Dana Blankenhorn

This Week's Clue: Internet Lessons in The War Against Oil

Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 35  of This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since March, 1997. It would be the issue of September 3.

Enjoy.

---

The key to  how technology has changed, and how politics has changed, is the same as how our approach to energy must change.

Technology is no longer defined by the few, but by the many. Computing power is no longer centralized, but decentralized. The greatest use of spectrum comes from unlicensed frequencies, not licensed ones. The best network is a dumb one, defined at the edge rather than the center. The big money in politics should come from the netroots, not the big contributors.

Open source. The Internet. WiFi. Howard Dean. Blogs. They're all telling us the same thing.

Our approach to the War Against Oil is completely wrong.

We're focused on defining point sources, on big plants. On corporate or government control. We should be focused on decentralized systems, defined at their edge. They're more robust, they're more defensible against attack by guerillas, but more important they work.

Yet the proprietary centralized model is the only one we read about. That's because, in the oil era, this defined the only correct approach. Oil and coal aren't everywhere. The process of cracking petroleum to produce useful fuels is dirty and dangerous. Tesla beat Edison.

With new times, new sources, and new problems should come new approaches.

What the Financial Press Never Gets

Everything at CNBC, and in the rest of the financial press, is focused on personalities and numbers.

Never operations.

Yet operations are the real key to business success or failure. Once your business is built, it's the day-to-day operation of the business which determines your success. Not your marketing. Not your financial wizardry. Not the personality of your CEO. Not the food at your press events. Not how sexy your people are.

Operations. Nothing else.

This is easy to see by the performance this decade of Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

August 1967

The best way to see the future, and the present, is to look closely at the past.

In supporting a generational view of history, I have looked closely at the 1960s as a rough analogy of our time. So today let me introduce you to August, 1967, through the pages of Time Magazine, and glean some hints from it as to what is happening today.

The month began with the Detroit riots, which echoed and reinforced what had happened in Watts two years before. The riot led Time to a closer examination of black leaders, and it chose to focus on Whitney Young of the Urban League. This was followed by a cover featuring yachtsman Bus Mosbacher,  reinforcing that this was still a time of great prosperity.  The month concluded with yet-another Vietnam cover. 

Looking at that August 25 issue it's important to note how little skepticism the editors had toward America's aims. This was the high point in the political career of George Romney, Mitt's dad, and his gains were made possible by a growing skepticism among Republicans of Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy. Not the ends, mind you, simply the means. "All of Southeast Asia is at stake today," George Rommey said, echoing Johnson's Domino theory. Yet among Republicans, Romney was considered a dove.

In the Garden of Good and Evil

There's something important needs be said in relation to yesterday's post on why people turn evil.

It has to do with my saintly wife, and a bad habit of my own.

I've felt it, and said it for years. When we're alone I call her "Better Than I Deserve."  I have always felt honored to be her friend, have since our first date in 1975. She's smarter than I am, more level-headed. She's organized, she's absolutely ethical, her parents were more accomplished and even our own kids admit that, back then, she was much better-looking than I was. (I think she she still is, but the kids insist we both look fine.)

Yet when I've trotted out this canard she has always felt annoyed. And after yesterday I know why.

The phrase, in many ways, is the most evil thing I say. It's a Larry Craig thing to say, the flip side of Michael Vick's impunity. It's just plain wrong.

Different Ways to Evil

Today's news brings us stellar examples of  two ways evil can worm its way into the human heart. (To the right, super dog Penina, a true champion pit bull, athletic as well as beautiful. And good, too.)

For Michael Vick it was impunity. From a very young age Vick learned  that his athletic ability put him on a different plane from ordinary men.  What were wishes to his peers he could have merely by wishing.

This is the heart of the thug lifestyle, which has taken over so much of sport on its highest levels. We admire those who can act with impunity before the law, like the gangsters did in their 1930s newsreels and in their movie re-incarnations, like the stylish drug dealers on Miami Vice in the 1980s, or like George Bush's Texas Mafia in our own time.

We admire it, we even root for it. The man at the center of it hears this cheering and thinks it's because of what he's doing. He forgets it's because so many of us, secretly, want to do likewise.

Athletes and movie stars and politicians all learn that there is one face you wear for the public, and one you wear for yourself. For Michael Vick, dogfighting was the face he wore for himself. He lived his life as a champion dogfighter, knowing that one catastrophic knee injury could see him "put down" and left to rot. He hoped to train such champions at his kennel. He knew it was wrong, he knew it was evil, but he kept at it for years because he believed his private life was above the law, beyond it. For proof he only had to look at what happened on those few occasions when the private and public met. Arthur Blank had Billy "White Shoes" Johnson "fix" things for him. No doubt, Michael thought, all those Home Depot lawyers were in business to fix things for Arthur Blank.

Of course when the man with impunity falls, the cheering stops suddenly. We turn on him. We turned on Al Capone. We turn on Vick. We'll turn on Bush.

But impunity is not the only route to evil.

There Are No Solar Panel Standards

This is a great time to be in the solar panel market.

You can sell as much as you make, no matter its efficiency, no matter its size, no matter how it plugs into whatever.

Over the long run that is a huge problem. It's a big problem for the industry, and a bigger problem for its customers.

With smaller panels, which may have a specific purpose (like running a light on your lawn, or a watch battery) this is no big deal. So long as the panel creates enough power to run the device in question you're golden. It's a closed loop.

