Nathaniel Dean James's Blog, page 8
April 23, 2014
Food For Thought # 002
Book Review – Power Hungry
Is Britain a Racist Nation?
I couldn’t help but laugh while listening to some of the callers on BBC Radio 4 this afternoon as they proclaimed that the UK Independence Party and its recent spate of provocative electioneering proved that they are racists. I don’t know if they’re racists or not, but if they are, their stand on immigration isn’t the smoking gun some seem to think it is.
Immigration is a problem in Europe. But as UKIP rightly points out, it’s not a social problem, but a policy problem. As far as I can see, nobody is blaming those who choose to come to Britain in search of better wages and living conditions. That a person living in Poland or the Czech Republic might decide to up stakes and cross the open border into a country where their chances of earning a living wage are much higher is not some mysterious behavioral abnormality or sign of aggression, but the perfectly rational act of a sane human being. The real question is why, after two decades of “union”, is this still such an obvious choice for those who are making it?
I think the real issue is the fact that in opening its internal borders, the European Union is leveling only a small part of the playing field, while disparities that are harder to overcome, such as wages, prices and economic performance, remain unbalanced. Under such circumstances, the inevitable outcome is obvious enough. The question isn’t, why are people flooding to London in search of opportunity, by why isn’t this also happening in Warsaw or Prague? The answer, dare I say it, is more likely to be found in Berlin.
Lest we forget, the EU was originally conceived as a means of breaking down barriers to trade by the two nations who stood to benefit most from such an arrangement, Germany and France, on the benevolent pretext of staving off another war. By “barriers to trade” we mean, of course, tariffs on French and German exports. Britain, on the other hand, was not a party to the original arrangement and has never been very well positioned to take advantage of it in the way its continental “equals” have. Britain did not so much joined the union as slowly surrender to it as a consequence of its own economic descent. This disparity in historic advantage accounts for much of the political opposition to the EU in Britain today. Margaret Thatcher, for all her faults, understood well that London would surrender political power to Brussels at a considerably higher price than most, in so far as it already owed much less to the arrangement, and thus had more to loose.
In the current economic climate, of course, the proverbial chickens have come home for everyone, and by extension, more of them will inevitably be roosting in Britain. By contrast, Germany, which has been riding the wave of European prosperity for several decades, is in the unenviable position of having to admit it.
As for immigration into Britain, the problem, in so far as it is a problem, is not so much a matter of current political trends as the inevitable outcome of several decades of history. As such, there is not much anyone can do about it. Britain may be suffering economically, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with an influx of foreign labor. The animosity surrounding the question of immigration, on the other hand, is essentially a reaction to the collision of two opposing trends in the wake of global economic stagnation, neither of which is really understood by those shaking their fists and preaching their frustration.
Racism is what it has always been – the incoherent ramblings of a small cohort of narrow minded dilettantes whose limited and superficial understanding of the world in general damns them to a life of eternal and blind frustration. That such people sometime succeed in stirring the masses to echo some note of their sentiments should not be misinterpreted to mean they are sympathetic to them, but only confused and unsure in which direction to vent their anger.
Britain is no more a racist nation than it is a Christian one. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that Britain is among the most tolerant and open nations in the world. UKIP’s stance on immigration, while partly justified, is also naive, in that it is trying to isolate an issue that is only one aspect of a much broader picture. Even the suggestion that leaving Europe would be a solution is misleading because it implies that it could be done at all. The only way to leave the EU in 2014 is never to have joined it in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a UKIP supporter, and certainly won’t be voting for them. But I don’t think their stance is racist just because it touches on a subject that is regularly hijacked by the extreme right in the pursuit of its own nefarious objectives. True, both sides are blinkered, but for very different reasons.
April 22, 2014
Review – The Americans (TV Series)
Title: The Americans
Creator: Joe Weisberg
Network: FX
Cast: Keri Russel, Mathew Rhys, Noah Emmerich (for full cast see the IMDB page)
My rating: 8/10
Review: Good television is like rocking horse manure. In fact, other than The wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Southland, I can’t think of any TV shows I’d waste my time watching these days. I have since added The Americans to this list.
