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"Cloud Atlas" Author David Mitchell: "What a Bloody Mess We’ve Made"

by DaleYbjrkf Posted on October 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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British novelist David Mitchell is best known as the guy who wrote the great novel that was made into the challenging movie Cloud Atlas. Yet the screen fails to convey the true brilliance of Mitchell, who has been widely hailed as one of the English language’s best prose stylists. He so convincingly captures the patois of disparate characters that one might mistake him as the charismatic frontman for a creative writer’s guild.

Over a 15-year career, Mitchell has earned a cult following for the way his work seamlessly bridges historical, contemporary, and science fiction. Readers of his latest novel, The Bone Clocks, won’t be disappointed. It offers a genre spanning, multistranded narrative that begins in an English pub in 1984 and ends in 2043, when the oil runs dry and a war wages between bands of immortals.

On a recent drive together through San Francisco, the 45-year-old author told me about his “midlife crisis novel,” and why he’s not so confident about the survival of the human race.

Mother Jones: How does it feel to be back in San Francisco?

David Mitchell: It’s where I did my first solo book event ever in 1999. I was living in Japan. It was my first ever time in America, my first book event, first everything. Back then there was no one that wanted to meet me. So I did an urban hike, with trees and a steep hillside and these steps and ended up at the ocean. I had my first meal in a real American diner by the sea.

MJ: The architecture of your books involves interconnected novellas whose characters often turn up unexpectedly. Which comes first, structure or character?

DM: The structure is the attention grabber, and somewhat unusual, but emotional resonance should be something all novelists should want to create. If you don’t care about characters, you’ve got dead bodies on your hands.

For the same reason you can’t make yourself laugh by tickling yourself, you never actually know if you’ve achieved empathy for the character. I start by making the character want something and yearn for something—and what are the holes in their lives? That’s a key to making that bond with the reader. But I needed a theoretical place for the characters to go; they couldn’t all be there at once—which brings us back to structure.

MJ: There’s a musicality in your writing, an elegant single-mindedness. Is this a conscious effort?

DM: I think long and hard on each word, and then I’m revising, revising, revising. For me, and for a lot of writers, writing is mostly rewriting. And for me, at that level, if assonance and alliteration and dissonance feel right, then that’s what I do. I go with those words and not others.

MJ: Talk about your Bone Clocks protagonist.

DM: Holly’s an amalgam girl, a compilation girl, a mixtape girl. She’s pretty solidly working class, though in the middle era of her life she’s writing books. She’s rebellious, says no more than I ever did as a boy, more than I do now—with gay abandon even. My daughter’s not quite the right age yet, but any father of a daughter becomes more feminist than he was before. I hope this knowledge gives me a slightly different way of looking out.

MJ: Recently, you’ve thrown an interesting conceptual bone at the reader by suggesting that your novels all form one über-book, in which characters and themes may overlap and reoccur. If this book is part of a larger universe, then who are you still thinking about?

DM: Right now I think about Hugo, because I realize he’s out there, he’s aging. It’s the end of The Bone Clocks and he’s got the body of a 24 year old. He was born around the same time as me, in the late sixties, and I wonder what he’s up to. At the end of The Bone Clocks, he gets to have his thirties, when most of his contemporaries are in their 60s. He’s a future character.

MJ: Have you heard of the movement, popular among libertarians, called Transhumanism?

DM: Once the book is handed in, the characters are in cryogenic suspension. That belongs in that Transhumanist tradition, doesn’t it? With West Coast attitude, you can cheat death. In a strange way, it peculiarly belongs to the tradition of The Bone Clocks. Is it not a kind of a malady? Is it not indicative of our beauty-obsessed culture, equating being over 40 with being on the threshold of the old folks home? Stop feeling envious of beautiful, healthy young 20-year-olds—not a sideways envy, but a painful blade in the guts. That’s the enemy of the contemporary life, especially when you have other things to be dealing with in the domestic sphere.

MJ: Do you think we handle aging poorly?

DM: If you were an alien anthropologist studying a TV program, you wouldn’t be aware of anyone with white hair other than an occasional anchorman. Terror makes you profoundly age averse. We become sort of mean to seniors: “Why are you holding up my queue?” And so they venture out much less. Japan’s not much better. It’s a Confucian country where in theory they equate age with wisdom and not decrepitude, but you can’t survive as an old person in the middle of Tokyo—you’d get trampled. And so, you don’t see them.

