Thoughts And Observations

Here are some thoughts and observations that I have written down. Some have already been described in previous postings. This is divided into ten sections so that you can easily leave and then return to your place.

1

A primary human error is to oversimplify. We, as a whole, just do not handle complexity very well. Our emotional side in particular does not like complexity. It is just so much easier to deal with a black and white situation than with a spectrum of color (colour).

One of the most deceptive and misleading words there is is the word "talent". The deception involves a strong sense of improvement or the lack thereof. A person who appears to be very "talented" at something probably isn't so talented. It is more likely that the person with so much "talent" actually has the drive and discipline to just keep on improving over time. A person who lacks such a sense of improvement will then say "Oh, look at how talented that person is". Even when a person is exceptionally good at some activity upon trying it for the first time, it is likely that the "talented" person is proficient at some other activity with similar patterns to the new activity.

My definition of a wise person is one who will thank you when you prove them wrong. But like many complex themes, wisdom is open to more than one definition. A wise person believes what they see instead of seeing what they believe. That is, they do not form a view of the world and then try to fit everything that they see into that view. The wise amend their world-view whenever necessary.

I have defined the three basic facets of life as being, doing and, having. All of your life can be broken down into these three facets.

When people stop believing in God, they just replace him with something else. The great ideological struggles of the past century would seem nonsensical to someone centuries ago. In days past, something that did not involve religion would not even seem worth going to war for. But we have only replaced religion with secular ideologies, and the wars over these ideologies are at least as destructive as wars over religion would be.

Four words which are heard too rarely in the Christian community are: sin, Satan, heaven and, hell.

I see a strong link between industrialism and evolutionary theory. This theory uses an industrial-like process to explain the development of living things. It was not until millions of people were working in factories, rather than on farms, that belief in this theory became widespread. When working all day in agriculture, one sees what God has produced, but when working in a factory one sees only the machines and the building which man has produced.

The toughest people in the world have nothing to do with physical toughness. The toughest people in the world are nice people who go through all of the trials that life throws at them and still remain nice people. Physical toughness is child's play by comparison.

God is absolute one way or another. If God exists, then he should be the primary focus of our lives. If God does not exist, then he is not worth even mentioning. There is really no logical middle ground.

The ultimate triumph of Satan is not just to get people to do evil things, but to get them to do evil things in the name of God.

If you really want to understand western civilization then you must understand that when a nation is religious for a long time and then falls away from the religion, the patterns of the religion and the stories of the holy scriptures will still be manifested in a myriad of secular ways.

What tends to happen is that a nation will follow God and as a result it will gain power and prosperity. But then it will drift into thinking that it became powerful and prosperous because of it's innate superiority over other people.

We already know how to live better lives and how to build a better world, the trouble is that it is things that we do not want to hear.

An amazing example of how history repeats itself is the role of Greece in ancient times pioneering the way for a new level of civilization in Europe and the role of Japan doing the same for Asia in the Twentieth Century.

Whenever I am online, I try to read an article or two on Wikipedia just to be better informed. I recently read about Fulgencio Batista, the leader of Cuba who was overthrown by Fidel Castro in 1959. Prior to reading the article, I knew that he was an ally of the U.S. and had connections to organized crime but did not know much more about him. I was stunned at how history repeats itself. This is a close repetition of the story of the Shah of Iran being overthrown twenty years later. The Shah is in the role of Batista, Khomeini is in the role of Castro and, the U.S. has a very similar role in both plays. The Bay of Pigs Invasion is congruent to Operation Eagle Claw. The play is the same, only the stage and the actors are different.

No matter which country you belong to, your country is never as important in the world as you think it is.

It does not get a lot of attention in the western press, but Chinese companies are remaking virtually the entire continent of Africa.

The Cold War was very much the long shadow of the Second World War. The end of the Cold War can thus be largely explained by simple demographics. By the late 1980s, a new generation of leaders had emerged which had no direct experience with the Second World War.

What the world really needs is fewer people. Some countries are moving in the right direction by depopulating, a few examples are Italy, Russia and, Japan. The conundrum is that if a country does what is best for the world and lowers it's population, it loses influence to those nations which are not doing the best thing for the world and are increasing their population.

History is made by radicals who turn out to be right. The way to make history is not to follow the crowd, but to sense when not to follow the crowd.

The trouble with history is that human history is basically a history of warfare and the winners of the wars are the ones who get to write the history books.

Nothing will hold a place back like having too much reverence for the way things have always been done. When you see a place that is not doing very well economically, it is probable that the people there lack a strong sense of progress.

The thing that is so different about our times, in comparison with the rest of history, is that we are now able to make changes in the world around us faster than we can comfortably adapt to those changes.

It is relatively easy to see when an economic system has moved too far leftward or that social programs need to be curtailed. There will be a significant increase in inflation.

Inflation does have it's value. When a government is in debt, inflation decreases the amount of real money that it will have to repay.

When there is a recession in which inflation is not a significant factor and it is not because of some calamity, it is because the wealthy people are taking too much money for themselves and it is not leaving enough money in circulation to buy all of the goods and services that are being produced. Since it does not make sense to produce goods and services that no one is going to buy, there is a cutback in production.

The difference between a Socialist/Democrat and a Republican/Conservative is that the Socialist will show you the price tag while the Republican will hide the price tag and it is only when you get further along that you see what the real price tag is.

One great problem with the world is that rich people tend to have few children while poor people tend to have many children. This concentrates wealth and spreads poverty.

There is a lot of truth to the saying that "People ultimately get the government that they deserve".

By it's very nature, politics should be boring. What politics really comes down to is paving the roads and disposing of the trash. But modern democratic political campaigning forces us to try to load something with excitement which, by it's very nature, is mundane.

America's fixed four-year election terms makes campaigning skill, as opposed to actual skill at governing, that much more important. In a parliamentary democracy, an election is over within a month or so of when it is first called. This makes campaigning less important in comparision with governing. America's fixed terms does provide some added stability, but campaigning goes on for more than a year before the election. This means that a party which may not be very good at actually governing can still "hang in there" by being exceptionally good at campaigning.

How have America's Republicans managed to make "socialism" into such a dirty word? It is true that socialism can be taken too far and sometimes is. But it is also true that mandatory public education, minimum wage and workplace safety laws, unemployment insurance, limits on working hours and overtime pay and a myriad of other benefits that we tend to take for granted are, in fact, socialism.

A major flaw of capitalism that gets too little attention is that the system is based on competition. A lot of people cannot compete without being nasty. This gets into the culture and increases the level of nastiness which is considered acceptable, and then this goes to undermine the principles for which the society stands.

The trouble with socialism is the temptation to think that if a moderate amount of socialism works well, and it does, then a lot of socialism will work even better, except that it doesn't.

The establishment of the best economic system is a fine balance between motivating people, but not letting the few most successful people set up the system to suit themselves.

Another flaw of capitalism is that it tends to produce short-term thinking. The profit motive throws the spotlight on the immediate future. Major problems emerge down the road that could have been avoided with better long-term planning. Post-war suburbs were built to revolve around everyone having a car without a thought as to where the gasoline would come from in the future or what it would do to the environment.

When it comes to crime, the more difficult a society makes it to live by the rules the more people there will be who do not live by the rules.

Be loyal to people but do not be loyal to ideas. A wise person will not get emotionally attached to an idea. If you have believed something for years and then can see that it is not true, or unworthy of belief, then drop the idea like an empty bottle.

Sometimes, the worst thing that can happen to an ideological or political group is that it reaches it's goal and gains power. There are a lot of ideas out there whose adherents are better at spinning dreams than at actually running a modern country.

One way in which we oversimplify things is that we take what is good advice at one point in time and harden it into dogma, which is presumed to be the answer at any point in time.

We zig-zag through history, instead of taking the more efficient straight line. The ideologies that we come up with tend to be reactions against other ideologies. An ideology will be in place until it's flaws become apparent. Another ideology will form as a reaction against it. But the new ideology will go too far in the opposite direction so that, in time, yet another ideology forms as a reaction against it, and which also goes too far in the opposite direction. The overshot is because we put our emotions into such things. This zig-zag is what I call "The Reaction Syndrome".

My favored definition of freedom is that the individual is at least as important as the group. An alternate definition is that exactly the same rules are written down for everyone.

The basic meaning of democracy is very simple. It means that no one is special.

Freedom does not mean everyone being the same. Just the opposite, it means agreeing to disagree. The price of freedom is to be sorrounded by persons who choose not to be like us.

Whether freedom produces a better society than non-freedom and, if so, how much better, depends on the quality of the people.

In 1989, democracy seemed to have swept the world. But instead of being the beginning of global democracy, we now see that it was the peak of democracy and that it has taken a step back since then. Maybe this should prompt us to ask if we can really handle living by such high principles.

The current upheaval in the Middle East, revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt so far, are really highlighting the fact that many countries are close allies of America and the west not because they are democracies, but because they are NOT democracies. Remember that when a dictator is overthrown in an effort to bring about democracy, the overthrow is the easy part. Building a working system of democracy is much more difficult.

Don't forget my old book, written in 1997, "The Commoner Syndrome". I predicted that, in the future of America and other western countries, the middle class would be much reduced by global economic forces. I compared it to the humps of camels, the single hump of the dromedary (Arabian Camel) with some rich and some poor but with most people in the middle, would be replaced with the two humps of the bactrian camel with more rich, more poor, and fewer people in the middle. The 2009-2010 recession has really decimated the middle class, even as the rich have gotten more numerous and much richer.

The simplest, and crudest, form of democracy is a simple rule of the majority. While this is an improvement over the non-democracy rule of a minority it falls short of true democracy, which is based on the interplay between majority and minority.

America practices both democracy and capitalism, and few people want to change that. If someone asked me to explain in one sentence why I am a Democrat, instead of a Republican, I would say that "I am a Democrat because Republicans put capitalism first, while Democrats put democracy first". There is absolutely nothing wrong with making money, but when money is allowed to equal power those who have it also have the ability to set things up to suit themselves and send even more of it their way. This is ultimately self-defeating because most wealthy people sell something to the average person, and if the consumer does not have enough money then the business will suffer.

Since the beginnings of civilization, societies have had both rich people and poor people. The true test of how well a society works is the proportion of people it has who are neither rich nor poor.

I have thought of a simple definition of a civilized society. This refers to the values of the society and not to the level of organization or technology. In a civilized society, it is preferable for a guilty person to go free than for an innocent person to be punished.

The trouble with freedom is that it takes some special people to really handle it. Freedom releases the worst in people, as well as the best. Like so many other things involving people, freedom has a peak. When we go past that peak, and get too free, it just allows the strong to dominate the weak.

Remember that freedom is quite a complicated idea. There are two possible slants to freedom, "freedom to" and "freedom from". The simplest example that I can think of is smoking. Should people have "freedom to" smoke or should they have "freedom from" second-hand smoke? Complete "freedom to" is just the law of the jungle and, complete "freedom from" is merely a benevolent dictatorship. The most satisfactory brand of freedom is a peak midway between the two extremes.

The basic meaning of democracy is that no one is special. The trouble is that we live in a world of people who all like to think of themselves as special. How many people, from any country, really want to be in a room with a hundred people from a hundred different countries, and speaking a hundred different languages, and to be told that all of you are equal, none of you has any right to expect to be considered as above anyone else? There is nothing wrong with wanting to be special, as long as we are willing to work honestly for it. But too many people want to be special just because of who they are or where they were born.

I have never figured out why anyone would want to announce that there is going to be a recession. Such an announcement causes people to curtail their spending, and so the recession which results is self-fulfilling. It just does not make sense.

The one thing that underlies so many of the problems in the world, from global warming to fuel and food prices, is that the world simply has too many people.

Once again, the thing that is so different about the times in which we live is that we have reached the point where we can change the world faster than we can adapt to the changes that we have made in the world.

There has got to be a simple way to take a direct measurement of a person's health. What if we were to put a cut in a person's skin, of pre-determined length. The health of that person could be expressed as being in inverse proportion to the time that it requires for the cut to completely heal. This is true because the healthier and younger a person is, and the better their diet, the faster the cut would heal.

Whatever indictments Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir may have against him for other issues, he really deserves credit for bringing off the recent referendum on southern Sudan becoming a separate country so well.

More schools seem to be offering courses in difficult foreign languages like Chinese, Japanese, Russian and, Arabic. It used to be just western European languages like French, Spanish, German and, Italian. This is a very good step forward, but it seems that Hindi is rarely offered. This is actually an Indo-European language, which probably makes it somewhat easier to learn for English-speakers. It seems to me that because so many Indians can speak English, there is less reason for westerners to learn to speak Hindi.

This may be obvious to some readers with an interest in ancient history, but it may seem by a glance at a map that the Indus River Valley of Pakistan should have been a center of early civilization on a par with the Nile River of Egypt and the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers of Mesopotamia. There were two important city-states around the Indus River, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, but no civilization like there was along the Nile or in Mesopotamia. Maybe two recent events give us a clue as to what hampered the development of early civilization in the Indus Valley. First was the tragic earthquake of 2005 in Pakistan, and then the extensive flooding in 2010. It is know that Mohenjo-Daro was destroyed several times by floods. My thought is that earthquakes and floods like this must have happened on a fairly regular basis over the past few thousand years, and this explains why early civilization here was not as developed and widespread as in Egypt or Mesopotamia.

Recessions and economic crashes are actually corrections, to correct what is wrong in the system that brought about the crash or recession. The trouble is that they take on a life of their own and turn into over-corrections that sets the economy back further than need be to remedy the cause of the correction. The solution is not to have reason for any such correction in the first place.

One thing that must be understood in order to understand how the world works is that when a society is religious for a long period of time, but then moves away from the religion somewhat, the patterns of the religion will remain. These patterns will then be filled with other things, since when people stop believing in God they tend to replace him with something else. Holy scripture is usually unchanging over time so when it is replaced with politics or ideology, we end up taking what may have been good advice at one point in time and hardening it into unchanging dogma.

In the book that I wrote in 2003, "The Patterns Of New Ideas", I suggested that the internet would logically bring about an entirely new branch of the military, which could be named the "Cyberforce", just as the development of aircraft brought air forces into being. No country has yet established an entirely new branch of the military to conduct operations online. Yet, you can see what I mean. Several countries now employ legions of hackers to work along side their armed forces, and various corps to defend against such attacks.

In the book that I wrote ten years ago, in the spring of 2001, "The End Of The World", I explained how a prominent factor in the future resulting in both the further integration and consolidation of the European Union and, it's involvement as a whole in influencing the outside world will likely be the wariness of mass migration to Europe from across the Mediterranean. With the present uprisings in north Africa and the Middle East, you can now see what I mean by this.

One thing that we have really made progress at in recent years is something that you do not hear much about because it is now non-news. I recall when there used to be plane crashes in the news all the time. But now, such crashes are few and far between. By far, the most dangerous part of taking a flight is the drive to and from the airport in a car.

2

Remember, once again, that when a dictator is overthrown in order to establish democracy, overthrowing the dictator is by far the easiest part. The establishment of real democracy in a country that has no tradition of it, and is not occupied by another country, is really difficult and frustrating.

One of the problems with nuclear energy is that it's early proponents made too many promises. It is not that nuclear energy is a failure because it did not live up to these promises, it is that the promises were the result of too much enthusiasm in the first place.

The first oil war was really the Second World War. Hitler's Blitzkrieg (lightning war) tactics were modern and effective. Their weakness was the requirement of a plentiful supply of fuel. My thought is that Hitler ended up spreading his forces too thin in order to secure oil. This happened both in the Soviet campaign, the goal being the oil fields of the Caucasus, and in north Africa where the real goal was the oil of the Middle East.

One subject in which I have a life-long interest, yet also have mixed feelings about, is history. Of course we should study history, to know who we are, where we came from, and where we are likely to be going. But history also reinforces precendent. Human history is, more than anything else, a history of warfare. It is not fair to those who lives through a war that it be forgotten, yet we also tend to repeat the patterns with which we are familiar. Like so many thing having to do with human beings, there is a peak of efficiency to be found in the amount of study devoted to history.

Have you ever wondered why America seems to have a double army? On the one hand is the regular army, and then there is the U.S. Marines. The Marines are generally considered as somewhat more suited for special duties, mainly because their basic training is longer. But in function, there does not appear to be a lot of difference between the two. Marines are traditionally a detachment of soldiers carried on board naval vessels that can be send ashore, if necessary. Marines, of any country, are required to be tough and resourceful because they cannot count on the support network that the regular army has. That is what the U.S. Marines originally were. It seems to me that this changed when the Marines were allowed to recruit on their own, someone could join the Marines directly without first joining the Navy. This brought many more recruits than were needed to fulfill their original mission on board Navy ships. So, the function of the Marines drastically expanded to accommodate all it's qualified recruits. The result is that the Marines are now essentially a parallel army with tanks, helicopters and, aircraft, just like a full branch of the military. It is the U.S. Navy SEALs (for SEa, Air and, Land) which has arisen to take the place of, and fulfill the original role of, the Marines.

Successful Democrat presidents in the U.S. are often referred to by just their initials. Every American knows that TR is Teddy Roosevelt and FDR is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. John F. Kennedy is known as JFK and his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, as LBJ. Why not help the Obama Administration along by referring to Barack Obama simply as BHO?

One really encouraging story in America that does not get much attention is how the Arab community is revitalizing the Detroit area.

As you may notice, harshness has a way of backfiring. For a few examples, you can read "Left Turn In South America" on this blog. Iran has built up a lot of industrial capacity over the past few decades, much of it under the control of the Revolutionary Guard. With the sanctions against it in place, the country has difficulty selling goods on the global market. So, what they are doing is producing lots and lots of weapons. Wouldn't it be better to engage with Iran and encourage them to produce consumer goods instead? If Iranians put the same care into making cars as they have into making carpets for centuries, I would really like to have an Iranian-made car.

I do understand why some people are intolerant and dismissive of anything foreign. Understanding different countries, and their people, requires effort and mental work. Just shunning anything to do with the outside world is the simplest and easiest way to accommodate intellectual laziness.

A progressive society depends on the interplay between the young and the old. The old, of course, have knowledge and experience that the young don't. But the old, in gaining their experience, have collected opinions, viewpoints on the world, and vested interests that affect the way they see the world. As we age, we tend more to "see what we believe" instead of "believing what we see". The young have the advantage of being free of most of this, at least for a time.

Why is it so difficult for human beings to write a story with nothing bad at all in it? As far as I know, there has never been a novel set in Heaven. How many stories have you ever read in which there are no bad people, and nothing negative or challenging occurs? This can only be a reflection of our nature.

A society with an emphasis on the group is easier to manage and control. But it is individualism that really brings creativity and new ideas. When people have too much respect for the way things have always been done, they are less likely to notice better ways of doing things. When people think like everyone else, they are less likely to notice the things that no one else has noticed. Community is all well and good, but remember that it was the Reformation, with it's emphasis on self-improvement, think-for-yourself individualism and, disdain for the established order as foolish and sinful, that brought about the Industrial Revolution and created the modern world. Tradition and stability is the realm of the group, but progress is more likely to be the realm of the individual.

The way to the best possible society is improvement from both ends. The government should provide an adequate safety net and those social programs deemed to be worth their cost. On the other hand, the people must do all that they can to improve themselves, their health and, their skills.

An often overlooked fact about Mexico is that the old language of the Aztec Indians, known as Nahuatl, is still widely spoken as a daily language, especially in remote areas in central Mexico.

When democracy is coupled with capitalism, we run into the fact that wealth distribution will inevitably be unequal and that money will inevitably equal power. In theory, all citizens should be equal, regardless of how much money that they have. This may be true when it comes to voting, but wealth always enables those who possess it to rearrange society to suit themselves to some extent.

One difficulty with capitalism is that money has a way of becoming an entity in itself. I read about a man who became wealthy because he "really knew how money works". Money should be only a vehicle for facilitating transactions. The way to gain wealth should be to somehow create wealth, not by "knowing how money works".

Nastiness tends to be a sign of weakness, not of strength. In a political campaign, for example, the side which most resorts to nastiness is really the inferior side, with the weaker arguments, and is trying to compensate for this weakness by being nasty.

There is always a better way of doing things. The way to make progress is to always be looking for it.

Around forty years ago, there was a popular book titled "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler. The book is basically about how we are moving into an era in which we are able to change the world faster than we can adapt to the changes that we have made in the world. My book "The Commoner Syndrome" is about the same topic. But I think that I have approached it from the opposite direction, adapting to grasp the future instead of being victimized by it. Of course, the price of failing to grasp the future is to fall behind those individuals and countries that do.

The past thirty years have been a fabulous time for millionaires. There are many more millionaires, and many of those that were have become billionaires. The trouble is that so much of everything else is broke. The shift has been more from a redistribution of wealth, rather than actual creation of wealth.

Ronald Reagan could have been a really great president, if only he had been more flexible. Inflation was rampant when he took office, but his shift to the right had it reduced to near zero by the end of his first term in office. If only he would have moved to the center at that point. Instead, he remained rightward and that is what brought about the destructive economic crash of 1987.

In my book "The Patterns Of New Ideas", written in 2003, I suggested that the national defense against computer attacks was worthy of the establishment of an entirely new branch of the military, the "Cyberforce", on a par with the Army, Navy and, Air Force. This is now starting to become reality. Estonia has created a "cyber army", and China now has what it calls it's "Online Blue Army". I recently heard a news report about the new "Syrian Electronic Army".

No country is as much a victim of it's location as Pakistan. It borders and was carved from India, with which it has fought three wars as a result. It also borders Afghanistan, and gets pulled into whatever is going on there. The Indian Subcontinent is still undergoing geologic tectonic collision with the Asian Continent, and Pakistan bears the brunt of the resulting earthquakes. Finally, much of the country is lowland not far from the heights of the Himalayas, and the result of that is the periodic devastating floods. If only Pakistan could become tectonically detatched and drift some distance out into the Arabian Sea away from all of this.

When it comes to doing business across the world, one great advantage that the Chinese have is their willingness to learn languages. Relatively few people speak Mandarin or Cantonese Chinese who are not Chinese. This means that they cannot travel abroad and expect to be spoken to in their own language, and this works to China's advantage.

One thing that Buffalo, New York does not get it's deserved credit for is the development of the air conditioner. The idea of air conditioning had been around since ancient times, but the first modern air conditioner as we know it was developed in Buffalo. It is difficult to imagine how much this has contributed to the world as it is today. Few people wanted to live in Florida or the southwestern U.S. before air conditioning became widespread. What would a place like Singapore be like without air conditioning? Would the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur or the Burj Khalifa in Dubai have been built if they could not be air conditioned? To read more about the role of Buffalo in this humble but world-changing development, see www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Haviland_Carrier

A great paradox is that if we made a list of the most loved people ever, and another list of the most hated people ever, there would be many of the same people on both lists.

When you read the news, it is important to remember that a lot of what you are reading is just the writer's opinion or interpretation of an event.

Jobs are returning to America following the recession. Unfortunately, what was once higher-paying jobs are being replaced with significantly lower-paying jobs. There is little that any government could do about this. The reason is a falling backward along "The Idea Curve". For my explanation, see the posting by that name at the top of my progress blog, http://www.markmeekprogress.blogspot.com/

It is becoming clear to many what has happened in Mexico. Since the administration of current president Felipe Calderon, violence associated with drug cartels has exploded to previously unimaginable levels. At the time of this writing, around thirty thousand people have been killed in such violence since Calderon took office in 2006. It seems that previous administrations probably had some type of truce agreement with the cartels that Calderon's government has refused to go along with. This is not to blame the other administrations, is it fair for Mexicans to be dying like this because of the demand for drugs in other countries?

Effective socialism is not funded by heavy taxation. It is funded by income from resources or from government participation in profitable sectors of the economy, and this does not mean shutting out the private sector.

Economics made really simple is like taking two pieces of wood of equal length. Place the boards together so that they stand upright, forming an inverted "V". One board represents the supply side of the economy, and the other represents the demand side. As long as the two boards remain equal in length, they should continue to stand upright. It is only when we try to emphasize one side over the other that we increase the risk of the boards falling down.

Germany is probably the greenest of the major countries of the world. In a recent demonstration, there was a banner praising the sun (sonnen). Maybe the next step in the land of Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW and, Audi is the development of the first practical solar car. I gave my impressions in the postings "Parallel Revolutions" and "The Problem With Sunshine" on my progress blog, http://www.markmeekprogress.blogspot.com/ I highly value my community of readers in Germany.

As for Iran developing nuclear energy, remember that the country is just as vulnerable to earthquakes as is Japan.

Have you ever thought about what a difficult language English really is? As just one example of it's irregularity, the words: cough, dough, bough, rough and, plough should all rhyme, but they don't. However, it is this wide "span" of sound that makes English easily able to absorb words from other languages so that it can serve as a global language. I think that this results from English being a Germanic language, but having had a large number of French words incorporated following the Norman Invasion of what is now England about a thousand years ago.

We probably have nowhere near realized all that computer technology can do for us. One solution to both the shortage of fuel and global warming is simply to replace cars on the highway with packets of electrons on the information superhighway by arranging for tens of millions of people to work and attend classes from their home computers. But, this upsets the way that things have always been done. Many people do work from home, the disadvantage is that they tend to be left "out of the loop" and to hurt their chances for promotion by not being visible at the office.

A surprising fact about the European Union is that, while it consists of 27 countries with a population of nearly 500 million people, more than half of it's residents live in the four largest countries. More people in the EU are either German, British, French or, Italian than all of the other nationalities combined.

Don't be surprised if, in the future, a separatist movement arises in the former East Germany. Since reunification, virtually all of the top figures in the government, the military and, business are Wessies, those from the former West Germany. Ossies, from what was East Germany, have been very rarely seen at the top levels of society. Current chancellor Angela Merkel is the one major exception. It will be highly unlikely that such a separatist movement would succeed in dividing Germany, but it may be inevitable as memories of the hardships in the former eastern state fade.

Inflation is actually an ideal way to measure whether an economy has gone too far to the left. The trouble is that such measurement is difficult due to the fact that inflation can also be caused by other factors, such as relative shortages of staples such as food and fuel.

It is not good for a political party to be in power all of the time. A party tends to reevaluate itself when it is out of power. This fallow time is, in the long run, better for the party than if it had continuously been in power. Britain's Labour Party and Canada's Liberals will almost certainly emerge as better than before. Mexico's PRI, which led the country for 70 years, may be ready for another long term in power, after being out of power for a decade. I am sure that Ireland's Fianna Fail (Soldiers of Destiny) will someday emerge as much-improved. Japan's Liberal Democratic Party and India's Congress Party might also end up as improved if they were not in power almost all of the time. America's politics is one of the most well-mixed in the world, neither party has been overwhelmingly dominant.

Wild and destructive weather patterns have unfortunately been described as "the new normal". Let's not forget the political implications that this might have across the world. I remember watching the news as a child when there was a devastating 1970 cyclone in the Bay of Bengal. The result of this cyclone was the former East Pakistan declaring it's independence the following year, as the nation of Bangladesh. What will happen if there is a destructive storm in an area of a country occupied by a minority group, or which already has separatist leanings, and the afflicted area is displeased with the response of the central government?

It would be easier for residents of different countries to understand each other if there was better coordination regarding the names of government positions. Britain's elegantly-named "Chancellor of the Exchequer" is what most nations call a "finance minister". Likewise, America's "Secretary of State" is what is usually referred to as a "foreign minister".

If America normalized it's relations with Cuba, it could be a bonus to the health care system. Medical tourism to countries such as India is now commonplace. It is often less expensive to fly all the way to India for a medical procedure than to have it done at home. Cuba is much closer, and has long been known for the number of doctors that it trains. Back in the Cold War, Cuban doctors were to be found in Communist countries across the world. At the time of this writing, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has gone to Cuba for an operation.

Two presidents that handled America's economy well were Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon. Nixon was a Republican, but a moderate one in terms of economics. A look at their biographies reveals something that they had in common, that not many U.S. presidents do. They both knew what it was to be poor.

The fundamental thing that must be realized about economics is that there are two sides to the economy, the supply side and the demand side. Many leaders act as if there is a competition between these two sides, or that one must be emphasized at the expense of the other. The truth is that the two are mirror images of one another. One side cannot grow without the other and if one side retracts, so must the other.

