Dana Blankenhorn

Protection Racket

My PC is very slow.

(This is actually a drum mat, sold in the UK.)

I checked it out with my malware and anti-viral. The malware detector didn't find anything serious. The anti-viral found almost 2,000 copies of a file called sgregister.

I looked it up. Sounded dangerous. I checked message boards for advice. They suggested a "free" product. Click a link, download it, load it, let it run -- waste a few hours. Then my fear is confirmed -- you have 743 serious errors.

But my "Free" software won't fix any more than a half-dozen of those errors. If I want them fixed, I have to register and buy it. I have to pay.

Culture Shock

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Ever take a look at hair styles of the 1970s? Or the clothes?

Maybe this will jog your memory. It's a picture of me (the sullen one at the right) taken with my father and brother in 1976.

My dad at that time was 56, close to the age I am now. He was a conservative man, a small businessman. Note the leisure suit. Note the long hair on all of us. My brother, then 13, seemed to be sporting what later came to be known as an "anglo," a sort of white man's afro, a round, curly confection of hair which at the time, I believe, was a sort of dirty blond.

We were dressed this way because that was what culture dictated at the time. This was after 8 years of Republican political dominance, which would be interrupted only briefly by Watergate and the Carter Administration.

America's politics began moving solidly to the right in the late 1960s, and continued moving to the right through the George W. Bush Administration. The turn has just now come, and it's tentative.

The same thing happened (ironically) at the dawn of the liberal era. All those movies featuring elegant people in ballrooms, dressed to the nines, existed against the backdrop of a nation in rags. (Shown are Guy Kibbee and Joan Blondell in "Gold Diggers of 1933.")

Or go back another 40 years. All the cultural touchstones of the "Ragtime" era were in direct opposition to what was really going on. The long dresses, the foppish hats, the attraction of opera, all were in opposition to the growing urban restiveness and populist rage of the time. 

Sure the Populists  lost. They were hammered. Yet William Jennings Bryan remained a very popular figure right up to his death. Mencken's "booboisie" were populist in outlook, sometimes (not always) layered with progressive pretensions.

We're talking culture here, not politics.

The Tub

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 47 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I'm going to put the lesson of this week's Clue right at the top.

The world is bigger than you think. And your world is smaller.

This is a personal story that starts 20 years ago. I was in Japan, and found myself staying with Hiro Nakamura (right). Not the Heroes hero, the real guy, a nice gentleman who was born in Yokohama but was then just starting to make his way in the world, with a small apartment in the Tokyo suburbs.

It was a tiny place, smaller than the first apartment my wife and I had 10 years earlier. It was split in two, with a bedroom on one side just big enough to fit a few sleeping bags, and a living-dining area on the other side featuring the world's smallest kitchen.

It also had a bathroom, in front of the bedroom. And in this bathroom it had a shower, a toilet, and a deep, deep tub. I was confused at first, but Hiro explained this was a soaking tub, an ofuro. The water was kept at a constant temperature. I could shower and get myself clean, then remove the cover from the ofuro and soak in hot water for a while. It was like being at a ryokan. It was very nice.

I thought about that tub often when I came home. I thought, if I ever make enough money to afford a bigger house, I want one of those bad boys.

After two decades of hard work by both me and my lovely wife, I was ready to go for it. We had the loan, we had extra cash. We hired an architect who gave us a design featuring just such a tub (she said) -- from a company in Charlotte called Americh.

We began to build. This was six months ago.

Piece Work

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 46 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Here is the difference between a political campaign and running an American government.

In a campaign you have a platform. That platform includes many different parts. They are an integrated whole.

But once you start governing you have to separate the pieces. Anything requiring Congressional action must be passed separately. Thus Presidents are told to concentrate on doing just one big thing.

A great economic plan, jammed through Congress by a narrow majority, has been the instrument of choice for a generation now. Reagan used it, Clinton used it, Bush used it. This set the table for everything else they did, or tried to do.

This was not possible with President Obama. There were just too many things that have to be done. His stimulus plan, while massive, only turned the nose of the airplane up and kept it from crashing to the ground. It was not what he was about, not what we voted him in for.

