FROM STONE TO SILICON BY LAWRENCE A. Husick

[Richard Munro] HERE IS A QUOTE

From fascinating article it really underlines my basic educational belief that the raising for children must be a coordinated effort of the home what the Spanish call educación, a community of faith (ekklesia), and the school. It starts in the home and it ends in the home. This is why ideas of spending even more on schools and early education are all a waste of money as far as I am concerned MUNRO



However, I reserve the right to add an Innovation #0 (since

I work with computers, and programmers start counting from

zero, not 1). Innovation #0 in my view is one that outshines

and underlies every other innovation we have discussed. That

is the concept of intentional pedagogy. This is perhaps the

last thing in that great long list of what separates us from

the "lower animals," a phrase Darwin rejected. It's the idea

that humans can intentionally transmit culture and

generalize knowledge from the specific instance to that

which is teachable, and then intentionally give that

knowledge to another person across time and space. From

telling your child that the fire is hot and not to touch it

to the internet itself, intentional teaching is the most

important innovation of all time.



"The systematic use of teaching to ensure the learning of

skills and acquisition of knowledge by others is evidently a

peculiarity of the human species."[1] "Humans are remarkable

among animals for the way in which they teach their

young."[2] S.A. Barnett suggested that homo sapiens, the

understanding man, is perhaps not the right taxonomy for our

species, that really what we should be called is homo

docens, teaching man.

Foreign Policy Research Institute
Over 50 Years of Ideas in Service to Our Nation www.fpri.org

Footnotes
The Newsletter of FPRI's Wachman Center

FROM STONE TO SILICON: A BRIEF SURVEY OF INNOVATION by Lawrence A. Husick

Vol. 13, No. 25
October 2008

Lawrence Husick is a Senior Fellow at FPRI, where he co- directs its Wachman Center program on Teaching the History of Innovation. This essay is based on his presentation at "Teaching the History of Innovation," a two-day history institute for teachers held October 18-19. The Institute was hosted by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, MO and webcast worldwide. See

http://www.fpri.org/education/innovation/

for videocasts and texts of lectures.

The History Institute for Teachers is co-chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall. Core support is provided by the Annenberg Foundation and Mr. H.F. Lenfest; funding for the innovation program is provided by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The next history weekend is Teaching the Nuclear Age, March 28-29, 2009, at the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas.

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Webcast for Students and Teachers on Innovation and
Entrepreneurship

Tuesday, November 18, 2008
11:00 AM ET
2:00 PM ET

As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, FPRI will present two 45-minute webcast on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Secondary schools/classes may sign up to view the webcasts live online and participate in the Q&A periods.

The founders of Yahoo!, Google, and FaceBook are famous and very wealthy. They are our modern heroes. In part, each owes his success to the work and success of many other innovators and entrepreneurs in an unbroken line stretching back hundreds of years. As Isaac Newton famously repeated, "If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

On whose shoulders do Jerry Yang and David Filo (Yahoo!), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), and Mark Zuckerberg
(Facebook) stand? What innovations form the foundations of these companies’ products, and how can we understand how history can give each of us a better chance to create great products and achieve great success?

Lawrence Husick, co-director of FPRI's Wachman Center
Program on the History of Innovation will present a fast- paced webcast that traces these modern systems' roots from from an early form of telegraph, through Napoleon's France, to Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, “Ma” Bell, Bell Labs, and then finally to BitNet, ARPANet, the Internet and World Wide Web.

MUNRO: This was so fascinating and original I had to post the entire thing. I might make commentary on it later.


To register for either or both webcasts go to:

http://www.fpri.org/education/innovationwebcast/

For additional information, contact Alan Luxenberg at
lux@fpri.org or telephone (215) 732-3774 x105.
----------------------------------------------------------


FROM STONE TO SILICON: A BRIEF SURVEY OF INNOVATION

by Lawrence A. Husick

"Innovation" is not just inventions; it is a process of making changes by introducing valuable new methods, ideas, or products. "Innovations" are the things themselves--the ideas, methods, and processes. It's not simply that better mousetrap; it's different ways of thinking and doing.
Innovations may of course be inventions, but they may also be beliefs, organizational methods, and discoveries. An innovation is a value-creation mechanism. It is the way we humans manage to extract more value, generate more economic surplus and therefore more leisure time, and manage to get away from just hunting and gathering.

We can approach this topic through a "tough question." Not "what is the most important innovation in the history of man"--that one's easy. People can and do differ, but most come up with just one. No, the tough question is, "What are the 25 most important innovations, in rank order?" Rank order here means the absolute value of the impact of an innovation, be it for good or ill, on human life, times the total number of lives affected. There is no requirement that the lives impacted have any idea about the innovation or how it works. Most of us have no idea how those little people get inside our television sets to entertain and inform us, and yet we watch television. Innovations are made and affect us, and we in turn affect the course of innovation, even without deep understandings of the mechanisms.

In my list below, there may appear to be a bias toward newer innovations. That's simply a result of the ranking formula.
Looking at world population in the common era, since the year one (because in the year zero, no one had yet invented the concept of zero--that came around 600 or so), most of the people who have ever lived have lived in the last 200 years. Thus, even small innovations have tremendous impact when multiplied by the population experiencing them.

The ranking is constructed from the considered opinion of many people, too many to name. It's neither right nor wrong- -the purpose of this discourse is to provoke argument. What is included wrongly? What is left off in error? How is the order dreadfully, woefully messed up?

And now, a brief tour through the history of innovation, working backward from #25:

Innovation #25 is relativity and quantum mechanics, invented in 1912. We are a scant 103 years since special relativity, since Einstein's miraculous year of 1905, and everything we touch in industrialized society owes a debt to Einstein and his colleagues. Our entire way of looking at matter and the universe changed in the seven years from 1905-12. In fact, you would not be reading this paper on a screen, talking on the telephone, watching television, driving a car, or using any other modern marvel without the solid-state electronics that were made possible by this revolutionary innovation in how we think about the structure of the universe, from the largest galaxies down to the smallest subatomic particles that allow us to make microelectronics and nanotechnology.
In fact, one of the more troublesome and problematic challenges of the twenty-first century--how to get rid of the atom bombs we created in the twentieth century--also owes its existence to relativity and quantum mechanics.

Innovation #24 is electromagnetism. Again, the idea that we can harness electricity to do work that used to take back- breaking labor by people and animals is a revolution. Hans Christian Orsted first noticed the effect in 1820; in 1821, Michael Faraday came up with an electric motor. Most of the motive force in modern society, and all the electricity that T. Boone Pickens advertises as being created by burning fossil fuels--all the things that let us ride up in elevators and escalators, turn on our cars, have electric motors do work for us, and have electric lights--all of it comes from theories of electromagnetism. How important is electricity? Five years after Edison installed the first electric light bulb in Manhattan, the first generating plant, the Edison Electric Company, wished to celebrate its anniversary by turning off the lights for five minutes at midnight on New Year's Eve. The mayor of New York pronounced that this would be a hazard to public safety and prevented Edison turning off the power. Think about going to the grocery store in the absence of the electricity that runs the freezer and refrigerator cases. Think about our food distribution system, our communication and transportation systems. Nothing we do in an industrialized society is possible without electricity. Indeed, a critical measure of our success in Iraq and Afghanistan is our ability to build infrastructure and keep the lights on in.

Innovation #23 is evolution and natural selection. Darwin first posited this theory in On the Origins of Species in 1859. The theory was 25 years in the making, but Darwin, for reasons we now understand, was dreadfully afraid to publish it. It changed the way we view our place in the natural order. Some would say it forever debased humankind, because Darwin made it clear that we are just animals--animals of a special sort, but animals nonetheless. Our understanding of evolution and natural selection has since informed all of
our understandings of biology, ecology, healthcare,
population dynamics, and the many consequences of human actions in the natural world.

Innovation #22: Before electric power, there was steam power. The first steam engine was the French Papin engine of 1690. From 1690 through the early part of the 18th century, through Savory to Newcomb in 1712 and finally to Watt, the steam engine made a huge difference because it multiplied man's ability to do work. Before the steam engine, you needed draft animals to do anything substantial. The mining of coal was incidental and small-scale. The steam engine, which was used to drive the pumps that could drain the mines, made mining coal practical. You could finally go deep enough to get coal, which in turn was a primary fuel for the steam engine. This is an example of an innovation fueling and making available another innovation that in turn fed back on the first innovation. One of the things we learn in studying history is that there is no straight line of ascent--we always zigzag. The steam engine was truly a step forward, although it took over 100 years for it to come to final form and end up driving locomotives and steamboats and
changing transportation forever, which also changed
economies and nations.

Innovation #21: Before the steam engine, if you wanted to do serious hard work, you did it with water power. Water power was first exploited in 240 BCE, in the Fertile Crescent area in the Middle East and in Asia Minor. It is a tremendously efficient innovation, because it drives heavy millstones without draft animals. It changes the motion of falling water into useful work. Water power remained an important part of society and the economy well into the developments that sparked the Industrial Revolution in Europe. In fact, some would argue that the abundant rainfall and number of rivers in Europe created an economy based on water power
that permitted Europe to develop technologies that
outstripped the rest of the world beginning in the late Renaissance. The same is true of the factory system of New England, where mills were built to harness the rivers of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

As to efficiency, a car's gasoline engine can reach an efficiency level of only about 30 percent in terms of conversion of fuel to effort. An "undershot" water wheel, where the water flows beneath the wheel, invented more than two millennia ago, is over 25 percent efficient. And if you build a sluice and make the water an overshot water wheel, so the water falls on top of the wheel, the efficiency rockets to 75 percent. If we could build cars like that, a 100 mpg car would be no problem at all. The problem is just building a big enough water tank.

Innovation #20 is more of a world view. It is the concept of science itself, which until well past the time of Thomas Jefferson was called natural philosophy. There was no differentiation between the study of philosophy and the study of man's place in the world and his relation to God.
Newton himself said that he was trying to understand the world and the universe so that he could understand God's plan. Einstein echoed this in saying that he studied physics because he tried to understand the "mind of God."

The use of the scientific method and of objective systems of understanding and codifying the world originated in the sixth century BCE in Greece, when we went from observation to theory. Observation had long preceded theory; it was what you did if you wanted to understand the calendar or astronomy, when to plant and when to reap. But that was purely empirical. It was the Greeks who gave us this idea that there was some objective theory that knit things together that was outside of but understandable by man's experience. They also gave us formal systems--mathematics, logic, statistics. Later thinkers gave us concepts like place value (think about trying to write big numbers in Roman numerals) and, as discussed earlier, the very concept of zero.

Innovation #19, which appears at the top of many lists of innovations, is moveable type. Most Westerners would credit moveable type to the Gutenberg press of 1436. But in fact moveable type goes back to imperial China in 1040. There the type pieces were ceramic; Koreans took this invention forward about 200 years later using some metals. But the difficulty is that in pictographic languages, such as Chinese and Korean, which have 5,000 characters, the time required to find and remove one piece of type from a box system of 5,000 made it impractical and inefficient to set type. The Koreans and Chinese also had social institutions that limited printing to a bureaucratic and governmental system. There was no private market for printed materials, and eventually those cultures went back to one-off woodblock printing. Fortunately for us, Gutenberg came up with the idea of moveable type, special inks, and an efficient press, and understood the advances in what are called the type metals--tin, lead, and antimony. His innovation found a ready market because by that time, every educated person in Europe wanted the Vulgate Bible. The desire to have a Bible of one's own drove the market.

This is also an example of failures of protection of inventions. Gutenberg made all of his apprentices and
everyone who worked in his shop sign a draconian
nondisclosure agreement. And yet, within five years of Gutenberg's first use of moveable type, the technology had spread all over as his apprentices left and formed their own shops, and thus has it ever been.

