The Coronavirus

[pbrower2a]

(07-19-2021, 04:06 AM)Dustinw5220 Wrote: I look forward to seeing the positive impact super elder Boomers have in the next 1T, at least I am for 'true' authentic Prophet/Idealist Boomers like you and Eric who are on the right side of history and stand for the right values, the Hard-Right neoliberal Boomers (including a certain ex-president) have had far too much power and prominence for far too long! With so many older generations following the pattern the GI's set, I would honestly be shocked if even Generation X (as an elderhood Nomad/Reactive generation) was quite as willing to go off into that good night as their Lost predecessors were (and I hope they don't, we're gonna need continued positive influence from the best kind of Nomads/Reactives to stop the potential excesses of the next Awakening Era from getting too out of hand)!

The worst Boomers got into the limelight -- the ruthless, rapacious, selfish exploiters who insist that others regard them as benefactors. Such is how the Southern Transcendentals saw themselves: that they were doing great good for slaves. They had no trouble with the exploitative, dehumanizing character of slavery. People doing great evil can believe that they are doing great good for Humanity. 

I look at Boomer executives as the worst ever for enriching themselves as no other executives have ever done, keeping their subordinates poor and scared, denying opportunity for anyone not born into the Master Class any opportunity to improve their lives, promoting monopoly and cartels, and squeezing out small business in favor of corporate behemoths with bloated bureaucracies ideally suited to extreme narcissists.

We will need more flexibility in our economy for much more than treating people badly. Let's start with education: elementary school is for the basics, but beyond that we need to teach people how to live. That people are amenable to a crass demagogue like you-know-who indicts the lack of moral content in teaching in K-12 education. The world is more complex than it used to be because of technology that can either ennoble and enrich life or stupefy it into something ugly, mindless, and cruel. Technology, like all power, has no morality attached. It is up to us to use it for benign purposes or to let it go destructive.    

We need more culture and less entertainment. We need the knack for detecting and rejecting propaganda. We need to become more sophisticated about psychological manipulation. We need to recognize the validity of cultural traditions not ours when they are in our midst. Yes, that means "Mr. Patel" and "Mrs. Nguyen" who may are far more admirable people than the meth dealer nearby who might be your third cousin. 

We will need fewer hours of leisure not only due to the greater efficiency of manufacturing but also because we will have largely sated all basic needs. Much of what we experience will be virtual (news media and other reading material as transitory electrons on a screen instead of ink on paper that lasts until one discards the paper; music on electronic channels instead of on vinyl, cassette tapes, or CD). We are going to have 3D printing as a norm for toys, repair parts, and who-knows-what-else. 

At best we are going to need to fill our lives with some sort of intellectual or creative activity, civic service, or enriching experiences (communing with Nature) if the fruits of prosperity that the End of Scarcity implies if the fruits of our prosperous efficiency are not to become "pearls before swine". For many, having huge amounts of spare time and no idea of how to use it will be terrifying. 

Quote:You know, I actually had a similar discussion with Eric about this recently. Only in our case, we were talking about the next Unraveling Era, because chances are many of us Millennials are still gonna be around during that time. If there's enough of us left, we might be able to stop civic/institutional life from entirely decaying in the next 3T. As you pointed out before, older generations are living longer now, suddenly the archetypal/societal role that used to be mostly absent depending on the turning continues to play a pivotal role in the turning they were once largely missing from (old Prophets/Idealists in a High Era, old Nomads/Reactives in an Awakening Era, old Heroes/Civics in an Unraveling Era, and old Artists/Adaptives in a Crisis Era). The fact that all four archetypes now get to have an influence in cultural/public life in each turning is not only completely unprecedented but a whole new ball game, perhaps continued influence from an older generation would help curb some of the worst aspects/extremes of each turning, thus hopefully making the next saeculum calmer and less disruptive than previous ones. If continued influence from an old Prophet/Idealist generation can keep the inner world from fully decaying in a 1T, couldn't continued influence from an old Hero/Civic generation keep the outer world from completely decaying in a 3T?

I am tempted to believe that this Crisis Era ends in the early-middle part of this decade, barring some gigantic shooting war that suddenly blows up (for such a view of the world look to John Xenakis' "Generational Dynamics"... with the caveat that he is extremely pessimistic about human nature and political institutions... and this fellow thinks that Donald Trump is wonderful and that someone like me is stupid for seeing Donald Trump as a disaster. Maybe extreme pessimism in human nature fosters support for right-wing demagogues like Trump, Bolsonaro, etc., who offer authoritarian, anti-egalitarian solutions for all things. I can hit Trump from the Left for violating liberal values and from the Right for his disdain for some well-established traditions that have ensured sanity even in the face of decisive change. I am not sure which tradition will prevail in America in the upcoming High; it could be a composite. Anything is richer than the cultures of "sex&drugs&rock-n-roll" that appeared in the Boom Awakening. As far as I am concerned, poor Latino families that have solid values that include a solid nurturing of their children is far better than what I hear of in the tales of meth busts. Maybe we shouldn't teach unquestioning faith in police, but it's a bad idea to do things that cause the "Big Blue Meanies" to take Mommy and Daddy away when someone reports meth-related activity. 

I have wandered off considerably here. Idealist generations generally fade out in a High as the Idealist component goes from very old people in their late-sixties-to-mid-eighties to the infants. On the other hand, life expectancies are longer because people are staying fit, getting good medical care, staying active, staying involved, and -- this is a big one: not smoking as much. I'm guessing that tobacco use reached its peak among the Lost Generation and has steadily faded, at least through Boomers. One can have "Mormon lungs" and a "Mormon liver" without being a Mormon. I was a moderate drinker in my twenties, and I just can't hold liquor as I used to. I used to be able to drink four drinks in a night by spacing them two hours apart.,. I can do only one now.  Maybe the Boomers who will be most remembered will be the last ones to be remembered -- the ones who weren't the filthy bastards who took everything that they could. 

