Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Gen Eds H4: From Waterloo to World War II

This is the fourth post in the World History part of my "General Education in a Nutshell" series. This series involves ten subjects you might study in a general education or "liberal arts" core at a university or college. The first topic in the overall series was philosophy. So far in the world history section:
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The World Wars
1. The first world war (1914-18) established the United States as a world power. The second (1939-45) established the US as the dominant world power, along with the Soviet Union. It is sometimes difficult for Americans to imagine a time when the US did not take center stage on the world arena, but we have only been a major player in the world for about a century. We did not actually join into World War I until its final year, in 1917, but our participation tipped the scales in favor of the Allies. Similarly, we did not join in World War II until 1941, after the Japanese mounted a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

These wars marked a new phase in the history of war, one where alliances between a network of nations prompted conflict on a global scale. The first world war started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Since he was heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, his death led Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia, which led the other Central Powers (Germany, the Ottoman Empire in what is Turkey today, and Bulgaria) to declare war on Serbia. In turn, this situation led Serbia's allies, the Entente Alliance of 1907 (France, Britain, Russia), to declare war on the Central Powers.

President Woodrow Wilson called World War I "the war to end all wars." The fact that people could even think it was possible to end war shows how sobering a wake-up call this war was. Wilson urged the US to enter the war in 1917 to "make the world safe for democracy." [1] The period in the lead up to the war was arguably a time of great optimism among elite whites, a time when the privileged thought humanity had reached a high point. They looked back on history and saw themselves as the pinnacle of steady progress, a thread of Western "civilization" leading up to them at the height.

World War I showed that humankind was just as savage and brutal as it had ever been, and World War II punctuated it. More than 38 million people died in World War I. Aerial warfare, trench warfare, chemical weapons, the machine gun--they were all introduced to the world in the first world war. And it all started absurdly and coincidentally in an obscure city by a bumbling guy with a gun just sitting in a cafe and a bumbling heir apparent who didn't have the sense to get off the streets after someone threw a grenade at him.

Germany soon became the leading force in the war, and it was Germany that paid the greatest price. At the Treaty of Versailles (pronounced ver-SIGH) in 1918, Germany was required to pay for most of the cost of the war ("War Guilt"). At the time, the famous British economist Maynard Keynes warned that the reparations were too harsh ("Carthaginian"). And indeed the severe economic state that resulted in Germany, compounded by the Great Depression, facilitated Hitler's rise to power and thus the second world war.

2. The second world war left a lasting impression on the psyche of the world that remains today some seventy years later. Adolf Hitler became an archetype of human evil, a Satan among humanity. The Holocaust he conducted, leading to the murder of six million Jews, became an archetype of the problem of evil. Why would a good God allow such things to happen?

Meanwhile, the victory fed the American ego. In the Normandy invasion, we saw ourselves as the rescuers of the world. [2] We convinced ourselves that we were the world's savior. The Truman Doctrine in 1947 pictured America as the one to come rescue those parts of the world in danger from the Soviet Union.

World War II also ushered in the atomic age. The Manhattan Project was a secret race to develop an atomic bomb first before the Germans. Ironically, Hitler's racism against Jews in the 1930s had caused an immense brain drain from Germany sending the likes of Einstein, Max Born, and Hans Bethe to Britain and the US. Some of the brightest scientific minds of the world were directly sent to the enemy because of Hitler's stupidity. So are all who think one race is better than another.

America dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is often said that this action probably shortened the war by six months, thus saving far more lives than were killed. Nevertheless, the dropping of the bomb, along with the "carpet bombing" the US conducted on German cities like Dresden, is usually posed as an ethical question. Did the "end" of saving more lives justify the "means" of dropping the bomb on so many non-combatants?

Upon the first successful testing of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project, is reported to have quoted an Indian scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

3. The end of the second world war seems more or less to have signaled an end to the long era of colonialization, which went back to Christopher Columbus in 1492. Within a short period of time France would abandon its colonies in Asia. Britain and France soon left the Middle East, which they had overseen since the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in World War I.

Prior to World War I, the Ottoman Turks had controlled the areas we know as Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. Similarly, the Turks oversaw the slightly more independent kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. During the first world war, the Allies stirred up an Arab Revolt with dreams of an Arab nation that would span from Syria to present day Yemen. This Arab revolt helped divert enough Ottoman attention to enable the British to prevail over the Turks.

But after the first world war, the British and French were given mandates by the newly formed League of Nations (1920) to administer the area until such time as its peoples were able to rule themselves. Somewhat arbitrarily, the area was divided into Mesopotamia (Iraq), Transjordan, and Palestine--all controlled by the British. Meanwhile, Syria came under French control. These divisions were arbitrary because the peoples of these areas did not think nationally, but ethnically. Iraq, for example, brought together three quite different people groups (Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd). It was a set-up prone to future conflict.

In the time between the world wars, Saudi Arabia and Iraq became independent states (1932). A Turkish revolt in 1923 wrested this formerly Ottoman center from British oversight and established it as an independent nation. Syria would become free of its French mandate at the end of World War II (1946), and Jordan (1946) would similarly become independent of Britain. Egypt finally became free of British presence in 1953.

The result has more or less been a mess. When kings or dictators have controlled these territories with an iron fist, they have remained relatively stable for a time (but with great pain for various internal groups). But these artificially created states have also seen major coups almost to a country. The second Iraq War only seems to have heightened the destabilization of the region. We can only hope that the democracies the West naively tried to install will eventually take hold and mature.

We already discussed the founding of Israel in 1948 out of the territory of Palestine that the British had overseen between the wars. This has proved to be the most destabilizing event of all in the region this last century, even more than the second Iraq War. Many Christians of course consider it the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Others consider it a self-fulfilling prophecy based on scriptures taken out of context. Maybe it is both.

The Great Depression
4. On October 29, 1929, Black Tuesday, the US Stock Market crashed after a decade of seeming prosperity. Or at least to the privileged of society, the "Roaring Twenties" had been wonderful. Ironically, 1920-33 were also the years of Prohibition, during which it was illegal to sell alcohol. But a downturn in the summer of 1929 was not addressed, leading to a snowball of panic and crisis.

There are competing theories for why the Depression turned out to be so bad, most of which suggest that the failure of the Federal Reserve to respond turned what might have been a mild recession into the worst economic crisis of modern history. The Keynesian approach suggests that the Fed should have invested money in the market, somewhat like the bailouts of the 2008 recession did. If we take recent history as an example, it seems to have worked. And you could argue that when President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR, 1933-1945) started doing this in 1933, it turned things around.

The monetarist approach blames the Fed for not increasing the supply of currency in the market as the crisis began. Banks did not have adequate currency to provide people with money during runs on banks. Over 900 banks had to close. This created a spiraling effect. Businesses went bankrupt. Unemployment soared. People didn't have money. The purchasing of goods stopped, causing more businesses to fail.

Perhaps both approaches have truth to them.

The protectionist responses of President Herbert Hoover (1929-33) and Congress only seemed to worsen the crisis. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 put tariffs on imported goods to record highs, and other countries responded in kind. So trade plummeted. The rest of the world suffered at the same time, giving rise to dictatorships, fascism, and militant communism. Stalin solidified state control of Russian farms, perhaps killing as many as 20 million of his own people. Hitler used the situation to rise to power, and ended the German financial crisis by spending money on a military build-up.

5. The New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt helped right the nation economically. Just five days after taking office in 1933, The Emergency Banking Act provided adequate currency to banks in order to meet the demands of their customers. That same year, the Banking Act of 1933 created the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation, which makes sure that the holdings of individuals in banks are guaranteed by the federal government.

Later in his first term in office, Roosevelt would create the WPA (Works Progress Administration) to put people to work (1935). It made the government the single largest employer in the country. Social Security was also created in 1935. Roosevelt would be elected four times as president, finally dying in office in 1945, just before the end of World War II. After his death, Congress would enact law that limits presidents to two terms in office.

From where I sit, these measures not only started to reverse the Depression, but they helped a lot of people in dire need. We may have our own problems from some of these programs that need addressed today, but the basics seem to have been overwhelmingly positive. Again, the relative speed with which we emerged from the Great Recession of 2008 suggests that the bail-outs and other actions of the government and Federal Reserve were the right ones. Our contemporary nay-sayers are on Hoover's side.

The acts of Roosevelt did cause a fundamental shift in the way the federal government functions in American life, as well as in the relative attitudes of the Democratic and Republican parties toward the government. During the Civil War, the Democratic party took the part of the pro-slavery, state's rights approach to government. But FDR's efforts to bring the US out of the Great Depression resulted in the single greatest expansion of the federal government in our history. Since then, Democrats have been the champion of the federal government, and Republicans the champions of state's rights.

Democrats would dominate the presidency for the next forty years. Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" would expand government programs even further. The two Republican presidents of this period, Eisenhower and Nixon, would leave these government programs largely intact. Only with Ronald Reagan were some of the regulations of the New Deal folded back.

The Age of Physics
6. In 1900, Lord William Kelvin (for whom the temperature scale is named) remarked at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science that there was really nothing significant left to discover in physics. He could not have been more wrong. On December 14 of that same year, Max Planck delivered a paper that is often viewed as the beginning of quantum physics. Energy, he suggested, only exists in packets.

Quantum physics developed rapidly over the next thirty years. Lasers, nuclear weapons, DVDs, super-powerful computers, cell phones--none of these would have been possible without developments in our understanding of the atomic world in quantum physics.

The second great development was Einstein's theory of relativity. In 1905, he set forth his special theory of relativity having to do with time and speed. In 1915 he set forth a general theory of relativity addressing the effects of gravity on space and time. The theory opened up the study of the universe in a way impossible before (e.g., black holes), and certainly accurate GPS wouldn't exist without it.

7. This is as good a place as any to mention some of the great scientific developments of the 1800s as well. In 1865, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell published his foundational work on electromagnetism, building on the work of others like Michael Faraday before him. The late 1800s would see these theories put to good practical use, with Thomas Edison developing light bulbs, the phonograph, and many more things. Alexander Graham Bell developed a workable telephone in 1876.