Innovation #18 is fossil fuels. Today, when we hear fossil fuels, we tend to think that maybe we've gotten into trouble with this one. But fossil fuels have been critically important in the last hundred years. The first recorded uses of coal were around 1,000 BCE, in the Middle East, when it was said that there were rocks that burned like charcoal.
These were exposed coal scenes where people could simply chip away at the surface to collect them, but they also produced very hot, sustainable fires. Coal and charcoal contributed to many other important technologies. Getting beyond coal, however, had to wait a long time. The first use of natural gas drilled for its own purpose and not, for instance, for a flame (which became known as the Oracle of
Delphi) was in 1859, when we drilled our first well in Ohio.
In the same year in western Pennsylvania the first oil well was drilled and the first oil refined. In the century and a half since then, we have come to understand that our addiction to fossil fuels is perhaps irreversible.

Fossil fuels changed the way in which economies operated.
For the first time, the density of energy and fuel made it possible to make things portable. That meant changes in transportation. At the Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, there are some steam engines that stand 80' high. Today we can build engines small enough to power weed-whackers, barely the size of a softball. And it's all because of the energy density of fossil fuels. We will not replace fossil fuels completely in our lifetimes, but we are beginning to understand that petroleum and natural gas may be too valuable to burn to get from point A to point B. That is because these hydrocarbons are also the stuff of which we make miracle drugs and plastics and thousands of other things we consider indispensable.

Innovation #17 is the specialization of labor, or some would say tribal and clan organization. The idea that some people do some things better than others has been with us since well before the dawn of recorded history. Perhaps the first instance of that was the recognition that some people are well suited for hunting and others for gathering, that some people are better out there in the field and others make food that's tasty. Sexual dimorphism also gave us the
ability to separate roles. We continue to push the
boundaries of that today in society. Traditional societies have those roles relatively well set, and one of the great sources of friction in the world is the clash between societies that are overcoming those roles and those that choose not to. But the specialization of labor went far beyond to the specialization of roles in society, so that some people could knap flint and make tools, and others could use those tools. Some could make arrows and bows and spears and others could hunt with them. Some were good at making fire, and others not so good. The idea that you can build a society by specializing those roles freed a lot of people and a lot of time, improved efficiency, and created value.

Innovation #16, paper, ia a relatively recent innovation.
Paper was first mentioned by the Chinese in the year 105, and yet the Chinese continued to use other materials because paper was thought of as too fragile, writing too expensive.
Paper continued to develop until finally, by the sixteenth century, wood pulp paper became more widely used than rag paper, which created an explosion in publishing and the growth of knowledge. It can really be said that wood pulp paper created the modern educational system. Before that, the cost to create a book and disseminate it created bottlenecks in the economy. With wood pulp paper, publishing began to bloom, and with it, modern scholarship.

Innovation #15 is also at the top of most people's
innovation lists: the wheel. The first wheel was probably a millstone transported for its own use (as a stonecutter makes millstone in the quarry and then must somehow get it to the mill.) One theory of how the wheel might have developed is the idea of rollers and sledges. These systems were instrumental in building the Egyptian pyramids and before that the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, and perhaps the megaliths of Stonehenge. The wheel changed how we move things, how far we could go in a day, and how far we could
farm from a village. Thus the wheel heralded the
domestication of draft animals, because once you decide you're tired of pulling the thing along, you look for something else that's going to pull better.

Innovation #14 is formal law codes. Certainly there were formal law codes before the Code of Hammurabi, who was
codifying oral or fragmented law. But by 1,780 BCE,
Hammurabi had laid down a formal code of laws, most of which did not deal with criminal law but rather with civil and commercial law. That trend continued through the Egyptian Book of the Dead, even to the Ten Commandments and the
Twelve Tables of Rome. The great works of law and
literature, including one of the greatest, the Book of Leviticus, show that we have come up with an awful lot of civil law, a lot of ways of saying how people should relate to one another commercially. In effect, we have been simply writing down our politics for thousands of years. But law is a way of reducing the cost of dispute resolution to a society, and thereby increasing the efficiency of its economy. It's much better if you know what you're supposed to do and what happens if you don't. That predictability increases efficiency.

Closely allied with law is Innovation #13, the concept of money. Money also has a long and storied history. Humankind started out with barter. What do you have that I need? It
went with specialization of labor. If someone makes
arrowheads all day, how are you going to get the arrowhead from him? You're probably going to trade something you've just hunted with an arrowhead he made. Money comes into the picture as a way of solidifying the power of the state.
That's why the Sumerians, the first agricultural urban society, were the first to adopt a concept of money. In other words, I've got a lot of stuff stored, I'll give you something that says you now own it. In effect, it's a form of deed.

We come forward from coins to paper money and finally the thing that enables all modern economies, the concept of fiat and credit currency, which was developed in late medieval Europe, in which letters of credit and letters of mark allowed us for the first time to bank on the power of the state itself rather than on the value of the coinage.

Innovation #12 is gods and religions as social institutions.
Religion creates social cohesion by creating in and out groups. It gives a priestly class super-authority (authority that doesn't come from who you are, but rather who you
represent) and shapes behavior in both prescriptive and
motivational ways, all in a tremendously economically
efficient mode. If you are a priest-king living in a palace in ancient Sumer, you have a prescriptive authority of saying, "This is the God speaking and not the man," and you have the ability to promise rewards in the afterlife at no particular cost to yourself or the ruling class. It's a debt
you'll never have to pay off. Economically and
organizationally, religious organization has to be ranked right up there at the top with almost any other economic advance.

Dostoevsky probably put it best in The Brothers Karamazov, when Fyodor Pavlovich said, "Damn it all, what wouldn't I do
to the man who first invented God!" To which Ivan
Fyodorovich replies that there would have been no
civilization if they hadn't invented God, and no brandy, either.

Innovation #11, systems of writing, went from pictographs, whether cuneiform or Chinese in their evolution, with thousands of individual symbols to be learned, to an
alphabetic system which evolved from the Phoenicians,
through a long period of evolution that we can trace all the way down to our use of Roman script today. The idea that characters can be combined in grammars to represent ideas made possible written records of tremendous complexity and efficiency, calculations as place value was developed, and Gutenberg's printing press. Our alphabet derives directly from something 2,900 years old. One of the only advances thereafter was the development of a separate numbering system, what we call the Arabic numbering system.

Innovation #10, food preservation, arguably first developed around 10,000 BCE in the Neolithic revolution, meant that you didn't have to eat what you killed right away, but could save it for lean times. Portable food sources that are
dried, freeze-dried, salted, spiced, pickled, cooked,
smoked, or fermented allows travel over longer distances and more efficient migration with animals, changes society, and generates tremendous value. We understand all of these
methods and techniques, but many of them have been
supplanted by electric refrigeration. It would now be very hard to find salted cod, which was a staple of the northern European diet for 2,000 years. Instead we buy fresh cod or go to Costco, where they routinely fly in a 600-pound tuna caught two days ago in the Solomon Islands in the middle of the Pacific. (I shudder at the carbon footprint.)

Innovation #9 is metallurgy. Ancient people built fires that burned hot. They looked in the bottom of the fire pit after a while and noticed there were some things there that were harder than the kinds of stones they were used to dealing with. What were they? What could be done with them? The progression was from copper, silver, and gold to soft metals first mined and smelted in about 4,400 BCE; to the idea of alloying certain metals, for instance copper with tin, to get bronze, which is a harder and more durable metal; to the Iron Age to finally steel. In fact, Damascus steel is probably the first instance of the use of nanotechnology, as carbon nanotubes from the furnaces were incorporated that made the steel remarkably hard yet not brittle. Metalworking became both a science and an art. In Jared Diamond's theory of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), steel is the third leg of the dominance tripod of the West.

Innovation #8: Ceramics and pottery. Some of the other things the ancients found in the bottom of a fire pit were pieces of clay that through repeated firings had gotten hard and had their porosity reduced. So you have the ability to make clay vessels, first to store dry things like grains, then fired clay in which you can store liquids, and finally earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain, which eventually in the hands of Chinese became high art. From a simple clay pot unearthed in Syria, 6,600 BCE we come all the way forward to our finest toilets today, which are vitreous china, made by
the same processes of molding and firing clay. Our
microelectronics also owe a debt to pottery and ceramics.
Computer chips are built on a ceramic substrate that conducts the heat away from them. No ceramics, and the chips would burn themselves up and your cell phone would quit working.

Innovation #7, farming, is really a chain of innovation over a long period of time. The first animal to be domesticated is generally thought to be the dog, around 15,000 BCE. (The horse was domesticated on the steppes of Central Asia in about 5,000 BCE, but the horse collar, which would make the horse so useful in farming, would have to wait another 4,000
years.) The domestication of plants began with the bottle gourd, something you could dry out and carry as a canteen.
Imagine what it would be like if you couldn't carry water with you when you go hunting. You would have to stay pretty close to sources of water. With a bottle gourd, you could go farther and have greater access to more crops and herds.
Wheat was arguably the most important crop in the world until rice--the most efficient crop for converting the nutrients in sunlight into edible material--came along about 5,000 years later.

From the domestication of animals and plants to hydraulic agriculture--the idea of artificial irrigation of crops that was developed in the Fertile Crescent--to the plow and the concept of crop rotation, chemical fertilizers (which didn't occur to us until the seventeenth century), artificial nitrate fertilizers (which didn't occur until we could synthesize them at the beginning of the twentieth century), and finally the Green Revolution in the early 1960s, farming has given us the ability to create unprecedented economic surplus, which many would say gave us the rest of the innovations listed here.

Innovation #6: Clothing. Without clothing, people have to stay where it's warm and dry. It took a long time to go from draping ourselves in tanned animal skins to figuring out how to use a needle to sew them into some sort of a shape, and a longer time still to the weaving of cloth and the making of tailored, layered clothes. In the stone age, not only did you eat what you killed, you also wore it. We've been able to reconstruct the clothes of Utze, a Copper Age hunter, found when a glacier in the Austrian Alps receded. He wore snow shoes lined with grass for insulation. He had a cape made out of woven grass, carried sophisticated animal skin bags for his gear, and he was truly a happy wanderer until someone shot him with an arrow and he died and got frozen in that glacier.

Innovation #5: Symbolic communication. Starting with cave painting, human beings began to communicate with each other across time and space, not simply face to face. The idea that one could communicate with people through symbols made externalization of information and language possible. It gave us a storehouse of information that didn't need to be transmitted just by showing someone how it worked, whether you were drawing on the walls in a cave in Lascaux or coming up with counters in Aswan that indicate that some dates were brought by camel from a far-away place. At the same time, symbolic communication in Sumer developed into cuneiform, pressing reeds into soft clay and baking them. (We know a tremendous amount about cuneiform because it's really hard to get rid of clay tablets.)

Innovation #4: Lever simple machine. There are a number of classes of simple machines, of which the lever is perhaps one of the oldest. It allows people to amplify their mechanical effort. Hammers and plows mean that instead of the effort of one person digging with hands or tools, now there is mechanical advantage. Farmers can plow deeper and throw farther and with more force. Archimedes is famously said to have stated, "Give me a place to stand with a lever and I will move the whole world." In fact, the concept of a lever has moved the whole world since its invention.

Innovation #3: Inclined plane simple machine. Don't just think ramp, think blades, wedges, chutes, slides, and screws. Chopper cores unearthed at the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa that are 1.9 million years old show a clear effort to manufacture. They were used for chopping and scraping hides as well as for hunting. That technology was brought forward to the high art of the Clovis arrow point and the higher still art of Archimedes' screw water pump, which permitted hydraulic irrigation by pumping water up out of canals and rivers and into irrigation ditches with a simple turn of the screw.

