Dana Blankenhorn

What Follows Evil Done in Our Name

What makes America exceptional isn’t that we don’t do evil.

Anyone who has gone through more than high school history knows that the United States is, at its heart, a European empire given a veneer of idealism we have yet to live up to.

America’s governments have endorsed slavery, committed genocide, taken power by force (starting in Hawaii), and overthrown any government of color we didn’t like. You may tell your kids whatever lies you like. Kids elsewhere aren’t fooled.  If anything, the evil done in our name has only gotten worse in my lifetime. Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Iraq are just the highlights.

What’s most interesting is that other societies can call this history what it is, history. When Trump threatened to destroy 52 Iranian cultural monuments, “one for every hostage,” he was talking about something that happened 40 years ago. The median age in Iran is 31. I talked with a Vietnamese math genius last year, age 28, and asked him about The War. His parents had no memory of it. It was from his grandfather’s time.

We’re stuck in a memory hole. The developing world is not.

The year 2020 is a turning point because the gating factor to growth today is human capital. Trained, agile, active, ambitious minds are where the money is at today, not oil.

America has dominated the economy of this century, so far, because we imported such minds. We also offered the greatest support to them, in terms of education, capital, and market opportunity. Trump has tossed things into the fire with everything else. An economic and demographic cliff yawn before us and his supporters don’t even see it.

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.

2020: The Crisis

“THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” 

Thomas Paine (right) died penniless in 1809, the forgotten Founder. He died that way because he was a writer, not a politician. His writing was a demand, not a request or a negotiation. The words above were read to Washington’s men before they crossed the river at Trenton. Paine made ours a revolution, not just for the patrician, but the working man. Not just for the General, but for the private. Not just for those who would lead, but those who would die. 

Every crisis has casualties. The year 1968 was marked by terrible casualties. The Great Depression and the following war killed tens of millions of people. The Civil War killed 2% of this country’s people, mostly young men in the prime of life.

Compared to that, the Crisis caused by Trump should be easy to overcome, its casualties minimal. But that won’t be. His Presidency reeks of all the worst in our history. It combines the greed of those around Warren Harding, the weakness of James Buchanan, and the racism of Andrew Jackson. The crimes are all done in plain sight, as Nixon’s crimes were done.

We’ve had some bad men in the White House, but never one whose soul belonged to another country. Trump is Putin’s man. It’s that simple. We beat Russia in the Cold War, but revenge is a dish served cold, and Trump is Russia’s revenge.

The year to come will be all about Trump. It can’t be about anything else. Can America throw off a foreign dictator when he’s already in the White House? Will we stand, once again, against the racism, the misogyny, and the brutality our forefathers fought against? Are we Americans or docile Soviets?

Against the Mullahs, against Moolah, against the militarists, the three arms of the triad that has kept the developing world in bondage for centuries, it seems we have only words, faith, and hope. The question seems simple. Whose side are you on – America’s or Russia’s? But those who fear the loss of their power over other races, and over women, won’t be swayed by words. It’s going to take the hard work of all of us to win this, and even if we win the battle the war to save the planet will have just begun.

2019: Into the Mouths of Wolves

As 2019 draws its last breath it seems the entire world is beset by tyrants, ravening wolves feeding at the souls and bodies of their people. (Cartoon by Michael de Adder, fired in 2019 for telling too much truth in his cartoons. 

Lovers of democracy and of liberty look upon the world map and despair. Everywhere we see retreat, destruction and death. Even in our country, which should be the torchbearer of freedom, the Trump darkness grows ever darker. Every effort, by anyone, to rein him in is met with ever-greater outrage. The center, despite its best efforts, cannot hold.

I have been banging my brain to find an analogy for this year in American history. It’s the summer of hate, against 1967’s Summer of Love. It’s 1939, the beginning of the war. It’s 1859, the eve of the war.

Of course, it’s none of these things. But 2019 has things in common with all past climax states in our history.

I’ve read a lot of American history this year. Until recently America’s history is an almost nonstop string of white racist provocation. The only kindness we’ve shown has been to our European “brothers,” and then mainly with our own interests at heart. Trump is not as out of bounds as he sounds.

Moore’s Law of Health

One topic in the coming re-write of my Moore’s Law book, now called Moore’s Law Explains it All, involves what I call Moore’s Law of Politics.

Moore’s Second Law, the rising capital cost of chip making, offsets Moore’s Law itself. Moore’s Law of Software, its value increasing with use, offsets Moore’s Law of Content, because most content doesn’t gain in value once you read, hear or see it.

At the same time Moore’s Law of Health, the fact that technology lets us live longer, creates a negative in Moore’s Law of Politics.

Political decision-making is stuck in the past.

I got a reminder of this during my recent trip to Heidelberg. I met a young Vietnamese mathematician. He was about the same age as my own son, 28.

I asked him about the Vietnam War. To him it’s an historical relic, like our Civil War. Even his father wasn’t impacted by it. It’s something from his grandfather’s time.

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.

The Death of the Oil Patch

Lost in my commentary on the coming decade was its first chapter, called The End of Oil.

The global economy has become dependent on oil since I was in college. Oil is behind most of our current problems, from global warming to the rise of Putin.

But the fall of oil is made possible by one fact. At the start of this decade I called it crossover. It’s the point where wind energy, and solar energy, become cheaper than energy from fossil fuels.

We made that crossover on schedule, in 2016. Since then, as I predicted, costs for renewables have continued to fall.

This is especially true for the most important form of renewable energy, efficiency. Insulation, LED lights, better furnaces and appliances, and computer controls mean demand for electricity in the U.S. has been stable through this decade. As a result, utilities have embraced electric cars, a technology as old as fossil fuels, but abandoned early in the 20^th century because electrical systems hadn’t scaled but oil infrastructure had.

All this should be good news. But it’s not. It’s a crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since World War II.

Even OPEC now sees demand for its product falling. The International Energy Agency has cut its demand forecasts repeatedly this decade, and now agrees with me.

Where Have You Gone, Al Gore?

The Sun shines. The wind blows. The tides roll. We live on a molten rock.

Yet in 2019 California’s electricity was still running through a centralized system that was obsolete 20 years ago, when then-Vice President Al Gore coined the term “enternet,” predicting renewables could make the energy grid resilient. 

Now that his vision is possible, he’s silent.

Ordinary people are now way ahead institutions of this. Residential solar is growing at 30% per year.  The fastest growing occupation over the next decade is expected to be that of a solar power installer.  Old solar panels are even recyclable, into anodes for new solar panels.

Fall of the Moolahs

A political tsunami is most likely when Wall Street gets out of step with the economy.

While it’s not yet showing up in the statistics, the U.S. economy is already in recession.

If you import or export, your business is down. If you’re a retailer, your business may be gone. If you’re a farmer, only the government is holding you up. If you’re a manufacturer and you’re not named Boeing, you’re struggling. If you’re in transportation you’re hurting. If you’re in the oilpatch, you’re dying.

The reason this isn’t apparent can be seen in the latest headlines from Maersk, the Danish shipping company. Their sales are down, but so are their costs, so their profits are up, and so is their stock. 

How can profits be rising, and thus stock values, if we’re in a recession?