Our next speaker is Dr. Peter Klein. Peter teaches economics at the University of Missouri, author of a number of books and important papers. But to me, the best news about him, at least recently, is the fact that he's the new executive director of the Institute and he's at Missouri for the rest of this year and then he'll be coming full-time to Auburn at the end of June and we're very glad to have him. I could tell a lot of stories about Peter but I'll just mention that in 1988, he was graduating from Chapel Hill and going to Berkeley to get his PhD in economics and he wanted some help and probably some comradeship too. He sent a letter and I called Murray Rothbard and I said, Murray, I've just gotten the most extraordinary letter I've ever seen from a student. I said, this kid is amazing. May I fax this to you and if you agree, would you talk to him? Because Murray began Peter's association with the Institute and he's been quite extraordinary. He worked closely with Murray, Bert Blumert and others and we're very proud of him. I sort of feel paternal towards him. I could tell a number of stories but I'll just add one more. Peter got his PhD. He was invited because of a member of the Berkeley faculty to spend a year of internship on Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors in Washington. So one day I got a visit from the FBI. The FBI from their Opelika office who knew the FBI had an Opelika Alabama office. So they said we're doing background check on Peter Klein security check and we'd like to talk to you about him concerning his internship and I said, but his internship ended about three months ago. And the guy said, you know the government. I said, well, okay. I do know the government. So expect more great things from Peter in terms of all the work he's going to do for the Institute and he's going to talk to us now about interstate highways, radar and Tang. Does war provide and promote technological innovation? Dr. Klein. It's been a privilege to be associated with the Mises Institute for 24 years now and I'm looking forward to many more years of successful collaboration. Many of you remember several weeks ago President Obama got himself in a little bit of trouble for uttering the now infamous remark. You didn't build that referring to entrepreneurs who create small businesses. Now the President's defenders immediately pointed out that in context the President was not meaning to denigrate small business owners or to indicate a lack of appreciation for entrepreneurship but rather the President was trying to highlight the critical role of government spending in creating the environment in which entrepreneurship and small business can thrive. The President's remarks were as follows. He said, somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive, small business people. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. In other words, according to the President, lots of people benefit from government spending including you tech entrepreneurs who use the Internet to innovate and to create value for consumers. Of course when the President says somebody built these roads and bridges somebody made these investments. Of course he means the state. The state is the somebody that according to the President is sort of making everything happen. In context, I think the President's remarks are even worse than they were made out to be by the Romney camp and the President's critics. What Obama is getting at is a very popular fallacy. That's this notion that government spending on scientific research and on technological development is critical to scientific progress, technological progress and to economic progress. This share is viewed by almost all mainstream social scientists and most politicians of course. Even scholars who are otherwise favorably disposed to the free market will argue that some goods and services such as basic scientific research and even a lot of applied research and development have certain characteristics. There are so-called public goods which the free market cannot provide and must be therefore provided by the state. Now a general critique of this public goods argument will have to wait for another day. A number of economists from the Austrian school and elsewhere have shown pretty convincingly that this is a very poor rationale for government spending. But today I want to focus specifically on this argument that government spending on science and on technology is vital for technological and economic progress. This argument, it's often been pointed out, is used as a rationale to justify not only war but the establishment of a sort of permanent military-industrial complex. One benefit of warfare and one benefit of vast government expenditures on warfare, according to some many scholars is that we get all these wonderful new technologies. We get spin-offs of government R&D that lead to valuable consumer products, government interstate highways being a great example, the interstate highway system was established by President Eisenhower to facilitate the movement of citizens throughout the United States or to facilitate commerce by allowing cargo to travel by truck rather than rail but was to facilitate the quick and easy mobilization of people and materials for war. Eisenhower as a general had seen Hitler's Autobahn system in Germany and marveled at the ability of the Germans to move armaments and soldiers quickly across the German state and he wanted the same kind of setup for America but people will argue, okay fine so the interstate highway system was designed to facilitate military transportation but so what, now we have it for civilian use and isn't that great. Radar, if you study this argument if you look at the history of technology and 20th century history more generally you often hear people argue that one of the great things to come out of World War II was the technology of radar. Now radar, of course the basic research on radar had been conducted long before in the late 19th century by a number of scientists including a doctor Hertz in Germany but it's true that during the late 1930s and early 1940s British and American scientists worked very hard to refine the technology to implement the technology and to make usable radar stations on the ground on airplanes, sonar technology sonar using the similar technology in boats and submarines and so it is argued we would not have the marvelous air transportation system that we have today if it hadn't been for the government developing radar to try to beat its enemies on the battlefield. I don't know what Mr. Hertz and these World War II scientists would have thought of TSA but that's a subject also for another day. And who can forget Tang? Tang, the instant breakfast drink. For years it was said that Tang was a product of the Apollo program. It turns out even NASA now admits that Tang had nothing to do with that Tang was created by a large food company and was used by astronauts but was not in any way created by NASA. So the argument in a nutshell that one hears from the defenders of war and the defenders of the military industrial complex is that war has some side benefits that are good for society. Not only does it help to mobilize all of society's resources in some important shared national purpose give a civic pride in the martial spirit of course through coercion and exploitation and abuse of course but it also gives us new technology and isn't that great. We can spend a lot of time going through examples further examples of technologies developed for military use. Some of them are obvious the atomic bomb which was research on which led to the development of nuclear energy for civilian use for generating electricity but also some sort of administrative improvements logistics, techniques for loading and unloading ships that were developed during World War II have now been adopted by commercial transportation companies. The whole discipline of operations research the systematic analysis of flows of materials through production stages and so forth was developed by economists and others during World War II and subsequently adopted by a number of large companies. A lot of these innovations come out of inventions come out of World War II. Computing, early digital computing devices were developed during World War II to help break the enigma code the Germans enigma code for example and then in the Cold War in the Cold War we got the first real computer the ENIAC world's first general purpose digital computer which was developed by military researchers not for any commercial application it was not designed to solve scientific problems or designed to help with commerce it was designed to improve the performance of battlefield artillery the reason those complex calculations were needed was to calculate the effectiveness of different kinds of artillery techniques but again moving to social science the whole discipline of game theory which is often used by business strategists today and a number of other social scientists for peaceful uses game theory has many weaknesses of course but these techniques were developed by researchers at the Rand Corporation and elsewhere during the Cold War operating on your taxpayer dollars so what can we say about this argument? I mean it is absolutely true that we do have a number of technologies that were enabled by public spending directed by the military establishment that's absolutely true is that an argument in favor of military spending or of a large military industrial complex I think the right, well of course the answer is no and there are a couple of different ways we can address this argument now one approach is to look at individual cases in a bit more detail and evaluate what kind of research was actually done what technologies were embraced by the government scientists what alternative technologies were available how efficient or effective was the work that was done relative to feasible alternatives and it turns out if one studies any of these cases in detail beyond the bumper sticker thanks to the government we have radar kind of approach the details are extremely messy and as we would expect from our general understanding of how efficient government is how well government functions we would find that one can easily articulate reasons why these programs did not work very well the technologies that were developed were highly inefficient relative to feasible alternatives the execution was not good there are a number of historical legacies of government investment in particular technologies that continue to haunt us today radar is an interesting example that commercial aviation after World War II was in many ways of course reliant on these advances in radar technology but there are a number of problems with the kind of radar implementations that were used problems that persist even until this day the U.S. I once did a study of the U.S. air traffic control system about 10 years ago and the U.S. air traffic control system is highly inefficient relies on very outdated antiquated technology that was essentially developed during World War II users of government developed radar have had a hard time adopting newer and improved technologies because they have huge investments in the government legacy version of radar there are a number of other cases like this that we can look at where we can poke holes in the particular arguments that are used to explain why these technologies are desirable but there's a much more basic theoretical problem