Innovation #2 is the taming of fire. Fire has been around a long time, often caused by lightning strikes. But being able to make fire on demand, or first being able to capture it from the wild and preserve and use it as you wish, permitted humans to live in colder places, work after dark, inhabit places that were dark and perhaps dangerous, scare off animals at night, and cook food in order to preserve it.
Fire-starting technologies are tremendously tough to master, which probably also meant more specialization of labor as humans began to use simple technologies like the fire plow, the fire drill, and the smudge bundle, otherwise known as the cigar.

Innovation #1 in spoken language--true semantic, syntactic, phonetic language. This idea allowed humans to transmit information about the world from one person to another. It
underlies all cooperation, the economy, and clan
relationships. Spoken language is the most important
innovation we have ever come up with.

However, I reserve the right to add an Innovation #0 (since I work with computers, and programmers start counting from zero, not 1). Innovation #0 in my view is one that outshines and underlies every other innovation we have discussed. That is the concept of intentional pedagogy. This is perhaps the last thing in that great long list of what separates us from the "lower animals," a phrase Darwin rejected. It's the idea
that humans can intentionally transmit culture and
generalize knowledge from the specific instance to that
which is teachable, and then intentionally give that
knowledge to another person across time and space. From telling your child that the fire is hot and not to touch it to the internet itself, intentional teaching is the most important innovation of all time.

"The systematic use of teaching to ensure the learning of skills and acquisition of knowledge by others is evidently a peculiarity of the human species."[1] "Humans are remarkable among animals for the way in which they teach their young."[2] S.A. Barnett suggested that homo sapiens, the understanding man, is perhaps not the right taxonomy for our species, that really what we should be called is homo docens, teaching man.

So what didn't make the list? Lots of things, for reasons that I hope you will understand and then vehemently disagree with. Everything from theories of disease, inoculations, and antibiotics to guns and gunpowder, and plastics to democracy to even the idea that there is such a thing as an idea, in my estimation couldn't make the cut of the metric I set forth earlier: impact on lives times number of lives. Others have had different concepts of what innovation means and what innovations are truly important. My hope is not that I have it right, but that readers will help me get it more right with your comments, questions, emails, or simply throwing it wrapped around a rock through the transom.


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Notes

[1] Barnett, S.A., Teaching Considered as Behavior, in Comparative Psychology: A Handbook, in Greenberg, G. and M.
Haraway, Taylor & Francis, 1998, p. 203.

[2] Marton, F. et al., Learning and Awareness, Erlbaum Assoc., Mahwah, NJ, 1997, p. 166.


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-----Original Message-----
From: Foreign Policy Research Institute [mailto:fpri@fpri.org]
Sent: Saturday, October 25, 2008 6:57 PM
To: rmunro1@bak.rr.com
Subject: The Top 25 Innovations in World History

Foreign Policy Research Institute
Over 50 Years of Ideas in Service to Our Nation
www.fpri.org

Footnotes
The Newsletter of FPRI's Wachman Center

FROM STONE TO SILICON: A BRIEF SURVEY OF INNOVATION
by Lawrence A. Husick

Vol. 13, No. 25
October 2008

Lawrence Husick is a Senior Fellow at FPRI, where he co-
directs its Wachman Center program on Teaching the History
of Innovation. This essay is based on his presentation at
"Teaching the History of Innovation," a two-day history
institute for teachers held October 18-19. The Institute was
hosted by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas
City, MO and webcast worldwide. See

http://www.fpri.org/education/innovation/

for videocasts and texts of lectures.

The History Institute for Teachers is co-chaired by David
Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall. Core support is provided
by the Annenberg Foundation and Mr. H.F. Lenfest; funding
for the innovation program is provided by the Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation. The next history weekend is Teaching
the Nuclear Age, March 28-29, 2009, at the Atomic Testing
Museum in Las Vegas.

----------------------------------------------------------
Webcast for Students and Teachers on Innovation and
Entrepreneurship

Tuesday, November 18, 2008
11:00 AM ET
2:00 PM ET

As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, FPRI will present
two 45-minute webcast on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Secondary schools/classes may sign up to view the webcasts
live online and participate in the Q&A periods.

The founders of Yahoo!, Google, and FaceBook are famous and
very wealthy. They are our modern heroes. In part, each owes
his success to the work and success of many other innovators
and entrepreneurs in an unbroken line stretching back
hundreds of years. As Isaac Newton famously repeated, "If I
have seen a little further, it is by standing on the
shoulders of giants."

On whose shoulders do Jerry Yang and David Filo (Yahoo!),
Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), and Mark Zuckerberg
(Facebook) stand? What innovations form the foundations of
these companies’ products, and how can we understand how
history can give each of us a better chance to create great
products and achieve great success?

Lawrence Husick, co-director of FPRI's Wachman Center
Program on the History of Innovation will present a fast-
paced webcast that traces these modern systems' roots from
from an early form of telegraph, through Napoleon's France,
to Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, “Ma” Bell, Bell
Labs, and then finally to BitNet, ARPANet, the Internet and
World Wide Web.

To register for either or both webcasts go to:

http://www.fpri.org/education/innovationwebcast/

For additional information, contact Alan Luxenberg at
lux@fpri.org or telephone (215) 732-3774 x105.
----------------------------------------------------------


FROM STONE TO SILICON: A BRIEF SURVEY OF INNOVATION

by Lawrence A. Husick

"Innovation" is not just inventions; it is a process of
making changes by introducing valuable new methods, ideas,
or products. "Innovations" are the things themselves--the
ideas, methods, and processes. It's not simply that better
mousetrap; it's different ways of thinking and doing.
Innovations may of course be inventions, but they may also
be beliefs, organizational methods, and discoveries. An
innovation is a value-creation mechanism. It is the way we
humans manage to extract more value, generate more economic
surplus and therefore more leisure time, and manage to get
away from just hunting and gathering.

We can approach this topic through a "tough question." Not
"what is the most important innovation in the history of
man"--that one's easy. People can and do differ, but most
come up with just one. No, the tough question is, "What are
the 25 most important innovations, in rank order?" Rank
order here means the absolute value of the impact of an
innovation, be it for good or ill, on human life, times the
total number of lives affected. There is no requirement that
the lives impacted have any idea about the innovation or how
it works. Most of us have no idea how those little people
get inside our television sets to entertain and inform us,
and yet we watch television. Innovations are made and affect
us, and we in turn affect the course of innovation, even
without deep understandings of the mechanisms.

In my list below, there may appear to be a bias toward newer
innovations. That's simply a result of the ranking formula.
Looking at world population in the common era, since the
year one (because in the year zero, no one had yet invented
the concept of zero--that came around 600 or so), most of
the people who have ever lived have lived in the last 200
years. Thus, even small innovations have tremendous impact
when multiplied by the population experiencing them.

The ranking is constructed from the considered opinion of
many people, too many to name. It's neither right nor wrong-
-the purpose of this discourse is to provoke argument. What
is included wrongly? What is left off in error? How is the
order dreadfully, woefully messed up?

And now, a brief tour through the history of innovation,
working backward from #25:

Innovation #25 is relativity and quantum mechanics, invented
in 1912. We are a scant 103 years since special relativity,
since Einstein's miraculous year of 1905, and everything we
touch in industrialized society owes a debt to Einstein and
his colleagues. Our entire way of looking at matter and the
universe changed in the seven years from 1905-12. In fact,
you would not be reading this paper on a screen, talking on
the telephone, watching television, driving a car, or using
any other modern marvel without the solid-state electronics
that were made possible by this revolutionary innovation in
how we think about the structure of the universe, from the
largest galaxies down to the smallest subatomic particles
that allow us to make microelectronics and nanotechnology.
In fact, one of the more troublesome and problematic
challenges of the twenty-first century--how to get rid of
the atom bombs we created in the twentieth century--also
owes its existence to relativity and quantum mechanics.

Innovation #24 is electromagnetism. Again, the idea that we
can harness electricity to do work that used to take back-
breaking labor by people and animals is a revolution. Hans
Christian Orsted first noticed the effect in 1820; in 1821,
Michael Faraday came up with an electric motor. Most of the
motive force in modern society, and all the electricity that
T. Boone Pickens advertises as being created by burning
fossil fuels--all the things that let us ride up in
elevators and escalators, turn on our cars, have electric
motors do work for us, and have electric lights--all of it
comes from theories of electromagnetism. How important is
electricity? Five years after Edison installed the first
electric light bulb in Manhattan, the first generating
plant, the Edison Electric Company, wished to celebrate its
anniversary by turning off the lights for five minutes at
midnight on New Year's Eve. The mayor of New York pronounced
that this would be a hazard to public safety and prevented
Edison turning off the power. Think about going to the
grocery store in the absence of the electricity that runs
the freezer and refrigerator cases. Think about our food
distribution system, our communication and transportation
systems. Nothing we do in an industrialized society is
possible without electricity. Indeed, a critical measure of
our success in Iraq and Afghanistan is our ability to build
infrastructure and keep the lights on in.

Innovation #23 is evolution and natural selection. Darwin
first posited this theory in On the Origins of Species in
1859. The theory was 25 years in the making, but Darwin, for
reasons we now understand, was dreadfully afraid to publish
it. It changed the way we view our place in the natural
order. Some would say it forever debased humankind, because
Darwin made it clear that we are just animals--animals of a
special sort, but animals nonetheless. Our understanding of
evolution and natural selection has since informed all of
our understandings of biology, ecology, healthcare,
population dynamics, and the many consequences of human
actions in the natural world.

Innovation #22: Before electric power, there was steam
power. The first steam engine was the French Papin engine of
1690. From 1690 through the early part of the 18th century,
through Savory to Newcomb in 1712 and finally to Watt, the
steam engine made a huge difference because it multiplied
man's ability to do work. Before the steam engine, you
needed draft animals to do anything substantial. The mining
of coal was incidental and small-scale. The steam engine,
which was used to drive the pumps that could drain the
mines, made mining coal practical. You could finally go deep
enough to get coal, which in turn was a primary fuel for the
steam engine. This is an example of an innovation fueling
and making available another innovation that in turn fed
back on the first innovation. One of the things we learn in
studying history is that there is no straight line of
ascent--we always zigzag. The steam engine was truly a step
forward, although it took over 100 years for it to come to
final form and end up driving locomotives and steamboats and
changing transportation forever, which also changed
economies and nations.

Innovation #21: Before the steam engine, if you wanted to do
serious hard work, you did it with water power. Water power
was first exploited in 240 BCE, in the Fertile Crescent area
in the Middle East and in Asia Minor. It is a tremendously
efficient innovation, because it drives heavy millstones
without draft animals. It changes the motion of falling
water into useful work. Water power remained an important
part of society and the economy well into the developments
that sparked the Industrial Revolution in Europe. In fact,
some would argue that the abundant rainfall and number of
rivers in Europe created an economy based on water power
that permitted Europe to develop technologies that
outstripped the rest of the world beginning in the late
Renaissance. The same is true of the factory system of New
England, where mills were built to harness the rivers of
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

As to efficiency, a car's gasoline engine can reach an
efficiency level of only about 30 percent in terms of
conversion of fuel to effort. An "undershot" water wheel,
where the water flows beneath the wheel, invented more than
two millennia ago, is over 25 percent efficient. And if you
build a sluice and make the water an overshot water wheel,
so the water falls on top of the wheel, the efficiency
rockets to 75 percent. If we could build cars like that, a
100 mpg car would be no problem at all. The problem is just
building a big enough water tank.

