Dana Blankenhorn

Truth

Since finishing my book on Moore’s Law (for delivery on the Amazon Kindle after Thanksgiving), I’ve begun a new project.

It’s called 1933. (This is not it. It's a history by Philip Metcalfe I've been using in my research.)

It’s an alternate history novel. It’s based on the idea that FDR, and the people around him, understood the threat of Hitler from the start and acted against it.

That era had a lot in common with our own. Manufacturing was acting on the economy as Moore’s Law is acting on ours. Efficiency created more supply than bankers could create demand for. A few wealthy men presided over a society of millions of fearful people who couldn’t keep up with the pace of change.

The most charitable thing I can say about Donald Trump is that he wants to make Warren G. Harding great again. His policies are identical. Fealty to Wall Street, corruption, laziness, isolationism. He even uses the phrase Harding used to describe this – America First. Democrats, by contrast, have a Harry Truman view. They have learned from the Hitler era, and the long Cold War following it, about concepts like collective security. From 1947-1990, we used all our strengths, overt and covert military action, but also the “soft power” of diplomacy, our economy, technology, and liberty, to take down the Russians. Moore’s Law, and everything that came with it, began as a Cold War activity.

Now Trump’s throwing all of that on the fire.

It’s almost impossible to conceive a world where World War II did not happen. But it began quite suddenly. Hitler gained power as Chancellor in late 1932. By the middle of 1933 democracy had been dismantled, Jews were being brutalized, the first concentration camps were being built. Hitler, and his henchmen, were completely transparent about their aims. They accomplished those aims, and this led Germany down the road toward its complete destruction.

Trump is Not Unusual

Lost in The Eternal Now, reporters make One Big Mistake in writing about Donald Trump.

They call him unique.

There is nothing unique about Donald Trump. Yes, he is attempting to overthrow gains the American people won from tyranny over the course of 100 years.

But all those fights were against other Americans, and American governments. We have been here before. We have always been here.

Let’s not even talk about slavery or the Indian genocide. Let’s not even play Ragtime, the book, movie or musical where a black man is put down while a white immigrant rises.

Let’s start with that great liberal hero. Woodrow Wilson.

Fall of the House of Oil

There is no energy shortage. The sun shines. The wind blows. The tides roll. We live on a molten rock.

At the start of this decade, when I first began covering the War Against Oil, and changed the sub-head of this blog to reflect that, I believed the key to victory was bringing enough investment to the space, public and private, so that the cost of renewable energy would fall below that of fossil fuels.

It’s happened.

Crossover happened just as I expected, in 2016. The cost of energy from solar panels is now lower than that from burning coal. The cost of energy from windmills is now falling below that of burning natural gas.

The only thing keeping fossil fuels alive in the big utility model is the sunk cost of infrastructure. When that proves unreliable, as it did in Puerto Rico a few years ago, it’s replaced by solar power, batteries, and micro-grid technology, just as Al Gore predicted two decades ago. 

This Medium Cries Freedom

Throughout the decade now ending there has been a steadily growing drumbeat of elite opinion to the effect that this medium enables tyranny.

I blame Trump. The Russian manipulation of Facebook made Trump possible. Now tech must live down that legacy.

It means every collection of private data, whether by corporations, government or hackers, whatever the motive, is seen as evidence we need to throw our computers out the window. Every new technology meant to thwart abuse, meanwhile, is seen as a threat to human liberty.

Tech can’t win.

Technology can, in the hands of a ruthless dictator, enable terrible abuses. But there’s a limit.

The Political Triumph of Tech

Some 40 years ago, when I was commuting up the West Loop of I-610 for the Houston Business Journal, oil seemed to be in big political trouble.

We know how that turned out.

Today, in 2019, it seems that “Big Tech” is as friendless as “Big Oil” was then. But history sort of rhymes. These only seem to be different days, and you don’t have to be able to rhyme benzodiazepine to figure it out.

Reporters without brains call the reaction against tech their big story. But it’s the reaction to the reaction we need to be looking at.

The Cult of Trump

The most important thing to know about Donald Trump is this.

He’s a cult leader.

There is nothing unAmerican about that. America has been the home to cults since its founding. The first half of the 19^th century was filled with them. The Mormon Church is just one example, but there are many others.

Don’t throw your magic underwear at me for writing that. Most churches begin as cults. Their founders claim to have “special knowledge” and cult leaders pass it to the congregation. The early members gain a special status, because they have the special knowledge. It’s something all western religions have in common. We all want to be the chosen people, because it means that others weren’t chosen, and you’re automatically better than they are.

The Sun Shines, The Wind Blows, and Watch Houston Become Detroit

Nearly a decade ago, having been tossed to the curb by ZDNet for calling out a “privacy” lobbyist as an industry shill, I changed the headline of this blog to focus on renewable energy.

“There is no energy shortage. The sun shines, the wind blows, the tides roll, we live on a molten rock.”

Tidal and geothermal energy have yet to make major contributions to our energy mix, but the Sun does indeed shine and the wind does indeed blow. More important is the cheapest form of renewable energy, efficiency, and which is always before us.

Today, U.S. energy demand is just passing its year 2000 peak. This is true despite Gross Domestic Product, the economy’s production of goods and services, rising from $13.131 trillion in 2000 to last year’s $18.566 trillion.  That’s 41% more economic activity with no increase in energy use.

Decoration Day

The holiday known as Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day.

It was established in 1868 to memorialize the Union victory over the South and the Slave Power.

The pro-slavery attitudes of the South never died, however. It became the “Noble Cause.” It remains ignoble today.

Jim Crow is one testament to it. So is opposition to the Civil Rights cause, the “duality of the southern thing.” Whites prohibiting “miscegenation” made every mixed-race baby a crime until 1967, six years after our 44^th President was born. I’ll explain why this is funny in a moment.

The Demand of 2020: Law and Order

Regulations are the guardrails of corporate law.

They kick in before people are hurt. They’re usually aimed at corporations, not individuals. Everyone is punished by the paperwork. The penalties come in the form of fines.

Regulation is the best protection business can have.

When regulation isn’t imposed by government, it comes in other forms. It comes in insurance requirements. It comes from the plaintiff’s bar. Fines come in the form of differing rates to protect truck fleets, different prices for handling transactions, and in jury awards.

Capitalistic Feudalism

The central problem of our time is the march toward feudalism.

It began among capitalists.

Democracy is essential because it lets people change their minds and, upon changing them, reform the institutions that control their lives. That’s what the Declaration of Independence is about. It argues that despotic systems must be overthrown when they threaten our “life, liberty” or pursuit of happiness.

Many people, including me, have argued that the current attack on democracy began with The Jim Crow Project.

But long before one of our major political parties abandoned democracy, business did. It happened as these things usually do, with the very best of intentions.

As I noted last week, the system that came into effect in 1789 had only property owners voting.  The true genius of succeeding generations has been to expand the right to vote, thus the pool of those who can effect change, to more and more people. This work continues, and it’s important.

But there’s another kind of democracy, corporate democracy. It may be even more important than electoral democracy because even functional democracies operate by the Golden Rule – he who has the gold makes the rules.

Before we can hope to have electoral democracy, then, we must have corporate democracy.