with this kind of argument it is certainly true that in many cases the government spends money on building things and doing things that otherwise would not have been built or done is that an argument in favor of building or doing and of course just a few moments reflection will let you realize the answer is no think of the pyramids it's true that if there hadn't been a pharaoh with access to a huge supply of slave labor along with all sorts of other technological compliments architects and builders and stone masons and slave masters who could whip the slaves and so on a complex ecosystem of technological complementarities to use the modern jargon we wouldn't have the pyramids does that mean that the pyramids the creation of the pyramids was good for the people of Egypt of course it was a monument to the pharaoh and the pharaoh's own god-like position and so forth the government builds monuments to itself all over the place giant ugly statues and museums and so forth and you can say well gosh the private sector wouldn't have built the Lincoln Memorial well yes that's exactly right in other words the fact that something exists as the result of government expenditure is not an argument that it creates any sort of economic value moreover in a lot of these cases when the government spends money on X it may be creating something or building something that the private sector was already doing and the government sort of takes advantage of that and maybe steers it in a slightly different direction so at best government spending is harmless in this sense in the sense of determining what the output is because it's simply subsidizing the private money that would have been used to produce something with public money that produced the same thing or in most cases it makes us substantially worse off because it it leads to the creation of things that we otherwise wouldn't have and that we don't want that we don't want of course I'm not arguing that government spending is ever neutral but in terms of the specific technologies that we have government either co-opts existing technology or it changes the technology into something that the market would not have provided but which we would have preferred to have been provided by the market I mean you know President Obama used the internet and the internet is a great example there's a lot of literature on this I've written a little bit on this myself you know it's true that Al Gore notwithstanding right the government did play a substantial role in the design and infrastructure of the internet but that role was not all for the good there are a number of reasons why alternative private competing networks would have done a better job of creating a global information network than the government the one that the government created you know I need only call your attention to the famous fallacy of the broken window from given to us by Frederick Bastiat and popularized by Henry Haslett right you know the specific technologies that come out of wartime R&D bureaus are like the pain of glass in Bastiat's story right I mean we see them right and we say wow isn't it great that we have radar isn't it great that we have the internet isn't it great that we have the interstate highway system right but what we do not see what Bastiat called the unseen right is the technologies that we would have had if resources had not been taken from the public and used to favor government contractors and government connected scientists and so on we don't see the technologies we would have if the private sector had been allowed to produce them in the absence of a giant militaristic government now the history of government funded science is extremely interesting especially immediately after World War II. Key figure here is Vannevar Bush who was one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project later became director of the National Defense Research Committee during World War II and was director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development which later morphed into the National Science Foundation so Bush was a big advocate at the end of the war of creating a permanent peacetime government military research there's a lot of controversy among different government officials about what form this agency should take Bush wanted it to be organized through the universities where the government would simply fund research that professors would do at universities, others a major player was Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia wanted the government to actually do all the research itself in government funded labs. There's a very interesting discussion of all this in the book by the British scientist and historian Terrence Keely who some of you are familiar with who's one of the most important critics of government funded science as Keely described the origins of the National Science Foundation in his book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research for Kilgore this is Keely, he says for Kilgore Senator Kilgore the major purpose of the National Science Foundation was not the generation of new knowledge nice though that would doubtless be but the generation of trained scientists. Kilgore wanted to create a reserve of scientifically trained personnel who could be mobilized for strategic purposes. In other words ready for the government to call upon them to create technologies of war the National Science Foundation therefore was created in 1950 in the same year for the same reasons as the National Security Council so the NSF which funds a large amount of scientific research done at US universities was created not to advance knowledge per se but as part of the Cold War effort to beat the Soviets to dominate the globe and so on. So the National Science Foundation was part of the National Security apparatus in every important sense now there is some recognition of these problems in the literature very important historian named Paul Thorman has argued that government funding of science and especially in physics distorted scientific progress in physics and got scientists working on the wrong problems problems that the government wanted solved rather than problems that had the greatest potential for the creation of knowledge and benefits to society. Seymour Melman has argued that most of the military R&D spending during the Cold War simply crowded out private spending and that we have worse technologies and less technology today as a result of Cold War military spending on science and R&D and then we would have had as an alternative and let's think of it this way that most of the huge part of the scientific community during the 1950's and 1960's was essentially working for one client which had its own particular set of needs and this left these scientists and researchers ill prepared to deal with commercial clients who of course had a variety of different kinds of needs and wants making goods and services for consumers. So in short when we look at a company like Apple or Google or Facebook and we marvel at the innovation that these companies produce we recognize that these innovations are valuable and beneficial to society because they must pass a market test. No one can coerce you into buying Apple's products or some other company's products. These innovators must satisfy consumers and they must satisfy their suppliers of capital and so on. They have to produce goods and services that create value to consumers. The RAND Corporation and the Pentagon the National Science Foundation and so forth they do not face any kind of market test. The goods and services that they produce are valuable to the directors and valuable to certain congress people and they certainly do provide benefits to researchers in the form of higher pay access to bigger staffs lots of toys to play with and so forth but there's no market test that gives us any confidence that these innovations are creating anything of economic value. So remember to economists value is created by the introduction of goods and services that make consumers better off as demonstrated by consumers willingness to pay. The government can create lots of monuments whether they're Adam Bombs or statues in Washington DC but these do not create benefit to consumers they benefit the government they benefit certain scientists they certainly are not in the interest of society. Thank you very much.


Well, greetings. Thank you very much for tuning in. My name is Elliot West. I am professor emeritus at the University of Arkansas. And I'm here to give a presentation on the book that I recently published continental reckoning the American West in the age of expansion. I'm here at the invitation of the National Archives. I want to thank them certainly for that invitation for the opportunity to do this program. And I want to thank them also for the incomparable work they do in opening up the research of the American past to historians and to lay folks. It's something that historians rely on absolutely. Certainly it's an institution that I've used many, many times over the years. My dissertation was based in part from the National Archives and I used it certainly in the preparation of this book. Thank you. Thank you for the thank you to the National Archives. Thank you again, all of you for tuning in. The book, as I said, is continental reckoning. It is a, it seemed to get the slide to advance here. There we go. It was published in February by the University of Nebraska Press. It's a book I've worked on for well more than 20 years. Let me talk a little bit about what book is about and why I think it's worth people paying attention to the story is certainly critically important to understanding to understanding the course of certainly recent American history. Begin with a, I think an often overlooked or underappreciated fact, the age of expansion. Now that I mean a period that began in the 1840s in this country. In only three years, 1845 to 1848, the United States expanded by roughly 1.2 million acres. That's about three quarters of 1.2 million square miles. That's roughly three quarters of a billion acres. It began in 1845 with the annexation of Texas down there at the bottom of the map. Next year, 1846, the United States and a treaty with Great Britain require the Pacific Northwest. This will call Oregon country. At the same year 1846 we went to war with our neighbor to the south Mexico. The war lasted about two years, 1848 and ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which we gain what's called the Mexican session, basically the American Southwest California and the American Southwest.  