Wisconsin and the Middle East

February 28,2011

Wisconsin and the Middle East. Two places, so dissimilar, but with a common bond so strong it is undeniable. Can you guess what that commonality might be?

People in both of those places are now revolting against their governments.

I'd be among the first to agree that elections have consequences. In Wisconsin and other states, voters were faced with difficult choices where the outcomes might express more or less than the choice on which they voted. But, governments are more complicated in their governing than the opinions which got them elected. It is truly difficult to understand what issue or issues caused any voter to make their (often binary) decision. When a politician uses that decision as a claim for everything they personally deem within their own voting purview. I cringe and shudder.

Likewise, when Middle Eastern despots claim their right to absolute rule, I can understand the reaction of those of their people who want them gone. The protests in Wisconsin have taught me.

We - all of us everywhere - seem to have little patience for those who govern. We have no tolerance for others with an opinion unlike ours. And since most people lie in the middle of the proverbial bell-shaped curve, we are now a planet ruled everywhere by extremists. Fundamentalists of every description. Religious fundamentalists, Christian, Moslem, and Jewish want us to obey their versions of correct behavior. Political extremists of every kind  claim the right to govern us, even when the issue at hand has little to do with what voters were thinking when they elected the politician. Without consensus, economic and financial experts claim they know best the regulations we should permit, even though most of us haven't the skill to understand to follow their apparently  well-disguised intentions.*

Special interests and greed continue to own unmitigated power. Whether it is duly elected Republican governors in the United States, desiring to eliminate the right of labor unions to collective bargaining, or despotic rulers of poverty stricken countries who have privately pocketed funds that might have been used to elevate the education level of their citizens, the result widens the gap between the socio-economic lives of the richest and poorest of us.

It is ironic, then, that this intended result has the unfortunate unintended consequence of the likelihood of massive political unrest and upheaval. We've all witnessed the revolts across the Middle East. I predict we'll see voters revolt across America in the 2012 elections. Why? Because, the majority of voters are moderates, while left and right-wing extremists dominate the news. If Americans cannot find a moderate candidate to vote for, the extremists elected from the party that lost the previous election will once again again claim that they were elected to put in place their own extremist agenda.

The solution in both the Middle East and in America is moderation. Back in the 1950s, we had moderates practicing a moderate form of politics, promoting moderate religious views, practicing moderately regulated banking and economics, and life was good. I fear we'll never see the likes of those days again.

Spy Toys

Like most thriller writers, my secret weapons really are secret weapons.

When I was writing my first thriller manuscript, I had a conversation with James Rollins, who told me where he found out about liquid armor. He got it from the US Army’s website, and has used it in some of his Sigma series. I borrowed the tech toy from him.

One of my friends is a computer hacker. He’s helped me with the theme and tech content of one of my manuscripts.

I know some folks who’ve worked at D.A.R.P.A. and they spoke to me about projects they had cancelled. Great spy tech. Even for cancelled projects, I thought D.A.R.P.A. was off limits.

Lately, however, spy technology I know about and wouldn’t have ever put in a story has showed up on television. NCIS and other shows have used tech I thought was classified. Seeing on the tube what I thought was the province of a classified status has shaken my understanding of the rules.

So then, what are the rules? Should they be followed? I thought anything with a current field use should be kept secret. I thought anything that could be used as a weapon against my government should be kept out of my fiction. Was I wrong? If NCIS, NCIS LA, and a few movies recently released offer examples of the new rules, then fiction writers can write about whatever they want.

Live and learn.

The Middle East has always been a time bomb

The Middle East has always been a time bomb. It still is.


From the time the Jewish people migrated into the area now known as Israel, a few thousand years ago, until now, this area has known war without end. The Bible has a passage containing Moses' use of spies to scout the Holy Land before they occupied it. (In North America, we did the same thing, but we didn't just conquor the indiginous people, we eliminated most of them.)


Now, the Arab crescent is boiling over with unhappy young and disadvantaged people who have known only kings and dictators. Is it possible for democracy to succeed in such places?


In the United States, I believe we hope so. In fact, I'd bet most of the world hopes that the kings and dictators will be replaced with tolerant governments. Would this be good for the United States? Would it make a permanent peace with Israel possible? It's very hard to say.