MJ: The last section of your book presents a dim view of what’s to come for us humans. What do you think our future holds?

DM: I’m a country boy and I love trees. The World Without Us talks about how what a great benefit to the planet Earth, the disappearance of human beings would be. It would be lovely, in a really quick time frame—except the nuclear reactors. They, of course, are monstrous and melting for millennia to come, without a power grid to cool the water, to cool the nuclear waste. We’ve damned the planet by failing to keep a lid on radioactive waste. I see myself not just as a citizen of a state but also part of a life form and ecosystem: Humanity is a sentient life form with a wherewithal to be conscious, and what a bloody mess we’ve made.

MJ: Do you think technology could avert disaster?

DM: They can use a computer virus to deactivate Iran’s reactors but a virus can’t stop plutonium from being radioactive. The only way to stop it is not to synthesize the stuff in the first place, but it’s a bit late for that. The best thing about nature is what Agent Smith says in The Matrix: Humans spread and breed until the natural resources are used up, and then move on. What’s the only other life form that does this? The virus.

MJ: The immortals in the story, besides shedding light on our ageism, made me think about the relationship between resource scarcity and climate change. Care to elaborate?

DM: Resource wars can take religious guises or political guises but if there was enough going around none of them would happen. You’re in a drought in a pretty well functioning state, but imagine if you’re in a drought in a loose network of failed states and the place is awash with AK-47s. Gosh, this is getting to be a gloomy thing. But, overpopulation may usher in the Endarkenment. Civilizations do end. That’s why there are new ones. It’s a zero sum game.

At this, Mitchell leans back with a smile, and suggests a question: “What’s your fantasy air guitar solo?”

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"Cloud Atlas" Author David Mitchell: "What a Bloody Mess We’ve Made"

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Ruling on Nuclear Waste Storage Could Create a "Catastrophic Risk"

by JaninaBeauchamp Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Strict safety controls sought by environmental groups for the storage of radioactive waste at dozens of nuclear power plants may fall to the wayside under a rule that’s expected be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next week. According to a congressional source who does not wish to be identified, the NRC is rushing to vote on the rule before the September retirement of Commissioner William Magwood, an ally of the nuclear power industry.

The rule would establish that the environmental risks of storing spent fuel in pools of water at reactor sites for extended periods are negligible and for the most part don’t need to be studied as part of the licensing requirements for nuclear power plants. But critics of the rule say that the NRC is blatantly ignoring its own research, which shows that the practice could lead to serious disasters: “You will have all the waste sitting, basically, in a giant swimming pool,” the source says, “and the potential of the swimming pool draining or being breached by an accident or an attack or a power loss that causes the water to boil off—all of those things would have impacts that the NRC’s own analysis says would equal that of a meltdown of the reactor core.”

Existing nuclear plants are designed to store spent fuel for no more than a few years but have accumulated large stockpiles of it due to repeated delays in plans to build a permanent repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. In 2010, the Obama administration canceled the $15 billion Yucca project, raising the distinct possibility that a single geologic waste storage site may never be built. In 2012, the National Resources Defense Council successfully sued to force the NRC to stop licensing nuclear reactors until the commission conducted an environmental impact study on the long-term risks posed by on-site waste—including the possibility that those temporary storage sites will become permanent. The completed study, along with the new rule, is expected to be approved by the NRC on Tuesday, over the strong objections of environmental groups.

The NRC rule would pave the way for nuclear waste to be stored in open cooling pools at reactor sites for up to 120 years—and up to 60 years after a reactor is decommissioned. Environmental groups say that’s way too long. “The pools are a catastrophic risk,” says Kevin Kamps, the radioactive-waste watchdog for a group called Beyond Nuclear. Many pools, designed to store the highly radioactive rods for no more than five years, are holding up to four times as many as intended. Packing so many rods into the pools dramatically increases the risk of a fire should a leak cause the cooling water to drain. A 2003 NRC study found that a pool fire could contaminate 9,400 acres and displace 4 million Americans from their homes for years.

The NRC’s assumption that operators will guard and maintain their waste for decades after their plants are decommissioned is laughable to many enviros. In comments submitted to the NRC last December, the NRDC pointed to “the sad history” of managing hazardous waste in America, which often involves commercial operations going bankrupt and saddling taxpayers with the cleanup.