There is the group of economically ascending nations known as the BRICS. These are Brazil, Russia, India, China and, South Africa. These are clearly widely diverse nations, scattered across the globe and with not much else in common, other than their upward economic trajectory. Which nation will be the next to be added to the group? The status of Turkey really seems to be rising lately. Even if it is not in the European Union, maybe the group can become the BRICTS.

2011 is shaping up to be one of those years that comes along once in a while in which the basic order of things changes. The old post-war and post-Cold War order of the world is fading and what will take it's place has not yet emerged. There have been recents news articles questioning what the G8 is really worth anymore. A top U.S. military official had similar doubts about NATO, which was intended for the Cold War. The European Union is in crisis with the several member countries that require economic bailouts from the rest. The western countries in general are still in the process of recovery from recession. The old order of Arab governments, with at least a defacto peace with Israel, is in the process of being replaced. Even OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries, could not come to agreement in their recent meeting and in any case, control less than half of the known oil in the world. Something else has to take the place of this old order.

Has anyone noticed the incredible similarity between the British election of 2010 and the Canadian election of 2011? In both elections, the usually-dominant centre (center)-left party, the Labour Party in Britain and the Liberals in Canada, was routed. This left both countries with the conservative side in power, but with a much-strengthened further-left party. This further-left party is the NDP (New Democratic Party) in Canada, and the Liberal Democrats in Britain. The only major differences are that the further-left party now exists as a coalition partner in Britain, while it is the main opposition in Canada, and that the conservative party was in power at the time of election in Canada, while it gained power in the British election.

An aircraft that does not deserve to be forgotten is Britain's DeHavilland Comet. It was actually the pioneer aircraft of the modern passenger jet era. It was the first successful aircraft to fly passengers at high altitude with jet engines and a pressurized cabin. The Comet is remembered for the crashes which afflicted it due to metal fatigue. But the idea of a pressurized cabin, which is neccesary in the thin air at high altitudes where jet engines operate most efficiently, was a new concept at the time. Later aircraft were designed around the lessons learned from the Comet. There is an informative article about it on http://www.wikipedia.org/ .

There are a number of large minority groups in the world, who do not have a country of their own. There are the Basques of Spain and France, the Roma of eastern Europe, the Kurds of the Middle East, the Tibetans and Uighurs of China, the Aboriginals of Australia and, the Ahmadis (Ahmadiyya) of Pakistan. There is also, of course, a significant Moslem majority in India. But the minority which may get the least attention is the Berbers of north Africa. The Berbers have their own language, which has sometimes been suppressed in favor (favour) of Arabic. The language is known as Tamazight. It will be interesting to see how the Berbers will be affected by the ongoing changes in that part of the world.

There is a simple way to classify living things on a very broad scale. It involves dimensions of symmetry or assymetry. We could say that plants have meaningful assymetry in only one of three dimensions, while animals have meaningful assymetry in two of three dimensions. Plants are meaningfully different only from top to bottom, while animals are meaningfully different from top to bottom and also from front to back.

In all fairness to the Chinese Navy, the coast of China is boxed in by other countries and islands off it's coast. Nearby countries often complain of feeling threatened by Chinese naval maneuvers near their coasts. But if we look at a map, there is really no way for ships to get from China to the open sea without going near some other country.

The question of whether a country will be a dictatorship or a democracy may well come down to simplicity. Which type of government would be the most simple? To begin with, dictatorship or monarchy is much simpler than democracy. Just do whatever the dictator says, or get thrown in prison. This gives the simplicity advantage to dictatorship. But as citizens get more sophisticated, and have better communication tools, it gets more and more complicated for a dictatorship to hold onto power. We reach a point where democracy gains the simplicity advantage, and thus prevails.

The computer keyboard is the latest manifestation of what I will call the Primary Control Mechanism. The original such mechanism was the reins used to control a horse. This developed into the steering wheel used to steer a car. Do you see how the computer keyboard is a continuation of this pattern? Using a computer very much resembles driving a car and looking through the windshield, or riding a horse while looking over it's head. Computers "hitch a ride" on the fact that people are used to driving cars. The Windows start button is like the key to start the car. The main window represents the windshield, while the smaller windows are like the car's mirrors. The icons on the desktop resemble the car's dashboard. The drop-down boxes are congruent to street signs. The highway becomes the information superhighway, there are unfortunate slowdowns in traffic on both highways.

Google, the owners of Blogspot, is now getting into the field of self-driving cars. What I would really like to see Google do, as I have stated previously, is to sell sections of the satellite imagery on http://www.maps.google.com/ as the standard fold-out road maps. It would be much easier to find a place, or find one's way around, if road maps showed what the area actually looked like as seen from above.

So much progress has been made in curing diseases such as polio and tuberculosis. But unhealthy lifestyles are making it so those diseases are simply replaced by the modern diseases of affluence: cancer, high blood pressure (hypertension) and type-2 diabetes.

I just cannot imagine how the death penalty deters crime. For the death penalty to deter crime, criminals would have to stop and think carefully about the possible consequences of their actions before they did something. My reasoning is that if a criminal was in the habit of thinking carefully about the possible consequences of his actions, then he probably would not be a criminal in the first place.

The earth must once have been much warmer than it is now. The ice caps are composed of frozen water, but that means that the water must have been able to flow there, at some point, prior to freezing. It is easy to see what cooled the earth. Plants being buried before they could fully decay removed carbon from the air, which drastically reduced the greenhouse effect. The remains of these plants formed coal and oil. By burning these fossil fuels, we are putting this carbon back into the air, and restoring the earth's former hot climate.

I have written this before, but I still do not understand it. After the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite, the U.S. Government put a lot of effort into promoting math and science education in order to avoid falling behind in this area. So what did Hollywood do? Star Trek was a very popular television show of the 1960s and 70s, there was not an episode that I had not seen. But instead of promoting science, it did just the opposite to an extent. The science officer of the starship Enterprise, Mr. Spock, was only half-human. He was portrayed as a hyper-logical scientific automaton, completely devoid of human emotions but able to effortlessly do complex calculations in his head. It made it appear that anyone who was interested in science and mathematics was not completely human.

The primary factor that holds us back economically is the fact that we can make what we need with fewer workers than we have. The result is unemployment, and the lack of spending by the unemployed takes away the reason to produce all that we possibly could. We have great difficulty breaking out of this trap, and the only real way to full productive employment is the continuous flow of new ideas.

A lot of what a nation does is rooted in it's history. China is the land of the Great Wall, and this is reflected today in one of the greatest building sprees in human history, particularly that of infrastructure projects like bridges and dams. The most important contribution of Germany to the world, and a candidate for the most important invention ever, is the printing press. This is what the country turned to in the dire economic situation of the 1930s, and the glorification of it's heritage, by printing tons of paper money which resulted in extreme inflation. In the U.S., the idea for the internet in the 1960s was simply a wire version of the interstate highway project the decade before.

We could say that the Industrial Revolution brought us into a new era in which industry replaced agriculture as the most prominent human endeavor. But a primary difference between the two involves the common measurement of time and we have never completely made the transition in this respect. Industry revolves around the clock and the week just as agriculture revolves around the calendar and the year. For industrial workers, it is being on time for one's work shift during the work week that matters. For agricultural workers, it does not matter what time of day or which day of the week one plows and plants, it is the month, or time of year, that matters. We are in the industrial and office era, proportionally few people work on farms in the west any more, yet we still use months. The months have names but the weeks don't. If we were completely industrialized, we would have named each of the 52 weeks of the year and would have discontinued the use of months as the relic of a bygone era. This did not happen because it took a long time for the shift to industrial labor (labour) to take place, and urban industrial workers continued use of the months which began for agricultural use.

A good time to think about economics is when you are putting on your shoes. In an economic transaction, there are always a buyer and a seller. The trouble is that the world has been inundated with legions of economists and politicians who believe, for some reason, that one is more important than the other. If you have seven left shoes and five right shoes, how many pairs do you have? The answer is always the lower number, in this case five. So much of politics and economics is like someone who insists that either the left or right shoe is more important than the other. The two are exactly equal in importance, and if there is an unequal number of the two then it is the lower number which will define how many economic transactions can take place. The folly of demand side economics is that if you give people more money to buy goods, without producing more goods, you will just get an inflationary spiral started. The folly of supply side economics is that if you lower taxes on companies so that they can use the money to produce more goods, without giving the workers more money to buy those goods, the goods will not all sell and companies will cut back on production, which will get a recessionary spiral started. But when we go too far to one side, the opposition tends to over-correct so that we then go too far to the opposite side, until the cycle repeats itself. Our goal should be to have the same number each of left and right shoes.

We have forgotten the value of self-education. A lot of the well-known figures in science and technology from the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and, early Twentieth Centuries had surprisingly little formal education. They basically taught themselves. Not to minimize the value of a degree from a good college or university, but when you are taught like everyone else you also learn to think like everyone else. While there are certainly advantages to having people with like ways of thinking, if you think like everyone else than you will not notice the things that everyone else has not noticed. My thought is that progress actually occurred faster in those days because books had become widely available, but formal education still was not universal. The key to "thinking outside the box" is to be educated in a way not quite like anyone else.

I have yet to write anything about the art of writing itself. It does not matter to me if some people do not like commas. I am a heavy comma-user in my writing. I favor (favour) short paragraphs, with long sentences subdivided by commas. This gives me three organizational tools; paragraphs, sentences and, sub-sentences. In longer and more complex articles, I may also use headings. This posting involves long paragraphs, but these paragraphs are artificial because I am describing each thought or observation here in only one paragraph to make the posting easier to follow. But generally, I think shorter paragraphs make writing easier to read with one to four sentences per paragraph. I have never taken a writing class, outside of the usual classes in school. The way to learn to write is simply to read. My basic assumption about my readers is that you do not have enough hours in a day to read a lot of flowery prose. So, I get to the point of the article as quickly as possible. My belief is that the best writing is that which provides the same information in the least number of words. However, really important points should be repeated more than once and a really important point, or a pivotal sentence in the article, should be in a paragraph by itself.

It would make it a lot easier to overthrow unwanted dictators if there was a place where they could go to live out their lives in a reasonably comfortable exile. That place used to be France, where many former leaders went into exile. When I was walking around Paris, I saw who I was fairly certain was Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the former president of Iran. I walked in his direction for a few minutes, hoping to maybe chat with him, but lost track of him. Bani-Sadr was the foreign minister of the Khomeini Government, which overthrew and replaced the Shah in 1979. He was removed from that position, but was later elected as president. He wanted to release the American hostages, but Khomeini held the real power. He ultimately fell too far out of favor (favour) with Khomeini and went off into exile in France. Maybe it wasn't him on the Paris street, the Shah's prime minister, Shahpour Bakhtiar, also went to exile in France but was assassinated there. Anyway, Saudi Arabia has also served as a comfortable exile, for such figures as Idi Amin and most recently Ben Ali of Tunisia.

If there are a few people who are unable to pay their bills, it is because they are unfortunate or irresponsible. If there are many people who cannot afford to pay their bills, it is because something is wrong with the system.

With regard to science, it is said that the Nineteenth Century was the century of chemistry, the Twentieth Century was the century of physics and, the Twenty-First Century will be the century of biology. If the century of chemistry gave us dynamite, and other chemical explosives, and the century of physics gave us the atomic bomb, what kind of fantastic bio-weapons can we expect from the century of biology?

Has anyone ever watched satellites go over? On any clear evening, there is a window of time in which satellites can be clearly seen. It has to be after nightfall, or it will not be dark enough to see the satellite. But it must be early enough in the night that it is dark where the observer is, but the sun is still shining on the satellite. It is unlikely to see a satellite in the middle of the night, because then it would be in the earth's shadow and would not be illuminated by the sun. I have watched quite a few satellites, they look like fairly faint stars moving against the background of the fixed-position stars. If a satellite is no longer visible, it must be because the sun is no longer shining on it. I live at 43 degrees north, nearly halfway to the north pole from the equator. Since satellites in an equatorial orbit would be around the latitude of the equator, I cannot see these. Every satellite that I have seen has been moving in a north-south course, these are the ones in a polar orbit so that they pass over my latitude.

I have seen something really amazing a couple of times. If there is a jet contrail along an east-west line in the western sky after sunset, it is possible to watch as the portion of the contrail that is still illuminated by the sun retreats westward as the earth rotates eastward, as the portion of the contrail which is not illuminated by the sun advances. But it moves slowly, it is necessary to look up at the contrail every couple of minutes, or so.

Let's give credit where credit is due. The electric light bulb is one of the most important inventions ever. Thomas Edison generally gets the credit for it, at least in North America. Did you know that the light bulb which Edison patented had already been patented a year before in Britain by Joseph Swan? I encourage you to read the article on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan and come to your own conclusions.

So much of the distress in western civilization over the past 150 years stems from the fact that when people have been religious for a long period of time, and then somewhat drift away from that religion, they tend to replace the religion with other beliefs such as nation, politics and, ideology. But nation, politics and ideology are man-made and should never be made into a religion.

We tend to incorporate the patterns in the world around us, but to manifest them in different forms. I have really picked up on the robber baron mentality of making as much money as possible, and using that money to make still more money, as much as possible. But I have this attitude toward knowledge, rather than money.

It is time that we had a name for what I will call the "Name Crunch". The world's population is dramatically increasing, we are reaching seven billion (thousand million or milliard) about now. Yet we still use about the same number of personal names that we did long ago. This means that there are many, many times the number of people with the same name as there once was. This applies to both first names and family names. It is well-known that all Sikhs have the surname "Singh", meaning "Lion", but Moslems in particular use only a relatively few names. The world's most common first name by far is "Muhammad". This would result in a serious name crunch even without the internet, but in our interconnected world it is about time that we had a name for the Name Crunch. We need more names if we are going to have more people.

Why do you suppose that an increase in earthquakes, as prophecied by Jesus, is an important part of the signs and events leading up to the end of the world as we know it? We know very well where earthquakes are likely to occur. We just do not know when they will occur, earthquakes take us by surprise. The pattern is exactly the same concerning the return of Jesus, we know the general time frame we just do not know exactly when. It will take us by surprise.

Maybe the solution to world hunger just requires some thinking outside the box. All of our food comes, either directly or indirectly, from plants. Oil also originated with plants that were buried. Oil, like food, contains energy. We do not think of petroleum as being a food material, but I have a feeling that there is a way to mass-produce a vast amount of food from oil. I suggested the idea in the book "The Patterns Of New Ideas", under the heading "Artificial Foods".

3

I have described a wise person as "someone who will thank you when you prove them wrong". But there must be many ways to define wisdom. Another way is as the ability to see both sides of an argument. It is much simpler and easier to just pick one side or the other, and especially easy to just go along with what everybody else thinks. It is difficult to evenly view both sides, and to come to a position somewhere in the middle, especially when the issue is a very emotional one.

There is always discussion, in the U.S. and elsewhere, that we need to make the school year longer and cut down on summer vacation time. But there is another side to this view. Free time can be valuable in learning too. I remember in my childhood, there was a pond in a nearby field that would freeze over in winter, and sometimes evaporate away altogether in summer. When a Chevrolet car dealership was constructed near the pond, it changed the shape of the pond and the nearby environment but did not eliminate it. I described this pond in my autobiography. I did not stop to think about it at the time, but I was developing a strong sense of how water, earth and, ice all work together and this sense would result in many of these postings.

People are not born to live by high principles. We set down all manner of such principles, but that does not mean that everyone will internalize them and live by them. The difficulty of living by high principles can be described in geometric terms. Human nature is a circle, and high principles are a square. When the square is within the circle, the area of the circle outside the square represents crime, or the breaking of the law. There is also a circle within the square, and the area of the square outside this inner circle represents the arbitrary making up of artificial and unofficial rules, and trying to impose those arbitrary "rules" on people around them, because they are unable to handle the freedom that results from the high principles. It requires special people to live by high principles, but special people who do not see themselves as special because the essence of all sets of high principles comes down to the idea that nobody is automatically special.

One of the finest examples of wisdom that I have ever happened across concerns a manager who had a remarkable record of taking the helm at ailing companies and turning them around to profitability. Often, the manager would be required to cut the staff in a company. This was very difficult to do because the manager was going into a company where he did not know anyone, and was not completely familiar with the operation. But he hit upon a fool-proof tactic. He would talk to all of the workers, one-by-one, and listed to what they had to say about the company and the operation. While talking with the manager, the workers could make constructive complaints if they wanted to. However when a new boss comes on the scene, workers will often talk one another down in order to gain favor (favour) and possibly move ahead at the expense of others. The manager would listen to the workers, and those who talked down another worker, unless there was very good reason for it which there usually wasn't, would be the ones to get let go. This simple tactic never failed to improve the company.

Has anyone else ever thought about a bizarre contradiction in our use of the alphabet? Children learn the alphabet as ABCDE..., but when they use a computer, they see the alphabet as QWERTY... . How much sense does this make? Wouldn't it be much better if there was only one version of the alphabet, instead of two? We can either change the alphabet order to QWERTY..., or we can change the order of the keys on a keyboard to ABCDE... . My choice is to change the order of the keys on the keyboard. The QWERTY order does make it easier to type because the most-used letters in the alphabet are the easiest to get to. But when that system was developed, a few people did a lot of typing and most people did not type at all. Nowadays, almost everyone does a little bit of typing. If we changed the order of the keys on the keyboard, not only would typing almost certainly be easier for the vast majority of people who do not spend all day typing, because the keys would be easier to find, but it would eliminate this situation of having two orders of the alphabet.

Since salt is known to be an important factor in ailments such as high blood pressure (hypertension), we may wonder why so many foods are marketed which contain salt. The reason is that salt is also an effective preservative. A processed food which contains salt will have a longer shelf life than one that doesn't.

We know that the universe is expanding, at least from our point of view. It is generally portrayed that, in the distant future, the universe will be a very cold and dark place because of this expansion. However, I find that this cannot actually be true. It is the groups of galaxies that are moving further away from each other as the universe appears to expand. These galactic groups themselves are holding together by gravity. Almost all of what you can see in space with your eyes alone is in our galaxy. It is also possible to see the Andromeda Galaxy and the two Magellanic Clouds (in the southern hemisphere). But these are a part of our so-called "Local Group". This means that, if the universe was suddenly a hundred times it's present size, only astronomers would notice.

Lamb, as meat, has never seemed to catch on in North America. Lamb is sold in stores, but it is usually people from other countries who buy it.

As for Pope Benedict's recent trip to his native Germany, we should not expect the country to be exceptionally religious. I see modern Germany as actually the creation of secularism. There was once many small German-speaking dutchies and principalities across central Europe. When the Reformation began, these states were split between Protestant and Catholic and any unity was unimaginable, even after they were all invaded by Napoleon. But as secularism spread across Europe in the Nineteenth Century, religion became less important and only then was a united Germany possible. Traces of the Reformation still remain. Look at the difference between the warm reception that the pope received in Freiburg, compared with the much cooler reception that he got in Erfurt, which was once Martin Luther's home base.

Why is it such a mystery that the four rivers described in the story of creation in the Book of Genesis do not match the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers which are found there today? The area was the route of mountain glaciers which came down from the nearby Zagros Mountains. In every ice age, moving glaciers obliterate the drainage pattern of the landscape and it forms over again with the water from the melting glaciers at the end of the ice age. The new drainage pattern is usually similar to, but not identical to, the former drainage pattern. The main reason for the difference is that the glaciers themselves alter the contours of the terrain over which the waters will flow. An ideal example is found at Niagara Falls, as described in my Niagara natural history blog. The so-called St. David's River, from before the last ice age, did not follow exactly the same course as the present Niagara River.

There are a number of slanted words which we use to describe world events. One such word is "insurgent". We tend to use this word to describe those who are not on our side. The Contras of Nicaragua in the 1980s could have been described as insurgents, yet I cannot recall ever seeing this word assigned to them. The reason was undoubtedly that they were fighting against a Communist government, and were on our side. So, they were "freedom fighters" rather than insurgents. Another such slanted term is "regime". A regime is simply a government, but have you ever heard of a friendly government being tagged as a "regime"?

Most people would agree that freedom is better than non-freedom. Most people would also agree that to be disciplined is better than to be indulgent and indisciplined. But what people may not agree on is where we cross the line from productive freedom into indulgence and indiscipline.

In an ideological contest between left and right, the long-term winner tends to be the one that is closest to the center between the two.

One thing that more people should be aware of is the problem of space junk. There is all manner of metal from defunct satellites and rockets traveling at high speed in low earth orbit. Hopefully, most of it will eventually lose altitude and burn up by friction with the atmosphere. The trouble with trying to clean up space junk is that it risks making it worse. It is much better to have one large piece of space junk, which can be tracked and avoided, than to have it break into numerous smaller pieces moving in orbit like bullets. As far as I know, there has been only one accidental satellite collision in space since the Space Age began. But this belt of space junk in orbit can be fatal to any future spacecraft, as well as it's crew. Concern about space junk is not new, but there seems to be only a relatively few people who pay much attention to it.

Let's not forget pinball, the mechanical predecessor of video games. A pinball machine would be basically a flat surface, standing on legs like a small table, with a clear plastic or glass surface above and parallel to the flat surface. Enclosed between the two would be a course in which a round ball, usually a metal ball bearing, would move. The one playing the game launched the ball with a spring mechanism, attached to a handle, to the far side of the slanted flat surface. As the ball rolled back toward the player by gravity, he had a number of levers to operate to deflect the ball in order to keep it in play as long as possible, or to get the ball to some target. It was fun, I once spent a summer working in a store with several pinball games at the front of the store. I had an hour for lunch, and figured that I would spend a few minutes playing pinball first. The next thing I knew, my lunch hour was almost over.

One thing that socialism accomplishes is the control of population growth. Most of the countries where population is stagnant or declining are those which have a relatively comfortable safety net.

We moved from the Age of Agriculture to the Industrial Age when mechanized farming became so efficient that it only required a few percent of the workforce to feed everybody and the employment of most workers involed goods which had been produced in factories. But things change, or maybe tides eventually turn back in the opposite direction. Now, it is only a few percent of workers in western countries who work in factories. Meanwhile, food is getting more and more expensive. Much of the increase in food prices is due to the rising cost of fuel, which was not much of a factor when the move away from the Age of Agriculture took place. Maybe we are entering an era in which farming small plots of land, to produce food for local consumption, will be profitable instead of being just a hobby.

The idea of democracy originated in ancient Greece (Democritas is also the one who introduced the idea of atoms). But it is no accident that modern democracy, as we know it, first took hold on a large scale in Christian countries. The reason is simple and obvious. Many kings, leaders and, governments are to be found in the Bible. But only a few are really good. The vast majority range from corrupt to incompetent to just plain diabolical. The government is thus portrayed not as a source of widsom to be blindly obeyed, but as something to keep a close watch on. The only practical way to do that is to give all of the people a voice in how the country is being run.

Why does anyone want their country to be a superpower nowadays? Living in a superpower just means that you will find yourselves at war more often. Superpowers tend to get more blame for what goes wrong than they do credit for what goes right. The quality of life for the average person in a country has essentially nothing to do with how much of a military or economic superpower that country is. If you are a fan of space exploration, for example, but you live in a country that does not have a space program, you can follow the space programs of the countries that do just about as easily as anyone living in those countries.

There are only two fundamental ecosystems on earth, the land and the sea. Even though birds fly in the air, the air is not actually a separate ecosystem. We can tell this by looking at the design of birds. There are two basic designs for aircraft, with the cockpit either below the wings or above the wings. The view of the ground is better if the cockpit is below the wings, but the view of the sorrounding sky is better if the cockpit is above the wings. All birds have their bodies, and eyes below their wings. This means that they are designed to have the best view of the ground or water below, rather than of the sorrounding air. Also, the two eyes of a bird are positioned laterally, the same as land and sea creatures. This reflects a design for a view of the horizon below, because a vertical pair of eyes would give the best view of the sky above.

If you will be visiting a country where the driving is done on the opposite side of the road, and you want to get an idea what it will be like, park with a main road behind the car and watch the road in the rear-view mirror.

It is widely regarded that one of the factors which made America's Apollo Space program a success was the experience gained with military rockets during the 1950s. Much of the early development of rocketry was done in the U.S., including that done by Robert Goddard. The concepts behind German rockets of the Second World War were then taken further. But it was the Soviet Union that first put an object, Sputnik, and then a man in space. My belief is that is was experience with the truck-mounted batteries of the Katyusha Rockets in the war, and afterward, that made this possible. At the beginning of the war, Soviet military equipment was clearly inferior and the Katyusha is credited, along with other developments like the Kalashnikov Rifle and the T-72 Tank, with reversing this. But I have never seen the Katyusha given credit for it's contribution to space exploration.

I consider spaghetti as evidence in the dispute as to whether Marco Polo, or maybe other early travelers, actually reached the orient. Spaghetti is one of the many forms of pasta made from wheat. But it's form is unlike any other European food. The resemblence of spaghetti to the noodles which have been a staple in east Asia for centuries, in form if not in composition, is probably no coincidence.

The way I see it, the Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s has a deeper meaning for that region. The war was not only a conflict between Arabs and Persians, or between Sunnis and Shiites. It was also a battle between secular nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Saddam Hussein's Iraq, representing secular nationalism, hoped that the Arab minority in Iran's border province of Khuzestan would rise up and join them. Meanwhile, Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, representing religious fundamentalism, hoped that their many fellow Shiites in neighboring Iraq would rise up and join with their co-religionists. Neither happened, and the war eventually concluded in a stalemate. Since then, the secular nationalism and religious fundamentalism in the region have continued to exist side-by-side with neither really predominating over the other. My opinion is that, if the war would have ended differently, the following balance of secular nationalism and religious fundamentalism would have followed the pattern established by the war.

In a mature democracy, the two main parties are fairly close together. This makes for less of a jarring transition from one administration to the next. The trouble is that if the candidates are fairly close together on the issues, it often results in a nastier campaign because there is not much to do except to attack each other's character.

A wise leader finds a way to spend money so that it covers all of the requirements, and then it all comes back in the form of taxes and other revenue.

Have you ever wondered which career is the best to prepare a future national leader for office? Besides the usual lawyers and career politicians, many people may think that being the CEO of a large company is the best. But the two are completely different in nature. As I pointed out in "Economic Balance" on my economics blog, a company is a simple realm of absolutes while a national economy is a complex realm of balance. Spending money is not as absolute in a national economy as it is in a company because, while the money is gone, it will stimulate the economy by promoting production and jobs and much of it will thus return in the form of taxes. Likewise, cutting spending is not as absolute in a national economy as it is in a company because it will also cut production and jobs, resulting in a decrease in the amount of tax revenue. What about an airline pilot? It is necessary not only to keep the passengers comfortable, but to manage a very complex set of controls in order to keep the right and left sides of the plane carefully in balance. Rajiv Gandhi is the only national leader that I can think of whose prior career was that of a pilot, but maybe it is something to think more about.

When a new technology is introduced, users must understand how it operates in order to use it. As the technology matures, users need to understand less and less of how it operates in order to use it. The technology has really arrived when a user needs to know only a minimum of how it actually works in order to use it.

The trouble with the global economic order is that it was built during a time of low fuel prices. A single factory might ship goods across the world, regardless of where it is located. Now that the days of low fuel prices are gone, the logical thing to do is to decentralize by locating factories closer to the consumers. This makes sense not only to ensure that the consumers have the jobs required to earn the money to pay for the goods, but to minimize fuel costs as the money saved by production far away is increasingly offset by the cost of fuel to ship the goods.

People who really accomplish a lot tend to have a very fine sense of time management.

While we are worrying about all of these economic issues, tigers in the wild are almost extinct.

I have often written that when a nation of people is religious for a long period of time, but then becomes more secular, they tend to adhere to the same pattern but to substitute something else. The religion substitute often ends up being ideology, politics or, nationalism. There is no better illustration of this than the relentless examination of the private lives of politicians and candidates. Of course, we need to be led by people who are honest. But how much sense does it make that we can be operated on by a doctor or dentist, put our lives under the control of nurses, let a mechanic work on our cars, shop in a store which is handled by a manager, work for a company run by a CEO, ride on a plane or bus or train operated by a driver or pilot, or give your personal financial to someone, all without knowing a thing about their private moral standards. But let someone run for office, often even a local office, and the standards change completely. The ironic thing is that, in days past when society was more religious, a powerful man could misbehave a little bit without serious public repercussions. It cannot be said that politicians are in a position to do greater harm if they turn out to be dishonest. Their every move is usually scrutinized by the opposition, and those in many other professions are in the position to do far greater harm. This seemingly senseless extreme scrutiny of politicians is actually an example of how we have, at least unconsciously, replaced the former religion with politics and ideology so that politicians effectively become the new "religious leaders".

