Remember 1971's R-rated Summer of '42 and its 1973 PG-rated sequel Class of '44?

Based on the titles of both, these films were clearly about 1926 cohorts - who went on to serve in World War II.

So did even 1927 cohorts, even though few if any of them saw actual combat - yet they are still legally regarded as "World War II-era veterans," and entitled to all benefits applicable thereto (1927 cohort David Dinkins, the late former mayor of New York City, had to move heaven and earth to get himself into the Marines - but he succeeded).

Also in 1973 there was American Graffiti, which famously asked the question, "Where were you in '62?"  (The characters had just graduated from high school that summer, making them 1944 cohorts - thus suggesting a first birth year for Boomers as earlier than 1946).

Now, fast forward to the 1978 movie Almost Summer.

It's theme song begins with the following lyrics:

"Susie wants to be a lady (movie) director,
And Eddie wants to drive a hearse.
Johnny wants to be a doctor or lawyer,
And Linda wants to be a nurse."

Not a word in there about "developing a meaningful philosophy of life."

Since this movie made its debut in theaters on April 21, 1978, and the script had to have been written before that, the characters had to have been patterned on no later than 1959 cohorts.

For further information, click on this link:

Almost Summer - Wikipedia

He actually made fascism cool! 

As parents protest critical race theory, students fight racist behavior at school (msn.com)

During the first week of October, Brooklyn Edwards was in the school gymnasium during her lunch period when she said a classmate took a piece of cotton out of his pocket, tossed it on the ground and told her to pick it. 

Brooklyn, 15, described the incident a month later at the Johnston County, North Carolina, school board meeting. She said she’d dealt with racist bullying frequently as a Black student at Princeton Middle/High School, in a majority-white small town southeast of Raleigh. Classmates called her racial slurs, she said, including in front of teachers who failed to react. One classmate suggested she kill herself, so she might be reborn as a white girl, Brooklyn said. 

“It’s bad enough we have to deal with racism in the real world. We shouldn’t have to deal with it in school,” she told the school board, pleading with them to investigate racial harassment in the district. “I’m speaking up for the ones that are too scared to speak up for themselves.”

After sharing her experiences at the board meeting, “I felt relieved and glad they finally knew what was going on,” Brooklyn said in a recent interview, “but I had a lot of doubt they were going to do anything.”

Kaiulani Moses, Brooklyn’s mother, said it was disheartening to see the Johnston County school board focused on a different issue this fall: ensuring that critical race theory, an academic concept that examines how racism is perpetuated through policies and institutions, is not taught in schools. She believes that sent the wrong message to students who bullied their classmates and the teachers and administrators tasked with ensuring safety. 

“It has made these children and some personnel and administrators at this school feel protected,” Moses said. The district is one of hundreds nationwide where some parents and conservative activists demanded that schools block classroom discussions of “white privilege,” cut back on equity training for teachers and stop hiring diversity consultants. The Johnston County Board of Commissioners promised in June to release $7.9 million in school funding if the district banned critical race theory, which administrators said schools did not teach. 

In response, the school board enacted a rule in July barring staff members from doing anything to “create division” in the community. Then, in October, the board passed a policy that limits how teachers can talk about race and requires educators to present historical American figures as “innovators and heroes to our culture.”


After Brooklyn spoke at the board meeting, she said she continued to receive social media messages from classmates calling her racial slurs. Her mother transferred her to a different school in October.  

“I shouldn’t have to relocate my children because they refuse to fix this problem,” Moses said. “It’s all about politics, and our children are having to pay for it.” 


Moses said she met with the superintendent this month, after weeks of requesting to speak to him, and he said he would look into the harassment. The superintendent declined an interview request. The school district said in a statement that administrators began investigating Brooklyn’s claims in early October but did not share the outcome of that investigation. The statement said no other student has reported current incidents of racism at Princeton Middle/High School.


“Our school board members and school administration will not tolerate racist bullying and harassment of our students,” said Caitlin Furr, a district spokeswoman. “We will continue to investigate reports that are brought to us and to take other steps to make sure our students have a positive school experience.” 