The late 1800s would also see Charles Darwin setting forth his theory of evolution in 1859. It did not cause an immediate change in cultural thinking but it has had a significant long term effect. For those looking to get rid of God, evolution provided a way to try to get around the impression that the world is far too orderly to have arisen by sheer chance. However, Darwin's theory was not seen as hostile to Christianity by everyone. Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, and B. B. Warfield, all inerrantists and conservative Calvinist scholars, did not see the new theory as problematic.

However, when evolution teamed up with critical theories of the Bible coming out of Germany, we had the makings of what would become the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. From 1910-15, a set of 90 essays were published by scholars called The Fundamentals, pushing back against these sorts of developments. The controversy over evolution came to a head in 1925 with the Scopes Trial in Tennessee. John Scopes was on trial for teaching the theory of evolution, which was against the law in Tennessee.

William Jennings Bryan, representing the state, squared off against Clarence Darrow, representing Scopes. Bryan was opposed to evolution not so much because of Genesis but because he saw it as leading to "social Darwinism," a sense that the "fittest" in society deserved to survive, while those who were poor and weak simply had not been selected by nature to advance. [2] Bryan won the trial, but it is often thought that he lost the war in the process.

Industrial Revolutions
8. The Second Industrial Revolution is typically dated to the late 1800s and early 1900s. In particular, this phase of development involved the incorporation of technology into the production of goods. Improvements in the production of steel opened the door for the Steel industry to boom. Steel made it possible for the railways to boom. The need for steel drove the mining industry. Oil was needed for the trains too. The Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869. Some of this growth was started in the wake of the Civil War, which required the production and distribution of everything from troops to weapons.

Soon we had the rise of millionaires like Andrew Carnegie, the Vanderbilts, J. P. Morgan, the Rockefellers. This was the Gilded Age. It was an age of unthinkable wealth for those who controlled industry. Without laws and systems in place, there was inevitably corruption. Railroad businessmen were sometimes called "robber barons." And with this amount of money came the power to have significant influence over government.

9. It was also an age of immense immigration. The early 1800s had seen an influx of northern Europeans, including a lot of Irish and German immigrants. The late 1800s saw more from southern and eastern Europe (e.g., Italian and Polish), as well as the beginnings of Chinese and Japanese immigration. These newcomers flocked to the big cities. They worked for low wages in the new factories.

They also caused alarm. Immigration in large numbers has always caused alarm. We shouldn't think that the temperance movement was just about alcohol. It was as much against the people who were thought to be drinkers--the Irish, for example. Anti-catholicism in the 1800s wasn't primarily a matter of theology but a matter of the people who were Catholic, namely, immigrants. Why do we have Polack jokes? Much of it stems from sentiment against immigration.

Protectionist and "nativist" laws were passed accordingly. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited new Chinese from coming into America altogether. In 1924, a law was passed that froze immigration at its 1890 levels. All this opposition to immigration took place as France gave the Statue of Liberty to America in 1876 to honor our hundredth birthday as a nation. "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to breathe free."

So the current fears and anger about immigration are nothing new. Been there, done that. And will again.

10. There was virtually no regulation on the businesses of the late 1800s. Workers had little or no power to protest poor working conditions, although the late 1800s would see the rise of labor unions. The Supreme Court of that age almost always sided with business. The North took advantage of its win over the South and truly to the victor went the spoils for a few years. "Carpetbaggers" was a pejorative term southerners used for northerners who moved to the south after the Civil War to take advantage of its disempowered state, which ended when the northern troops left in 1877.

The late 1800s were replete with financial crises, some of them having to do with the insistence on tying the amount of money in circulation to the gold standard. Limiting money to the gold standard caused the same problem that would later accentuate the Great Depression--without money available, banks and other companies weren't able to pay their debts and went out of business. This was one factor in the Long Depression of 1873-79 (although some would extend it to 1896).

The United States permanently went off the gold standard in the Nixon administration and the value of currency is currently tied to the gross domestic product (GDP) of the country. This is arguably a far more appropriate and less volatile way of approaching currency.

Unions did form, collections of workers that banded together to fight for reasonable wages and work conditions (remembering that the standards of that age were already far lower than anything we could imagine today). These sometimes ended in violence, especially in urban areas where the conditions were the worst. There were initially no protections for workers, no limits on the number of hours expected, no provision for on the job injuries. There were plenty of people to replace you if you disagreed with your boss. And because the powerful held the controls, state militias and police came down hard on strikers. There was almost always loss of life.

1877 saw the first nationwide strike, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. In response to the depression, the railroads began to repeatedly cut wages. Without any bargaining power or unions yet, rail workers walked off the job for 45 days in sufficient number as to paralyze the train industry. The National Guard was formed in part in response.

Those who are comfortable are often unaware of the hardship of other groups, who suffer and seethe for a time in apparent silence. Those with nice lives think everything is going just fine. Then when those under hardship rebel or revolt, the privileged think them the fiends. "What is your problem?" they think, since they have been blissfully unaware the whole time. They call on the police to clamp down on the riots and mobs created by conditions that have benefited them--or at least not harmed them.

These dynamics have shown up most recently in the Black Lives Matter movement. Unaware of the ease with which the upper and middle classes conduct life, the violence of the cities is pinned on bad character. The privileged aren't aware that their circumstances are quite different, much more comfortable than those who finally explode. So we want the police to take care of it. Ultimately, the conditions that feed the violence must be addressed before there will be a real change. So it was in the late 1800s.

11. In 1848, Karl Marx predicted that capitalism inevitably resulted in revolution. 1848 was a year when uprisings took place in Germany, France, Italy, and Austria. Marx, loosely basing his ideas on G. W. F. Hegel, argued that capitalism always ended in a bloody revolution of workers, who then ushered in communism--a system where everyone worked according to their ability and then shared their resources in common with those who had need. After seeing that England did not have such revolutions, he later modified his views to think that some countries might make these changes by law rather than revolution.

History has shown Marx wrong both about the inevitability of revolution as well as on his dreamy vision for communism. Every state that has tried non-democratic socialism (none even made it to communism) has been an economic failure, bringing everyone down to a lowest common economic denominator. [3] That is, except those in charge--the leaders of non-democratic socialist states usually replace wealthy capitalists as the privileged and maintain their power by oppression.

The most significant communist revolution was of course that in Russia in 1917, taking Russia out of World War I. The Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, took over Russia and soon created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It was the first Marxist state, but it would not be the last.

12. The corruption and the injustice fed by unbridled capitalism in the late 1800s were the seeds of the Progressive Movement of that age. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was a start, the beginning of an attempt to ensure the kind of competition between business which is necessary for it to work. Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, could have not foreseen how capital would gravitate toward single entities in a way that shut down the very competition that he saw as helping everyone as if "by an unseen hand."

Public sentiment was affected as the phenomenon we know as media began to rise, a powerful tool to impact public sentiment. "Yellow journalism" and "muckraker" novels presented issues and people in a skewed light that nonetheless steered public opinion, much as the media does today. Hollywood was born in this era, at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, was one such muckraker, depicting the plight of the American worker. It helped provide Congress and the President with enough cover to pass laws that booming business opposed because paying workers more and treating workers humanely cost them money. We would not recognize the harsh conditions of that age.

President Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 championed what he called the "Square Deal." It included three Cs--conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection. Although he was blocked on many of these proposals during his two terms in office (1904-1912), many of them were passed under subsequent presidents. Today we would consider such protections common sense. They are in part why we do not have the violent riots of workers that the world saw in the late 1800s.

Roosevelt was a Republican president and a progressive. You might argue that the Republican party, with its earlier stance on slavery, had started as a progressive party. But in the 1912 election, Roosevelt had become too progressive for the Republican party of that time. So he ran as the candidate of a new party he called the "Bull Moose Party." It split the Republican vote, and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected, the first Democrat to be elected since Andrew Jackson (1829-37), the first Southerner since before the Civil War.

From that point on, the Republican party would be the "conservative" party of tradition, and the Democratic party would be the progressive party. The Republican party had already become the party of big business in the the post-Civil war era. It has remained the party most aligned with business ever since.

The Civil War
11. The Civil War in the United States wasn't merely a fight over slavery, although it certainly was. There was a movement to purge the Civil War of its associations with slavery in the late 1800s. That is simply wishful thinking and whitewash. There would have been no war if the country as a whole had not been on a trajectory to do away with slavery.

Nevertheless, even if slavery was the underlying issue, it was fought on the surface over the question of who has the authority to decide what the states in the South could and could not do. The trigger was slavery; the war was over authority. And of course the conflict bore the marks of the Industrial Revolution all over it.

When the North won the war, the United States won. That is to say, the states of the South were asserting that individual states had the primary authority, rather than the unified nation expressing its overall will through the federal government. This was the best result for the thriving of the nation as a whole and indeed for the South itself in the long term.

If the Confederacy had won, would the South have stayed a largely agricultural collection of independent states? Would its progress then more or less followed the same route as Mexico this last century, remembering that the difference in industrial development between the South and Mexico was not that great at the time. Would slavery have continued to the present? The North won the war because it was industrialized. The South in part was fighting to remain an agricultural economy, depending for its economy on human workers (slaves).

If the North had lost, would it have devolved into more of a confederacy model? If so, the US might not have become a world power. And if the US had not become a world power, might the Germans have won World War I? If so, we would not have had a Hitler or a World War II. The Turks might still control the Middle East. In any case, the world would certainly be a different place.

10. Northern troops occupied the South until the Compromise of 1877. The first ten years after the Civil War were a time when African-Americans had been able to hold public office. There were former slaves in the state legislatures. There were black mayors of cities.

But the 1876 presidential election ended up in a crisis in the Electoral College. Under accusations of voter fraud on the one hand and the throwing out of votes for political reasons on the other, the results of the votes in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana were under dispute. Thus the Electoral College vote was also under dispute. Congress appointed an Electoral Commission which, however, also voted along party lines.