Innovation #20 is more of a world view. It is the concept of
science itself, which until well past the time of Thomas
Jefferson was called natural philosophy. There was no
differentiation between the study of philosophy and the
study of man's place in the world and his relation to God.
Newton himself said that he was trying to understand the
world and the universe so that he could understand God's
plan. Einstein echoed this in saying that he studied physics
because he tried to understand the "mind of God."

The use of the scientific method and of objective systems of
understanding and codifying the world originated in the
sixth century BCE in Greece, when we went from observation
to theory. Observation had long preceded theory; it was what
you did if you wanted to understand the calendar or
astronomy, when to plant and when to reap. But that was
purely empirical. It was the Greeks who gave us this idea
that there was some objective theory that knit things
together that was outside of but understandable by man's
experience. They also gave us formal systems--mathematics,
logic, statistics. Later thinkers gave us concepts like
place value (think about trying to write big numbers in
Roman numerals) and, as discussed earlier, the very concept
of zero.

Innovation #19, which appears at the top of many lists of
innovations, is moveable type. Most Westerners would credit
moveable type to the Gutenberg press of 1436. But in fact
moveable type goes back to imperial China in 1040. There the
type pieces were ceramic; Koreans took this invention
forward about 200 years later using some metals. But the
difficulty is that in pictographic languages, such as
Chinese and Korean, which have 5,000 characters, the time
required to find and remove one piece of type from a box
system of 5,000 made it impractical and inefficient to set
type. The Koreans and Chinese also had social institutions
that limited printing to a bureaucratic and governmental
system. There was no private market for printed materials,
and eventually those cultures went back to one-off woodblock
printing. Fortunately for us, Gutenberg came up with the
idea of moveable type, special inks, and an efficient press,
and understood the advances in what are called the type
metals--tin, lead, and antimony. His innovation found a
ready market because by that time, every educated person in
Europe wanted the Vulgate Bible. The desire to have a Bible
of one's own drove the market.

This is also an example of failures of protection of
inventions. Gutenberg made all of his apprentices and
everyone who worked in his shop sign a draconian
nondisclosure agreement. And yet, within five years of
Gutenberg's first use of moveable type, the technology had
spread all over as his apprentices left and formed their own
shops, and thus has it ever been.

Innovation #18 is fossil fuels. Today, when we hear fossil
fuels, we tend to think that maybe we've gotten into trouble
with this one. But fossil fuels have been critically
important in the last hundred years. The first recorded uses
of coal were around 1,000 BCE, in the Middle East, when it
was said that there were rocks that burned like charcoal.
These were exposed coal scenes where people could simply
chip away at the surface to collect them, but they also
produced very hot, sustainable fires. Coal and charcoal
contributed to many other important technologies. Getting
beyond coal, however, had to wait a long time. The first use
of natural gas drilled for its own purpose and not, for
instance, for a flame (which became known as the Oracle of
Delphi) was in 1859, when we drilled our first well in Ohio.
In the same year in western Pennsylvania the first oil well
was drilled and the first oil refined. In the century and a
half since then, we have come to understand that our
addiction to fossil fuels is perhaps irreversible.

Fossil fuels changed the way in which economies operated.
For the first time, the density of energy and fuel made it
possible to make things portable. That meant changes in
transportation. At the Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, there
are some steam engines that stand 80' high. Today we can
build engines small enough to power weed-whackers, barely
the size of a softball. And it's all because of the energy
density of fossil fuels. We will not replace fossil fuels
completely in our lifetimes, but we are beginning to
understand that petroleum and natural gas may be too
valuable to burn to get from point A to point B. That is
because these hydrocarbons are also the stuff of which we
make miracle drugs and plastics and thousands of other
things we consider indispensable.

Innovation #17 is the specialization of labor, or some would
say tribal and clan organization. The idea that some people
do some things better than others has been with us since
well before the dawn of recorded history. Perhaps the first
instance of that was the recognition that some people are
well suited for hunting and others for gathering, that some
people are better out there in the field and others make
food that's tasty. Sexual dimorphism also gave us the
ability to separate roles. We continue to push the
boundaries of that today in society. Traditional societies
have those roles relatively well set, and one of the great
sources of friction in the world is the clash between
societies that are overcoming those roles and those that
choose not to. But the specialization of labor went far
beyond to the specialization of roles in society, so that
some people could knap flint and make tools, and others
could use those tools. Some could make arrows and bows and
spears and others could hunt with them. Some were good at
making fire, and others not so good. The idea that you can
build a society by specializing those roles freed a lot of
people and a lot of time, improved efficiency, and created
value.

Innovation #16, paper, ia a relatively recent innovation.
Paper was first mentioned by the Chinese in the year 105,
and yet the Chinese continued to use other materials because
paper was thought of as too fragile, writing too expensive.
Paper continued to develop until finally, by the sixteenth
century, wood pulp paper became more widely used than rag
paper, which created an explosion in publishing and the
growth of knowledge. It can really be said that wood pulp
paper created the modern educational system. Before that,
the cost to create a book and disseminate it created
bottlenecks in the economy. With wood pulp paper, publishing
began to bloom, and with it, modern scholarship.

Innovation #15 is also at the top of most people's
innovation lists: the wheel. The first wheel was probably a
millstone transported for its own use (as a stonecutter
makes millstone in the quarry and then must somehow get it
to the mill.) One theory of how the wheel might have
developed is the idea of rollers and sledges. These systems
were instrumental in building the Egyptian pyramids and
before that the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, and perhaps the
megaliths of Stonehenge. The wheel changed how we move
things, how far we could go in a day, and how far we could
farm from a village. Thus the wheel heralded the
domestication of draft animals, because once you decide
you're tired of pulling the thing along, you look for
something else that's going to pull better.

Innovation #14 is formal law codes. Certainly there were
formal law codes before the Code of Hammurabi, who was
codifying oral or fragmented law. But by 1,780 BCE,
Hammurabi had laid down a formal code of laws, most of which
did not deal with criminal law but rather with civil and
commercial law. That trend continued through the Egyptian
Book of the Dead, even to the Ten Commandments and the
Twelve Tables of Rome. The great works of law and
literature, including one of the greatest, the Book of
Leviticus, show that we have come up with an awful lot of
civil law, a lot of ways of saying how people should relate
to one another commercially. In effect, we have been simply
writing down our politics for thousands of years. But law is
a way of reducing the cost of dispute resolution to a
society, and thereby increasing the efficiency of its
economy. It's much better if you know what you're supposed
to do and what happens if you don't. That predictability
increases efficiency.

Closely allied with law is Innovation #13, the concept of
money. Money also has a long and storied history. Humankind
started out with barter. What do you have that I need? It
went with specialization of labor. If someone makes
arrowheads all day, how are you going to get the arrowhead
from him? You're probably going to trade something you've
just hunted with an arrowhead he made. Money comes into the
picture as a way of solidifying the power of the state.
That's why the Sumerians, the first agricultural urban
society, were the first to adopt a concept of money. In
other words, I've got a lot of stuff stored, I'll give you
something that says you now own it. In effect, it's a form
of deed.

We come forward from coins to paper money and finally the
thing that enables all modern economies, the concept of fiat
and credit currency, which was developed in late medieval
Europe, in which letters of credit and letters of mark
allowed us for the first time to bank on the power of the
state itself rather than on the value of the coinage.

Innovation #12 is gods and religions as social institutions.
Religion creates social cohesion by creating in and out
groups. It gives a priestly class super-authority (authority
that doesn't come from who you are, but rather who you
represent) and shapes behavior in both prescriptive and
motivational ways, all in a tremendously economically
efficient mode. If you are a priest-king living in a palace
in ancient Sumer, you have a prescriptive authority of
saying, "This is the God speaking and not the man," and you
have the ability to promise rewards in the afterlife at no
particular cost to yourself or the ruling class. It's a debt
you'll never have to pay off. Economically and
organizationally, religious organization has to be ranked
right up there at the top with almost any other economic
advance.

Dostoevsky probably put it best in The Brothers Karamazov,
when Fyodor Pavlovich said, "Damn it all, what wouldn't I do
to the man who first invented God!" To which Ivan
Fyodorovich replies that there would have been no
civilization if they hadn't invented God, and no brandy,
either.

Innovation #11, systems of writing, went from pictographs,
whether cuneiform or Chinese in their evolution, with
thousands of individual symbols to be learned, to an
alphabetic system which evolved from the Phoenicians,
through a long period of evolution that we can trace all the
way down to our use of Roman script today. The idea that
characters can be combined in grammars to represent ideas
made possible written records of tremendous complexity and
efficiency, calculations as place value was developed, and
Gutenberg's printing press. Our alphabet derives directly
from something 2,900 years old. One of the only advances
thereafter was the development of a separate numbering
system, what we call the Arabic numbering system.

Innovation #10, food preservation, arguably first developed
around 10,000 BCE in the Neolithic revolution, meant that
you didn't have to eat what you killed right away, but could
save it for lean times. Portable food sources that are
dried, freeze-dried, salted, spiced, pickled, cooked,
smoked, or fermented allows travel over longer distances and
more efficient migration with animals, changes society, and
generates tremendous value. We understand all of these
methods and techniques, but many of them have been
supplanted by electric refrigeration. It would now be very
hard to find salted cod, which was a staple of the northern
European diet for 2,000 years. Instead we buy fresh cod or
go to Costco, where they routinely fly in a 600-pound tuna
caught two days ago in the Solomon Islands in the middle of
the Pacific. (I shudder at the carbon footprint.)

Innovation #9 is metallurgy. Ancient people built fires that
burned hot. They looked in the bottom of the fire pit after
a while and noticed there were some things there that were
harder than the kinds of stones they were used to dealing
with. What were they? What could be done with them? The
progression was from copper, silver, and gold to soft metals
first mined and smelted in about 4,400 BCE; to the idea of
alloying certain metals, for instance copper with tin, to
get bronze, which is a harder and more durable metal; to the
Iron Age to finally steel. In fact, Damascus steel is
probably the first instance of the use of nanotechnology, as
carbon nanotubes from the furnaces were incorporated that
made the steel remarkably hard yet not brittle. Metalworking
became both a science and an art. In Jared Diamond's theory
of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(1997), steel is the third leg of the dominance tripod of
the West.

Innovation #8: Ceramics and pottery. Some of the other
things the ancients found in the bottom of a fire pit were
pieces of clay that through repeated firings had gotten hard
and had their porosity reduced. So you have the ability to
make clay vessels, first to store dry things like grains,
then fired clay in which you can store liquids, and finally
earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain, which eventually in
the hands of Chinese became high art. From a simple clay pot
unearthed in Syria, 6,600 BCE we come all the way forward to
our finest toilets today, which are vitreous china, made by
the same processes of molding and firing clay. Our
microelectronics also owe a debt to pottery and ceramics.
Computer chips are built on a ceramic substrate that
conducts the heat away from them. No ceramics, and the chips
would burn themselves up and your cell phone would quit
working.

Innovation #7, farming, is really a chain of innovation over
a long period of time. The first animal to be domesticated
is generally thought to be the dog, around 15,000 BCE. (The
horse was domesticated on the steppes of Central Asia in
about 5,000 BCE, but the horse collar, which would make the
horse so useful in farming, would have to wait another 4,000
years.) The domestication of plants began with the bottle
gourd, something you could dry out and carry as a canteen.
Imagine what it would be like if you couldn't carry water
with you when you go hunting. You would have to stay pretty
close to sources of water. With a bottle gourd, you could go
farther and have greater access to more crops and herds.
Wheat was arguably the most important crop in the world
until rice--the most efficient crop for converting the
nutrients in sunlight into edible material--came along about
5,000 years later.

