Gun control means hitting your target…

Okay, ok, so that’s over the top NRA type slogan, but after the differing results of two murderous rampages this week, you have to admit that it’s at least a valid point of view. Today the latest whack job crazy went on a shooting spree in Colorado Springs, killing at least four people. Thankfully, there was a security guard there…with a gun!

Jeanne Assam, a security guard employed by the church under attack, shot the attacker dead:

"I saw him coming through the doors," she told reporters on Monday. "I took cover, and I waited for him to get closer, and I came out of cover and identified myself, and engaged him, and took him down. And that's pretty much it."

Amen!

I’m sure I’m not the only person that is completely sick of these absolute crazy people who need to take out their frustrations on the innocent.

I do not own a gun, but I’m perfectly comfortable around them. My father taught me how to shoot at a young age, and that included absolute respect for the weapon and what it can do. Even still, I’ve often revisited my feelings on gun control and wondered if maybe America would be better off without all the guns. I think perhaps the answer was once “yes,” but that now it is too late. We’d be better off without all these guns, but it is impossible to get this genie back in the bottle. There are just too many out there.

Certainly tragedies like Virginia Tech and last week’s Mall shooting would have been averted if the United States citizens had never had guns so readily available, but they did, and they do. If that’s the case, how much better (or rather, less worse) would Virginia Tech and the numerous mass shootings have been if someone with a good heart had protected the defenseless. Good for Jeanne Assam. Thank God that she was there, that she had a piston, and that this creep didn’t get away with killing more than the four people that he did.

hey this thing works!

Hello World???

This thing hasn't let me log in for months. So much to rant about! Will be sure to get back to it asap.

So funny watching Hardball tonight. I saw Pat B. arguing with Robert Reicsh (am I spelling that right? No time to lookup tonight). Surreal to see Pat be SO wrong on free trade (knew he was a protectionist) and RR be so hard core free market. In my mind RR totally destroyed him. Even weirder to see Chris Matthews announce Pat as the"winner!" The more i watch him the more I'm convinced that Matthews is a complete idiot!

The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib

I spent the weekend watching all sort of documentaries, starting with a Saturday morning running of HBO’s “The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.” When pictures of the events at Abu Ghraib first surfaced a few years ago, I had the reaction that most all Americans had, horror. This was not our America, this was not representative of the ideals we hold dear.

Unfortunately, given the climate at the time (and still pervades today), the dialog about these completely unacceptable events quickly devolved into a blame game. Instead of rooting out causes, punishing wrong doers, and putting measures in place to prevent this in the future, the discussion immediately went to cries of “Bush lied!” or “America, love it or leave it.” In retrospect, I think responsibility for the poor handling after the fact lies with the Bush administration, and more specifically Donald Rumsfeld.

More on that in a second, but first a few words on torture. If any good has come from the whole ordeal it is that the events have forced the discussion of torture into the national debate. As a civilized society, we pride ourselves on being “above” the coarser elements of humanity. For example, rather than follow a path of vengeance toward serial killers and mass murderers, we dole out life imprisonment or even quiet euthanasia by lethal injection to people who clearly earned far worse. We like to think that we have taken the high road versus evil.

Torture, in the context it’s entered into our national discussion on the other hand is a different animal all together. Torture as we are discussion it has a goal or end of its own, to extract information. In traditional confrontations where one nation is heads up fighting another, it is easy for both sides to agree not to torture captured combatants under the Geneva Conventions. However, the world is different now. We, that is, “civilized” people, are scared. Faced with faceless, unknown enemies that don’t “fight fair,” we’re as a society thrashing on what is a “right” or “moral” path. How do we fight evil without it pulling us down with it?

Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz has written extensively about torture and posed difficult questions that we need to confront as a nation. The American people are somewhat bi-polar on the issue of torture. On the one hand, we despise torture and anything remotely resembling it. As practiced by unlawful tyrants, say Saddam Hussein, we’re outraged and disgusted. On the other hand, we cheer many of our idyllic heroes, the “Dirty Harry’s,” and the “Jack Bauer’s,” when they take the pragmatic-but-brute-force measures necessary against evil doers to save the innocent.

Dershowitz cuts to the quick of the matter with his hypothetical scenario –(paraphrasing) Imagine a known killer has been captured. Prior to capture he has kidnapped your child (not “a” child, your child). The child is in a box, buried in the ground with only an hour of oxygen left. The killer isn’t saying where to find the box. In this instance, Mr. Civilized, would torture be an acceptable tool to save the life of your child? Is there a parent out there, confronted with this reality that would say “no?”