Even at operable nuclear plants, about a dozen waste storage pools are known to be leaking, including one at New York’s Indian Point reactor, which is discharging radioactive water into the Hudson River. To minimize the risk of disaster, environmental groups want the industry to move its waste into thick concrete-and-steel dry casks at a cost of roughly $7 billion. But in a 4-1 vote earlier this year, the NRC ruled that this wouldn’t be cost-effective.

NRC spokesman David McIntyre denied that the commission is rushing to vote on the waste rule before the retirement of Commissioner Magwood, who joined the commission in 2010. Earlier this year, Magwood said he would accept a job as director general of the Paris-based Nuclear Energy Agency, an association of governments that sponsor, and in some cases own, American companies licensed to operate nuclear power plants. In a letter to the White House last month, the Project on Government Oversight complained that Magwood’s failure to step down from the NRC after accepting the NEA job represented a “glaring conflict of interest.”

In a response circulated by the NRC, Magwood claims that the NEA “is primarily a research and policy agency” and that his future job doesn’t affect his impartiality.

Yesterday, 34 environmental groups called on the NRC to delay its vote until Magwood steps down. His retirement comes amid a broader shakeup of the NRC panel: Commissioner George Apostolakis’ term ended last month and was not renewed by the White House. The two vacancies on the five-member commission will be filled by Jeffrey Baran, an aide to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), and former NRC general counsel Stephen Burns.

Environmental groups hope the new commission will break with its industry-friendly past. “The industry crawls all over that place in terms of lobbying,” Kamps told me. “They own that place.”

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Ruling on Nuclear Waste Storage Could Create a "Catastrophic Risk"

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Creeping Up on Unsuspecting Shores: The Great Lakes, in a Welcome Turnaround

by Myrna Posted on June 28, 2014

Scientists attribute the resurgence to an unusually cold winter that limited evaporation as well as heavy precipitation in the winter and spring. See the original article here: Creeping Up on Unsuspecting Shores: The Great Lakes, in a Welcome Turnaround Related ArticlesVast Stretches of Minnesota Are Flooded as Swollen Rivers OverflowIs Nuclear Power Ever Coming Back?Hardcore Capitalists Warn That Climate Change Is A Big Deal For American Businesses

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Creeping Up on Unsuspecting Shores: The Great Lakes, in a Welcome Turnaround

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Vast Stretches of Minnesota Are Flooded as Swollen Rivers Overflow

by Myrna Posted on June 24, 2014

After heavy winter snows and torrential spring rains, floods spread throughout the state, from Canada to Iowa. Read More: Vast Stretches of Minnesota Are Flooded as Swollen Rivers Overflow Related ArticlesIs Nuclear Power Ever Coming Back?Hardcore Capitalists Warn That Climate Change Is A Big Deal For American BusinessesThese Maps Show How Many Brutally Hot Days You Will Suffer When You’re Old

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Vast Stretches of Minnesota Are Flooded as Swollen Rivers Overflow

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Amazon’s War Against Book Publishers Goes Into Nuclear Territory

by LidiaHowchin Posted on May 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Amazon.com, the company run by the psychopathically competitive Jeff Bezos, is apparently upping the ante into nuclear territory in its contractual dispute with book publisher Hachette:

The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling’s new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” — a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — is suddenly listed as “unavailable.”

In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons’s new novel, “The Girls of August,” coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $60). Otherwise it is as if it did not exist.

Well, at least this is a war between equals. That makes it a little easier to stomach than Amazon’s routine attempts to strong-arm boutique publishers after sweet talking them into making Amazon such a big part of their business that they can no longer survive without them.

But it’s also why I’m so unhappy over the inevitable demise of Barnes & Noble. It seems inevitable, anyway, and when it happens Amazon will be essentially the only source left for e-books. At that point, Amazon will no longer have any real incentive to improve its crappy e-reader, but we’ll all be stuck with it anyway. Yuck. I don’t have a ton of choices even now, but at least I have some.

I dunno. Is there some way for the Justice Department to demand that Amazon figure out a way to make its DRM accessible by third parties so that we can have a thriving market in e-readers? I don’t really understand the tech well enough to know whether that’s possible. But Amazon already has near-monopoly control of the e-book market, and if B&N does eventually die, Amazon will basically have total control. Isn’t that supposed to be a bad thing?