To get an idea of how much land we're talking about, try to imagine the United States expanding over the next three years by that same amount of territory, expanding now to the south, up to the west, the south. What would the United States look like if we were to expand that much and that much territory to the nation during that period of time? Well, the United States would stretch southward, we would acquire all of Mexico, all of Central America, and about one half of the country of Columbia. Or if you want to think a little more globally here, try to imagine that between now today, May 9, 2023, and September the 24th, 2025, the United States would add to its territory, but land would roughly equal a little bit less than that of modern India. I think it's fair to say, we can all agree that things would happen following that. Try to begin to get your mind around the kind of implications of what it meant to add that much territory. There are challenges that that would present, the opportunities that that would present. It was a huge turning point, a huge pivot in the American story. And what was this country? It wasn't one thing. This country was that we would be acquired, it was divided among scores of different centers of power. It was the emergence of different cultures, mostly Native American cultures, many, many different peoples, an enormously diverse geography. And all of that somehow had to be brought under the control of the United States. Now, that's in 1848. Fast forward, about 30 years, let's say 18, around 1880. What did this country look like at that point? It looked like that. And roughly 30 years, that's well less than half of a normal lifetime. In 30 years, this country was organized politically. It was bound into the nation by technologies of transportation and communication. It was developed economically. It was virtually transformed environmentally, physically. 30 years happened so fast. By 1880, there is now what we can call what we now would call the American West. So that's one thing that I'm doing in this book. I'm trying to tell the story of this extraordinary episode of beginning with the expansion of the 1840s. Taking it up to this, taking the story up to about to about 1880. What we can really say is sort of the birth of this modern American region. Somewhere between one third, one half of the continuous contiguous of 48 states. An amazing, an amazing story really incredible be diverse story diverse. So many chapters to it. So that's one thing, but the book is really about two things as I as I began to develop and research and to write this story I became increasingly convinced. This was really, there were really two stories here. One was the birth of the West. The other was the absolutely critical role that this new part of America this is the American West playing. And one of the great transformations of American history. During these same years, roughly the second half of the 19th century. That the fundamental trajectory of the United States shifts on to a new course. It shifts towards narrative, the American narrative shifts on to a new course that carries us into what we would come to know in the 20th and the 21st centuries as modern America. What we see during these years is not just the emergence of the West, not just the birth of the West. We also see the emergence and the birth of modern America. And what I'm arguing in this book is that the two, these two developments are absolutely intertwined. They're like historical twins. And like human twins, in many ways, we can't understand one without the other. These two stories are bound up together. We don't appreciate that enough. We don't appreciate enough the way in which the American West played the birth, the emergence of the American West played in the creation of this nation that we know as modern, the modern American state. It's quite a transformation and it's critically, critically important to understanding who we are today. So what I'd like to do today is to concentrate on that second story, the relationship between the emergence of the West and the emergence of modern America. Concentrate on that second story and to illustrate that by three examples of these connections between these two developments sections between birth of the West and birth of modern America. One way to get at that is to think out of a mind game. Ask yourself, when you talk about modern America, what, what do you mean? What are we looking at? You might try to make a list of those traits, those things that, you know, that identify modern America has differed from the America that came before. Ask yourself, what is it about the United States in the 20th century, the 21st century that is fundamentally different from the United States in, let's say, 1850, 1840, 1830. What is it? What is it that makes modern America modern? What does it make a list? Now, ask yourself, looking at that list, looking at those traits, those distinctive traits of modern America. Are there any ways we can connect them to this emergence of the West, to the birth of the West? Are there any ways that we can, we can see, suggest how the emergence of the birth of the West then played roles in the transformation in these distinctive traits that came about by the turn of the century, by the opening of the 20th century? I think there were. I became convinced that there were many examples of this. What I'd like to do today is to look at three of them. Three cases in which we can look at these distinctive traits of modern America and relate them to the events of the consolidation of the West, its integration into the nation, its integration into this larger, into this larger world. Let's look at a few of those. What is it? What is the distinguishes modern America? Well, at one time, I think it's irrefutable. I think it's something we can certainly all agree upon, that modern America, the modern United States today is the great global economic superpower. We're all aware, of course, that in some ways we're being challenged by others, China in particular, but put this in perspective, put this in perspective. The gross domestic product of the United States today, about $20 trillion annually, is one and a half times greater than China. It is several times greater than those following China of the United Kingdom, Germany, of Japan. It's really an additional question. We are the 800 pound gorilla economically speaking of the global economy, not just of the world today. We are the greatest economic power in the history of humanity. And how might the American West have played a role in that after its acquisition in the 1840s and over the next 30, 40, 50 years? Let's begin by what I call in the book the great coincidence, the great coincidence. The last of those three steps of expansion. The Mexican War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended that war, that treaty was signed by this man on the left, Nicholas Trist. On February the 2nd, 1848, in this suburb of Mexico City, this February 2nd, January 24th, 1848, in Northern California along the American River. This other man on the left, James Marshall, looked down, he was helping, he was a New Jersey carpenter who had come out during the gold rush and came out of California to work on John Sutter's state. And he was helping to build a mill and he looked down into the American River and he saw this little flak, glittering flak he reached out and picked it up. It was gold. A little flak of gold was worth about half a dollar at that time. That set loose what was far and away up until that time, the greatest gold rush in human history. Difficult to overestimate the amount of gold, the impact of this gold rush on the American economy during the next, during the next several years. So, again, think of this now, January 24th, Marshall finds that first speck of gold. They were the second nine days later, that's about 200 hours. Within about 200 hours, the United States acquires California, and California begins to be revealed as arguably the richest place on planet Earth. Well, the great coincidence and its impact was, was enormous. As I said, this gold rush was, was, was by magnitude greater, anything that had happened, anything that had happened before. More gold was mined in the banner year of 1852 in California that had been mined across the world during the entire 18th century. More gold was mined in California, and in Australia, a rush that came soon after that, during the first seven or eight years after Marshall's discovery, that had been mined across the entire world from 1492 from the Colombian landfall until 1848. So much gold, so much gold was being produced in California. That in 18, when the San Francisco NET was founded, and then began to process this gold and the gold bricks. They discovered that so much gold was being processed that they couldn't handle it all. The furnaces couldn't handle all the gold dust was being blown out of the smoke stacks. So they had to go around, go around and do the neighborhood buildings and neighboring buildings and sort of sweep up the gold dust these gilded rooftops of these buildings. A lot of gold, a lot of gold. And this was followed over the next several years by other rushes gold and then silver rushes the first silver rush at the Comstock load in 1858. And then across these silver and silver strikes across across the American West. So, in other words, exactly coincident with the acquisition of the far west. The West begins to turn out the churn out enormous amounts of well, and this is precisely at the time when the United States was retooling into this modern economy. An economy that is industrial economy is much more urban. In other words, the West began to provide the raw wealth, the funds necessary for this great retooling of the American economy. So, in the American economy began to transform during these years into the one that we would know that we would know in the next century that we know today is this economics. And yes, it did. How is it financed. It was financed in part by this extraordinary outpouring of wealth that immediately began to be revealed and to be discovered in this, this new part of the nation. And that turned out to be just, just the start of it. The gold and silver, which are the certain most important what I call precious metals in the world. The most value at the time, the most valuable non precious metal was copper copper that was necessary for the wiring of this electrification. Copper is absolutely essential for the building of factories copper is essential for the creation of this new, this new communications network of the of the telegraph. Well, turns out the American West was also the time, the richest area on earth for the production of copper. This is like Montana, but Montana, like Arizona. Elsewhere this map shows you copper deposits today, but you can see these go back to what the far west there the southwest, the southwest and the northern United States was the leading producer by 1880. The United States was far and away the leading producer of producer of copper across the world at the very time that copper was actually essential for this economic industrial transformation of the economy. Now this transformation was one from the, the age of wood, the earlier, earlier economy to the age of iron and steel. But you got to remember that wood was still very, very important to this wood necessary, like in railroads would necessary for the construction of these, the most productive minds in the West. enormous amounts of wood were needed whole forest was stripped in the west to provide the wood necessary for these, for these changes. And as it turned out, the American West was, say the least, a place where you could find a lot of wood those rich forests of the northwest. A great redwood forest of the Northwest, huge old growth forest of the Pacific, of the Pacific West. We need wood, we got it. We got it from this new land that we had, we had applied. It's almost as if, as we began this great transformation would carry us into this, into this role of economic superpower. If we needed something, all we needed to sort of look around the West, there it was, the West, raw wealth, the raw, the raw wealth and gold and silver, the other kinds of subsidiary necessities for this copper wood. And it would go on and on, you know, take this into the future, think of the, think of what