Our Man in Abiko's Blog, page 22

KUROKAWA'S FUKUSHIMA REPORT: THE MIXED METAPHOR AND THE GROUP HUG

Oh dear. Our Man does hope the wheels aren't going to fall off the Kurokawa report into the Fukushima accident before it's had time to build any kind of momentum (the editor does hope Our Man stops mixing his metaphors before the reader has a chance to get to the point -- ed.) but seems this line about the blame for Fukushima is causing folk to get their knickers in a twist:

Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to 'sticking with the program'; our groupism; and our insularity.

This line doesn't appear to be in the Japanese language version of the report, which has led folk far smarter than Our Man to conclude that the report may be:
A personal soapbox for Kurokawa whose thing is internationalism.It's the here-we-go-again Japan is unique, has four seasons, not like anywhere else, evolved from a different breed of ape bullshit. So therefore, it's not such a big deal report after all, just an appeal to outmoded and inaccurate cultural stereotypes.Evidence that there are two reports -- one for the foreigners and one for the Japanese. Take your pick of what the implications of all that might be.Our Man doesn't want to be seen as an apologist for Kurokawa, or Japan as unique, or anything that might suggest he knows more than any one else on this and many other matters -- he really, really doesn't... but...
But is it possible that this line of spin, thrown in for whatever reason, is just that -- a bit of spin? And maybe the meat and potatoes of the matter (watch those mixed metaphors, smart ass - ed.) are contained elsewhere in the report -- you know the bits about the nuke company colluding with the regulators colluding with the media colluding with whoever else is left to collude with that allowed the natural disaster turn into a man made tragedy?
For what it's worth, Our Man believes toadyism, reflexive obedience, devotion to sticking to the program and insularity are not exclusive to the Japanese; they apply equally to elites in the West too. Hello, Goldman Sachs? Hello, The U.S. Government? Hello, The UK Conservative Party? Hello, The Murdoch Empire? Et bloody cetera.
Meanwhile, as the resistance movement bickers, the Gomiuri Shimbun can begin Phase One of the business as usual approach: marginalise the report by burying the point in a haystack of words in which there's something for everyone.
Sigh.
The smart talk seems to be over at Shisaku. Looking forward to his considered take. All this fake thinking for himself is giving Our Man a headache. Need a group-think group hug.
Carry on!

FUKUSHIMA NUCLEAR ACCIDENT: 'RESULT OF COLLUSION'

Our Man is no expert on nukes. Nor is he an expert on Japan. Or Government reports. Or Fukushima. Or much of anything. But off the top of his head, he can't ever remember an official government report so damning of the status quo, so spot-on with what Our Man thinks really happened.

So, he shares it here in its entirety and with an executive summary for folk with as little patience as he has for long documents. But he wanted to post it here just so he has it for future reference.
He has no doubt that the forces of reaction (he's looking at you, Yomiuri Shimbun) will do everything in their considerable power to mitigate the impact of this report. They will try ignoring it; when that fails, they will marginalize it; then look for chinks in the report's armour; then attack its creators; then go after any of its believers. And repeat.

Or if they are really smart, they will agree it's spot on and then ignore its recommendations and do nothing.

In other words, they will do whatever they can to kill the truth. And they may succeed. But at least we have the document to know that they are wrong.
Naiic report hi_res
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Our Man is betting you haven't read the report. But you probably should. So here's Our Man's executive summary after a quick glance through, that you can cut out and stick on your fridge:
"The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant cannot be regarded as a natural disaster.""It was a profoundly manmade disaster -- that could and should have been foreseen and prevented.""...a multitude of errors and willful negligence...""It's fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to 'sticking with the program'; our groupism; and our insularity.""The accident was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said parties.""TEPCO was too quick to cite the tsunami as the cause of the nuclear accident and deny that the eathquake caused any damage.""The residents' confusion over the evacuation stemmed from the regulators' negligence.""The government and regulators are not fully committed to protecting public health and safety; that they have not acted to protect the health of the residents and to restore their welfare.""The safety of nuclear energy in Japan and the public cannot be assured unless the regulators go through an essential transformation.""Replacing people or changing the names of institutions will not solve the problems."

JAPAN TODAY, TOMORROW THE WORLD

Despite the hype about ebooks, you might be surprised to know how hard it is to get anyone to take them seriously. Or at least, one by Our Man.

So, forgive Our Man his chuffedness to see this. Japan Today has run the Abiko Free Press story about Hana Walker's book. THE FULL STORY IS HERE. Lest you suspect Our Man of merely seeing $$$ before his eyes when he thinks of you, dear reader, know this: he is in no way, shape or form able to even contemplate quitting his cover job to concentrate on chronicling Hana's continuing adventures.