This fall, teens in more than a dozen states have staged protests and spoken before school boards about racist bullying and harassment from their peers — sounding alarms over discrimination in some of the same districts and states targeted by conservative activists calling for a ban on anti-racism lessons. 


Students have walked out of class over racist remarks by classmates in Connecticut and Massachusetts, racist social media posts by teens in Minnesota and Washington, graffiti with racial slurs found in bathrooms at schools in Michigan and Missouri, and threats against students of color in New York and Ohio.


David Hinojosa, an attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law who spearheads the nonprofit organization’s work on equal educational opportunities, is concerned that the battles are imperiling efforts to achieve racial and gender equity in schools. He cited the widespread actions opposing diversity efforts “that have proliferated across the country,” beginning with former President Donald Trump’s anti-CRT executive order last year and continuing through state efforts to ban books and limit how history is taught.


“When we say it’s not OK to talk about this truthful history,” he said, “there’s going to be a bleedover effect into the behaviors of school teachers, the behaviors of school leaders and the behavior of students.”


The wave of student activism in recent months, he and two other civil rights experts said, shows precisely why schools cannot afford to avoid the topics of race and discrimination. 

“What the students are shining a light on is the necessity and urgency of talking honestly about race and reckoning honestly with racism,” said Matthew Delmont, a Dartmouth College history professor who’s studied the civil rights movement. “These student protests are making it painfully clear these are issues schools need to fully address as part of the curriculum.”

The uprising after George Floyd’s murder last year spurred many educators to incorporate anti-racism lessons. Districts promised to reform their discipline practices, reduce achievement gaps and combat hateful incidents, which had been rising in recent years before the nationwide protests.


The most recent federal data shows the number of schools where at least one racial hate crime occurred more than doubled from 543 in 2016 to 1,276 in 2018. In a report issued last month, the Government Accountability Office estimated that about 1 in 4 students ages 12 to 18 are exposed to racial, homophobic and antisemitic slurs and anti-immigrant rhetoric at school.


“It’s not just the kids — it is the system itself,” said Ava Farah, 15, who is Arab and Latina and helped organize a walkout last month at Bloomfield Hills High School, near Detroit, after racist graffiti was found in campus bathrooms. “The system allows these kids to get away with it, and the government and our schools have to do something to try and take apart that system.”


A representative for the Bloomfield Hills district said administrators held multiple forums in recent weeks to discuss racism, and they are developing an action plan to address incidents of hate and bias in the schools, which will include additional diversity training for staff and students. The graffiti is being investigated by law enforcement with assistance from the state’s assistant attorney general who oversees hate crimes.


Darren Hutchinson, the John Lewis Chair for Civil Rights and Social Justice at Emory University’s law school, said the experiences described by many of the student protesters are not only disheartening, but they raise concerns that school districts may be violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination. 

“What they’re experiencing is very real. If students are using the N-word and teachers aren’t responding to that, then the teachers are being complicit in racism, and that’s a very important matter to address,” Hutchinson said. “It sounds like some of those schools — based on the reports I’ve read — are turning a blind eye to the racial harassment students are experiencing.”

The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights is investigating 188 school districts over allegations that they have mishandled racial harassment in violation of Title VI, up from 178 a year ago.

The pushback over diversity and inclusion initiatives ramped up this year, with some parents and conservative activists calling the programs too political and inappropriate for school settings. They raised concerns about state standards on ethnic studies curricula, teachers using lesson plans that labeled certain identities as “oppressive” and staff training materials that discussed forms of white supremacy.


Parents and conservative activists have singled out some administrators and teachers at school board meetings and online, accusing them of using assignments and books to indoctrinate students on racial issues. Some educators have been fired or pushed to resign. 


The politically charged atmosphere has prompted concerns among civil rights advocates that some school staff members will be reluctant to take a strong stand on issues involving race.


“White students don’t want to be called oppressors,” Hutchinson said, “but students of color don’t want to be oppressed, and that’s what you’re seeing with these protests.” 


In Pennsylvania, students staged multiple demonstrations this fall against a ban imposed by the Central York school board on an anti-racist reading list that a group of students, parents and educators had created last fall as an optional resource for anyone looking to learn more about discrimination. 