Now nearing the end of its second season, The Americans is a period drama set in the United States during the height of the Cold War. It centers on an all-American family living in the suburbs of Washington D.C., the patrons of which are in fact a Soviet spy cell, and the hectic business of keeping up appearances while remaining at the beck and call of their increasingly ambitious, and often unreasonable, handlers in the Kremlin.
While it’s difficult to gauge just how true-to-life events in the show are, The Americans has certainly managed to set itself apart from the naive and often ridiculously simplistic format so characteristic of most contemporary television. A fact that probably owes much to its creator, a former CIA officer himself.
But what really sets the show apart is its focus on the human side of the equation. Far from being the only consideration, the complexities of international espionage are often overshadowed by the equally tricky job of raising two teenage children in a country still coming to terms with its own internal upheavals and generational tensions.
As for the acting, the show is well cast and there are no weak links, another aspect that serves to set it apart from many of its contemporaries. The production is also above par, with everything from the cars and clothing to the soundtrack in keeping with the era. In fact, I couldn’t help wondering where they managed to get their hands on so much vintage Detroit steel from a period practically defined by a glut of the collective imagination.
In conclusion, if you’re looking for a clever way to kill some downtime, you could do worse. Unfortunately, Netflix has yet to discover this little gem, but you can watch it on Amazon Instant Video, Vudu and iTunes. The first season is also available on DVD and Blu-ray.
Origin – Season One (free sample)
Below you will find the complete first chapter of my novel, Origin – Season One. The book is a thriller. Dare I say, in the mould of Ludlum’s Bourne trilogy? Well, not quite, but almost. This post is primarily intended as the target of links in other places, but should you come across it by happenstance, please do not hesitate to dive in with unbridled curiosity.
Chapter 1
Federal Reserve Bank New York, New York Friday 14 July 2006 1600 EDT
Gert Dekker wiped the sweat from his brow with the palm of one hand and took another step toward the curb. The nervous tic in his right eye gave him the odd appearance of a man staring at a flashing disco ball. His attention was fixed on the intersection of Nassau and Liberty Street, where the motley parade of afternoon traffic continued to inch forward under the pitiless sun of a Manhattan summer. Now slowly suffocating inside his wool suit, he had resolved to turn and go back inside when he saw the car.
It was hard to miss.
Unlike most embassies in post 9/11 New York, the Zambians still thought it was a good idea to fly the national flag on their cars. The white S-Class Mercedes pulled to a stop at the curb, and a young man in a chauffeur’s uniform got out to open the door for his passenger.
The man who emerged from the car was blacker than the history of Europe and towered a full eight inches above Dekker. He wore a navy suit and a white shirt with a blood-red tie. His hair was cropped in a flattop that made him look more like an action figure than a diplomat.
“Mr. Ambassador, it’s a pleasure to see you again,” Dekker said.
The ambassador flashed him a shark’s grin, but ignored Dekker’s outstretched hand. He stepped aside to let his assistant out, a thin, bespectacled man carrying a dark brown alligator-skin briefcase.
“Right this way, Ambassador,” Dekker said.
Two guards joined them inside the lobby and Dekker led the small procession toward a row of polished brass elevator doors at the end of the hall. One of the guards took a key-card from his breast pocket and inserted it into the slot below the buttons on the panel. A moment later the radio on his hip squawked. “You’re clear for Sub Two.”
“Gentlemen,” Dekker said, “I’ll have to ask you to wait here until we’ve opened the vault. I’ll be back to escort you down as soon as we’re ready.”
The ambassador clearly didn’t like the idea of waiting but voiced no protest.
The sublevel antechamber was a narrow room about twenty feet wide. Four marble pillars ran up the corners to a domed ceiling decorated in a series of murals of Greek or Roman origin. It gave the room the eerie feel of a mausoleum. In contrast, the vault doors were modern. Not the round steel doors you might expect to find in one of the oldest banks in the country, but square and made of brushed titanium. The seam between the frame and the doors was barely a millimeter wide, and there were no visible hinges.
Dekker removed a chain from his neck and inserted a small toothless key into the panel beside the door.
“Allied Bishop Control, go ahead.”
“Vice President Gert Dekker. I need access to 2-A, please,” Dekker said.
“Please scan in, sir.”
Dekker placed his thumb onto the small rectangle next to the screen.
“Thank you, Mr. Dekker.”
