It is said that before God offered the Torah to the Jewish people, God went to the nations, the other nations in the world, and offered it to them. And for various reasons, it didn't work out. So you can imagine God going to the Egyptians. Would you like the Torah? The Egyptian says, what's in it? It says, monotheism. I'm God. That's it. The Egyptians would say, no. We have hundreds of gods. We worship everything that move and a lot of things that don't. And polytheism, it's what we do. It's who we are. It goes to the Greeks. Would you like the Torah? What's in it? Sexual morality. Adultery, nothing like that. The Greek says, we're Greeks. We worship the human form. We have Bahanelian debauchers and Dionysian rebels. And that's who we are. It's what we do. That's our very nature. God goes to the Romans, the people who would become Rome. Would you like the Torah? Rome said, what's in it? What's that? Don't murder. And I said, are you kidding me? Rome is going to be one of the greatest empires in the world. It will last for a thousand years. We're not going to be successful by having comparative politics classes. Rome will be spread on the edge of a sword. Killing is something we're very good at. It's what we do. It's who we are. It's important to know that those votes, those decisions were not unanimous. There were people in the different nations who wanted the Torah. Who wanted to accept the Word of God. But they were outnumbered. They were outvoted. They were shouted down. It's handed down that when God gave the Torah to the Jewish people at Harsenei, the souls of all future Jewish generations were there. It's also said that those people who voted for the Torah, God said, okay, you had a chance to get the Torah for free. If you want it, you're going to have to work for it. I'm going to take your soul and I'm going to put it in a Gentile body. And your challenge, if you want the Torah as badly as you say you did, is to work your way. Try to find the truth. Try to find your way to me. And if you live a Jewish life and if you can convince a Besdan, you can have the Torah. You can be a Jew. So 63 years ago, one of those souls was placed into a little boy who was born to Italian immigrant parents who came over after the war. And from my earliest memories, I was always a very religious kid. I can honestly say that in all my life, not a moment has passed where I doubted the existence and the presence of God. It was just a fact. I knew it like I knew my own name. And I took my religious life very seriously. I grew up Catholic. A lot of people say you were born Catholic. No one's born a Christian. You have to accept it, either through baptism or later on as an adult. But I grew up with Italian Catholic parents. And I wanted to be a really good religious kid. I was sent to a Catholic grade school. I became an altar boy. And I wanted to know and I wanted to understand because that would help me be a better religious person. And even as a little kid, there were certain fundamental concepts in Catholicism and Christianity in general that as a child you struggle with. It doesn't make sense.  Let me explain forever. Take a thousand billion years times 5,000 billion years square that it never ends. For the sins of a lifetime, that didn't seem fair. And kids have a fundamental sense of fair. It's not fair. It's not right. So I wanted to understand. I wasn't being a smart alec. I wanted to understand because this didn't seem right and I wanted to know another one. You could only get to God by believing in Jesus. Actually, at that age, you can only get to God by being a Catholic. But let's just say you couldn't get to God unless you believed in Jesus. And again, that didn't strike me as being right because if anyone knew what people were like, it would be God who created us. And God knew you couldn't get 50% of people to agree on where to go for lunch. And you're going to get the majority of people to believe in Jesus.  And again, when you're 8, 9, 10, 12 years old, it didn't make sense. At the school I went to, we were taught by nuns and priests and also lay teachers. And we were very fortunate in our parish. Our parish priest was a Jesuit. A Jesuit, Monsignor Fernando, a superbrainy guy, very, very astute, intellectual. So I was about, I guess, 12. I made an appointment to see Monsignor Fernando. And I put these questions to him. You have to believe in Jesus to see God, the eternal damnation.  I want to be a better believer. I want to be a better godly person. And Monsignor Fernando, bless him, gave me an explanation. That was so far above my head, he could have been speaking another language. I'm sure it meant something, but to someone in the seventh grade, it wasn't clicking. But when you're young, nothing makes sense. So I figured, okay, eventually I'll catch on about the age of 13, 14 when a lot of kids stopped going to church or synagogue. I, too, stopped going to church.  But I still believed in God. I was still very religious. I just didn't go to church anymore. It just wasn't who I was. Later on in high school, I became a born-again Christian. This is a different kind of Christian than a Catholic. And to go through a born-again conversion experience is probably one of the most powerful things I've ever gone through. Unless you've gone through it, it's almost impossible to describe it.  It was very powerful. It struck me to the core. And I figured with this euphoria, finally, finally I get what it is to be a Christian. Also, it's at this point that I started reading the Bible. Something you should know in Catholicism. At least the Catholicism as it was back in the early 60s and in the mid-60s. I don't know how much of it pertains to today. But Catholics were discouraged from reading Scripture. And I have to tell you, I have a certain degree of sympathy for this. Because if you were to pick up Scripture, Hebrew or Christian Scripture, just read it like you would a book, it is very confusing and very misleading. And so Scripture is something you're supposed to be taught. But here I am picking up and just for fun, how many people here have read the Bible? And I say read the Bible. I mean read the Bible cover to cover every chapter, every sentence, every word. See, that confuses me. The Tanakh, as we believe, was basically written by God through the Spirit and prophets. Directed to the Jewish people. If God wrote you a book, wouldn't you want to understand or wouldn't you want to read what it said? I'm astonished at how many people, how many Yeshiva guys have never read the Bible. They've read Mission and Gomorrah. They read what's in the Haftar readings and things. Again, I find that confusing. But I read the Bible. I wanted to be a very serious Christian. When the initial euphoria of the born again experience started to settle down and level off, these same questions I had remained. Eternal damnation. The way to get to God is through Jesus and Jesus only. There's no third way. And being now in high school, a teenager, by the way, virgin birth. So let's throw that one in. Now the minister at the church that I went to, I figured, well, let's ask around. Now my born again friends, I started asking them. And they said, well, you need to pray more. And the Holy Spirit will give you the answer. Now I've been reading religious stuff at this point basically all my life. And I found that answer a little unsettling. And I also realized that the people who are now my friends, my born again friends, had very little, if any, theological background. None. Fine. The minister, the pastor, whatever he called himself. I had a meeting with him. One way to get to God through Jesus. Eternal damnation, virgin birth. I need some help here because I'm a born again Christian and I want to be a good one. And so he sat there and was very pensive. And he says, well, you know, you need to pray more. You need to pray more and the Holy Spirit will show you the answer. Judge my disappointment. So my Christianity basically left me shortly thereafter. I couldn't very well say I was anything other than a nominal Christian, but I was still a religious person. I still believed in God. I'm now in my 20s. I'm living in Toronto and I live downtown. And I don't know if it's still there. It may be still, maybe it still is. The world's biggest bookstore was not far away from where I lived at the time. And being a reader, what I like to do is walk through the bookstore and look at the different books and buy different books. And of course, being a religious person, I would sometimes buy books on religion. Some of the books I bought were about Judaism. I knew virtually nothing about Judaism. Only Jewish friends I had were the Jews I worked for and they were all non-observant. They were basically secular. They had traditional upbringings. And by this time in my mind, I pretty well figured out what it was. We have God, the Creator. He sets out the rules. He expects us to follow the rules and follow the laws and live a good life. And if we do, things will generally go well. And if we don't, things will generally not go well. So I start for the first time in my life. I'm in my 20s now reading about Judaism. And I liked what I was reading, so I read more and more and more. And I realized, and remember when I said in my mind I had figured out how things were? To my shock, I realized this was it. This is what I believed. So it wasn't a case of me changing religions. It was me discovering to my great surprise that there was a religion. I believed in it. I just didn't know it. I'm reading more of a voracious reader about the subject. I read everything to get my hands on.  