It’s rather the opposite of what you’re probably thinking.

The decay of empathy starts slowly, as you first say “no” every time you’re asked for money. It accelerates quickly after that, as you simultaneously discard eye contact while pretending you didn’t hear the entreaty, eliminating the need to respond. By the end, the scar tissue covers your mind’s eye and there is no active act of refusal anymore. The blind spot you’ve grown simply and completely blocks out what you wish not to see, acknowledge, comprehend, empathize.

That — the complete hardening of oneself until you un-see the unpleasantness — is one of the worst transformative acts I’ve ever seen in myself.

My conclusion is that in between the periods of protective rationalization, embrace the shame and make something positive happen. There’s no gordian solution, just a billion brief bouts of empathy.

[comments preferred on google plus]

Without hyperbole, the most important problem in America today is that as individual citizens, we have lost our sovereignty. It is gone, lost to corrupting power of money. No matter your political suasion, everything you think is wrong with America today stems from this one root cause. Really.

The most important 90 minutes you can spend this weekend is listening to Larry Lessig lecture on this topic. He explains the depth and breadth of the corruption, and he proposes a plan to solve it.

This weekend, instead of giving more of your time and money to the entertainment industry (who have proven themselves to be actively hostile towards us), listen to this lecture, and spend some time thinking about what it means.

There’s no call to action — yet. We are planting the seeds for a grassroots revolution that needs to come.

###

Stepping off the soapbox now, I observe with a hint of irony that it is in fact the entertainment industry that has given us the best treatment of the overwhelmingly corruptive powers of institutions on people, that being The Wire.

The 9th annual No Pants BART ride was over the weekend, and it was hilarity all around.

Jeff and I did the entire trip from condo, walking 10 blocks to BART, the festivities themselves, and the cab ride home all without pants.

Perhaps my favorite moment of the day was when a group of 20 of us were walking down the street, and encountered this mom and toddler. She asked us what we were up to, and we stuck to the line of just forgetting (or hating) pants. The little kid starts pulling at his pants and whines, “I want to take my pants off too!” and this being San Francisco, the mom happily obliged. I shudder to think of what laws were broken in that exchange.

All in all, a lovely time, and it’s been a while since I’ve flown the freak flag.

Check the rest of the album on Picasa: NoPantsSF

I’m giving up on social networks. Between G+, Flickr, Twitter, Path, LinkedIn, and whatever else, it’s just too damn hard to manage them all. It feels like work, which is exactly opposite the point of being connected to my friends.

Whither Facebook? No, sorry. They don’t give you control over your own stuff. When computer nerds talk about “bla bla bla privacy”, just replace it all with the following question — do you have control over your stuff? Facebook doesn’t give it to you, at least not as of today, in the amount that you deserve. So no matter how much other shiny stuff Facebook might tempt you with, it’s not worth it because you’re lending them your things without the promise you can get them back. If they change in the future, great — I’ll happily change my mind. But until then, they can go fuck off.

So, what to do about photos? Because every superfluous service ditched is a step closer to sanity. After wasting two hours of my life, I’ve discovered it is possible to use Google Plus Photos to mostly replace Flickr for my primary use case, which is hosting images for my WordPress blog.

Why Google Plus?

• Lots of storage space. And it’s free too, which is a bonus. (I pay for Flickr Pro currently; it’s been worth it, but I’m just getting fatigued. Sorry, Flickr!)
• You get to choose who sees your photos.
• You can download all your photos in a batch. You can let others do so too. This is great if you want to take your ball and go home if Google makes you mad, and it also allows Auntie Susana to grab all your photos to make a calendar or mug or whatever with.
• You can embed the photos in your blog.
• It’s super duper easy to upload photos from your phone. In fact, you can turn on automatic uploads from your phone.
• You can specify a Creative Commons license for your photos. This is important to people like me who care about the open flow of information and data.
• You can get stats via Google Analytics.

So what’s the catch?

The catch is that you can’t actually do those things from the Google Plus interface today. You need to actually go into Picasa Web to manage your photos and.