Trees can be classified according to trigonometry. Not including the trunk, the trigonometry of the main light-gathering structure of a tree is a function of the sine of the primary latitude of the geographical area where the tree is found. The sine is the trigonometric function that starts at zero for 0 degrees, and goes to 1 for a right angle of 90 degrees. Palm trees, for example, are found in low latitudes and their light-gathering structure is nearly entirely horizontal because the sun shines down on them from almost directly overhead. If you look at common mid-latitude deciduous trees, such as maple, oak, elm, sycamore, willow, etc. the horizontal and vertical elements of it's leafy light-gathering structures average to roughly equal. But when we come to the evergreens, which are found at high latitudes, we see that the light-gathering structure of the tree is much more vertical than horizontal. In fact, we could most likely conclude that the co-secant (the angle corresponding to a particular sine), plus the average angle of the sun in the sky at the "primary latitude" of the tree, will equal a right angle of 90 degrees.

Malls are a creation of our modern automobile culture. But at the same time, it is a reaction against cars by being the place where we leave our vehicles behind and walk. As much as anything today, malls are actually a return to ancient times. If we went through a mall and removed everything electric and everything made of synthetic materials, such as plastic, and glass (there was glass in ancient times, but not for windows). If we could replace concrete with cut stone and replace more recently-developed alloys, such as steels, with older alloys such as bronze or with unalloyed iron, a walk through the mall would be very much like a trip back into ancient history.

Without sending any spacecraft to look at Mercury, it should be obvious that the planet is composed mainly of iron. Iron is abundant in the inner Solar System and is heavier than rock. Mercury is not much more than a third of the distance that the earth is from the sun, with it's tremendous gravity. To pull in enough matter to coalesce into a planet, the gravity of Mercury must compete, at least over a limited area, with the sun's gravity. Iron is the only material that is abundant and heavy enough to form most of the mass of a planet that close to the sun. It should also be obvious that the craters on Mercury would be deep, from powerful meteor impacts. Passing chunks of rock or metal around Mercury would be accelerated to high velocities by the sun's gravity, the result being a much more forceful average impact than those striking the earth or moon.

I recently read an article about the negative image of big business that made quite a bit of sense. In the past, large companies were often generous in a way that seems to be missing today. Back then, authority within the corporation was much more centralized. Today corporations tend to be owned by shareholders, with the company being run by a hired manager who does not actually have any ownership in the company. But this means that there is no one person with the authority to be generous in giving away the company's assets.

One of the drawbacks of democracy is that we end up with too many people telling us what we want to hear, and not enough people telling us the things that we don't want to hear.

We cannot see stars during the day because the dust in the atmosphere disperses the light of the sun so that the sky appears blue, and the light from the stars gets drowned out. But if we could, we would see the same view of the stars that we saw at night, exactly six months and twelve hours later during the day.

One thing that the world is really divided on is the practice that we in the west refer to as bribery. But notice that bribery is not forbidden in the Bible. That is because, in much of the world, it is simply the way things have always been done. It is to be expected and is not considered to be dishonest at all. Suppose that a driver is caught speeding, what is really the difference between paying the police officer a bribe, or paying a fine in court?

The trouble with making progress is that it inevitably upsets the existing order of things. New ideas are invaders that rearrange the status quo, and there will be those who prefer the status quo the way it is.

The truth is that a country is often better off in the long run after being occupied by a foreign power for a period of time. The Hyksos introduced the horse to Egypt. The Jews learned a lot about the world, and became a more sophisticated people, due to the exile in Babylon. Seven hundred years of Arab control certainly added to the culture of Spain.

As I suggested in the book "The Patterns Of New Ideas", wherever people settle there will be telephone poles. What if we could tack a number to every telephone pole in the world? All that a person would have to do is enter in the number on the nearest pole to pinpoint their exact location. This would be lower tech, but much less expensive and at least as useful, as GPS.

Why does the U.S. really need postal addresses at all? The country is divided into five-digit zip codes. There is also a four-digit suffix for each building in the zip code, mine is 14304-2113. So, why do we need the actual address at all if every building in the country can be identified by this nine-digit number? The country is also divided into three-digit telephone area codes but, unlike zip codes in which the first digit gets higher as we go west, area codes are entirely random. Couldn't we have combined the two systems so that the first three digits of a zip code would also be the area code of any given location? That way, someone with an address would also have the area code of the location. Furthermore, telephone country codes for calling abroad also seem to be entirely random. Couldn't they be assigned by time zone, so that anyone would know what time it was in the place that they were calling by the code?

One of the most puzzling things about the world is the so-called "Resource Curse", also known as "The Paradox Of Plenty". You can read about it on http://www.wikipedia.org/ , if you like. The strange fact is that, across the world, people who live in countries that are rich in natural resources tend to be less well off than people in countries with few such resources. But riches under the ground lead to people trying to set up the system to get those riches for themselves. A country with abundant commodities to sell may get by on that, and neglect development and education. The government of a resource-poor country is more dependent on the support of it's citizens, and so is more likely to function as a democracy, while a autocrat or dictator with control of mineral wealth can use it to keep himself in power.

Modern Germany can be considered as a creation of secularism in that the many small German-speaking states across central Europe did not unite into one country as long as religion was very important and they were divided between Catholic and Protestant, after the Reformation. Neighboring Belgium happens to be just the opposite, with religion keeping the country together and secularism pulling it apart. It used to be united with the Netherlands, to it's north. The country split over religion as the northern part of the country went Protestant, and what is now Belgium separated in order to remain Catholic. At that time, religion proved to be more important than language as Belgium is bilingual, with about 60% of the country speaking Dutch and the rest, French. Dutch-speaking northern Belgium is known as Flanders, and the French-speaking south is called Wallonia. But with the secularism of today that is changing and Belgium has long consisted of two quite separate societies, although it has not yet split.

Have you ever noticed the amazing correlation between the Sixteenth-Century Reformation, that took place in Europe, and language? Every country in Europe that speaks a northern European, or Germanic, language went Protestant, or at least majority Protestant. No country that does not speak a northern European language went Protestant. Southern Germany remained mostly Catholic, but the majority of the country went Protestant. Switzerland, home of reformer Huldreich Zwingli, was divided between the two, but it is also divided by language with it's own dialect of German, known as Swiss German, being spoken along with French and Italian. France started with a strong Protestant element, the famed reformer John Calvin was French, but French is a Romance language and the French Protestants, known as Huguenots, were eventually supressed or driven into exile. English is a northern European language, but it also has a strong French influence due to the Norman Invasion. There are many English words that can be seen as of French origin. England went Protestant, but retained a significant Catholic minority (Liverpool is traditionally considered as the country's Catholic center). Indeed, Catholicism almost recaptured England with the reign of "Bloody Mary" and the Anglican Church was founded as a form of compromise between the two. The Scandinavian countries which speak northern European languages, except for Finland with a language unrelated to any of the others, went solidly Protestant.

There seems to be no end to the race to have the tallest building in the world. The latest news is that Azerbaijan intends to build a record-breaking structure with oil wealth in Baku. While these are certainly impressive feats of engineering, the fact remains that a building has a peak of spatial efficiency which diminishes beyond a certain height. The reason for this is the elevator shafts that extend from the ground floor to the top of the building. In order to have the same level of elevator service, a building that is twice as high must have twice as many elevators. These elevator shafts take up floor space so that with other factors being equal, an eighty-story building will have less available floor space than two forty-story buildings.

It would be a real breakthrough in technology if a way could be found to make electronic devices and solar cells without requiring rare earth elements.

Have you ever looked at a map of the world an imagined what it would be like if the Strait of Gibraltar had been tectonically sealed so that the Mediterranean Basin was separated from the Atlantic Ocean? The Mediterranean Sea would be a fraction of it's present size and would be a larger version of the Dead Sea, highly saline and losing by evaporation the water in took in from various rivers. There would be a lot more land in the area than there is now, but it would be mostly desert. The land south of the Alps would stretch down to the Sahara to be the largest expanse of desert in the world. We can only imagine how different human history would have been. Early civilizations would be concentrated in south and east Asia, rather than the Middle East. There would be a great increase in dust that would be swept out over the Atlantic Ocean by the east wind. This dust would act as condensation nuclei so that North America and the Caribbean area would be hit with tremendous hurricanes.

Leaders can be classified along a spectrum according to how they relate to the status quo. Does a leader seek the complete preservation of the status quo, with no changes or improvements? Or does the leader seek the complete overthrow of the status quo? Or is the leader somewhere in between, seeking reform and improvement but not an overthrow?

Humans use both words and numbers to communicate and to describe things. Reality operates by numbers, but we are more comfortable with words. The fundamental function of computers is to act as an interface between words and numbers for us. A much-overlooked aspect of being good with computers is to be good with words.

4

In the course of modernization, there is an advantage that both India and China have. A country must make the transition to fast food. People in a country on the go will not always have time to prepare and eat a traditional meal. The west has made this transition decades ago, but it has had a definite downside in poor nutrition and weight gain. However, Chinese and Indian food has a lot that was originally intended to be "fast food". In Indian villages of centuries ago, flat stones would be heated in a fire and then flat breads prepared on the stones before they cooled.

I have an idea for a civil engineering project. The dry states of America's southwest would very much like to get some of the water in the Great Lakes, but the states around the lakes are not in agreement. Northern Ontario is divided into two watersheds, some of the land drains into the Great Lakes, but much more drains into Hudson Bay. Why not construct a series of canals to intercept rivers and streams that would drain water into Hudson Bay, and channel the water so that it drains into the Great Lakes. Pipe the excess water to the southwest, and those states pay their water bill to Canada. The canals would not have to be neat or navigable.

Every generation for about a century and a half has seen a major step in communications technology. We have gone from the telegraph to the telephone to radio to television to use of satellites to the internet to cell (mobile) phones. The next step should be the widespread use of computer and phone technology to automatically translate one language into another, as described in computer postings on the progress blog.

What if North Korea had a version of Aung San Suu Kyi?

With all of the enthusiasm for democracy, never forget that it is one step away from chaos and that it requires mature people to really handle it.

Here is an idea that I first suggested in the book "The Patterns Of New Ideas". One place that a mirror would be very useful is at the front of the hood of a car, where the hood ornament is found. The mirror could be flipped up by a switch inside the car. This would enable drivers that are stopped at an intersection to see if there is oncoming traffic if their vision was blocked. This would be particularly useful in snowy climates to see around a snowbank, and also very useful to see around buildings at street corners. The mirror would be facing to the driver's left on cars in countries that drive on the right, and vice-versa. Such a mirror would prevent a lot of crashes.

There are two levels of competition. In what we could call "level one competition", the competitors do their best to outdo one another but do not actually do anything to hinder each other's efforts. In level two competition, hindering the efforts of competitors is an essential part of the game. Most sports feature level two, or what we could call "two-dimensional competition". But most competition in life is level one, the great exception being warfare. Politics is, ideally, a level one competition, but often degenerates into level two.

The worst time for a martial society is when there is peace.

In ancient history, we have one empire after another dominating the scene. But I find that such emires sometimes should be considered as pairs. The first pair is Assyria and Babylon. Actually, Babylon was a part of the Assyrian Empire until it was revitalized by the influx of people known as Chaldeans. Led by Nabopolassar, they threw off Assyrian control and then proceeded to conquer Assyria itself. The Baylonians then conquered much the same area that the Assyrians earlier had. The second pair is Greece and Rome. The first great empire based in Europe was Greek. Rome later conquered Greece, and then some of the same territory that had been part of the Greek Empire. But the religion of Rome was very much an adaption of that of Greece, and the intellectual life of Rome also revolved around that of Greece. Should these two pairs really be considered as completely separate empires, or as realignments within a single empire?

Hockey and soccer (called football outside North America) are essentially the same thing.

Two religious groups that I have never seen compared with one another before is Ahmadis (Ahmadiyya) and Mormons. Ahamdis, centered in Pakistan and India, relate to mainstream Islam in just about exactly the same way that Mormons, based in Utah, relate to mainstream Christianity. Both have prophets that appeared during the Nineteenth Century to restore the true religion. For Ahmadis, this was Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and for Mormons it was Joseph Smith. The main difference is that Ahmadis do not seem to have an additional holy book, while Mormons have the Book of Mormon.

The world is really stuck in the economic doldrums. But the answer, as it appears to me, is surprisingly simple. One of the perils of mass manufacturing, when it came along around a century ago, was that of workers not being paid enough to be able to afford to buy the cornucopia of goods being produced. This would bring the entire system to a halt, and is what happened in the Crash of 1929. Goods were just piling up in warehouses because people did not have enough money to buy them. Factories began cutting back on production, meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiralled into a devastating crash. Here we are again, except that this time it is on a more global scale. Manufacturing has moved to Asian countries because wages are low, resulting in lower prices for the goods in western markets. But with the jobs gone from the west, as a result, there is not as much demand for the goods as there would be otherwise. What if the workers in Asian countries were paid enough money to be able to buy the goods there? This would make the goods less competitive in the west because it would mean higher prices. But the demand would be made up locally by the workers earning higher wages. With less reason to buy the goods in the west, due to the higher prices, it would make economic sense to manufacture in western countries again. People in Asia would be enriched by having more money to spend on goods being manufactured locally, people in the west would have large-scale manufacturing jobs back, and we could all live happily ever after. We just have to break out of this "low wages in the east, no jobs in the west" pattern that we seem to be stuck in now.

We know about all of the explorers from Europe who found, and established connections with, the new world of North and South America several centuries ago. But what about the other direction? I have difficulty believing that no parallel to Christopher Columbus ever happened on the west coast of the new world. It is true that it is much further to sail from Asia to North or South America as it is from Europe. But it is also true that there is a vast number of islands in the Pacific that people had been sailing between for centuries. The Polynesians in their swift canoes are just one example. There are ocean currents across the Pacific in both directions, making two-way travel easier once a settlement is established. The ancestors of the native Indians in the new world came from Asia over the land bridge that formed when the sea level dropped during the ice ages. Are we sure that there are no traces of Asian settlements to be found somewhere along the west coast of North and South America? What about the Chinese admiral Zheng He, who sailed a fleet of ships to distant Africa, couldn't someone like this have reached the western hemisphere?

Once again, effective socialism does not come about from loading people with taxes but by use of a country's resources and other assets to generate revenue for the various government programs.

North Korea considers Japan, the country's former colonial overlord, as one of it's arch enemies. The strange thing is that this pseudo-worship of the country's leaders in the Kim Dynasty; Kim-Il-Sung, Kim-Jong-Il and now, Kim-Jong-Un is a mirror image of the traditional Japanese reverence of the emperor. North Korea being closed to the outside world is also a reflection of Japan prior to being forced open by Commodore Matthew Perry in the mid-Nineteenth Century. In those days, foreign sailors shipwrecked in Japan were treated harshly and Japanese who left could never return.

The difference between the world of the sciences and the world of people is that in science, the ultimate goal is to break everything down into the simple and fundamental rules by which the universe operates. There is a rule in physics known as "Occam's Razor" which states that the simplest explanation for something usually turns out to be the best explanation. But that is certainly not true in the world of people. People are complicated, the world that they create is complicated, and it is folly to try to oversimplify it.

Do you really want to be able to grasp how reality operates, in terms of science? It helps to have ability at mathematics, since that is the patterns underlying all of reality. But what you really need is a good grasp of geometry. We live in a spatial universe and geometry describes the way that it works, and this includes trigonometry also. No subject is more important in science. I find it significant that Albert Einstein's prized possession, as a youth, was a book of geometry that he had been given.

Now that we have the ability to explore space, what we lack is a real reason to explore space. After we have put people in orbit countless times, had them walk around on the moon, and all that, what do we do now? It is very important to explore and learn about space, but what is really the point of sending people up there? Robot spacecraft can explore just as well as humans, and without the cost and danger. As for resources, if we found that there was a mountain of gold on the moon, it still wouldn't be worth it to go up and mine it. What would we really gain from putting a colony of people on the moon or on Mars? The trouble is that people are better off on earth than they are on the moon. We approach space exploration in the same spirit as earthly exploration of centuries past, but distant lands on earth had air, water, crops and, people to spread the Gospel to, while the moon or Mars have none of the above. Maybe robots and space were made for each other.

The general story of ancient Israel is that there were twelve tribes. After King Solomon's death, his less-than-competent son, Rehoboam, took over and failed to prevent the split into two separate nations; Israel with ten tribes, and Judah with two. A couple of hundred years later, Assyria took the population of Israel away and settled the people in distant regions of Mesopotamia. This was a common Assyrian tactic to break the resistance of conquered people. These captives have been lost to history, and are known as the ten lost tribes. People from other areas were brought into Israel and settled in their place by the Assyrians. These new people intermixed with whoever remained, and by the time of Jesus their descendants were known as Samaritans, named after the region of Samaria. The two tribes that did not get taken away by the Assyrians, Judah and Benjamin, comprise all of the Jews from that point on. They were later taken captive in a similar way by Babylon but returned to the land. However, I find that the New Testament contradicts this. Some people of the ten lost tribes must have remained, without getting mixed into the Samaritans, because there is a woman named Anna in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 3, identified as being from the tribe of Asher, which was one of the ten lost tribes.

It was the French Revolution of 1789 that opened the modern political era. I watched the spread of democracy in eastern Europe in the autumn of 1989, as one Communist government after another was overthrown, and ever since then I have wondered how much of a coincidence it is that it took place just after the bicentennial of the French Revolution.

Democracy and capitalism are usually practiced together. But the two are not completely in harmony, and there is a dynamic tension between them. The frontier where democracy meets capitalism is labor (labour) unions. When unions are strong, and membership is high, democracy is prevailing over capitalism. When unions are weak, and membership is low, the opposite is true.

The competing philosophies of the world's two largest passenger aircraft manufacturers, America's Boeing and Europe's Airbus, can be seen to be rooted in the home territory of each. Airbus believes in the model of larger planes. But Europe is a more compact and densely populated continent with effective train service between large cities and smaller ones. A lot of people will fly from one large city to another, and can then take ground transport to their final destination. American cities are more spread out, and Boeing's concept of more but smaller aircraft is to fly from major cities to airports at smaller cities. There would not be enough passengers on these side routes to make flying a large aircraft profitable, and this is where smaller planes would be useful.

Do you want to be the first person in human history to accomplish a monumental feat? As far as I know, no one of any era has ever visitied every country in the world. As each year goes by, it becomes more and more possible. I wonder if anyone will ever achieve it.

There is a time when democracy can be taken too far, and that is during wartime. The ultimate example is Walter Cronkite declaring in 1968, after the Tet Offensive, that the Vietnam War "may now be unwinnable". It was not true, the Tet Offensive was a shock but the Communists suffered heavy losses. The fact that such a statement was allowed certainly showed that America is a democracy, but think about how much it must have encouraged the enemy.

Once again if you really want to understand how western society works, you have to understand that when a country is religious for a long period of time and then drifts away from the religion, the patterns of the religion will remain but something else will take it's place. Ideology, politics, nationalism, faith in science and technology, and sometimes unabashed hedonism, will become the new "religion". Over the past 150 years or so, you can see this pattern over and over again. How many people do you know who treat their country, culture or, ideology as if it were kind of a religion? How many times have you heard someone talking or writing about the world wars or the Cold War as if it were a cosmic struggle between good and evil that sounds or reads like something out of the Bible? We were designed to have a relationship with God, and when we do not have that we replace it with something else.

There is much complaining among workers about "living paycheck to paycheck", just barely managing to pay the bills and never being able to save any money. But there is a mechanism at work here. If people were able to save money, it would be taking that money out of circulation. Since the currency that a nation issues is a mirror image in value of the goods and services that are being produced, this means that there will then not be enough money to buy all of the goods and services that are being produced. This then means that some workers would be let go, because it does not make sense to produce goods that are not going to sell, meaning that there would then be even less buying power. Since money spent and money earned forms a cycle, this would cut back on earnings and force people, as a whole, to spend their savings. The system has a built-in bias against savings and the mechanism is to keep workers "living paycheck to paycheck".

An interesting controversy is whether it is better for cars to drive on the right side of the road, or on the left side. Most countries drive on the right side, there is a good article about it on http://www.wikipedia.org/ titled "Driving Side". I happen to be a dual citizen of the U.S. and Britain and my view is that it comes down to the gadgets being used by drivers. Proponents of left-side driving say that it is safer because of the side of the brain that is most-used in driving a car. But figuring that most people are right-handed, and that the driver will likely be operating devices such as radios and CD players while driving, makes the case for driving on the right. On the other hand, if holding a phone and talking while driving were legal everywhere, it would make sense to drive on the left so that the driver could hold the steering wheel with his right hand and the phone with his left hand. If texting while driving, which is particularly dangerous, were legal it would bring us back to driving on the right so that the driver could text with the right while holding the steering wheel with the left. But since texting and talking on a phone are illegal, or at least not a good idea, while driving that seems to favor (favour) driving on the right.

Maybe the best leader of a revolution is one that is an inspiration, but not an actual hands-on leader. When a revolution for freedom succeeds in overthrowing some tyrant, there is a tendency toward the leader of the revolution simply becoming the next tyrant and often being more repressive than the first tyrant. This has happened over and over again. But if there is no leader at all, and the tyrant is overthrown, the result is often chaos. This can clearly be seen in the Arab Spring revolutions. There is a thin line between democracy and chaos, and chaos is from where dictators often arise.

One thing that there is no real established precedent for is separation referendums, the separation of part of a country to form an independent nation. This recently took place in the former Sudan, which split into two nations, and earlier with the separation of Eritrea from Ethiopia and the division of the former Czechoslovakia. Consider, for example, the 1995 referendum on the sepration of Quebec from Canada. About half of the population of Quebec lives in the Montreal area. Generally, Montreal voted to stay with Canada while the rest voted for separation. What if the referendum had succeeded? Would Quebec have become an independent nation, and that would be the end of it, or could Canada say that the rest of Quebec can go if it wants to but the Montreal area voted to stay and it will. If the separatists can divide the country, then why can't the country divide the separatist region? Furthermore, is it right to divide a country that has existed for a long time on a simple majority vote? It must be considered that some people are likely to vote for separation, not really wanting it but just to "send a message" to the government. Finally, if a region can separate from a country if it feels that it will be better off, can a country eject a region that it feels it would be better off without? The only example of this that I can think of is the attempted creation in South Africa of "homelands", such as Bophuthatswana and Transkei.

When a person gains wisdom, they come to the point where they realize that if everyone was given everything that they asked for, the world would not really be a better place.

How secure is your country? If it were cut off from the outside world, such as during warfare, would it be able to manufacture all of the things and grow all of the food that it needs?

Some good may yet come from this fuel-price crisis. Production work used to move to the other side of the world so that it could be done much more cheaply, due to lower wages. The trouble is that factories do not only produce goods, they also produce the jobs that people need to be able to afford those goods. Expensive fuel erodes the advantage of production in distant countries, so that there is more incentive to manufacture closer to where the products will be sold. This will bring jobs back. Meanwhile, the countries where the manufacturing is done will be forced to rely more on their own people to buy the goods being produced there, meaning that they must be paid enough money to be effective consumers. The possible downside to this favorable (favourable) scenario is the shortage of resources and energy.

The lesson of economics over the past century, or so, is that the economy is shaped like a pyramid. It cannot be flat, some wealth disparity is necessary to provide incentive. If everyone got paid the same, or got paid regardless of how well they worked, there would be little motivation. But if too much wealth is concentrated, there will not be enough money left in circulation to buy all of the goods and services being produced. There will follow a cutback in production so that workers will have even less money, until it spirals into a recession or a crash. Remember the lesson of 1929. Great advances had been made in assembly line manufacturing processes and factories were churning out fantastic amounts of high-quality goods from cars to radios. But workers were not being paid enough money to be able to afford to buy the goods that they were producing, and the goods were just piling up in warehouses. Factories began cutting back on production, meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiralled into a devastating crash.

Some devices are described as "electric", and others are described as "electronic". Have you ever wondered what the difference is between the two? This seems to be another situation akin to the difference between fruits and vegetables, that I covered in the posting "Natural Produce" on the biology and meteorology blog. There is no definitive boundary that separates one from the other. There is one definition that a device that works with large amounts of current is electric, while one that uses minute amount of current is electronic. But that does not seem to be suitable because light bulbs are considered as electric, while the cathode ray tubes that were used, until recently, in computer monitors and televisions are electronic. Many car light bulbs use only a little bit of current, while the cathode ray tubes used a vast amount. There is another definition that when a current flows through a conductor, it is defined as electric, and when the current flows through a semiconductor or a vacuum it is defined as electronic. The trouble with this definition is that neon lighting would then be considered as electronic, and since neon is a simple technology that hardly seems applicable. I have thought of a boundary definition between the two, it involves the direction of the current that is applied to a device. If the direction of the current does not matter, as in a light bulb, the device is electric. if the direction of current does matter, as in a transistor or a microwave oven wave generator, the device is electronic.

One of the reasons behind the success of McDonald's is it's supreme sense of location. When opening a restaurant, McDonald's gives the impression that it is willing to pay whatever it has to pay to get absolutely the best possible location. This is because people who may be unfamiliar with the area will often stop at the first such restaurant that they see, or the one that is the easiest to get to. The other fast food chains do not have quite as good of a sense of location. Even it's arches are wise marketing. Most business signs are rectangular, and this makes the curve of the arches stand out. Few lit signs are the gold-yellow color (colour) of the arches, and this makes it stand out even more.

What about the relationship between smart people and mathematics? Alexander the Great and Napoleon were brilliant at mathematics in their youth, and this certainly helped with strategies as generals. But some scientists who made brilliant leaps of intuition, including Albert Einstein and Michael Faraday, were not quite at the top in mathematical ability. But this may have actually made it easier to let the mind try to grasp what is possible, and letting others concern themselves with filling in the mathematics.

Cumulus clouds are the fluffy clouds that are found in three types at three levels of altitude. Cumulus is one of the three basic types of cloud. The others are the flat layers of stratus cloud, and the high wispy cirrus cloud. There is the low, exceptionally fluffy cumulus clouds. There is altocumulus clouds at a higher altitude, and cirrocumulus at an even higher altitude. One rule that I have noticed just from sitting outside is that the rate at which a cumulus cloud changes in shape and form is proportional to the altitude of the cloud. The high cirrocumulus change the slowest, and the low cumulus change the fastest. This seems to be related to the amount of kinetic energy in the air. At lower altitudes, the air is both warmer and more dense meaning that it has more kinetic energy in both of the two ways than the air at higher altitudes.

There is one thing about Israel being the promised land in the Bible that could not have been realized in those days. Notice on a map of the world where Israel is located. There is no more centralized location in the world. If God wanted to raise up a nation that would spread his word to the far corners of the globe, there could not possibly be a better place. Israel is at the crossroads of Africa, Europe and, Asia. It had coastline on the Mediterranean to journey west, and coastline on the Red Sea to journey east. Israel was right on the main trade routes between Africa and the near east. There could not possibly be a better location.

One disadvantage of capitalism is that there are some things that are just too big for a corporation to handle, and requires the involvement of the government. Some obvious examples are the moon landings and space exploration, the development of the internet, the building of America's highway system in the 1950s and, the development of the atomic bomb. Another example involves the relationship between television and computers. A television and a computer are closely related. Personal computers are clearly adaptation of television to mainframe computers. Yet, the two developed along completely separate lines. Companies were either on the television side, or the computer side. It appears to have been just too much to develop the two together.