I had to do something about it. I said, like, what happens if I'm hit by a streetcar? I'm gonna be buried a Christian. I can't have that. So the only synagogue I had ever gone to was Bethsetic. I went to a friend's wedding. I had one, remember the big conversion, powerful experience. Here's the second one. My girlfriend at the time, we were at the wedding and we arrived there. It was night and we entered what I now realize is the back of the lobby. And so what I thought was the back end of the lobby was, in fact, the front. I'm wondering now because, you know, we were on time. No one else was there. And so I'm wandering around and if any of you have been to Bethsetic, there was in those days, and it probably still is, a glass case with a safari, say, for Torah, a Torah scroll in those cylindrical cases. And it was open up. And I saw a Torah scroll for the first time in real life. And I stood there looking at it, and Susan was off doing whatever, looking for, you know, anyone else invited to the wedding. And it hit me like a thunderbolt. I am looking at the Word of God. And it just struck me so profoundly because I've been religious all my life. And I looked at it, and I looked at it, and it just hit me because I was reading a bit about Judaism at this time. So I go over to my girlfriend at the time, and I said, Susan, you're not going to believe this. This is the most incredible thing out back here. This Torah scroll is written in Hebrew. I just found it fascinating. And she says, well, I certainly hope so. You were staring at it for 15 minutes. And I looked at my watch. I thought it was there maybe a minute or two. But apparently, I don't know what happened. I stood transfixed for, Susan says, 15 minutes staring at a Torah scroll. After a while, I couldn't let things stand. I had to do something about it. The only shul I'd ever been to, but said it. I'm brand new at everything. Anything I've ever learned, I taught myself and was from books. So I made an appointment to see the rabbi. And I said, I go into his office. He's very nice. I said, I want to convert to Judaism. And he says, you know what? I get this all the time. People watch Fiddler on the roof. They want to be Jewish. It's not for you. There's a lot of roses. It's not for you. And I was, when you come from a Christian background and you make a decision you want to convert, you expect people to roll out the red carpet. This is a monumental decision. And this is like ho-hum attitude. I was not expecting this. And it was very discouraging. So I made another appointment. And I came back and I said, I want to convert. And this is why. And I came back again and again and again. And you realized that I wasn't going away. So he decides, OK, well, let's take this guy in. Let's convert him, which I did. And in those days, they had conversion classes at the Holy Blossom next door. But the assistant rabbi, Troster, I believe, after speaking with me on one or two occasions, realized there's not much point sending you to a conversion class. You're not at that level. So I asked some friends of mine, where do you get an orthodox conversion? And one of my friends said, well, you go see Rabbi Steinberg, Oliver Sholom, at the Toronto Jewish Congress. OK. So I made an appointment with Rabbi Sholom Steinberg, Oliver Sholom. And I said, hi, I want to convert to Judaism. My hair is still wet from the conservative mix. I want to do an orthodox. And he says, well, this isn't for you. I get people coming in all the time. And by this I'm starting to catch on. And I come back again and again and again. And he says, OK, this kid's not going away. I do an orthodox conversion through the Toronto Jewish Congress the best then at the time, because a friend of mine said that's where it was. I got married. We had two children. I got divorced. And it was about this time that this sort of been, this isn't going in exactly chronological order, some of these things overlap, that I bought a computer and I went online. And at the time, 1990, whenever it was, I thought I was the last person in the world to go online. And I went to this, there's a platform called, in those days called CompuServe. And they had all these forums. There was the religion forum and the Jewish forum. And I went to the Jewish, the Judaism forum. Because I wanted to talk to Jews about Judaism. This is all fun and games for me. This is what I've been waiting for my whole life. I was disturbed by how many people I ran into online who were Christian missionaries, who were striking up conversations with people in the chat room, getting them to, oh, you should come over to this religion forum, which was really a Christian forum. And this burned me. It really did, because coming from a Christian background, I knew, and especially a born-again background, I knew all the tricks and I knew all the things and all the flaws and I knew a lot of the arguments. So I started picking fights with these people, but it just bothered me that this was going on. Later I found out there were Muslim missionaries, but that's another story. And it was, I wanted to get involved. Again, I didn't want to sit there and do anything. I wanted to get involved. And it was about that time that I heard about a character by the name of Julius Sis. And that he had an organization called Jews for Judaism. And one of the things that they did, which was to combat the effort of Christian missionaries to target Jews for conversion, to keep Jews Jewish. So I said, I have to get involved somehow. And I found out shortly thereafter, I was living in Hamilton at the time, that Julius was speaking, as we talked about earlier, at the Jewish Community Center, which was an encaster, a small town nearby. And I went to see him and I introduced myself. How do I get involved?  And so I started getting involved, doing as much volunteer work as I can, in addition to being online and talking to people and helping people, not just with respect to missionizing Tastic, but also people who wanted to become more religious. I wanted to help them. And I wanted to be the person who wasn't there for me when I started to become Jewish and I started to be interested. And so I was helping people as best I can. My daughter, about five, six years ago, made aliyah, she now lives in Ashgod. She married, has children. And in the traveling and the marriage and the divorce and the moving back and forth, the documents to my Orthodox conversion were lost. I didn't have any paperwork. It didn't bother me. Everyone knew I was Jewish. Everyone knew I converted. But I thought to myself, if I was going to make aliyah, or if I even had to prove I was Jewish, I wouldn't be able to do it. By the way, almost 30 years had passed and all of the witnesses to everything, to the Kutuba, to the Besdan, to the conversion, to the Geras, everyone had died. And there was no paperwork. So someone said to me, he says, you know what? You need to contact the Toronto Besdan. I said, I don't think it operates anymore. He says, no, no, no, no. The Toronto Besdan. I said, what are you talking about? He says, no, no, no. That was like a renegade Besdan. You need to go to the real one. I said, what do I do? Contact Rabbi Vail, which I did. I talked to Rabbi Vail, told him the story. He says, well, it's a little complicated and the witnesses and the stuff like that. And I said, there's something called a Girol-Homerov. There's a technical deficiency you could fix it up. It wasn't nearly as enthusiastic about this as I was hoping he would be. So I emailed him. I emailed him every week for six months until I think he agreed to let me meet the Besdan just to shut me up. By this time, I was coming to Toronto, as I still do, every Shabbos and every Yentaf. I live in the Niagara region, about an hour and a half drive away. Every Shabbos, every Yentaf, I come to Toronto because from the United States border to Hamilton, there were two, there are now three, someone had a bar mitzvah, three Orthodox Jewish men. That's it. That's all. So I come here. Julius was very kind to me. Rabbi Skobak was very kind to me. And I slowly started making inroads and I had the great good fortune to fall in with a very good group of people. And so when it came time for me to meet with the Besdan, I let people know that I was going to meet with them. This is meeting them for the first time. And so along came Julius Siss, Rabbi Skobak, Rabbi Bartfeld. I was governing Rabbi Bartfeld's shul for several years at this point. And they stood up for me. And I may very well hold the Toronto-Besdan land speed record for conversion because from the time I met the Besdan for the first time, to the time I had my mitzvah, it was approximately five months, maybe a little more than five months, but you know, conversions these days and from an Orthodox Besdan, it's not unusual for it to take two years. So I'm in Toronto, two days a week, back and forth. And what I wanted to do was I wanted to help people. I wanted to help people who were considering converting. I wanted to help Balitriva, people who were born Jewish, but wanted to become religious. And a concept that I had recently, of which I've recently become aware, b'nei noach, noaheids. These are Gentiles who don't necessarily want to convert, but they want to believe in the God of Israel, the Creator. That became a big passion of mine. And about a year or so ago, there was someone in Israel, a very charismatic speaker, a Brezlover, Chosed, by the name of Rav Dromosh Guzuto. And he has an outfit called the Amunna.com, the Amunna channel. He approached a friend of mine who's going to be speaking later on in a couple of weeks, Yohanan. Yohanan comes from Nicaragua. He speaks Spanish. And he was told there's a big movement in Latin America about Spanish-speaking people who want to know God, the God of Israel. And Rav Dromosh said to him, I want you to do a series of videos aimed directly at the Spanish-speaking people. Put it on YouTube, put it on Amunna.com. Fine. He then comes to me. He says, you know, people who are starting for the first time to become religious, a guy who's a rabbi or who has a Yeshiva background, we can't talk the same language they do. We don't come from what they come from. You do. How would you like to make some videos? Just directed specifically at converts, no-hides, and returnees. Baleshuva. I says, how many do you want? Just keep doing them. At last count, I think I've done about 155 videos. And then, Julia Sess said, we're going to be doing some videos on YouTube.  And so, I've had the great pleasure and the great privilege of having Julius have me record several of it. I've lost count of how many videos we've done. And again, the same in my life, the same thing holds true. When I was becoming, I won't say becoming religious, I was always religious. When I started becoming Jewish, there was no one really there to help me. And I want to be the person who wasn't there for me, if a person wants to become a religion. If a person has never prayed before in their lives, and people have come to me, how do I pray? How do I talk to God? And I take them by the hand, and I show them, and I help them as best I can. And thank God for Julia Sess and Rabbi Skoback who's given me this opportunity. And this is something that I will hopefully continue to do for a very long time. And thank you for your patience, thank you for your time, and thank you for listening.