In a Constitutional crisis, a compromise was struck. If northern troops would be removed from the South, the election would be given to the side of the debate favored by Republicans. Rutherford Hayes thus became president and the troops were removed in 1877.

What followed was a squashing of African-Americans in the south with the north complicit. Indeed, the Civil War was reinterpreted to be almost entirely a war about state's rights, saving the south the embarrassment of a war fought over slavery. Lynchings began to use fear to drive African-Americans into silence and submission. Voting fraud and intimidation soon drove blacks out of public office. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and other ruses were put in place to discourage them from voting, much as voter ID laws today are a not so thinly disguised attempt to keep certain demographics from being able to vote.

In 1890, Jim Crow laws were passed segregating blacks from whites in public spaces. The Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 affirmed that this was a "separate but equal" situation. We now recognize the extreme shame of these practices. It took federalism to stop it. It took a Supreme Court reversal to stop it.

11. African-American men nevertheless received the right to vote in the narrow gap before northern troops left the south. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 promised "equal protection under the law" to all the citizens living in a particular jurisdiction. Although it was firmly opposed by the south, it was demanded before southern states could regain representation in Congress. Then the fifteenth amendment in 1870 gave African-American men the right to vote.

Women would not get the right to vote until 1919 and the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Nationalism and New Imperialism
12. The 1800s saw a sharp rise in nationalism, and the second Industrial Revolution led countries to draw more heavily on colonies around the world for resources and labor.

Germany was the key player in the forces of new imperialism that rose with great force in the late 1800s. After the defeat of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna left 39 German states as a loose "German Confederation," with Austria as the dominant power. However, Prussia--what is now northeast Germany and northwest Poland--was also quite powerful.

The Austro-Prussian War ("Seven Weeks War") in 1866 left Prussia as the stronger force. It formed a "North German Confederation" of some 22 German states. With this grouping, we have the first German nation-state. The key figure behind this calculated consolidation and expansion was Otto von Bismark, appointed by the king as "Minister President of Prussia."

Prussia would only increase in power. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Prussia took some of the easternmost parts of France (Alsace-Lorraine). Cleverly, Bismark drew the key south German states into the conflict (Bavaria, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Hessen-Darmstadt). In 1871, the second German empire (the second "reich") was born with Bismark as Chancellor. It would live until the end of World War I in 1918).

13. Germany was now the dominant power of Europe. The Berlin Conference of 1884-85, called by Portugal and organized by Bismark, divided up Africa according to the powers of Europe. This was the "Scramble for Africa." On the one hand, the conference prohibited slavery in Africa. On the other hand, a "principle of effective occupation" came into play. If a country "effectively occupied" a particular territory, other powers were to stay clear.

The result was that France claimed most of the northwest part of Africa, Britain much in the northeast and south. Belgium was in the middle (the "Congo"), while Portugal, Germany, and others had lesser spots.

In the 1800s, the British and the French were the main colonizers of Asia. Britain largely claimed India as its colony, while France tried to keep its self-respect by control in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. China found itself under pressure from countries like Russia, Britain, France, the United States, and Japan. In the late 1800s, Japan would begin to modernize (1868) and truly become a force to be reckoned with, defeating China in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and defeating Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05).

14. Of course the United States had been in an expansionist mode throughout the 1800s. James Monroe set out his "Monroe Doctrine" in 1823, indicating that the US was claiming the land all the way to the Pacific Ocean as its "manifest destiny." Thomas Jefferson had already added land purchased from the French in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Texas entered as an independent country in 1845 after winning its independence from Mexico in 1836.

Tensions with Mexico soon led to the Mexican-American war from 1846-48, which resulted in the US acquiring southern territories from Texas to California (the "Mexican Cession"), supplemented by the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, which added the southernmost part of modern day Arizona and a piece of New Mexico. This expansion west was also accompanied by forced migrations of native Americans (at best) and indeed, extensive exterminations (at worst).

Next Week: From Cromwell to Napoleon

Major Take Aways:
  • Don't go to war over your honor.
  • Human nature is no more evolved than it has ever been. The worst atrocities of history are always only a generation away.
  • No race is better or more clever than another.
  • Don't demoralize the defeated--it will come back to haunt you.
  • Never invade Russia on foot in the winter.
  • Unbridled capitalism leads to thoroughgoing corruption, economic crisis, and violent revolution.
  • Tying the amount of currency to a standard like gold in this day and age usually turns potentially small economic downturns into major economic crises.
  • Allowing for adequate amounts of currency, spending to bail out key capital forces, and creating job programs gets you out of a depression.
  • Taking advantage of a weaker group may be to your advantage for a time but eventually it comes home to roost with a vengeance.
  • People almost always react in fear with protectionism when there is an influx of immigration. 
  • Republicans and Democrats have switched flavors over time on more than one issue. 
[1] He had originally urged an isolationist approach, which suited most Americans. But German submarines foolishly continued to sink ships with Americans on them, starting with the RMS Lusitania in 1915. Although it was a British ship, 128 Americans died on it. [2] Although the efforts of our brawn might have been pointless if the British had not already broken German code, allowing the Allies to anticipate German movements.

[2] Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley are names often associated with social Darwinism.

[3] Democratic socialism has been more successful in parts of Europe, although certainly not overwhelmingly prosperous.

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Harry Shepherd Prophecy 6

This is the sixth installment of my grandfather's prophecy book. I present his words exactly as they were in 1960. They are very interesting from a historical perspective.
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IV. How Far Has God Progressed With This Program?
When the Lord began with it, naturally, He must begin with number one the formation of the nation. Then the second one would be the providing of a land in which to place the nation. With this people still in existence but in a world-wide dispersion we would naturally expect this order to be reversed when God began his work of bringing the Abrahamic Promises to final fruition. We would also expect the prophets, if their writings and the Bible are inspired, to follow the same order, too. In other words, the Lord's Work Program would begin on the land first to take away the desolate condition and then follow this with the return of the people, letting them help rehabilitate the land. If you will turn to the thirty-sixth and thirty-seventh chapters of the Prophet Ezekiel, written about 2500 years ago, you will find this reversed order in connection with world affairs in the time of the end of this Church Age. In chapter thirty-six God gives a discussion in connection with the restoration of the fertility and productivity of the land of Israel. In chapter thirty-seven He follows with the truth of the restoration of His dispersed chosen people to the land in this end time. This is immediately followed by chapters thirty-eight and thirty-nine concerning the destruction of trouble-making (verse 13) Russia and her satellite allies in the end time. This reversed order is the one in which God has been working and therefore we must be in some phase of this end time.

In 1860, one hundred years ago, God began to increase the rainfall of the Holy Land. A similar increase is promised and Ezekiel 34:26. See Joel 2:23. The former rains fall in autumn; the latter rains in the spring. The rains now, 1960, are about twice as much as one hundred years ago and some of the finest oranges in the world are now being grown in the little Israeli nation. God in His work on the Abrahamic Promises has used His returning people to drain swamps, to fertilize barren lands, to water dry places and to cause the desert to blossom in fruit-producing gardens. The divine order has been the land first—the second promise—and the nation second—the first promise—so as to have the land in shape to receive the great modern Israeli Exodus of our day. Surely this order of work, as well as the work itself, is a sign of the return of Abraham's greatest son. Let us consider next, God's modern work on the first promise to Abraham to make him a great nation.

In this discussion we are indebted to the splendid book of Mr. William L. Hull, entitled, “The Fall and Rise of Israel”,* for some ideas and information which we offer within from an Abrahamic angle. After God began the rejuvenation and rehabilitation of the land which had lain more or less desolate for centuries, He must of necessity turn His attention to His chosen people, dispersed among the nations of the earth, in order to begin again the verification of making Abraham a nation. There was no Israeli or Jewish nation at the end of the nineteenth century but God was at work on this phase of His Abrahamic Program. Jews satisfied with their surroundings, possessions and state, would have to be stirred up or bitterly persecuted before they would want to return to the land of Jacob's descendants. Then the first phase of God's work to get such return would be for him to create in the hearts of many Jews an urge and feeling that the time had come for a Jewish return to the Holy Land. Shortly before the outbreak of Russian Anti-Semitic pogroms in 1881, God began to do just this. From this urge and feeling sprang the lovers of Zion movement in Russia out of which came the agricultural colonization movement of 1882. The Lord continued this urge and feeling in the decade 1890-1900 from which came the Zionist movement whose first Congress met in Basle, Switzerland, Sunday, August 29, 1897, with 196 delegates from almost all lands where Jews lived, with the object of establishing in the Holy Land a Jewish national home. In order for God to carry this work of a Jewish return to a more complete fruition, two other phases would need to be carried out. After the stirring up of Jewry the land of Palestine must be wrested from the Turks who had held it for 400 years. Then the second phase would be for the land to come under the control of some nations in favor of a Jewish return and settlement of it. The third phase would be for the land finally to be controlled by the Jews themselves with the setting up of a new nation and with an exodus of them from all over the world.

* Ideas of truth and information have been taken here and there from Mr. William L. Hull’s book, “The Fall and Rise of Israel” between pages 102-350, and restated in our own ways. The Abrahamic angles are our own. Mr. Hull’s book is published by Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan. This part from Pages 102, 110, 111, and 1:20, used by permission.

Monday, August 29, 2016

Monday Review: Great by Choice 7

This is the final post reading through Jim Collins and Morten Hansen's book, Great by Choice.

1. The final chapter has to do with luck. Did the 10X companies have better luck than the comparisons, or did the comparisons have worse luck? Did the 10X companies have good luck earlier than the comparisons? Or was there a single, giant piece of good luck that made the difference?

Collins and Hansen say no. They say the difference is what 10X companies did during their luck that made the difference. By Collins' analysis, all the companies had pretty much the same overall amount of bad and good luck. They defined good luck as involving 1) some significant event independent of the people involved, 2) an event with potentially significant good or bad consequence, and 3) an event with some unpredictability to it.

