(via PSFK)

Topic 2:
Wandering around the Green Festival this weekend, I encountered Zach Houston sitting on a fold-up chair, manual typewriter on lap, hawking poems "Name your topic, name your price". Giving him $3 and the topic of "haystacks", he whipped up a 15 line poem while answering questions from kids walking by and pointing at the typewriter, "What's that?!"

Topic 3:
Living Library is an organization promoting the idea that you can check out a person for a 30 minute conversation, designed to break down stereotypes. LA Times has a poorly written story about the living library in Santa Monica, if you want to get a perspective on how it works.

(via the Berkeley Heights Library blog)

* Information Overload - the key is in repetition; read a few books over and over, take copious notes. We retain only a small fraction of what we read and hear. Focus on a few key concepts and repeat over and over. Spaced repetition (x6)
* Negative Filtering- we create a logjam in our minds with all the things we can't do. One person who shows confidence in you can make all the difference; also, you can choose who to listen to and who to ignore (negative feedback)
* Lack of Follow-up - you have to repeat and ingrain these habits into your mind. Repeat repeat repeat, but also with an eye towards teaching others, since this is the best way to solidify what you know.

How to listen with a positive mindset:
* listen with no prejudice or preconceived ideas
* listen with a learning attitude that is excited about new information
* listen with positive expectancy
* listen with a pen in hand, taking notes, with a desire to hear not only what's being said but what it can trigger in your imagination
* listen with a "how can I use this?" attitude

It's true, we do a lot of things unthinkingly. And if our habits were healthier, so much the better.

Tangentially but amusingly, they point out that the Social Security Administration's website is not available 24/7, but works government hours of Weekdays 5 AM - 1 AM, Saturday 5 AM - 11 PM, Sunday 8 AM - 11:30 PM.

* Best advice: read a lot, write a lot.
* Kill your television.
* 1st draft-- shut the door, just write, let the story out. The characters really should start to push their own story at some point. 2nd draft is what you let other people read.
* Read The Elements of Style (Strunk & White)
* Stories consist of 3 parts: narration (action, moving the story along), description, and dialog.
* King distrusts plotting a story- our lives are essentially plotless, plus plotting and spontaneous creation aren't compatible (HUZZAH!!!! BECAUSE PLOTTING IS MY WEAK POINT!)
* Building characters in fiction- pay attention to how real people behave, and tell the truth. In real life, there are no minor characters-- each of us is the star in our own life. Treat them as such.
* He shares his own frustration and shame that he carried around about the stuff he wrote.

For those without a lot of time, reading the 8 page Preface might get you to partial enlightenment. Or you can watch the 2 segments on Bill Moyers: September 2008 and November 2008

Phillips' earlier work, American Theocracy, covered an interesting angle I might have to check out in further detail-- the three most recent leading world economic powers had special relationships with key energy sources: Netherlands - wind & water, Britain - coal, and the US - oil. "The earlier two proved unable to maintain their global preeminence when a new energy regime emerged, and now Americans must worry."

One of my favorite parts was Phillips pointing out the discrepancies between earlier American economic crises with this one. Today, we barely understand the baillouts happening, and are not meeting to discuss their impact on everyday American lives, but "Economic favoritism in Washington is as American as apple pie." Federal policy favored manufacturers and railroads during the decades after the Civil War, instead of farmers. "Tariffs, railroad land grants, and tight money... all subsidized capital, not agriculture. Farm families, especially on the grain-dependent Great Plains, came to understand that they were fighting for their livelihoods. The leading histories of agrarian populism describe giant meetings, sometimes literally thousands of wagons gathered on the prairies, to discuss railroads, bands, unbearably low grain prices, free coinage of silver, and the need.. 'to raise less corn and more hell.' Economic pamphlets were passed from farm to farm, periodicals like the National Economist had hundreds of thousands of subscribers... Compared to early-twenty-first-century torpor and lack of serious financial debate, the nineteenth-century agrarian civic engagement had an almost Fourth of July quality. "

Plunge Protection Team, created in 1988 by Reagan probably to more loosely define the backroom antics that occurred during the 1987 crash. Who are these people? What effect have they had on our economy by preventing bubbles from bursting completely?

"We are in an Age of Disappointment," said Kevin Phillips in the November 2008 Bill Moyers' Journal episode mentioned above. So absolutely true.