Deferoxamine, DFO, loaded black phosphorus nanosheets decorated by polydopamine layer are prepared and compounded into gelatin methacrylate-slash-sodium-alginate-methacrylate-GA, hybrid hydrogel, as a smart responsive therapeutic system for accelerated bone regeneration. The BP-PD nanocomposites served as bioactive components and near-infrared, NIR, photothermal agents, which conferred the hydrogel with excellent NIR-slash-PH dual-responsive properties, realizing the stimuli-responsive release of DFO and PO-43- during bone regeneration. Under the action of NR-triggered mild photothermal therapy, the GA-slash-BP-PD hydrogel exhibited a positive effect on promoting osteogenesis and angiogenesis, eliminating excessive reactive oxygen species, and inducing macrophage polarization to the M2 phenotype. Through macrophage M2 polarization-induced osteoimmune microenvironment, this hydrogel platform could also drive functional cytokine secretion for enhanced angiogenesis and osteogenesis. In vivo experiments further demonstrated that the GA-slash-BP-PD system could facilitate bone healing by attenuating the local inflammatory response, increasing the secretion of pro-healing factors, stimulating endogenous cell recruitment, and accelerating revascularization. This article was authored by Minheil Wu, Huifan Lu, Dan Li, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


This study investigates the correlation between electric vehicle, EV, energy consumption and various kinematic parameters. Three regression models were constructed based on different levels of aggregation of the kinematic parameters. The first model uses aggregated values of the kinematic parameters of trips, while the second model includes detailed acceleration data. The third model uses the raw data of the kinematic parameters as input parameters to predict the energy consumption. All three models showed similar results, indicating that the kinematic parameters have a strong correlation with EV energy consumption. However, the third model had a lower fit than the other two, suggesting that more detailed information about the kinematics may improve the accuracy of the model. This article was authored by Cedric Dekauer, Yuri VanMurlo and Thierry Kussmanns.


Appalachian Wireless proudly brings you unlimited data. Unlimited data is only $80 a month for a single line. Four lines as low as $200. Better service? Bigger savings? That's today's Appalachian Wireless. An East Kentucky network company. Get a speed slow to 25 gigabytes per line to 512 kilobits for phones and tablets. And 15 gigabytes for motors. See store for more details. To help combat the drug abuse epidemic in Kentucky, more specifically in our region, the president of well care of Kentucky was in Louisa this morning to present a check to officials with addiction recovery care. They're here today to present us a check with $25,000, which is great because we'll use that for capacity expansion. But what also is real important is that it signals that this organization, well care, understands the drug epidemic that we're having and they're partnering with us and so we're excited about that partnership. Well care officials announced the funding today at Karen's Place maternity center in Louisa, which serves pregnant women and new mothers with substance abuse addictions. But well care of Kentucky president and CEO Bill Jones says he knows that is only a small percentage of those who need help. We have a large percentage of our membership that are in Eastern Kentucky. We recognize that substance abuse is a huge problem or issue in the state of Kentucky and we want to do everything we can to try to help address it. Megan Evans is one of the many women who say Karen's Place saved her life. She completed other treatment programs only to relapse again and again, eventually hitting rock bottom. Not going back to my job and not having my kids and not having anything at all and having my family lose my family and losing absolutely everything. Well care of Kentucky donated the $25,000 to addiction recovery care which operates Karen's Place for women as well as $10,000 to the healing place in Louisville. In Louisa, I'm Shannon Deskins, EKB News.


Hi everyone, Sean with jaspyscasebreaks.com here doing 2021 break king stars and legends hobby three box case break random letter number 13 high risk high reward 18 spots when we get to random letter in the list below we'll go by the player's first letter of his or her last name that appears on the card so if we pull Charles Barkley we'll go to the B spot for Barkley we pull a Kareem Abdul Jabbar it'll go to the A spot for the last name starting not the second portion of the high-fated last name oh and any of the letters not represented on the list if we pull anything from those will be randomized at the end to the group so here's the list of letters from a down to combo spot of YZ INN which we've pasted right here and here is our list of customers from Nick Stover down to last spot mojo Michael Estrella last spot mojo times two dice for randomized both lists and pair those up four and a four eight times eighth and final time Michael Estrella down to Nick Stover eight times the randomizer and eight times on the letters eighth and final time from B down to E you see eight times on the randomizer there eight times on the customers and eight times on the dice so Michael Estrella with B Adam Cupperman with F Brenton Young with W Bradley Zitterman with G Chris Cataloni with P Daniel Katz with K Nick Stover with S Michael P Coro with H Eric Jock with A Adam Cupperman with L Nick Stover with T Brandon Latulip with the combo spot of YV INN Michael Estrella with C Nick Stover with R Mike Grzinski with D Kyle Jack with M and J and Nick Stover with E so that is the randomizer quick trade window not many trades in letter random letter breaks but especially because there's also no checklist so it's a blind trade but trade window is open if anybody has a letter in particular they're trying to get here's your chance didn't expect a lot of talks for trades so trade window going once trade window going twice trade window going three times this print right cool so let's see what's in here so you can see 2021 break king stars and legends three boxes per case any great players with a G Griffey Ken Griffey he's pretty good Jeff Gordon for the racing world Gail Goodrich what else Tom Glavin there's our three boxes Ron Gantt Horace Grant if we're gonna go there yeah see plenty Kevin Garnett yes that is true now you're hoping for a graffiti okay cool at least we got something for you we're starting off with hey Rex called it Kevin Garnett 1999 hoops nameplates PSA 9 is that rookie call you a kid you went straight to the NBA talk about accelerated learning we think your kid Monica might stick around for a while they'll also work to describe enthusiasm game yes I think this is rookie Kevin Garnett right new Hall of Famer G Bradley Zimmerman right off the bat Rex called it next up Tom Glavin another G nice two-color patch and Otto from tops five star two out of 30 that is 2018 tops five star baseball G again Bradley Zimmerman two for two couldn't think of a single one is 95 Garnett rookie is it really Mikey yeah 1995 never mind it's very strange and this one is not a G it's the big hurt Frank Thomas 1990 leaf rookie BGS 9 5 centering was a nine corner surface and edges all a 9 5 going to spot T and Nick Stover big hurt look at that big old smile who knew that he would go on to destroy hundreds and hundreds of baseballs one graded card 1984 tops Daryl Strawberry PSA 9 s Nick Stover for strawberry day LeBron James winning tickets from 2017-2018 contenders basketball PSA 10 for the J spot Kyle Jack Barry Sanders the great one Nick Stober in the S spot 45 out of 45 immortal descriptions Barry Sanders from 2004 NFL legends well that's kind of cool we got the captain Derek Jeter tops tech 2000 PSA 9 gold Jeter that is let's say one out of ten was that that one out of ten so we're looking at right there maybe potentially one out of ten Derek Jeter for J and Kyle Jack hard to tell what that's supposed to try trying to say with me saying one out of ten anybody else have any other guesses it's not actually like printed on that's pretty cool and oh Roger Maris Orlando Sapeida 1962 tops PSA 6 Maris is Kyle Jack M C is Michael Estrella it is out of ten right that's what I thought for some bread so that is randomizer between M and C so Michael Estrella with C and Kyle Jack with M that's going to be randomized between you two and our final card from the box I know that guy Kobe Bryant be Michael Estrella 1967 1990 sorry 1996 1997 Fleer Ultra rookie BGS eight Kobe such a cool-looking set old-school grading centering was a nine-quarters seven and a half edges eight five surface eight five cool old-school Beckett slab too there you go so last thing we need to do figure out who's gonna take home that let's pop over to randomizer there's Garnett's rookie year 1995 and this is gonna be Maris Sapeida so dice roll name on top after three and a four seven times seventh and final time Sapeida C stays with Michael Estrella and the C seven times the randomizer seven times on the dice Orlando Sapeida's name is on top so that will go to the letter C and Michael Estrella for you and there you go guys that does it next box is our next break is in the store that was do we hit any of the sales she hits Frank Thomas but that's a 10 would we pull a PSA 9 so none of those sales she hits hopefully the next box for us that was 2021 break king stars and legends hobby three-box case break random letter number 13 from Jasper's case breaks calm I'm Sean Jasper's case freaks calm thanks for hanging out see you next time


Hi, I'm Ryan Mitchell, Forestry, Wildlife and Natural Resource Regional Agent with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System. Today we're going to explore the differences between good fire and bad fire in land management as well as how Alabama Extension can help. Fire has existed as part of our natural system for as long as time. It serves as a natural tool that promotes many native plants, reduces unnatural fuel loads, returns nutrients to the soil, and even eliminates weeds and pests from agriculture land. Prescribed burning is the intentional burning of land under specific weather conditions. It has proven to be an important method of today's land management practices. By applying a controlled version of a natural process, we can manage forests and agricultural land better than ever. Planning a prescribed burn requires the identification of burn objectives. Once identified, these will help dictate the time of year and the desired weather conditions needed to achieve your objectives. The most important goal of conducting a prescribed burn is safety. To achieve this goal, personal protective equipment is required. This gear includes goggles or glasses, boots, fire resistant clothing, and gloves. Make sure that you, as well as others, always wear these provisions. Controlled burns are considered good fire because of its natural benefits. However, without planning, fire quickly can become a danger instead of a tool. It's the first record of prescribed fire in the southeast more than 10,000 years ago. Humans have burning practices down to a science. This is especially true at Alabama Extension. By providing science-based, non-biased information through programs such as the Learn to Burn workshops, Extension can help you achieve your land management objectives. For more information about good fire, visit the Alabama Extension website at www.aces.edu.


