TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s governing party said Thursday that an internal survey found that nearly half of its national lawmakers had ties to the Unification Church, in a widening controversy that emerged after the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Abe was shot to death during a campaign speech in the western city of Nara in July. The suspect, Tetsuya Yamagami, reportedly told police he killed Abe because of his apparent link to the Unification Church. A letter and social media postings attributed to him said large donations by his mother to the church bankrupted his family and ruined his life.

That led to revelations of widespread ties between the governing Liberal Democratic Party and the South Korea-based church, which experts say urges Japanese followers to make large donations to make amends for their ancestral sins, including Japan’s past colonialization of the Korean Peninsula.


”I take the results of the party survey seriously,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters. “In the future, the party will sever ties to organizations with known social problems and make it a party policy, so we won’t invite suspicion from the public.”

The Unification Church has been accused of inappropriate recruitment and business tactics and of pressuring adherents to make large donations, which the church denies.

Ninety-six of the LDP lawmakers reported attending events organized by the church or its affiliates, while 20 said they had made speeches. Nearly 50 said they paid money at events, while 29 accepted donations. Abe’s younger brother, former Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi, and former Economy and Industry Minister Koichi Hagiuda were among 17 who accepted church followers as election campaign volunteers.


Abe, a conservative nationalist who was one of Japan’s most influential politicians, recorded a video message last year for the Universal Peace Federation, a church-affiliated group, in which he praised federation co-founder Hak Ja Han Moon, who also heads the Unification Church, for her efforts in promoting traditional family values.

Opposition lawmakers criticized the survey for having excluded Abe because he is deceased. The survey also did not include LDP lawmakers in local assemblies, where church followers are also active in influencing policies, critics say.

The Unification Church was founded in South Korea in 1954 and came to Japan a decade later. It has built close ties with LDP lawmakers over shared interests in conservative causes, including opposing Communism. Abe’s grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, helped found the church’s political unit in Tokyo in 1968.

Kishida, despite a Cabinet shuffle in August in which he purged seven ministers with acknowledged church links, including Kishi, ended up with more in his new Cabinet. Support for Kishida’s government has tumbled in recent media surveys, apparently because of party members’ church links and plans for a rare state funeral for Abe.


A family funeral for Abe was held in July at a Tokyo temple, but Kishida wants to hold a state funeral on Sept. 27 at the Budokan martial arts arena with about 6,000 invited guests. The only other state funeral for a former prime minister in recent decades was for Shigeru Yoshida in 1967. It was criticized as having been decided undemocratically and an inappropriate use of taxpayers’ money.
Critics say Kishida’s decision to hold a state funeral for Abe is an attempt to please lawmakers belonging to Abe’s former faction within the governing party to maintain party unity and buttress Kishida’s own grip on power. He has said Abe deserves a state funeral as the longest-serving post-World War II leader and for his diplomatic and economic achievements.

Kishida’s government initially put the funeral cost at 250 million yen ($1.7 million) but recently said it will require at least 1.4 billion yen ($9.7 million) more for security, transportation and hospitality for foreign dignitaries and other guests. Some say the cost could further increase.

https://apnews.com/article/shinzo-abe-japan-tokyo-religion-assassinations-a75644fdc80f69c4603322948e848c60

What are some differences and similarities you see between GIs and Millennials?

I have posted Biden speeches before here, but I can't find them easily now. So I will post here the evidence that Biden, though sometimes it doesn't seem so, is capable of speaking dramatically and forcefully to the crisis issues of our fourth turning. He is truly the gray, gray champion, and we have no alternative but to support him, with all his shortcomings, even though he is also Slow Joe, all the way through our fourth turning to its last year, 2029. Here is Biden's speech on the MAGA Republican threat to democracy.

Do you approve? Disapprove? Support some other alternative?

Recently I've been reading the works of the demographer and geopolitical polymath Peter Zeihan. In the interest of avoiding polemics and alarmist cries of Armageddon, I should start by clarifying that he identifies as a "Small d democrat". Sure, he is on the more libertarian end of the Dems because he likes things like free trade and making business deals rather than war, but none of his work covers anything to do with race, nationalism or anything else more talked about in social conservative circles. Most of his data comes straight from government statistics provided by the military, the BLS and various international geopolitical statistics, so, while those have those limitations (which he often talks in great detail about), little of where he sources his information would be biased in favor of my own views on various social issues. 