The actual Obama program consists of two other pieces of legislation. Call them the labor bill and the jobs bill.

The Stupidest Man in the World

The history of business is littered with the bones of men and companies that ignored progress.

Usually this ignorance appears after the founder's death. The fate of Polaroid was not sealed until years after the death of Edwin Land. Toyota did not overtake GM until decades after Alfred P. Sloan was a-moldering in his grave. 

But sometimes, in a few tragic cases, the fall comes in the lifetime of the founder. This is increasingly common in the era of Moore's Law. Thus we had the tragedies of men such as Ken Olsen, An Wang and Seymour Cray. New solutions change the game, the Great Man refuses to play, and he is crushed on the wheels of history.

This had not happened in media in quite a long time. True, the Linotype crushed many small papers under the heel of Hearst and Pulitzer. But radio did not kill the newspaper, and many TV licenses were given directly to radio companies, even newspaper magnates.

Thus the industry was completely unprepared for the Internet. I well remember an event at the Atlanta Press Club in 1995, where Cox Enterprises chairman James Cox Kennedy confidently predicted the Internet would be an enormous boon to newspapers, enabling him to "repurpose" his content and get paid multiple times for the same story. I just shook my head. The man was clueless, and history has shown that to be true.

But Kennedy was a genius next to Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch, feared as perhaps no press baron ever just a few years ago, now stands  as the Stupidest Man in the World.

The reason is on the cover of Michael Wolff's 2008 book about Murdoch. "The Man Who Owns the News."

The Stupak Opportunity

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 45 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The Stupak Amendment, which analysts are calling the worst thing ever for the women's movement -- it prohibits coverage for abortions even in private contracts written on the health exchange -- may in fact be an enormous opportunity.

And that opportunity holds big lessons for other political movements as well.

First, want to know why the AARP is  so powerful? Cash flow. 

Thanks to a deal with UnitedHealth, AARP draws millions of dollars per year in insurance kickbacks from its members. Thus it's not just an interest group, but an institution. The AARP's endorsement of the House measure went a long way toward assuring its passage last night.

Planned Parenthood, by contrast, is financially weak. It has been burdened with the call of "choice" for a generation, against the stronger frame of "life." It is constantly on the defensive, where if it looked at history and changed its frame to working "against slavery" (a woman's independent life can today be ended by any guy's sperm, and even a rapist's baby brought to the world at the point of a gun, according to the other side) things can be turned around.

But this post is not just about politics. It's about money.

The Robocall Campaign

Last year the election was everywhere.

Even though Georgia was considered a backwater, a reliable red state filled with Angry White Men, there was enormous excitement. Both parties worked hard, yard signs were everywhere, there were rallies and people making phone calls.

Not this year. Atlanta just had its mayoral election and no one I knew cared. It's not just that a run-off was expected. There was a total lack of yard signs, few people talked about it, and I felt undecided almost before walking into the booth.

Instead of buying TV ads or hiring people to canvass, all the campaigns this year relied on robocalls, recorded messages that seemed to come from every area code around (and some that do not exist) but were in fact tapes with happy voices telling us who they were and who they were voting for.

Which is another thing about the campaign that struck me. All the calls were upbeat, relentlessly so. I wasn't told who to vote against. I was told "I'm someone you should trust and here is who to vote for."

The result was sad because turnout was low and real issues were not discussed. Everyone was rattling about crime, but the crime rate is not that high. There have been some spectacular incidents, acts of desperation by young, bored, pathetic people. But the gangs are in the suburbs now.

The real problem with Atlanta is that we pretend to be a great city but we are in fact a small one. There are just 500,000 people here, even with gentrification. We're like Tucson or Portland, but for decades we've pretended to be Philadelphia or Chicago, because we're at the center of a metro area that has grown to 6.6 million people. The efforts of Cobb and Gwinnett Counties to wrest control of the center from Atlanta have brought them Atlanta's poor, its crime and congestion. Government leaders there ignore the rot, and fearful whites move even further-out -- to Henry County in the South, Paulding County in the northwest, Cherokee County and Forsyth County to the north. They're as ignorant as they always were, so the problems will follow them there.

Good riddance, I say.