But he is still on cloud nine. He's proud of Hana's tale. He couldn't have written a better book at this time, and folk whose opinions he respects have enjoyed reading it. Even better, folk, even if only a small trickle, are buying his book. What more could a silhouette really want? Oh, OK, your money.

AN HONEST LOOK AT RACISM

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hi! My Name is Loco and I am a Racist is hard to read.

Not because of the writing, far from it, Baye McNeil's prose is straight and true, with a playful turn of phrase and compelling immediacy that won't surprise anyone who has read his blog.

No, it's personal. Completely personal.

Enter Hi! My Name is Loco and I am a Racist and you don't just enter the author's world, you enter his mind, heart and soul. This is no mean feat -- it's much harder to do than it looks. But it's not always comfortable for the reader.

Our Man is only able to write honestly by establishing a complex set of mirrors within mirrors held together with bits of string and a knotted hanky or two -- the silhouette, the third person, the bottle of 7-Eleven red, the humour (not to mention asides from me - ed.). Reading Baye's book is like being asked to walk in his footsteps, only he's walking the high-wire with no safety net.

And now it's your turn, go on. Just don't close your eyes. You can't close your eyes.

Baye's life is revealed with clarity and an honesty as 20/20 as his hindsight. The women he has screwed. The friends he has made. The assholes who dissed him. The friends he has outgrown. The love he has lost. His failings. His successes. His confusion. And his clarity; his absolute certainty that he is a racist.

And yet, and yet, and yet... it's this premise, in a book packed with as much honesty about race as Richard Wright's Native Son, that doesn't ring true to Our Man. Baye calls racism the mammoth in the room, but Our Man would call it the paper tiger in the book.

If we accept that race is the defining characteristic of Loco's life and that he is a racist, then in his world view, this is the operating principle behind everyone's life.

But Our Man doesn't buy that. And Loco doesn't either.

At every turn in the book, Loco's humanity and individuality shine through. Every insult from the Japanese who refuse to sit next to him on a busy train, every ignorant jibe from his white former roommates, every act of opportunism from his black friends are met with indignation. Indignation that anyone could be so blinded by bigotry to not see the individual staring back at them.

Loco is many things: a great teacher, a straight-talker, an individual, not to mention a great writer. But a racist? Our Man begs to differ.

View all my reviews

GATEKEEPERS? MEET THE BARBARIANS

Our Man has been struggling with the right metaphor or allegory or whateveryoumacallit to describe the changes to the Murdoch empire. Despite not actually reading beyond the first subhead of the NYT story, or indeed having much of any familiarity with the Roman Empire beyond the Asterix Era, Our Man can say with some confidence the following:

While Solomon only teased about splitting the baby in two, King Murdoch is severing his empire into the bad bit and the good bit. The bad bit will shrivel and die, like the Western Roman Empire, and the good bit, like the Eastern Roman Empire, will go on and on.

The problem is Our Man doesn't know which is which. Is the bit with Fox TV the good or bad bit? Or is the bit with the Sun and the Times and Wall Street Journal the bad bit? What about the Holy Roman Empire? The Catholic Church? The Sick Man of Europe? The Scramble for Africa? Arkright's Mill and the Spinning Jenny? Consider this from Clay Shirky:

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done. In ye olden times of 1997, it was difficult and expensive to make things public, and it was easy and cheap to keep things private. Privacy was the default setting. We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a Wordpress install.

So the publishing part of the Murdoch Empire is, to use an old newspaper expression, fucked. But Our Man reckons the same is true of the entertainment "good bit". Blogging is to newspapers what YouTube is to movie studios, n'est ce pas? Just give it a year or two.

Gatekeepers? Meet the barbarians.

YEAR OF THE MONKEY

Realising a dream is an odd sensation. Liberating and frustrating in equal measure. Or as Our Man prefers to think of it in memo form:

Removed monkey from back, now gotta find new monkey. 

Our Man has lived with the novel-writing primate for several years, and to be suddenly free of him leaves Our Man at a loss. He's filled that time with doing PR stuff and generally goofing off, and it's time to say enough of that. He's coming round to the view that the best PR is to just keep writing good stuff, build an audience one reader at a time. A radical idea, for sure. And one Our Man feels most comfortable with.

Will Hana do battle with the forces of evil again? Of course. But first, Our Man has a couple of ebook shorts he wants shot of before he's ready to grapple with another Hana Walker manuscript.

#HALFLIFEBOOK PR: THE ART OF FAILING SUCCESSFULLY

Apologies for going on and on about Hana Walker's Half-Life 2:46, but, as you know, this writing a book lark has been a hell of a monkey on Our Man's back so please forgive him if he spends a couple more posts blowing his own trumpet (nobody else is gonna blow it, certainly not those monkeys - ed).

