How to Find Reliable News Sources in Today’s Stormy Info-Sea

As a child growing up in a household with a respected and celebrated journalist (my father), I learned from an early age the importance of media accountability, fact-checking, and primary sources in news reporting, and how subtly and effectively language – emotional words in particular – can be used to “spin” any story. You will understand that it’s therefore always been my practice to question news sources and ask others where they get their information. This applies to not just COVID, but everything. Fortunately, there’s a terrific website which can give you reliable and objective ratings for a great many of the news sources worldwide.

The mediabiasfactcheck.com site is the gold standard in rating news sources for reliability. If you’re one of the (sadly few) people who yearn for the most unbiased and accurate news reporting you can find, and want to avoid the internet echo-chamber effect of isolating yourself from voices which disagree with your own preconceptions and beliefs, here’s the lowdown. I strongly recommend you take a few moments to understand the methodology involved, visit the many most factually accurate and least biased sources listed, and perhaps search and check the ratings of your own habitual news sources. For example, here’s the rating for the venerable news agency Reuters (reuters.com), which just about every news outlet in the world subscribes to as a primary source of fatcual information and breaking news:

Mediabiasfactcheck is an easy site to use with an extensive multilayer top menu, and covers everything from small-town TV and radio stations to national newspapers and websites around the globe. Here are the prime features you’ll want to check out:

The website’s methodology, with a few comparison charts, is quickly explained here:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/

A comprehensive listing of the least biased and most factually accurate sources worldwide is here:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/center/

 

Simple search – search bar where you can enter the source whose rating you want to see; use the upper, “Dedicated Media Search” bar to search (enter source name and press Enter):

 

Filtered search: search bar where you can set your own filters:

I’m of course aware I’m preaching to a choir of sensible readers here, as those who are already convinced of the accuracy of the sources that agree with their unshakeable beliefs will only feel reinforced in being privy to the TRVTH that others are too stupid to see. If Breitbart or Moveon.org is where you get most of your information, you’re probably not interested in any of this. That’s okay: it’s a free country.

For myself, I’m extremely picky about sources, and you should be too if you have any interest in trying to form a clear picture of world events. I recommend following at least six reliable sources in more than one country to help a form a wide and comprehensive picture of world events based on fact rather than spin, speculation, manipulation, and downright misinformation.

Play with it and have fun! I hope you find this as useful a tool as I do in navigating the minefield which news has become.

Comments are in all cases moderated.

Notes From an Alien Shore

A few weeks ago I happened to ask two friends a question that had been on my mind a good deal lately. Both conversations went very much like this (I’ll call the friends “X” for simplicity):

ME: “Do you ever wonder what we are? What we really are?”

X: <Silence/blank stare>

ME: “I mean, think about it. We’re not our bodies, that’s obvious. But we’re not our minds, either, that’s just the organ that does the thinking. A Christian would use the word “soul”, but that just raises more questions, as does the notion that we’re a splinter of some kind of supreme being. So what are we?”

X: Honestly, I try not to think about that sort of thing.

Admittedly, two people is a narrow sample. But that fact that two intelligent, thoughtful friends should give me exact, identical answers really made me think.

I ask myself questions like the one above all the time. Questions of existence, of reality, time and space, life and death, meaning and ethics, good and evil; questions of everything that concerns our existence and what it means to be human…these occupy my thinking for large parts of every day. Metaphysics matters.

I also have a quirk in that I tend to consider everything from basic principles, taking little on trust or as given. So much of what we’re taught or presented with is false, biased, or founded on incomplete and/or sloppy assumptions that anyone interested in investigating the real must go back to the beginning or risk building on sand, or shaky foundations at best.

Moreover, to see reality at its clearest, I believe it’s critical to be free of any and all ideologies, especially political or religious belief. The moment you assume an ideology or a belief system is the moment you stop seeing reality as it is, but begin instead to filter it through the lens of your ideology, to try to make the actual territory of the real match your map. As someone once put it, “we see the world not as it is, but as we are.” So the answer is to just not be as anything—be you, a naked flame of being with no philosophy or ideology. Simply observe and think.

I do this with everything. When I was a decorative painter—a career I pursued with considerable success for twenty-five years—I took no classes but taught myself everything about colour, materials, and technique from scratch. Once I’d mastered the basics, I looked for new ways to achieve certain effects, as well as creating an array of paint effects nobody had ever seen. I mixed most of my own materials rather than buying off-the-shelf. The result was that within a decade or so I’d not only mastered the craft and was in high demand, but the look of my finishes was entirely different to the generic, cookie-cutter “faux painting” that my many competitors were practicing. This gave me a huge edge.

More recently, I’ve taken a similar approach with writing, approaching the craft from the standpoint of what works and gets results, and eschewing the mountains of stupid, fashionable rules and diktats endlessly touted at writers’ workshops and on countless blogs and Twitter feeds. Of course it’s important to know these “rules”, and a small minority of them are useful, even vital; the rest just need to be buried and forgotten.

It always struck me as odd that people talk about reinventing the wheel as though it were a waste of time—nothing could be further from the truth. Sometimes you invent a better wheel; sometimes you come up with something that makes the wheel like as useless as a bag of rocks.