With the Olympics just completed, have you ever thought about just how subjective boxing is? It is an extraordinarily subjective sport. There are universally-accepted rules, but a wide disparity in how to score a match. How much should a knockdown count for the the scoring? Suppose one boxer lands the most punches, but his opponent manages to score a knockdown? Suppose one boxer clearly wins the first two rounds, but then his opponent really comes on and wins the last round by a wide margin? Should a strong finish count for more in the scoring if one boxer wins the earlier rounds, but his opponent wins the later rounds? What about appearance? If two boxers compete evenly, but one appears more battered and bruised at the end, should that count for his opponent in the scoring? If one boxer is the aggressor, but his opponent skillfully blocks and avoids his punches, does the one get any credit in the scoring for being the aggressor or does the other get credit for defensive skills? What about infractions? There is general agreement on what constitutes fouls and illegal tactics, but a wide disparity in what happens then. One referee might disqualify an offender immediately, another might just take some points off his score, and another might give him a simple warning with no penalty. How about championship matches? There is an unwritten rule that a championship does not change hands by a close decision, the burden is on the challenger to really dominate the match if he is to win. As you might expect, the winner often comes down to which boxer's hometown the match is taking place in. It is not uncommon to hear a boxer dismiss a loss on his record with "Oh, that was just a hometown decision".

5

What do you think of the prophecy in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 11? There are two witnesses of God in Jerusalem in the last days of the world who are killed by the forces of the Antichrist. Many are delighted that they have been killed, and people around the world celebrate for three and a half days until God raises them up to Heaven. Stop and think, when the Bible was written how could anyone know that there would one day be the technology that we have today which would make it possible for people across the world to instantaneously follow the news in a far distant place?

Part of the reason that Americans sometimes have difficulty understanding the outside world comes down to sports. Americans play different sports than most of the rest of the world. People incorporate the patterns in the sports that they grow up with, and these patterns affect how they think and reason in other aspects of life. People from different places will have an easier time understanding one another if they have played the same set of sports.

Human beings are competitive, and it is on this that capitalism is based. But there is also a communist side to human beings and this is being displayed with all of the things that are beings shared for free on the internet.

I don't listen to rock music anymore, but what was once a counterculture rebellion against the establishment has now become the establishment. The song that I once chose as the greatest of the rock era, "Baby Blue" by Badfinger, is still around forty years later. No new music has emerged to displace rock music, and people are familiar with these songs that were popular twenty years before they were born.

Let's not forget what turned out to be one of the most important business decisions ever made. IMB decided to allow any other company to copy it's computer architecture, with the exception of the BIOS. Rival Apple, meanwhile, kept it's architecture proprietary. But this is why the IBM-Microsoft team ended up capturing over 90% of the market, even though it was Apple and not Microsoft Windows that first introduced the graphical interface.

The development of the internet shows how government and business should work together in a mixed economy. If developement of the internet had been left to business alone, each company would have had it's own standard so that there would be hundreds of competing standards. Instead, the government set down the basic standards such as the ASCII coding of numbers and letter and the TCP/IP protocols of the internet, and let the private sector join in from there.

The way to understand the physical geography of the earth's surface is to be able to separate what features were formed be geological actions, such as tectonic movements and volcanism, what was formed by glaciation during ice ages, what was formed by flowing water, and what was formed by erosion. Finally, how these four factors worked together to make the earth the way it is.

Wikipedia is the great source of information on the web. When anyone wants basic information about something, why would a book about it be necessary? Just go to Wikipedia for free. But Wikipedia, as brilliant as it is, offers information that is already known. I am trying to get around it by offering new insights and information. I will not write anything on my blog that is not new, or at least a new way of looking at things.

I am sure that a lot of supposed UFO sighting can be explained as satellites in orbit. I have written previously about seeing satellites. There is a window of time after sunset, and I suppose before sunrise, when satellites can be seen. It must be dark where the observer is located, but the sun must be shining on the satellite. I have seen satellites moving, and then vanishing suddenly when the sun is no longer shining on them. Some satellites may be very faintly visible in the moonlight of a full moon. I live at 43 degrees north, nearly halfway to the north pole from the equator, so I usually only see satellites moving in a north-south line in a polar orbit, above the earth's poles. Recently, however, I saw for the first time a satellite moving eastward in an equatorial orbit, over the equator. The satellite vanished abruptly when it got into the earth's shadow so that the sun was no longer shining on it. If I had not known what it was, it could have appeared as a UFO. 

Freedom is not about people who all agree, it is about people who agree to disagree.

Jesus told the Jewish religious leaders that their temple would be so completely destroyed that "not one stone would be left upon another". It must have seemed absurd at the time. But about forty years after Jesus' crucifixion, the Jews rebelled against Roman rule. The wooden part of the temple was set afire, and the heat melted some of the gold so that if flowed down between the foundation stones. After the fire went out, soldiers pried apart the stones in the search for gold so that indeed "not one stone was left upon another".

The legend of Atlantis is not so far-fetched at all. It is about a great city that is now on the sea floor. In the posting "Sea Levels During The Ice Ages", I explained how precipitation that fell upon glaciers that covered about 30% of the earth's surface during the ice ages would freeze into part of the glacier, and so would not circulate back through the watershed. This means that sea level must have dropped significantly, since glaciers might be 2-3 km thick, and much of the shallow coastal seas would have been dry land for thousands of years. This would be true even in the warm areas around the equator. This explains migrations like how the ancestors of the native Indians of North America crossed over the Bering Strait from Asia, and how people got to settle Japan. Why should there not have been settlements on land that later went back to being sea when the ice age ended?

Stop and think for a moment. How many times has a person been sent to prison and become remorseful for what he had done, and determined to live an honest life upon release? But when that day comes, one of the first things that he finds out is that he can never again hope to hold any kind of decent job with a convict record. So, someone who had wanted to live a good life feels that a door has been slammed in his face and eventually ends up back in prison.

The trouble with foods that profess to be highly nutritious because they are made with "real fruit" is that, in nutritious fruits and vegetables, the skin tends to be the most nutritious part and this is often discarded when making processed foods.

I recently saw an article questioning the value of a college degree. It had a cartoon of a smiling new graduate behind the counter in a fast food restaurant asking "would you like fries with that"? Supposedly, the worst that can happen to someone in the world of work is to end up behind a counter asking that ubiquitous question "would you like fries with that"? Actually, although few people want to spend their careers asking "would you like fries with that"? There is some definite benefit to having spent some time in a fast food restaurant. I never worked at McDonald's or Burger King, but I did spend some time at Kentucky Fried Chicken (or simply KFC). I have felt ever since that I had a good sense of process and organization. Any business involves process and organization, but in a fast food establishment the process is highly accelerated and my feeling is that this is beneficial to people who have worked in one.

There is one change that the technology of the past few decades has brought about that I cannot recall ever reading anything about. Whatever happened to pencils? When I was in school, carrying both a pencil and a pen was mandatory. Pencils were for drawing, and especially mathematics, where erasing might be necessary. Pencils are still around, and will be for the forseeable future, but in nowhere near the numbers that they once were.

In any kind of war or conflict, it is a tremendous advantage to have a lot of people who know the enemy's language. Regardless of technology, we give a rival a great advantage over us when they know our language, but we don't know theirs.

You have probably never heard of "The Cancun Catastrophe". That is because it has not happened yet. Someday, hopefully well into the future, southern Mexico will slip westward against the tectonic plate boundary, as it has been doing for millions of years. The shelf of shallow water of the Yucutan Peninsula extends so that it is close to the shelf of shallow water extending westward from Cuba. The peninsula and it's sorrounding shelf will be pushed against the shelf around Cuba. There will be the earthquake of earthquakes, the sea floor will be forced upward so that Cuba will be joined to Mexico and will form a narrow peninsula enclosing the western half of the Carribean Sea.

In order to understand history, one thing that must be pointed out is that a strong sense of nationalism, or of national patriotism, is a relatively recent development. In ancient times it was the god or gods that one identified with, rather than the nation which usually was only a collection of those who worshipped the same god or set of gods. Even around the beginning of the Twentieth Century, there were many people who were unsure to which nation they belonged as the tribe or ethnic group was more important. I get the impression that nationalism is very much an American development. The War of Independence in 1776 seems to be the first war in which the nation was the driving factor. The war was not about ethnicity or religion or economic ideology. It was about people who thought that they should be a nation unto themselves.

One thing that I am still waiting to see is an idea that I suggested in the book "The Patterns Of New Ideas". Wouldn't a story be more interesting if each of the major characters in the story was assigned a color (colour) of ink? When one character spoke, the words would be printed in blue. When another spoke, the words would be in red. Modern printing technology would make this easy to do but the idea has not caught on yet.

When you see an area or a town that is "down on it's luck", part of what is happening is that the people probably lack a strong sense of improvement. The idea that it is possible to take wherever you are, whatever you have, and just keep improving on it. Those that do have such an attitude tend to go and live somewhere else. The town is left with the attitude that "the way it is is the way it always is", except that it isn't. Suppose that you see someone that you have not seen in years, you remember that the person did not use computers and presume that they still don't. But what about improvement? Maybe the person has learned new skills since then.

Not all knowledge is from books. One of my most prolific topics here has been economics. I have never taken an economics class, and can only remember reading one book specifically about economics. I did not read that book all the way through and it did not make enough of an impression on me to even remember the name of it. But I have followed the news since childhood and have held close to 25 different jobs since I was old enough to work, and that has given me a pretty good sense of how things work.

Spanish-speaking countries are the only western culture that name boys Jesus (pronounced Hay-seus). I believe that this began when Spain was ruled for about seven hundred years by Moslems. Muhammad, in it's various spellings, is by far the world's most common first name and naming boys Jesus was a reaction to this.

One thing that Barack Obama does well is what we could call "the partial success". He has a way of doing things in a way that if the venture does not turn out to be a complete success, it still might be a partial success. The ideal example is the health care reforms that were presented as pieces so that the reforms might still be a partial success, if not a full success. The Clintons, in contrast, presented their health care plan as a book in such a way that the entire package was either accepted or rejected.

Have you ever stopped to think about the status of the word "ain't"? When I was a youth, the word was everywhere but teachers would scold us that it is not a proper word and "ain't isn't in the dictionary". Well, now it is in the dictionary and it is considered as a real word. The striking thing is that now that it has arrived and has status as a word in the dictionary, young people rarely use it.

One of the most successful things that the United States has ever done is the Marshall Plan, the lending of money to other countries to rebuild after the Second World War. What might the world have been like if the Marshall Plan had extended to Palestine after the reestablishment of Israel?

One subject that should be studied much more in schools is inventing. The best way to teach students to be creative in coming up with ideas of their own is to study those who have made the world what it is by coming up with new ideas. Too much respect for the way that things have always been done may bring about a stable social order but is the greatest hindrance to noticing better ways of doing things.

So many new discoveries are happened across accidentally. An effort will be underway to find some solution or solve some problem. While that may or may not be successful, it might bring about the discovery of something else that was unintended. Remember that new discoveries are often arrived at not by answering questions that no one else can answer, but by asking questions that no one else has asked.

The philosophy of the Industrial Revolution has been cast aside. The idea was to let machines do as much of the work as possible so that people would have time to learn, and then to develop more machinery that would free them from still more work. The trouble is that this noble, and apparently wise, concept runs into human nature. For people to be freed from work in such a way would require the implementation of a communistic system, but that would destroy incentive. Unemployment is actually the goal of the original philosophy, it is making progress if we can make the things that we need with fewer workers than we have. But the competitive system that we need to provide incentive turns unemployment from a positive into a negative. When people are not working, they are not doing the spending that it takes to keep the system operating efficiently. When production can take place with fewer workers, the system must find some non-production work for them to do or else it will not make sense to produce the products that they will not be able to buy.

How many other people out there think that this culture has gone way too far? Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes recently went through a divorce. Their divorce was treated as legitimate entertainment. The feeling seems to be that if someone is on television, then we have every right to be entertained by their personal business. Don't you think that this is debasing and dehumanizing and degrading? Wouldn't we be better off spending our time reading and improving our skills?

There is actually a legal basis for a mild version of socialism, that is between the extremes of capitalism and communism and would allow people to earn money but would guarantee a basic standard of living and health care to everyone. In prehistoric times people lived by their own foraging and hunting, there was no agriculture or settled communities. Civilization can be said to have originated when someone noticed that if the seeds of a plant were discarded, identical plants would then sprout from them. Thus began agriculture, and with it permanent habitation because it was no longer as necessary to search for food. In place of foraging for their own survival, each person was assigned a task in the division of labor (labour) of the settled agricultural community. We can consider this as a covenant, which I will call the Fundamental Covenant. A person will do the work assigned to him, and in return will receive the necessities of life as a share of the resulting production. I explained this in the book "The Patterns Of New Ideas", in the section "Power At The Center", concerning economics and politics. But this means that, if a person is unable to work or to find work, society must provide at least the necessities of life to that person whose ancestors must have entered into the Fundamental Covenant. Wealthy people could in no way have gained their wealth without the Fundamental Covenant, and the societal structure that it provided, so that they have a legal and logical and moral obligation to give back to the Fundamental Covenant in the form of adequate taxes. This is especially true since, in most areas, there is little or no original terrain that is not claimed as private or protected property to which the person could revert to the prehistoric way of life. No person can be effectively excluded from the Fundamental Covenant by those who have gained so much from it.

Do motorcycles promote socialism? Have you ever noticed that, in societies where motorcycles, motorbikes and, scooters are very prevalent, particularly western Europe and Japan, the political slant seems to be generally mildly socialist? Riding such vehicles requires balance, being careful not to lean too far to either the left or the right, and this acts as a form of unintentional social engineering.

In all honesty, how much did the Allies of the First World War contribute to bringing about the Second World War a generation later? Many have already expressed the opinion that the decision to demand that Germany pay the entire cost of the war was ridiculous and destructive, since the war started not because of aggression by any of the major powers but as a result of the tangle of alliances involving the unstable Balkans. But what about the stock market crash of 1929 that so impacted Germany, as well as much of the rest of the world? The three major Axis powers in the First World War were Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, the Ottoman Empire, which was later reduced to Turkey. After the war, both Germany and Turkey eventually underwent extreme transformations with a patriotic and nationalistic bent. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was no longer a factor because it was broken up to form the modern nations of Austria and Hungary, as well as nations such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia which would much later fragment further. Germany's postwar nationalistic transformation revolved around Hitler and the Nazi Party, which led to another world war. Turkey had a similar transformation, the modernization led by Ataturk (Mustafa Kemal). The great question is why the postwar transformation of Turkey turned out to be so positive, while that of Germany turned out so negatively. The modernization of Turkey, led by Ataturk in the 1920s, was certainly a model for other countries and for Reza Shah, the father of the Iranian Shah who was overthrown in 1979. The major difference was that the Allies made more demands at the end of the war on Germany than on Turkey, and also Germany was much more affected by the crash of 1929 and the economic depression of the 1930s. Germany ultimately did undergo such a positive transformation, the "economic miracle" after the Second World War. But if only the world had been a different place this is what might have happened after the First World War instead. It is certainly also a factor that Germany, as well as Italy, were unified only relatively recently and thought it unfair that other Europeans had empires while they didn't, and Turkey had just concluded a long imperial period. But with the anniversary of D-Day just concluded, I think it is unrealistic to claim that the Allies share none of the blame.

6

We often see the phrase "creating jobs". However, it is important to remember that the jobs which tend to disappear during a recession are those jobs that are not vitally necessary to the economy anyway. How many readers remember when gas stations used to have attendants who pumped gasoline (petrol) so that drivers did not have to get out of their cars? It seemed that they just went away during a recession, and never came back. The amazing truth is that, if we could bring about jobs that would not vanish during a recession there would not be a recession, since it is the reduction in consumer spending that brings about the recession.

A city today is generally defined as such by it's population, which is greater than that of a town or village. But many cities simply got to be classified as such by an increase in population. I notice a way to differentiate what we could call "core cities" from suburbs that have grown to become cities, or from towns that have merged to form cities. The difference is in tall office buildings, not in tall hotels or industrial structures but in office buildings. Niagara Falls, Canada is certainly a city today, yet while it has any number of tall hotels and observation towers it has no tall office buildings. We saw in the posting, on the world and economics blog in "The City Of Five Towns", how this city is the result of towns merging together with the result that there are no tall office buildings. A number of suburbs of nearby Buffalo, NY are now cities in their own right, but no tall office buildings are to be seen. Niagara Falls, NY had tall office buildings, of which one remains standing, because it grew more from a centralized location than did it's Canadian counterpart across the river. The reason is that a core city will naturally concentrate property vales in a way that makes tall office buildings logical, but when a suburb grows or towns merge to form a city the increasing land values are more dispersed.

Every true revolution in technology overthrows at least a part of the existing social order. The Industrial Revolution brought feudalism to an end. The computer revolution is having a similar effect in weakening the power of established educational institutions. Who needs a degree when one can come up with a new computer application, drop out of college or even high school, and soon join the wealthiest people in the world?

The best economic system will be the one that stars out by making the best estimate of human nature. This is where economics really begins. The trouble with both capitalism and communism is that neither got human nature really right to begin with. Communism overestimates human nature, while capitalism underestimates it. People, as a whole, are not magnanimous beings that really want to work and share their wealth, if only they were not subjugated by the wealthy and private property. So, communists had to try to make them into that ideal by force in sending errant workers to work camps and "reeducation camps". Capitalism first makes the incorrect presumption that everyone's goal is to be wealthy, and that they are all always seeking more wealth.  Capitalism also considers humans as basically lazy, who require both the stick and the carrot to motivate them to be enterprising and to work hard in the search for wealth. As I have long been writing, the truth lies between the two.

A country will generally be better off if it is a democracy. But democracy runs contrary to thousands of years of human history. What is immediately good for the country may not be good for democracy, and vice versa. An obvious example is monitoring communications in order to prevent terrorism. To be a democracy, and to reap it's long-term benefits, the country must put the interests of democracy above it's own interests and that is sometimes difficult to do.

Democracy is a lot like doing calisthenic exercises in gym class. It's too easy to just go through the motions of doing the exercises enough to pacify whoever is watching without putting much into, or getting much out of, the exercises.

A democracy is no longer a place where the government does not monitor your communications. Now, a democracy is a place where the news outlets are at least allowed to warn you that the government is monitoring your communications.

I see that there are two distinct types of rain, that from stratus and that from cumulus clouds. Clouds can form over both land and sea. But the surface of the sea is much more uniform than the land, and this tends to form the uniform layers of stratus cloud. The land, in contrast, has warmer and cooler areas so that there is an updraft from a warmer area, such as a city or town with it's hot blacktop surfaces, and corresponding downdrafts in the green cooler areas in between. This forms cumulus clouds over the updrafts, with clear air in between. Clouds drop their component water as rain when the temperature lowers, either due to air movement or altitude. The vertical fluffy cumulus cloud can drop a lot more water on a limited area than the flat horizontal layers of stratus cloud. Downpours that are intense, but cover a limited area and do not last very long, are from cumulus clouds. The light drizzle that is so familiar to places like Britain and Ireland is from stratus clouds that have originated over the nearby sea. Stratus clouds cover a wide area but, without the support of an updraft, are thin relative to cumulus clouds so that they cannot drop as much water per time and per area. This illustrates why areas located where the prevailing movement of air is off the sea tend to get drizzle, or stratus rain, and those inland tend to get the heavier, but more brief, cumulus rain.

There have been two revolutions in everyday technology going on over the past few decades, that of transportation and that of communications and information. The trouble is that there is very poor coordination between the two revolutions. Companies that make cars do not consider that the people who will be driving those cars spend much of their time talking on phones or texting. Companies that make phones do not consider that the people who will be talking on those phones spend much of their time driving.

Have you noticed a pattern in how the western countries are struggling economically? None of the economies of the western countries can really be described as robust at the time of this writing, but some are doing better than others. The difference lies in taxes, not in the level or structure of the taxes but in how easy or difficult it is to evade those taxes. Plainly and simply, the countries in which it is easiest to avoid taxes are the ones that are struggling the most. The western countries with the more stable economies and budgets are the ones in which it is more difficult to get around paying taxes. Everyone knows that there is an attitude in some places of "taxes are for losers who are not smart enough to avoid paying them". One of the reasons that the rich seem to keep getting richer, at the expense of everyone else, is that when a big company announces plans to build a facility somewhere, it tries to negotiate it's way out of paying the usual share of taxes. If the demands of the company are not granted, it will simply locate the facility somewhere else. What do you suppose that estate planning is? It is basically making an estate look as if it is worth less than it is so that no taxes will have to be paid on it. One simple solution for the economy is for everyone to pay their fair share of taxes. It is said that the downside of capitalism is that those with wealth are able to set up the system to suit themselves so that they get richer, while the poor get poorer. The primary way that this is done is for the wealthy and big corporations to hire tax lawyers to steer them around their taxes.

Do you know what this world really needs? We need a way to harness energy directly from the sun, without requiring the rare elements that prevent solar power from being really widespread. Plants can do it, so why can't we?

Suppose that in shoe stores, there were some managers who believed that the left shoe was more important, and other managers who believed that the right shoe was more important. When a left manager took over a shoe store, he would fire those workers who believed that the right shoe was more important. Some managers might give workers a second chance and send those with the wrong belief to special retraining programs. Customers would be divided in their opinions also, those who believed that the right shoe was more important would not think of shopping at a shoe store whose manager thought that the left shoe was more important. Shoe stores would have a photo or image of either the right or the left shoe out in front. There might be an uproar in a community if a shoe store planned to locate there whose manager had the opposite opinion of which shoe was the most important. Fortunately, shoes are relatively simple and we do not have these issues with shoe stores. We can easily see that both shoes are of equal importance. But economics is not so simple. We do have a lot of people and countries who have the opinion that either the buyer or seller, either right or left, is somehow more important than the other. We do have people who kill each other, and countries that go to war with each other, over whether buyer or seller is more important. Those who favor the buyer are usually described as leftward, and those who favour the seller as rightward. Actually, just as with shoes, both are equally important.

Publishers of world atlases actually have quite a bit of power in making the decision of whether a political entity should be considered as an independent country or not. A number of autonomous or semi-autonomous political entities are seeking recognition as independent nations. The best-known is Kurdistan. There is the autonomous region of northern Iraq by that name but the territory populated by Kurds, which are generally Sunni Moslem but not ethnically Arab or Turkish, extends also into Iran and especially into Turkey. The leader of the Kurdish drive for independence, Abdullah Ocalan, is in a Turkish prison. Northern Cyprus is really a defacto nation, it is populated mainly by ethic Turks rather than Greeks as on the rest of Cyprus, but at this point is not recognized by any nation besides Turkey. Then there is Somaliland, the northern area of Somalia considers itself as a separate nation but has no international recognition. Does anyone remember the South African "homelands" of the 1970s? These lands were also referred to as "Bantustans", and were supposedly given to black South Africans as nations in return for giving up South African citizenship. There was Bophuthatswana ( I remember how to spell it because I once used it for a password), Transkei, Ciskei, Venda and, Kwazulu. But none were recognized by any nation outside of South Africa, although there were some international athletic events and a Frank Sinatra concert in Bophuthatswana. It is certain that if the major publishers of world atlases defined it as such, it would go a long way towards recognition as a country, whether or not the governments of other countries granted recognition.

An interesting question, which does not usually get much thought, is whether or not it is a good idea for governments to buy mortgages from banks. Some countries, such as the U.S. and Canada, buy mortgages in the theory that it will get the money back to the bank so that it can then lend the money out again with the end result of more people being able to own their own homes. Other countries, such as Britain, do not have the government buying mortgages in the theory that it will encourage irresponsible lending. Both sides have a point. In The U.S., the government-sponsored corporations commonly known by the names based on their acronyms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, buy a majority of mortgages from banks and then bundle them into securities to be sold as investments. This certainly promotes home ownership, but there is less incentive to be sure that the buyers will actually be able to afford the mortgage over the long term. Small banks and credit unions typically sell their mortgages to larger banks, who sell them to "Fannie or Freddie", who then sell them to investors. But this passing along of debt can invite trouble, the attitude comes down to "I'll get my commission for originating the mortgage and if they default, by that time it will be somebody else's problem". There still is no clear answer, at the time of this writing the Obama Administration intends to gradually dissolve "Fannie and Freddie" but that may be more difficult to do with their newly regained profitability.

We may not be able to see it clearly because we tend to put our emotions into the subject of economics but, somewhere out there, is a logical balance of what the wealth distribution in an economy should be for best long-term results. There will be maximum economic activity if the wealth in a society is shared equally, but forced equality destroys incentive to work hard and innovate. Somewhere, there is a balance between the two.

In nations with a high crime rate, you will inevitably find that there is at least some glamorization of crime such as making bandits into legends or folk heroes. A nation whose people are disgusted by crime will have a low crime rate.

One thing that I cannot help noticing about the prophecies in the Bible of the Apocalypse being fulfilled in our times is that it used to be strictly a Protestant Born-Again Christian topic. There was once very little written about this by Catholics. But now, I notice that this has changed. There is quite a bit of Catholic writing about this subject, as well.

Karl Marx was not a failure, he was a brilliant success but only with half of the picture. The internet is the fulfillment of Marx, with it's free web sites and shared applications. But it came through private companies, not through the collective work of the people, and religion has certainly not faded away.

A number of European leaders, of Germany, France, the Netherlands and, Britain, have expressed the opinion that multiculturalism is somewhat of a failure. The populations of countries such as these are today several percent or more Moslem immigrants, and their children. But part of the problem lies with the host countries. By the time Europe became a large-scale immigrant destination, around the 1960s, it had become so secular that Europeans had largely forgotten what it is like to really live a life based on religion. Europe is traditionally Christian, and the way a Christian and a Moslem try to live their lives are roughly similar. But a Christian, a Moslem and, a Jew have far more in common with one another than any of them does with a non-believer. Alcohol is another factor, Europeans as a whole are very fond of alcohol which is forbidden to Moslems. This should have been known when they were admitted in large numbers. I, as a Christian, am hoping that Moslems will influence Europeans in reminding them what a religious life is like. Surveys show that white English people who live near a significant number of Moslems are more likely to say that they believe in God than those that don't.

It is impossible to really understand the world without understanding religion. This is not just understanding the religions themselves, it goes far beyond that. The reason is that people are designed to believe in something and when they don't believe in religion, they will replace it with something else. So many of the ideologies that arise serve the purpose of being a religion substitute for those who are no longer focused on God, this is particularly true of Communism and Nazism and is usually an element of various nationalist and ethnic movements. Also when a society is religious for a long period of time, the patterns of the religion will continue to be manifested in various ways, even if secularization later takes place.

What if unions were national in scale? With the traditional local-scale unions, the workers try to get wages as high as possible from a company that wants to maximize profit by keeping wages as low as possible. But if there were national unions, whether of workers or employers, it would logically be just the opposite. If all employers, every company and organization that pays wages, had a national conference to decide what to pay workers of every job description, each individual employer would want to keep his own worker's wages low but would want the other employers to have their worker's wages high so that they could afford to buy the goods from his company. Employers would come to an agreement among themselves how much to pay workers of each job description that would be in everyone's best interest. The employers, and all wage-payers, would essentially say to one another "I'll pay my workers enough to buy your products, if you will pay your workers enough to buy my products". With a national union of workers, the situation would be reversed. Each worker would naturally want his own wages to be high, but other workers' wages to be low enough so as to not erode the buying power of his wages by inflation. The workers would essentially say to each other "I won't demand a high wage that will erode your buying power by inflation if you won't demand a high wage that will erode my buying power by inflation". The situation would reverse from local unionizing in that employers would want to pay their workers a high wage, so that their workers could afford to buy each other's products, but the workers would be reluctant to accept a high wage, so that they would not erode each other's buying power by inflation.

Brits tend to be considered as fair-weather Europeans, moving closer to or further from Europe according to how beneficial it is. But Britain has actually shrewdly positioned itself relative to Europe. Britain is not capitalist by U.S. standards, but it is by European standards. There is somewhat less in the way of welfare state benefits than the European average, but also lower taxes and a higher income gap. This means that skilled Europeans from nearby countries can earn more money in Britain, but be close enough to easily visit home. According to the latest reports there are about 300,000 French expatriates living in London, and French presidential candidates regularly make campaign stops there as if it were a part of France. The Scandinavian countries have generous social benefits, but executives are highly taxed. While there is no great exodus away from home, many such Scandinavians do spend some time earning money in Britain. The British Pound is kept strong to keep the most of the country's companies and assets from being bought by foreigners. This would be destructive if Britain were more of a manufacturing economy, rather than centered on finance as it is. Britain is under pressure to integrate more into Europe, but this pressure is countered by Brits who would rather leave the European Union altogether. But I believe that there must be many in Europe who would like to keep the relationship between Britain and the rest of Europe just the way it is.

