At CBBForum, people are discussing the Theory, and it doesn't look good.

Check it out here: https://cbbforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4278

The OP gives a great overview of the theory, although he has this to say with a sneer:

Quote:So basically, because Millennials came after a Nomad generation, Generation X, the authors expect twentysomethings and teens to follow social norms, be intolerant of homosexuality, oppose drug use, listen to the Backstreet Boys and 'N SYNC, dress preppily, believe kids have too much freedom instead of seeking youth rights, get behind the president during times of war, trust corporations, and value unity, order and stability for their own sake.

The wiki RationalWiki has an article on the S&H theory, which you can read here:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/William_St..._Neil_Howe


Like a lot of people, it calls the theory pseudoscience. Some of their points sound as if the editors on that wiki don't understand the theory at all. For example, this part:

Quote:The "crises" chosen also lend themselves to confirmation bias. The Depression and World War II period was a time of drastic societal change, but so was the Vietnam War and 1960s. Why is one a "crisis" and the other an "awakening"?

I hate Millennials online because so many of them are arrogant atheists who want an end to hope, faith,  and spirituality. They don't have a respect for the soul, the afterlife, or the intrinsic value of a person. It makes me not care if harsh laws are applied against them. They started it against the Millennials who are still religious.

If things like doxxing or trying to get people fired for their opinions were outlawed then the issue could be fixed. Only harsh laws can clamp down on a crazed majority.

I hypothesize that certain Strauss-Howe generational events, which I call "abandon-business" events, strongly influence the course of history.

My article, Abandon-business events and a history book gives an example. It does so, by mining the dates in a book, recently published, which focuses on one aspect of recent United States history: postmodernism.

This aims to be a serious, scientific article, so please critique!

A solution to many of our problems?

This is about a Ponzi scheme. No, it is not Social Security, which really is well funded... but it is far more pervasive and set for a fall. In some places (Greater Detroit may be the most blatant and infamous), public revenues and public costs have gone into a complete imbalance...and you know how that goes.

There's plenty of blame to spread around, some of it undue. Greater Detroit is an anathema to many in rural and semi-rural Michigan, much of it on race (which explains the infamous Michigan Militia). This said, many 'lesser' communities far from Detroit and in no way urban, have much the same problem of urban sprawl (in cities of only 10,000 people). Traffic congestion is hideous, and this is not for some special event. Note well: just as in giant cities, infrastructure costs start small and rise exponentially, and a city needs more growth to offset the rising costs of infrastructure -- whether the city has 5000 people or 5 million. 

Ethnic tensions? Economic distress becomes inter-ethnic tensions. Misplaced priorities? Cities having to spend huge amounts of money replacing sewers and streets instead of on educating children. Political corruption? A poor financial condition creates stresses that invite demagogues who become crooks as soon as they take office. I've mocked former Detroit Mayor (and jailbird) Kwame Kilpatrick as "Kwame Crook-Patrick"... but cities not in trouble don't vote for people like him. 

So how can one connect urban design, high collision and death rates involving motor vehicles, troubled public finances, soulless development, wasteful use of energy, and pathological government? Oddly, catastrophic decisions in urban planning. Developers get much of the blame here, but so do public officials who saw quick growth but not unwelcome  consequences twenty years later. As many people do if given the chance, the ones who made the decisions got rich or improved their career prospects for about twenty years. They expect things to magically take care of themselves when things project to go badly.  

Strong Towns looks like a solution.  It does require us to rethink how we do many important things in life. 

 

Quote:   ... the local unit of government benefits from the enhanced revenues associated with new growth. But it also typically assumes the long-term liability for maintaining the new infrastructure. This exchange — a near-term cash advantage for a long-term financial obligation — is one element of a Ponzi scheme.

Quote:“Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability.”

The other is the realization that the revenue collected does not come near to covering the costs of maintaining the infrastructure. In America, we have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates the cost at $5 trillion — but that's just for major infrastructure, not the minor streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that serve our homes.