On a related note, we were recently given a bag full of DVDs of new and recent TV shows by an actor friend; apparently these things are passed around to people in the Screen Actors Guild so that they may consider them when voting for Emmy nominations. The shows include a wide variety of stuff, from The History Channel to offerings from Amazon, from American Crime to Portlandia; the last three episodes of Mad Men are in there, as well as the whole mini-series of Wolf Hall (a historical about Henry VIII, and the only one of any interest to me).

Since I don’t watch any TV at all, the huge majority of these were new to me. After enjoying Wolf Hall, we attempted some of the others, like an episode of Mad Men, and now, American Crime.

In trying to understand what people get out of TV shows like these, I’m thrown back to the gulf I sense when trying to discuss existential truths that concern me deeply only to discover that people I care for and respect would rather just not go there. I feel—and I suspect many writers will share this feeling—as though I’m living among aliens, where I barely grasp the parameters of the society and what makes it tick.

Is it even possible to understand why people behave the way they do without buying in to pop culture? Sometimes when I see people talk (and certainly when they argue), it seems to me that rather than processing and responding with thought and intelligently, they’ve learned to interact with others from TV soaps, and are just throwing out stock phases, learned reactions, mannerisms, expressions, postures. No wonder the world is the mess it is.

Why, for instance, would any sane person want to watch something like “American Crime”, which is so drenched in realism that no shred of escapism or joy is left to the viewer, so that the only possible reaction one is left with is to just end it all now? The question baffles me.

And don’t get me started on reality shows or celebrity chef contests. What possible pleasure anyone can take in watching real people put in often humiliating conflict situations, subjected to extreme stress, and then publicly defeated or even ridiculed, I can’t imagine. The Roman games were at least honest.

Fnally, take a simple predictive Google search. The trending popular searches which flash up as you click in the box are almost invariably to do with celebrities, sports, TV shows, or something so mind-numbingly banal as to leave me shaking my head. It’s glaringly obvious that the overwhelming majority of us aren’t much preoccupied with the mysteries of existence.

I am, it seems, legend. Perhaps I’m not even real.

Are you?

 

The road Most Traveled: Good Intentions, Catastrophic Results

A Federal judge has just ordered Apple to unlock the phone used by one of the two San Bernardino shooters so it could access the phone’s records. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has said the company will fight the order, stating that it has neither the ability to bypass its own strong encryption and that this would set a dangerous precedent. Although I’m not an Apple user, I’m 100% with the company on this and applaud their decision.

The question here is a simple one of the road to hell. It all begins, as usual, with good intentions: we want to stop terrorism. But as Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a back door. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.”

Yet we continue to jog blissfully into an Orwellian future in which the state (the UK is no different) not only insists but has also persuaded a good many of its citizens that their lives are in dire and imminent danger from foreign threats, and that any violation of privacy or individual freedoms is secondary to fighting that threat. Politicians of course make huge capital on this, and the media does nothing to bring some perspective and reality to the actual real threats to our daily lives, which for most people are to do with poor education, debt, poverty, ill health, unaffordable housing, the criminal cost of healthcare, and long-term insecurity—not terrorism.

The US has been in a state of perpetual war for over thirteen years, and continues to be. Its misguided foreign policy actions have destabilized a huge region of the world by trying to impose Western notions of government on nations utterly ill-equipped to embrace democracy (you have to have an Enlightenment before you can consider democracy, and when you still think tribally, corruption and self-interest are going to quickly corrode and ruin any attempt at forging a new state).

Saddam was undoubtedly a brute, and Bashir-al Assad (still in power today) not much better; Gaddafi was mercurial and unreliable. But although some individuals and/or sections of those societies were persecuted during these leaders’ rule, the vast majority of people in Iraq, Syria, and Libya had jobs, food, and a reasonable, often happy and secure standard of living. Today they’re straggling across Europe by the millions like beggars, taking handouts and desperately looking for places to settle—and that’s if they haven’t drowned in the Aegean or Meduterranean after having been fleeced by a whole new class of local criminals our good intentions have benefited: people smugglers. In the process, the rest of Europe is being destabilized.

I fully understand that government has a primary mandate and responsibility to keep its people safe. But in reality, the risk from terrorism is infinitesimally small: if you live in the USA, your chance of dying in a terrorist attack is about 5,000 times less than that of being shot by a US citizen (and even that’s not something that keeps most of us awake at night). The simple act of getting on a plane has already become a tedious, time-wasting hell despite the fact that study after study has shown TSA checks to be up to ninety-five percent ineffective at detecting threats. If you live in a city, your actions while out in public are already recorded on countless cameras; your cellphone and the plastic in your wallet provide extra layers of tracking and monitoring. But government insists it needs a further backdoor into everyone’s lives, and argues tooth and nail that any level of  inconvenience and curtailment of individual privacy and liberty is justifiable.

Every day we see evidence of how the well-intentioned use of electronic records ruins lives. The undiscriminating and poorly-thought-out register of sex offenders is one: is it—to take just one example—really okay that because an eighteen-year-old had consensual sex with a seventeen-year-old, he should be viewed as a sexual predator in the same data bucket as a child molester? How many of my readers didn’t have underage sex of one kind or another in their high school or college days? And let’s not even talk of the teens whose lives have been upset by the (silly, but, hey! these are kids) practice of sexting one another.

