It is requisite to choose the most excellent life; for custom will make it pleasant. - Pythagorean saying
  
It is better to suffer, than to do wrong. - Pythagorean saying

The best and greatest winning is a true friend; and the greatest loss is the loss of time. - Pythagorean saying
 
The virtuous man is driven by responsibility, the non-virtuous man is driven by profit.  - Confucius
 
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useless. - Seneca
 
Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence. - William Blake
 
There are no sons of God, but there are mature and thus rational and perfect sons of the Cosmos. There is no Christ, but there is a brilliant man and a greater teacher of mankind.  - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
 
Nothing exists, save atoms and their combinations. There is no atom, which wouldn't periodically take part in life.  - Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
 
This is the goal of all living, that the Cosmos may be known, and admired, and that it may be crowned with further beauties. Nowhere and at no time, so far as we can tell, at least within our own galaxy, has the adventure reached further than in ourselves. And in us, what has been achieved is but a minute beginning. But it is a real beginning. - Olaf Stapledon
 
In you, humanity is precarious; and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you  - Olaf Stapledon
 
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. - Carl Sagan
 
Progress should not bow to fear, but should proceed with eyes wide open. - Max More

Quote:The Baby Boomers ruined America. That sounds like a hyperbolic claim, but it’s one way to state what I found as I tried to solve a riddle. American society is going through a strange set of shifts: Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history: The longest such period ended in the Civil War. So what’s to blame for this institutional aging?

One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018. The retiree share of the population is booming, while birth rates are plummeting. When a society gets older, its politics change. Older voters have different interests than younger voters: Cuts to retiree-focused benefits are scarier, while long-term problems such as excessive student debt, climate change, and low birth rates are more easily ignored.

But it’s not just aging. In a variety of different areas, the Baby Boom generation created, advanced, or preserved policies that made American institutions less dynamic. In a recent report for the American Enterprise Institute, I looked at issues including housing, work rules, higher education, law enforcement, and public budgeting, and found a consistent pattern: The political ascendancy of the Boomers brought with it tightening control and stricter regulation, making it harder to succeed in America. This lack of dynamism largely hasn’t hurt Boomers, but the mistakes of the past are fast becoming a crisis for younger Americans.

Quote: Meanwhile, even as higher education gets more expensive, the actual economic returns to a university degree are about flat. People who are more educated make more money than people with less education, but overall, most educational groups are just treading water. The social norm requiring degrees for virtually any middle-class job is one largely invented by Boomers and their parents, and enforced by those generations.

Based on looking at generation definitions online and studying about historical events that took place, I'd surmise the idea that saeculums (set of four generations) aren’t really ~85 years but most likely around 72 years. Not to mention that the average lifespan worldwide is around 72 years or very close to it (a year or so give or take).

Finding generation equivalents based on birthyears is hard. The only ones that are probably known is GI/Silent compared to Millennials/Z and probably Boomer/X compared to Millennials/Z, making each “saeculum” 72 years instead of around ~85 years and “half-saeculum” 36 years instead of ~42.5. Based on various sources, I would say that it would be safe enough to conclude that these are the GI, Boomer, and Millennial equivalents of each other:
 

All/almost all sources lump them as GI/Boomers/Millennials:

1918 -> 1954 -> 1990 (Horses)

1919 -> 1955 -> 1991 (Goats)

1992 -> 1956 -> 1920 (Monkeys)

1993 -> 1957 -> 1921 (Roosters)


Some sources lump them as GI/Boomers/Millennials, and they usually/traditionally are:

1994 -> 1958 -> 1922 (Dogs)

1995 -> 1959 -> 1923 (Boars)

1996 -> 1960 -> 1924 (Mice)


Some sources lump them as GI/Boomers/Millennials, but they usually/traditionally are not:

1997 -> 1961 -> 1925 (Oxen)

1998 -> 1962 -> 1926 (Tigers)

1999 -> 1963 -> 1927 (Rabbits)


All/almost all sources don’t lump them as GI/Boomers/Millennials

2000 -> 1964 -> 1928 (Dragons)

2001 -> 1965 -> 1929 (Snakes)

2002 -> 1966 -> 1930 (Horses)

2003 -> 1967 -> 1931 (Goats)


If you look at it in a big picture, it does make a little bit of sense. It also seems to coincide with the Chinese Zodiac, as shown above.