With that out of the way, here are some stats from his various works that highlight why I was completely wrong about China:
1) China imports 85% of their energy, most of which has to pass through the Persian Gulf.
2) Xi Jinping has one of the most complete cults of personality in recent history. So much so that he has more or less executed anyone for providing even the most trivially inconvenient news. As a result, he no longer gets....any reasonably accurate news or updates on world events whatsoever. 
3) China has less than a 1/3 the global average of arable land per capita. 
4) China's military is an army of combat virgins, who haven't really seen any real combat since 1975 with the zenith of the Vietnam War. 
5) As a result of the 1 child policy (and sex-selective abortions), China's breeding age population has the worst gender imbalance of just about any country in recorded history. 
6) Even by their own estimates, recent data has conclude that they've overcounted their population by at least 100 million. 
7) With regards to agriculture, China spends more per calorie of output than any other country on the planet.
8) The most liberal estimates claim that China's population will be cut in half by 2070 on account of how severe their aging crisis is. More recent estimates put that number as close as 2050 (ie, a net loss of....650,000,000 people in the coming 3 decades).
9) Wages in China have already risen 15 fold since 1999. That sounds great...until you realize it's driven primarily by severe labor shortages. 
10) Of the few breeding age males and females they do have, their current cultural setup more or less isolates them, leading to even lower prospects for demographic recovery. 
11) What little agricultural output they do have is dependent on chemical fertilizers of which they are by far the world's largest importer of. 
12) Most of those chemical fertilizers arrive via, wait for it.....trading ports in the Black Sea. 
13) Just because they are the archetype of a net exporter of manufacturing goods does not mean that they aren't a net importer of virtually all of the most important and expensive raw materials inputs required for production. 


tl;dr: they...are...toast. More so that just about any great power of the last 500 years. What your takeaways from this will depend largely on your personal beliefs, but personally, I'm happy to watch those communist fuckers burn in hell where they belong, and you can rest assured, I will be grabbing the popcorn to watch this shit show for at least the next decade. 


For those of you interested, Peter's four books are 
- The Accidental Superpower
- The Absent Superpower
- Disunited Nations
and just recently
- The End of the World is Just the Beginning

In the meantime, if you want an example of what he talks like/how he thinks, he has several quality interviews on youtube, of which this is one such example (as you will quickly see, he handles this issue with a lot more compassion than I have any desire to).

Ibn Khaldun (1332 – 1406) was a scholar of the Middle Ages whose work includes a description of how a dynasty's power wanes over successive generations, even as its wealth and culture grow. The parallels with S&H are unmistakable, and in fact the authors reference him in The Fourth Turning. I thought he deserved his own thread and I'm just going to start it off with a couple of blog posts I published recently.


A REALLY GOOD HISTORY BOOK FROM ABOUT SIX HUNDRED YEARS AGO
 May 27, 2022  Steve

I recently finished The Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun, a book which had been part of my tsundoku for some time and which I finally got around to reading in connection to generations theory research. Khaldun’s work is actually referenced in The Fourth Turning, by William Strauss and Neil Howe, in the chapter on archetypes in history. I might have remembered this, but it was only when I rediscovered the fact that I felt compelled to pull The Muqaddimah off my shelf to read it and find the connections.

Khaldun has his own theory of a generational cycle in politics, or at least a generational progression. It’s basically the idea that as the generations pass, the authority of a dynasty declines and eventually disappears altogether. The founding generation establishes and consolidates the authority, and the next generation continues to benefit from it while beginning the process of constricting it. The third generation is just living in the shadow of that authority, even as the dynasty is in its most materially prosperous phase. The fourth and last generation of the dynasty is dissolute and wastes the legacy of the previous generations; at that point the dynastic authority disintegrates.

The parallels to the turnings theory of Strauss & Howe, which also has a four-part cycle and theorizes four generational archetypes, are plain. There’s also a similarity to the cycles of government identified in ancient times by Polybius. It’s fascinating to think that Polybius was writing fifteen hundred years before Khaldun, and Khaldun was writing over six hundred years before our time, and yet these parallels are there, even with modern thinking. It’s like these different scholars writing in different eras are all discovering the same fundamental truths.

Khaldun’s work is comprehensive in its scope (he’s what you would call a polymath) and reminds me a bit of Aristotle, just in the breadth of what he covers and the systematic way he goes about categorizing and explaining things. His work is also reminiscent of Herodotus, in that he writes about historiography and the importance of applying a discerning intellect to the study of history, lest one simply repeat the misinformation that is frequently passed down as historical fact.