Intellectual discussions and new world reality aside, what happened at Abu Ghraib was nothing remotely like the seemingly black and white scenario above. It’s clear, from the documentary’s point of view at least, that what happened at Abu Ghraib was grossly out of line with anything Americans would ever accept as their standards. What happened at Abu Grahib appears to be a case of the lack of enough resources (or the right resources), lack of proper communication, and lack of leadership around what is acceptable. Military Police, who were trained for battle operations around collecting POWs, not being prison guards, were in effect co-opted by Military Intelligence. The practice of “softening up” prisoners prior to interrogations was left in the hands of non-trained, non-accountable, non-lead individuals. The best description was one witnesses mention in the movie of how it reminded him of the behavior of the school boys in the Lord of the Files.

The real loss here is America’s claim to the high ground. It is a basic American value that when they can the strong should protect the weak. The individual gets the benefit of the doubt (which does not mean that enemy combatants get the rights that an citizen accused of a crime does). This is not what happened here. The images at Abu Ghraib have fanned the flames of anti-American sentiment. This was a big loss that unfortunately, no one really paid for. Several soldiers were convicted of various infractions, and one Brigadier General was dropped in rank. I really like Donald Rumsfeld. I think he’s smart, and tells it like it is, and was honestly working to protect the United States. The documentary showed proof that Rumsfeld approved some techniques for extracting information from enemy combatants. I’m not sure you can place actual blame for Abu Ghraib on the approvals Rumsfeld made, but it’s clear to me now that we should have placed responsibility. Unfortunately, it’s lonely at the top. If someone working for you steps out of line that bad on your watch, you have to go. Rumsfeld probably should have been taken out of office, if only to send a high-level message to the world that Abu Ghraib is not what we stand for. (To his credit, Rumsfeld offered to resign three times while in office)

On America’s positive side, we really wash our dirty laundry in public. Few countries around the world practice the self-flagellation that we do. We’re big, and we’re powerful, and we mean well, but sometimes we screw up (big). When we do, we beat it to death, and we do so in public. I found the participants and witnesses in the movie to be quite credible and forthcoming about the situation and the things they did wrong. Unfortunately, the self-examination will be lost on America’s enemies. Our best hope is that we learn from our mistakes going forward.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Just finished James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds.” This is a great book about the “behavioral economics” involved in groups. The basic premise of the book is that with certain conditions met, the decisions and actions taken by a group of people produces consistently better results than those that would have been taken by any single person in the group, including the smartest and or best informed individuals.

Surowiecki explores numerous examples that encompass problems of cognition, cooperation and coordination. Through these examples, he shows how very often performance of these groups is strikingly better than the performance of any single person. A group of people with a diverse set of information and opinions on a topic, can better predict the right answer if they have a way of systematically aggregating all of their input. Each person has a different set of incomplete information for a particular problem, some of it correct, some of it incorrect, but all of it incomplete. The aggregated results of these different proposed answers cancel out the incorrect information, and produce a better (not necessarily “best”) result.

One of the things I found most interesting in the book was the discussion of predictive markets. A predictive decision market is a form of game theory whereby different actors are allowed to trade on the given likelihood of possible events. The idea is that a group of people betting on potential outcomes can predict certain events as more likely than others, giving government or private enterprise more actionable information.

You might remember a few years back a DARPA project called the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) (which was lumped under a program called Total Information Awareness) that set up a market that predicted the possibility of world events including terrorist attacks, assassinations, and other world events. Some eager beaver congressional-types leapt on the program as morbid and “crazy.” It’s unfortunate, as it could be one way to better aggregate and surface the U.S.’s maze of intelligence agencies. Today the United States’ intelligence information is spread out across myriad agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, ATF, etc.) that don’t have incentive to always work together. PAM would have had actors across these organizations make “bets” on potential world events. No, not with real money – though predictive decision markets get better when the actors have real skin in the game of one sort or another. The U.S.’s solution to the cross agency information problem? Make them all report to a single person, the National Intelligence Director. If Surowiecki’s theory is to be believed (and it’s a convincing argument) this is the exact wrong action – in effect, placing all of the responsibility on a single person (see the CEO-worship section near the end of the book). We can only hope that the predictive decision market has been setup anyway, but that it’s actually classified.