Students marched, wrote newspaper op-eds and used a petition and an Instagram campaign, successfully pressuring the school board into voting unanimously to reverse the ban. But to student organizers like Edha Gupta, a senior at Central York High School, damage had already been done. 

“It is evident to me that diversity and the voices of color in this district do not matter,” Gupta, 17, said at a September board meeting. “I don’t feel welcome here — not anymore.”

Students protesting against racial harassment have been met with mixed responses from administrators. In Tigard, Oregon, a superintendent joined a walkout, while in Rome, Georgia, where state education officials passed a resolution this year calling for limits on what is taught in schools about racial issues or current events, students were suspended for leading a walkout in response to classmates waving a Confederate flag.


Hinojosa worries about the impact on students if they aren’t supported in their fight for an educational experience that’s free of harassment and discrimination. 

“We’re putting all of that at risk because CRT has been used as a dog whistle to mean so many different things,” he said.

In Iowa, one of eight states that enacted laws to ban critical race theory or limit how educators can talk about race, a top Republican lawmaker said Nov. 18 that he will propose legislation to ensure school staff members face criminal prosecution if they share books like “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas and “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie, which he considers obscene.

That same week, the Black Student Union at West High School in Iowa City organized multiple protests and spoke at school board meetings after social media posts circulated showing white classmates using a racial slur, wearing blackface and threatening to stab Black students in the eyes, according to students and Little Village magazine.


Iowa City rolled out a plan one year ago to increase staff training on issues like microaggressions and white supremacy, evaluate teachers on how well they promote equity and tackle disproportionate rates of suspension for Black students. A national conservative activist group, Parents Defending Education, slammed the initiatives, labeling them as teaching critical race theory and “promoting activism.” 

But students of color in Iowa City said these efforts have not done enough to change campus culture. At the protests last month, students described racist encounters with classmates. A Muslim girl said students had yanked her hijab off in the hallway, while a Black student said she had to drop advanced classes to get away from students who called her racial slurs.

“How are we supposed to live in an environment that continuously disrespects us?” asked Maria Kazembe, 18, co-founder of the school’s Black Student Union. 

Matthew Degner, the Iowa City schools superintendent, said the students’ experiences were concerning.
“I don’t think there’s anything worse than when you hear a story from a student that’s been subjected to something like that,” he said. “And it causes you to look in the mirror and think, where do we fall in responsibility for that?” 

Degner said he believes the district has a solid multiyear plan to address equity and racism, but he acknowledged that students of color feel otherwise. 
“If that was sufficient, then we wouldn’t be hearing some of these stories and kids wouldn’t be experiencing this,” he said.

After speaking at school board meetings about racism, Nisreen Elgaali, 17, co-president of the Black Student Union, said she received death threats online, and someone submitted an anonymous tip to the school falsely claiming that the group was planning another protest where students would carry knives and guns. 

“The kind of the backlash we’ve been receiving is completely disturbing,” Elgaali said, “but we’re honestly not surprised because the animosity has always been there.” 

Degner said the district will deploy two lesson plans for students on the impact of racial bias in the coming weeks.

But Black Student Union members want the district to take a zero tolerance approach to incidents of racism, saying they don’t think much will change until it’s clear that there are severe consequences for students who commit acts of hate. 

“Racism thrives in our hallway, and people think that if they do these things that they’re going to be OK, but they shouldn’t be OK — like, we’re not OK after going through all of this,” Kazembe said. “We’re just students trying to go to school, and a lot of us are scared and feel unheard.”

On 14 December 2021, a fuel tanker truck exploded in the Samari neighborhood of Cap-Haïtien, the capital city of the Haitian department of Nord, killing at least 75 people and injuring more than 100.[1][2] Haiti, hit with an economic crisis fueled by an earthquake four months earlier, was unable to adequately treat victims of the explosion, with hospitals undersupplied and in disarray.

