Dana Blankenhorn

Making It About Us Again

Why are people so disgusted with the present political campaign?

It's not about us. (Picture by Fred Askew from MonthlyReview.)

Candidates give lip service to this being about us, but it seems to be more about the media and the pundits and their own obsessions than about us.

Campaigns generally get into the weeds like this when the discussion about us becomes uncomfortable to the elites in power. It's not policy choices which make the elites uncomfortable. It's the idea of someone other than the elites making those choices which makes them uncomfortable.

I'm not talking here of idiots and know-nothings making decisions based on their own prejudices. I'm talking about candidates and parties addressing our real crisis, not just pandering to our short-term problems but inspiring us with a different future.

What's happening, to both young and old, is we fear losing control of our future. We don't know where our next job is. We don't know if America can ever lead again. We don't know how we'll pay our bills or educate our children. We fear we've lost control, personally, politically, economically. We're scared.

Why the Press Hates America

There are several good reasons why the TV media wants to use Jeremiah Wright to push Barack Obama to the sidelines:

1. This decade has been very-very-good for Big Media. Monopolization means you don't have to work hard for profits. Disney, GE, Time-Warner, Microsoft and Fox have gotten everything they could have wanted (and more) from this Administration.
2. The Internet threatens to destroy Big Media's ability to create campaign narratives, which lie at the heart of its political power. You spend your life working toward the height of power, you're going to resent another medium trying to take that power from you.
3. The myths, values and assumptions of 40 years are deeply ingrained in New York and Washington. Power isn't going to give up easily. It has to be seized.
4. After decades of basing power on Nixon's McCarthyism, using 30-second soundbites, TV can't conceive of people sitting through a long speech and getting information on their own.

It is telling that Obama is having problems right now with under-educated, older women, people who are unlikely to use the Internet. They're the people most easily manipulated by Big Media. That's the greatest threat the Internet Thesis has right now.

When a comedian is the best reporter in the room there is something wrong with the room. It's not just Jon Stewart's interviews. His bit about the rice shortage last week was classic, getting the message of American arrogance through our resistance.

Not everyone is helping, however, which says something very interesting about this medium.

The American Disease

I have no scientific proof of this, but I have long believed ADHD to be the American Disease.

Up to 5% of Americans are diagnosed with ADHD. I'm one of them. I'm creative, I'm quick, I tend to being a polymath. I also have trouble finishing anything longer than a blog post, I'm quick to anger, and I have enormous trouble concentrating on anything I'm told I have to concentrate on (as opposed to what I want to concentrate on). I am very difficult to compel.

In other words, I am both hyper-focused and distractable, I can be charming but I'm prone to depression. These are symptoms typical of what I call "male" ADHD, the kind you hear about and read about most often. I have likened it, most popularly, to having Robin Williams in my head. (This also brings a tendency to self-medicate. Robin's had two stints in rehab.)

There is another kind of ADHD, which may be dramatically under-diagnosed. I learned about it from my daughter. I call it "female" ADHD. In this version you become Robin's audience. You're lost in your own world, and breaking out into the real world can be a struggle. This often comes with learning disabilities -- dyslexia in my daughter's case.

So why do I call this the American disease? Partly because very few Europeans have it. To many Europeans this proves Americans are making the whole thing up. But think about it. If you were living in, say Germany or Italy 100 years ago, or in Ireland or Scotland 200 years ago, or in England 300 years ago, and you had ADHD, what's the first thing you'd think of doing?

Right, getting the heck out of there. Going to America.

Principles and Ideology

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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What is most frustrating to me, as I read responses to my blog posts here and elsewhere, is how often I come up against raw, naked ideology.

Ideology is a soul stealer. Ideology blinds us to reality, substituting an artificial construct. Ideology, regardless of where its -ism comes from, is simply impractical.

One big reason why we have generational change is that the principles which first motivate important changes morph, over time, into ideology. This happens at all times, to all types of principle. The kind, simple words of Jesus have been transformed over the centuries into a host of warring ideologies. The same is true for Mohammad.

The same is true, in our time, for Adam Smith, for George Mason, for John Locke, even for Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, all the  great men who are credited with defining what is today modern conservatism.

I have been quite taken with the interviews surrounding the book Pure Goldwater, co-written by Barry Goldwater Jr. (who supported Ron Paul) and former Nixon counsel John W. Dean (who now seems to be a Democrat). Dean revealed that, while Goldwater Sr. was seen as a right-wing extremist in 1964 he was, by the end of his life, considered to be something of a libertarian, out of step with his own party. He even befriended the Clintons!

Goldwater was a man of principle. What he saw in his lifetime was those principles morph into an ideology, an absolutism as troubling as what he had fought in the 1950s.

An Alternative Energy Census

One of the treats in my first reporting job, at the Houston Business Journal, came in learning about geological maps. Using sonar and great creativity, engineers in the "oilpatch" mapped where potential oilfields might lie. The maps determined the value of potential oilfields, and told wildcatters where they should drill.

With businessmen now taking The War Against Oil seriously, we need new maps.

Such maps might indicate:

• How much sunlight falls.
• How deep you must drill to reach usable geothermal resources.
• How reliable is the wind.
• Where is a stream capable of taking a water wheel?

From such maps we can determine the potential alternative energy value of any place in the country.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

ADHD is like this sometimes.

Just when you think you have a handle on everything, that things are moving forward, the call comes and you're thrown back into it.

A science teacher this time. John argued about the answer to a question. It got personal. He got mad. He raised his voice. He ignored signals to calm down, to leave the room. The other kids were scared, and didn't know what he was going to do.

