April 14 2014: A CONFESSION—I LOVE CRAZY ARCHITECTURE. IT MAKES THE WORLD FEEL LIKE A BETTER PLACE

"My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income."

Errol Flynn

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Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the streets—before I got sense and became a writer—and eventually  a Best Selling author (a story with more twists and turns than the average thriller—though with rather more sex, I’m glad to say) I had a colleague called Charles Gerard who had once shared a house with Errol Flynn in Hollywood. He said that Flynn’s advice to him after he had moved in was not to sell the furniture because the house and its furniture were only rented.

The ever charming and promiscuous Errol Flynn (who well justified the expression “in like Flynn”) starred in one of the first movies I saw—which was CAPTAIN BLOOD from the book by Rafael Sabatini.

The movie featured a hanging—a scene that left a vivid impression on me at the age of four or five—and, perhaps a harbinger of the real hanging I came across decades later which inspired my first book, GAMES OF THE HANGMAN. Everything, as they say, is connected—and, in my experience, it really is—though sometimes in very strange ways.

I must write more about Charles some other time. He wasn’t a genuinely wild man like Flynn, but he had the habit of getting into extraordinary situations—and of getting out of them through luck and charm. He also defined sophisticated and was one of the best guides to Europe you could imagine. If Charles recommended a hotel or a restaurant, if would always be outstanding—and normally unusual in some detail. All in all, he was a delightful man. That said, I was never quite sure what he did in the company—and I knew him for years—and I’m far from certain that anyone else did—but whatever it was or wasn’t, I am certain he did it with style.

Back to crazy architecture. Great architecture absolutely fascinates me—and reminds me yet again of just how wonderful the world could be if we put more effort into creativity and human potential—and a great deal less into the excesses of consumerism. I’m particularly turned on by modern architecture—when it works—and am profoundly depressed when it doesn’t.

My favorite architect is Frank Gehry who has been conducting a highly successful campaign against the straight line and the predictable;e for years—and who produces some truly jaw-dropping work.

The above is a proposed plan for the Battersea Power Station site in London and is by Gehry Partners and Foster + Partners 

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ALL BOOKS BY RAFAEL SABATINI INLUDING THE CHRONICLES OF CAPTAIN BLOOD

High adventure at its best.

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April 13 2014: YOU MIGHT THINK THAT A REASONABLE PERSON WOULD BE OUTRAGED BY THE BLATANT VOTER SUPPRESSION POLICIES AND GERRYMANDERING THAT ARE CURRENTLY SO COMMON IN THE U.S.—BUT APPARENTLY NOT. DAMNED IF I UNDERSTAND

Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to choose between look-alike candidates from two parties vying to see who takes the marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future employers. The money of vested interest nullifies genuine voter choice and trust.

Ralph Nader

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When I lived in Ireland, I never had any trouble voting there. Initially, you registered (an easy process) and then a week or so before the election you were sent a card telling you when and where to vote—which also served to identify you. You then turned up with the card, were given a ballot paper, and voted. Queuing was minimal and I was normally in and out in ten minutes or so. If you forgot your card, you merely had to identify yourself and be checked off a list. It was totally straightforward and fast.

Given that background, I am completely baffled by the voting processes that are all too common in the U.S. Why aren’t they illegal? Why aren’t there national rules to rein in these flagrant abuses of “the democratic process?

I have never received a satisfactory answer. Americans just seem to accept this kind of criminality—even though it skews the electorate in favor of the Republicans (and yes, I know the Democrats have made great use of gerrymandering in the past). My point is not party, but the corruption of process. It would, as they say, from where I come from (which is Ireland) “make a bishop weep.”

The following story is from THINKPROGRESS It left me incredulous—in the fullest sense of the word.

New Rule Prohibits Voters In Miami-Dade County From Using The Restroom, No Matter How Long The Line

During the 2012 presidential election, voters reportedly waited on line for upwards of six hours. That wait alone is enough to deter would-be voters from going to the polls. But now residents in Florida’s most populous county will have another disincentive: they won’t be able to go to the bathroom.

Earlier this year, the Miami-Dade County Elections Department quietly implemented a policy to close the bathrooms at all polling facilities, according to disability rights lawyer Marc Dubin. Dubin said the policy change was in “direct response” to an inquiry to the Elections Department about whether they had assessed accessibility of polling place bathrooms to those with disabilities.

“I was expecting them to say either yes we have or yes we will,” Dubin said.

Instead, he received a written response announcing that the county would close all restrooms at polling places “to ensure that individuals with disabilities are not treated unfairly,” a January email stated. “[T]he Department’s policy is not to permit access to restrooms at polling sites on election days,” Assistant County Attorney Shanika Graves said in a Feb. 14 email. Elections Department officials did not immediately respond to ThinkProgress inquiries.

