Dealers of Lightning

If you have ever wondered how the many of the basic technologies that people deal with every day – computers, networks, the internet – were invented, and who the people behind those inventions were, this is the book for you. I found it particularly interesting how well the people and companies who created the internet succumbed to creative destruction. In almost every circumstance, it was a band of rebels who came out of nowhere to establish the now dominant technology. The parent company or the current front-runners were almost always enamored with their current technology and couldn’t bear to look around for something better or more efficient, or even something that just worked.

Dealers of Lightning

Evolving Christian attitudes towards personal and national self-defense

Hattip: The Volokh Conspiracy

The paper starts out in the 19th century and chronicles the Christian Church’s move to the right during the first half of the Twentieth Century, and then its move to the left in the second half. The paper makes the case that the elements of the Church which moved left in the post Korean War America strongly identified with the broader leftist movement in America including sympathy for Palestine, socialism, antipathy towards gun owners, and general pacifism; the paper further suggests that those elements are largely composed of the leadership of the church, and lack the backing of the more conservative laity – one of the reasons for the Evangelical revival.

While this paper has a relatively clear conservative bias, it is quite interesting none the less, both as a brief history of the Church’s political stance over the past century, as well as some of the political movements that are likely to happen in the next decade as a result of pressures internal to the Christian Church.

Evolving Christian attitudes towards personal and national self-defense[pdf]

The Diamond Invention

An interesting look into the Diamond industry. The book starts out by examining the operating conditions and procedures of some of the world’s diamond mines. It also talks about the history of diamond mining and about wars that are financed and to a certain extent instigated by the diamond trade. The book finishes off by discussing some of the problems faced by the diamond industry, and how they plan to deal with some of those problems.

One of the most important things I took away from this book was how poor an investment diamonds really are. From the book:

Because of the steep markup on diamonds between the wholesale and retail levels, individuals who buy retail and, ;n[sic] effect, sell wholesale often suffer enormous losses on the transaction.

The Diamond Invention

The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil

The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil

An interesting look at the history of the Soviet Union and its finances. The money quote is on page 2.

Bukharin
and Rykov essentially told Stalin: “In a peasant country, it
is impossible to extract grain by force. There will be civil
war.” Stalin answered, “I will do it nonetheless.”
The result of the disastrous agriculture policy implemented
between the late 1920s and the early 1950s was
the sharpest fall of productivity experienced by a major
country in the twentieth century.

FMFM 1A, Fourth Generation Warfare

FMFM 1A, Fourth Generation Warfare[pdf]

A quick primer on fourth generation warfare by the Defense and National Interest website, as well as other types of warfare and how they differ from eachother. If you’ve heard of fourth generation warfare, but don’t really understand what it means and how it differs from the others, this is a nice intro text.