Somewhere inside the wall an electric motor began to turn, and the entire door moved out of its frame as if levitating. It extended about a foot, then began to rise, revealing two large hydraulic arms that pushed the heavy door up from the inside.
As both men watched the door rise the indifference on their faces gave way to a look of stupid incomprehension. They leaned forward like a well-practiced double act, then rose again as the door ascended to eye level and finally came to a stop several inches above the opening.
Dekker walked toward the open door the way a man might approach a sleeping creature of unknown temperament. He glanced back at the guard. “Get the chairman down here.”
When the guard didn’t move, Dekker shouted, “Do it. Now! And get rid of the ambassador.”
The guard ran back to the elevator. Dekker stepped into the vault, his eyes still fixed on the wall. Something toppled over beneath his foot and rolled across the room. Dekker’s eyes followed it. It hit the far wall with a soft clang, and he saw it was a spray can. Several feet above it, written in two rows of large clumsy red letters were the words “SED QUIS CUSTODIET IPOS CUSTODES?” In some places the paint had run all the way down to the marble floor and formed small pools.
Dekker knelt and picked up the can. There was a sheet of paper fastened to it with a rubber band. When he unfolded it, a small memory card dropped to the floor. Dekker knelt to pick up the card. He recognized it as a standard SD card, the same one his own digital camera used. He scanned the safety deposit boxes along the wall, but saw no sign that any of them had been opened.
The paper was a printout of the vault’s 120 deposit boxes, complete with the names of their owners. At the bottom someone had written the words “Back Off” followed by a long line of numbers that meant nothing to him.
Dekker was too shocked to hear the guard return.
“Sir, the chairman is on his way. What the hell is going on?”
Dekker turned to him, his eyes vacant, uncomprehending. “We’re fucked, Andy. That’s what’s going on. We’ve just been fucked.”
I know, I know, two swear words in one sentence, right? It violates more than one common-sense principle of good writing. Blame Dekker. He’s the one who said it.
If you are sufficiently intrigued to carry on, you will find the complete book at a very reasonable price here. Failing that, the book will be free on Amazon during two days in May, although the exact two have yet to be established. I will post the dates here on my blog as soon as I have them.
Food For Thought # 001
“Three quarters of the world economy is built on promises to pay with money whose value is to be derived from assets that do not, and never will, exist.”
-Stuart Mitchell Rainey
Adventures in Publishing – Week 10
Alas, the time has come to see about throwing some money at the problem of marketing. In aid of this I have spent all day harvesting advice on the subject from the four corners of the web. My preliminary conclusion is that using a paid ad on http://www.bookbub.com in combination with a two-day free giveaway through Amazon KDP Select is by far the best way to get maximum bang for your buck. This is good because two days is all I have left. The other three evaporated in early March as I blindly charged ahead with my first free giveaway only days after publication with absolutely no marketing behind it whatsoever. I still remember how impressed I was by the second day as over two hundred people downloaded my book. In retrospect, this is quite hilarious. I have since learned that 10 to 15 thousand downloads is what you might call a modestly successful run. Lesson? If you don’t tell people where to stop and look, chances are they’ll keep right on walking.
Oh well. I don’t mind being stupid once. Being stupid twice is a different matter. Assuming the boys and girls at Bookbub find my offering a good fit, the two day promotion will go ahead in the first two weeks of May (I have left the dates flexible to garner maximum favor). I have also made a list of lesser forums on which to announce these two historic days when the time comes.
The other piece of wisdom I gleamed from my investigation was that a free listing should be “chased down” by a follow-up promotion for the priced book. For this too I have assembled a list of possible candidates. All in, the budget for this experiment will be around $600-700. I will publish a detailed list of the services I used and the results in a later post in this series.
Wish me luck!
April 16, 2014
Book Review – Postwar
Author: Tony Judt
Title: Postwar – A History of Europe Since 1945
Available at: Amazon
My Rating: Excellent *****
Synopsis by publisher: “Almost a decade in the making , this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world’s most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy.”
My Review: A lot has been written about Europe between 1939 and 1945. Indeed, a lot went on in those years that would have a profound effect on the future of the European continent, and the world. But just what were those effects? In this masterpiece of narration, historian Tony Judt takes the reader on a journey from the ashes of 1945 right up to the middle of the 1980′s that is both enthralling in its detail and brilliantly written. True, the author is at times quite-single minded in his views on certain topics, but one can hardly expect an author to remain entirely neutral throughout a work of this scope. That said, I had no trouble distinguishing fact from opinion.
