This is really interesting … if you’ve ever wondered how much authors make on books. Dan Brown probably pays for a pack of cigarettes with a million dollar bill, but not so much the others.

Lynn Viehl wrote a book called Twilight Fall. It made the New York Times best seller list (news to this snooty liberal). But she’s promised readers of her blog that she would show them the inside part of the book publishing business.

She did so, revenue statement and everything.

It is very interesting. She only made about thirty grand. I have a book deep inside me, wanting to get out. If my book were a movie script, it would be called “Straight to DVD”.

Inside me. That’s where the book will stay.

You’re welcome.

The Muslim faith is widely scourged here in the land of the free, as people are inclined to be provincial and project their own evil onto others. (I’m way above that sort of thing myself, mind you.) But if you set aside the jihads and seven virgins waiting (just as Christians should set aside virgin births and Revelations), it has some appealing features.

Among these features are avoidance of alcohol, daily prayer rituals, and a severe mandate that those who accumulate wealth must share with those who are less fortunate.

They also have some weird stuff, just as other religions do, concerning diet, clothing and travel. Food restrictions probably came from a time when they made sense, as with Jews who avoided crustacean seafood, which could be deadly poisonous. And the pilgrimage to Mecca is a wasted vacation, as far as I am concerned. I’d much rather go to Arizona and watch spring training.

What set me off on this was some reading I did this morning by Loretta Napoleoni in her book Rogue Economics. I’ve just been triggered to learn more about it, and can’t begin to be useful here, but she was writing about Sharia Economics, which has its roots in the Qur’an.

The concept of “interest”, or money making money on money, is outlawed in Islamic societies, though in practice they cannot avoid it, since western economics sets the table for them.

The ideal behind the concept is that wealth is the product of labor, and that payment of money must be done in return for good or services, and not merely because someone holds financial investments. It is so foreign to Westerners that we automatically dismiss the idea as impractical. But events are leading many of the Islamic faith down a non-western path.

Napoleoni specifically writes about two events: The Asian collapse of 1996, and the aftermath of 9/11/2001.

The former was brought about by flight of capital from South Korea, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. (The latter two are heavily Muslim.) It is a classic example of too much power in too few hands, and the inability ot nation states to control the flow of capital. Those countries were devastated by the collapse, and are yet to recover. One country, Malaysia, decided to abandon Western economics, and turn to the Sharia form. It limped along for a while, and of course was shunned by the IMF, which waited for it to regain its senses. In recent years, it has attracted Muslim capital, and the country is performing quite well.

The other event was 9/11, and the ominous “War on Terror”, which many Muslims regarded as a mere witch hunt. It caused many wealthy Muslims to withdraw from the world scene, and seek to close the walls and build their own economies, free of Adam Smith, Alan Greenspan, and the IMF.

The brief chapter I read this morning was just a trigger, and it’s a whole new area for me – I invite readers here to spill their knowledge on us – if you can add some expertise to these ramblings, I can simply put up a post under your name and let you have at it.

Please add your two bits. In the meantime, it’s a whole new avenue for me.

I’ve had some rumblings that point to yet another awakening, meaning that it is time to move on.

We have a young relative who is in the advertising business, and who is currently faced with the choice of working for an agency in a new city, Chicago, or working for an old employer whom he has left twice for greener pastures, or venturing out and forming a new ad agency with some like-minded cohorts.

I don’t know what his future holds. But when we sit with him, he talks about it, pesters us with questions, asks for our input. We are careful not to offer advice. We only ask him to consider this or that, to ferret out his own thoughts.

His thought processes are intertwined around conversations with others. That’s how he processes information.

For others, it is a ruminative process. Thinking is hard work, but some can do it while sitting in a chair looking out the window. They organize thoughts, create strategies, and then act. It’s quite a gift, but doesn’t come about by accident. These people are usually highly educated and have worked very hard at learning how to think. While education for most of us is a tool of enslavement, for these people, it is a path to freedom.

For myself, I’m an odd duck. I think with my fingers. I sit down to write and most times do not know what awaits. Often it is a revelation to myself. That’s why I regard writing not as labor, but rather as recreation. Our old and departed friend Bob Garner had a blog for a while, and was tortured by the thought that he had to write something every day. He quickly gave it up. For me, it is a privilege, and even if I have 300 readers or sixty (which is where it currently sits), I love doing it.