From the domestication of animals and plants to hydraulic
agriculture--the idea of artificial irrigation of crops that
was developed in the Fertile Crescent--to the plow and the
concept of crop rotation, chemical fertilizers (which didn't
occur to us until the seventeenth century), artificial
nitrate fertilizers (which didn't occur until we could
synthesize them at the beginning of the twentieth century),
and finally the Green Revolution in the early 1960s, farming
has given us the ability to create unprecedented economic
surplus, which many would say gave us the rest of the
innovations listed here.

Innovation #6: Clothing. Without clothing, people have to
stay where it's warm and dry. It took a long time to go from
draping ourselves in tanned animal skins to figuring out how
to use a needle to sew them into some sort of a shape, and a
longer time still to the weaving of cloth and the making of
tailored, layered clothes. In the stone age, not only did
you eat what you killed, you also wore it. We've been able
to reconstruct the clothes of Utze, a Copper Age hunter,
found when a glacier in the Austrian Alps receded. He wore
snow shoes lined with grass for insulation. He had a cape
made out of woven grass, carried sophisticated animal skin
bags for his gear, and he was truly a happy wanderer until
someone shot him with an arrow and he died and got frozen in
that glacier.

Innovation #5: Symbolic communication. Starting with cave
painting, human beings began to communicate with each other
across time and space, not simply face to face. The idea
that one could communicate with people through symbols made
externalization of information and language possible. It
gave us a storehouse of information that didn't need to be
transmitted just by showing someone how it worked, whether
you were drawing on the walls in a cave in Lascaux or coming
up with counters in Aswan that indicate that some dates were
brought by camel from a far-away place. At the same time,
symbolic communication in Sumer developed into cuneiform,
pressing reeds into soft clay and baking them. (We know a
tremendous amount about cuneiform because it's really hard
to get rid of clay tablets.)

Innovation #4: Lever simple machine. There are a number of
classes of simple machines, of which the lever is perhaps
one of the oldest. It allows people to amplify their
mechanical effort. Hammers and plows mean that instead of
the effort of one person digging with hands or tools, now
there is mechanical advantage. Farmers can plow deeper and
throw farther and with more force. Archimedes is famously
said to have stated, "Give me a place to stand with a lever
and I will move the whole world." In fact, the concept of a
lever has moved the whole world since its invention.

Innovation #3: Inclined plane simple machine. Don't just
think ramp, think blades, wedges, chutes, slides, and
screws. Chopper cores unearthed at the Olduvai Gorge in East
Africa that are 1.9 million years old show a clear effort to
manufacture. They were used for chopping and scraping hides
as well as for hunting. That technology was brought forward
to the high art of the Clovis arrow point and the higher
still art of Archimedes' screw water pump, which permitted
hydraulic irrigation by pumping water up out of canals and
rivers and into irrigation ditches with a simple turn of the
screw.

Innovation #2 is the taming of fire. Fire has been around a
long time, often caused by lightning strikes. But being able
to make fire on demand, or first being able to capture it
from the wild and preserve and use it as you wish, permitted
humans to live in colder places, work after dark, inhabit
places that were dark and perhaps dangerous, scare off
animals at night, and cook food in order to preserve it.
Fire-starting technologies are tremendously tough to master,
which probably also meant more specialization of labor as
humans began to use simple technologies like the fire plow,
the fire drill, and the smudge bundle, otherwise known as
the cigar.

Innovation #1 in spoken language--true semantic, syntactic,
phonetic language. This idea allowed humans to transmit
information about the world from one person to another. It
underlies all cooperation, the economy, and clan
relationships. Spoken language is the most important
innovation we have ever come up with.

However, I reserve the right to add an Innovation #0 (since
I work with computers, and programmers start counting from
zero, not 1). Innovation #0 in my view is one that outshines
and underlies every other innovation we have discussed. That
is the concept of intentional pedagogy. This is perhaps the
last thing in that great long list of what separates us from
the "lower animals," a phrase Darwin rejected. It's the idea
that humans can intentionally transmit culture and
generalize knowledge from the specific instance to that
which is teachable, and then intentionally give that
knowledge to another person across time and space. From
telling your child that the fire is hot and not to touch it
to the internet itself, intentional teaching is the most
important innovation of all time.

"The systematic use of teaching to ensure the learning of
skills and acquisition of knowledge by others is evidently a
peculiarity of the human species."[1] "Humans are remarkable
among animals for the way in which they teach their
young."[2] S.A. Barnett suggested that homo sapiens, the
understanding man, is perhaps not the right taxonomy for our
species, that really what we should be called is homo
docens, teaching man.

So what didn't make the list? Lots of things, for reasons
that I hope you will understand and then vehemently disagree
with. Everything from theories of disease, inoculations, and
antibiotics to guns and gunpowder, and plastics to democracy
to even the idea that there is such a thing as an idea, in
my estimation couldn't make the cut of the metric I set
forth earlier: impact on lives times number of lives. Others
have had different concepts of what innovation means and
what innovations are truly important. My hope is not that I
have it right, but that readers will help me get it more
right with your comments, questions, emails, or simply
throwing it wrapped around a rock through the transom.


----------------------------------------------------------
Notes

[1] Barnett, S.A., Teaching Considered as Behavior, in
Comparative Psychology: A Handbook, in Greenberg, G. and M.
Haraway, Taylor & Francis, 1998, p. 203.

[2] Marton, F. et al., Learning and Awareness, Erlbaum
Assoc., Mahwah, NJ, 1997, p. 166.


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For information, contact Alan Luxenberg, (215) 732-3774,
ext. 105.

RE: We do not live in a KRITARCHY –rule by judges... Munro strongly supports Prop 8 in defense of traditional marriage

RE: We do not live in a KRITARCHY –rule by judges or in a CRYPTARCHY –rule by secret coteries. My definition of democracy is government of the people, by the people and for the people.


except of a letter to a friend.


Dear X:



I know you don’t agree. But good people can agree to disagree. I strongly support prop 8 and because it I have come under a torrent of hate mail that I am against equality, that I am anti-gay, that I am against democracy and even that I am a racist etc. etc. But my conscience is clear. I don’t worry about personal attacks now; I did not worry about them in 1997-1998 when I supported Prop 227.



You know me well enough that I believe in living and let living and that I can peacefully coexist with the other be they of a different race, creed, sexual orientation or political persuasion. I respect the right of people to have a private live and live as they choose AS LONG AS THEY DO NOT HARM OTHERS nor do things that will HARM SOCIETY.



I do not believe the liberal doctrine of absolute equality of condition and absolute equality. Yet no one could be a stronger advocate for individual freedom than I but there are limits.



Blind people are not equal to you or me; they cannot be granted the privilege to drive an automobile and for good reason because the health and safety of the public is an issue.



13 year olds cannot drive legally and for the same good reason. Driving is a privilege not a right.



13 year olds cannot marry under any circumstances because by our law and tradition they are under the age of consent and even with the consent of their parents and guardians are considered too young to be able to commit to something as serious as marriage and child-bearing. 16 year olds (and slightly younger in some jurisdictions) can marry only with the consent of their parents or guardians.



Similarly, marriage between two consenting adults, one male and one female, is a privilege and not a right. T



he California Courts comparing gay marriage to interracial marriage is offensive and fallacious to me. It is offensive because our opponents claim we are sexist AND racist.



But racism has nothing to do with this campaign. This campaign is about defending democracy and the rule of law and defending the American family and in a real sense defending America itself. If we do not have strong families, we will not have a strong society. You can spend all the money you want in politicized schools but society will fall apart and drop in education standards as it is dropping now.



American society was built upon religious pluralism but all major groups agreed and had a consensus on some key issues such as the basic wisdom and goodness of the Bible and on marriage, monogamous marriage, between one husband and one wife and barring incest –though of course the exact definition and scope of incest varies somewhat.



You will recall the Reynolds v United States case (1879). The Supreme Court upheld a federal law against the practice of polygamy. Chief Justice Morrison Waite argued that the federal law prohibiting polygamy was not a violation of rights because polygamy was widely viewed as harmful to society and so for the good of society some rights-in this case religious practices- may be limited.



I am campaigning actively for Prop 8; Sunday I will dedicate four hours with hundreds of other volunteers calling registered voters all over the state to urge them to support Prop 8 for three basic reasons:



1) It is undemocratic for a coterie of judges to change fundamental laws and traditions of the people by fiat. This kind of judicial activism is abhorrent. The people already voted for Prop 22 affirming traditional marriage.

2) The unintended consequences of upholding so-called Gay Marriage may lead to a complete breakdown as to what is marriage. People will flock to California and unleash a torrent of law suits in all 50 states. In these troubled times this is nothing more than a vain and selfish act. Also I don’t see how they could stop incest, underage marriage , polygamy polyandry etc.

3) We have already seen how public schools are forcing pro-gay agendas in public schools. Teachers will be required to attend diversity training (indoctrination) and any criticism of the gay and lesbian agenda will be viewed as ‘hate speech’. This is creeping totalitarianism. I dare anyone to try to restrict my free speech. I will oppose it with every fiber of my being –to the death.



Prop 8 will not take away any rights from anyone; gay couples have with the recent civil union laws gained all the rights they say they wanted.



I just think everything about this gay marriage campaign has been duplicitous, underhanded, corrupt and undemocratic.



We do not live in a KRITARCHY –rule by judges or in a CRYPTARCHY –rule by secret coteries. My definition of democracy is government of the people, by the people and for the people.



Prop 8 will be an expression of the people, by the people and for the people that is for the good of our civil society.



If Prop 8 fails, of course , I will peacefully coexist with a society which exalts the Ayres of this world and embraces many customs and practices which I think are wrong and morally evil.



But there is no question it would help alienate me from the government and the society which thinks marriage is not important and essential to the education of children and the good of society. I hope I do not survive to see the fall of the Republic but the seeds of its dissolution and fall are all around me. God help us. We are becoming an American Babylon.



I know you don’t agree but I wanted you to know how I felt. I don’t hate anyone, nor do I want to persecute anyone. People can live their private lives as they like. But marriage is a not a private matter. Marriage is a public matter a very public matter and is the most important social contract in our country by far. I agree with Dennis Prager that this could be a turning point in American history and that Prop 8 is one of the great issues of our times –more important than the ephemeral triumph of this party or that.



Sincerely,



Ricardo Munro




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: ROFTERS@yahoogroups.com [mailto:ROFTERS@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of R K MUNRO
Sent: Saturday, October 25, 2008 12:10 PM
To: ROFTERS@yahoogroups.com
Cc: 'jul
Subject: RE: [ROFTERS] Re: Father Neuhaus Says it Well...Again



EXCERPT FROM A RECENT LETTER TO A FRIEND:

Dear X; it is God's truth: CTA gave 1 million to defeat Prop 8. As a
public school teacher I am ashamed. But personally it strengthens my
conviction as to the need to educate children in what is right and what is
wrong.

My wife and I were talking about it and she said it just means parents have
to work harder against the forces of evil and corruption in what is fast
becoming our American Babylon. (Of course she is aware that her Spain has
become a Spanish Babylon -Gay marriage already has been legal there for
years thanks to the Socialists)

And of course I am -on both sides of my family descended from families who
refused to go along with the official state religion; my mother's family
were Free Church Evangelicals and my father's family were Scottish Recusants
(though there are some Scottish Episcopalians -not Anglicans thrown in
there- but I was always told most Catholics publicly said they were
Episcopalian just to avoid trouble and persecution

I think traditional families are going to be persecuted and some as you say
will withdraw from society.

