The World and Everything in It: March 11, 2024

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like us. My name is Di Fresella. I live in Edmond, Oklahoma with my husband. Dave, I still thank God for you. I hope you enjoy today's program.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! Today on Legal Docket: a dispute over firearms and bump stocks, but also statutory interpretation and grammar.

JUSTICE GORSUCH: And people don't function things. They may pull things, they may throw things, but they don't function things.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Also today the Monday Moneybeat: parsing the economic meaning of the State of the Union.

And the WORLD History Book: Wall Street financier Bernie Madoff goes on trial.

AUDIO: And now 50 billion dollars in assets are wiped out, gone.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, March 11th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Time now for the news. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Debate on border deadlock » The border crisis just may be the defining issue of this year’s general election. Multiple recent polls show it’s the top concern on the minds of voters.

President Biden and Democrats are laying blame for the border crisis at the feet of Republicans for rejecting a Senate border bill. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries:

JEFFRIES: The only way forward is for House Republicans to put the bipartisan national security comprehensive bill on the floor for an up or down vote.

But GOP Sen. James Lankford, who helped write that very bill, is pushing back. He said of President Biden:

LANKFORD: He has tools right now to be able to make a significant difference. He’s choosing not to do those.

Lankford said President Biden took executive actions shortly after taking office to throw open the floodgates at the southern border.

Laken Riley » Donald Trump hit President Biden hard on the border crisis while campaigning in Georgia over the weekend.

He also met with the family of Laken Riley. She was the 22-year-old nursing student murdered last month. The suspect in that case was in the country illegally and was arrested at the southern border before being released inside the country.

TRUMP: Laken Riley would be alive today if Joe Biden had not wilfully and maliciously eviscerated the borders of the United States. To her family tonight, I promise you, I will demand justice for Laken.

Trump and other Republicans are also blasting Biden after he expressed regret for having used the term “illegal” to refer to Riley’s suspected murderer. He told MSNBC:

BIDEN: An undocumented person and I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal.’ I should have — it’s undocumented.

Trump’s campaign said, “He should be apologizing to the family as opposed to apologizing for the word that he used.”

Helicopter crash at southern border » A National Guard soldier from New York who was seriously injured in a helicopter crash over the U.S.-Mexico border remained hospitalized Sunday.

Two National Guard soldiers and one Border Patrol agent on board were killed when the chopper went down near Rio Grande City, Texas on Friday.

Video footage showed Mexican drug cartel members laughing near the scene of the crash. And Texas Republican Congressman Tony Gonzalez said Sunday:

GONZALEZ: I have long pushed to label cartels as terrorist organizations. Let’s take the gloves off, and let’s hold these criminals accountable.

The cause of the crash is still under investigation.

DOJ probe of Boeing Max Alaska Airlines blowout » The Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation into the Boeing jetliner blowout that left a gaping hole on an Alaska Airlines plane in January.

In a statement, Alaska Airlines said, “In an event like this, it’s normal for the DOJ to be conducting an investigation.” The airline added that it does believe the airline is the target of the probe.

Meantime, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Sunday:

BUTTEGIEG: Boeing needs to cooperate in every respect, and the FAA has given them 90 days to show a comprehensive plan as to how they’re going to turn their quality issues around.

Boeing has provided U.S regulators with the names of the employees who were on that flight after the NTSB called out the company last week for failing to provide that information.

Senators on U.S.-Israel support / sea port » A U.S. Army vessel carrying equipment to build a temporary pier in Gaza sailed toward the Mediterranean on Sunday. President Biden last week announced plans to increase aid deliveries to Palestinians by sea.

But remarks caught on a hot mic after the president’s State of the Union address also drew a lot of attention. Biden was heard saying he would be having a “come to Jesus” meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And Biden said over the weekend:

BIDEN: He has a right to defend Israel, a right to continue to pursue Hamas. But he must, he must, he must, pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken.

Biden again called for a cease-fire. But Hamas has rejected the terms of a proposed six-week pause in the fighting negotiated by the governments of the U.S. Egypt and Qatar.

U.S. Embassy in Haiti » The Pentagon says it has flown in forces to Haiti to beef up security at the U.S. Embassy there and to allow non-essential personnel to leave.

