http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-zealand-...1479038221

Quote:A powerful earthquake struck New Zealand near the city of Christchurch, causing strong jolts felt more than 120 miles away and prompting a tsunami threat along the country’s east coast.
New Zealand’s Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management said on its verified Twitter account that a tsunami threat covered all of New Zealand’s east coast, including Christchurch, Wellington and the Chatham Islands, and urged people in those areas to move to high ground or go inland.
The agency later said the first wave had arrived on the northeastern coast of the South Island, but didn’t say how tall it was. “The first wave may not be the largest. Waves may continue for several hours,” MCDEM said on Twitter.

The quake, which the U.S. Geological Survey initially recorded as magnitude 7.4 but later raised to 7.8, struck just after midnight Sunday and was centered 93 kilometers (57 miles) northeast of Christchurch, on the country’s South Island.
The USGS said the quake was at a depth of 23 kilometers (14 miles). The quake was followed by a number of strong aftershocks, but there were no immediate reports of major damage or injuries, the Associated Press reported.



Christchurch resident Hannah Gin told AP she had just sat down in her living room to watch a replay of the recent All Blacks versus Italy rugby union match when her house started shaking. Upstairs, her mother let out a scream.
Ms. Gin, a 24-year-old lifelong Christchurch resident, is accustomed to quakes, so she said she sat calmly and waited, figuring the rumbling would stop in a few seconds. Instead, the shaking just went on and on—for at least three minutes, according to the clock on her phone, she told AP by phone.
The quake was far less violent than the one that struck her city in 2011, she said, adding that there was no jarring up and down or side to side, just a long, rolling sensation. But it went on for much longer than the typical quakes that strike the area, she said.
“I could hear the sliding door sliding back and forth and we’ve got washing hanging up and I could see the washing moving,” Ms. Gin told AP. “It just kept going and going.” Her house, which was damaged in the 2011 quake, didn't appear to have sustained any damage from the latest quake, she said.

The quake also knocked out New Zealand’s emergency call number, 111, for about 10 minutes, the AP reported, citing police.
In Wellington, 214 kilometers (132 miles) north of the quake’s epicenter, power was knocked out in some places, and some windows were smashed and some chimneys collapsed, the AP reported. It caused items to fall from shelves and windows to break in Wellington, and forced hundreds of people on to the streets as hotels were evacuated, AP said.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said there was no tsunami threat to the country.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/bill-c...le/2607228#!

Quote:Bill Clinton stood before an audience of blue-collar workers in Lansing, Mich., two days before the presidential election and told them he understood and empathized with the economic frustrations of the working class.

"There's a lot of road rage out there because after the financial crash, it took a long time before incomes started going up again. There are still some families that if you adjust for inflation, their incomes are about what they were the last day I was president more than 15 years ago and their costs are going up. And that's really tough," the former president drawled as he campaigned on behalf of his wife, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

"So when you get up every morning, and you look in the mirror and you don't think you've got the power to make tomorrow better than today, that's a pretty tough load to carry," he told an audience that included union laborers...


http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/bill-c...le/2607228#!

A few years back on the old forums, I proposed a thought about larger cycles than the four generation saeculum to help describe the nature of 4T conflicts.  Perhaps its a theory done before; I am just a casual student of generational theory.  The consideration is that there are pendulums alternating between hot and cold war, internal and external conflicts.  I am not talking about the Soviet-US Cold war which may be part of another cycle.

Current Crisis here in US - Internal Cold War
World War 2 - External Hot War
American Civil War - Internal Hot War
Revolutionary War - External Cold War (if viewed as a proxy battle between England and France)
Glorious Revolution - Internal Cold War (yes there were some battles)
Armada Crisis - External Hot War (England and Spain)
War of the Roses - Internal Hot War (between the houses)

Thats about all I have got into it.

https://www.propublica.org/article/reven...tten-class

Quote:In March, I was driving along a road that led from Dayton, Ohio, into its formerly middle-class, now decidedly working-class southwestern suburbs, when I came upon an arresting sight. I was looking for a professional sign-maker who had turned his West Carrollton ranch house into a distribution point for Trump yard signs, in high demand just days prior to the Ohio Republican primary. Instead of piling the signs in the driveway, he had arrayed them in his yard along the road. There they were, dozens and dozens of them, lined up in rows like the uniform gravestones in a military cemetery.

The sign man wasn’t home, but he had left a married couple in charge of the distribution. I got talking to the woman, Contessa Hammel. She was 43 and worked at the convenience store at a local Speedway gas station after four years in the military. And this was the first time she was voting in 25 years of eligibility...



https://www.propublica.org/article/reven...tten-class

Maybe it will be retired now that Donald Trump has been elected President.

So let us and the Russians work together to obliterate ISIS - and none of this "What if this creates a power vacuum in the Middle East that Iran might step into?"  As Ted Kennedy should have said, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Same goes for the imminent repeal of ObamaCare: Instead of "what if"-ing that to death - what if emergency rooms go bankrupt treating the newly uninsured, what if poor, sick people are "dying in the streets," as Trump himself taunted Ted Cruz with in one of the Republican debates - the states, church groups, and most of all, the putative champions of the poor like George Soros and Tom Steyer, need to start getting together now to prepare for the sh**-storm to come.  Waiting until repeal actually happens is inexcusable.

And there is nothing less 4T-ish than saying "What If?" to everything, allowing it to paralyze necessary action.