At the time of the incident, Haiti was in the midst of a fuel shortage due to gangs seizing control of the fuel distribution.[3] Many gangs have hijacked fuel trucks, kidnapped their drivers and blocked fuel distribution ports.[4] The fuel shortage has caused hospitals, schools, and businesses, who were relying on gasoline generators due to Haiti's unreliable electric grid, to shut down.[5][6] Fuel trucks resumed deliveries only a month before the incident when G9 gang leader Jimmy Chérizier allowed trucks to pass into Port-au-Prince.[7][8]


Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, was also hit by an economic crisis.[4] A few months before, after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, an earthquake that killed 2,248 people caused US$1.5 billion in damage. After this, gangs began to take charge as aid distribution was lackluster, and looting became rampant.[4][9][10]

A fuel tanker carrying 9,000 US gallons (34,000 l) of fuel, in an attempt to avoid a motorcycle, overturned and began spilling fuel.[7] The driver of the truck exited the vehicle and warned bystanders not to approach. Victims of the explosion had been attempting to collect fuel by hitting the tank with hammers when it exploded, with fuel stored in houses nearby worsening the extent of the explosion.[1] Seventy-five people were killed by the explosion and more than 100 people were injured.[6][5] The blast also set 50 homes on fire, damaged businesses and charred vehicles.[7][11] Firefighters had been dispatched to the area, but due to water shortages had to call aid from airport fire services.[4]
After the explosion, several victims were injured due to trampling.[5]

Ambulances took up to five hours to arrive, and 15 victims had to be airlifted.[6][4] Victims were sent to smaller, less equipped hospitals as the largest hospital in the city had shut down in November due to being attacked by bandits. These hospitals were overwhelmed and were unable to handle the victims, as they lacked basic supplies, with some victims being placed on the floor of the hospital due to the lack of hospital beds.[6][5] Field hospitals were also set up in the city.[4] UNICEF sent medical equipment to the city for burn victims.[11] President and Prime Minister Ariel Henry announced three days of mourning in the country.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cap-Ha%C3%AFtien_fuel_tanker_explosion

... the most heated arguments on here centered around what birth year marked the start of what generation (1958 vs. 1961 for the Xers, 1981 vs. 1982 for the Millennials - and more recently, 1997 vs. 1999 for what I have labeled the "Activist Generation")?

The rise of Donald Trump and his "base" has relegated such discussions to parlor-game status.

Make no mistake about it: The Second Civil War - or some crazy "Grand Compromise" to avert it - is coming in 2025.

What follows is a plausible synopsis of what the latter might entail.

The two flags of the title are, of course, the flags of two totally separate, sovereign nations - the New Union, and the New Confederacy.

Since I couldn't find a link to an image of a Confederate flag with 20-some-odd stars, consider what appears below as a proxy for the flag of the New Confederacy (of course without the word "Arkansas" or the four blue stars in the center) -



A cross - symbolizing the New Confederacy's hyper-Christianity - can be placed in the center.

(This flag can also be used as a replacement for the Confederate flag if no civil war breaks out, especially if the cross in the center is added - see Mississippi's new state flag, which features a magnolia blossom with the motto "In God We Trust" underneath it).

The flag of the New Union would also have 25 stars, although the actual number of stars for both flags may differ.  This is because "horse-trading" will be necessary to make the New Union coterminous - namely, a "Blue Corridor" consisting of the northernmost tier of counties in North Dakota, Montana and Idaho, thus linking Minnesota with Washington state.

Obviously the New Confederacy will demand something in return - and that "something," based on the 2020 Presidential election map, would clearly be Georgia; and if the Republicans "re-flip" Georgia in the 2024 election, Virginia is next in line (thanks to the result of last month's gubernatorial election in that state) - or the New Confederacy also gets New Mexico as well as Arizona if the Republicans "re-flip" Arizona in 2024 (as recently as 2004, Republican George W. Bush carried New Mexico).

One of the major virtues of such an arrangement is that the New Confederacy's Canadian border would be completely eliminated (and I'm sure that they wouldn't object one iota to that) - and if the Republicans do not re-take Arizona (and population trends say they won't), the New Confederacy's Mexican border would be confined exclusively to the Rio Grande, which could then be dredged to create a deep "moat" - a prospect that would no doubt please the New Confederates no end.

To connect the two parts of the New Union fully, both an interstate highway - the number I-98, which all-too-conveniently fits into the numbering format (in that 98 is an even number, reserved for highways that run east-west, with the numbers of interstate highways increasing from south to north) is still unassigned - and a high-speed rail line paralleling it, both running between Duluth and Spokane (which each end bearing northward so that they enter the "Blue Corridor" at the current Minnesota-North Dakota and Idaho-Washington borders) - could also be built.  That will pose no problem at all - either fiscally or logistically.

