Michael Lewis paints a bleak picture of our prospects under continued domination of the "government is the problem" meme. See video here:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/michae...nder-trump

Bestselling author Michael Lewis says the idea that civil servants are “lazy or stupid or dead weight on the society is...the most sinister idea alive in this country right now." In his new book, “The Fifth Risk,” Lewis examines how the Trump administration has been staffing the federal government, and its “ignorance of the mission.” Lewis sits down with William Brangham for a conversation.

• Judy Woodruff:
  As we have been reporting, addressing enormous global challenges like climate change require more than just individual action. They require the leadership of active, engaged governments.
  In his new book, "The Fifth Risk," bestselling author Michael Lewis reports on the Trump administration and its approach to staffing the federal government.
  William is back with the latest installment of our "NewsHour" Bookshelf.
  He began by asking Michael Lewis to explain the book's title.
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  It's the risk you're not imagining. It's the thing you're not thinking about when you're worried about whatever you're worried about.
  And the beginning of the story is really seeing the federal government as a portfolio of risks that are being managed. Most of — most of them, we aren't even thinking about, things like the risk that some nuclear bomb is going to go off when it shouldn't go off, managed out of the Department Energy, or that we won't have an accurate picture of the society, managed out of the Department of Commerce.
  It collects all the statistics about the society. I mean, you move across the government, it's breathtaking how many mission-critical things there are, and how it's being done in spite of this vague hostility the society has to its own government.
  
  
• William Brangham:
  Your reporting really covers the period after Trump is clearly going to be the president and the transition that goes on when one administration switches to the next.
  How would you characterize, broadly speaking, how that transition happened and what occurred?
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  So, there's what's supposed to happen, and there's what happened.
  What is supposed to happen is that the outgoing administration spends nine months and a thousand people's time building briefing books across the administration. So, the Obama administration did this. And the idea was, the day after the election, whoever won would send hundreds of people into the government to get the briefings.
  And the Trump administration didn't show up. They never bothered to learn what these agencies are doing.
  
  
• William Brangham:
  The book has so many fascinating vignettes of people who work within these different federal agencies.
  And I wonder if there's one story that stands out to you that's emblematic of this larger issue that you're talking about.
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  Well, the larger issue of the ignorance — the problem of ignorance of the mission, and, as a result, putting the wrong person in.
  I mean, there are hundreds of examples, but I mean, I think one that is easily described is, inside the Department of Agriculture, there is a chief scientist. And this person is responsible for distributing $3 billion in research grants every year.
  Now, this is going to agricultural research, most of it, one way or another, now associated with climate change. it's how we're going to — how we're going to continue to grow food and graze sheep and milk cows in different — in a different climate. And it's a serious issue. It's the planning for the — the food supply of 50 years from now.
  The person who was doing that was a very distinguished research scientist in agriculture named Cathie Woteki. She's a world-class authority on the subject of agricultural science.
  Trump replaced her with a right-wing talk show radio host from Iowa who happened to have supported him in the election who had no science background at all.
  That kind of thing, taking people who really know something, and replacing them with people who are just like loyalists, who have absolutely no idea what the mission is, is a theme that runs right through the administration.
  
  
• William Brangham:
  Does the mission suffer? I mean, I think obviously, you could look at that kind of a transition and say, that seems a drastic shift in priority.
  But these bureaucracies largely have a career staff that are there largely permanently. I mean, doesn't — doesn't that staff keep the mission going for the most part?
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  So of the top 6,000 career civil servants in the federal work force, 20 percent of them quit or were fired the first year of the Trump administration.
  So, already, there's a — you can see a gutting of the civil service. And the idea that these people are lazy or stupid or dead weight on the society is — I think it's the most sinister idea alive in this country right now. I really do.
  And I think — and it's because they are — they're very mission-driven people. They're very knowledgeable people. What they aren't is money people. And…
  
  
• William Brangham:
  Meaning they're not in money for themselves.
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  Yes, that's right. You don't take these jobs to be famous — rich and famous. You take these jobs because you really care about the thing.
  And they're the government. And without those people, this place collapses.
  