A real predictive decision market that you can go to and play with (and bet real money) is called Intrade Prediction markets. Intrade allows you to bet on real events, including current events, financial index milestones, entertainment, and even the weather. For example, you can bet that on both the Republican and Democratic nominations for the 2008 election, as well as the eventual winner. For example as of today the market predicts a 51% likelihood that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic ticket (Obama is tracking next at 23.4, and Edwards at around 11, plus other candidates which are more noise.) Just to mark it down, if you were to take the leaders in both Presidential and VP nominations, the Democratic ticket will be Clinton/Obama. Republican ticket will be either Giuliani or Mccain (they’re tracking 31 and 30), with Mitt Romney as V.P. We’ll see. The idea of the market is that as we get closer and closer to an event the market reads information better or sees a given outcome as more likely. Actors in the market can buy and sell contracts at any time.

Predictive decision markets are a really interesting area. Definitely not the last you’ve heard of this topic.

The end of the book describes an instance of crowds not acting in concert for a better benefit, stock bubbles. Surowiecki details multiple examples of stock bubbles, and potential explanations of how and why they are caused (no one knows exactly). One reason (or at least sign that one is happening) is that people are basing their actions on other’s actions, rather than their own information. That is, when people are buying an asset because prices have gone up (opposite usual trend when a price goes up) and they think prices are going to continue to go up – sign of a bubble.

This is a really interesting book – great companion to Freakanomics, The Tipping Point, and The Undercover Economist. Highly recommend it.

Everyone has an angle....

I really enjoy documentaries, but sometimes a documentary is so obviously a piece of propaganda that you cannot let it pass. I recently watched “Wal-Mart, the High Cost of Low Price,” and found it to be outrageously one sided.

Okay, so I admit it. I am a “free-market” conservative with a MBA who is ardently pro-business. However, I really do try to be honest with my opinions. Abuses happen all the time in a free market system, and since I also fancy myself a “law and order” type, I fully support ironing out misdeeds whenever they happen. So it was with my best go at neutrality that I popped in this DVD. Unfortunately, this piece of work is so blatantly anti-Wal-Mart that any criticisms of the company’s business practice that are honestly worthy of being questioned are drowned out by total anti-consumer, anti-business, anti-choice rhetoric.

The film starts out okay. It confronts the very real question of – Do we want to allow large competitors to drive mom & pop businesses in small towns out of business with their superior pricing power. This is a sensitive topic and actually a very fair question. The film uses the example of H&H Hardware, a small hardware store in business for forty-three years that is being forced to close its doors because of the competition represented from Wal-mart. It is heart-wrenching to see this family owned business being destroyed because it is unable to compete with a behemoth. Real issues are surfaced including the fact that the presence of Wal-Mart in the town instantly discounts the value of the retail space that H&H hardware owns. Resale or lease to other retail vendors is immediately devalued because Wal-Mart would likely compete against any new tenant.

It’s sad, and it’s horrible, and sorry (this is where “mean” market guy comes in), completely irrelevant! What is left out of the argument in the documentary is the value that Wal-Mart brings as a superior competitor. The fact of the matter is that Wal-Mart wins versus these smaller competitors not because of an “unfair advantage,” but because it delivers better value to the market. Potential customers of H&H software (and any other small business) are free to spend their dollars wherever they want. Given Wal-Mart’s lower prices or convenience provided by wider product selection, Wal-Mart is winning customers based on delivering value to the customer. Customers vote with their dollars, and Wal-Mart is winning.

The film passes on the sentiments of the small town businesses, but their own words give them away:
“ I’m all for free enterprise, but…it’s [Wal-Mart] owned by the richest people in the world….”

“I think government should have more control, if Wal-Mart isn’t’ a monopoly, what is?”

“I’m a staunch American, there are things that are not good for the people…”

“I don’t think Sam Walton would be happy with this. He didn’t start the store to crush competition.”

What all these statements have in common is that the speakers feel that they are “owed” a job. Consumers should “have to” shop from them because they have been there for years and put their time in. The egalitarian side of anyone would say “yes,” certainly these people are owed something. However, reality dictates that consumers want, and will migrate to the best value. What the statements above really say is “you owe me a job. Because I’ve been working hard all these years, you should be forced to shop at my store, even if a cheaper solution exists.” I’m certain none of these well-meaning people would actually say this, but their sentiments say as much.

