbed his girlfriend's shoulder. "Amara, would you mind?"
"Sure," the short-haired brunette said before heading out the front door towards the shop where Alley was doubtlessly working out.
"Hey, you okay?" Finn asked, picking up Julie's stool and sitting in it.
"Sometimes I can almost forget why we're really here," Nate said. "But we're in trouble, man. We're in deeper trouble than any of us know. The Ringmaster got to Julie, got to her before she ever met me. It makes me wonder…"
"If the reason we're here after the Ringmaster is actually her idea in the first place?" Finn nodded soberly. "Maybe. Doesn't mean we can't sort it. Alley, Jia, you, you're mighty, all of you."
Nate stood up and looked out the backdoor, only to see Julie heaving up her breakfast on the lawn outside. A profound chill cut through him at the sight. Mighty they might be but the revelation of the reason for Julie's feelings had shattered any…progress or whatever it was they'd been making. Nothing would ever be the same after this. It couldn't be, not when both of them had no idea if her feelings could ever have been real or not.
If the Ringmaster really was his mother…
Slowly, Nate's fingers squeezed shut into a fist.
Dance of Shadows: Chapter 34
Leave a Reply to Epiphany Cancel reply
17 thoughts on "Dance of Shadows: Chapter 35"
Epiphany Post author April 30, 2015 at 1:51 pm
A year is far too long to leave a story without a new post.
I still don't really have much of the rest of the story plotted but that's no excuse! I know how it ends. Now to figure out how to get there…
Sorry for all of the expository text up front but hey, figured the few people still reading might like a reminder of where we are and how we got there. 🙂
Oniwasabi April 30, 2015 at 7:38 pm
Yay! Finally! Another of the original fan stories continues!
Now you have to promise to get the next chapter up before I finish the next SSS book ^_^
MDS April 30, 2015 at 9:42 pm
Damn now I really need to get back to Darkest Days…
Good to see you back man.
Epiphany Post author May 5, 2015 at 10:42 pm
I remember really liking Darkest Days. I need to get back into my fanficiton reading.
So yes, please write more. 🙂
Epiphany Post author May 1, 2015 at 4:56 pm
I already have the next chapter written. Now to figure out the chapter after that…
BeamMeUpScotty May 1, 2015 at 1:59 pm
Ecstatic that the story is continuing!
In all seriousness, the credit goes to you. You posted on last chapter a week ago or so and it got me thinking about the story again and at last a bit of the engine moved forward. I have no idea if I have the creative fuel to make it to the finish line but at least we're moving again. 🙂
Thanks for the kick!
Credit goes to you, especially going back after a year. I know how hard it can be to get back into a story you've let go for a while. I'm just happy a little positive feedback helped. Their is some truly good writing in this universe Drew has allowed others to populate. I'm just looking forward to a good read 🙂
Strangely, I'd been basically facing writer's block with the plot for the last year (plus crazy busy) but within a day or two after your comment, it unjammed. Probably the bigger issue was refreshing my memory on the finer details and finding my character voices again. I'm still not entirely convinced I have but what the hell.
I've noticed there's quite a bit more fan fiction than there used to be, including your Change of Pace! I'll give it a read sometime in the near future. 🙂
BeamMeUpScotty May 6, 2015 at 6:04 am
Thanks! I only discovered Drew's works the beginning of this year, and knew nothing of web series or fan fiction. I've been an amateur writer for awhile, and I'm glad to finally get some feedback from people other than immediate family and friends.
Mike G. May 1, 2015 at 8:09 pm
Yay!! Welcome back!
And a great chapter to start the return, excellent!
Thanks for the welcome! Speculation and/or suggestions are always encouraged. 🙂
Oniwasabi May 3, 2015 at 5:01 pm
Hey Epiphany, you forgot to add the tag "New" to your story to get it to show up in the RSS feed on Drew's site. Just a heads up!
Epiphany Post author May 4, 2015 at 12:21 am
How? I clicked the edit button on my post, went down to the 'Tags' box in the right sidebar and typed in 'New' and clicked the Add button. New with a greyed X then appeared in the Tags box. However, there's no save button anywhere I can find on the page. I ended up clicking the 'Update' button a few boxes up and it claims my post is updated (and editing the post again shows the Tag of 'New' still seems to be there). However, http://www.drewhayesnovels.com/ still doesn't show this chapter in the Latest Fan Made Content right sidebar (assuming this is what you're talking about).