The reason we have this gap is because the public yield from the suburban development pattern — the amount of tax revenue obtained per increment of liability assumed — is ridiculously low. Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability. The engineering profession will argue, as ASCE does, that we're simply not making the investments necessary to maintain this infrastructure. This is nonsense. We've simply built in a way that is not financially productive.

In this article from the Atlantic, Jean Twenge disses Millennials.


https://www.theatlantic.com/national/arc...ic/256638/


Twenge writes: "The first books written about Millennials were not just positive but glowing. The best known of these, Millennials Rising, is subtitled The Next Great Generation. Authors Neil Howe and William Strauss predicted that Millennials would resemble the generation who fought World War II: conformist, socially conservative, and highly involved in the community and interested in government. 'Once this new youth persona begins to focus on convention, community, and civic renewal, America will be on the brink of becoming someplace very new,' they write."

But you Millennials ARE conformist, socially conservative, and highly involved in the community and interested in government!

She also writes: "Howe and Strauss were right about other trends -- rates of teen pregnancy, early sexual intercourse, alcohol abuse, and youth crime have continued to decline. However, these behaviors aren't related at all to civic orientation, and have a tangential relationship at best to the desire to help others or contribute to society. They are also determined by many factors beyond generational attitudes, such as demographics, drug wars, policing, birth control availability, and even -- as the authors of Freakonomics argued -- the legalization of abortion."

No, Millennials have decreased teen pregnancy, alcohol abuse and crime because they're a buncha wholesome Scouts! S&H got it right, foo's!

Why do so many people fail to see the social conservatism and conformism of Millennials?

Thanks to computing being imposed into many areas of life lately (even pre-COVID), this has a side-effect of the numbers running the show. Metrics in many categories that people use to measure how good or bad life is. COVID-19 may be accelerating what was already going on in the personal fitness device arena for a decade. People would wear these devices that capture more and more information with each new release then extrapolate to scores that people assume determine how healthy they are. Similar thing playing out with climate change: we need to stay below +2.0 ºC relative to pre-industrial times & how we get there is by consuming X units less energy per year by year Y. Later down the line (Awakening?), we all realise while we look good on paper, we really haven't got anywhere. Also: material needs easily met during the High but no sense of higher purpose in life, with this changing in the Awakening. How have Highs usually played out in prior saecula? Were there any in the past that didn't follow a war?

ROME (AP) — A magistrate slain by mobsters in Sicily and praised by two popes has been beatified by the Roman Catholic church on Sunday in the last formal step before possible sainthood. 


Rosario Livatino was gunned down on a Sicilian highway outside Agrigento as he drove to work in 1990. Three years later, during a pilgrimage to Sicily, Pope John Paul II hailed him a “martyr of justice and, indirectly, of the Christian faith.”
Livatino was beatified in a ceremony in a cathedral in Agrigento. Hours later, Pope Francis at the Vatican said Livatino worked to judge “not to condemn, but to redeem.” As an investigative magistrate, Livatino, 37, had been leading probes into the Mafia and corruption when he was slain. He was known for praying daily before entering court. 

Francis also praised Livatino as a “martyr of justice and of the faith,” noting that the magistrate “always put his work ‘under the protection of God,’” a reference to Livatino’s motto. Describing Livatino as a “witness of the Gospel until his heroic death,″ Francis expressed hope that his example would inspire others to be ”loyal defenders of legality and of liberty.”


Shortly after meeting with Livatino’s parents in Agrigento, John Paul II became the first pontiff to publicly decry the Mafia. In improvised remarks on May 9, 1993, at an outdoor Mass in the ancient Valley of the Temples, John Paul thundered against mobsters, demanding they repent their murderous ways.


Four gunmen shot at Livatino’s car as he drove without bodyguards. The alleged masterminds and attackers were eventually arrested and convicted. The Agrigento area is a power base for the Stidda, a group of mobsters who rival Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia with its main stronghold in the Palermo area across the island. Helping in the prosecution was description from a northern Italian businessman who was driving by and witnessed the shooting.

