Sticks and Stones

 Indisputably, any citizen of the United States would want politicians that accurately represented them and worked for the benefit of the nation. That said, the qualifications for office are, at best, adequate. Most of the requirements are reasonable standards. Each potential Congress member must be an American citizen for at least nine years and be a resident of the State they represent. Senators must be at least 30 years of age and representatives at least 25. The President must be a natural-born citizen and 35. However these are the only formal qualifications a candidate must have. This is why I suggest the addition of one more requirement: a mandatory IQ test result of at least 120 for every candidate for a governmental office.

At this point you may wonder, why on earth have candidates take IQ tests? Haven’t they proven themselves intelligent and motivated already by running for office? My reasoning is based on the assumption that the majority of the American population is intelligent and capable and therefore would be represented best by intelligent and capable politicians. However the truth of the matter is that quite a few political candidates, past and present, for any office, have substandard intelligence and have slipped through the cracks formed by the scant requirements. Two examples: Former President George H. W. Bush and current President George W. Bush. Daddy Bush has an IQ of 98 and our very own Dubya has an IQ of 91 (Lovenstein Institute Presidential IQ Study). An IQ score of 100 is considered average, with most likely professions being truck drivers, machine operators, farmers and carpenters. Bush Sr. was a Texas representative in 1966 and 1968 before being vice president to Ronald Reagan and then President. Bush Jr. was also a Texas representative, and became Governor of Texas in 1994. Obviously, a mandatory IQ test prior to campaigning would have saved America from the collective bad decision-making of the two Bushes, as neither of them would have made it to Congress at all.

Sure, most political candidates are smart and do their jobs well. Granted, the current requirements are logical and serve the purpose of providing the nation with good lawmakers and civil servants. Nevertheless, the addition of intelligence testing to the existing qualifications would reinforce the standard of politicians and lead to improved decision-making for the people’s benefit. Congress would not be stunted by any stupidity and would work more efficiently. Smarter politicians would also raise the rock-bottom public opinion of the government, and give the multitude of foreign countries that currently hate us, a more realistic impression of the American people. We can only benefit from such an addition, and although intelligence testing may not affect the majority of political candidates, it certainly would minimize the chances of ending up with a president who can’t pronounce the word nuclear.

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Jean Nouvel, the bold French architect known for his innovative works such as the Torre Agbar tower in Barcelona, a precursor to London’s very similar 30 St. Mary’s Axe, has received architecture’s top honour, the Pritzker Prize. Informally known as the ‘Nobel prize for architecture’, a jury chosen by the Hyatt Foundation awarded the $100,000 grant and bronze medallion today. Previous winners include Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid and the first winner in 1979, Philip Johnson.

Critical and commercial success in architecture is increasingly coming from architects who do not have a ‘house-style’ and Jean Nouvel is no exception. Like David Chipperfield, the British architect who won the RIBA Sterling Prize 2007 for his Museum of Modern Literature in Germany, Nouvel believes the surrounding environment essentially dictates the design of a building. “The story, the climate, the culture of the place,” he said. “The references of the buildings around, what the people in the city love. The wind, the colour of the sky, the trees around - the building is not done only to be the most beautiful,” he said. “It’s done to give advantage to the surroundings. It’s a dialogue.” However, he does not design buildings simply to echo their surroundings. “Generally, when you say context, people think you want to copy the buildings around, but often context is contrast,” he said.

Nouvel’s projects are diverse; from designing luxury homes for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie to building the Concert Hall Lucerne in Switzerland, his work has challenged the way in which architects approach architecture. He claims anything from the monumental and the civic, to the residential and vernacular can be realised successfully by an architect with an appreciation of the surrounding environment. The jury said of Nouvel’s industrial Guthrie Theater, which has a cantilevered bridge overlooking the Mississippi River, “the theatre both merges and contrasts with its surroundings.” It added, “It is responsive to the city and the nearby Mississippi River, and yet, it is also an expression of theatricality and the magical world of performance.”