The sad part is even patriots like me start to doubt if the America we are
becoming is worth fighting for. Eventually it will get to the point of no
return. My worst nightmare would be to know my daughters or granddaughters
(none yet) were forcibly conscripted into the combat arms of the military.
Actions like that would not be 'equality" they would be the end of private
life and a true persecution of religion.

Gay Marriage is not equal rights; its about getting privileges and access
to money and inheritances and eventually Affirmative Action preference in
hiring and promotions. Marriage is a privilege and to me a sacrament -you
would call it a covenant I believe but it is the same thing-. Jesus' words
on marriage could not have been clearer.

See for example Benedict XVI's commentaries on Jesus's teachings.

VATICAN CITY, OCT. 8, 2006 (Zenit.org ).- Here is a
translation of the address Benedict XVI gave today before reciting the
midday Angelus with the crowds gathered in St. Peter's Square.

* * *

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

This Sunday, the Gospel presents to us Jesus' words on marriage. He answered
those who asked him whether it was lawful for a man to divorce his wife, as
provided by a decree in Mosaic law (cf. Dt 24: 1), that this was a
concession made to Moses because of man's "hardness of heart", whereas the
truth about marriage dated back to "the beginning of creation" when, as is
written of God in the Book of Genesis, "male and female he created them; for
this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his
wife, and the two shall become one" (Mk 10: 6-7; cf. Gn 1: 27; 2: 24).

And Jesus added: "So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has
joined together, let not man put asunder" (Mk 10: 8-9). This is God's
original plan, as the Second Vatican Council also recalled in the
Constitution Gaudium et Spes: "The intimate partnership of life and love
which constitutes the married state has been established by the Creator and
endowed by him with its own proper laws: it is rooted in the contract of its
partners... God himself is the author of marriage" (n. 48).

My thoughts now go to all Christian spouses: I thank the Lord with them for
the gift of the Sacrament of Marriage, and I urge them to remain faithful to
their vocation in every season of life, "in good times and in bad, in
sickness and in health", as they promised in the sacramental rite.

Conscious of the grace they have received, may Christian husbands and wives
build a family open to life and capable of facing united the many complex
challenges of our time.

Today, there is a special need for their witness. There is a need for
families that do not let themselves be swept away by modern cultural
currents inspired by hedonism and relativism, and which are ready instead to
carry out their mission in the Church and in society with generous
dedication. ( HIS HOLINESS THE POPE BENEDICT XVI)

Munro: marriage is between one husband and one wife. Anything else is
PORENIA and is morally wrong and evil. Sexual immorality is wrong. It was
wrong yesterday, it will be wrong today and it will be wrong tomorrow. It is
harmful to true love and harmful to children and families and in the long
run corrosive to society.

Most Protestant versions of the Bible translate the Greek word porneia with
the terms you mentioned. Porneia can mean any kind of sexual immorality. The
specific word for "adultery" used in 5:32 and 19:9 is moichaomai when it
says, "he commits adultery." Your interpretation requires that porneia and
moichaomai are synonyms, but I don't think that is the case.

Here is another article: http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/2005/0509sbs.asp

__

New York Times Reports:SARAH. "Palin has emerged as the most electrifying speechmaker among the four politicians on the major party tickets."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/us/politics/14palin.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y&oref=slogin





She’s intelligent, she’s adorable and she has the audacity to speak her mind,” said Ray Gilson of Corapeake, N.C., who attended the Virginia Beach rally. “I’ve never loved a politician like I love her. I want her to be president someday.” Many millions feel the same. This is not the end; it is just the beginning.



At least the NYT is sometimes honest enough to report real enthusiasm for Palin.



Ms. Palin has emerged as the most electrifying speechmaker among the four politicians on the major party tickets. She generates enormous fervor at her events; people sometimes do not stop clapping or shouting words of praise until Ms. Palin pauses.



But they are quick to point out:

But Ms. Palin’s partisan zeal could repel some independent voters in closely contested states like New Hampshire and Pennsylvania; Democratic polling in both states shows Ms. Palin with high negative ratings among independents. Palin advisers say many of these voters do not know enough about her; Ms. Palin is campaigning in Pennsylvania on Tuesday and New Hampshire on Wednesday.

This remains to be seen; the truth is there would be no race at all without Sarah Palin.



She jumpstarted a moribund campaign and gave it life. This is a tremendous achievement. Her ascent to national prominence is historic and is not a flash in the pan.



This may be like her Lt. Governor race which seemed like a defeat but like Lincoln’s 1858 Senate defeat to Douglas it really was a victory to be so close and OUTSPENT 20 to 1. In the next election, Palin then known statewide defeated all her opponents. Palin will be back and as I have said many times, no matter what happens, she cannot lose in November. She can only win. If it is close she will get credit and still be Gov. of Alaska and in place to achieve more reform and positive energy legislation. If Mac wins she will be the heir apparent; if he loses she will be the frontrunner for the 2012 GOP nomination.



At every rally in Florida, Ohio and Virginia Palin draws three , four , five times, ten times the crowds Bush raised in 2000 and 2004. There is no comparison. Many people supported Bush as the lesser of two evils –I never once met an enthusiastic supporter of Bush. Palin is a phenomenon and this is just the beginning. I recently spoke with a group of McCain supporters –even single one said they wished it were Palin’s turn and they were hopeful no matter what happened in November they would have Palin. (Munro)

QUOTE OF THE DAY by Thomas Sowell

But the country does not deserve to be put in the hands of a glib and cocky know-it-all, who has accomplished absolutely nothing beyond the advancement of his own career with rhetoric, and who has for years allied himself with a succession of people who have openly expressed their hatred of America.

THOMAS SOWELL, speaking of Barrack Obama 10/4/2008

http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2008/10/03/do_facts_matter

War, Money, VD HANSON, and the last gasp of America

From: julzNC
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2008 11:11 PM
To: Richard Munro
Subject: War and money



Ancient thinkers from Thucydides to Cicero insisted that money was the real source of military power and national influence. We've been reminded of that classical wisdom these last three weeks.

That's Vic Hanson here: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzFhNDU0NmNkNDZkZGI4MDQ1YzM2NmJmZjQ3M2Y1ZTk=.



I have been pounding every table I could find in this matter for 20 years, especially in the last 8. I don't understand how this country could have conducted itself for so long as though money grew on trees, or streamed from the printing press, without horrific consequences.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Sean Sculley
Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2008 8:12 AM
To: R K MUNRO
Cc: julzNC
Subject: Re: War and money



Yes, read this last week.

The real plague is that of multiculturalism, namely, THE MANDATE FOR DIVERSITY, that has colored if not directed every one's judgement for two generations.

Largely fostered by the educational establishment and then willingly propagated in businesses, the press and our scum politicians, should the Karamel Krooner get in, those tenets will become Law. The insertions in the once three, but now four hundred page so-called bail out plan make that quite clear.

There is no meaningful moral fiber, precious little intellectual curiosity, blah, blah, with which to resuscitate America.

Phillpe de Montebello's tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the sole exception and may, under the new director, a purportedly a civilzed man, may remain an island of his kind in sea of puke for another generation, possibly. Sarah America, (and the militray, particularly Pataeus's Army and the USMC), is the last gasp of a dwindling, mostly white minority that appreciate the difference between hard and soft, that knows virtue cannot be separated from brawn.
We can rail and explain all we want.

SCULLY



On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 2:47 AM, R K MUNRO wrote:

Quite right of course VDH is right…it what happened to the British Empire 1946-1947. Essentially they were bankrupt and overextended. They have never completely recovered from 1914-1918. We could face the same fate EXCEPT we have some aces in the hole…we have food exports and vast natural resources of timber, natural gas and coal.



RM








My dearest Seanin –and friends-



I agree with you that Sarah America –Palinism may be the last gasp of White America and by that I mean English-speaking Christian America.



I certainly don’t imply any racialism or racial segregation. America is a nation of immigrants but it is not and cannot be people of nations of separate peoples. This notion of particularism and racial separatism and Marxian multiculturalism is particularly odious to me. We are one Nation, under God or we are nothing.



Palin’s family itself is racially mixed and all her children are of mixed ancestry as the blood of indigenous America flows in their veins.



And of course I myself have married into the Spanish-speaking world –also our cousin culture –we came from the same Christendom of the West.



Perhaps some forget that Scottish crusaders perished fighting the Moors in Spain and that the heart of Robert the Bruce lay in a place of honor in a Spanish cathedral for centuries but I do not forget the Men of Douglas and Keith who lay down their lives –not for Scotland and not for the Bruce but for the Spain and the Holy Faith.



These peoples –the Latin/Hispanic/Mexican peoples- are as I have said many times before our Western Allies and these peoples are and have been learning the art of freedom and democracy and gradually turning their backs to their deep heritage of feudalism and Spanish authoritarianism born in the cauldron of seven centuries of war for survival.



The Spanish-speaking peoples have great values such as a deep sense of sacredness and family which I deeply respect and honor and is one of the reasons I have married into that world- and things to teach us and they have great vigor; like a subterranean river their strength and forces runs deep throughout the continent.



But these people, like other immigrants, too must be assimilated to the American Republic and American ways if we are to retain our political unity.



We can live in a country with Americans of Latino ancestry etc but we cannot long endure in my view as a polyglot boarding house who have no loyalty and love to our states, our Armed forces,our Constitution and flag.



So let me be very clear –I am the enemy of racialists and Nazis and extremists and modern know-nothings and xenophobes. This is not just talk –the men of my race and line drained their dearest veins and blood twice in the last century in countless battlefields to stop the march of Prussian Militarism, Japanese Militarism and Nazi tyranny. My father’s and uncles’ and grandfather’s generation put these evils to the sword so even to imply that I or they are fascists or have any sympathy with the odious doctrines of those foreign dictatorships would be deeply resented.



But I do think there is such thing as an American culture and such a thing as American values and for want of a better word I call this White America. We can obfuscate and call this Western America but that doesn’t fit or European American or the culture of DWEM’s but that doesn’t fit or Anglo-Saxon America –that comes close or Christian America but it would be more accurate to say Judeo-Christian America or English-speaking America but that is not a term any American, let’s face it would use.. So I am being blunt and using a term that most Americans in the privacy of their homes would understand; it is not for most Americans an exclusive term but surely when African Americans accuse each other of ‘talking White’ –how can White be a language? –they themselves are using the same concept.



I consider myself to be an Anglophile but as most of you know I am not an Englishman nor the son or descendant of Englishmen but I respect and honor the best of that race and line and for example Washington, Lincoln, Churchill were all English and I think among the greatest statesman of our modern age or indeed anytime. I honor and revere their memory as I honor that Dutchman with a Scotch streak FD Roosevelt.



The Gaels have many virtues but unity and statesmanship of that level was never their virtue; they served as independent lieutenants to Romans and Englishmen that I freely admit. Roman law and English law are magnificent but could never have been created by quarrelsome, impetuous, and let’s face it primitive clannish Celts.



We can say what ever we want but Toynbee was right –we were the last White Barbarians of Europe. As Toynbee said the Iron Age in Europe ended on April 16, 1746. But let me say we entered the Union as free men and one of the reasons we loved America and gave to her all our heart and blood was that here was a land where a man could breath free and live as we say BYDAN FREE.



A strong English-speaking America can assimilate non Europeans to our culture and our language and our democratic way of life. What I call Bydan Free. The core of America is made of people who have been Bydan Free and not just since 1776. My race and line has always been Bydan Free. We never submitted to the Romans, the Vass (the Vikings) nor the Anglo-Normas nor the English; our heads were bloodied by unbowed.