While he does echo these ancient Greek philosophers, he is also plainly a denizen of the medieval age. He takes for granted the validity of his religion, Islam, and believes in spiritual reality and supernatural powers (he has a whole section railing against sorcery and its danger to religion). His model of physics is based on the four elements, and his model of biology and medicine is the medieval one of the four humours corresponding to those elements. We might think of these views as scientifically backward, but he’s simply working with what was known in his time, before the advances of the modern era.

What’s truly remarkable about Khaldun’s work is his discourse on social and political science. He has this conceptual framework around which he constructs a theory of how and why civilization forms, and its sources in religious and dynastic authority. In his view, religion forms dynasty and dynasty forms civilization, which sort of marks him as a theocratic medievalist. But you could think of this view as simply the idea that government must be rooted in some kind of moral ground in order to establish its definition of justice.

In his treatise, Khaldun repeatedly invokes the same concepts as he describes civilization in general, and the difference between simple desert civilization and what he calls sedentary civilization with its wealth and cities, basically describing a rural-urban divide. Let’s see if I can do a good job summarizing his theory.

In order for humans to live together cooperatively in a society they need some sort of “restraining influence” to prevent them from simply predating on one another. This influence can come from religion or it can come from the “royal authority” of a ruler. The royal authority of a ruling dynasty derives from “group feeling,” which is like social cohesion within a population, creating mutual esteem and loyalty. At first a dynasty has “desert attitude,” meaning a simple way of life and qualities of toughness and courage. This enables it to prevail over its enemies and establish its rule. But subsequent generations of the dynasty lose the desert attitude as the dynasty develops “sedentary culture.” The dynasty prospers economically, its cities grow in wealth and population and become advanced in the sciences and crafts, but all of this is at the expense of group feeling. Eventually the dynasty falls to some other one which has the desert attitude and group feeling that enable it to achieve military superiority.

It’s clear why Strauss & Howe would have referenced Khaldun, since his analysis has similarities to their turnings theory. You can also see how Khaldun anticipates the future thinking of Western philosophers. While reading The Muqaddimah and encountering his ideas, it occurred to me that the Age of Enlightenment might as well be considered to be the time when Western philosophy finally caught up to Ibn Khaldun. Honestly, encountering these ideas in a book written in the 14th century makes me reconsider the whole concept of a rift between the “medieval” and “modern” ages. It also make me wonder how Khaldun would see our world today, if he were to somehow be here to observe it.

I found The Muqaddimah to be a very easy read. Khaldun writes with confident authority and with common sense, and his thinking is very clear. Credit must go to the translator, Franz Rosenthal, for transforming Khaldun’s Arabic into straightforward English. I’m very happy to add The Muqaddimah to my “Read” bookshelf, from where I’m sure I will keeping referring to it as I continue my studies of generations and history.

On another thread someone posted an article by Philip Bobbitt, in which he mentions his idea of how our constitutional order is evolving from the nation-state to what he terms the "market state." I noted in a comment that Bobbitt has this whole theory of how the constitutional order changes periodically and how his theory might be related to other theories of cycles of history. I was surprised that we didn't have a thread about him already on the forum (I mean, that's what we discuss here, right?), so I have created this one.

First, this is a blog post I published a few years back on his theory:

http://stevebarrera.com/category/strategy-review/

[A review of] The Shield of Achilles, by Philip Bobbitt. Bobbitt is a constitutional law expert, and this very long book (usually described as “magisterial”) formulates a theory of the evolution of the state as proceeding through periodic “epochal wars” which redefine the constitutional order. As each new form of the state is legitimized, the seeds are planted for the growth of the form which will come to replace it. Thus he describes a kind of historical cycle, to join many others which have been postulated.

Recently watched the new documentary on Netflix about the infamous and ill-fated Woodstock 99. If the original Woodstock was an expression of youthful Prophet idealism, Woodstock 99 was an expression of youthful Nomad nihilism. Woodstock 99 and all the chaos and riots that ensued from it are what happens when middle-aged Boomers try to push the nostalgia of their youth on a younger generation while also forgetting the supposed ideals of their youth for greed and self-interest. Trainwreck: Woodstock '99 | Official Trailer | Netflix - YouTube

Much has been made of the relative progress of Millennial women vs. Millennial men. Generally, the trend has been that the women of this generation have fared better than the men, in terms of educational achievement and subsequently income, and in terms of empowerment in society overall. I thought we could explore that in this thread.

