I Gotta Fever, and the Only Prescription is More Post

I've been absent of late due to the fulmination of various forces in my life, but I gotta post. I worked for sixteen hours today, I have a meeting tomorrow, classes Tuesday, work Wednesday, and I have a problem set and midterm Thursday; so it's not looking like this week will see my triumphant return to blogging, although I can promise that my next substantial post will be very good.

It all goes to show, I think, that blogging is a luxury for the rich. I've tried to blog unemployment over at LoOG, but I've felt wraithlike doing it, overextended, drawn out, like being pulled in all directions with no end in sight. I can't devote the amount of time I want to to really examining phenomena like the Occupy movement, because doing so cuts way from time I could be spending working, now that after so many long months of searching, work - even work undesireable in normal circumstances - is available. So, it's official: I've progressed from the ranks of the unemployed to the employed. I'll have more details on this; but for now let's just say that I'm too tired to feel anything about it, and I'm deathly afraid of hubris.

Things are starting to settle down and become a little more regular, but I still have reservations, and there is of course a huge lag between starting a job and feeling the comforts of regular employment (I have trust issues, which I'll expand on in a later post.), and I'm super risk-averse now, and my experience in Japan has put a fire inside me that will drive me until my own death.

Stint at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen

I have a rather bizarre series of creative non-fiction which will be going up in installments at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.  This will serve as one of two bookends to my adventure in Japan, forever closing this chapter of my life and ushering in a new one.  Check it out at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen or below the fold:

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A Raga for April 26th

raga of spring - Vasant Ragini, Ragamala, Rajput, Kota, Rajasthan. 1770.Krishna dances with maidens1.  As someone who aspires to rationality, I find the irrationality of ritual endlessly fascinating (whether this irrationality is of the exotic, hardcore, or wimpy varieties).  While specific rituals are always irrational to the outsider, count on ritual as ostensibly purposeless fixed-action pattern to slither its way into even the most consciously rational of life-models.  

2.  The familiar algorithms of ritual provide soothing punctuation to the unmanageable run-on sentences of modern life.  Like a defrag program, their regular employment serves as an anchor to help everything else run smoothly.

3.  The role of strictly observed ritual in my life in Fukushima was to allow me to wake up everyday and play with my children until the early afternoon, ride my bike to work while listening to science lectures, teach classes until evening, ride my bike home, and write for three or four hours everyday.

4.  Through this deliberate existence, I managed to fit full-time employment, active parenting, an hour and a half of moderate exercise, an hour and a half of study, and an article into each day.  This was only possible by making small yet compounding improvements in ritual efficiency over the course of almost two years of the complete systemic control provided by strict observance.

5.  Since coming to America exactly a month ago, I've had no sustainable ritual presence in my life.  Without ritual and its anchored associative permutations, time disappears into the void.

Retrospective of Front Porch Republic

"No man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, [then] each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness." - Alexis de Tocqueville, intellectual forbear of Front Porch Republic

Front Porch Republic turns two today.  From Mark T. Mitchell:

On March 2, 2009, FPR was born. We’ve been going for two years now and our mission remains clear: to advance human flourishing through the promotion of political decentralism, economic localism, and cultural regionalism. The need is great and there is much work to be done. We are committed to fostering healthy communities and promoting discussions about policy and practices that will further this goal.

I am on board with this kind of conservatism.  I am sympathetic to both Austrian and institutional economics and political decentralism.  I think Big Food represents one of the gravest problems for humanity at several levels, and I hope to take up subsistence farming to some degree after moving to the United States.  I'm anxious to produce my own varieties of decidedly non-rubber tomatoes, red and white miso, and mountains of basil, with long-term aspirations to mushroom husbandry, craft dairy production, and bee-keeping.  I'm proud of and love traditional New England culture more and more everyday, and I hope to be a steward of that culture from this summer, when I will be returning to the United States with my family after almost five years of living in Japan.  