Dubin said he was “shocked” at this response, and not just because it suppresses the vote for everybody. The Americans with Disabilities Act also requires entities to make “reasonable accommodations” to those with disabilities. For those with a number of conditions, including diabetics and those taking diuretics, closing the restroom will make standing in that line impossible, and thus discriminate against disabled voters.

DISGRACEFUL

But those with disabilities are not the only ones who would suffer disproportionately from this policy. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis found that blacks and Hispanics waited almost twice as long to vote as whites in the 2012 presidential election. Another analysis found that this “time tax” also impacted young voters. And this would be one of a number Florida voter suppression policies that have a particular impact on the elderly.

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April 12 2014: BOOKS OF EXCEPTIONAL INTEREST: CREATIVITY INC by ED CATMULL

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

Albert Einstein

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DO WE DO ENOUGH TO ENCOURAGE CREATIVITY? NO, BUT WE SPEND A GREAT DEAL OF TIME CRUSHING IT

I’ve got great faith in the power of creativity to change life for the better—but I’m painfully aware that powerful vested interests try and block every move in that direction.

In essence, creativity means not just questioning the status quo—but changing it—and that normally means threatening someone’s rice bowl for a while. Besides, change in itself—even if considered good—is disruptive. It forces us out of our comfort zones and makes us feel insecure—emotionally, even if not logically.

In short, society is ambivalent about creativity—and we have a tendency to sideline it into the creative arts. There, we can use it for entertainment—without feeling threatened.

Creativity, in the context of how most of us earn a living, is another matter entirely. There, although we talk the talk, we resist it ferociously—with considerable success. And we start off by hammering creativity out of our children through the school system. We call the process ‘socialization.’ Unfortunately, that tends to be interpreted as the need to conform—and conformity is no friend of creativity.

Housing is a case in point. Given the importance of a home in our lives, you would think by now we would have come up with a low-cost, energy efficient, environmentally friendly home—and the technology exists—but we are still building homes much as we did fifty years ago.

The Constitution is another example. It was a truly creative document in its day—but the evidence is abundant that a fresh creative eye is needed now (And the Founding Fathers expected it to be changed). Are we doing anything about it? Not so you’d notice.

CREATIVITY,INC.

I haven’t read Ed Catmull’s book yet—but his success with Pixar is a matter of record and deserves our admiration. Nonetheless, what I would really like to see would be the creative talents of people like him and his remarkable team applied to wider issues—everything from matters of social concern to climate change. Movies are a fine thing—and I love them—but creativity should know no borders. It’s a phenomenal force that we don’t seem to know how to harness adequately as yet.

Certainly, the creative arts enrich our lives to an extraordinary degree—but why stop there?

It strikes me as self evident that we need to become vastly more creative about harnessing and deploying our innate creativity. The potential is there. The support for encouraging it across the board is not.

The answers are out there. We just have to go and look. But are we asking the right questions? I’m far from sure about that.

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SHETWA TANEJA

http://staneja.com/advice-from-the-baffling-publishing-industry/

“It’s been three years since I began writing stories as a profession. I have had three books published so far: The Skull Rosary, The Ghost Hunters of Kurseong, Krishna. Two of these released in 2013. Needless to say, I feel good.”

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April 11 2014: QUALITY VERSUS QUANTITY. HOW FAR WILL AUTOMATION GO—AND AT WHAT COST? OUR WEAPONS SYSTEMS ARE NOW SO EXPENSIVE, WE CAN AFFORD TO BUY FEWER AND FEWER—TO THE POINT WHERE IT’S BECOMING RIDICULOUS. WE’RE GOING TO END UP WITH A ONE SHIP NAVY, A ONE TANK ARMY, AND A ONE DRONE AIR FORCE—AND BROKE

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

Mark Twain

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The above is the U.S. Navy’s USS Zumwalt—the first of its newest class of destroyers. The Navy wanted 32, but at $5 billion a ship, is getting only three. THREE!

Can three do the job of 32? I doubt it.

The 15,000 ton Zumwalt is ultra high-tech and automated. Its features include:

• Cannons that fire rocket-propelled, GPS-guided rounds
• Stealth design that gives the 610-foot ship the radar signature of a small fishing vessel
• Computer intelligence capable of preparing the ship for battle and engaging enemy targets on its own
• A crew of just over 150—half of what would normally be required on a ship of this size. In a pinch, it can be manned by a crew of 40.
• A Total Ship Computing Environment, which allows it to be controlled from any of a couple dozen consoles around the ship. If the captain happens to be on the bow or the stern rather than up on the bridge when there’s an emergency, he can still take control of the ship.