Welcome to the Cato Institute. I'm David Bowes. I'm the executive vice president here, and I'm very pleased to have all of you. We have a perfect program tonight for this season in which we are celebrating the birth of the American Republic. We're going to be talking tonight about the history of liberty. And this really is the most important topic in American history and in the history of Western civilization. The libertarian tradition is at the core of our civilization. It has its roots in ancient Greece and ancient Israel. It developed through the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The rise of Christianity throughout the Middle Ages and into the American times. You cannot understand the world we live in without understanding libertarian ideas and without knowing something about the people that we'll be hearing about tonight. Some of you know that a couple of years ago, I published my own books on the libertarian tradition. And I can't help thinking that they are complementary with the book we're talking about tonight. I wrote Libertarianism, a primer in which I tried to lay out the basic principles and the contemporary argument for libertarianism. And I edited the libertarian reader, which collected about 60 of the greatest writings ever on liberty. Now Jim Powell has written The Triumph of Liberty, which tells the story of the great champions of freedom through their individual biographies. All those books should be available in any good bookstore or from Lezay Fair Books at LFB.org. Of course, those of you here tonight will be signing Jim Powell's book, The Triumph of Liberty, after the event. Our speaker tonight has a great background for writing about the history of liberty. At the University of Chicago, he studied under the great historians William McNeil and Daniel Boersten. As a student editor there, he published The Great Libertarians, Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, George Stigler, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. And he was a research assistant for another Nobel laureate, Ronald Coase. He became a journalist after that and wrote more than 400 articles for publications ranging from American heritage to the Saturday evening post to reason and liberty. He's a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and he's the editor of Lezay Fair Books. To write this latest book, he visited libraries, bookstores, museums, historic sites in Europe, Asia and South America as well as around the United States. This book, The Triumph of Liberty, a 2000 year history told through the lives of freedom's greatest champions, is being published officially on the 4th of July by, appropriately enough, the free press. Jim has also created a website to talk about the book and the ideas and the history of liberty, which is libertystory.net. So now to discuss the triumph of liberty and the lives of its greatest champions, please welcome Jim Powell. Thank you, David. It's always a delight to be back here at Cato, which has done so much for liberty. In his book, Studies on Philosophy, Politics and Economics, F.A. Hayek explained that an important reason why socialism captured the imagination of intellectuals is that liberty ceased to be a living, relevant, inspiring idea. Hayek went on to say that more people seem to get their political ideas from history than from economics. For instance, a lot of people believe government intervention is needed to keep the economy going because they believe the stock market crash of 1929 caused the depression and that the New Deal got us out of it. So back in 1994, I decided to tell the story of liberty through the lives of heroes and heroines as a way to try to inspire old friends for liberty and to try to win some new ones. I've been studying the history of liberty for some four decades since my days at the University of Chicago, and I knew a great deal about intellectual history, economic history, legal history and related issues. But I was quite unprepared for the extraordinary drama and the powerful emotions of this story, which I came to understand by going through hundreds of biographies and published diaries and letters and other such material. I was overwhelmed to see how much friends of liberty suffered, how much they persisted against what they often found to be hopeless odds, how they helped each other, and in myriad ways, helped keep the cause alive. Liberty has to be one of the most thrilling stories ever told. In the triumph of liberty, for example, I tell the story of the amazing swede Raoul Wallenberg, who saved almost 100,000 Jews from the gas chambers. He operated in Budapest within Nazi controlled territory, which meant that escape was impossible. He was armed only with a pistol, which he never used. Wallenberg's driver, Shondor Ardai, recalled one phenomenal moment. We have come to a station where a train full of Jews was on the point of leaving Germany and the death camps. The officer of the guard did not want to let us enter. Raoul Wallenberg then climbed on the roof of the train and handed in many protective passports as he could through the windows. The Nazis fired their guns and cried for him to go away, but he continued calmly to hand out passports to the hands which reached out for them. I believe that men with guns were impressed by his courage and on purpose fired above him.  We'll take the story of Frederick Douglass, which is among other things about the wonder of liberty as it appeared for the first time to a runaway slave. When Douglass reached the shipbuilding port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he decided to settle down, he was amazed at the prosperity around him. He wrote, I had very strangely supposed while in slavery that few of the comforts and scarcely any of the luxuries of life were enjoyed in the north, compared with what were enjoyed by slaveholders in the south. I probably came to this conclusion from the fact that northern people own no slaves. I suppose that they were upon a level with the non-slaveholding population of the south and I knew they were exceedingly poor. I'd become accustomed to regard their poverty as the necessary consequence of not owning any slaves. I had somehow imbibed the opinion that in the absence of slaves, there could be no wealth and very little refinement. Douglass continued, Here I found myself surrounded with the strongest proofs of wealth in New Bedford, lying in the wharves and writing on the stream, I saw many ships of the finest model in the best order and the largest size. Upon the right and the left, I was walled in by granite warehouses of the widest dimensions, stowed to their utmost capacity with the necessaries and comforts of life. Added to this, almost everybody seemed to be at work, but noiselessly so, compared with what I had been accustomed to in Baltimore. I heard no deep oaths or hoared curses against the laborers, I saw no whipping of men, but all seemed smoothly to go on. Every man appeared to understand his work and went after it with a sober yet cheerful earnestness which betoken the deep interest which he felt in what he was doing as well as a sense of his own dignity as a man. To me this looked exceedingly strange. From the wharves I strolled around the town, gazing with wonder and admiration at the splendid churches, the beautiful dwellings and finely cultivated gardens, evincing an amount of wealth, comfort, taste and refinement such as I had never seen in slaveholding Maryland. There's a great deal of lyrical visionary writing in the history of Liberty. I take these lines by the great Irish liberator Daniel O'Connell. He said, we will plant in our native land the constitutional tree of Liberty. That noble tree will prosper and flourish in our green and fertile country. It will extend its protecting branches all over this lovely island. Beneath its sweet and sacred shade, the universal people of Ireland, the Catholics and Protestants and Presbyterians and dissenters of every class will sit in peace and union and tranquility. Commerce and trade will flourish, industry will be rewarded and the people contented and happy will see old Ireland what she ought to be. Great, glorious and free, first flower of the earth, first gem of the sea. And yes, while researching the triumph of Liberty, I found humorous moments too. When the English political exile John Locke was asked what he was doing in Holland, he reportedly replied, I am here for the beer. As you might know, had Locke been in England at this time, he probably would have been executed as a conspirator against the king. The Scotsman Adam Smith worked on the wealth of nations for about a dozen years. And as soon as it was published in 1776, he began revising it. He had time for little else, except perhaps this jibe at his reputation for forgetfulness. He told his publisher, I had almost forgot. I was the author of an inquiry concerning the wealth of nations. University of Chicago Nobel Laureate George Stigler, who had documented the reasons why government regulations tend to backfire, came up with this game for children. He offered a million dollars to a child who could answer three questions. First, who was buried in Grant's tomb? Second, whose head is on the Lincoln penny? And at this point, of course, the children began to anticipate great riches. And then came the third question, who was Adam Smith's best friend? Now Stigler had in mind some contemporary of Smith, but on one occasion a child said, who was Adam Smith's best friend? Why you are Uncle George! And so he was. As I reflect on the story of Liberty during the last 2,000 years, several points stand out to me. First, how much has been gained for Liberty despite all the issues which trouble us today? Just imagine for a moment that you were living 2,000 years ago in Rome. Nobody's heard of individual rights. Freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion. All of these things were utterly unknown. Marcus Tullius Cicero was beheaded for speaking out against the tyranny of Mark Antony. Murder had been common in Roman politics since at least 133 BC, when a reformer named Tiberius Sampronius Grocus was clubbed to death by senators he disagreed with. According to the biographer Plutarch, who wrote in the 1st century AD, Rome was filled with murder and there's no counting the executions or setting a limit to them. Rome was an empire based on military conquest and slavery. At the Emporiums of Capua and Delos some 20,000 slaves a day changed hands. Now how was it possible to go from that world to this world? How could you possibly get from there to here? It's almost unimaginable. We've come a long way in part because many people struggle valiantly for liberty over a very long time. A dozen of the people I write about were imprisoned. Another dozen were exiled. Two were beheaded. One was shot to death. Despite all the obstacles, friends for liberty have managed to advance the cause through their ideas, their stubbornness, their persistence and their courage. The Dutchman Hugo Grocius convicted of defending free will in Calvinist Holland was imprisoned but he escaped in a trunk intended to carry his books. And he wrote his great treatise on peace which made him the father of international law while in impoverished exile in France. Alexis de Tocqueville completed democracy in America and his other important books despite migraine headaches, neuralgia and stomach cramps which lasted a week at a time and he endured bouts of