With Picasa Web, you can:

• arrange the photos in an album in the order you want
• set a cover photo for the album
• grab the link to an individual photo to embed elsewhere, like a blog
• set up analytics tracking

Don’t even bother trying to figure out how to do those things in Google Plus Photos. You can’t, at least not today. Luckily, Picasa Web does see all the photos you’ve uploaded into Google Plus; you can manage them in Picasa, then flip back over to G+ to share with your circles if you want.

Feature for feature, Flickr Pro is moderately better. But in the bigger picture of “too damn many social networks”, something’s gotta give. Again, I’m sorry Flickr. I loved you for a while, and will always remember you fondly. But it’s time to consolidate and simplify.

So, it’s been pretty fun watching the internet punish GoDaddy for supporting SOPA.

At the same time, it reminds me of fighting a guy in a wheelchair; you’re not on a level playing field.

Yes, GoDaddy made the mistake of angering their customer base who are also the most likely people to actually know and care about SOPA. But their other mistake was being a commodity supplier in a monopolist list.

If you are a sports fan, will you stop watching ESPN? Will you refuse to buy tickets, memorabilia, and apparel for your favorite baseball and football teams? The MLB and NFL are supporters of SOPA too.

If you have a credit card, will you cancel it? Both Visa and Mastercard are supporters of SOPA.

If you are sick, will you stop taking Lipitor, Celebrex, and Viagra? Oh, you don’t take those? Ok, will you stop buying Advil then? All drugs owned by Pfizer, yet another SOPA supporter.

My points, in ascending order:

• A real boycott involves self-sacrifice. Taking 20 minutes to change your name registrar is not sacrifice. Please stop feeling like you’re doing something real when you switch away from GoDaddy.
• There are too many forces aligned against us to make boycott an effective technique to prevent SOPA. I’ll never buy a UFC pay-per-view event, nor use L’Oreal beauty products. I also do not plan on cancelling my credit cards, and if I wind up in the hospital, I do not plan on refusing Pfizer drugs.
• What may surprise you, dear fellow infovore, is that the web 2.0 economy is a nice toy and all, but the old boy network still has the real power. In what may be a second surprise, parts of the old boy network still respond to archaic technology, such as actual voice phone calls and real letters printed on dead trees. Cynic though you may be about the Congress, have you called or written yet?
• Money. Money is the root cause behind SOPA, and everything else you hate about The System. The only way to fight back is with money. Sorry, there is no other way around it. Full stop.

If you want to do something real, donate money. A real amount of money.You are here on the internets, you are probably affluent enough to donate real money.

We should be so lucky that in order to get what we want politically, all we have to do is buy it. We don’t have to freeze our asses off in tents, we don’t have to endure horrific pepper spraying or physical violence. We just have to send some money, and then we get to carry on with our comfortable lives, doing everything else we enjoy doing.

I recommend sending money to:

• The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: defending your rights in a digital world”
• Rootstrikers is a network of activists fighting the corrupting influence of money in politics.

Will you join me?

Weekend #2 in the left coast started out quite delicously. Some people take photos of their dogs. Or their babies. You know, stupid stuff like that. I take photos of things that are pure awesome sauce viz., food. Rebecca was amused, claiming only “Asian people do that”. To that, I say “Well, Rebecca, only robots shoot lasers out their eyes and have rocket packs”. As usual, my logic was undefeatable.

Saturday saw a nice hike up Mt. Tamalpais with Jeff’s brother Joel and his wife Jenny. According to Jenny’s pedometer, we walked approximately 1347896134689 steps that day, which I think translates into the maximum distance a Saskatchawaneanian spotted skink would travel for poutine.

It was Fleet Week here, and although I only saw half of Sunday’s air show, it was nonetheless, awesome. Unfortunately, fog moved in right when the Blue Angels were about to perform, so they scuttled the show.

No worries though, because your intrepid explorer did manage to find some entertainment after all. Riding the bus home, a fine gentleman who had partook in just one too many Steelhead Reserves sat in the rear stairwell, alternately singing, screaming, mumbling, speaking in tongues, spitting, and threatening to urinate on himself and would the bus driver kindly please let him off the bus because he didn’t want to be a prisoner. After about 15 minutes of this nonsense, the bus doors finally opened, whereupon the gentleman apparently had a change of heart and wanted to stay on the bus after all.