The Navy seems to be going the same way as the Air Force where the cost per weapons system (whether it be a ship, aircraft, or armored vehicle) is escalating at such a rate that we are likely to have a hard time affording an adequate quantity.

Quality is a fine and necessary thing, but even the most technologically advanced ship cannot be in two places at once—and the Navy has global responsibilities (and ships deploy comparatively slowly). Ships are also disconcertingly vulnerable—particularly to missile strikes and mines—so redundancy would seem to essential. In fact, China’s development of ultra-high speed hypersonic missiles (6,000-9,000 miles per hour) raises fundamental questions about warship survivability.

Can you detect, track, and destroy something coming at you that fast—even with lasers?

The United States, Russia, China and India are all engaged in a hypersonic arms race.

It is possible to buy a civilian ship of size for several hundred million dollars. Could civilian ships be modified for naval use? The Navy is not my area of expertise, but it strikes me that $5 billion is a great deal for a single, vulnerable, warship. We could buy 20 (or more) customized civilian ships for the same money—and dedicate them to disaster relief,

Which option would be more likely to promote peace and the global interests of the U.S.?

By the way, it was Lenin—not Stalin—who commented: “Quantity has a quality of its own.” He was right.

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April 10 2014: GLOBAL MILITARY DOMINATION ON THE ONE HAND (not to be confused with being strong enough to deter aggression)—YET THE EARNING POWER OF MOST AMERICANS IS IN DECLINE. COULD IT BE WE HAVE OUR PRIORITIES WRONG—RIDICULOUSLY AND TRAGICALLY WRONG?

“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched.”
Albert Camus

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IN REALITY WE SPEND A GREAT DEAL MORE ON NATIONAL SECURITY THAN THE ABOVE GRAPHIC INDICATES

Politicians like to talk about the Defense Budget—but that excludes a whole raft of defense related expenditure such as the Veterans Administration, nuclear weapons (placed under the Department of Energy), Homeland Security—and so on.

Add these in and that raises the true total covered by the MICC (Military Industrial Congressional Complex) to in excess of $1 trillion a year. Add in the interest we pay on the money we have borrowed to fund National Security expenditure and our wars, and we are up to $1.? trillion. You can certainly add hundreds of billions—and that is almost certainly on the low side.

BUT IS U.S. MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME REALLY DECLINING IN REAL TERMS? YES IT IS

THE BLUE LINE IS THE IMPORTANT ONE. The above chart actually underestimates the problem because the CPI (Cost & Price Index) shortchanges housing, educational, fuel and other costs. In short, there is more inflation than the CPI admits. For instance the CPI states that housing costs have gone up by roughly 40 percent whereas the Case-Shiller index shows that the cost of a home has risen by 68 percent.

The media don’t get into this kind of detail because it takes work—and because the people who own them don’t wish them to. Meanwhile, the rest of the developed world invests in stuff which makes them more competitive and improves the quality of their lives—and we wonder where we are going wrong.

It is really not a mystery. We are spending too much money on the wrong things to the benefit of the wrong people—and have been doing so since 1945.

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April 9 2014: BOOKS OF EXCEPTIONAL INTEREST: ALL THE PRESIDENTS’ BANKERS by NOMI PRINS

The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler.

Mario Batali

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Though I receive a great deal of fan mail, I blush to admit that I very rarely write it—despite holding many authors in the highest regard.

Why so? I’m really not sure. It just wasn’t a habit I got into when I was young. I guess I was too busy reading the next book; chasing the next woman (extremely time consuming); or learning how to write (even more time consuming).

Either way, I regret it now. As I have learned firsthand, fan mail means a great deal to an author. We write—mostly in solitude—so it is truly wonderful thing to receive direct feedback from a reader.

Fortunately, I have received many thousands of fan e-mails—and I have tried to reply to all personally. As for writing to writers whose work I admire—and they are many--I am trying to mend my negligent ways (within the limits of having enough time for creative writing).

In that spirit, I did write to Nomi Prins, a former Goldman Sachs executive, author and journalist, who has done more than most to reveal the reality of the ABM (American Business Model). What is more, she wrote the most charming reply.

Was I influenced by her looks? I plead guilty—she is a striking-looking woman—but that is not why I wrote to her.

I wrote to her because she is an exceptional talent with the experience and expertise to identify and explain how the ABM is rigged to favor the few at the expense of the many.

Free enterprise? You jest. The American Business Model has been deeply corrupt for generations.

The following is a brief extract from a recent interview with Mark Karlin of www.truth-out.org The whole interview is well worth reading—and if you are new to the content—it is mind-blowing.

TRUTHOUT: Reading your new book, I get the feeling that the privileged few in the private sector who control most of America's money, de facto, don't really give a whit about democracy.  What they are focused on is free markets for the plutocracy like a laser.  Is that your perspective?