The new Minnesota-Washington border would be at a location mutually agreed upon by the two states (creating super-sized "panhandles" for both).

While there would be significant population exchanges, given how far to the left the New Union would go, and how far to the right the New Confederacy would go, now free from the burden of opposition from the other side, it probably wouldn't even match the Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923 - let alone the chaotic, and occasionally deadly, Indian-Pakistani population exchange of 1947.

This comes courtesy of the redoubtable Guardian:

The supreme court’s abortion ruling is even more unsettling than it may seem | Moira Donegan | The Guardian


Don’t be fooled by the Supreme Court’s nominal hedging on its endorsement of SB8, the Texas abortion ban that deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who assists in an abortion after six weeks’ gestation. In a ruling on Friday, the court held that a lawsuit by Texas abortion providers could go forward – but only on narrow grounds. Only those state officials responsible for licensing medical providers may be sued, the court ordered – no one else involved in the state’s practical maintenance of SB8 is liable. The ruling said, for instance, that the providers could not sue court clerks, those bureaucrats tasked with actually docketing the lawsuits that would enforce SB8.

For providers, it seems that the best possible outcome for the suit now is that they may be able to secure an injunction preventing medical providers from being delicensed. These perplexing limits placed by the court on which parties can be sued to challenge SB8 ensures that though the suit against the law will be at least partly allowed to go forward, it will be largely toothless.



In the meantime, SB8 will remain law. Women in Texas are effectively banned from securing a legal abortion in the state, even though the still-standing Roe v Wade decision says that they have a right to one. It’s likely that SB8 will remain in effect at least for the duration of Roe’s lifetime – meaning that Texas women will not be able to obtain legal abortions after six weeks for the foreseeable future. Many of the initial media responses to the court’s opinion emphasized that since the suit was allowed to go forward, on technical grounds, the ruling was a narrow win for the abortion providers. But in reality Friday was a massive win for the rightwing Texas government, and for anti-choice forces nationwide.


That SB8 has been allowed to take effect – now for the second time – by the supreme court reflects the justices’ eagerness to gut abortion rights. The fact of the matter is that the court is already set to overturn Roe and allow states to ban abortion outright. That much was clear to anyone who listened to last week’s oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, a case surrounding the constitutionality of a 15-week ban in Mississippi, which devolved into grim misogynist spectacle as the Republican appointees held court on the supposed ease of giving infants up for adoption and their own robust comfort with overturning long-settled precedent.


That ruling is scheduled to come down in late May or early June. When it does, a slim majority of states are expected to ban abortion, either immediately or very soon thereafter. That means that soon SB8 – and the copycat bills that it has inspired in states like Florida and Arkansas – won’t be necessary for the anti-choice lobby to achieve their aims. Instead of concocting an elaborate enforcement process in which rogue anti-woman vigilantes enforce their abortion bans, the states will be able to enforce their bans themselves.


SB8, then, and the supreme court’s embrace of it, can be understood not only as a harbinger of the justices’ deep contempt for the abortion right, but also of their childish impatience to exert this contempt upon American women. They can’t even wait six months. They want to ban abortion right now. In pursuit of this goal, the supreme court has proven itself willing to undermine its own capacity to oversee state laws, to enforce federal supremacy, and to protect constitutional rights.

The anti-choice substance of the court’s decision in SB8 was not surprising; its embrace of Texas’s tactics perhaps was. Aside from its direct attempt to undermine women’s rights, SB8 also took aim at judicial authority. By banning abortion long before viability, the law flouted the supreme court’s precedents in Roe and Planned Parenthood v Casey. But that much a slew of vehemently anti-choice justices would probably forgive: all six of the Republican appointees clearly believe that Roe was wrongly decided, and at least five of them (all but Roberts, who seems more trepidatious) appear eager to overturn it. But in its novel enforcement mechanism, SB8 sought specifically to evade judicial review – not just to give the court an opportunity to overturn its own precedent, but to make it so that within Texas borders supreme court precedent didn’t matter.


