Apparently Trump has more flunkies (a nasty way of looking at it, but the GOP is an authoritarian cadre party; cadre parties have flunkies and not independent actors) in the Senate, but he has lost the House. A bunch of states have ditched Republican governors from the Tea Party era.

Effects on the presidential election: Republicans will have no help from Democratic Governors in some states that Trump won in 2016. Trump will have to win fair and square, and if his approval levels result in poor electoral numbers, he will not win.

Only eleven Democrats will be up for re-election in 2020 in the Senate, and only two will be in a state that Donald Trump won in 2016. Doug Jones, the incumbent Senator from Alabama, won under freakish circumstances unlikely to be repeated. The other incumbent Senator running for re-election in a state that Trump won in 2016 will be Gary Peters in Michigan -- and he won against the 2014 Republican wave, which says more about Michigan. On the other side, Susan Collins (R, Maine) has probably doomed her Senate career in a state that looks hostile to Trump, and Corey Gardner (R, Colorado) is in a state hostile to Trump after having barely won in a wave year. Also, Arizona has an appointed Senator... appointed incumbents tend to have trouble.

There will be relatively few gubernatorial races -- eleven.

The Presidential election will be all up to Donald Trump. Will he moderate? Will he compromise? I doubt it. We know his personality, and basic personalities  rarely change at his age except as the result of dementia. I have never seen dementia make any person more pleasant to be around.

Hi, I propose following theory for this current Fourth Turning we're in:

Regeneracy began almost immediately with TARP and stimulus bills. There were a number of programs from the FED and federal government to 1. arrest the credit crisis and 2. jump-start the faltering economy. We now know this was a lot faster and more successful than post 1929. Instead of a 3 year free-fall before FDR did "something" in the Great Depression, we arrested the fall in asset prices and GDP within about a year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average made new highs 5 years after the peak compared to 25 years before. UE fell to new lows within 8 years. Thus, economy repaired quickly.

However, politically the divisions and value wars continued unabated. Progressives vs. conservatives and also a new and growing group of people who are the losers from the Great De-industrialization in America. The latter forming a new coalition with the conservatives, creating the New Deal Coalition of our current Fourth Turning. We may call it the New Deplorables Coalition. They have been uniting behind President Trump. He is the Grey Champion leading us through the Fourth Turning. 

It seems to me that the upcoming Midterm elections actually are the climactic battle between the two value regimes in America. After this we have a quick path to the resolution (a large variety of domestic changes and international trade pacts, re-establishing the industrial core of our economy).

Can anyone guess the generations of the characters in the following films?

Lady Bird (2017)

Mid90s (2018)

Dazed and Confused (1993)

American Graffiti (1973)

It (2017)

I am 18. I belong to the massacre generation.

Quote:By Julia Savoca Gibson
Julia Savoca Gibson is a freshman at the College of William & Mary who plans to study history, film and the media. She is from Richmond.

November 1
It was last Saturday when it hit me that my entire life has been framed by violence.

I don’t remember being born on Jan. 28, 2000, and I don’t remember being a year and a half old when 9/11 happened. I don’t remember the panic of my mother as she stepped outside our house in Washington and smelled the smoke of the burning Pentagon. I don’t remember her knowing I would grow up in a changed world.

But I remember other things. I remember being 7 years old and seeing adults who were sad, angry, shocked after something terrible happened at Virginia Tech. I remember not knowing why. I remember the lockdown drills at my elementary school, the helpful signs in every classroom telling us where to hide in case of a “Code Blue,” which meant active shooter. (I remember we were told that having all the kids in one corner, a misguided protocol no longer followed, was the best means of protection.)

I remember being in seventh grade, and I remember my teacher looking up from her computer, pale, and running out of the room without a word during a quiz. I remember her walking back in, tears streaking her face, as she told us there had been a shooting in Newtown, Conn., where her grandchildren lived. I remember her telling us they were all right, and I remember thinking of my little brother in his second-grade classroom and feeling my stomach churn.

I remember walking into my high school the day after the Orlando nightclub shooting and seeing one of my gay friends sitting limply in a chair, eyes hollow. I remember sobbing. Often, I remember sobbing. I remember friends’ tears a year later, after the shooting in Las Vegas, and I remember feeling angry that I wasn’t crying. I remember Parkland the most clearly. I remember the silence. No one talked about it the morning after. No teachers mentioned it. I remember bringing it up at lunch but receiving only passing responses. I remember talking to my friend Max about how odd it was that no one said anything. I remember him gathering our friends to organize a walkout. I remember walking out, and I remember the silence of the crowd of students standing outside in the March cold. I remember the crackle of the megaphone we used as we read one name of one victim every minute. I remember those 17 minutes. I remember marching, once, then twice, and again and again.