2. There were a couple interesting examples of taking advantage of good luck, and of not taking advantage. AMD had some really good luck when Intel was vulnerable, but it wasn't able to deliver. Meanwhile, Intel's "fanatic discipline" saw them through that crisis. AMD failed.

Collins seemed reluctantly to acknowledge that it often comes down to people. If Amgen had not happened to snag Fu-Kuen Lin (who just happened to catch an ad in the paper), it probably wouldn't have developed the drug that made it boom. Without Bill Gates, Microsoft wouldn't have happened. Amid all the luck, good and bad, they finally seem to admit something I don't think they wanted to--the brilliance of specific people has often been the ultimate key.

Yes, yes, they were people with fanatical discipline. Yes, they were people who were empirically creative. Yes, they had productive paranoia. That's what Collins and Hansen have fronted in this book. But all those important elements still wouldn't have made a difference without some very key extraordinary people.

3. Bad luck, even really bad luck wasn't the end of many of these extraordinary characters. In fact, really bad luck sometimes was the driver that propelled them forward.

Here endeth the book review.

Sunday, August 28, 2016

Seminary PL20: Good Communication

This is a post about communication in the church. We are in a series of posts on church leadership and management. Last week we looked at the dynamics of a healthy team of leaders.

This is the sixth post on church management in my "Seminary in a Nutshell" series. In this seminary series, first I did a section on the Person and Calling of a Minister. Now this is the nineteenth post in a section on the Pastor as a Leader (see at the bottom).
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1. Communication is an obvious component of any church. How will the people in the church know when to come to services and other events if that information is not communicated? How will the staff and ministers of the church know when and how to do their jobs if that information is not communicated? You could have people who want to come, whom you want to come, who do not come because they do not know to come. You could have people who want to do things, whom you want to do things, who do not know to do them because they do not know what to do.

The importance of communication is obvious. Some aspects of communication fall more under administration as I am defining it, the day to day operations of a church. Nevertheless, I am treating it under management because in the big picture, good communication is essential for good leadership and church managers must make sure takes place.

2. From a big picture perspective, good communication is an essential ingredient in trust and belonging. If things are going on in the church that you are interested in or value, but you do not find out about them until after the fact, you may feel excluded and marginalized. On a leadership team, this is even more true if things are going on that relate directly to you.

It's true that the larger a church gets, the less everyone can know everything going on. In Sticky Teams, Larry Osborne tells of how a church can reach a size such that the church board cannot oversee or even preview everything going on. He also mentions that a church can reach a size where key employees cannot know everything going on in another area of responsibility in the church.

But it goes without saying that an employee of a church should know what is expected of him or her. It goes without saying that an employee needs to have the information he or she needs to be able to do the job.

3. In this day and age, people expect information, and a lack of information is often viewed very negatively. There is often the assumption that a leader is trying to hide something if information is not provided. Indeed, some (mostly bad) leaders deliberately withhold information as a power move. It seems to me that it was fairly common in older generations (e.g., Boomers) to withhold information. However, younger generations now view such behavior as sneaky and suspect. Open disclosure, at least for now, would seem to be the name of the game.

Sometimes leaders provide information but not the information that is wanted or needed. I heard of a situation once where a leader was always initiating projects and relationships that those in the organization only heard about incidentally or when they were necessary to move the projects further. The train, as it were, had already left the station by the time they became aware the train existed.

This situation raised two questions. On the one hand, did they need to have this information or be aware of it in the first place? Certainly they would have been more on board if they had known what was coming down the pike. But if they were not intrinsic to the new projects or relationships, was the problem theirs or the leaders'?

Again, in this day and age, people want more information rather than less. A culture where things are not hidden from the rest of the team is a healthier, more vibrant team than one where plans are difficult to find out. In the case of the leader in question, the secrecy of new plans engendered significant distrust. When the team asked for more information, they were given information but not the information on developing plans that was causing the tension in the first place.

However, there is a second question. There are times when a leader is trying to maneuver around potential opposition or to minimize resistance to plans. You simply cannot always have everyone reach consensus on a plan. At such points leaders need to figure out whether the benefit of the goal is worth the amount of future opposition and resistance. There is a time to back off on a good goal because people just aren't on board for it.

In other cases, the good goal is seen as worth the opposition and the leader may feel the need to work around irritants against the plan. It should be emphasized that hiding things is never the optimal situation. It needs to be a really good goal (or the opposition really carnal or misguided) to resort to hiddenness. However, there are times when it is best to be incommunicative to certain parties until the project or mission is too far underway to sabotage or a certain party just has to be brought in.

4. As far as the more administrative aspects of communication, a church of almost any size should have the basics--a website, a calendar, an email system, a presence on social media. A church without a website in this day and age is a church that doesn't want to be found or visited. The website should give information like where the church is located, who the pastor and staff are, phone numbers and email addresses, when the services are, what the identity of the church is (what you believe, what groups you are associated with). The possibility of giving is also highly recommended.

A presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can be set up in a few minutes. If you want to push out emergency information and prayer requests, having a Facebook prayer group and other groups is incredibly helpful at this moment in history. GroupMe is incredibly helpful for emergencies, and having a group that receives text prayer alerts is hard to beat. It may be surprising how much esprit d'corps such "trivial" media create.

The church should have an email system and someone should be checking their email daily and responding. Pastors and staff, of course, may have to establish systems if these channels get too clogged. Lots of time can be wasted doing email and engaging social media. In this day and age, it's better to err on the side of communication than non-communication. But pastors shouldn't get too sucked into the "email buddy" that wants to hash out every sermon by email every week.

Email sabbath is also important and perhaps might coincide with whatever a pastor's day of rest is.

Gmail and Google calendar are free services that a church may want to consider. Someone of course will need to maintain it, but the calendar is essential for the congregation to know what is going on in a busy church. Top staff might consider having a common calendar as well, which provides a kind of accountability so that everyone knows where everyone else is at a given time.

5. It's possible to over-communicate, of course. As someone has said, words are like currency. The more you have, the less each is worth. Of course a lack of currency also leads to economic crisis.

The higher the leader, the more valuable each word should be. A leader's words should not be spam. In general, the level of leader should generally match the level of communication. We may not like it, but this is usually the way human perception works, and perception is a reality, for good or ill.

Huge churches often protect their head leaders from a good deal of mundane communication. While this may seem strange for a Christian world where everyone is equal in God's eyes, it has to do with the mission and not status. It is not that senior leadership is better than anyone else. It's just very hard for the work to get done if senior leadership spends what would inevitably be a great deal of time responding to what would inevitably be a large volume of mundane communication.

6. Some leaders feel very strongly about layered communication channels within an organization. They feel that subordinates should not skip levels to communicate with higher administration. In general, it is important that your immediate superior not feel you are backstabbing or undermining them by jumping over them. Some also feel that you should only communicate with others at the same level as you within an organization.

These are not absolutes but they are good defaults. Beware the blind carbon copy (BCC). Keeping confidences is essential to trust and good relationships. Some conversations are better had in person. Anything written down can and will be held against you, possibly. Decisions should usually be made in person rather than through email, although sometimes email can save time when you do come together to make decisions. Also, email may be necessary if one is one a short timeline.

Next Week: Pastor as Leader 21: Hiring, Firing, Recruiting

Leadership in General
Strategic Planning
Church Management

Saturday, August 27, 2016

4.3 Using a Voltmeter

This is the third and final week of Module 4 in the Navy Basic Electricity and Electronics series. The first two weeks were:
Here are my take-aways from this final section of this module:
  • Always connect the multimeter in parallel when you are using it as a voltmeter (the opposite of an ammeter).
  • If you do not know the voltage range you are measuring, start with the highest reading and work down.
  • Your multimeter will likely have a section for DC (direct current) and a section for AC (alternating current). AC is the kind of electricity that comes out of a wall socket. DC is the kind of current that comes from a battery or self-contained unit.
  • Black lead goes to the more negative side of some load bearing or current generating object, red on the more positive side.



Friday, August 26, 2016

The Timing of Hebrews 1

The older I get, the more I find it incredible that the timing of Hebrews 1 isn't obvious to everyone.

1. The verbs of Hebrews 1:1-4 center on recent events involving Jesus, especially his exaltation:
  • God "spoke" is the main verb of this introduction, and he spoke "in these last days" in contrast to the speaking of God through the OT prophets. The timing is thus squarely recent.
  • Jesus is a Son who "sat on the right hand of Majesty in the heights," a clear reference to the exaltation. "Sat" is the main verb of the relative clause in 1:3-4, squarely placing the timing of that clause at the exaltation.
  • Yes, 1:2 looks back ("through whom he made the worlds") and forward ("whom he placed heir of all things"), but the point of view from which we look forward and back is now, at the time of Jesus' exaltation/enthronement.
  • Jesus sat, "after making a purification" - timing again is clear, exaltation
  • "Having received a name/title better than the angels" - train of thought isn't ambiguous in the slightest. He sits, he receives the title. He was lower than the angels on earth (2:9). Now he's greater (1:4). He gets the title/name at the exaltation.
  • So the most focal locus for the descriptors "being a reflection of glory and a stamp of substance" is the exaltation because this is what the relative clause is talking about.
Nothing here seems even slightly ambiguous or controversial. I'd like to see anyone go a different way without some special pleading going on.

2. This is the literary context for the chain of OT quotes that follows:
  • "For to which of the angels has he said at some time, 'You are my Son.'" Train of thought, train of thought, basic IBS and exegesis. "For" means we are getting either an explanation or a substantiation. Thus, this is overwhelmingly the most likely title in view. (I'm open to Rissi's, it's all three: Son, God, Lord, but still not tipped in that direction)
  • Bauckham is a brilliant eisegete at this point. There's not a hint anywhere in the context that the name he receives at his exaltation is YHWH. The author of Hebrews probably doesn't even know Hebrew. And even if he did know that "Lord" sometimes translates YHWH, NT authors often didn't pay attention to the original meaning. They were good Pentecostals.
  • So "Son" is the most likely name/title in view, especially given the train of thought from 1:4 to 1:5.
  • The timing of "You are my Son" is thus the exaltation. This fits with the history of NT tradition. Acts 13:33 clearly puts the timing of Ps. 2:7 also at the exaltation. Interestingly, this verse is used of the Messiah in the Dead Sea Scrolls and even in the original psalm was likely an enthronement psalm.
I pause again to wonder whether anything other than eisegesis will lead a person to a different conclusion. Where's the ambiguity?