Incidentally, Sam Walton (IMHO) would think no such thing. This is a man who was OBSESSESED with cutting costs inside his operation, and was EQUALLY OBSESSED with passing that value on to his customers. It’s documented over and over how Walton would traipse the isles of competitors constantly recording prices for goods, as well as new merchandising ideas. The precise reason Wal-Mart is the “monster” it is today is the culture of cost-cutting and passing value on to the customer that Sam Walton championed. It is not hyperbole to say that millions, perhaps billions of people have benefited from lower prices for goods and services offered by the cost cutting Sam Walton and his company.

What follows in the movie is one reason after another why Wal-Mart is ruining the country. “They’re a billion dollar company – why can’t they afford a better health care program.” The simple answer is – they don’t have to. Most workers at Wal-Mart are low-skilled workers. Translation- easily replaceable. That sounds harsh (and to some extent it is), but it is reality. Undoubtedly one of the highest components of cost built into prices at Wal-Mart stores is the cost of employing people at the company. If getting workers at the lowest cost produces lower costs for consumers, is that really bad? No one who works at Wal-Mart is forced to work there. You might say, “but Wal-Mart is the only large employer in town.” Yes, that may be true. History is littered with examples of people who moved out of town to seek employment where it was more plentiful. It DOES create hardship for individuals, but what is the alternative? Should we only allow Wal-Mart’s in towns that also have a Target? Maybe. Certainly many many communities have voted to pass up on allowing Wal-Mart zoning rights to build in their town. That is completely within their prerogative in our society.

The fact is that retail workers are low skilled and reasonably easy to replace – that is why they are low paid. If there was a dearth of available talent to fill these positions, basic supply and demand would raise those wages (including the “good” health care benefits offered to those employees). One man in the movie quips, “I’ve worked there three years and only got $1.07 raise.” That sounds horrible, but if someone can be hired to fill that position for the same cost (maybe even minus the $1.07 raise) why should they give him more? If he’s not contributing more value to the company, should he be entitled to more automatically? In a free society, if he can contribute more and is not getting it, can’t he take another job where he is fully valued? (um..yes!)

A good portion of the middle part of the movie is devoted to how Wal-Mart actively fights to bust any type of union organization at the company. My first reaction to this was, “ummm…duh!” Unions serve different purposes (in some eyes), but mainly they add to the cost of labor. If Wal-Mart’s mission is “always the low price,” (in other words- give the best value to consumers), how could it possibly stand by and allow such an enormous cost to be added to the delivery of it’s products and services? What’s more, if (in the United States at least) no on is being forced to work at Wal-Mart, what value does unionization bring to the employees.

Many things are brought up in the movie that strike me as innocuous. “Wal-Mart does illegal surveillance of employees in the break room!” Well, um, don’t they own the break room? Why is it illegal? “Wal-Mart managers are told to do more with less- discourage any overtime.” Well, um, isn’t that their prerogative – if they want to hire more people to cover the time they need and decide that costs less than paying some people overtime, um, isn’t that their right?

Of course, there is completely potential for abuse in a hard nose system like this. There are reports in the movie of intimidation of employees. Something along the lines of “you have to do this work off the clock so as to avoid overtime, or you’ll lose your job.” Or, “this is how you cheat workers by moving their overtime work to their next pay check/pay period.” If that’s true, that’s wrong and immoral and a perfect place for a hotshot government prosecutor to do the right thing and take Wal-Mart to task. Certainly abuse like this would be hard for your average hourly unskilled worker to combat. The same holds true for reported bias against women and blacks. However, absent proof, it’s just hearsay. Certainly this particular “documentary” has not established it’s bonifides as an impartial source. OF COURSE a company with 1.2 MILLION employees is going to experience racial and gender bias – that does not in of itself prove that it is systemic.

Possibly the most disturbing part of the film had to do with Wal-Mart’s treatment of workers in other countries, specifically China. Given our pre-disposition to think of China as, well, less-than-giving to the average worker, it is easier to believe such abuses of the system as described in the film. Lack of a true free market economy, as in the United States, makes it easy to believe that many of these workers are half-enslaved by China and actions of Wal-Mart. IF they are true, they are shameful, and the free market should react by voting with it’s dollars else ware. However, this film is hardly proof.

