Photo: The Digital Revolution, also known as the Third Industrial Revolution, is the shift from mechanical and analogue electronic technology to digital electronics; this is a visualization of the various routes through a portion of the Internet (Wikipedia).    
    However, the matter at hand is the Fourth Revolution (see: Chris Riegel, Hour 1 Block C below).       
    Bernard Marr of Forbes describes it this way: “The Fourth Industrial Revolution describes the exponential changes to the way we live, work and relate to one another due to the adoption of cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things and the Internet of Systems. As we implement smart technologies in our factories and workplaces, connected machines will interact, visualize the entire production chain and make decisions autonomously. This revolution is expected to impact all disciplines, industries, and economies. While in some ways it's an extension of the computerization of the 3rd Industrial Revolution (Digital Revolution), due to the velocity, scope and systems impact of the changes of the fourth revolution, it is being considered a distinct era. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is disrupting almost every industry in every country and creating massive change in a non-linear way at unprecedented speed.”  https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/08/13/the-4th-industrial-revolution-is-here-are-you-ready/#4ecf0935628b
 
Permissions: Wikipedia  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Revolution
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 1, Block A:  Dan Henninger, WSJ editorial board and columnist, Wonder Land; in re:  Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas hasn’t necessarily made herself into a laughingstock; she’s playing to her base, which appreciates her public face.  The primary workers, who do the scut work to get people elected . . .   Left are chopping people up by gender and other ways. People on the right divide people by issues.
Elizabeth Warren has competition: Booker and Harris, among others.  The most activist left have
become pretty loony, quite frankly. These are the people working hardest for elections, More and more absurd remarks coming?  Probably. You can get away with saying a lot of crazy things and go a long way these days.  https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-is-elizabeth-warren-1539816439
Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 1, Block B: Michael Ledeen, FDD & Pajamas Media, in re: Sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran, a predator state. The regime must be changed – internally is best.  In Eastern Europe toward the end of the USSR, the end of the regimes came from the top. 
Vulgar Marxism: “If things get bad enough, there will be revolutions” as if revolutions just happen naturally – whereas in fact revolutions are rare, and mostly fail, and usually occur when things are getting not worse but better – for example, the French revolution, Hitler, Mussolini. It’s the opposite of conventional wisdom. Most of our pundits and our policymakers keep saying, “We don't want to change the regime, we want to change its actions.”  How? By sanctions, which will make them more miserable, and when things get bad enough for the Iranian people they’ll rise up and revolt. I don’t think the people will overturn the regime.  I think we’ll have to support a revolution, as we did with the USSR.
In the waning days of the Soviet Union, we reached out to samizdat members, asked “What do you need?” Turned out they didn’t need much – just communication with other Soviet citizens. We provided Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty [and many private citizens and nonprofits sneaked in computers, faxes, and whatever civilian electronics were available at the time]; but now we aren't doing much of anything in Farsi. Most of the people we have running Radio Farsi are carryovers from the old days and support the regime, as Obama did.  Trump doesn’t support the regime, but he doesn’t seem to get that we need to go after it, fight it.  And he’s not doing that.
JB: You said that endorsing the Green Revolution was a good thing. Still possible? 
ML: Yes, easily.  The thing the Trump Adm does worst is personnel. They haven't changed Radio Farsi. Remember the guy on the cover of the Economist holding up his bloody T-shirt? You'd think they’d have him on air all the time, but they don’t. Am amazed, astonished and dismayed. Very discouraging.  For some reason, the USA, arguably the most revolutionary nation in the world, does not use revolution as an instrument of foreign policy when it's our most lethal instrument against despots. All the tyrants know it and dread it, are scared to death of it. Rouhani and Khamenei all speak of the US trying to foster a “white revolution” —nonviolent peaceful transformation of the regime. They know that could bring them down – but we don't. We don’t get it. Will the sanctions work? No. https://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/as-iran-wobbles-washington-is-still-without-a-winning-strategy/
 
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Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 1, Block C: Chris Riegel, Scala.com CEO, in re: The Global Competitiveness Report 2018, from the World Economic Forum: Shows that as the economies around the world continue to move into the Fourth Revolution – all the cool things that the tech revolutions of the past 40 years have yielded – they’ve fostered the “creative class.”
This is not a zero-sum game – US and Canada are on the same landmass and both are doing well.   The Malthusian argument that you get to a population or energy consumption the world cannot sustain never took into account technological advances. . . . Government can create conditions for success but cannot [itself create success ].
In France, failure is a societal problem; but if you succeed, the govt isn’t your partner but is your overlord; taxes are confiscatory.  . . .  More than half the world is now able to have a smartphone.
Economic, demographic, cultural and social manner of [improving things].
 