For us Lexington was just another skirmish with the forces of Empire and enslavement going back to Mons Graupius (79AD and Alesia and before). We have an ancestral memory of a long rear guard action over the centuries with the might of Rome for as the Bard sang (and I translate)



FOR WHEN THE BEAT OF THE KETTLE DRUM,

Of the steely hard Roman come,

Taken were our own hilltops,

One by one,

In hellish storms of fire darts and missile…



Though unwritten and only half remembered the memory of a 1000 Numantias and Masadas in Spain, in Gaul, in Cisalpine Gaul-northern Italy Celtic speaking in the time of Caesar- Britain, Galatia- still runs strong. Ne obliviscaris. Do not forget.



Though I cannot prove this I am quite sure Sgt William Munroe –it was in his tavern that Hancock and Sam Adams met the night of April 18,1775 with Captain Parker- was very aware of the military history of his race and line –their brave defense of Mary Queen of Scots –their fighting by the side of Wallace and the Keiths and the Bruce against Longshanks and later against Cromwell. The had read their Paine –I am sure April 16 1745 and its aftermath crossed their lips and they talked treason to the King and Parliament. If they were Scots and sons of Scots how could they have not? For such people REMEMBER THE PEOPLE THEY CAME FROM and the FORTITUDE OF THEIR ANCESTORS who were BYDAN FREE. This love of freedom is more ancient even than our deep Christian faith and I realize that sometimes the pride and fury of this heritage of mire-catha –battle-frenzy or the ancient blood lust- lies just below the surface and threatens to break loose of the Master’s teachings.



The ancient voice says KILL OR BE KILLED and be a TERROR TO THE WORLD –take no prisoners- and essentially DIE WITH A SWORD IN YOUR HAND but the apostles bid us to channel our energies in defense of the good –our Holy Faith- and the meek and of womankind. That is the essence of course of Highland or Scottish Chivalry. One makes a oath to serve and Dread God and obey his commandments and to break that oath to kill for self or for lust or for revenge is the ultimate disloyalty. One renders under to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.



When I was a boy I learned of Bannockburn but also of Lexington –where the first Sergeant was a Munroe and veteran of the French and Indian War (Fraser’s Highlanders) and that 16 of the 77 men at Lexington were Munroes and over a third were the sons or nephews of Highland soldiers many of whom had been pardoned by Pitt after having been disposed under bills of attainder by the Duke of Cumberland and his grisly gang.



Recently I saw a rousing National Guard commercial an ode to the citizen soldier at Lexington and I could not help but think of my clansmen and kin Ebenezer Munroe who claimed to have fired the shot heard round the world. Knowing the hot blooded and proud nature of my race and line – I do not discount it.



Such men were BYDAND FREE they would never allow a Lowlander like Pitcarin tell them what they could or could not do.



When Pitcairn said DISPERSE YE REBELS that just fired them up. Five Munroes were killed or wounded that day. No one can say we are not a fighting race. But the defeat of the morning was turned into victory by evening and it was brave Englishmen, Welshmen, Scotsmen and New Englanders who did the job. It was, very much a victory of borderland people, up country English, lowland Scots, Highlanders Bristol people, Welsh people the kind of people who had never been entirely dominated by anyone and who refused to accept the yoke of tyranny from anyone. Not the Imperial Government of 1775 and not the Imperial Government of 2008. The elections of 2008 and 2012 may be the last stand for this America.





Either we take charge to ensure an EQUAL future for our children or we will be Affirmative Actioned to death and mediocrity and ultimately economic, military and political collapse.



Either we take charge to protect our natural rights to life liberty and property and our free exercise of religion and our right to bear arms or we will be ground beneath the wheel of oppressive confiscatory taxation of the Bold State.



Make no mistake if Obama nationalizes health care he will destroy vast swaths of private business and private employment and inaugurate the largest spoils system for Affirmative Action sinecures this country has even known. That is Michelle Obama times 10,000. or times 100,000. Non producers collecting $100,000, $200,000 and $300,000 a year.



When Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to the whole world –just to raise the tax base- it was basically a death blow to the Roman polity

I for one see in Affirmative Action Creeping Bold State Socialism the enslavement and destruction of the private sector and the pursuit of excellence..



For one thing service in the army was no longer a pathway to citizenship.



Latin ceased to be the lingua franca in many places and neither a lack of education or military service kept anyone from claiming land and being Roman. So many parts of the West simply ceased to be Roman. I remind all of you that Roman Britain Bavaria and Vienna and Switzerland were part of the Roman Empire for almost 500 years but in these places Latinity was all but extinguished.



Very soon the Roman Army was composed of mostly Barbarian hordes. At one of the last battles of the Roman Empire Aetius commanded fewer than 7,000 Roman soldiers –all the rest were garrison troops- and most of his Army versus Attila the Hun at Chalons were barbarians. “ I can just imagine the proud fury of the Visigoths in this campaign which may have saved the West from total annihilation. But it astonishing to think how the far the Roman Army had falling since the glory days of Caesar, Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. Sort of like the trajectory of the British Army. since 1945.



I say it without malice but England, that is to saw the UK could not withstand another 1940 today; they would fold in weeks so tiny is their Army, Navy and Air-force and so disarmed and cowed are their people.



In 1940 the common people were armed and rural people had shotguns and pistols to defend themselves. Not any longer. And the armed minority will be the true masters if the disarmed majority.



***



“The discomfiture of the mighty attempt of Attila to found a new anti-Christian dynasty upon the wreck of the temporal power of Rome, at the end of the term of twelve hundred years, to which its duration had been limited by the forebodings of the heathen." HERBET

The confederate armies of Romans and Visigoths at last met their great adversary face to face on the ample battle-ground of the Châlons plains. Aëtius commanded on the right of the allies ; King Theodoric on the left; and Sangipan, king of the Alans, whose fidelity was suspected, was placed purposely in the centre, and in the very front of the battle. Attila commanded his centre in person, at the head of his own countrymen, while the Ostrogoths, the Gepidae, and the other subject allies of the Huns were drawn up on the wings. Some manoeuvring appears to have occurred before the engagement, in which Aëtius had the advantage, inasmuch as he succeeded in occupying a sloping hill, which commanded the left flank of the Huns. Attila saw the importance of th e position taken by Aëtius on the high ground, and commenced the battle by a furious attack on this part of the Roman line, in which he seems to have detached some of his best troops from his centre to aid his left. The Romans, having the advantage of the ground. repulsed the Huns, and, while the allies gained this advantage on their right, their left, under King Theodoric, assailed the Ostrogoths, who formed the right of Attila's army. The gallant king was himself struck down by a javelin, as he rode onward at the head of his men; and his own cavalry, charging over him, trampled him to death in the confusion. But the Visigoths, infuriated, not dispirited, by their monarch's fall, routed the enemies opposed to them, and then wheeled upon the flank of the Hunnish centre, which had been engaged in a sanguinary and indecisive contest with the Alans.

In this peril Attila made his centre fall back upon his camp; and when the shelter of its intrenchments and wagons had once been gained, the Hunnish archers repulsed, without difficulty, the charges of the vengeful Gothic cavalry. Aëtius had not pressed the advantage which he gained on his side of the field, and, when night fell over the wild scene of havoc, Attila's left was still undefeated, but his right had been routed, and his centre forced back upon his camp.

Expecting an assault on the morrow, Attila stationed his best archers in front of the cars and wagons, which were drawn up as a fortification along his lines, and made every preparation for a desperate resistance. But the " Scourge of God " resolved that no man should boast of the honor of having either captured or slain him, and he caused to be raised in the centre of his encampment a huge pyramid of the wooden saddles of his cavalry. round it he heaped the spoils and the wealth that he had won; on it he stationed his wives who had accompanied him in the campaign ; and on the summit Attila placed himself, ready to perish in the flames, and balk the victorious foe of their choicest booty, should they succeed in storming his defences.

But when the morning broke and revealed the extent of the carnage with which the plains were heaped for miles, the successful allies saw also and respected the resolute attitude of their antagonist. Neither were any measures taken to blockade him in his camp, and so to extort by famine that submission which it was too plainly perilous to enforce with the sword. Attila was allowed to march back the remnants of his army without molestation, and even with the semblance of success.

***







See for example Creasy http://www.standin.se/fifteen06a.htm



PRAISE THE LORD AND PASS THE AMMUNITION…we are going to need plenty of both if we are to survive. MUNRO




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Palin-Biden Debates: Stunning Victory for Sarah Palin is a game changer

“SAY IT AIN’T SO JOE…doggone it….we are going to look towards the future…” Sarah Palin



I agree with you about Fannie Mae but it ain’t over yet…Mac has TWO debates…centered on domestic affairs to launch an overwhelming airstrike on the Obama bandwagon. I think as in Midway McCain is holding back his best strikes for a knockout blow –a devastating knock out blow from which OBAMA’S NATIONAL CAREER MAY NEVER RECOVER. (and then it will be Hillary in 2012 possibly versus a Palin-Petraeus ticket.)



Palin was outstanding; I counted at least 10 clear factual errors by Biden TEN. Not arguable things but clear misrepresentations.. Biden claimed he and Obama would reduce taxes and waste when both have the reputation of being taxers and wasteful spenders. Palin was the clear winner. In an audience of independents 86% said Palin won. Watch the poll numbers go up next with for McCain.



Biden VOTED against COAL and said there was no such thing as clean coal. Biden voted against off shore drilling. Obama voted against it.

And both men have talked about mandating anywhere from 20 % or more of our energy to come from alternative resources at a time when 50% of our electricity comes from coal fired plants.

America is the Saudi Arabia of coal and has huge resources of natural gas. The McCain plan of clean coal, more than 50 nuclear plants for clean electricity and more American natural gas –the all of the above approach Palin mentioned is feasible.



She didn’t mention that Biden was AGAINST THE ORGINAL ALASKA PIPELINE and claimed it would wipe out the caribou population. In fact there are ten times as many caribou today as in 1973. The reason is the pipeline has created so many jobs for Alaskans and Native Americans that they can hunt merely occasionally for sport and do iron dog races rather than live a subsistent lifestyle..

Obama and Biden would wave the WHITE FLAG OF SURRENDER. One of the best nights when Palin said NEVER AGAIN to the corruption on Wall Street and Washington. That is a hint of the McCain strike to come in the last two debates.



Biden promised tax cuts and talked about MRI’s but with the Obama-Biden plan would we all be on waiting lists as in Canada for YEARS to get treatment? What good is health care if you die before you can get treatment. That is Canada. That is Britain. It might even be Cuba. McCain’s plan is modest, economically feasible and appealing to middle class American. Erase state lines so there can be more choice in group plans and give every American a $5000 tax credit.



Yes there are many people who are uninsured but the vast majority of middle class Americans and retired people have good plans and good group and private insurance and they like getting the best medical care possible. My wife is alive today because they detected the tumor in December –had the biopsy by January 19-and operated before February was out. It was quite literally a race for survival. But due to outstanding preventive care, an outstanding surgeon and access to the very best voice specialists at UCLA my wife dodged a bullet, did not lose her voice or her health and is not 99% recovered (and getting stronger gradually month by month). I shudder to think what would have happened if we had had Socialized health care. Obama dangles Free Health care as a panacea to the American people but what he offers is a chimera. Socialism is and always will be the sly enemy of freedom, innovation and efficiency. The American system has brought the most innovation in medical technology and new pharmaceuticals of any country in the world. Do we really want to destroy this engine of innovation? Reform it certainly. Help more Americans get full access to it but not destroy it. That way lies madness, in my opinion.



Dick Morris said Palin was a superstar and she won the debate. He said –exactly what I told my wife and an audience of Independents and Republicans- that Palin’s performance was the best performance since the Ronald Reagan.