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Amazon’s War Against Book Publishers Goes Into Nuclear Territory

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It’s About Time to Start Giving CPAC the Media Coverage it Deserves

by ShastaSnoddy Posted on March 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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CPAC, that great annual gathering of conservative red meat and can-you-top-this condemnation of President Obama, came to an end Saturday (with a petulant, syntax-challenged stemwinder from Sarah Palin, natch). In passing, Lexington mentions something that’s long puzzled me:

It is traditional for journalists to be a bit sniffy about CPAC straw polls, and with reason….CPAC attracts a very specific slice of the conservative movement, and its straw polls have a woeful record of predicting actual presidential nominees. Half the voters in this year’s effort were aged between 18 and 25, and two-thirds were male. Many seemed keen on Mr Paul’s brand of libertarianism, with its government-shrinking, pot-legalising, tax-cutting, privacy-obsessed, pull-up-the-drawbridge isolationism.

….Yet those who dismiss CPAC as a youth club for Ayn Rand (and Star Wars) fans risk overlooking the importance of the speeches here. Though the speakers pander to the crowd, they know that their words are whizzing around blogs, Twitter, talk radio and cable news TV. As a result, the senators and governors with presidential ambitions often give voice to what they believe their voters want to hear.

My puzzlement has always been just the opposite: the national political press mostly doesn’t dismiss CPAC as an inconsequential libertarian love-fest. They love covering CPAC. But why? Every year, CPAC demonstrates its own irrelevance by overwhelmingly supporting Rand Paul or Ron Paul or some other eccentric conservative type in its final-day straw poll. It’s solid proof that the attendees at CPAC represent a small and only slightly influential wing of the conservative movement.

And yet, the mere fact that CPAC reliably delivers the crazy seems to guarantee them plenty of coverage. I confess that I don’t really get it. The average CPAC attendee wants to legalize drugs, cut the military, and rein in the NSA. The conservative movement writ large supports exactly the opposite: it wants to put the stoners in jail, give Vladimir Putin what for, and send the NSA a thank you card for protecting us from terrorists.

So why all the media love for CPAC? What’s the deal?

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It’s About Time to Start Giving CPAC the Media Coverage it Deserves

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Friday Cat Blogging – 7 March 2014

by Kyle3094ioyoxj Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last weekend’s rain has obviously traumatized Domino. Sunny skies may have returned to Southern California since then, but Domino has spent all week hiding in a blanket cave anyway, just in case the rain clouds return. Her humans failed her once, after all. There’s no telling when we’ll fail her again.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 7 March 2014

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George Bush Lost an Entire Generation for the Republican Party

by WDURorycdmmnca Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Pew has released a new survey about the social and political attitudes of various generations, and it makes for interesting reading. The thing that strikes me the most is just how clear the trends are. Each successive generation is more politically independent; more religiously independent; less likely to be married in their 20s; less trusting of others; less likely to self-ID as patriotic; and less opposed to gay rights. There’s virtually no overlap at all. It’s just a smooth, straight progression.

But the single most interesting chart in the report is one that doesn’t show this smooth progression. You’ve probably seen this before from other sources, but the chart on the right basically shows that for the past 40 years voting patterns haven’t differed much by age. In fact, there’s virtually no difference between generations at all until you get to the George Bush era. At that point, young voters suddenly leave the Republican Party en masse. Millennials may be far less likely than older generations to say there’s a big difference between Republicans and Democrats, but their actual voting record belies that.

Whatever it was that Karl Rove and George Bush did—and there are plenty of possibilities, ranging from Iraq to gays to religion—they massively alienated an entire generation of voters. Sure, they managed to squeak out a couple of presidential victories, but they did it at the cost of losing millions of voters who will probably never fully return. This chart is their legacy in a nutshell.

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George Bush Lost an Entire Generation for the Republican Party

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Sanctions Against Putin Won’t Do Much For Crimea, But We Should Impose Them Anyway

by IonaMartinelli Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dan Drezner, after waiting an unconscionably long four or five days, has weighed in on the efficacy of economic sanctions against Russia:

Sorry, but the fact remains that sanctions will not force Russia out of the Crimea. This doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be imposed. Indeed, there are two excellent reasons why the United States should orchestrate and then implement as tough as set of sanctions on Russia as it can muster.