A lot of people need to grow some - and I don't mean marijuana, even though it is becoming legal in ever more states.

Let's chronicle, in real time, the unfolding of President Pussygrabber's betrayal to the White male cohort-led Trumpsters as well as his institutionalizing the alt-Right's anti-American values agenda.  It should be fun!

The Trump presidency is predicting what's to come and the 1T attitudes people will take.

Breaking from Newsmax.com
#Calexit: Trump's Victory Renews Push for California to Leave US
A new push for California to exit the United States has arisen in the wake of Donald Trump winning the presidency. "Yes California," a campaign that aims to put a referendum on the 2019 ballot for the Golden State to leave the U.S., leads the charge.


CNN reported that 61 percent of the state’s voters supported Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, and the state’s electoral college votes went to her.

"As the sixth largest economy in the world, California is more economically powerful than France and has a population larger than Poland. Point-by-point, California compares with countries, not just the 49 other states," read the campaign’s site.

While the "Yes" campaign has been considered a fringe movement, supporters of leaving the union took to Twitter after Trump won, using the hashtag #Calexit, a reference to the Brexit movement in Britain to leave the European Union.

The New York Daily News reported that one Twitter user issued a proposal in graphic form:


While not calling for the state to leave the union, two Democratic legislators in the state, Senate president Kevin de Leon and assembly speaker Anthony Rendon, issued a statement about the election results:
"We woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land, because yesterday Americans expressed their views on a pluralistic and democratic society that are clearly inconsistent with the values of the people of California."
© 2016 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Now that the conservatives are the "ins" and the liberals the "outs," will we now see a return to the days of the left seeking a "Second Amendment solution" to what they see as the nation's problems - the days of the Black Panthers ambushing police officers en masse, the Weather Underground blowing up buildings, and the "Zebra shootings" of whites in and around San Francisco?

On the cause of states' rights, a role reversal is even more likely - as voters defied the federal government on both raising the minimum wage and legalizing recreational marijuana use Tuesday, with ballot initiatives on those two issues going a combined eight for nine.  And with the repeal of ObamaCare now imminent, liberal states - and even some conservative ones; e.g., Utah - are sure to move heaven and earth to see to it that the newly uninsured are given some sort of safety net.

And according to this piece, states' rights could be the key to diffusing the Culture Wars once and for all:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/proje...ia-fits-in

Can Trump End The Culture Wars?

By Daniel K. Williams

Donald J. Trump was elected with a higher percentage of the white evangelical vote than any other Republican presidential candidate has ever received, and he has received strong support from prominent Christian Right leaders. Yet if Mr. Trump delivers on his promises, he will not give the religious right what its leaders have traditionally demanded or what the Republican Party platform calls for. Indeed, he will give them very little national legislation at all, but will instead offer them maximum latitude to pursue their agenda at the state level — a shift that may portend a potential breakthrough in the nation’s polarizing culture wars.

National legislation has long been the goal of the religious right. When the movement emerged in the late 1970s, evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson sought federal constitutional amendments to ban abortion and restore school prayer, because they wanted to reverse what liberal rights activists had done at the national level through the Supreme Court. In the early 21st century, leaders such as James Dobson continued this trend by persuading President George W. Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment proposal to define marriage as exclusively heterosexual.

In recent years, evangelicals have become so concerned about protecting their own religious liberty against federal mandates or court decisions that they have given less attention to imposing a moral agenda on the rest of the nation. Although the Republican Party platform continues to promise a constitutional amendment protecting human life from the moment of conception, the pro-life movement has not made any serious attempts to pass that amendment since the 1980s. Nor has there been much talk in the last decade of a national ban on same-sex marriage.

Mr. Trump is well positioned to promote a further shift away from national moral regulation. For much of his adult life, he held culturally libertarian views on abortion and gay rights, and he evinced little interest in the religious right’s agenda. Early in his campaign, he expressed discomfort with conservative evangelicals’ opposition to the rights of transgender people to use the public restroom of their choice. But he quickly came to embrace a “states’ rights” position on same-sex marriage and transgender rights, a position that would allow culturally liberal New Yorkers the right to pursue different policies than cultural conservatives in Mississippi or North Dakota. And while Mr. Trump stumbled over abortion during his campaign, the policy that he ultimately reverted to was to leave abortion legalization up to the states — an outcome that he would try to ensure by nominating conservative Supreme Court justices who might overturn Roe v. Wade.

Mr. Trump has gone further than any previous Republican presidential nominee in a generation in insisting that the religious right should enact its agenda at the state, rather than federal, level. Although this was the policy position of many Republicans during the 1970s (including President Gerald Ford), religious right activists persuaded the G.O.P. in the early 1980s to abandon its states-rights approach to abortion and other social issues, and promise national legislation to implement the religious right’s agenda. Mr. Trump is leading the party back to its more traditional stance.

While many liberals will find this outcome unsatisfactory — since it offers them no opportunity to secure national protection for individual rights that they consider inalienable — it may be the only compromise solution that can give both conservatives and liberals the freedom to pursue their own agenda at the local level without fear of a national backlash.

If a socially libertarian New Yorker can deliver this compromise to the conservative white rural evangelical voters who put him in office, both conservatives and liberals should see that for what it is: a landmark opportunity to move beyond the culture wars.

Daniel K. Williams is a professor of history at the University of West Georgia and the author of “God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right."