Japan has recently adopted a strategy to boost economic activity by printing a lot more currency. So far, it seems to be working by making Japanese more affordable and making Japan less expensive to visit. The question is just what is the right formula to add more currency without turning it into unwanted inflation.

The recent U.S. Government scandals are actually a great compliment to the Obama Administration. When a leader's opponents emerge with a minor scandal it probably means that they have tried, and failed, to find a major scandal. There seems to be some truth to the improper directing of IRS tax audits, but this is relatively trivial and those who would like to derail his presidency will have to do better than this.

A summary of my economic philosophy is simply that left and right are both part of human reality, and the best economy is the one which best weaves together left and right.

How can you tell a dictatorship from a really free society? One place to look is at the laws. Free societies tend to have laws that are precise and well-defined, while the laws of less-than-free societies are often vague and open to interpretation. Suppose that a country has a law against "damaging national unity" or "threatening the social order". What that probably means is that the government can arrest anyone they want at any time, for anything that they interpret as potentially undermining their authority. Many western countries have laws that can be used to maintain immediate order. America has a law against "disturbing the peace", which is very subjective. Yet I have never heard of anyone actually being convicted and sent to prison for "disturbing the peace", the charges are always dropped later. We saw in "Civics Made Really Simple", on the world and economics blog, that the fundamental purpose of government is to keep the subjective at bay, and the further away it keeps it the freer the society.

The traditional claim of countries with centrally-controlled economies is that the wealth distribution is grossly uneven in a market economy and that an economy with central planning can even out such a destructive wealth gap, while still rewarding hard work, enterprise and, study. There is some truth to this, but one of the downsides to a planned economy is that the capital city always gets favored (favoured) over the rest of the country. I cannot think of one country, in recent decades, with a centrally-planned economy that did not give proportionally more to it's capital city.

The story in the Bible about Joseph in Egypt rising to become the governor of the entire country was long seen as being highly unlikely, and not really to be taken literally. But don't be so fast to doubt it's literal truth. Modern archeology has revealed that there was a Semitic people, known as the Hyksos, who unexpectedly entered and conquered Egypt, and this has given a lot of credence to the story. The Egyptians much disliked the foreign rule and eventually put together a rebellion that freed them from the Hyksos. The Bible does not actually mention the Hyksos. But suppose that  the Hebrew Joseph entered Egypt during the period of Hyksos rule. The capabilities that he showed would make it not unlikely at all that he would be promoted among his fellow Semites. The Book of Exodus begins with a new pharaoh coming to power in Egypt who does not know Joseph and who has concerns that the now-numerous Hebrews, who were ethnically related to the Hyksos, might be a threat to the security of Egypt, and so the Hebrews are made into slaves. If this new pharaoh was the one to take power upon the ejection of the Hyksos, then this old story suddenly seems very plausible. My understanding of ancient Egyptian history is that the pyramid building mostly went on early, during the Old Kingdom. The pharaohs of the Old Kingdom gradually lost authority, until it was restored by force as the Middle Kingdom with the capital now at Thebes. The Hyksos invasion ended the Middle Kingdom and when they were expelled, it ushered in the New Kingdom, with the capital in the Nile Delta, where the Hyksos capital had been.

An unfortunate myth that has been handed down since ancient times is that a country will be better off if it rules over other countries. That may have been true in antiquity, but has not been true for a long time now. Ruling one or more other countries simply does not make life better for the average person in the ruling country. In studying Nazism, I just did not understand how all of these conquests, even if the plan went flawlessly, was going to make life better for the average German. National pride and prestige is one thing, but grinding out a day-to-day living for the masses of people is another thing. One thing that is really striking is that Charles Dickens' stories of poverty and hardship in Nineteenth-Century London took place when the British Empire was at it's height. Certainly one reason that, despite some expectation, Spain never joined the Axis side in the Second World War is that, by that time, countries like Spain, France, Britain and, Portugal had already held vast empires and now had a world-weary attitude toward ruling other countries. Germany, in contrast, was relatively new as a united nation and had never ruled other countries as colonies, with the exception of Namibia and some islands in the Pacific.

It's truly amazing how the Soviet war in Afghanistan during the 1980s parallels America's war in Vietnam during the 1960s and early 1970s. Vietnam warmed up to America when a new generation arose who did not remember the war, and who saw no reason to consider America as an enemy. Now, the same thing has happened in Afghanistan. The demographics of both countries are very youthful and a new generation has arisen that does not remember the 1980s. A Russian cultural center has been built in Afghanistan and instruction in the Russian language is in high demand in schools.

This student loan crisis in America is driving a movement toward people educating themselves. A lot of top universities are giving away course material free online and self-teaching courses like those of Salman Khan are very popular. Education seems to be one of those areas like health care, where capitalism doesn't belong. It is not that capitalism does not work in providing the best results, at least to some extent and in some areas, it is just that we try to take it too far.

I used to wonder if there was some pattern in the lives of great dictators, something that they all had in common that had not been previously seen. Finally, I noticed something. All great dictators are from small towns. How many of the really great dictators can you find who grew up in major cities?

The difference between school and the real world is that in school, you are generally given complete information and you know what the rules are. In real life, you are not given complete information, you do not know for certain how much of the information that you do have is accurate, and the rules are not quite as fixed as they were in school. In school sports the playing field is already established, in real life we often create the playing field as we are going along.

Two things that we rarely stop to think about is how many casualties in war are really accidents, the result of "friendly fire", and how many innocent people there are in prisons.

Plainly and simply, how progressive a country is can be stated as the inverse of the proportion of the population that works in agriculture.

We are just as busy as we have always been. Inventions come along that save time, but these are inevitably balanced out by other inventions that take up our time.

One way to get an idea of how much technical progress we are making is the new words that enter the collective vocabulary, since new technology requires new words. In the field of computers especially, we are continuously forming new words out of acronyms of old words.

When there is a conflict or disagreement, the easy thing to do is to pick one side or the other. The more difficult thing to do is to analyze and understand both sides and see if possibly the truth lies somewhere in between.

We see ourselves as the dominant living species on earth. But a strong case can be made that the honor should really go to ants. They have been around many, many times longer than we have and cataclysms that would wipe us out would barely affect the lives of ants on the whole.

One thing about Niagara Falls that does not seem to get much written about it is the cloud that forms over the falls. The falling water lands on rocks at the base of the falls so that a vast amount of water gets splashed into the air, which causes the cloud to form as some of the water condenses. This has meteorological significance because a cloud would not form here otherwise. Relative humidity is the percentage of water vapor (vapour) in the air, in comparison with the total amount that the air could possibly hold at the given temperature. If no cloud at all forms at the falls, that means that the air is dry or the relative humidity is low. If the cloud from the falls extends some distance into the air, that means that relative humidity is moderate and the water condenses for a while before it re-evaporates further away from the falls. If the cloud from the falls extends all the way up to the clouds in the sky, this means that the relative humidity is already high so that there is not much room left for more evaporated water and the water remains condensed. This is related to what we saw in "Contrail Meteorology" on the meteorology blog.

Remember that the requirements for freedom is, first of all, that the same rules be written down for everyone. Second, that a balance be found between the two slants on freedom, which are "freedom to" and "freedom from". The ideal example is smoking, should people have "freedom to" smoke or should they have "freedom from" second-hand smoke? Extreme "freedom to" is simply the law of the jungle, while extreme "freedom from" is a controlling dictatorship. Every society is really "free" in it's own way, it's just that there are a spectrum of different slants on freedom.

We are in the Obama Era because it is now a two-term presidency. For those who read my book "The Patterns Of New Ideas", remember that in the section about politics and economics "Power At The Center", I pointed out that socialism reappears in America about every thirty years or so. The book was written in 2003, when the country was far to the right. One manifestation of American socialism was the New Deal of the 1930s. The next was the Great Society of the 1960s. The next manifestation, as the Obama Era, was somewhat delayed, but that is explained in the posting "The Wave Model Of Economics" on this blog. Economics in America alternates between left and right waves, regardless of which party is actually in power. All manifestations of socialism must obviously occur on a left wave, and so we had to wait until the current left wave began in 2008.

7

There is so much talk today about "smart" technology. But yet some of the most important technology that we deal with on a daily basis remains extremely dumb. It's time that we applied the concepts of smart technology to traffic lights. When you go on a green light on a main road, the lights are supposed to be timed so that you will pass through green lights for the rest of the way on that road. But it just doesn't seem to work that way and it wastes a tremendous amount of time and fuel.

One of the greatest scientific accomplishments of all time, and one that I believe deserves more credit, is the Russian spacecraft that first photographed the other side of the moon. The same side of the moon always faces earth, and this was the first time the far side had ever been seen. It is sometimes referred to as the "dark side of the moon", but that is not technically correct because it receives the same amount of light that our side does. It is fully lit when we have a new moon, and fully dark only when we have a full moon.

Britain's center-left Labour Party would seem to be the natural governing party of the country. The trouble lies in it's spending. It tends to spend it's way into trouble, until the only recourse is to bring the Conservatives back into power. By 1979, after years of Labour spending, inflation in Britain reached a very dangerous 27%. This was the time of the notorious strike-inflation spiral, where workers in one industry would see others getting pay raises by going on strike and so they would strike too. Giving everyone a pay raise is the way to a disastrous inflationary spiral. The recession that Conservative Margaret Thatcher's government induced was the only way to get inflation under control. Ronald Reagan was, at the time, doing a similar thing in the U.S. The hardships caused by the austerity brought about the summer 1981 riots. Labour regained power in 1997. This time, under the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, spending was not as out-of-control as it was in the 1970s. But still, there was too much spending and this ultimately brought the Conservatives back to power in 2010. The pattern repeated itself in nearly identical form, the austerity program brought on by the Conservatives led to a repeat of the 1981 riots in the summer of 2011. It seems that Labour leads Britain until it spends it's way into trouble, and the Conservatives then have the task of cleaning up and dealing with public discontent over the necessary austerity. The question is: Will Labour get it's spending right if and when it's turn comes to get back into power?

Propaganda can be defined as one side of a story that has at least two sides.

The reason that a moderate rate of inflation is not necessarily a bad thing is that deflation, the lowering of prices, is even worse. A little bit of inflation acts as a barrier against deflation. If the price of a product is dropping, but manufacturing costs are not, then it could mean that the manufacturer will make less money from the sale of the product than it took to make the product so that making it will no longer be worth it.

One thing that must be kept in mind about the United States Constitution is that it was written in the late Eighteenth Century. The constitution protects citizens from oppressive government. But there were not the large companies at the time that there would be in the following century. The majority of workers at the time were small farmers or independent tradespeople. The result is that the constitution lacks protection against the oppression by big companies that would become rampant. The U.S. constitution is a product of it's time. I am sure that if it had been written a hundred years later, it would be just as much about workers' rights as about protection from oppressive government.

History used to move much slower in the past than it does today. Technology now makes change much faster. Also, the world's population is increasing so that theoretically we should be producing more history. Won't this result in an overload of history? As time goes on, to be informed about how we got to where we are today, a student will have to learn more and more.

I say that the "holy grail" of physics is time. We have the so-called Standard Model, with all of these particles, but are still no closer to explaining exactly what time is. Einstein explained how everything revolves around the speed of light, and how that affects perception of time, but still not what time is. I have never seen a plausible explanation of what time really is, other than the cosmological theory that I have presented.

It is, perhaps paradoxically, negatives which show that democracy works. It is not when all is going well that democracy shows it's value, but when it is not. Scandals demonstrate that a society can be ordered so that those who lead have to follow the same rules as everybody else.

Sometimes things have to be complicated, but there is great value in simplicity. America's tax code is now actually longer than the entire Bible. Remember the lesson of soccer (called football outside of North America). The reason that it is the world's sport is that it is simple. No expensive equipment is required to get a game going, just a ball and a level playing area. In fact, a ball is not even absolutely necessary because a bundle of rags can be tied together in it's place.

One of the greatest misnomers in the world is the computer. It has been several decades since computers have been used primarily for computing, meaning doing calculations with numbers. Computers are now used primarily for communication and information management, even if this is done by breaking the data down into numbers.

The 2013 scandal concerning the monitoring of communications by the U.S. Government is another example of how we could define our era. We have reached the point where we can change the world faster than we can comfortably adapt to the changes that we have made in the world.

If we knew everything, if there was nothing which we did not completely understand, words would no longer be necessary because we could use more-efficient numbers.

Once again, I don't understand why we don't just tack a number to every telephone pole in the world. Wherever humans settle, and build communities, there will be telephone poles. To tell exactly where you were, all that would be necessary is to key in the number off the nearest pole.

One of the troubles with a wide wealth gap is the effect that it has on crime. Poorer people start to view the establishment, instead of the criminals, as the enemy. There is glamorization of crime and glorification of those who can "beat the system" that is so unjust and unfair.

The basic patterns of economics reflect those that humans have always been dealing with. Shoppers "hunt" for bargains, while businesses "fish" for customers. Just as males and females are equal in number and pair up, so do money and goods. We have only a certain and limited "pattern vocabulary", and we reuse the patterns that we are familiar with.

Credit makes recessions and economic crashes worse. It's bad enough when consumer spending decreases, and it gets a recessionary spiral under way. It's even worse when people have borrowed money that they find themselves unable to repay.

I see a close relationship between credit and inflation. If money is borrowed, and it is necessary to pay back more than was borrowed, the extra money will find it's way into prices as inflation. It does not matter much if interest rates are high or low because low rates will bring about more borrowing. This is why low interest rates can lead to high inflation.

Modern transportation technology should be making us a lot healthier. It drastically increases the variety of food and medicine that is available. It also works against inbreeding. In times past, most people married someone who lived a kilometer or two away. Now, it is just about as easy to marry someone from far away.

Ever since 1978, popes have been chosen based on their country of origin. Pope John Paul, from Poland, was instrumental in opening the Iron Curtain. Pope Benedict, from Germany, was an attempt to reverse the onslaught of secularism in Europe. Pope Francis, from Argentina, is an attempt to stem the flow of Latin American Catholics to Evangelical Protestant Churches.

The world now has about 7 billion (in North America that is a thousand million) people. Most people agree that this is more than it can comfortably handle. The so-called "Black Death", bubonic plague, really decimated the population of Europe and the Arab countries in the Middle Ages. Many places had their populations reduced by a third, and it took about 150 years for the numbers to recover. But what would the population be like today without the bubonic plague?

In the ancient competition between beer and wine, it seems to me that wine has a definite advantage. It seems inevitable that, in places where grapes are plentiful, wine is the preferred beverage. Beer actually originated in ancient Egypt, and today is associated with places like northern Europe and Canada where grapes do not grow as readily. Vintners and wine-drinkers can truly claim that beer is only for those who can't grow grapes.


How much of a dictatorship, or how centrally controlled a country is, can usually be seen in how prosperous the capital city area is compared with the rest of the country. Centrally-controlled countries tend to favor the capital city over the rest of the country.

If you could build a time machine so that you could travel in time, the common inexpensive scientific calculators would be worth a massive fortune if they could be sold in the 1940s or early 1950s.

To understand the physical universe, have a strong sense of geometry. To understand how we fit into the physical universe, have a strong sense of complexity. To understand the human world, have a strong sense of religion. This applies not because religion is so important in itself, but because people are designed to believe in something and when that something is not religion then they tend to put something else in it's place, such as nation or ideology, and treat it like a religion.

Outsourcing has both pros and cons. It certainly helps to build a more stable and peaceful world. A country whose economy is well-entwined with the global economy will tend to be a better-behaved global citizen. But factories don't just create products, factories also create jobs. Factories move elsewhere, where wages are lower, to be able to offer their goods back home at lower prices. The trouble with that is that the people back home no longer have the jobs to be able to afford the goods, even at lower prices.

Who says that market forces must be treated like a god? Why can't struggling business owners band together and agree to give one another priority when buying anything. That would mean that each business owner would get more business, but at the expense of being required to purchase everything from fellow struggling businesses, if possible. That may not be enough to keep a struggling business going indefinitely, but could keep it afloat until it was time for the owner to retire.

It seems to me that being a successful investor requires the ability to think just the opposite of everyone else. When the market is high, and everybody else is buying, that is the time to sell. When the market is low, and everybody else is selling, that is the time to buy.

Europe might be as secular as it is because of past emigration. Religious people may have been more likely to leave.

It was the steam engine that began the Industrial Revolution. But it was not completely without precedent. I see clocks based on pendulums as being, in a way, forerunners of the steam engine. The function of the piston in the steam engine very much resembles that of the pendulum in the clock, and there is a great similarity between the two, except that the functions are reversed. In the clock, the mechanism drives the pendulum while in the engine, the piston drives the mechanism.

There will be the maximum economic activity if wealth is divided equally. But if wealth is divided equally, it will destroy incentive to work hard and to be enterprising. The way to an effective economic system is to strike a balance between the two.

The great downside of capitalism is unemployment. It should be a positive in that we can make what we need with fewer workers than we have. But capitalism turns it into a negative because, due to the precarious relationship between production and consumption, it means lack of consumer spending which gets a recessionary spiral started.

Have you ever read about what is referred to as the "Carrington Event", the great solar storm of 1859? The electromagnetic storm on the sun induced tremendous electric currents into the telegraph wires of the day. With our far more wired world of today, what kind of effect would such a storm have. It could almost completely shut down global electrical transmission and communications. This kind of storm is supposed to happen only about every 500 years, let's hope that is correct. This is a great promotion for fiber optics, and "The Light Computer" on the progress blog, which would not be affected.

The tides of capitalism today move faster than building longevity. The result is that we are left trying to find other uses for buildings after they have outlived the purpose for which they were originally designed.

Money circulates in the economy in the same way that blood circulates in the body. Squeezing consumers by paying them a diminished share of the wealth in the economy is like cutting off the blood circulation because an economy is dependent on consumer spending.

In a new democracy, the military may be a part of the process. As the democracy matures, comedians and cartoonists become a part of the process.

The ironic thing about the near-civil war situation in Iraq, at the time of this writing (2013), is that this is just what the Government of Ayatollah Khomeini wanted in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. The hope was that the majority Shiite Moslems of Iraq would rise up against Saddam Hussein and the then-ruling minority Sunnis, and join their fellow Shiites from across the Border in Iran.

Why can't an ellipse be expressed as an angle? An ellipse is a kind of flattened circle, with two foci instead of one. Imagine a cylinder with it's base on a plane. If we cut the cylinder directly across, we will get a circle. But as we increase the angle of the cut, we will get more and more of an ellipse. An ellipse can be expressed as a ratio between the maximum axis and the minimum axis. This would be the same as expressing an ellipse as the angle of the cut if it were a section of a cylinder with the sine of the angle being congruent to the axis ratio. The higher the sine, the more eccentric the ellipse. At a sine of 1, a right angle upward, the ellipse would be simply a straight line.

When it comes to political campaigning, or any kind of campaigning, the easy way to campaign is to just select one, or a few, examples supporting the point of view. But this is the easy way to campaign, by presenting a limited scope without looking at the big picture. A more difficult, and superior, campaign is to take in the big picture. Limited scope campaigns often appeal to the listener's emotions. Any campaign can come up with examples to support it's perspective, but how much is that really representative of the big picture?

In western culture, lending and borrowing money is routine business. But, in other cultures, there is at least some status involved in lending and borrowing with the borrower accepting a lower status relative to the lender. When we borrow from other countries, we give them a reason to feel superior to us.

Among economic conservatives, the best leader will often be the one who is the most leftward. Among liberals, the best leader will often be the one who is the most rightward. Remember that the most effective economy is not right or left, but the one that best weaves the two together like the warp and woof of a cloth.

The U.S. spying scandal of 2013 is an ideal example of how power inevitably gets abused. There has never been power that has not been abused, trying to bend the rules in use of power is human nature.

When comparing western economies, remember that they do not have the same "starting point". The Democrats might be in power in America, while the Conservatives rule Canada, but Canada is still further left in that the Conservatives will not try to dismantle the health care system. The same goes for Labour in Britain and conservatives in continental Europe.

The 2013 mayoral crisis in Toronto actually showed the strength of the parliamentary system, as opposed to the presidential system. The ideal of the parliamentary system is that no one gets too much power. The presidential system, in contrast, tends to give more power to the top person. The mayor is not as essential to the daily operation of Toronto as are the mayors of American cities, an American city could be seriously gridlocked if the mayor should become incapacitated. Elections are another issue, they are not on a set schedule in parliamentary democracies but are called when the ruling party feels strong. This means that campaigning is far less important than it the set presidential terms, and election can be called and be over within little more than a month. In the U.S., presidential campaigns go on for well over a year. The possible disadvantage of long campaigning is that it requires a somewhat different skill set than actually governing, and a party that is not good at governing can still get into power by being good at campaigning. In the parliamentary system, it is the party which actually rules and not the prime minister. If a prime minister becomes unpopular, the ruling party can simply replace him or her (Margaret Thatcher and Brian Mulroney, for example) with someone else and continue to govern. The presidential system probably provides a little bit more stability, but a scandal like Watergate would have been much less disruptive in a parliamentary system as the prime minister would have been quickly replaced by someone not related to the scandal.

Our surroundings subtly affect the way we think. I believe that the more tall buildings there are in a society, the more acceptable will be a wide gap between the rich and average people. This is another example of what we saw in "Social Engineering", on this blog.

Be wary of an ideology that is a reaction against something because such reactions tend to go too far in the opposite direction, ultimately resulting in another reaction in the opposite direction. I define a mature ideology as one that has already been through a reaction in opposite directions. An example is mild socialism, it is halfway between extreme capitalism and extreme communism and is a reaction against both.

My cosmological theory can be illustrated as a large ship leaving port. I remember being on deck as we left for North America. I was told that the ship would soon be moving, but it didn't. It was the port and the land that somehow began moving away from us, while the ship remained at rest. If there were scientists that lived on the ship, and never went ashore, they might develop theories on what causes land to suddenly move like that. We see the universe the way we do not only because of what it is, but also because of what we are. If we cannot manage to think "outside ourselves", we will remain like the passengers on the ship who see it as always being at rest, but when we can it causes so many of the unanswered questions about the universe to just fall into place.

The reason that the Korean War of 1950-53 is often referred to in America as "The Forgotten War" is simple demographics. Soldiers returning home from war tend to start families. The generation after the First World War reached military age for the Second World War. The generation after that (the baby boomers) reached military age for the Vietnam War. The Korean War was in between and did not fit this pattern.

In the ways of the world, the Golden Rule is that the one who has the gold is the one who makes the rules. In the ways of God, the Golden Rule is to treat others as you would like them to treat you.

A criminal will see money left unattended, and will take it without thinking of the consequences. A non-criminal will see the money, and will think about taking it, but will not take it because of the potential consequences. A moral person will see the money, will know that he can definitely get away with taking it, but will not take it because it is not the right thing to do.

The worst kind of fame is that in which no one likes you. That means that you must have gained fame by doing something bad. Certainly much better is the fame where everyone likes you. but having everyone like you probably means that it is some type of "eye candy" fame, that does not really make lasting improvements to the world. The best type of fame is actually where most people like you, but there are some that don't. The reason is that this makes it more likely that you have become famous for actually accomplishing something that has made lasting improvements, and the ones who do not like you are the resentful and the disenfranchised of the old order.

With the spring 2014 disappearance of the Malaysian jet over the Indian Ocean, I recalled an article that I had read years ago. When satellite technology became available, ships were quick to take advantage of it for navigation and communication. But planes were much slower to make use of satellites. Even today, planes still use older technology and have not made maximum use of satellites.

There is a machine that does not exist, but would cause massive global upheaval if it were invented. Rice is by far the most important food in the world, no other food even comes close. It is also one of the crops that cannot be picked by machine. If a machine were ever introduced that can pick rice, it would throw many tens of millions of people out of the work that their families have done for generations. The year that the rice-picker was introduced would likely be remembered as a year that saw the beginnings of political revolutions and economic crises.

If the pace of human technical development had been different, electricity would have been widely used as money. I don't mean representative digital money or non-national currencies, such as bitcoin. I mean electricity traded for it's own value, in the same way as gold.

The trouble with population control, because the world does have far too many people, is that people are living longer. If a nation manages to decrease it's population, who will take care of the millions of elderly?

If history is any guide, then slang is the future. The English language used to have "thee", instead of "you", and "thine" instead of "your". How do you suppose that the newer words came into common use? They must have started out as slang. Maybe it was teenagers who wanted to be cool who started saying "you" to one another, and that is why we use that word today. Why do we keep referring to it as "information", when we can see that many just refer to it as "info"? It is the same with "night", we see a growing preference to just spell it as "nite". It is reasonably safe to presume that information and night will eventually end up going the way of thee and thou.

Our view of the era from the mid Nineteenth Century to about 1960 is affected by the technical developments in photography. When you look at old black and white photos, it is easy to forget that colors were just as vivid in 1890 as they were in 1970. Somehow, the black-and-white era seems simpler and less colorful when the fact is that it wasn't.

The minimum wage is a contentious issue in America at the time of this writing. Anyone who works all week should have the right to be able to afford to live. To have it otherwise invites criminal activity instead of honest work. The question is where the extra money is going to come from. Will it be a genuine redistribution of wealth from the top of the wealth pyramid, or will it just result in price increases in the fast-food restaurants and bargain stores that cater to those with lower income so that it doesn't really help anyone?

It takes a lot of wisdom to be able to define the era in which we live. We know that our era is different from past eras, and is sure to be different from future eras. But it is very difficult, while living in an era, to discern exactly how it is different. I say that ours is the era when we first reached the point where we could change the world faster than we can adapt to the changes that we have made in the world.

It seems that ethnic groups which are more urban are not as interested in space science or astronomy. The reason is simple. It is much more difficult to see stars from the city because the bright lights drown out the light from stars. Out in rural areas, it is difficult not to be impressed by the night sky.

Just how visually oriented Americans are can be seen in the environment. Young Americans led the world in the battle against pollution in the 1960s and early 1970s, I was a child when the first Earth Day was celebrated. But when it comes to global warming America is perceived as one of the world's laggards, although this is not entirely fair. The most obvious reason is the visual sense. Pollution is a shock to the senses, while global warming is more nebulous and invisible.

Do you really want to understand an article that you are reading? First, read it over several times. If there is a news article that I really want to grasp, I will save it and come back to it at the end of the reading while opening up another browser window for the rest of the news. After reading it several times, start from the bottom of the article and read it, paragraph by paragraph, to the top.

I have mixed feelings about the decline of penmanship and manual drawing, due to the advent of computers. Neat penmanship teaches one to be a neat and orderly person. I used to draw, and it provides practice in putting everything in just the right place. A precisely-made drawing is actually a form of mathematical equation that describes the view of a scene from a particular perspective. My feeling is that I became a better writer because I spent some time drawing. The thought once occurred to me that drawing is very good manual training for a surgeon.

The buttes and mesas of the U.S southwest can be explained in the same way as the Niagara Escarpment, as we saw in "The Niagara Escarpment And The Meteorite", on the geology blog. The terrain was once at a higher level in the southwest, before the sandstone layers eroded away over millions of years. The entire area is seafloor that was forced upward into dry land as North America, driven westward by the spreading of the Atlantic seafloor due to magma emergence from below along the line of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, collided with the Pacific Tectonic Plate. A body of water could have formed on the raised one-time seafloor. Into that body of water, or it's watershed, a meteorite could have landed. The meteorite could have contained chemical elements which, when absorbed into the bottom of the body of water, made the resulting sandstone much harder and more resistant to wear than ordinary sandstone. The body of water could have ceased to exist as the land was gradually forced further upward by the tectonic collision. The water could have retreated to a number of puddles and small ponds that remained, in which the chemical elements would be very concentrated. The bottoms of those puddles and ponds would end up as especially hard and resistant rock, that would somewhat protect the layers of sandstone below from erosion, and these were the tops of the buttes and mesas that we see today.

There are enough friendly fire incidents in warfare as it is, where a soldier is wounded or killed accidentally by his comrades. Is anyone noticing that military uniforms across the world are becoming very similar? What would it be like if there were to be a war between two countries whose uniforms were very similar?

One reason that a wide wealth gap in a society is dangerous is what we could call the "Robin Hood Complex". Criminal enterprises often stay in business because they have a lot of support from the people, providing services that the government doesn't. This is often the case with drug cartels.