Dimensions of "Bullnomics"-- exaltation of financial markets as rational and safe underpinning for public well-being, the conning of the American public with misleading stats that understate inflation, and the rise of Christian fundamentalism "God wants you to be rich". I'm intrigued by the connection of "the preoccupation of Americans awaiting the Rapture... keeping another band of voters unconcerned about budget deficits, peak oil, and the deflation of the U.S. dollar. " Tim Weber is quoted, "If Jesus may come at any minute, then long-term social reform or renewal are beside the point."

Ordinary Americans are bearing more of the risk burden. Income instability grew even faster than income inequality. Jacob Hacker emphasized data showing that the chance a household would experience a 50% drop in income at some point rose from minimal in 1970 to 20% in 2002.

New York banks felt secure because they knew the Federal Reserve would bail them out, they knew they were on Helicopter Ben's chopper route. Back in 2002, Ben Bernanke joked that if needed in a crisis, money could be dropped from helicopters.

What did the other failed empires do in their waning days? Spain issued some reforms, moved the capital briefly from Madrid, tried to get the other major regions to help foot the bill of the empire, tried to restore their military reputation. At the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, Spain was no longer an empire. The Dutch (The United Provinces of the Netherlands) faced a similar problem, where they lived on interest income and rents, instead of continuing earlier commercial and maritime activities. From 1688 to 1713 they fought a series of wars that cost them both trade routes & serious debt obligations. Holland refused to pay more taxes despite having more wealth than before.

"It remains possible that four decades of US hubris, periodic military intervention, and overreach in the Middle East will be perceived as playing the same role for Washington as did the Thirty Years' War for Madrid (1618-48), the 1688-1713 wars for Holland, and two successive world wars for Britain."

"On the edge of the decline the Spanish had gloried in their New World gold and silver; the Dutch, in their investment income and lending to princes and czarinas; and the British, in their banks, brokers, and global financial network. In none of these situations, however, could financial services succeed in upholding the national preeminence that had been earlier built by explorers, conquistadores, maritime skills, innovative science and engineering, the first railroads, electrical dynamos, and great iron and steel works."

The emergence of the Islamic nationalist bond market in Asia. Islamic bonds, or sukuk (securities made religiously acceptable by avoiding interest payments or investments in alcohol, tobacco, pork-packing, and gaming industries). Standard & Poors has estimated the potential of the Islamic finance market at $500 billion.

Russian scientific submarine placed a flag on the seabed at the North Pole in 2007, staking a territorial claim, trying to gain access to the oil beneath the shelf.

"The future United States from the start drew immigrants from England, Holland, Scotland, and Protestant sections of Germany, as well as Huguenots, Flemings, and Jews, so when the baton of economic leadership passed to the United States in the twentieth century, there was a notable continuum of financial and commercial custom... It is hard to see how any major twenty-first-century shift of power to Asia can occur without a major discontinuity unless a financial Anglosphere - the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and perhaps the Netherlands - can remain a coequal power center for at least three or four decades."

"The underlying question before us... is whether the housing and credit crisis expected to span the 2007-10 period constitutes the global crisis of American capitalism, in the sense of being the one that signals the Great Transferal to Asia."

"Recent polls in the United States by Zogby / New Global Initiatives show an unprecedented 1.5 million Americans having already decided to the leave the United States and another 1.8 million calling themselves likely to leave. Emigration was also pronounced from declining Spain (to Spanish colonial America), from eighteenth-century Holland (to Dutch colonies, and by professionals and skilled workers to Britain and Sweden), and from declining rural and industrial areas of Britain in the first half of the twentieth century (to the colonies, the dominions, and the United States).

Breathe.

Suskind's book comes in three acts, expertly weaving stories of Afghan exchange students, Pakastani ex-pats, Benazir Bhutto, Guantanamo Bay detainees and top US diplomatic officials. Act I: Other People's Shoes, Act II: The Armageddon Test, and Act III: The Human Solution. Of all the acts, Act 2 was the least enjoyable-- whenever Suskind inserted himself into the story, it bizarrely lost its personal touch for me.

Usman, the Pakistani emigrant who moved to America to go to college, lives in DC and works as a data analyst, is stopped by Secret Service one morning on his way to work after he stops to adjust his iPod. Racially profiled, he's swept into the car and taken to a basement of the White House, interrogated for hours, then released after giving up the names of everyone he's ever met in America. This begins to set into motion his days of true-american-ness, hard drinking and partying. Then one night a fellow Pakistani has friends in town who end up wanting to kill Usman because if they kill a lapsed Muslim, they earn a ticket to heaven. Usman quickly rethinks his life in the US, kicks around the idea of returning to Pakistan to work from that side to change the world.

This only a portion of the goodness inside-- read it!