we would need in the 20th century petroleum economy based on based on the internal congestion, conduction in uranium or nuclear power. If we look around, we need something, we look to the West, and there it is. The West, it was this great storehouse, treasure, treasure house of resources necessary for this, for this critical transformation. And it shows up in places that you might not otherwise expect. Here with the appalling slaughter of the American bison in the 19th century, the near extinction of this one of those prolific life forms on the North American continent. Within 10 years, the surviving population of bison, which is probably around 15 million in 1870 was reduced to barely 1000. It's a famous story. It's a story that we shake our heads and pluck our tongues about. We need to ask ourselves, how did that happen? Why did that happen? Why over suddenly this was in the year 1872 as it turned out, why right at that moment suddenly there was this, there was this massive destruction of bison. Well, it's a story basically of supply and demand. There was suddenly around 1872, suddenly a voracious demand for bison hides. Why? Well, there was a global shortage of leather. Other than have been supplied them to that point. Probably by the United States, mostly by the nation of Argentina, but that, but that supply of cattle in Argentina, providing that leather was running dry. Why did they need so much? It wasn't normally think of belts and boots and so forth. It was rather for factories. The factories that were appearing in the United States, the factories during Western Europe needed enormous amounts of leather for belts like on this, this photograph of the gaskets in these things. This was part of the raw stuff that factories that patients needed for their industrialization. We don't normally think of that, but that was a huge demand. And it was discovered in 1871, 72. It was discovered that in fact, while they're running out of cattle, but bison hides could be processed into perfectly usable industrial leather. Suddenly, at that point, there was this almost this extraordinary demand for those animals that were grazing out there, out there on the great plains. Suddenly they began to be absolutely devastated slaughtered the bison had this. See in this slide kind of in itself a kind of industrial look. This was sort of industry on the great plains. Shipped up by these new systems of transportation, like the railroad. So, why did the bison almost disappeared over 10 years. Well, thank God they didn't really need to come back. But why did it. Well, what killed them. Well, the factories did. In a way, we can say that the factories ate the bison. Once again, the American West fighting this fundamental resource that was necessary for this transformation of the American economy. And you see this happening all over agriculture. Like in the California Central Valley is essentially an industrial enterprise. The American West is in many ways leading the way for this economic transformation. Its own efforts applying industrial technologies to agriculture, massive production of brain coming out of the Central Valley. It was sent, not just to the East United States, but sent over the Pacific Rim, China, that was sent more than 17,000 nautical miles to England. California Central Valley was the primary foreign source of wheat of grain in England. People in Liverpool sat down to dinner and had bread. Quite often the bread they hit we're reading came from a came from California being produced in California by these new industrial industrial techniques. This is Fred of the Great Plains and what are called bananas apart. This is the illustration of the cover of the cover of the book. This is the industrial techniques applied to the growing, growing crops. So, the West itself is in many ways leading the way in this industrialization is this transformation into a modern, a modern, a modern industrial power. So the first point I will make is we can agree that the United States is a is an economic superpower. We can then look to the West to help us understand how that came about. I think we can see some obvious and obvious connections here both of the sources necessary and examples of this of this economic transformation. Second, a second way in which we can see the West as a force in the modernization of America. Another thing I think we can agree on is that the United States today is I think again without question. The leading scientific force in the world. There are ways we can, we can measure this. I would back. For example, I would ask the question. Okay, over the past several years, last past 10 years. Looking at the Nobel prizes in the sciences. Nobel prizes in the sciences. How many have come have been given to how many Nobel laureates are there in the United States? And how does that compare with other nations? If you do that, what you will see is the number of Nobel laureates in the United States in these scientific areas is greater than the next six nations on that list. So we are, once again, you know, Caltech or Bell Labs or MIT or whatever we are the superpower in scientific research. How did that happen? It's not something we would normally associate with the American West and think of sort of lonesome cowboys and sourdows and, you know, minors, lump creeks in California. But one of the things that surprised me when I got into research is how the West during these years was arguably the most fertile and active scientific laboratory on Earth. The field of the field of the field of theology and archeology and anthropology and epidemiology and oceanography. So I think a thickenology and look to the West and you will see you're likely to see extraordinary work being done out in this research and thinking that it's contributing to this period, which was I think, again, without question, one of the most active and progressive periods in the advance of scientific thought in modern history. And again, we can use many examples to illustrate this, but let me focus on one. This was one of the organs might be called one of the Prince of Sciences during these years. And that is the field of paleontology. The investigation of ancient life through the search for fossils and the attempt to make some sense of that fossil records. The first one was without doubt, the most active laboratory in paleontology during these years and so I'll try to explain in a moment. There was a reason for this. My paleontology was such an active field why there was such attention given to this to this field. The first point to make is the extraordinary effort that was made out west and extraordinary contributions of the West in this in this in this area. Well, two men in particular are associated with this more than any others. For these two fellows. OC Marsh and Edward Coke. They are. They were both Easterners. Marsh was a professor of paleontology at Yale University. Every pope was a native Pennsylvanian, the son of a very wealthy Pennsylvania family. He was an independent independent researcher. The other marching pope were the key figures in this in this remarkable effort during this time. They were also bitter bitter rivals. I frankly loathe each other. And they were engaged. Some authors have called the bone wars bitter competition to come up with the most funds between them to make the greatest, make the greatest splash. And this was incidentally sort of front page news. This was a huge story at the time is a great popular interest in the in the competition and the rivalry between these between these two guys. Michael Crichton popular novelist has even written the novel based on based on this rather. What struck me which was interesting to me was that this work in the West and paleontology was conducted not just not just by these superstars. I'll talk more about them in just a moment. Also by ordinary West ordinary Western people on the ground itself. Here's one example. Bill Reed will you make bill read bill read you can see here from the slide. He was a hunter meat hunter for the Union Pacific Railroad. He was hard to provide me, you know, meals for the people building for the railroad and for those working the railroad. And by some hunting elk hunting deer. But he was also one of many examples out there who became sort of amateur boat hunters amateur paleontologists. Self talk read up on himself. He is able to identify the spots that he would make. And he, you know, another fellow another fellow meat hunter came across one in particular that caught his interest. He contacted OC Marsh told him about it has to be paid for it. And he was our stick him up on it. And Mars ended up powering him as his, as his primary sort of field man working out there. We was responsible for discovering one of the great fossil beds in the West, the Como fossil beds in Wyoming. And read was the man who discovered and help excavate and put together. Famous example, this is the triple docus Carnegie, which was in today in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, some of you might have seen it. So, they'll read the meat hunter. We went on to become a sheep rancher later was an example one one example of one of these sort of ordinary guys out there who was caught up in this fever, caught up in this passion. Searching through the chalk biz of the American Great Plains to unveil to unveil these these great mysteries of the past. Another Charles Sternberg, Sternberg was a teenager about East when he came out to Kansas to join his brother's brother was a surgeon with Dr. Fort Harker, Kansas. Brother also had a ranch outside of Fort Harker. Here's, here's Harker this is a desolate, desolate Western Coast. And he asked Charles to come out to help him help him with the ranch. And as Charles doing that he became fascinated by the discovery first of all of fossils of ancient plant life area what's called paleo botany. And, he eventually collected what became one of the great collection of the great gatherings of paleo botany. It's now today is today in the. He's in the natural history of that case. In Washington. And then he went on to Sturburne went on to a long career, and in paleontology in the search for the bones of ancient, ancient life. For the Sternberg, for example, and you can go to museums across, across the Western world and find the results of Sternberg's work. This is in the London Museum of Natural History. This is a triceratops discovered by us. So we see that out West is this remarkable series of discovery hundreds, hundreds of new species, including dozens and dozens of dinosaurs. We're discovered through the, through the work of people like Marsh and Coke, and people like Reid and Sternberg and others out there. It was a remarkable effort, remarkable effort. Why was there such attention to paleontology? Why was this really this passion on hunting during these years? Well, I think you can guess it was tied up directly with what was certainly the most volatile, hotly contested question of the day. And that revolved around, of course, the work of the God is in theories of Charles Darwin evolution through natural selection. Which had implications, not just for American science, science, but of course, for the very understanding of humans are of our deep, of our deep past, moral, theological meanings in addition to scientific meanings. Well, it was that they really drove, I think, more than anything else, the search for ancient life, and do its fossil remains. Geology entered upon the earth being