  
• William Brangham:
  This place being this society.
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  The society.
  It's not like the government is a tool that we might use to address the biggest problems we have. It's the only tool for most of the biggest problem. You're going to deal with climate change, that's going to be from the government.
  If you deal — anything having to do with science and technology, all the basic research, the very basic research is done with government — through the government, because if it's not going to pay out in the next 10 to 15 years, industry doesn't want to have anything to do with it.
  The future is driven by what the government does. And it has been in this country forever. I mean, you don't get the Internet without the government. You don't get the iPhone without the government. You don't get GPS without the government.
  We are drastically cheating the future when we beat the government, the way we treat it. It's not just Trump. I mean, we have been doing this here for several decades, this — playing with the idea that the government's the problem, not the solution. He is just the ultimate expression of the problem.
  And I think if it's like there is this exquisitely important machine that we have allowed, through our own neglect, to accumulate rust over the decades. And now he's come in with a sledgehammer. And, yes, we're going to play a real price if we don't pay attention.
  
• William Brangham:
  In the last third of the book, you really talk about the centrality of government data and how important that is.
  And there's a few passages where you list a lot of ways in which the Trump administration has been scrubbing its Web sites of data. The USDA was removing reports of farm animals being abused, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau removing reports of financial abuse, FEMA removing data about electricity and water in Puerto Rico after the hurricane.
  What is behind that?
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  All the climate change data across the…
  
  
• William Brangham:
  Right, at the Department of Energy.
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  There is a threat, anyway, to the weather data being accessible.
  It is not ideological. It's been driven by narrow financial interests. Someone…
  
  
• William Brangham:
  Financial interests?
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  Someone has a business that is going to be more profitable if this information is not available.
  And so it's ranchers who want to be able to abuse animals, or it's a — it's a weather company that doesn't want the weather data publicly accessible, because they want to be able to sell it to people.
  
  
• William Brangham:
  After talking with all of these different officials working within these crucial agencies, what is the thing that scares you the most? What keeps you up?
  
  
• Michael Lewis:
  It's a broad thing. And the broad thing is the fantastic myopia of this moment.
  We're going to look back and say there were many — unless we drastically shift course — look back and say there were many moments where we cheated the future by the way we behaved in the present.
  And I think that's — that's been true for a while, but I think it's really true right now.
  
  
• William Brangham:
  The book is "The Fifth Risk."
  Michael Lewis, thank you so much.
  

A recent post from my blog.

THE MILLENNIAL COUNTER ARGUMENT

 September 25, 2018  Steve Comments 0 Comment

Since the streaming video era began, a new kind of content from the Millennial generation has become prevalent. It consists of episodes of commentary that dissects cultural phenomena, common sense knowledge or received history to get at hidden or unrepresented truth.

A famous example is Adam Ruins Everything, which began as a series on the CollegeHumor web site and then became a television show on truTV. An example you may have seen on Facebook is Racist History. Other examples abound on YouTube, in the form of named channels such as Counter Arguments, CaptainDisillusion, Knowing Better, Loose Canon by Lindsay Ellis (though I think she might have dropped that name), and Hilarious Helmet History from the web site Cracked (which itself fits this description).

With Spock-like logic and more than a little snark, the Millennial creatives who produce this content challenge assumptions and rewrite the narrative of conventional wisdom. Unsentimental and hyperrational, they seek to shine a cold, hard light on reality and reveal stark facts, repudiating the hysterics and oversaturation with meaning that characterize the Boomer outlook.
It’s like they seek to jettison all of the histrionic cultural baggage of the Boomer era, and rebuild a world based on reason and accuracy, in keeping with that Millennial mantra, “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Here is a great example of what I mean:

[url= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU4VcOQz...U4VcOQzQm0[/url]

CNN has one of the better articles on how the Millennials might look at things differently politically.

Yuval Noah Harari is an historian and futurist with a wide following, and he has a new book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century"  A great model for me!

We need to develop mental and emotional resilience. We need to re-engineer the world inside us. Global cooperation is needed to solve the most significant problems. Control of data is control of society. We have too much information today; censorship today means flooding people with information. Artificial Intelligence might replace human abilities before we know what they are. There's a shift in power underway from humans to algorithms. Every technology opens different doors, and can be used to create hell or paradise; it's up to us. Computers will care about us better than humans; we may downgrade humans in order to make them more efficient. Free media gives us excitement, not information, in the battle for attention. People think in stories, not facts, and we need new stories. We are better off today than ever in history; but things can get worse quickly-- if we think things are completely broken, so we break them in order to start over. There's lots to worry about, but humans have the ability to rise to the occasion. We can't leave the future to the free market or an arms race. These are some of his points.