Think what I have going as a story teller. I take my age (65) and subtract that from my birth-year, and get "1890". I heard tales of people at the unsuccessful tail end of the settling of the Western frontier. That was western Nebraska, where there just isn't enough soil moisture for farming unless you dig a deep-enough well to harvest the Ogallala aquifer. My maternal grandmother's  family went out west to western Nebraska with some livestock and some household possessions by train and returned in two years or so to southern Michigan or northern Indiana. I remember people who lived before automobiles, telephones, phonographs, refrigerators, household electricity, and inside plumbing were norms... and long before there was radio, let alone television. Maybe I will get to tell people about the "primitive" 1960's when color TV was on only one network, when two-lane "Blood Alleys" were the norms of travel, when cable and satellite TV did not exist, when stereo recording was still a novelty, when party lines were the norm in rural America, and when computers were gigantic energy-devouring mainframes that have less computing power than a cell phone roughly the size of a cigarette pack but thinner than a cigarette. I can also tell people about the nastiness of race relations in "Kukluxistan".  I may have been a child at the time but I remember being disgusted about the bombing of the Eighth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in which four innocent girls who had done nothing wrong were torn to pieces... and this poster



Images like this can sear your mind even if you are eight years old, not in the area, and not connected to their cause. People might disappear if they wander off from a "rest home" while senile  on a cold winter day while clothed for July... and their bodies might not be found until April. People in their twenties? Anyone in even mediocre shape can do a twenty-mile hike. 

---

         
How do you think Covid-19 might specifically color the attitudes of the Silent (they grew up during the last Crisis Era, and now they're experiencing another Crisis Era from a late life perspective), Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z (they're the Artists/Adaptives who are experiencing this Crisis Era as children and teens, and many of them will probably live long enough to see the next Crisis Era unfold) respectively?[/quote]

The Silent are what they are. They may have been nimble-minded all their lives, but they are approaching the end of the line. Yes, that includes Joe Biden! They will have the unusual role for an Adaptive generation of shaping events (if only a comparatively-small number of people of their generation) do that. The ideas and ideals that they developed seven to eight decades ago are largely set. Expect nothing really new. This said, they are the last to remember any semblance of the New Deal as an agenda -- even if such is the much-touted Marshall Plan, which is basically the New Deal applied to western Europe. Their creative days are over. They are through with their biggest contribution to American culture, comedy. Among still-living Silent comedians (Mel Brooks, Dick van Dyke, Bob Newhart, John Cleese, Alan Alda, Carol Burnett, and Christopher Lloyd... they just don't do it anymore. The wit is not as sharp and their timing is gone (some have strictly gone to drama, and I speak of many of them no longer with us). We could use that again... but my suspicion is that the kids born in the early part of the twenty-first century will be the likes of the "new Johnny Carson", the  "new Andy Griffith", the "new Joan Rivers", the "new Flip Wilson", the "new Jerry Lewis", the "new Mary Tyler Moore",  tje "new George Carlin", and the "new Richard Pryor". We need that self-effacing comedy to keep from getting too full of ourselves, a fault of many of us in a Crisis Era. 

I expect nothing really new from the Silent.

There may be suppressed boomers who have the virtues that one usually associates with Idealists at their best. OK, many of us, I included, can be self-righteous bastards on such topics as drugs, drunkenness, street crime, racism, homophobia, religious bigotry, corruption, terrorism, human trafficking, poaching, child abuse, and environmental destruction... as if any of those make a better world. Many of us, most infamously Donald Trump, are self-righteous without having any viable morality. It may be that the less narcissistic among us are the ones who didn't Make It during the neoliberal era, which for some of us is practically our entire adult lives between entering the workforce and retirement age.

This said, creativity and moral leadership don't exactly retire. Just think of Robert Frost, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky who all remained highly creative late into their lives. I hear plenty of half-wit clergy and think "I could do better than that". I can't say that my writing will be worth remembering... or that my painting. I have found myself able to come up with fresh tunes, and I have the perfect lines for a song...  "I need to love"... don't we all?

Age is starting to take its toll on the earliest wave of X. A hint: Barack Obama turns the Big Six-Oh next month. The contribution most expected from a Reactive generation as workers is athleticism... and that starts fading in one's early thirties.  

Here's how it goes for baseball players:


   Peak Age by Skill
Hitters                   Pitchers
Metric         Peak Age   Metric         Peak Age
Linear Weights   29.4     ERA              29.2
OBP              30.0     Strikeout Rate   23.6
SLG              28.6     Walk Rate        32.5
AVG              28.4     Home Run Rate    27.4
Walk Rate        32.3
2B+3B Rate       28.3
Home Run Rate    29.9

 https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/...27-theory/

Obviously most people are not professional athletes, but for much work such brute force as lugging, hand speed, and hand-eye coordination matter greatly. As with pro athletes, laborers are prone to injuries. The wisest of any Reactive generation try to find other ways in which to make a living than raw labor. When opportunities for advancement in corporate or governmental bureaucracies are rare, many become entrepreneurs who get to use skills that their former employers did not realize that they had or would have dismissed had they known. 

Generation X is just getting into the role of peak participation in political and economic leadership. It won't be able to get away with what Boomers could get away with. Maybe owning a mom-and-pop restaurant is what is available, and it pays far less than the megabuck salaries that corporate executives have been garnering. If one never got a chance to do a skilled trade, then $150,000 a year from a small business is good enough for a good life. Owning an original Picasso or a house full of artifacts from Cartier might get very old very fast. Reactive leaders at their best have the caution of people who "have been burned" unless t6hey are Barack Obama -- who seems to have learned more from other people's mistakes than from his own. They have abandoned any youthful cynicism that might come from "having been burned". The first wave is too old to start feathering any nests. 

I make a distinction between mature Reactives and immature Reactives as political leaders. Mature Reactives are more mellowed, knowing that they can't do good for themselves without doing much more good for others. Their best hope is to do convince people to do on a large scale that they have gotten some success on a smaller scale. They don't pretend to have some highly-systematized moral agenda, but they are moral enough. Think of such American Presidents as Washington, John Adams, Grant, Cleveland, Truman, Eisenhower... and Obama. Foreign figures? Charles de Gaulle is a prime example.  They might have their limits, but if the system is already set they need innovate little. 