If this kind of conservatism seems like an impossible dream, don't take my word that it's not.  Go check out Front Porch Republic.  Here are some highlights from the first two years.

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The Book Store

The last time I went back to the States for Christmas, I paid a visit to my local Barnes and Noble megastore chain.  There was a massive “Young Adult” section, comprising almost a quarter of the store's shelf space, subdivided into smaller sections, like "Young Adult Adventure", "Young Adult Mystery", etc.  My favorite subsection was called “Paranormal Teenage Romance”, and it was full of factory series trying to capitalize on the Twilight fad.  This section probably contained a hundred or so books.  

Across the store, past Biblical and New Age sections (I'll refrain from making an irreverent joke here.) was a section called “Philosophy”, containing a hundred or so books.  “Philosophy” was sandwiched between a section containing a hundred or so books on the impending 2012 volcano-people disaster/redemption and a shady bathroom area with a sign reminding customers not to take merchandise into the toilets.

Upon closer examination, “Philosophy” was full of colorful books like “The Philosophy of Batman Begins”, “Dr. House for Dummies”, and "Dexter and Free Will".  I ultimately purchased Dan Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea for about twenty-five dollars, Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere for a rip-off price of forty dollars, and a Barnes and Noble publications's full-color photo, oversized volume on anatomy and physiology on sale for only eight dollars.  These books are currently decorating my bookshelf until I overcome my crippling blog addiction.

Time Management 2011 ('Hey where are my keys?')

Barely three weeks into 2011 and I can already hear the shatter and crash of people everywhere tossing their new year’s resolutions out the nearest window. Normally I wouldn’t notice it over the sound of the toilet as I flush my own promises away, right along with the back end of the year’s first Tuesday afternoon beer. But this January there’s a new kind of noise around the Kato household. Yes, that sound you are hearing is the smooth, even drone of methodical, almost superhuman planning.

I’ve thrown a few resolutions on the table this year. Not casually tossed under the kotatsu, or mindlessly slipped onto my desk, under a pile of what may be last year’s city tax forms and trail of related notices and summonses. No sir, I’ve been cultivating my powers of concentration in preparation for what is shaping up to be a landmark year for me. This year, no more minutes and hours will be wasted, lost forever in the vortex of inefficiency. This year, things are going to get done, frequently and fast, with none of my valuable ‘Run & Gun Time’ wasted on YouTube or dental floss or barely-bleeding kids.

It’s 8am as I sit down to pound this out. The kerosene heater is empty again and there’s frost on the insides of the windows, but I’m not going to squander a single moment on wimpy creature comforts. I just cranked out forty quick push-ups (all right, the last few weren’t too quick), and the kids can do the same when they wake up. Go push your trains around, or crawl back and forth across the living room a hundred times if you’re that cold, I’ve got work to do here. Talk about efficient; not only am I getting down to business several minutes sooner thanks to my brand-new razor-sharp personal management strategy, but I’m simultaneously teaching my nine-month-old kid the value of both time and exercise.

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Fitting In

Cu Chi, Vietnam'Writers are introverts by nature.’ So went the opening statement of the article I read recently. (Yes, the article; I’ve definitely got to ramp up my efforts in the self-education department.) Immediately upon reading this I felt a deep, suppressed urge to start screaming at my laptop. ‘Faceless coward! Who do you think you are? What do you know about me and my vert? I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs twice and both times came out an Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving EX-trovert!’ Boy was I about to explode.

But I am a grown man, so instead I snuck past the wife, preoccupied with keeping my sons from stabbing each other with Buzz Lightyear pencils, and into the kitchen to grab a piece of anger management chocolate.

I’ve been an extrovert all my life. This includes my childhood, most of which I, as a skinny soccer player, spent in constant fear of ridicule by a neighborhood full of football players. On the outside I might have seemed like a loner of sorts, but this was not at all the case. I had plenty of friends: Pac-Man, Tony the Tiger, the entire Yankees lineup and Christie Brinkley, to name just a few.