In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor compared SB8 to the views of John C Calhoun – a nineteenth-century pro-slavery campaigner who argued that states have the right to nullify federal laws that they do not like. America fought its civil war in no small part over this question. By first allowing the SB8 to go into effect, in September, and then by gutting the lawsuit against it this Friday, the supreme court has, shockingly, endorsed a scheme to undermine its own power, and granted a state the ability to evade federal precedent. Nullification, it seems, is back in style.


For years, court watchers have wondered whether the justices’ institutionalist instincts would overcome their misogynist ones: if the Court had to choose between maintaining its own power and legitimacy, and overturning Roe, which would it choose? Now, it seems, we have our answer.
_______________________________________________________________________________________

Nullification?  Really?

What about the 18 states (plus the District of Columbia, which should be a state) that have legalized recreational marijuana use?

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, no?

Hi guys,

So the fouth turning only look at the cycle of the US and may also a lot of western europe countries. They started their cycle at same time.
I would be interessted to have a disscussion about different countries and when their cycles started.
So i am live in Germany the cycle starts pretty same time then in the US. But i think about other european countries like turkey.
Maybe you hear about the turkish lira they have a big inflation and in my opinion it seems like there are further in the cyclus.
Also if you look at the histroy of turkey i think their "new era" started earlies about 1923. Thats really interessting.
Also would be intressted to discuss other countries and nations, like Spain, india, china etc.

So where you guys from? What do you think about cycles of other nations? Is there already a part at this forum for such topics?
Or you know some good sources about this topic ?

Thank you

Ethan Crumbley, the recent Michigan school shooter, is age 15. This means the earliest he can have been born is 2005, making him Homeland generation. I think he is the first headline-making shooter from his generation. It's also noteworthy that his parents have been charged with manslaughter in the case. Could this be a Homeland generation trend : passing responsibility for their antisocial behavior on to their parents? It might just be the particulars of this case, but it could be the start of a trend. It should make red zoners happy (we shall see if it does) since they have argued that mass shootings are because of failed parenting, rather than easy access to firearms.

1998: 1/10
These guys were among the oldest to be in college when COVID-19 started, but not everyone goes to college and thus this reason might apply to another birthyear. They were also the first to start elementary school after the start of the Iraq War, but what else?

1999: 3/10
My bias on this one, but other than not being able to vote in 2016 and probably starting high school after smartphone adoption rates hit 50%+, I can't really see how these guys will get seen as Homelanders in the future.

2000: 2/10
These guys were born after the Y2K celebrations, probably among the first to not really understand the killing of Osama bin Laden, and graduated high school after the Parkland shooting, which gave "Gen Z" its identity, but these still are not really enough, IMO, for them to be a Homelander start.

2001: 5/10
This is possibly the absolute earliest year I can see Homelanders reasonably start in. They were the first to be born after the actual start of the 3rd millennium, the first to be born during Bush 43's presidency, were among the first to not really remember Hurricane Katrina or its aftermath (which arguably led to rising gas prices in the mid 2000's), and probably the first to not really understand events like Occupy Wall Street and the death of Trayvon Martin.

2002: 9/10
Probably the best start of Homelanders atm. They were the first to be born after 9/11, born at the absolute crux of the analog/digital transition, probably still in elementary school when the Sandy Hook shooting took place (which led to children getting even more sheltered), and graduated high school after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

2003: 6/10
These people were born after the establishment of Homeland Security, which automatically makes them "Homelanders" by default. They were also born after the start of the Iraq War and came of age after the January 6 insurrection.

2004: 8/10
A good but a later start date. These people were probably the first to have an unlikely chance of remembering the 2008 Financial Crisis (which according to S&H started the 4T in the US) and were the first to come of age after the end of the War in Afghanistan.

2005: 1/10
I simply think this is too late for a Homelander start, and the only reason I can think of that makes them one is them likely still being in high school when COVID-19 ends, but it is unknown when that will happen. Although S&H uses this start date, I do not think it is a good start date, and in fact, I think this is the worst start date on this list.

2006: 3/10
Same as above, but I think a 2006 start date has more merit than a 2005 one. They are probably the first to not really understand the significance of Osama bin Laden's death and were the first to start high school after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.