July 2025 – Political theory and practice

Captain Future (1940+)

Japanese anime (1978-9) 52 half-hour TV episodes rated 7.9 by 1,700 cineastes. These were also screened throughout Europe at the time, as witnessed by the German and Spanish reviews on the IMDb.

Genre: SyFy.

DNA: Japan.

Verdict: More, please.

Tagline: Holy Jupiter!

Between 1940 and 1951 Captain Future policed the nine planets in radio plays, pulp magazines, and even pulpier paperback books in the United States. There were further adaptations, like the Japanese series noted above.

Seventeen of his 45-minute adventures were available from Radio Archives the last time I looked. Recommended to all SyFy nerdlngs. These radio plays were written by Edmond Hamilton and voiced by Milton Bagby who does a marvellous job.

Captain Future is Curtis Newton who is the most scientific of all scientists in the Solar System, where all nine planets, some moons, and a few asteroids and a comet or two are inhabited, and even some pinheads, mostly by humanoids, along with the required monsters for Curtis to tame, bamboozle, trap, or slay.

In his mission of mayhem he is aided by a living brain in a self-propelled glass box with waldos, being the last of Dr Simon Wright whose science is second only to that of Curtis; Grag the giant metal manling; Otho the rubber android, and assorted others. See the Wikipedia entry for details.

Nothing stops Captain Future: when villains maroon him on an uninhabited asteroid in a space suit with two hours of air, using the metals of the asteroid and his handy sonic screwdriver borrowed from Dr Who, he promptly builds a nuclear reactor to turn the rock itself into a space ship. Likewise the dreaded demons who dwell in the Great Red Fire Sea on Jupiter are no match for this wizard of science.

Sorting out the Solar System is a big job, to be sure, but Curt is an even bigger sort-outer than that, and in the later stories he extends his crusade against wrongdoers to time travel as well as interstellar and intermolecular space. This crusader needs no cape when he has science on his side.

I heard some of these stories as a child, syndicated to a local radio station, and now I listen to them on my daily walks as a holiday from the unrelieved idiocy of contemporary events.

Edward Tufte, ‘The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,’ Beautiful Evidence (2006), pp 156-185.

Good Reads meta-data is 213 pages rated 4.15 by 2,354 litizens.

Genre: Methodology.

DNA: Data.

Verdict: Close the barn door.

Tagline: Down with Power Point.

Edward Tufte has authored many excellent and creative books on presenting and analysing data, becoming a one-man industry. He made famous Charles Minard’s (1869) graphic of Le Grand armée of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Tufte nominates this image as one of the very best visual displays of information. Many readers will have seen a version of it even if the names Minard and Tufts are unknown.

Power Point (PP), launched in 1990, was in its adolescence when Tufte wrote this chapter, but now PP is a fully grown adult with ubiquitous grandchildren. Its lineage has become so dominant that its cognitive stye has been assimilated by most of us without being conscious of what it is. In fact most who have been indoctrinated into PP do not even know it.

Tufte’s master narrative is that PP, like all cultural artefacts, reflects the social structure of the environment in which it was created, and it promotes these structures in its diffusion. (He doesn’t say it quite this way, but I gave it a Mary Douglas spin with some Michel Foucault seasoning. It was generated in a giant corporation called Microsoft, and it mirrors the features of such a large rent-seeking organisation in being hierarchical, linear, simple, and bureaucratic. Its first purpose was to be a tool for salesmen to sell advertising campaigns to other large corporations marketing products, it is well to remember, and it still bears that birthmark.

The convergence of these characteristics produces superficiality. Tufte demonstrates this shallowness repeatedly. The simplest example of the many he presents is this: four sheets of A4 paper can hold enough information (words or data) to fill 200 PP slides.

An audience can read the text or data on a PP screen three times faster than a presenter reading it out loud, but many presenters still insist on doing that. It is something we have all endured, a nervous presenter who makes a joke about PP overkill and then proceeds to do that with forty-five slides in a 10-minute presentation. The audience was lost right after the joke. At best, Tufte allows, PP is a useful crutch for the poorest 10% of presenter such as the preceding example. For the rest it is a hinderance.

Let it be clear, the Cognitive Style is inherent in PP, not brought to it by the presenter. However it is now true that the cognitive style of Power Point has permeated the culture and practice of presentations and one hardly dares not use it – either the style or the application or both – for fear of being beyond the pale. It has become the norm. We audience members have been primed to expect it as the lingua franca of presentations at seminars, lectures, workshops, conferences, hearings, and everywhere. Indeed many innocents have never seen a presentation that wasn’t PPed, even if PP itself wasn’t used, its style was. Like a virus the cognitive style has been contagious and has infected other hosts. What is this style?

It forces a presenter to shun comparisons since they cannot be shown. To presume the reality is linear even when it may be reflexive. And it resolves things to the dozen words that go on even a text heavy slide in a font that can be read by the audience.

What is the alternative? In some cases PP should not be used at all, indeed, front of the room presentation should not be used. For engineering, conventional written reports are far superior, and they should be read not presented, and then discussed. In the main Tufte recommends a very serviceable alternative: sentences. Discussion in short.