I recently visited Madrid and stayed at Hotel Puerta America, a conceptual hotel where each floor is designed by a high profile designer. Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield, Arota Ishozaki and Jean Nouvel are just a few who have experimented with hotel design as the operators, Silken, claimed the project ‘had no budget’. Nouvel’s floor, the top one, is perhaps the most impressive. It is wildly romantic; stunning Japanese influences and a heady sense of artistic involvement, the design is a world away from the environment, a dusty residential area of a metropolitan Madrid. Forgiving the experimental nature of the project, it seems Nouvel has stuck to the ‘context is contrast’ mantra very strictly. Where other designers who have a ‘house style’ merely put their signature curves and deconstructive lines (in the case of Zaha Hadid) on their floor, architects such as Foster and Chipperfield, who are driven wholly by an environmental and social sensitivity to architecture, and no house style, chose to echo their surroundings. In the case of Foster, the palette of Spanish artist and friend Chilleda was employed; the dusty sienna brown worktops working symbiotically with the yellow ochre leather of the furnishings. It seems both Nouvel and Foster have gained success differently by echoing and contrasting the environment to provide feelings of excitement and familiarity respectively.

This year’s Pritzker Prize winner is yet another example of a successful architect who is very different to his contemporaries. Not restricted by an ‘ism’, not a disciple of a school, just a servant to society and its needs. I feel excited and privileged to be living in a time where architecture really is becoming all about social concern.

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We’ve had major surprises in the past few weeks. Politically, the Eliot Spitzer revelation and resignation caught everyone totally unaware. Socially, some of us witnessed a gory geek-led attack on Sarah Lacy for soft-balling an interview with Facebook’s notoriously-shy Mark Zuckerberg. Culturally, France’s foreign minister suggested an EU boycott of the Olympic opening ceremony as a result of China’s repression of Tibet.

But economically, the-tip-of-an-island blew the world into searing chaos. The three firms most heavily involved in the sub-prime mortgage crisis; Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch all teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. While so far only one has collapsed, the other two remain balanced, delicately, on the whims of Wall Street traders.

The collapse of Bear Stearns was only surprising because it seemed Wall Street believed these firms could get away with their incredibly profitable but totally absurd subprime lending. The International Herald Tribune reported yesterday from within Bear Stearns, about the employees’ reaction. Many spoke of total shock, a feeling of betrayal, and ominously; none seemed aware that this sort of collapse was well within the realms of Bear Stearns operations.

Bear Stearns’ operations were so risky because they were bundling valueless loans with some good loans and then sold them to other institutions which were totally unaware of what they had bought (other than seeing the AAA rating on the bundles).

Surely a firm operating in this manner should go bankrupt. It had made risky financial maneuvers, assumed it would not get caught, and when it all fell apart - everyone was surprised. The story should have ended there. Bear Stearns would have collapsed into a smoking heap, other firms would peer at the wreckage and learn some valuable lessons. Although the following year would be fraught with panicking traders feeling insecure about deals, it would be the ultimate culmination of Milton Friedman’s pro-free-market ideals. Leave it to the market, we chanted.

But when the market fell apart because their brash deals collapsed, they called in the Federal Reserve. Although the Fed deserves blame for not reigning in Wall Street during Alan Greenspan’s boom years, it should not be paying for Bear Stearns collapse. Nevertheless, it floated $30 billion to grand old JP Morgan and Bear Stearns was snapped up on Monday for $236 million, massively down from the $3.54 billion it was worth on Friday.

Most impressively, JP Morgan has an option on Bear Stearns World Headquarters (photo above of the Kohn Pederson Fox-designed skyscraper built in 2001) so if Bear Stearns stakeholders vote down the JP Morgan bid, not only will they likely be bankrupt immediately, they could get evicted from their own headquarters; a building which is worth approximately 5 times what JP Morgan bid for the whole company.

Here in England when our government did something very similar: nationalising Northern Rock, our Senior Staff Writer wrote a sarcastic article labeling the Prime Minister a ‘dyed-in-the-wood Commie’. While joking, the point is that the nationalisation of Northern Rock was direct government intervention in the financial system after its collapse. Which is exactly what the Fed did for Bear Stearns. Headlines across the world trumpeted it as JP Morgan saving Bear Stearns, but this was funded by the Fed’s $30 billion.

Government intervention in this ways is like giving candy to the class bully. Bear Stearns was ruthless in its quest to make money from subprime mortgages. For this, Bear Stearns should not be nursed back to life, it should be allowed to collapse because it brought its downfall upon itself. Notice Goldman Sachs, another player in Wall Street, has $21 billion to hand out in bonuses; it was not necessary for Bear Stearns to operate in this way. It chose to, and for that error, it should fall. Saying it is too big to fail should only be a justification for propping up necessities like waterworks, electricity suppliers, and so on.

