Dana Blankenhorn

Mark Twain, Tech Writer

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 20 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Mark Twain's been gone for over a century now, but his work still leaves a mark.

He was considered America's premier writer for much of his life, and remains our most famous. He worked from the unusual position of humor, but produced some of the most profound classics of the American page.

It's well-known that he liked technology. He wrote “Huckleberry Finn” on a typewriter, which was technology in the 1870s. He lost a fortune on a typesetting machine, which was the minicomputer of the 1880s. He ran his own publishing house and pioneered the selling of books by subscription. And he wasn't shy about any of it, which is a lesson more writers should take to heart.

But what I didn't realize until reading his autobiography  recently was just how much of a technophile he really was.

Gun Owners Anonymous

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The people who attended last week's NRA convention, and the people who support them politically, engender a wide range of emotions in those of us who don't share their ideology.

Fear. Loathing. Anger. In my case, rage and ridicule come quickly to mind.

But the most important, most effective emotion is not being deployed. It's the emotion that led Gandhi and Dr. King and even Jesus Christ to change humanity. It's almost never deployed against the greatest threat to life in our time.

Law and Order

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 18 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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One way to see the bend of political history clearly is to look at the issue of law and order. (To the right, the original cast of the long-running NBC series.) 

Americans have always favored law and order, and opposed movements that dismissed it. The Republican Party spent a generation hammering Democrats for being “soft on crime,” from Spiro Agnew sneering at the “nattering nabobs” who enabled student protests in the 1960s to George H.W. Bush and his “Willie Horton” ad in 1988. Democrats were only able to break through when they went “yeah-but” on law and order, as with Bill Clinton's support of “welfare reform” and harsh sentences for drug crimes.

The Renewable Energy Sweet Spot is Storage

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

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While most attention in renewable energy is focused on solar panels, or wind turbines, or the use of pine pellets and algae for fuel, the real sweet spot is in storage.

Imre Gyuk , energy storage program manager at the Department of Energy, says it's not just because solar and wind are intermittant. It's also because an increasingly computer-driven society requires cleaner power.

You know this in your own life. If you have a desktop PC, chances are you have a Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) sitting under your desk, or at least a “power conditioning” power strip next to you – maybe both. Spikes can damage critical components.

News Sites Play Hide the Pickle

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 16 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Throughout the Web, the information with the highest cost and lowest return is news.

For me to appear at an event in person, I have to get dressed, get there, stay there, and get back home. It's a full day production. It keeps me from doing anything else.

The problem is that all this effort doesn't bring me any more page views than I'd get from just picking the story off the wire and commenting on it. Less, because I'm not a major news player.

The problem I face is exponentially greater for the major news player. Everyone links to the first person with the story, sometimes with credit but more often not, and the number of page views the first-mover gets may be relatively small. This isn't all bad. Often, the best story is the one that is well-considered, that brings in other facts, that's researched with links and thought through before it's published.

As a result, news sites have been engaged in a growing game I call hide the pickle.

The Fourth Riding of the Ku Klux Klan

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 15 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Historians think of the KKK as having three great “ridings.”

The first, right after the Civil War, was designed to overcome Republican Reconstruction. The second, early in the last century, was designed to enforce Jim Crow in the South and racial segregation in the north. The third, in the 1950s and 1960s, was a deliberate reaction to the Civil Rights movement.

Historians will write that we are currently in a fourth riding, and ironically it's the Party of Lincoln, the Republican Party, that is now the KKK party.

Most analysts are too polite to say this. Even black analysts are usually too polite to say this, perhaps because many such analysts, like Al Sharpton, have been welcomed into the chattarati and are no longer subject to it. You get some wealth, get some comfort, see the Klan riding off toward someone else's house and you got to figure, hey I got mine. (Right, Dr. Carson?)

The Great Deception of David Stockman

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 14 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I know that liberal economists like Paul Krugman want to dismiss David Stockman's latest book, The Great Deformation as the work of a “cranky old man”

But it's not. It's the finest form of political jiu jitsu. And it's dangerous stuff, very dangerous.

Stockman, who was briefly a Reagan budget director, and who was then made wealthy by Wall Street, reveals here that his heart is in the Austrian economics brought to this country by followers of Ludwig von Mises.

Round Two of the Copyright Wars

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 13 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have been following the copyright wars since their inception, in 1997. I watched the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, and the No Electronic Theft Act.

Both had a similar aim, to keep people from stealing making and re-selling copies of material subject to copyright, now that technology allowed for clean (or nearly clean) copies.

My sympathies here are purely with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and blogs like Boingboing, which hate these laws as attacks on freedom of speech, of association, and the free exchange of ideas.

Time Is Money And Money Is Time

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 12 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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All the talk about the price of content misses the point.

Content has a price, always. Whether you're reading content, listening to it, or watching it on a screen, the price is your time.

Time is the most valuable asset any of us have. Our time is limited. We must spend big hunks of it sleeping, eating, and traveling. We spend a third or more of our time making the money we need to sustain us.

What's left, the time available for content, is thus very precious.

I got a clue on this when I received an Amazon Kindle Fire for Christmas. I'd gotten Amazon Prime for the cheap shipping, thus I suddenly had access to all sorts of “free” content. Lots of TV shows I missed, lots of movies. Too many, it turns out. When I try to catch up on a series I thought I'd like, I find I'm taking time away from reading I could be doing.

The 1973 Game: The Year Of Going Too Far

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

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There's a natural progression to a generation's historical arc.

A crisis for which current thought has no answer creates new stories from the old opposition, which overthrows the old older and is then validated by a new political coalition.

Until this point it's possible to see the failures of the past as emanating from some extremist fringe, some virus within the old order that, once eradicated, makes it viable again. But then the old mainstream goes too far, the new majority identifies the whole of that mainstream as anathema, and a new generation's politics are made solid, the way starch exploding in heated liquid creates a stable pudding.

I saw this a generation ago, in 1973. Liberals, desperate to gain the last possible advantage they could through court action (since courts are the branch of government that most resists change) handed down decisions like Roe vs. Wade. Roe was a great decision for women but, as even feminist lawyer (now justice) Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted, it was a decision that held within it the seeds of a profound backlash, since it went beyond what legislators and voters were willing to do and enshrined abortion as a natural right.