Dana Blankenhorn

The Real Magic of Harry Potter

NOTE: Many of the points made here were made by me in April, 2006.

With today's delivery of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final installment of J.K. Rowling's  epochal story of growing up, the time has come to reveal the true magic of Harry Potter.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Were the Drafting Committee of the Second Continental Congress to pause from their labors of writing a Declaration and appear on your doorstep tomorrow, there is no doubt they would find you, and me, all of us to be mighty wizards indeed.

Everything we take for granted -- television, recordings, telephones, air conditioning, planes, trains and automobiles, this medium you're using -- was unimaginable in 1776. And not just the obvious.

• Most carrots were not orange in 1776.
• Portland cement was invented in 1824.
• Flush toilers did not come into common use until the late 19th century.
• The first American oil well was drilled in the 1820s.
• The germ theory of disease had not been thought of in the 18th century.

The very idea of doctors needing cleanliness was unimaginable. This would nearly kill Adams himself during the great Philadelphia Flu epidemic of 1793.

This Week's Clue: Common Humanity and The War Against Oil

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 29  of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of July 23.

Enjoy.

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Anthropomorphism, the transforming of animals into human-like characters, has a long history.

But only in modern times have animal characters been seen as fully human. Even when we acknowledge them as animals.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. Pikachu.  Just one of 493  characters created by Nintendo in their Pokemon game. It was one of my kids' favorites growing up, so I not only had to buy them the game, and the player, but I had to watch the cartoon show spin-off.

There I learned something interesting. While the game characters were created based on the multitude of insects Satoshi       Tajiri played with growing up, the TV story was an allegory of how animals deserve to be treated, and by extension how the world deserved to be treated. What began as insects fighting like battle robots became environmentalism.

Maybe it's because Japan has been highly urbanized for longer than most other nations. The process seems to have gone further there than elsewhere. But the process has gone on everywhere, right under our noses.

Charlie Crist for President?

Who is the most popular U.S. born Republican, right now?

Well, he isn't running for President. And the guy you're thinking of is Austrian.

He's Charlie Crist.  The guy on the right to the right. He's the new Governor of Florida. Think Schwarzenegger with better hair and a Made in USA label on him.

With Republicans preferring "none of the above" to all their current options (including Fred Thompson as Hamlet) it's beginning to look like there will not be a knock-out blow during the primaries.

There may even be an effort to select uncommitted slates of delegates and actually let the convention choose the nominee.

This would suit Charlie Crist fine. Because he's not going to run. He would have to be drafted.

Web Command of the Year

Embed.

The embed command, which places an object, usually a Shockwave player, inside a Web page and directs it to play some video clip on command, is the most important piece of code in our time. (There will be a test on the clip above later in this item.)

What made YouTube was this simple embed command. People don't spend their whole days at YouTube, watching its videos. They search YouTube and, when they find what they like, cut-and-paste the embed command so their own work will give the clip they have found context.

The embed command is why Google paid $1.65 billion in stock for YouTube. The embed command is why Google was hosed in that deal, because YouTube did not own, nor did it control the embed command. It was merely the first company to make embed the heart of its business model.

All the brouhaha over Viacom "taking back" its videos from Google, which even I engaged in, was in the end meaningless because of the embed command. After a very short period of time Viacom added the embed command to its Comedy Central clips, surrounding the window with its trade dress, and we all went on as before.

Class War Is AlwaysOn

The class war on behalf of the obscenely rich is becoming more ridiculous by the day.

One reason for this is the minions of the obscenely rich never pay a price for advocating feudalism, or for calling Woodrow Wilson's progressive income tax "communism."  They feel protected, safe behind their castle walls.

Time to tear down some castle walls starting with those of Jeff Bussgang and the so-called AlwaysOn Network. (Bussgang, I should note, is a dot-com millionaire who is now a partner at IDG Ventures, IDC's venture capital arm.)

Bussgang's latest piece, whining that his people will suffer if their own gains in the funds they manage are taxed like income instead of the half-price 15% rate, almost made me toss my cookies this morning:

On the one hand, it is galling that Steve Schwarzman’s butler pays a higher tax rate than he does.  On the other hand, raising taxes on such a critical part of corporate America that is so intricately linked to our capital markets, industrial competitiveness and technology innovation clearly isn’t going to help our global competitive advantage.

Who benefits more from government do you think, Steve Schwarzman or his butler? Who benefits more from our military, our order, our infrastructure, the products of our schools? Who benefits more from the stability which guarantees your wealth stays yours?

