Here are some reference links for secular cycles:

First chapter of Turchin and Nefedov’s Secular Cycles
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8904.pdf

Secular cycles as demographic cycles:
http://cliodynamics.ru/download/Korotaye...apter1.pdf

Two millennia of Chinese secular cycles
http://cliodynamics.ru/download/Korotaye...apter2.pdf

Outline of US secular cycle
https://aeon.co/essays/history-tells-us-...-gap-leads

American instability cycles
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.to...0Paper.pdf

I've gotten the basic layout for the WordPress site down and set up a preview.  I'll be tinkering somewhat with it, at some point I want a site wide logo.


http://www.generational-theory.com/wp/

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree...l-abramson

This may shock you: Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest

Jill Abramson
I’ve investigated Hillary and know she likes a ‘zone of privacy’ around her. This lack of transparency, rather than any actual corruption, is her greatest fla
It’s impossible to miss the “Hillary for Prison” signs at Trump rallies. At one of the Democratic debates, the moderator asked Hillary Clinton whether she would drop out of the race if she were indicted over her private email server. “Oh for goodness – that is not going to happen,” she said. “I’m not even going to answer that question.”

Based on what I know about the emails, the idea of her being indicted or going to prison is nonsensical. Nonetheless, the belief that Clinton is dishonest and untrustworthy is pervasive. A recent New York Times-CBS poll found that 40% of Democrats say she cannot be trusted.

For decades she’s been portrayed as a Lady Macbeth involved in nefarious plots, branded as “a congenital liar” and accused of covering up her husband’s misconduct, from Arkansas to Monica Lewinsky. Some of this is sexist caricature. Some is stoked by the “Hillary is a liar” videos that flood Facebook feeds. Some of it she brings on herself by insisting on a perimeter or “zone of privacy” that she protects too fiercely. It’s a natural impulse, given the level of scrutiny she’s attracted, more than any male politician I can think of.

I would be “dead rich”, to adapt an infamous Clinton phrase, if I could bill for all the hours I’ve spent covering just about every “scandal” that has enveloped the Clintons. As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising.

Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.

The yardsticks I use for measuring a politician’s honesty are pretty simple. Ever since I was an investigative reporter covering the nexus of money and politics, I’ve looked for connections between money (including campaign donations, loans, Super Pac funds, speaking fees, foundation ties) and official actions. I’m on the lookout for lies, scrutinizing statements candidates make in the heat of an election.

The connection between money and action is often fuzzy. Many investigative articles about Clinton end up “raising serious questions” about “potential” conflicts of interest or lapses in her judgment. Of course, she should be held accountable. It was bad judgment, as she has said, to use a private email server. It was colossally stupid to take those hefty speaking fees, but not corrupt. There are no instances I know of where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor.

As for her statements on issues, Politifact, a Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking organization, gives Clinton the best truth-telling record of any of the 2016 presidential candidates. She beats Sanders and Kasich and crushes Cruz and Trump, who has the biggest “pants on fire” rating and has told whoppers about basic economics that are embarrassing for anyone aiming to be president. (He falsely claimed GDP has dropped the last two quarters and claimed the national unemployment rate was as high as 35%).

I can see why so many voters believe Clinton is hiding something because her instinct is to withhold. As first lady, she refused to turn over Whitewater documents that might have tamped down the controversy. Instead, by not disclosing information, she fueled speculation that she was hiding grave wrongdoing. In his book about his time working in the Clinton White House, All Too Human, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos wrote that failing to convince the first lady to turn over the records of the Arkansas land deal to the Washington Post was his biggest regret.

The same pattern of concealment repeats itself through the current campaign in her refusal to release the transcripts of her highly paid speeches. So the public is left wondering if she made secret promises to Wall Street or is hiding something else. The speeches are probably anodyne (politicians always praise their hosts), so why not release them?

Colin Diersing, a former student of mine who is a leader of Harvard’s Institute of Politics, thinks a gender-related double standard gets applied to Clinton. “We expect purity from women candidates,” he said. When she behaves like other politicians or changes positions, “it’s seen as dishonest”, he adds. CBS anchor Scott Pelley seemed to prove Diersing’s point when he asked Clinton: “Have you always told the truth?” She gave an honest response, “I’ve always tried to, always. Always.” Pelley said she was leaving “wiggle room”. What politician wouldn’t?