On a related note, why is all the main fiction at http://www.drewhayesnovels.com but fan fiction is over at superpowereds.com? Inquiring minds want to know. 🙂
Oniwasabi May 4, 2015 at 2:19 am
Drew had the superpowereds.com domain reserved for a while and decided to use it for the fanfiction stuff a few months back. Just to do something with it and keep the squarespace site less cluttered I think.
As for the RSS feed, it can take a long time to update sometimes (I think mainly because most of the authors never go back and remove the New tag from their older posts). You list there now, at least when I checked a minute ago, though the feed will get messed up from time to time so don't be too shocked if your chapters vanish intermittently.
Epiphany Post author May 20, 2015 at 7:08 pm
I decided to go back and remove the New tag from a couple posts but now the story itself is listed as 'Recently updated'. Which feels disingenuous when all the content is the same. I don't suppose you know a way of avoiding that?
Oniwasabi May 20, 2015 at 7:25 pm
Sadly that's a WordPress 'feature' and can't be disabled (that I'm aware of at lwast)
← Echos: Chapter – III
A Change of Pace – Chapter 5 →


text:
Get your Silent Hill fix on PC with fan-made Alchemilla
If you're still mourning the fact that those PS4 lot got to enjoy some first-person chills in the form of PT, the teaser (and game in its own right) for Silent Hills, and you didn't, mourn no more. Some diligent modders have, inspired by the Silent Hill series, crafted a first-person horror adventure using the Source Engine.
While Alchemilla is soaked in nightmares, it's cerebral rather than physical. There are no monsters and no combat, just an oppressive atmosphere and puzzles. The designers did want to add those things, but couldn't find anyone to help them implement it in time. It's not really a loss, though.
It seems that quite a lot of what makes Alchemilla an impressive fan game is down to limitations. The focus is on puzzle solving and exploration and, of course, that pervasive sense of dread. Has there ever been a horror game that was improved with lots of shooting?
Like combat and enemies, the creators wanted to put in an inventory and notes system, but were unable to do so. Instead, you'll need to take your own notes and draw your own maps. So dig out a notepad and a pen.
You can download it here and take it for a spin yourself. You'll need to have the Source SDK installed first, though, which you can download from Steam.


Three remarkable graduating seniors have been named winners of the university's top awards for their scholastic achievement, their extraordinary service to the university and the community, and their personal courage and persistence.
Adrianna Sylva Alexandrian is the recipient of the Thomas More Storke Award for Excellence, the campus's highest student honor, for outstanding scholarship and extraordinary service to the university, its students, and the community.
Guadalupe Cruz is the recipient of the Jeremy D. Friedman Memorial Award, which recognizes outstanding leadership, superior scholarship, and contributions to undergraduate life on campus.
Nayra A. Pacheco is the recipient of the Alyce Marita Whitted Memorial Award, which recognizes a non-traditional student's endurance, persistence, and courage in the face of extraordinary challenges while pursuing an academic degree.
Adrianna Sylva Alexandrian is an honors student, researcher, and community volunteer with a passion for social justice. She will graduate with degrees in Feminist Studies and in English. A low-income, first-generation college student of color, Alexandrian is a Gates Millennium Scholar and a participant in the prestigious McNair Scholars Program. Her faculty nominator cited her "outstanding interdisciplinary training, intellectual curiosity, public health research and volunteer experience, personal resilience, and mature dedication to a career in the field of public health, working to reduce women's health disparities in low-income communities of color."
Alexandrian's extraordinary service record reflects leadership roles in vital issues of education, policy, and health. During her time at UCSB, she has volunteered as a client advocate for Domestic Violence Solutions, a Santa Barbara shelter for women and children, and served as co-chair of End Fake Clinics, an organization that raises community awareness about crisis pregnancy centers by promoting advertising policies that call for accurate health information. In addition, Alexandrian served as the commissioner of public health and safety for UCSB's Associated Students Office of the President, was a student member of the Student Health Advisory Committee, and is a programming assistant for the Women, Gender, & Sexual Equity department.