I would also argue that the ages of each equivalent were similar to each other when certain events took place (using 1924, 1960, and 1996 - the Mice years - as an example):

1924 borns were 2/3 when the Bath School disaster (arguably the GI Gen's Columbine or Y2K) took place, 4/5 when Black Tuesday took place, 14/15 during the start of WWII, and 20/21 when WWII ended.

1960 borns were 2/3 when JFK was assassinated, 4/5 when the first US troops arrived in Vietnam as well as when Immigration Act of 1965 was passed, 14/15 when the Vietnam War ended, and 20/21 when Reagan was inaugurated along with the start of the AIDS crisis.

1996 borns were 3 when Y2K took place, 4/5 when 9/11 happened and the War on Terror commenced, 14/15 when Occupy Wall Street took place, and 20/21 when Trump was inaugurated along with the rise of the #MeToo movement.

A breakdown of each generation starting with the year 1802:

Civil War Saeculum (72 years)

1802-1819: Transcendental Generation

1820-1837: Gilded Generation

1838-1855: Bleeding Generation (grew up during Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War)

1856-1873: Progressive Gen (the main people involved in the rise of progressivism in the early 20th century – Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, Jane Addams, and Al Smith for example – were all born sometime during this 18-year span)


Great Power Saeculum (72 years)

1874-1891: Idealists

1892-1909: Automobile Generation (grew up during the rise of the automobile)

1910-1927: GI Generation (anyone 18 and older during WWII but either are unlikely to or can't remember Franz Ferdinand's assassination)

1928-1945: Silent Generation (anyone under 18 during WWII)


Millennial Saeculum (72 years)

1946-1963: Baby Boomers (born after WWII but before JFK's assassination)

1964-1981: Gen X (anyone that wasn’t 18 yet during the MTV launch but already 18 by the time Y2K happened)

1982-1999: Millennials (anyone under 18 when Y2K took place)

2000-2017: Homelanders (anyone born after Y2K but already adults when the Apophis asteroid, probably their - along with the Neo-Prophets' - equivalent of Y2K, will come)


Post-Millennial Saeculum (72 years)

2018-2035: Neo-Prophets (any minor when the Apophis incident may happen)

2036-2053: Unnamed nomad gen

2054-2071: Unnamed hero gen

2072-2089: Unnamed artist gen


Please let me know what you think about this idea.

In New York state and Washington DC there are active movements underway to decriminalize sex work, the more politically correct term for prostitution. A similar movement in San Francisco proved unsuccessful. As these issues are the realm of the individual states and localities and not the federal government, it is amazing that currently the act is illegal in 49 states and legal in only parts of the 50th(Nevada).

Perhaps ironically discussions of this increased after the FOSTA/SESTA acts were passed last year. Sadly many honest service providers ended up being lumped together with the sick human traffickers, and a result has been a bona fide witch hunt.  And because of its illegality providers tend to be scared to report abuse and mistreatment. This could be rectified through decriminalization efforts. Ironically some of the biggest opponents of decrim are service providers themselves because then they would have to start paying taxes on it.

If it were legal in more of the nation, would sex work become more affordable to the masses? Currently the average rate for a provider is between $300 and $500 per hour in most places. Your thoughts here.

California’s proposed car ban is the perfect mix of hubris and silliness

https://www.dailybreeze.com/2018/01/13/c...silliness/

Trump declares emergency to expedite arms sales to Saudi Arabia and UAE

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/24/polit...index.html

U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey offers death-penalty bill for cop killers

https://www.timesonline.com/news/2019051...op-killers

My blog post on the Homeland generation, in case you are not on the FB group and missed it. 