That comes amid a continued crisis with armed gangs overrunning the country.

Mohamed Irfaan Ali is chairman of CARICOM. That’s a group of 15 Caribbean nations, including Haiti. He’s calling a meeting of world leaders, including from the United States.

ALI: To urgently address this state of affairs and all other matters critical to the stabilization of security.

Haiti’s government is asking for an international security team to help restore order.

Oscars » Oppenheimer won big at last night’s academy awards. The R-rated historical drama won Best Picture.

AUDIO: I can perform this miracle. World War II would be over. Our boys would come home. 

Christopher Nolan won Best Director for the same movie, and Cillian Murphy won Best Actor for Oppenheimer.

Emma Stone won Best Actress for her role in Poor Things.

I’m Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: A gun case on Legal Docket. Plus, the Monday Moneybeat.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 11th day of March, 2024. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. It’s time for Legal Docket. Our pledge to you is that over time if you listen every Monday you’ll hear something about every single oral argument heard by the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Well, we expect opinions to be handed down now til the term ends in June. Landmark decisions around the meaning of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” the Takings Clause and property rights, veteran’s benefits, arbitration, to name just a few, and the reach of the administrative state, several of those.

EICHER: Including an oral argument we’ll tackle today, the case of Garland versus Cargill. It’s about guns, although it’s not a question of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

Rather, it’s about how to interpret a statute from 1934, the National Firearms Act. It made possession of a machine gun a federal crime, and defined a machine gun as: any weapon which automatically shoots more than one shot by a single function of the trigger. That includes any attachment that can convert an ordinary firearm into a machine gun.

REICHARD: I called one of the parties in the case of Garland versus Cargill. Not Garland. The other guy.

MICHAEL CARGILL: My name is Michael Cargill, owner of Central Texas Gun Works. All separate words.

Cargill’s business is selling guns and ammo along with training and safety courses. He also bought some bump stocks to sell.

CARGILL: A bump stock is a device, a stock that you pretty much add to a rifle and what it does is it just allows a shooter to fire the rifle a little faster.

Once you attach a bump stock to a rifle, it causes the trigger to bump repeatedly into your finger from the recoil energy of the gun once it fires. Hence, the name; the trigger bumps to your trigger finger so you don’t have to pull it. Your finger doesn’t move; it’s the trigger that resets.

Bump stocks used to be legal until this happened:

SOUND: [Massacre in real time]

CARGILL: What happened was back in 2017, a madman decided that he was going to shoot at concert goers at a Las Vegas concert. And so at that time, the government decided they were gonna ban them because of that heinous crime.

EICHER: Thousands of country music lovers attending an outdoor concert endured an 11-minute massacre. 60 people died, hundreds were injured. The attacker opened fire from a nearby hotel, the 32nd floor. He fired more than 1000 rounds using bump stocks on several weapons.

REICHARD: Public pressure mounted to do something. President Donald Trump directed a change to the way bump stocks are classified. Days later, the ATF (The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) changed the definition of machine gun to include bump stocks and make them illegal.

So gun shop owner Cargill surrendered his bump stocks. Then he sued to challenge the ATF as exceeding its authority.

CARGILL: It's about an agency within the government deciding that they're going to create, or write, a law. And that should be reserved for Congress. We elect our congressmen and women to go to D.C. to represent us and to create law, write law, whatever, not bureaucrats that are in agencies. That's not what that's supposed to be used for.

EICHER: At oral argument, though, debate revolved more around how bump stocks actually work. And whether they fit under the meaning of the legal phrasing: “single function of the trigger” and “automatic.”

Arguing against the bump stocks for the government, Brian Fletcher, Principal Deputy U.S. Solicitor General:

BRIAN FLETCHER: Those weapons do exactly what Congress meant to prohibit when it enacted the prohibition on machine guns, and those weapons are machine guns because they satisfy both disputed parts of the statutory definition.

REICHARD: For the other side, Cargill’s lawyer Jonathan Mitchell argued that is not what the law says.

JONATHAN MITCHELL: The statutory definition of machine gun extends only to weapons that fire more than one shot automatically by a single function of the trigger. Mr. Cargill's non-mechanical bump stocks fall outside the statutory definition for two separate and independent reasons.