But as I soon discovered, big city justice is swift and unerringly meted out. A fellow traveler thoughtfully launched the gentleman’s belongings out the rear door and helpfully explained, “get the fuck off the fucking bus you fucking drunk fuck”, whereupon the gentleman elected to participate in this meeting of the minds, grabbing the door preventing it from closing, and inquired multiple times if the helpful traveler wouldn’t like to step out the bus and “come be my bitch, you cock-sucking pussy motherfucker”.

It wasn’t until this moment that I realized a single man could prevent an entire diesel-powered city bus from moving, but apparently the “Reserve” in Steelhead Reserve stands for a reservoir of superhuman powers gifted upon you, an observation I note here and remember for the next time there is an earthquake and Muni needs me to go lifting trains and buses off the Golden Gate.

This little repartee had serious legs and looked to continue for the rest of the afternoon, but luckily for us all, a good samaritan waiting for his bus at the stop intervened and captured the gentleman’s imagination, by which I mean the gentleman was probably imagining how much better he would have felt the next morning if he hadn’t repeatedly used his head to probe how hard the sidewalk was. The good samaritan gently encouraged the gentleman to try several times, while we mere penny stinkards on the bus applauded merrily as we finally pulled away.

After this bit of excitement, I found peace and tranquility and a big honking bowl of ramen in Japantown, and thus did the weekend come to pass.

See all the photos.

After an uneventful 16 hours of driving with a brief 3 hour nap, landed in San Francisco, safe and sound, albeit a little sick of pizza.

I was quite relieved to discover that you can indeed still trust strangers over the internets, and that after sending a Very Large Paypal to someone I’d never met for a place I’d never seen, the keys, were, as promised, with the building manager in an envelope with my name on it. Welcome to Hayes Valley!

Then: the joy of truly internalizing the implications of a 3rd floor walk-up, humping my port-a-partment in an unexpected 9am workout. “Move-in for time”. My new place has a whiteboard, so I proudly wrote “9am – Alex – 37 minutes” on it. (and if you get that joke, wow, because it’s not even funny) Returned the minivan a day early and was surprised by a nice $200 refund. Call that one a win.

Struggled to stay sensate Saturday; lucid somnambulism moreso.

Sunday was much better, managing to hook up with my dear friends the Vydunas to catch Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in Golden Gate park.

I love the cliched truthiness of this city. Within 10 minutes of sitting down, an adventurous lass asked if, perchance, we know where to procure “either shrooms or mollie, I don’t care which, I just want something”. We were sorry to disappoint, but no fear, because apparently we were sitting right next to the friend of a drug dealer who overheard and helpfully yelled out, “oh, HE’S selling drugs”. My feeling is that all parties (including us) were satisfied with the end result.

Loophole exploitation also amused me to no end. It’s perfectly legal to have open alcohol in Golden Gate park, but illegal to sell it. My favorite was the guy walking around hollering, “ICE COLD BEER! I’VE GOT ICE COLD BEER!”. But did he mention it was for sale? No sir! Just announcing to the world what he has, officer. Genius.

Tuesday, I camped out at the Poll Everywhere office, a short hop away in the Mission. As lunchtime came and went, I thought to myself, “ah ha, no wonder these guys are rockin’ because they don’t ever eat!” And then in a wacky web2.0gasm, the office suddenly erupted into a full-on ejaculation of nerf projectiles and RC helicopters whizzing about and flying gummi bears. I took cover behind an Aeron chair and poured a steady stream of hot-but-you’d-never-know-it-because-it’s-actually-insulation-duh foam into my field of fire and held my corner. For like hours, it seemed. So then I thought, “how on earth are they doing so well because they don’t do any work as far as I can tell”. But hey, San Francisco! Startups! You know, whatever. Dhuude.

