Dana Blankenhorn

What I Learned on my European Vacation

Regular readers have missed me, I hope.

I took a two-week break to take my bride of nearly 46 years to Europe. Specifically, we flew to Germany, where my father’s people came from. On our first day we saw a ruin called Castle Blankenhorn, built in the 12^th century. Folks who came from that castle, which was controlled by the Hohenstaufen dynasty, took its name when they moved on.

We moved on, too, in a 2022 VW Tiguan with a 6-gear stick shift, along Autobahns which at times had no speed limit. We saw the Neuschwanstein Castle, the fairy tale accompaniment to an older pile built on a ruin like “da castle a my fadder.” We saw a statue dedicated to Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Studios (and 20^th century Hollywood). We went to a soccer game in Ingolstodt, visited its street festival, and explored the “Romantic Road,” created after World War II specifically to lead tourists to medieval sites (and extract their money). I do wish they extracted a little more of mine, in the form of hats, t-shirts and the like, but they’re still into books, postcards and refrigerator magnets.

Word of the Year: Enshitification

Enshitification is what happens when principles go out the window.

Principles like service, like honor, like honesty, like “a little looking for the other fella,” as James Stewart said in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, are what make civilization possible. When they disappear, as they have over the last several years, it doesn’t matter much what your system is or what your laws say. Those with power will take it, and only the strongest will survive.

This is mostly discussed today in the realm of politics. Words have lost their meaning and are often used to mean their opposite in the name of victory. Facts mean nothing and are simply denied in the name of power.

What No One Wants to Hear

America is doing great. Anger burns itself out. We’re playing the 1983 Game. Ask your folks what happened in 1984.

No one wants to hear this, let alone admit it.

The Reich won’t hear it because it’s their job to be angry. The left won’t hear it because they think anger is necessary to beat the Reich.

The truth is different.

A Lesser Class of Billionaire

I’m old enough to remember when the image of a billionaire was of a man like Sam Walton, who walked humbly and became the source of stories focused on how he was just like the rest of us.

He was followed by people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who saw wealth as a tool, and who resolved to give that tool away when they were done with it. Other wealthy people emulated them, signing pledges to give their wealth back to the commons, because everything we have is merely borrowed from our time and must be recycled when we’re gone.

Over the 15 years, however, a new kind of billionaire has emerged. They’re malevolent, not benevolent. Some of their fortunes, like that of Elon Musk, are self-created. Others, like that of David Sachs, are built using other peoples’ money. Still others, like Harlan Crow, just inherited their wealth.

But this new class of billionaire is uninterested in their fellow citizens. They see wealth as a means with which to both obtain political power and maintain it even after they’re dead. They now control our courts, they fund our elections, and they think they’re better than anyone else.

Billionaires are now threatening the very structure they built.  

Food Riots

I wish I had better news today, but how can you grow food at temperatures that kill germs? 

You can’t.

Food riots are coming, all around the world, in the wake of the “new normal” that is 2023. 

With temperatures averaging over 100 in the growing regions of Europe and North America, I can’t see a big crop coming in. Those temperatures are going to move to the southern hemisphere this winter, burning Brazil, Argentina, and Australia. Everyone’s talking about El Nino. Fewer are talking about this new normal.

Food may be an inflationary story in the west, but it’s a survival story in the global south. Few are paying attention to the coming starvation. Wars, even “good wars” like the one in Ukraine, are environmental disasters on many levels. That war needs to be ended, quickly, which means a deeper involvement in the near term, and greater risk.

Can China Be Turned?

A quiet effort is underway to turn China from the path of war back to the path of prosperity.

If it works, it’s the biggest story of the decade.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken got a surprisingly warm reception in Beijing last week. He even got an audience with Xi Jinping, complete with a handshake that shows Xi as an old Chairman Mao.

China’s establishment is torn between two ambitions.

Its military and political establishment want Taiwan back. They’re willing to kill millions of their own people to get it. They see the price being paid for their depredations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong as worthwhile. They want what Japan wanted before World War II – a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” that can stand as an equal to America’s dominance of Latin America.

China’s business establishment, and its people, want the deal they signed up for 45 years ago. Deng Xiaoping made a compact with his citizens in 1978, capitalist prosperity in exchange for absolutist unity. Westerners read Tiananmen as the destruction of freedom, and China’s efforts to forget it as ignoring the lessons of history. Both are true. But the other side in that exchange, an apartment, a car, and a chance at real wealth, is just as real.

The Real Cause of Extremism

A lot of ideas have been mooted to explain Christian radicalism and Fascist extremism among my generation of Americans.

Its cause is the same as that facing southern aristocrats in the 1850s, the accelerating pace of change.

I won’t relitigate the 19^th century. But the 21^st has seen change at ludicrous speed. Moore’s Law leaves nothing untouched. There’s no stability, whether in business or socially. Everything has gone online, from money to entertainment to community. What has come out looks frightening.

On China

Since the start of COVID, the U.S. and China have drifted toward a Cold War that threatens to become a hot one.

China insists we don’t understand it. All they want is the respect due the world’s second largest economy. That means a sphere of influence covering East Asia. That means no one questions their government’s actions.

They say the U.S. has that. We reject that idea but look at the record. Since World War II, America has built an empire on the backs of our military. We haven’t lived up to our ideals any more than China has lived up to Karl Marx’. We’re hypocrites.

I know what you’ll say. China’s record is worse. It’s doing to Xinjiang’s Muslims what we did to our native Americans. Its behavior in Hong Kong is as bad as ours against black Americans. It sees Taiwan as a threat it needs to take out. We feel the same about Cuba.

The Most Important Technology in the World

It’s not AI.

AI is software which runs on hardware. Hardware may be software, but it must be manufactured to implement the software.

The makes the most important technology in the world EUV.

Extreme UltraViolet lithography (EUV) uses high frequency ultraviolet light to etch circuits on silicon chips. It’s important because, as circuits grow closer, the wavelengths of visible light become too wide to etch with them.

A Dutch company, ASML, was the first to perfect EUV lithography. Creating a microprocessor with an ASML EUV system isn’t that simple, either. Taiwan Semiconductor was the first processor maker to do it. (Micron will soon start using EUV for memory chips.) Intel is also working on adapting EUV, and their “roadmap” includes EUV chips with line distances measured in Angstroms, one-tenth of a nanometer.

Things Are About to Happen

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. 

A political campaign can start only after policies are implemented.

In 2023, a lot of things are about to happen that will have profound impacts on how people vote next year.

• Ukraine is coming for Russia. We’ll know a lot more about that by fall.
• Jack Smith is coming for Trump. We’ll know a lot more about that by fall.
• Gun, abortion, and education policies are being implemented by states and we’ll know a whole lot more about their effect by fall.

I haven’t even mentioned the weather, which will show in no uncertain terms just how damaging our reliance on fossil fuels has become. Droughts and hurricanes will wreak terrible havoc on the whole planet this summer, and on Americans too.