Clinton distrusts the press more than any politician I have covered. In her view, journalists breach the perimeter and echo scurrilous claims about her circulated by unreliable rightwing foes. I attended a private gathering in South Carolina a month after Bill Clinton was elected in 1992. Only a few reporters were invited and we sat together at a luncheon where Hillary Clinton spoke. She glared down at us, launching into a diatribe about how the press had invaded the Clintons’ private life. The distrust continues.

These are not new thoughts, but they are fundamental to understanding her. Tough as she can seem, she doesn’t have rhino hide, and during her husband’s first term in the White House, according to Her Way, a critical (and excellent) investigative biography of Clinton by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, she became very depressed during the Whitewater imbroglio. A few friends and aides have told me that the email controversy has upset her as badly.
Play
Like most politicians, she’s switched some of her positions and sometimes shades the truth. In debates with Sanders, she cites her tough record on Wall Street, but her Senate bills, like one curbing executive pay, went nowhere. She favors ending the carried interest loophole cherished by hedge funds and private equity executives because it taxes their incomes at a lower rate than ordinary income. But, according to an article by Gerth, she did not sign on to bipartisan legislation in 2007 that would have closed it. She voted for a bankruptcy bill favored by big banks that she initially opposed, drawing criticism from Elizabeth Warren. Clinton says she improved the bill before voting for passage. Her earlier opposition to gay marriage, which she later endorsed, has hurt her with young people. Labor worries about her different statements on trade deals.

Still, Clinton has mainly been constant on issues and changing positions over time is not dishonest.

It’s fair to expect more transparency. But it’s a double standard to insist on her purity.

Gone
The requested resource
/forum/
is no longer available on this server and there is no forwarding address. Please remove all references to this resource.

I used the word "constellation" because it appears this chart of happiness vs cohort somewhat mimics the generational constellation and various cohorts' current economic situations. The only surprise is the fact that Millies are happier in general than X (albeit not by much). We X are screwed, head end Millies and Disco Boom not too good either. Aquarian Boom and Silents have all the money. In the case of younger Millies it may just be the effect of naivete - give them a few years and we'll see what actual outcomes look like.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/chart...47253.html

http://www.usnews.com/news/best-countrie...illennials

Quote:You see them everywhere, the articles about millennials. As a culture we’re obsessed about what they wear, what technology they use, what careers they pursue. I’m no exception. No matter how vapid the article, I devour the click bait like a hungry shark. But my interest is beyond what millennials believe about parental leave or Hillary Clinton. I have a far stronger motivation: I desperately want to know whether I’m one of them.

Experts who study generations and the reporters who talk to them don’t quite know how to handle those of us born in the early 80s, “cuspers” wedged between millennials and Generation X. Depending on whom you ask, the generation started in 1980, ‘81 or ‘82 and ends somewhere in the late 1990s...


http://www.usnews.com/news/best-countrie...illennials

This is almost humorous, but it is too close to the current reality.

Quote:After the Fact In the history of truth, a new chapter begins.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/0...d-of-facts

… "Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, fundamentalism and postmodernism, the religious right and the academic left, met up: either the only truth is the truth of the divine or there is no truth; for both, empiricism is an error. That epistemological havoc has never ended: much of contemporary discourse and pretty much all of American politics is a dispute over evidence. An American Presidential debate has a lot more in common with trial by combat than with trial by jury, which is what people are talking about when they say these debates seem “childish”: the outcome is the evidence. The ordeal endures.
Then came the Internet. The era of the fact is coming to an end: the place once held by “facts” is being taken over by “data.” This is making for more epistemological mayhem, not least because the collection and weighing of facts require investigation, discernment, and judgment, while the collection and analysis of data are outsourced to machines. “Most knowing now is Google-knowing—knowledge acquired online,” Lynch writes in “The Internet of Us” (his title is a riff on the ballyhooed and bewildering “Internet of Things”).” …
… "People who care about civil society have two choices: find some epistemic principles other than empiricism on which everyone can agree or else find some method other than reason with which to defend empiricism. Lynch suspects that doing the first of these things is not possible, but that the second might be. He thinks the best defense of reason is a common practical and ethical commitment. I believe he means popular sovereignty. That, anyway, is what Alexander Hamilton meant in the Federalist Papers, when he explained that the United States is an act of empirical inquiry: “It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” The evidence is not yet in.”

