Victor D. López's Blog: Victor D. Lopez, page 72

Last Amazon giveaway for February: Eternal Quest

On its surface, this speculative fiction short story (7,800 words) deals with one man’s obsessive quest for knowledge and the devastating price he must pay for the knowledge he ultimately acq…

Source: Last Amazon giveaway for February: Eternal Quest

The Grasshopper and the Ants – 21st Century Edition . . .

THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE ANTS by Aesop (Project Gutenberg, new translation, http://www.gutenberg.org)

One fine day in winter some Ants were busy drying their store of corn, which had got rather damp during a long spell of rain. Presently up came a Grasshopper and begged them to spare her a few grains, “For,” she said, “I’m simply starving.” The Ants stopped work for a moment, though this was against their principles. “May we ask,” said they, “what you were doing with yourself all last summer? Why didn’t you collect a store of food for the winter?” “The fact is,” replied the Grasshopper, “I was so busy singing that I hadn’t the time.” “If you spent the summer singing,” replied the Ants, “you can’t do better than spend the winter dancing.” And they chuckled and went on with their work.

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21st Century Version of the Grasshopper and the Ants (by Victor D. Lopez, fan of ants everywhere and every when)

One fine day in winter some Ants were busy drying their store of corn, which had got rather damp during a long spell of rain. Presently up came a Grasshopper and demanded that they give him a fair share of their stores. The Ants stopped work for a moment, though this was against their principles.

“May we ask,” said they, “what you were doing with yourself all last summer? Why didn’t you collect a store of food for the winter?”

“The fact is,” replied the Grasshopper, “I was busy with more important things, like hugging trees, holding hands and singing Cumba Ya with like-minded people. Unfortunately, these activities are not not prized by the stupid elites that unfairly oppress the lower classes and try to exploit them by such means as having them do meaningless, underpaid work that is beneath their dignity.”

“If you spent the summer singing, holding hands and hugging trees” replied the Ants, “when you should have been planning for the winter and building up your stores to see you and your family through the winter, you can’t do better than spend the winter dancing.” And they chuckled and went on with their work.

The grasshopper, who was a very sensitive sort, was deeply offended by the selfishness and intransigence of these wealthy ants who were unwilling to provide their fair share to support the less fortunate members of the community, like himself. “You did not build the corn you reaped through your avariciousness over the summer while more enlightened people than you were hard at work exploring their sensual and artistic natures. You did not cause it to rain, or the sun to shine, or the bees to pollinate the nascent crops. You simply reaped the benefit of the bounty of nature that belongs to everyone and greedily attempted to keep for yourself a harvest provided not by your work but by the grace of mother earth. You are thieves, hoarders, and selfish beasts that would take for yourselves that which nature provides for all of her children in equal measure.” He then stormed off, while the ants shook their heads, smiled and returned to their work.

Later that day, the grasshopper returned with hoards of like-minded people seething about the outrage and disrespect shown them by the selfish, cruel, heartless ants. They fell upon the ants beating them senseless, took the greater part of their harvest and burned what they could not take to teach these evil little ants a lesson, all the while chanting:”Yes we can,” “power to the people,” “no justice no peace” and a range of similarly catchy phrases as they beat the selfish ants, liberated their food stores and burned the rest. It was a great day for grasshoppers who danced into the night around the bonfires of their victory.

That winter, the ants starved, as did the grasshoppers who had gorged themselves upon the liberated stores of the selfish ants in a few days of round-the-clock partying and soon exhausted them, and could find no succor from the other free spirits in their village. As their last act, they gathered, held hands, hugged a tree and sang in unison their final song: “It is all the fault of the stupid ants who brought their destruction upon their heads and ours through their selfish unwillingness to share their hoarded bounty. Stupid, selfish, egotistical, greedy little ants. All their fault. All their fault. If only they had been as enlightened as we.”

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Victor D. Lopez [Originally posted by me in Publisheduthors.org]

Last Amazon giveaway for February: Eternal Quest

On its surface, this speculative fiction short story (7,800 words) deals with one man’s obsessive quest for knowledge and the devastating price he must pay for the knowledge he ultimately acquires. Beneath the surface, this story is about deep friendships complicated by unrequited love, split loyalties, the interplay of id, ego and superego, (or Plato’s appetites, reason and the spirited element that Freud “borrowed” and “re-labeled”) and existentialist lessons learned much too late in life.