I remember going with two friends last Friday to a Shabbat service in the spare room of a local Methodist church, sponsored by my college’s Jewish organization Hillel. I remember my friend Lucy leading the prayers, with her singing and playing guitar, and I remember my valiant attempts to sing along using the transliterations below the Hebrew in the books they’d handed out. I remember getting kosher dinner with them afterward as they explained to me how and why kosher food was a thing. I remember them describing the different kinds of Judaism they all came from.

I remember waking up on Saturday morning and seeing the news on my phone. I remember the sadness, shock, anger. I remember the haunting thought that the shooter might have gone to our service instead, or could go to the next one. I remember a stream of dripping wax burning my finger at the vigil I attended. I remember the look in my Jewish friends’ eyes.

And it was then that I remembered everything at once. I remembered all the violence looming around me, and my friends, and my entire generation. I remembered that for anyone born near the year 2000, this is all we’ve ever known.

I remember filling out my absentee ballot a few weeks ago. I remember voting, hoping that weeks, years, decades from now I’d be able to remember that we changed.

While at a quiet time at work today reading through company policies and procedures I have been thinking about the situation in Western Europe. I am predicting a messy civil war like that in Syria or the former Yugoslavia in the 1990's for whole of Western Europe. It could very well envelop the whole continent.

If there is an economic meltdown which I am predicting, the tensions between the Far-Right and Islamist's in Europe are going to led to spiral of violence, which will end up in a civil war(s). Both sides believe they are in a deadly civilizational struggle.

The Spanish Civil War was the dress rehearsal for World War II. Then the Civil War in Syria will be the dress rehearsal for this conflict. Alt-right fighters will be coming in from Americas and Australasia. Islamist fighters coming from the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

If Britain faces a no-deal Brexit it will be the first place this will occur. If a no-deal Brexit does not occur, then France will be most likely place it will start. In the no-deal Brexit scenario the British police force will be totally overwhelmed by the violence and the military will be forced to intervene. I don't think many in the military are going to obey the commands to shoot at the far-right forces, In fact some of them are going to join them. The violence spiraling further would depend on how the military is going to react.

As the conflict escalates expect people to choose sides, Moderate Muslims will be likely forced to pick the side of the Islamists. Everybody else will be forced to pick the side of the far-right. There is going to be one massive backlash against the Socialists and Liberals who will be seen as helping to support the other side. The LGBTQ+ community along with the Feminist activists could be subject to a backlash as well.

Depending on what happens in North America and Australasia, the alt-right will be cracked down on very hard to prevent such a conflict starting in these countries. The Muslim community I am not sure at this stage, it depends how this conflict is seen by authorities and popular opinion.

In the end the far-right will win the conflict, however the cost is going to be pretty heavy. If a civil war on the scale that of Yugoslavia happened on the European continent, the death toll would be between 3-6 million to 80-170 million displaced. Military intervention by Russia and Turkey will definitely happen as well, which will make that toll even probably even higher.

Plus liberal democracy throughout much of Europe will be extinct throughout most of it, Replaced by authoritarian regimes dependent on the military for support. For how long I don't know. Perhaps a few years before another revolution led by the majority of Millennial's who never supported the far-right or maybe not until the next Awakening.

The more I think about this the more frightening it gets, given that the Middle East has just entered a Fourth Turning. Because Turkey (along with maybe the states of the Maghreb) will military intervene in such a civil war, although such a war(s) would be rather short because the various military along with police forces of the European nations will ally with the far-right against the Islamists. Then various neofascist European states could form themselves into a neo-fascist European superstate or an alliance and then decide to re-conqueror the Middle East for Christendom. While in Turkey Edrogan could declare himself as the Caliph or leader of the faithful in 2023 or 100 years after the abolition of the Ottoman Caliph. Such a war with its theater in the Middle East and North Africa could be truly apocalyptic with nuclear weapons being used.

(10-26-2018, 01:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-26-2018, 02:47 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

pbrower2a Wrote:What is spirit, anyway?

For Olaf Stapledon, spirit was the will for intelligence, kindness and creativity. He believed this is the essence of human personality, or any other intelligent being, distinguishing us from animals. I agree with him here.

When he wrote about the emotional source of Nazism not being simply evil, he probably had in mind the desire for loyalty to something higher than the individual. A Christian directs it towards God, an environmentalist toward nature, a Nazi towards the mystical "soul of the race". Stapledon certainly condemned the racist actions of the Nazis.