The argument of course is that an honest citizen has nothing to fear from all this. Really? Try telling that to someone who’s been accidentally put on a no-fly list because of some data entry error or some other innocent reason (it happens). And although China’s new Social Credit System—a data-driven rating system similar to our own credit rating systems but with the emphasis on your status and trustworthiness as a citizen—isn’t likely to be replicated in the US  anytime soon, the reality is that all kinds of aggregated data, including your online browsing and shopping habits, are already finding their way into databases that can affect your ability to rent a home, get a job, obtain credit, and a great deal more.

Nor is it just government. PayPal has just clamped down on allowing account holders to use its system to pay for VPN (virtual private network) subscriptions, presumably on the grounds that VPNs, which are used to mask a user’s real computer identity (IP address), may be used for terrorist communication or other illicit activity. What about the many hundreds of thousands of people who use VPN for entirely legitimate activities such as researching sensitive subjects (journalists do this all the time), getting around censorship in countries under authoritarian rule, or simply  avoiding being tracked by advertisers. (PayPal are of course doing this not out of any noble motives but simply to forestall any possible future heat from government over enabling the masking of criminal communications).

Consider the slew of new voice- and audio enabled devices that are appearing in your home, like the Amazon Echo, which “hears you from across the room with far-field voice recognition, even with music playing”: do you really want that in your house? Even if it doesn’t come with a backdoor or a camera, what do we think happens to all the data it collects about our and our family’s daily habits? You don’t think that’s mined? Increasingly sophisticated AI can do that with ease and extract every ounce of commercially  valuable information about us.

You’ve already been carrying around a tracking device (your phone) for years. Within the very, very near future, your home is going to be bursting with microphone- and camera- equipped devices which are all connected to the net as part of the IoT, or Internet of Things. If you’re not concerned about this, you should be. Quite apart from any government surveillance, just about anyone can hack in to these devices. For a single, chilling example, the camera on the monitor in your childrens’ room is ridiculously easy to hack, its IP address quite possibly already on a website. Think about it.

Everything—everything—that takes place in your home and car will—unless tech companies hold a hard line, and good luck with that one—be available on production of a court order. Right now the bar is terrorism; but other, more everyday, criminal activities will soon qualify. How long before all that data becomes available to your ex’s divorce lawyer? What if your current prospective employers can one day gain access to the data mined from these devices? Because you can bet that it’s all going to be for sale, legally or otherwise. And don’t forget that security on the current IoT is just about non-existent (this is in fact a big concern with self-driving cars, which can currently be hacked with such ease that a person with a laptop can take control over the car with very little difficulty from anywhere in the world).

In conclusion, I believe that tech companies have an absolute responsibility to protect the rights and privacy of their customers at every level. Not only should devices not come with a backdoor, ever, but every possible measure should be taken to ensure that networked devices, from our phones to our cars, refrigerators, baby monitors, and home thermostats are protected against intrusion and hacking by strong encryption and security measures. The emphasis and primary focus should be on the inviolability of the consumers’ privacy and individual rights. And we should demand that of them.

After all, it is we, and our hard-earned dollars, that have made Apple, Google, and Amazon what they are today.

 

The Lockdown of Boston

“The return of terrorism to the U.S.”, was a phrase used on NPR today, as the city of Boston was literally locked down by the authorities.

The return of terror? Two young nutcases with low-tech bombs?

I don’t for a moment want to minimize the horror of what happened in Boston. Moreover—as an Englishman who lived in London all through the murderous IRA terror campaign of the 1970s and 1980s—I’m relieved to see just how robust and solidly the people of Boston reacted to the event. My personal fear when the bombing occurred was that, just like after 9/11, this media-saturated nation so unused to terrorist attacks on its own soil would go into a tailspin of fear, bringing the fragile economic recovery to a screeching halt. Instead, Bostonians were out on the streets the next day, laying wreaths at the bomb site and vowing not to be cowed.

Today, the streets of Boston are deserted except for thousands—no exaggeration—of heavily-armed police, FBI, and other authorities looking for the surviving mad bomber. A major metropolitan area locked down to find one nineteen-year-old.

I usually don’t believe in second-guessing police and intelligence forces—they have a phenomenally difficult  job to do, and typically do it pretty well. The decision to lock down the city, shut down transport (not to mention cutting off cellphone service immediately after the bombings)… I can’t imagine these decisions were made lightly.

On the other hand, I think we might consider whether this isn’t (i) overreaction, and (ii) a sinister, Orwellian glimpse of a post 9/11 security state in full action.  My point being that this is one individual at loose here, not a platoon of terrorists. One kid—admittedly armed and desperate, possible even carrying explosives—but still, one kid.

What kind of message does the willingness on the part of the authorities to shut down a city to hunt down one single person send? We can glimpse some of the reasoning: doing this might save lives, prevent a hostage event, make it much harder for the killer to flee…but still, is this a proportionate reaction? Or does it project an image of hysteria, amplifying an already tragic event and—with the all-too-eager help of the news media—turning it into a full-blown national crisis which will rock the nation’s already-fragile psyche? Now this precedent has been set, we can expect it to happen again.