What really captivated me about this book is the sheer scope of what is covered. Far from concentrating on the west, Judt takes us behind the iron curtain, providing a clear and vivid picture not only of events, but attitudes, mindset and the thinking behind much of the cold war and its effect on both sides of the divide.
In summary, of all the books I have read on this period, this one is by far the most comprehensive. It is also written in a way that is guaranteed to captivate the reader, something that cannot be claimed by all of its contemporaries. As for who should read it, I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the state of modern Europe and the path which has led us to where we are today.
Brain Theory – The Great Myth Of Our Time
There is perhaps no greater insult to a man than the assertion that everything he is, every fiber of his being, every idea he has ever had, and everything he has ever felt, is really just an elaborate chemistry experiment taking place between his ears. The very idea is an insult. And yet otherwise rational human beings are gravitating toward this absurdity in ever growing numbers. That it is an absurdity, and not a proven scientific fact, should be obvious to anyone who hasn’t surrendered their right of empirical observation to the self-elected congress of wishful thinking currently presiding over the field of neuroscience. If you actually listen to what they are saying, there is only one thing on which everyone involved can agree: no one has any workable idea how to put the theory into practice. To borrow the words of William Shakespeare, it’s “a lot of ado about nothing”.
This inconvenient little factoid is not broadly advertised, and understandably so. When it comes to public perception, sometimes a campaign of silence is the best way to let a myth proliferate. What we do see is a lot of touching enthusiasm, most of it spoon-fed to us in popular media, about the latest “breakthrough” in cognitive science. These frequent soundbites all follow the same pattern. Some experiment conducted at the university of wherever suggesting that people whose names begin with the letter D are more likely to become dentists than astronauts because their brains demand it, or how mice prefer wine to water if you speak French to them. The two constants that probably escape most people listening to these “advances” are the words think and believe. As in “scientists think they may have….” or “it is now widely believed that this could change the way we look at…”.
It is true that the scientific process often begins with a hypothesis. This is then followed by an indefinite period of research aimed at proving or disproving it. The difference here is that the assumptions made about the brain have all but cast the second part of the experiment aside. In any other field this would be considered the height of folly. But the brain lobby is proving uniquely adept at overcoming its own lack of honest success. So much so that while the rest of us where scratching our heads, an entire field of medicine has cropped up around the speculation about gray matter.
Don’t believe me? Try this paragraph. I found it on the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ website:
How do they work? [antidepressants]
“We don’t know for certain, but we think that antidepressants work by increasing the activity of certain chemicals work in our brains called neurotransmitters. They pass signals from one brain cell to another. The chemicals most involved in depression are thought to be Serotonin and Noradrenaline.”
Or how about this one from the website of the British National Health Service:
How antidepressants work
“It is thought antidepressants work by increasing levels of a group of chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters. Certain neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and noradrenaline, can improve mood and emotion, although this process is not fully understood.
Increasing levels of neurotransmitters can also disrupt pain signals sent by nerves, which may explain why some antidepressants can help relieve long-term pain.”
You can spend all day looking at the official answers to this question, but they won’t change. Yet by 2018, the market for antidepressants in the United States will reach 13.4 billion dollars despite growing evidence they are no more effective in the treatment of mental illness than placebos.
So the question begs: if there is no real proof that the brain is the source of human cognizance and behavior, both favorable and not, why are we being led to believe it anyway. Personally, I can think of about 13.4 billion reasons the industry might want you to swallow the company line.
The next time you see another cheerleading exercise on the five o’clock news about the latest breakthrough in the understanding of human behavior you might want to make a point of finding out where the money for the project came from. Following the money is often a good way of getting to the root of certain human behavior, and it will get you there a lot quicker than a brain scan.
April 15, 2014
Here We Go Again – Tech Bubble 2: Social Media
It would seem that the only thing you need if you want to invest in the stock market these days is a terminal case of amnesia. Luckily for Wall Street, there seems to be a pandemic of it sweeping through the investor class in 2014. The fact that interest rates have effectively been negative for the last six years isn’t helping either. The result is predictable enough. It can be expressed in a simple calculation.