depression. Eventually he succumbed to tuberculosis. The great German playwright Friedrich Schiller produced his plays about liberty while he suffered from severe asthma, tuberculosis, liver and heart disease. The last nine years of his life when he was practically an invalid were his most productive. Schiller wrote one play about liberating the Swiss which is Wilhelm Tell another about liberating the Dutch which is Don Carlos and yet another about liberating the French which was the maid of Orléans. It is not easy to stop, wrote Thomas Mann, once I have begun to speak of Schiller's special greatness a generous, lofty, flaming, inspiring grandeur. Schiller's mighty talent, his libertarian sentiments, he is a poet who knows how to bring tears to our eyes while at the same time rousing our indignation against despotism. Cornell University historian Stanley Izzerta wrote this about the Frenchman known as the hero of two worlds. Lafayette knew only one cause during his long lifetime, human liberty. As a young man he risked his life in war and revolution for that cause. In middle age, living under the barely concealed dictatorship of Napoleon a regime he detested, he recalled how he had been wounded, denounced, condemned to death, despised, imprisoned, beggared and exiled all in the service of human liberty. Poor, powerless and with no prospects at that time Lafayette asked, how have I loved liberty? With the enthusiasm of religion, with the rapture of love, with the conviction of geometry, that is how I have always loved liberty. One of the really incredible aspects of this story is that most of the people who struck mighty blows for liberty had humble origins. They had no money, no connections, no pull, very little to indicate great promise. What they did seemed impossible. Who would have ever predicted that a poor wandering monk would turn out to be the first great champion for toleration and peace in modern history? This was Dutch-born, desiderious Erasmus who defended free will against Luther's claims of predestination who denounced war-making kings and popes and who protested the slaughter of 100,000 German peasants. Who would have predicted that a failed corset maker would help inspire the American Revolution? Harvard historian Bernard Balin reflected, Thomas Paine's Common Sense is the most brilliant pamphlet written during the American Revolution and one of the most brilliant pamphlets ever written in the English language. How it could have been produced by a bankrupt Quaker corset maker, the sometime teacher, preacher and grocer and twice dismissed excise officer who happened to catch Benjamin Franklin's attention in England and who arrived in America only 14 months before Common Sense was published is nothing one can explain without explaining genius itself. Who would have ever imagined that a palsy brewer would become the most ingenious political agitator of the American Revolution? Whose newspaper articles, communication network and dramatic protests like the Boston Tea Party kept the British constantly on the defensive. I'm talking of course about Sam Adams. The English historian Thomas Macaulay was once so hard up after the failure of his father's business that he pawned a gold medal he had won at Cambridge. But he made himself one of the most eloquent of all authors on liberty. His very first speech in 1824 proclaimed his talent with these words for the emancipation of slaves in British colonies. He said the peasant of the Antilles will no longer crawl in listless and trembling dejection round a plantation from whose fruits he must derive no advantage and a hut whose door yields him no protection. But when his cheerful and voluntary labor is performed he will return with the firm step and a wreck brow of a British citizen from the field which is his freehold to the cottage which is his castle. How was it possible that the failed storekeeper and pencil maker would give a little talk, never see it published during his lifetime and yet have it achieved global influence? Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morrison wrote that Henry David Thoreau's civil disobedience became the best known work of American literature to the peoples of Asia and Africa struggling to be free and it has earned the honor of having its sale prohibited in communist countries. And it would have seemed utterly preposterous to suggest that the son of a seamstress and a failed businessman would win a Nobel Prize and help make friends for liberty around the world and yet this is what Milton Friedman has done and continues to do. The story of liberty teaches us to take a long view and carry on. For 14 years, Ayn Rand worked on Atlas Shrugged, her epic defense of liberty and individualism and it went on to sell four and a half million copies. It sells tens of thousands of copies every year without being promoted by the publisher or assigned by professors and now at last the movie of Atlas Shrugged is being made. Victor Hugo's masterpiece, Les Miserables, about a private individual who was hounded by police but helps humanity was in the making for 22 years. It became the first international publishing event with simultaneous editions appearing in Amsterdam, Leipzig, London, Madrid, Paris, Turin and St. Petersburg. The musical Les Miserables become the world's most popular musical seen by over 40 million people. For six decades, Thomas Jefferson carried on as one of the most gifted pens for liberty, turning out more declarations, resolutions, reports and other official documents than any other founder. He turned out as well over 18,000 letters which offered keen insights on fundamental issues to practically everybody who was anybody in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The civil rights movement took a decade to turn the tide against compulsory racial segregation. Leaders of the free trade movement persisted for a quarter century before English grain tariffs were abolished, enabling poor people to buy cheap imported food. The movement for women's suffrage took an incredible seven decades from the time housewife Elizabeth Cady Stanton launched it in 1848. Her declaration of rights and sentiments was based on the Declaration of Independence and she advocated equal property rights and the right to vote as a means of securing this. Carrie Chapman Catt recalled that suffrages conducted 56 campaigns of referendum to male voters, 480 campaigns to legislators to get them to submit suffrage amendments to voters, 47 campaigns to get state constitutional conventions to write women's suffrage into state constitutions, 277 campaigns to get state party conventions to include women's suffrage planks, 30 campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt women's suffrage planks, and 19 campaigns before 19 successive congresses. A tremendous amount of persistence in all of these cases. Again and again, the triumph of liberty, one can see how a few individuals or even a single individual can make a huge difference. The Greek bookseller Atticus paid Cicero's bills and helped sustain his spirits during his years of exile. During the 1680s, the Dutch Quaker merchant Benjamin Furley provided sanctuary for exiles William Penn, John Locke, and Algin and Sidney, and he kept Sidney's explosive manuscripts safe. Arthur Tappan and a few other Quaker merchants backed William Lloyd Garrison, making it possible for him to publish The Liberator, the foremost-established newspaper for three decades. Ellen Windsor, Rebecca Windsor Evans, and Edmund C. Evans made it possible for Albert J. Nock to write some of his best books, including Jefferson and Our Enemy of the State. When the Austrian adversary of socialism, Ludwig von Mises, arrived as an exile in the United States back in 1940, he didn't know anybody, he didn't have much money, but he did remember that journalist Henry Haslett had reviewed the English-language edition of his book Socialism, and he gave Haslett a call. Well, Haslett had spent much of his youth in a home for fatherless boys, and he had to give up his dreams of a college education because he didn't have any money. He started working for newspapers, and by the time the call came from Mises, he had worked his way up to a job at the New York Times. Haslett used his New York Times connections to get Mises some writing assignments and money, and he also used his Times connections to help get Mises' wife's daughter out of Nazi-controlled Paris. And Haslett helped persuade Yale University Press to publish Mises' books, Bureaucracy, Omnipotent Government, and Human Action. Since I began this talk recalling an observation of Hayek's that people aren't likely to support liberty unless they find it really inspiring, let me close with a Hayek's saga. During the Battle of Britain, Hayek's intellectual adversary and personal friend John Maynard Keynes helped find quarters for Hayek's family in Cambridge, and Hayek began working on a book idea in a semi-converted barn. The book, which explained why central planning must produce dictatorship, was The Road to Serfdom, published in England on March 10, 1944. It provoked much controversy, and the 2000 copy press run was sold out. To secure an American publisher, Hayek sought help from Fritz Maklip, an economist who, like Hayek, had attended the economic seminar of Ludwig von Mises back in the 1920s. Maklip had emigrated from Vienna to the United States, and he worked in Washington. He wasn't able to interest any American publishers in The Road to Serfdom, but he did show the English edition page proofs to Aaron Director, Milton Friedman's brother-in-law. Apparently, directors sent them to Frank Knight in the University of Chicago's economics department. Knight, in turn, recommended the book to William Couch, editor of the University of Chicago Press, and it was accepted. So there were very few friends of freedom at this time, but they were just enough to get the job done. Well, Henry Haslett wrote a 1,500-word front-page review in the New York Times Sunday book review declaring that Friedrich Hayek has written one of the most important books of our generation. The University of Chicago Press ordered another 10,000 copies. Reader's Digest editor, DeWitt Wallace, another friend of liberty, devoured the first 20 pages of this April 1945 issue to The Road to Serfdom. And then Harry Sherman, whose co-founder of Book of the Month Club, distributed another 600,000 copies of these in addition to the 8 million that got the original Reader's Digest at that time. Among the readers of the condensation was a former Royal Air Force pilot named Anthony Fisher, a self-made entrepreneur who pioneered the rent-a-car business in England. He was so excited about the road to serfdom that he decided he should go into politics and promote liberty. Since he lived near Hayek, he went over for a chat. Hayek convinced him that politics would be a waste of time until public opinion was more receptive to ideas on liberty. Hayek advised him that what Fisher should do is go out and make some money and use some of the proceeds to fund a think tank to try appealing to intellectuals and sway opinion that way. Accordingly, Fisher became a dairy farmer, but he was wiped out by hoof and mouth disease. Then he learned about factory farming of chickens, and he started Buckstead Chicken Company, which dramatically cut the cost of chickens in England and did more to put a chicken in every pot than all the politicians put together. As Hayek suggested, Anthony Fisher