In the past couple of years, though, I have been subjecting myself to just the kind of writer’s introversion I suspect that person was going to tell me about had I kept reading. For a while there (a while meaning the twenty-year stretch from freshman year in college to the birth of my first son) the weekend was for me a chance to turn off my brain and let a few otherwise suppressed biological processes take over for a while. Now, starting Friday afternoon (or Thursday evening, or sometime Wednesday, depending on how effectively I’ve been able to avoid picking up more teaching jobs) I am thinking only about spending those once-hallowed days of debauchery punching out that long overdue blog post or cranking out the next chapter in the upcoming novel or continuing my wayward search for the holy grail of literary notoriety.

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They Were Never Planning on Televising the Revolution

art by Jack Jerz. Click on photo for link.Fake Steve Jobs and blogosphere hater Dan Lyons speculates that the latest FCC net neutrality ruling ushers in the age of consolidation for the Internet:

No matter what you think about the new rules, however, they signal an important turning point in the development of the Internet. We are going from Phase One, where everything is free and open and untamed, into Phase Two, which is all about centralization, consolidation, control—and money.

Because don’t kid yourself. Money is driving all of this. As in: Hey, we’ve created this marvelous new platform for communicating with each other. We’ve demonstrated that very large sums of money can be generated by sending stuff over these wires. Now let’s figure out who gets what.

Tuesday’s new FCC rules grant two big concessions to carriers. First, the rules will apply to wired broadband connections, but they will pretty much leave wireless alone. Second, carriers remain free to create “fast lanes” on the Internet. They can charge Internet companies to ride on the faster pipes, and perhaps also charge consumers more money to get access to those speedy services.

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The Inductive: Volume II

Here we are one year after launching The Inductive.  If you go down to the archives at the bottom of the right column, you'll see that entries start in July of last year but this was at the old Wordpress blog, which we imported to The Inductive last November.  Our Google Analytics account for this site dates from November 19th, so that is how we shall mark our anniversary.  

What We've Accomplished:

(1.) 207 published posts in Specific Facts, totaling approximately 165,000 words, which puts our one-year blog output about halfway between Angels and Demons and the Da Vinci Code.  

(2.) twenty-four published, full-length articles in General Principles, totaling about 72,000 words, the approximate length of Michael Crichton's classic The Andromeda Strain. 

(3.) seventy-two published entries in Dispatches From the Wild Wild East - about 50,000 words - close to the length of E.L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times.  

(4.) nine reviews of classic or topical films and albums in the Art of Leisure - 13,000 words - the length of two full New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, or Atlantic articles.

(5.) The grand total word output for the Inductive thus far is approximately 300,000 words spread across 312 entries, which means at this pace, we'll eclipse War and Peace sometime early next summer.

(6.) We've had somewhere between 60,000 and 90,000 pageviews in the last year, and somewhere between 23,000 and 30,000 unique visitors during that same period.  This makes about 250 pageviews and 90 visitors per entry, but there is a wide range.  Most posts for Dispatches from the Wild Wild East attract few readers, while our reviews seem to be very popular.

(7.) While today is only November 22nd, this month is already the best so far for the Inductive in terms of hits and visitors.  The blogosphere and Google have been kind to us.  The numbers showcased in (6.) should continue to increase steadily in 2011.    

(8.) Six authors from disparate backgrounds contributed to the Inductive in our first year.

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The Grass Is Always Greener

I've written in defense of Facebook before, and Alexis Madrigal does it better than me:

...The real struggle is with ourselves to use Facebook well … You get to determine your level of investment in the digital world around you. You get to choose the people you listen and talk to. You have control over your data. You get to define who you are, no matter what your Facebook profile says. All that is not lost unless we choose to lose it.