I read not long ago that one of the morbid calculations that regulatory bodies have to make is the dollar value of a human life—a necessity when trying to decide whether to, say, build a pedestrian overpass, ban a chemical, etc.; in short, a cost-benefit analysis. Just a few years ago, that figure—the dollar value of a life—had been determined at around $8M; with the recession, it’s dropped to something closer to $6M, I believe.

Now let’s consider what it costs to shut down a city like Boston for a day. The business and production lost, the damage to personal incomes, etc. I can’t imagine it’s anything less than many billions of dollars. So in terms of pure cost-benefit, locking down the city seems a non-starter.

I can only think, then, that this has been done for two reasons: first to reduce the chances of the killer getting away to as near zero possible; and second, to send a message that the authorities will stop at nothing to catch anyone who commits an act of this sort.

These last are very powerful arguments, and I both understand and applaud them; I know for sure I wouldn’t ever want to make a decision like that. Still and all, I can’t help but feel that it sets a terrible precedent and—worse—underscores the idea that we’re all in danger, all the time, now that “terrorism has returned to the U.S.”. I think the authorities over-reacted.

If terrorism is ever to be defeated, it won’t be because of the application of overwhelming force by the state: it’ll be by people, by individuals, by every single one of us refusing to be cowed, refusing to live in fear. If they blow up a plane, get on a flight the next day; if they bomb a subway car, get on the subway; if they destroy a building, rebuild it taller, and don’t be ten years over it. And let’s stop dignifiying them with the name “terrorist”—these people are, and have always been, mad bombers, no more.

Terror is a state of mind.

Why We CAN’T All Get Along

A couple of days ago, as the US Supreme Court prepared to visit the interminably vexed question of gay marriage, I had an interesting exchange of views with a Facebook friend I deeply respect, Michael Potts, Professor of Philosophy at Methodist University in Fayetteville, N.C.  A Christian of a powerful intellectual bent, Michael expressed the view that “we can’t go on the way we’re going without the culture war turning into something more than a metaphor”, and that the eventual solution might be a move towards setting up semi-autonomous communities of like-minded individuals.

The same idea—taken a bit further—has been floated by a number of individuals, including some libertarian billionaires. Their proposals essentially envision de facto city-states with their own governments and laws, sometimes with the goal of creating tech hubs just outside US territorial waters so as to circumvent the US visa requirements which are increasingly threatening to put a brake on a strongly resurgent tech industry. Other groups driven more by ideals than business considerations just think it would be really cool to experiment with new types of social order, and I confess the idea holds great allure. Most of these ideas involve seasteading, the locating of these new communities on manmade islands or even simply recycled oil rig platforms.

There are strong arguments both ways. At the same time as I think our only hope as a society, even as a species, is to learn to compromise, reach accommodations, and work together with a shared vision, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that this is a lost cause. It seems to me that conflict and struggle are so deeply hardwired into our primate psyche that there isn’t a hope in hell—absent forced external tampering or thought control, and none of us want that—of ever resolving our deepest differences. Not, at least, within a pluralist, democratic system, and least of all within a dog-eat-dog capitalist society with free speech and free media. And we know how well the alternatives worked.

I remember back in the early oughts talking to some fellow who was worried about the “black helicopters” and the UN’s “New World Order,” a popular right-wing meme about the Antichrist forcing free nations into a single world government. I pointed out that the maps of Eastern Europe were being redrawn every few months, it seemed, in the wake of the collapse of communism, and that the exact opposite was happening, with people everywhere who’d been welded together under strongmen like Tito wanting instead to secede and govern themselves.

The internet has of course added fuel to this particular fire, both directly and indirectly, with traditional media forced to ratchet up controversy and partisanship to compete for a shrinking audience. And while I—an extreme social liberal on many issues—would like to think that we can reach accords on the issues that divide us, and daily hear Rodney King’s impassioned words, I know the chances of this ever happening are close to zero.

The irony perhaps is that while we of social liberal or true libertarian bent (as opposed to the neo-libertarian conservatives) are willing to let others live the way they want and not impose our ideals on them or dictate their lifestyles, it’s just about impossible for a devoted Christian to take that stance. Much as it drives me nuts, I refuse to take the easy way out of the rabid atheist and absolutely dismiss their worldview. While deep religious faith  may to me be at best a comforting crutch and at worst delusional,  to others it’s part of who they are. And you can’t demand respect without giving it, however grudgingly. We can disagree with someone without making them the enemy.

In conclusion, I’m going to quote Christian White, one of the protagonists of my recent thriller, “Sutherland’s Rules,” who finds himself pondering these same issues in the hills of Afghanistan after a narrow brush with death, and has just been reassured by an Afghan friend that “God is good”:

There were times when he’d have given body parts for real faith, for the comfort and unburdening it would bring. As a consequence, he thought about faith a lot, to the point where sometimes he felt downright stalked by God, as if God really needed him to believe, wanted his pathetic soul.