did use some of his proceeds, and he funded the Institute of Economic Affairs, and this did much to influence the political climate in England. Among those attending IEA functions over the years was Margaret Thatcher, and later her successful privatizations inspired other countries to start selling off government assets too. Fisher sold Buckstead Chicken Company and put most of his share into a turtle farming business because it uses a lot of meat. But he got wiped out in the early 1970s by endangered species laws. He was in bad financial shape, he was almost 60, so it was very hard for him to make that money back. But by this time, the success of the Institute of Economic Affairs had become evident to all, and other people began offering him money to start think tanks like the IEA in other countries. Fisher helped the Fraser Institute get firmly established in Vancouver, British Columbia. He went to New York and helped establish the Manhattan Institute. He went to Dallas and established the National Center for Policy Analysis, and then to San Francisco to start the Pacific Research Institute. He started the Atlas Economic Research Foundation to handle the increasing volume of requests from around the world, all of which happened because Fisher was inspired by that book that Hayek wrote in a semi-converted barn. Another man stirred into action by the road to surf, and was Harold Lunow, who worked for his uncle William Volcker's wholesale business in Kansas City. Volcker had started a charitable foundation in 1933, and by 1944, Harold Lunow had succeeded Volcker. He used his funds with stunning effect. Lunow arranged to pay Ludwig von Mies' salary at New York University after NYU refused to pay Mies' anything. Lunow paid Hayek's salary at the University of Chicago when that university didn't think Hayek was worth a paycheck. Lunow funded conferences, which figured in the development of Hayek's book The Constitution of Liberty. Lunow paid for the lectures Milton Friedman delivered, which became Capitalism and Freedom. Lunow approved the grant to Murray Rothbard, which resulted in man economy and state, and Lunow helped finance the founding of the Montpelerin Society, which every couple years brings Friends of Liberty together from around the world. All because one man had an idea that another man with some money was inspired to take decisive action. As you can see, the history of liberty abounds with stories which touch people's hearts. They can inspire old friends of liberty, win new friends, and help spur us all to carry the torch of liberty on its next lap. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jim. You know, it occurs to me there are actually a surprisingly large number of movies in the theaters right now that deal with themes in the history of liberty, from The Gladiator in Ancient Roman Times to Sunshine in East-West about the tyrannies of the 20th century, and of course the Patriot about the American Revolution. So maybe you should go stand in movie lines and hand out flyers about your book. Pardon me? Well, I haven't seen Chicken Run, so I can't swear to that one. We're going to invite you all up for wine and cheese in a few minutes, but before that, we'll take a few questions here. And Jim, I think I'll just let you come back up here and call on people. Would you wait for a microphone to come around so we can get your question on tape? Yeah. There are really so many favorites. That's a very hard question to answer because I must say I was very fortunate in my selection of stories. I had known something about all of the 65 people before I started the book, but I knew them primarily through their writings. I had not done such a focused effort on their biographies, and there were far more dramatic things going on than I had any idea. And I must say one story after the other, I just found emotionally overwhelming and quite gratifying. Certainly the most dramatic story that I could ever imagine is the story of Raul Wallenberg going into that horrific situation and doing the number of things he did. I talked with some of the people who were rescued by Wallenberg, and there were just so many of those stories. Almost everyone is more incredible than the last to read about the single negotiation that saved 70,000 people in December of 1944 when the Hungarian Nazis were about to wipe out what was left in the Jewish ghetto before the Russians came in. That was certainly one of the most, perhaps the single most dramatic story. Lafayette, those of us who are focused on intellectual history and ideas don't pay so much attention to Lafayette, but to read not just what he did during the American Revolution, but the early role in promoting a constitutional government during the French Revolution. His very dramatic face-down with Napoleon. After Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, he was still the most feared military commander in Europe, and he still would have been very difficult to dislodge from power in France. It might have taken a good deal more pushing from Wellington or other external forces, but by that time Lafayette was in the constituent assembly, and he rallied enough people and had a very dramatic face-off with Napoleon, and forced his resignation before there was more bloodshed. Lafayette was in correspondence with the freedom fighters throughout Europe, with the people in Spain, with those seeking independence in Greece. In his attic at the place he lived outside Paris, he hid free polls, because there was a period certainly in the 1820s when it was illegal for the Polish immigrants to come in. He called his attic the attic of free polls, which is where he hid them until they could find something else. Then Lafayette played a role in the downfall of Charles X in 1830. He played a role in the downfall of two kings and an emperor and was just a tremendous personality. He was very emotional. He had no correspondence with Jefferson and especially with Washington, but with all of these people, he's just pouring out and pouring out. I remember reading one of the more critical biographies of Lafayette is by Oliver Bernier.  He was a simpleton. He was vain. But Oliver Bernier, at the end of this, when he said, you know, he devoted himself utterly to human liberty a lot worse than that. So even his worst critics conceded the most important points. I mean, I just fell in love with Lafayette, but there were so many of these people. As I said, there were episodes that you can never forget. I referred to Hugo Grosius getting out of prison in a trunk and his maid was telling the soldiers, don't sit on the trunk. There's a very valuable books in China in here making sure it was anchored to the ship so it didn't wash overboard. I had thought that Holland was a very tolerant place because of course that's where William Penn and Sidney and Locke and others, there were a lot of Jews who were found sanctuary in Holland. But in the early period, there was as much intolerance there as elsewhere and a lot of courage displayed. See, there were just so many, the preponderance of stories has a great deal more drama than I had any knowledge of when I started just pursuing the biographies to see what did people run into and how did they overcome it. So I feel just thrilled with the stories as they worked out. It's really quite amazing to have been the same tradition with these people. Yes? I'm curious as to what criteria you brought to bear in selecting your candidates. I'm particularly curious since Milton Friedman is identified on the book jacket as a controversial choice. I would have thought that Friedman would have been the least controversial of all choices. And also I'm curious as to whether you took into account attributes that might be considered anti-liberty. For example, Martin Luther King who is included because of his incalculable contributions to the freedom of African Americans, that was not enough to include Abraham Lincoln apparently. King had favored redistributionist policies that many of us would have considered to be antithetical to liberty. Jefferson was considered by many to be condemned because he was a slave owner. So just what were the criteria that you applied? Well, certainly I had to make a judgment as to whether their contributions to liberty outweighed their contradictions. There's no question about that. And there are very few people who turn out to be perfect. A lot of people have even minor annoyances when you're looking at them from the standpoint of a story. I certainly came to the conclusion that Jefferson's contributions primarily in articulating principles and insights about liberty were so voluminous and so important that they outweighed the fact that he held slaves. And of course all the people, the Virginians of that period, the late, you know, the 18th century, none of them were defending slavery. They should have gotten rid of them. I don't understand it. But they at least were not defending it. So defensive slavery came later, 1820s, 1830s, people like Calhoun who are now saying that slavery is essential for civilization. That's a whole different thing. So you had to make a judgment over their contributions exceeding their drawbacks. In the case of Martin Luther King, it's hard to imagine doing a history of liberty without addressing what was going on in the South at that time. Martin Luther King relates back to Cicero, the higher law principle of determining the legitimacy of laws. You're not just accepting the government's word that his law is legitimate because all kinds of horrific things have been legal at one time or another. So that was a very sound principle which he was reviving. He also related to Thoreau in the book, the principles in civil disobedience. And the fact that in my view, Dr. King lost it later when he thought that marches and speeches could eradicate poverty does not in any way diminish from the truly heroic displays during the period when he was fighting compulsory segregation. Just to review the number of times he was shot at and all those other things, there were so many of those four or five places where he lived were bombed. Just to imagine that you're running into that resistance when all you're asking for is equal rights. And at some point somebody has to take the initiative to move against that. So I would again think in his case, sure there were drawbacks, but the contributions were quite enough to merit inclusion. It would be hard for me to imagine not having anything related to the civil rights period quite apart from the fact that the civil rights movement has become more of a special interest function at this time. It does not take away from what was done at that time. So you make judgments about these people. Also, the availability of adequate biographical material, that's a key factor. There were a number of people that I would like to have done. I just could not get enough biographical information on. Generally, Cicero is the earliest figure about whom a great deal is known because of all the letters of his that were found, his orations that were found, contemporary accounts of him. You could go back to Lao Tzu or some of his Euripides, people who expressed important ideas on liberty before Cicero, but we don't know much about their lives. And Lao Tzu probably didn't even exist. He was probably a name given to, he could have been named given to a number of storytellers much the way Homer was. We don't know if Homer was alive, but there was a continuity