The future is not Big Government. Self-serving politicians. Powerful bureaucrats. This has been tried tested throughout history. The result has always been disaster. President Obama your agenda is not new. It's not change and it's not hope.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

Sometimes I think I might not have written 'The Age of Miracles' if I hadn't grown up in California if I hadn't been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster of danger and denial.

My heart is so light that it's amazing. I get to play all this grief all this loss all this disaster and chaos. It's hysterically funny. I am very light.

I jetset around and play these songs and get to hang with some pretty amazing people then I go home to a really great farm though actually it's a disaster area of a farm at the moment. But it's certainly a blast. I wouldn't trade lives with anyone right now.

France and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing though is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.

In the U.S. alone weather disasters caused $50 billion in economic damages in 2010.

We virtually never feel our age but thinking that we should can lead to disaster.

We have become a society that can't self-correct that can't address its obvious problems that can't pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that - for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati - we can't wake up from.