It is about looking for truth and meaning in all the wrong places and about the deep tragedy of misdirected efforts in the single-minded pursuit of all the wrong things. It is also about love, and the noble and often tragic self-sacrifice that true friendship requires, about the pain of unrequited love and split loyalties, and ultimately the very real tragedy of too many lives spent in the single-minded pursuit of lesser important things. Nothing else I have ever written since those happy, productive days as a college sophomore means more to me, and it remains little changed from the original.

Please enter for a chance to win a free copy and/or share the following link with anyone whom you believe may enjoy a short story that sums up what I believe to be the meaning of life in both fiction and fact. You can enter here:  https://giveaway.amazon.com/p/f3da20911647f3f8 . Thank you!

 

Intellectual Property Law: A Practical Guide to Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks and Trade Secrets

The paperback and eBook versions are available for libraries to purchase with  library discounts for the eBook version. Please consider recommending it to your local library. Libraries can order the $8.99 eBook for $6.99 through one of my distributors so it won’t break the bank. The list price of the paperback is $18.95 though distributors can price it lower or higher as they see fit. A giveaway for the Kindle version of the book in the U.S. is currently underway as well here: https://giveaway.amazon.com/p/d07a803485634cb0. A final giveaway for my Mindscapes short story collection is also still live here: https://giveaway.amazon.com/p/57bef69f6b727c97. Thank you for your interest!

Poetry reading – free verse

Here is a link to a long poem on my dad’s passing – Unsung Heroes: Felipe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMhHLYK92Js

Sample poetry and short story readings

Here is a link to a few poetry readings and a short story reading from my Mindscapes and Of Pain and Ecstasy books: YouTube

 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGA9...

 

Intellectual Property Law Trailer

I just posted a trailer with my reading of the general introduction  on copyright law from my Intellectual Property Law: A Practical Guide to Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks and Trade Secrets. The book is intended as a general reference or particular interest to authors, artists, librarians, entrepreneurs and anyone who would like to know more about a very interesting but complex subject. Unlike my law related college textbooks, this book is aimed at the general public. The video also provides some front matter from the book and additional biographical information about me an details about my books, textbooks and scholarly articles. You can access it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2XQFQbzG3c.

Is it time for Congress to regulate sub-prime lenders legally charging interest rates higher than loan sharks?

Almost all states today restrict the maximum rate of interest that may be charged to a borrower by a creditor with the maximum rate often varying depending on the type of borrower involved, the amount borrowed and the purpose of the loan with wide-ranging differences among the states as to the maximum interest rate applicable to a variety of loans. The federal government has never imposed a general restriction on usury in the United States, leaving it up to the states to regulate the matter as they see fit. With the exception of loans to active duty military personnel and their dependents for whom a maximum interest rate of 36 percent is imposed by federal law, Congress has been more concerned with mandating transparency as to the cost of credit transactions than with regulating interest rates or fees as such. The Truth in Lending Act (TILA), for example, requires lenders to provide to consumers detailed information about the cost of credit that includes not only interest, points, and related charges but also service or carrying charges, any loan fee or finder’s fee, fees for investigation or credit reports, credit insurance fees, broker fees charged to the borrower, and insurance premiums included in the finance charge. Thus the emphasis is on providing credit to consumers with full disclosure rather than on protecting consumers from unfair or even unreasonable credit terms (with the noted exception of active duty personnel and their covered dependents.)

Nevertheless, federal law does impact state usury laws in ways that undermine or negate state efforts to protect their citizens against usurious contracts. Nationally chartered banks and lenders sponsored by Native American tribes, for example, are excluded from state regulation. This has allowed some lenders to completely skirt state usury laws and in many cases charge interest rates that are higher than those imposed by illegal loan sharks. And many of these sub-prime lenders target the most desperate and least informed consumers, saddling them by design with loans that they can never repay. Among these lenders, payday loan lenders have attracted the most scrutiny, though at present there is little that states can do to protect citizens within their borders from such lenders who are eitehr federally chartered or aligned with Native American tribes.

For a full discussion of this issue, you can access the full text of my recently published article by clicking on teh following link: López, V. D. When Lenders can Legally Provide Loans with Effective Interest Rates Above 1,000 Percent, Is it Time for Congress to Consider a Federal Interest Cap on Consumer Loans? Notre Dame Journal of Legislation (Vol. 42, Issue 1) 2016.