All the kind words and promises in the world won't do a lot of good at times like this. Talking to the teacher I feel like I'm talking someone down off a ledge, all the while feeling like I want to crawl out there with them.

It doesn't help to realize that this is happening less-and-less. It doesn't help much to realize that, when John came home that day, he was filled with remorse, angry at himself. He didn't want to hear my words. He had heard them too often. They were playing in his head all day.

Yet in some ways these are the best of times. We got a letter last week inviting John to apply to Yale. I have on my desk an invitation from five top schools, including Harvard and Penn, for him to attend a seminar on going to one of them. It's like being the parent of a top basketball prospect with iffy friends. He might become a star or he might fall down completely.

Open Source is Parallel Processing on Steroids

I was chatting up a Washington liberal today, and it was depressing.

The subject was computing. The liberal bemoaned the power of corporations to wreck a great, highly-functional government project.

The project was starved for funds, its developers allowed to leave, and now its bones were being picked by lobbyists, all aiming their "best of breed" systems as replacements for bits-and-pieces of what had once been a magnificent computing edifice.

Even if Democrats are elected this fall, he said, they don't understand these technical arguments about open source vs. proprietary. They'll be bought off just like the current crop.

Which is when it hit me, the frame he could use to tear down all those vendors and bring back what was lost, what is in the process of being lost.

Open source is parallel processing.  (Shown is the parallel processing lab at the University of Utah.)

No matter how big a vendor might be, it's still one system. Like the Von Neumann architectures that dominated computing for its first 40 years they have a bottleneck. The only way to speed up the process of finding a solution is to speed the whole process, get more GHz. It's this kind of thinking which led, by the 1980s, to so-called "supercomputers" like the Cray.

Parallel processing was developed in the 1980s at the Sandia Labs in New Mexico. The idea was simple -- to break jobs into parts, to move the parts onto many systems, and then to put the solutions together on the back end.

In the 20 years since parallel processing has come to dominate computing, relegating Von Neumann to a Wikipedia entry. First people stacked Macs to beat a Cray. Then they used parallel processing on the Internet itself, creating distributed computing projects like SETI @  Home. Today parallel processing is used inside chips -- all today's latest AMD and Intel silicon is doing parallel processing. From two to four to eight -- who knows how far we can go with it.

That's sort of how open source works. Only on steroids.

Because with open source not only do you parse out pieces of a project to different companies, or different developers, but their work can cross-pollinate. Not only can you build systems in parallel, but you can also use a vast community of users to find bugs, and another vast army to stamp out the bugs.

The genius of Linus Torvalds lies in his ability to constantly re-engineer Linux' development process, first farming out all the work, then finding new ways to coordinate the massively-parallel architecture which develops in response. And the design of Linux itself responds well to this parallel processing impulse, since it consists of central functions in a kernel, ancillary functions surrounding it, and a host of distribution providers who can build working systems from all the pieces -- sometimes using just parts of the kernel for a mobile system, embracing optional things like virtualization for a server.

The Future of Corporate-University Collaboration?

If anyone knows of any other deals like this, let me know. Because right now this looks unique.

And if anyone has any opinions, fire away, because this is not your usual blog post. This one asks more questions than it answers.

Rice has signed a deal with Lockheed-Martin in which the latter will have a sort of "mini-lab" inside the Smalley Institute. The company will pick through what everyone is doing, and fund up to six projects each year which could be quickly brought to market.

The new lab-in-a-lab is called the Lockheed Martin Advanced Nanotechnology Center of Excellence at Rice,  or LANCER.  Cute...cute name.

Another type of spam victim

Every spam which goes out has millions of victims. (I hope those lovely people at Hormel, makers of this fine canned pork-and-ham product so beloved in Hawaii and Alaska, accept my apology for the picture or, if they wish to complain, do so to John Cleese.)

When sending out millions of spams to e-mail boxes, the spammer hopes this will become thousands of larger victims, those who respond positively to the spam. By including viruses and other malware in the spam, this "success rate" increases, as many people are infected just by downloading the spam. (I learned this after installing a new anti-viral which checks mail as it hits Mailwasher.)

But there's another type of victim, as anyone (like me) who has had the same e-mail address for some time (or worse, their own domain) will attest .

That's the from: victim.

Class War

What was the most amazing statement in this week's ABC debate?

For my money it was anchor Charles Gibson's assertion that $200,000 is a middle class income. It is, in fact, within the top 4%.

The Census Bureau estimates the current median family income at $62,228. It varies by state. As high as $78,000 in New Jersey, as low as $46,000 in Arkansas. A median income means half of all families make more than that, half make less. It's a true, real-world average.

But I have no doubt that, to Gibson, his statement was right-on. Half the people he knows make more than $200,000, only half less. Which is precisely the problem.

If you make your living as a talking head, on network or cable TV, it's almost certain that you are, by most common definitions, wealthy. This is true for those so-called "newspaper" people you see on TV, not to mention nearly all the pundits and "strategists" who populate the political chat shows. (For the record, our family is doing just fine -- nowhere near $200,000, though.)

This is a very important point to understand when you're looking at today's media. If there is a class war -- and I would argue that there has been for many years -- everyone on the tube is on the rich side of that divide. Everyone, whether they're claiming to argue for conservatives or liberals.

This was not always the case. When I was a kid journalists were truly middle class, their incomes close to the median. Top editors were a bit above, reporters were always below. Our job was to identify with the middle class, and with those who had middle class aspirations. We could do that because that's where we lived -- in the middle.

No more. Now those paid to supposedly advocate on behalf of the middle class are themselves far above that station.