tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post3775040218346601259..comments2024-03-29T02:03:49.151-04:00Comments on History Unfolding: The stakes for 2020David Kaiserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05020082243968071584noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-42466325165555789632019-07-04T04:24:20.765-04:002019-07-04T04:24:20.765-04:00https://www.huffpost.com/entry/baby-boomers-sociop...https://www.huffpost.com/entry/baby-boomers-sociopaths_n_58b9a358e4b0d2821b4dd797?fbclid=IwAR31w91p2urj7fipu7a5IXtAebIriUgo-aNTcpXuiXWh173ml9HQVWG-i7A&guccounter=1<br />Another interesting generational article, author interview. Not neccessarily meant as commentary.Energyflowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14476915209268786507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-39232476626466902162019-07-02T04:47:28.510-04:002019-07-02T04:47:28.510-04:00Likely a country divided, arguing, irrelevant as a...Likely a country divided, arguing, irrelevant as after ivil war. Only problem is that the USA after the tortuous fight against itself from inner divisions of Civil War became in European and Asian conflicts of WWI/II semingly the only adult in the room, managing spoiled children in kindergarten fighting one another(reminds me of Putin's attitude towards us now). So yes we need to revisit our shadow, do psychoanalysis, discover real purpose again. Decades of internal battles lie ahead between ethnic, racial groups and ideological, regional ones. Lincoln said that 'a house divided against itself cannot stand' echoing perhaps revolutionary war phrase 'if we do not hang together we will most surely hang separately'. In the latter phrase obviously an external pressure is to be presumed. Nowadays that pressure is rebuilding from Eurasia and from internal entropy. Such problems as infrastructure decay, pension problems, high debt on every front, overstretched, incompetent military, stock market decoupled from classic valuation models, govt. economic measurements of national health GDP, unmployment and inflation increasingly useless and health care system as a rapacious profit system feeding vampirelike off the body public. Presumably a series of internal and external crises will force a rethink, if not systemic collapse, like in USSR post Chernobyl. This year's coming massive crop failures could be a start. Maybe other natural disasters like san andres fault break or hurricane swarm with trillion dollar damages could break the bank. Likely is nibbling away at the substance in every area as above. Millenials become a lost generation instead of a hero generation, confounding the standard pattern due to overindebtedness and inflated real estate prices(low interest rates pumping easy money that direction) and dogged low earnings, video game addiction and drug usage, low family formation. Ideological formulas won't work, from Washington or elsewhere. People themselves make decisions based on deep sense of need in personal lives. So universities are closed as they bring student negative benefits, no job prospects,crushng debt. Local governments likewise become bankrupt as they are just porkbarrel for public unions like teachers who can't teach but demand high pensions, police who appropriate proprty and break down people's doors in SWAT manner to retire at public cost. Meanwhile streets go unpaved, bridges and schools, water mains unrepaired 50 years long. So the individual turns inward as education is useless, job prospects few, public life uncertain. When schools are prisons, universities debt diploma mills, public services nonexistent or declining the young live online with friends and do gig work or make money online. Party politics is of interest only as virtue signalling. Like religion is very private nowadays ( jewish yogi uses wicca and buddhist meditation or conservative christian goes church shopping each sunday a different congregation looking for a 'buzz'). Politics will be similar, not just duopoly and very local. 20 years of internet and we have Orwell. Freedom of knowledge, communication, enterprise became ologopoly working for and with the state. Innovation always ends in a dead end. 'Pursuit of happiness' as Buddha might have said 'is a fool's game'.Energyflowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14476915209268786507noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-56832625738425344992019-07-01T10:53:04.194-04:002019-07-01T10:53:04.194-04:00My concern is that the Democratic party can easily...My concern is that the Democratic party can easily unite behind climate change which is an existential issue facing all of us. Yet, there was so little on climate change in the two debates.<br /><br />The economics-based Ray Fair model (https://fairmodel.econ.yale.edu/vote2020/index2.htm) only gives the Dems 46% of the vote (nationally for president) in 2020. It has been a very successful model and predictor of the past few presidential elections. With the economy doing so well and with the Democrats in a food fight to see who can give away the farm the fastest, I'm really worried about 2020. The only presidents from the opposite party (like Trump in 2016) to not get re-elected are Carter, Hoover, Benjamin Harrison and Quincy Adams. (I'm not including Grover Cleveland because he did get a second non-consecutive term and I'm combining Taylor and Fillmore into one.)NoOnehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08685249095572192084noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-33987285341777208342019-06-30T19:29:31.916-04:002019-06-30T19:29:31.916-04:00Aloha Dr. Kaiser,
Long time we no talk story!