I think this is obvious, and if you don't get it, may nature select against your genes.  The one concern I do have with Facebook is that it is so much better than anything else at allowing users to use their own local knowledge to coordinate and manage information that it will soon come to monopolize much of the activity on the Internet (just like Microsoft with the operating system market in the 1990s) - future blogging will be solely on Facebook, email will be taken over by Facebook (perhaps as soon as tomorrow), games developed will be all for Facebook platforms a la Farmville; essentially, we could be seeing the genesis of something far more of a monopoly in any meaningful sense of the word than Microsoft ever was

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We Are Not Seth Godin

Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the U.S.S. Enterprise.Thanks to Andrew at 30 Words for the link to Twist Image's take on business writer Seth Godin's move to abandon his ties with traditional publishers.  The way the move was reported by the Wall Street Journal, one would think the singularity was now and cyborgs waited in the on-deck circle to tear us carbon-based lifeforms all to pieces.  (No, not really, but it's a pleasant fiction.)  Twist Image brings it all down to Earth with the headline, "You Are Not Seth Godin":

We tend to see this one act: "Seth leaves major book publishing behind." What we forget is the track record (twelve best-selling business books, as many speaking events per year as he would like to do, his own seminars, thousands of Blogs posts, free eBooks and more goodwill thank you can shake a stick at). This amounts to decades of doing tons of things (let's not forget about Squidoo) that all had him in direct connection with the people who will buy his books from him, talk about it to their peers and evangelize his always-brilliant thinking.

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Computer (Windows Vista) Problems

My computer exploded the other day, from two weeks of 100-degree heat in Fukushima, Japan. The motor on my five-year-old Dell simply combusted in a cloud of smoke while I was watching Sesame Street Jason Mraz videos with my daughter, the room reeked of plastic, and I quiety panicked at the prospect of losing a years-worth of baby videos.  But, from my small amount of computer hardware knowledge, I don't think there should be any damage to the hard drive, and I plan on bringing my desktop tower to some nerds for fixing as soon as I can pass my Japanese license test (future post).

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David Brooks Gets Obama, America Right

Kudos to New York Times columnist David Brooks for helping to further catalyze the post-partisanship which the election of Barack Obama represents for some.  Brooks, a moderate conservative, recently wrote a column called, "Getting Obama Right" where he even-handedly castigates partisan portrayals of the President from both sides.  From the right:

Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine.

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Stop Ranting about Facebook Privacy Settings

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic recently posted an article, "Facebook Does Not Understand the Meaning of Privacy" as a response to recent comments made by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg vis-a-vis speculation that the company is selling user information to advertisers.  From Zuckerberg:

In the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information (sic). People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that's evolved over time.

The Atlantic rightly points out that Facebook updates, including the "news feed" section, were initially unpopular with its base of elitist Ivy League students trying to show-off for their selective group of peers.

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The National Review

The National Review was founded by William F. Buckley in 1955, as a counterpoint to liberal intellectual journals, which had, until that point, dominated the landscape of political debate.  In his founding statement, Buckley described his vision of the National Review’s role in the discourse:

[The National Review] stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no other is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

Now, the folks at the National Review seem to have taken a literal interpretation of Mr. Buckley’s vision.  Buckley was a confident intellectual that could articulate conservative values in debates with his liberal counterparts, helping lay the groundwork for the modern conservative movement, first with Barry Goldwater in 1964 and then with Ronald Reagan in 1980.  Today, the National Review is a magazine for partisans that defines itself less on a core set of values and more on its opposition to the other side.  It is the journalistic embodiment of the “party of no.” On its blog, the Corner, many of its authors spend most of their time caricaturizing the views of “the Left” (capital “L”), focusing on why it is wrong, rather than why they are right.  What once was considered the intellectually-honest voice of conservatism now just marches in lockstep, attacking whoever a few dominant voices (Charles Krauthammer, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh) deem the villians to be.  Eventually this leads to a wholesale rejection of the premises of the other side, because acknowledging even the valid concerns of opposing views undermines your own central tenet: opposing the opposition.  Now, the National Review yells “Stop,” before the other side starts.

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