Reason one: a rifle with a bump stock can only fire one shot per function of the trigger because the trigger must reset after every shot and has to function again before another shot.

MITCHELL: The statute is concerned only with what the trigger does and whether a single function of that trigger produces more than one shot.

EICHER: Reason two: everything about the bump firing process is manual. There’s nothing automatic, like spring or motor involvement.

MITCHELL: The process depends entirely on human effort and exertion as the shooter must continually and repeatedly thrust the forestock of the rifle forward with his non-shooting hand while simultaneously maintaining backward pressure on the weapon with his shooting hand. None of these acts are automated.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett posed a hypothetical to Fletcher for the government:

JUSTICE BARRETT: Let's imagine someone builds a fully automatic machine gun, and I won't try to come up with the technology for exactly how this is going to happen, but they install a tripwire on their property and they just leave the gun there unattended, walk away. Somebody trips the wire and then it begins shooting lots of rounds. Does that satisfy your definition of a machine gun?

FLETCHER: I think it does, yes.

BARRETT: Why?

EICHER: Because, Fletcher answered, the tripwire still qualifies as one act by a person that then initiates a multi-shot fire. Then Justice Neil Gorsuch asked a grammatical question:

JUSTICE GORSUCH: Let me ask you about the function of the trigger. You liken it to a stroke of a key or a throw of the dice or a swing of the bat. Those are all things people do. A function of the trigger, do people function triggers? I thought, you know, maybe somewhere in fifth grade grammar I learned that was an intransitive verb.

FLETCHER: Yeah.

GORSUCH: And people don't function things. They may pull things, they may throw things, but they don't function things. And, again, it's a very old statute, and it was designed for an obvious problem in the 1930s and Al Capone, and people were -- with a single function of the trigger, that is, the thing itself, was moved once, and that's what they wrote. And maybe they should have written something better. One might hope they might write something better in the future. But that's the language we're stuck with.

REICHARD: Both sides endured tough questions. Justice Elena Kagan wasn’t so sure about the arguments for Cargill, the gun shop owner. Listen to this exchange with Mitchell:

JUSTICE KAGAN: I view myself as a good textualist. I think that that’s the way we should think about statutes. It’s by reading them. But, you know, textualism is not inconsistent with common sense. Like, at some point, you have to apply a little bit of common sense to the way you read a statute and understand that what this statute comprehends is a weapon that fires a multitude of shots with a single human action. Whether it’s a continuous pressure on a conventional machine gun, holding the trigger, or a continuous pressure on one of these devices on the barrel. I can’t understand how anybody could think that those two things should be treated differently. 

MITCHELL: Well, they're treated differently because the statute turns on a single function of the trigger.

Justice Samuel Alito asked another sort of question:

JUSTICE ALITO: Can you imagine a legislator thinking we should ban machine guns, but we should not ban bump stocks? Is there any reason why a legislator might reach that judgment?

MITCHELL: I think there is. Bump stocks can help people who have disabilities, who have problems with finger dexterity, people who have arthritis in their fingers.

That was a bit too much for Justice Sonia Sotomayor:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Why would even a person with arthritis, why would Congress think they needed to shoot 400 to 7- or 800 rounds of ammunition under any circumstance? If you don't let a person without arthritis do that, why would you permit a person with arthritis to do it?

MITCHELL: They don't shoot 400 to 700 rounds because the magazine only goes up to 50. So you're still going to have to change the magazine after every round.

EICHER: Cargill was in the courtroom listening to all this, and he was getting worried things were going off track.

CARGILL: What concerned me is the fact that a Supreme Court justice would think that a particular firearm can actually fire 800 rounds a second or 800 rounds a minute. I don't know any gun that can fire that. I don't know what gun can actually hold that type of capacity – 800 rounds a minute, 800 rounds a second. There's no handgun. There's no rifle that you can do that with.

Cargill was relieved when the arguments turned from firing capacity to the administrative state. Here’s Justice Gorsuch:

JUSTICE GORSUCH: I can certainly understand why these items should be made illegal, but we're dealing with a statute that was enacted in the 1930s. And through many administrations, the government took the position that these bump stocks are not machine guns. And then you -- you adopted an interpretive rule, not even a legislative rule, saying otherwise that would render between a quarter of a million and a half million people federal felons and not even through an APA process they could challenge, subject to 10 years in federal prison, and the only way they can challenge it is if they're prosecuted, and they may well wind up dispossessed of guns, all guns in the future, as well as a lot of other civil rights, including the right to vote.