In summary (sorry, so long winded this time), this movie is completely intellectually dishonest. A company of Wal-Mart’s size must certainly have some problems. It must do some things that are less than optimal for society, or even wrong. However, the film completely omits any mention of ANY of the good that Wal-Mart does through providing jobs in rural areas (or anywhere for that matter) or the low prices that it brings to consumers (including the low-income families) that shop there. What’s more, the film ostracizes the Walton family, certainly collectively the richest in the world, but leaves out the world-wide set of investors that benefit from the profits of a successful Wal-Mart. In fact, the company is so big and successful, that any person who owns a mutual fund with any percentage of large cap equities is almost guaranteed to have some ownership in the Wal-Mart company.

Much ado about nothing

What is going on with congress? The recent passage of the non-binding resolution opposing President Bushes troop increases in Iraq seems to have unleashed a wave of back-patting. What astounds me is that anyone thinks anything has actually been accomplished.

Totally separate than the question of whether you support or oppose the troop surge, when did we start recognizing Congress for spending days and days debating a “non-binding” resolution. Basically, a bill that even if passed, does…nothing. It doesn’t require the Executive branch of government to change how it operates one bit.

Sure, you could argue that all the hubbub has brought focus on the issue in the media and in the minds of the American people. That might be perfectly legitimate, but wouldn’t “binding” legislation do the exact same thing?

It strikes me that this is the exact reason so many Americans choose to send Governors to the White House more often than Legislatures. Not only do Governors DO things, they don’t run around congratulating themselves after using taxpayer time and money to pass irrelevant legislation. Again, put the issue itself aside. Republican or Democrat -- how are we supposed to take these clowns seriously?

The Blind Side

If you enjoyed the book Moneyball, and you like football, you’ll really enjoy Michael Lewis’ new book, The Blind Side. Michael Lewis is well known for writing business profiles of finance and high technology personalities. In both Moneyball and The Blind Side, Mr. Lewis describes the events involved in the evolution of a major league sport, and how those changes have changed how players are paid.

The story told in The Blind Side is a perfect example of how market forces work together to shape events. The book is the story of how the Left Tackle position evolved from just another lineman position, to be the second highest paid position in the National Football League.

Two forces in NFL football intersected to create the circumstances we have today. The first was the success of Bill Walsh, former coach of the San Francisco 49’ers, and his West Coast Offense. The second force was the emergence of a single player, Lawrence Taylor.

The West Coast offense changed football from a running game where the pass was used as the exception, to a game where receivers spread the field and ran exact passing routes. Quarterbacks in this system proceed through a number of pre-set choices as a receiver, and look to make the highest completion rate, not necessarily the longest yard gain. Quarterbacks in this system were becoming very successful.

A glitch emerged in the West Coast offense. More eligible receivers meant less men on the line blocking. Bill Parcells, the Defensive mastermind and head coach of the New York Giants unleashed Lawrence Taylor, a new kind of pass rusher. Bill Parcells believed that a very important piece of a football game is the element of fear. Taylor lived to sack quarterbacks, and he did so in a way that would hurt, not a small example of which was the infamous Joe Theisman broken leg.

And so this became the crux of the problem. The highest paid member of the team, the quarterback, and thus the business’ largest asset, was under fire. It so happens that most people, and so most quarterbacks, are right-handed. When the quarterback drops back in the pocket they stand sideways, with their right side back and their left side pointed forward. In this position the team’s largest asset can see in front of him, and to his right, but not behind him, thus…the blind side.

What emerges from this is a really fascinating example of market forces at work. Where once all lineman were considered interchangeable parts, now one line position becomes critical. The left tackle became the definitive position that protects the quarterback’s blind side from the new order of Lawrence Taylor like defensive ends. With the labor agreement in the early nineties that brought on free agency, pure market forces erupted.

The scarcity of the body-type and skills that make the best Left Tackle became so in demand that that position became the second highest paid position in the NFL. Higher than running backs, higher than wide receivers – all for a player that most fans never distinguish from the other lineman.

As in Moneyball, The Blind Side has its own equivalent of “the Greek God of Walks.” That is, a player that epitomizes this new reality of the game. In the Blind Side, that player is a “freak of nature,” by the name of Michael Oher. A poor black kid from West Memphis, Michael Oher came “out of nowhere” to be the country's best left tackle prospect. Lewis interweaves the story of Oher’s journey from nothing to college football (he currently plays for Old Miss), with the story of the evolution of the left tackle position.