Anyway, the rest of the week til now has been a blur. I’ve been trying to keep east coast hours, so up and working by 6am, and supposedly done by 3. Getting up has been painful but doable; stopping on time a little harder, actually. Along the way, I’ve found the local climbing gym, acquired a big heavy annoying bike U-lock that I hate, and found a Chinese tutor.

So, I’m past my first hump day, and making good progress on eating the entire city.

Establishments of note:

• Big Mouth Burger, first meal, really damn good fries
• Flipper’s gourmet hamburgers, burger was a bit better than Big Mouth’s
• San Jalisco, amazing carnitas, chile verde and chicharrones were a bit tough
• Memphis Minnie’s, my own fault for fucking up perfectly good hot andouille sausage with a terrible bun
• Nabila’s, my local grocery! ♥

To try:

• truffle guy, group consensus as we walked past in the park: “don’t buy drugs from strangers in the park”; group consensus after a day’s reflection: “the guy has 4 ½ stars in yelp, he must be good!”
• Cu Co’s, I’ve got a hot date with you, in my mouth, mr. plantain burrito

And, you can see all my photos thus far:

• San Francisco, first week

We interrupt this viagra sporadic Platypus Friday to bring you the special moving edition, wherein your humble narrator departs for points west.

I find it satisfyingly symmetrical that just as I came to Ft. Collins in a Dodge Caravan, so shall I leave in a Dodge Caravan.

In retrospect, a minivan was way too spacious. I could easily have fit everything into a midsize car with a roof rack, which is the option I’ll be taking for the return voyage.

And now, I’m off to pick up my large pizza and get ready for 18 hours of driving fun.

See you on the other side.