As co-chair and external affairs coordinator of the Associated Students (A.S.) Food Bank, Alexandrian put her efforts behind a successful fee initiative campaign to generate ongoing institutional support for the program, and gave a presentation titled "The Impact of Hunger and Rising Tuition Costs on Students of Color at UCSB," at the campus's "Facing Race" conference.
Alexandrian's research interests complement and support her volunteer activities. The findings of her Feminist Studies honors project, "Restricted Choices: Childbirth Options for Low-Income Women in Santa Barbara County," advanced her motivation to research both the social inequities that shape women's reproductive health, and to design interventions that will enhance women's health knowledge and promote access to quality health care for women and her families. She will continue such research when she enrolls in the Master of Public Health program at UC Berkeley next fall.
Most remarkable is the fact that Alexandrian accomplished all this despite overwhelming challenges and disadvantages, not the least of which is 80 percent hearing loss in one ear, and mild loss in the other. Growing up in a working class family that lacked health insurance, Alexandrian recalls losing her home at age 10 and moving from a hotel to a trailer before her family found a place they could afford to rent. This experience, as well as what she describes as the "unimaginable loss" of her mother and sister to preventable health crises during her time at UCSB, have motivated her to serve her campus and community, and to create a legacy of hope for the future.
Video interview with Alexandrian about her experiences at UCSB.
Guadalupe Cruz and her contributions to UCSB and the local community are nothing short of outstanding. Recipient of the Jeremy D. Friedman Award, she is described by one nominator as a "passionate, compassionate, and innovative leader." Cruz began her service as an active member of the Leadership Education and Action Program, and as the president of San Miguel Residence Hall. An impressive list of accomplishments followed, most notably, perhaps, her role in creating the A.S. Food Bank.
Recognizing hunger as an unacknowledged issue for many students, Cruz used her extensive research experience to assess the situation and find a solution. With former A.S. President Paul Monge-Rodriguez, she established a fully operational food bank available year-round. Now in its third year, the food bank has assisted more than 1,600 students. Cruz took her idea further, and with her A.S. Student Initiated Recruitment and Retention Center colleagues, created a student-run Book Bank that has an inventory of more than 2,000 textbooks.
After receiving her bachelor's degree in sociology, Cruz will continue her education at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she will earn a master's degree in counseling psychology.
Nayra A. Pacheco, an undocumented student born in Oaxaca, Mexico, has demonstrated extraordinary determination and perseverance in overcoming unique obstacles resulting from her immigration status. The Alyce Marita Whitted Memorial Award winner, Pacheco has been a fearless voice for undocumented students in Santa Barbara, and a passionate advocate for immigration reform. When other students would have given up on the dream of attending UCSB, she worked tirelessly to reach her goal.
Financial hardship marked Pacheco's academic career, preventing her from living in a university-owned residence hall during her first year, and forcing her to withdraw for at least one quarter each year to find the means to continue her education. Despite these challenges, she is graduating with a bachelor's degree in the history of public policy with an emphasis in environmental studies.
While fulfilling her own aspirations, Pacheco helped others satisfy theirs. She served as the external affairs chair and as the advocacy chair of the student organization Improving Dreams Equality Access and Success (IDEAS). As an IDEAS officer, Pacheco worked tirelessly on immigration campaigns and issues, organizing training sessions, conferences, and fund-raising efforts. She was a leader in establishing an IDEAS conference for high school students, and saw the annual event grow from a dozen or so participants to more than 200 this year from around the tri-county area.
In addition, Pacheco has worked with Santa Barbara City College, the Mexican Consulate of Oxnard, and Casa de la Raza to educate local students and families about the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, coordinating a community forum of over 500 attendees, and three smaller workshops to provide assistance with applications. She has also worked with the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the Fund for Santa Barbara, and the American Civil Liberties Union. She was coalition chair for a UCSB voter registration campaign, elections organizer for the Third District supervisorial race, and a research assistant with several faculty members.
In the words of her nominator, "Nayra is an amazing student … who is fearless, driven to help her community, and … is an outstanding role model to every Gaucho."


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