So what is an immature Reactive?  Some (including gangsters such as Capone, Siegel, Buchalter) look out for themselves from childhood at the expense of themselves. They use power to settle scores (Quantrill, Hitler, Vishinsky, Himmler, and plenty of characters in ISIS) or to achieve some megalomaniacal dreams (Leopold II, Mussolini, Quisling, Mao Zedong) that hurt people badly.  

The Millennial Generation is just making its way into very high public office.  Not yet forty, it just elected its first US Senator. If that looks slow, such reflects that America's power structure has elderly people wielding power as long as they are physically able. This generation is much more liberal than older generations -- enough that one can predict that unless some countervailing trend takes place, this generation will lead America into a much-more egalitarian mode. Civic generations do much well. They prefer that even their religion (if they do not give it up). They have a tendency toward cultural blandness... especially if they have served in a war that reshapes the world... and themselves. They often have a nearly-magical respect for technology,,, and little foresight about the damage that rigid application of such technology leads. Unlike the older generations, it is not fully halfway through a normal lifespan. Environment and history can still shape it. 

I'm not going to say much about the Homeland Generation because it has yet to fully form.

[beechnut79]

(07-20-2021, 06:15 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I already see a huge difference in the economy: Big Business seems to be seeking industrial labor again, offering pay much higher than I recently remember. Super-cheap labor, a pattern of the neoliberal era, may be at an end.

If anyone thinks that people get treated better because they are overworked and underpaid -- think again. Economic exploitation entrenches itself with the exploiters finding ways to make it sting all the more and make it harder to escape. The workers recruited are, I presume, young ones. Maybe we will see some of America's best and brightest do this before matriculating in college.  Someone who has done real work before attending college may think differently about the proletariat if he has ever been part of it. Those who have never done such work might see proles as expendable people whose happiness is never a legitimate objective in life and may see anyone who has ever endured hardship to be flawed for such.. and untrustworthy.

The exploitation you mention has made it difficult for many folks just to carve out some time to play. Spending time with friends, engaging in meaningful hobbies. Celebration, love, joy--it all takes a back seat because the need to constantly be working leaves little or no time to bask in it. Have pointed out many times that the need for so many to work two or even three jobs just to get by made liars out of so many futurists who once heralded the coming of a leisure oriented world. In one piece I read it was said that there is a holding pattern in these folks' lives that make their only hope of escape a huge stroke of luck, such as a big lottery win. In the story they were referred to as Generation LIMBO. In caps because I was able to create the perfect acronym for the situation: Lower Income Mostly Beyond Overhaul.

[Eric the Green]

(07-21-2021, 10:44 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(07-20-2021, 06:15 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I already see a huge difference in the economy: Big Business seems to be seeking industrial labor again, offering pay much higher than I recently remember. Super-cheap labor, a pattern of the neoliberal era, may be at an end.

If anyone thinks that people get treated better because they are overworked and underpaid -- think again. Economic exploitation entrenches itself with the exploiters finding ways to make it sting all the more and make it harder to escape. The workers recruited are, I presume, young ones. Maybe we will see some of America's best and brightest do this before matriculating in college.  Someone who has done real work before attending college may think differently about the proletariat if he has ever been part of it. Those who have never done such work might see proles as expendable people whose happiness is never a legitimate objective in life and may see anyone who has ever endured hardship to be flawed for such.. and untrustworthy.

The exploitation you mention has made it difficult for many folks just to carve out some time to play. Spending time with friends, engaging in meaningful hobbies. Celebration, love, joy--it all takes a back seat because the need to constantly be working leaves little or no time to bask in it. Have pointed out many times that the need for so many to work two or even three jobs just to get by made liars out of so many futurists who once heralded the coming of a leisure oriented world. In one piece I read it was said that there is a holding pattern in these folks' lives that make their only hope of escape a huge stroke of luck, such as a big lottery win. In the story they were referred to as Generation LIMBO. In caps because I was able to create the perfect acronym for the situation: Lower Income Mostly Beyond Overhaul.

Good points, brower and beechnut

[pbrower2a]

(07-21-2021, 10:44 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(07-20-2021, 06:15 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I already see a huge difference in the economy: Big Business seems to be seeking industrial labor again, offering pay much higher than I recently remember. Super-cheap labor, a pattern of the neoliberal era, may be at an end.

If anyone thinks that people get treated better because they are overworked and underpaid -- think again. Economic exploitation entrenches itself with the exploiters finding ways to make it sting all the more and make it harder to escape. The workers recruited are, I presume, young ones. Maybe we will see some of America's best and brightest do this before matriculating in college.  Someone who has done real work before attending college may think differently about the proletariat if he has ever been part of it. Those who have never done such work might see proles as expendable people whose happiness is never a legitimate objective in life and may see anyone who has ever endured hardship to be flawed for such.. and untrustworthy.

The exploitation you mention has made it difficult for many folks just to carve out some time to play. Spending time with friends, engaging in meaningful hobbies. Celebration, love, joy--it all takes a back seat because the need to constantly be working leaves little or no time to bask in it. Have pointed out many times that the need for so many to work two or even three jobs just to get by made liars out of so many futurists who once heralded the coming of a leisure oriented world. In one piece I read it was said that there is a holding pattern in these folks' lives that make their only hope of escape a huge stroke of luck, such as a big lottery win. In the story they were referred to as Generation LIMBO. In caps because I was able to create the perfect acronym for the situation: Lower Income Mostly Beyond Overhaul.

That exploitation is a conscious choice of elites: to sacrifice efficiency through monopolization and bureaucratization. A once-generous welfare state became a system of enforcing the will of legalized loan-sharks. Just contrast the American system of paying for college education to the norm of the 1970's in which much college education went from being a heavy subsidy  to one in which one had to work at menial jobs to keep the loan balance low (which ensured an abundant supply of unusually-good, cheap, pliable labor).  Employment would often be transitory and under despotic management. The disappearance of well-paying factory jobs ravaged large numbers of communities, many of those small towns and cities. Such prosperity as existed was concentrated in a few urban areas in which property rents would be exorbitant. Young workers would be burned four ways: they needed post-secondary education to get a job that could offer a sort-of-middle income, that education would be extremely expensive  and usually have a low and highly-uncertain rate of return. Urban landlords in the "right places" would be gouging slumlords. Big Business consolidated markets to monopolize almost everything. They farmed out manufacturing to super-cheap labor in the Third World.

