Dana Blankenhorn

Propaganda for Good

Russia thought it was attacking a Russian province.

Turned out it was attacking Europe.

Europe is a state of mind. It’s egalitarian, but it’s fractious. It’s united, but not entirely. It’s western civilization in microcosm – messy, slow to anger, but mighty when provoked.

The invasion revealed that Putin’s Russia wasn’t even a nation-state. It was a medieval Empire, gilded by 20^th century ideologies, wealth, and technologies.

What makes this Empire so dangerous is that it has used all it had to attack America. Until recently it was successful. Putin ran our government, through Trump. Had we not beaten Trump he would be sitting in Kiev right now.

The Putin threat to this nation is still alive. It can still win. That’s because Trump was never Putin’s most dangerous puppet.

Rupert Murdoch is.

Without Fox News, Trump would have gone nowhere. Without Fox News, racism could not still be rising. Putin is a King. He won’t be satisfied until he rules everything. Murdoch is an oligarch. Rich man wants to be King.

Find me three issues on which Murdoch and Putin fundamentally disagree. I’ll wait.

I’ve written this before. It is time for Americans to become Ukranian in the defense of our heritage and rights. I’m not talking about grabbing guns and heading for Kentucky. I am talking instead of using what Ukrainians have taught us, in their hour of need, about propaganda.

The video above teaches this lesson. The song is about mothers, how they grow gray but still treat us like children, protecting us. What we see are women soldiers rushing into the war zone to take children to safety.

Then note the twist. These aren’t their own children they’re saving, or not just their own. When the children are safe, the women go back to the war. They seek their faith. They go on. They are soldiers. Everyone is a soldier.

What America is going through is a struggle. It’s a struggle that can be won. But it will take every weapon at our disposal, including propaganda. We have 5 ½ months and, if we win this time, anything is possible. If we fail, nothing may be possible for a long, long, long time.

Cash is Still King

You don’t have a loss until you sell.

I am reminded of that during the current tech wreck.

I have a retirement account, which for a while was worth over $1 million. It’s worth just two-thirds of that now.

But that’s OK. Because the account includes about $140,000 in cash. I can buy some stocks. I don’t have to sell any. I can wait out the bear market.

The stocks I own are all in real companies, most of them profitable. I have some dogs that may not come back, like Cloudflare and Upstart. But Amazon will rise again. So will Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Bitcoin won’t come back (I hope), nor the rest of the cryptotrash. There’s still almost $1.22 trillion locked in that garbage. There are losses still to come.

The Year of Clarity

This is the year the masks came off. This is the year the cold war became a hot one.

Russia’s attack on Ukraine was a mask coming off. The oligarchs who embraced Vladimir Putin for two decades, and all those who pretended he wasn’t the second coming of Hitler, were exposed. Some tried to back away. Others doubled down. It doesn’t matter. We know now who is on the side of freedom, and who isn’t.

It was a clarifying moment. It created clarity across Europe, and in much of America too. Lines have been drawn. On one side lies democracy, liberty, everything we’ve claimed to stand for over 230 years. On the other side lies evil. Yes, many of its ghosts are American, in genocide, in slavery, in racism and eugenics and the rest. But these are ghosts.

At least we pretended they were.

The leak on overturning Roe vs. Wade is a second clarifying moment. That’s not so obvious yet. Many still try to pretend it is politics as usual.

It’s not. It’s a declaration of war.

The Way to Wealth is Tolerance

There’s nothing wrong with wealth.

Wealth is supposed to create a sense of responsibility. Andrew Carnegie understood this after he sold his Carnegie Steel in 1901.  Thereafter he devoted himself to giving all his money away. MacKenzie Scott, formerly Mrs. Jeff Bezos, is doing that today. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have promised to do that.

They do it to protect the system. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith defended capitalism by positing that wealthy people would be inclined toward the common good. Some are. Others are not.

For every Carnegie there’s a Vanderbilt. The good news is that, after a few generations of profligacy, even a Vanderbilt fortune can run dry. Anderson Cooper is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt but he’s not a rich man. That’s a hopeful story.

The good news is that, so far, 2022 is giving me an 1898 feeling. David Traxel’s book on 1898  describes a nation facing a Populist uprising amid a progressive ferment. It describes a war that was blissfully short, a turning point because it brought to power a man who would get along with Wall Street.