If it is put on the screen, the audience reads it and does not attend to what is said. Sight beats sound more often than not, for example music videos use sights to distract from the ostensible music.

Moreover, the slides endure, posted on web sites, distributed by email, printed on paper. What is said about each slide evaporates into the air.

I know I have railed about PP in 2021, but here I am at it again.

Edward Tufte,‘The Cognitive Style of Power Point,’ page 156-185.

P.S. Christie’s Auction House has on offer this title in a set of three of his other titles for $US 8,000. Do your Christmas shopping early!

Ectoplasmic Man (1985) by Daniel Stashower.

Good Reads meta-data is 203 pages, rated 4.22 by 2403 litizens.

Genre: Krimi; Species: Holmes.

DNA: Edwardian England.

Verdict: Poof!

Tagline: Now you see him, now you don’t.

Erik Weisz (1874-1926) of Appleton Wisconsin is wrongly accused of murder, melée, and mayhem but Sherlock comes to the rescue as only he can, his Boswell at hand. You know Erik, that is, Harry Houdini stunt performer, illusionist, and escapologist extraordinaire.

With a few of the tricks of his trade, Houdini assists Sherlock in identifying and apprehending the villain. Most amusing is Watson’s first airplane ride. Indeed. Of course there is no end to Sherlock’s wiles and the conclusion is foregone, though there are some nice and neat twists and turns along the way that confirm his nostrum: when all possibilities have been eliminated the impossible remains, or something like that.

No trade secrets are revealed and I never did find out how Harry got through that wall.

***

The lengthy entry on Erik in Wikipedia makes for good reading. There I note that after World War I he devoted a great deal of his time, effort, and reputation to debunking fraudulent spiritualists. He became a member of the editorial board of the Scientific American as a result.

This is a title in the series The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which books, mostly reprints, are by a different authors. In this one there are several typos, e.g., ‘wanned’ for ‘warmed’ and some formatting errors. I expect the text was converted to digital for the Kindle by an A.I. that couldn’t read.

Tank Girl (1995)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 44m, rated 5.4 by 36,000 cinematizens.

Genre: Dystopia; Subspecies: Post Apocalyptic.

DNA: Comic book.

Verdict: Smaller doses, please.

Tagline: Shazam!

The title character injects energy, colour, and confusion into every scene she is in and she is in nearly every scene. On the few occasions when she takes a break, Malcolm McDowell plays… Malcolm McDowell. That sneer hasn’t changed since Clockwork Orange (1971).

While the story and characters are derived from a comic book series, the film lacks the subtlety and finesse of that original! It is all ‘Slam! Bam! Wham!’ and repeat for its runtime.

There is no story just action and reaction. There are no characters just a blur of movement. But there is plenty of that. I watched it with one eye while doing crossword puzzles. It didn’t distract me. Although I admit I enjoyed some of Tank Girl’s antics.

The Stalwart Companions (1978) by Paul Jeffries.

Good Reads meta-data is 192 pages, rated 4.08 by 695 litizens.

Genre: krimi; Species: Holmes.

Verdict: Stilted.

Tagline: Bully!

What chance do villains have when a young Sherlock Holmes is on the case? Even less when he is abetted and assisted by a young Theodore Roosevelt.

Holmes is in a company of British actors touring the USA so he can learn the tricks of the thespian trade: make-up, disguise, voice changes, posture, accents, and costumery. A brash Roosevelt had written him a fan letter after reading one of his early monographs on ash or something and they meet in New York City. No sooner than they do, than a man is shot and off they go in pursuit, this dynamic duo.

To the police this is a mugging gone wrong, but in it Holmes sees an ocean or more exactly a political assassination in the making.

Thanks to the intervention of Holmes, President Rutherford Hayes is not assassinated. His one-time Democratic rival Samuel Tilden figures in the investigation, as does a later Vice-President, Chester Arthur, and an elusive Charles Guiteau. A student of US presidential history will see in this list a connect the dots picture. In a corrupt election Hayes defeated Tilden, who, to his credit, accepted the result for the sake and peace and quiet. Later, Guiteau shot President Garfield, while proclaiming he was a Stalwart, the name of a political sect. The result was that Arthur, likewise a Stalwart, became president. Hmmm. The rug of history has been pulled over this for centuries.

Until the current incumbent caused the question of corruption to be reopened, historians had regarded Arthur to be the most venal president. He will now have to cede that title to the Felon-in-Chief.

Footnote: Guiteau had a brush with utopianism in that he joined Noyes’s Oneida Community for several years, but was banished. The details are salacious. The brief biography of his miserable specimen reminded me of many holders of high office in the news today.

I said ‘stilted’ above because it is written as if it were from Roosevelt’s diary and so imitates his laboured styled. And I guess it is successful in that imitation because it certainly is laboured.

***

Stimulated by this reading I once again sought a biography of Tilden. No recent one exists, as I discovered the last time I tried to find one about ten years ago. There is a gap in the literature then, but this time I did find one published in 1939 and will acquire and read that as the world turns.

I formed a very high opinion of Theodore Roosevelt in reading Edmund Morris’s three volume biography of the man some years ago. Highly recommend to biographistas.

This book is a volume in the series of more than thirty reprints as ‘The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.’ I have read several others, each by a different author.