If you want to see how pathological capitalism could get without the restoration of outright serfdom, then just look at what we just endured. Because life became precarious, the exploiters could foist adherence to its ideology as a survival strategy. 

COVID-19 exposed a festering wound in our economy, with food processing in which early-industrial norms of crowding, despotic management, high danger from industrial accidents, and in which any contagion could spread rapidly could cause mass infection. Respiratory infections, we all came to recognize, did not ravage healthy people in advanced industrial societies. Then came COVID-19. COVID-19 demonstrates much of the failure of our economic order. 

The futurists did not fail; they may have gotten the time wrong because economic elites were able to thwart the post-scarcity era by taking everything possible themselves. Futurists of 1900 might have been unable to foresee the rise of the murderous, dehumanized, exploitative ideologies lumped as "fascist" in supposedly-sophisticated societies. Even the USA had the Ku Klux Klan of 1915; I look at its ideology and I see people who might have rounded people up for extermination in death camps and restored slavery to multitudes. In one nightmare scenario that I can think of the infamous yellow badges read "JEW" and not "JUDE", and the difference in language does not differ in significance. For that scenario to not become Nineteen Eighty-Four with a racist, slave-owning society (as an aside, the language defending antebellum slavery could have been a partial precedent for Orwell if he had looked to that), I need to have the Nazis fail to seize power in Germany and japan to become a democracy. A hint on what would differ but be much the same: Germany and Japan both have their equivalents of the New Deal, and such appears in America as the "Rommel-Plan". 

Model minorities maybe extremely valuable to a society... and what could be a more definitive example of a model minority than German... or American! -- Jews? Take away the prudery, and Christian ethics are Jewish ethics. 

Donald Trump is a lazy and unsophisticated version of a would-be fascist tyrant. It is only the mercy of Providence that Trump did not fully understand what he was doing. Hitler knew his history well, and studied what he needed to know in the arts of persuasion and administration while ignoring the significance of morality and humanitarianism. Hitler turned to brutality after destroying democracy and freedom quickly. Brutality is effective until it destroys the initiative and resourcefulness of the exploited people. Trump did not move as rapidly as Hitler or Pinochet in smashing all semblance of freedom, and that makes all the difference in the world this time. COVID-19 made Trump an electoral failure in his bid for a second term.

[Bob Butler 54]

(04-09-2021, 02:20 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Donald Trump is a lazy and unsophisticated version of a would-be fascist tyrant. It is only the mercy of Providence that Trump did not fully understand what he was doing. Hitler knew his history well, and studied what he needed to know in the arts of persuasion and administration while ignoring the significance of morality and humanitarianism. Hitler turned to brutality after destroying democracy and freedom quickly. Brutality is effective until it destroys the initiative and resourcefulness of the exploited people. Trump did not move as rapidly as Hitler or Pinochet in smashing all semblance of freedom, and that makes all the difference in the world this time. COVID-19 made Trump an electoral failure in his bid for a second term.

I see Hitler as centered on his nation and culture, while Trump is centered on himself.  That makes them hard to compare.  Still, the elites and the racists are a real problem in America.  Trump managed to take advantage of them.

[nguyenivy]

I see again the headline spreading about life expectancy in the US having dropped by the most since WW2. Would those of you here who are S&H theory experts put the COVID-19 pandemic as the big crisis of our time, or is COVID-19 not it despite all that has happened in the last 18 months? The GFC 2008/2009 may have kicked this 4T off, but I wouldn't be surprised if it takes the rest of the 2020s to truly recover from the pandemic. As for anything else that may be coming in the 2020s that may eclipse COVID-19, the only thing I would put my money on is impacts of climate change (more natural disasters). Not a war as the world is way too interconnected and dependent on one another than in prior saecula. COVID already disrupted supply chains enough for countries to try anything as foolish as a big war which could completely cut the supply chain.

[pbrower2a]

(07-21-2021, 05:01 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(04-09-2021, 02:20 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Donald Trump is a lazy and unsophisticated version of a would-be fascist tyrant. It is only the mercy of Providence that Trump did not fully understand what he was doing. Hitler knew his history well, and studied what he needed to know in the arts of persuasion and administration while ignoring the significance of morality and humanitarianism. Hitler turned to brutality after destroying democracy and freedom quickly. Brutality is effective until it destroys the initiative and resourcefulness of the exploited people. Trump did not move as rapidly as Hitler or Pinochet in smashing all semblance of freedom, and that makes all the difference in the world this time. COVID-19 made Trump an electoral failure in his bid for a second term.

I see Hitler as centered on his nation and culture, while Trump is centered on himself.  That makes them hard to compare.  Still, the elites and the racists are a real problem in America.  Trump managed to take advantage of them.

Hitler also exploited the economic elites -- tycoons, executives, and big landowners. He took their money and stole their souls in return for promises of super-cheap labor. He did deliver that. 

It's hard to see what culture to which one could affix Donald Trump. This said, culture does not dictate politics. Nazis and Zionists often had much the same taste in music. In that I have no connection to any particular culture. You can probably figure that I am quite cosmopolitan. Trump has no obvious culture other than the celebration of his empty self. 

Culture is over-rated as an improvement in human nature. The Russians have one of the richest cultures in the world, and yet they ended up with Stalin. Of the Germans I can say much the same, except that they ended up with Hitler instead. Japan has one of the richest aesthetic cultures in the world and are highly receptive to the best of any other culture (Western classical music might as well be theirs, too).. and yet they still ended up with a regime that 'gave' the world the Bataan Death March, horrible experiments with germ warfare, and the brutality of the construction of the Burma Railroad. 

The Nazis were proud of the great achievements of German and Austrian music.

[Bob Butler 54]

I see this as a multiple crisis.  Covid, racism, climate change, division of wealth, infrastructure and war are the issue candidates, more or less in order with debate quite possible.  Climate change has already had a bunch of catalysts, be they Katrina, other hurricanes, the western wildfires and draught.  However, the reds seem to be immune to them.  Will the draught become severe enough to cause a breakthrough?  It would take something big to raise that issue higher.  