With the first whiff of contact with the new land, the Europeans spread smallpox to the Indians, even before seeing them. Their animals interspersed their germs into the forests, where the disease quickly spread and ravaged entire populations. By the time actual people to people contact was established, the civilizations were already in serious decline.

How did the ancient Indians get here? Multiple migrations out of the Bering Strait area, then down the coast in boats. Artifacts have been dated from 13,000 years ago on the new continents.

They'd invented the wheel, only to use it in toys but not to do labor-- they were lacking large pack animals to harness, plus wheels not effective on the landscaped roads they had build for llamas (steep steps).

At any rate, highly readable look on the social, political and ecological environment of the area pre-"Discovery".

Recommended by Kottke.

The overall gist of the book is to just get out there on the road, you don't have to save up a bunch of cash, just set one foot in front of the other, work along the way, don't be a slave to your pre-ordained schedule, don't make fun of the natives, do be open to anything that happens to you along the way.

Perhaps the best use of this book is as a bibilography, since at the end of each "chapter" he lists 20-ish books you should check out for more information.

Overall: useless

Negative points for mentioning space tourist Tito's $20M trip into space.

Basic idea of the book is great-- exploring why a billion people are starving during an era when a billion people are obese, globalization's effect on small farmers, farmer suicides, etc.

Unfortunately, his writing style renders it unreadable.

Overall, an enjoyable reading experience that teaches mindful driving (and mindful cycling, walking).

The premise for the story is a writing class, one of those adult-extension classes where you imagine a bunch of losers gathering together to praise each other's meager scratchings. Only the teacher of this group (Amy) is actually good, and is actually a published writer. And the group of supposed losers show themselves to be individually interesting (everyone has 1000 stories inside), a cohesive group that makes great progress. Throw in a murder mystery and voila, you got your Writing Class.

One of the class members makes threatening phone calls, tapes other class members and plays them back to Amy over the phone, mails mimicked poetry, causes the deaths of 2 group members (one falling off a cliff, one poisoned), plus near death of Amy.

Interspersed with the storyline, any aspiring writer can pick up tips from the fictional teacher-- the idea that we suspend our disbelief that the author has actually done all the things she portrays in her fiction, which enables the writer to just let go and write, without worrying that too much of her is being exposed. Other tips-- lists of ideas and characters. Writing exercises where you assume the other gender, or make up ten names and write thumbnail sketches of each name, or write an opening paragraph for a short story or novel on the spot. Amy shows us how to "show, not tell".

The story's coherence & charm begins to unravel for me when the narrator stops referring to his wife as "his wife", but as Clara. So she is finally revealed. Wow. But the most egregious error would be the American Graffiti-type recap of where everyone is now and what's going on in their life. Extremely unnecessary for a novel.

Good beach read.

The sacred hunger refers to the desire for money and its quest being ordained as above all others, allowing any means to acquire it. The term comes up in a conversation between the ship's doctor (Paris) and a portrait painter (Delblanc) stationed in a remote fort who buys passage on the ship and whose preaching of a life where everyone is equal leads to the founding of the settlement post-beaching of the ship.

Twelve years pass, and Erasmus Kemp learns of the existence of his father's ship on the Florida coast. Consumed by the desire for revenge on his cousin (Paris, the ship doctor), Kemp charters a ship and heads off to the colonies to see for himself, and to catch his cousin. The cause for this bloodlust remained somewhat unclear until the end-- Kemp was beaten by his cousin in some race as a young child and always held it against him. Kemp's party stumbles upon the settlement where blacks and whites have comingled in perilous harmony, a balance that seems sure to crumble any day now, as smart residents have begun to take advantage of those less talented and talk of slavery begins to crop up as one powerful trader tries to trap another into being his slave.

Overall a powerfully compelling look at the life and time of that era, from the perspective of sailors, gentlemen, Governors, and slaves.

Ross Johnson is portrayed as the smarmy, greedy CEO of RJR Nabisco, who rose from obscurity in his 40s after languishing in Canada for his early career. After merging Standard Brands (who?!) with Nabisco, he then merged Nabisco with RJ Reynolds tobacco. Getting bored of jetting about and playing golf, Johnson decides to pursue the LBO after the 1987 market crash left the stock price depressed.

Interesting connection between The Informant and this book-- page 372:
"But even schmoozing with the president failed to lift Johnson from his growing pessimism. Later, leaving for the plane to New York, he turned to Dwayne Andreas, chairman of Archer Daniels Midland and chairman of the committee. Andreas was a friend; Johnson said he wished they saw each other more often. "Well, Dwayne," he said, "I might have a lot more free time in a couple of weeks."