For the GI Generation, Betty Freidan 

For Xer Anderson Cooper. 


Any other examples come to mind?

In this 4T, everything sounds like a garbled mess on the radio.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/ge...dia-235430

Also reveals Bush family voted for any one but Trump.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertain...79f55ae791

Quote:The headlines this month have been alarming. “Steve Bannon’s obsession with a dark theory of history should be worrisome” (Business Insider). “Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable” (the Huffington Post). “Steve Bannon Wants To Start World War III” (the Nation). A common thread in these media reports is that President Trump’s chief strategist is an avid reader and that the book that most inspires his worldview is “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy.”

I wrote that book with William Strauss back in 1997. It is true that Bannon is enthralled by it. In 2010, he released a documentary, “Generation Zero,” that is structured around our theory that history in America (and by extension, most other modern societies) unfolds in a recurring cycle of four-generation-long eras. While this cycle does include a time of civic and political crisis — a Fourth Turning, in our parlance — the reporting on the book has been absurdly apocalyptic.

I don’t know Bannon well. I have worked with him on several film projects, including “Generation Zero,” over the years. I’ve been impressed by his cultural savvy. His politics, while unusual, never struck me as offensive. I was surprised when he took over the leadership of Breitbart and promoted the views espoused on that site. Like many people, I first learned about the alt-right (a far-right movement with links to Breitbart and a loosely defined white-nationalist agenda) from the mainstream media. Strauss, who died in 2007, and I never told Bannon what to say or think. But we did perhaps provide him with an insight — that populism, nationalism and state-run authoritarianism would soon be on the rise, not just in America but around the world. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertain...79f55ae791

Here is a chart of Federal deficit since 1950.  Democratic and Republican administrations (lagged one year) are colored in blue and red, respectively. The reason for the lag is that incoming president inherits an economy and budget from his predecessor.  His policies enacted in his first year won't really have an impact on the statistics until the next year.


The chart clearly shows that both parties sought to keep the budget fairly close to balanced for the first 25 years in the chart. Average deficits during that time were 0.7% of GDP. Inflation averaged 3% and wage growth was strong.  After our "friends" the Saudis hiked oil prices 300% the budget went out of control, deficits rose to 2.7% and inflation soared to 9.1%. Conventional economics was clear on the issue, deficits needed to be brought under control as the economy recovered.  This could be done with tax increases (e.g. restore the 1968 surtax, cancelled by Nixon in 1970, or pass the necessary payroll tax increases to put that program back into solvency, as Reagan later did) or with spending cuts (future presidents found stuff to cut, why not then?). 

Well, they didn't. Hence Carter placed Volcker as Fed Chief, who promised to pursue inflation control through extreme interest rate policy, which works by suppressing wage growth, reducing wage-push inflation.  High inflation meant the wage increases workers were getting in the late seventies did not keep up with inflation, real wages fell 0.4% per year over that period (see table).  The Volcker policy was successful.  Inflation was moderated despite the enormous deficits run over the 1980's and early 1990's.  As expected, wages continue to fall at a good clip.  When Clinton was president, a determined effort was made to balance the budget, which was successful.  Positive wage growth was restored, with wage growth 1.6 percentage points higher than the prior era and 1.3 points higher than the subsequent period. After the start of the new century, we went back to running big deficits again.  And wage growth has fallen as expected.


Summary Table
Period     Deficit/GDP   Wage Growth   Inflation
1950-1974     0.7                 2.1                   3.0
1975-1981     2.7                -0.4                   9.1
1982-1993     4.1                -0.5                   3.9
1994-2001     0.1                 1.1                   2.6
2002-2016     4.2                -0.2                   2.0
Wages here are unskilled wage rates from Measuring Worth.

I think we can put accounts of protesters shouting down Republican politicians in town halls and other public venues into one thread.  First to get the dubious honor in this thread is Senator Joni Ernst, junior Republican Senator from Iowa. At a veteran's meeting in Maquoketa, protesters shouted "Your last term!" in unison, drowning out applause for her.

She's up for re-election in 2020. An extremist in a moderate state, she should be vulnerable in a high-turnout election.

https://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/your-la...town-hall/

I ran into this rather terrifying article. More scary octopus tentacles involving both Steve Bannon and Russia undermining Western democracy.

Ever since I was in high school it seems Boomers have been clamoring that things would lead to chaos. They'll say, "There would be chaos if people did whatever they wanted". They claim that there would be chaos if people went naked in public, that there would be chaos if girls were allowed to show their navels in class, that there would be chaos if kids were allowed to keep their hats on in class, that there would be chaos if marijuana were legal, that there would be chaos if people were allowed to scream if they were angry, or even, "There would be chaos if men could marry other men".