Gorsuch pointed out that one of the sponsors of a bump stock ban was Dianne Feinstein from California, the senator who died last year. At the time, she derided the ATF’s banning bump stocks because she recognized that meant the ban wasn’t on solid legal footing.

Or, as Cargill put it:

CARGILL: You know, we've heard of that schoolhouse rock song, how does a bill become law? Well, someone in Congress writes a bill, they both vote on it in both houses. It then goes to the president, president signs it, and that's how it becomes law. Not because an agency within the federal government decides they're going to create a right law.

REICHARD: So I ended our conversation by asking Cargill what he’d say to one of these administrators if they were politically accountable in the same way his elected congressman would be.

CARGILL: The United States of America, we have a constitution. We need to follow that constitution. And fortunately, the Second Amendment is the second on that list. And people try to equate that with driving and cars and vehicles. Well, let me explain this to you. Driving a car, that's a privilege. But the Second Amendment, that is a right. That's why it's called the Bill of Rights. It is not called the Bill of Needs.

Strong emotions on both sides, for sure.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: All right time now to talk business markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnsen. David is head of the wealth management firm, the Bahnson group, and he is here now, David. Good morning.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Well, good morning, Nick, good to be with you.

EICHER: Well, David, the State of the Union, there was some economic messaging in that message. And I'm glad we got out in front of the big story last week, David, you may remember the Neo logicism “shrinkflation,” and I'm a little bit surprised that the Cookie Monster wasn't in the gallery at the State of the Union. But you know, you don't always get what you deserve. But quite seriously, there's going to continue to be messaging on this, I expect and I think we ought to touch on it again. Especially given that the President gave a shout out during his address to a piece of proposed legislation by Senator Casey of Pennsylvania, proposed piece of legislation to brand packaging changes of fraudulent practice. Can you talk about the market impact of things like that?

BAHNSEN: Well, the market impact of that is nothing, because it's never going to happen. But the market impact to the discussion and the overall subject is once again, markets having to price in the desire for an increased regulatory state. And I want to be clear here, this is at a federal level. You're talking about the United States Senate, talking about how people package and the requirements they'll have when it comes to chips and cookies. So this would be the kind of thing I would have made up as a like, example of how ridiculous things would be in a slippery slope. If I were trying to reduce the opponents argument to absurdity, this is the kind of thing I would have made up 25 years [ago], sort of a satire. And now it's now it's become real.

EICHER: Yeah. Yeah. We also had a cap on late fees that was brought up midweek last week, which has got to be good news, I guess, to people who get hit with late fees on credit cards. But then there's those thorny, unintended consequences that no one ever considers. Can you think of a handful of those on the late fee, which is going to happen by the way, that is in place?

BAHNSEN: So, I don't know. I don't know that it will happen, because the Supreme Court still hasn't ruled on the very existence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

So this statute was put through by the CFPB, which is in a very bizarre way under the executive branch. And so this is a Biden administration policy, and they have stated that the new policy for credit card companies is that the limit that they can charge, the maximum for a late fee, is $8, unless they want to go through a whole process by which they explain and get approval to be able to charge more.

But your question to me was about unintended consequences. And I want to be clear, that people who think okay, well, I pay my credit card late every month. So now the fee will go down from $20 to $8, should not be celebrating, because they will end up paying for it through higher interest. The credit card companies will simply increase the interest rate, and they're very likely could be people that get credit canceled or do not get approved for cards. So your use of the term unintended consequences is exactly right, Nick. This one is just screamingly obvious. And it's not just unintended consequences, where they take the cost of one policy and move it to somebody else. In this case. This will be paid by the people they think they're trying to protect.

EICHER: Anything else in the president's speech in terms of tax policy or economic vision or anything else that you notice that you want to comment on?

