Dana Blankenhorn

The Phony Profession

Back when I was at Rice University in the mid-1970s I was told that journalism was a noble profession.

It may be noble, but it’s no profession.

Even at Northwestern’s Medill School, where I received a year of training before being tossed into the world in 1978, I knew different. It’s a trade, the teachers told me there. They insisted I not call them “professor.” Journalism is a job. It’s writing for someone who buys ink by the barrel.

The problem with the journalism business is that it’s still locked in that mindset. Even after the print business is long dead, journalism is still measured by advertising linked to dead trees. There’s a reason for this. The business refused to adapt.

When people began seeking information online, a quarter century ago, journalism did not come along for the ride. I feel the blame. I knew then, after a decade covering the Internet, just how we should move forward, and I wrote about it. I asked publishers, “How hungry are you,” suggesting they seek commission income from business partners rather than selling billboards.

No one listened.

Defending Facebook

Let’s start with something that should seem obvious.

Facebook is no longer a social network. It’s the global telecommunications company.

It became this by offering free services on a global scale. This came about thanks to its investment in cloud, beginning early in the last decade. While AT&T sat on its assets, along with all the companies once known as PTTs (Postal, Telegraph and Telephone services), Facebook put $1 billion/quarter and up into a network of cloud data centers.

Facebook did it the same way Amazon did, with cash flow. It made its services free, like Google.

Better Days Are Coming

When you hit bottom, when you are at the end of your rope, when you're in true despair, you can’t imagine getting out.

America is at the bottom. We’ve found that what we said about ourselves was tissue thin. The economy has collapsed around our ears. Death is all around us.

But better days are coming.

We can beat COVID-19. We know how to do it. Other countries have done it. Europe and much of Asia are opening, coming out of their cellars, living again.

The key is cooperation.

That’s all it takes. Wear a mask when you go out, or a face shield. Try to stay home. Wash your hands. Stay away from other people. Love thy neighbor.

The virus travels on the droplets you expel when breathing. It travels fastest when you sneeze, but even those droplets don’t travel much further than 6 feet. If 95% of us cooperate with each other, then the rate of transmission will drop below 1 and we’ll be back on the downward slope again.

Why Black Lives Matter to Me

You’re looking at the face of an old white guy and wondering about the headline.

Here’s the story.

I was brought up racist, on Long Island. I didn’t think that was the case, but I know now it was. I knew people like Roger Stone, Eugene Delgaudio and David Keane when they were kids. That’s because during the height of the Vietnam era I was part of a group called Young Americans for Freedom, a right-wing agitprop created by William F. Buckley when the SDS was getting started.

I’m not proud of it. I got falling-down drunk at age 16, and the hangover lasted until the day after school started. I told my parents I was sick.

We weren’t rich, but we had a lot of white privilege. It helped me get off Long Island and into Rice University, even though my parents had saved nothing for college. It got my dad a small business loan when he fell through a false roof and became disabled. The parents of the girl I married turned out to be well-off too. Most Rice parents are.

I was blind to my own good fortune. I saw myself as an idealist. I went to Northwestern, got a job at a business newspaper, and covered the end of the Houston oil boom.

The Great Bull Trap of 2020

Three times in the 12 years, Republicans have convinced the rest of us to bail out common stockholders.

• During the Great Recession, banks were bailed out by the Federal Reserve creating cash, subsidizing consolidation, and forgiving them the crime of creating fake “insurance” for mortgages.
• In 2017, the Trump Administration bailed out the bull market with a tax cut that went almost entirely to propping up stock prices, extending the disconnect between stock values and the real economy.
• In 2020, the Federal Reserve created trillions of dollars of new money, and Trump wound up giving it to people who didn’t need to spend it, once again propping up assets like stocks.

1918 vs. 2020

There are too many differences between the COVID-19 pandemic and the 1918 flu pandemic to count. Here are just a few.

First, the viruses have almost nothing in common except that they’re viruses. No one even knew the 1918 pandemic was even caused by a virus until years later. Over time, virology evolved. We now produce semi-reliable vaccines against mutations in the H1N1 virus that caused the 2018 flu every year.

With COVID-19 we have a lot more tools. But it's a completely different type of virus, as different from H1N1 as you and I are from whales. Still, we had a model of it available within weeks of the outbreak. We understand about messenger RNA and have hundreds of vaccine candidates now going through testing.