I agree war is unlikely.  The Chinese are into brinksmanship and if you play those games so constantly there is always the chance of miscalculation, but I agree that financial games are more profitable since somewhere between the invention of the machine gun and nukes.  The idea of gathering power by heavy militarily conquest seems obsolete, though some conservatives stick with old thinking.

The key tipping point is looking like the 2022 mid terms.  The Republicans seem to be betting on the recent trend that the winner of the prior presidential contest tends to lose ground two years later.  On the other hand, the last crisis FDR won by ever increasing margins as his fixes to the crisis problems seemed to work.  During crises you have to fix the crisis problems, so the do nothing stay the same faction generally fades.  If the Republicans are so obviously blocking solution to the crisis problems, how will they hope to pick up votes?  If you obstruct popular actions, do you gain?

I know Biden wants to break through before then, and maybe he will.  Trump will be greatly diminished by his legal problems.  Things are still teetering.  It seems 2022 will give a clean victory in the Congress where every senator doesn’t have a veto.  We shall see.

But there are a lot of issues.  Even if the agenda for solving them is set, everything won’t go away instantly.  The pandemic is hanging on.  Global warming will take decades to turn around even with real commitment.  With his Dream speech MLK presented a list of demands which were mostly met, but did not prevent a need for more and different demands now.  Will other demands come another time?

“Answer hazy”, says the magic eight ball.  “Ask again later.”

[David Horn]

(07-21-2021, 05:01 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(04-09-2021, 02:20 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Donald Trump is a lazy and unsophisticated version of a would-be fascist tyrant. It is only the mercy of Providence that Trump did not fully understand what he was doing. Hitler knew his history well, and studied what he needed to know in the arts of persuasion and administration while ignoring the significance of morality and humanitarianism. Hitler turned to brutality after destroying democracy and freedom quickly. Brutality is effective until it destroys the initiative and resourcefulness of the exploited people. Trump did not move as rapidly as Hitler or Pinochet in smashing all semblance of freedom, and that makes all the difference in the world this time. COVID-19 made Trump an electoral failure in his bid for a second term.

I see Hitler as centered on his nation and culture, while Trump is centered on himself.  That makes them hard to compare.  Still, the elites and the racists are a real problem in America.  Trump managed to take advantage of them.

Good point. It's hard to build a lasting political movement on narcissism.  Eventually, that gets old -- even for the acolytes with no life of their own.

[David Horn]

(07-21-2021, 05:22 PM)nguyenivy Wrote: I see again the headline spreading about life expectancy in the US having dropped by the most since WW2. Would those of you here who are S&H theory experts put the COVID-19 pandemic as the big crisis of our time, or is COVID-19 not it despite all that has happened in the last 18 months? The GFC 2008/2009 may have kicked this 4T off, but I wouldn't be surprised if it takes the rest of the 2020s to truly recover from the pandemic. As for anything else that may be coming in the 2020s that may eclipse COVID-19, the only thing I would put my money on is impacts of climate change (more natural disasters). Not a war as the world is way too interconnected and dependent on one another than in prior saecula. COVID already disrupted supply chains enough for countries to try anything as foolish as a big war which could completely cut the supply chain.

H-m-m-m.  This seems more like a perfect storm.  Worse, some aspects, like global warming, require attention that will conflict with other crises like racism and inequality.  We'll need universal sacrifice, but sacrifice is never equal or even vaguely fair.  Sadly, I see a massive box of bandaids being applied everywhere, and actual solutions coming, by necessity, in the next saeculum ... or never.  

We've finally managed to create an existential environment with multiple crises and little clue on solving them.  If anything, we're too divided to agree on anything, no matter how trivial, so working together will be impossible for this 4T.  Maybe the Millennials will have a better shot at starting the process in the 1T.  I hope so.

[David Horn]

(07-21-2021, 06:45 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I see this as a multiple crisis.  Covid, racism, climate change, division of wealth, infrastructure and war are the issue candidates, more or less in order with debate quite possible.  Climate change has already had a bunch of catalysts, be they Katrina, other hurricanes, the western wildfires and draught.  However, the reds seem to be immune to them.  Will the draught become severe enough to cause a breakthrough?  It would take something big to raise that issue higher.  

I should have read the entire thread before responding to other posts, because we're solidly in agreement on this one.

Bob Butler Wrote:I agree war is unlikely.  The Chinese are into brinksmanship and if you play those games so constantly there is always the chance of miscalculation, but I agree that financial games are more profitable since somewhere between the invention of the machine gun and nukes.  The idea of gathering power by heavy militarily conquest seems obsolete, though some conservatives stick with old thinking.

Hypersonic and laser weapons may change that calculus. War in minutes rather than months and years is almost unthinkable, but becoming more possible by the day.

Bob Butler Wrote:The key tipping point is looking like the 2022 mid terms.  The Republicans seem to be betting on the recent trend that the winner of the prior presidential contest tends to lose ground two years later.  On the other hand, the last crisis FDR won by ever increasing margins as his fixes to the crisis problems seemed to work.  During crises you have to fix the crisis problems, so the do nothing stay the same faction generally fades.  If the Republicans are so obviously blocking solution to the crisis problems, how will they hope to pick up votes?  If you obstruct popular actions, do you gain?

If the Dems lose either chamber in 2022, all bets are off. We're dealing with a GOP that seems totally immune to reason and unmoored from facts. If opening the economy and society in general is OK even in the face of rapidly rising COVID cases, what's off limits?

Bob Butler Wrote:I know Biden wants to break through before then, and maybe he will.  Trump will be greatly diminished by his legal problems.  Things are still teetering.  It seems 2022 will give a clean victory in the Congress where every senator doesn’t have a veto.  We shall see.

Biden has been a breath of fresh air I didn't expect. So far, he's doing well, but he needs every vote in both houses to do much of anything.

Bob Butler Wrote:But there are a lot of issues.  Even if the agenda for solving them is set, everything won’t go away instantly.  The pandemic is hanging on.  Global warming will take decades to turn around even with real commitment.  With his Dream speech MLK presented a list of demands which were mostly met, but did not prevent a need for more and different demands now.  Will other demands come another time?

