Trump Revives Threat of Force Against North Korea's 'Rocket Man'

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/...rocket-man

I would argue that Sub-Saharan Africa is on a different saeculum to the West and they are currently in an Awakening which started in the 2010s. 
 
I will start with South Africa, which I argue is currently in an Awakening which started in 2012.  Their last Crisis was roughly from 1976 (with the Soweto uprising) to the end of Apartheid in 1994. Also, I can see both the Boer War and the the revolution Shaka initiated which created the Zulu Kingdom which is a period called the Mfecane ("Upheaval" or "The Crushing"), as part of previous Crisis's. The current South African zeitgeist while it has soured a bit, is still quite optimistic and the institutional order is relatively strong. South Africans remember the period roughly from 1976 to 1994 much differently, they consider it among the darkest periods in their history.  Indeed, the South African zeitgeist is the total opposite of South America, which is very deep into a Crisis.
 
When it comes to South African generations, the “Generation of 1976” are described in a way that is so consistent with a Civic Generation, since they are praised for the sacrifices they had so that the modern South African nation exists today and the South African media have reported how active older people seem to be today. While The Born Frees (the description of which is very consistent with a Prophet generation), those born after the end of Apartheid are very fiery and some are challenging the order their parents the “Generation of 1976” established although that is a bit simplistic. Because some of the Generation of 1976 have always been revolutionary and starting to exhibit hubris as they have taken the reigns of power. For example; the recent exportation of White owned farmland without compensation, initiated by a Civic generation president Cyril Ramaphosa (1952). 
 
Indeed, South Africa’s presidents have showed very clear reflections of their generations, with PW Botha and Nelson Mandela as Prophets, FW De Klerk, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma as Nomads. While the current president Cyril Rampaphosa is a member of a Civic Generation.
 
The sort of zeitgeist that indicates an Awakening to me, is not just restricted to South Africa either. A former Fourth Turning forum user, who speaks to a Nigerian guy born in the 1980s, said that Nigeria is currently going through an Awakening and that guy is a member of an Artist generation.  Also, I have some observations from Uganda as well.

The story goes I was dating online a woman from Uganda (1988 cohort), who we met through the OkCupid website, for a few months. We got to know each other very well, also I learnt a lot about Ugandan society and even read local newspapers. Well, the impression I got Uganda is not a society in a Crisis currently. Rather the societal mood would be something more consistent with a society in an Awakening. Ugandan society is currently in an optimistic mood, although the established order is being challenged especially by the young people. This makes a lot of sense, given the events of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, which scream totally like a Crisis event to me.

An example; there are young people in Uganda who are part of the student climate action strike movement. However, they have not managed to mobilize huge groups of their peers in their activism, which I found surprising because here in Australia that has exactly happened. This woman’s job is a public health worker, specializing in providing clean water to communities (especially refugee camps) in the North of the country. She is also a single mother; whose son lives with her parents in another part of the country.
 
Her personality to me did not fit into either a Nomad or Civic archetype, rather come to think of it her personality is very consistent with that of an Artist, entering the midlife stage in a society in an Awakening. The contrasts between her and my former Peruvian (1982) girlfriend who is very much a Nomad "tough cookie" is very striking.
 
Indeed, she found my midlife Nomad personality intriguing, however yet baffling at the same time, especially that I have become very cautious in recent years.

The title says it all. Most if not all of the gig economy platforms, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, etc. use a five-star rating system, which in itself is fine. But the way they administer it is very flawed to say the least. In their minds anything below five stars might just as well be zero. I would think that a lot of people would by nature be reluctant to give five stars unless the provider went way over and beyond the call of the duty, such as rescuing the family dog from ongoing traffic.  If the rating system were administered the way it should be, anything 3.5 (70 percent) or higher would be passing unless a real serious offense was committed. Uber boots drivers from their platform if their rating falls below 4.6, which is still 92 percent, very commendable on any school test. I am wondering if any of you here have any ideas as to where this four stars equals zero mentality comes from. Might also be interesting to have a discussion on how these companies can say that there people are not employees if they indeed have the power to boot them from the platform. A lawsuit waiting to happen? And also as to if this type of arrangement represents the wave of the future.