A new technology has really arrived when it can be used without the user understanding much of how it works.

Einstein's 1915 theory of General Relativity was introduced around the time that aircraft could be seen in the sky. The first theory of Special Relativity, from 1905, was influenced by a clock tower near which Einstein worked in Switzerland. I consider it as very possible that the General Theory, concerning gravity as resulting from a path as a straight line but through curved space with the curvature of space being the result of the gravity of a massive object, could have been similarly influenced by the flight of an aircraft through a wind. The airspeed as perceived by the pilot, would not be the same as the ground speed because it would be affected by the wind.

I have been thinking that the so-called "Blizzard of '77" that took place in western New York State and southern Ontario during late January and early February of 1977 deserves some special recognition. What was special about the blizzard in meteorological terms is that is wasn't "new snow" that was providing the massive snowfall. December 1976 was especially cold, and also had an exceptional volume of snow. This was unusual because heavy snow in the area is typically "lake effect". Lake Erie is warmer than the cold air. A lot of water evaporates from Lake Erie, but the cold air cannot hold the water for long. The prevailing wind in the area is from the west, which means that the excess water usually ends up as plenty of snow falling on the Buffalo area. But when it gets cold enough for Lake Erie to freeze over, as the most shallow of the Great Lakes it is the only one that freezes over in winter, the lake effect snow abruptly ceases because water is no longer evaporating off the lake. Any snow falling after that is from the larger-scale weather picture. but by late January of 1977, Lake Erie had not only frozen over but the large-scale weather systems had piled up a lot of snow on the frozen lake. Next came gale-force winds from the southwest that picked up the snow piled on the frozen lake and dumped it on the Buffalo area and southern Ontario in an episode that residents are not likely to forget. There is an article about it on Wikipedia, nearly thirty people died altogether. As far as I know, all of the deaths were in the U.S. and none in Canada. The odds of these factors: Lake Erie freezing so early, yet covered with deep snow, and then the gale force winds that picked up the snow and caused it to fall a second time, are extremely unusual. The long-term effects of the blizzard are another story. When the tremendous volume of snow melted, it accelerated the emergence of buried industrial chemicals over which houses had been built in Niagara Falls, NY. This was due in part to construction of  a downslope expressway which hindered runoff of the meltwater. The following year, the story of the infamous Love Canal would make Niagara Falls famous for something other than the falls.

The fundamental dilemma of our times is that the very nature of technical progress means putting people out of work. Progress is finding a way to do a task with three people that used to require six people. But then, without the consumer spending of the unemployed three, it becomes difficult to make a profit with the new method. We try to create other jobs for the unemployed three, but the reason that so many jobs disappear by the recessions that are periodically brought along by lack of consumer spending is that they were "make work" jobs that were not really necessary to begin with. This is another way that we have reached the point where we can change the world faster than we can adapt to the changes that we have made in the world. We have yet to adapt to the fact that we can now make what we need with fewer workers than we have.

I consider it very important for democracy in a country that it have more than one top university. It is not good for free and independent thought in a nation to have all of it's scholars educated in the same place. I have long thought that England was an early democracy because it had two university centers, Oxford and Cambridge, and there was some rivalry between the two. America mirrored this with Harvard and Yale.

Do you want an illustration of how small atoms and molecules are? There is energy in the molecular bonds, which combine atoms together. We get energy from food and fuel by breaking these bonds and releasing their energy. This should mean that there are fewer calories in chocolate if it is ground up than if it were a solid whole. Yet there is no noticable difference in calories between the two. This is because the number of grains in the ground chocolate is so infinitesimal in comparison with the number of molecules in the chocolate.

The notes from a musical instrument, such as a violin or viola, are subtly affected by exactly how the instrument is constructed, even the species of wood and it's age. Somewhere out there is a way to determine exactly what a person looks like, including even how tall they are and how much they weigh and the way that they walk, from the information contained in their voice.

One thing that is important to remember about history is that there is often a positive side to destruction. This is because destruction provides something that cannot usually be obtained any other way. That is the chance to start over and do things better. If the kingdoms that were around at the beginnings of civilization were still the nations of the world today, we would have made nowhere near the technical progress that we have. This is related to what we saw in "The Property Order", on the world and economics blog. The great advantage of settling a new place is that it provides a chance to start the property order over.

The thing that the Crusades of the Middle Ages ultimately accomplished was to bring about the Ottoman Empire. This was one of the most important empires in history, it's divisions following it's end after the First World War very much affect our daily news today. The Crusaders set out to liberate what is now Israel from Moslem control, although there were certainly many ulterior motives such as the pope trying to divert Christians from warring with each other and many landless young men in Europe with few other prospects. But the Crusaders also attacked Byzantine cities in Asia Minor. It probably is no coincidence that the Crusades began within a few decades of the great schism of the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches in 1054. The Ottomans eventually emerged and took advantage of the instability left behind by the Crusaders.

We still do not grasp very well how money flows through the economy in a cycle. Business owners, driven by the profit motive, naturally seek to sell their goods and services for as high a price as the market will bear. They also try to maximize profit by keeping overhead costs, primarily wages paid to workers, as low as possible. But the risk in this is that not enough money will get paid out in wages to be able to buy all of the goods and services that are being produced. Business owners would usually prefer to cut back on production than to lower prices. But this means that workers would have even less money to purchase the goods and services, resulting in a further cutback in production. Consumers cut back on spending when they read that a recession is brewing, when the way to stem the recession would be to spend more, except that any such extra spending would have to be with money that they do not have, The result is a recession or, in more extreme cases, a full-scale crash.

8

When we look at the history of ages past, we often question why they couldn't have done one thing or another differently, People in the future will likewise ask of us why we didn't just get all of our energy from the sun.

One thing that has never made sense to me concerns dogs. Nations and other organizations have used a multitude of animals as their symbols. As far as I know, no nation has ever chosen a dog as it's symbol. Such symbolism is full of predators such as lions, tigers and, eagles but the only major honor that dogs seem to have been given is that Sirius, the brightest star in the sky in the constellation of a dog known as Canis Major, is referred to as the "Dog Star". An intelligent, loyal and, capable creature emerges from the wild and becomes a close companion of human beings. But yet referring to someone as a "lion", a "tiger" or, an "eagle", vicious predators would would have us join them for lunch (literally) if they had the chance, is a compliment, while referring to someone as a "dog" is an insult. This is as good of an example as I can think of to illustrate all that is wrong with our value systems.

In looking around on Google Street View, one thing has become apparent. Cities, or areas of cities, that have back alleys are also likely to have higher crime rates. Back alleys tend to be poorly lit at night, and give criminals a ready route to and from crime scenes, as well as a place to congregate and to escape law enforcement.

Traffic lights not only control traffic, but also serve as navigational reference points in cities; "Go three lights that way, turn left, go two lights, and there it is". Why don't cities put numbers on the traffic lights, it would make navigation much easier?

When you see a restaurant with a hand-written menu outside, it does not mean that the restaurant is too poor to afford properly printed and illustrated menus. What it probably means is that the menu actually changes every day because food is always purchased fresh from the market, and the menu depends on what fresh food is available and in season.

Why do we still use months? A month was originally based on a cycle of the moon, which is 29 days. The purpose of months was agricultural, so farmers would know when to plant which crops. Weeks and hours were not as important as months when most people worked in agriculture. It did not matter which day of the week or which hour of the day the crops were planted, only which time of year. The week was primarily of religious significance, to observe the Sabbath Day. But we have long since moved into the industrial and post-industrial era. Today, life revolves around the week and the time of day. The way most people go about their day depends on the day of the week, not on the month of the year. Even the few percent of the population that do work in agriculture do not depend on the moon to tell them when to plant crops. Why don't we name the weeks of the year, and let the months fade into history? It is true that the number of weeks does not fit evenly into the number of days in a year, but the beginning of a new year does not have to coincide perfectly with the weekly cycle. This would not interfere with religious holidays based on months or lunar cycles.

What started out as mobile phones have become mobile wallets and communications systems. How many readers remember the first mobile phones about thirty years ago? They looked like bricks. The way I see it, the next logical step is for phones to be a complete mobile computer system. The only practical way to unite phones and computers is the use of the projection technique that was described in the posting "Cell Phone Projection", on the progress blog, www.markmeekprogress.blogspot.com .

I think that the basics for the best economic system is for the government to pay down debt, and hopefully build a surplus, when times are good, and to save infrastructure projects for when a downturn comes. Hiring and spending for those projects will put money back into the economy to increase demand for consumer goods. The income from resources should go to the good of the society, and not into private hands, even though private companies may be licensed to develop those resources. The ironic thing about the U.S. economy at the time of this writing is that there is so much unemployment, yet there is so much work that needs to be done. There is extremely long wait times for social security and disability claims to be processed, and millions of older homes in the northeast and mid-west have reached the end of their useful lives and need to be replaced. This would keep millions of people working for decades. But it is not something that private enterprise will undertake on it's own, government intervention in the economy is required.

The price of land is roughly proportional to the area of structural floor space, within a building or home, relative to a given area of land, counting road surface as floor space.

Patriotism is sometimes inverted in a free society. A U.S. athlete declined to stand for the playing of the national anthem because of his religious beliefs. Some saw it as unpatriotic. But the price of living in a free society is to acknowledge that others are also free and, unless something is an interference to others or against the established law, they have the right not to see things as we do. This is sometimes difficult to do. When it comes to law, remember that the difference between a dictatorship and a free society is that the laws in the free society are precise and well-defined, while the laws in a dictatorship tend to be subjective and open to interpretation. What it all comes down to is that the right of an athlete not to stand for the national anthem due to religious convictions, without being banned from the team or thrown in jail, shows that he does live in a free society.

Rock music's place in history is as the anthem of the Baby Boomers. This refers to the demographic bulge in the population from babies being born after millions of soldiers returned from the Second World War and started families. In the U.S., the Baby Boom is defined as those who were born between 1945 and 1964. The truly amazing thing about rock music is that with the sheer volume of songs, over 200 per year for about fifty years, practically every song had a different name. This is what was truly creative about this music. The vast majority of songs were about some aspect of romance, but they managed to find a different name for every song.

That special period of time, known as The Sixties, was entirely the product of demographics and did not conform exactly to the calendar decade. The Baby Boom began with babies being born when soldiers returned home from the Second World War when the war ended in 1945. The first of these children reached majority age in 1964 and that is when the Sixties, with ti's emphasis on youth culture, really began. The parents of the Baby Boomers remembered the Great Depression of the 1930s, and this drove them to place high value on material goods. But the Boomers themselves didn't and rebelled against the crass materialism of society with drugs, hedonism and, spirituality. The technological progress of the Sixties, from the space program to color television to more efficient cars, was largely the product of education through the G.I. Bill, which sent returning soldiers to college. "The Sixties" concluded in 1972, which is when the first of the Baby Boomers would be turning 27 and became more concerned with raising families of their own. A time such as the Sixties had to have something to rebel against, America's involvement in the Vietnam War extended for the same period of time as the "real Sixties" from 1964-72.

If people are given high principles and the ability to think for themselves that is too much for them to handle, but they are constitutionally blocked from installing a dictator or other powerful leader, they will find a way to make the crowd into the dictator. This applied to groups of people, as well as to entire nations.

The economic spectrum has capitalism at one end, communism at the other end, and various shades of socialism in between. Capitalist theory is that businesses should be allowed to fail when there is no longer sufficient market demand to support them. But should an entire city, such as Detroit, be allowed to fail due to market forces? I define the answer to this question as the boundary between capitalism and socialism. A capitalist would allow the city to fail, while even the mildest of socialists would not. Nationalization seems to me to be the boundary between socialism and communism. When a nation would nationalize, meaning to take over and put under the control of the government, the assets of private business, it has crossed the line into communism. The only exception might be temporarily during large-scale wars, or other national emergencies.

In Scotland's independence referendum of 2014, it seems that quite a few voters told pollsters that they were going to vote for independence, to send a strong message to London, but then actually voted against it. As the day of the referendum neared, the union side (against independence) moved ahead in the polls. I got the feeling that some voters who were going to vote against independence, seeing that the independence side was going to lose, turned and voted for it, not because they wanted independence but just so that it wouldn't lose by a wide margin. My belief is that the turning point in the campaign came when the First Minister of Scotland and leader of the independence campaign, Alex Salmond, became irritated with BP (British Petroleum) and threatened to nationalize it's assets in Scotland upon independence. That was a crucial mistake, the last word that global business wants to hear is "nationalize".

When a country undergoes a revolution, whether political or in thought, one thing that it sometimes does is to change it's capital city. The classic example is the movement of the capital from Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) to Moscow. This was followed by the movement of the Turkish capital to Ankara by Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey, during the great makeover that he achieved in the country. This movement tends to be from a capital on the coast to a new capital in the interior of the country, signalling that the country is now looking inward. Brazil built an entirely new city in the vast interior of the country, Brazilia, as it's capital. This showed a new focus on it's own interior instead of looking outward.

One thing that I never read about the end of the Cold War is the change of the city's name from Leningrad back to the original name of St. Petersburg (St. is an abbreviation for saint), instead of the former name of Petrograd. I think that this shows a change in attitude toward religion.

One name that is seen everywhere in northeastern North America is "Hudson", but few people seem to know what it means. Henry Hudson was an English explorer who sailed up the river which now bears his name as far as what is now Albany, while sailing for the Netherlands. Prior to this, he had spent quite a bit of time exploring by ship in the Russian Arctic. Finally, sailing for England, he searched for a sea passage through to the orient. What he actually found was not a passage, but a vast bay in northern Canada. The ship was frozen in for the winter and, when Hudson insisted against the wishes of his crew on proceeding further to search for the passage when spring came, his crew mutinied and put him and his few supporters in a small boat with some supplies and set them adrift. Not a trace has ever been found of what became of Hudson, but the bay that he was in also bears his name.

Remember that the way to discovery often consists not in answering questions that no one else can answer, but in asking questions that no one else has asked. Remember also that if a nation wants it's people to be innovative, it cannot enforce too much conformity. When people have too much of a follow-the-group attitude and a great amount of respect for the way that things have always been done, they are less likely to come up with better ways of doing things.

India is ideally suited to be a democracy simply because it has just so many religions and different people and languages in different regions that it is very accustomed to accommodating all of these differences.

The amazing thing about chapter 13 in the Book of Isaiah is that it foretells the destruction of Babylon, which oppressed the Israelites and destroyed their temple, before taking them into exile. The thing that is so amazing is that this was written before Babylon was even a great power. At the time of Isaiah, it was Assyria that was the ruling power in the Middle East and Babylon was merely a province under Assyrian rule. Long before, Babylon had been a great nation and had developed what is probably the world's first extensive code of law, under the famed king Hammurabi. But, sure enough, migrants known as Chaldeans began settling in Babylon. They revitalized Babylon and made it strong again. Finally, under a leader named Nabopolassar, they rose up against their Assyrian masters. A nation to the northeast, the Medes, noticed what was happening and joined the battle against Assyria. There was not much sympathy for the cruel and oppressive Assyrians. Joy swept the Middle East as the capital city of the Assyrians, Nineveh, fell to it's enemies. Egypt was a former enemy of the Assyrians until it's leaders noticed the rise of Babylon. It established a base to try to save Assyria, to keep it as a counterbalance against Babylon, but Assyria was doomed. However, after Babylon took the place of Assyria as the master of the Middle East, it proved to be just about as oppressive as the Assyrians before them. When the Jews rebelled against Babylonian rule, they destroyed Jerusalem and the Jews's Temple and took most of the population captive to Babylon. The Medes, who had shared the victory over Assyria, had a vassal nation known as the Persians. But the Persians rebelled and overthrew their rulers, so that the Medes and Persians were still together but now the Persians ruled. Conflict began between Persia and Babylon. While a drunken party was going on in the glorious palace within the walls of the city of Babylon, Persian military engineers hastily built a dam across the Euphrates River and the Persian Army got into the city under the wall along the riverbed. Resistance seems to have collapsed once the Persians got inside the city, possibly the people welcomed them as liberators. The Jewish captives in Babylon were released by the Persians and allowed to rebuild the Temple and city of Jerusalem. If a skeptic may say that this prophecy was added later, then why did the Israelites of the time treat these writings like they were more valuable than gold?

When I landed in the U.S. in the autumn of 1968 one thing that I quickly picked up on was science, in particular the exploration of space because the Apollo Space program was going on. There seemed to be a lot of confidence that science and technology could ultimately solve just about everything. I realized later that this emphasis on future science and technology was the result of the 1964 World's Fair, that had been held in New York City. This fair was certainly an aspect of what I term "The Sputnik Vector", as described in the posting by that name on the world and economics blog: www.markmeekeconomics.blogspot.com . Following is the first children's book that I ever read on my own, outside of school. This began the series of events that led to this blog:
https://www.google.com/search?q=space+by+marian+tellander&biw=986&bih=635&tbm=isch&imgil=Oa0uZ-DsqHVeUM%253A%253Bp2ydooNyjyg3lM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.vintagechildrensbooks.com%25252Findex.php%25253Fmain_page%2525253Dproduct_info%25252526products_id%2525253D9722&source=iu&pf=m&fir=Oa0uZ-DsqHVeUM%253A%252Cp2ydooNyjyg3lM%252C_&usg=__mg91CUxC5hQCtRxQTz0EIQYcZB8%3D&ved=0CEoQyjc&ei=PZ9eVPeWM-bfsASRjoDgDw#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=Oa0uZ-DsqHVeUM%253A%3Bp2ydooNyjyg3lM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.vintagechildrensbooks.com%252Fimages%252Fspacetellanderbcfol10H.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.vintagechildrensbooks.com%252Findex.php%253Fmain_page%253Dproduct_info%2526products_id%253D9722%3B489%3B606

America's rate of high school graduation needs improvement, and fewer than half of the students who start college end up getting any kind of degree. A major part of the problem is how many hours students have to work while going to school, particularly to pay for a car. It is true that working teaches responsibility and other vital skills, but it no doubt cuts heavily into studies.

Before the Industrial Revolution, technology was relatively simple but artists had achieved great complexity in painting, sculpture, theatrics and.music. It is through this art that humans mastered complexity, and the explosion of technology after the Industrial Revolution is largely the result of transferring that complexity into technology. My complexity theory holds that things like art and sports, that are not "essential", serve to transmit the patterns of the things that are essential.

One thing that does mot seem to be mentioned as a virtue in ancient times is neatness. It occurred to me that nowhere in the Bible is it praised to be neat, at least as far as I can see. My conclusion is this is due to complexity, the more complex life becomes the more likely is neatness to be considered as a virtue. We can tell a lot about what life was like in ancient times not just by what is in books like the Bible, but also what isn't in them. I also noticed that there is not a single mathematical calculation in the Bible, of any complexity, and this led me to "The Zero Hypothesis", on the progress blog.

The political boundaries of Europe revolve around language and religion. There were many small German-speaking duchies and principalities across central Europe that were long precluded from uniting because they were divided between Protestant and Catholic following the Reformation. When religion became less important, in the late Nineteenth Century, there was conflict between the two most powerful German-speaking states over which would lead the confederation. The one that proved to be the most powerful was Prussia, and the second-most powerful remains today outside the confederation as Austria. England and Scotland were off-and-on rivals through the Middle Ages and their ultimate unity in 1707 was certainly based on religion after they had landed on the same side of the Reformation. Ireland was part of the British union, but there has always been more distance between Ireland and England than there has between Scotland and England. This can be easily explained by Ireland's Catholicism. Had Ireland gone to the Protestant side after the Reformation, it would almost certainly have a relationship to Britain that is similar to that of Scotland, complaining about London and seeking more autonomy but ultimately voting to stay. The northern part of Belgium, that speaks Dutch, is known as Flanders. It split from the Netherlands over religion after the Reformation, because it's people wanted to stay Catholic. Today, Belgium is riven by language as many in Flanders now do not see a need for the union with the French-speaking part of the country. I was looking around the magnificent medieval city of Ghent on Google Street View and was surprised to see hardly anything written in French, it was all in Dutch. Spain has a separatist situation similar to that of Belgium in Catalonia, the region around Barcelona. Catalonia shared Catholicism with the rest of Spain, but had it's own language. When religion became less imortant, it made the language difference proportionally more important. The Slavic languages of eastern Europe are fairly similar to one another but the region was historically divided along religious lines, between Catholic and Orthodox, following the East-West Schism of  the year 1054. This accounts for the sometime divisions between Russia and Poland, between Serbia and Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia and, between the eastern and western parts of Ukraine. The introduction if Islam to the region by the Ottoman Empire further added to the divisions that the Balkans are known for. Geography is also a factor, Switzerland was divided both by language and religion. It split between Protestant and Catholic and speaks three different languages, Swiss German, French and, Italian. But it is united by being separated from surrounding Europe by it's mountains. Italy has been many small states over the centuries, separated from one another by mountains and distance, but they had both language and religion in common and when modern communications and transportation came along, unity became inevitable. The Norwegian, Swedish and, Danish languages are similar enough to usually be mutually intelligible. If the three had not been separated from one another by water and mountains, I am sure that it would never have developed into separate languages and would likely be one country today.

9

To understand the geographical lines across the world, remember that those running east-west tend to be natural while those running north-south tend to be artificial. East-west, or latitudinal, lines involve the position of the sun in the sky. The Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are 23 1/2 degrees north and south of the equator and represent the furthest extent that the sun is directly overhead during the course of the year. The sun is directly overhead at the one in each of the northern and southern hemispheres on the first day of summer and overhead at the tropic in the opposite hemisphere on the first day of winter. The Arctic and Antarctic Circles are the latitudinal lines above which the sun does not always rise and set once every 24 hours, summer brings much longer days and winter much longer nights above the Arctic Circle. North-south, or longitudinal, lines are artificial and involve the measurement of time. Longitude is measured from the Prime Meridian, which extends through the Greenwich Observatory In London and is considered as zero degrees. Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT, was useful for measuring geographical longitude because a clock could be carried on ship and set to GMT, while a measurement of local solar time would reveal the longitude of the ship. Latitude was much easier to measure because it was equal to the angular altitude of the North Star over a flat horizon. On the opposite side of the globe from the Prime Meridian is the International Date Line. This is at 180 degrees longitude, except that it curves in order to avoid any land so that no one will have to wake up where it is one day and go to work or school where it is already the next day.

Daylight Savings Time may have made sense at one time, but that time has long since passed. It was intended to save electricity by shortening the time in which it was necessary to have electric lights on. Nowadays, there are so many electric appliances that people are going to use when they awaken regardless of whether or not it is dark outside. These appliances include stoves, microwaves, televisions and, hair dryers. The amount of electricity used by light bulbs is minimal by comparison, especially with the phasing out of incandescent bulbs. Daylight Savings Time is a relic from before all of these electric appliances.

Was communism really a failure, or was it just before it's time? Suppose we were to reach a point in technology where we had everything that we needed, and machines were doing virtually of the work that had to be done. How could capitalism operate, since there was no more that was needed and no work that was necessary? Such progress would be impossible under capitalism because people would not be paid if they were not working, and there would be no work necessary to do. The only practical system would be communism. It could be that capitalism is a more primitive system, intended for when there was still a long way to go before all work was done for us and the primary occupation would be having fun, and as we progressed to that state we would transition into socialism and then essentially work-free communism. This was the philosophy of the Industrial Revolution, and the reason that there is so much unemployment now is that we actually are making the progress to move to that condition but are still stuck in a more primitive mindset. Capitalism is for when there is a lot of work to do, relative to the available workforce, and communism is for when there is no work to do. We must transition through intermediate socialism from one to the other as we make technical progress toward eliminating work.

An ideal model of capitalism is the common vending machine. It is making progress to design a machine which can do the job of a merchant or shopkeeper. Their labor (labour) is no longer necessary because the machine can do the work. This would seem to be progress, letting machines do the work for us. But, under the ideology of capitalism, if one does not work then one does not get paid. What is the merchant or shopkeeper who was replaced by the vending machine to do now? Communism imagines that the pieces of the economy are connected more than they are, while capitalism imagines that they are connected less than they are. If the former merchant or shopkeeper is not earning any money now, he will not be able to buy any of the goods which are offered in the vending machine. If there are many others who were also put out of work by progress, it could slow sales enough to get a recessionary spiral started and possibly bring the whole system crashing down. The former shopkeeper will have to find something else to do, but if the progress that is being made does not produce enough jobs to offset the ones it has eliminated then he will end up either unemployed, and not doing the spending that is necessary keep the economy going or, engaged in some type of "make work" job that is not really necessary to the economy and will likely be eliminated in the next recession anyway. The internet is like a global vending machine putting "brick and mortar" stores out of business. Communism destroys incentive when there is still work to be done and progress to be made, but capitalism turns the unemployment when progress is made into a negative when, in a better system, it would be a positive because it means that we can now make what we need with fewer workers than we have. We see communism manifested today in the free apps and shareware online, but it still needs to be inter-weaved with capitalism like the warp and woof of a cloth.

We easily forget that capitalism, if allowed to run wild, will ultimately put itself out of business and end in an extreme economic dictatorship. One enterprise will gain a monopoly in each industry and use it's resulting power to prevent any competition from arising. But such a system would be unsustainable unless workers were paid enough to buy the products that were being produced. This is what anti-trust laws were created for, to save democracy from becoming meaningless due to concentration of economic power.

When studying ancient times, as well as the Bible, we should have some sense of time perspective. The pyramids of Giza, and the Sphinx, were completed before 2500 BC. This means that the pyramids were more than a thousand years old when the story of Moses and the Exodus took place. The pyramids are much further removed from the time of Jesus as the time of Jesus is from the present time. The pyramids are about as distant in time from Alexander as Alexander is from us. There is about as much time between Abraham and St. Paul as there is between St. Paul and us.

Nothing makes ancient times seem as close by as the former Shah of Iran, who was overthrown in 1979. The Peacock Throne was the same position occupied by the Persians who conquered Babylon and allowed the captive Israelites to return home and rebuild the temple.

The archaeology of the future is likely to involve space junk. Ancient people did not stop to think that their refuse would be important in the distant future. Objects in space would survive any kind of cataclysm on earth. The third state rocket of the Apollo lunar orbit mission of 1968, for example, was discarded when it's fuel ran out and remains in orbit around the sun. The equipment left on the lunar surface can be photographed by spacecraft in orbit around the moon. With no erosion on the moon, the footprints of the astronauts could remain for thousands of years. Old satellites will certainly remain in earth orbit, since the geostationary orbit where a satellite will orbit at the same speed as the earth rotates is a very high 34,800 km or 22,300 miles. Other booster stages which were discarded by lunar missions remain at the bottom of the ocean.

London has the so-called "Green Belt" around it. Here is a map link with satellite imagery: www.maps.google.com . This means that the city limits are strictly set and it is not allowed to expand past those limits. I value England's green countryside as much as anyone, but what this does is to create a pressure cooker of prices. The cities with the highest prices tend to be the ones where there is not much room to expand. The reason that things tend to be more expensive in cities is that land is more expensive, and this price of land finds it's way into everything else. Remember that in "The Three Fundamental Costs", on the world and economics blog, the price of land is the first of the three. London must make do with a fixed amount of land, but this results in the soaring of prices as the economy grows. Many cities are afflicted by the wealthy driving up property values so that the less-wealthy nearby find their rents continuously raising, but London is particularly notorious. I am not suggesting Phoenix-style sprawl, but maybe London could be allowed to expand as far as the M-25. While on the topic of Britain, my native Gloucestershire was really in the news of 2013, although not for anything good. The building in the west end of Cheltenham, which looks like a doughnut or flying saucer at the intersection of the A40 and 4013 and which Google Street View does not permit a close look at is Britain's GCHQ, which works with America's security agency to spy on everybody.

The World Wars are fading into history, 2014 will be the centennial of the beginning of the First World War. In fact, maybe the World Wars are fading from memory too quickly. One thing that held the world back from a third world war is certainly the memories of the destruction of the first two. There is a certain amount of peril in going into an era in which no one remembers the world wars.

I wonder if civilization is really spiritual in nature. In terms of the spirit, we are beings that were created to live in Heaven but who find ourselves on this earth. We, unlike any animal in the world, may be instinctively searching for a way to regain our original Eden. Since we cannot physically walk into Heaven, we search in the ways that we can best replicate our intended home by such routes as technology and political systems.