But try as he might, whatever powerful feelings he might have in the throes of fear and need (and didn’t everyone have those? Didn’t finding yourself in a foxhole turn everyone into a believer?), he couldn’t overcome his rational doubts. And you couldn’t fake these things, couldn’t fake belief. Oh, he knew plenty of half-assed believers, people who used church as a social club and mouthed religion as a good gambler might hedge a bet, and they seemed content enough. Not him. You didn’t try faith on like a pair of shoes, walk around in them a while to see if they fit before committing. If it wasn’t genuine and from the heart, it was hollow. And any God worth believing in would see through that.

Yeah, we’re never going to get along. It might well be time to experiment with some new social structures, because the current ones, and maybe even the whole edifice of western democracy, is threatening to burst at the seams. Expect a strong backlash from governments when the first city-states become viable.

Your comments are welcome.

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Related

Floating semi-autonomous communities

My own earlier post about tolerance and America’s culture wars

Michael Potts’s excellent, thoughtful blog  (As a sample, check out this terrific post in which he addresses Christian misconceptions about Goth culture )

An Even More Inconvenient Truth

Have you seen the short, unsensational YouTube video with the graphs of wealth distribution in the US, comparing what Americans believe the wealth distribution is, what they believe it should (in fairness) be, and what it actually is? You should: it’s both eye-popping and sobering, and I’ve linked it at the bottom of this post. For the moment, the takeaway is that one percent of the population owns fifty percent of the nation’s stocks, bonds, and mutual funds—effectively, the nation’s wealth, and, more importantly, the tools to greater personal wealth. The figures are verifiable, and almost five million people have seen the video.

It’s no secret that the middle class is shrinking and doing less well. Nor is it surprising: in a society whose economic model resembles nothing so much as a wealth transfer system for lining the pockets of the rich and near-rich, and where democracy is patently and unashamedly for sale, the American rags-to-riches dream, though still attainable, is only going to work for a tiny minority. For the rest, it’s the soup kitchen or multiple part-time jobs, with few or no benefits.

There are, at present count, somewhere around 600,000 homeless in America. To house them all in “efficiency units,” small but well-appointed 200- and 300-square-foot housing modules of the sort now being built for real rents in places like New York and San Francisco, could probably be done for around $35Bn. The cost of one and a half Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, that’s really not a lot; in fact, a few of the very wealthiest Americans, certainly any pair of the first ten or so, could cover the whole sum and still have enough left over to live beyond most people’s wildest dreams.

Stay with me, because this isn’t about the anonymous homeless multitude: it’s going to get personal. I’m going to be talking about you and me.

Unfortunately, the ranks of the homeless in the US (and elsewhere, for that matter) are likely to grow rather than diminish. Despite the delusional optimism of articles like the recent one in the Huffington Post which suggests that the post-war/baby boomer generation is about to reshape the social order, when you’re playing against a stacked deck the chances of that happening (without violent social upheaval, and none of us wants that) are close to zero. Instead, as this generation enters what would once have been the Golden Years—now more like the Tin Years—a society that promotes eternal youth and beauty is going to have to deal with the grim reality of its aging population.

Consider. A large proportion of the boomer generation, the 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964, has nowhere near the savings to sustain them, even if they don’t require expensive healthcare—which a great many of them will. Ask a financial planner today how much you should have set aside for when you retire, and they’ll tell you anywhere between one and two million dollars.

Million?

Yes, million. Because whereas we once had the decency—thanks to widespread smoking and simpler medicine—to keel over within a decade or so of retirement, we boomers are living an average of fifteen years longer than our grandparents. To make matters worse, those of us who don’t have savings or families that can afford the $4,000 or more a month to park us in some generic assisted living facility are, to put it mildly, in trouble.

This is a crisis as serious as any asteroid strike or tsunami for those affected—and that’ll be tens of millions of people in the US alone. Vast numbers of people are living on razor-thin safety margins, and their kids are likely doing even worse. Unless you’re one of the dwindling group who’ve carefully set money by and own a good home, had the luck to father a doctor, have a USPS pension or one from the golden age of GM, and aren’t bankrupted by healthcare costs before Medicare kicks in, well…as entitlement programs begin to pop their rivets under the strain of a huge demographic bulge—the majority of whose constituents suffer at least one chronic disease—your future is looking rocky.

I know, this is a grim topic. But it’s important, not least because the vast majority of us will be affected, but because there’s so damn little straight talking about it. Nobody wants to look the issue in the eye, let alone do anything about it.

And it gets worse.

However unhappy our circumstances of our dotage may be—and I truly hope they aren’t, and that your sunset years are happy ones—the combination of a predatory healthcare system and the tyranny of people who think their beliefs and moral values trump ours conspire to deny us even the degree of compassion we afford our pets, namely a gentle, painless exit. Unless you live in one of the very few places (such as Oregon) where you have at least a notional right to death with dignity, you’re stuck with being kept alive by heroic measures long after your sell-by date whether you like it or not. Don’t assume that your DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order will make a damn bit of difference, either, because the realities of the ER are such that unless it’s waved in the doc’s face by a firm and clear-minded friend or relative, you’re going to be kept alive whether you like it or not.

What’s to be done? Well, you can vote, for one thing. You can lobby, write your congressperson, and make your voice heard. You can talk to people and spread the meme. If you’re a writer, you can write about these issues*. If you have some savings, you can consider getting together with a few friends or couples, pooling your resources, and buying a large house, even setting up some sort of elder commune, and taking care of one another, an idea whose time has certainly come and which, correctly planned and executed, can offer a viable model. But whatever you do, don’t just put off thinking about this stuff because it’s unpleasant.