of this oral tradition. We refer to that as Homer, but you can't write about that. So there were some people in other countries. They tried to get information about B.R. Shanoi, who was the courageous opponent of the five-year plans in India. And I was not able to reach his daughter, Suda, in Australia, and I had some good conversations with Parth Shah in India, but I couldn't get enough biographical information. I tried Yakuchi Fukuzawa, who was a great champion of self-help in 19th century Japan and imported a lot of ideas about that component of liberty. Again, I couldn't get enough biographical information. That was a crucial limiting factor. Overall, I would say I was not aiming to assemble a top 65, a top 100, or anything like that, even though it certainly would be odd if you have a story of liberty that somehow does not include a major name. As pieces began falling into place, I'm looking for other things that would fill out a sequence on peace or a sequence on economic liberty so that a reader would get a rich treatment of each of those topics through the stories of people who had something to do with accomplishing them. Yeah. I just have a bit of an off-beat question for you, but I think you'll know the answer. There are a lot of circles in Washington. I'm right here. There are a lot of circles in Washington. And if you could refresh my memory, something about if the horse is on four feet, three feet or two feet, it depends whether the rider was killed in action or wounded, depending on how many feet the horse is on, the statues. Does that ring a bell? Did I say it wrong? Yes, I think we have some knowledge here. Wait for a microphone. Final answer. You can call home. If you have, if the horse is all four feet on the ground, the rider was not wounded. If one foot is in the air, the rider was wounded. If both feet are in the air, the rider was killed. Always learn something here. That's right. That's right. You get such a talented, knowledgeable group of people. It's amazing how much knowledge you can tell. Yes. I'm Bob Hershey. I'm a consulting engineer. In your research in going over these letters and doing the interviews, what did you find that was new and overlooked by previous biographers? It's really a scoop. Well, I would say the main thing, the main area where I'm adding value here over previous biographers is that the typical biography ends with an individual's death. It'd be very hard for me to think of a biography that goes beyond somebody's death. I mean, there must be a few, but 99 out of 100 are going to end with somebody's death. And certainly what I am particularly interested in doing relating to the thought of Hayek is to tie all of these extraordinary things as much as possible to the present, make them as relevant to people living now and what people are doing now as possible. So what I did was to trace the reputation and influence of these people down to the present. And in order to do that, I had to, in most cases, interview specialized scholars who had written on this subject, but this doesn't come out of any of the biographies. Take one wonderful story which involves Shiller. Shiller died in 1806, and that's as far as any of the biographers go, but there's a tremendous story after that because Beethoven loves Shiller and Beethoven is writing poems about Shiller, and then Beethoven, of course, uses Shiller's Oh, the Joy and the Fourth Movement of his Ninth Symphony and Gio Aquino Rossini writes his last opera, William Tell, based on the Shiller play about assassinating a tyrant. And now the Rossini play runs, the opera runs five hours, so pretty soon nobody's performing it, but of course the overture comes down to us as the theme for the lone ranger who's on the quest for liberty and justice. Verity, Giuseppe Verity, based five of his operas on Shiller plays. He was avid and he didn't write an opera on William Tell because Rossini had already did that, but he was enchanted by the play and he went to the Swiss sites where Geller was killed and these various sites that take place in the play. 1859 was the bicentennial, or it was the centennial, I should say, centennial of Shiller's birth, and it was the biggest event, certainly the biggest political event in the history of Germany up until that time. There were torch-lit parades and celebrations all over Germany. There was a collection of some 3,000 speeches that were given in Germany. There was a four-day celebration in New York. There were celebrations in San Francisco. There were celebrations in Sydney, Australia, all over the world, so it didn't just have to do with German unification. Keep in mind that when Napoleon was conquering Europe and Germany, Goethe, who was initially a more revered literary figure, he turned his back on it all. He said, well, there may be some good things we can learn from the French. You imagine the Germans weren't too crazy about that. Shiller, they loved Shiller. Now, Shiller was not a nationalist. He wrote a work right before he died called German Greatness, in which he was urging that the way to greatness is basically laissez-faire in peace. Just let people be with their families in peace. So Shiller was the great hero of Germany. That's where this comes in. So Mises writes about... The Germans turned to Shiller for their ideas. It was the ideas of Shiller that were being celebrated. And in 1909, I guess it was, 150 years after Shiller's birth, there was a performance of the maid of Orléans at Harvard Stadium. There were 15,000 people who showed up. In the 1920s, Bertolt Brecht and the socialists, they were dumping on Shiller for his idealism on liberty. But Thomas Mann wrote, you know, when he said, I saw a performance of Don Carlos, and it had this fire in the spirit that even unfashionable as it was, it just over-overcame the audience. During the 1930s, after Hitler came to power, the Nazis let some Shiller performances go on. There's a famous line in Don Carlos where Poza is advising the king of Spain. It's tiring the king of Spain. You should leave the Dutch alone. Poza says, give us freedom of thought. Well, the Nazis said you can perform, but just take out that line. And so when the action would go forward, the audience knew where that missing line was. They plotted the missing line. So the Nazis just said you can't play any more of the Shiller. After Hitler's downfall, there were 26 theatrical companies that toured Germany performing Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell and other of Shiller's works. It's only been since World War II that Goethe's reputation has come back. And Thomas Mann, I just can't recommend too highly an essay that he wrote on Shiller in his book called Last Essays. He's just overcome with this great champion of peace and toleration, who represents all that's decent in German culture. But all of this, you will not find in the biographies because it goes after his death. There were two books on Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. So in the case of Franklin, I traced the reputation and influence of the autobiography since his death, which is a whole other story there. The influence on Andrew Carnegie equating James Mellon to leave his farm and launch what became the Mellon family fortune and so on. So I could go on with many examples, but they're quite fascinating to trace the ups and downs of reputations and influence right down to the present. It makes for, I think, a far more dynamic and interesting story as well as adding value that you can't get from the conventional biographies. I think at least one more question there. More is the same question before, but in a different fashion. My question is dedicated to a thinker from Great Britain at one point. His name is Isaac Berlin. Isaiah Berlin? Yes. I asked this question in relation to the criteria that you pick about those thinkers. And the gentleman before me has raised a question about, let's say, Martin Luther King versus Jefferson, for example. What equality versus, let's say, the notion of liberty. Berlin has an interesting question to ask in his essay on the two concepts of liberty. Right, positive and negative. And there are two issues over here. One is that freedom from what and to what is quite commendable and noble for a person to free himself from something. But if the endpoint of that freedom is something else, which is questionable, it does not justify that very freedom from the endpoint. So for Berlin, for example, there's no ultimate principle in which you can pick from one to the other. There's no overall action framework. Any more than you can do the same thing in the relationship between liberty and equality, for example. There's a trade-off, a judgment call that you have to make, and there's a variety of judgments. My question to you is, based on the understanding of Berlin's insight, what then is the criteria that we have discovered if anything at all based on your research, which can overcome the very problem that Berlin has? If your answer is no, however, that you have not discovered any principle since his death, then my question to you is, how are you going to reconcile some of the impartiality which as a consequence of the problematic that Berlin has talked about for many years since then? Thank you very much. I'm not sure I follow all of that. Not everybody credits me with deep thinking. Let me mention another criteria in selecting people, namely that Free Press had correctly imposed a limit. I mean, I had long looked forward to writing a very long book, but people have told me that readers have limits. Free Press said, 900-page double-spaced manuscript is what you got. So if I had introduced any more people, I would have to cut from something else, either cut an entire story or cut the average length in order to have the total not exceed 900 pages. So if you keep adding stories, that means that all the rest that are there are increasingly going to move away from narrative, which is where the adventure is, I think, and to summary, which would be closer to an encyclopedia listing, which was the last thing I wanted. So certainly there are many wonderful people who could have been included, but at some point you have to make a judgment and that, of course, does not take away from the important insights that Isaiah Berlin contributed. Any other questions? Yes? It's confusing even further with the criteria that you use for choosing your heroes, but Karl Marx, for example, could be portrayed as a champion of the liberty of the labor masses, right?  Over my dead body. I know, over mine, too. I'm from Poland. None of that, but you see, I think it's kind of... I mean, I'm probably going to buy the book and read it to kind of discover my own what you had in your head, but, you know, the champions of labor, of, you know, establishing certain criteria is very important for what liberty constitutes. So the question is, why wouldn't you include Karl Marx? This was a book about champions of liberty. I know there's a more substantive answer than that, but you can read the book and see. Thank you very much, Jim, for being here, for launching your discussion of this book. Please go out in the hallway and buy a copy of the Triumph of Liberty. If you miss buying it here, it will be available in every bookstore on Amazon.com at LFB.org. And even at the Cato website, although I think we may be running out with tonight's event. Thank you very much for coming, and we look forward to seeing you at Cato again soon.