a post from 2012:

Originally Posted by The Wonkette
 -- do you believe that Russians are/were on the same saeculum as Americans and Western Europe. Justin '77 would take issue with the assumption that a 1921 Russian cohort would be a Civic.


me:


They might have been ahead of much of the rest of the world in the saecular cycle going into the Second World War because their mid-19th-century Crisis was the Crimean War instead of some the later Crises in some other countries (Britain and India -- Sepoy Rebellion in India, US -- American Civil War, Japan -- Meiji Restoration, China -- T'Aiping rebellion, Germany and Italy -- unification, France -- attempt to establish a client state in Mexico, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Paris Commune, Mexico -- Juarez' revolt against Maximilian, Canada -- its independence Crisis)... but the Great Patriotic War forced the Soviets/Russians back onto the cycle of the West.

In 1917 while other participants in WWI were still decidedly 3T, Russia was at a time analogous to the late 1850s in America, when political polarization peaked, political distress was extreme, and institutions failed due to corruption and cronyism. Russia was polarized between extreme plutocracy in defense of class interests and would stop at nothing to preserve a way of life.... and the most effective opposition was Bolsheviks who offered the most extreme leveling of social differences and the obliteration of institutions that seemed to enrich a few and do no good for anything else. Imagine the American Civil War in which the Union and Confederate sides had no trace of gentlemanly behavior in which every victory left a wake of mass executions and expropriations -- that is how I see Russia in 1917, a dangerous time in which any spark can initiate a premature Crisis of extreme severity, the 3T/4T cusp in which every adult generation is at its worst. Elderly Adaptives scared from being born into a Crisis world try to patch things together with compromises that satisfy nobody. Idealists are clearly divided into hostile, intolerant, exclusive camps that seek the annihilation of each other. Reactive young adults see war and revolution as opportunities for choosing the 'right' side and deriving profit. What might become a Civic generation endures a scarred childhood that enfeebles it. Such ensures a social implosion.

Russia/the new USSR got a short respite known as NEP -- but Stalin put an end to that with his Five Year Plan and imposed his severe collectivization and the ensuing Great Purge at roughly the same time as the Great Deprssion in the West. The Great Purge petered out and Russia seemed to be going toward a 1T... but the Nazi/fascist invasion of the Soviet Union imposed a Crisis Era from outside. If the Great Patriotic War isn't a Crisis, then what is?

A 1921 cohort in Russia might have been been an Adaptive cohort had it not been for the death struggle between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.

Resuscitated from the Obituaries Forum on the old T4T Forum

The Silent Generation will be best known in American culture for comedy which is well recorded because the whole adult lifespan of the Silent is largely recorded. Good comedy remains useful to life. With comedy, something that people just don't do well late in life because when the timing goes so does the comedy... it really is over.

With the Silent, comedy is largely self-effacing, and it is exactly what people need if life is to avoid becoming unduly formal. Think not only of Johnny Carson, but also Andy Griffith, John Winters. Leslie Nielsen, Dick Van Dyke, Bob Newhart, Joan Rivers, Alan King, Tim Conway, George Carlin, Jerry Lewis, Flip Wilson, Bill Cosby, Mary Tyler Moore, Christopher Lloyd, Mel Brooks, Dom DeLuise, Woody Allen, Michael Palin, Graham Cleese, Richard Pryor... they kept America from being excessively reverential to flawed GIs and as shrill and strident as Boomers. As they die off or can no longer do comedy, we get more in-your-face stuff characteristic of Boomers and Generation X. Such can be funny, but it is unlikely to create empathy.

To be sure there were great GI comedians (Morey Amsterdam, Minnie Pearl, Gracie Allen, Henny Youngman, Lucille Ball, Don Knotts, Bill Dana, Don Adams)... but the next Golden Age of Comedy is likely to appear soon after the 4T ends.

Howe and Strauss didn't catch it or at least didn't write about it. The disappearance of the Silent from the comedy stage likely ensures that comedy will not smooth such gaps of generation and region as there now are.

