Dana Blankenhorn

What Lasts

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 12 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The death of my friend Russell Shaw was one of those events which happens to everyone, the kind of event which forces you to re-assess your own life and path.

Sudden death can come to any of us, at any time, in any way. As we age, heart attacks become quite popular.

I still remember my trip to Japan, almost 20 years ago now, for the Electronic Networking Association. We were given a banquet in Sendai, copious amounts of sake, which caused me to pass out. When I awoke I learned that one of our party had stayed with the festivities, agreeing to join his hosts for a Japanese-style bath, many degrees hotter than an American hot tub. And there, his heart stopped. He was pretty old, I thought later, 53.

I'm 53 now. And Russell was 60.

Final Warning

After the shiny, happy people feeling you got from reading my last post, now I'm going to bring you down.

Over at Juan Cole's shop, former University of Chicago professor William Polk reads the tea leaves and pronounces the War With Iran to be at go time.

To last week's US News warning he adds the personal recollection that Dick Cheney also made a trip to Saudi Arabia in March 2002 -- ostensibly diplomatic but (we now know) his warning, and assurance, that Saddam Hussein was a dead man.

The article contains the tantalizing possibility that Israel's recent attack on Syria was just a test of its radar and anti-missile defenses, but Polk then adds news that there has been an unprecedented build-up of U.S. Navy assets in the Persian Gulf:

Of course, deploying forces along Iran’s frontier does not necessarily mean using them. At least that is what the Administration says. However, as a historian and former participant in government, I believe that having troops and weapons on the spot makes their use more likely than not.

Instead such forces create a "climate of war" like the one which set off The Guns of August and World War I, a climate which both Bush the Wiser and Bush the Dumber have given in to before. He adds that the rationale for war is contained in the 2005 National Defense Strategy, which asserted America's right to engage in first-strike warfare anytime, and anywhere, it chose.

What can halt the march to war? Just one thing.

Rice Science Thursday: Big Buckyball

One interesting thing about C-60 carbon fullerene molecules, or "Buckyballs," as Rice people have been calling them ever since they found the things in 1985, is that they don't have to be that size.

Or that shape.

In fact the most useful structures based on this form of carbon are Buckytubes, which the rest of the world (which has no sense of humor) knows as carbon nanotubes.

Imagine the basic structure of a soccer ball, with carbon atoms in each corner of each pentagon, then instead of wrapping it around itself as tight as possible open the sides until they head into infinity. And beyond.

Well you don't have to make the ball tiny either, even though that's the first type of Buckyball Drs. Smalley, Curl and Kroto actually found. You can extend the structure as you would with a nanotube and make it really big.

Fine, Mr. Smarty Riceypants, but what can you do with them? Well, you put stuff in 'em. Like hydrogen. And here's the thing, as the kids at Dr. Boris Yacobson's lab (back at the mothership) have just figured out with their cool computer models. They can hold hydrogen as tightly as the gravity found in the center of Jupiter.

By Jove indeed.

Night of the Concern Troll

You can fool all of the people some of the time.

That's one-third of a famous quote, from Abraham Lincoln. Cynics depend on that to maintain power. After all, in a democracy you only have to fool most of the people once in a while, at the time of an election, to rule.

At a transformative time -- and this is such a time -- that trick doesn't work. But it does work most of the time, which is why concern trolls continue to trot it out. Even now.

"I'm not a racist. I'm an adult. But most people aren't," they'll say. "Most people are easily manipulated. They're fools. Want proof? They listen to me."

Want further proof? Just look at the polls.

In the face of such "overwhelming evidence" it is easy for idealists to get discouraged. The worst thing that can happen, however, is that you accept the trolls' premise. I'm an adult, you're an adult, but those people over there are children, easily led, just looking to follow.

That way lies madness.

That is the cold cynicism at the heart of the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. It has a long history in our culture. It was central to H.L. Mencken's derision of middle class voters as the "booboisie."

Now I think Mencken was one of our greatest writers, but his own politics were fascist. His sensibility, the idea that there is a "better" class of person and that the majority is a mob, sounds great in the salon, but if you really believe that blatherskite you should turn in your American citizenship.

