I've advanced a little in examination of social structure and change. Particular chnges, such as the industrial revolution and modernization, social procesees, social types, and social structure are all being examined.

In religion, several connections were advanced my last time through, and this time I focused on catching up a little on Asiatic religions, especially those in China and Japan, and those that originated in Persia.

As I read the news and news summaries, I'm often slightly confused by the alphabet soup of international Governmental Organizations and why they are important. I've added pages for the European Union, NATO, and the CIS (I was surprised that was still around: the individual nations get more attention now), and the World Trade Organization. I may do some rearranging or alternate connections, but this will be useful when get these developed as far as current events.

More peoples

After doing a review of Asiatic peoples, next up was a review of Western civilization. Since many of these nations are smaller than Asiatic peoples, they are a bit harder to get to. For Anglic peoples, the most accessible is the United States, and although I didn't really want to consider its history separately from the rest of it just yet, the accumulation of events just about forces it. The Latin nations form a big block. I'm close to forming groups of these and anxious to get there. Northeast European peoples are developing rather slowly, except for Russia, and so are Germanic peoples. Balkan peoples aren't yet to the point where I can do much with them, and it;s going to take a while to get to Scandinavian peoples.

I've had a little more success with the division of African peoples. I recently reached a critical point where I should break these into Western, Eastern, Central, and Southern African peoples, and connections to them were made in modern history and some of its subdivisions. American Indian peoples still don't have enough connected nations for me to subdivide, but this will be coming soon, about the same time as Latin peoples.

Taking shape

I think I'm getting somewhere. For about the past month, I've been trying to track events on a day-by-day basis, or at least a week-by-week basis. In the process, it's been pushing me to connect more and more recent periods of history to more and more nations. I have this extended as far as the 20th century, the last seven years, and and up to the current year. I'm close to getting the current quarter and current month extended to most of the nations I have in the knowledge base. Getting caught up that far is a satisfying accomplishment, and will be a big help in analyzing daily news and current events.

In going through peoples, the addition of nations has reached a point where I can start taking a closer look at particular peoples of the Middle East. I had this broken down into some categories, but then decided to approach this from the point of view of particular nations, and hadn't got caught up. I reached a point where I could re-think and rearrange those subjects, so some long-dormant categories are coming active again. There are quite a few events associated with Israel and neighboring countries, but since most of these are fairly small, it's going to be a while before I can get to them. I'm not quite to the point yet where I can follow reports on the war in Iraq. By my rules of development, which I have to follow more or less in order to keep from getting compleely lost, I still need to add a few nations in order to get Iraq into its own little category in the current month. I note that Egypt has been rather quiet in international news lately. I've also noticed an ongoing conflict between militant Kurds in Northern Iraq and Turkey, which is something I would like to follow as well. I'm also getting closer to being able to follow events in Iran. There isn't as much progress on other peoples of Asia, although a lot of current attention has been focused on Pakistan. India is rather bigger, but a lot of events escape attention.