3. At least the starting focus of the chain of quotes is thus also the exaltation, when Jesus is enthroned as royal Son of God. It's not that 2:5 denies pre-existence or "eternally begotten." It just isn't talking about those questions at all. Those questions come from a different time and place.
  • 1:6 is thus most likely picturing the exaltation. It is tempting to place it at the judgment, the "second" coming (given the context in Deuteronomy). Those of us who've seen some Christmas plays immediately think of Luke and the angels at Jesus' birth, but we can't be sure that the author of Hebrews even knows that story!
  • The context and the literary form (quote, and quote, and quote) suggest this is God leading Jesus into the heavenly world (2:5). The angels bow as their king enters the heavenly throne room. I feel the tug of other interpretations, but the force of context is squarely in this direction. 
  • 1:7-12 is a grammatical package ("on the one hand," "on the other hand" in Greek). 1:7 thus gives us the key to know what the main point of 1:8-9 and 1:10-12 is. The point is that angels are transitory and servant while Jesus is eternal and king.
  • Note again the enthronement focus of the quote in 1:8-9. God has anointed Jesus as king above his companions. An enthronement ceremony again fits perfectly with the clear exaltation context of the earlier verses. "Therefore God, your God, has anointed you." Jesus as God is distinguished from God the Father as God, with God the Father having the clear supremacy.
  • Now we get to the "Lord" quote. See how far into the train of thought we are? We are almost done. Do we really only get to the hidden key point now? This look back to creation and forward to eternity is surely not the center of the timing. Surely it is just as in 1:2. From the standpoint of the exalted Jesus, we look back and forward. The main point, a la 1:7, is the eternality and unchangingness of Christ's role.
  • The chain ends with a statement that again clarifies (1:13-14). Angels are, in one of their roles, servants for humanity. This is a role that is about to end. The timing, once again, is overwhelmingly clear. It is positioned at the end of the ages, with Jesus poised to rule and humanity on its way to glory.
I have obviously gone over this train of thought over and over again. I've worked through Bauckham multiple times. I just don't think it's even close. This is clear, straightforward IBS, an alarmingly missing skill among card carrying PhDs, IMO.

Friday Science: Geometry of Logarithms

This is my post on the fifth chapter. Well, Roger Penrose is a smart dude. I followed some of the material in this chapter and knew of some of it, but a lot of it is a bit beyond me. Still more fundamentally, I'm not exactly sure why we are talking about the material in this chapter. It's relevant to quantum physics I know, but I can't quite catch the context.

1. So I know the chapter dances with graphs of the addition and multiplication of complex numbers. Penrose makes a connection between the way logarithms behave and the way the graphs of complex numbers work. Complex number graphs 1) have an x axis that is used for the "real" part of a complex number (see my last post for a + bi as the standard form of a complex number, with a as the real part and bi as the "imaginary" part). Then 2) instead of a y axis they have an "i" axis.

2. Then he shifts to treat these graphs in terms of polar coordinates. Polar coordinates treat a point in terms of an angle that is at zero and then moves in a circle in a counterclockwise direction. Then there is a distance "r" from the origin (0,0) to that point. So the point is described in terms of an (r, ϑ) instead of an (x, y). I believe he is doing this because these ways of thinking about imaginary numbers help us get some little grasp of why the equations work the way they do.

3. Logarithms are a way of conceptualizing how exponential functions work, one that was developed in the 1600s. For some reason, I've always had trouble conceptualizing them. I get exponents. So the following relationship makes sense to me: bn=x. Thinking about this relationship logarithmically rearranges the relationship to say that the logbx=n.

4. Now I understand all these ingredients. I just don't quite get what these things all cook. The next ingredient is the number e (2.718281828...). It is a curious number that is somehow basic to the universe. It can be derived from the following formula:

The logarithm base e is called the natural logarithm (often abbreviated "ln"). Apparently, the logarithms of imaginary numbers can be expressed and graphed in terms of polar coordinates: z=loger+iϑ.

5. I'm afraid I'm still struggling to have some sense of perspective on a number of other relations that are in this home stretch. e2πi=1. And imaginary numbers can be put into polar format using the form w=re.

6. Another relation he mentions is ii. I can't entirely follow why but this is equal to eilogi =0.207879576...

7. The final section implies that there is a direct application of this math to the quantum world. Although I'm still not clear how. :-)

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Harry Shepherd Prophecy 5

This is the fifth installment of my grandfather's prophecy book.
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THE WORLD SETTING AT THE TIME OF
THE BIRTH OF JESUS CHRST

Let us look at the world setting at that time. Rome is Mistress of the world. The gates of the temple of the heathen God Janus—are closed for the third time in the 750 odd years of Rome's existence. These gates were opened in times of war and closed in times of peace. It then was a time of peace, with Augustus Caesar as Emperor. Wise men from the East break in suddenly upon the Roman scene with the question, "Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen His star in the east, and are come to worship Him"—the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6) born in this time of Roman world peace. Also a fiery evangel appears in the wilderness of Judea preaching "Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Some time later the world's greatest Evangel appears, using the same text as above. What does this world situation mean? This—that God in His Work Program has inaugurated the beginning of the third promise to Abraham of a blessing and to be a blessing. This, of course, would be brought about through the birth, coming, ministry and complete work of the world's Redeemer—Jesus Christ—the second evangel who used the text "Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

The Jews Reject a Golden Opportunity
What will the descendants of Abraham—now called Jews—do with this golden opportunity to receive this third promise and pass it on to this Roman world situation? God lets his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, give the Jewish leaders and nation three years of divine teaching, ministry and works to see. At its end they reject and crucify their Messiah in His coming in humility as a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief—His First Coming, saying, "His blood be on us, and on our children" (Matthew 27:25). This rejection of their Messiah suspends again mainly Gods Four Promises to Abraham. In about forty years (70 A.D.) the Romans destroy their Holy City—Jerusalem—their Herod's Temple, and scatter them over the Empire. They lose Promise One and so no nation. They lose Promise Two and no longer any land. The called-out ones, the church, born at their Pentecostal Feast with 120 Jewish members, accepted the Third Promise and preached its benefits to Jew and Gentile individually over the Roman world. The kingdom of heaven, preached by John the Baptist and Jesus was postponed and the Church Age came in.

With this national rejection of this third promise great economic loss came upon the Holy Land to continue for centuries. When Joshua parcelled out the land to the twelve tribes of Israel it was a land flowing with milk and honey with no danger of a depression. The absence of that danger was to be conditioned on the obedience of the Israelites. If they obeyed God the Holy Land would be blessed by its great Care-Taker, Whose eyes were constantly upon this land, and it would yield abundantly (Leviticus 26:3-13 and Deuteronomy 28:1-14) to them. If they disobeyed, God's curse would come upon them and also upon the land. It would finally become a desolation. The Israelites and the land go together. It seems this land will not yield for other peoples. This might account mainly for poor Arab farming. It has been said that with Israel obedient and in the land, world affairs are prosperous and with Israel disobedient and out of this land, world affairs are troubled. As they failed in obedience the land became desolate for centuries under God's promised curses (Leviticus 26:16-46 and Deuteronomy 28:15-68). Such was the Holy Land's condition 100 years ago when Abraham Lincoln was elected sixteenth President of the United States. Such it was when I was born in 1883. Let us see somewhat how far the world has come and how far God has come in the renewal of His work on the Four Promises to Abraham, in the lives of some of us older ones and thereby raise a reasonable inference as to how near we are to the coming, the Second Time, of the Jewish Messiah, Jesus Christ, as part of these Abrahamic Promises. Our fourth major point is: How Far Has God Progressed With This Program?

Monday, August 22, 2016

Monday Review: Great by Choice 6

This is the sixth post reading through Jim Collins and Morten Hansen's book, Great by Choice.

1. This chapter is called "SMaC," which stands for "Specific, Methodical, and Consistent." The authors are suggesting that companies that performed extraordinarily well over the long haul despite crises that tanked other companies had smac recipies from which they deviated little over the course of thirty years.

Throughout the chapter, specific examples are given. Southwest almost entirely stuck to its formula of only 737s, stick to less than two hour flights, stay out of food services, etc over the long haul of some thirty years. Progressive stuck to high risk drivers, pricing for individual customers, keeping experiments to less than 5% of total revenues. Intel stuck to doubling the capacity of its integrated circuits every two years, being unbendingly reliable in delivery, avoiding markets with entrenched competitors, not skimping on R & D. Even David Breashear, Mt. Everest photographer, had a formula to which he fanatically stuck.

The point I think is that there was less overall change from the core winning formula among 10X companies than there was among parallel companies that could have succeeded similarly but failed instead. Over thirty years, the 10X companies only had 10-20% change of their basic formula. The competing companies varied from 55-70%.

"The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change; the signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency"  (138).

2. That is not to say that they did not change. Indeed, several of them changed in key ways and would have failed if they had not. One wonders if this chapter could have also been written from that perspective. Microsoft "zoomed out and back in" and realized that it needed to get on the internet train in the mid-90s. Intel realized that its core business in memory was going nowhere and changed fairly significantly to microprocessors, which had only been a minor element in their portfolio up to that time.

So how does a lasting company make the changes that are needed? Here's where the previous chapters come into play. They have productive paranoia that smells a looming crisis and zooms out and then back in to refocus. They have empirical creativity that makes changes on the basis of empirical evidence.

The chapter ends by using the US Constitution as a good example of a company that has gone the distance. It set up a good core formula, but made room for amendments. But the process of making amendments is arduous and, aside from the original ten in the Bill of Rights, we have only made 17 changes in 225 years.