The Progressive movement and Wall Street’s self-interest lined up perfectly. Few people understand this, even today. Utilities for electricity, telephony, for transport, for water and for natural gas, could only be created through regulated monopolies. The late 19^th century’s efforts to create them in other ways failed. J.P. Morgan portrayed the evil trust king in the popular imagination, and Theodore Roosevelt the benevolent trust-buster. But they were working toward the same end. The result was today’s American cities.

Isolation

I’ve been watching a lot of soccer lately. I’ve also been reading a lot. I’ve even checked in on Amazon Prime.

What I haven’t been doing is obsessing over politics. I think that’s true for many millions of people, especially on the left.

Why? Because it doesn’t matter until it matters.

The result is an assumption in Washington that fascism is about to take over. They see progressives isolated within their own lives, confusing that with acceptance.

This is true around the world. Ukranians feel isolated. Chinese feel isolated. Religious minorities are isolated everywhere.

Silent Majority

The thing about a Silent Majority is that we’re silent.

We just want to get on with our lives.

There used to be two seasons in Washington. There was political season and policy season. Drunk on the attention of the last few election cycles, Washington reporters and pundits now think it’s always political season. Republicans, the minority party, have indulged them with constant outrage. The insurrection meant to bring down the U.S. Constitution was just the start.

But I can’t see a single issue on which Republican stands represent a majority view. The only way these views get any traction is by filtering everything through a Republican prism. There’s an entire media class, owned by oligarchs, doing nothing but that. Extremism in the defense of liberty is a vice, for in extremism there is no liberty. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is a virtue, for without moderation there is no justice.

Ghosts of Our Fathers, Angels of Our Nature

When someone says of the Fascists, oligarchs, religious bigots, and racists of today’s Republican Party “that’s not us,” I shake my head.

That is us. I’m a history major. America has always been a battle between our ghosts and our better angels. There’s nothing Russia or China can teach us in that regard.

• Slavery? We perfected it, in the American South.
• Genocide? We perfected it, in the American West.
• Eugenics? We invented it, in American cities.

The Taliban have been here since the Puritans. Nearly all Christianity’s craziest cults were American-born. The Great Awakening of the 19^th century was just an appetizer.

Metaverse From the Bottom Up

There’s an enormous amount of capital going into what’s called the metaverse today. An awful lot is being written about it. The vast majority is being wasted.

I know this because Moore’s Law has been around for almost 60 years. Two generations. We know how a change like this occurs.

It occurs from the bottom up.

It was start-ups that forced IBM into mini-computers and, later, into PCs. Digital software natives Microsoft and Apple eventually pushed IBM aside entirely and let its own bureaucracy devour it. The same was true with networking. If we waited for AT&T to build the Internet, we’d still be waiting. It was the government’s insistence on open standards, driven largely by the needs of national defense, that drove the model in the 1990s.

This Ain’t the 70s

I came up in the 1970s, the era of stagflation.

I was fortunate to be spared the worst of it. I lived most of the decade around Rice University. While everyone else in America was suffering, Houston enjoyed a boom. I didn’t drive regularly until I got a job that paid for it, in 1978. Even then I was young enough to bike everywhere. Houston is flat and youth can dodge cars.

Despite my penny-pinching, and that of my dear wife, the house we eventually found was less affordable than houses are today. This was because money cost money, a lot of money. We paid 12% interest, adjustable every 6 months. We half-expected to be paying 15% in three years.

By the 1980s inflationary expectations were built-in to the economy. Everything was expected to cost more because raw materials, starting with oil, were so dear. Stagflation meant a stagnant economy wracked by inflation.

Tech Demands Freedom

America dominates the global tech economy because freedom.

The freedom to think what you want, and be who you want, is now the key to economic growth.

This is a point that’s widely ignored by American elites today. Americans love to talk about what’s wrong and have overestimated our global adversaries since 1776.

It’s most obvious now in our economic competition with China.

China is a great manufacturing power. But it continues to trail in software and science. It deliberately put down its Cloud Emperors for threatening the state. It can’t deliver the latest semiconductor technology.

Software is the product of hands and minds. You can’t automate its production, the way you can a car. You can improve productivity with better tools. But organizing a team requires that coaches listen as well as speak. Man management, they call it.

The best scientists, coders, and writers are all motivated by something inside. We’re not doing it for the money, we’re not doing it for an ideology. We each have our own reasons. In my case, it’s a desire I’ve had all my life to be heard, to be seen, to be part of the conversation. If you want to get the most out of us, you must respect that. China’s government doesn’t respect that.