NOMI PRINS: The notion of free markets, mechanisms where buyers and sellers can meet to exchange securities or various kinds of goods, in which each participant has access to the same information, is a fallacy.  Transparency in trading across global financial markets is a fallacy. Not only are markets rigged by, and for, the biggest players, so is the entire political-financial system.

The connection between democracy and free markets is interesting though. Democracy is predicated on the idea that every vote counts equally, and in the utopian perspective, the government adopts policies that benefit or adhere to the majority of those votes. In fact, it's the minority of elite families and private individuals that exercise the most control over America's policies and actions.

The myth of a free market is that every trader or participant is equal, when in fact the biggest players with access to the most information and technology are the ones that have a disproportionate advantage over the smaller players. What we have is a plutocracy of government and markets.  The privileged few don't care, or need to care, about democracy any more than they would ever want to have truly "free" markets, though what they do want are markets liberated from as many regulations as possible. In practice, that leads to huge inherent risk.

Huge investment risk, indeed! The track record of unregulated financial markets is that they invariably lead to malfeasance and collapse because they offer too much temptation for human nature to resist. That happens again and again with the government being forced to step in because the consequences of financial collapse are so dire for the population as a whole. So who pays? In most cases, not the people who caused the collapse, but the taxpayer—especially in the U.S. In effect, the major financial institutions can—and do—gamble without consequences. And, where the Great Recession was concerned, the situation—as far as the Big Banks were concerned—was no different. In fact, because they were allowed—with the aid of government support—to swallow up their smaller brethren—they ended up even bigger.

Those responsible rarely lose their jobs, are even more rarely prosecuted—let alone imprisoned, are paid far more than they would receive in the real economy, and are shielded from the consequences of their actions by the politicians of both parties—at the expense of the average American.

I would like to be able to write that such behavior is un-American—but the truth is that such manifest corruption is—today—as American as apple pie. It underpins the current ABM (American Business Model).

To make matters worse—and it is hard to believe they could be much worse—recent research has revealed that such financial institutions, since they are deemed too important to be allowed to fail—can borrow money more cheaply. In effect, being implicitly backed up by the government, they receive an annual subsidy in the $80 billion range. Over 10 years, that constitutes the bones of a trillion dollars.

Meanwhile, the earnings of the typical American are in decline.

So what do we all do about it? Mostly—nothing.

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April 8 2014: IF PEOPLE TRULY UNDERSTOOD HOW WONDERFUL IT IS TO BE A WRITER, WE’D ALL BE WRITERS—AND WE’D ALL STARVE. THE WORLD NEEDS THE MUNDANE. BUT TO BE ANYTHING BUT A WRITER—NO MATTER HOW WORTHY, WIDELY PRAISED, OR WELL REWARDED—IS MUNDANE

“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Thoughts of suicide have got me through many a bad night.”
Albert Camus

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Do I believe what I wrote in the headline? Yes, I do—but I will freely confess that I am hopelessly biased. What can I say! I’m in love with what I do. And every day—good or bad—it gets better.

I was looking for an Albert Camus quote on the role of the writer when I ran across the following on the blog www.andyrossagency.wordpress.com

I am a great fan of Camus, whose life was at least as interesting as his writing—which is saying a great deal. He is also one of the most quotable men—an author of astonishing insight.

Both Camus and the blog are well worth reading. But let me start with an extract from the blog.

What I have started telling writers, what I would like them to hear from me, and what Anne Lamott has said so much better than I ever could, is that writing is an incredibly courageous undertaking. It is an activity that begins in the dark without any real knowledge of where the journey is destined to end.  Or to use another metaphor of a race.  Sometimes you will cross the finish line, receive the silver jug and go off into the sunset. But more often you will slip on a banana peel and break your leg 20 yards before the end of the race. But what an adventure it has been!

Which brings us to Camus. Albert Camus wrote his masterpiece, The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. A lot of you probably read it in your freshman humanities course. Camus always took on the big themes, in this case, the meaning of life.  Sisyphus is condemned by the gods for all eternity to roll a boulder up a mountain, whence it will then roll down of its own weight. For Camus this was a metaphor of  human life, a ceaseless striving in a universe without meaning.

It strikes me that this is also a metaphor for the work of the writer. For Camus, Sisyphus’s effort is heroic and filled with grandeur. In the final, unforgettable lines of his book, Camus says: ” Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

I find it hard to imagine two more perfect sentences—particularly since they describe exactly what I feel. One must imagine Sisyphus happy is a line to die for (and he is).

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Camus is beyond wonderful. Read anything and everything he wrote—he had extraordinary insight into the human condition—and read about the man himself. If memory serves, the biography I read was by Herbert R. Lottman. It was a life-changing event.

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