Saturday, August 20, 2016

4.2 Voltage in a Series Circuit

This is the second week of Module 4 in the Navy Basic Electricity and Electronics series. The first week was:
1. While amperage measures anywhere in a circuit, as long as it is connected in series. Voltage can only be measured where there is a difference in potential, and it is measured in parallel.

2. A difference in potential exists either where there is a "voltage rise" across a battery or source of electromotive force... or it can be measured across a "voltage drop," something that offers resistance to that force (e.g., a resistor, a lamp, etc...).

3. The voltage source can be symbolized with an E, or Es (source voltage), or Ea (applied voltage) or ET (total voltage).

4. Kirchoff's Voltage Law is that the total voltage drop will always equal the total applied voltage. This is more or less the same as the conservation of energy. The voltage used up by each resistor or load will add up to the total voltage across the battery or voltage source.

5. A second important rule is that in a series circuit, the largest voltage drop will take place over the largest resistance.

Friday, August 19, 2016

Friday Science: Square Root of Negative 1

A fourth post will be brief. Chapter 3 was about real numbers. This chapter talks about the "magic" of complex numbers. I didn't immediately follow everything in this chapter, and don't have the time to mull it over. But the 1700s saw the realization that there were good reasons to talk about the square root of negative one.

Of course anything squared ends up positive, so there is no "real" number that multiplies by itself and turns out negative. So mathematicians of the 1700s defined a quantity "i" that multiplied by itself to equal -1.

A "complex number" is a real number plus another number times i. So these numbers have the form a + bi.

As it turns out, complex numbers are intrinsic to quantum physics. They thus do relate in a fundamental way to reality. More on that to come in future chapters.

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Thursday Novel Excerpt: Leaving the Netherlands 2

Continued from last week
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Two years before the later Maartin, the nephew, boarded a ship for America, the Peace of Westphalia had been signed in 1648. The Netherlands were now officially free from Spain. The wars were over, at least for the moment. What should the soldier class do?

This Maartin was sixty-six when he decided to take his family and start out for Nieu Amsterdam in 1650. He had no castle. The courts had taken that from his line. He himself had settled as an adult in Amersfoort in the province of Utrecht. The family had slowly moved west through Dutch territory from generation to generation.

But the intrigues of the province of Holland, the westernmost province of the Netherlands, were of no interest to his temperament. It was far too broad-minded for Maartin. They actually had a non-Christian synagogue in Amsterdam! He had seen it.

The people from Holland were always fighting over irrelevant ideas, he thought. A century ago there was that rascal Erasmus, who had pushed back against the Reformation. Then forty some years ago there was Arminius at Leiden, that heretic who unfortunately died before they could behead him. At least the Synod of Dortrecht had put an end to the Remonstrants and all their nonsense.

Give him the black and white faith of the Dutch Reformed Church. God determined everything, and everything that happened was so because of his divine decree. None of this angels on the head of a pin business.

But Maartin hoped to change his family's fortunes in the new world. The thought of a new adventure, of new territory to conquer, invigorated him, even at sixty-six. He loaded his sons Roelof and Jan, his daughter Anetje on a ship in March of 1650. He hoped to come back for his wife Maria within the year.

Maartin would die of yellow fever at sea and never return for his wife. The thirty year old Roelof and his siblings said a small word commending him to the sea and dropped his body in the ocean. God's will is God's will, Roelof said. God would raise him up from the sea again on the day of resurrection.

As for them, they were determined to make a new and better future for themselves!

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Gen Eds H3: From the Cold War to the Millennium

This is the third post in the World History part of my "General Education in a Nutshell" series. This series involves ten subjects you might study in a general education or "liberal arts" core at a university or college. The first topic in the overall series was philosophy. So far in the world history section:
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The Internet and Globalization
1. We might have talked more about the immense impact of the internet and social media in the previous post. However, it is just as well to discuss this epoch-changing, immense shift in world culture as we think about the world situation at the turn of the millennium. 9-11 has slowed down some aspects of globalization, but it has far from stopped it.

In 2016, as I write, there is a blip of some retrenchment on globalization. The Brexit vote this summer started a process of Britain's removal from the European Union (EU). The initial economic consequences have been soundly negative, although we will see what the long term consequences are. Most economists predict that Britain will lose far more than it will gain.

In the US presidential campaign, both major candidates oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) because of the anti-trade climate in the country at present. Donald Trump's primary demographic is exactly the kind of individual most adversely affected in the US by companies doing business outside the country. Hillary Clinton was initially supportive of the legislation (which has been strongly promoted by current President Obama). But in order to solidify supporters of the other Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, she has had to flip on this issue.

Both Trump and Sanders regularly bring up/brought up the fact that Bill Clinton when president had signed into law NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada, which went into effect in 1994. Although most would say that this agreement had a net positive effect on the US economy overall, it certainly resulted in a loss of jobs for many American workers whose jobs left the country. As Ross Perot warned in the 1992 election, many local workers experienced the "giant sucking sound" of jobs moving to Mexico.

President Obama assures the American people that the TPP has provisions to guard against sweat shops and other elements of disproportionality that were not part of NAFTA.

2. Many have likened the transformation brought about by technology to the shift in the 1500s from an oral to a literary world. Thomas Friedman, in The World is Flat, points to a convergence of ten forces that together created an inevitable globalization. The ten "flattening" forces he mentions are 1) the fall of the Berlin Wall, 2) the launch of Netscape as an IPO, creating a way to set up webpages, 3) the ability to do work flow electronically, 4) the possibility to upload stuff to the web, 5) outsourcing, 6) offshoring, 7) supply chaining, 8) insourcing, 9) in-forming, 10) all this stuff on steroids.

The "triple convergence" he saw was the combination of these things taken together to create a 1) platform, that made everything 2) horizontal rather than vertical, and 3) brought together people from all over the world who used to be excluded.

We find all sorts of casualties of these changes and there will be more. Barnes and Noble has made some adjustments, but Borders is gone. Just as the "supply chain" bookstore mostly eliminated the corner bookstore, Amazon and print on demand have killed traditional print book sellers and publishers. [1] Ebook sales have leveled off a little but continue to take over print book territory.

Print newspapers and magazines have closed left and right. Only those that have managed to adjust to the electronic world are hanging on. A new model, where the content is mostly free and money is made by algorithm driven advertisement, has taken over.

The physical chain Blockbuster was run out of business by Netflix. Napster and its successors drove Tower Records and other traditional music sales stores out of business. Digital photos drove Kodak out of business. Meanwhile, online education is slowly eroding many colleges who refuse to be anything but residential.

That anyone questions that this is the new reality is utterly befuddling to me. There will probably always be a place for physical books, pictures, colleges. But they are on their way to becoming niche markets.

3. Another feature of the new reality is what Friedman calls the "horizontalization" of economic relationships. So I can self-publish a book through CreateSpace and sell it directly to someone through Amazon. I don't need a publisher. I just need to convince you that it's worth buying or perhaps have someone vouch for it.

Similarly, I don't have to sell something of mine to a "middle man" for you then to purchase used from him or her. I can sell it directly to you on eBay.

Going along with this horizontal aspect of the modern economy is the decentralization of organizations. [2] One wonders if some of the attitudes of people toward fighting terrorism assume that terrorist networks are top-down bureaucracies of the older type. This is the old "Cut off the head of the snake" approach. But terror networks don't necessarily have a head. They are more like the mythical Hydra--"Cut off one head and two others come back in its place."

Wikipedia is a great example of horizontalization and decentralization. Although some still scoff at it, it is clearly the most influential "encyclopedia" of all time. The information is apparently over 99% reliable. This is an encyclopedia put together by the public and edited by the public. It covers virtually every topic imaginable. No company could have put this resource together by hiring writers, and the expense it would have taken is unthinkable.

Google has to be mentioned as a resource beyond imagination, free to the whole world. Rather than a human sitting down to guess where you want to go, algorithms predict your preferred path based not only on your past searches but on the collective searches of everyone. Google Translate would have been nigh impossible to design on a traditional model but it gets more and more accurate as it self-corrects from the input of the countless individuals who are using it. Google maps has put the nail in the coffin for the traditional road map and atlas.

The Reagan Revolution
4. It seems to me that our next major point where a set of late twentieth century developments coalesce is the election of Ronald Reagan. Perhaps the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union would have fallen anyway, but Reagan played a key role in the actual history as it developed. So we are not necessarily saying that he was the cause of all these events, only that he aptly captures this moment in history.

Reagan won the electoral college by a landslide (although he only had 50% of the vote). He represented the cross-section of at least three strands that we would recognize as part of "conservatism" today. First he represented the older concern for national security. Jimmy Carter before him had been a president who had negotiated peace deals (e.g., between Israel and Egypt). By contrast, Reagan would rouse nationalistic fervor with his talk of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and his desire to set up a "star wars" space defense system. [3]

Ironically, Reagan's military build up is sometimes said to have driven the Soviet Union financially out of business, unable to compete with the amount of money he was investing in the military. But of course we should not underplay the significance of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet president when the USSR was finally dissolved in 1991. You might argue that Reagan had no plan for peace with Russia. It came to him.

One of the greatest accomplishments of Reagan's presidency was the fact that he made America feel good about itself again. The decade before his election had seen President Richard Nixon resign in disgrace for lying about spying his team did in relation to his Democratic opponents, a scandal called "Watergate" after the complex in which Democratic headquarters were located. The war in Vietnam had ended in disaster and was experienced by the American people as a devastating loss. What was there to show afterward for those 59,000 troops lost?

Reagan made large numbers of people feel proud again about being American.