First, a post from my blog:

EMPOWERED MILLENNIAL WOMEN

Four years ago, a young woman gave a victim impact statement against a man convicted of criminal sexual conduct. It was a high profile case, because the criminal conduct had been ongoing for decades and involved hundreds of adolescent girls. The woman, Kyle Stephens, confronted her victimizer and made a powerful statement which included these resounding words: “Little girls don’t stay little forever. They grow into strong women that return to destroy your world.” It was a landmark moment in the history of the #Me Too movement.





Stephens is a member of the Millennial generation, while the man she was confronting is from Generation X. Her statement was like a challenge to the men of older generations: you can’t get away with what you used to do. It was a sign of a new young adult era, with a new young generation on the rise – a generation with high expectations, and one that wouldn’t tolerate bad behavior. A social movement was underway, and the careers of many prominent Boomer and Xer men who were guilty of sexual harassment or assault, even if it had been in the past, crashed and burned.

The Millennial generation had been the beneficiary of protection, regulation, and zero-tolerance policies throughout their childhood, and it was to be expected that this trend would follow them into young adulthood. With all that structure while being raised came boosts to self-esteem, along with pressure to achieve. This is how Millennials came of age with high expectations, which has caused older generations to complain that they are “entitled.” But how could older generations think that Millennials could – or should – settle for less, or be taken advantage of?

Millennial girls, in particular, were raised to believe in their specialness and in their capabilities. They were the high-achievement Lisa Simpsons, in contrast to the slacker older brother Bart Simpsons of my generation (Generation X). In popular kids’ entertainment their role models were empowered: Power Rangers, Powerpuff Girls. The pop superstars of their adolescent years were GenX/Millennial cuspers like Brittney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Beyoncé – independent ladies singing about how they were in charge in their relationships with men, if they even wanted a man at all.

Small wonder that Millennial women have taken the adult world by storm, and asserted their rights within it. True to the spirit of Destiny’s Child and Independent Women, they may be the most financially successful generation of women in American history. They are faring better than their male counterparts in today’s job market, which is not surprising given that they also dominate college enrollments. In fact, one of their hurdles in life is finding a partner who is a good match, given these disparities.

That’s not to say that women don’t still face discrimination and harassment. Nor is it to justify anti-feminist backlash. But where such backlash exists because of the gap in outcomes between Millennial women and Millennial men, that is a problem. The solution is not to disempower women, but to find ways to empower men as well. Raising job prospects for those without a college degree would be a good start. Making life more affordable for the working class in general is also a good bet.

The #Me Too movement was actually started by a Gen Xer, a decade before it grew to prominence. It has come to the forefront of public consciousness at a time when Millennials are the rising young adult generation. In that sense it represents the demand of a new generation of women, raised in a sheltering social environment, that the adult social environment also be safe for them and respectful of them. Only then will they be empowered to achieve their destiny.

I've decided to post a bunch of my generations-related blog posts from the past year here in these forums. I'm going to start with this one, which is *extremely* selective in that if you haven't read this comic series, it likely won't mean much to you. But if by chance you have read or are a fan of Frank Miller's "Give Me Liberty" series I hope you will appreciate my generational interpretation and generational breakdown of the characters.

First, the blog post:

http://stevebarrera.com/generations-in-t...e-liberty/

GENERATIONS IN THE COMIC SERIES “GIVE ME LIBERTY”
 February 15, 2022  Steve

I’m not a huge comic books fan, but I do have a small collection of mostly indie stuff from the 80s and 90s. Included in my collection is the Frank Miller series “Give Me Liberty,” which features my favorite comic book hero of all time, a scrappy young soldier named Martha Washington. She has no particular powers, just grit and determination and a good heart, although she isn’t beyond an occasional breech of moral conduct. The series itself, including all the sequels and one shots (I own almost all of them), is colorful and over the top, which is pretty normal for comic books. It’s not a superhero story, but rather a political satire about the United States, with strong science fiction elements, mainly in the form of advanced A.I., robotics and military technology.

I like the comic’s clean style and fun sci-fi storylines, but what I really love about it is the way it depicts America’s Culture Wars as a real life war, with the different factions actually forming into different political entities and duking it out in a second American civil war. I will note that this is fun only in the context of a comic book. In reality, a second American civil war would be an absolute horror. It’s not something to wish for. But through the medium of comics, with cartoonish characters and outlandish premises, a fictional civil war becomes a way of exploring America’s politics in the Unraveling era.