I don't know where brower's post is that asks this, but this is a question for a philosophical thread of some sort. As I see it, spirit is synonymous with consciousness, which cannot be accounted for with mechanistic or physicalist theories, and is called the "hard problem" because physicalist scientists try to solve it in their terms, which cannot be done. As I see it too, it is an ethical or moral issue. Although it has been well pointed out to me by Dr. The Rani that physical things are valuable, when we respect living beings as spirits, including humans and all possible higher beings beyond humans as well, then we treat them better than if we consider them as physical objects without sentience. That of course does not extent to "transhumans" who have become machines.

The machine age and the industrial age (same thing, virtually) were built on the model of mechanical cause and effect physicalism. We have transformed the world into our own mechanistic model of reality. That has been useful to us, but it is idolatry to conceive the world in the image of our own machine model. Machines cannot substitute for conscious organic beings, and real progress is to extend our natural human potential through expanded consciousness. The endless progress of machines has its own momentum now, and its impact may not be positive unless subordinated to real life.

The consciousness revolution of the 2T, which reminded us of these facts about consciousness and machines quite clearly, has been put on the back burner in the 4T by younger generations who are overly enamoured with recent high tech progress, and who live in virtual realities. This trend has accelerated just in these 4T years since 2008 with the proliferation of smart phones and other mobile tech. It would be good to take stock of this trend at halftime.

From my blog: http://stevebarrera.com/generation-x-at-...ing-point/

Generation X at the Turning Point

Let’s take that list of what to expect of the living generations in the current social era – the Crisis Era in Strauss & Howe terms – and look at the expectations for my generation, Generation X. My generation is in mid-life now, between the ages of 36 and 57, in the phase of life where we will reach the peak of our career achievement and financial earnings. Having already sorted ourselves into winners and losers in the Unraveling Era, and then weathered the Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession, for many us this peak won’t amount to much. Many of us will be lucky if we can retire with even a modicum of comfort.

A tiny minority of us have become the wildly successful and wealthy techno-utopians who have reformatted the economy. The billionaires at the very top of the heap even have their own space programs. But most of us are just muddling along, without a grand plan, as we have all of our lives. Despite economic recovery, we are anxious about what disruptions will come in the remaining few decades that we will be able to earn a living. We haven’t all been materially ruined – yet – but the Crisis Era is not over, and our President has decided to start a Trade War (insert eye roll emoji here).

It is plain that Generation X is ambivalent about the emerging new order. On social media we confront the current political crisis with posts that range in tenor from mocking to incredulous to anguished. It is unclear where we are headed, so ambivalence is perhaps inevitable. What is clear is that the old Culture Wars of the previous era have come to a head – and while some of us have picked our faction, many of us remain on the sidelines.

Gen X may be overshadowed by older generations, which have retained power at the highest echelons of government. For the most part we are ignored in the media, obsessed as it is with the generation that came after us. But we’ve quietly taken over managerial leadership positions in both the private and public sectors, where we can make a difference behind the scenes. Our generation’s archetype is known for its pragmatism and resolve in solving the issues of the Crisis Era, and with the unfolding future comes our chance to live up to the expectation.

I don't know if threads like this are allowed, but this was something I have been thinking about for a while.

Here are the ones I can think of for each generation starting with the Silents:

Silent Generation:

Pol Pot (b. 1925)
James Earl Ray (b. 1928)
James "Whitey" Bulger (b. 1929)
Jim Jones (b. 1931)
Louis Farrakhan (b. 1933)
Dianne Feinstein (b. 1933)
William Luther Pierce (b. 1933)
Charles Manson (b. 1934)
Saddam Hussein (b. 1937)
Maxine Waters (b. 1938)
David Lane (b. 1938)
John Wayne Gacy (b. 1942)

Baby Boomer:

Ted Bundy (b. 1946)
Hillary Clinton (b. 1947)
Edmund Kemper (b. 1948)
David Duke (b. 1950)
James Hodgkinson (b. 1950)
Harvey Weinstein (b. 1952)
Stephen Paddock (b. 1953)
Mark David Chapman (b. 1955)
John Bachtell (b. 1956)
Osama Bin Laden (b. 1957)
Jeffrey Dahmer (b. 1960)
Yolanda Saldivar (b. 1960)

Generation X:

Malik Zulu Shabbaz (b. 1966)
Timothy McVeigh (b. 1968)
Mohammed Atta (b. 1968)
Cory Booker (b. 1969)
Paul Nehlen (b. 1969)
Quannel X (b. 1970)
Matthew Hale (b. 1971)
Wade Michael Page (b. 1971)
Kristian "Varg" Vikernes (b. 1973)
Jared Fogle (b. 1977)
Rachel Dolezal (b. 1977)
Richard Spencer (b. 1978)
Linda Sarsour (b. 1980)
Mark Collett (b. 1980)