incomparably older than what people had believed before. Certainly older than the standard sort of theological estimates of the age of the earth. The earth must have been. It had to have been millions and millions of years old, not thousands of years old for this evolution to provide the time for this evolution to take place. So the geologists were establishing the antiquity of the years. The geologists were showing in fact the earth was is as old enough to give room to give the time for Darwin's ideas to develop. It was a paleontologist who would get down to basics and to try to try to pursue the questions of just how, how this worked, how natural selection worked. Probably the most important work was done by Marsh himself of the of a great pair, Marsh and Coal, who was Marsh who came up with the finds, the discoveries that went the farthest for confirming Darwin's ideas. Here he is. Center top, of course. These are all Yale grad students, by the way. Mars should go out with these teams of graduate students out of the West every year, almost every year in search of the fossil remains, which are trying to piece this together. Working also with those locals out there like read, like read. Well, it was March you came up with what were I think the two most important confirmations discoveries that confirmed Darwin's ideas of evolution through natural through natural selection. The first one had to do with a sequencing of evolutionary change. Darwin argued that if you take any living species today, you would see that it was a product of step by step by step by step by step backward through gradual changes over time sort of links and evolutionary chain. That carried carried us into an animal, any kind of a species of the sea today, human beings included. Well, his critics said that that's interesting, but prove it. You have any fossil examples of that Darwin didn't. But Marsh came up with one. Mars provided this first evolutionary chain through the collection of bones of the American horse. Specifically, specifically also remains a horse pose and horse close feet of horses. But Mars did work many, many years and the collection of these bones was to put together. Absolutely clear sequencing of how one particular type of toe and foot. Let into change gradually over to gradually over long periods of time to the next one, which led to the next one next one which ended up with the modern horse modern equus. It was kind of a creation of this. Classic evolutionary Bush, the thing that way with different branches. Most of them dying out. Some of them persisting over time, which lead from over 50 million years in this case from our Ethereum and they're at the bottom. This is a sort of colleague sized. First horse, he'll hit us. It was first called dawn horse up until the necklace today, 50 million years. So, or his critics said, okay, give us an example. And Mars said, okay, here's one. And it was just simply unquestionable. In this case, it was impossible to refuse this. I will also argue that if you trace something like the evolution of equus back even farther, you will see that it branched off other earlier brand other earlier parts of that evolutionary shrub. And each of those branches branched off others, and each of those branched off still others. What I was saying is, if you trace it back far enough, you will find that every species is distantly related to just about every other to every other. We all have this common origin. And consequently, over time, you will see species that seem to be so very different. In fact, our cousins, distant cousins, cousins. For example, today whales. We know the whales are just related to bears. Well, Darwin suggested that one example of this was a distant relationship between birds, modern birds, and modern reptiles. He said they come from the same, some of the same branch. Again, critics said, well, prove it. Show us. And Mars did. He did in this publication. Put on porno thieves. What on porno thieves was a was a national magnificent public magnificent illustrated publication of birds, ancient birds. Quite clearly had other relation other characteristics that linked them to ancient reptiles are there are the dinosaurs to the ancient generators of modern of modern reptiles. So, it was a Dharma's arguing that, for example, Hawk is related to a rattlesnake. Well, you've got to find common ancestors for each of those two things. Mars did. He did his centerpiece of this argument was this a six foot long avian. This is a robotic avian that swam through, swam through ancient seas and on the Great Plains, called a hisperonus regalis. You show the certain bones leg bones of particular of hisperonus regalis were fairly related to the leg bones of other dinosaurs and other creatures of reptilian creatures of time that evolved into reptiles. But the real clencher was the head, the head of hisperonus regalis. Well, particularly the, the bill, the beak, which had teeth. So here was a toothed bird, a bird with teeth. And these teeth furthermore were related to the teeth that we would find in dinosaurs and teeth that would show that in turn evolved into the teeth of modern, the modern reptiles. So, again, this was a, this was a clencher. We can incidentally call this hisperonus regalis, which was of its translates as a royal bird the West. So in his research with the horse, which is arguing along with the bison and the most iconic Western animal there is, and the royal bird of the West and Mars would draw upon this Western work to make these two great strides toward the confirmation of Charles Darwin's ideas of natural natural selection. Also, Darwin was impressed by this. In fact, Darwin wrote when he received, quote, on Tornathese publication, the next day he wrote back to Mars and said, this is the, this is the greatest contribution to my ideas in the last 20 years. Going back to the last 20 years, he meant the publication of origin species. So Darwin was saying this, this discovery, this discovery was the most important confirmation since I published this very controversial theory. So, if we want to go back and ask the question, what makes modern America different? One way we can answer, I think it's by saying we are not just an economic but a scientific superpower, scientific superpower. And if we look for back to the West, or the beginnings of that, so I said we can see that in many, many different areas of society. But this is a good example, maybe the one of the most significant scientific areas of research of the day paleontology and geology. It was in the West, these great breakthroughs remain. So in the West, if you can see the beginnings of this trajectory of the United States toward this position today at the leading at the head of the head of the modern scientific world. The third way, modern America and the question of citizenship. Here, what I'm suggesting here is we think of what I like to call the American family, the American family or the American also. Now that I mean, what we need the populations of people who are what we believe will be accepted as members of the American of the American family whether we're talking politically, socially, culturally, who do we live in the house. Who do we live in the house. And I think it's also fair to say, what we see in modern America is the is the comes and go is sort of a pendulum movement, but certainly over time, a greater and greater and greater acceptance of groups different groups into the American family into into the house, not just in terms of numbers we expect that of course the population grows, but more importantly here more specifically here in terms of different cultural by varieties, increasing diversity of participation of inclusion in the American family. Certainly, in terms of race, ethnicity of cultures of language, you see then over time is this, this is gradual expansion or comprehensive embrace for different groups. That I think also characterizes modern American. Well, can we look back to the West and see beginnings of that as well. I think we can. Now, when I say that this goes back to the middle of the 19th century, the latter part of the 19th century. What was happening back in the middle of the 19th century that as an example of this, this expansion of the American family. I suspect that the first thing how you would think of quite rightfully, of course, is emancipation. And the end of African American slavery at the end of the Civil War. And the efforts after the Civil War to bring freed people were fully into the American family into American citizenship programs like those of the Freedmen's Bureau of Education. It's an economic place in American society, educated in various ways in which they are brought in, brought more fully into the American household. And of course is that absolutely true. We should keep that close to center stage. But you got to keep in mind that this didn't start the emancipation. And really with expansion began with expansion of the 1840s went after all as we push their boundaries to the Pacific coast. We were bringing within the United States boundaries. Towers of different native peoples, Indian peoples, extraordinary variety of people. Many, many different cultures and ways of life and languages and cosmologies and so forth, brought into the country and places like California. This was arguably the most culturally diverse place in the Western Hemisphere, California, each of these are different native peoples. And we also began a process of trying to integrate them were fully in into into the American line, promising them citizenship eventually. They finally got it 1924 along the way we would school them literally quite littering in the American way of life and the way to do this of course the laboratory in which this was to take place this was to happen was reservations. Back in reservations, we can check our heads, sort of cultural arrogance of us building people. This is who you ought to be. You've got to step forward on this ramp of progress and to improve your condition to become modern civilized people. And we should do that. Many reasons, many reasons to criticize and to condemn the reservation system certainly isn't effective it was corrupt. Inefficient. But it was after all, the official attempt to bring people to admit them into American citizenship. They were committed to that. Not to destroy them, but to eventually bring them into the American household. How are we to do this. One way to get at it is to look at what are called peace metals. These were metals given by the administration at any one time during the 19th century to leaders of American Indian tribes and groups express our kinship with them to express our support of them. One side of each of these piece of metals was the silhouette of the president of the time. On the other side was illustrations, which spoke to that administration's ideal policy toward Indian people. So if you go back to Jefferson, the first piece of metals under Thomas Jefferson, it was focused on trade, sort of clashed hands of trade with far Western people. Lincoln was on the verso of Lincoln's. Well, shows an American Indian with a classic planes headdress plowing a field. It shows a search in the background. It shows a schoolhouse on there to the left. If you look closely you can see any kids out front schoolhouse playing baseball. So this was, this was the vision of the Lincoln administration of what our policy should be toward Indian people's bring them into the American economy