Here are the rumblings:

I was down at Pearl Street Mall here in Boulder last week, and remembered a place I had long forgotten: Left Hand Book Store. It’s down a flight of stairs, nested away. I was there when we visited some years ago, and thought it would be a privilege to live in a town that had such a store. Back then, I walked out with an armload of books. Last week, I could not find one book that even remotely grabbed me. I have no use for the Buddha, am not interested in the slaughter of the Native American population. Michael Parenti is a pseudo if ever there was one. Left wing economics is Utopian nonsense. And Chomsky … well, I admire the man and thank him for his many volumes, but he is old and his time has passed.

(Chomsky’s most important work, that I beleive should be read and digested by all, is The Responsibility of Intellectuals. (I do not presume to be one. I offer that up because most of that breed spend their lives in service of power. Their efforts do not serve human freedom, which is the proper function of education.))

The other incident was some volunteer work I do. Bob McChesney hosts a program on public radio in Urbana, Illinois called Media Matters. He’s a well known author, and consequently gets the most incredible guests, from Chomsky to Richard Dawkins Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein to … Albert to Zinn, I guess. I transcribe the program that airs on the fourth Sunday of each month. I’ve been very lucky – I have gotten Wendell Potter and Gore Vidal and Chris Hedges, and each was fun.

Last time I got Michael Albert. He’s an old lefty, and went on and on about a new society he dreams about, with empowered workers and shared wealth, free minds and free bodies. I first ran into Albert in the early nineties, and found him boring then. Here he is, two decades later, no closer to fruition, and unchanged. He still thinks it’s gonna happen. He still doesn’t understand people.

How can so much life pass by without learning a thing or two?

I take some pride in knowing that my life has been movement … from nothing to right-winger-states-rights to Reagan Republican to nothing to Chomsky leftist to Naderite to what I am now: nothing. The list of things I do not believe in is long. I focus my attention on my latest romantic breakup. In relationships we do not go from love to friendship. We go from love to anger to hatred to disinterest.

I’ve been focused on Democrats for a long time. It’s time to treat them with the disinterest they so richly deserve. Things are going to change here at this blog. No more dwelling on the futility of two parties or imagining an enlightened populace. I choose to run in interesting circles, read interesting books, and write about things that fascinate me, learning with every peck of the keyboard.

And no more health care or election fraud or agitprop or body counts. Those battles are long lost (and election fraud itself is so pointless, as even clean elections give us shit). And there is so much more to explore. Life is so much more interesting than that.

I am thankful that I encountered Michael Albert, as he reminds me of how bad (and boring) it can be to be an idealist. There is so much more to life than trying to lift people out of the trenches. Leave them be. I plan from this day forward to do two things: Try to focus on new and interesting stuff while at the same time making fun of right wingers.

It’s my calling.

COSTCO has on display many computers of various prices, all PC’s. I was looking at the one priced at $999.99 this morning, and there was one of those electronic sticky notes up in the corner that said

Check out this sticky note. It’s really cool. Bet it makes you want to spend $1,000 on a crappy computer.

Had to be an Apple guy -they are kind of cultish.

I get a kick out of Rusty Shackleford. I am one of the few people who puts up comments on his blog, and I had to quit because I could never remember either my name or password, and the password recovery system doesn’t work. I am either Mark T or Tomato Guy or Boulder Boy over there, and right now none of the three work.

Anyway, Rusty doesn’t write much – he merely links and puts up things others have written. His commentary is saved for his “topics” at the end of each post. Here’s the list for a piece he put up on talk radio:

Shut Up Hippie
Liberal Shenanigans
Traditional Media
Stupid People Rule!
Media
Zombie Apocalypse
Barack Obama
Stupid things the Left does/says
Liberal Bias

Does that sum it up? His close is always “That is all”.

I’ve given him a hard time – he doesn’t seem to care. He never actually addresses anything head on – he just characterizes things. He’s not deep. He’s not terribly witty. He never links to anyone who isn’t bona fide right wing.

Here’s his comment from over at Left in the West, where some dude Yellowstone Kelly wrote a long piece on how hard it is to run against Denny Rehberg:

There’s a point to this commentary, right?

Anyway, I’ve tried to reason with the guy. I’ve tried to be sympathetic and understand that he is probably young and needs a lot more weathering. Here’s the problem I’m having: He’s likable. He’s unique. He’s unpretentious. He’s not full of himself. He’s refreshing. I get a kick out of him. I’ve got to stop being mean to him.