My personal opinion is that the current unrest in the Middle East was inevitable. It is a repeat of history not just from that region, but from the world over. Look back to the mid-nonteenth century's revolts in Europe, where Prince Metternich played a prominent role. From the mid-1840's to World War One, there was a time of conflict in Europe between the rich and poor leading to a few mostly-failed revolutions. During the Great Depression (the one in the 1920's and 1930's, not the current one), global conflict between the rich and poor intensified. World War Two ended that conflict, but it's happening again all over the planet. What's happening in the Middle East is more visable that what's happening in the United States, but greed for power among the rich and a desire for a decent life among the poor will always set the stage for violence and change.


History repeats itself. It's not that we don't learn lessons from history. It's that greed and power are what motivate those who seek to govern. The real lesson is in our DNA. We're built like this.


Expect the worst to happen. Be surprised when, or if, it doesn't. As for me, the current  unrest is marvelous fodder for spies and their roles in political power shifts. As a fiction writer, it's time to sit and watch.


After all, the Middle East has always been a time bomb.

Fiction Writing - The Future of Publishing

February 23, 2011

Over this past weekend, I attended the San Francisco Writers Conference. I sat in sessions and soaked up lots of useful stuff, from ways to improve my writer’s tradecraft, to short courses in publicity for writers. I made connections with some literary agents and editors. It was a useful weekend. I also listened to my peers. They expressed concerns about what is currently happening in the publishing industry and how it might change their careers.

As the former CEO and publisher of an eBook company for almost a decade, I think I may have something useful to contribute in that discussion.

Everyone who watched the demise of the old infrastructure of the music business already understands what is happening. My opinion is that it provides more than an object lesson. The fate of the old lions of the music business looks to me to be the fate of the larger publishers. Yes, there are significant differences in the infrastructure of the industries, their product composition and the consumer attitudes toward change, but the lessons are there and to ignore them is to remain in denial.

Music went through several technological improvements in delivery before the major impacts hit the companies. First, we went from wax cylinder to 33 1/3 record to CD. Each of those left the record companies with no choice but to adjust their fixed asset base with massively changed equipment, and then amortize the costs across the sales of their products. Rough, but possible to survive the changes. The last, biggest change was the one of distribution, and this was the killer. Once record sales were replaced by song sales, and sold not in physical format but MP3, delivered over the Internet, the effects of change were massive. Brick and mortar stores were unnecessary. Trucks, warehouses and other infrastructure were assets the companies could no longer amortize and they became useless.  Barriers to entry became a non-issue. Distribution was the only issue. Now let’s look at publishing. Each of the factors here is the same except for two: No one buys books by the chapter, and everyone uses software and possibly an eReader, if not a cell phone to read. Taken as a whole, the similarities outweigh the differences. Publishing is undergoing a change of seismic proportions.

In their current stage, publishing companies won’t survive. They must jettison the unneeded fixed assets and find a way to become relevant. I’m not sure what they can do with all the trucks, warehouses and printing presses, but there is no way they can charge these off against the price of an eBook and get customers to go for it. Not when literary agents can become the publisher of record for eBooks sold through distributors such as barnesandnoble.com and amazon. Within five years, there won’t be any bookstores. The price of an eBook won’t be much above $9.99. Smaller organizations like literary agencies and writing critique groups will become the ‘publishers.’ The financial failure of Borders is proof enough of this as a forecast of the future.

Libraries will lose their relevance as printed books become scarcer and more expensive. With neither bookstores nor libraries, printed books will be bought in short runs by the author and sold at signings conducted at restaurants and senior centers. For the most part, publicizing a new book will likely become a blogging event.

To see what will happen, no one need go farther than read T. S. Kuhn’s short monograph, published in the 1950’s, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He uses several historical examples, and concludes that those who cannot adjust to technology changes cease to have economic relevance.

Writers will still become authors, and literary agents will still be the arbiters of quality.  But, any literary agent who can’t find a way to take advantage of the incredible opportunity offered by a time of massive change will find themselves gone from the planet.

Writers will need to learn how to be marketers. Promotion and Marketing will be their biggest post-writing activities, and these activities will be quite different from what they did pre-eBook. Some will jettison their paper publishers after getting a few titles in print and begin selling eBook titles to their established customer base. J. A. Konrath has done this and it works. Others will stick with their paper publishers and pray they can survive. Should the publisher adapt to the new world. It might work. Paper publishers currently provide the prime advantage of the stamp of quality to what goes out in print, and it is a formidable advantage for an unknown writer.

To survive, after shedding the unnecessary fixed assets that now burden them financially, publishers will probably purchase the literary agencies that are publisher of record. By itself, this changes everything. If they can’t come up with a better idea, or if they don’t begin acquiring the literary agencies that “own” the best writers, they will surely perish from carrying the weight of their current fixed asset infrastructure without the counterbalance of direct access to talented writers.