When Jade Doskow first started photographing her Lost Utopias series in 2007, it seemed eerily prescient. Published as the international banking system teetered on the brink of collapse, the remains of World’s Fair sites she highlighted seemingly captured the ruins of a time before our collective optimism towards the future had vanished. But World’s Fairs still happen. In fact, they’ve never been bigger. Recent and forthcoming expositions in Astana (2017), Beijing (2019) and Dubai (2020), make it clear that World’s Fairs still offer predictions of what is to come, illuminating human aspiration.

Expos are celebrations of art, science, engineering, and vernacular architecture, but they’re also opportunities for cities to announce themselves open for business. Following the carving of the Simplon Tunnel through the Alps, Milan invited the world to L'Esposizione Internazionale del Sempione in 1906. That same year, most of San Francisco was leveled by a colossal earthquake and resulting fires but aimed to re-emerge like a phoenix with the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition. With Expo ’92, Seville sought to prove that it, and all of Spain, had truly emerged from the shadow of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. Yet all the noble aspirations, centenary celebrations, and talk of the brotherhood of nations boils down to selling a city to an international audience.


Long before the internet, Expos were encapsulations of the global village. Millions flocked to experience foreign cultures and new innovations. With their national pavilions, countries competed for attention in the hope of attracting tourism, investment, or political recognition. But the greatest benefactors were almost always the host cities. Mies van der Rohe’s architectural contribution to the 1929 Exposició Internacional is remembered not as the German Pavilion—after the country that commissioned it—but the Barcelona Pavilion. Demolished the following year, it became a dazzling modernist specter in photographs and renderings until rebuilt in the Catalan city in 1986.
The lasting benefits for cities can be found in their fabric. The profits of the Great Exhibition of 1851 provided London with Albertopolis, with its still-flourishing museums like the V&A. Paris was left with a host of buildings from successive expositions including the Eiffel Tower, once intended as temporary. Whether the traces left behind are sublime or ridiculous is subjective—Brussels has the Atomium; Seattle, the Space Needle; Melbourne, its Royal Exhibition Building; Montreal, Habitat 67 and the bones of the Biosphere; Nashville, a life-size replica of the Parthenon. In a deeper sense, World’s Fairs changed the way citizens moved around and engaged with their cities from the initiation of the Paris Métro to the Vancouver Skytrain. Land was reclaimed in Chicago and Liege. Ghent, Vienna, and Suita were redeveloped. Melbourne and Barcelona were illuminated with electric lights. New roads, railways and flight paths emanated like nervous systems across countries, to bring spectators from the countryside and abroad.

Then, the Western-centric story goes, World’s Fairs fell from grace. Part of this was down to audiences simply aging. Who could blame nostalgia towards witnessing the Crystal Palace, the head of the Statue of Liberty in a Parisian park, the extra-terrestrial Trylon and Perisphere, or the Tower of the Sun? This was bolstered by the fact that many of the greatest buildings, like Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan’s Transportation Building of 1893 with its famed Golden Door, had been demolished and so attained a lost perfection in memory. World’s Fairs seemed to suit children, who would be swept up in the spectacle of monorails, geodesic domes, and Ferris wheels. They’d also fail to notice the temporary, occasionally-shoddy nature of the structures, or the fact that many Expos ran at a financial loss. When the Louisiana World Exposition capsized into bankruptcy in 1984, it seemed to confirm that the promise offered by World’s Fairs had already passed into the realm of Kodachrome photographs and Super 8 film.

More here.

When do you expect the 1T to start? Also, will there be a difference between America and Europe in that respect?

I think it could be late 2020s. Perhaps like 2024 in America and a few years later in Europe, since there has usually been a lag.

Some factors to consider:
-how Brexit unfolds
-US elections of 2020. If a moderate (probably gen X) candidate wins, this could be a start of the 1T. If a polarizing (probably boomer) candidate wins, the 4T will continue.
-what happens to the EU

A new idea I am working on, in beginning stages, I'm recently reflecting on the idea of decimation of open space and how that affects children and then the archetypes and turnings.