There have been volumes written about conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. I really do not see much in the theories. The question that arises is about later assassination attempts. The assassination of Kennedy was an incredible shock. The president was riding through Dallas in an open limousine close to crowds of people, with no apparent thought of danger. There were two later assassination attempts on Gerald Ford, and one on Ronald Reagan, but neither produced much in the way of conspiracy theories. My conclusion is that it was the sheer shock of the Kennedy assassination which led to the theories, a U.S. president had not been assassinated since 1901. The Kennedy assassination had a drastic effect on society, I see it as the beginning of the turbulence of the 1960s. Within three years Charles Whitman, who looked like the very last person to do such a thing, would initiate the modern era of gun massacres at the University of Texas.

While I am unconvinced by any of the Kennedy assassination theories, I do have one about modern gun massacres in general. We know that Jesus gave the return of the Jews to Jerusalem as the beginning of the countdown to his return after the Tribulation to set up his Kingdom on earth. The return of Jesus would occur within one generation of the Jews' return to Jerusalem, which was accomplished in the Six-Day War of 1967. The Second Book of Timothy, chapter three, prophecies about how generally nasty people will be in the Last Days before Jesus' return. Some versions of the Bible translate that some people will suffer from "uncontrollable fits of rage" in the last days of the world. There were no guns in biblical times, and so no terminology for a massacre. What if this prophecy refers to such massacres? Charles Whitman got the modern era of senseless gun massacres started in 1966, less than a year before the Jews' return to Jerusalem. Mindless gun massacres are not limited to America, but have gone global and in recent decades have taken place in Canada, Britain, Australia, Germany and, Norway.

I am no Republican or conservative, at least not when it comes to economics. But one character who has been treated unfairly by history is Richard Nixon. He used his authority as president to cover up a bungled burglary by his campaign staff and hindered prosecution of it and ultimately had to resign as a result. But before that, he was a capable president who accomplished a lot. He added to social security and negotiated and end to the Vietnam War, or at least America's role in it. The wealth distribution in America was actually the most balanced that it has ever been during his tenure. Nixon made landmark visits in 1972 to China, and then to Russia. These visits did a lot to make the world that we have today. It took political courage to take the U.S. dollar off the gold standard because the possible results were unpredictable and the resulting inflation had the potential to ruin a presidency. One thing that he was a master at is knowing how to handle Communists. Prior to becoming president, those listening to Nixon's 1960 debate with John F. Kennedy on the radio thought that Nixon had won, but he neglected to shave and those watching on television thought Kennedy had won.

There is an old saying that "There is no honor (honour) among thieves", that generally appears to be true. But it is not always the case. When society reaches a point in the wealth distribution structure where life becomes very difficult for many, there arises what I will call "The Robin Hood Syndrome". The corrupt and unfair society becomes the enemy and those who would otherwise be considered as thieves become crusaders instead. The Robin Hood Syndrome will witness those who would otherwise be considered as criminals being made into folk heroes who have found a way to "beat the system", or at least defy it for a while, which is a truly dangerous point. This can be seen in the legendary bank robbers of the 1930s in America. With the 2013 death of one of Britain's train robbers, I was struck how when one of them was caught and jailed the others helped him to break out and saved his cut of the loot for him. This is a vestige of a Robin Hood Syndrome from pre-socialist days.

I have always read about the world and given some attention to news. But I considered a lot of what I read about as beyond comprehension as if some people in distant lands were so completely different from us that they could not really be understood. It was my later becoming a Christian that made so much fall into place. I suddenly realized things that had nothing to do with my new faith, but did have to do with religion. People are designed to believe in something, if you want to understand this world then you must understand that. If they do not have a relationship with God, then they will simply put something else in His place. I realized that Nazis and Communists were not really different from us at all. They had taken people who, for the most part, no longer believed in God and did a magnificent job of giving them something else to believe in. Some people around me had strong patriotism to their country or devotion to their political ideology. I saw that, lacking a true relationship with God, this became their "religion". Finally I had read about Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who had remained in the Philippine jungle for 29 years after the end of the war rather than surrender and died in January 2014. There are actually a number of such cases, but his name is the best-known. He actually wasn't much different from us at all, it's just that his emperor was the focus of his religion and his military orders in service of the emperor were his sacred scriptures. He had a lot in common with a monk. Like so much else, it all came down to religion.

One of the briefest, but most important, postings about economics is "The False Package" on this blog . The trouble with politics is that it has mixed economics with social values and religion. One party is conservative in both economics and social values, and the other is liberal in both economics and social values. What if someone (like me) is liberal in economics but conservative in social values? Someone might support the conservative party in their country for their social values, but that also means voting for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. Someone might support the liberal party for their sound and fair economics, but that means also voting for social values that they do not agree with. There is too much packaging, and is comes down to religion. It used to be that social values were the domain of religious leaders and politicians took care of things like economics. Now that we are secular, the social values have been mixed in with economics.

It still does not make sense. We will put our lives in the hands of a doctor or airline pilot, we will put our future in the hands of a lawyer, we will put our money in the hands of a bank manager, all without knowing anything about their personal lives. But let an elected official, or one running for office, do anything out of line and we come down on them like a ton of bricks. It is true that a crooked politician has opportunity to do harm, but that is also true of a lot of people who do not get scrutinized. The reason comes down to religion. We used to be religious, and be guided by religious leaders who had to be worthy. Now we are secular, but the patterns of old remain. The difference is that politicians have become the new "religious leaders" just as many people treat their country or their ideology as if it was a religion because we are designed to believe in something, and if we don't believe in God then it will be something else.

Democracy is not the answer, it is only a step toward the answer. Democracy has solved a lot of problems, but has created other ones to take their place, even though the new problems are usually preferable to the old ones. Democracy, along with technology and science, has led to increased wealth and has gone along way to eliminating natural calamities like famine. But while democracy has helped to do away with natural calamities, it has replaced them with artificial calamities. The economic crashes of 1929, 1987 and, 2008 did not have to happen and there was no natural or physical reason for them to happen, these were purely artificial crises brought about because the economics was not working. Democracy has facilitated a vast amount of progress against disease, polio used to be a dreaded crippler and killer. But while life expectancy has increased, there has also been a great increase in modern diseases of civilization like hypertension, diabetes, obesity and, cancer. We have made tremendous progress in technology to make life easier, but this same technology has brought the nuclear bombs that could bring it all to a close. The basis of democracy is political change by "the ballot instead of the bullet", but while political violence has been nearly eliminated in western democracies it has been replaced by senseless gun massacres. Democracy is only a step in the right direction in which problems are not eliminated, but are merely preferable to the ones which were before.

The euro is a radical idea, taking a group of nations and printing a common currency. We should not expect that everything will go smoothly without any unexpected difficulties. The Mediterranean countries that are struggling economically are limited in what their governments can do to stimulate the economy because they have given up their ability to print money as they see fit. The result is that anything like the quantitative easing being done in the U.S., putting money into the economy to keep interest rates low by buying bonds, is not possible. The European Central Bank could print more euros for the Mediterranean economies, but the truth is that there are considerable differences in the economies of European countries and that would cause inflation in Germany and the rest of northern Europe that uses the euro. My idea is to take a temporary step back from the economic union and split the euro into two, a "northern euro" and a "southern euro". This would enable the struggling countries to print more euros to stimulate the economy. It would also cause the southern euro to drop in value against the northern euro. At some future date, when this economic crisis has been resolved, southern euros would be exchanged for standard euros at the market rate of exchange at the time, and the euro would merge back into one.

What gun advocates in America should do is watch a reenactment of the Revolutionary War. When Americans were given the right to own guns, bullets as we know them today were far in the future. The guns of the time were essentially muskets. After a bullet was fired, powder had to be poured into the firing chamber and then the projectile rammed down the barrel of the gun. This meant that, after a bullet was fired, it would be at least a minute or so before another one could be fired. A gun massacre, such as those we see today with rapid-fire assault rifles, would be utterly impossible. Even after bullets were developed guns could still only fire one shot at a time, machine guns were heavy and cumbersome and initially required a two-man crew. This is why bayonets were mounted on guns of the time, for close combat when there was no time to reload. The intention was never that anyone who had a grudge against anyone in particular, or the world in general, could just go out and buy a gun that was capable of a massacre.

One of the drawbacks of capitalism is the shortage of low-cost housing. Developers would much prefer to deal with commercial buildings or higher-end housing. I pointed out in the book "The Patterns Of New Ideas" how there is so often a glut of office space available, but a shortage of affordable housing. When is the last time that you read of a private developer taking the initiative and building inexpensive housing. Can you imagine Donald Trump deciding to build a housing project? Affordable new housing is usually dependent on the government taking the initiative and contracting with private developers. Look at the predicament that America got itself into by letting capitalism run wild in the 00 decade. Vast numbers of new, and pricy, homes were built in the southwest and Florida which, it turns out, people could not afford. This severely dropped the property values of those who lived nearby. Meanwhile the infrastructure in the older parts of the country, including the electrical grid, is very much in need of replacement or upgrading (Remember the blackout of 2003)? There are many millions of homes approaching the end of their useful lives which could have been replaced. Just think what might have been if the government had contracted with developers to get done what was needed, instead of just trusting the free market to sort everything out. The 1929 economic crash was caused by factories producing such a volume of manufactured goods, which people were not earning enough to afford. The 2008 crash was a mirror image of it except that it was caused by the volume of new homes that people were not earning enough to afford.

How many times have you pictured a place that you have never seen, only to find that it is completely different when you do see it? When I was a young child and began to listen to songs on the radio, a song called "Pleasant Valley Sunday" was often playing. The radio announcer said that it was about an actual place. I recently remembered that I had pictured it as a semi-rural community in a valley with typical suburban homes. The song is actually about Pleasant Valley Way in West Orange, New Jersey. On Google Street View, I see that it is nothing at all like I pictured it. The suburban style houses are about right, but it is much more of a main road than I had thought, it isn't in any noticeable valley and, far from being semi-rural, it is just outside the New York metropolitan area.

In New York State, there has been a lot in the news recently about Florida being about to surpass New York in population. New York State, "The Empire State", was once the most populous U.S. state. It was surpassed by California in 1964, according to sources online. I remember when Texas surpassed New York's population in the 1990s. When Florida's population surpasses it, New York State will be fourth in population. It is not that New York State is actually losing population, but that sunnier states are growing faster. In the city of Buffalo, New York, there are lamentations about how much of the population that the city is actually losing, especially to places like Florida. But there is one thing that I have not seen in the news. In an earlier of these "Thoughts And Observations", I linked to the www.wikipedia.org article on "Willis Carrier" and pointed out that Buffalo did not get the credit it deserved for the invention of the humble but world-changing air conditioner that made widespread settlement of hot climates practical. Incredibly, it is this invention that is behind the draining of Buffalo's population and the stagnation of that of New York State. Without air conditioning, it is highly unlikely that the populations of Texas and Florida would ever exceed that of New York State. We have heard about countries inventing weapons, only to have them better used by their enemies, but I have never seen this happening on such a scale with a peaceful invention.

Learn how to read people. I read once about a prosecutor that, upon finding out that all of the jurors were non-smokers, told them that the defendant was a heavy smoker even though that had nothing to do with the crime for which he was on trial. The prosecutor was just trying to start the trial by getting the jurors to dislike the defendant. Had I been on that jury, I would have taken this move to be a sign of weakness. If the prosecution really had a strong case against the defendant, there would have been no need to resort to a tactic like this.

We refer to our economy as a market economy. The trouble is that it really isn't a true market economy. A market economy is based on the traditional marketplaces in towns and villages, where goods and produce were bought and sold. But markets rarely used fixed prices. The price of goods was usually arrived at by haggling. This fulfilled the basic law of supply and demand, because sometimes goods and produce were more plentiful and at other times more scarce. But in a large-scale economy, cashiers and clerks in stores cannot be expected to haggle with customers over the prices of goods. So, a price tag is attached to everything that is for sale. But this has the effect of limiting the fluidity of prices that is characteristic of a traditional marketplace. When there is a sudden increase in supply, the store is not as quick to drop the price according to the law of supply and demand. With workers being paid the same, there is not enough money being paid out in wages to purchase the excess. Without the fluid drop in prices, the necessary correction to the imbalance has to come from some other direction. Factories begin cutting back on production of the good in excess. This means letting go of workers, and thus less money in circulation, and a recessionary spiral gets underway. The most important word in economics may be "floating". The more fluid is the dynamics of the system, the less the risk that something will go wrong.

Why is the interest rates on savings accounts that banks offer so low as to not be worth it? There was a time when banks used to offer real interest for those who save money. But stop and think for a moment. One thing that is worse than inflation is deflation. Deflation is a lowering of prices. That might sound like a good thing, but it takes away the incentive to make anything. Why should a company make something when, by the time they get it to market, it's price has dropped to the point where they will not recoup what it cost to make it. Deflation also discourages spending for all but immediate necessities like food. Why make a large purchase now when the price will be lower in several months? Governments tend to like an inflation rate of about 2% per year as a cushion against deflation. But when people save money, that is money that is being taken out of circulation, which means less immediate economic demand. Notice that the western country that has traditionally had the greatest emphasis on saving money, Japan, is also the most vulnerable to deflation. The western country that uses personal credit the least, which is Italy, is also especially vulnerable to deflation. Did you ever wonder if the government ever pressured banks, over which it has leverage because it lends them money, to stop offering any significant interest on savings accounts to discourage people from saving money?

Stores really adore gift cards, and the reason is simple. They know that at least some of the cards will be lost or forgotten about. They know that on many others the full amount of money on the card will not get used, and all of that is pure profit. They also know that shoppers will often spend over the money on the card, just to use it all. Stores adore gift cards in the same way that airlines absolutely adore people who book a flight, but then don't show up, so that the airline can then sell the seat to another paying flier.

It would seem logical that we could be getting our energy directly from the sun. But if we stop and think for a moment, we realize that if everything were to suddenly run on sunlight that it would actually bring about an economic catastrophe, due to the nature of our economic system, because entire industries would become obsolete and tens of millions of people would be thrown out of work. Whenever there is a major step in technology, it has the same effect of obsolescence. This is why I consider it unfair to blame President Obama for America's persistent unemployment and underemployment during his tenure. The rise of the internet also brought about mass obsolescence. Jobs and industries that are no longer really necessary often do not disappear until there is a recession, and this "internet obsolescence" did not really become apparent until the recession that began with the economic crash of 2008. President Obama's two terms in office were not really long enough for all of the displacement to fit back into the economy.

We rarely read about how the deep recession that Japan went into in 1990, and still has not completely recovered from, changed world history. The internet, along with phones and mass social media, blossomed after this recession. It is logical to think that had this recession not occurred, Japan would have dominated these fields in the same way that it had previously dominated cars, electronics and, cameras, and Silicon Valley would today be outside Tokyo.

One thing that is confusing is the letters EU. In English, it means European Union. But in Spanish or French It means United States; Los Estados Unidos or Les Etats Unis.

Capitalism is like a fast car. It can certainly get you to where you want to go. But it is along a twisting and winding road along a steep cliff. It is necessary to be ready for a sudden turn, sometimes to the left and sometimes to the right, to avoid a crash.

I once had a book about radio technology from the 1930s. It was considered as important that radio sets, both receivers and transmitters, be grounded to the earth. This usually meant a wire connecting the metal chassis of the radio to a water pipe or a metal stake in the ground. Presumably, this was to improve transmission and reception by way of a "ground wave" as well as transmission through the airwaves. But I now believe that there was another reason. There was a tremendous solar storm in the year 1859, known as the Carrington Event. This was before radio, but the storm induced tremendous electric currents in telegraph cables that damaged equipment and set fire to stacks of paper. My opinion is that the main reason for the emphasis on grounding in the early days of radio is memory of that solar storm, which has now been forgotten. There have been minor solar storms since then, but nothing anywhere near as powerful. If such a solar storm occurred today, it would be a global catastrophe. The miniaturization of electronics has made it ever-more vulnerable to the electric currents that would be induced in it by a solar storm of that magnitude. The fine electronics of phones and computers would be instantly fried, and useless. Vehicle engines that are operated by on-board computers would not start. There probably would be no electricity. The global economy would be paralyzed, and there would certainly be mass starvation. It has been predicted that a solar storm of the magnitude of 1859 should only occur once every five hundred years. We had better hope that this prediction is right.

There is another factor behind the "space race" to the moon and Mars. Being able to launch rockets into space is a subtle reminder to a country's potentially troublesome neighbors that "If we can land a rocket on Mars, we can also land rockets on your cities".

Never underestimate the importance of history in world events. When the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948, war broke out almost immediately. This is rooted in the fact that it presented an opportunity to reenact the Crusades. Likewise, when the separate states of India and Pakistan were founded in 1947, it presented an opportunity to reenact the battles centuries before between the Moslem Mughals (or Moguls), and the Hindu Marathas.

We are in a time (early 2015) of falling oil prices, and most people will not be complaining. If it is any consolation to countries that depend on oil imports, there is plenty of peril in being an exporter of oil also. Oil is a commodity that is subject to price swings. An oil-exporting country might plan it's budget around oil being a certain price, only to find that the price has fallen well below that. What happened in the late 1980s is that the price of oil fell, due to a glut on the market. Some of the members of OPEC, the cartel of oil exporters which agrees on production quantities in order to maintain the price, secretly pumped more oil out of the ground, beyond their quota, in order to make up the cash shortfall. This, of course, caused the price to drop still further and to continue the spiral. The price of oil collapsed, reaching an incredible low of below US$10 per barrel. The largest oil producer of the time was the Soviet Union, not a member of OPEC. Today, Russia, Kazakhstan and, Azerbaijan are three of the largest oil producers. At that time, all were within the Soviet Union. My certainty is that it was this crash in oil prices that brought the Cold War to an end, probably more than any other factor. Furthermore, it would never have ended the way it did without Mikhail Gorbachev. Have you ever thought about how different history might have been if oil prices had spiked in the late 1980s, so that the Soviet Union would have been enriched?

Before we scold Russia about "backsliding" from democracy, we should keep in mind that the country tried to do things our way after the end of the Cold War but that it was a disaster. Capitalism in Russia during the 1990s caused a few people, the oligarchs, to get fabulously wealthy but the country as a whole to be worse off. The economy crashed much like that of the U.S. did in 1929. It was Vladimir Putin that got the country on a much better course. If you want to read about it, see the article about "Boris Yeltsin" on www.wikipedia.org , especially the introduction and Section 6.

Running an empire is like having a bus full of teenagers, some of which are unruly and rebellious, stopping at your house and the driver telling you that they are now your responsibility, and Good Luck.

We can see that the pyramids and ziggurats of the ancient Middle East were actually artificial representations of mountains. The top of a mountain was considered as a special place for religious purposes because one was, presumably, closer to god or the gods, and could see much more of the ground below. But the best place for farming was in river valleys, in which there were not likely to be mountains. So, substitute mountains were built as pyramids in the Nile River Valley of Egypt and as ziggurats (stepped platforms) in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley of Mesopotamia. But no comparable structures were built in the third major river valley of early civilization, the Indus Valley of Pakistan. This is simply because there were mountains all around.

There would be no IS (Islamic State) if Saddam Hussein had not been removed, so that we could make the country into a "democracy". The president that was installed in his place simply did not have control over the country like Saddam did, and which I had written about on my blog on a number of occasions. The the rise of IS is a direct manifestation of this. Iraq is an artificial country put together from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, composed of several diverse groups, and if it is going to hold together then it must undergo an extended period under a strong leader, as I have repeatedly written about here and described in "The Strong Leader Binding Phase" on the world and economics blog, www.markmeekeconomics.blogspot.com . The same can be said of Libya, which is now (January 2015) essentially two countries. We saw this in "A Few Words About Libya", also on the world and economics blog.

IS, Islamic State, is actually a correction and it has a lot of history behind it. First, it is a correction against the secular influence from the west. It is also a correction of political geography. IS spans Syria and Iraq, both of which can be considered as artificial countries that were assembled from remnants of the Ottoman Empire. IS is bridging this artificial boundary of the Syrian-Iraqi border because the population is mostly Arabic-speaking Sunni Moslems on both sides. Starting in Syria, and then extending to Iraq, gives IS a powerful historical basis because the first Islamic caliphate, the Umayyads, were based in Damascus, the capital of Syria. They did not found Damascus, it was already an ancient city at that time. The second caliphate, the Abassids, built Baghdad, now the capital of Iraq, as their base. If only IS could gain control of both of these cities, it would give them a very strong historical basis as the new caliphate. There is no caliphate now, it was abolished by Ataturk when he founded modern Turkey after the end of the Ottoman Empire. IS would reverse this and establish both a new empire and a new caliphate. This is entirely a reversal of the secularization and artificial boundaries that have been imposed on the region.

There is a move across the world toward mobile phones, and away from land lines. Many countries, which never had good land line networks to begin with have just skipped that stage altogether. But land lines do have their advantages, particularly when it comes to doing business. A land line, which is at a fixed location, conveys stability and permanence. Would you rather do business with a company that gives you a land line number, or with one that only has a cell (mobile) number?

One factor in modern warfare is that the fixed fortifications of the past, from fortresses and castles to trenches, gave the advantage to the defender. The only advantage that the attacker would have would be that of surprise. The technology of modern warfare, in contrast, gives the advantage to the side that takes the initiative.

If everything worked perfectly, credit would be a wonderful thing. You would just go out and buy what you needed on credit. With millions of people making such purchases, this would greatly increase demand for goods. This would bring the manufacturers of those goods to increase production and add new factories, thus employing many more workers. With more workers having more money to spend, demand would increase across all sectors of the economy. You would thus earn more money, enough to pay the credit bill, because there would be more demand in your line of work, or to get you a job if you didn't have one. The trouble is that, first of all, the wealth structure is very uneven. So much of the money that was spent would not go back into circulation, but would increase the profits of the few wealthy and would thus be taken out of circulation. Second, much of the increase in production would take place in distant countries and unless workers in those countries were also in on the credit boost then much of the increase in economic activity would be dissipated.

The world has made tremendous progress in eliminating wars between nations. Other than the wars involving Iraq, and those involving Israel, there have been hardly any wars between nations since the end of the Cold War. This is actually a monumental achievement that we rarely stop to think about. But yet the world is full of conflict, the idea that we have put an end to warfare would appear to be ludicrous. The difference is that today, conflict tends to come in the form of civil wars rather than wars between nations.

The trouble with the concept of flying cars is the method of propulsion. It is easily within our capabilities now to build a small jet or propeller-driven plane that can come down, land on a stretch of road, fold the retractable wings back, and drive along the road as a car. Then, when the driver/pilot decides to take off again, simply unfold the wings. That would be fine as long as there are no other cars on the road. But would you want to be behind a car that is driven by a jet engine? Would you want to be on a bicycle or motorcycle and have a car bump into you that is driven by a propeller? Cars are driven by wheels, but that would be useless when in the air. Practical flying cars would seem to require two separate means of propulsion but, with present technology, that would make it too heavy to fly.

One of the major news events of 2013 was the removal of Mohammed Morsi as president of Egypt. Ever since the overthrow of the king in the 1950s, the country had been led by leaders that had come from the military. Hosni Mubarak was forced to relinquish power as part of the Arab Spring, and Morsi won as a democratically-elected president. I have not yet expressed an opinion of it here on this blog, but Morsi's crucial mistake was to try to seize more power in late 2012. He attempted to increase his powers, which would have effectively made him into a dictator.

Wherever people from Yemen, Somalia and, Ethiopia go, the legal systems of their host countries do not seem quite sure how to classify the leaves known as Kat or Khat or Quat. These leaves are chewed as a mild stimulant, often in a social setting. But is it a drug that should be illegal? The opinion of most people is "no". I do not know what khat is, other then reading about it, but it is certainly no more damaging than alcohol.

Computers have very much changed the art of writing. Using a computer to write makes it much easier to write without any initial organization of the material. The writer can just start writing whatever comes to mind, and then organize it afterward. Before computers, it was more efficient to plan and organize the writing first before writing the final draft. Computers make it much easier to do successive drafts of the writing material, writing and then going over it to see what can be done to improve it. Before that, each draft would have to be typed over. I started writing before computers were widespread, and I still plan my writing out first. Although I do not always completely stay with the plan when I see how it actually looks in print. I do like to casually write on a computer scratch pad just to get an idea how something might look in final form.

Heat is exchanged in air differently then it is in solid materials. In solid materials heat is exchanged between hot and cold by conduction, which is the faster-moving hot atoms and molecules colliding with, and imparting kinetic energy to, the slower-moving cold atoms and molecules. But the molecules in air are much more sparse then in solid materials, this is also why air is transparent. Molecules in air do not collide with each other as much, so that there is far less conduction of heat than in solid materials. But this fact that molecules in air travel further before collisions makes it so that a volume of air expands when heated much more than a solid material. This expansion of air upon heating brings about another method of heat exchange, known as convection. Air expands upon heating, making it lighter than cold air. The colder air then sinks to replace the war air that has risen and a convection cell will form with the circulation of hot and cold air. The lack of conduction of heat within air means that, if you can hold warm air close to you with a coat or a blanket, you can stay warm even when the surrounding air is cold. The reason is that the coat or blanket blocks the convection that usually distributes heat in the air. The lack of conduction of heat in the air also affects the weather. The reason that air masses exist, whether of warm or of cold air, is because heat does not conduct well in air and there is no convection if the warm air is already above the cold air. These cold and warm air masses are why we have warm fronts and cold fronts, with either cold air pushing warm air or vice-versa. Rain tends to accompany a front because the conduction that does take place between the warm and cold air means that the warm air will not be able to hold as much water as it did previously. So, it is the relative lack of heat conduction in air that creates air masses, but the relatively little conduction that does take place creates rain along the boundaries between the air masses. But the front between the two is always wedge-shaped with the warm air above the cold air. So, the same reason that we have changes of temperature, and the accompanying weather, is the same reason that a blanket or coat keeps you warm.

10

The universe is actually very simple. There are two electric charges, negative and positive. Like charges repel and opposite charges attract. Everything is ultimately composed of these charges. But then along comes energy. What energy always ultimately does is to oppose the basic rules of attraction and repulsion of the electric charges. This is the basis of how the universe operates, everything else is mere details.

The 1960s really brought changes to the world, and there have been endless writings about those changes ever since. But one change that does not seem to get written about often is architecture. The 1960s had it's own style of architecture, in the circular buildings that seemed to mostly go out of style afterward, at least in the western countries. A few well-known examples of 1960s circular buildings are: Toronto City Hall, Renaissance Center in Detroit, Ostankino Tower in Moscow, the Rotunda in Birmingham in England and the British Telecom Tower in London (formerly the Post Office Tower).

There have been recent (January 2015) demonstrations in the eastern part of Germany about the "islamization" of the country by immigrants. But part of the issue is demographics. Europeans simply do not have enough children to replace themselves and to pay the taxes that are necessary to support a population where the average age of white Europeans is continuously getting older. Italy, in particular, has a gradually declining population. Another part of the issue is the former nation of East Germany itself. Since reunification, it is clear that the eastern part of the country is not really being treated as equal. I wrote about this in one of the other "Thoughts And Observations", When I wrote that, there was not a single former East German among the top figures in politics, business or the military, with the exception of Angela Merkel herself. I was surprised to read recently that there was only one player from the former East Germany on the country's victorious 2014 World Cup team. It is sometimes difficult for two nations to be on equal terms after uniting, and it is certainly not limited to Germany. North and South Yemen united into one country around the same time that Germany did, but the former south launched an unsuccessful war to regain independence a few years later. Sana'a was the capital of North Yemen, and became the capital of the entire country. South Yemen was sometimes referred to as Aden, which was the name of it's capital city.

The danger in economic damage to a powerful country is that militarism is a ready way to recover from economic collapse. The Nazis knew this well, they absorbed unemployment by drastically increasing the scope of the armed forces and got factories back to full production making military equipment for them. The United States, in the same period, never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s until mass production for the Second World War began. Ronald Reagan also made extensive use of militarism in the early 1980s to boost the economy. It was necessary to purposely induce a recession because that was the only way to stop inflation, but then the military spending helped the economy recover. Reagan's military spending was especially focused on the U.S. Navy and the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars).