Millennial:

Eric Harris (b. 1981)
Dylan Klebold (b. 1981)
Anita Sarkeesian (b. 1983)
Jason Kessler (b. 1983)
Seung Hui-Cho (b. 1984)
Nathan Damigo (b. 1986)
Omar Mateen (b. 1986)
Colin Kaepernick (b. 1987)
Jared Lee Loughner (b. 1988)
Travis Reinking (b. 1989)
Christopher Harper Mercer (b. 1989)
Aaron Hernandez (b. 1989)
Inna Shevchenko (b. 1990)
Devin Patrick Kelly (b. 1991)
Matthew Heimbach (b. 1991)
Elliot Rodger (b. 1991)
Adam Lanza (b. 1992)
Dylann Roof (b. 1994)
TJ Lane (b. 1994)
Joshua Ryne Goldberg (b. 1995)

Generation Z:

James Alex Fields (b. 1997)
XXXTentacion (b. 1998)
Nikolas Cruz (b. 1998)
Thomas Rousseau (b. 1998)
Trippie Redd (b. 1999)
Anissa Weier (b. 2001)
Morgan Geyser (b. 2002)
Danielle Bregoli (b. 2003)
Kaia James (b. 2006)

Tim Egan lives in Washington State and has been writing for the NY Times for decades.  Normally, he writes East Coast opinion with a West Coast spin.  Today, he took on his Boomers and Millennials to task, asking why Boomers are so backward and the Millennials so lame.  It was so in step with what we've been writing, it could have been posted on this forum.

I have figured out what the main battle of this Fourth Turning, it is Liberal Democracy vs the Alt-Right/Neo-Nationalist (which I see as a spectrum) movement. For a while I was on the fringes of the alt-right scene, I got into because of the my involvement in the counter-jihad movement and in recent years it has been entering this territory. I have recently figured out how incredibly insidious this ideology is and they are duping a lot of people, usually gradually.  


I don't believe law enforcement authorities (in general) know how bad it has gotten, because they only notice when the people have reached the alt-right stage, not the neo-nationalist/alt-lite stage. For example; Milo Yiannopoulos or Jordan Peterson* and Richard Spencer are in the same movement, just on different points of the spectrum. Essentially people start on the road to the alt-right when they get 'red-pilled' or starting believing in conspiracy theories say like that of cultural Marxism. I think writing book on this whole movement (if good guys win) will become my life work, so that future generations of people can avoid same fate.



The neo-nationalist parties which are major political players now aren’t too extreme. Although it is alarming that it has entered the American Right (which is 30% odd percentage of the American public that are Trump supporters). In Australia on the other-hand they are still pretty fringe, although starting to enter into a few minor parties.

However, the second global financial crisis will come and a lack of global effort to combat it will plunge the world into an massive economic downturn like the Great Depression. Then those countries with neo-nationalist parties in power will get more extreme or more extreme alt-right parties will come to power. 

The countries of Western Europe have been pretty good at identifying and containing alt-right. However the European Union is weak and neo-nationalist parties are governments in some Eastern European countries. Such parties as the Austria Freedom Party and Italy's Lega Nord are in government in those countries. Millennial students on university campuses have been good at trying to prevent speakers they deem as having 'alt-lite' or 'alt-right' ideas.
 
Therefore, the first Turning Purge which the one in the last first turning was McCarthyism can go two ways depending on which side wins. 

If Liberal Democracy wins, anybody who part of the Neo-Nationalist/Alt-Right or even suspected of Neo-Nationalist/Alt-Right leanings. Nationalism and Populism are going to become words akin to Fascism and Nazism. I applaud Twitter and Facebook for starting to purge people with this subversion elements. Donald Trump is complaining that it unfairly targets Conservatives.
 
If the Neo-Nationalist/Alt-Right wins, little doubt authoritarian regimes would emerge that would be at best 'illiberal democracies' at worst downright totalitarian. 

They will purge what they consider their enemies which will be at the very least.
Anybody in the media and in public life they deem as "Leftists" or "Communists".
Feminist and LBGTQ activists.
Academics and teachers which they see as peddling "Cultural Marxism".
Transgender and even Homosexual people will be regarded as suffering from a mental illness and be sent to psychiatric hospitals to be retreated.
 
Depending on the regime in power:
Muslims (in some areas, where they are especially big enemies of whatever alt-right regime is in power)
Jews
Other ethnic groups deemed undesirable.
 
These regimes death toll won’t be on the scale of Nazism or Communism, still a lot of people killed.
Ultimately the alt-right want to take society back to the 1950's (well a fantasy version). Expect the education system to be purged of anything remotely resembling “cultural Marxism” and "post-modernism".