Now one can doubt now –looking at her solid record of reform, her executive experience, her success in laying out the foundation expanding and widening our energy with natural gas –defying the oil oligopoly, that Sarah Palin is qualified to be a Governor (one of the highest rated in the country with a strong record of bipartisanship), and qualified to be Vice President.



Biden was impressive in his own way –much more so than Obama – everyone with us said so!!! –BUT he seemed ill at ease trying to defend Obama whom he has criticized so often just months ago and whom he said was CLEARLY NOT READY OR PREPARED TO BE THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE.



And now he says that Barrack like some magic pumpkin has morphed into a highly qualified candidate for chief executive. INDEED, “Say it ain’t so Joe…SAY IT AIN’T SO!!!”



Sportin’ Life Obama –the mystery man whom even now we know very little –the man who has the thinnest resume of achievement of any presidential candidate in the entire history of the Untied States- could win, of course, it’s possible the American people might be bamboozled into such a wild gamble but then again that game plan AIN”T NECESSARILY SO!!!



And one thing is certain as I have been saying for weeks –we are watching the emergence of a new political force in America.



Sarah Palin has proved she has what it takes to lead and lead vigorously. Obama might win, and McCain might lose. McCain might win and Palin will win with him –and get most of the credit. But no matter what the outcome –it should be clear that SARAH PALIN CANNOT LOSE IN NOVEMBER. If it is close she will get the credit –still be a hugely popular governor with more chances to boost her already outstanding record. We are looking at the woman who is at this moment the woman most likely to be the first woman president of the United States by 2012 and 2016.



America’s love affair with Sarah Palin has just begun.



The Washington elites score Palin’s folksie accent and plain American speech –the Left course calumnies her and attacks her as a religious fanatic –falsely claiming that the church or churches she and her family belongs to are outside of the mainstream of American life.



But the truth is Sarah Palin’s religions beliefs are very much like mainstream America and that SHE DOES NOT BELONG TO THE CHURCHES SHE IS ATTACKED FOR HAVING ATTENDED. I have attended many religious services –out of fellowship or good manners- usually for baptisms and weddings but that doesn’t mean I accept the theology of those churches.



The attacks on Palin remind me very much of the attacks on Gen Scott –who was called falsely the “Roman Catholic Scott” and Stephen Douglas who was accused of being pro-Mormon for having Mormon friends and a secret Catholic because his second wife was Roman Catholic and raised all the children in that faith. But Douglas himself was not a religious man merely a man with tolerant view vis-à-vis the many denominations he encountered in his American travails. Sarah Palin is an authentic American personality.



I have studied American politics all of my life. I have read biographies of every president and every major political figure in American history from Fighting Bob Lafollette to Jane Addams to William Jennings Bryan, outspoken presidential nominee James B. Weaver and Mary E. Lease. It was Weaver who said –in 1892- “There is but one issue in the South. That is competition to see who can most hate the Negro. The that wins gets the nomination. The whole thing is a dead-drag on the country…Slavery must be the greatest of all crimes. Here, we are after all these years after it has been abolished, and we are still paying the penalty for it..” This was four years before Plessy V. Fergusson.



Perhaps you do not remember or know Mary E. Lease but she was an important precursor to every successful female candidate for state, local and federal government. She was a Populist in an age dominated by corrupt Republicans and Racist Redeemer Jim Crow Democrats. Like Sarah Palin, Mary E. Lease was good-looking,beloved and admired by those who knew her, courageous and plain-spoken. Like Sarah Palin she was a mother of a large family –Lease had four.



Mary E. Lease said: “What you farmers need is to raise less corn and more Hell!”. She went on:



“Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street , by Wall Street and for Walls Street. The great common people of this country are slaves and monopoly is the master,” How the people cheered. If woman had had the vote she might have made governor or president. So people said at the time.



Tonight we saw the death shroud of the Old pre-1968 Democratic Party in the gaffe-prone godfather of Delaware Tort , ear marks and pork, Joe Biden. The only Senator left who voted AGAINST THE ALASKA PIPELINE in 1973 when Sarah Palin was in the 2nd grade and I was in high school. And we saw the rise of a new populist progressive Republican party –a party that has a real hope to hold its ground and win many electoral victories for years to come. This is the meaning and the essence of Sarah Palin. Her emergence and her freshness is like a whole new chapter in history unfolding before our very eyes.



Yes, I have seen every presidential and vice presidential debate since 1968. I have read and studied every race for election in American history. I have read histories of every election. And the biography of Sarah Palin, the personality of Sarah Palin, the wit of Sarah Palin, the authenticity of Sarah Palin and yes, the political instincts of Sarah Palin seems to me to be , as I have said weeks and months before to be ordinary but at the same time extraordinary. Classically Western and classically American right out of Turner’s frontier thesis.



Some consider me to be a wise and prescient man –some of you recall I predicted the triumph of Clinton and the closeness of the 2000 election, correctly predicted that George W. Bush would lose the popular vote. It would all come down to Florida –a state in which Mr. Bush took the early lead and NEVER WAS PASSED BY GORE.



But I was confident Ole W would win by the narrowest of margins because I knew how many Navy, Marine and Air Force absentee votes there were in Florida and that Florida State law allowed TEN DAYS for them to register.



Since I knew the spirit and opinion and fighting spirit of the men of the Sixth Fleet and Seventh Fleet and American bases around the world –there has never been a time I did not have a friend, former comrade in arms or former student who was not serving in one service or the other- I knew the military vote –particularly of the Navy and Marine officers and NCO’s –those most likely to vote would be overwhelmingly for Mr. Bush.



Bush never lost the lead. I was right and the liberal pundits were wrong. Joe Lieberman –you might recall –a man of honor knew this too and refused to countenance any rejections of legitimate military votes. If he had been a crook and if the Democratic operatives had been allowed to carry out such corrupt subterfuge, Gore may have won but the Republic and the rule of law would have been wounded and perhaps mortally so. McCain recognized this civic virtue in his old adversary Lieberman and it is why McCain –against the advice of many Republicans – campaigned for his honest Democratic friend against a fellow Republican. And Lieberman has paid him back with unstinting loyalty. Liberaman like Stephen Douglas and Daniel Webster will be remembered as one of those near great Americans who were true profiles of courage and civic virtue. NON MIHII NON TIBI SED NOBIS. “ Not for me alone nor for you alone but for all.”



October 2, 2008 is a date that will be remembered in American history. In Minnesota all America who wished to see saw it. A star was born. They were witnessing what Alaskans have known for years, what liberals call half in fear and half in unreasoned contempt the rise of Palinism.



Others have doubted in these past weeks and congratulated themselves on their conventional wisdom. As Fred Thompson said rightly such spinners of lies, calumnies, out of context quotations and impossible gotcha questions –the kind Obama never has to parry- ought to hang their heads in shame if they are capable of shame.



Palin showed her true mettle tonight and I feel the best is yet to come.



Obama will achieve the feat of being an interesting footnote in history rather like General McClellan or William Henry Harrison or James Buchanan.



And by saying this –for two of three of these Americans rose to the highest office of the land- I am saying that Obama might eke out a narrow pyrrhic victory in the general election as he did in the primaries and so back into the presidency as a relative novice completely unprepared and outmatched for the challenges ahead like Buchanan or Carter and so fail disastrously bringing America to the brink of moral, military and social catastrophe.



But I do not fear this even this mortal storm. Because the figure of our age may not be the superficial, charming Obama but that remarkable woman of Wasilla, Alaska who seems to be, at times, a reincarnation of TR, Annie Oakley, Harry Truman and that Mary E. Lease with whom Mrs. Palin, I am sure, would have had a lot in common.



Obama evokes a little of Adlai Stevenson,, a little of W.E.B Dubois, a little of William Jennings Bryan,, but especially Schuyler Colfax of Credit Moblier fame.



I would be very surprised if Obama can every escape the taint of Acorn, the Rev. Wright,, Fanny Mae not to mention his complete disassociation and disconnect with American victories in the field in Iraq, Afghanistan and other intelligences and counter insurgency victories in Asia, Europe and Africa that, remain for the present, unknown. The truth of his character and associations and his mediocrity will catch up to him eventually.



McClellan too wanted to cut and run and raise the White Flag of Surrender even though victory of the Union was clearly at hand.



We cannot know precisely how the future will play out but we can sense as through a glass but darkly that America will, in time, call upon the skills and virtues of Sarah Palin and discard the vain hopes of phoney Obama change.



John McCain himself will fade in history as Harrison, as McKinley as Gerald Ford or as the Bushes. But he will be forever remembered for his associations and his role in the emergence of Sarah Palin.



This is what Auld Munro thinks and this is what Auld Munro senses.



Sarah Palin –well done. It is a privilege to share this time and this century with you. She has my vote and support now and for years to come.



And like me there are legions, countless millions. And America is just getting to know her.



I do not know Sarah Palin as Whitman did not know Lincoln –Whitman knew Lincoln only from afar and by his deeds and his words- but Whitman recognized real greatness of heart and mind in honest Abe that man who came out of the wilderness.



I do not say what I say out of any hope of advancement or personal gain. All my life I have served as a citizen –and I have been active in several successful campaigns- and as a citizen only. Not for me but for the land I love, knowing that a good conscience is the best reward of all. Service is honor enough. That is the true essence of civic virtue.



But my sense of Palin is that she represents a new force in American politics and is the only hope for a progressive rejuvenating spirit in the Republican party which without her is moribund.



Sarah Palin is a game changer. She will bring onto the national scene men and women from without the tired old oligarchy of Yale, Harvard, and Columbia, men and women of the true North and West. They will bring about true change –not only in the Republican party but in Washington as well.



What a privilege it is to share the same century with such a genuine American personality like Sarah Palin.



She will make her mark on American history. We are witnessing history.



I feel more certain about this than anything since my cousin Helene Munro called to tell me she met, while a student a Junior College, a candidate for governor of California called Ronald Reagan. He talked to her face to face for about thirty minutes after giving a modestly attended speech with almost no media present. He stayed to talk to the students. She told me to watch him. Not only did every one say this was the man they wanted for governor but this is the man we want for president.



That was 1966 and since that time neither she nor I have ever seen a political phenomenon to match Reagan –until now. And her sense –what well call second sight- matches mine.



That might seem amusing to you or quaint or vain but I will never forget she was the first person to tell me that Ronald Reagan was the greatest American she had ever met and a man who seemed regal, avuncular and presidential all at the same time.



And, of course, she was right.



This I can see as ‘second-sighted Sandy could see the glory and the hope and the doom of Drummossie Moor, Gallipoli and the Struma Valley –April 1917.



All seemed hopeless –a handful of brave men were down to their last reserves of strength and their last cartridges, but one day changed everything and the world forever.



For they got the news that the Yanks were coming. America had declared war. It was a game changer.



Corporal Johnny Robertson 1st Battalion ASH –American Johnny he was known to the men because he had worked for Thomas Edison and had voted as a naturalized American citizen for Theodore Roosevelt- told them all that Germany would fall. It was, he said, only a question of months not years. And so such news was a very great encouragement. Somewhere, someplace there would be a place for them and a land of freedom. They did not know where –they would soon be scattered to the four corners of the earth but they knew Germany would not prevail.



The triumph of Palin will come though I know not if it will be in a month or in a few years. But come it will.



We too have got the news that a team of Mavericks is coming to clean up a Washington culture that has become the very sink of cowardice, corruption and obliquity..





Let us hope and let us pray,

Mac and Palin all the way.



RICHARD K. MUNRO, MA

Bakersfield, California October 2, 2008. 1052PM



AMERICAN TEACHER and American by choice and thanks to Sarah Palin, a proud Republican (I am like Joe Lieberman a former Democrat).