BAHNSEN: Well, there was the standard class warfare. It was a bit more preposterous than normal. The notion of the corporate income tax rate being a handout to the rich, America was paying one of the least competitive business tax rates in the country—35%. And the Trump administration lowered that to 21%. But also through that legislation, allowed what has turned out to be over a trillion and a half dollars to be repatriated back on shore that had been profits earned offshore that were staying offshore. So I was shocked to see the venom by which he went after the business tax cuts knowing that the great beneficiaries of that were small businesses, were wage earners, most certainly as a reason, one of the reasons that we have had reasonably low unemployment. So the class warfare, I thought, was not only immoral, but really economically misguided. And I think that the overall speech indicated a lot of affection for the regulatory state. You know, I can make fun of this stuff with Cookie Monster in translation. But it isn't funny. I mean, that the credit card fee stuff. This is just egregious overreach by the federal government and the economy at a time when growth and productivity are desperately needed.

EICHER: David, the day after the president speech came up very good jobs report, again outpacing expectations by economists and better than the average. And here we go with more job creation. Talk a little bit about the jobs report.

BAHNSEN: Yeah, unlike the last report that had upward job revisions from prior months, this did have downward revisions from past months, which is perhaps why bond yields dropped, didn't didn't go higher. However, it was, again, a very good headline number. The household survey did not verify it, so there wasn't a real strong validation in one of the other methodologies. But there just simply isn't any question that they're right now most people who want to have a job are able to get one. And of course, the data still continues to be unable to deal with the two metrics I think that are most pressing, which is the unfilled jobs, which speaks to a skills gap and an inability to meet the skills gap, and then really, the labor participation force, which if I sound like a broken record on The World and Everything in It, it's by design, because somebody's got to talk about this. The idea, it's such a huge focus in my new book Full-Time, you can't have 10 million people leave the workforce and not have it impact your culture. And I want people who are looking for a job to be able to find one. But I also want more people to be looking for a job.

EICHER: Right. So David, before we go, I'm going to propose a defining terms this week of ”“bubble.” And the reason for that is I've heard you talking about some overvalued stocks.

BAHNSEN: Yeah, I think the word bubble is one of the most important terms to understand in any kind of financial lexicon. And there is a general sense in which bubble could be a reference to something that is overvalued. But I think that the way I like to define bubble is something that is more macro, more systemic, affects a broader part of the population, and that by definition, involves leverage and involves debt. If something is overpriced, and it comes down the person who held it or owned it suffers from the price dropping. But if an entire asset class, let's take housing up until the Financial Crisis, is in a bubble, and it is largely financed with debt, the values have to drop but the debt doesn't drop, and so it leaves people upside-down. And then that causes prices to drop further, when you have to liquidate the bad debt. That is systemic, a lot of ".com" back in the late 1990s, going into 2000, was owned on margin. People had borrowed money from their broker to buy really stupid ".com" stocks. So the systemic selling that went into all of it, it was said to be a bubble that burst.

The most famous ones, Nick in my lifetime, are Japan, which I've talked about a lot written about a lot, the housing crisis, ".com,". A more narrow version was what happened to crypto in 2022, where so much of the violence of that price drop was because so much of that crypto had never been paid for. It was people who were borrowing, and in some cases, borrowing from criminal you know, outfits to buy it as we now know. Debt and leverage is really the key behind a bubble. In a more generic sense, you could say anything overpriced is a bubble. The problem though, with a bubble, Alan Greenspan used to say and I don't fully agree with him, you don't know something was a bubble until after it burst. I don't think that's true. I think there are valuation metrics that can speak to reality. But it is true that you don't know when it's gonna burst. And so there's certain things that we can identify as being in a bubble, but that doesn't mean the bubble can't blow bigger before it eventually pops.

EICHER: All right. David Bahnsen is founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of the Bahnsen group. You heard David mention it just a moment ago, but as well latest book is Full Time: Work and the Meaning of Life you can find out more about that by visiting fulltimebook.com, fulltimebook.com. David, I hope you have a terrific week. We'll talk to you next time.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday March 11. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next, the WORLD History Book. Thirty-five years ago, a computer scientist proposes an idea that becomes the World Wide Web.

And, 51 people perish in the mosque shootings in New Zealand.

EICHER: But first, 15 years ago, a financier is convicted for one of the biggest frauds in Wall Street’s history. Here’s WORLD Radio Reporter Emma Perley:

EMMA PERLEY: It’s March 12th, 15 years ago, and financier Bernie Madoff is on trial for one of the biggest frauds in the history of Wall Street. Audio here from CNBC as Madoff arrives at the courthouse.