Fortunately, Our Man is a silhouette, otherwise he would blush as red as Hana's felt-tipped front cover when he thinks how shameless he has been in pursuing coverage of his pet project. When it's for others,  for folk who genuinely suffered, as in Quakebook, or, in the case of Reconstructing 3/11 for his fellow writers (they genuinely suffered your editing - ed.) Our Man had no problem being shameless in the pursuit of hits.
But Our Man messed up this time round. He put a link on the Quakebook twitter feed thinking Hana's tale would be of interest to folk who bought Quakebook (although stressing her book was a personal project, with personal gain, not for charity) and he should have listened to his own conscience and not done it. He was rightly taken to task for besmirching Quakebook's good name, and he immediately removed the link from the feed. Our Man genuinely regrets the slip in judgment. What can he say? He got wrapped up in the retweet frenzy and lost sight of the only thing that really matters in all of this -- integrity (yeah, do like the pros do when writing for other publications - you are supposed to not mention the whole reason you are writing and wrap yourself in the flag of the greater good, then insist on a merely biographical link to your latest hardback doorstopper overprced at $19.99 -- that's called integrity - ed.) 
So, Our Man messed up. He's sorry about that. He won't do that again.
He vows to find entirely new ways to mess up. Like the letter to Granta above. Which, despite failing even from the stage of conception (at the bottom of a bottle of 7-Eleven red), actually delivered a really generous reply from Ellah, proving the truth of Our Man's new motto...
When failing, it's important to fail successfully.
Meanwhile, Our Man is quietly optimistic Dan Ryan will surprise us all and knock the PR ball outta the park. (Let's hope he knocks out those pesky monkeys, eh? - ed.)

Carry on.

WELCOME TO ABIKO? #HanaLives

My fellow Abikans,

Four score and ten minutes ago, Our Man came to a decision about what to do about PR gurus, publicity-seekers and assorted internet trolls. His natural reaction, and indeed any right-thinking Abikan's, is to ignore the haters; to take the higher ground; to correctly use semi-colons; and speak no ill of the complete time-wasting tossers.

But when the trolls of this world (see the garish welcome to Abiko PDFs left anonymously at Dan Ryan's email inbox above, free PDF downloads available) attack the reputation of one of Our Man's friends, a girl no less, he cannot stand idly by and let the outrageous slings of fortune sling unfortunately.

What, you may ask, is our Man on about? What indeed. The so-called PDF arrived this morning in the so-called bunker (with an advert for Uri Geller's so-called lucky bracelets).

Our Man could refute each accusation against the character of Hana Walker, thrust unceremoniously into the limelight of international publishing with the release of her Half-Life 2:46 book available at all good Amazon stores priced at $3.99 around this cruel interconnected, internationalized but increasingly easy to monetize world, but what would be the point?


Yes, Brent. There are far too many people on the internet with far too much time on their hands. But together, we may go hand-in-hand (if you wash them first) to the higher ground. 

And thank you, Durf. That kind of wholehearted self-less, self-sacrifice for the greater good will not be forgotten, certainly not in the true Greater Abiko Co-Prosperity shpere.
Is Hana Walker's Half-Life 2:46 a work of fiction? A good question. A better question would be: is it true? And the best question of all would be: Is the book any bloody good?
The answer, my fellow Abikans, agents provocateur, boys and girls, is yes.
#HanaLives

HANA'S ON THE SHELVES

That was quicker than Our Man thought -


Hana Walker's Half-Life 2:46 is live!  

#HALFLIFEBOOK ALMOST LIVE...

So this is it. Our Man has sent off the completed ebook file of Hana Walker's Half-Life 2:46 to Amazon and it's just a matter of hours, or probably minutes, until the book hits the virtual shelves in America and Europe. Though thanks to the internet you can buy a copy wherever you are from the Abiko Free Press bookstore RIGHT HERE.

Is it a page-turner? Did Our Man make the right call on the balance of sublime vs ridiculous? Did he do Hana's voice justice? Did he edit it well enough? Listen to the right advice? Shun the wrong?

He doesn't know. But he does know this: It's the best he could write at this time. Hemingway said something along the lines of self-doubt was the artist's reward. But he went and shot himself and Our Man has no intention to do that, so really, maybe his advice kinda sucked. And besides, Our Man is no artist (yeah, we all saw the cover - ed.)

But this is the straight-up truth: Our Man put his all into those 50,000 words, and for any faults the book may have, it's still worth a read. Does the book work? You be the judge -- the first couple of chapters are free on Amazon. Go ahead, have a nosey round.

And should you buy a copy and want to write a review on Amazon, Our Man will be most grateful, even if you think it sucks. But know this: if you should get as far as "whale in a can" -- that bit is not a formatting mistake. It's supposed to be like that.

Carry on!