The blame remains at the feet of Alan Greenspan. Bear Stearns, Citicorp, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Countrywide, and the rest should be free to operate and make vast profits. Their activities fuel economic growth and generate wealth across the world. However, regulation should have been in place to ensure those worthless loans were not ‘mislabeled’ AAA. These firms should be free to invest, invent, foster entrepreneurship, and make trillions of dollars; but not by swindling others.

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There are two very important reasons why the entire tech industry got HD-DVD completely wrong. One, as Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow ought to be advocates of, is HD-DVD not having region coding or as much DRM as Blu-ray. The second, which the entire Wall Street Journal editorial board should support is the fact that variety is the spice of life. Oh, no, I meant that competition is the seed for all that is good and wonderful in our laissez-faire economic system.

The tech industry got HD-DVD so wrong because, unlike Blu-ray, HD-DVD had no region coding and had less restrictive DRM. This is important because consumers like you and me are sick of being dictated to about how we use our content. The VCR allowed us more freedom, as did the CD burner. Complicated codecs (Apple’s .m4p) and software restrictions (iPod usage limitations) severely hamper what we can do with the music we paid for.

Amazon’s MP3 store has gone a long way towards rectifying this situation but DRM on video remains as absurdly limiting as ever. iSquint, HandBrake, VLC, and so on exist just to help you untangle your content from their manacles. Why is it so hard?! HD-DVD did not have as complicated a DRM system as Blu-ray and for that reason we should have all been trumpeting it as the next generation product.

We should allow the market to operate on its own free from regulation and allow it to fight monopolistic tendencies. It is controversial to argue for more than one optical format, because the response will be that it complicates matters, forces a higher cost on the consumer by requiring her to buy two players, and complicate the lives of average citizens staring at stacks of competing players at CompUSA.

It may seem illogical to argue that competing formats is good for the consumer, but the opposite is true. When two similar goods square off the result is a bitter fight to the death with equally split market share. Using the example of colas, every time Pepsi lowers the price, Coca-Cola must follow suit. If Pepsi increased the quality of its product, Coca-Cola would have to scramble to match the new standard. In this way, Blu-ray and HD-DVD would have squared off and fought bitterly for our dollars. They would have increased quality, lowered prices, and packed in more features to beat the other for that precious penny.

All that is left is one player in a lucrative market. Yes, in ten years we will all download music and video from iTunes or Amazon or maybe even a resurgent Napster, but today Sony is grinning. It can riddle its product with copy protection, region coding, and restrictive DRM. Geeks/nerds/techies should be disappointed. Sony can also price its players and discs however it wishes, control production numbers to throttle output, and pay its employees whatever it likes. Economists should be disappointed. From whatever angle you approach the issue, I believe you too should be disappointed. Unless you work at Sony.

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In August 2001 I stood at the top of the World Trade Center. It was a moment I remember because it was an exhilarating experience: being so high up, gazing down at New York. The city looked so peaceful and likeable so when I came home just two weeks after returning from the USA and turned on CNN I was horrified by what I saw. Like a newly appalled America I wondered ‘Why?!’ I wanted to know why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama Bin Laden thought it was their duty from Allah to murder 2,974 people. Dad has always been hostile to religion; he wrote in support of Rushdie after the fatwa was issued, and Mom was a pacifist Buddhist: so the idea of peace being fundamental to religion seemed normal to me. But we all saw something very different on that Tuesday morning; and now we find that not only are individuals and groups intent on destroying the West, but whole countries. So once again we must ask: Why?

With the exception of Judaism, every religion says that scripture, revelation, and religious experiences should determine what laws we live under. Examples of this include the Ten Commandments in Christianity and the Pancasila in Buddhism. Considering God is believed to be the ultimate perfection, there should be no issue with using his commandments to govern the world because they are words of an omniscient and omnibenevolent being. We all agree that we should not murder, or steal, or commit adultery. So it appears there is no moral conflict between what we believe to be morally good and what is written in holy texts.

However, despite the fact that most of the edicts presented to us make appear morally sound and therefore corroborate our own moral sensibilities, many appear to be entirely immoral. Exodus 12:29 ‘At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in Egypt.’ If we read this as literally the action of God, the inherent immorality of it causes concern. Why should we allow a God who slays innocent boys and animals for the crime of the Pharaoh, to be involved in our self-governance? When concerned with our penal system, 1 Samuel 15:3 offers ruthless indiscriminate murder as punishment for wrongdoing; often seeing the sin of one man in a tribe as the sin of the entire tribe.

To read more of this essay, click here.

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