But knowledge has yet to bring power. Until science delivers an answer, we’re mainly doing palliative care, just as we did then. That goes for everyone, making this a true global event. But, as it was in 1918, our willingness to listen to what science DOES know makes a big difference.

This time, unlike 1918, many Americans aren’t listening.

Netiquette: The Issue for 2020

I covered the biggest issue of 2020 back in 1988.

I covered it in two ways.

On the one hand I covered the Electronic Networking Association for Newsbytes.

The ENA featured such cutting-edge minds as Mike Godwin and Joichi Ito. They met online, using software called PARTIcipate. They were communicating across nations and time zones. It was exciting.

They didn’t want to spoil it. They developed rules known as Netiquette to define proper behavior.

Netiquette can be summarized thusly: be nice. Assume goodwill. Be polite. Accept disagreement as legitimate. Don’t lie to make a point. Remain inquisitive and friendly. Understand that the person reading what you “say” can’t read your body language. Account for that.

My Congressman Has Cancer

John Lewis was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer a few days before 2019 ended.

A decade ago, that would have been a death sentence. Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, after a controversial liver transplant in 2009.

But there’s a new way of attacking it, immunotherapy. James Allison and Tasuku Honjo shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine  for their discovery of immunotherapy, turning the body’s own immune system against cancer. Four years after their discovery Jimmy Carter saw his own cancer go into complete remission, thanks to immunotherapy. An old friend, David Coursey, recently reported his own pancreatic cancer is in remission, a year after diagnosis. He looks good, strong, and has all his hair.

In short, there’s hope. But there’s also the reality. John Lewis will die. Just as you will die, and I will die.

Whenever that happens for John Lewis, he will go in peace because he’s a practicing Christian. His life has been a testimony to Christ’s work among us. He has kept going forward, 50 years past Dr. King’s assassination, because of faith that will make his final moments on Earth a celebration, a going home.

Instant Family

Last year a real Hollywood movie was made on our street. 

It came out early this year, and Wikipedia says it grossed $120 million. It found life on Amazon Prime and, when I saw it was available, I gave it a look.

The film stars Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne as childless adults who spent a month being driven up and down the street in black cars on their way to filming. Primary filming was done at 262 Winter. We’re at 215. Our house was never shown.

I remember 262 from back in the day, in the early 1990s, before the neighborhood became gentrified. It was barely a shell when a man named Michael bought it and renovated.

Some history. These houses all look like Craftsman barns, a central beam and a roof that slopes to the sides. My son John calls them “double-barreled shotgun shacks.” The homes on the east side were built around 1908, in the City of Oakhurst. Oakhurst folded in 1915, and the homes were joined to Decatur. Those homes on the west side were built in the early 1920s, when the City of Kirkwood folded and became part of Atlanta. Our house dates from 1923. The developer of the Oakhurst homes was a woman in Kirkwood named Lavinia Winter. Hence the name Winter Avenue.

Martin Hellman Has Concerns

What do you do if you win one of the big prizes in math or computing and are invited to become a Heidelberg Laureate? 

Some go back to their work, like Yoshua Bengio and mentor the next generation. Others become great men who wear their celebrity like a warm coat, like Vint Cerf, who is also in Heidelberg this week.

Then there is Martin Hellman. He won the Turing Award in 2015, along with Whitfield Diffie (who is also in Heidelberg), for public key cryptography, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. 

Public key cryptography became controversial as soon as it  s was announced. The National Security Agency tried to suppress the technology under Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who later saw the problem with weak solutions, said Hellman. Another cryptography war erupted in the 1990s with the “Clipper Chip,” an attempt to give crypto a “backdoor” for cops. Hellman called it  a front door. 

The third cryptography war began only recently, with the FBI putting pressure on Apple and others to get “exceptional access”  to iPhones, and the Trump Administration now trying to ban strong encryption. “It’s in a lull,” Hellman said of the current conflict. “Hopefully it dies.” But attacks are global, with even Australia trying to limit it. “They want to defy gravity to put things in space more cheaply,” he said. Hellman has been arguing this case for decades. 

In the process Hellman has created a second life, as an activist.

Martin Hellman has concerns. He likes freedom, and hates war. He rejects attempts to ban encryption because cops already have plenty of  information on us, like security cameras and license plates that can be automatically read as you drive. “I recognize there are trade offs. The FBI is trying to protect safety. We just  have to point out when they’re wrong.”