That’s my prediction, for what it’s worth.

If you’re a writer, take heart, the times may be interesting now, but the future is still bright. If you’re a literary agent, you hold all the cards if you play them right. If you’re a print publisher, the time has come to stop wondering what will happen and choose which literary agencies you want to become close with. Pick carefully; the clock is running.

Technology (Hacking) - Wikileaks and hacking in general

December 6, 2010

I believe all humans lie and all keep secrets. When I worked as a subcontractor for the government, one of the things I could do was lie well enough to pass a lie detector test. Most of my lies were lies of omission, but some were untruths I told. All spies lie. We have to in order to survive. Alternate identities are a lie. The way we walk is a deception: I am harmless. The way we talk is often a lie: I am not who you think. When we steal the secrets of others, we lie: I have nothing that could compromise you.

I stumbled across a secret that could have gotten me into massive trouble, had I revealed it. So, I never did. Even though its value has diminished over the years, I never will. Not telling is a lie. All secrets are, in essence, lies.

Our government tells us lies every day. Some of the lies are lies of omission, but many more are lies crafted by political parties to invoke fear into voters. Power is often maintained through a fabric of lies. When our government listens to its intelligence services for information relating to enfolding world events, it often is hearing lies. I know this, because by not telling my handler what I’d found out, I was, in effect, crafting a place where a lie could sit as its substitute. And, at least one lie did find its way into the fabric of our government’s understanding of world events because of my own actions.

When Julian Assange created Wikileaks, he and his followers worked for a world where truth can be more easily available. If no government lied to the world, what would the world be like?
Computer hackers have existed almost since the day computers were invented. Before I ever worked for the government, one of my major focuses as a management consultant was computer security. I worked on several computer crimes and solved them. I was quoted in Institutional Investor and in Pension and Investment Age on computer fraud and countermeasures and wrote an article for the Journal of Cash Management. I’ve been an expert on the topic of computer hacking for decades. About fifteen years ago, someone broke inot our house and stole documents that made it possible for them to sell my wife’s and my identity. I used my skills to track the culprit and find him (3,000 miles away). I helped get him arrested. My skills are still functional.

I think most hackers are better as fictional devices than as real people. In fiction, a writer can use a hacker to do either good or bad things. In real life, most of the hacking I know about is identity theft and its relatives. Nasty stuff. But, not all is bad. The hackers who “stole” secrets from our government and used Wikileaks to post them for all to see are doing us all a service, in my humble opinion. The truth is out there. The hackers are setting it free.

Politics - Did our current administration have pre-knowledge of 9/11?

From a story reported on another web site (http://www.crooksandliars.com/House Hearings On State Department IG Shows Conflict) during September 2007 , Inspector General Howard J. Krongard testified before Chairman Henry Waxman of the Congrssional Oversight Committee. These hearings continued, and on November 14, the public discovered that brother, Alvin Bernard "Buzzy" Krongard, may be on Blackwater’s advisory board. Buzzy had previously served as the Executive Director of the CIA.

The most disturbing thing about Buzzy is on September 6 and 7, 2001, just before '9/11,' he initiated a number of (criminal) transactions in financial markets that indicate specific foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

From a story reported on another web site (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/10_09_01_krongard.html), until 1997 A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard had been Chairman of the investment bank A.B. Brown. A.B. Brown was acquired by Banker's Trust in 1997. Krongard then became, as part of the merger, Vice Chairman of Banker's Trust-AB Brown, one of 20 major U.S. banks named by Senator Carl Levin this year as being connected to money laundering. Krongard's last position at Banker's Trust (BT) was to oversee "private client relations." In this capacity he had direct hands-on relations with some of the wealthiest people in the world in a kind of specialized banking operation that has been identified by the U.S. Senate and other investigators as being closely connected to the laundering of drug money.

In the case of at least one of these trades - which has left a $2.5 million prize unclaimed - the firm used to place the "put options" on United Airlines stock was, until 1998, managed by the man who is now in the number three Executive Director position at the Central Intelligence Agency.

On September 29, 2001 - in a vital story that has gone unnoticed by the major media - the San Francisco Chronicle reported, "Investors have yet to collect more than $2.5 million in profits they made trading options in the stock of United Airlines before the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks, according to a source familiar with the trades and market data... The source familiar with the United trades identified Deutsche Bank Alex Brown, the American investment banking arm of German giant Deutsche Bank, as the investment bank used to purchase at least some of these options."