5. Some of the most long lasting changes under the Reagan administration were economic. Reagan put into play the economic philosophies of Friedrich Hayek, which suggest that deregulation of business is the key to economic thriving. The late 1970s saw economic stagnation, in part the result of economic events and decisions made during the Nixon administration to fix prices, as well as the oil embargo imposed on the United States in 1973 by OPEC because America was supplying Israel militarily. [5]

Reagan's economic approach is generally called "supply-side" economics, where by decreasing or eliminating barriers to the supply of goods and services, you increase economic growth. Then, the prosperity this set up brings to the leaders of industry is meant to generate jobs, increase wages and, in effect, "trickle down" to the ordinary person. [6]

The evidence does seem fairly clear that deregulation causes business to thrive, and this approach does seem to have generated economic growth at least in the short term. There is more debate about the effect such growth has on the average person. Nothing ensures that employers will increase wages and, in this age of increasing animation and computerization, there will only be less and less need for more human hands going forward. [7]

One act of deregulation that has arguably had a massive influence on American culture is Reagan's dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Created in 1947 in the aftermath of World War II, the Fairness Doctrine required the media to present both sides of controversial issues in a "honest, equitable, and balanced" way. With this principle out the window, a climate has evolved in which particular news outlets clearly cater to specific clientele in a way that has made objectivity a liability.

6. Reagan's deregulation also fit with a political position that had shifted from Democrats to Republicans in the mid-twentieth century, namely, a bias toward state's rights. The Democrats had of course favored state's rights in the lead up to the Civil War, while the Republicans had championed the ultimate priority of the federal government. During the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the 50s, southern Democrats had continued that trajectory in their opposition to increasing moves by the federal government to undermine racial discrimination in the South.

However, this situation switched as Republicans like Richard Nixon developed what has come to be known as the "Southern Strategy." Republicans targeted the "Dixiecrats" who were opposed to the civil rights movement and desegregation, resulting in large numbers of southern Democrats becoming Republicans over the issue of race. Similarly, Democrats like Lyndon Johnson began to champion civil rights causes.

The current lay of the political landscape embodies the results of those shifts. The Democratic party has largely been the party of African-Americans ever since, while Trump's candidacy in the current election (2016) has brought to the surface white supremacist elements we had hoped had largely disappeared from American culture and the Republican party. Similarly, Republicans have definitively been the state's rights party since the 1960s, while the Democratic party is more the party of federalism.

7. Another wave that Reagan rode was the rise of the "Moral Majority." The late 1940s saw the birth of "neo-evangelicalism," with figures like Billy Graham and C. F. H. Henry leading it. For Graham, it was simply a drive to get as many people in America "saved" as possible. He went around the country and eventually the world with "Billy Graham Crusades," renting out stadiums and pressing the crowds on their need to accept Jesus as their personal Savior.

For Henry, the "crusade" was a little different. His goal and that of others was to give an intellectual respectability to the Christian response to modernism. There had been some initial response at the turn of the twentieth century to the "threats" of modernism--"higher criticism" of the Bible and evolution being the chief worriers. A group of scholars largely from Princeton had published a series of 90 essays called The Fundamentals in response to these forces from 1910-1915.

But by the middle of the twentieth century, the bulk of Christianity had simply continued on its merry way, making fun of evolution and seminary education without any significant intellectual response. [8] For Henry and Harold Ockenga (who coined the name in 1947), neo-evangelicalism was meant to be a thinking man's response to what they thought were corrupting intellectual trends within Christendom and the United States.

As the snowball has rolled, the name "evangelical" has accrued to itself a whole host of religious conservatives, including the fundamentalists from whom Henry initially sought to distinguish himself intellectually. [9] Jimmy Carter was the first president to call himself a "born again Christian," but most "evangelicals" at the time weren't buying it. Although there has always been a thread of progressive evangelicalism (e.g., Jim Wallis), the term is now almost exclusively used of a particular Christian voting block within the Republican party. [10]

8. What crystallized this alignment was the aftermath of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision of 1973, which concluded that states could only pass legislation prohibiting abortion in the third trimester of pregnancy. Roe v Wade decided that it was the woman's decision as to what she did with her body during the period before the third trimester. This ruling was modified somewhat in 1992 (Planned Parenthood v. Casey), when the trimester framework was changed to the viability of a child to survive outside the womb. In effect, that opens the door for state legislation prohibiting abortions after around the 22 week of pregnancy.

In the 1979 election, Jerry Falwell and others used Roe v. Wade as a way of rallying conservative Christians around Ronald Reagan as a candidate. Since that time, a whole host of Christians will never vote for non-Republican candidate. For many Christians, a candidate's position on abortion is the only real question to decide their vote. The argument is that only a Republican candidate will appoint the kinds of Supreme Court judges who might eventually overturn Roe v. Wade. Therefore, the argument goes, a Christian can never vote for anyone other than a Republican for president, no matter what other issues or positions might be in play or at stake.

As we already mentioned, Jerry Falwell founded the "Moral Majority" in 1979 as a rallying force for those opposed to abortion, as well as those opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment, [11] those in favor of school prayer, and those in favor of traditional family values. In 1977, James Dobson started Focus on the Family, which included a regular radio broadcast promoting similar values. Numerous other Christian outlets emerged to mobilize conservative Christians in relation to contemporary politics (Marlin Maddoux, Phyllis Schaffley). At times, the dividing line between specifically Christian concerns and the political concerns of the Republican party have undoubtedly blurred. [12]

Civil Rights Movement
9. Hostility to Supreme Court "activism" tied into a sentiment from the civil rights era, namely, the sense by many in the South at that time that the Supreme Court was making law rather than making decisions on the basis of existing law. The phrase, "activist judges" has been used as a rallying cry for Republican campaigns since that era. "Strict constructionism" is a rallying cry for those who believe that the Supreme Court must only decide on the basis of what is explicitly said in the Constitution, that it cannot extend the principles of the Constitution to areas that the Constitution does not explicitly address.

Going even further, "original meaning" advocates like Justice Clarence Thomas make decisions not only on what is explicitly said but on what was in the heads of the legislators who put it there. In other words, even if a strict constructionist today would not read the words of the Constitution necessarily to imply certain values, the meaning of the words of the Constitution is locked into what the original legislators were thinking. If they owned slaves, then equal justice for all cannot include slaves, for example, even if slaves aren't mentioned explicitly. [13]

Roe v. Wade arguably provided a respectable way to channel anger toward the Supreme Court by those in the South who were forced to integrate during the sixties and early seventies. It's hard today to champion state's rights and anti-Supreme Court activism on the basis of slavery or racism. But abortion provided a way of using a positive moral issue to channel resentment over desegregation and the overturning of Jim Crow laws.

10. World War II empowered both women and African-Americans in the United States. Both had served their country nobly during the war. While men were overseas fighting, women went to work to generate the kinds of supplies needed for war ("Rosie the Riveter"). Over 2.5 million African-American men served in the Armed Forces during the war.

This was not a genie that was going to go back easily into the bottle. Women and African-Americans had shown that they were just as capable, just as intelligent, just as American as any white male. So a new wave of feminism was launched, and soon also the civil rights movement.

The first chink in the armor--perhaps the first instance of what would come to be considered Supreme Court activism--came in 1954 with Brown vs. the Board of Education. In this decision, the SC reversed a decision from 1896 (Plessy vs. Ferguson) that concluded that "separate but equal" education for blacks was possible. The court of 1954 by contrast concluded that there was nothing equal about the separation of blacks from whites in Kansas. No doubt the recent shock of the Holocaust was fresh in the minds of many Americans at that time.

11. This opened the door wide open to begin to do what should have been done immediately after the Civil War. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the "colored" section of a Montgomery, Alabama bus after the white section was filled. It inspired a movement. Four days later, a local pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. led a boycott of the Montgomery Transit System. Finally, in another SC decision (Browder v. Gayle, again considered as activism), it was ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional. [14]

This civil rights movement would only gain steam. In 1961, there were Freedom Rides to the south to challenge in a non-violent way the refusal of southern states to abide by Supreme Court decisions (again, considered activist) that prohibited segregated restaurants and other public places. (The background of "anti-activist judge" rhetoric should by now be abundantly clear.) These Freedom Riders--both blacks and whites--peacefully violated Jim Crow laws and made police drag them to jail. They were sometimes physically abused.

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous, "I Have a Dream" speech on a "Million Man March" to the Washington Mall. President John F. Kennedy had already called for civil rights legislation that would outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. He would be assassinated (Nov. 22, 1963) before it was passed. His vice president, Lyndon Johnson, would see it through as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Lyndon Johnson was then elected in 1964 in one of the largest landslides of US history. His theme after election was "The Great Society." The goal was to carry forward the vision of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and JFK's New Frontier, to end poverty and racial injustice. 1965 saw the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which prevents racial discrimination in voting. Under Johnson, Medicaid and Medicare were created.

The late 60s were a tumultuous time in US history. Not only was the civil rights movement in full steam, but US military involvement in Vietnam was ramping up, along with opposition to it. Malcolm X, who represented a more militant wing of the African-American struggle, was assassinated on February 21, 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. At the same time, Thurgood Marshall was appointed as the first African-American Supreme Court Justice in 1967.

Barack Obama became the first African-American president in 2009. Far from ending the racial divide, it has brought race to the foreground. If anyone thought racism was over in 2008, they were wrong. Similarly, although the "war on poverty" did significantly decrease poverty, it has not eliminated it and, in fact, has had the unintended consequence of creating a phenomenon known as "generational poverty."

The Cold War
12. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged from World War II as the two primary world powers. The end of the war saw the Soviets approaching Berlin from the east and the Allied troops approaching from the west. In the aftermath of the war, the landscape of Europe largely divided along the same lines. Eastern Germany and countries to its east like Poland, Czeckoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and other areas between soon became part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. These countries became communist, effectively under the control of Russia.

Meanwhile, countries that had been part of the Allies during the war (or that had been liberated by the allies) remained democratic states: western Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and (after dual occupation for 10 years) Austria. In 1949, the United States and 11 other western nations formed NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with the goal of containing the spread of communism. In response, the Soviets created the Warsaw Pact in 1955.

The tensions between the US and Russia would continue until the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. This is generally known as the "Cold War." Although the US and the USSR thankfully never engaged in direct combat, these tensions and the preparation for such combat had a major impact on the policies and actions of the United States throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the Korean War of the 1950s and the Vietnam War of the 1960s/70s were largely proxy wars fought against the spread of communism.

