Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

I’ve got a few things I want to write about over the next couple of days – I want to do a Wednesday Comics review, a Spotify playlist and a Doctor Who post, just for a start – but for now here’s some links (one or more of the above will be posted tonight).

My friend Jazzhandsseriousbusiness (I haven’t had a chance to ask him/her yet if s/he is hiding hir real name for good reason a la ‘Costigan Quist’ or has just not posted it yet) is starting a series of posts aimed at Lib Dems who are disengaged from the party, telling them how to get more involved. I’ll definitely be reading this, as since I moved from my old constituency to the one next door my involvement has dropped down to almost nil (one constituency meeting, one delivery round for a local candidate who’s also a friend, and a couple of days’ volunteering for the Euro elections, in the last six months, not counting non-party activism like No2ID and Hope Not Hate), but I suspect it’ll be handy for anyone who wants to get more active within the party.

Jonathan Calder asks “Will the real Nick Clegg please stand up?”

Anton Vowl on the Mail’s disgraceful attack on ‘comedy Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik’ for having a great-uncle who was evil scum.

And some non-Lib-Dem links:

J.H. Williams III walks us through the stages of composing a Batwoman cover. It’s a cliche, but nonetheless true, that Williams’ work is enough by itself to justify the continued existence of the Big Two comics companies.

David Mitchell argues, quite rightly, that the current plans to fund only ‘useful’ research are the acts of barbarians and savages who want to make *absolutely certain* that Britain develops absolutely no new ideas and anyone with two brain cells to rub together will emigrate as soon as possible…

Absurdist literature seems to make people better at pattern-matching.

The New Yorker has an excellent, if harrowing, essay on how Texas executed an innocent man a few years ago. Of course, with Supreme Court Justices like Scalia saying guilt or innocence shouldn’t matter when it comes to execution, it’s amazing that any guilty people get executed. And even if everyone who was executed was guilty, it’s still a barbaric, inhuman practice. Join Amnesty and help put a stop to it.

And Gavin Burrows talks about girls’ comics of the 1970s.