Each new Thesis rises based on reaction to what came before. The cynicism of the Nixon Era, whose sunset we now see before us, was a reaction to the idealism, the Capra-corn if you will, of the Roosevelt Era. Which itself was a reaction against Menckenism.

Sudden Death

I suffered some panic attacks recently, and I  now know why.

Russell Shaw (right), my friend of many years, died suddenly on Friday. He was 60.

Sudden death is a shock to loved ones at any age.

For the young it most often comes from a bullet or a car crash. A few athletes die suddenly from undiagnosed heart conditions, and these cause the most shock of all because it's not supposed to happen that way.

Hate, Fear and Hope

The great progress of my generation is that our hates and fears have become our political divide.

That wasn't the case before the 1960s. Before the 1960s we were united in our hates and fears. Hatred of black people was endemic to the Democratic Party's mission for generations. The response by generations of Republicans was to speak to those fears while doing as little as possible about them.

The idea that this is progress came to me while watching Barack Obama in Philadelphia today. It was the kind of transcendent talk I was hoping for. It even shocked some Republicans for its bluntness, because he acknowledged the legitimate grievances of people like Geraldine Ferraro, even as he urged us all to get over them.

But he also went beyond this. In talking about Jeremiah Wright (above), and about the Trinity Church he attends, he brought home the religious nature of our hates and fears as well. Then he turned the mirror on himself:

I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

In giving his own confession, Obama challenged us all to testify, and in that testimony to make the changes in our hearts which are a precondition to real racial progress.

It's Not That They're Clueless

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

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My blog friend Oliver Willis calls those in charge of our financial house clueless.

That's an easy mistake to make.

In fact, it's in the nature of our economic system that you go right up to the line of legality in order to maximize profit. Anyone who doesn't do that is an economic loser, either in the short run or the long run.

You want to go right up to the line, peer down over the edge, and maybe move your toes back a bit. That's what your lawyers are there for, to move your toes back a bit.

This is fine so long as the law is reasonable. If the law is reasonable and cops are on the beat, walking right up to the line of legality and staring down into the canyon is both legitimate and good business. It's what makes markets efficient.

The problem in this case is the law was made unreasonable, and the cops chose to look the other way.

All the problems Bear Stearns caused were through the creation of new, "unregulated" markets. An unregulated market is a market that's looking for scandal. Because there is no reasonable line you can walk right up to, it's easy as heck to become Wile  E. Coyote in such a market -- everything is fine so long as you don't look down.

The defaults on sub-prime mortgages last year were when we started to look down.

A Grieving Process

Something interesting is going on in the Democratic primary which everyone is missing. (There is hope4survivors you know.)

While the media natters about how nasty this is getting, Clinton supporters themselves reveal a deeper truth.

Whether it's in their anger at being outnumbered, or their attempts to bargain away from the inevitable, whether it's a denial of their own reality or self-flagellating depression, what becomes obvious is we're seeing a grieving process at work.

Usually the candidate goes through this process for us, and delivers the campaign's death blow in a seppuku-like speech. The Edwards campaign went like that. One day you're out there, and the next you're not – it's a car crash way to go.

As a longtime Democrat I've become an expert on campaign grief, since I've gone through it so often. I can only remember supporting one winner in my entire life, Bill Clinton, and I can only remember being really happy about it once, in 1992.

Everything else has come to grief.

With Al Gore I went through all the stages long before the election. With Howard Dean I withdrew into a shell and never really “came out” for Kerry until election night, when I watched his loss roll in at a hotel ballroom with a cash bar. I avoided newspapers for days after Dukakis' loss. The size of Mondale's defeat left me stunned.

I see what's happening with the Clinton people because I know from grieving. The arithmetic of a nomination fight is inevitable. There's a cancer eating away at the prospective Hillary Clinton Presidency. Numbers. She “won” Ohio and Texas, but her gains from that were wiped out by Wyoming and Mississippi. Now the drift toward Obama has renewed itself.

The “gotchas” which the Clintonites see as his “bad week,” the Rezko trial and the Preacher Wright flap, have merely reminded people that she has financial skeletons and that Obama is, in fact, a Christian. (You can't hammer on him about the evils of his Church of Christ pastor and call him a Muslim at the same time.)