We can see how stars operate just by looking at the world around us. There are two facts in particular that stand out. First, atoms that are heavier than iron and nickel are exponentially less common than iron and nickel and atoms that are lighter. Second, the heaviest of elements, referred to as rare earth elements, are usually found together in deposits that are mined on earth. The reason that elements up to, and including, iron and nickel are so much more common then the heavier ones is that there is a limit to the size of atoms that can be formed in stars by crunching lighter elements together. This is because electron repulsion, the mutual repulsion of like-charged electrons in orbitals around adjacent atoms, becomes greater in heavier atoms and the gravity of the star’s mass cannot overcome it. Iron is as far as this process goes, and that is why it is so abundant in the earth and the inner Solar System. The formation of heavier atoms requires an additional input of energy, and that only comes when a large star explodes in a supernova and gives off the energy of the explosion. The elements lighter than iron and nickel are formed continuously over millions of years while the elements heavier than that are formed only during the few seconds that the star is actually exploding. The reason that the heaviest elements, the rare earths, are often found together in deposits is that “layers” of elements tend to form in stars, with the heavier elements in the center. The explosion of the star in a supernova provides the additional burst of energy that can crunch heavier atoms together into successively heavier atoms. But this process lasts for only the very brief time of the explosion, and there is no time for the extended process of forming separate layers. If these heaviest elements were formed by the long process of crunching lighter atoms together by the kinetic energy of gravity, without the burst of energy of the supernova, they would have separated into separate layers in the star and would not be found together in deposits on earth.

Would there have been a Berlin Wall if there had never been a Great Wall of China?

Can you believe that the Nobel Peace Prize, which is given in various categories every year for those supposedly doing the most to contribute to peace, was actually started by the man who invented the dynamite which has made wars vastly more lethal and destructive?

There was a wall around the U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran when it was seized by students in 1979, who were demanding the return of the former Shah of the country for trial. The Shah had recently entered the U.S. for cancer treatment. The thought occurred to me that, instead of protecting the embassy compound, it could have actually made the seizure more likely to happen. If this does not seem to make sense, let’s remember what a powerful force history can be. Ancient Persia became the greatest power in the world with it’s conquest of Babylon. In a brilliant tactic, the Persian soldiers got inside the walls of Babylon, where a drunken party was going on in the royal palace, by quickly building a dam across the Euphrates River which flowed through the city, and then entering the city by way of the riverbed. Storming the U.S. Embassy compound gave the Iranian students the chance to reenact that great ancient victory, at least subconsciously. The thing that is so ironic about this is that Iran (the name was changed from Persia in 1935) has been Islamic for only about half of it’s total history. There has always been a struggle of ideas between Islam and the pre-Islamic past of Persia. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 itself a reenactment of the earlier Islamic conquest of Persia. The Shah represented the pre-Islamic past, the Revolution and Ayatollah Khomeini represented the coming of Islam. The Shah, occupying the ancient Peacock Throne, securely linked himself to the pre-Islamic Persian past by holding a lavish 1971 celebration in the ruins of Persepolis to celebrate the 2500th anniversary of the Persian Empire. But this means that the students who got inside the walls and seized the U.S. Embassy, while motivated by the Islamic Revolution, were actually reenacting the greatest victory of pre-Islamic Persia.

The former Shah of Iran was a glimpse of what a real king was like. In particular, the lavish celebrations of himself being crowned “king of kings” in 1967, and the celebration of the 2500th anniversary of the Persian Empire in 1971. This must have been how a king celebrates, with no one to answer to about how much the party cost. Royalty like that of Britain can celebrate too, but they know that the country is keeping a careful accounting of how much money is being spent, while the Shah had no such concerns. Saudi royalty seems to conservative for lavish celebrations like those of the Shah.

Saudi Arabia is surely the most royal country in the world. The country was founded by Abdulaziz, also known as Ibn Saud. No one seems to know exactly how many sons he had, but it may be over forty. All of the kings of the country, up to the time of this writing, have been his sons. There are literally hundreds of his descendants now, all of which are princes and princesses, in a country of less than thirty million. Saudi Arabia, named for Ibn Saud, is one of only six countries, as far as I can see, that was named for a person. The other five countries are Bolivia (for Simon Bolivar), Colombia (for Christopher Columbus), America (for Amerigo Vespucci), Israel (for Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel) and the Philippines (for King Phillip of Spain).

Western society cannot help but be affected by the patterns in the Bible. If Israel and Judah had not split into two separate nations, it is much more likely that there would not have been the two major splits in Christianity; the schism between Catholic and Orthodox in the year 1054, and the Reformation which began in 1517. Maybe the U.S. Civil War of 1861-65 wouldn't have happened either. There actually was a civil war between the tribes of Israel before the split into two kingdoms. It was all of the other tribes against the tribe of Benjamin. This civil war began when villains from the tribe of Benjamin brutally raped and killed a woman. Her husband cut her body in pieces, which he sent to the other tribes. The civil war began when the tribe of Benjamin refused to hand over the villains.

One thing that I found surprising is how much less partisan politics in the U.S. was in the past. There were photos of a cookout in the 1950s, with Democrats and Republicans enjoying dinner together. Such a bipartisan event would be much less likely to be seen today. My explanation of the difference is religion. When the country was somewhat more religious, politics was merely about the day-to-day operation of society. There was no real reason why people who had different views on that mundane operation couldn’t be friends. But people are designed to believe in something and when they do not believe in God as much, they will replace him with something else. Now that the country is less religious, politics has become the new “religion” for many people, and having a cookout with the infidels of the opposing political party is less much likely to happen.

The west and the Middle East act as two mirrors facing one another. The Woodstock music festival in 1969 was very much a mirror image of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Iranian Revolution ten years later, with students in bell-bottoms chanting “Death to America”, was a mirror image of U.S. college students in the 1960s and early 70s protesting the Vietnam War. The Arab Spring movement, beginning in 2011, was a mirror image of the anti-Communist demonstrations in eastern Europe in 1989. The 2014 protests across American cities over the shooting of black people by police was a mirror image of the protests during the Arab Spring.

History is like a set of history books. The books tell us who we are, and where we might be going, but they can be a heavy load to carry around.

There is an infrastructure-progress spiral going on in many countries. A country, or an area of a country, cannot get going on progress unless it has a sound infrastructure. No one wants to build a factory in a place where there are regular electrical blackouts or where the water supply is unreliable. No one wants to manufacture goods where there is not adequate roads to bring raw materials in, and take the finished product out. No one wants to invest in a tourist destination where there is not a modern airport nearby. But to build the required infrastructure, tax income is necessary. If there is not the development, then there will not be the tax revenue to build the infrastructure that is required to bring in the development.

I really wonder how much India has been affected by the Bhopal disaster of 1984. The country has an excellent infrastructure for telecommunications. It is a world power in software and space travel. But it lacks anything like the industry of China. Narendra Modi has initiated a “Make In India” campaign to emphasize manufacturing. Could the Bhopal disaster have steered India away from factories owned by foreign manufacturers? The reason that I thought of this is that I live in the city where the Love Canal disaster took place. It was, of course, nowhere near the scale of Bhopal, but I see how it has affected the local psychology with regard to industry.

Peace is more than the absence of conflict. In recent decades, warfare between nations has been greatly reduced. Although that is certainly not true of civil wars and terrorism. But war does accomplish one thing in that it resolves conflicts. The relative peace between nations in recent decades has just left a lot of unresolved conflicts.

When militants in the Middle East strike at local western targets or take hostages, they are harming those westerners who probably sympathize with them and admire their culture. When people in western countries are intolerant of Moslem immigrants, they are harming those Moslems who admire and want to be a part of western culture or else they wouldn’t be here.

The United States would not be so tolerant of a wealth gap that is far wider then the other western countries if first, it was not afflicted by the Resource Curse (Paradox of Plenty) and second, it had not had widespread slavery in it’s early history. The era of late Nineteenth Century robber barons was the social descendant of slavery. The U.S. is very rich in resources, but the wealth from such resources can have it’s destructive side. The Resource Curse is when the wealth from natural resources ends up being used to keep a repressive government in power or, in the case of the U.S., making a very few people very rich, so that the average person ends up worse off then if the country didn’t have such natural wealth.

Two of the most devastating acts of terrorism took place in Iran, within the context of the Iranian Revolution. Both of these events are still controversial. In August of 1978, a crowded theater called the Cinema Rex in Abadan was set afire, killing over four hundred people. Both sides, the government of the Shah and the revolutionaries, blamed each other. The Cinema Rex often showed western movies which the revolutionaries disapproved of. The government of the Shah claimed that this was why the revolutionaries set it on fire. The revolutionaries claimed that government agents started the fire to make the revolutionaries look like murderous fanatics and, according to a Wikipedia article, the theater had shown an anti-Shah film. The second terrorist attack was the Hafte Tir Bombing in the summer of 1981. This bombing wiped out much of the Revolutionary Government of Iran, although Ayatollah Khomeini was not among them. Not many governments in countries that had recently gone through such a revolution would have survived this bombing. It was generally considered as the work of someone employed as a sound technician. But it has never really been established who was behind the bombing. Was it the Mujahedin I Khalq or, as a few suspect, was it the Mossad?

How much does creative destruction apply to cities? There are a number of cities along the shorelines of North America’s Great Lakes. By far the two largest, and most important of these cities are Toronto and Chicago. Toronto and Chicago have something else in common. Both had their downtown cores destroyed in massive fires, Chicago in 1871 and Toronto in 1904. In the immediate sense, both fires were devastating. Even though, amazingly, there were no fatalities in the Toronto fire. But, over the long term, it gave both cities a chance to start the property order of the city over. That is an advantage that the other cities on the Great Lakes did not have. It eventually resulted in these two cities becoming far larger and more important then the others. (See “The Property Order” on the world and economics blog).

It was actually the French-speaking Canadians that made Canada into an independent country. Canada has long been a majority English-speaking country. But settlement of North America, from Europe, began in the eastern part of the continent, and that is where French Canadians are based. If early eastern Canada had been English-speaking and Protestant, like the U.S. to the south, there would be much less logic in it becoming a separate country than if it was French-speaking and Catholic.

If Canada had been around in ancient times, archeologists might have concluded that Tim Horton was the mightiest pharaoh ever. There were shrines in every town where the pharaoh’s adoring subjects paid homage to him with ritual cakes, known as doughnuts. Incredibly, Tim Horton was actually a hockey player who was killed in a crash on a highway at night in St. Catharines, Ontario while trying to evade police, who suspected him of drunk driving. There was a doughnut shop, but he could not have imagined the Tim Horton’s empire of today.

It is surprising how simple the universe actually is. There are two electric charges in the universe, negative and positive. Opposite charges attract and like charges repel. Then there is energy, which overcomes the rules of the electric charges. This is basically how the universe operates, all else is details.

Iran and Turkey are neighboring countries which have undergone much the same patterns of events over the past century, but those events seem to go much more smoothly in Turkey. My conclusion is that the reason is what is known as the Resource Curse. The Resource Curse (or the Paradox of Plenty) is the often-seen phenomenon where the citizens of a country that is rich in natural resources end up being worse off than if the country had no such resources. The reason is that natural riches often go to keeping a dictator in power, and attracting detrimental attention from other countries. The government of a country that is lacking in natural resources is more dependent on the will of the people to stay in power, and is thus more likely to be a democracy. The reason for the difference is that Iran has significant reserves of oil, while Turkey doesn’t. Both countries went through parallel modernization and secularization processes. The modern secular Turkish republic was founded by Ataturk after the end of the Ottoman Empire. The old Ottoman Turkish language had it’s script replaced with the Latin alphabet. The world-renowned Hagia Sophia mosque was converted into a museum. Most importantly, the caliphate was abolished. Turkey was an ally of Israel after it was established. Neighboring Iran was going through a parallel process with Reza Shah, the father of the final Shah. But Iran was pulled into the Second World War because of it’s location as a transit point for supplies to the Soviet Union, and as a base for refugees. One of those forgotten sidelines of history is that there was once a large Polish community in Iran. It’s oil was considered as essential to the western countries. This brought about the 1953 coup to overthrow the elected prime minister and restore the Shah, because he served western interests. The westernization brought on by the Shah ultimately brought about the Islamic anti-western Revolution of 1979, and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini. Turkey has also moved back closer to Islam and away from the west, but the process was much smoother. President Recep Erdogan is in the role of Ayatollah Khomeini in moving back toward Islam and away from westernization, but he is not cursed by oil as Iran was. Islamic schools and dress for women is reappearing. Bringing back the old Ottoman Turkish language has been proposed. Israel is no longer the ally of Turkey that it was previously.

Slavery is very much related to climate, being limited to hot climates where labor is more difficult. When have you ever heard of slavery in a temperate climate? Slavery is also inversely proportional to technology. The more skill is required for a given task, the less adaptable it is to slave labor.

To understand the city of Niagara Falls, Canada, it is vital to understand the character of Sir Harry Oakes. Originally a student in the U.S., he decided instead to take his chances in looking for gold. He found a gold deposit it in Ontario, became fantastically rich, and moved to Niagara Falls. His stately mansion, Oak Hall, is now the headquarters of the Parks Commission. His name is all over the city on Oakes Park, Oakes Drive and, the splendid Oakes Gardens near the falls. When I lived there for a few years as a child, I once thought that oak trees had been named after him. He later got tired of the taxes and moved to the Bahamas, where he was mysteriously murdered. One thing that tends to get overlooked in the city, but is actually it's centerpiece, is the Oakes Gardens.

Could America’s clashes with Islamic fundamentalism possibly have contributed to economic crashes? There had been no such crash since 1929, until there was one in 1987 and again in 2008. The one thing that all three crashes have in common is that all came after two successive rightward Republican presidential terms. When people clash with a foreign ideology, it often prompts them to retreat further into their own ideology. It can easily be seen that, at the time of this writing, the fundamentalism of Islam is spreading to both Buddhism and Hinduism. Narendra Modi has emerged as the fundamentalist Hindu leader of India. What about Ronald Reagan? After inducing a necessary recession to break inflation in the early 1980s, he kept the economy too far to the right which resulted in the crash of 1987. But Reagan’s two terms were marked with clashes with fundamentalists, from the Beirut Barracks bombing of 1983 to bombing the home of Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi to patrolling the Persian Gulf and accidentally shooting down an Iranian passenger jet. He also clashed heavily with Communism, dubbing the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire” after it shot down a South Korean passenger plane. Could this have prompted Reagan to retreat further into his own ideology, which was rightward capitalism? The global situation was much calmer during the successive first Bush and Clinton presidencies, there was also nothing close to an economic crash. The first President Bush did fight the Gulf War in 1990, but Saddam Hussein was a secular dictator and not an Islamic fundamentalist. But the second Bush presidency brought the worst clash of all with fundamentalism, that of 9/11. The battle with fundamentalism consumed the two-term second Bush presidency, with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also could have pushed George Bush deeper into his own ideology, the same rightward capitalism, because the result was the very serious economic crash of 2008. How else is it possible to explain this? We seemed to have learned our lessons from the 1929 crash, and nothing like that happened again for nearly sixty years. Then, suddenly, there was the crash of 1987 after nearly a decade of struggle with fundamentalism. Twenty-one years later, there was an even worse crash after another two presidential terms of battling with fundamentalism. The odds are very much against that being a coincidence.

I have long wondered about the sudden appearance of monotheism, in ancient Egypt during the time that the Israelites were in bondage there? Egypt had been a very polytheistic nation until a pharaoh named Akhnaten introduced the idea of only one god, or at least that one was far more important than all of the others. The one god was represented by the disc of the sun. His son was the most famous of all pharaohs, Tutankhamun. But the new theology disappeared just about as quickly as it appeared when Akhnaten died. Was this sudden, but temporary, appearance of monotheism connected to the Israelites? Were the Egyptians somehow influenced by the religion of their Hebrew slaves? Was the God of the Hebrews trying to reach down to the Egyptians themselves, in an effort to convert them, but they did not catch on. His son, Tutankhamun, was not a great pharaoh by any means, dying as a youth, but is so well known because his tomb was discovered intact.

The Nineteenth Century in America was so capitalistic that there was a private national police force, known as the Pinkerton Agency. They were often used in strike-breaking, but are best remembered for their pursuit of outlaws like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Only an extremely capitalist society would have such an organization under private, rather than government, control.

One group of people that really have history in their favor is the native Indians of the Western Hemisphere. The dynamic interaction between white Europeans and the native Indians is far from over. In fact, it is playing out over many centuries. I see this interaction as a relatively quick conquest and domination by the white Europeans, followed by a long and slow rebound by the Indians. We are now in the midst of that rebound. The white people thought that the clash between the two was, for the most part, a victory. The white settlers carried diseases for which the Indians had no immunity. They introduced the Indians to alcohol, which had a destructive effect. But the Indians introduced the white man to tobacco, which has had a far worse effect. It was also within Indian territory that the white people found drugs such as marijuana and cocaine, which have had a devastating effect on society. The vast majority of the people in the western hemisphere is still of native Indian ancestry. The fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States are Hispanics, which are of mostly Indian extraction. It was in the United States that the native Indian population was greatly reduced, but that is being replenished by Hispanic migration. Mexico has a far higher proportion of native Indian population than the United States. The U.S. took about half of Mexico’s territory, but Mexicans have since been moving back into the U.S. southwest and this is a microcosm of the entire conquest and then rebound. Mexico City is probably the largest city in the world. It is built on the site of two previous Indian cities, first Teotihuacan and later Tenochtitlan. Since the population of Mexico City is overwhelmingly native Indian, it can be seen as the third incarnation of Indian cities at that location becoming the world’s largest city. Several nations are now led by leaders of native Indian, rather than European, extraction. The rebound will continue with the western hemisphere gradually returning closer to it’s native Indian roots, even though that will not include Indian languages and religion. It will look more and more like the native Indians absorbing the white people and their ways, rather than being conquered by them.

At the time of this writing, Narendra Modi is celebrating Diwali with tens of thousands of Indians in London's Wembley Stadium. He has previously received such welcomes in other such locations which are home to many Indians, such as New York and Toronto. But there is something that I do not understand, and have not seen referred to in the news. Mr. Modi is known for his "Make In India" campaign, to accomplish this he is trying to make it easier to do business in India, including for those outside the country. His visits visits to centers of Indian immigration across the world seems to clearly indicate that his government would like the help of these Indians, and their offshore-born children, to support the "Make In India" campaign. But yet the law in India differs from most western countries in that, when an Indian takes out citizenship in another country, he automatically loses citizenship and must surrender his Indian passport: http://www.expatinfodesk.com/expat-guide/relinquishing-citizenship/indian-passport-surrender/ The stadium-full welcomes from ex-pat Indians that Mr. Modi receives and attends abroad shows that he definitely considers them as still Indians, and would like their participation in the "Make In India" campaign. But will the citizenship law be amended? Any business-oriented country must realize that it is easier to launch a business enterprise spanning two countries if one happens to be a citizen of both countries. Most western countries simply do not recognize any dual citizenship held by it's nationals, meaning that it is not forbidden. (Note-By the way, when I link to outside web sites from this blog, I try to avoid those that put cookies on your computer).

As of 2015, the opposition to the nuclear and end-to-sanctions deal with Iran is based on economics. The two major opponents of the deal are the Saudi Government and U.S. Republicans. If Iranian oil floods the world market, the already low price of oil will drop even further. This will really hurt a major producer like Saudi Arabia, as well as the friends of Republicans in the U.S. oil industry. Russia is also dependent on oil revenue and the oik price collapse of the 1980s was certainly a factor in Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union that that time. On the subject of Iran, there was a recent news article about the number of Toyota vehicles seen in Iran, which is supposedly under international sanctions. This is nothing new. I remember reading an article back in the mid-1980s about the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, which described how the Revolutionary Guard drives around in shiny new Toyota Land Cruisers. It is well known that there are ways around the fact that western credit cards do not work in Iran, a merchant can simply call up someone in Dubai and it will look as if the transaction went through there. But the supposed success of the sanctions on Iran can be seen in the number of Toyota vehicles that are visible in photos.

The Arab Spring Revolution in Egypt only ultimately succeeded in replacing a ruler that had come from the military, Mubarak from the Air Force, with another ruler that had come from the military, El-Sisi from the Army. For a relatively brief time, the country was governed by an elected president named Mohamed Morsi. The crucial mistake that Morsi made was in trying to seize more power, in late 2012, which would have essentially made him a dictator. I am not necessarily saying that his removal and replacement by El-Sisi was not the logical course, but the thought occurred to me that the result may have been different if the capital of Egypt was in Alexandria, rather than Cairo. The most famous of the pyramids, those at Giza, are just outside Cairo. There are no pyramids at Alexandria. The nearby pyramids could have had a subconscious effect. "This is the land of the pharaohs. How great of leaders Khufu (Cheops) and Khafre (Cephren) must have been to build those pyramids, which are the most famous structures in the world and have been there for 4500 years. A real leader in this land must have a lot of power. What would the great pharaohs of the past have thought of this childish democratic process, which originated in distant foreign lands that they had never heard of?"

What would St. Paul, the apostle of the New Testament in the Bible who made extensive missionary journeys throughout much of the Mediterranean, have thought if he had known that there were more continents that were not yet known, but would someday be reached by ships like the ones he traveled on, and that one day just about the largest city in the world would be built there, and named for him? The Roman Empire, in which he was a citizen and throughout which he traveled on missionary journeys, would fragment and the Latin language of the empire would likewise fragment. One of those fragment languagess would become known as Portuguese, and would become the language of the land on which the city named after St. Paul was built. The city is today known as Sao Paulo. The same can be said of St. John, who spent his old age writing the Book of Revelation on the island of Patmos, and of the city named for him on another island, San Juan in Puerto Rico.

Many first names should actually be considered as different forms of the same name. Consider Susan and Suzanne. The two are different names. But have you ever heard of two sisters, one named Susan and the other Suzanne? No, because the names are too similar. What about Melvin and Marvin, or John and Jonathan, or Carol and Carolyn, or Marie and Maria? If we would not see two siblings with two names, because the two names are too similar, then the two should be considered as different forms of the same name.

Pakistan is not covered by Google Street View. But there are photos that are posted at every location in that country. I noticed a number of buildings, in the Karachi area, that look like former Hindu temples, from before the partition of 1947 which separated Pakistan from India. None of these buildings seem to have been reused for mosques. Moslems have re-purposed any number of former Christian churches as mosques, the best-known being what might be the single most important building in the world, Hagia Sophia. But that does not seem to be done with former Hindu temples. The former temples look as if they are being used for warehouses, or some such purpose.

Once again, I have often wondered what makes a country end up as a dictatorship. One thing that became clear is the nature of the laws. In countries that are more free, laws tend to be clear and precise and well-defined. In countries that are less free, laws tend to be more vague and subjective. No country sets out to be a dictatorship, but if there is a vague and subjective law against such as "threatening the social order" it basically means that the ruling powers can find a reason to throw in jail anyone that they consider as a threat to their authority.

If Hippies during the 1960s would not have gravitated to the San Francisco Bay area, making it seem hip and cool, Silicon Valley would not be there today.

How much of a coincidence is it that the so-called Watts Uprising, in Los Angeles in 1965, happened exactly one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865? There seemed to be a feeling that "We have been 'free' for a hundred years, but are still not really free".

One thing that America can really claim is to essentially own the outer Solar System. A number of countries have sent space probes to the moon. Mars and, Venus, but the far reaches of the outer Solar System belongs to the U.S. The outer Solar System is, of course, a frontier, and this is yet another reflection of what we saw in the posting "Land Of The Frontier", on the world and economics blog www.markmeekeconomics.blogspot.com .

One reason that Japan went into a prolonged recession, beginning in 1990, was that the postwar constitution that was written for it by General Douglas MacArthur was not entirely suited to Japan. Economically, the boom times of the 1960s, '70s and, '80s were a prolonged version of America in the 1920s. Just as the Crash of 1929 brought and end to the "Roaring 20s", Japan's "economic miracle" also came to an end in 1990. At the time of this writing, Japan is starting to re-think it's postwar commitment to pacifism, and rebuild it's military forces. This could actually have very positive economic effects. Ronald Reagan knew well that the way out of recession is military spending. Before that, Adolf Hitler didn't take long to bring Germany out of the terrible economic depression of the 1930s, which began with the crash of 1929, by absorbing unemployment through a drastic expansion of the military forces, and getting factories back to full production by making military equipment for them.

Once again, remember that you can never understand this world without understanding religion. Human beings were designed to believe in something, IS understands this very well, and when they do not believe in God then they will replace him with something else. I remember the day in my youth when it suddenly occurred to me what was really behind apparently secular movements like Nazism and Communism. They had taken people that, for the most part, no longer believed in God, and had done a magnificent job of giving them something else to believe in. Patriotism or political ideology has become the substitute "religion" of many people today. Their country becomes their god, and what may have been a sensible economic course at one point in time is frozen into eternal dogma.

We can see a number of patterns coming together and being reflected in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. I have already written about how it resembled the American anti-Vietnam War protests of a decade earlier, bell-bottomed pants were even in style in Iran at the time of the Revolution. I have also written, in an earlier "Thought And Observation" in this series, how getting within the wall around the U.S. Embassy Compound allowed the Iranians, at least subconsciously, to re-enact the Persian Empire's greatest victory of ancient times, getting inside the walls of Babylon and conquering the city. Even the Cinema Rex fire of August 1978, which both the Shah and the revolutionaries blamed on the other, had a precedent in the bar fire of 1973 in New Orleans. But I also see the Russian Revolution of 1917 reflected in the Iranian Revolution. There was actually two revolutions in 1917, the February Revolution and the better-known October Revolution. The February Revolution was the one that resulted in the abdication of the Czar, and the formation of a "Provisional Government" consisting of an alliance of liberals and socialists. It was the following October Revolution which brought Communism and the formation of the Soviet Union. How much of a coincidence could it be that, given that the Iranian Revolution resulted in the abdication of the Shah in February and then the second major stage in the Revolution, the seizure of the U.S. Embassy and it's staff as hostages took place just after the end of October, on November 4? Considering that Russia was using the Julian Calendar at the time of it's Revolutions, the "October Revolution" was in what is now November and the "February Revolution" was in what was now early March in the Gregorian Calendar. The Russian Revolution was, of course, ultimately a reflection back to the French Revolution of 1789, which opened the modern political era by overthrowing the monarchy and replacing it with a republic. This is also mirrored in the Iranian overthrow of the Shah, but instead of "storming the Bastille", they stormed the U.S. Embassy compound.

Even if the unemployment rate in the U.S. is dropping, workplace participation is lower than it has been in decades. This means simply that a significant number of Americans are neither working nor seeking employment. The unemployment figures only count those that are actively seeking employment. But remember that our whole idea of progress revolves around putting people out of work. If it takes six workers to do a job, and a way is found to do it with only three workers, that is considered as progress. but then we lament about either unemployment and low workforce participation.

It is no mystery that the Industrial Revolution followed the Protestant Reformation. In my view, the idea of Protestants was to go back to the Bible, rather than focusing on the accumulated traditions of the church. In the Bible, the place referred to as "the world" is a foolish and sinful place that does not, for the most part, follow the Word of God. This may sound like a negative thing, but when people have a lower view of "the way things have always been done", it opens the mind to look for better ways of doing things and this is what brought about the Industrial Revolution. But what is actually in the Bible may have had even more of an impact on it. I wonder if the fantastic vision that Ezekiel was given of God, very similar to that of St. John in the Book of Revelation, involving meshing gears, was a factor in the development of the steam engine, around which the first part of the Industrial Revolution revolved. I also wonder about whether the "Age of Exploration" might have went as it did without the influence of the stories of St. Paul's missionary travels by ship in the Acts of the Apostles. There is even the question of whether tightrope walking would have ever become the art form that it did were it not for the Gospel stories of Jesus and Peter (at least briefly) miraculously walking on water. If you really want to understand western civilization, never underestimate how much influence the Bible has had.

One thing that I find puzzling is how relatively few Shiites there are among Moslems in north Africa. The third caliphate of Islam were the Fatimids, who founded Cairo and ruled from north Africa. The Fatimids, unlike the first two caliphates, were Shiites. The split between Sunni and Shiite was originally over who should be caliph, the leader of the caliphate. Even though the caliphate, other than IS of course, was abolished by Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey after the end of the Ottoman Empire, the split remains.