13. The Korean War was a result of a situation in Asia similar to that in Europe. The Soviets had liberated the northern peninsula of Korea from the Japanese, while the US had liberated the southern part. In 1950, with the support of the USSR and communist China, north Korea launched an offensive to unify the Korean Peninsula. China had itself become communist in 1949 when Mao Zedong took over Beijing and declared the nation the People's Republic of China.

The newly formed United Nations (1945) then came to the aid of southern Korea. An armistice was signed in 1953, although no peace treaty was signed and North and South Korea remain technically at war. As a democratic nation, South Korea is an incredibly prosperous nation, while North Korea remains one of the most impoverished and oppressive places on the planet.

14. A similar situation developed in Vietnam in the 1960s. The area had been under French control for the first half of the twentieth century, but after France was taken over by the Nazis, Japan was given full access to the country until it was defeated in 1945. In the nine years that followed, an uneasy situation between the north and the south developed, with Ho Chi Minh and the communists in control of the north (allied with communist China and the Soviet Union) and the hereditary emperor in control of the south.

Over the decade that followed, the US would become more and more involved in trying to contain the communist north from taking over the south. In 1965, regular US combat units were deployed for the first time. But the conflict dragged on and on, with some 59,000 deaths of US soldiers. Opposition to the war in the US steadily increased, and it became a political football in US elections. Vietnam was the first television war, the first "living room war," a fact which no doubt fueled anti-war sentiment.

Nixon would withdraw troops in 1973. Then President Ford evacuated the remaining Americans when Saigon fell in 1975. The effect on the American population was demoralizing. We would not regain our military confidence again until the first President Bush speedily won the first Iraq war in 1991. His son probably expected a similarly quick end to the second Iraq war in 2003.

If the end of the Vietnam War had been demoralizing, the nation faced in the end of 1974 the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon. Nixon faced impeachment for perjury over the Watergate scandal, where he and various members of his team had bugged and carried out various spying on his Democratic opponents. His fall has contributed to a deep suspicion of politicians that has become endemic to American culture.

15. A key element to the Cold War was the nuclear arms race. The US had effectively hastened the close of the war with Japan by dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshema and Nagasaki. It was not long, however, until the Soviets had also developed the bomb as well (1949).

In the ensuing years, both countries raced to improve their bombs and their methods of bomb delivery. Missile silos are scattered across the United States with Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) ready to launch. Any number of submarines also have nuclear missles from which an attack could be launched if the USSR struck our land-based missles were disabled (SLBMs). The SALT I treaty with Russia in 1972 froze the total number of missles between the US and the Soviets.

Probably the closest the US and the USSR ever came to nuclear war was in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 while Kennedy was president. After Cuba had become communist in 1959, Kennedy tried to restore the government with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. Cuba then invited the Soviet Union to station nuclear weapons on the island, much as the US had secretly placed in Italy and Turkey.

An agreement was thankfully reached whereby the Soviets removed its warheads from Cuba, the US promised never to invade Cuba again, and the US removed its nuclear missiles from Turkey and Italy (which the US public did not even know were there).

The philosophy during this era was "mutually assured destruction" or MAD as a nuclear deterrent. Both powers more or less were set up to annihilate each other no matter who started a nuclear war. Therefore, it was in the interest of neither to ever start one. The situation has changed significantly now that many nations have nuclear weapons and there is the possibility that a terrorist will obtain and set off a "dirty bomb" that is hand delivered.

Most recently, Iran has been the greatest fear. The Obama administration has received sharp critique for recent arrangements made with Iran that have at least stalled its development of a nuclear arsenal. The argument is that without this arrangement, they would pretty much have nuclear weapons already. By making the Iran Nuclear Deal this year, Iran will remain some time away from having them, and other courses of action can be pursued if and when they resume movement in that direction.

16. The United States was shocked in 1957 when the Soviets successfully launched a satellite, Sputnik, into orbit. Thus was the space race begun. Similarly, in 1961, the Soviets beat the United States to launch the first human into orbit (Yuri Gagarin). Finally, JFK reluctantly decided to make a mission to the moon a matter of national security and pride. In 1961, he gave his pitch to a joint session of Congress and on July 20, 1969, the first humans stepped on the moon.

President Dwight Eisenhower had started the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 for peaceful purposes of space science. Kennedy would now charge it to developed manned space missions, to the moon as soon as possible.

17. One of the darker moments in the Cold War were the years from 1950-56 when Senator Joseph McCarthy held hearings on Capital Hill to investigate individuals accused of being communist sympathizers. His "House unAmerican Activities Committee" wreaked havoc in the lives off Americans who were blacklisted not for any actions they had taken but for their supposed ideologies. His era is a warning to any time when some politician begins to talk about ferreting out people who are "unamerican" in their views.

18. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, signalling the end of oppressive and impoverishing communism in Eastern Europe. By 1991, the Soviet Union would crumble.

19. A final key event of the post-WW2 period must be mentioned, namely, the founding of Israel in 1948. Palestine had been under the control of Great Britain since not long after the end of World War I. Over the previous half-century, Jews had steadily moved to Palestine as part of a "Zionist" movement, a sense that it was God's will for them to be in possession of the land of Israel. In 1947, the United Nations proposed two states, one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem a somewhat neutral territory under UN control.

When British control came to an end on May 14, 1948, David ben-Gurion declared the existence of The State of Israel, with then President Harry Truman giving his support the same day. The following day, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and forces from Iraq entered Palestine to secure Arab control. Ten months later, the State of Israel not only controlled all the original territory designated by the UN, but 60% of that designated for an Arab state.

The current polarization of the Muslim world with the west and the United States largely stems from the creation of Israel and US support for it. It was not the case before, demonstrating that the religion of Islam itself is not the root cause of the alienation. With every attempt to reduce Israel, it has expanded. The Six Day War of 1967 resulted in a similar expansion. Only a minority of Arab nations have come to recognize Israel as a nation (e.g., Egypt).

No one has made any major progress on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis since Jimmy Carter. The Palestinians refuse to compromise and continue to lose land. Israel has no real motivation to negotiate, since they slowly incur on Palestinian territory with every passing year.

Next Week: From Waterloo to World War II

Major Take-Aways:
  • Luddites tend to be run over by history.
  • Supply-side economics tends to grow economies but should probably be balanced with appropriate measures so that the majority have a clear benefit as well.
  • There is an ethical dimension to economics which goes beyond mere numbers.
  • Our professed reasons for certain political and "moral" positions are often not what we say they are, but rather the result from our cultural background, group affinities, and personal histories. 
  • We also tend to become more and more certain about ideas we were once tentative about, then we overwrite our past memories to think we were always that certain. 
  • Communism is a failed economic and political system. It does not lead to economic prosperity and its twentieth and twenty-first century instances were highly oppressive.
  • Beware any politicians who want to investigate other Americans for their ideas rather than their actions (hate speech is a special category, though, where certain actions are instigated by speech).
[1] Walmart eliminated most of the corner grocery stores as an earlier phase of this transition. Now the "middle man" is more and more being eliminated altogether.

[2] Check out The Starfish and the Spider for a somewhat extreme version of this reality. It is at least worth noting that the organizations Jim Collins examines in his books largely date from the period before this convergence fully was in place, although his principles still largely seem to apply. For example, the "dot-com bust" of 2001 would demonstrate some of his take-aways.

[3] As we'll mention below, the Soviet Union or U.S.S.R. (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) was the communist collection of nations with communist Russia at the center. It is generally believed that Reagan's star wars idea was impossible to pull off at the time scientifically.

[5] OPEC stands for "Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries."

[6] Opponents of this approach thus often call it "trickle down economics." George Herbert Walker Bush, who would become Reagan's vice president, called it "voodoo economics" during the 1980 campaign when he was still running against Reagan.

[7] The notion that machines might eventually replace human workers is an old idea, going back to the 1800s and the English textile industry. Called "Luddites" after a man named Ned Ludd who in 1779 destroyed two stocking frames, individuals who are resistant to technological advances and the resulting cultural shifts have often been made fun of. In particular, thus far technological development has always created new kinds of human jobs, since someone has to create and maintain the machines.

However, some feel that we are reaching a new level of technological development, where the machines can make and take care of the machines. With the advent of "artificial intelligence" (AI), we can imagine a world where human workers are not needed at all. If such a world continues to unfold, we will have to fundamentally rethink the purpose of work and the way economics might work in that world.

[8] George Marsden (Fundamentalism and American Culture) and Mark Noll (The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind) have dubbed this collection of "dispensationalists," holiness people, and Pentecostals, "fundamentalists." This is an ironic name for this group, since those who wrote The Fundamentals were largely Calvinist intellectuals.

[9] David Bebbington's description of evangelicals (Evangelicalism in Modern Britain) has become very popular: individuals with a commitment to 1) authority of Scripture, 2) activism to change society for Christ, 3) centrality of the cross, and 4) importance of personal conversion. However, this is arguably an attempt to find common ground across quite different periods of time which differed significantly from each other in character.

[10] For more on one person's analysis of twentieth century evangelicalism, see Molly Worthen's, Apostles of Reason.

[11] The ERA was a proposed amendment to the Constitution which passed Congress and was signed by President Carter but fell three states short of being ratified. It aimed to put equal rights for women into the Constitution. Although it failed as a law, its values have more or less been adopted by both parties and the culture at large.

[12] In 1967, Robert Bellah called this phenomenon, "civil religion." It is the inability of many Christians to tell the difference between their Christian devotion and their patriotism or, in this case, their political affiliation.

[13] Although these categories are well-known, I appreciated the descriptions of Jim Garlow in his Well Versed (171). However, I disagree with many of his applications of Scripture. For example, although the argument is very common in certain Calvinist circles, there is simply no biblical mandate that restricts the function of government to restraining evil. Governments can do good too (cf. Ps. 72; Rom. 13:4--"do good").

[14] Justice Clarence Thomas might have dissented under his original meaning approach. If the creators of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 would not have included where you can sit on a bus under "equal protection under the law," he would have not have considered such laws unconstitutional.