as farmers. We should Christianize them, make them part of the American mainstream by converting them to Christianity. We should educate their children in order to bring them into the mainstream of American life. The question about this I think should strike about this is the obvious parallel between this and the policy toward free people. Again underway just shortly after this, this metal was struck. We were to invite free people into the economy through 40 acres of the mule. We were to provide to the Freedman's Bureau and provide education for them. So this was all driven by sort of an evangelical Christianity. People like Oliver Howard, who was a head first head of the Breedman's Bureau and for him Howard University was named today. See here I think is almost precise parallel between our policies in the East with freed folks and in the West with American Indians. Part of the same part of the same process. Part of this process again of bringing more people into more different groups into into American society. But at the same time, can also say as a basic characteristic of modern America that every step of the way in opening up our embrace of new groups has been met with resistance, often violent resistance. No, no, we need to keep the American family tighter that it is certain groups out of that family. We need to keep doors to the American household shut and locked. And this was true in the West as well. Again, we think of this most often I think in terms of the East free people, the violent resistance of the Ku Klux Klan. The efforts especially after 1877 1880, you know, to clamp down to pose a racial white white supremacist order, racial order on the East. The same thing was happening out West. There were those who were attempting to do something basically the same. And California, we see a case of, I think, unquestioned efforts, genocide, attempted genocide, genocide is thrown around, I think, too easily today does not apply in many other places in the West toward Indians. California outright assaults on native peoples slaughter of the efforts by militias funded by the California government to send militias against against Native gatherings and to slaughter them to kill them. To to enforce to bring them into forcefully as his forced labor, including in the brain farms of central California to see here. One result of this was this catastrophic decline of California native population, roughly an estimated 150,000 and 1848 the time of discovery. That was something in the neighborhood of 90% over the next over the next 50 years. Well, any sort of the only ones. Hispanic peoples were brought into the American household with the treaty what would be a doggo which, which, which permitted which citizenship to all former Mexican citizens, if they chose to, they could choose to go back to Mexico or to keep their country as they wished they were granted citizenship for the stroke of the pen. But just as with Indian peoples, there was violent resistance against this, especially attempts to impose a white down racial order in California, and in the Southwest for the concentration of Hispanic peoples was once again we associate this kind of thing. With the southeast aftermath of emancipation resistance through emancipation. And we think of lynching, especially after around 1880 as obvious expression of this hostility. Well, recent research now recent research now suggests that not only was the same thing happening out West. But that thing on a scale that was at least as appalling is that among free people in the southeast way historians measure lynchings and group is to ask how many are there are 100,000 people of that particular group over a particular time. And we associate mostly with the southeast, particular in places like Mississippi, which are the highest rate of lynching, as far as we can tell. But wasn't after 1880. It was. We estimate about 53 or 100,000 persons. What we asked the same question about the lynchings of his fellows in Southern California in the Southwest, during the feeding period leading up to 1880 period immediately after expansion, 1848, around 1880. What was the rate there 473. And we're just starting to do this research. It's far better documented in places like Mississippi there is a place. But the initial indication is that this is that this is at least as awful, at least as appalling up West as it was in the East. An example would be Chinese in the West, who come in great numbers, especially after about 1852. And in this case, the effort was not to bring them into the American family but rather to exclude the opposition to the Chinese presence was so great in 1987. The United States passed Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which is the only time in American history, and a particular people have been denied access to this country, not just limited, but denied access to this country on the basis of their ethnicity. As you see here, the idea was to build our own Chinese wall, a great wall of China in this case to exclude them. So, if we again ask ourselves, what does modern America mean, I think part of the answer would be, well, it's a story of the 20th century and 21st century, a story of a gradually expanding inclusion of our groups. And the story at the same time of bitter resistance, often violent resistance. This sort of swing back and forth, swing back and forth during the 20th century up until today's. As you know, we are going through another period in which there seems to be a rise of efforts of white supremacy of violence against Asian people in this country. So we're sort of swinging the pendulum swimming back now to this other way. That's what makes America, one of the things makes America modern, in addition to our, in addition to our, in addition to our scientific supremacy and our economic economic supremacy. Well, I hope this has given you some sense of what I'm trying to do in this book. In this case are in this case the show. Tell the story, not just of the birth of the West, but also to also about the role of the West in this fundamental transformation of American life. This is the shift of the American net narrative to help us understand who we are today. So what I'm suggesting here I suppose is we cannot possibly understand who we are today as Americans, without looking back and bringing into this story, the role in the transformation of the nation through the transformation and the birth of the American. I hope that's giving you some understanding of what's what this is and hope that's giving you some incentive to explore this question my book or elsewhere, explore this question to bring the West more fully into the American story. Thank you so much for this. I enjoyed it greatly. Again, my thanks to the National Archives, not just for the invitation to be with you here today, but most of all, through their extraordinary work and helping people like me in my professional effort to try to understand the American past a bit more fully. Thank you very much.


Now, regardless of whether you are using a paid or free Instagram profile, you still need the following four components that we discussed. In this lesson, we're covering specifically the business operations, as you can see right here. Now, let's dive right in. Operating parameters. From the customer side, we're talking about the ordering window. What is that? That means that you are setting up clear hours and clear days of your operations to let your customers know when they can place an order with you and the delivery window. You're setting clear time of delivery as well for your customers of when they should be receiving their orders. And once again, don't worry, we're going to dive into a clear example for you later on in this lesson as well. So just understanding that there is a clear, precise ordering window and a clear, precise delivery window for your customers. Now, on the business owner side is important for us to dictate our preparation windows. When are the times that we're going to be preparing our items? When are we going to be going out to buy the items and ingredients? So why is it important? It is because you need to set yourself up for success. You need to set up your operations. So then that way you can actually have a work-life balance. So then that way you can manage your time accordingly, prepare for the week in advance and most importantly, happy customers. Then you set the right expectations for your customers as to when they should be receiving the orders and when we would be replying them. They are much more happy. It builds trust, reliability for your business. A lot of businesses that I see and a lot of accounts that I see, they don't have these clear expectations that they set out and thus when you're not managing expectations carefully then a lot of things can go wrong, miscommunication happens and poor customer experience. So three windows of sale that we previously talked about. First up, ordering window. Be super specific what the cutoff time is for ordering. So for example, or ready to grill as an example that I'd love to use. For them, the cutoff time for ordering is Saturday at 9pm for taking in orders for delivery the following week because they need to make sure that they have all the preparation and prepare the food for their customers. So be specific with your ordering window. Next up is the preparation window. Now that there is the cutoff time of Saturday at 9pm, it is the hours that you schedule yourself to buy the ingredients and to prepare the ingredients. So after all the orders are received, let's say if you receive 10 orders for that week, now you can schedule time to purchase enough ingredients to fulfill on that Sunday. So then that way you can do all your packaging on Monday and delivery on Wednesday. So now that those two windows are dictated and set for your customers and you have communicated that to them, then dictate the delivery window. It's either delivery or pick up to fulfill the orders. So for example, Wednesday, Thursday is pick up and delivery from 12pm to 7pm. So then that way you can coordinate with all the customers that have placed the order. As you can see here in the visual format, we talked about the ordering window. So people can order from Monday all the way up until Saturday at 9pm as a cutoff time. This is what it looks like as the first window of sale. Next up is your own preparation from purchasing ingredients to preparing the food, to packaging the food, this is your window for preparation. So then you know that this is your time, right? So for your specific time, you can actually set the preparation window that fits best for your schedule. This is just an example to showcase to you what it looks like and why we're doing this. Lastly, the third window of a sale is delivery and pick up. This is the time for delivery and pick up for all these orders. So as you can see, when you have this schedule all laid out, it becomes a lot easier for you to manage this operation. And this just goes on from week two, week three, week four, and it just keeps going on like that. But if you don't set this up properly and if you're not clear in your operations, then it becomes very, very difficult for you to manage orders, manage your lifestyle and manage this as a side gig. So in this lesson, you have already learned how to do that. Now go into the resource link below, print out the weekly schedule template and establish your own hours of operations for yourself and your customers.