Weird, eh?

Here is a very interesting piece by Johann Hari on Ayn Rand. Hari is reviewing two new biographies out on her which I plan not to read, Goddess of the Market ,by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller.

I have no intention of delving into Rand’s abhorrent philosophy. It’s enough to say, as Hari does, that it is more psychopathy than philosophy. Rand had some personal characteristics that sprang from a childhood where she was traumatized by Bolsheviks (her father, in frustration, went “on strike”). She viewed the world through the lens of that trauma. But nothing she put forth actually works. We don’t depend on supermen, free markets lead to disaster, no one is self-made, and people need and care for one another. She was wrong about everything.

Hari takes a stab at why she has such appeal in the United States.

Rand expresses, with a certain pithy crudeness, an instinct that courses through us all sometimes: I’m the only one who matters! I’m not going to care about any of you any more! She then absolutizes it in an amphetamine Benzedrine-charged reductio ad absurdum by insisting it is the only feeling worth entertaining, ever.

“All of us” is far more than the United States, where her philosophy enjoys a large following. Why the US?

The founding myth of America is that the nation was built out of nothing, using only reason and willpower. Rand applies this myth to the individual American: You made yourself. You need nobody and nothing except your reason to rise and dominate. You can be America, in one body, in one mind.

I think he’s getting close to it. Most of the Randites I have met have a strut about them, as in “I made it on my own. I am self-made”. It’s self-delusion – these are white guys in a society dominated by white guys, educated in public schools, probably attending land-grant colleges, using public utilities and the commons to their advantage. They don’t know what toughness is. Any minority member could tell them that making it means overcoming difficulties they never really faced.

My favorite line: Hari calls Rand a fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls.

Her disciple, Alan Greenspan, had her aboard at his swearing-in ceremony as he joined the Ford Administration. That was as close as Rand would ever come to the sort of reverence among the elite that she craved. She died alone, abandoned by all who knew her. While it is sad, it is appropriate for the promoter of a philosophy that says we need no one. She lived her dream.

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama:

“It is self-evident that free economic activity in markets invigorates society. But it is also obvious that the idea of letting markets decide everything for the survival of the strongest, or the idea of ‘economic rationalism’ at the expense of people’s lives, does not hold true any more.”

Markets are but a tool at our disposal, but should not be the hammer that nails us.

PS: If Hatoyama can muster the courage to eject the U.S. military bases in Japan and forge stronger ties with Russia, a natural trading partner, then they will have a real leader.

I have never read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. I should try again, but I am either not smart enough or too attention-deprived to struggle through such long bouts of dense prose.

I take comfort in knowing, however, that most who cite him have not read him either, otherwise they would cite passages like this, which I am picking up in Loretta Napoleoni’s Rogue Economics:

Commerce and manufacturing can seldom flourish long in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice, in which people do not feel themselves secure in the possession of their property, in which the faith of contracts is not supported by law, and in which thew authority of the state is not supposed to be regularly employed in enforcing the payment of debts from all those who are able to pay. Commerce and manufacture, in short, can seldom flourish in any state in which there is not a certain degree of confidence in the justice of government.

(Napoleoni is, by the way, an Italian economist and part-time resident of Whitefish, Montana.)

There are other snippets around, as well, that indicate that Smith was well-aware of the effects of power – not evil people – but all people as we behave when we have power over others.

The right wing once took to wearing Adam Smith neckties, a subtle indication to one another that they had absorbed lessons inaccessible to the rest of us, that markets flourish when left alone, and that governments impede markets, even impoverish and enslave us if left unchecked.

As Smith points out, without government, there are no markets to flourish. What we have is chaos and tyranny. That is where unregulated markets naturally lead us, as we seemingly have to learn again, and again, and again …

As my old Aristotlean football coach used to say, all things in moderation. (Yeah, that’s right – an Aristotlean football coach, an oxymoron.) Many on the right think those of us who see government as an essential part of a flourishing economy as weak people, unable to compete, fearful of freedom.

But our personal characteristics really have very little to do with any thinking about these matters. It’s not about cowardice or entrepreneurship, desk-slavery and job “security” versus risk-taking. Most people are natural followers – that’s our tribal heritage. That’s why we have survived and flourished.