Addendum: Don Rickles could really needle people. Of course I would never encourage anyone to try his sort of comedy in a public setting; it fits people tending to get too big for their britches, as in Hollywood.

Quote:you know its a 4th turning because the culture and values forum is gathering dust.

something's been on my mind for a while. and thats how different saeculums offer great cultural masterpieces in some mediums, but seem to completely fail in others.

for instance, the current cycle will be very well remembered for its music, as well as its movies. however the visual arts that have been made from the 60s onwards is mostly garbage. There are still a couple of living renowned painters, the pop artist David Hockney comes to mind, but his time came and went long ago. I could also name a couple of Australian painters like Peter Booth and Pro Hart, but that may be due to Australia's relatively thin history of any sort of cultural achievement whatsoever

regardless the visual arts of the late 20th century, apart from some notable photographers, will be best remembered for gimmicky stunts like stained bedsheets and sharks in formaldehyde. As i said, it seemed the rot really set in after 50s/60s Pop Art. From that point, the most creatively gifted kids chose to pick up the guitar rather than the paintbrush. There have certainly been good artists, but none that have entered the popular memory, if you're deeply connected with art circles you might know some names, but the average man on the street won't.

But the Jazz age cycle shows a different story. Painting was at its zenith, probably its most socially relevant point since the Rennaisance. From Van Gogh to Pollock we basically see a pattern similar to popular music post WW2: Like Elvis and the early rockers, Impressionists such as Van Gogh never created anything necessarily complex or intentionally offensive, but the mere fact that it just looked so different from all the other art out there caused a public furore. They were told they couldn't paint properly by the older establishment, they weren't allowed to exhibit work, they were outcasts without really trying too hard. As fin-de-siecle Paris made way for the new century, new revolutionaries emerged. The German expressionists such as Kirchner, then Picasso and Braque, and then a crazy splintering of all sorts of artistic factions: futurism, constructivism, vorticism, dada, de-stijl, and so on. After WW1 the idealism turned to cynicism (a number of prominent artists, driven by their nationalist ideals, died in the war). They declared the world absurd, painters like Di-Chirico made great work infected with a social commentary, eery empty landscapes a reflection of the great loss of humanity just suffered. Other artists would come to be influenced by the frenetic energy of Jazz music. But the art started to get abit crazy. Rauschenburg famously did a "reverse-artwork", erasing a completed De-Kooning piece and exhibiting what was basically a blank sheet of paper. This, along with Marcel Duchamp's readymades, is what i consider to have basically lit the fuse that caused the mass calamity that is contemporary art. What began as the free and lively notion "that art can be anything" has left art not even knowing what it is. Judgement, criticism and taste were being murdered. as the 1920s and 1930s progress, there were still some prominent pieces being offered, by the guys who'd been doing it for 30 years as well as with the emergence of the Surrealists (who could be considered a form of 4T escapism), and later the Abstract Expressionists. Dali, Khalo and Pollock are great painters from the GI generation, the Pop-artists that followed them would be late GIs and Silents, but thereafter the well runs dry.

When i was in the states last year one of the lasting impressions were the Diego Rivera murals, usually a tribute to the people of whatever city it was in. They were amazing. Its hard to imagine how a visual artist now would pay such a sentimental tribute to the workers of today. The legacy lives on though, you can hear it every now and again even in common bar talk. some guy makes a doodle on a napkin and says "oh im no Van Gogh". Novels are another prominent legacy from that cycle, it seems many people past say age 65 say they wanted to be writers when they were young, because many of the greatest cultural idols were writers. Obviously technology plays a part in this. the popularity of the novel exploded in the 19th century due to advances in printing and the eventual invention of the typewriter. The aforementioned modernism era in painting was somewhat forced upon by artists because the invention of photography had made redundant the need for realism and accuracy. People wanted to achieve something in paint that the photograph couldn't manage. The popularity of music in the current cycle can be attributed to the emergence of the affordable LP and record player, not to mention the inventions of radio and television. But with the destruction of the music market thanks to online piracy, i have my doubts as to whether the next generation of artists and prophets will take to music as enthusiastically as the silents and boomers did.

I can see this rant is already too long so i'll end it there. other thoughts on this notion?