I was mad at him, I was mad at her, and I was just handed a gift-trap means of complete and utter destructive revenge. If you like true revenge stories, you found the best place for your vengeful needs, where they are created with fleaky visuals and artificial love. For this episode, hold on to your butt cheeks and grab some refreshments, because it's a wild one.  Followed by a story, about a bully that receives a bully beatdown that's worthy of Spartan standards. Next story is about a bullied child, who had enough and took matters into her own hand, leaving the bully with a form of, crippling depression. If you're one of the extra spicy viewers, you want to stick for the last one, because the principle of proportionality, is rejected and thrown out of the window. So much so, that it has to be emphasized that the final act in this story, is not saluted by royal AI. Before we start, do the following to the like button, when it's storming outside, act chivalrous, by leaving with the promise that you'll enter the car first, so you can unlock the car for the like button from within the car. But when it actually reaches this point, pretend the door mechanism isn't working anymore, leaving the like button to face the rain in total despair, until it's soaking wet. Naturally, viewer discretion is advised. These revenge acts might be disturbing to snowflakes. The following story is told from a woman's perspective. File a false restraining order and threaten my life? Okay, let's dance partner. A few years ago, my now ex-wife filed a false restraining order against me. While we were getting a divorce, she was living with her boyfriend in another state. She had decided that a false restraining order was an excellent way to be awarded full possession of the vehicle I had purchased. We only had one key to the vehicle, and she was in possession of both the key and the vehicle. This is important later. I was exceedingly upset that she had knowingly filed a false restraining order, and upon being served, I immediately submitted my appeal and request for a hearing. I contacted my company, and had them print off all my Department of Transportation GPS logs, as well as company internal vehicle tracker data. I also printed out my personal GPS tracking data from the navigation system I was using. So not only did I have federally accredited logs showing exactly where I was. Or more importantly, was not. I also had two very detailed systems information showing my exact speed, cardinal direction, and other pertinent information. Recorded in two-minute and 30 seconds intervals. After I had compiled my entire body of evidence, I wrote a three-page testimony to read to the judge to assist in explaining the entirety of the data, as well as present my side of the appeal. Almost 30 days passes, and I realized that upon a German of the case, and subsequent exiting of the courthouse. There is a chance I will be able to reach my vehicle before my ex does. With this in mind, I decided to contact the dealership from which I had purchased the vehicle, and acquired a second key. As we had only received one key when we purchased the vehicle, I knew she would not expect me to even be capable of driving away in it. So, fast forward a few days to the court date. I had driven across two states to attend this court judgment appeal. With all my paperwork, written testimony, and key to the vehicle. I arrive approximately four hours prior to the hearing time, and patiently wait for the magic moment to come. Bad news. It was extremely anticlimactic. As she was a no-show. The judge summarily ruled in my favor, and the restraining order was dismissed. The judge then asked if I had anything further for the court, and if not, I was free to go.  The judge confirmed this, but when I asked if that meant I could also retrieve my vehicle, the judge said that they were unable to give legal advice. When I was in the middle of apologizing, the judge told me to find a seat in the back of the courtroom, so her secretary could provide me with a signed order of dismissal for the restraining order. In the case I were to be questioned by law enforcement for any reason regarding property or contact, it was best to have this documentation on me. As the cancellation of the order may not reach the police system until close of business that same day. The way in which the judge had worded her response was very clear in intent. She could not specifically tell me I was good to retrieve my vehicle, but she was taking the extra time to provide me with the paperwork that gave me a legal opportunity to retrieve my vehicle. So I sat down, and after nearly 10 minutes, the court official that was designated with the task of typing and printing the paperwork, got the judge's signature on it, and brought it to me. As I put it in my binder of other paperwork, and turned to leave the courtroom, the judge called out to me. Turning in mild surprise, I looked at her. Seeing her devious smile while saying, good luck. Now I had to formulate a plan. See, as the ex-wife had not been present for the court proceedings, neither was my vehicle. I had the address for her boyfriend's parents' house. As it was all over the initial restraining orders list of protected properties. I decided to utilize Uber to go to the address, and check if the vehicle was present at the address. Upon starting the Uber trip, I requested the Uber driver to wait for me at the address after dropping me off, giving her a quick summary of my circumstances and plan, to ensure that I had a witness present for the intended retrieval of my vehicle. Quite simply, to ensure that no false allegations of fictitious activities during the recovery of said vehicle would have a metaphorical leg to stand upon in court. The lady Uber driver was sympathetic to my cause. And agreed. Even going so far as to give me her personal contact information in the event I required her for a future court appearance. Upon arrival at the address I had available, the vehicle was, indeed, present. The Uber lady waited until I had acquired the vehicle, left the premises, and she followed me about two miles to witness I had left the property completely, and then she went on her way. Bless that lady, she was a saint. So, I make it about a half hour away, and my phone rings. I answered it, and it was my ex-wife's boyfriend, and as you can imagine. He was not happy. He rambled off several vulgarities, and other random insulting comments which I entirely brushed off. Then he made a very large, and unintelligent mistake. He said if I ever see you again, here, or anywhere, I will blow your head off. Now. I'm a veteran. I don't take very kindly on threats to my life. I was upset at him, I was upset at her, and I was just handed a gift-wrapped means of complete and utter destructive revenge. I immediately hung up, and dialed 911 to report a verbal threat on my life. I headed to the parking lot of a local big-box store to meet the responding officer, and ensured I didn't leave until I had a case number, attached written statement, and the reporting officer's identification information. I completed my trip to my home state, and the following Monday, this was all on a Friday, I went to my local courthouse and filed for an emergency restraining order. The judge that was available to hear my case for an emergency order was, interestingly enough, the same judge handling the divorce. She listened to the case I provided, reviewed the police report information I provided, and issued the requested emergency order. Doesn't sound like a good revenge, does it? Well, my ex-wife was living with the guy in his parents' basement. The restraining order issued by the judge protected myself, my property, and it seemed, it also protected my spouse. From him. See, we were still legally married, so I was legally able to list her as protected party. When the restraining order was served, he couldn't be within 600 feet of my, now, ex-wife. As she lived with him in his parents' basement, he wasn't the one that had to leave, she was. But, she no longer had my vehicle. She lost her brand new job. She wasn't able to get to school, so she failed her college course, but was stuck with the student loans for it anyway.  For those individuals concerned about the ex's pregnancy and child, I was not aware she was pregnant at the time. To my knowledge, she was able to make it back to her home state, and is living with her mother. Raising the child to the best of her abilities. I've heard she has a total of three kids now, by three men. Moral of the story?  I don't like to play games. I will go out of my way to avoid playing games. I will bend over backwards to make sure I don't have to play games. But if you force my hand into playing aforementioned games, I will not be the one that loses the game. Which is something I told her verbatim on our third or fourth date. Guess she forgot, lol. Hold on to your butt cheeks for this one and grab some refreshments, because my story sounds crazy, but is really my story. My story happened a good nine to 10 years ago, when I was about 11. I had this horrible bully that frequently made sure that I would come home depressed or crying. The bully was younger than me, but what was worse, was that he was way taller than me, in the range of 5 feet 7 inches, while I was like 4 feet 11 inches. I was quite small for my age due to my parents who were also quite short. He was so tall, because he had something that would make his bones grow faster, this will become very important later on in the story. The bully, who I will call spaghetti for bully spaghetti, had bullied me in a variety of ways. He would frequently say things about my height and call me a disabled no life that didn't matter. He would also say very anti-Semitic things to me, since I'm Jewish, to the point he even threw a brick through one of my windows with a letter on it, saying things I can't share here. He even drew certain symbols on there for good measure I guess. This bullying had continued through the rest of the four years I was in that school, which made me extremely depressed. So much so, that at some point, it lowered myself worth about my life drastically. Thinking back, I can only say I was very young and acting dumb. But one day around the final week of school, the bullying devolved into the worst event that happened to me. Spaghetti pushed me down a small fleet of stairs. When I fell down the stairs and reached the bottom, he ran down towards me and jumped on me. This hurt like hell and I started crying, he saw this as an opportunity to kick me while I was down. Luckily one of my friends found me on the ground. At the time it was so hard to breathe, that my friend picked me up and brought me to a teacher. The teacher, who I'll call meatball for the bad teacher she was, you'll see why later, was shocked and then told my friend to get another teacher, specifically the one who used to be a nurse. At the end of the day, I felt better and was told that I had to stay after school in order to talk about what happened. I finished the rest of the day and then came back to meatball. Spaghetti was also there. I thought I had finally the chance to expose him.  