I wish you well. I wish you a golden old age surrounded by loving family and friends, in a better world. It could happen. But it’ll only happen if we have the will to bring it about.

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The video of US wealth inequality can be found here. Watch it.

*My own thriller/adventure novel, “Sutherland’s Rules,” despite being a rousing, upbeat romp, features older protagonists dealing with their own declining years.

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The Samsung Galaxy S4: A Brief Rant

The Samsung S4? I can’t begin to fathom why anyone would get so excited over a telephone.

I’m sorry, a device. I know it’s so much more than a phone, that it’ll work as a TV remote, respond to crazy air gestures, possibly even tell you your weight and fortune. But it’s a gadget, people, not the Second Coming.

So while 600,000 Americans are homeless; while the Middle East inches inexorably towards a meltdown that will affect us all; while the sequester that nobody wanted but the public couldn’t be bothered to wrap their heads around begins to squeeze jobs, lives, and institutions; while bankers who should be rotting in prison get fresh bonuses and are once again happily dealing in collateralized mortgage obligations (which everyone has mostly forgotten about despite the fact that they brought about the recent Great Recession, and no, there never were any real regulations passed because the legislators are all in the industry’s pockets anyway); while all this goes on, almost half a million Americans watched Samsung’s online product launch event.

Are we insane? Oh, yes.

We’re insane because we use phrases like “sports hero;” because we spend $4 on 500-calorie desserts disguised as coffee drinks; because we allow the food, banking, and so many other industries to largely police themselves; because we think nutrition is complicated and, besides, refined, prepackaged garbage tastes better; because we think a global population of 7-going-on-9 billion people is okay;  because we think celebrities matter; because we surrender our privacy and freedoms to politicians who keep beating the War on Terror drum; because we continue to reward aggressive alpha male behaviour and inflexible thinking at every opportunity; because we think the arrival of yet another ephemeral bit of electronic wizardry is an event of vast import.

Oh yes. We’re insane.

The Writing Blogger’s Dilemma

I had a vision of sorts this week, a minor epiphany in which I perceived our hyperconnected community as a vast cloud of flocking birds, wheeling and carving through the sky in near-unison, a collective entity in which each individual’s motion and vector is both a contributor to and a function of the whole. Amusingly, this understanding came while using Twitter.

As individual writer-bloggers, we influence and learn the most from our immediate friends and neighbors on social media and in the blogosphere. And through our collective writings and readings an emerging wisdom on various subjects of common interest seems to be cohering. I see both benefits and dangers in this.

The advantages are clear: information is quickly shared, giving us the tools to adapt to a rapidly-changing craft environment. This information includes everything from writing tips and techniques to new markets, emerging subgenres, publishing scams, and the latest marketing techniques. Being up-to-date or even ahead of the curve in any of these areas is a desirable thing.

The downside to this group dynamic is of course that the individual is subsumed. In writing, reinforcement of the same few ‘rules’ can and does lead to dogma and rigidity, the result of which is a flattening-out of individual style and technique and an increasingly formulaic quality to the resulting manuscripts. I’ve been seeing this for a while, and I believe it’s getting worse: you will be assimilated. The same of course applies to markets, creating boom-and-bust cycles (I predict Zombie Romance will not be red-hot in five years, and that even YA and MG will lose their pre-eminence).

Marketing and self-promotion are an area of primary interest to writer-bloggers, and one where we would do well to question and scrutinize the emerging wisdom. One of the reasons—the primary one for many people—that we blog and strive for a high profile in social media is that we’re told that by enhancing our visibility this will help us promote our work. This is the received wisdom, the flock’s collective judgment, so it must be right, mustn’t it?

Well, no. Ask yourself who reads your blogs and your tweets, who interacts with you on Facebook. Beyond friends and family, I’d bet money that it’s mostly other writers.

Now this does have a value. We writers all need the support of and interaction with other similarly afflicted individuals to keep up our spirits and retain our sometimes tenuous grip on sanity. But how many of these people are going to buy our books, or talk about them? I think there is some effect, but far, far less than we think. Are the four or six or more hours we spend each week blogging about technique and talking about our work on social media going to pay off in sales? Is the three-part, forty-five hundred-word series I recently did on Trad v Self Publishing (and thanks to all of you who wrote to me about it!) going to sell my next book?

Not according to the research. The smart money seems increasingly to point at reader word-of-mouth as the single factor of real significance in promoting a writer’s work and increasing their sales. Not blogs, not Facebook, not Twitter, not sponsored ads, not marketing campaigns, not book giveaways and signings, not even reviews: word of mouth, it seems, trumps all of these. And word of mouth will be directly proportionate, I believe, to the quality of our work.

I’m not for a moment suggesting we should all stop blogging right away or close our Facebook and Twitter accounts. For one thing, these all have a social purpose; for another, everything we write—with the possible exclusion of shopping lists—serves to improve our craft; blogging, I’d argue, serves a very valuable purpose in helping us learn to frame and set out our ideas and arguments.