Free money + stock market = bubble
What’s truly astounding about this new episode, however, is that no one seems to care. Far from being repentant about its attempt to assassinate the world economy in the lead up to 2008, the banking cartel seems more defiant than ever in its determination to resurrect a house of cards on Wall Street. Nowhere is this more evident than in the frenzy of mutual self-delusion surrounding social online media.
The idea that Facebook, effectively an elaborate internet messaging service, is today valued at just under 175 billion dollars is a fiction so blatantly removed form reality that it’s hard to know whether to laugh, cry, or just jump off a bridge and be done with it. To put this into perspective, McDonald’s, one of the most iconic brands in the world, not to mention an actual business, is worth less than 100 billion dollars. Other “lagers behind” include Disney at 136 billion, Amazon at 114, At&T at 185, and Toyota at 149.
And Facebook is by no means alone. Twitter is apparently worth 25 billion dollars, while poorer cousins Linked In and Pinterest are worth 1o and 8 billion respectively. And if you missed the boat on these “bargains” you can always put your money into Candy Crush, whose maker, King Games, recently entered the market with a valuation of 7 billion. Failing that, there’s the online takeaway ordering service Just Eat, which, if you recently won the lottery at the expense of your mind, is said to be worth 1.5 billion dollars.
True, if you had thrown a big chunk of your hard earned cash at Amazon, Google or eBay when they first appeared you might now be reading this on your luxury yacht in the Seychelles. But there is a fundamental difference in the historic potential of these companies and the current crop of online hopefuls. They may all be based on the internet, but that is where the similarities end. Amazon and eBay sell things. Not through annoying and largely ignored banner adds, but as an actual vendor or broker of tangible goods. Google, in turn, is a vendor (Nexus phones), a software developer (Android), and an advertising giant through its innovative and hugely successful AdWords and AdSense platforms. These companies sell products and services directly to consumers and have huge and growing market share. In contrast, social media providers, while they may be growing, rely almost entirely on advertising. Much of it, ironically, for Amazon and eBay.
As with tech bubble one, the thing that seems to get both brokers and investors so excited is the numbers. Not dollars and cents necessarily, but people. Facebook has 1.3 billion active users. Twitter has just under half of that, while Amazon has only about 30 million regular customers. Yet at the end of 2013 Amazon made a profit of $0.66 from everyone one of these on average, while Facebook walked away with just $0.04 per head. Or to put it differently, Amazon made a profit of 20 billion dollars while Facebook made only 6. To understand just how absurd this situation is, if every man, woman and child on the planet was a Facebook user, and it managed to innovate a way to double its earnings per user, it would still be a less profitable enterprise than Amazon. Incidentally, such a rise would, at least in theory, make the company worth over a trillion dollars on paper in accordance with current thinking.
The problem is in the multiples. It was once generally held, and rightly so, that a company’s price-to-earnings ratio should realistically be around 10-1. Which is to say, a company should not really be valued at over ten times its annual earnings. Apple, for example, has a current PE ratio of 13.12. AT&T has a PE ration of 14.14. Kraft Foods, in contrast, is sitting a little high at 21.45. But these are all sober valuations when we look at Facebook, whose current PE ration is 98.15. This is what you might call nosebleed territory, or 10% optimism and 90% pure speculative madness.
If share price is a reflection of investor confidence in the potential of a company to grow, it’s difficult to see just where all this growth in the social media sector is going to come from. Perhaps analysts are factoring in the possibility that space travel will open up markets on other planets, or that the world itself will end before investors regain their wits and begin looking around for the exit signs. Who knows.
The simple fact is that like all bubbles, this one will burst eventually. When it does, you can count on two things: a lot of innocent bystanders will be standing inside the blast radius, and few of them will have seen it coming. The ones who did will have cashed out by then and used the proceeds to bet on the inevitable crash.
Alas, such is life in the “grow or die” economy, which has been on a collision course with the real world for the best part of a century now. It stands to argue that when real growth becomes elusive, an institution addicted to multiplication must necessarily turn to fantasy and empty hope to fulfill its needs. That regulators and politicians alike are willing to stand back and let delusion win the day is a testament to just how much we have come to rely on wishful thinking as an alternative to actual problem solving and the painful choices such a path would entail.
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