It’s about living in a climate where we are protected from excess. Government can do that for us. But when government gets out of hand, as many say it did in the post-war era, we were able to vote out the people who gave us that philosophy, and usher in the era of deregulation, tax cuts, and wealth concentration.

The problem that I see now is that we don’t have the power to usher out the people that we ushered in. They have power over us, and are not going to let it go. They control the media, most of the government, the corporations and both political parties (we are only allowed two). These “free” market patrons have given us bubbles and meltdowns, unfettered greed, preventive wars, massive debt and a seeming desire to undo every good thing that came out of the New Deal.

That’s the tyranny of private power. Oddly, it is harder to dislodge than tyrannical government. That is a contradiction, on the right wing anyway.

Over here on the left, we get it. And we don’t need to wear ugly ties to demonstrate it.

What do we have left?

We have a few tools. We can still use our government-provided courts and sue the bastards, and occasionally win. (That’s why “trial lawyers” are so despised. They are a countervailing power.) We can strike, boycott, sabotage. We can organize. Sooner than later, I hope, we will rediscover the power of popular organization against entrenched private power.

Oh yeah: And we can vote. … … … … I’m joking, fer chrissakes! We have only two corporate choices when we vote. Voting is not organizing. Voting dissipates power. It’s a mere illusion of control.

Below is taken from Bill Maher’s Real Time, June 18, 2009. (I’m a little behind on my Real Time.) Maher (or his writers) seem to have a good understanding of politics in 2009 America. I hear very few people who understand so well the real differences between the two parties and the ideas and aspirations of most Americans.

His most poignant words are “properly argued and defended.” There are many good, solid liberal and progressive positions that are easily defended by competent people, but far too often we get mealy-mouth appeasers like Max Baucus and Chuck Schumer, not to mention Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. These people haven’t a clue what we-the-people want. But we’ve been stripped of all choice, and are stuck with them.

Anyway, Maher did a bang-up job.

By the way, Maher would not even be known to us were it not for the fact that HBO is subscription-based. That network on occasion runs some truly controversial programming. He’d never be allowed to say what he says in an advertising-based medium like ABC, FOX, or NPR. In fact, ABC booted him in 2002 for saying something that was true.

Now last week in this space I criticized Obama for not fighting corporate influence enough. I made some liberals very angry. My phone rang off the hook, my email filled up, and Nancy Pelosi got so mad that her face moved.

Look, folks, I like Obama too. I’m just saying let’s not make it a religion.

And as far as you folks on the right who think that we’re now somehow in league, we’re not in league. I was criticizing Obama for not being hard enough on the corporate douche bags you live to defend. I don’t want to be on your team. Pick another kid.

So I stand by my words, but there is another side to this story, and that is that every time Obama tries to take on a progressive cause, there’s a major political party standing in his way – the Democrats. Now, people talk a lot about a third political party in America. We don’t need a third party. We need a first party. You go to the polls, and your choices are the guy who voted for the first Wall Street bailout, or the guy who voted for the next ten.

This week we’re hearing that a public option for health care is unlikely, because it doesn’t have the support of enough … Democrats. Even Ted Kennedy’s plan (Ted Kennedy – yeah) leaves 37 million uninsured. This is because we don’t’ have a left and a right party in this country anymore. We have a center-right party, and a crazy party. And over the last thirty-odd years, Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital.

So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby – that’s the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers and Civil War re-enactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans. And who actually worry that Obama is a socialist.

Socialist? He’s not even a liberal.

I know he’s not, because he’s on TV. And while I see Democrats on television, I don’t see actual liberals. And if occasionally you do get to hear Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky or Dennis Kucinich, they’re treated like buffoons. OK – these are not three of the world’s most charismatic men, but then no one is going to confuse Newt Gingrich’s for Zac Efron, and I have to look at his fat face on TV more than that free credit report song.

Shouldn’t there be one part that unambiguously supports cutting the military budget? A party that is straight-up in favor of gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes on the rich, universal health care, legalizing pot and steep direct taxing of polluters?

These aren’t radical ideas. A majority of Americans are already either for them, or would be if they were properly argued and defended. And what we need is an actual progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren’t being served by the Democrats.

Because, bottom line, Democrats are the new Republicans. It’s like when some Chinese company buys the name of some old American brand and slaps it on some cheap crap. You buy it out of reflex and it’s only later that you think Wow! I didn’t even know Woolworth’s made dildos!