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Welcome to our latest Facebook Live chat in the hashtag Just Society Seals. I'm Simon Lee, Director of Citizenship and Governance Research here at the Open University. And I'm delighted to welcome a new colleague, Professor Eduardo Ongoro, who is Professor of Public Management, has just joined us as an expert in the European Union, amongst other things. And so the question I guess Eduardo to start with is if I'm a student doesn't matter which way I've voted, but I know Brexit's happening, what if I say, well, thank goodness, because I never understood the European Union anyway, why do I have to bother about it? Thank you, thank you. This is a very big and very important question actually. Just before, let me immediately make my thoughts to all those who were affected yesterday by the London Bridge attack. But here we are with this so important question. I think it is important because not just because we are going to have two years of very tough and crucial negotiations for Britain, but because we are going to redefine a relationship for the decades to come between Britain and the European Union. And with a partner you need to know the partner in order to make the most of any relationship. And this happens in interpersonal life, it happens also between political systems. So in Britain do we see the European Union in a different way to say people in Italy, France, Germany? Yes, I think we see it in a fundamentally different way. I think the EU in Britain is seen mostly as an economic affair and a set of trade arrangements. In Italy, in France, in Germany, it is really a political project, a peace project, and it has an ideational, even ideal dimension, which is probably not really a coat and grasp here in the British debate. Okay, so we're going to have to deal with our friends across Europe anyway over the coming decades and as you rightly said, in the wake of the terrorist attacks, we know those happen on the continent, we want to cooperate in security and so on. So how can we best understand the European Union at its noblest? I think we need to look at history and go back to a very fundamental fact that divided Europe at the end of World War II. Britain was the winner and they would say all the other countries on the continent, broadly speaking, were the losers. Of course, there are some qualifications here, the role of France and the goal, the role of Italy and the anti-fascist movement, but it's crucial to understand that the European Union was born as a project to overcome a major failure. And what was the key lesson that those countries learned just after the devastating failures of the World War II? They learned the lesson that borders may not be the solution to many problems, may not be a source of protection, of certainty, of identity, which is very much still a British perception, but rather they may be a source of conflict and drama. If I may on a more personal issue, I myself am the son of a refugee, my grandparents and my dad had to flee a part of Italy which then was annexed to Yugoslavia and so the problem is people who get on the wrong side of the border. That's terrible, that's a drama. And what's the best solution to overcome this drama? Make the border meaningless, free circulation of people. But that's very moving as well. However, couldn't a robust British response to that be to say, well, but we're different then, we've got different historical roots. You kindly said we were in some sense the winners. But if you go back over the centuries, we somehow see ourselves differently? This is true at the same time incomplete. It is true because it is so that in some key battles which marked landmarks, actually landmark key moments of European history, Britain was the winner and other countries on the continent were the losers. But let's take the very bold picture. The Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution of course, which came just before, and the modern age, it's all really the same civilization. I love painting, I often go to the National Gallery and what you see there is just painters English or Scottish or Welsh with French, Flemish, Italian, German painters, one next to the other. So what we have in common is really so much that any partnership must be based on mutual and reciprocal understanding. OK, so that's the history. Are there other ways in which it looks different to European Union depending on which side you are of the channel? I used to work in Northern Ireland and the issues there look different depending on which side of the RHD you are. First of all, I think in this schematic relationship we must not forget our Irish friends. Absolutely crucial. And again, there is a border issue here. Those Irish friends, I will not use the word trapped. But yes, somehow, on the one or the other side of a border that is going to be rebuilt. But beyond that, of course, there are other enduring and lingering differences. And one, I think, is the very conception of law. And I'm really grateful to have such a prominent scholar and colleague in the field of the philosophical foundations of law and legal studies here. Because really common law and continental law are different in some fundamental senses. And this shapes the way in which organisations work. Even public organisations deliver in public services. And this is probably also another reason why at times there is this sense of relative estrangement between people on the continent, filling out forms for complying with the legal system and requirements, and people having more straightforward relations with public organisations here in Britain. You touched on a very important point of difference, I think, speaking as a lawyer, that the British public have their reservations about European judges, Eurocrats. And anybody who's unelected and, therefore, they think out of their control. Although, actually, we seem to love the history of unelected judges making decisions for us here. Are we wrong? Oh, that's a fundamental question. Actually, I think this goes back again to this perception. If the EU were just a trade arrangement, you cannot have unelected people somehow to regulate in such a pervasive way your life. But if the EU is a peace project, you accept that you need non-elected institutions for securing and maintaining peace.  But let's hope to make the most of Brexit, at least in this sense, to really understand in depth each other. I think this will be in itself such a great achievement. Thank you for that, Edward. You certainly have a beautiful perspective over time. Is that part of your explanation of why there's a difference? Oh, absolutely. I do think so. I think it's not just history, so looking at the past. But it's also looking at the future. If we listen to the debate nowadays with the elections, and I'm sure also just in the aftermath of the election with the new government, whichever it will be, it's all about the short term here in Britain. It's about negotiating Brexit. It's about getting a deal, a good deal, the best deal, whatever kind of deal. If you just speak to normal German people, he or she will assume that not just himself or herself, but his or her children and grandchildren will be in the European Union, will vote for the European Parliament, will be regulated by the European Court of Justice. So the temporal perspective is completely different. You is something for the short term in Britain. It is something for the long term on the continent. Let me then conclude by asking you a short term and a long term question. In the short term, are we going to be able to see things that you've written that are coming out about the European Union? Yes. And then I'll come to my long term question. Oh, thank you. I think actually it's for the short term because in August it is for coming a major handbook with just 63 chapters going in depth into any aspect of European, of public management and public governance, across Europe, UK and continental Europe. And so I hope that the Open University is contributing also in this way to a sound and grounded debate about what Europe and public governance in Europe is. Okay, and my long term or principle question is, speaking as a Catholic, I've always been taught, I guess, that Catholic social teaching has its expression in the European Union in terms of subsidiarity, solidarity, the common good. Are those the kind of noble ideals that are there, whether people are Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish or other things? I think this is absolutely a crucial question because we have like two ways of seeing a political system. One way is that somehow this political system is able to produce good for its members in itself. And this is actually the vision of the EU in most continental, of continental Europe. And then we have a more contractual vision whereby a member joins a union or a political system if it considers it good, usually more in the short term, for its development. And this is probably more the British approach to this, at least it's been so far. Actually this is why I'm going to publish another book on the philosophical foundation of public administration which will delve exactly into these two conceptions and how they may appear so abstract but they are so concrete. They really give us some key coordinates, some key concepts and ideas for understanding our present. Eduardo, thank you very much. It's been really a great pleasure. Thank you very much.