Original link: http://stevebarrera.com/growing-up-in-crisis-america/

GROWING UP IN CRISIS AMERICA

 June 4, 2019  Steve Comments 4 Comments

When one reads in online media about the generations that are alive today, it is most typically a story contrasting the Baby Boomers with the up and coming Millennials. Sometimes my generation, Generation X, gets a mention. In other blog posts, I have referred to the Silent Generation. You may even have read about the post-Millennial Generation Z, usually said to have been born starting some time in the late 1990s.

Clearly some generation must follow the Millennials, but I have my doubts about the Gen-Z concept. In the generational theory which I study, the next generation, still in childhood, is called the Homeland generation. This name was coined early in the century, around the time that the Department of Homeland Security was instituted in response to 9/11. The name evokes the idea of a country entering protective mode, and of a generation that is sequestered within it.


With the first birth year of the Homeland generation being 2005, the oldest of their members are just turning 14. What can we say about this child generation and their experience growing up in an America in crisis?

The Homeland generation has clearly been the beneficiary of the restoration of the American family that began when Millennials started being born in the 1980s. The era of rising protection of children has reached its apex; children are now completely ensconced within the family unit. You can see it online in social media with the endless stream of posts of happy families headed by Gen-X parents – and, increasingly, by Millennial parents.

Protective child nurturing has reached the point that there is are hints of concern that overprotection has gone too far. But despite memes extolling the free-wheeling child rearing of days past, there is little sign of the protection relenting. Instead, in a shift away from the way that Millennials were raised, Homelanders are being taught not so much that they are special and unique, as that they must learn to fit in and to get along with others. It’s a trend propelled by concern for the perceived negative consequences of being a social misfit in a time of rising suicide rates and mass shootings, or of standing out in an era of social media scrutiny.

Homelanders, in fact, are the first generation to have their entire lives documented on social media. It starts when they are still in the womb, with sonograms posted by excited expecting couples. Then comes a flurry of adorable toddler posts, capturing every precious moment. Once they hit school age, there is a mandatory start of the school year portrait for every grade from kindergarten on. My favorite indicator on social media of the centrality of family in American life, and the Homelander generation’s comfortable place within it, is the themed costume group photos that come out every Halloween.

It seems to me like Homelanders are always on exhibit. If not as the trophies of proud parents and grandparents, there are two prevalent ways in which Homelanders are put on display. One is the viral video featuring a toddler in some moment of discovery or precious and adorable behavior. Follow this link for a great example.

The other prevalent way that Homelanders are put on display is in the role of victims, as object lessons about the failures of our society. Movies like The Florida Project and Beasts of the Southern Wild portray young children in trying circumstances, on the economic fringes American life. Another example, What Maisie Knew, warns of the follies of the affluent and the damage that divorce and neglect do to a child.


The Homelanders who are truly on the fringes of American life are the undocumented migrants – their status raises doubts that they even belong to the homeland at all. The political left has made ample use of images of their tribulations to protest immigration policy. One photo of a crying toddler being processed by immigration authorities has become an iconic representation of these suffering innocents, caught on the edges of a fragmented society that is, with difficulty, trying to group itself back together.

In conclusion, the Homelander experience is reflective of the needs and priorities of their Gen-X and Millennial parents – to restore family stability, and to provide a controlled and safe environment for child nurture within a society that feels out of control and unsafe. With these goals in mind, children are being taught that rather than stand out, they should fit in. Rather than express emotions, they should manage emotions.

This is the opposite of how Generation X was raised half a century ago, at a time when family stability was not a priority, and parents sought to provide a free environment within a society that felt overly controlled and limiting. The reversal is a response by Gen-X, conscious of the failings their generation has faced as a consequence of lax parenting. Today’s parents will surely make there own mistakes, as all parents do, taking on what is the most difficult of all human endeavors. They will take things too far, and so set up the course corrections that will lead to another shift in how children are raised, for a new generation yet to be born.

To end this post on a positive note, here is a wonderful example of an adorable young Homelander viral video. These kids are our future.

Because of my Aspergers I can't fully relate to any archetype. How does Autism affect generational theory?

Amash at town hall: 'My job is to protect the Constitution'

https://www.chron.com/news/article/Amash...902223.php