Trailing decisions

Why is it that so much of the argument around Iraq is about four years ago? I love Tim Russert and think his show is great, but every Sunday the start of every conversation is defined by “did you make the right decision back then and if you knew then what you know now would you have voted the same way?”

While Monday morning quarterbacking may be a fun “what if” scenario, and serve to help us collectively learn from our mistakes, it doesn’t help us define who would be a good commander and chief. Today it seems that all of these candidates for President in 2008 so far seem to define themselves most by “what was my position on a particular issue at a particular time (the war) and do I think I was right or wrong?”

In my mind, this is the entirely wrong criteria to choose a President. It’s a bit like evaluating a stock. You can look at “trailing earnings” as an indicator of a particular company’s past performance, but it in no way guarantees future performance. And you would never look at a single quarter’s results. What matters is the future outlook. This is why a company can announce a growth in earnings but have it’s stock go down.

A better indicator of a Presidential candidate’s future success is a more in depth analysis of his or her values and character. A look at a lifetime of decisions provide evidence of a person’s character, looking at a single decision, even a big one, does not qualify as rigorous analysis. Show me a single great leader that at one time or another has not made the wrong call on a big decision.

The continual harping on “what would you have done four years ago and would you do the same thing now,” is only serving to teach politicians that they can never be wrong. What we do want in a President is someone who, given something they perceive as a clear and present danger (rightly or wrongly)…does something!

One (the?) American Inflection Point

I’ve just finished a great “one-two” punch on Civil War history. The first is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals, the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.” The Second is the first in Ken Burns’ documentary, “Civil War.”

I was interested in Team of Rivals beforehand, but after seeing Ms. Goodwin speak at book signing in December, I had to read it. As she explained, it was at first not obvious how to take a different approach to Lincoln, who has been written about possibly more than any other President. Her tack on the subject was to approach Lincoln from his cabinet, made up of men who he had outmaneuvered for the Republican nomination.

Team of Rivals is a fascinating analysis of someone who must have been one of the world’s most adroit politicians. Ronald Regan has often been quoted as saying “You can accomplish much if you don’t care who gets credit.” Certainly Lincoln and his deft handling of some very large personalities is one of the best embodiments of this sentiment.

She told a story, which I later reread near the end of her book about Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy, in the wilds (Africa I believe) and speaking to a set of primitive people was pressed into telling all he knew about “the greatest leader ever known,” Abraham Lincoln.

There were so many interesting facts from the two sources (a few mentioned in both), including:

• The last veteran of the Civil war died in 1959, ninety-eight years after the war began! Can you imagine a single life that saw fighting in the Civil war, the transcontinental railroad, manned flight, World War I, Pearl Harbor, World War II, the atomic bomb, and maybe even Elvis?


• Ten states in the south did not even have Abraham Lincoln on the 1860 presidential election ballot!


• Robert E. Lee was offered command of the entire Union army by Lincoln. Lee was against succession and firmly against slavery. However, when forced to chose he had to choose his native land, Virginia.


• Ulysses S. Grant started the war as a “Mustering officer;” basically a recruiter. Here was a man who was a failing businessman at the start of the war, but just seven years later was President of the United States.


• The Confederate constitution was very much like the United States constitution. Two differences of not included a line-item veto (yay!) and curiously, outlawed international slave trading.


• The treatment of John Brown in Burn’s documentary was very interesting. On the one hand Brown was clearly a murderous vigilante. On the other hand, the abolitionist was the “meteor” that more than any other individual precipitated the Civil War, and the eventual end of slavery.


• Team of Rivals reminded me of something I have usually not thought of - that is, Seward's actions as Secretary of State that kept both England and France from recognizing Confederacy, and staying out of the war - events that would certainly have changed its course.


• You always hear how bloody and awful the Civil War was. 600,000 men died in the Civil war, two percent of the American population. In one battle, in the space of TWENTY minutes, 7,000 men died! That’s more than twice all the U.S. Soldiers who have died in Iraq. That is certainly not to diminish that sacrifice at all – it’s more to point out the horrifying scale of the carnage. Horrifying even to imagine. Contrast that with the start of the war, the Union loss of Fort Sumter, a 34 hour cannon barrage – total casualties…one horse.
  

The two sources together make a great combination. The one is an interesting documentary that gives the background of the war. The other is a great description of Lincoln all of the battling politics that governed the time leading up to the Civil War, and the effort required by the North to see it through to victory.

Reading the one and watching the other, you are reminded just how much the Civil War really defined the United States as it is today.