For the beatification, Livatino’s blood-soaked shirt was taken from investigators’ evidence deposits and put into a glass-enclosed reliquary, a holder of relics for faithful who want to venerate those beatified.

The Vatican has been considering developing a doctrine about excommunicating Catholic mobsters. That drive followed a visit by Pope Francis in 2014 to the southern Italian region of Calabria, the stronghold of the ’ndrangheta crime syndicate, which is one of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers. Francis met with the father of a 3-year-old boy slain in the region’s drug turf wars and declared that all mobsters are automatically excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

The Vatican’s commission on human development on Sunday said that to honor Livatino a working group was set up to study “excommunication for mafias,” an initiative which will involve bishops worldwide.

https://apnews.com/article/europe-sicily...7d029e97e7

This is a repost of a thread I began during the time that spammers ruthlessly invaded this webpage.  It got lost in the shuffle at the time and no doubt got deleted along with the huge volume of spam that surfaced at the time. The title of this thread is what I would title my autobiography if I ever were to write on. It has only been recently that I became familiar with the word misogyny, which is an obsessive hatred toward women. Well, I was the opposite of a misogynist, one who liked women too much, and it did get me in trouble at various times. Sometimes it cost me on jobs even though there were no sexual harassment laws yet at the time and I was never guilty of anything approaching that anyway even though I often developed attractions toward female coworkers. Before those laws were passed I believe that the bosses were able to get away with quite a bit but was not the case for the rank and file workers.

I tried going to places such as singles bars which were very much in vogue at the time with mostly miserable results. I was usually the one who got approached by the bouncers even if I struck up a conversation about something as innocent as the weather. I ended up figuring out that the establishments were a waste of four things--time, money, energy and sanity--perhaps the latter even more than the first three. I seldom was able to get anyone on the dance floor during my infrequent excursions into that world. Later on I found organized singles dances, which most of the time were more fruitful in the early years but as time went along it seemed as though the ladies were a lot choosier about who they would even accept a dance from. Seldom did I get paired off toward the end of the dance as was commonplace. I also joined a plethora of inexpensive dating services before most got so ridiculously expensive when the whole yuppie thing it.

Social life was top dog for many years of my life, and while credit scores didn't even exist at the time or at least weren't widely advertised, I lived on the edge in many ways and was even threatened a couple of time with car repossession and even apartment eviction because I wanted to make sure I had enough money for pleasure and a great social life. Usually I didn't scrimp on food but even that I did on occasion.  It wasn't until I was probably around that I learned that there is a word for this type of person who puts pleasure above all else--a hedonist. It doesn't have to be sexual pleasure but that seems to be usually what is assumed when the word is used.

It is often said that we are called to follow our dream(s). And I had a great dream of being the supreme ladies' man who could get almost any women he wanted. That part felt flat on its face early on. In trying to make dates I had a ratio of about ten nos for every yes, a stat that made me horribly disillusioned. The obsession was no doubt spawned by the fact that I was socially isolated in a boarding school from ten years of age and into my twenties. I was 26 before I had my first real date, and the feeling of life having passed me by went through the stratosphere and no doubt led to my obsession. I joined a social group primarily for single people with mixed results. I ended up getting called on the carpet for things that I felt most of the other men in the group got by with fairly easily. At that time not much was known about Asperger's, and I often felt that much was kept hidden for me. Wasn't till the 1990s that the condition became more widely known, and because diagnosis wasn't available before then I am not sure I ever was really diagnosed. Yet on an Internet test I took a while back where if you score 32 points or higher you're considered an Aspie, I scored a 31 which has to make me at least a borderline case. And have often read that clumsy actions toward opposite gender is a hallmark of the condition. Yet at the time I was bold and determined not to be pigeonholed into some type of proverbial box.

There is much more to tell but I will leave it at this point from how, hoping to generate opinoins and feedback on the topic.