This broke me and I realized she wasn't there to help me at all, so I became silent. In the end, she told us that we were both equally responsible for what happened, and that we both had to stay extra long after school, to help clean the school. This infuriated me. As soon as we walked out of that class, spaghetti began making fun of me again. Saying things like, if you weren't so useless, this wouldn't have happened and people like you are cowards, so I knew you would tell the teacher. This was the final straw. Luckily for me, we were on the second floor of the building, which had two entry points, one with a collection of small stairs and one with one long stairway. Luckily for me, he decided to go to the long stairway. Revenge planned. When we eventually came to the stairway, I waited until he was already two steps down, this way I could easily Spartan nudge him. I stood ready and decided, that for this revenge, I had to do it like Leonidas, with a forceful Spartaboot. When I did, it felt incredible at first. But then I looked down all those stairs and saw that spaghetti boy looked like he was in extreme pain. I took it in, laughed and then decided to take the exit from the other stairway, so I would look less suspicious. Luckily for me, I saw the janitor on my way out, who later told Neatball that I couldn't have kicked spaghetti from the stairway, because he saw me leave from the other stairway. The day after, I heard that spaghetti was injured and I was questioned if I did it, but because the janitor was a witness and they eventually thought I had nothing to do with it. They just let me slip. Remember I told you he's so tall as a kid, because his bones grew faster? This condition he suffered from, made the bones grow in such a way that would make a fall potentially worse. Because of this and the Spartaboot, the aftermath was that his bones tiered through his muscles, skin and nervous system when he fell and broke his legs. I only learned about this later, because after a few years. I heard that spaghetti boy is in therapy and that he broke both his legs, and that his nervous system in his legs is permanently damaged in a mysterious way while he was at school. The cherry on top, Neatball was the last teacher in the proximity of him when the incident happened, they looked at her as the responsible one for what had happened. She actually lost her job and had her teaching license removed. Nowadays, spaghetti boy uses a wheelchair and quit his academic path. Apparently, he is still trying to recover by doing a lot of therapy, but I know his family well enough that they can't pay for that forever. Even though it was never my intention to ruin his life and it just packed out like that, I still do not regret a single thing. I'll jump straight into it.   After a couple weeks of enduring this, it became too much. I lost it. I was tired of him verbally and physically bullying me, then sucking up to the teachers for safety or his retaliation. It boiled up to the point that I knew, it was time for revenge. Above his locker was one of the huge old AC systems, and I knew just the thing to do with it. On the night of a school basketball game, I went in with some tools and wire. The way it was set up was so when he slammed open his locker, it would pull down hard on the AC unit, which just so happened to be barely being supported. The next day, I get there and when I was going to the bathroom, I hear him scream. Everything went just as planned. The aftermath was pretty rough. It broke his legs and they had to get firefighters to come in with some of their equipment to get him out. This was due to the positioning of the AC unit and the locker on his body. Even better, his dad sued the school. Searched them right for being blind to bullying. It really was the perfect crime, no cameras, proof, or fingerprints. He's still in a wheelchair today. Unlike most of the revenges in this place that are justified in some sense, I admit this one was very out of proportion. I am not proud of it, but I'm sharing this more as a way of venting than anything else. I am no writer, so this is long and maybe tedious to some. Before I go into it, I want to emphasize that you should never do what I did, never try this at home. This happened about six years ago when I was halfway through my medicine degree. In my country, it is not as difficult to enter med school like in the USA. So I was very young, barely 20 years old at the time. Also, I had just recently came out of the closet. This is essential to the story, because I came out after my first ever male love interest, we will call him Bert, rejected me and basically outed me to the entire faculty in the process. But that in itself, is another story for another time. So, I was in the middle of a rough heartbreak when I met the third protagonist of this tale, my rebound, who I will call Ernie. Well, I had met him before, around the time I was trying to win over Bert, because the two of them hated each other. The sworn enemies kind of thing. So, it seemed natural that he came to me after the rejection. Bert and I had been very good friends and Ernie befriended me to get intel or something he could us against him. I was not mad about it, all the other way around, I was totally on board with his plan. The next two or three months. We spent a lot of time together, partly because we like to gossip behind his back, and partly because we had hobbies in common. By the end of the semester, I came to realize I had fallen in love with Ernie. Sadly, this wasn't realistic. Ernie was technically straight, so I did not try anything romantic with him.  But things suddenly changed. He started acting coldly and treating me bad every time I tried to reach him, and at one point he confronted me about my crush. Not only did he reject me, but started calling me a clingy such and such among other insults. Needless to say, our friendship was completely destroyed. Much later I found out that during this time, Ernie had been experimenting with another hetero curious dude. When this guy decided he preferred his girlfriend over Ernie, he basically turned his anger against me. I admit, I can be quite irritating sometimes, so it seems this was what made me the perfect bullseye for his hate. So here I am, second heartbreak in least than six months, that is my luck. But still not mad enough to do something about it. Until I felt the backstabbing. I do not know how, when or why, but some weeks after our fallout, Ernie and Burt had become best friends forever, those you dream having when you are a kid. It was impossible seeing them apart while going around campus, at parties or even in class. Rumor has it, they were more than just friends, by this point Ernie was also out of the closet, as a bisexual man. And now I was the one being bullied. Soon enough, after they started hanging out, gossip about me became the norm. I became known as a crazy stalker and obsessed little man. Hey, even Gollum from Lord of the Rings seemed saner than I based on their stories. Additionally, any contact I had with Ernie or Burt ended in confrontation, to the point I had to actively obeyed them. That is when I decided to act, and what started only as a little prank, ended being something deadly. Time came for the birthday party of a friend we all three had in common and in which all our social groups will be reunited under one roof, she was a very popular girl.  It was very simple, we bought some love seeds which name starts with V, smash them, and the plan was to mix some of it in their drinks to make them have the effects for the whole party to witness. Both loved using skinny pads, so we knew it would not only be uncomfortable, but very visible too. Clarification, as med students, we knew mixing alcohol with that stuff could have side effects, so we calculated a low dosage for our prank. This will be important later. Flash forward, we are all in the party and everything is going great. Too great I will say. I was very happy, and very drunk.  But in the end, my bad judgment won. With Clara's help, is was not hard to slip it in my target strings while everyone was distracted. They sipped it whole. Minutes later, I could see the effects work on Burt as he was trying to get away from everybody on the dance floor while covering his privates. Fun fact. In Latin America we tend to dance very close to each other, so it was actually very funny seeing him trying to explain to every dance partner that he wasn't trying anything with them on the dance floor. You may be thinking.  But this is not the end. While Burt was suffering the funny side effects, Ernie was not that lucky. His friends were asking if anyone had some medicine for pain control, as he was having a moderate migraine. Remember the doses thing? Fearing I had screwed up and gave him more than what I wanted, I came to check on him, to see if he was all right. What happened next, was what led to the unfortunate events of the rest of the night. When I came close, he pushed me away very hard and threw me to the floor. He was drunk, or roused and had a headache, all things making him more aggressive than usual.  If not for some of the people around us that stopped him on time, he would have hit me in the face. In that moment I snapped.  I hated him so much, I decided something evil. Remember dear reader, I was drunk, under normal circumstances I would have not been able to pull this through. But the alcohol had weakened my moral compass and the anger had ended the job. I stood up, did not say a thing against him, and went looking for the first 8 kit. I had been to my friend's house before, so I knew where it was, unlike Ernie's group. I took a pill and handed it to the first one of them I found, telling her it was medicine for the headache. She bought it, and I just waited. In fact, what I had given the girl was a tablet of nitroglycerin I took from the kit. Which wouldn't help Ernie. In my country both look very similar so is hard to tell them apart. Under normal circumstances, nitroglycerin is used for chest pain, but one of its main contraindications is its use with those love seeds, due to their potent combined effect. It can be lethal. I knew it, but at that moment I did not care. Soon enough, I heard the screams. Ernie had fallen to the floor due to a drastic blood pressure drop, and everyone was already calling rescue services. I will skip what happened in the next few hours. The party obviously ended, and Clara took me to her house. She was panicking, believing our prank had killed him and that we would go to jail for the rest of our lives. I was in my drunk super villain stupor and told her to calm down, assuring her we would be fine. I cannot stress enough how drunk I was, and the egotistical douchebag I can become when that happens. Meanwhile, Ernie was taken to the ER where they rehydrated him and were able to stabilize him. So no, no murder happened that night, although it was close. The next day, I finally recovered my senses while being hangover. Now afraid of my stupidity, I used every means I had to find out what happened to Ernie and, more importantly, if someone knew I was involved. Something essential here is that Ernie was taken to our college hospital due to our friend living close to the campus. As I was doing my practices there, it was easy seeing his medical record, so this is the reason I know what is coming next. In brief, Ernie had entered a state known as Distributive Shock due to the hypotension he suffered from the mix of the pills and alcohol. Luckily for everyone involved, he had arrived to the hospital just in time and nor his brain nor his heart suffered permanent damage. His kidney kind of had some acute problems but nothing serious. On the other hand, no one suspected a thing about me. The doctors assumed it had been a bad reaction to the excess of alcohol and maybe a recreational narcotic at the party, as this was not uncommon to happen. Some tests were done, but nothing came out and after he completely recovered, they just decided to let it be. The police were not involved. The aftermath of all this is very curious. I assume that due to his near-death experience. Ernie became more, let's say, docile. The rumors about me stopped in, with time, our animosity towards each other faded. Same with Bert. Later that year I found a boyfriend and my heart slowly recovered from what happened with the duo. This experience altogether, helped me realize I had some anger issues among other things, so I started going to psychological therapy to work on them and to prevent something similar ever happening again. Till this day no one knows what really happened that night and even my best friend just believes our prank backfired. Not that I actually intended to do this evil thing. And that is the end. Yeah, kind of heavy. If someone is wondering, I know how messed up all this was, and as I said before, I am not proud of it. I was very, very lucky nothing serious happened. On a side note, therapy helped me, so that's a plus. Thank you for enjoying this episode, which was made with artificial love. Subscribe to receive future episodes, and tickle the like button for Good Karma. Do you have any experiences surrounding this topic? Share yours below, I'll join the conversation. And I'll be seeing you. In the next one.


Supercritical water gasification is a promising technology for converting wet biomass into a product gas that can be used as substitute natural gas, SNG. It uses water in its supercritical state, which has drastically different physical properties than when it is in its liquid form. The process is also faster than traditional gasification processes, requiring only a few minutes of residence time. Research on this technology dates back to the 1970s, with many studies conducted since then. This article was authored by owner Sol Yacoboyla, John Herringk, K. G. Smit and others.