Should we writers then try to steer our blog and social media focus towards items of interest to our readers, actual and potential, so that we can attract more of them and that way extend our marketing reach? Well, good luck on that one. We’re not Kim Kardashian or Keanu Reeves, and fiction readers don’t typically idolize authors to the extent of following their utterances on social media and reading their daily ruminations.

In conclusion, then, I’ll keep blogging and maintain my social media presence, but with the awareness that I do so not for self-promotion but to maintain social contacts, exchange ideas, and give something back to a community of writers which has often been generous towards me; and of course for the sheer fun and banter. But if I find myself with just one spare hour in my day… well, that hour is probably better spent working on the next book.

I Did it My Way

Years ago, back in the ‘seventies, I used to ride motorcycles. My favourites were the British and Italian  classics, the Triumph Bonneville and Norton Commando, and most of all, my beloved Ducati 750 Desmo. These were far from perfect machines: the Triumph left puddles of oil everywhere, the Norton had issues with its quirky Isolastic engine mounts, and my gorgeous Ducati suffered from maddening electrical issues. Nonetheless, each of these bikes had at least one feature so outstanding, did one thing so damned divinely well, that I could overlook all their other faults.

By contrast, when I got to know my first Japanese bike, the newly-introduced Honda CB 750, a four-cylinder technological marvel of the time, I experienced a strong sense of anticlimax: from handling to acceleration to braking, the bike did everything well; it didn’t drip oil, didn’t try to shake itself and you to pieces, and it was dependable in the way we’ve now come to expect from everything Japanese and German. But I didn’t love it. Couldn’t. It lacked the fire, the one outstanding trait that redeemed all the faults of my previous European machines. Why?

Design by committee.

Three decades later, I still feel the same way. It seems a universal law that if you try to iron out every flaw in something and take a truly cooperative approach to design or creativity, the end result lacks heart, spirit, fire, whatever you want to call it. (I’m sure you’re thinking right now of examples that would prove me quite wrong, but I’m afraid you’ll never convince me. I have a seventh sense that can discern genius and creative fire in anything, from a frying pan to an aircraft). To make something that works very well is easy; to make something that turns sane people into fanatical cultists (see: Mac owners) is far harder. Steve Jobs trumps HP any day.

I rather think it’s that way with the Arts, too. With film, no question, right? Hollywood movies are almost without exception bland, formulaic, and devoid of the fire I’m talking about. Well, I’m starting to think it’s at least partially true of books as well. All things being equal (in this case, the writer being a pro that knows his or her craft, and having a good story to tell), I’d rather read the story at least close to the way writer originally envisaged it, at the length they felt it needed to be, with the ambiguous or unhappy ending the publisher’s marketing department vetoed because it could hurt sales, than a heavily-massaged, corporate product which half a dozen people have had major input on.

This isn’t to say that writers don’t need input. As well as writing, I’ve both edited and published other authors’ stories myself, and I understand the myopia all artists can sometimes suffer; and God knows we all need feedback and copyediting. But I have serious issues with the increasingly Hollywood-corporate approach to creativity that a lot of authors have to endure, because I believe that  somewhere along the line, something is going to get lost, some intangible quality that makes the work unique and sings of the Artist’s spirit and vision. I mean, can you imagine an art dealer or gallery owner walking into Picasso’s studio and telling them more people would like the painting and it would fetch a higher price if he backed off the Prussian Blue a bit? Yes, he was a genius, but Fine Art painters are typically left to work undisturbed, and the finished product is the way they see it.

We’ve seen what the corporate approach to Art has done for Hollywood and the music industry (or for that matter the brewing industry) over the decades, and it’s not pretty: it’s sucked all the uniqueness and bite from the products of each and incrementally replaced them with a formulaic smoothness that’s wholly lacking in originality and… Integrity? Fire? Truth? LotR, Firefly, Psycho,… Would any of those have turned out the way they did if the creative genius behind each had been replaced by a committee and second-guessed at every turn? For a compelling example, check out John Mellencamp’s superb 2010 album, ‘No Better Than This’, recorded the way they used to do it in the ‘fifties, with everyone singing and playing around a single mic. As Mellencamp explains, “everything was cut live with no overdubs or studio nothing! These are real songs being performed by real musicians—an unheard-of process in today’s world. Real music, for real people!” Smooth, it’s not. But it’s drenched in integrity, spirit, and that unmistakable, ineffable spark of creative truth.

Is it any coincidence that each of those industries–Hollywood, the Music Industry, and the breweries–have now lost huge amounts of market share to the Indies and small ‘crafters’ in each field? The worm turns.

Yeah, I can hear all the rebuttals, but, hey–this is op-ed, not a statistical analysis. And, yeah, I’ve always been an autodidact and a loner in every one of my endeavours, winning or losing largely on my own merits. It’s the way I’m wired. I’ll take advice, even solicit it, but I’ll do it my way or not at all, thank you very much. So when I discover someone like Dan Simmons or Kris Rusch, writers I enormously respect and admire, are wired much the same way, it makes me feel I’m not entirely crazy. And that’s a big reason why I’ve decided to publish my new novel, ‘Sutherland’s Rules’, through my own Indie press, Panverse Publishing, even though all the feedback I’m getting suggests it might be a very good candidate for a traditional publishing deal. Because, among a laundry list of other things, I want more control than I’m ever likely to get going the traditional route.