First, this problem is going to crop up again. Vladimir Putin has now invaded two neighbors in six years to destabilize regimes perceived to be hostile to him. Post-Crimea, any new Ukraine government will continue to be hostile to the Russian Federation. There are other irredentist areas in the former Soviet Union — *cough* Transnistria *cough* — where Putin will be tempted to intervene over the next decade. At a minimum, he should be forced to factor in the cost of sanctions when calculating whether to meddle in his near abroad again. President Obama was correct to point out the “costs” to Putin for his behavior — now he has to follow through on that pledge.

Second, while sanctions cannot solve this problem on their own, they can be part of the solution. Over the long term, Russia does need to export energy to finance its government and fuel economic growth. Even if planned sanctions won’t bite in the present, the anticipation of tougher economic coercion to come is a powerful lever in international bargaining. The closer the European Union moves towards joining the U.S. sanctioning effort, the more that Russia has to start thinking about the long-term implications of its actions. Any political settlement over the future of Ukraine will require compromise by the new Ukrainian government and its supporters in the West. Imposing sanctions now creates a bargaining chip that can be conceded in the future.

This mirrors my own judgment. Putin has very plainly decided that invading Crimea is worth the price, and it’s improbable that economic sanctions—especially the scattershot variety that we’re likely to put together in this case—will change that. Nevertheless, it needs to be clear that there really is a price. It also needs to be clear that face-saving compromises are still available to Putin that might lower that price.

For my money, the biggest price Putin is paying comes not from any possible sanctions, but from the very clear message he’s now sent to bordering countries who have long been suspicious of him anyway. Yes, Putin has shown that he’s not to be trifled with. At the same time, he’s also shown every one of his neighbors that he can’t be trusted. Two mini-invasions in less than a decade is plenty to ramp up their anti-Russian sentiment to a fever pitch.

Putin’s invasion has already cost him a lot in flexibility and maneuvering room, and it’s very unlikely that tighter control over Crimea really makes up for that. At this point, it’s hardly a question of whether Putin has won or lost. It’s only a question of just how big his losses will be.

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Sanctions Against Putin Won’t Do Much For Crimea, But We Should Impose Them Anyway

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Flashback: Why Ronald Reagan Invaded Grenada

by ELMIrishxpc Posted on March 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here is Ronald Reagan on October 27, 1983, explaining his decision to invade Grenada in a nationally televised address:

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was seized. He and several members of his cabinet were subsequently executed, and a 24-hour shoot-to-kill curfew was put in effect.was without a government, its only authority exercised by a self-proclaimed band of military men.

There were then about 1,000 of our citizens on Grenada, 800 of them students in St. George’s University Medical School. Concerned that they’d be harmed or held as hostages, I ordered a flotilla of ships, then on its way to Lebanon with marines, part of our regular rotation program, to circle south on a course that would put them somewhere in the vicinity of Grenada in case there should be a need to evacuate our people.

Last weekend, I was awakened in the early morning hours and told that six members of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, joined by Jamaica and Barbados, had sent an urgent request that we join them in a military operation to restore order and democracy to Grenada….These small, peaceful nations needed our help. Three of them don’t have armies at all, and the others have very limited forces. The legitimacy of their request, plus my own concern for our citizens, dictated my decision.

Shorter Reagan: the government of Grenada was in chaos; Americans were in danger; and nearby governments requested our help. So we sent in troops. Does this sound at all familiar?

As it happens, there was little evidence that any Americans were in danger, and the nearby governments had asked for help largely because Reagan had requested it. The real reason for the invasion was that Grenada was a nearby country and Reagan was concerned that Cuba and the Soviet Union were establishing a military foothold there. Does it start to sound familiar now?

You may decide for yourself whether the invasion of Grenada was justified. The Cuban military presence was real, after all. And there’s certainly no question about the instability of the Grenadian government.

Then again, the eastward expansion of NATO and the more recent EU/American attempts to increase Western influence in Ukraine have been quite real too. And there’s certainly no question about the instability of the Ukrainian government. So does that mean Vladimir Putin was justified in sending troops into Crimea? Once again, you may decide for yourself. But Grenada might provide a useful framework for thinking about how regional powers react to perceived threats in their backyards.

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Flashback: Why Ronald Reagan Invaded Grenada

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