(Pa...Aloha Dr. Kaiser,<br /><br />Long time we no talk story!<br />(Pardon the pidgin, I needed an entree.)<br /><br />I think, sir, you are hasty in proclaiming “We are nearing the climax of the fourth great crisis in American national life”. In my mind it speaks of American navel gazing when what is called for is a world-wide, 360-degree view. Strauss and Howe cast their theory in terms of the American Experience. Is the experience they describe unique to America, or do other societies experience similar cycles of history? And if they do, where are the Americans vis-a-vis the others?<br /><br />I ask because I see the world as still dealing with the consequences of the deals made in Paris in 1919 (happy 100th anniversary!) at Versailles following the end of WW1. By the way, was there a lot of attention paid in the West to the Chinese celebration last month marking the 100th anniversary of its May 4th Movement? The what (from your readers)? You didn’t know that China in 1917 entered the war on that side of the Allies sponsored by the British? You didn’t know that some 140,000 Chinese laborers were sent to Europe to support British operations? I say look it up.<br /><br />My perspective is that WW2 put paid to the empires of the European colonialists. I think Roosevelt understood that that would be one of the outcomes of the war and thought up the United Nations as a way of dealing with this new world-wide reality. I think he understood that the USA would inherit some of the economic fallout from this forthcoming new world order and figured the UN was the best hope of managing it to good outcomes. A good thought perhaps, but Mammon stood in its way.<br /><br />Events like American support of French opposition to Vietnamese rebels and the American led overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran soured good will and trust Americans had built up after the war. The Korean War became a stalemate with China. The Second Indochina war was lost to the Vietnamese and Chinese. Our good friends in Saudi Arabia destroyed southern New York City and America elected to fight with a Tar Baby called Afghanistan to which we’re still stuck. Then America opted to overthrow the one guy tough enough to hold together the artificial construct resulting from the 1919 Treaty of Versailles known as Iraq. In doing so America launched a war refugee wave of millions that has destabilized our European allies. And our current clown president chooses to piss in our allies’ soup pots.<br /><br />At home the Republicans, with a tenacity and discipline Lennin would admire, successfully conspire to reduce American society from a democratic republic to an oligarchy of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. <br /><br />As I argued several years ago on this site, all the previous crises have been resolved by violence. To be meaningful at this level, the crisis must be existential. I think we’re at the WW1 stage now. There’s more to come. How bad will it be? As the clown likes to say, “We’ll see what happens.”<br /><br />Put on that helmet and flack jacket, soldier! Stay alert, stay alive! War’s a coming! <br /><br />Ed CilibertiEd Cilibertihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09378230201414293974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8746692.post-27769832732575346792019-06-30T15:30:39.632-04:002019-06-30T15:30:39.632-04:00Professor
Interesting review.
This was the most in...Professor<br />Interesting review.<br />This was the most interresting for me:"...That means, for instance, that "undocumented"--that is, illegal--immigrants should receive guaranteed health care, because all people should receive it. Since immigrants are poor, largely nonwhite, and largely from the third world, we should decriminalize their status at once. That, in fact, seems to be more important to most of today's Democratic candidates than giving the 11 or 20 million illegal immigrants now living in the United States a path to citizenship that would allow them to vote--an idea we did not hear about during the debate..." DK<br /><br />I have commented on this crazy ideology on my site. <br /><br />It resembles nothing so much as that of the radical fringe abolitionists, who were secretly behind Lincoln's run for the White House. They want to decriminalize, as the abolitionists had wanted to immediately free the slaves. <br /><br />Giving illegals citizenship benefits goes even beyond that of the Radical Republicans in merely freeing the negroes, although it was in Radical Republicans' interest then to give them the vote to keep control from the Democrats. One can easily imagine a similar strategy here, with the vote coming later, after the essential decriminalization.<br /><br />All the bestBozonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18078858723231122013noreply@blogger.com