Chaos is clearly the bogeyman of Boomer and Joneser social conservatives. So I wonder, what exactly would this hypothetical "chaos" they speak of look like if it were to finally break out? People running in all firections screaming and bumping into each other while fire broke out and demons and giant worms came out of the middle of the Earth? It's hard to picture...and would things really be this terrible?

It's odd because when Boomers and Jonesers were raising us Gen-Yers they didn't teach us to value "order" or to fear "chaos". It seemed to start when Gen-Yers got into high school.

This question is especially for you Boomer and Joneser conservatives. What exactly are you so afraid of happening? -Craig

I found this to be an interesting, and enlightening, piece about the history of 4chan and an analysis of the motives behind the young "deplorables'" embrace (from their mothers' basements) of Donald Trump.  

Quote:1. Born from Something Awful

Around 2005 or so a strange link started showing up in my old webcomic’s referral logs. This new site I didn’t understand. It was a bulletin board, but its system of navigation was opaque. Counter intuitively, you had to hit “reply” to read a thread. Moreover, the content was bizarre nonsense.

The site, if you hadn’t guessed, was 4chan.org. It was an offshoot of a different message board which I also knew from my referral logs, “Something Awful”, at the time, an online community of a few hundred nerds who liked comics, video games, and well, nerds things. But unlike boards with similar content, Something Awful skewed toward dark jokes. I had an account at Something Awful, which I used sometimes to post in threads about my comic.

4chan had been created by a 15 year old Something Awful user named Christopher Poole (whose 4chan mod name was “m00t”). Poole had adapted a type of Japanese bulletin board software which was difficult to understand at first, but once learned, was far more fun to post in than the traditional American format used by S.A., as a result the site became popular very quickly.

These days, 4chan appears in the news almost weekly. This past week, there were riots at Berkeley in the wake of the scheduled lecture by their most prominent supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos. The week before that neo-Nazi Richard Spencer pointed to his 4chan inspired Pepe the Frog pin, about to explain the significance when an anti-fascist protester punched him in the face. The week before that, 4chan claimed (falsely) it had fabricated the so called Trump “Kompromat”. And the week before that, in the wake of the fire at Ghost Ship, 4chan decided to make war on “liberal safe spaces” and DIY venues across the country.

How did we get here? What is 4chan exactly? And how did a website about anime become the avant garde of the far right? Mixed up with fascist movements, international intrigue, and Trump iconography? How do we interpret it all?

At the very beginning, 4chan met once a year in only one place in the world: Baltimore, Maryland at the anime convention, Otakon. As a nerdy teen growing up in Baltimore in the 90s, I had wandered into Otakon much like I had later wandered into 4chan, just when it was starting. I also attended Otakon in the mid-aughts when 4chan met there, likewise to promote my webcomic.

As someone who has witnessed 4chan grow from a group of adolescent boys who could fit into a single room at my local anime convention to a worldwide coalition of right wing extremists (which is still somehow also a message board about anime), I feel I have some obligation to explain.

This essay is an attempt to untangle the threads of 4chan and the far right...

http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/int...societies/

Quote:Intra-elite competition is one of the most important factors explaining massive waves of social and political instability, which periodically afflict complex, state-level societies. This idea was proposed by Jack Goldstone nearly 30 years ago. Goldstone tested it empirically by analyzing the structural precursors of the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and seventeenth century’s crises in Turkey and China. Other researchers (including Sergey Nefedov, Andrey Korotayev, and myself) extended Goldstone’s theory and tested it in such different societies as Ancient Rome, Egypt, and Mesopotamia; medieval England, France, and China; the European revolutions of 1848 and the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917; and the Arab Spring uprisings. Closer to home, recent research indicates that the stability of modern democratic societies is also undermined by excessive competition among the elites (see Ages of Discord for a structural-demographic analysis of American history). Why is intra-elite competition such an important driver of instability?

Elites are a small proportion of the population (on the order of 1 percent) who concentrate social power in their hands (see my previous post and especially its discussion in the comments that reveal the complex dimensions of this concept). In the United States, for example, they include (but are not limited to) elected politicians, top civil service bureaucrats, and the owners and managers of Fortune 500 companies (see Who Rules America?). As individual elites retire, they are replaced from the pool of elite aspirants. There are always more elite aspirants than positions for them to occupy.  Intra-elite competition is the process that sorts aspirants into successful elites and aspirants whose ambition to enter the elite ranks is frustrated. Competition among the elites occurs on multiple levels. Thus, lower-ranked elites (for example, state representatives) may also be aspirants for the next level (e.g., U.S. Congress), and so on, all the way up to POTUS...




http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/int...societies/