What am I talking about? Unraveling era? Well, I’m back to generational theory and the cycles of different social eras. In generational theory, the Unraveling era is a period of cultural fragmentation that comes after a great spiritual upheaval. The recent Culture Wars era, from 1984 to 2008, was just such a period in history. The comic series was published in the 1990s, right in the middle of this period. Part of what it makes the comic such outlandish fun is how it portrays America’s subcultures as organized groups wielding actual power and capability beyond anything reasonable or accurate to the time period.

Now, the action doesn’t start in the comic book until 2009, so it’s ostensibly predicting the future, as though those subcultures were destined to evolve into hardened factions. And given how things are actually going now, it might not be completely off the mark. Arguably, the comic is only wrong in the details about the factions, which admittedly are portrayed in a satirical, hyperbolic manner. Also, there might be too many of them. In real life, they’ve consolidated a bit more.
Here is a more or less complete list of the factions you will encounter in the comic: environmentalists, radical feminists, health nuts, religious fundamentalists, “real America” reactionaries, capitalists, computer geeks, gay white supremacists (I kid you not), regular white supremacists, and radioactive party mutants. Outlandish, right? Some of these factions form their own breakaway countries during the civil war. The feminists take over the Southeast, and the reactionaries take over the Southwest. The Pacific Northwest becomes a totalitarian state devoted to healthy living; some people today claim that any government attempt to enforce COVID-19 mitigation mandates amounts to the same thing.

As I already noted, these factions are depicted in a satirical and over the top fashion. It makes the comic humorous and fun. But there’s a grain of truth to the depictions, as there is to all satire. That people could identify so strongly with some subculture, to the point of physical conflict with other subcultures, has been made plain in our time. Proud Boys and Antifas battling in the streets of America in the 2010s isn’t so far off from what Miller has written in his comic books. The real life factions even have over the top costuming to maintain group identity, which we make fun of on social media, calling it “militia cosplaying.” But though we may mock the more devoted members of these groups, this factionalization is still dangerous. It’s just not certain we are likely to break up as a country as dramatically as happens during the fictional lifetime of Martha Washington.

Speaking of the main character in the comic, I wanted to also discuss the comic series from the standpoint of the generations depicted. Martha Washington’s birth year is actually given in the story – it’s 1995. This would have been in the future at the time the story was first published. This birth year makes Washington a member of the Millennial generation. Now, at the time the comic was released, the Millennial generation was in early childhood, and Miller may not have been aware of them or their qualities. The character he creates, I believe, is really from Generation X, based on her life experience and personality. She’s abandoned in childhood, left to fend for herself (which she does very well) and is basically a rogue-like character. She is self-reliant, but also loyal and honorable – Gen X qualities.

This is a pattern I encounter in speculative fiction all the time. The authors of the stories observe the contemporary generations and social era, and extrapolate the then current trends into the future. This is why this story, set in our time (that is, in the early 21st century) is really a parable about society at the time it was published (that is, the late 20th century). The characters belong to the generational archetypes that fit 1990, not the ones that fit 2010. I hope this makes sense.
Martha Washington and the other soldier-type characters she encounters are Gen-Xers. The primary antagonists, all older than her, are Boomers. A particularly fun character is the supervillainish Surgeon General, who leads the totalitarian “Health State” in the Pacific Northwest. He is definitely a Boomer parody, with his obsession with pure living. Another character, President Rexall, is clearly a parody of Ronald Reagan, which would make him GI or Greatest Generation. The President who replaces Rexall for an interim is kinder and more tolerant, and I make him to be a Jimmy Carter-like member of the Silent Generation.

Again, this is typical of speculative fiction: you see character archetypes that make sense for the time the story was published, projected into the near future, completely disregarding the fact that as time passes, generations age and the roles played by the archetypes change. But that’s OK; the point of this kind of fiction is to playfully examine the current state of society in an imaginative context.

In the case of Frank Miller’s Give Me Liberty, the author, who is a member of the Boomer generation, has crafted a story about a sort of uber-Gen Xer surviving in a fractured, falling apart society. I’ve seen this pattern in other work from the 1990s, particularly in the cyberpunk genre. It’s like this generation of late wave Boomer creators was a bit infatuated with the rising young generation, and imagined stories where they take self-reliance and rugged individualism to new levels, proving how much the individual can achieve through authenticity and force of will. Miller even admits in an afterword that one of his stories was inspired by that iconic champion of individualism, Ayn Rand.

How far individualism can really get you in a fractured society is being put to the test in the real world today, and the record so far doesn’t look as good as it does in a comic book adventure story. But that doesn’t take away from the value of comic books themselves, as a vehicle for expressing our ideals and speculating on our future fates, given what we know about human nature.