1. Seal Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper, by Howard Wasdin. Decent book, you get to learn more about sniper training than any other book I’ve read thus far. The fighting is through Somalia, the Black Hawk Down incident, and so while interesting, less relevant to our times than later books I picked up over the summer. Content: B+, Writing: B+
2. Three Cups of Deceit, by Jon Krakauer. Everyone who read Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea should read this Kindle short that basically tells how badly Mortenson is running his charity, and how it’s much less effective than claimed. Recommended.
3. The Great Stagnation, by Tyler Cowen. Another Kindle short that is highly recommended; it talks about why we’re in the seeming economic mess we’re in today. Short answer: we’re not as rich as we thought. I wish there were more suggestions for what to do about it, but the goal of the book was to set the stage for discussion, not to outline all the answers. Recommended.
4. Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, by Paul Greenberg. Are fish food? Or are they wildlife? It’s not an easy answer. Greenberg covers a lot of ground about the ethics of eating both wild and farmed ocean fish. Recommended for the conscientious consumer.
5. Horse Soldiers, by Doug Stanton. US Army Special Forces (aka Green Berets) go to Afghanistan and mount the first cavalry charge of the 21st century against fucking tanks. Seriously. Horses vs. tanks. At times hilarious, always interesting. Stanton is a writer, not a soldier and you can tell. Writing: A+, Content: A.
6. Rising Plague: The Global Threat From Deadly Bacteria and Our Dwindling Arsenal to Fight Them, by Brad Spellberg. Good potential, poor writing, no real new ideas or even explanations. Skip.
7. In The Plex by Steven Levy. The story of Google in the early days. Great writing, good insight into one of the most relevant companies of our times. Recommended
8. One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick. A Dartmouth grad becomes a Recon Marine officer. Extremely interesting and relevant, because I felt like, “there but the grace of God go I”; we’re essentially contemporaries, and had I made slightly different life choices, I could easily have been in his same shoes. Fick, a pretty good writer, is deployed both to Afghanistan and Iraq. He covers some of the same ground as Horse Soldiers, and you start putting your Rashomon story together. Writing: A, Content: A.
9. Generation Kill by Evan Wright. Rolling Stone reporter gets embedded with the Recon Marines, who are the special forces of the Marines. Wright hangs out with the enlisted men who are under Fick’s command, and so it’s pretty fun to read the books side-by-side; you can really get a good sense of the early fight in Iraq. Writing: A, Content: A.
10. Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 by Marcus Luttrell. Luttrell harbors a grudge against the liberal media, and wants to pin blame on the reaction at home for making a tactical mistake that cost his buddies their lives. Only worth reading to find out what happened next and you don’t learn as much about sniping training as Wasdin’s book. Writing: C, Content: B.
11. The Declaration of Independents by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. Two editors from Reason magazine write a book subtitled “How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America”, which I don’t understand, because they spend a lot of time talking about case studies where non-traditional thinking was advantageous, but in my opinion, failed to connect that to any sort of concrete action about how to create a viable, politically electable Libertarian candidate. Had high hopes; I give it a B-.
12. The Unwritten Rules of Baseball, by Paul Dickson. Good, but I guess there aren’t really enough unwritten rules to merit an entire book. Had potential, but in the end, only a B+.
13. Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer. Describes the story of Pat Tillman, the NFL player who enlisted in the Army to fight in Afghanistan, and ended up getting killed by fratricide. Krakauer is a great writer, but I always have an issue with his all-too human, fatally flawed subjects, whom I usually end up hating and thus detracts from my ability to enjoy the fine writing. Krakauer does this on purpose, of course, but I can’t help myself. Call it a character flaw. It’s also why I hate Wes Anderson movies.
14. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. The author of Seabiscuit writes a second book about an amazing WWII survival story, and it is an amazing read. Recommended even if you’re getting sick of me talking about war books.
15. The Triple Agent by Joby Warrick. Tells the story of the suicide bomber who killed many of the CIA’s top analysts in Afghanistan. Decent story, but it makes you wonder a bit about women at work who have chips on their shoulders. A big ego combined with bad operational security got a lot of people killed. Writing: B+, Content: B+.
16. Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk. Strange book, well-written. Typical uncomfortable Palahniuk plot and subject material? Killing a porn star with sex. Anyway, you either love or hate him, but he’s a damn good writer.
17. Play Their Hearts Out by George Dohrmann. Basically every single NBA player comes up through powerful “amateur” basketball leagues that have been totally corrupted by money. Dohrmann spent 8 years embedded with a group of extremely talented 4th graders and watches them grow up. This is one of the best books I read all summer, and I don’t even like basketball that much. Highly Recommended
18. The Pirates of Somalia by Jay Bahadur. Somewhat interesting to learn about pirate culture, but the writing style suffers from “first book-itis”. Good read if you’re curious how we still have pirates in this day and age. Short answer: the ocean is fucking huge and even sending giant navy gunboats to patrol, there’s no way to cover all that area. Advantage pirates.
19. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. You either love or hate Gladwell’s just-so stories. Still, it’s not a bad way to spend an afternoon, so why not.
20. State of Denial by Bob Woodward. You knew Bush and Rumsfeld were bad, but you didn’t know just how bad until now. I would have laughed if I wasn’t crying the whole time (and this coming from someone who initially supported the pre-emptive invasion).
21. Newjack by Ted Conover. Sing Sing prison in New York won’t allow any reporters to do stories, so Conover goes through the entire process of becoming a real corrections officer for several years to write the story. A surprise pleasure to read, maybe the second best book I read all summer. Gotta love both his and Dorhmann’s dedication. Recommended
22. Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain. Too much inside baseball for me to really enjoy. The best chapter in the whole book is the one about the guy whose job it is to cut fish for a high end restaurant, mostly because Bourdain gets out of the way of himself and talks about this other guy. Just read that chapter and return the book. A+ chapter, C+ overall.
23. I Beat the Odds by Michael Oher. The subject of The Blind Side tells his side of the story. I guess he just wanted to let people know that he knew how to play football before high school, and didn’t appreciate how the movie made him seem like an oaf. Whatever. B-
24. The Heart and the Fist by Eric Greitens. Many books by enlisted SEALs, Greitens writes one as an officer. Between his book and Fick’s you get a very good sense of how excellent officers should carry themselves — officers eat last. Not a bad credo for anyone in a leadership position of any sort. This was my favorite SEAL book of the three (or so) I read. Writing: A, Content: A.
25. Conspiracy of the Rich by Robert Kiyosaki. This is the same guy who wrote Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I read about 1/2 chapter of this book before returning it. D-
26. Decoded by Jay-Z. If you really love Jay-Z, you’ll be amazed by this book as he goes into rich detail about all his lyrics…. ever. I skipped all his excess masturbation and just read his normal masturbation, which made for a pretty enjoyable autobiography. B.
27. A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. A delightful book about suicide. I haven’t read a bad Nick Hornby book yet.
28. Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage by Sherry Sontag. Holy shit, the number of times we almost got into war with Russia during the cold war is insane.
29. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Good counterfactual points arguing against every facet of religion. Helps atheists win more drunken bar conversations and become more confident in their right to be free from religion. Certainly helped to clarify my thinking.
30. God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens. The stronger, more polemic, less accessible, more soaring version of Dawkins’s book. I always wonder if I’m well-read enough to really understand or hell, even enjoy Hitchens. Probably not, but I try anyway.
31. Anthropologists in Arms by George R. Lucas, Jr. Should anthropologists be embedded in the military? We’ll never know; I put this book down after a chapter because it was written in a terrible academic style.
32. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua. Frankly I’m not sure why this book caused such a shitstorm amongst white people. My guess is that the typical “just listened to a story on NPR/FOX and instantly formed an opinion” thing happened, because anyone who actually reads this book will realize the obvious ironic tone and self-deprecation that Chua uses to write about her child-raising experience. I thought it was hilarious throughout. Recommended
33. Coraline by Neil Gaiman. My first Gaiman book. Not bad. I haven’t seen the movie, but the book was fun.
34. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. I think Kingsolver has one of the sexiest brains on this planet. Hooah.
35. Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. Excellent front story about modern civilization meets ancient one in the field of ultra-marathons. The best western ultra-runners compete against the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico. The writing was a little exuberant at times, and some of the backstories were pointless and annoying but overall, an excellent read.