Since the Turnings are always essentially based on how children are raised, I would say there is a HUGE axiom within the reverberation of archetypes: children growing up with too much control or too little control.  Control may not be a good word, I'm writing this quickly.  Just about children even BEING ABLE to go outside and roam or have autonomy and explore.  Even if they are not, the ability to do that is vanishing. 

Is there really a true urbanization of America now in this the 21st Century?  It's shocking to think only a few children will experience nature as a part of their daily experience.  I must admit I don't have a lot of scope for such a thing, how can I because I was raised in a certain way in a certain place, can I truly imagine what experience others' have had? 

That is why I attempt to gather information from live sources, real human beings with real experiences.  I don't think these things can be found in books or online with "data".

I used GWTW to illustrate the idea a whole portion of our civilization may be eroding in front of us.  I am not trying to debate about WHAT was being lost in that movie, only the idea that the Civil War happened at the peak of a Turning such as we may experience soon or are now.  I am talking about the concept that at the turn of the 19th century, many ways of living simply had ceased to exist.  The documentation for such things - IMO - are sometimes displayed in pop culture.  The author of the book GWTW wrote a detailed story of the Old South as it passed away in the blink of an eye.

I'm actually a little heart-broken that children growing up now will never have the opportunity to roam freely in neighborhoods, explore freely and be left to their imaginations.  It is also physically healthy as well as psychologically, and stimulating to all area of the brain.

Not 20 years ago, one could imagine places spanning America full of farm lands, back roads, mountain trails.  The last still exists in a large way.  The heartland, though, is filling up quick with urbanization.  Small towns are becoming larger.  City sprawl continues.  Every major city in America is facing urban sprawl.  The south and southwest are especially filling up.  Plugging up deserts, no one cares about that.  Or grasslands.  Only places that literally cannot be excavated (mountains, rocky hills, treacherous places) are left alone. 

This is IMO from the systemic idea of growth at all cost.  And THAT model is, of course, a factor of hyper-capitalism.  An economy; one based on consumption; thus expansion is the only thing that propels the never-ending monster.  It cannot end.  When it ends, we end.

But, the idea of open roads and back roads, the supposed "byways" and smaller drives meant for scenery.  <---- but is that over?  I'm old enough to remember an America that was about seeing an experience. I got to see almost every one of the "bucket list" things I ever imagined never seeing in person as a child.  The joys of a roadtrip seem to be gone not because people don't enjoy them, they simply do not exist.  One city flows into another and so on.  The "roads" connecting them are becoming smaller and shorter.  There is no access to universal green space or open country.  Children do not and will never again grow up on farms or work in such situations as adults. 

America has - from the beginning - been a pioneer state.  We have made the ambition of exploration for the sake of exploring.  I do not think it's wise to not mourn this passing.

I will throw it out there.  Since I was alive and pretty much an adult by that time, right now feels an awfully lot like the late 80s/early90s when everything seems to have gotten turned on its head.  The familiarity I am speaking of I will direct that toward the current president having been an aberration (which I said a long time ago) and may be removed in the future election.  The climate right now is sort of on fire a little bit.  It seems many people are angry and not just seething but striking out in ALL ways as if a bridled, frustrated beast of the field trying to buck loose from chains.

Could it be everything will soon shift?

I cannot say what it may look like, but I think the most major indicator of public mood "feels" a certain way that cannot be immediately or authentically quantified. 

Since the reason I come to this thread is to exact the ideas of the 4th Turning and Generations books, I am using those ideas to "see".  This is something I can gauge because I was there and present at the end of the 1990s in America.  There is no real explanation for it even now.  It is a general mood that things are stagnant and need a cleansing.

Could this be a one presidency like Bush?

Based on the "flip-flop" patterns we make as humans (I believe is the basis of the Turning theories) we get too much of something, or not enough of something else, then we need to rotate back again.  It seems TO ME clear this is what's happening.  It feels like what I know of the late 1960s and 1970s (but was not "there" to make a coherent personal analysis even by memory), and feels kind of the same "mind" or "mood" as the 1990s, and now it feels that way again.