I started reading this book about waves of technological development, and thought it would make a great subject for comparison with saecular theory or historical cycle theory in general. I'm only part way through it, and here is what I've learned so far, as presented on my blog.

http://stevebarrera.com/ruling-the-waves...breakdown/

Ruling the Waves: A Saecular Breakdown

I've posted before about "books from the Third Turning that I didn't get around to until the Fourth Turning." Waiting on the bookshelf for some time has been Ruling the Waves, by Debora L. Spar. This book is subtitled "a History of Business and Politics along the Technological Frontier" and in the introduction discusses the Internet a bit. It was published in 2001 (pre-9/11!), when the commercial Internet was young and Web 2.0 was just getting going. The book was hoping, then, to shed some light on what was to come in the development of cyberspace.

The author has a premise that when a ground-breaking new technology is introduced, it goes through four phases of development before becoming a commonplace part of everyday life on which we depend. First there is the invention phase, involving just a few people, and then the entrepreneur phase, where risk-takers develop the new technology commercially. Next is what she calls a period of "creative anarchy," when the most successful entrepreneurs battle for supremacy in the marketplace, and finally the rulemaking phase, where those who now dominate the technology application push for a fixed legal structure within which to operate.

She goes through different waves of technology, and I was interested to see how what she describes compares to Strauss & Howe saecular theory. The first wave Spar analyzes is the wave of advancements that led to the Age of Discovery - but this happens over a long period of time (centuries) so bringing saecular theory into it seems difficult. The next technological wave was that of the telegraph, and here it is easier to do the analysis.

I was half-expecting to find that the Gilded generation were major players in the drama of the development of the telegraph, since they are the Nomad generation of the Civil War Saeculum. After all, the Nomad generation of the current saeculum, my generation, has had a big part to play in the rise of Internet technology. But what I found is that the the main players in the story (looking at the U.S. part of it) were all from two generations - Compromise and Transcendental. The Gilded are nowhere to be found, probably because they were too young.

The narrative of the development of the telegraph did track pretty well with the turnings of the Civil War Saeculum, however. The invention period occurs at the end of the Transcendental Awakening, the 2nd turning. It involves two key players, Samuel Morse (b. 1791, Compromise Generation) of course, and Alfred Vail (b. 1807, Transcendental Generation), who worked closely with Morse. The idea of transmitting electricity over wires had been known about for decades; their genius was in combining the transmission with encoding, to create information. They managed to get some public backing through Congress to build a line, but the enterprise failed.

So then came the entrepreneurs to buy them out, and build a private enterprise instead. A key player was Amos Kendall (b. 1789, Compromise), a former postmaster general who left his position specifically for this purpose. He proved that it was possible to raise funds privately to build a telegraph line, and once the public caught on to what the technology made possible, the money started flowing into more and more companies building regional lines. Other big time entrepreneurs of this period included Henry O'Rielly (b. 1806, Transcendental) and Cyrus Field (b. 1819, Transcendental), who built the first trans-Atlantic line.

Without going into too much detail, the competition became fierce, as well as costly to the companies involved. In the period leading up to the Civil War, that is the 3rd turning in saecular terms, there was fighting over patent rights and access to markets, as well as confusion sowed by competing signal standards and encoding methods. This is the "creative anarchy" period in Spar's terminology.

The winner of this period of conflict turned out to be Western Union, thanks in large part to the efforts of Hiram Sibley (b. 1807, Transcendental), who led it in its transformation into a telegraph company, eventually establishing the first transcontinental line. With this consolidation came standardization - the rulemaking period. After the Civil War, in the 1st turning of the next saeculum, Western Union became a huge and powerful monopoly, enough to worry people into pressuring the government to regulate it, though not much was done in the Gilded Age.

I just find it fascinating that the so many of the key players in the development of the telegraph were from the Transcendental generation, the Prophet archetype of the Civil War Saeculum. They were the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs equivalents of their time, and of this technological wave.

It wasn't until the end of the new saeculum, with the founding of the FCC, that private communication networks became thoroughly regulated. That was during the era of radio, which is actually the next technology covered by Spar's book. So I will continue reading Ruling the Waves, and report in another post what I discover.

What would be differences between the archetypes in terms of Big 5 personality traits?
I thought about Agreeableness - a prophet would be low since he prefers his own vision, even if noone agrees with him. A civic would be high, since cooperation with others is more important for him. However, prophets are fascinated by the supernatural, and this is a trait of high agreeableness people.
Openness to Experience can also be relevant. A prophet is open to unusual and otherworldly experiences, while a civic prefers down to earth, well known things.
One lady on Personality Cafe prefers to define prophetic as high openness and low conscientiousness, and civic as low openness and high conscientiousness. Sounds good match.