And so that’s it. This is why I hate to sleep, because I don’t think I read enough over the last 4 months.

But, in a few weeks, the winter reading season will be here.

• there doesn’t seem to be a dress code (as of this writing). I saw plenty of men and women wearing sandals. I also (enviously) saw one male wearing cargo shorts (and I would’ve done the same had I known).
• the oath they make you swear is 100% secular, which is good for non-deists
• there is open wifi in the building, but since all electronics must be turned off in the courtroom, the wifi is only really useful for the pre-courtroom introduction phase
• as a corollary to the above point, while you’re allowed to have reading material in the courtroom, it must be made of dead trees; kindles and iPads are out

I didn’t get selected for the voir dire questioning, meaning I saw in the back of the courtroom while the other 12 individuals were instructed by the judge and questioned by the attorneys.

It was a misdemeanor criminal trial, meaning they only needed 6 jurors. So after a mildly interesting voir dire session, both the state and the defense got to preemptorily strike 3 jurors each, leaving 6 jurors. The 6 stricken jurors, along with myself and approximately 10 others in the back of the courtroom were dismissed for the day, and thus of our obligation for the rest of the year.

Some color commentary:

• counsel for the defense seemed slightly more polished than the assistant DA
• the judge and attorneys all did a good job of conveying the seriousness of the jurors’ tasks
• I found myself approximately as bored as I was during my 100-level college classes, as the judge explained the process, aiming at the middle part of the bell curve; but I don’t have any suggestions for improvement

All in all, although I found the process just a hair’s shade on the interesting side of the boredom divide, I was glad not to be selected.

Finally, a stray thought on receiving the summons in the first place. At first, I thought it was because I recently re-registered to vote (after being forcibly removed from the rolls due to lack of voting in a prior election), but apparently you do not need to be a registered voter to be selected; the county draws from driver license records too.

So, don’t think that de-registration from voting will get you out of jury duty in the future. Although on a personal note, when my voter registration lapses again, I probably won’t re-register.

If there’s some election in the future that I care about, I’ll try to influence it the true American way, which is to pay money to the side I want to win, and is way more effective than a single vote anyway.