Is it time for the U.S. to adopt the world-standard “loser pays” rule for civil litigation?

The United States has the dubious distinction of being the most litigious nation on earth. We have more lawyers per capita than most every other nation as well. If memory serves, only Spain has more lawyers as a percentage of its population than the U.S. Perhaps one reason is that unlike in the U.S. where the study of law requires three years above the baccalaureate degree for would-be lawyers to earn their Juris Doctor degree, Spain dispenses with the liberal arts/humanities core and requires only a four-year degree where law is the preeminent subject of study. Spain also allows graduates to practice law without the equivalent of a bar exam upon successful graduation–and they can practice not only throughout the country (no regional licensure is required) and can also advise clients throughout the European Union, not just those in Spain.

The reasons for our litigiousness are not cultural as some would have us believe; rather, it is a direct result of our adversarial common law system with its complexity and unpredictability in contrast to the civil law system utilized throughout most of the world. One aspect of our legal system that further exacerbates litigiousness is our departure in colonial times from the world-standard loser-pays system whereby the prevailing party’s legal fees are paid in whole or in part by the loser. In the U.S. each party to litigation has to bear the cost of paying for their own lawyer, win or lose. Defenders of the “American System” base their arguments largely on the basis of access to justice; that is to say, they argue that adopting the “loser pays” world standard (that we refer to as the British system mostly to obfuscate the fact that it is the world standard, not just a competing system used by one county) would prevent persons with limited resources from accessing the courts to seek redress of wrongs for fear of having to pay the other party’s reasonable lawyer’s fees as well as their own if they lose. The obvious counterargument is that the ends of justice are not served by people pursuing weak claims, and that it is unjust to have parties sued by plaintiffs with weak, dubious claims to have to bear the cost of lawyer’s bills they would not have incurred but for a system that encourages litigation by insulating plaintiffs and defendants from suing or defending claims they have no reasonable hope of winning.

An interesting and telling historical fact that is often lost in the debate is that the American system whereby each litigant pays for heir own lawyer regardless of whether they win or lose in court is that it was adopted purely as a means of increasing lawyers’ fees and encouraging litigation when colonial lawyers argued for the removal of statutorily mandated fees. They wanted to be able to charge what the market would bear but feared losing revenue if the then-prevailing loser pays system was kept in place as both plaintiffs and defendants might balk at litigating what would become significantly more expensive claims due to fees that would no longer be set by statute but by each lawyer as he/she saw fit. The solution was simple: invent the American system whereby each person would be responsible “only” for their own legal fees and not the prevailing party’s legal fees in the event they ended up on the losing end of a lawsuit. That was a simple, elegant solution that had nothing to do with access to justice but rather was implemented to serve the interests of lawyers; it was a rule created for, of and by lawyers to serve their self-interest. And we are now saddled by it as a society, in my view at least.

In 2014, a friend and colleague and I co-authored an article that is now available online. You can read more about the issue and our proposed solution by clicking on the name of the article here: Leading the World in the Wrong Direction: Is It Time for the United States to Adopt the World Standard “Loser Pays” Rule in Civil Litigation?, Victor D. López and Eugene T. Maccarrone, North east Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 32, (Fall 2014).

Free Science Fiction Short Story Download

Until the end of the month, you can download my short story “End of Days” in most eBook formats here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/428812.

This is one of the ten short stories in Mindscapes: Ten Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction Short Stories (C) 2014 by Victor D. López.

This short story poses a novel theory as to the role of black holes in both the creation and destruction of an endless number of universes that coexist in an incomprehensibly complex multiverse. It is a cautionary tale about the arrogance of scientists who are the cosmic equivalent of amoebas attempting to discern the secrets of the universe by thoroughly examining within the limits of their perception the drop of pond scum they inhabit. It is also a cautionary tale about the ability of determined, well-funded terrorists to begin the process that will lead to the destruction of our corner of the multiverse by the creative use of materials at their disposal.

The end is very, very near and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.

You can also enter a giveaway for a free copy of the Kindle version of my Mindscapes short story collection here: https://giveaway.amazon.com/p/57bef69f6b727c97. And you can even get a free copy of the Audible audiobook version with a free, no risk one month trial membership in Audible by clicking here: Free Mindscapes Audiobook.