Genera outrage and panic, I think there are more of that <--- than the opposite with people being content and reasonable.  We are still building toward a more huge fluctuation, but I am not sure I can say what that looks like.  Perhaps just a REALLY strong version of what I have described, because I was nowhere close to existing in the last comparative Turning which was WWII and New Deal era.  I cannot speak to that because I was not there to know what anyone was "feeling".

I think the 20th century categories we typically use to think about politics are obsolete. We need something new. Many people are familiar with Nolan's chart, but I'm not satisfied with it because it measures how much government action does one want, rather than goals one wants the government to achieve.

Today there are five main political orientations, and I choose to use colours as metaphors for them. Each of them prioritizes certain principle.



Purple prioritizes self-expression. Fundamentally it’s individualistic Leftism. It sprung from either the countercultural movements of late 20th century or progressive varieties of Christianity. Main concern of this orientation is to help the victimized wherever they are: oppressed minorities, animals, the environment itself. Its preferred economic system is either democratic socialism or capitalism with strong welfare system. Purples are sometimes called “bleeding hearts”.

Red prioritizes economic equality. Unlike purple, it is essentially tribal. Reds believe the state should be a tool of organized working class, hostile to business. This means Marxists or trade unionists whose loyalty is directed at the international working class. Their preferred economic system is command economy. They are typically most concerned with “bread and butter” issues, so there are no distinctly Red views on culture.

Yellow prioritizes non-coercion. Yellows believe the best thing a government can do is not interfering with market forces. In terms of culture, they favour the right to privacy and freedom of speech. They include some neo-conservatives, market fundamentalists, classical liberals and the most extreme variety: libertarians. Some of them have pretty mystical reverence for the market.

Black prioritizes traditional righteousness. They are basically religious conservatives: Islamists in the Middle East and Dominion Theology in America. Virtually non-existent in modern Europe. Hardcore varieties of Black seem determined to make the world a Kingdom of God, while more moderate Black types prefer a society based on "natural law" and the traditional family. Not really interested in economics.

Blue prioritizes raw power. Typically lead by a strongman. Want to further the nation’s interest without moral obstacles, to make it the strongest and dominate everyone else. In terms of culture, it requires promoting "manly" or "militaristic" values. The most exteme variety is obviously fascism, but it is rather rare in this day and age. More typical of our era are „right-wing populisms” like Trumpism in America and various euro-sceptics on the European side. In domestic politics, it aims at total security and builds a police state to achieve it.

Some movements are hybrids. I put Stalinism and Nazism on the Red-Blue border, alt-right on the Blue-Black border, neo-cons on Yellow-Black border and liberal globalism on Purple-Yellow border. Christian democracy is a more unusual Black-Purple hybrid, which cannot be shown on the pentagon. Their views on economics, foreign policy and the environment are Purple, but cultural conservatism comes from Black Thomism.

If you are curious, my economic views (compassionate capitalism) are on the Purple-Yellow border, while the way I think about culture is mostly Yellow (preserve privacy and freedom of speech) with some Black influences (dislike of pornography, drugs, etc.).

Using S-H, we can add that Purple and Black have strong connections to the prophetic archetype, since they focus on individual behaviour. Blue and Red have strong connections to the civic archetype, since they focus on the institutions. Yellow is more difficult, maybe nomadic? Most libertarians seem to be gen X.

OA is a fiction website in form of an encyclopedia written in the 120th century. I like it very much. The more remote eras are pure science fiction, but the nearest future is very realistic.

What do you think about their timeline for the 21st century?

https://orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b2afc424975

The more interesting bits:

57 (2026) In the spirit of optimism NASA, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and European Space Agencies and a consortium of private corporations begin work on the astonishingly expensive international Mars Mission Profile. - a parallel to space enthusiasm during the previous high

90s (2060s) - Especially among the educated classes, traditional religions continue to be usurped by younger, more exotic beliefs, such as Sanandism, Babaism, Cosmism, Transhumanism[/url], etc. - Looks like a belated awakening. I would argue that will happen in the 2050s, or even late 2040s.

110's (2080s) - Conventional nation-states decline at an increasing (though still slow) rate as commercial, virtual, and micro- states become more common. - An unraveling

119 (2088) - An internet based virtual world war centered on North America which shifts a number of assets and influence from previous geopolitical and corporate powers to new players. - The beginning of next crisis

Do you think they used S-H theory?