The trouble comes in when you're talking about connecting panels to the grid, or trying to choose which panel to buy.

There the lack of standards is bound to be maddening.

So far few people seem to have even thought about this. They're too busy looking at what to put in a solar panel, or what shapes might yield to the most efficiency. When they talk about "setting new standards," they're talking about a maximum power output, not about standards in the way the PC industry talks about them. In the last story linked-to above, no one is thinking about how the panels might be replaced when they wear out, and with what.

These are, in many ways, Heathkit days for the industry. We're uncertain how important concentrating solar power onto panels with mirrors might be, as opposed to adding more panels. The result is that press releases about new panels sound as jargon-filled and unintelligible as a 1974 parts ad in Popular Mechanics:

A product of Evergreen’s cutting-edge String Ribbon™ manufacturing technology, the 195W panel has the best available power tolerance (-0 / +2.5%), guaranteeing 100% of rated power.

Huh? And that's from a company which considers itself to be on top of what state and federal regulators are thinking.

The Clinton Depression

It is increasingly obvious that Hillary Clinton will be the 2008 Democratic nominee and, with it, the next President.

She has won the debates. She has the most money. She has enormous institutional support. She has sewn up important voter blocs (especially unmarried women). She has been a brilliant tactician, outmaneuvering both her Democratic and Republican opponents at every turn.

I think this is causing a great depression in the minds of many Americans. On both sides of the aisle:

• Hillary Clinton represents incremental change.
• Hillary Clinton means we have to fight all the battles of the 1990s on into the indefinite future.
• Hillary Clinton can have a hectoring tone that's like rubbing a balloon.

My Hero Falls

To a lot of kids today the fall of Michael Vick is tragic. They believed in him. They thought he was special. They are terribly saddened.

For me the loss is also personal. But it has nothing to do with Vick. It has to do with a hero from my time.

His name is Billy "White Shoes" Johnson.

In the years when I lived in Houston, from 1974-1980, Billy was my favorite player. He was mostly a punt returner, but he was also a wide receiver. He played with enormous flair, and when he scored he did this silly Charleston-like touchdown dance which sent the crowd at the Astrodome into a frenzy.  He finished his career in Atlanta, with the Falcons, and the Oilers moved to Tennessee a decade or so later.

Turns out that, in this decade, Billy Johnson was Vick's "fixer."

What's a fixer? A fixer is a guy hired by the team to back you up when you screw up. He fixes things.

In Billy's case the title was coordinator of player programs. In 2002, when Vick failed to show up on some parking tickets it was Billy who drug him to court, then told the media Vick's claim that the charge was "bogus." Two years later, when one of Vick's friends swiped the watch of a security scanner at the airport, Billy got it back, and paid the guy off.

Liberals Need To Believe

      If you believe nothing you'll believe anything

I never thought I would need to explain the need for a political belief system here. It seemed too obvious. But upon reading stuff like this at Firedoglake, questioning the need for ideas because of the hash Republicans have made of theirs the last several years, I can see it's not so obvious.

In a superficial way I can sympathize. As I noted in this week's Clue, Democrats never, until recently, were defined by belief. It has been an essential element in the Nixon Thesis of Conflict that Democrats be defined, and that the definitions come from Republicans.

This results in all the things Democrats complain about concerning what they call Wingnuttia. They're abused. They are targets of routine abuse, and it seems there's a shield between any argument they make and their opponents.

That shield is the conservatives' belief system.

A political belief system, whether you call it a philosophy or values, faith or assumptions, are a base you can build on. A generation ago people like William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater gave conservatives such a base. The result is their ideas seem never subject to question. When things go wrong it's because leaders failed conservatism. This drives liberals crazy.

This belief system has also impacted liberals, often unconsciously. It creates a constant ideological wind in the face, so it seems the only strategy is to lean into it, as a sailboat leans into a wind, in order to make forward progress. But when you're sailing "into the wind" you're not really going forward -- you're going at an angle from your chosen direction, and must tack repeatedly, back-and-forth, to make real progress.

Good Guys, Bad Guys

In The Chinese Century, my first alternate history novel, written right after the 2004 election, I painted Jiang Zemin and Hu Xintao as heroes for an implied devotion to stability and peace.

It was fiction. China has the worst environmental record, the worst human rights record, the worst safety record, of any government in the world. So I believed then. So most Americans believe now.

These are some of the advantages which Americans feel are our birthright:

• We're free. They're not.
• We'll be told. They won't be.
• Trust us. Don't trust them.

The worst legacy of our time has been how open to question these assumptions have become. Rather than writing about Iraq, or the wiretaps, or the Justice Department, or Guantanamo, the torture, the corruption, or any of the other issues Left Blogistan loves harping upon, let me talk about basic health and safety.

1. How many of you know the real safety record of Robert Murray, the man who owned the Utah mine which collapsed? We just spent two weeks with this slimeball, and his sanctimony. Only after-the-fact did our supposed "free" media reveal anything of his safety record.
2. Who was to blame for the latest Mattel toy recall? China? No. It was a Mattel "design flaw" which caused most of 9 million toys to be recalled, because they contained powerful magnets little kids could pull out and swallow. Magnets designed into the toys by Mattel.
   

Far more important than our media's transparent grandstanding against viewers' interest is the actual record of the Chinese government in dealing with business issues.

• China is putting in an antitrust law, while ours has been gutted.
• China has begun a serious crackdown on shoddy goods, while American businesses continue to ignore health and safety.