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Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 1, Block D: John Tamny, RealClearMarket, Forbes, and author, The End of Work, and Who Needs the Fed?, reminds us that Willis Carrier developed the air conditioner in Syracuse New York – allowing many people to move to Florida and live productive lives there. It literally made the world much more productive. This is the genius of free trade.  I don’t care where it was invented; I just want access to it.  This runs counter to the argument by Ian Hathaway (Bookings Institution) and Richard Florida (University of Toronto), who hold that if  the US doesn’t maintain its technological edge, then our living standards will go down.  No, no, no: we have lower living standards precisely because other people aren't as innovative in other parts of the world.
They don’t realize how isolationist they are; they argue that the US faces an assault of innovation from other parts of the world; in fact, as the rest of the world liberalizes, I think of all the Willis Carriers in China no longer having their talent suffocated.
Steve Jobs’s father: he came from Syria.  If he’d stayed in Syria, there’s never an Apple.  The US doesn’t have a technological edge, it has a freedom edge. Talented, ambitious people keep coming to the United States because free people can prosper. People drive progress, not countries. If the world’s strivers have a chance to get to the United States, they can innovate. Countries around the world have suffocated talent forever.   . . . We want France, India, China to thrive, to create their own Microsofts – if they do, think about how we’ll live here.
If markets are open and free, advances that take place in the US will lift up innovation around the world.  If Americans succeed in harnessing something, people will want it around the world.  The important thing is that people and trading lanes be free.  
 
 
 
Hour Two
Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 2, Block A:  Michael A Vlahos, Johns Hopkins and The American Conservative, in re: The people-elite divide. In stable periods, elites tend to be relatively homogenous; the different factions tend to share a world view, e.g., Britain during the Victorian era. – Liberals and Tories.  In the US, a Volksgemeinschaft, where a relatively unitary elite dominated by liberal Democrats and the Republicans were merely slightly more fiscally conservative versions of their Democratic brethren.
Today the big question we must confront is: How is the elite split to be viewed to give us a better understanding of the path we’ll ultimately end up taking? Which moiety is more dynamic, and is more in tune?
Democrats have lost the common touch, live in archipelagos of islands on the East and West Coasts, represent the [enormous blocs of income] that have emerged in the last 40 years.
At the time of the French revolution there were two elites— the old aristocracy, incapable of connecting with the people; the other elite, more dynamic, was the bourgeoisie, who basically led the revolution.
The president’s rally in Missoula, Montana, on stage dressed in his blue suit and red tie surrounded by Montanans wearing hardworking rodeo garb.  Trump isn't defined by his wealth; he created a kind of demotic people on TV that was a representation of the people he now leads.
When I look at the blue elite, I think of all the people in the Javits Center on election eve:  all yuppies! In times like these, elites need to find a way truly to connect to the people they lead.
 
Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 2, Block B: :  Michael A Vlahos, Johns Hopkins and The American Conservative, in re:  . . . Cf. the planter aristocracy and today’s blue elite: the former preferred civil war to change.  Today’s  [contretemps] will inevitably lead to new elites.
Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 2, Block C:  Chris Lowe, Shark Lab, California State University at Long Beach; in re:  Great white shark attacks (or bites) off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Encinitas (near San Diego), California.
Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 2, Block D:  Chris Lowe, Shark Lab, California State University at Long Beach; in re:  Great white shark attacks (or bites) off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Encinitas (near San Diego), California.
 
Hour Three
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Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 3, Block A: Benham Ben Taleblu, FDD, in re: Iran, oil, China; the UAE and opposing Gulf states. 
 
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Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 3, Block B: Dr. Aykan Erdemir, FDD & former member of the Turkish Parliament (2011-2015), served in the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee, EU Harmonization Committee, & Ad Hoc Parliamentary Committee on the IT Sector and the Internet; in re:  Turkey; Pastor Andrew Brunson; a “budding romance” ’twixt Trump and Erdogan?  (Not exactly.)
Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 3, Block C:  Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack,com, in re: Neil Armstrong.
Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 3, Block D:  Robert Zimmerman, BehindtheBlack,com, in re: Space.
 
Hour Four
Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 4, Block A:  Hundred Days: The Campaign That Ended World War I, by Nick Lloyd
Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 4, Block B:  Hundred Days: The Campaign That Ended World War I, by Nick Lloyd
Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 4, Block C:  A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire, by Geoffrey Wawro
Friday 19 October 2018 / Hour 4, Block D:  A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire, by Geoffrey Wawro