“Answer hazy”, says the magic eight ball.  “Ask again later.”

I have to agree, and will not see the end of this mess personally. Mostly, I hope for my grandchildren.

[pbrower2a]

(07-22-2021, 07:52 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(07-21-2021, 05:01 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(04-09-2021, 02:20 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Donald Trump is a lazy and unsophisticated version of a would-be fascist tyrant. It is only the mercy of Providence that Trump did not fully understand what he was doing. Hitler knew his history well, and studied what he needed to know in the arts of persuasion and administration while ignoring the significance of morality and humanitarianism. Hitler turned to brutality after destroying democracy and freedom quickly. Brutality is effective until it destroys the initiative and resourcefulness of the exploited people. Trump did not move as rapidly as Hitler or Pinochet in smashing all semblance of freedom, and that makes all the difference in the world this time. COVID-19 made Trump an electoral failure in his bid for a second term.

I see Hitler as centered on his nation and culture, while Trump is centered on himself.  That makes them hard to compare.  Still, the elites and the racists are a real problem in America.  Trump managed to take advantage of them.

Good point. It's hard to build a lasting political movement on narcissism.  Eventually, that gets old -- even for the acolytes with no life of their own.

Eventually people go back to the sports bar and show off their encyclopedic knowledge of sports trivia, grow a garden that gives them pride, start playing hymns or pop tunes on their Hammond organs, or do some hobby that does far more to assert individuality than does participating in a political cult damned to marginalization. Politics becomes problem solving to a far greater extent than identity, which is healthy, and fewer people are in rage. 

The deficiencies of Donald Trump as a political leader are all too obvious. Narcissism is the norm in political leaders of almost all kinds, whether democratic or dictatorial. The wiser sorts of narcissists like FDR know that they must earn the accolades. The not-so-wise ones corrupted by power, like Ceausescu who think themselves entitled to the sort of adulation that the Beatles got for their legitimate achievements in music, rely upon a personality cult and a dreaded secret police. 

When people are back to putting more effort into a garden than in politics, playing more music on a solo instrument or in some ensemble, debating whether the Chicago Symphony or the New York Philharmonic is a better orchestra, painting rustic scenes or urban abstracts, or doing needlepoint... as politics again becomes boring -- then we are in a 1T.

[pbrower2a]

The Centers for Disease Control give us a partial report... because the story is not yet fully complete.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR015-508.pdf

Quote:Provisional Life Expectancy Estimates for 2020 Elizabeth Arias, Ph.D., Betzaida Tejada-Vera, M.S., Farida Ahmad, M.P.H., and Kenneth D. Kochanek, M.A. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention • National Center for Health Statistics • National Vital Statistics System NCHS reports can be downloaded from: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/index.htm. Introduction The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) collects and disseminates the nation’s official vital statistics through the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). NCHS uses provisional vital statistics data for conducting public health surveillance and final data for producing annual national natality and mortality statistics. NCHS publishes annual and decennial national life tables based on final vital statistics. To assess the effects on life expectancy of excess mortality observed during 2020, NCHS published provisional life expectancy estimates for the months January through June, 2020 in February 2021 (1). This report presents updated estimates of life expectancy based on provisional mortality data for the full year, January through December, 2020. Provisional data are early estimates based on death certificates received, processed, and coded, but not finalized, by NCHS. These estimates are considered provisional because death certificate information may later be revised, and additional death certificates may be received until approximately 6 months after the end of the year. This report presents life expectancy estimates calculated using abridged period life tables based on provisional death counts for 2020, by sex, for the total, Hispanic, non-Hispanic white, and non-Hispanic black populations. Estimates for the American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN), Asian, and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander (NHOPI) populations were not produced due to the impact of race and ethnicity misclassification on death certificates for these populations on the precision of life expectancy estimates (2). There are two types of life tables: the cohort (or generation) and the period (or current) life table. The cohort life table presents the mortality experience of a particular birth cohort from the moment of birth through consecutive ages in successive calendar years. The period life table does not represent the mortality experience of an actual birth cohort but rather presents what would happen to a hypothetical cohort if it experienced throughout its entire life the mortality conditions of a particular period. Period life expectancy estimates based on final data for 2019 by sex, Hispanic origin, and race are also provided in this report for purposes of comparison (see Technical Notes and reference 3 for description of methodology). Unlike the previous estimates based on 6 months of data, this full-year report presents contributions of causes of death to the changes in life expectancy using a life table partitioning technique (see Technical Notes). Keywords: life expectancy • Hispanic origin • race • cause of death • National Vital Statistics System Data and Methods Provisional life expectancy estimates were calculated using abridged period life tables based on provisional death counts for 2020 from death records received and processed by NCHS as of May 13, 2021; provisional numbers of births for the same period based on birth records received and processed by NCHS as of April 7, 2021; and, July 1, 2020, monthly postcensal population estimates based on the 2010 decennial census. Provisional mortality rates are typically computed using death data after a 3-month lag following date of death, as completeness and timeliness of provisional death data can vary by many factors, including cause of death, month of the year, and age of the decedent (4,5). Mortality data used in this report include over 99% of the deaths that occurred in 2020, but certain jurisdictions and age groups may be underrepresented for later months (5). Deaths requiring investigation, including infant deaths, deaths from external injuries, and drug overdose deaths may be underestimated (6,7). See Technical Notes for more information about the calculation of the abridged period life tables, 2019 life expectancy estimates by race and Hispanic origin, and life table partitioning by cause of death. Results Life expectancy in the United States The Table summarizes life expectancy by age, Hispanic origin, race, and sex. Life expectancy at birth represents the average number of years a group of infants would live if they were to experience throughout life the agespecific death rates prevailing during a specified period. In 2020, life expectancy at birth for the total U.S. population

(Read the source material if you want to see something more legible and connect to links).

Some conclusions that I draw (again, read the source material, as it ill serves cutting and pasting):

1. It may surprise many of us that Hispanic populations have overtaken non-Hispanic whites, let alone blacks, in life expectancy. That may reflect culture. Hispanic culture seems much more optimistic and life-affirming than the non-Hispanic mainstream.