What about nomads and artists?

Or could these be just cultural mindsets, which don't depend on personality?

It's taking forever to end. I hate this time period. Any advice on how to kill time until it ends?

Here are the Millennial/Z equivalents of X/Millennial birthyears. 

Note that these are just estimated guesses. I'm only going to use 1992-2007 to make it not too long of a read.

This website (this is only talking about what is discussed on here)
1992: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1971 
1993: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1972
1994: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1973
1995: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1974
1996: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1975
1997: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1976
1998: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1977
1999: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1978
2000: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1979
2001: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1980
2002: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1981
2003: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1982
2004: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1983
2005: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1984
2006: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1985
2007: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1986


Sources, articles, other websites (this is talking about sites like Pew, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, McCrindle, etc)
1992: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1976
1993: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1977
1994: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1978
1995: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1979
1996: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1980
1997: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1981
1998: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1982
1999: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1983
2000: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1984
2001: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1985
2002: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1986
2003: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1987
2004: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1988
2005: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1989
2006: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1990
2007: Probably the Y/Z equivalent of 1991

That's my take from Saturday's gubernatorial election in Louisiana.  The text comes courtesy of the award-winning (j/k) blog, Category 6 (the strength of "hurricane" sure to happen unless we cut out this divisiveness, post haste) on facebook.


In a rare non-Tuesday election, Democrat John Bel Edwards was re-elected governor of Louisiana - an outcome that is instructive on many levels.

First, it is living proof that national liberalism - the philosophy that Rose Montefusco identified her husband Tony in the short-lived 1975 NBC-TV series The Montefuscos as having - liberal on most things but conservative with the (Catholic) Church - is alive and well in America (Senators Joe Manchin, Bob Casey, and Doug Jones, Congressmen Daniel Lipinski and Henry Cuellar, and Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina, just to scratch the surface, are clearly national liberals).

The term "national liberal," by the way, was coined by Michael Lind, who used it in his two bestsellers in the '90s, The Next American Nation (1995) and Up From Conservatism: Why The Right Is Wrong For America (1996; in the latter book he quoted Marvin Harris, who correctly identified the 1958-68 baby bust in his 1987 work Why Nothing Works: The Anthropology Of Daily Life) to denote those who are progressive economically but conservative socially.

Second, it proved that holding an election on a weekend as opposed to the traditional Tuesday can greatly help the Democrat, since it will increase, or more accurately, not reduce, the turnout of Democrat-leaning constituencies - and that could have been the decisive factor in the Louisiana governor's race, which Edwards won by just 51-49 per cent. If the election were held on a Tuesday instead, Edwards very likely would have lost.

A Catholic, a Baby Buster (born in 1966) and a Desert Storm veteran who is staunchly pro-life, Edwards signed a bill banning abortion after 15 weeks of a pregnancy in May of 2018, and just 12 months later doubled down on this by signing an even more stringent "heartbeat law." But with an eye on his party's progressive wing, Edwards expressed support for banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation with only the most narrowly-drawn religious exemptions, raising the minimum wage, and equal pay for men and women.
Michael Lind posited that Catholic voters could position themselves as a moderate foil to both the low-church Protestant fundamentalists on the right and the "secular humanists" on the left.

The re-election of John Bel Edwards - who added the "Bel" to his professional name to avoid confusion with John Edwards, the former North Carolina Senator and unsuccessful Vice Presidential candidate whose career was destroyed by an adultery scandal, and who closely resembles an actor who subsequently appeared on a SunSetter awning commercial - is living proof that the death of national liberalism as a viable political philosophy has been greatly exaggerated.

This John Edwards, or lookalike thereof, won't be hawking awnings on TV anytime soon.

If you think "OK Boomer" was offensive, better leave this thread now.

   

There is actually a play up Off-Broadway that incorporates the Fourth Turning idea. It's pretty amazing to consider - I guess it's completely mainstream now. You can thank Steve Bannon for that.

Here's one review - it's only up for a couple more days so you'll have to see it by by this weekend. I actually went and saw it a couple of weeks ago and I will post my own review as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/theat...gQpFolEffs

Review: In ‘Heroes of the Fourth Turning,’ a Red-State Unicorn

An astonishing new play by Will Arbery risks a rare stage subject: Christian conservatism.


From left: Zoë Winters, Jeb Kreager and Julia McDermott reuniting at a conservative college in “Heroes of the Fourth Turning.”Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

By Jesse Green

• Oct. 7, 2019