When you have a seventh sense, you have to trust it. Even if it means leaving a few drips of oil here and there.

 

What Ails Us

The recent senseless events in Aurora, CO brought home to me yet again the central irony that underlies the security of our society: that two of civilization’s greatest strengths—compassion and free speech, two noble ideals—are also our greatest weaknesses. And it made me turn again to a favourite play written 2,500 years ago.

The fact that I’ve taken very little interest (beyond the general facts) in the Aurora killings doesn’t mean I have no opinion. I have no need (do you?) to see rescuers carrying blood-soaked victims from the scene, or scenes of anguished, weeping parents and friends of loved ones, or to know the shooter’s background and what others thought of him. I know we seek out the detail, the minutiae, largely because we need to understand how and why these terrible, senseless things happen, why previously harmless people suddenly blow and slaughter random, innocent strangers; yet for me, the how and why seem terribly obvious.

But let’s look at the irony first.

The Aurora, CO shooter, like almost all these sickos, got exactly what he wanted: fame. He got it because the rest of us believe in free speech and a free press. The same holds true for terrorists—where would they be if the media simply ignored them? Powerless, since their power is rooted in fear. Similarly, terrorists use our compassion against us by taking hostages. When we place high value* on every individual life—as we do in civilized societies—they have us over a barrel. So although logic dictates that one should never, ever accede to a terrorist or kidnapper’s demands, we invariably (and often despite public denials by the authorities that demands were met or ransoms paid) do. Again, publicity pays a part, but compassion is the underpinning here. Because we place a higher value on a single life than people in many parts of the world place on a hundred, an entire nation’s foreign policy can be affected or its leadership toppled by fanatics on the other side of the world taking a few dozen hostages.

But whatever logic may dictate, humans don’t typically act on it, much less so where strong emotion is involved. Although simply denying extravagant publicity to terrorists and flashy mass murderers would rob them of a good deal of their power, I don’t expect it to happen soon.

So where does this leave us? Returning to domestic (i.e., US) violence, I don’t for a moment believe more stringent gun laws are the solution. They didn’t help in Norway, and the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan came within an ace of  killing thousands without firearms**. We could argue about smaller capacity magazines causing less deaths, but that doesn’t address the core problem, which is one of a very deeply sick society. Just two generations ago dynamite and fully automatic weapons were freely available in the US, and nobody went around shooting up cinemas or blowing up high schools. What happened? What changed?

For an answer, we could do far worse than look back 2,500 years to the great Greek tragedist, Euripides. Euripides was over 70 when he left the frenzied, disillusioned, war-obsessed city of Athens for the freshness and mountains of Macedon, never to return, and it was there that he wrote his penultimate and, to my mind greatest, play, The Bacchae.

For those who aren’t acquainted with the work, The Bacchae is overtly about the conflict between Dionysus, God of fertility, ecstasy, and wine, and King Pentheus, the arrogant and masterful king of Thebes. But for a deeper look, let me offer a few brief extracts from translator Philip Vellacott’s excellent introduction to the Penguin Classics edition:

The play sets forth two opposite sides of man’s nature. First there is the rational and civilized side, on which a large community like a city depends for its stability. Since Pentheus is a king, he is in Thebes the official representative of this side, which is concerned with law, the conventions of sex and property, the organizing of war. Then there is the instinctive side, which by its simplicity by-passes all the errors of rational man, enjoys the life of the senses without the ability or desire to analyse it…

When the civilized grows arrogant and masterful, it is betrayed from within by the bestial…

The ‘worship’ which the Greek Gods required  (…) was simply a recognition that they existed, that they were an integral and immutable part of human nature, of human society, of the natural world…

The Bacchae is—among other things—a demonstration that the consequences of refusing ‘worship’ in this sense to Dionysus are disastrous, since such a refusal is a denial of undeniable fact; it is a ‘condemnation,’ if you will, of intolerance, violence, and cruelty, all of which are generated when humanity tries to deny either of the two sides of its nature.

Does any of this ring bells?

In my recent 4th July post, ‘On Freedom,’ I wrote about the increasing and often petty limitations on our own freedom, such as not being allowed to enjoy a beer on a beach. In our earnestness to make our society ever safer, we continually tighten the restrictions on individual behaviour at the same time as we turn up the heat and pressure on everyone. Oh, it’s all well-meaning: we are compassionate, we want nobody to be hurt or suffer. So we legislate for every eventuality, and then look for more loopholes, and close those off. Public drunkenness makes us uncomfortable, threatens us, so we have rules against it; but soon those rules don’t seem enough, so we make more rules… and more… And like King Pentheus, the more rules we make, the greater our fear of and sense of threat at even minor infractions, until eventually, all of us feel penned in and unable to move, with all the safety valves shut off. Something has to give, and some people will blow—with sometimes catastrophic consequences.

In a conflict between a God and a king, who would you place your money on?

*     *     *

*someone recently calculated, using a complex and arcane procedure, that the value of a human life in the US is currently around $8 million.

**police found the cult had explosives, Anthrax and Ebola cultures, and stockpiles of chemicals to produce enough Sarin gas to allegedly kill  four million people