I once said facetiously that if I had my way I would let the Central Americans who fled countries ravaged by turf wars by drug cliques in America under remain in America under one condition: that they would take in the children of America's largely-white meth fiends as their own. Meanwhile I would deport America's addicts so that they could experience first-hand the consequences of their supplying of blood money to those drug cliques. Think of what the illegal aliens would get; as parents of US citizens they would be on the fast track to citizenship. They would impart a far more wholesome culture upon children who don't live near meth anymore. For the children they would get a true bilingual experience, and that would be good for everyone involved. Nothing teaches more about one's own language than does learning a foreign language. (Of course no other country wants our drug-addled trash, so therein lies a problem). But being brought up Hispanic and drug-free is far better than being raised by parents who look like one but can't shake off meth... right! This is less shocking than Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal.

2. So what causes the higher life expectancy among Hispanic-Americans despite being poorer as a whole? First, not smoking as much. The second-lowest state in the percentage of smokers is California, which has a surprisingly-large Mormon population (that is part of it; Utah is 51st among the States and the federal district in consumption of tobacco products, and California is a distant 50th), and Hispanics account for much of the low smoking rate in California. Not smoking offsets the effects of air pollution in infamously-smoggy L.A. Texas, which has some very poor populations as in states to its east from Oklahoma in the west to North Carolina and Georgia in the east, is below average in tobacco use and the states to its east are all above average. (Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia fit this pattern, too of poverty and heavy smoking). Texas Hispanics, largely Mexican-Americans, are really-light smokers. That explains much. Another factor is that Hispanics have more tightly-knit communities. One is not alone, which explains how Mexican-Americans were much less-likely than others to die during a heat wave in Chicago in 2015. Someone was looking out for elderly Hispanics to make sure that they had fans and could keep their windows open. Blacks and poor whites often got neglected... and died for that neglect. 

3. The strengths of Hispanic communities depend upon them being close to each other. With COVID-19 that may have been too close in housing, let alone many workplaces (as in food-processing places in which many of them work) or in the hospitality business and retailing in which they see everyone, infected or not. COVID-19 ravaged Hispanics as it did not ravage non-Hispanic whites or even blacks. Non-Cuban Hispanics vote heavily Democratic irrespective of economic status, and if they endured a disproportionate number of deaths from COVID-19, then that made have made the 2020 vote closer in Arizona and Nevada than many of us expected. 

4. Declines in life expectancy by ethnicity and gender were as follows:

Hispanic male -3.7
non-Hispanic black male -3.3
Non-Hispanic black female -2.4
Hispanic female -2.0
non-Hispanic white male -1.3
non-Hispanic white female -1.1    

Political consequences are possible and even likely. This may have made elections in Arizona (Hispanics), Georgia (blacks), Michigan (blacks), Nevada (Hispanics),  Pennsylvania (blacks), and Wisconsin (blacks) closer than one might have expected in January 2020.  COVID-19 might have made a difference in Florida and North Carolina, which many liberals thought might go D. Texas, which has large numbers of blacks and Hispanics, might have been much closer without COVID-19. Most deaths were of people of voting age, so political effects would be felt in 2020. 

I'm not accusing anyone of political manipulation. COVID-19 certainly disenfranchised black and Hispanic voters discriminatorily, whether the effect was design or accident. Draw whatever conclusions you wish. 

5. People may have been dying of COVID-19 instead of something else, like cancer, strokes, HIV, cirrhosis, diabetes, or dementia. For people in weakened conditions, COVID-19 might have been the official killer on a death certificate -- but COVID-19 dwarfs those causes combined. 

6, The most obvious limitation on this study is time.  We do not know what effects will arise in the future, but they cannot be good. Maybe the distribution of vulnerable people will change from 2020 to 2021. COVID-19 survivors often endure complications that themselves shorten life. Compromised organs and brains will cause trouble for decades among relatively-young survivors. Diabetes is a multi-organ plight. If COVID-19 does not kill outright it can still shorten life.  

.

[pbrower2a]

Yes, the brain is an organ, too, and COVID-19 can do it much harm, too.  From the Lancet:


[color=var(--theme-headings,#00539e)]Abstract[/color]
[color=var(--theme-headings,#00539e)]Background
There is growing concern about possible cognitive consequences of COVID-19, with reports of ‘Long COVID’ symptoms persisting into the chronic phase and case studies revealing neurological problems in severely affected patients. However, there is little information regarding the nature and broader prevalence of cognitive problems post-infection or across the full spread of disease severity.
[color=var(--theme-headings,#00539e)]Methods[/color]
We sought to confirm whether there was an association between cross-sectional cognitive performance data from 81,337 participants who between January and December 2020 undertook a clinically validated web-optimized assessment as part of the Great British Intelligence Test, and questionnaire items capturing self-report of suspected and confirmed COVID-19 infection and respiratory symptoms.
[color=var(--theme-headings,#00539e)]Findings[/color]
People who had recovered from COVID-19, including those no longer reporting symptoms, exhibited significant cognitive deficits versus controls when controlling for age, gender, education level, income, racial-ethnic group, pre-existing medical disorders, tiredness, depression and anxiety. The deficits were of substantial effect size for people who had been hospitalised (N = 192), but also for non-hospitalised cases who had biological confirmation of COVID-19 infection (N = 326). Analysing markers of premorbid intelligence did not support these differences being present prior to infection. Finer grained analysis of performance across sub-tests supported the hypothesis that COVID-19 has a multi-domain impact on human cognition.
[color=var(--theme-headings,#00539e)]Interpretation[/color]
Interpretation. These results accord with reports of ‘Long Covid’ cognitive symptoms that persist into the early-chronic phase. They should act as a clarion call for further research with longitudinal and neuroimaging cohorts to plot recovery trajectories and identify the biological basis of cognitive deficits in SARS-COV-2 survivors.
[color=var(--theme-headings,#00539e)]Funding[/color]
Funding. AH is supported by the UK Dementia Research Institute Care Research and Technology Centre and Biomedical Research Centre at Imperial College London. WT is supported by the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Neurotechnology. SRC is funded by a Wellcome Trust Clinical Fellowship 110,049/Z/15/Z. JMB is supported by Medical Research Council (MR/N013700/1). MAM, SCRW and PJH are, in part, supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King's College London[/color]

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclin...2/fulltext

[color=var(--theme-headings,#00539e)]Keywords[/color]

• COVID-19
  
  
• Long covid
  
  
• Cognition
  
  
• Deficits
  
  
• Online assessment
  
  
• Attention
  
  
• Memory
  
  
• Reasoning
  
  
• Planning
  

Read it and weep.