CNBC: He is 70 years old, he will plead guilty to 11 criminal counts, and almost certainly spend the rest of his life in prison. There goes Bernie Madoff.

Since the ‘80s, Madoff made wild claims about the enormous gains of his firm. But almost 20 years later, financial analyst Harry Markopolos realized that the firm’s profits were mathematically impossible. Here is Harry speaking with 60 Minutes in 2009.

HARRY MARKOPOLOS: It took me five minutes to know that it was a fraud. It took me another almost four hours of mathematical modeling to prove that it was a fraud.

Despite several investigations into the firm’s asset management unit, the scam continued until Madoff’s two sons informed the police in December 2008. Audio courtesy of Sky News only a few days after the revelation.

SKY NEWS: They invested their money with Madoffs, in some cases all of their money, tens of millions of dollars which apparently he was taking, reporting to be getting 10%, 15% returns of their money when in fact he had lost all of it. 50 billion dollars in assets are wiped out, gone.

Madoff was sentenced to 150 years for his crimes. Here is Madoff speaking from prison with Business Insider in 2014.

MADOFF: I sort of rationalized that what I was doing was okay, you know, it wasn’t going to hurt anybody and it was a temporary thing.

The Justice Department is still reimbursing the victims of the fraud to this day, and has since recovered over 4 billion dollars.

Next, on March 15th, 2019, an armed gunman opens fire in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.

ADRIAN WRIGHT: The first shot went off, and the Imam paused. It was dead silent.

That’s survivor Adrian Wright speaking with CBC News.

WRIGHT: When the other shots went off, and people started screaming, that’s when noise erupted in the Masjid. Just a flurry of gunshots started coming through, and I was seeing it hit the ceiling, hit the walls, hit people.

A white supremacist named Brenton Tarrant enters the Al Noor mosque on a Friday afternoon and begins shooting in a premeditated attack. After seven minutes of terror, the shooter drives to Linwood Islamic Centre. Abdul Aziz tells Global News he heard the shooter arrive at the Centre.

ABDUL AZIZ: We heard some gunshots. And at first I thought it was somebody probably playing firecrackers or something.

Aziz ran outside to distract him.

AZIZ: I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t have any fear on me or anything, my only concern was to save other people from that, doesn’t get hurt. And I was screaming to the guy, “Come, I’m here! Come, I’m here!” I tried to put his focus on me.

The shooter continues inside and opens fire again. He drives away three minutes later. Police pursue the shooter in his vehicle, eventually ramming his car off the road and arresting him. Justice Cameron Mander stated this at the trial:

JUSTICE MANDER: Your victims include the young and the old, men, women, and children. Your actions were inhuman.

The shooter was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole for 51 murders, 40 attempted murders, and terrorism.

Finally, we end on March 12th, 1989. Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee writes a technological proposal that will radically change the nature of communication. He calls it an information management system, or rather, the World Wide Web. Here is Berners-Lee discussing his ideas with the BBC.

BERNERS-LEE: The basis of the web is fundamentally very simple. The idea that any piece of information can have an address that you can point to it is very simple.

Berners-Lee works at CERN, a scientific research organization. And he encounters a problem: all the computers have separate softwares and programs. Information cannot be communicated from one computer to another. Audio courtesy of the Washington Post:

BERNERS-LEE: All these systems are incompatible. And if I’m sitting at one computer system, I can’t get any information on the other one. I had to log into it separately and have to learn a completely different program.

So he proposes a plan for just one system which all computers can access. His manager accepts his proposal a year later, calling it “vague but exciting.” After designing the first web browser and server, Berners-Lee distributes internet instructions for users to implement it themselves. Soon, millions of people join the World Wide Web. Audio courtesy of a 1994 BBC broadcast:

BERNERS-LEE: Imagine a world where every word ever written, every picture ever painted and every film ever shot could be viewed instantly in your home via an information super highway.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Emma Perley.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: Protecting kids online. Florida is working on a law to combat social media harms, but is it constitutional? That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. 

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Psalmist writes: “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations.” —Psalm 67:1, 2

Go now in grace and peace.

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