Who benefits more, proportionally? Whose income is more tied to the rule of law, and the protection afforded by police? C'mon. Even Tom Wolfe, who has spent most of his lifetime sucking up to the ultra-rich, seems to have gotten that memo.

The excess which 40 years ago lay on the streets of San Francisco now lies 40 miles south, on Sand Hill Road. Wake up and smell the patchouli, Bussgang. You're soaking in it. 

The Fourth Rising of the Klan

I began writing this for another blog, but found it was a little too intense for the audience. So I've placed it here, on my personal blog. Let me know what y'all think.

One more note. A radio host this morning bemoaned how blacks and whites might split on their reading of the Michael Vick story. I think it's better to let such emotions out, to deal with what drives them, and to seek common ground. They are important, illustrating how hatred dehumanizes everyone it touches.

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Since Katrina the covert racism found in many Deep South states has become increasingly overt, and the region will pay a high price if, as expected, Democrats sweep to power nationally next year.

Troy Davis (right, from his Web site). Genarlow Wilson. Michael Miller. Each is a case study of white, Republican politicians sticking it to poor blacks, while other white, Republican politicians pile-on with racist rhetoric and no white, Republican politician calls them on it.

Brad Warthen of The State sums it up well: In the South, the GOP is the White Man's Party. Everybody knows that. This in an article where he's trying to argue that racism isn't an issue, let alone THE issue, in Deep South politics.

A generation after Dr. King (two generations for many blacks) race remains the issue in the politics of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana because there are enough black voters in all those states to control the actions of one party, along with  the governments of some cities and counties. This causes white voters to gravitate toward the other party, and to other jurisdictions, resulting (in our time) in increased segregation, increased inequality, increased distrust, and (finally) increased racism.

Michael Vick Deserves No Sympathy

My daughter has decided to make protecting animals her passion. She has learned many things along the way, and taught me many lessons, for which I am grateful. She has witnessed first-hand the cruel way we treat animals, and the inhuman emptiness found even in some animal lovers.

Her most important lesson is that, even if we eat or breed them, we have a responsibility to animals. They have souls, simpler, more basic perhaps, but souls nonetheless. Heeding this lesson is part of man's own civilizing process.

Thus there is needful cruelty and there is needless cruelty.

Raising dogs to fight, to kill other dogs, and murdering those who don't do well is needless cruelty. When the Humane Society or ASPCA breaks up a dog-fighting ring, all the dogs involved must be put down. It is needful cruelty. Their training makes them impossible to place as pets. It's not their nature which is bad, it's their nurture. And it can't be unlearned.

People who engage in dog fighting dehumanize themselves. They hold all life as cheap. They forfeit all sympathy, all claims on our emotions. They deserve nothing more than what they dish out to the animals.

How Blogging Became Journalism

Blogging is fast becoming just another way to do journalism, another skill set journalists can learn and excel at. (Former blogger Andrew Sullivan now writes for The Atlantic.)

It didn't have to be that way. But those working for publishing houses had a big advantage over the rest. They had a business model.

Publishers know how to monetize page views. They may not move quickly to embrace new forms, like blogging, but they do know how to do business.

Bloggers don't. And unfortunately their representatives apparently don't, either.

I Can Make You Believe Anything!

One of the great, dying concepts of the TV age we're leaving behind is that I can convince you of anything, if I just outshout you, outspend you, or have more institutional support than you do.

This belief, that lies can beat truth if they're louder, is behind so many of our problems today. The health care crisis. The climate crisis. The Iraq War. Our sucky political system. And we're seeing it all over  today's news:

• The Pentagon is on TV right now, pretending that happy talk about Iraq can overcome the reality on the ground.
• David Vitter (right) thinks he can throw his wife (the one who'd said she would castrate him) in a leopard-print dress and the press will ignore his preference  -- to wear diapers for hookers.
• Right-wing morons are selling businesses on the idea that they can beat back a true "blog attack" by flooding the zone with negative comments.

Monopolies Are Worthless

History will show one of the salutary impacts of this decade has been an economic experiment, testing the economic viability of monopolies in a changing world.

The Bush Administration has pushed American business toward monopolies and shared monopolies, partly for ideological reasons and partly to make business easier to control. We now know for certain the economic impacts of such a policy.

It does not work.

Proof can be found in news that Vodafone has at least considered making a bid for Verizon, which holds a monopoly on telephone landlines in the eastern U.S. and a stranglehold on the wireless market as well. Its growth as a monopoly was profiled by the $200 Billion Broadband Scandal, the book which occasioned the creation of this blog.

Vodafone, by contrast, holds only mobile phone licenses in the more competitive European and Asian markets.