[pbrower2a]

Updated map of counties that have fully vaccinated 70+% of all eligible residents.



Let's give a shout-out to Vermont and Connecticut!

[pbrower2a]

[David Horn]

(07-25-2021, 03:18 AM)taramarie Wrote: A year ago if you would have told me i would be facing down an army of armed policemen with no fear in my heart, that they were hurting others, but giving me the wide berth, listening to and apologizing to me when i spoke to them about our rights to our freedoms and for common sense, i would not believe you. I still cannot believe what is happening here. It seems im in the middle of the start of a 4th turning civil war in Europe which is attempting to create an apartheid here and i am standing for legal freedoms for all.

Best of luck on your mission.  Europe has a bad habit of fostering autocracies, and stopping them in their infancy seems to be the most, and maybe only, effective way to change that.

[Eric the Green]

Sad to report that according to worldometer, the USA was back in first place in new covid cases for Friday July 23.

USA 68,150
Indonesia 49,071
Brazil 45,460
India 39,498
UK 36,045
Spain 31,171
Russia 23,811
Iran 21,814
France 19,561
Mexico 16,244
Argentina 15,622
Malaysia 15,573
Thailand 14,575
South Africa 13,719
Colombia 13,164

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[pbrower2a]

Source: New York Times... the NYT is not putting COVID-19 coverage behind a paywall. I appreciate this!

No modern precedent

Covid-19 has caused the largest decline in U.S. life expectancy since World War II, the federal government reported yesterday. But Covid is not the only reason that life expectancy in this country fell last year to its lowest level in almost two decades.

Even before the pandemic, the U.S. was mired in an alarming period of rising mortality. It had no modern precedent: During the second half of the 2010s, life expectancy fell on a sustained basis for the first time since the fighting of World War II killed several hundred thousand Americans.


By The New York Times | Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Deaths of despair
It’s hard to imagine a more alarming sign of a society’s well-being than an inability to keep its citizens alive. While some of the reasons are mysterious, others are fairly clear. American society has become far more unequal than it used to be, and the recent increases in mortality are concentrated among working-class Americans, especially those without a four-year college degree.

For many, daily life lacks the structure, status and meaning that it once had, as the Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have explained. Many people feel less of a connection to an employer, a labor union, a church or community groups. They are less likely to be married. They are more likely to endure chronic pain and to report being unhappy.

These trends have led to a surge of “deaths of despair” (a phrase that Case and Deaton coined), from drugs, alcohol and suicide. Other health problems, including diabetes and strokes, have also surged among the working class. Notably, the class gaps in life expectancy seem to be starker in the U.S. than in most other rich countries.


By The New York Times | Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Covid, of course, has aggravated the country’s health inequalities. Working-class Americans were more likely to contract severe versions of Covid last year, for a mix of reasons. Many could not work from home. Others received lower-quality medical care after getting sick.

Since vaccines became widely available this year, working-class people have been less likely to get a shot. At first, vaccine access was playing a major role. Today, vaccine skepticism is the dominant explanation. (All of which suggests that Covid will continue to exacerbate health disparities beyond 2020; yesterday’s report on life expectancy did not include data for 2021.)

Race and sex
Covid has also caused sharp increases in racial inequality. As a Times article on the new report explains:

From 2019 to 2020, Hispanic people experienced the greatest drop in life expectancy — three years — and Black Americans saw a decrease of 2.9 years. White Americans experienced the smallest decline, of 1.2 years.

I exchanged emails with Case and Deaton yesterday, and they pointed out that racial patterns contain some nuances. Hispanic Americans live longer on average than non-Hispanic Americans, both Black and white — yet the impact of Covid was worst among Hispanics. “This is not simply a story of existing inequalities just getting worse,” Case and Deaton wrote.

The fact that many Hispanic people work in frontline jobs that exposed them to the virus surely plays a role. But Black workers also tend to hold these jobs. It’s unclear exactly why Covid has hit Hispanic communities somewhat harder than Black communities (and would be a worthy subject for academic research).

Covid has also killed more men than women, Case and Deaton pointed out, increasing the mortality gap between the sexes, after years in which it had mostly been shrinking. Life expectancy was 5.7 years longer for women last year, up from 5.1 years in 2019. The gap had fallen to a low of 4.8 years in the early 2010s.

The bottom line: Covid has both worsened and exposed a crisis in health inequality. But that crisis existed before Covid and will continue to exist when the pandemic is over.

[Bob Butler 54]

(07-25-2021, 03:18 AM)taramarie Wrote: Here in Slovakia it seems the dictatorship eradicating basic rights and bringing about a European apatheid is winning. On top of that i learned nasty things are in store for those who caused havoc for the government in opposition to their new illegal law. Including myself. They really want a war and they will get a digital one as like HELL will i let them remove freedoms that should be for all.

Unfortunately, this isn’t too different from what is happening in America.  Tribal thinking assumes one subgroup is superior to others in the culture.  Prejudice is developed towards other groups, which supposedly justifies oppression and violence.  The Balkans area is more ancient in their thinking, but it is essentially the same thing as America.

I just don’t see where the presence of oppression and violence helps the culture overall.  Places where you see Tribal Thinking in action are a mess.

Still, I have often noted how people don’t change their perspective.  If they start out one way, they stick to it until it utterly fails.  This happened in the Industrial Age with the loss of a crisis war, the recognition that you will have to submerge one’s values in the face of superior force.  With Gandhi, King and the suffragettes, protest and legislation opened the door to another form of change.  One can hope that works in the Balkans, but some people are awful fond of superiority, prejudice, oppression and violence.